A ‘balikbayan’ in the field: scaling and (re)producing insider’s identity in a Philippine fishing community

Introduction

Some years prior to my taking-up postgraduate studies at Cardiff University I had a dinner-date with a friend from my hometown in the Philippines. She was working as a domestic helper in the Middle East and came back for a month-long vacation. She was telling me how her life had changed since she left home for a job overseas. Her observation sounded all too familiar to me, having heard it from countless friends who had the fortune (or misfortune, depending on one’s ideological stand) to work abroad. The change in her life she was referring to pertains to her economic and social status in the community. ‘Balikbayan’ (balik = return, bayan = home/country), a Filipino word for someone who has lived or worked overseas and returns home for a visit (Guevarra, 2006; see also Coloma, 2008), have some of the biggest and most comfortable houses in our town (and in most Philippine rural communities as well). They exude cosmopolitanism (see e.g. Sampson [2003] for her analysis of Filipino seafarers) and also command respect and awe in their communities by virtue of their generosity in supporting town activities like the one documented by Cruz-Lucero (2006) in Southern Philippines. Several years after that encounter, having studied and lived in the UK for three years, I would experience the same thing, yet in a much more conflicted and complicated situation: I returned home not for a vacation but to do research.

In this article, I explain how my status as a ‘balikbayan’ researcher contributes to and underpins the production of my multiple identities in the field. Subscribing to the belief that ‘the researcher carries embodied distinctions, for example of gender, race, ethnicity, dis/ability, and class, all of which are constitutive elements in the research process’ (Woodward, 2008: 537), this article explores the epistemic salience that being a ‘balikbayan’ researcher brings to research experience and its bearing on the reproduction of identity in the field. Here, it is the emplacement of the Philippines in the circuit of global labor that bestows returning natives with a conflicted epistemic salience in the field. In general, this article adds up to the robust literature on the politics and methodological complexities of insider research (Aguilar, 1981; Henry, 2003; Jackson A, 1987; Jackson AY, 2008; Labaree, 2002; Mannay, 2010; Mercer, 2007; Merton, 1972; Messerschmidt, 1981; Narayan, 1993; Wolf, 1996). A caveat should be mentioned here, though. This article is not specifically designed to focus on epistemological issues concerning insider research per se; a separate paper written for the said purpose addresses this concern (Turgo, 2012). Having said that, the article contributes to the critique and extrapolation of the agency of research participants in ‘interpellating’ the presence of researchers in the field (Ganga and Scott, 2006; Jordan, 2006; Joseph, 1996; Soni-Sinha, 2008; Venkatesh, 2002). It points to how, as Jacobs-Huey explains, ‘research participants affect the people and places to which ethnographers have access during fieldwork, thus influencing their research in substantial ways’ (2002: 793). This article also reiterates Guevarra’s observation that ‘whereas [the] existing body of literature on ethnic insider research problematized the notion of ready-made membership in the field and illustrated the vulnerable positions that researchers occupy, what remain undertheorized are the ways such vulnerability plays out within the context of place and location’ (2006: 531). Furthering the argument made by Guevarra (2006), while places are conceived in specific geographical forms, places are shaped by the overlapping influence of scales. Scales, this article suggests, determine the terrain of engagement in the field between the researcher and the researched, shape the micro politics of doing research at home, and the production and reproduction of identities of researchers doing insider research.

Following the introduction, I talk about the research context of the article and how the notion of being a ‘balikbayan’ in the Philippines is a fraught identity, both cultural and political, being as it were embedded in the country’s protracted labor exporting history and its diasporic imaginary. I also take up scales and how this concept is deployed in the article. It is followed afterwards by my experience in the field. Here, I provide an ‘inventory’ of how people in the field constructed my identity. Thereafter, I discuss this orgy of identity construction in relation to how global, national and local scales play an important part in framing the construction of one’s identity. For the conclusion, I summarize the major arguments set forth in the article, which underscores the importance of a nuanced and critical understanding of how informants impinge on the conduct of research in the field, and how places and scales play a role on the dynamics of insider research. Here, I also discuss some practical problems that such construction brought to my research.

