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Being the Third Generation in Tzintzuntzan

Peter S. Cahn (University of Oklahoma)

Being a member of the third generation of anthropologists to conduct fieldwork in Tzintzuntzan has indelibly marked the nature of both the data I collected and the conclusions I made.  If I had attempted the same project in a field site unknown to the anthropological literature, my results would have differed in far more than geographical nuance.  Ethnographic research in social anthropology training is still a solitary task, a rite of passage that separates seminar-taking graduate students from writing-up fieldworkers.¹  However, by undertaking research in a community already well studied by my main adviser (Professor Stanley Brandes), and his own academic mentor (Professor George M. Foster), I joined an ongoing dialogue that included my informants as well as those of my predecessors.  Through this dialogue, an ethnography emerges that is both informed and inchoate.

Contributors in earlier chapters of this volume have written about the history of long-term research projects, the effect of continuing contact with a community on their theory and method, and passing the mantle to the next generation.  My own vision is less expansive.  From my vantage point at the end of a Ph.D. program, I can look back with clarity on the decision to choose my field site and topic, the experience of conducting research, and the process of analyzing and writing.  But, until I begin an academic career and take on students of my own, it will be difficult to predict how I will care for the mantle I received.  Therefore, in this chapter, I will confine my comments to the advantages and disadvantages, the benefits and frustrations, of being a third-generation fieldworker in Tzintzuntzan.  Using examples from my own dissertation project, I will argue for the significant impact which receiving the mantle of long-term research has had on the ethnography produced.  I will further suggest how joining an ongoing research project enhances graduate training. 

Joining a long-term project

I did not enter the Ph.D. program in socio-cultural anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley with the intention of joining a 55-year longitudinal study of the mestizo community of Tzintzuntzan, Mexico.  My particular research interest was religious change among Latin American indigenous groups.  Given my broad topical and geographic focus, I found the Berkeley Department’s size and theoretical variety attractive.  I had also forged a relationship with a professor there who agreed to become my primary academic adviser.

In my first year at Berkeley, rather than hone my own dissertation project, I took wide-ranging seminars and assimilated graduate-level reading loads.  The first-year cohort met twice a week in a seminar designed to introduce us to major ideas in the discipline.  On one day, we would meet with the professor for structured discussion of the readings; on the other, we students met on our own.  We also instituted a series of visits from current and emeriti faculty, who would recount their intellectual autobiographies and familiarize us with their ongoing research projects.

One week, George M. Foster was the guest professor in our seminar.  I knew that Foster had directed my adviser’s doctoral dissertation, when Brandes had been a graduate student at Berkeley in the late 1960s.  I also knew that Foster’s recent generosity had helped solidify support for the department library, which was renamed to honor him and his wife, Mary.  Until his visit to our classroom, however, I knew very little about his work on peasant societies or his longitudinal research project in Tzintzuntzan, Mexico.  He described for us his initial fieldwork in Tzintzuntzan and how he had unintentionally begun a long-term ethnographic project there, sending teams of students during the summers to research different aspects of life around Lake Pátzcuaro.  Although he had not brought graduate student researchers to Tzintzuntzan since his retirement about twenty years earlier, he still felt that many issues and changes in the community remained to be studied.

At that point in the semester, I was thinking about a summer visit to Latin America, possibly a chance to scout out a site for my own year-long fieldwork experience.  Later, when I recognized Professor Foster at a department function, I broached the idea of spending the summer in Tzintzuntzan.  He responded enthusiastically.  We arranged to meet to discuss the details, which turned into a weekly reading course in the spring semester before my first visit to Tzintzuntzan.  That February, Foster and Brandes traveled to Tzintzuntzan to celebrate the community’s largest fiesta of the year.  On that trip, they selected a family for me to live with and prepared them for my arrival in June.  Back in Berkeley, I had access to the most recent ethnographic census data, so I immediately looked up the household where I would be living and memorized the names and ages of all the family members.

