# To be there for what? Reflections on fieldwork in post-Katrina New Orleans

Nicolas Larchet

Department of Sociology, Université Le Havre Normandie

nicolas.larchet@univ-lehavre.fr

## Abstract

This chapter put into perspective a fieldwork experience undertaken in the city of New Orleans, Louisiana, over a period of five years, resulting in publications spanning fifteen years. After presenting the institutional and historical context that led me, as a French graduate student in sociology, to study the reconstruction of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina as a "social laboratory" into larger political and cultural processes, I will address the following questions: where to conduct observations? who and what relationships to observe? to answer which research question? how to negotiate access to the field? to collect and analyze data? to leave the field and publish results without betraying the trust given by informants? Accounting for the material, cultural and social resources that shaped my experience, I will conclude by providing prospects for future fieldworkers.

Between 2007 and 2012, as a French graduate student in sociology, I made several field trips to New Orleans, Louisiana, to study political and cultural processes in rebuilding the city, which was heavily damaged by flooding from Hurricane Katrina in 2005. While sociologists tend to anonymize the names of places and people they observe in order to generalize their data and to protect their informants' privacy, I had to transgress this rule of method¹: before having a research project in mind, I knew I wanted *to be there*, that is to live through this very particular time and place, and I was not alone. For the duration of my research, I came to know personally a dozen of social scientists who were all doing fieldwork in post-Katrina New Orleans at different stages of their careers, from a graduate student in anthropology to a full professor of contemporary history – limiting this count to French researchers alone, with whom I was more likely to be in contact both in the field and back in France.

At the end of 2005, the Social Science Research Council put together a Task Force on Katrina and Rebuilding the Gulf Coast "to help the social scientists working on Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath to connect better to each other, set a collective agenda, create stronger connections between different lines of intellectual work, and bring the results of social science analysis to public actors" (Calhoun and Erikson, 2006). Among other research and editorial activities, this group published on its website a bibliography referencing "reports, journal articles, book chapters, and books that explore the human effects of Hurricane Katrina." When it was last updated in July 2011, it totalized 1,072 English-language references and no less than 23 special issues of academic journals (Erikson and Peek, 2011). Graduate students and academics were but one group among thousands of activists, social workers and other young professionals who came to the city to participate in its recovery, positioning "New Orleans as a cause célèbre for a generation of idealistic millennials" (Campanella, 2013). I will further develop on the consequences of this so-called "brain
gain,” but first I will describe my training as a fieldworker, to resituate my own experience in a
collective one.

Fieldwork as a rite of passage for the graduate student: a perspective from France

The year before Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana and the Gulf Coast, I had spent two semesters as an exchange student at Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge, the Louisiana capital located at one hour's drive from New Orleans upstream the Mississippi River. A 20-year-old student in political studies at the University of Strasbourg, France, I knew little about research other than through my reading assignments, and only had a single course on social sciences methodology. When I enrolled at LSU I mostly took courses in political science, which was then my major, but also in sociology and anthropology at the undergraduate level. I discovered this later discipline through a last-minute assignment to a "Cultural Ecology" course in the Geography and Anthropology Department. The course syllabus announced the study of "cultural adaptation to harsh environments, including mountain and highland regions, the arctic, deserts, humid tropics, and grasslands, livelihood strategies, local knowledge, domestic economies, land use practices, and resource management institutions." Discovering a whole new field of knowledge, I remember wondering why our professor insisted on showing us a slideshow from his last trip to Mexico, where he could be seen in hiking gear, venturing into remote canyons to meet isolated tribes. Because my academic background was then limited to theoretical notions of political science, law and economics, I had no idea that such endeavor could be a respectable professional practice.

The seminars of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, the graduate school where I had enrolled for my master’s degree upon my return to France, allowed me to satisfy this curiosity. Our professors encouraged us to doing fieldwork during our master’s degree and doctorate studies, albeit without always practicing it themselves. Their teaching took the form of research seminars, where they shared their field experiences and invited students to do so – a pedagogy they called “research training by research doing.” The intensive research methods we were taught at EHESS were a decisive break from the bookish experience of journalists, salon philosophers and other cultural elites who dominate French intellectual life. In defiance to more established academic fields, we hold on to the belief that any doctoral student who had not left the library to go and meet ordinary people, taking part in their daily activities and sharing their joy and sorrows, had not done “real research.” We had to have something new to say about the world, and to say it in the words of people we call our “informants” (enquêtés) seemed to us the best way to be heard.

The long-term, in-depth qualitative research by immersion in a social setting removed from the
observer's experience, which is known as “ethnography”, “participant observation” or “fieldwork”
among other labels, has long been dismissed by professional social scientists. With rare exceptions,
the founders of our disciplines were armchair scholars who conceived of research as a purely
intellectual work of theoretical synthesis, aimed at ordering a corpus of heterogeneous data
collected by explorers, missionaries and colonial administrators in distant societies, or by
philanthropists, social workers and welfare officers in their own societies. This division of labor
was well established: even empirical sociologists of the so-called “first Chicago school” analyzed
personal documents gathered by the later, rather than first-hand data – at the exception of Nels
Anderson's *The Hobo* (1923), where the information gathered through direct observations and
interviews is not treated differently than secondary sources on the lives of itinerant workers. While
Bronislaw Malinowski's fieldwork among Trobriand Islanders (1922) had just legitimized first-hand data collection in anthropological research, this revolution won't be felt in sociology for the decades to come. The oft-quoted call attributed to former journalist turned Chicago sociologist Robert Park in an address to his students: "In short, gentlemen, go get the seat of your pants dirty in real research," did not reach a larger audience until it was first published in 1971 in the introduction of a qualitative research textbook (Lofland and Lofland, 1971: 2).