On being a ‘balikbayan’

This article came out of a PhD thesis (see Turgo, 2010) about the everyday life of a fishing community in the Philippines in the context of a localized fisheries crisis. The thesis explored how power, gender and economic relations in the community were impacted by global processes and how these relations remained local and yet continued to be shaped and reshaped by extra-local forces unfolding beyond the community’s immediate environs. I came to Banaag (not the real name of the fishing community) in July 2008 and left in January the following year. My family has lived continuously in an area not far from the fishing community for the past 40 years. My father was a fisherman and my mother and older brother still live in the area. I left the community when I was 16 for my university education in Manila and since then would visit the place on a regular basis for the next intervening years until I left for the UK in 2006 to do postgraduate work. Many of my family’s relatives and friends are from the fishing community.

The Philippines are considered to be the world’s third largest ‘labor brokerage states’ (Rodriguez, 2010) after China and India (see also Kobayashi, 2009). The Philippines started exporting labor in the 1970s, coinciding with the oil and construction boom in the Middle East (Aguilar, 1996; Kobayashi, 2009). Since then, successive Philippine governments have promoted, if not made it an official government policy, to export Philippine labor to the rest of the world (Parrenas, 2001). In 2006, annual overseas deployment of workers passed the one million mark and foreign remittances outpaced official development assistance and foreign direct investment flows combined (Jimenez, 2010). Estimates have it that, in 2009, 10 per cent of its 90 million population work abroad (Kobayashi, 2009). The biggest number of foreign workers in Hong Kong and Singapore are Filipinos and there are some 250,000 Filipino seafarers – the Philippines being by far the most important single source of seafarers in the world (Sampson and Schroeder, 2006). Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, the Philippine central bank, reported that, between 2000 and 2008, the country’s remittance receipts rose by more than two-fold, from $6.1 billion to $16.4 billion, and that these transfers in 2008 were ranked by the World Bank to have been the fourth largest in the world (Alba and Sugui, 2009). In 2010, the total payment of Filipino overseas contract workers was $18.76 billion (Remo, 2011).

Returning home for a six-month visit for my fieldwork, I had never conceived myself to be a ‘balikbayan’. I know the implications of being one. In a Philippine context, there is a surfeit of meaning attributed to it. It is not just about someone going home after some years of working or living overseas either as a domestic helper or a skilled worker earning his/her keep in some global cities of the world (Constable, 1997; Groves and Chang, 1999; Lan, 2003; Parrenas, 2001; Tadiar, 1993, 2003, 2010). Among others, being a ‘balikbayan’ bestows both prestige and obligation to the person acquiring this subject position (see e.g. Coloma, 2008; Guevarra, 2006). Being able to experience a different culture, a ‘balikbayan’ is looked up to as a possessor of social, economic and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986, 1989). To be a ‘balikbayan’ is to possess a ‘status identity’ (Beouku-Betts, 1994). He has ‘seen’ the world and therefore is well positioned to judge things and explain everyday events in a more sophisticated manner than the person who has not left the confines of his community. Aside from that, having had the opportunity to foster contact with other people from other places, he/she could act as a bridge or a middle person in securing assistance from someone for someone or in most cases, job opportunities somewhere. Finally, being able to earn more money than could be had in the Philippines, a ‘balikbayan’ is viewed as a reservoir of bottomless resources, a veritable giver of goods, and in most cases, of money (Acejo, 2009). This is not unexpected since Filipinos with family members or relatives working overseas enjoy a higher standard of living. In their study of Filipino households, Semyonov and Gorodzeisky found out that ‘in comparison to households with no overseas workers, the net increment among households with either husband or wife working overseas is over 13,000 pesos per month, and the net increment among families in which both parents are overseas contract workers is over 43,000 pesos per month’ (2004: 19). ¹