For my summer project, Foster and Brandes advised that I select a project that could be completed in a two-month period.  Pursuing the theme of religion seemed unfeasible since I would be present for only one of the major fiestas of the liturgical calendar.  Moreover, discussing issues of spirituality and conversion would require greater rapport than I could generate in a short visit.  So, I prepared to focus on the marketing of pottery, a topic that intersected with the changing socioeconomic conditions in the community that influenced religious life as well.  Tzintzuntzeño potters, for the main, still produced their ceramic ware using the same methods that Foster had documented when he first arrived in the community more than a half-century earlier.  However, improvements in transportation and tourism had modified the way artisans sold their goods.

The directed reading course with Foster and Brandes familiarized me with the literature on Tzintzuntzan.  Anthropological researchers in Tzintzuntzan, though collegial, have tended to publish as single authors and in a range of scholarly journals and monographs.  To construct my reading list, I included as many pieces about Tzintzuntzan as I could find.  From the first generation of researchers, I read the original ethnography that detailed the ways of life in the community as observed in 1945 (Foster 1948) .  The first-year theory course no longer included discussion on the nature of peasant societies, so I revisited the debate about Foster’s (1965) formulation of the Image of Limited Good.  From the second generation, I read Kemper’s (1977) study on the migration of Tzintzuntzeños to Mexico City and Brandes’s (1988) examination of the fiesta system, neither of which seemed directly relevant to pottery, but which later proved useful.

Entering the field as the third generation

When summer arrived, George and Mary Foster accompanied me to Mexico.  We traveled with a classmate of mine, who also planned to do research in Tzintzuntzan that summer and had participated in the reading course.  Even with my advance preparation, I was taken aback by the physical beauty of the setting: white-washed adobe houses on the edge of a lake surrounded by jagged volcanic cones.  The rainy season made the hillsides lush with vegetation and the air clear and moist.  The Fosters escorted me to the house where I would be living, a wonderfully simple process compared to what I had heard from colleagues who had spent the initial months of fieldwork locating a suitable place to live.

The Fosters stayed for an entire week to make sure that we two novice researchers began our projects smoothly.  Despite the diminished energy associated with being in their upper eighties, the Fosters still maintained lively friendships with nearly the entire community and included us in all their socializing.  They took care to introduce us to both potters and merchants, who would be helpful resources in understanding how the artisanry market had changed.  They gave us advice on how to conduct ourselves in the field as well as how to take assiduous yet unobtrusive notes.  With their imprimatur of legitimacy, initial acceptance into the community came with unusual ease.

Unfortunately, the near-universal welcome I received did not translate into productive research.  As it turned out, pottery marketing was such an uncontroversial subject that neither artisans nor sellers had many opinions about it.  To the potters, their craft was simply an inherited occupation and one of the few money-making activities, however meager, on which they could rely.  Beyond that, potters and non-potters had little to say about their craft, how they sold their goods, or what pottery-making meant to them.

But when a troupe of Florida evangelicals pulled into the town plaza one summer evening with clowns, puppets, and balloon animals, the whole town started talking.  My first hint that something out of the ordinary was going to happen came during Mass the previous Sunday.  After giving his sermon and communion, the parish priest announced that a free medical clinic would be held the next day in the town hall.  On Monday, after visiting with some potters, I decided to go see how the clinic was going.  When I arrived, I found a mob of people.  A whole section of the second floor was given over to an optometrist, another office had become a gynecologist’s consulting room, and the ground floor had been transformed into a bustling pharmacy.  Outside, dentists operating in a mobile van would end up pulling 43 teeth that day.

I quickly noticed that the nurses and doctors were North Americans, only some with a command of Spanish.  One of them, wearing a polo shirt and taking a break from the clinic, noticed me and introduced himself in English.  He explained that he was part of a team of physicians and nurses from West Palm Beach, Florida, who had been coming to Michoacán for several summers to offer free medical clinics.  I asked him if they came with a particular organization.  He answered, pointing to the logo on his shirt, “The Church of Christ.”

