First run Interview

Here are the notes from the first-run interview. Since we have changed our topic to focus more on the coffeeshops as a legally- and culturally-created space, I had no real analogy in the States, so I decided to focus my interview on a visitor's impressions of those spaces, and the social mores, customs, and practicalities of marijuana in the Netherlands from their outside perspective. In hindsight, it might have been interesting to talk to a bar owner here to compare the sort of legal scrutiny that they receive to that of a coffeeshop owner in Amsterdam. Of course, there is a big difference between those two establishments in that the production and distribution of alcohol is legal. So, notes:

Interviewee:

Name: *******

Place and Date: 6:00pm May 22, 2007 at the Matador Bar in Ballard

Demographics: White male, 30 yrs. old, grew up in Bowling Green, OH; recently of Georgia, currently in the process of moving to Seattle.

Questions:

1. Tell me about your trip to Amsterdam.
1. How long were you there? When did you go? What did you do there? Why did you go?
2. What were your experiences of coffeeshops while in Amsterdam?
3. What were your impressions of the native culture in regards to coffeeshops in Amsterdam? How did you feel as a tourist?
4. What manifestations of tolerance of marijuana and coffeeshops did you notice during your time in Amsterdam?
5. What rules or customs were you aware of in regards to marijuana coffeeshops in Amsterdam? How were you made aware of these rules or customs?
6. Did you see/were you aware of ant conflicts related to coffeeshops?

Field Notes:

¨ Interview occurred in a busy bar, at a busy time of day. Not a desirable setting, but what we could manage at the time.

¨ Interviewee admitted, somewhat ashamedly, that the primary reason for going to Amsterdam was to smoke marijuana. Interviewee and traveling companion arrived in Amsterdam and made their way to a coffeeshop before they even checked into their hostel.

¨ Interviewee expressed some uncertainty about how to posit answers. He suggested that there is a difference between the way he would talk about drugs to somebody who had never done them and how he would talk about them to somebody who had. Different language, attitudes, etc. Drugs are associated with counterculture, and as such create their own social world. **I wonder if we are going to see evidence of this in Amsterdam, where soft drugs have undergone a process of social normalization over the last 30 years.**

¨ Going to coffeeshops and getting high “was not an end.” Spent a lot of time high, but once the novelty had worn off he would get high and then go and do other things, not sit around in coffeeshops.

¨ “Not knowing what to expect, we had to ask what the deal was” when first entering coffeeshop.

¨ Was taken by surprise at the potency, despite having smoked marijuana before. “Scaled it back” after first experience.

¨ “It seems silly looking back.”

¨ “A lot of people will get their picture taken with a cop, holding up a joint. That’s a tourist thing to do.”

¨ “I was well aware that it was legal but techinically tolerated. Everyone knows that in America it’s illegal to drink in public, but there are times and places where drinking in public was tolerated. I figured it was kind of like that. Put it in a plastic cup, don’t be an idiot, and nobody’s going to mind. So I guess I related it to things I already knew.”

¨ “There are definitely mores. I remember having conversations with locals about, you don’t just walk around getting high in public, y’know, and just because it’s tolerated or legal or done doesn’t mean that it’s appropriate in every situation, and that was pretty clear right off the bat, talking to anybody.”

¨ Related a story about smoking a joint while walking up to a train that they were going to board. Conductor said, “This is your train, but that has to stay.” According to interviewee, conductor was not offended, but was ready to enforce regulations and mores.

¨ Interviewee expressed no awareness of conflict around drugs in the culture. “I never saw any indication of that. They seemed very well integrated into the society. It was a thing, it was there, you could partake of it if you wanted, you could ignore it if you wanted. Similar to the way that alcohol is treated here. There are plenty of people who drink, and there are plenty of people who have drinking problems, and everyone knows about all of that. I got a very similar feel about the way that people dealt with it there. They dealt with it very commonsense for the most part. I didn’t see hardly anything about policy or police enforcing it or anything, so if there was policy having an effect, it was doing it sort of indirectly.”