In France, one had to wait for popular textbooks such as Stéphane Beaud and Florence Weber's *Guide de l'enquête de terrain* (1997) and Henri Peretz's *Les Méthodes en sociologie. L'observation* (1998) to see a larger acceptance of these methods in sociology, which were taught to audiences as diverse as highly selected students at the École Normale Supérieure, and first-generation students on scholarships in so-called universities "for the masses." This late discovery coincided with a new relationship between the state and sociologists: the distribution of large research grants by powerful patrons in dialogue with senior officials in the 1950s-70s gave way to more individualized academic careers, which required original research during the doctorate studies. We learned that we had to put ourselves to the test, very personally, by going in the field. We were not aware at the time that we were about to live a unique experience on the scale of a lifetime, one that most of us won't have the opportunity to reproduce in the future: like political activism, fieldwork is also a matter of biographical availability (McAdam, 1986).

As a result of this long process of inculcation, *ethnographie* — the terminology favored by most French social scientists — had become a rite of passage for candidates to the profession of sociologist. From 1985 to 2004, the share of sociology doctoral dissertations including the keyword "ethnograph*" in their title or abstract never exceeded 5% of the total number of dissertations defended in this discipline in French institutions of higher education, according to the theses.fr database. Starting in 2009, the share of sociology dissertations claiming an ethnographic approach exceeded 10%. In 2015, this share was already 15%. In 2016 and 2017 it had risen to 20%, and in 2018 to 25%, a share maintained up to this day. This last score is close to the share of "anthropology and social ethnology" doctoral dissertations claiming an ethnographic approach according to the same criterion, which exceeded 20% of the total number of dissertations defended in these disciplines from 2010 to 2014, and 30% from 2015 on.

Attending their advisors' seminars, EHESS doctoral students were invited to reflect on the way they were perceived by their informants and on the roles the latter had assigned to them, in order to control the effects of their own position in the field on data collection. This self-critical attitude, which has been known as "reflexive sociology" since Pierre Bourdieu popularized it (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992), established a sharp break with the positivist, Durkheimian epistemology that Bourdieu himself promoted early on, like most French sociologists of his generation who were trained in philosophy. We were told that one could not gain access to knowledge of "others," whether from a social background or a culture foreign to his or her own, without knowing oneself first, that is, without elucidating one's position in the complex relationship that binds the fieldworker to his informants.

Here I was in March 2007, ready to go back to Louisiana with a newly found interest and training in qualitative methods. I had cherished memories from New Orleans, a city that I wish I had had the time to know better, before the events surrounding Hurricane Katrina marked a little more these memories in the past. Without knowing it consciously at the time, I was drawn to this place
with the same sense of urgency that “golden age” anthropologists were drawn to indigenous cultures disrupted by their contact with the West. I will now describe these events to explain how I did choose to study citizen participation in rebuilding the city for my masters’ thesis, and how I reoriented my research question for my doctoral fieldwork after this deceitful experience.

## A sense of urgency: New Orleans before and after the storm

On August 28th, 2005, as a tropical depression evolved into a Category 5 hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico and was expected to hit New Orleans the following day, its mayor ordered a mandatory evacuation of its 455,000 residents. When the hurricane made landfall 50 miles east of New Orleans, most commentators believed the city had been spared, until a failure of its levee system, maintained by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, allowed the storm surge to flood eighty percent of the city for the weeks to come. Around 100,000 residents did not or could not evacuate the city because they were too poor, ill or elderly to do so in the absence of a public transportation plan. More than 1,200 of these residents died of drowning, lack of medical care or dehydration under heatwave conditions. The survivors were trapped for up to five days on the roof of their homes, bridges or elevated highways where they called for help, or packed inside the “Superdome” stadium, which was revamped as a shelter of last resort under the surveillance of the National Guard. In the whole Gulf Coast region impacted by the hurricane, around 1.5 million people were forced to leave their homes for the months and even years to come, in what has been described as the largest displacement of people in the United States since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

Katrina was a man-made disaster, in the sense that its causes were not entirely “natural” but also shaped by political choices, such as prioritizing the exploitation of fossil resources over the protection of natural barriers to hurricanes destroyed by the petroleum industry. Indeed, global warming was frequently mentioned at the time as a cause of the higher frequency and intensity of hurricanes, and George W. Bush was heavily criticized for its decision not to ratify the 1997 Kyoto protocol. But Katrina was also a man-made disaster in its consequences, impacting differently rich and poor, Black and white citizens, reflecting deep social, economic and environmental patterns of inequalities.

While up until the end of the 19th century, New Orleans was confined to a crescent-shaped strip of higher ground along the Mississippi river, the city had grown outside of the river bend by the early decades of the 20th century, expanding on former “backswamps” reclaimed by the Sewerage and Water Board’s extensive system of pumps and drainage canals. Contrasting with the urban character of the historical city, made of narrow houses closely built to and which could be traveled by foot, bicycle or streetcar, these new suburban neighborhoods were made of sprawling one-story brick ranch houses, which welcomed most of the city’s “white flight” in the 1960-70s, joined by a sizable Black middle-class exodus in the 1980s. Facing a shrinking population amid rising unemployment, poverty and crime, the city’s political and business elites slowly converted its activities from the petroleum and shipping industries towards the fast-growing tourism and hospitality industries. Begun in the French Quarter as early as the 1940s, the city’s gentrification accelerated as its historical core was turned into “historic districts” from the 1970s on.