During the day-long clinic, there was no overt or even subtle proselytizing.  When they packed up the supplies and the building gradually reverted to its government functions, I thought it was the end.  I went into my room to write up all that I had seen that day.  My landlady, who was used to housing anthropologists and understood that my project was to see everything mundane and unusual, knocked on the door and announced: “Something’s going on in the plaza.”

From the entryway to our house, I saw flashes of movement and heard children’s squeals coming from the normally sleepy town square.  When I got closer, I saw a clown enticing small children with animal-shaped balloons and a school bus unloading blond teenagers.  On the adjacent basketball court, they had set up a makeshift puppet theater, microphone stands, and loudspeakers.  The clowns led the kids from the street back toward the basketball court, where other visitors in sequined costumes were encouraging the children to sit facing the stage.  When a ring of kids had formed along with some rows of adults standing on the edges, the performance began.

Only a few of the performers spoke Spanish, but that did not matter since they mostly acted their routines to the words of a taped Spanish soundtrack.  A group of women singers led the chorus while puppets and magicians entertained.  The culmination of the event was the teenagers’ allegorical retelling of the New Testament in which God appeared as a toy maker and Jesus as the doll sent to bring harmony to the workshop.

As soon as the play ended, the preaching began.  A Mexican took the microphone.  He talked dramatically about the importance of having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and his own miraculous recovery from drug and alcohol addiction.  He ended his sermon by calling forward all those interested in delivering themselves to Jesus tonight.  Having read about the hostility evangelical faiths had received in Latin America and having witnessed Tzintzuntzan’s own strong Catholic faith, I expected the preacher to have few takers.  To my surprise, a woman came forward, then another, and then several more until a group of thirty or so circled the speaker.  The Floridians joined hands around them in energetic prayer.

In the days following the visit, I tried to understand why so many people had responded to the preacher’s call.  One Catholic informant, who did not join the prayer circle but watched the event, told me, “It is a beautiful message that there is one God.”  Others complimented the “beautiful” music.  The only outright skepticism I heard came from a sixteen-year-old girl who taught catechism to Catholic children: “They don’t want us to love the Virgin.  She is even greater than Jesus.  She is His mother.  I just let the message go in one ear and out the other.”  In the play, the mother of Jesus was dressed like a flamenco dancer.  She stepped out of a group of toys to receive God’s child, then faded back into the chorus of toys for the rest of the play.  The topic of religion did not prove too sensitive for discussion, and it certainly roused the emotions of the community more than ceramics ever did.

A pastor/physician returned to Tzintzuntzan without the Florida crew the following Monday for a Bible study and medical consultation.  There were about sixteen women present on the now barren basketball court.  They listened quietly as he read passages from Scripture, then became animated when he closed his Bible and opened his medical kit.  He came several more Mondays and even talked of renting a more permanent location for his consultations.  By then, the summer had ended, and I was scheduled to return to Berkeley.  Though I failed to discover anything remarkable about pottery marketing, I had honed my qualitative research skills, confirmed my interest in the topic of religion, and selected Tzintzuntzan as my primary fieldwork site.

Advantages and disadvantages of Third-generation fieldwork

When I returned to Berkeley, I felt both energized and focused.  My foray into fieldwork convinced me that I had a feasible dissertation project, which I could summarize succinctly whenever anyone asked me.  I began formulating a research proposal and contacting faculty members for advice.  Neither Foster nor Brandes had pressured me or even suggested that I return to Tzintzuntzan for my dissertation research, but I felt a definite urgency to return.  For one thing, the religious landscape seemed to be mutating so rapidly that I was curious to document all the developments.  In addition, being in Tzintzuntzan had been so enjoyable, a sheer bliss that rarely makes it into the write-up and analysis of field research.  The community’s acceptance of my presence extended to a constant stream of invitations for meals, parties, and even to serve as a godparent.  Collecting data was arduous, tiring even, but never dull.

