Decision Making in an Ethnographic Context (

********** One day in 1996 I made a choice to study the development of outreach programs for people living with HIV and AIDS (PLWHA) in Thailand. As an ethnographer, I weighed social location and distance in relation to the field and its occupants. I grappled with the partiality of the research process. More difficult to consider was how hard it is to make choices that cut off one avenue of research while opening up another. I failed to think through how ethnographers make decisions subconsciously and "on the fly" when confronted with challenges and unexpected issues. Making choices, consciously and unconsciously, forced me to regard the constant state of flux in my research and the people that it involved. Certain people became central in my life; others grew marginal. As Michael Angrosino and Kimberly Mays de Perez point out, "Ethnographers and their collaborators do not step into fixed and fully determined positions; rather, their behaviors and expectations of each other are part of a dynamic process that continues to grow" (2000, 683). I had to make decisions about what my relationships with others around me should be and could be. I made many decisions while conducting dissertation research in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and in this essay I examine how some of those both closed off and opened up opportunities for geographical inquiry. I discuss location and positionality, and social and physical distance, as they informed the research process. Fieldwork is always affected by choices made in the research process, which begins before we enter the field and continues as we attempt to describe, interpret, and analyze the data we collect (Wolcott 1994). DECISION ONE: STUDYING AIDS IN THAILAND My research began with my decision to study Thailand and its burgeoning AIDS crisis. A general interest in Asia started in high school and intensified in college. Attempting to gain some sort of understanding, I began to study Asian culture and society, Japanese, and Buddhism. My undergraduate experience with political-economic and Marxist theory led me to study not developed Japan but the developing world of Southeast Asia. Thailand came to be my area of study when, in graduate school, Thai was the only mainland Southeast Asian language taught yearly. After a short stint in Thailand as a master's student studying the representational politics of the sex-tourism industry (Del Casino 1995; Del Casino and Hanna 2000), I shifted my focus to HIV and AIDS--related research. My interest in the growing epidemic was piqued when discussions with commercial sex-work industry people usually led them to mention the growing AIDS crisis and its impact on Thai society. Had I chosen another facet of the tourism industry, such as ecotourism, it is perhaps unlikely that I would have had to confront the AIDS epidemic. Back in the United States, I became interested in how the HIV/AIDS crisis started, its relationship to the historical development of the commercial sex industry, and its ties to the distribution and use of heroin. Delving into the literature, I found that almost everyone was focusing on the transmission of HIV. In the early- to mid- 1990s, governmental programs were highly invested in an epidemiological model that focused outreach on high-risk groups, such as commercial sex workers and intravenous drug users, as vectors for the spread of HIV. The message seemed clear: The Thai government and a majority of the academic establishment were convinced that prevention was the cure. If there were no new HIV cases, care was not going to be an issue. Although this is true, by 1994 Thailand faced a crisis with the potential to far outstrip the cost of the prevention campaign: health care. The risk-group model collapsed as rates of mother-to-child transmission increased, signaling that HIV transmission was much more pro lific than had been thought. Creating risk groups might contain HIV discursively, but the reality of complex networks of sexual intercourse and drug use meant that HIV could now be found in any social group, including Buddhist monks, married women, and children. …