Meanwhile, historical Black neighborhoods built on the city's least desirable lands next to its former “backswamp” started to subside below sea level, as the drainage of the new suburban neighborhoods emptied the soil of its groundwater. A racialized pattern of space occupation
emerged throughout the New Orleans metropolitan area, upsetting traditional “backyard” patterns of segregation typical of Southern cities. If whites, on average, tended to live on higher grounds than Blacks, middle-class whites also tended to live on the west side of the metropolitan area, whereas both working and middle-class Blacks tended to live on its east side, in proximity to shipping canals which connected the city’s port and industrial facilities to the Gulf of Mexico. As the eye of the hurricane passed to the east of the city, these waterways channeled its storm surge right through these predominantly Black neighborhoods.

In the days following the disaster, the images of tens of thousands of New Orleans citizens trapped in the flooded city, the vast majority of them Black and poor, made international news as they waited for assistance and were instead met with the deployment of armed forces. The administration of George W. Bush came under scrutiny for its lack of preparation and punitive response to the crisis, while the U.S. Congress debated whether the city should be rebuilt with federal funds or just left to itself. As the majority of New Orleans residents were living in temporary housing provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in distant metropolitan areas like Houston or Atlanta, a battle for the right of return of displaced residents began in the city's streets, urban planning meetings and courtrooms over the following years.

**"The city as a social laboratory:" participation and privatization in rebuilding New Orleans**

One month after Katrina hit the city, its mayor appointed 17 business, civic and religious leaders (8 whites, 8 Blacks and one Latino) to form an *ad hoc* consultative body which was mandated to develop a rebuilding plan, the Bring New Orleans Back Commission. One of its members, the chairman of the Business Council of New Orleans, was quoted in the press as stating the city should be rebuilt “in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically” (Cooper, 2005). Civil rights and labor activists jumped in to denounce the “ethnic cleansing” of New Orleans’ majority Black population (Davis, 2005; Klein, 2005). These radical critics gained traction in January 2006, when the mayor’s commission unveiled its rebuilding plan, which proposed a moratorium on building permits in flooded areas, and to turn entire neighborhoods, all of them predominantly Black, into parks and open spaces. Facing opposition from residents and civil rights leaders as he was running for reelection, the mayor withdrew its support to the rebuilding plan, which was taken over by the City Council with the promise that every citizen’s voice could be heard. Hundreds of community meetings were thus organized throughout the city’s neighborhoods in 2006, as well as “community congresses” connecting displaced residents in Baton Rouge, Houston, Dallas and Atlanta via videoconference. Prepared with significant public input, these neighborhood rebuilding plans were then compiled into a comprehensive master plan, the “Unified New Orleans Plan,” under the authority of a state agency responsible for the distribution of federal rebuilding grants, the Louisiana Recovery Authority.

This plan had still to be adopted by the City Planning Commission when I arrived in the city in March 2007 for my master's research. While in France the theme of citizen participation was briefly put at the center of the political debate during the 2007 presidential campaign, I decided to study these processes in post-Katrina New Orleans, mainly out of curiosity for the American political traditions of federalism and multiculturalism, in contrast with the French highly centralized and universalist, color-blind approach to citizenship. Viewing the city as a "social laboratory" (Park, 1929), I had one goal in mind: to gather enough data during my three-weeks stay there to complete my master's thesis, allowing me to apply for a state doctoral scholarship. Most of my data came
from volunteering for a housing rehabilitation program managed by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), as well as from the observation of public hearings in the City Council Chamber and interviews with community organizers and program directors. I will not develop further here this first field experience. Instead, I will focus on my doctoral research, which built on frustrations encountered both in and outside the field during my master's research. Far from being empowered by citizen participation, New Orleans residents were exhausted by the amount of efforts they put into the slow, chaotic planning process, and urged the local authorities to take responsibility for rebuilding the city in public hearings. Instead, public input was met with an unprecedented wave of privatization of the city's services and infrastructures.

Adopted by the City Council and the Louisiana Recovery Authority in June 2007, the “Unified New Orleans Plan” called for the entire city to be rebuilt, but federal rebuilding grants were directed to the reconstruction of the city’s infrastructures and to a compensation program to help uninsured homeowners rebuild or resell their properties, even though the majority of New Orleans’ housing were rental units. After the city demolished most of its public housing to replace it with mixed-income developments, as average monthly rents increased by two-thirds in the first year after Katrina (from $676 to $1,128 for a two-bedroom apartment), its poorest residents were discouraged to return. According to different estimates, by the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina in September 2006, the city had only about 230,000 residents, a 49% decline from its pre-Katrina population. The 300,000 population mark will not be reached until January 2008, and the 400,000 mark has yet to be reached at the time of this writing.