A year after I had returned from my first visit to Tzintzuntzan, I loaded my backpack with notebooks for another research trip.  This time I would travel alone and remain in the community for a full year, from August 1999 to August 2000.  I had arranged to stay with the same family as I had during the previous summer, since we had developed a good rapport and I had cultivated a taste for my landlady’s cooking.  My intuition proved true in that religion was a topic of great personal and communal interest in Tzintzuntzan.  During the year I spent in Michoacán, I regularly visited a dozen different evangelical congregations around Lake Pátzcuaro while living with a Catholic family and participating in the Catholic rites that dominated local life.  Although I was investigating a topic that no previous researcher had asked about, I became increasingly aware of how the preceding generations of anthropologists informed both how my interlocutors viewed me and how I interacted with them.

1) The first advantage I noted in the field was the ease of access.  While it was true that I would have had difficulties asking about sensitive religious issues upon my initial arrival in Tzintzuntzan, it did not take long before I had reached a high level of comfort with many informants.  Letters of introduction on official university stationery impressed no one as much as a verbal explanation that I was a student of “El Doctor,” their affectionate nickname for Foster.  Sometimes, if I presented myself as an anthropologist, but not specifically as part of a team of researchers, informants would ask if I knew El Doctor.  When I would say “yes,” they immediately became less guarded and more responsive to my questions.

The community had become so thoroughly familiar with anthropologists that I rarely had to explain the goals of the discipline or the purpose of my project.  They took it as a given that outsiders would want to know about how they lived and felt it a point of pride to inform me of the facts as they saw them.  It had been challenging enough justifying to my parents the role of an anthropologist, so I was relieved to find that my new neighbors felt perfectly comfortable with the idea.  As one friend phrased it, while introducing me to an out of town relative, “He’s an anthropologist.  That means he’s going to learn how we live, then go back to his country to help people understand Mexicans better.”  I did not know if she was repeating what another researcher had said or simply was stating her observations of anthropologists’ roles.  In either case, I saw no reason to contradict her.

Tzintzuntzan had not always been so accommodating of foreign researchers.  In fact, some of the most repeated anecdotes that I heard from neighbors recounted how Foster had been mistreated during the early days of his stay in the town.  They jokingly told how a man had duped the eager ethnographer into drinking water after tasting fresh mescal, a combination known to induce vomiting.  Their laughter belied their embarrassment at how ignorant and closed-minded their parents and grandparents had been.  Now, they have come to appreciate the interest of outsiders, which distinguishes their community from others and helps generate tourism.

The frequency with which I heard the story about Foster drinking mescal points to another way in which being the third generation enhances access to data.  People in Tzintzuntzan not only made me feel at home, but also knew how to relate to me because they saw me as part of a lineage of previous researchers.  Much of my daily activity in the field involved a sort of informal intimacy, that is, visiting informants and engaging in unstructured conversations that traversed several topics.  Many times, we filled the potentially awkward transitions in our chats with gossip about other ethnographers.  My predecessors had established godparenthood ties as well as personal friendships over the years.  They had introduced their families to people in Tzintzuntzan.  While I was living in the community, I had periodic access to electronic mail in nearby Pátzcuaro, so I acted as a conduit for news between Mexico and the United States.  In this way, data gathering mixed with pleasant chats and became a true exchange of information.  Note-taking felt more congenial than extractive.

At the same time, the facility of acceptance comes with the danger of greater expectations.  Jose Limon’s (1991) description of “precursory” ethnographers resonated with me in the field.  As Limón had experienced in his own fieldwork in south Texas, anthropologists must contend not only with the group studied, but also with the anthropologists who have preceded them.  In my case, the working habits of precursory ethnographers shaped the expectations for how I should behave.

For instance, Foster scrupulously collected data on traditional remedies, often with a tape recorder.  In my research, I did not find it as important to document exact details of folk prescriptions, nor did I use a tape recorder in my interviews.  This occasioned some questions.  An older informant would sometimes interrupt a train of thought to ask me, “Aren’t you going to write this down?”  Or, she would make a reference to how El Doctor used to record their conversations.  Another time a potter remarked to me that El Doctor used to stay at his house until midnight watching how he fired his wares.  For me, the unspoken implication was that going to sleep at 10 p.m. made me a sluggish fieldworker.  Even though the specifics of the pottery process were not so useful for my investigations, the expectation existed that I, too, would study what those before me had investigated.