I went to the field mindful of and exercising what Guevarra calls ‘balikbayan’ consciousness, which refers to a kind of ‘situated knowledge stemming from a position of privilege and produced in the process of examining one’s diasporic location and the struggles of returning and being “home” in a particular community as an outsider-within’ (2006: 527–8). While I did not totally reject my ‘balikbayan’ status, since I thought it to be a ‘methodological capital’ (Sin, 2007), I downplayed my years of stay in the UK in conversations and focused instead on my years spent in the community. It was my tactic to further my reintegration into the community and, at the same time, for me to feel ‘genuinely’ that I was really one of them. However, there was no escaping from my status identity. People would often refer to me as ‘si Boyet na “balikbayan”’ (Boyet the ‘balikbayan’); and there was much to be gained as a ‘balikbayan’. I enjoyed the esteem of my informants. Access to people was relatively easy, as has been experienced by Coloma (2008), Guevarra (2006), Guieb (2009) and Mangahas (2000) when they too returned to the Philippines to do research for their PhD theses. But I was never prepared for the many ways in which my being a ‘balikbayan’ had been actively reconstructed, interpreted and given a particular twist and turn by the people I interacted with. Speaking about her fieldwork in the Philippines, Guevarra spoke about how employment agencies tried to construct her as their ally, ‘their liaison to a public that has scrutinized their business practices’ (2006: 527). According to her, while her being a ‘balikbayan’ presented a host of opportunities, her subject position also presented significant problems. Her being a ‘supposed’ ally of employment agencies ‘challenged her intellectual pursuits, political commitments, notions of responsibilities to participants (labor brokers) and implicated actors (workers) in the project’ (2006: 527). In many fronts, Guevarra’s (2006) experience echoes mine. My being a ‘balikbayan’, though it opened doors, also highlighted my shifty, tenuous and conflicted membership in the community. It revealed that while I was insistently going ‘local’, the people around me were constructing my identity, which was going beyond my desired scale of living. They were rescaling my life in relation to their wants and needs. For many of my informants, I had the power to jump scales. I will talk more about this in the latter part of this article.

Early on, my mother had signaled the epistemic mine I was treading on in my research when she mentioned that people in Banaag would always see me as a ‘balikbayan’. That observation made me laugh since I was not a ‘balikbayan’. I was just an ordinary guy returning home for a visit, for some research work – a purely academic exercise. I was not a ‘balikbayan’ in the way it had been understood in the community and in the Philippines at large. I had never worked in the UK. I was never the familiar and ‘idealized’ ‘balikbayan’ who worked for some years overseas (and for others, acquiring a foreign citizenship) and went home with bulging wallet and luxury goods. I went to the UK to study and not to work. I always believed, rather naively, that people in the community would see me as I saw myself: a returning native student, not very much unlike an ordinary local student who has returned home after spending some years studying in Manila. But, as I soon discovered, I had no control over my epistemic production and reproduction in the field. As much as I explained, mirroring the experience of Guevarra (2006), people were at a loss as to how I could be able to spend some six months with them without visible source of financial resource to pay for my needs. Where would I get my money to support my stay in the community? Who was funding my ‘vacation’? All these questions furthered the belief of many people in Banaag that I was really doing well financially to be able to live with them without earning money at all. I was indeed a ‘balikbayan’, through and through. In this charade of perception and misconception, my disavowal of and my informants’ insistence on the truthfulness of my status identity in a way positioned me ‘to occupy that in-between space of ambiguity, hybridity, fluidity’ (Henry, 2003).

The scales of our lives

When I say scales, I speak of the global, national and local spatialization of living; although there would be other scales available, such as regional, with the emergence, in the international level, of regional economic and political organizations (such as the EU, APEC, ASEAN, etc.), which clearly have an effect on how decisions are made on the global and national levels by nation-states. When I refer to global, national and local scales, I do not offer the view that there are ontological arenas of life that could be fixed as global, national and local. All these scales intermingle with one another and do not exist in a particular locale or clearly bounded territory. Scales could inhabit one space and a person’s social praxis all at the same time. In a highly global environment, such as global futures trading, for example, people tend to forget that transactions take place in a particular location and are participated in by particular people following local logics and rationalities (Boden, 2003), and abiding national regulations. All sociospatial practices and social relationships are intertwined with varying scales of living.

