Method Envy (or is it skill envy?)

In preparation for drafting Chapter 2: "Land, Labor, and the [Indigenous] Nation," I've been hitting the books lately. Mostly, I'm reading things that are long overdue on my "read this, damnit" list or that I read so cursorily the first time that they might as well be first reads. This process is, not surprisingly, both edifying and terrifying. On the one hand, I'm getting all sorts of great insights that I will, hopefully, be able to incorporate into my chapters and am deepening my understanding of and familiarity with existing scholarship. On the other hand, reading the erudite and incisive scholarship of my betters leaves me painfully aware of the gaps and oversimplifications in my own work. It also reawakens my anxiety about remembering subtle insights long enough to have them make it into my writing.

One major cause of both uplift and dismay for me is a sort of methodology envy which may very well be more envy of skill and depth than actual method.

The two most compelling texts on my reading list in the past week have been a set of articles by A. Kim Clark and the book Liberalismo y Temor by Mercedes Prieto, both historical anthropologists. Both women practice a level of evidentiary density that boggles my mind and makes the loosely knit ruminations of my own work feel all the more fictive in comparison. Of course, I have to recognize that these are women in the prime of their careers and I am only starting. On the other hand, I long for the sort of affective certainty that comes from building an argument rich and directly related archival piece by rich and directly related archival piece. Confronted with the archival ephemerality of the Ecuadorian art world and exacerbated by the sweeping abstraction of my central theme, my own methodology tends more to assemble a handful of gestures and then draw a speculative path among them.

So I wonder, did I merely look in the wrong places? Did I perhaps choose the wrong focus? Are my archives and my historical skills fundamentally deficient? Or does the work I'm doing, the study of rhetorical and visual culture in Ecuador, simply force a different, perhaps more tentative and less demonstrable, methodology? Most likely, I suppose, the answer to each of those is "in a way, yes."