Dogs and Cats in South Korea: Itinerant Commodities

By Julien Dugnoille

Dogs and Cats in South Korea: Itinerant Commodities shows that though dogs and cats are consumed in the millions each year, they are recipients of both cruelty and care in a very unique way compared to other animal species in South Korean society. The anti-imperialist and postcolonial stances associated with the consumption of dogs and cats in South Korea are oversimplistic. Stereotypes by societies that do not eat these animals overshadow the various ways in which South Korean citizens interact with them, including companionship. In fact, many dogs and cats go from companion to livestock, and from livestock to companion, demonstrating that the relationships with these creatures are not only complex, but also fluid. The trajectories of the lives of dogs and cats are never linear. In that sense, individual dogs and cats in South Korea are itinerant animals navigating an exchange system based on culture, economics, and politics. With nuance and cultural understanding, Dugnoille tells the complicated stories of these animals in South Korea, as well as the humans who commoditize and singularize them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Release date: Dec 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781612497068

Julien Dugnoille

Julien Dugnoille is a senior lecturer in anthropology at the University of Exeter. He received his DPhil in anthropology from Oxford. For nearly a decade, much of his work has been dedicated to examining the place of dogs and cats in South Korean society and culture, a particularly complex and interesting research area that touches on cultural relativism and imperialism, the use of animals in national identity rhetoric, the legitimacy of food taboos, speciesism, and the question of violence within the debates between welfarist and abolitionist approaches to human-animal interactions.

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DOGS AND CATS IN SOUTH KOREA

NEW DIRECTIONS IN THE HUMAN-ANIMAL BOND

Series editors: Alan M. Beck and Marguerite E. O’Haire, Purdue University

A dynamic relationship has always existed between people and animals. Each influences the psychological and physiological state of the other. This series of scholarly publications, in collaboration with Purdue University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, expands our knowledge of the interrelationships between people, animals, and their environment. Manuscripts are welcomed on all aspects of human-animal interaction and welfare, including therapy applications, public policy, and the application of humane ethics in managing our living resources.

Other titles in this series:

Assessing Handlers for Competence in Animal-Assisted Interventions

Ann R. Howie

The Canine-Campus Connection: Roles for Dogs in the Lives of College Students

Mary Renck Jalongo (Ed.)

Pioneer Science and the Great Plagues: How Microbes, War, and Public Health Shaped Animal Health

Norman F. Cheville

Cats and Conservationists: The Debate Over Who Owns the Outdoors

Dara M. Wald and Anna L. Peterson

That Sheep May Safely Graze: Rebuilding Animal Health Care in War-Torn Afghanistan

David M. Sherman

Transforming Trauma: Resilience and Healing Through Our Connections With Animals

Philip Tedeschi and Molly Anne Jenkins (Eds.)

A Reason to Live: HIV and Animal Companions

Vicki Hutton

Animal-Assisted Interventions in Health Care Settings: A Best Practices Manual for Establishing New Programs

Sandra B. Barker, Rebecca A. Vokes, and Randolph T. Barker

Moose! The Reading Dog

Laura Bruneau and Beverly Timmons

Leaders of the Pack: Women and the Future of Veterinary Medicine

Julie Kumble and Donald F. Smith

Exploring the Gray Zone: Case Discussions of Ethical Dilemmas for the Veterinary Technician

Andrea DeSantis Kerr, Robert Pete Bill, Jamie Schoenbeck Walsh, and Christina V. Tran (Eds.)

DOGS AND CATS IN SOUTH KOREA

Itinerant Commodities

Julien Dugnoille

Purdue University Press | West Lafayette, Indiana

Copyright 2022 by Purdue University. All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America.

Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file with the Library of Congress.

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-61249-704-4

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-61249-705-1

ePub ISBN: 978-1-61249-706-8

ePDF ISBN: 978-1-61249-707-5

Cover image: Via Wikimedia Commons, painting by Yi Am, made of two paintings created around the same time with the same name. Cover also includes background elements manipulated form artwork by Asya_mix/iStock/Getty Images Plus via Getty Images

To JP

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

Itinerant Animals

Dog and Cat Biographies in Transcultural South Korea

CHAPTER 1

Dead Commodities Walking

Itinerancies of Dogs and Cats at South Korea’s Largest Meat Market

CHAPTER 2

New Women, New Mothers

Gender Ideology in South Korean Animal Advocacy

CHAPTER 3

Transspecies Nationalism

Inclusion of Nonhuman Animals in Ideologies of Korean Ethnic Nationalism

CHAPTER 4

Postmortem Itinerancy

The Deaths of Dogs and Cats in Postcolonial Conditions

CONCLUSION

A Continuing Itinerancy

On the Regulation of the South Korean Dog and Cat Meat Trade

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I WISH TO THANK the University of Oxford’s School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, the Academy of Korean Studies, the Fulbright IIE Commission, and the Korea Foundation for funding this research. A special thanks to Dr. Inge Daniels for her great supervision. I particularly appreciated her sharp criticism, kindness of heart, and sense of humor. Her input and commitment to this research were remarkable, and I really hope to work with her again in future projects. Thank you to Dr. Jay Lewis for his supervision and support over the course of my doctoral degree. Thank you also to Professor Marcus Banks for having been not only such a kind and encouraging mentor during my studies at Oxford, but also a good friend. Many thanks also to all my colleagues (anonymous or not) who have peer reviewed this manuscript and whose comments have greatly elevated it. In particular, thanks to Daisy Bisenieks for the great discussions, to Roger Goodman, Samantha Hurn, and Javier Lezaun for their thorough and intelligent review of my work during the DPhil, to Eimear Mc Loughlin and Elizabeth Vander Meer for their invaluable input and friendship over the years, and to Frédéric Keck and Miwon Seo-Plu for recently helping me see this data in a new light. I would also like to express my heartfelt gratitude to all my human and nonhuman participants, whose generosity, patience, and honesty have helped me make sense of a very complex and important topic. I am forever grateful to them. Finally, thank you to JP, to my parents, to Idem, Kyattsu Ai, SangSang, and Toshio, for all the wonderful love, support, and patience I received from them during the writing of this book.