The problematic of scale, observed by Herod and Wright, is made more pronounced in recent times:

largely in response to the tremendous transformations that our world has been experiencing – deindustrialization, the growth of international capital flow, the rise of global communications systems, and easier transportation between places, to name just a few – and the feeling that something new is happening to the way in which social life is scaled. (2002: 4)

Scales, following Jones’ (1998) assertion, are an epistemological category, a representational trope, a way of framing political-spatiality that in turn has material effects (see also Cox, 1998). The production of scale is a highly dynamic process through which power relationships become spatialized: scales are not things, but historical processes manifest in space (Mansfield, 2001: 1809). Scales are ‘socially produced and continually transformed by the imperatives of capitalism, and the resulting struggles and conflicts’ (Amin, 2002: 386). They are historically specific and subject to change, not simply in terms of concepts such as ‘globalization’ and the technologies and material that produce it, but in terms of the very concept of scale itself (Jones, 1998: 26–7). Being transformed, therefore, by historical forces, ‘spatial scales are never fixed, but are perpetually redefined, contested, and restructured in terms of their extent, content, relative importance and interrelations’ (Swyngedouw, 1997: 141).

Though Filipino workers have their own share of woes in their adopted countries of work (Aguilar, 1996; Constable, 1997; Groves and Chang, 1999; Lan, 2003; Lindio-McGovern, 2003; Parrenas, 2001; Tacoli, 1996), to be a ‘balikbayan’ is to be fortunate enough to transcend the constraints being imposed by one’s scalar position (primarily local and national). In today’s climate of hypermobility (Sheller and Urry, 2006), mobility is not really every Filipino’s prerogative. While a few (the Filipino elites) hop in from one location to another, others are chained to places. The relative mobility of workers (vis a vis the frenetic movement of soft capital) in today’s world could well explain to us the importance of being mobile in the world, especially in developing economies where as mentioned, one of the most-tested ways to move out of poverty is to find employment in the western world (see also Gardner, 2001). Thus, to be globally mobile compared to others who are nation-bound and locally circumscribed is a feat among developing economy dwellers, indeed. It is in this context that while the world is mired in the illusion of the global mobility of subjects, just like any developing economies’ dwellers, countless Filipinos are barred from leaving the Philippines, both for recreation and work purposes. While borders are, these days, deemed to be porous (Bhagwati, 2004; Ohmae, 2000), it is not the case in many countries of the world. Nation-states are still very much active in regulating their citizens’ movements and, thus, the salience in acknowledging the power of the national scale in terms of the im/mobility of people (Cox, 1997; Gilpin, 2000; Herod, 2009; Newman, 2006; Yeung, 1998). Being a Filipino limits one’s travel destinations. Unlike some citizens of the western world, Filipinos cannot just get on an airplane and embark on a journey. Filipinos need a visa to visit most countries of the world. On the other hand, the Philippine nation-state’s support to Filipinos wanting to work overseas (as a means to limit the rate of unemployment in the country and a source of foreign exchange) makes it convenient for Filipinos to seek employment overseas. There are dedicated government agencies that look after the welfare of Filipino overseas workers like the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA). Furthermore, successive Philippine governments’ campaign to valorize the contribution of Filipino workers overseas to the country’s financial wealth results in the local perception that to work overseas is to enjoy financial wealth and unrivalled social and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986, 1989). Nevertheless, not all are given the chance to work overseas. Though an estimated nine million Filipinos work overseas, many more despair to leave the country. Recent global developments have made it tougher for Filipinos to seek employment overseas. Indonesia, India and other Eastern European countries (in the case of the seafaring industry) are making it tough for Philippine workers to find employment overseas (McIndoe, 2008). Thus, in these interestingly difficult times, to work overseas has assumed an even more important symbolic and empirical undertone among Filipinos. To be a ‘balikbayan’ is to partake of the infinite opportunities that the global scale provides (and the wisdom that it imbues to whoever be a part of it); it is to have the ability to penetrate the borders of other worlds; and to enjoy the support and praise of the Philippine nation-state and, at the same time, to be able to transcend the limiting and limited imaginings and material resources of the national and local scales. It is the fusion of global, national and local discourses – oftentimes contradictory and sometimes univocal – that permeates the very narrative of how it is to be a ‘balikbayan’ in the Philippines and in my case, a ‘balikbayan’ researcher doing fieldwork at home.