My social expectations were also framed by the researchers who preceded me.  When Foster first arrived in Tzintzuntzan, he was already a Ph.D. with a salaried job.  Other researchers who started in the field as students later returned as tenured faculty.  As such, they have been able to help families in Tzintzuntzan pay medical bills and send children to school.  They are generous with gifts from toys to televisions, even sponsoring visits of Tzintzuntzeños to the United States.  During my dissertation research year, I was financially dependent on a fellowship stipend for all my expenses.  Though I knew of families with great monetary need, I could offer little more than emotional support.  While the expectation to help financially was never voiced, I nonetheless felt its pressure.

There also were examples of past researchers’ misdeeds that influenced how I was received in the field.  These were expressed.  Chief was the accusation that I would never return after finishing my stint here.  Despite some fifty years of regular anthropological visits, people in Tzintzuntzan clearly remembered the ones who never came back.  They had befriended these researchers and patiently answered their questions, but then never saw them again.  In some cases, this had happened before I was born, but it still weighed on the informants and, consequently, on me.  Particularly in the case of the colleague who had accompanied me to Tzintzuntzan in the summer of 1998 and later left the Berkeley Ph.D. program, I found myself defending her motives as well as my own.  Proving future intentions was impossible, so I am especially conscious of my obligation to return after completing my dissertation.

2) Another advantage of working in Tzintzuntzan has been the availability of resources.  Even before entering the field, I had read published accounts of the community as well as boxes of fieldnotes.  I had seen slides of the festivals in which I would later participate.  Yet, once in the midst of research, I discovered that the most useful resource of all was an office and small library that the Fosters maintained in the house of the family with whom they stayed when in Tzintzuntzan.

Usually I wrote up my notes in the room I rented near the plaza, but it was not a space for reflection.  The reason I enjoyed my living situation was its constant stimulation – small children playing, roosters crowing, customers entering, music blaring.  Having a separate office became increasingly necessary.  The Fosters’ apartment was a place without distractions and with comfortable chairs.  There, I could escape with my notebook to write more thoughtful prose, or I could read through monographs and check census data in the files kept there.

On one occasion, a non-governmental organization working with potters in Tzintzuntzan asked me to give a seminar to its engineers on the cultural explanations for local artisans’ unwillingness to accept innovation.  By their calculations, they were offering potters more energy-efficient ovens with the possibility of producing higher quality wares.  Yet, families in Tzintzuntzan and other communities were reluctant to incorporate the new techniques into their pottery making.  I remembered from reading Foster’s publications that CREFAL (a UNESCO organization based in Pátzcuaro) had attempted a similar project in Tzintzuntzan back in the 1950s, in hopes of stimulating artisan cooperatives.  It had met similar failure.  However, I had brought very few materials with me that I could use to prepare a talk that would be both historically accurate and useful for the engineers.  In the Tzintzuntzan office, I found the relevant citations with which I wrote a presentation that provoked productive debate among the audience.

I also benefited from the availability of human resources.  At some point during my fieldwork, I received visits from Foster, Kemper, and Brandes.  As much as I could, I participated in the once-a-decade ethnographic census (coordinated by Kemper in the year 2000) while continuing my dissertation fieldwork.  In addition to the oversight and troubleshooting I offered to Kemper and the team of local census-takers, I profited from the chance to meet families from all neighborhoods in Tzintzuntzan.  In the end, the resulting demographic data will also serve me in the chapter of my dissertation that describes the community.

Another time, I encountered difficulty with a particular informant.  As a self-styled historian of the community and former seminary student, his perspective could have been especially helpful to my research.  However, he was also a pompous anti-Semite.  In one discussion of the emergence of evangelical churches in Tzintzuntzan, he spun a conspiracy tale involving covert Jewish domination of the world.  He ended by recommending that I read the racist tract, “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”  I did not hide my Jewish roots from the community, so I found this accusation personally offensive.  Moreover, I was unprepared to dislike an informant so intensely and worried that it would impair my ability to understand religious movements in Tzintzuntzan.  In an electronic mail to Brandes, I explained my frustration, hoping for some general advice.  His reply was perfectly tailored: it turned out that when he had been a graduate student, he also had found this man offensive and recommended that I not bother trying to engage him further.

