I am relieved the holidays are over. I tried to forget about them but was mostly unsuccessful. Now, the evening of January 3rd I am finally feeling better. I have worked in the library for the past few days with my research assistant - she was doing various helpful tasks and I was fretting over my second monthly report on my research. I still have yet to finalize it and send it off to my advisor. Anyone that knows how I am about writing and deadlines can recall the torture it causes me. But I can say that the process is not as bad as it has been in the past. These reports are mostly for me, and I know that as I am working on them. They never feel finished, which causes me some stress, but they help me to see how far I have come in this project. We are also getting ready for a few interviews this week before my friend Rose arrives and I take a bit of a break.

My RA and I had a conversation after lunch today about my research. She said that since each time we meet she sees that I have developed the project further, answered questions and adapted my questions and directions she is curious to know what my project started out as. This is a very reasonable question and I think highlights both how difficult it is to know before going to the field where your work will take you and what the most interesting questions and phenomena will be, and at the same time why at least one of my committee members was concerned that I was not prepared enough to begin my work when I did. I explained what I had been planning at the time of my proposal defense and we both laughed at the huge questions I said my research would answer. I really do think that that is just the way it goes. How could I have know then about all of the fascinating changes taking place that I have only heard about since talking with people in south Rajasthan and rural areas in Gujarat?

I suppose there are some things I could have thought of in terms of what kinds of processes I wanted to look at and expected to be able to study. But it is only now that I have some context for these changes that I can understand what they might mean. For example, I had a feeling that the shift from regular hybrid seed production to Bt cotton seed production (genetically modified cotton, that is) would be resulting in some changes in patterns of labor migration, if for no other reason than that the popularity of these seeds is resulting in more production and thus a greater need for labor (ie many more people will be called to do this work). But I could not have known that this increase might be leading to social mobility for a group of men in Rajasthan that are responsible for gathering child laborers and transporting them to and from the farms in Gujarat. Now there is also heightened awareness about child labor and there is a question as to whether these middlemen will continue to make the same profits if fewer children go. I could go on and on, but this is just to say that I am learning new things all of the time, and in order to be able to theorize about why and how Bt cotton might be causing different kinds of changes I need to know a lot more about that situation!