Appalachian Affects: Fieldwork as Material Ecology

I have spent my entire life in the Mid-Ohio River Valley where I grew up on a small farm. But from April 2016 to January 2017, I visited 13 off-grid homesteaders in Southern Ohio to learn why they built homes as a form of environmental activism. Over the course of this fieldwork, I helped mix sand, straw, and clay to create cob—one of the earliest-recorded building materials. I attended community builds and worked on rooftops with an Appalachian solar company. My participants told me why they chose to build with vernacular techniques, such as rammed earth, citing examples from the 11th and 12th centuries. I learned about the habits of off-grid living and how to recycle rainwater. I made windows with old wine bottles and framed walls with truck tires. Because of these experiences, I now think of the field as a place where everyday habits unfurl haphazardly over time, like tangled brambles of honeysuckle, to spawn cycles of birth, growth, and decay within an ecosystem. Here, some materials and habits ripple across an ecosystem with more force than others.

The off-grid activists and homesteaders I met with built homes that—by design—reminded them that domestic habits spawn unintended patterns of action/reaction across an ecosystem. As Laura, a homesteading mother of two who built her home from salvaged truck tires puts it, “I want to show my boys how connected everything is, so that they can view the world in a different way to learn that every action they take has an impact on the environment around them.” Another time, while I mixed cob for her home, Laura talked about the ducklings we saw huddled around a gray metal water trough in the sweltering heat. In both cases, I realized that Laura’s domestic habits help her recognize the agency, vitality, and—what political theorist Jane Bennett (2010) terms—“vibrancy” of everyday materials. In the following spirit, this essay considers fieldwork as a series of ecological attunements that impact participant and researcher alike. I term this type of fieldwork, which studies the union of affect, action, and matter, material ecology. My methodology and writing thus take seriously object-oriented ontology’s call to “put things at the center of being” when considering how ethnographic fieldwork uncovers patterns of action/reaction (Harman, 2015). In such a space, lives blend in ways that are best captured in fieldwork through a phenomenology of things encountered, lost, and found (Ahmed, 2010). Here, you may start with tools and end with spiders. Here, stories of dogs turn into stories of towns and stories of culture. Here, in this field, all things are vibrant.

Only on rare occasion does fieldwork feel methodical. This is not for a lack of trying. The night before each drive, I gather supplies, laying each item out for inspection: an audio recorder nestled inside a black plastic eyeglass case; spare AAA batteries; clean white copies of my interview protocol and consent forms; extra pens; work boots and a pair of rubber galoshes; my tool belt; a hefty metal thermos; plastic 5-gallon water jugs for off-grid builds; and, finally, a bedroll for overnight trips. Everything neatly packaged and labeled—the mise en place of a nervous ethnographer fussing over how many batteries to bring, committing the first topics of conversation to memory, and fretting over what to wear. To shake hands or not to shake hands? Consent form before or after the interview?

There is always fear when we enter a field; the same fear I work so hard to stifle with an extra set of batteries and a well-packed bag. Fieldwork, to borrow a well-known dictum, makes the strange familiar and the familiar strange. But what does it mean to internalize this as a habit? To write and research in various shades of strangeness—physical, imagined, or otherwise? To place the ethnographer in the midst of known and unknown things? To think of the field as an ecology? In the field, we collect data points as we smell things, touch people, and taste food. And then, we write about these experiences. So, fieldwork, itself, is an embodied sensibility that emerges from dwelling in a place over time. In turn, we must pay attention to our surroundings, especially the objects and species that shape habit.

Why stage the tools of this trade? Why fuss over a pencil, a recorder, a set of spare batteries? I realize the answer to these questions nearly 4 months later when I lose the contents of my tool belt on a build. I treat objects associated with fieldwork with respect because, for me, work is where tools are. Labor orders matter, and efficient laborers recognize the right equipment: When you hay or scrape paint, you’ll set aside a pair of gloves, a bandanna, and a long-sleeve shirt. If you drive a truck, a cooler and a radio are a must. Same if you work in a machine shop, but you’ll want to add gloves, earplugs, and possibly a respirator. And if you work on a farm or with concrete, muck boots are indispensable. At every turn, the materials of work structure an ecology. Materials first, body second—take care of your gear and your gear will take care of you. When you begin fieldwork, you must be ready to work.