The ready availability of resources also has its downside.  Although the need for reflection during fieldwork was undeniable and the office an oasis, I found that it threatened to turn me into a passive researcher.  For example, I had to learn to rely on the census data volumes only when I had a specific question about genealogy or household arrangements.  When I investigated on my own and asked questions, the results were both richer and more up to date than I would find in the volumes in Foster’s office.  Similarly, I needed to balance using the library with being an involved participant-observer.  Since my time in the field was limited, I could not justify spending it reading what I could find later back in Berkeley.  It proved helpful to have resources at hand to answer strategic questions as well as to highlight what remained to be answered, but I did not want that to detract from my own discoveries.

3) Additionally, I benefited from sensing that I was making a contribution.  It is axiomatic that beginning researchers will experience pangs of anxiety in the field over the relevance of their project or their own ability to complete it.  When I was feeling most skeptical about the validity of my findings, I could console myself with the thought that at least I was adding to the body of knowledge about Tzintzuntzan.  Thankfully, the moments of self-doubt came infrequently.  Most of the time, the ease of access and the availability of resources instilled confidence in me that I could collect sufficient data to make claims in my thesis that would be significant to the discipline.

It helped me that my advisers gave me freedom to pursue the research questions that interested me.  The means of passing the mantle to younger anthropologists in Tzintzuntzan is very informal.  My initial foray into the realm of pottery was meant to familiarize me with ethnographic research, not to track me into a particular area of inquiry.  When I decided to follow the potentially divisive emergence of evangelical groups in Tzintzuntzan, I received solid support from other researchers.  As a result, I feel that I am conducting more than simply a restudy.  I am setting new terms for the consideration of religion in Tzintzuntzan.  I am part owner of the long-term project, and not just a graduate student for hire.

The frustration has come from not being sure of my own expertise.  Before I can claim anything about Tzintzuntzan, there are boxes of notes, dozens of articles, and several books that can contradict me.  The knowledge I have gained in fourteen months of fieldwork is considerable, but there are several others whose time in the community dwarfs my own.  In such circumstances, it requires an inordinate amount of certainty to make any assertion with authority.  When I do feel confident in describing, for example, a Catholic fiesta, I am likely to find it has already been said in print.

I saw an example of this undermining of authority when Professor Michael Shott, an archaeologist from the University of Northern Iowa, came to Tzintzuntzan to carry out a comparative survey of the longevity of ceramics in several communities in Michoacán.  He had contacted Foster and Kemper in advance for advice and a list of possible informants.  I was visiting one of the suggested potters when Shott appeared at the door.  The potter invited him in, and listened to his request for information on the age of various pottery pieces.  When he finished, the potter looked up at him from his clay and asked, “Didn’t Dr. Foster already write an article about that?”  He quickly explained that Foster had indeed collected that data decades ago, but that he was interested in updating the information.

While it has helped me to have advisers intimately familiar with the field site where I studied, coordination between researchers has proved challenging.  The informality I referred to earlier that gives each member of the team part ownership of the project can lead to disarray.  There is no central storehouse of data, nor any single format for recording them.  I do not know whether any of the other graduate students who came with Professor Foster for a summer in and around Tzintzuntzan recorded information on early religious converts.  In addition, I have no access to material collected by researchers who left without completing their thesis or publishing their findings.  Even among those scholars with whom I have regular contact, our projects stand independent of each other.  Kemper and I shared the field comfortably while he coordinated the year 2000 ethnographic census, but the intellectual intersection between our projects never became clear.  Our common base seems more geographical than theoretical or methodological.