Thoughts:

Again, environment was not conducive to long conversation, but subject was ready to speak willingly about the topic. And this was an American talking about his experiences there, which is going o be very different from the native, the politician, the coffeeshop owner, the police officer talking about the role that it plays in their lives/jobs/culture/etc. on a more or less daily basis.

First few days in Amsterdam will definitely have to be spent getting bearings, sussing out first contacts, seeing which groups are going to provide most opportunities for contact.

Did not have much need to look at environment in this interview as the environment was artificial and was separate from the place and the phenomenon being researched. It is interesting that it was in a bar given interviewee’s perception of how Dutch feelings about marijuana more or less mirror American sentiments towards alcohol. This will have to be investigated further as we do some direct observation in coffeeshops in different areas and at different times of day.

New Questions!

Our research questions, as they stand:

In the Netherlands, the possession, sale, and consumption of marijuana is technically illegal, but culturally and even commercially acknowledged and condoned. Because of this, coffeeshops and the activities therein exist in a strange legal limbo, with the parameters for their existence and acceptance constantly being defined by cultural mores, political interests, law enforcement, and the clientèle that utilize their services. This research attempts to probe the ways in which one or several of these forces influence the perception and operation of coffeeshops. Do the relevant actors believe the boundaries of this space to be tenuous? How dynamic is the definition of this space with regard to the actor's perception of its boundaries? The question in the research is intentionally left open so that upon arrival and initial survey of the scene in Amsterdam, we can identify the conflicts and potential points of flux around the relevant institutions.

Sample questions:

For law enforcement:
* How do you understand your role with regard to coffeeshops?
* Have you felt like your role with regard to the coffeeshops has changed over the last 5 years? The last 10 years? How and why?
* Do you feel that changing cultural or political currents influence your position or day-to-day activities?

For politicians/policy makers:
* How do you understand the legal space around cofeeshops? How do you feel about the current situation around coffeeshops?
* Do you think that the current legal situation with coffeeshops is adequate, or do you believe that it needs to better defined?
* From where and to what degree do you feel pressure to better define or re-define the current situation?

For coffeeshop owners:
* Do you feel like the environment in which you run your business has changed significantly in the last 5 years? The last 10 years? How and why?
* How has your business fared in the last 10 years? Better or worse?
* How precarious do you feel your business to be? Do you perceive the current tolerance of coffeeshops to have limits?
* How do you feel about the fact that in running a legitimate business you are forced to engage in quasi-legal acts? Does this worry you? Is it something that you think about?

Thinking Ethnography

The readings on Ethnography were useful for helping to frame and define what is a potentially very useful research presentation technique. I felt like much of the Maanen article was perhaps too concentrated on audience to really address issues of use and form, though his engagingly written history offered many insights on past (and potential) uses of ethnography, and the presentation of the methodological development was illuminating.

Of more use was the second piece, and organizing and conducting interview research. These helped bring to light many of the practical considerations that one must consider when engaging in ethnographic research and conducting in-depth interviews. Lots of good hints about taking notes as you go and taking in the whole environment.

The method of ethnography is going to be of use for Chase and I as we are exploring the daily activity within the coffeeshops in Amsterdam. I can see making observational trips to different types of coffeeshops (the literature divides them up into those that are for tourists, for the native Dutch, and for various ethnic groups) at different times of the day to observe activities and transactions. These trips will obviously veer away from "participant observation." Taking note of atmosphere, clientele, cultural or ritualistic activities, etc. and using some of these ethnographic techniques will enable us to develop a detailed portrait of the spaces, their cultural position and significance, etc.

As far as questions to ask and people to ask them to, I am still wrestling with this question a bit. As is evident in my previous blog post, my conception of the research project has kind of blown open in the last week and I am somewhat desperately flailing about for an anchor, a center, a focus. Chase and I are both obviously interested in the development of coffeeshops as social institutions, the culture within and the culture without, but I am questioning what the best ways to address those questions is. Talking to coffeeshop owners/workers, health professionals, law enforcement, and other native Dutch is going to fit into this somehow, but I'm still trying to decide what the best overarching research question is going to be. Need to talk with the rest of the group soon!