Work is labor; labor is rhythm, and rhythm and fieldwork are inextricably linked. Through bodily habit, humans perform culture, consume matter, and—as Sonyini Madison and Judith Hamera (2005) write—cyclically “reinvent ways of being in the world” (p. xii). But how you move through a given field depends on your tools. Although they are both tools, a recorder is different from a shovel, and the rhythms of spade shovel are alien to a 22-story tall dragline excavator named Big Muskie that scooped coal for the Central Ohio Coal Company until the early 1990s. But today, I realize that although affect-material relations may shift in a second, our underlying habits are much less likely to change. Shovels and buckets still do the same things, and when I get nervous before an interview, I pack and inspect my tools just as I would have done for any job. So, fieldwork is, first and foremost, habits that ripple through an ecology. There is no field if we can’t move through it.

~

I do my best thinking when I’m moving. This is what draws me to fieldwork. Fieldwork, in the most basic sense, is rhythm, but these rhythms are often not apparent until the body learns them. I first realized this working 10-hr days, 6 days a week, at a tool-and-die shop one summer. The pay was good, cash under the table, but every action was the same: Take a 6-ft. piece of metal rod, insert it into the chamfer machine. Mind the blade. Turn counterclockwise six times. Run your thumb over the edge to check for burs. Place the machined part on a plastic cart. Repeat.

When I went to graduate school, Marx made more sense, and I didn’t need to read about the bodily discipline of Taylorism and Fordism to understand it. As the body labors to action, a sense of self emerges. So, fieldwork is a study of body and habit, and some habits are more conducive to fieldwork than others. But most importantly, habits take their bearings from our surrounding ecology. We eat, breath, and work, in particular spaces with particular rhythms, but not everyone works, breathes, or eats equally. Some bodies must work harder than others, and so some bodies are harder to write about.

What happens when bodies breakdown? I spend most of my time with participants on ladders and roofs. At first, it is exciting, but pretty soon, the reality sets in. Time equals pain. Did it really only take me a couple of years to forget this simple fact? I may wield tools, but our union wreaks havoc over my body. No object is inert. At home, I open the freezer and take out an empty wine bottle rolling the cold glass against my instep. My neck aches; my back is stiff. I think about one of my participants, Dan, who often talks about years he spent on codeine when he was a roofer. Two stories up and half a world away.

You can’t write when you are working—I mean really working. It just doesn’t happen. There is no time for field notes when holding tools. Think about it: Einstein worked in a patent office, Kafka was a salesman, Vonnegut a Saab dealer, Fanon a psychologist. I doubt their collective imaginations would have survived the stone quarry, the machine shop, or the warehouse. What would IT look like if Stephan King had installed sheetrock for a living? On the Road if Kerouac was a truck driver? And now, I think about when I drove a truck—first for an ice factory, then to delivery brown packages to suburban mansions nestled between corn fields. It wasn’t that I didn’t think great thoughts then. It’s just that when the work boots finally came off, there was no time for writing. Some materials, like trucks or ladders, make fieldwork damn near impossible. For the ethnographer then, some material ecologies are easier to navigate than others. And, others evolve over time as materials coalesce in new, emergent patterns. In this way, all matter is vibrant, even if its vibrancy is recalcitrant.

~

Last week, I lost my muffler on Sweet Hollow road sustaining a rhythm I’ve chased ever since I first picked up a hammer. Rough carpentry is tripartite rhythm: The framer is the most experienced builder. He is responsible for measuring each timber. He stays on the build, relaying dimensions to a cutman who operates the saw. Rather than break the cadence of this call and response, most crews rely on a runner to ferry lumber across the build and help with installation. The runner is the least experienced carpenter, the type of person who doesn’t add fractions quick enough, can’t remove a speed square from their tool belt without looking, and binds the circular saw in anything thicker than a 2 × 4.

