Omg I'm in the news!!!

Omg I'm in the news!!! They’ve been showing Prince William’s visit in all the local, national, and even a couple international news stations. Since I’m the most brightly dressed and have the most fabulous eyelashes in the group, I’m pretty easy to spot. There was even a little snippet in a local news article that includes my name and research topic: http://yn.yunnan.cn/html/2015-03/04/content_3627460_7.htm (it’s in Chinese so it might be hard to read…)

Haha I heard there was going to be press, and I didn't want to look washed out all over the internet, so I specifically went and purchased some fancy eyelashes for the occasion. I bought some slightly subtler looking ones to look all demure and proper for the Brits, haha but I couldn't stand it and ended up adding on a second layer of huge lashes. I mean, he's a prince after all, so I gotta look my fanciest.

I was aiming for a selfie with him, but that didn't happen :(  I was so sad. Stupid security guards.
They wouldn't allow any pictures, but they didn't take away people's cameras during the security check, so OBVIOUSLY everyone had their phones out the moment he walked in hahaha.
I didn't get any pictures myself, but my mom has been combing the internet collecting them. It's too bad my face isn't on the back of my head in these, eh? Haha I'm sure a good face one will turn up eventually -- there were SO MANY cameras pointed at us.

My favourite photos so far are the ones with my friend Jessie. She was so completely unfazed by the Prince’s presence that she refused to take off her sunglasses, and then spent most of his time with us picking at an itchy mosquito bite on her elbow. (The picture with her picking her elbow in now on the front page of XTBG’s website.)

Funnily enough, this has actually really helped improve my relationship with the local Dai communities. I was a little self-conscious about being an outsider wearing a Dai dress for Prince William’s visit, especially since everyone kept thinking I was a local Dai girl, but I was hoping that I was mostly exonerated of cultural appropriation since every bit of my outfit was a gift from local community members and they were very excited to see me wearing it on TV.

Yi Kang, my Dai field assistant, told me that the local Dai community has been talking about me all day. Some thought that I must a Dai tour guide from XTBG, and those who met me already were quick to say, “No, her name is Lily! She is an Canadian/American working here with Yi Kang, etc etc.” Then others would chime in to say that they recognized me attending the recent village wedding, etc.
I also got to bring Yi Kang to the fancy dinner at the 5-star hotel, and she was so excited and told everyone about it. It was so cute! This is us at the pool (before I took off my clothes and jumped in completely).

I'm really pleasantly surprised by the positive PR effect this has had for me, especially since I've been really stressed out this week because I'm facing my first bit of community resistance to my research at my next study village.

The big problem for me is that new Holy Hill protector for this village won't let me do my plant surveys. I've been visiting this community since 2011 and I'm good friends with a few of the residents, and I've done Holy Hill plant surveys here previously in 2011 and 2013 with no problem. But the previous Holy Hill protector who let me do everything passed away a few weeks ago (may he rest in peace), and the new one is not as flexible. He's worried that having me in the Holy Hill will anger the gods that live there so that the gods will punish the village. He found some string from previous plant plots (likely mine...) and said that he threw it out. He said that removing the string helped restore some good fortune to the village. He said that if anything bad happens to a villager during my field surveys and the gods get angry, the gods will punish the villagers and then the community will hold the Holy Hill protector responsible.

He also said that according to reason, women should not be allowed to enter Holy Hills, but society being what it is now, he will ask the village head if I can enter as long as I’m not menstruating at that time (according to Buddhist beliefs). Sigh...

I was freaking out a lot because I have so much invested in this community already, what with my friends here and previous data and extensive research on this village's history, so changing a field site would be really rough. Not to mention, this community has two Holy Hills, one restored and one relocated after the Cultural Revolution, so it's such an interesting case study to understand how these communities have recreated pockets of sacred forests across the landscape.

But at the same time, I certainly can't fault the man for protecting what he sees as the best interests of himself and his community, and he has every right to make such a decision (no matter how much trouble it causes for my dissertation...).

I decided that I wasn’t going to get any further that day, so I said thank you for his time, and that I understood and respected the enormous responsibility that he has for protecting his community. I also gave him a present I brought from Canada. He seemed pleased and sent me home with a bunch of bananas as a gift, which I think is a good sign for a budding rapport.

In the meantime, I'm going to move on a start my plant surveys at my next Holy Hill site. I'll be back to this community and trying to work on my relationship with the local leaders (which is still rough sometimes when I'm a young girl in a patriarchal society). And who knows? Maybe after a few months of getting to know me, things might change later on. I can only hope! Besides, as my wonderful committee members have told me in response to my panicking emails, this might actually be a really great opportunity to gain some important insight on local community politics and how these interact with outside forces.

On the bright side, leaving some of my plant surveys for later is a welcome break too. Managing a field team is really hard! It's quite an adjustment dealing with the Chinese way of scheduling, because it's literally impossible to plan in advance. Plans are typically not confirmed until the night before, and even then they might change in the morning if there is rain or something else comes up, etc. And this is quite something to deal with on the fly when who and how many people can come completely changes what kind and how much data can be collected that day, which of course also changes what equipment to bring and how much food to provide, etc. Plus many of my field assistants are borrowed from other labs, so they can be called away at a moment's notice if their boss needs them. Right now I've got a rotating roster of main field assistants, plus secondary field assistants I call if I'm missing someone. But it's hard and time-consuming to train people over and over again, so I try to stick to the same people if I can.