New Orleans public housing units, some of which dated from 1938 and were the first in the country to be built after Franklin Roosevelt enacted the 1937 Housing Act, were for the most part built in above-ground historic districts and had sustained moderate damage from the flooding. Mostly made of red bricks, three-story buildings with balconies reminiscent of the French Quarter's architecture, more than 5,000 public housing units managed by the Housing Authority of New Orleans, together with about 9,000 units benefiting from the subsidized housing voucher program known as Section 8, housed 49,000 residents pre-Katrina, 88% of whom were Black. Despite a large mobilization of housing rights advocates and displaced residents, who fought the Housing Authority of New Orleans in the courts over its decision to demolish their homes without notice, those 5,000 historic public housing units were all demolished in the years following Katrina, and replaced with only 800 units scattered in newly built mixed-income developments (Arena, 2012).

Public housing was not the only public good to be privatized after Katrina. The city's old Charity Hospital, which was founded in 1736 and provided affordable care for generations of its residents, including 60% of uninsured patients, was definitely closed after its flooding and replaced by a new teaching hospital, which was built by state expropriation of a majority Black and Latino neighborhood after years of legal battles. Managed as a public-private partnership, it left most of uninsured patients to a network of community clinics. The Orleans Parish School Board, which served 65,000 students in 103 public schools pre-Katrina, was taken over by the state in November 2005, which transferred its authority to a “recovery school district” operated by the Louisiana Department of Education with the mission of turning around “underperforming schools.” Most of the city’s public schools reopened as charter schools over the years, that is as publicly funded but privately owned schools operated by for-profit organizations, until New Orleans became the first major American city without a single public school in operation.
When I came back to France, after defending my master’s thesis under the title “Citizens without a City: The Contradictions of Public Participation in Post-Katrina New Orleans,” I submitted a doctoral research proposal focused on these privatization policies in the city’s reconstruction. Although I did not obtain the scholarship I was counting on, I still decided to enroll in the EHESS doctoral program, giving myself a year to seek funding opportunities before evaluating whether to pursue my doctorate. Over the next year, I worked part-time as an education assistant (assistant d’éducation) in a Parisian high school, writing multiple versions of my research project and applying for a handful of scholarships without success, before obtaining at long last a research grant from a private foundation, as we will see below.

## Putting theories to test: from the neoliberal to the biopower hypothesis

Between my work shifts and my search for scholarships during my first year of doctoral studies, I made the most of my time by reading extensively to armor myself, both theoretically and methodologically, before going in the field. I knew I wanted to go back to New Orleans and to do an intensive fieldwork there, dismissing my advisor’s advice to study citizen participation in a comparative, transnational perspective. I knew *where* I wanted to be, but I still had to decide *what* I wanted to study. Since the first draft of my research project had been rejected for the state scholarship, I decided to look beyond these privatization policies, which seemed to me to attract too much political, ideologically driven critiques, following the advice of a professor who told us to choose research questions toward which we had mixed feelings.

Social scientists and activists of all persuasions were quick to draw parallels between these privatization policies and larger political processes: for some post-Katrina New Orleans was the site of experimentation of a neoliberal “shock strategy,” carried by the same “disaster capitalism complex” that benefited from the invasion of Iraq (Klein, 2007); for others it revealed a larger process of “privatization of risk,” replacing social policies of the welfare state (Calhoun, 2006); for others still it heralded the advent of a “contractual state,” focusing on national security issues and delegating public authority to private actors (Huret, 2010). I shared with these approaches the will to resituate this event in its extra-local and historical context, as a magnifying glass into otherwise discreet political processes. Since any observation is shaped by an underlying theory, I wanted to put existing theories to test in the field. But in contrast to these macro-social explanations, I wanted to focus my attention on localized experiments that did not manifest a withdrawal of state power, but rather its redeployment towards new modes of government beyond the state (Rose, 1992).

During this gap year, I had discovered Michel Foucault’s lectures *Security, Territory, Population* and *The Birth of Biopolitics*, both of which were published in 2004 on the twentieth anniversary of the philosopher’s death, renewing interest in his work. Foucault’s concept of “biopower” seemed to me like a promising counternarrative to most contemporary accounts of “neoliberalism,” which reduced state power to a repressive apparatus in the service of a capitalist ruling class. In contrast, Foucault’s analysis allowed us to think of power as a productive mechanism: while the privilege of sovereign power was “to take life or let live,” what Foucault called “biopower” were regulatory policies which replaced this ancient right with the power “to make live and let die” (Foucault, 1978: 137). Now I knew *what* I wanted to study, but I still did not know *how* I could do it: therefore, I embarked on a quest to empirically grasp the concept of “biopower” among all the social experiments taking place in post-Katrina New Orleans, which its mayor dubbed “the nation’s most immediate lab for innovation and change” (Roig-Franzia, 2015).
Conducting online research on New Orleans-based blogs and news sites while living in France in 2007-2008, I discovered a constellation of social movements advocating for the access to “healthy,” “sustainable” or “alternative” food in the city’s reconstruction efforts, with striking images of volunteers turning over the soil on land cleared in the hurricane’s path to make room for vegetable gardens. I also discovered that the city had just launched a local food policy, by mandating public health researchers to “create and provide staffing for a Food Policy Advisory Panel [...] to study the problem of a lack of access to healthy food among New Orleans families,” as read a City Council resolution adopted unanimously in May 2007. In Foucault’s wording, the City government aimed “to make live” New Orleans’ residents by reforming their food and eating habits, after leaving them “to let die” by failing to assist the poor, elderly or chronically ill in the wake of the disaster. This was it: I submitted a new research project focused on the construction of the problem of “access to healthy food” in post-Katrina New Orleans to a private foundation which was just established by an agribusiness multinational corporation, offering grants for young researchers studying “food in its biological, social or human dimensions.” Taking advantage of a historically high exchange rate from euro to US dollar, this grant allowed me to make two extended field trips to New Orleans, the first one from December 2008 to May 2009, the second one from December 2009 to April 2010.

