Fathermen: An Open Anthropological Platform
Adom Philogene Heron is a doctoral candidate in Social Anthropology and associate of the Centre for Caribbean, Latin American and Amerindian Studies (CAS) at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. He is editor and author of a blog called ‘Fathermen’, the outgoing sibling of a PhD project he is currently undertaking on fatherhood and men’s experiences of family life in Dominica, Eastern Caribbean. The blog seeks to render accessible the themes of his research to a broad audience and open up a public conversation on fatherhood, masculinities and family amongst Caribbean peoples.
The work of socio-cultural anthropology is to document, elucidate and communicate understandings of human social and cultural experience. Given this almost infinitesimally broad remit – to study any and all things human – anthropologists tend to focus on the particular. Thus, the minutiae and details of particular social phenomena, cultural contexts, geographic locales, and individual lives constitute the bread and butter of the discipline.
Yet with this penchant for the particular comes a preoccupation with the peculiar, the bizarre and the esoteric. Whilst not inherently problematic – anthropologists have produced a great number of fascinating and important studies drawing attention to marginalised forms of social experience – this preoccupation too often results in our conversations becoming somewhat insular. Aside from fieldwork our discussions are usually confined to seminar rooms, lecture theatres and museums, and occur amongst other academics (area specialists, fellow anthropologists or social scientists). By and large those with the biggest stake in our work are excluded from the conversations we engage in. Our ‘informants’, the people whose voices and life-ways we profess to represent are often forgotten, as if they couldn’t possibly understand our ‘heighty-tighty’ (to use a Dominican term for uppity) analyses of their lives.
However, in recent years there has been a concerted effort to ‘open up’ anthropology, by incorporating subjects’ voices into ethnographic accounts and displacing the traditional anthropological gaze through ‘native anthropology’/’anthropology at home’. At the level of publishing we have witnessed a move towards internet based discussion networks, open source journals and blogging.
The Fathermen blog falls firmly within this unfolding vision of an open anthropology. Launched in January 2012, Fathermen is the extroverted twin of an ethnographic research project I am currently undertaking on fatherhood and men in Dominican family life. Although my work focuses specifically on Dominica, I believe that the themes, social patterns and experiences I encounter in my fieldwork ‘speak to’ Caribbean realities throughout the region and beyond. As such the blog’s scope is broad: I post commentaries, videos, personal memoirs, essays, radio shows, short stories, photographs and poetry on all things associated with men and family life. Examples include a recent post entitled ‘The Plight of the ‘Paro’’, a short commentary on homelessness in Roseau; some images from a Fathers Day photography exhibition that I organized entitled ‘Look a Fada!’; and a critical analysis of UNWomen’s ‘Yes We Care’ TV advertisements in Trinidad and Tobago.
At present Fathermen functions not so much to inform others of research conclusions as to share emerging fieldwork meditations, half formed ideas I am in the process of trying to make sense of. Currently I am in the middle of research, dwelling in Dominica for approximately 18 months and as such I am yet to draw any firm analytic conclusions (even if provisional patterns are starting to gradually present themselves). Therefore, (for now) the fundamental goal of Fathermen is to open-up debate and contribute to an already growing public conversation on Caribbean men’s roles, practices and experiences vis families in the 21st century Caribbean world. The posts I have contributed thus far represent a series of fieldwork reflections in response to encounters I have had, newspaper articles read, events attended, incidents observed, videos I have seen, and discussions shared. I cross-post Fathermen entries on Facebook, through Diasporic social networking sites such as Dominicadiaspora.com (DD) and on occasion I submit them to Dominica News Online (DNO), an internet based newspaper. Dominica has a deeply engaged internet public, both domestic and overseas, who candidly comment on anything posted on either DD or DNO; therefore these sites provide good virtual spaces of critique, commendation and exchange of ideas.
My hope is that all Caribbean peoples can claim a stake in this little blog, hence as wide an audience as possible should be able to contribute to its polyvocal making. After all, every one of us has a father in some shape or form. If not an accessible physical father, then an idea, an ideal image of what a father is or should be; a mother who metaphorically fathers; a ‘sperm donor’; a psychic figurative space where we would want a father to be or he once was; a grandfather, a godfather, a step-father; an all mighty Father! From plantation to present the figure of the father has been itinerant and amorphous. Whilst many Caribbean peoples speak of fatherhood’s generic profile in various modes of absentia, most will readily admit that no singular typology of Caribbean fatherhood exists. In a sense then, the very idea of the father in the Antilles, reflects the existential landscape of Caribbeanness – ‘an open frontier’ of evolving plurality, hybridity and differentiation, as recently deceased Haitian scholar Michel- Rolph Trouillot has astutely pointed out. The point I am making (in a round-about way) is that the subject matter of the blog matters in an everyday sense to the region. Hence I invite any and all to participate in it – as contributors, commentators (in comments boxes) and critical readers.