Writing in the third generation

In some respects, the added scrutiny from both informants and other researchers encourages more scrupulous scholarship.  It increases the opportunities for collaboration and correction, making for a more informed ethnography.  But it also produces what I consider “inchoate” ethnography since there always exists the possibility of future updating, modifying, or challenging of any of our findings.  Any ethnographic work is open to restudy or reconsideration in light of new theoretical and socio-economic developments.  However, in long-term research projects, the possibility is nearly a certainty, and thus becomes an intrinsic part of the writing process.  In turning my data into prose, I find myself emphasizing the historically contingent nature of my conclusions.

There have been only a limited number of ethnographies of conversion in Latin America, and almost all have been situated in communities with a large evangelical presence.²  In Tzintzuntzan, non-Catholic religious groups have arrived only in the past twenty years, and have remained a fringe phenomenon.  By focusing my study on a community where evangelicals make up only a tiny percentage of the population, I could study the interaction between evangelicals and Catholics rather than simply the process of conversion.

In contrast, Annis (1987) conducted research in an indigenous Guatemalan community where 20% of the population had become evangelical Christians.  His study draws sharp distinctions between Catholics and converts in agricultural production, political behavior, and even textile designs.  He attributes entirely different “logics” to members of these two antagonistic religions.  Catholics adhere to a colonial-era dependence on the land and accept the communal use of wealth through the distribution of ceremonial expenses, while converts aim to be self-supporting and reject as “wasteful” the payment towards community rituals.

As evidence for an evangelical interest in personal over collective advancement, Annis cites statistics which show that evangelicals buy plots in the best locations, plant higher-yielding crops, and cultivate them more intensively.  Evangelical weavers display more entrepreneurial traits in selling their textiles and purchasing others’ textiles to resell.  Significantly, he records that converts opted out of the “Catholic cultural tax,” the fees requested from every household for the celebration of communal fiestas.  “By all accounts,” Annis concludes, “it is ‘cheaper’ to be a Protestant than a Catholic” (1987:85) .  I wondered if this held true for Tzintzuntzan – with a far smaller proportion of converts – as well.

In a mostly evangelical community, I would be inclined to focus on the ruptures converts have made from the Catholic Church.  However, in Tzintzuntzan my perspective was wider.  The depth of anthropological observation there allowed me to see how the Catholic Church itself had changed over time.  I could also see how conversion, though recent, had deep-rooted causes.  Working with a small number of convert families, I was awakened to the accommodations they must make as a religious minority.  Due to the friendly welcome I received, I was able to elicit rich qualitative data on an often prickly topic.

In analyzing and writing up my results, I have come to realize that it would be more fruitful for me to consider how evangelicals and Catholics in Tzintzuntzan share many similarities.  I did not find an ideological cleavage between the two religious traditions; instead, I noted how both groups valued personal advancement and the pursuit of profit.  At the same time, I spoke with several evangelical families who continue to pay the “cooperations” to community-wide Catholic fiestas.  Though they recognize that the money supports another church, they feel that the promotion of community harmony outweighs any harm.  Many converts maintain Catholic traditions like praying to the saints and participating in fiestas.

Unlike Annis, I found that the Catholic faith had adapted to modern life and did not remain linked to a moribund colonial mindset.  Minor celebrations in the 1940s have expanded and grown more elaborate by 2000.  Migration to the United States, in particular, has infused the fiestas with additional money and given new reasons to seek the divine intercession of the saints.  For their part, Catholic clergy acknowledged their ongoing educational mission by encouraging evangelical-like principles among their parishioners.  They called for individual reading and interpretation of Scripture as well as the restriction of alcohol consumption.

The conclusions I reach in the dissertation suggest an alternate view of religious conversion in Latin America, one that does not posit clear distinctions between Catholics and evangelicals but rather highlights their peaceful cohabitation.  I am aware, however, that future visits to Tzintzuntzan could undermine these findings if serious division were to occur in the community because of religious differences.  I also must be careful to distinguish conditions in Tzintzuntzan from those in other locations in Mexico, where evangelical religion has achieved a large percentage of converts and, in some cases, engendered violence.  Still, my data support a novel contribution to the study of religion in Latin America.  With the decades-long ethnographic record of the Catholic Church in Tzintzuntzan, I was able to identify how it had changed over time in reaction to the emergence of competing religious institutions.