Before going in the field, I emailed members of a public health research center which was mandated by the City Council to study the problem of “access to healthy food,” the Tulane Prevention Research Center. Affiliated to Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, it was part of a network of 28 centers funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to coordinate public health research and action throughout the United States. The Tulane Prevention Research Center had just received funding from the CDC in 2004 to shift its research focus from environmental exposure to lead poisoning towards “the effects of the physical and social environment on obesity.” Because of its new focus on obesity prevention and its community-based participatory research mission, it had taken the lead to establish a local food policy in post-Katrina New Orleans, partnering with community organizations to create a Food Policy Advisory Committee (FPAC), which the City Council mandated to deliver a “report with recommendations for programs and policies to alleviate the problem by January, 31 2008.”

As the “food desert” narrative was gaining momentum – that is, urban or rural areas where residents lack access to healthy food, contributing to the obesity epidemic – my goal was to study this food policy from below, by offering to do volunteer work for the community organizations represented in the FPAC and by interviewing its members as well as other activists whom I called “food reformers” (Larchet, 2012), and to challenge their narrative with observations of everyday life of residents targeted by their programs. But I first had to find an ally who would allow me to get a foothold in food reform: as I had learned from my previous fieldwork, everything was negotiable as long as I had to offer something in exchange for my requests.

## In the field: making allies and working with food reformers

I found a valuable ally in the Tulane Prevention Research Center’s “policy and advocacy coordinator,” a public policy specialist with degrees from Cornell and Oxford universities, who had previously work for a German-American think tank, and was employed full time to monitor the development of the FPAC. She became one of my main informants by opening the committee’s electronic and physical archives, which allowed me to contact each of its 32 members to conduct
in-depth interviews: public health researchers, non-profit executives, philanthropists, retailers, bankers, lobbyists, senior officials, etc. In exchange for her help, my informant asked me to write a report on the experiences of other “food policy councils,” which she told me would be shared with key partners. Through this initial contact, I was able to get hired as a volunteer with community organizations represented on its board. I was also invited to several FPAC meetings where a second set of recommendations were developed in 2009, which allowed me to meet with other food reformers active in the city at the time, and to negotiate interviews with them. All of these actors were quite generous with their time, but it goes without saying that I got better results coming from representatives of the organizations I was volunteering for.

These organizations were used to working with graduate students, either as volunteers or as interns, so I had no trouble getting accepted after presenting the purpose of my research. I was thus able to participate in meal distributions for a homeless shelter and the local food bank, for which I had also contributed to a national survey of emergency food recipients throughout the region. I also helped to set up community gardens and I participated in nutrition and urban agriculture training programs for a network of urban growers. I collected, sorted and packed heirloom seeds and prepared produce baskets for an urban farm, and operated a stall on a farmers market located in a majority Black neighborhood hard hit by Katrina and left without access to a supermarket. I became more involved with the community organization behind the market, which was headed by a Black woman who ran for mayor in 2006: every Saturday for four months, I arranged and sold local varieties of fruit and vegetables, free-range eggs, creole cream cheese, and even kombucha tea for what the market manager described as a “New Age” clientele, despite her efforts to attract “the people from the other side of the avenue,” that is to say Black customers, as the market was located on an avenue separating a gentrifying neighborhood from a largely poor and Black one.

I extended this first six-month stay with a second five-month field trip between December 2009 and April 2010, during which I continued my volunteer work with this latter organization. I spent more time at the office, most notably by coding questionnaires on the purchasing and consumption practices of emergency food recipients into a database, as the staff was rethinking its food delivery system after the market failed to attract its “target population of African-American and Latino families.” After almost a year of volunteering for this organization I was invited to participate in its executive meetings, where I was able to share some results of my ongoing observations of a corner store, as we will see below.

A last stay of a shorter duration, from September to December 2012, led me to New Orleans through several cities that had undertaken local food policies used as models for the programs I was studying in New Orleans: Hartford, Connecticut, where a nonprofit organization, Hartford Food System, was established in 1978 to implement a “strategy to reduce the cost of food” for inner city residents facing inflation; Knoxville, Tennessee, where the first food policy council in the nation was created in 1981 “to monitor the city’s food supply” following cuts in federal food assistance programs; and Philadelphia, where a think tank, The Food Trust, was established in 1992 to develop farmers’ markets and nutrition education programs, before launching in 2004 an influential public-private partnership subsidizing supermarkets throughout the state, the Pennsylvania Fresh Food Financing Initiative. This program was replicated in New Orleans following the FPAC recommendations, as well as in other cities and state governments over the
years, before inspiring Michelle Obama's backed Healthy Food Financing Initiative at the federal level in 2011.