Being a ‘balikbayan’ researcher in the field

I went to the field as an insider researcher, which means I shared in some degrees a similar cultural, linguistic, ethnic, national and religious heritage (Ganga and Scott, 2006: 2) with the people that I interacted with in the place that I studied. Insider researchers are generally believed to have a better and easier access to informants in the field (see e.g. Abu-Lughod, 1986; Chiener, 2002; Hsiung, 1996; Simmons, 2007). While this true to a certain extent, being an insider also poses a number of methodological challenges concerning identity construction made particularly salient with my being a ‘balikbayan’ researcher. As mentioned earlier, a more detailed consideration of how insider research could be problematized as a research identity in the field is addressed in my separate article (Turgo, 2012). My focus here is how my being a ‘balikbayan’ researcher underpins the nature of my identity construction in the field and how scales figure out in the process.

There has been an interest of late in how people being studied actively construct the identity of researchers in the field and, in the process, contribute to the shaping of the thrusts and objectives of research projects. In these studies, researchers realize, to their surprise, that they are always under scrutiny and endless speculation by the people they are studying. As researchers make sense of their identities in the field, they find out that they inherently occupy tenuous positions because of the power participants possess in defining their access and participation in their communities. That is, participants are not simply passive recipients of a researcher’s claim of authority and intellectual agenda, but are active agents who can redefine the contours of the research, outline and restrict the researcher’s role, or even steer the project in a different direction (Guevarra, 2006: 527). There are simply myriad ways to think about who the researcher is and what he/she is doing in the field. This is because, as Narayan (1993) contends, one’s positionality stems from threads of culturally entangled identity, where a person may have many strands of identification available, strands that may be tugged into the open or stuffed out of sight. Researcher positionality is not a fixed status but one that continuously shifts, dependent on the positioning of the other research participants (Dickinson, 2010: 118). Thus, while researchers speculate on the lives of the ones they are studying, the latter ‘talk back’ by constructing their identities in different ways. This is the case in any fieldwork setting, since, as Coffey explains:

[f]ieldwork involves the enactment of social roles and relationships . . . A field, a people and a self are crafted through personal engagements and interactions among and between researcher and researched. This negotiation or crafting of ethnographic self-hood in the process of fieldwork can be thought of as an establishment of a field identity or a field role. (1999: 23)

Regardless of how researchers present themselves, participants interpret them as human beings in ways that make sense in their lives and in a manner that is not necessarily predictable (Guevarra, 2006: 529). Some good examples regarding the active agency of research participants fashioning the identity of researchers according to their own will including: Abu-Lughod (1986) as a dutiful daughter; Briggs (1970) as a prodigal daughter; Fournillier (2009) as the ‘American girl’ and the resident cleaner; Jordan (2006) as a student and a negative agent; Kuehnast (2000) as somebody who could open doors to the presumed riches of the West; Morales (1989) as a drug trafficker, a foreigner and a stranger; Shore (1999) as associate member of an Italian family; Venkatesh (2002) as a drug dealer and an ‘Arab’ child molester; among others. Effects on research of identity construction are well documented. For example, Palmer (2006), in his study of the socialization of Korean American students, changed his methodology in the field and in the process:

altered [his] role from one who knows what is best for the students to one who wanted to learn as much from the students as possible . . . [He] came to view the participants as active agents who were capable of interpreting, negotiating, and managing their own lives. (Palmer, 2006: 485)

The task of negotiating one’s identity is further complicated by the fact that participants may attribute certain identities and roles to researchers for strategic purposes (Jacobs-Huey, 2002: 793). Jacobs-Huey (2002) mentions the case of Williams (1996) who had to constantly negotiate her membership to two communities that unfortunately were suspicious of each other. While the first prohibits her from mingling with the people of the second because of their dubious class status, the second was also critical of her closeness to the first, which they saw as an opportunistic lot. In what will follow, I will recount the numerous ways in which my identity as a ‘balikbayan’ was reconstructed by informants in the field for strategic purposes. In conjunction, I will try to contextualize, if rather sketchily, their identity construction of me, to highlight my informants’ engagement with their social world.