American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins notes that,
“Kinsmen are people who live each other’s lives and die each other’s deaths. To the extent that they lead common lives, they partake in each other’s sufferings and joys, sharing one another’s experiences as they take responsibility for and feel each other’s acts.”
The story of Fathermen, or better the research project preceding and underpinning it, begins in the vast and dispersed world of kinship I inhabit. That is, it begins in diasporic imaginings cast across a vast transatlantic field of familial intimacy and separation. These imaginings connect Bristol, the English port city of my birth, a slave-trading capital built on the profits of British sugar, tobacco and cocoa, where my arrivant maternal grandparents set up new lives, raised 5 children and found work at Wills Tobacco and Fry’s Cadbury Chocolate factories respectively; with Dominica, the rugged verdant island home from whence they departed in 1956, leaving behind the familiar rhythms of daily life, friends and family (including several ‘outside children’). My grandfather Peter Mendes Philogene retired and returned to the small fishing village of his birth in Dominica, some 29 years after leaving. My grandmother, Alaskar Philogene – despite speaking daily of somewhere else called ‘home’ – was never to return to Dominica in all her 41 years of life in Bristol.
On the 19th of December 2010, several months after I had moved home to Bristol following my undergraduate studies, I received a message from my cousin (also grandson of Mendes and Alaskar) telling me of the arrival of his son into the world and asking me if I would be consider becoming the godfather. I said yes without hesitation. Since my graduation three months earlier I had been contemplating the idea of further study. This news of my new role in the new life of my cousin’s progeny, and more importantly what I observed of my cousin’s attentive and committed fatherhood, prompted me to begin meditating on what it means to be and become a father. And with such meditations this enquiry came into being.
On the 24th of March 2012, 6 months after beginning to transform these thoughts into a PhD project, I received another message, this time from a cousin in Dominica. The message read that our grandfather, Mendes, now a returnee in Dominica from Bristol, was unwell. I messaged her back immediately telling her I had notified the family in the UK and that my mother would call her. She replied the following day after visiting our Grandfather,
“…. I did tell him that I communicated with your mom and he seemed extremely pleased – he was giving so many kisses – I think I got the kisses for all of you. This must mean something. I would attempt to call your mom from the hospital, but he won’t be able to respond so I am not sure whether this makes any sense.”
Peter Mendes Philogene – great-grandfather of my godson, grandfather of my cousins and me, and father of my mother, uncle and aunts – passed away at 1:15am on the 25th March 2012. Sadly my studies prohibited me from attending the funeral. I would arrive in Dominica to begin my fieldwork some months later on the 2nd October 2012 – this being only my second visit to the island, my first visit and only meeting with my grandfather coming as a small child in 1987. Upon first returning to my grandfather’s village in the second week of October last year, an aunt introduced me to my Grandfather’s best friend. Tears welled up in the eyes of the tall broad framed old man as he studied my face and gently gripped my hand in an extended handshake. “I feel like I’ve arrived too late”, I told him. Gathering himself he looked back at me with a warm smile, then with a sudden tone of assurance he reminded me “nothing happens before its time”.
Locating its moment of departure between a birth and death, this personally motivated project is marked by the beginning and end of the life-course of the father. The birth of a first child signifies the coming of fatherhood and the death of a grand-, or indeed great-grandfather signifies its closure.
Both Fathermen and the ethnographic enquiry from which it derives are dedicated to the memory of my Grandfather Mendes and the life of Milan.
A Call to Contribute:
I am of the belief that all of us possess anthropological faculties. In other words, we all have the capacity to reflect upon, enquire about and ask questions of the social worlds that surround us. Therefore, I invite readers to make a submission Fathermen. My modest hope is that many of the readers of this column will share it widely and take up this invite. A submission can take the form of a descriptive personal narrative/memoir/history of a father, uncle, godfather, big brother, grandfather …etc during your childhood, his old age, or his passing; a poem; a short story; a commentary; old photographs with captions etc… or any other suggestions.
For more information on Fathermen submissions or any of themes discussed please email Adom at: aph7@st-andrews.ac.uk
To visit the blog, see: http://fathermen.blogspot.co.uk/