When I work with John or Danny, I am always the runner. Community builds, however, lack a pecking order, and as a result, the way you stage scaffolding or the tools you carry can ruffle a few feathers. If ego or personality are involved, it gets messy—as in the case of a tiny home builder I interviewed who had many fancy tools, a half-dozen volunteers shifting restlessly in the mid-day sun, and an amazingly byzantine method for deciding where to set each post for the deck we were to install. It’s the thing I hate most about fieldwork, and dust ups usually occur once dehydration sets in. In the wilting, humid Ohio heat, a water jug goes a long way, and I always carry extras with me—one for myself, and one for when tensions run high. The whole ordeal reminds me of the way dogs preen and posture over a water bowl when they know someone’s watching.

Building (of any sort) can be an awkward, fragile space. There are times when the last thing you want to do is take notes. Although clichéd, studying how rhythms emerge through daily habit requires that you “go with the flow.” Once I realize this emergent property of fieldwork, I take fewer written notes and began narrating the day’s events, in private, on the drive home:

A Field Note Taken on Route 13 (July 2016). The drive to Big Muskie’s bucket. Past Chauncey. Past the dog pound. Past homemade wooden peeling signs for auto repair. And sawmills. Past Glouster—an old mining town desperately trying to reinvent itself with murals and homemade signs. Past Millfield and the mine disaster where summer heat makes clapboard siding waver in the distance. Into Wayne National Forest where dilapidated houses fall in on themselves. Crumbling foundations and pockmarked shingles. Buckingham AM Coal—King Coal’s back yard. Gas and oil derricks. Rusted. Mantis-shaped. Purple flowers on the roadside. Golden rod. Clear blue sky. Into the flatlands. Hay in tidy rows. Still green, still verdant but the outermost edges of the leaves turn brown. Tall-stalked yellow flowers. My sisters and I used to braid them as kids. And cupped flowers that grow in ditches on the side of the road. Amanda will tell me the color. I’ll stop by on the way back. A white clapboard church, a small rectangular with a primitive steeple. The sign outside says, “If you die today are you ready to meet Jesus?” Entering Morgan country and a highway adopted by the Morgan county republican party.

Note-taking-while-driving works best when I find a well-paved shoulder or rare straightaway. Sweet Hollow, however, is a gravel access road strung between pine-studded ridges. As I’m shifting gears while reaching for my recorder, I don’t see the rust-flaked Farmall tractor sputtering down the hillcrest in front of me. I avoid a crash, but by the time I coax my truck from the bar ditch, it’s missing a muffler, and I’ve lost the ability to enter a field undetected. It was a stupid, dumb thing to do—record while driving—but it taught me that there are no passive objects in ethnography. All things have the power of potentiality—even a muffler.

~

The biodiversity of the Mid-Ohio River Valley is astounding. Over 10,000 species inhabit this narrow band of hills, hollers, and rivers stretching through Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia. What I notice most about the spring though are the spiders. After cold spring nights, I find daddy long legs in my boots in the morning. Brown recluses fall into the washing machine when you leave the door open, and on sunny days when I hang my clothes out to dry, cobwebs cling to linens in silver tendrils.

Spiders weave either funnel webs, which vortex inward to trap prey, or sheet webs, which join crisscrossing snares like tangled skeins of yarn. Funnel webbed spiders are generally deadlier, and on a warm July night when I watch June bugs struggle in webs around my front porch light, I think about how people talk about Appalachia. Like a web, it sticks to you so that you never really leave. Appalachian habits represent a dense web of relations, rituals, and performances that can be impossible to escape, even in exodus.

