insteadofobjectivity

My paternal grandfather, Robert Niederholzer, built his home in the Butte Creek Canyon in the early 2000’s. I spent large portions of my childhood on the seven-acre slice of land, playing in the creek and amongst the dense trees, sitting on the concrete bench beneath a towering willow tree. In 2018, the Camp Fire tore through the canyon and took with it the garage, the pumphouse (home to the well and the pipes), one of the homes on the property, and countless trees, bushes, grasses, and various plants.
During this time, I resided in the nearby city of Chico and went to community college with hundreds of people affected by the fire, some far more severely than I. My grandparents had passed the property on to my dad and his siblings many years prior, and no one in my family nor any of our family heirlooms/treasures were harmed during the fire. Nonetheless, this experience uniquely affected me. At this point, massively destructive wildfires were quickly becoming the norm, some calling fire season our “fifth season.” Prior to the Camp Fire, I did not understand fully the implications of a disaster of this magnitude. Everyone in the surrounding communities mobilized during the relief effort, hundreds of them donating time, resources, money, and shelter to displaced people. Through this experience, I gained a uniquely subjective understanding of wildfire events.
Because of my current position as researcher and someone who the fire affected, I turn to Renato Rosaldo’s work on objectivism in ethnography. On page 175 of Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis, Rosaldo says that “the ethnographer, as a positioned subject, grasps certain human phenomena better than others. He or she occupies a position or structural location and observes with a particular angle of vision.” Applying this to my situation, I think that if I lacked the close personal ties to and experience with these research sites, I would both be less welcomed by the fire victims and less attuned to the magnitude of displacement and change that occurred. I discovered an interesting manifestation of this in two fields drawings I did.

The two places that I did field drawings in were the lookout point between Chico and Paradise, and a small, secluded spot on my property that used to be a picnic area. While sitting on the bench overlooking the valley from the ridge lookout, it felt very isolating. Smatterings of burnt trees and old stumps yet to be cleared away lay around me, and the short chain-link fence was adorned with countless overlapping stickers, many of which reference resilience, hope, and futures after the Camp Fire. I was not a resident of Paradise, nor did I have any attachment to the little town. In that moment, I felt as though I was observing history like you would in a textbook or a documentary. However, conducting field drawings in a different space, one affected by the same natural disaster, I noticed a much different feeling arise.
In the late morning, I strolled behind the pond on my family’s property to where and old picnic table used to sit. Previously, there was dense brush and thick groves of trees separating this space from the road and the rest of the property. After the fire, the picnic table (still yet to be moved) rests halfway on the grassy floor, badly burnt and toppled over, yet not quite reduced to ash. The voices from the road travelled far more clearly to where I stood, and I chose a rock as a chair instead of the decomposing picnic table. As I drew and listened, I felt a deep sense of mourning for days passed. I chose to jot down the word “skeleton” when describing the fallen and barren trees, bark blackened by fire. I heard animals rustling in the leaves and what is left of the brush, a reminder that humans and plants were not the only beings disrupted by the events of 2018. Compared to my experience at the ridge lookout, it was a far more personally introspective moment. As ethnographers, I think that we have an obligation to understand and work with our biases, not discard them.
Circling back to Rosaldo’s writing, the “absolute, universal, and timeless” nature of objectivism does not have a prominent place in ethnography like it once did. While it is important for me not to lean too far into my personal, subjective experience with my research, I think it would be a disservice for me to disregard that my emotions do indeed inform my research. If I work with this unique perspective and investigate what it might mean for my research methods instead of trying (and likely failing) to be a perfectly objective, disconnected observer, I believe my ethnographic work will be far richer.