At the same time, serendipity has also led to my having to revise my ambitions concerning this website. My original plan was to post regular reports on my research activities in Argentina as these unfolded, an anthropological correspondence “from the front”, so to speak. As is painfully obvious, although I have managed to send in several series of photos to be put up on this website, it is fair to say at this juncture – mid-August – that my initial idea of a “real time” reporting on my fieldwork has not worked out. To a great extent this has been due to the fact that I have ended up somewhat ambitiously carrying out two case studies rather than one. As a result, I have found myself singularly lacking time to produce the promised reports or even simply transcribe my field notes, much less process my data.

Although my original idea may have proved somewhat impractical, I still think that it had value, and my failure to match my ambition need not undermine the logic that underpinned the original idea, however. Over the next few months, I will transcribe and post up my field notebooks, reproduce my agenda, list documents and books obtained, post up interview transcripts – once these have been vetted by those I interviewed – and in due course, post up the reports and articles that I will be writing based on the material I have gathered. Hopefully, these will permit an ex post facto reconstruction of how I went about doing my fieldwork and how an anthropological investigation actually occurs.

What follows, for now, are extracts from reports and correspondence sent back to friends and colleagues, chronologically ordered, as well as the transcript of the first interview that I recorded. Please bear in mind that inevitably these are preliminary, rough transcriptions which contain mistakes and mis-transcriptions, as usually occurs when interviews are transcribed by a third party and they have not been corrected. I hope to correct these as soon as possible, although it should be noted that I have left all misconceptions and misunderstandings uncorrected so that the evolution of my thinking may be followed, and that I will not be correcting these. I will add further material, some of which is detailed below, to the website as and when is possible, as well as contextualizing details for all the interviews. 

Dennis Rodgers

(Any of the material included in the Crisis in Argentina website may be used freely, so long as it is accompanied by appropriate acknowledgement of it source) 

Report No.1, 15th May 2003

Report No.2, 14th July 2003

Report No.3, 19th August 2003

Interviews