Traveling by car from Boston to New Orleans and stopping for a few days in each city, I collected public and private archives on each of these experiments, and conducted in-depth interviews with policy specialists, nutrition experts and other food reformers active at the time. When I arrived in New Orleans, I recontacted some of my informants to keep me updated on the development of food policy in the city: the main recommendation of the FPAC, a public-private partnership endowed with $7 million in federal rebuilding funds directed to fresh food retailers in “underserved” neighborhoods, was only implemented in 2011 after being delayed by corruption scandals in the mayor administration. A deputy mayor and member of the FPAC resigned in 2010 after a state audit revealed he had provided taxpayer-subsidized loans to his brothers’ company, while in 2014 former mayor Ray Nagin was sentenced by a federal court to ten years in prison on twenty counts of corruption. This political climate impeded my access to City officials, as it generated considerable turnover among the staff in charge of food policy. Let’s turn now to the other side of my fieldwork, focusing on the population targeted by food reformers.

## Crossing the color line: observing the everyday life of a Black middle-class family

I decided early on that I did not want to limit my inquiries to food activists, experts and other policy entrepreneurs I lumped together as “food reformers.” I had planned to rent a room in a family home for the duration of my stay, which would allow me to observe their eating habits on a daily basis, in order not to let food reformers’ definition of the situation unchallenged. The idea was to do what Howard Becker did in *Outsiders* (1963), that is to study both “moral entrepreneurs” and the groups they label “deviants” – or, in food reformers’ phrasing, the “at-risk population” of low-income and minority families their programs targeted.

When I arrived in the city at the end of 2008, I first stayed at a hostel and started posting ads in small businesses and on classified advertisement websites, presenting myself as a French student looking for a room to rent. After a few unsuccessful attempts, I dialed a phone number that was given to me by an old friend from LSU. Over the phone was a 60-year-old white physician, who was living with his partner in the French Quarter. When I explained to him that I was looking to stay with a “New Orleans family,” he made a quick call to a Black employee from a luxury transportation company of whom he was a regular customer, Estavan Taylor², who was looking for a lodger since his oldest son had left the house. Twenty minutes later, he drove me to the Taylors so we could get acquainted, joking on the way about the fact that I was going to live in a Black neighborhood.

When we arrived at the Taylors' on that evening, Estavan, 55, welcomed us with his wife, Barbara, who worked part-time as a bus driver. They were alone that evening but were living in close quarters with their youngest son, a 25-year-old police officer, and with their daughter, a 30-year-old social worker, who visited the house every evening to have dinner with their six children, including one-year-old twins who were taken care of by Barbara during the day. I introduced myself as a sociology student writing a book on “food of the people of New Orleans.” Barbara let me know that she did not cook often as they were “always on the run,” then told me: “If you’re staying with us, you’re going to eat soul food!” I moved in with the Taylors two days later, in exchange of a monthly rent of $400, in reference to the rate of the hostel I was staying at. It was the 22nd of December. Except
for one week in January and two weeks in March when I travelled out of town, I stayed with the Taylors and shared daily meals with them for the next five months, until the 27th of May as read the last entry on my notebook.

My extended stay at the Taylors' puzzled visitors and neighbors: why would a student not take any classes and being paid to observe people? Although my foreigner and transitory status gave me a legitimate reason to cross the “color line,” my whiteness was never put into question by my hosts: in contrast with other fieldworkers' perceptions, being French did not place me outside the dynamics of American race relations (Wacquant, 2004). One could argue that Black Louisianans are aware of the role the French played in the slave trade and colonization of the Americas (“Why did Napoleon sell Louisiana to the U.S.? ” Estavan's youngest son once asked me), but in other contexts my French nationality seemed anecdotal. For instance, the day after my arrival, as Estavan introduced me to a neighbor passing by, he simply forgot from which European country I came from, suggesting that I was perceived first as a white male over other characteristics: as a foreigner, I could only be “European.” In contrast, while I was staying with a relatively well-off white family who sent their children to a bilingual school the following year, my French identity was put forward by my hosts in front of friends and neighbors.

My stay with the Taylors allowed me to challenge the “food desert” narrative: while they lived in a part of town where supermarkets had all closed since Hurricane Katrina, the Taylors did not suffer from a lack of access to healthy food, as Barbara drove to the suburbs to shop in a wholesale club. Several members of the extended family, especially women, were overweight or obese and well aware of their “unhealthy” eating habits, even joking about it. There was evidently more to this than inequalities in food access. While Bourdieu’s *Distinction* (1984) is centered on social class, I decided to revisit this influential theory to account for racial differentiation in order to make sense of the Taylors’ eating habits. In their taste for “soul food,” which was cooked and shared in abundance following strict dietetic and hygienic norms, the Taylors distinguished themselves both from middle-class whites and from poor Blacks threatening their hard-earned status as providers for the extended family, which allowed them to practice “distinction without treason” with regards to their Black identity (Larchet, 2022). Since my observations were limited to members of a single family, I decided to broaden my investigation during my next stay in the city.

**Looking for the others: observing social interactions at the corner store**

On my second field trip from December 2009 to April 2010, I was living with a white middle-class family, who were used to welcome French guests through their connection to their kids' French teacher. Instead of observing this family's eating habits, which looked too close to me, both socially and culturally, to be of any ethnographic interest, I decided to look for “corner stores” across St. Charles Avenue, a racial and class boundary separating the fast-gentrifying historical district where I was living from a Black ghetto which was still recovering from Katrina.

