This past May, my undergraduate professor and mentor invited me to join her for an ethnographic research project in Brittany, France. Before we left, I didn’t know what to expect. My professor told me we would be doing research on small dairy farmers in France and that I would help her as a translator. As we got closer to our departure, she gave me a little more information, her goals and some interview questions. I began to read some literature on dairy farming and food systems, and learned a bit about French cheese varieties. Yet, I still had no clue how it would all unfold or what we would learn.

Research is always like this. You get excited about an idea, you pursue it with many questions and in the end, it guides you. The people and the subject have their own story that unfolds as you sit in the center and discover it. The researcher can do nothing more than be interested, ask prompting questions and see what comes of it.

We arrived and dove right in. We started out by going to a festival at a local farm. They had been hosting this festival for the past 6 years to raise money for small local farmers. It began as three sons raising money to keep their mother’s dairy farm afloat, but over the years has grown to incorporate many people coming together for a common cause: to support local farmers. In addition to the festival, we spent the week shadowing this dairy farmer, participating in daily chores and going to farmers markets with her. We learned all about Jersey cows, how to milk them, and how to create cheese from their fresh, raw milk. It was a truly incredible experience.

The most inspiring aspect of research is starting out with an almost blank slate in your mind and coming out the other side with someone else’s life story. You enter their world and gather every bit of information you can. Then you take on the important responsibility of understanding the dynamics at play, doing justice to what the research is telling you and accurately portraying this story. We talked to neighbors and friends. We learned about community dynamics, the hopes and fears of local farmers, their struggles and their joys, and what it means to be a dairy farmer in a small town in Brittany, France.

As we learned what it takes to keep a small farm of 15 Jersey cows afloat for over 30 years, I felt privileged to be witnessing this story. It was one of strength, fortitude, and passion for a lifestyle that requires a choice to dedicate yourself to it no matter how hard it may get. The dairy farmer, her sons, their friends, and other community members came together as a community to overcome great obstacles for the purpose of staying true to the values that they believe in. She would not have succeeded without these factors: network of community, belief in a set of values, and the will to live only the lifestyle that she had chosen.

Photo Credits: Gerard Zawadzki

Now months later as we get further into the research, I am beginning to see a trend in those who choose to be part of an alternative lifestyle. Whether it be small farming, hippy movements, the rave scene, or my undergraduate research on religious communities, people would rather be disenfranchised from a majority that they used to be part of than to live in contradiction to their beliefs. Belief in this context meaning one’s way of seeing the world, what one values and how one reinforces this perspective in their every day lives. People will give up belonging, the bond of shared purpose or lifestyle, for the hope of a truer sense of belonging to a value system that they deeply connect to. In the lives of these small dairy farmers, their alternate way of life did alienate them from some neighbors and community members, but they also found their own community. The farm was always bustling with people, other local farmers, family friends, and friends of friends stopping in for a visit. The festival itself, continuing to grow year after year, was proof of the community they had built around this cause.

We continue to dig into the research, trying to understand what motivates a person to choose a lifestyle that involves many hurdles. This piecing together of a vast puzzle can be a daunting task. However, the part I find to be the most crucial for the anthropologist is making sure that we do justice to the personal story of these individuals whose entire life, whose very purpose as an individual give meaning and weight to the subject that we are researching. We study more than areas of interest, or human behavior. We are in the business of portraying how and why people live their lives the way they do. This is the anthropologists “raison d’etrê”. We are the story teller. We carry the personal details of another’s world with us, and at all costs we swear to protect and preserve the true essence of it.

More to come on this research as we delve deeper…