The easiest way to think of Appalachia—the way most think about it—is as a funnel web of poverty. A place where canaries live underground and the scars of Buffalo Creek, ¹ the Battle of Blair Mountain, ² and yellow-dog ³ scabs still smart. A place where Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty” was born in the face of poverty rates exceeding 150% of the national average (Lichter, Garratt, Marshall, & Cardella, 2005, p. 20). Yet, there is another side to Appalachia that rarely gets mentioned. With the signing of the Federal Highway Act of 1956, Appalachian roadways were reborn as webbed routes of exodus, this time luring people away from home. As West Virginia native, Kostis “Shorty” Bongalis, remembers “you had to learn the three rs—Reading, Writing, and Route 21. And if you couldn’t swim, you better have help crossing the Ohio River” (Salstrom, 2015, p. 117). Between 1950 and 1960, 839,581 “highlanders” migrated to the Buckeye state from Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia. As a surveyor of Lewis County, WV, noted in 1941, “the principal export product of this area appears to be children” (Kirby, 1983, p. 598).

In some cases, the federal government even built so-called hillbilly highways to encourage migration. For instance, the James A. Rhodes Appalachian Highway, which snakes along the Ohio-Kentucky border from Cincinnati, OH to Parkersburg, WV, was built to encourage travel and economic growth. Regardless of the success of these roadways in revitalizing Appalachia, however, The Great Appalachian Migration had an enormous impact on the Ohio River Valley, dispersing Appalachian customs, language, and history to surrounding cities and towns. In Dayton, OH, for instance, the promise of union jobs at AK Steel, General Motors, Delco, National Cash Register, General Electric, and Frigidaire drew tens of thousands of individuals to urban Appalachia. There is even an old joke, one repeated many times that most Mid-Ohio River Valley cities are filled of people too dumb or drunk to find Detroit. Maybe Steve Earle puts it best in his 1986 ballad “Hillbilly Highway”:

My grandaddy was a miner, but he finally saw the light

He didn’t have much, just a beat-up truck and a dream about a better life

Grandmama cried when she waved goodbye, never heard such a lonesome sound

Pretty soon the dirt road turned into blacktop, Detroit City bound

Down that hillbilly highway

That hillbilly highway

Hillbilly highway

Goes on and on.

This history remains codified in daily speech, performance, and habits throughout the Mid-Ohio River Valley. And likewise, Appalachian culture, history, and rhythms inform my performance of fieldwork. More specifically, the landscape, lifestyle, and habits of Appalachian Ohio shape how I interact and communicate with my participants, all of whom grew up in various shades of rural, Southern Ohio. When I work on Alex and Rachel’s house, for instance, Rachel and I both know to make chitchat about the hay, trading stories of walking behind the trailer, hay hook in hand, to chase down stray bales in the August heat; stacking bales bound in orange plastic twine while hay needled our forearms; and watching a rust-flaked tractor sputter in the sunset. And likewise, when I’m at Wes’, I know to roll handful of fresh-cut alfalfa between thumb and forefinger to check if it’s dry and ready to bale.

For my entire life, I have thought about Appalachia as a place of export, an ecology of extraction. But it is so much more. Appalachia: a place where paw-paw means both fruit and family. Appalachia: a place where mango may mean bell pepper. Appalachia: a sensory experience brought into words. The y’alls. The orange camo coveralls. The photos of a fathers and sons, bows in hand, crouching over whitetail bucks at the community bulletin board in Walmart. The independence. The interdependence. The grinding theatrics of a demolition derby. The smoke pouring from souped-up jalopies rollin’ coal at the country fair. The Confederate flags. The first time I saw a swastika tattoo. The young love of two pimple-faced teenagers wearing muck boots, his lanky arm over her slender shoulder, holding hands on the courthouse steps. The gun totin’, pot smokin’ off-grid builders I’ve met on solar jobs. The poverty. The rich cultural history. The moonshine and paw-paw festivals. The newly refurbished Eclipse company town. The other company towns.