This article argues that an understanding of how scales contribute to the subjectification and multiplication of researchers’ identity is imperative for us to understand better the complexities of doing (insider) research in today’s world. While ontologically, scales are invisible, epistemologically, they affect our dealings in the field. Researchers, unavoidably, due to their scalar positioning and, what Bordieu calls, ‘scholastic point of view’ (Reed-Danahay, 2005), bring to the field a particular experiencing of life that could be deemed as encompassing all scales. They inhabit all scales and mindfully so. They are conscious of their ability to jump scales, being knowledge workers (Brown and Lauder, 2006; Brown et al., 2002) and make use of their scale-consciousness to advance their standing in their field (here, I’m using field in Bourdieu’s sense). But not all have the privileges and abilities of researchers – primarily university-educated researchers. Many are limited by their education, race, nationality and class, among other things, to explore life’s possibilities. Though they too are conscious that ‘other worlds’ exist beyond the confines of their own world, they cannot jump scales. They are mostly moving locally. Immobility seems to be their lot. However, that does not stop them actively reading people as scale-free and scale-jumpers, and, in most cases, this signifies a privileged life and access to resources. In their own constrained local mooring, then, they frame ‘outsiders’ presence in the scale of their own reach and what this could do to them to advance their own lot. I turn to this in the following sub-sections.

A ‘balikbayan’ working for an employment agency

Wage work in the formal economy was hard to come by in Banaag. With the educational qualifications of most people in the community low, the only venue that most of them could tap for their daily sustenance was the informal economy. Thus, most people in Banaag were into selling food on the street, tending ‘sari-sari’ stores, ² running small canteens, doing domestic work (for women) for some affluent families in other parts of the town, performing manual labour (for men), selling fish (for both men and women), and working as bet collectors for the small town lottery. Any news about wage work in the locality, in the city or at best, abroad, was met with frenzied excitement and speculation. Everyone was on the lookout for a job and anyone who could provide one was keenly eyed. This was the prevailing economic and social condition that greeted me when I started my fieldwork. Early on in my research, I was already approached by some people in Banaag to inquire about possible jobs overseas. One good example of this is my conversation with Chito (not his real name) who was keen on finding work in the city or abroad:

This conversation must have been repeated several times with my informants. Other were persistent that they would visit me in my place thinking that a more private conversation with me would facilitate the granting of their request. Clearly, in the community, there developed a thinking that I was well connected (in my own community, in Manila and other cities and overseas), and therefore, I could facilitate their employment somewhere. In one clear example of how well articulated their conception of me as an excellent conduit for overseas jobs, I was approached by a family friend on my way home after conducting an interview with a fisherman. He was wondering, he told me, why I could not do anything about my brother who was working as a tricycle driver. Can’t I find a job for him in the UK? It should be easy since I am already there and I should be able to find a person willing to sponsor his employment in the UK. I was surprised by the query and the perceived conception that it was very easy to land a job overseas, and in the UK, specifically. My only response was that it is not that easy and I have no knowledge whatsoever of how I could find a job in the UK for my older brother.

As recounted, there was an expectation that since I had lived overseas, specifically in the UK, I could facilitate some people’s employment somewhere. It sounded so easy for them. The complications and bureaucratic and logistical hurdles of finding work overseas seemed easy in the light of my ‘connections’ to the outside world, my global positioning as a returning overseas university researcher in the order of things.

A ‘balikbayan’ who could help their children land a scholarship

University education in the Philippines not quite unlike in other developing economies is beyond the reach of the poor (Canieso-Doronila, 1996). In Banaag, I conducted a survey that revealed that, in a population of 708 people, only eight people actually finished college. Among these college graduates, I was the only one who attended the national university and had the fortune to pursue postgraduate studies overseas. Being privileged in this aspect and having enjoyed scholarships both in my undergraduate and postgraduate years rendered me a magnet for people who were seeking scholarships for their children to pursue further education. In most interviews that I made, before a door was closed behind me, the usual last query and request was a scholarship for their children. In some amusing incidents, I was even presented to children as the one responsible for their college education (‘Pag-aaralin kayo ng Kuya Boyet sa college!’ – ‘Boyet will send you to the university!’). In one really unforgettable incident, a family of five visited our house and the mother presented to me all her children with their school report cards and boasted how her children reaped all the awards in their school’s recognition and graduation rites. I was of course happy for her children but was totally unprepared for the request that came my way. I vividly recall our exchange of words:

Though I made no immediate promise, she must have been comforted by my answer that I did not know any scholarship available for her children so far but if and when I got to know one, I would inform her. This incident was repeated four times before I left and even up to the time of writing this article I continue to receive text messages from my informants inquiring about scholarships!