Post-Presentation Notes, Thoughts, and Questions

These are things that I jotted down while listening to Paul's comments. If anybody would like to comment (or if anybody even sees this), I would greatly appreciate it.

* How do coffeeshops fit in with or become part of people's daily routines?

* Look at pragmatic tolerance around coffeeshops not as something inherent to the culture, but as part of a process of fight and compromise that has played out in Dutch culture over the last several decades (and I have at least one article to back this up). It's not a factor in the creation of coffeehouses as a social institution, but a result of these conflicts.

* Don't try to make it more wholesome than it is, and seek out where the contradictions and conflicts are.

* How does the drug policy play out in international relations?

* Focus on one small and interesting question.

* Methodological issues, RE: variability as relates to the fact that we are two different people conducting interviews. Where are the places where we can introduce stability into our findings? It's true that in my own research I have usually resisted this type of rigidity, but if we want to try to merge our work, it could be important for us to think about standardization of results.

* WODC studies coffeeshops a lot. Main problem with their research is how to track behavior. We should look into their research, and Paul said that he could get us in contact with some people working there.

* Speaking of contacting Paul, I never actually talked to him about our research project like I had intended to when he was here. I would like to get a plan that is a little more solid than what we have right now (do you feel like it isn't solid? The presentation exposed a lot of holes to me, which is something that we should talk about ASAP), e-mail it to him and get him a bit more directly involved in what we're doing. If this lines up with VKS stuff at all, even potentially, I would personally love the chance to spend some extra time in there.

* Julie has the web address for the Addiction Studies Institute thing that is happening in Amsterdam this Summer. I will contact her right away for the web address.

* What do we hope to ADD to the discourse around coffeeshops and the culture around them? Part of answering this question is going to necessitate becoming more familiar with that discourse. I'll contact Paul for the WODC stuff ASAP, and we'll both have to spend some time digging through it. We definitely have our work cut out for us over the next couple of weeks.

* When we were asked what our project was about, both of us jumped straight to the question of where/how they exist in the Dutch cultural space. So, how do we get to that? What is being studied? Who should we be talking to to get at that information?

E-Research and What it Means to Me

As I somewhat clumsily elucidated in class on Monday, I see e-research as occurring in several different ways:

*The creation of flexible and easily managed remote data-stores for use between several researchers looking at similar issues or topics.

*The utilization of knowledge-creation models which focus on remote collaboration.

*The utilization of web technologies in research, enabling such activities as online ethnography and online network analysis.

Umm… I came up with a couple of more examples while I was walking to Big Time with my computer to eat lunch, have a beer, and type this up, but that’s all I can remember right now. Still that’s a decent if simplistic list, and must have some basis in reality.

So I am still considering how I should attempt to utilize e-research methods in my own research project, and will no doubt come up with ways while I am learning more about the possibilities of e-research. One thing that stands out as a possibility is conducting some web network analysis once I have identified some sources where visitors to Amsterdam are getting information about the Netherlands and the opportunities for extra-curricular activities that exists there.

And that’s all I got right now. Hmm… I wonder if Chase has any good ideas…

The Netherlands, Irony, and the VKS

It seems like irony drips off the pages of Buruma's book Murder in Amsterdam.

Re-reading the chapters for this assignment, which focused on Muslim communities and "Submission," one gets the impression that they are reading Catch-22 rather than a discourse of life in Amsterdam during the last half-decade. The degree to which actions have unintended and/or opposite consequences, parties flip perspectives, and situations are generally fouled up by, well, themselves is staggering and heartbreaking.

Most significant in my mind is the assertion on page 121 about the rates of schizophrenia among Muslim men in the Netherlands. "A young male of the second generation was ten times more likely to be schizophrenic than a native Dutchman from a similar economic background," Buruma reports. That in itself is terrifying: that the shared experience of a single group of people can have such a damaging effect, and not socially or economically but psychologically. And then you start reading into the inferred causes of such a split, that deep disconnect with both their family's culture and the new place that they've been transplanted to, and it just seems all the worse and more hopeless. And then the liberal factions ask themselves why these kids turn to extremism...