~

Appalachia, as both background and method—as a material ecology—represents a host of quotidian, ordinary affects that, as Kathleen Stewart (2007) notes, “slide into place at a moment’s notice” (p. 15). And, the Ohio River Valley is a place where the meaning of stories often comes ‘round in a circuitous fashion; they, themselves, are an ecology. So, let me tell you about my pitbull mix from Chan-see. She is a white, stocky knee-high bundle of muscle. She is also a pound puppy, so sometimes I imagine that when she was 6 weeks old someone pulled to the side of Old Route 13, put her in a ditch, and told her to stay. Everyday my dog reminds me that some stories of fieldwork are rooted in conditions that twist, scar, and ossify in unpredictable ways. For instance, sometimes you start telling a story about a dog and end up telling a story about where she’s from.

Chan-see is spelled Chauncey, but if you aren’t from ‘round here, you’ll pronounce it like Chaucer. That’s because you probably didn’t grow up with an accent that turns Staunton to Stantin or Lancaster to Linkister. When you mispronounce this name, folks from Chauncey will recognize this, and with this subtle slip of a tongue, you’ll be forever tied to a history of scab labor and undercover Feds looking to bust a still during prohibition days. In Chauncey, a community hinges on an accent. It is one of those performances of home that emerge from the specific habits, habitats, and histories of an ecology wrought over time. So, such habits influence my performance of fieldwork. When visiting participants, old combat boots, a white t-shirt, and canvas work pants balance the expectations of academic who brings the right tools to a build site and knows the difference between Appa-Latch-uh and Appa-Lay-shuh. If I hadn’t grown up on a farm, worked manual labor, or been raised ‘round here could I have ever entered this ecology?

~

There is an art to chitchat in small towns. Carsey’s is an old-school barber shop; the kind of place with a stenciled plate glass window and a candy stripe pole. The barbers are all men, all former military, and all have round, fat bellies that press against the back of your head while they work. The shop’s default haircut is a variation on the high and tight. Today, my barber is a former sailor with a crisp flattop. Swiveling me around in his chair, so our eyes meet in the mirror, he tells me he always carries a .380 pistol. We talk carpentry, guns, and my project. He tells me about a buddy of his, Ronnie Smith, out in Redtown, has built plenty of houses. I should talk to him, but he doesn’t know if Ronnie has a phone. He writes Ronnie’s name down on the back of a business card, which he slips in my palm as I head for the door.

I never found Ronnie, but this is life in Southeast Ohio. In this material ecology, fieldwork is never over. There is always the possibility that a conversation will crop up, and I’ll be invited to someone else’s house. Referencing “the field” or “fieldwork” is thus less a reference to place or practice as it is a shorthand for conveying the sensuous experiences associated with talking, working, and thinking about an ecology.

In Appalachia, chewing cud is a way of life, so you think before you speak, but you speak a lot. So, word of mouth is how fieldwork gets done in small-town Ohio. But, often I was given just a name, which meant that, in some cases, the individual didn’t own a phone, didn’t get cell service at their place, or was purposely trying to live off the phone grid. In bigger towns, word of mouth usually meant that the potential participant was afraid they were in violation of local building ordinances. In fact, after one interview, I was given contact information for another off-grid homeowner only to find that the family was facing eviction for residing in a condemned structure. When I called the next day to set up an interview, the father—a man with a scratchy voice and a heavy drawl—told me didn’t feel comfortable bringing an outsider to his home. Experiences like these remind me that, when it comes to people’s homes, I will always be an outsider. In fieldwork, some ecologies are never known.

~

Fieldwork starts and ends with the body. In the field, we are fascinated by bodies, what they do, how they move, and what they mean. So, fieldwork is an accumulation of habits that form as bodies interact within a larger ecology of more-than-human forces. Habit, as a method then, is that which makes things known or strange, and to borrow author Teju Cole’s (2016) aphorism, “we are our habits in sum” (p. xi). But in these, habits orient us to people, places, and species in novel ways. Depending on who we are, where we live, what we do, or what we eat, we navigate these fields differently.