A ‘balikbayan’ who could be a source of financial assistance

Just like most ‘balikbayan’, I was not spared from the expectation that I had a significant financial largesse to distribute. Although I was not totally unaware of this expectation, the gravity of the situation eventually gripped me when I started doing interviews. Though I believe that other researchers had experienced the same ‘exploitation’ in the field, I feel that my being a ‘balikbayan’ aggravated the orgy of requests that came my way. Though being exploited for money by informants was not new (see e.g. Venkatesh, 2002), I also thought that aside from being a ‘balikbayan’, being a native of the place made them feel that I could be easily persuaded to lend them money. In a number of interviews, my informants would indirectly signify their intention to borrow money from me to pay for their medical needs, electric bills, business venture, house rent, tuition fees and even interest for pawned jewelry! One example of this is Perla:

In this exchange, I was a visible target and Perla was clearly referring to me as one of the people who were lucky to be getting their money elsewhere. My answer in this kind of ‘pagpaparandam na hihiram’ (implied intention to borrow or ask for money) was silence and I would at once shift the conversation to other topics. Some, on the other hand, would be quite forward and my usual response would be to politely decline citing my limited budget. ³

Discussion

Conclusion

This article discussed how doing research at home is not a ‘homey’ affair, as it were; opaque to the contingencies of fieldwork and unmoved by the agency of participants. A researcher in the field is almost always occupying a shifting position and his identity is ripe for speculation. It is this conflicted positionality of being a native researcher that draws us to the realization that almost always to do research in one’s own community is to be caught ‘in an ambiguous and conflicting situation, which provokes tensions and contradictions that keep him in constant intellectual and existential crisis’ (Kanuha, 2000: 444). This is more so for a ‘balikbayan’ researcher who has to contend with his status identity conferred on him by the political-economic condition of his country and his country’s position in the global labor trade. A ‘balikbayan’ identity provides a context-generative background from which different ways of construing the researcher’s identity could be formulated and advanced in the pursuit of a particular agenda by the people in the field. The article also points out the power that informants have over the ‘fieldwork life’ of insider researchers (see also Dickinson, 2010). It highlights the fact that native scholars ‘negotiate and experience different positionalities in the field stemming from their ethnic, linguistic, gendered, educational, and class/caste backgrounds’ (Jacobs-Huey, 2002: 799). In my case, being a ‘balikbayan’ and its attendant socio- economic distinction in the field in the eyes of my informants brought forth my experiencing of a different ‘me’ while conducting research. My participants’ conception of me depended not on what I wanted them to think about me but rather hinged on their individual needs and the involvement of the community in the more expansive narratives of labor diaspora in the Philippines and the world at large. Furthermore, as location is about vulnerability (Guevarra, 2006), my several identities were particularly tied up with how the Philippines makes economic sense of its labor power and its relations with the rest of the world. While a number of studies have reflected on the ways in which research participants have actively engaged with the researcher in terms of constructing the identity of the latter in the field, very little literature on the topic has pursued and made visible the need to understand them in the context of the politics of scale and how scales make an impact on how people in the field perceive the presence of a researcher in the field. While there is a constant referral to insider research as a robust position from which to redress the preponderance of research done in ‘strange’ cultures, the need to further investigate and implicate the swirling narratives of scales in our daily life and their impact on our subject position as researchers have to be attended to. Insider research is influenced in various ways by the epistemological whirlwind of hypermobility and mobility of people in places. My status identity as a ‘balikbayan’ researcher is a product of the global movement of people and the place that I studied; a changing and dynamic landscape where people are mostly immobile and yet not oblivious to ‘a widening recognition of fluidity and movement, of a mobile world in which people and things, influences and effects, work across space and at a distance, breaching the boundaries of location’ (Hall, 2009: 572).