It just goes round and round: The immigrants come to this place, bringing with them very different ideas of how to live, of what to believe; different social structures and expectations, and with very few inroads into the society that they are entering. In the name of tolerance, the natives balk at what they see as backwards or regressive social tendencies, and this in turn pushes the immigrants even further to the outskirts, unhinges their social orders. The natives see this and in turn ostracize them further. And so on. And so on.

The case of the second generation is particularly sad, raised in an environment that doesn't jive with the ways that they are taught to live by their families and cultures. There was a passage about how the fact that they speak the native language while their parents usually don't means that they have to negotiate through governmental bureaucracies on their parents behalf. This often undermines their faith in their parents, shaking the base of the family unit, stranding these kids in a world that their parents don't understand. And the irony lies in the fact that the lack of access to the society, the lack of social services and roads to integration, further alienates them from the society, and the society from them. The need to deal with a culture that doesn't accept them and that is, in many ways, contrary to the belief system that they have inherited can be psychically crippling.

Am I repeating myself? I feel like I'm repeating myself.

Anyways, Theo van Gogh's approach to irony ended up being his downfall. The whole of Dutch society in Buruma's world seems to be filled with people who want to let their words speak for them so they don't have to act, and once action happens its effects are devastating. I was really intrigued by van Gogh's work on Najib and Julia. The work seemed surprisingly frank and sincere in the way that Buruma described it, and actually concerned with portraying and engaging Dutch Muslims. It makes his blatant offense seem mostly like a game, like there was some world view buried under his bristly public persona that he did want to express. In light of that work (granted, I haven't seen it or anything else he has done, besides Submission - we should work on correcting that), at least in the way Buruma describes it, irony seems sadly and ultimately fatally self-defeating.

Admittedly, I'm having a difficult time drawing a conceptual link between these conversations and Wouter's article on the VKS. I did have a question though: One of the primary assertions in the intro to the article says taht "working in these new information environments, researchers should become more productive and better able to cope with interdisciplinary problems." Now, the productivity I can understand: the aim is to link researchers working on similar projects across distances in digital environments. But how does that necessarily relate to interdisciplinarity? Is it just the fact that large collections of information and data can be aggregated and shared, or is there something else?

I like the view that the work at VKS is inherently interventionist, and my pithy comment to tie this to Buruma is that some intervention is needed in Amsterdam on behalf of the immigrants there. I can understand the Dutch being leery of Muslim customs, and I believe that it is possible for the groups to engage each other openly and sincerely to foster understanding. However, this isn't likely to happen until immigrants are given the opportunity to join the culture, and encouraged to do so. I talked about the cycle of ostracization before, and it seems like fostering integration is the best way to break it.

A Shot at the Abstract

The city of Amsterdam is unique on the world stage. It is a mid-sized metropolis, heavily touristed, and well-known for its permissive attitudes towards soft drugs and sex work. Our research seeks to understand the way that these permissive attitudes are understood by natives of and visitors to the city. For the “native” component of our study, we will be looking at how the permissiveness of Dutch society affects the way in which the Dutch perceive their homeland. We will ask a series of questions regarding this subject and see if there is any variation in opinion based upon such demographics such as age, religion, geographic location, etc. Furthermore, we will try and establish what the appropriate social conventions are when participating in the unique Dutch culture, and how people living in Amsterdam feel about all of the outside attention. Conversely, we hope to explore the ways that visitors to the city view this permissiveness, how it colors their impressions of Amsterdam and the Dutch, and how they understand the social norms and conventions around activities which are illicit in their own countries. Also important is where tourists get information about cultural norms, the accuracy of these sources, and the ways in which normative behavior is communicated across cultures. Our research will be situated geographically both within the city of Amsterdam and across national lines. We will address these questions through several methods, including on-the-street interviews, online research, surveys, and participant observation in many different areas of Amsterdam.