Sensory ethnography pays credence to these differences in terms of theory, method, and writing. Theoretically, sensory-based ethnography—as an extension of phenomenology—considers how perceptual modalities—such as olfaction, taste, and vision, touch, and proprioception (i.e., the ability to intuit the spatial location of body parts)—inform our sense of self. Hence, a sensory ethnography requires a theoretical commitment to view ethnography as an embodied practice of action, and as editors Paul Atkinson, Sara Delamont, and William Housley (2008) conclude in Contours of Culture:

What is undeniable, however, is that the physical presence of the ethnographer implies not merely a passive physical presence, but an active Being-in-the-World. It implies the sort of sensory action implied by phenomenological accounts of perception and interpretation. (p. 140)

Likewise, Chris Tilley (2006) argues that the embodied nature of ethnographic research is especially true for activities that “require doing rather than saying” (p. 328). Regardless of their background or expertise then, sensory ethnographers regard the body as a conduit to knowing a field.

A more-than-human approach to sensory ethnography, however, must take the impact of nonhuman habits into consideration. As researchers, we must first pay attention to our own cross-species socialization and then move outward in concentric circles. The macro stems from the micro: We must learn to recognize the materials that structure our own embodied habits before understanding how this body enters a material ecology of larger forces. Likewise, in the field, is helpful to focus less on the participant and more on their daily interactions with other species. As a result, I began carrying a notebook tucked in my waistband when working with participants to catalog the tools, bodies, and rhythms of fieldwork. Although I also took field notes in the form of audio recordings, the way the notebook sometimes chafed against my side while I walked—or the fact that I had to remove it before sitting—reminded me to note the species, tools, and objects I encountered. When I did this, I began to recognize the more-than-human aspects of an ecology.

Although writing in the field can be invaluable, the process of ethnographic data collection begins with headnotes. Headnotes catalog the day-to-day musings that follow us in-and-out of the field as we conduct research. Headnotes proceed fieldwork. They begin when we begin envisioning the field and are rooted in the individual consciousness of each researcher. In this way, as Michael Taussig (2011) notes, headnotes continue to evolve as the body becomes more comfortable in the rhythms of fieldwork. Headnotes are, therefore, an extension of habit and as, Roger Sanjek (2001) writes in “A Vocabulary for Fieldnotes,” “Headnotes are more important. Only after the anthropologist is dead are the fieldnotes primary (p. 94).” By thinking through the actions and body in fieldwork, headnotes provide ethnographers the chance to consider the fieldwork as a space of daily habit and embodied action across species.

The goal of head, scratch, and field notes then is to attend to the complex flows, fragile bonds, and fluid dynamics of symbolic meaning (Sanjek, 2001). But a more-than-human approach to ethnography must also account for how nonhuman actors alter sense and perception in the field. Fieldwork must thus consider how multiple modes of perception (i.e., taste, smell, etc.) rely on daily actions of consumption, production, and reproduction. For this reason, sensory ethnographers, notably Sarah Pink (2010), advocate for a sensory fieldwork that is rooted in the analysis of “how people make place in their everyday lives” (p. 332). Hence, sensory ethnographers often pay attention to daily habits, such as walking, eating, and dwelling to cultivate, as Pink and Mackley (2012) argues, “a sensory aesthetic [that serves as] an informative starting point for the analysis of everyday domestic life” (p. 17). Continuing, Pink notes,

A sensory aesthetic of home involves particular attention to the textures, sounds, and visual dimensions of home, how participants create atmosphere in their homes—as such, how they make their homes feel “right” and what they do about it when someone or something messes this up. (p. 27)

My participants craft a sensory aesthetics that recognize nonhuman materials as vibrant ecological actors who retain the ability to affect—and be affected—by larger networks of circulation. To address the role of such vibrant matter in ethnography then, many sensory ethnographers prefigure the field as a space of material circulation wherein, as anthropologist Harold Wilhite (2005) writes, “people do not consume energy per se, but rather the things energy makes possible such as light, clean clothes, travel, refrigeration, and so on” (2). In this way, a more-than-human orientation toward fieldwork means nothing unless we understand how bodies learn to consume matter in the distinct patterns. Tracing the impact of these patterns is the first step toward recognizing fieldwork as an ecology.