Generally owned by East Asian and Middle Eastern immigrants, small convenience stores located on street corners and therefore known as “corner stores” work as important sites of interaction in the city’s poorest neighborhoods. Making most of their profits from the sale of tobacco, alcohol, soda and snacks, they were marked as undesirable developments in the city’s rebuilding plans, as residents complained of loitering, drug dealing and other criminal activities taking place on their premises. These businesses were also targeted by food reformers: when it was suggested during a
FPAC meeting that corner stores could benefit from financial incentives to increase food access, public health officials defined “health criteria” to exclude stores selling tobacco and alcohol from these incentives, as well as stores allotting more than 10 percent of their shelf space to snacks. Other members opposed these criteria, which if adopted would have virtually excluded every corner store and other small businesses. Fewer than one-third of these stores sold any fruits or vegetables according to a survey from Tulane Prevention Research Center, which pointed to factors such as limited shelf space, cost of refrigeration units, or contracts with soda and snack vendors as restricting the availability of healthy food. However, little was known of the reasons why these products may not appeal to their customers in the first place.

I decided to focus my efforts on the Royal Food Store³, a small store with a kitchen serving hot food to go, owned by a 38-year-old Mauritanian immigrant, Mohamed, who employed two Black women working part-time as cooks. As I lived in walking distance on the other side of St. Charles Avenue, I frequented the store as a customer for several days, hoping to pass as a neighbor before negotiating my access to the field. On my first visit to the store, as I ordered a hamburger from the cook, I let her know I was French while chit-chatting. As I noticed that the owner looked North African, there was a chance he would speak French, so I hoped he would hear me and that it would be a good conversation starter. When I arrived at the counter to pay, he addressed to me in French, visibly surprised to see a white foreigner in this part of town. After a few visits to the store, I presented to Mohamed my project to observe the customers' social interactions. To my surprise he agreed wholeheartedly, at the condition that I did not come to the store every day. In exchange for his gratitude, I offered to help him at the store but he would accept it only once, as he was alone one evening during the Mardi Gras celebrations and fearful of being robbed.

During a four-month period from January to April 2010, I spent mornings or afternoons at the store, several days per week. At first, I occupied a chair at the entrance to the store, but I quickly migrated to the back after some customers allegedly mistook me for a plain-clothes police officer, as I was recording arrivals and departures in my notebook (Larchet, 2017). After several weeks observing the customers, I spent a growing amount of time speaking with Mohamed near the store entrance. He agreed to play an informant role about his customers after I gave him a copy of Elliot Liebow's *Tally's Corner* (1967). As the end of my stay approached, he invited me to join him behind the counter. My departure coincided with the selling of the store to the son of Vietnamese immigrants, which provided him with an occasion to reflect on his experience and to share his customers' life histories in an interview. I was surprised to learn that some of his regular customers who made a point of honor to appear “respectable” in their daily interactions had histories of violence, drug abuse, alcoholism and other addictions compounded by long-term unemployment and even times spent in and out of prison. The store provided them with a social setting where they could reclaim a sense of self-worth through compensatory consumption practices, demonstrating a taste for high-calorie “comfort” foods.

## Writing, quilting and getting away from the field

Upon my return from the field after my final visit to New Orleans in 2012, I felt a deep sense of unease as I set about writing my doctoral dissertation. Urban ethnographies, which of all sociology books had been the ones that had most impressed me, had now lost all their charm in my eyes. I had seen and lived for myself the kind of experiences that had fueled my student readings, and now I felt deceived by the stories they told. In what has become a well-established literary genre,
ethnographers willingly portray themselves in a heroic image to convince the reader of their hard-won credibility in the field, emphasizing their loss of innocence in the process. Urban ethnographies have nothing to envy to early accounts of explorers and anthropologists of distant societies in this respect: one ethnographer climbed into a boxing ring to test the blows of his informants (Wacquant, 2004); others involved themselves in the drug trade (Bourgois, 1995) or became “gang leader for a day” (Venkatesh, 2008) as a token of their integration into the underworld; yet another one had pushed the identification with her informants to the point of becoming an accomplice in an assassination attempt, chasing the target of their revenge behind the wheel of her car (Goffman, 2014). One wonders what has to be learned from such endeavors, other than their authors were willing to put themselves and others in danger to attract the attention of a thrill-seeking audience and to make a career in academia.

I came to the field to find other people, that is people from other cultures and classes than my own, and maybe to persuade myself that I could settle among them, but looking back at the whole experience I smile at this naïve pretense. In the end, I felt more empathy for food reformers, for whom I did volunteer work and with whom I had much in common, than with the mostly poor and Black residents they targeted. Even though I was living in a majority Black neighborhood, I was staying with a middle-class family who had limited relationships with its less well-to-do neighbors, and whose members were protecting their kinds from negative influences of the streets. When I was observing customers of the corner store, I had trouble establishing durable ties with them, contrary to the one I developed with Mohamed and his employees, and stayed up to the end an “outsider among regulars” (Larchet, 2014). The more time passed, the more I read, attended academic conferences, learn to present my work to different audiences, to teach classes, to grade students and to publish academic papers, the less I felt legitimate to write down these experiences. Since I was making an academic career on my own, it became clearer that my position was one of privilege, albeit relative, and that I had little to offer to my informants in exchange of their trust.

