Most people want to know what Houston is like, so we figured, since we're anthropologists, we'd ask ourselves: if we were going to do fieldwork in Houston, what would we do?

Anthropologists take on Houston.

James D. Faubion

I would study the ethics of contemporary capitalism from the vantage of the executive offices and the Public Relations and Human Resources departments of a certain major oil and gas company to which I think I could get access. (I'm afraid I wouldn't be able to confine myself to Houston alone--but it would be a fine place to start.)

Christopher Kelty

Oil and Water. Halliburton, Enron, Shell, Kellogg Brown and Root, Baker Hughes, Chevron-Texaco, the country's largest commercial seaport, catastrophic flooding, potable water shortages, and a crazy misunderstood devotion to privatization of land and water rights. Between oil and water, Houston is the center of a very "old" economy, one that's re-asserted itself dramatically in the last 5 years since the demise of that so-called new one. My project would be to get inside the transformation of the oil and water industries in an era of "sustainability," "homeland security," SUV-sized government protection of oil industries, gargantuan tax loopholes, and huge insanely complex derivatives fiascos. It would be liquid anthropology, like oil and water, but more than that, it would be BIG anthropology, like everything else in Texas.

Hannah Landecker

Well, Houston has an amazingly large and diverse medical sciences community, and there are some pretty intense efforts underway to make biotechnology the "new oil." Despite the fact that there's so much research, much of it federally funded, Houston and the surrounding area doesn't have anywhere near the private investment in biotechnology that you see in California and Massachusetts. Right now would be an interesting moment to watch the attempted transformation of raw materials into biotechnological products, and all the other transformations that have to come along with that - of intellectual research activity into intellectual property, of urban landscapes into research parks, and of gulf drilling investment into biotechnology investment. I would like to look more into the specificity of building a biotechnology industry in a place where the oil industry has been so dominant, since some of the same players are involved in both - Houston would be a good place to do ethnography of extraction!

Rod McIntosh

I do have a project in the Houston area. For the past five years I have collaborated with the U.S.Forest Service archaeologists at the Sam Houston National Forest, where I run my Field Methods in Archaeology (Anthropology 362) excavations. On the natural connector between the Basin of Mexico civilizations and the complex polities of the Mississippi Valley, the Texas Gulf Coast has nevertheless been considered an archaeological "black hole" because of persistent preservation and site disturbance problems. We have a series of sites with stratigraphic integrity going from "bubba" to 6,000 BC.

Julie Taylor

I think I might also look at the racism inherent in Houston's idea of its own Hispanic heritage. I am getting upset just thinking about all this.

Stephen Tyler

Some kind of language project on bilingualism in minority populations.

 

Graduate Students

Nahal Naficy

My fantasy research in Houston? ha ha ha, i don't know; I often dream lately that I have quitted this intellectual, diaspora sort of thing I'm in right now and started research in medical anthropology! I come from a family of doctors and my grandfather was famous for being one of the first graduates of Tehran University School of Medicine as well as of Harvard, someone who combined religious concepts of health and healing with traditional herbal medicine and cutting edge Western technology. My four year residence in Houston has constantly shocked me, among other things, with how differently medicine and concepts of pain, healing, health, etc are viewed and treated here. I think with the biggest medical center in the US, only across the street from Rice, Houston could be a perfect site for doing research on the way medicine is done and conceptualized in this country. Wow, now that I am writing about it, I realize I'm actually very much into this fantasy, but alas, I may be too far into my real research to make this shift.

Valerie Olson

Actually, I am engaged in preliminary research on space biomedicine and the local and global politics of space programs. It's fascinating how space medical research and "earth" medical research overlap in several institutions in Houston, as personnel from both areas work collaboratively on projects in such areas as physiology research, psychology research, and medical robotics.

Anthony Potoczniak

study the Latino music scene in the Houston metropolitan area and learn the dances that are associated with each musical genre

Michael Powell

Houston itself is an eclectic collection of things. Oftentimes, its difficult to imagine any greater order of things to the whole. but I would begin by focusing in on the junk collectors and the random object collectors: the flower man's house, the beer can house, the orange show, etc. just like the core of any good project, I think you see something that people are doing and ask: why? in this case, the practices are finding, collecting, and presenting. but more than anything, the focus is not just on people but on things and the relationships formed between the two that most people oversimplify as fetish and deviance.

Elitza Ranova

Despite its reputation, Houston has some truly beautiful parts (take for example the old oak trees lining up the streets around campus or the mind-boggling mazes of highway ramps). It also has nice places to go at night (like Etta's, the ancient blues bar in third ward). If I could I would take pictures of some of these places and the people that go there, and would make a photo essay.

Angela Rivas

If Houston was to be my next field site, one of the projects that I would like to conduct is an ethnographic study of the city as the epicenter of what a few years ago was locally called "a national obesity epidemics". This envisioned project ethnographically examines practices and understandings involved in the emergence of the so-called "obesity epidemics". This examination addresses various settings including official agencies in charge of public health issues; food industry and trends in the food market; population segments identified as "victims" of such epidemics; private health centers; and advertising companies, among others.   Another project that I would like to conduct if my next field site was to be Houston is an inquiry into security technologies. This envisioned project ethnographically examines security technologies for alleviating the lack of personal safety due to either urban violence and crime or more recent trends in terrorism. This examination addresses security technologies such as architectural and surveillance devices, official systems of information management, and modalities of policing, among others.    

Ana Wandless

Well, my main project is in Texas and I've already done preliminary research in/on HISD, which is of course a great place to start for a study of the current landscape of educational reform. But if I were to do a different project in Houston, it would probably be to expand my current research into a study of corporate accountability (again, Houston is a great, or infamous, place for that) and corporate training. I would also be tempted to develop a project that would indulge my obsession with Texas singer-songwriters by looking at the use of clichés in Texas music, which would of course extend well beyond Houston.

Dan White

If I were to conduct fieldwork in Houston I would have to be initially attracted to mapping the discourse surrounding the Human Genome Sequencing Center at Baylor. This would involve bouncing from the research center to the medical center to patient advocacy groups to bioethics committees to religious organizations and so on. However, my ideal project would center on BBQ culture and Houston's recent loss to Detroit in the rankings for "fattest American City." In this project I would focus on culture and memory in analyzing the dramatic impacts of such a blow to Houston's pride. I would hope to chart Houston's progress to regaining their title within the next year.

Amanda Ziemba

If I were to do fieldwork in Houston, it would probably be among independent, charismatic African Christian Churches, researching theological directions and pastoral care in the diaspora.