In any case, I'm really excited for the chance to really focus on my ethnographic work -- which I started when I first got here, but have been neglecting a bit lately for my plant surveys. I was also learning Dai language, which is a blast, but I need to keep practicing to improve! Haha and mainly I think it will be wonderful because I'll only need to think about one person's schedule at that point (the beautiful and wonderful Yi Kang), and her main priority is accompanying me.

Ok, that’s it for now! Sorry for the long delay again. I’m off to a hot springs tomorrow to celebrate International Women’s Day! It’s a pretty big deal in Dai communities, which I think is so awesome. The village committees organize a performance, and most women just got out on fun trips or go out shopping, or whatever else is fun and relaxing :)

XOXO

Starting fieldwork

Hi everyone! My profuse apologies for my prolonged absence. The past few weeks have been SO BUSY!! I literally dream about my research every night – there’s no escape! Right now I’ve started fieldwork, the beginning of which involves a lot of stress with planning and figuring out how to modify my original plans to fit the messy reality in front of me. (Haha plus I’m really out of shape, so mountain-climbing is really exhausting, especially in a disturbed tropical forest with lots of spiny lianas and other mean-spirited plants with vicious curved thorns for drawing blood from innocent, good-hearted people trying to save their habitat – I actually have a list of plants I now hate.)

Besides learning to live in clouds of mosquitos and hammering out methodology details, early fieldwork involves juggling the constantly changing schedules of my field team members and fighting for their time with other professors. On top of all this, I’m still reading a lot to refine my research proposal for the 5 grants I have due in the next 1.5 months. In short, I’m really looking forward to what I imagine my life will be like in a couple months: organized, and with a little time for myself in the evening (hahaha we’ll see).

Backing up a bit, I realized that I haven’t actually told many of you what research is about:

I am studying the changing relationship between indigenous communities and their traditionally protected sacred forests, its effect on land use practices, and the ecological implications of this evolving relationship for biodiversity conservation.

I’m working with indigenous Dai communities in Xishuangbanna, a prefecture in southwest China that contains the world’s northernmost tropical rain forest and China’s richest biodiversity. However, these forests are disappearing very quickly in the face of expanding rubber plantations.

Right now, Dai sacred forests called Holy Hills are virtually the only remaining forest fragments outside government nature reserves, and they have been documented to contain rare species and ecosystems that are often underrepresented in current protected area networks.

Besides their conservation potential, we also need to consider that there are competing interests at play in Holy Hills. On one hand, it is understood in Dai culture that maintaining Holy Hills improves community well-being by appeasing ancestor spirits. On the other hand, converting Holy Hills for increased rubber production improves material security and Dai social standing in Chinese society.

Ultimately, I’m trying to understand when and how community goals for protecting sacred forests are compatible with conservation goals. This is important for engaging with conservation science and policy-making in a way that can both conserve biodiversity while still allowing for cultural self-determination.

But besides research, the past month has had some fun things happen too. This was my first Christmas away from my family, and despite missing home and people I love, it was actually really great here. There’s actually a huge community of foreigners at XTBG (Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden) where I’m based. In some ways, it was one of the most Christmas-y holidays I’ve had. I think that because we are all far away from home, no one takes the Christmas holidays for granted, so we all know that if we want to celebrate it, we need to work hard to make it happen. We also work hard at going through all our holiday rituals to remind us of home, so we had lots of Christmas baking and caroling and parties. XTBG even threw us a special Christmas party for foreigners! Plus there is such a mix of foreigners here that I get to experience Christmas from all sorts of countries, haha and this year with a particularly strong Welsh influence.

New Year’s is less of an explicitly celebrated event in China because it is overshadowed by Chinese New Year, but this year I got to celebrate with a friend’s wedding on Dec 31. These are pictures of Nana and Ben at their ceremony – aren’t they adorable??

This is a picture of me at a string-tying ceremony in the wedding. They have these in Thailand too, I’m told. The older generation goes around and ties string on our wrists to wish us good luck and health, and we have to keep the string on for at least 3 days. It was really fun! Though my string got a bit stinky by the time I took it off…

The wedding (with 1000 guests!!) also involved some dance performances from all the young ladies and old ladies (haha they seem to explicitly exclude no middle-aged ladies). That’s me and my friend Rin eating dinner during the show.

I’m also really enjoying the food here. This is a picture of one of my favourite things to eat: algae! It’s scraped from the rocks in the Luosuo River, and then it’s hand-washed, spread in sheets on woven mats (as shown in the picture), dried in the sun, seasoned with all sorts of yummy spices, and deep-fried! It’s SO GOOD.

I’ve also been trying out the local moonshine. This is a picture of them making some from corn, though they will also use sticky rice.

I also went back to visit some of my old contacts in Dai villages from previous years, and I found that one of them had put up the pictures I mailed his family back in 2011! Isn’t that so sweet?? That’s me in the blue dress with the orange flowers in my hair, from when they had me try on some Dai clothing :)

Ok, that’s in for now because I need to sleep early for fieldwork again tomorrow. Man, I’ve barely scratched the tip of the iceberg for my work, and I’m already pooped!

Much love,
Lily