Here I go again - Malawi 2026

I look out of the taxi window, lost in my thoughts. That last stretch of road to Manchester airport seems to me the dullest in the country. It's Manchester, so everything is greyer than anywhere else and the weather is gloomy because it doesn't know to be anyhow else. I can't distract myself. Everything feels heavy. It's like this every time I leave to go somewhere. Not sure why I cant just get on with it. It doesn't matter how exciting plans for the trip are. It's like my bag is packed with stones. In a way, that's an easy metaphor for all the things that anchor one's everyday life, and that can't be left behind even though they are not physically with them. I am lucky: they are all beautiful things. But here I am, leaving alone, again. I try and trick my brain into being jolly, and play Enya loudly in my earphones. 'Sail away, sail away, sail away'...

The Peaks didn't look any better today!

5 years ago, I embarked on a much longer, much more complicated, ethnographic 'Orinoco flow' as well. I approached the departure terminal from another angle. Leaving Merseyside behind seemed easier: no Snake Passes to traverse. But the pandemic was still there, and together with stones, I had a large bulk of PPE and COVID tests in my bag. 'Naive' from The Kooks played in my ears and I was eaten by the fear of not making it into my destination: Kenya was imposing a new lockdown 4h after my flight was due to land. Walking around like a zombie into a deserted terminal after days of no sleep and many tears poured towards several, different causes, I managed to board the plane and collapse into a 9h nap - benefit of the fact that there were only 30 people on the flight and I could occupy a row with 4 seats. I woke up in Nairobi just on time to make my cheeky escape out of the capital to Eldoret, where the adventure began.

I have been dubious about reviving this blog. I wonder daily if the intrepid Serena who stubbornly talked herself into going to Kenya for 6 months in the middle of a pandemic still exists. That feeling of being heavy when leaving the UK is, at the moment, the only similarity I can think of. Everything has changed. Some things, for the best. Liverpool for Sheffield 💚. Ms Saligari for Dr Saligari. But also, naive for considerate - I really dont like to be considerate! Anthropologist for 'Social Science Researcher with expertise in qualitative methods' -  that's what I write on my CV to look more employable. Most importantly: the upcoming trip is not an ethnographic mission. I am not going to spend 6 months doing ethnographic fieldwork in a Kenyan community for my own piece of research. I am going to Malawi to work with colleagues to meet the deliverables of our project. Still very exciting, but...

Have I retained that ability to find the extraordinary in the ordinary? Am I still able to look in awe at things that for locals are the most mundane? Am I still skilled at that "art of noticing" (Tsing, 2015) that allowed me to be attentive to the circumstances I came across and explore the deeper meanings behind the apparently casual and “unruly” edges of things and experiences? In an academic landscape defined by redundancies, cuts in expenses, withdrawals of funding and an increase tendency to commodify research into a set of measurable and predictable outcomes, I have struggled to thrive as an Anthropologist. I have let go of lot of my enthusiasm. I have - with much shame - compromised the curiosity that fuelled my wish to investigate the tiniest, apparently most insignificant things humans do to fit the schemes currently allowing me to have a job and pay the bills. And, let's be honest: Social Scientists are having it harder than others, as the things they deal with are often seen as matters of "opinions" rather than "facts" - hence the lack of funding.

I opened "Blogger" a few days ago, 5 years after I intentionally closed it behind me the night I boarded on my flight back to Europe. I was so exhausted. I read back at some of my posts from Kenya. Initially, the impact with my very maccheroni-cal English made me turn up my nose. My style of writing in English was so primordial at that stage, but that was the pre-ChatGTP pre-trying to write a PhD dissertation stage, to be fair! :-) Yet, as I went through the posts, I remembered all the questions I got from my friends every time I used to published a post. People would send me messages to comment on what I had written, send reactions to my IG stories or stop me to have a chat when I bumped into them months later, eager to know more about what I learnt. I remembered how heartwarming that was. I remembered that writing small, dull things about my life during the Kenyan fieldwork actually gathered some quite unexpected interest and that, ultimately, it served the Anthropologist's purpose of getting to know cultures from the inside, and showing the world, especially the Western one, that things can work and be different than the pre-established, normalised way we often think about them.

In one of my (many) moments of absolute despair about the future of my identity as an Anthropologist, my PhD supervisor, AKA one of the most inspiring humans (and, "incidentally", women) I have ever met, told me that I had to find a way to "carry the discipline with me". Here to this blog continued life again. I have renamed the original "Of PhD and Travels during the Pandemic" into the current "Of Anthropology, Travels and Research Life during the Pandemic (and beyond)". That's my first, brave step. This post is the second - although I may soon regret opening up about how I feel! 

I will try and post some small stories about my adventure in Malawi, which I hope you will enjoy with me. They may be a bit unpolished, short and academically unconceptualised (that's probably for the best!), but if I manage to trigger some will to come back to this page even in just one of you, that would have served the purpose! 🙃