Part of series of project reflections from BW Lab grad TA Erin Parish and undergraduate Saira Butt and Albert De Caprio. Erin, Saira, and Albert are in San Carlos, Colombia this summer working on Platform and Passageways, with funding from an “out of the box” grant from Humanities Writ Large. They are also posting on Twitter under the hashtag #HWLOutoftheBox.

 

 A professor once told me that most anthropologists have personal experiences of living betwixt and between different cultures and different realities.  And so they decide to make a career out of it.  While I’m not sure if that’s entirely true, I’ve been around enough anthropologists to know we’re a pretty disjointed lot, and that well probably runs deep for most of us.  The requirements of anthropology—extensive fieldwork, extensive theorizing about what that experience means—leads to a multi-sited life, which can easily lead to a sense of living and working in a semi-permanent state of transition.

 

My field site—San Carlos, Colombia—is itself a location in transition.  The whole country is, a fact impossible to miss with the frequent references to the peace talks with the FARC currently underway in Havana.  San Carlos, in particular, is a poster-child for post-conflict possibilities in Colombia.  It has been the site of multiple pilot projects for internally displaced people returning to their homes and for reconstructing the social fabric of a community that suffered a decade of horrible violence.   I truly love the people I work with here and am never failed to be inspired by their effort to reclaim community and remake a sense of home.

 

San Carlos feels like home to me.  One way I’ve tried to integrate my life in Colombia, with my life in the United States, is to bring my other homes to it.  All of my family has come to visit me here, which has allowed me to share my experiences with those I love most.  Having a student here was another step in integrating the multiple worlds in which I live, creating a sort of unbroken thread between my life and work in North Carolina and Colombia.  It has been a great joy to share my field site with my student, Albert DeCaprio, and to be able to keep my identity as a teacher alive and well in my research site.

 

albert and me at CARE

People, places, and experiences can all serve as anchors, creating stability within transitions. I wish Albert the best of luck in the transition from the rural beauty of San Carlos to the urban speed of New York City and remind him of T.S. Eliot’s words: “In the still point of the turning world, is the dance.”  These spaces betwixt and between do not have to be unsettling but can instead be rich and creative locations to claim residence.   For many of us, home has become a multi-sited and mobile experience.  And there’s beauty in the notion and motion of home as a moveable feast, in whatever still point we might find ourselves in the turning world.  There might even be dancing there.