Abstract
Sara Delamont begins her 2012 autobiographical essay in Studies in Symbolic Interaction by quoting from Blanche Geer’s (1964) famous article ‘First days in the field’. Geer claimed that as a student she had a taste for milkshakes and convertibles (Delamont, 2012: 51). Sara said she always wanted to use Blanche’s title, and looking back, like Geer, found her youthful college self strange. She had not become the person she was then. 1
The memory of her childhood identities allowed Sara to reflect on her family history, a childhood spent with an eccentric mother, and an adulthood as an ethnographer, a tenured scholar, an adult whose life was as ‘unlike as her mother’ as possible (2012: 52). Her mother believed in witches, dressed in trousers, wore bright colours, climbed trees, danced under the full moon and picked wild fungi. Had Sara’s mother owned one of father’s MGs I imagine her racing through the English countryside with her long hair and a long scarf blowing in the wind. Think of Ingrid Bergman in the famous car scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious.
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Sara and I both got our PhDs in the 1960s. We are of that generation – symbolic interactionists, fieldworkers, Chicago School of Sociology in the background – Blumer, Hughes, Becker and Goffman. Sara became a structuralist, I turned postmodern. We went in different directions. But like Harry and Sue in the 1972 Harry Chapin song Taxi ‘something inside led both of us to answer the call of the world’, to make it visible through our interpretive practices, to settle for nothing less.
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Using her words, think of Sara thusly: I am happiest and feel most Fulfilled as a scholar and A person when I am doing fieldwork. I am an ethnographer, feminist, symbolic interactionist. I make the familiar strange, fieldwork makes me whole, holds my heart. I am a structuralist, Interviewing leaves me cold. I fight research that is introspective, ethnocentric, and self-referential. I spent the evening of my 64th birthday doing fieldwork. I am not a professor, I refused to give up tenure, I was told that women who wanted the PhD had penis envy, that I would have made the perfect barmaid. We were poor, no telephone, car, fridge, television. No hot water for baths, but the right cultural capital- books, music, art, theatre. I avoided my mother’s life at all costs, no children, I always worked full time, she never held a formal job. She had many lovers, and lived close to the New Forest where there have been covens since 1939. Paul and I have been life-partners for over 40 years. I never learnt to drive, never travel by car. I mentor students, write books, do ethnography, Left poverty behind, chose the prosaic and the material Over the ecstatic, the emotional and the supernatural. I edit journals, and Teach a course on neopaganisms, and sometimes dream of milkshakes and convertibles and do fieldwork, and fly high above the footlights.