After all, one of my main research results was that if food reformers' efforts to improve healthy food access in New Orleans largely failed to change the eating habits of existing residents, it was successful in accelerating the gentrification of its poor, Black neighborhoods. Therefore, obesity rates dropped in the city after Katrina, but not for the reasons intended. In other words, food reform succeeded in changing *inhabitants*, instead of changing their *habits* (Larchet, 2016). By allocating funds to supermarket chains, organic grocery stores, farmers' markets and urban farms, among other experiments adjusted to the tastes of white, middle-class newcomers like myself who were driven to the city to participate in its recovery efforts (Campanella, 2013), food reformers played a significant role in changing the demographics of the city, where the share of Black population passed from 66 to 60 percent between the 2000 and 2010 census. While I was already an objective allied of food reformers, I felt uneasy at the idea of “stealing” other peoples’ experiences (as Estavan once jokingly accused me of “stealing the kitchen’s secrets”) to sell them to other social scientists, activists and policy specialists who may found “recipes for gentrification” in a reading of my work (Alkon et al., 2020). Before writing my dissertation, I had already been contacted by American and French city officials who read some of my work in academic journals while looking at ways of improving food access in their cities. Whether it was out of “survivor’s guilt,” “white guilt,” the fear of betraying the trust informants handed to me, the fear of failing to hold myself to the standards set by my advisors, or maybe simply because I spent too much time
reflecting on it all, I felt tired, a little bit ashamed and even at times disgusted looking at my fieldwork in retrospect.

Ethnographic materials I collected during my successive stays in the city, either volunteering for community organizations, living with the Taylor family or hanging out with Mohamed at the Royal Food Store, have resulted into two dozen texts of diverse style and size – the shortest at one paragraph, the longest at 1,033 pages. Half of these were written for a specialized audience and published as articles in academic journals or chapters in edited books, the other half was split between unpublished conference papers, interviews in media and academic blogs, a research report and a three-volume doctoral dissertation. The first and last of these papers to date – that is, before this present essay – are based on my observations of the Taylor family (2008-2009), testifying to the long time that it sometimes required to make sense of data collected in the field, as much as to my difficulty to write about this intimate setting and to analyze my position within it (Larchet, 2022). Over all these years, I had lost track with my informants, as well as most of my interest in their lives. This whole experience seemed to me increasingly stranger as I looked at it from the distance of space and time, during which new encounters, research interests, professional and family duties made me more unlikely to revisit the field, or even to reproduce these intensive research methods in the future.

## Fieldwork as a widely shared cultural activity: from professional to “folk ethnography”

Looking back at this experience, a plurality of factors shaped my research from the start to its final stages. First, the availability of financial and material resources: I would not have done the same fieldwork if I had obtained a scholarship right after my master's degree, which forced me to take a gap year and to reorient my research question (and I would not have travelled to and in the US as easily if the euro were not historically high, or gasoline prices historically low in 2008-2009). Second, the availability of cultural and information resources: this gap year allowed me to read extensively and to frame my research question around theoretical notions which were largely discussed in academia at the time, such as Foucault's "biopower" and Bourdieu's "distinction" (but I was also influenced by political debates running through French society, such as the opposition between multicultural and color-blind policies). Third, the availability of social resources: the support of my family and friends kept me engaged to look for a scholarship and to pursue my doctorate in times of doubt, while advisors and colleagues gave me the opportunity to teach, present and publish my work early on (which proved indispensable to secure an academic job after my doctorate, but greatly postponed the submission of my dissertation). Last but not least, I could not have done my fieldwork without the trust and hospitality of my informants. This relation was evidently influenced by interpersonal and cultural factors too, in a city which has maintained close ties with French culture up to this day. Taken together, these factors remind us that qualitative methods are not reproductible, and heavily dependent on people and institutions we encounter along the way, providing opportunities that cannot arise twice.

The last time I saw Estavan and Barbara in 2012, they were eager to tell me that their daughter had gone back to college and had just graduated in a master's in sociology in order to become a certified counsellor at the addiction treatment center she was working at. Practiced in increasingly reflective and specialized societies, ethnography, loosely defined as the art of observing, analyzing and reporting others' behaviors, has become a widely shared cultural activity. A rite of passage for candidates to academic careers in the social sciences, it is also a requisite skill in professional fields
as diverse as social work, policing, journalism, market and consumer research, international trade and diplomacy. But it is above all a vital activity, in the primary sense of the word, for the ghetto resident who is compelled to adjust his behavior to an acute perception of others in order to circulate safely in the streets of his neighborhood, for the foreign store owner who seeks to build up a customer base and maintain its loyalty while identifying potential robbers among them, or for the field epidemiologist who surveys the streets and stores of a city to identify risk factors in the spread of an epidemic – to take three examples based on my encounters in the field.

In their calls for reflexivity and introspection that sometimes border on self-indulgence, ethnographers should never forget that their informants too engage in “folk ethnography” in their everyday practices (Anderson, 2011). It is up to each qualitative researcher to acknowledge these, and to try to establish more collaborative relations with his or her informants, allowing them to become readers, critics or even coauthors of his or her work (Hasan, 1999). As much as I tried to involve informants in my research process and to keep up with them after my departure, my attempts at recontacting them fell short. The fieldworker must never forget either than the people he spends years trying to understand and identify with have far more importance in his life than he will ever have in theirs. As far as my experience was concerned, as I failed to engage on equal terms with my informants, it taught that fieldwork is by and large a solitary, messy and trying endeavor, with uncertain returns and little rewards to offer to his participants on each side of the interaction.

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<footnote n="1">¹ Whenever I encountered *public actors* in the field, such as members of the New Orleans Food Policy Advisory Committee, they were quoted as such and not anonymized in my publications. However, I did anonymize the names of other people and places I encountered to protect their privacy.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² Name anonymized.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ *Idem*.</footnote>