Conclusions

Not only did participating in a long-term research project have intellectual consequences for my graduate training, it offered me practical advantages as well.  Ph.D. programs at large research universities require students to work with a few faculty advisers in a mentor/apprentice relationship.  In departments like engineering and physics, graduate students carve out a smaller project from a professor’s ongoing research.  Since their intellectual and methodological interests align closely, advisers and students in those disciplines form close relationships.  Moreover, faculty members have a direct interest in the success of their students’ research.  This has not been the case in social anthropology, where advisers may do research in an entirely different country and language from that of their students.  Participating in a long-term project in which my main adviser also has a stake has strengthened our relationship and made possible a more fluid exchange of ideas.

My connection with a long-term research project also has multiplied my opportunities for professional development.  National conferences like the American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting receive more applications to present papers than their schedules can accommodate.  As a participant in fieldwork in Tzintzuntzan, I had the opportunity to appear at an invited session at the AAA meeting in Chicago in 1999, which focused on many of the same issues that this volume addresses.  When the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, hosted an exhibit of Foster’s photographs of Tzintzuntzan, I was invited to be a speaker at the public event accompanying the opening.  In my slide presentation, I updated the audience about the life of the community since Foster’s original visit and shared insights from my own recent fieldwork.

Choosing Tzintzuntzan as the site for my doctoral research greatly reduced the time it took to receive my degree, a concern both graduate students and faculty share.  It eliminated the need for extensive pilot studies and field visits to determine an appropriate site for research.  In the field, I enjoyed unparalleled access to individuals in Tzintzuntzan, nearly all of whom received me with instant intimacy and candor.  In writing up, I benefited from a treasure trove of published sources on the community as well as the careful attention of my advisers.  Throughout the process, I did not let self-doubt derail me, because I felt certain my results would be relevant to other scholars.  All these benefits contributed to my completing my degree in a time significantly shorter than average.

My involvement with Tzintzuntzan so far has not been “long-term” by the standards of the other scholars contributing to this volume, but I am acutely aware that I am participating in a study that transcends my individual effort.  Being a member of a long-term research project has colored how I experience the field as well as the conclusions I draw.  The topic of conversion from Catholicism has not been explored fully in the corpus of Tzintzuntzan data.  Though evangelical families in the community remain few in number, their presence is strongly felt and growing.  My research will place them in relation to the Catholic majority and consider how both religions are modified and strengthened by the interaction.

For all the advantages I have enjoyed as a third-generation anthropologist in Tzintzuntzan, I also have had to endure frustrations.  It was a challenge to establish a research style and persona separate from that of my predecessors.  There was a larger than usual temptation to rely on already-gathered material rather than to put my participant-observer skills to work.  Moreover, I will not have the opportunity to introduce a new field site into the anthropological literature.  Instead, I will have the sense of caution that my arguments could be easily questioned by a number of persons with research experience in Tzintzuntzan.

Throughout my year in the field, I sensed an extra set of eyes looking over me.  I felt the responsibility to behave myself in Tzintzuntzan, and not only because many of my neighbors could easily inform my advisers of any misdeed.  I am aware that my time in the field will affect how future anthropologists are received there.  And just as I have benefited from the warm relations cultivated by Foster and others, I intend to make Tzintzuntzan an attractive place to those researchers who follow me.  Even before I complete my degree, I can state confidently that the positives of participating in a long-term research project outweigh the negatives.  The environment in which I conducted my research has helped shape the theoretical stance I take.  The dissertation that results may lack a splashy first chapter describing a “new” field site, but the remaining chapters will offer a fresh analysis on why religion has remained strong in Tzintzuntzan over the years.

NOTES

1.  1. Rabinow’s (1977) account of the division at the University of Chicago Department of Anthropology between magically transformed fieldworkers and earnest but naïve pre-fieldworkers has held true for many graduate programs in the 2000s.

2.  2. See Garma Navarro (1987), Rosenbaum (1993), Eber (1995), Carlsen (1997), Chesnut (1997), and Sullivan (1998).

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