In my field notes, I wanted to remember the objects, actions, and routines that generated an affective sense of home for my off-grid participants. But affects, by their nature, are fleeting and transitory. They are derived from the way things interact with their environment, and are, as affect theorist Brian Massumi (2009) notes, like a Doppler effect in that they are subject relative and always moving (p. 200). Likewise, I think of the way that my data collection changed as analogous to the way the body leans to adapt to its surroundings—for every change, something takes its place, in a process that I think of as an affective conservation of matter. My method of documenting the field therefore evolved to accommodate the landscape and affective atmosphere of cross-species interaction. Particularly, I tried to pay attention to the more-than-human habits and affects that emerged over time. Within this material ecology, some rhythms of fieldwork (e.g., shoveling and tamping dirt, organizing tools, or shaking spiders from your boots) form habits that ultimately generate affect and influence conscious thought. Although quotidian, events like losing a muffler drastically alter the rhythms of fieldwork as they simultaneously destroy and create ways of traversing a field. Writing thus becomes a process of collecting, organizing, and narrating the scattered, fleeting moments when rhythms change across an ecosystem.

Because of my decision to build alongside my participants, most of what I wrote, drew, or sketched in the field were scratch notes. If thinking about fieldwork through headnotes represents a phenomenology of the field, then scratch notes—that is, the hastily jotted first impressions of a field—offer a kind of roadmap of ethnographic habit and action. In this manner, sketches, poetry, and audio recordings from the field are all unintended work-arounds of the embodied nature and material constraints. These scratch notes offer a powerful way to map a cross-species socialization and affect-material relations across an ecology.

Typically, when writing scratch notes, I would wait for a break in the action or excuse myself to write three- to five-word summaries. In these notes, I relied on the power of a single word or phrase to capture a state of mind or conjure up an affective landscape. Most often I tried to focus almost exclusively on the materials, species, and actions of a field site. For example, the following scratch notes were taken during my visit to a participant’s off-grid cob house project in July:

Sharpening scythe blade. Needs to weld or solder it. “You have to be careful. You can swing these too hard.”

Asked “why cob”—most efficient, low-impact material.

Outline of the cob house is heart shaped.

Wolf spiders, yellow jackets, lady bugs.

Pileated woodpecker.

Snake skin sloughs.

Clay slip in pockmarked holes.

A big camera is not practical for working.

When does home stop being a home and become a place for natural decay?

Lady woods//union deserter//court martial//hanging

Bicycle spokes// 550 cord//nylon

When working, I didn’t have the time to note my interactions word-for-word, so I would keep a running mental commentary until I found the time to record them. Although, in retrospect, many of my scratch notes read like word-salad, they were my attempt to keep the vitality of the more-than-human field alive. As I became more habituated to my research practices, I began to develop my own shorthand for recognizing my body as a research instrument within this larger ecology.

As memory fades, so does the potential for evocative writing. Thus, following Malinowski’s advice to “produce a chaotic account in which everything is written down as it is observed or told,” when I returned from an interview or build, I compiled my scratch notes in a series of long-form stream of consciousness field notes on the people, places, and activities that I encountered (Sanjek, 2001, p. 99). The following is an excerpt from reflections on my second day at Stanley’s farm:

Cob project has been on mothballs since 2001, and it’s on the brink of breakdown. Waiting. Snakeskins wedged in crevices. Black rat snake and copperhead skin. Spiders and wasps are the primary occupants now. If you’re going to build your own home, you have to learn to work with wasps. Killing them is a losing battle. Save for yellow jackets you can learn to work alongside almost any type. The cob house is in mothballs. A body dying—a house dying. Houses don’t decay the same way. When you die your heart, stops pumping blood and that’s it. Its startlingly abrupt even if it’s taken months or years to reach the point of failure. The house on the other hand has no such discrete timeline, just various states of disrepair awaiting an inevitable collapse. Gnats, poison ivy, oak, and sumac these are the primary tenants now. Describe Stanley’s cob house: bicycle inner tubes, yellow nylon rope, and 550 paracord hold down the tarps. Find more sailing terminology about knots. What type of knots? Bowlines, clove hitches, sheet bends. Describe how the knots hold down the billowing tarps—all balled up at the ends and knotted. I don’t know why this fascinates me. Against the background of the lake it almost seems as if the house is about to set sail. Like it’s at a dock struggling against its earthen moorings. With the billowing tarps and undulating cob curves it looks graceful and alive. A ship’s hull with pockmarks and barnacles clinging to the side. Alight. But the house is not at sea. It’s not undulating. We take off the tarps, it’s like a snake sloughing off skin. Stanley talks about his time in the Navy. The house sheds its nylon plastic carapace a new life. Like a cicada breaking. This is the best image. With its pockmarked brown surface the house resembles the hard, nut-brown carapace of a cicada. The house is located about 800 meters away from the main house. That’s half a mile of mowing to reach it. Both Stanley and I are bloodied from thorns and knee-high thistles. Sacrifice for the cob gods I suppose. One of the tarps is an old Ralph Lauren billboard—take note of this. Inside the effect is eerie and unnerving. Light hits the roofline illuminating a blond sailor and failed congressional candidates above you. On the way, back for lunch we cross lady woods. Stanley sees me eyeing an old cemetery. He tells me that John Lady, a rebel deserted was captured, court marshaled, executed, and buried right there. This reminds me of the short story about a confederate hanging—An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge? The author, Ambrose Bierce, grew up in Meigs county, I wonder who influenced whom? Extended field notes, such as these, allowed me to record the day-to-day activities of fieldwork with an eye toward sensory perception and thick description. As a rule, I wrote field notes before transcribing each interview and tried to finish each entry within 48 hr of leaving a build. The length and tone of these field notes varied, but, generally, I tried to fill one notebook a month. I found that the more that I pushed myself to write, the more I learned to trace the union of humans, nonhumans, and affect as a more-than-human ecology.

~

Within a material ecology, there is no knowing where the field ends or begins. So, 3 years after my first interview I find myself somewhere new: Kickapoo, Illinois state park. Here, framed photos of crouching miners hang on the walls of the visitor’s cabin, signs warn of the dangers of swimming in abandoned strip mines, and honeysuckle clings to unstable clay highways left by steam shovels before the mine closed in 1940.

I ain’t from Kickapoo; I’ve been only once, but it reminds me that you never really leave a field. But how did I end up here? I drove; I did not fly; I camped, and I stumbled upon a familiar ecology—an ecology of coal slags, of steam shovels, of mine shafts and coyote bones. Well-worn, forgotten relics. I found Kickapoo because I am impulsive and forgetful. But so is fieldwork. It ebbs and flows through time, and, in the dry spots, dormant germs—like honeysuckle on a highwall—take root and sprout. At Kickapoo, my fieldwork travels to a new space where methodology begets madness. At Kickapoo, I recognize fieldwork as ecology, not method.

In an ecology, circulation matters. Ethnography is bodies, and places, and lives, and deaths, and, above all, creation. But it is the body first and foremost. So, we must think about the field as a set of materials—both human and nonhuman—that shape bodily habit through daily patterns of action and reaction. We must learn to recognize the ecological vibrancy of nonhuman matter: it is no longer inert; it now pushes back and exerts its force through larger processes of birth and decay. Now, “things” matter because habits shape our performance of fieldwork. It matters that the muffler I lost on a dirt road in Appalachia changed the way I took field notes. And, it matters that one of my participants lives in an old coal mining bed that had a coal bucket so large that it could fit two school busses side-by-side. And, it matters that I live in a place where mango may mean bell pepper. These things matter, because these things make up a material ecology of which I am now (a)part.