Interpretative research in the Global South: Do we need different methods?

Possible challenges connected with conducting interviews in the Global South

Regardless of the specific research question, I ask the person I am interviewing to tell me their whole life story and the history of their family. This applies regardless of whether I am interested in Christian and Muslim Palestinians in the West Bank and the figurations or relationships between them, or former child soldiers in northern Uganda and the processes of their reintegration into civilian society after returning from the Lord’s Resistance Army. This interview method is always accompanied by other methods, such as thematically focussed narrative interviews with so-called experts (such as members of NGOs, humanitarian organizations, the army or the local administration).

Now, we could ask, as some authors have done, whether requesting people to tell their own life story is a suitable method for interviews in the Global South, or whether we need to conduct them in a different way. The answer to this question has a lot to do with our expectations with regard to a biographical we- and self-presentation: whether we are prepared to accept the way the person responds to a request to tell his or her life story, or whether we only accept a response that corresponds to our own fixed idea of a biographical narration.

Whether it works straight away or not, whether it takes four hours or just a couple of minutes to get an answer, whether the answer is a long chain of arguments or a stream of narration: the manner in which the interviewee responds to my request to tell me the story of their life gives me first important clues to the nature of the setting or the grouping I am interested in. Thus it is not surprising that former child soldiers who have returned from the LRA usually begin with a detailed account of how they were abducted, and that they speak about their life before this event only after being asked about it in the second part of the interview; or that from a detailed account of their abduction and the first days with the rebels, in which they were forced to learn extremely cruel methods of killing, they jump to the time of their escape from the LRA, even though a period of maybe sixteen years lay between these two events.

This detailed narration, with hypermnesic memories of certain very bad experiences at the beginning of a phase of extreme traumatization, can be explained by the brutal invasion of this event into the everyday life of these young people, an event which ruptured their “earlier life line,” disturbed or damaged earlier self-images, and led to dramatic differences between their life before it happened and their life after it happened. We believe that these narrations also have the function of demonstrating that they were powerless in this situation and were abducted against their will. In such cases, the question is not whether it is a good interview or not. The important point is how this typical and frequently observed structure of the biographical self-presentations of ex-rebels can be explained. Useful in this respect is what we learn in the external questioning part of the interview, or in further interviews with the same person, about certain phases of their life, and how these are talked about, or whether there are phases about which the person consistently says nothing. In our interviews with ex-rebels in Uganda, we succeeded in eliciting biographical narrations concerning periods which they did not describe in detail or which they skipped in the first part of the interview, the so-called self-structured presentation.

Another example of a phenomenon that needs explaining is the fact that in most of the interviews that my co-workers and myself conducted in Palestine, more precisely in the West Bank, it was difficult to motivate our interviewees to tell us their life story. Rather, their primary concern was to present the argument that “we Palestinians have no internal conflicts, we only have conflicts with the (Jewish) Israelis” (Rosenthal, 2016). At first we thought that this was due to the presence of German researchers, but then we found that the interviews conducted by our Palestinian co-workers displayed the same phenomenon. Palestinians are anxious to resist any attempt—or Israeli policy—to divide them into different categories or “minorities,” which would make them even more powerless against the stronger conflict party of the Jewish Israelis. In their meetings with members of our team, they fought against these (more or less intentional) attempts to split them up by repeatedly insisting that they are a united, peaceful community or we-group, in which no one suffers discrimination because of their religion, their status as a refugee or a long-time resident, or their legal status. In the course of this research, there were nevertheless some interviews in which the interviewees spoke very openly about the conflicts within the Palestinian community. For them the interviews represented an opportunity to talk about their personal problems, or the way their we-group (or the grouping to which they are regarded as belonging) is discriminated against. Most of the interviewees who spoke openly about their experiences of discrimination could be regarded as outsiders in Palestinian society, such as members of binational families or people in a binational marriage relationship, people who have lived abroad for many years, or men who are defined as homosexual (Worm & Hinrichsen, 2016). Because of this empirical finding, the research team actively sought such outsiders as interviewees.

We usually hold more than one interview with each individual, usually combined with participant observations, inclusion of other people who are present during the interviews, and in some cases a transition to family interviews or group discussions with people who have been present from the beginning, or who have joined us at some stage during the interviews. Whether in the refugee camps in the West Bank, or in family compounds in northern Uganda, my experience shows that one must expect other family members or neighbours to come and show interest in the interview. A contrastive comparison, for instance of an interview in a hotel at which, besides myself and the interviewee, only a field assistant or interpreter was present, and one conducted with the same person in the presence of “the family” in their compound, would give us insights into dominant discourses, in other words the rules concerning what can or cannot be said by whom and in what context. The challenges involved in eliciting biographical narrations, conducting multiple interviews, and combining the findings from the interviews with data collected during observations or group discussions, are the same as those with which we are confronted when conducting biographical interviews with certain groupings in western Europe.

In general, I do not see these challenges as being connected with the method of narrative interviews. Rather, especially when beginning field research in unfamiliar cultures, we-groups, milieus or geographical regions, I have to cope with certain irritations or misunderstandings due to my ignorance of the local customs and discourses, or I hesitate to ask certain questions because I fear that people might be offended or embarrassed. And yet these irritations can be an advantage! In the literature on methods we find the suggestion that we should put ourselves in the position of a stranger when studying our own society or social milieu. This happens without any effort when starting with research in an unfamiliar milieu. And so it is a big advantage that we scholars from the Global North find ourselves increasingly confronted with the discovery of phenomena that do not easily fit into our categories (and vice versa, researchers from the Global South have this advantage when doing research in the Global North). This applies, for example, to our understanding of family structures, national borders, boundaries of groups, or concepts of state and “nation.”

In general it can be said that we should:

a) avoid subsuming phenomena too quickly under familiar categories

b) always have doubts that we understand what we hear or observe

c) never be afraid to ask questions in interviews.

Sometimes our ignorance of the regional or local context can lead us to think that certain phenomena are individual or special features of that region, when in fact they are far more widespread. For example, when I started working in Uganda, I had no idea how strong the belief in good and bad spirits is in many regions of Uganda, and of Africa in general. I gradually learned how widespread it is, that it does not depend on the interviewee’s educational background, and, very important, I had to learn what functions it can have. For example, family members of ex-rebels sometimes claim the returnees are possessed by bad spirits and give this as the reason why they have refused to allow them to return to the family compound—although the real reason is that the family does not want to recognize their rights to land or their right to participate in local decision-making processes. We also need to be aware that we- and self-presentations may be influenced by Western discourses, with the result, for example, that many do not mention bad spirits. So we need to be aware that interviewees may not mention certain things because they know that the interviewer is a European, and we need to be prepared to ask questions about these things just as naturally as about any other topic.

Even if some of the returnees believe that their mental problems are caused by bad spirits, for us they are clearly consequences of extreme traumatization such as we can also observe in the Global North. Extreme traumatization results from spending a long period exposed to constant death threats and not knowing whether or when this might come to an end. The consequences of this are not fundamentally different among different groupings of people; they are only interpreted differently. Whether they are traumatized by violence, or suffer from circumstances that are prescribed by inherited rules or accustomed discourses, they experience feelings of sadness and hopelessness, although they have been taught not to express these feelings, or they talk about them in a way that is different from what we researchers would expect. In other words, we should not assume that people from other parts of the world function according to completely different psychological mechanisms.

Significantly, I could have discussed the same challenges had I been asked to give a talk on interpretative research in Germany.