INTRODUCTION

ITINERANT ANIMALS

Dog and Cat Biographies in Transcultural South Korea

IN THE LEAD-UP to the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, owners of food outlets serving dishes containing dog meat came under particular scrutiny. To avoid offending foreign sensibilities, especially in large urban centers most likely to be frequented by foreigners attending Olympic events, the South Korean government had prohibited the sale of dog meat at markets, and banned restaurants both from selling dog meat-based dishes and from displaying dog carcasses (Derr, 2004, p. 26). Nevertheless, the ban was not strictly enforced, which led some restaurant owners to simply change the name of certain dishes from posint’ang¹ (dog soup/stew, invigorating soup/stew) to kyejŏlt’ang (seasonal soup), sagyet’ang (all-season soup), yŏngyangt’ang (nutrition soup), or sach’ŏlt’ang (four-season soup), in order to continue serving dog meat (Yoon, 2016, p. 362).² These euphemistic terms are still used to refer to dog meat dishes today. At the time, this perceived suppression of Korean culture reminded South Koreans of the painful episodes of foreign imperialism (especially under Japanese rule from 1910 to 1945), during which many Korean cultural traditions were erased. Demanding that dog meat restaurant owners hide evidence of their dog meat-based dishes during the Olympics thus reignited national feelings of pride in, and protectionism toward, what some saw as a traditional Korean practice. Perversely, the rate of dog meat consumption steadily increased after the Olympics (Kim, 1994).

Right up to this day, and increasingly since the 2002 FIFA World Cup was cohosted by South Korea, a large segment of the South Korean general public proudly defends dog meat consumption as an important part of Korean identity. A 2018 poll in the Korea Herald, for example, found that about half of the South Koreans surveyed were opposed to banning dog meat (Yonhap, 2018). However, in preparation for the 2018 Winter Olympics in P’yŏngch’ang, it appeared that the practice of hiding dog meat restaurants would once again be introduced. Indeed, animal activists claim that the provincial authorities of Kangwŏn offered about 3,000,000 won (about US$3,000) to 18 dog meat restaurants in P’yŏngch’ang and Kangnŭng to conceal or alter their dog meat signs (Pyeongchang’s Project to Hide the Dog Meat Restaurants from Olympic Visitors!, 2017). If this state demand to disguise such practices has the same effect on customer numbers as it did after the 1988 Summer Olympics, the general public might once again come to defend dog meat consumption as a key part of Korean culture and identity, to once again fuel a rise in its popularity.

The economies of the trade are very hard to estimate in situ, as dog farming is so controversial and dog meat is neither legal nor illegal, but the price of one bowl of puppy stew, while it varies greatly from one place to another, averages at around US$10. Recent figures reported by the Korean Association for Policy Studies (hereafter KAPS) indicate that of those who consume dog meat, the average frequency of consumption is 4.6 times per year, with an average serving quantity [of] 300 grams per person (Kim, 2008, p. 202). This, Kim concludes, suggests that [d]og meat is the fourth most-consumed meat in the Republic of Korea (Korea) after pork, beef, and chicken; the author adds that the total amount of dog meat consumed each year is approximately 100,000 tonnes (Kim, 2008, p. 202), a figure that includes the dogs processed for the production of kaesoju, an alcoholic beverage that mixes dog meat with soju and is consumed as a health tonic that is thought to regulate body temperature and increase sexual stamina.

Studies conducted by KAPS indicate that the value of the industry is around two billion US dollars, with, as of 2007, around 6,000 registered restaurants and a further 14,000 unregistered establishments selling dog meat-based dishes and products (Kim, 2008). Adult dogs are usually served as posint’ang, that is as soup (t’ang), but they also appear in many other dish forms such as hotpot (chŏn’gol), boiled and served in slices (suyuk), or stir fried (turuch’igi). One portion only needs 100–200g of dog meat, so one dog can feed several diners. Dog meat is not consumed as often as other types of meat in South Korea, one of the reasons being that dog meat stew is a much pricier dish (one dog usually costs the restaurant owner a little less than $180) than a stew that contains beef, pork, duck, or chicken, for instance. Puppies are turned into soups or stews, with one puppy typically serving just one or two portions. At the marketplaces, only the healthiest-looking individuals are held alive in the cages, while the others are killed, kept refrigerated, and sold to customers for lower prices than the live specimens.

Running in parallel to the rise in dog meat popularity has been the growth of a civil movement in South Korea that is campaigning for an end to the dog meat trade. This movement steadily gained traction over the second half of the twentieth century and has become more and more visible in recent years. Moran Market has traditionally been the largest market in South Korea in which dogs can be bought for food, and was seen as a symbol of dog meat consumption. The Korea Herald reported that this one market alone handled over 80,000 dogs, sold dead or alive each year, and supplied a third of all the dog meat consumed in the country. In late 2016, following pressure from civil society and animal welfare groups, the Sŏngnam City district government announced that all killing of dogs at Moran Market would be banned, and each of the 22 dog meat dealers was asked to dismantle their slaughter equipment.³ Despite this victory for the civil society groups, the ban was slow to come into effect: in March 2017, dog slaughter was still being observed at Moran Market. No killing was taking place in plain sight, but dog meat was being sold by a handful of dealers, and live dogs could be spotted in some of the marketplace’s distinctive red metal cages (ttŭnjang). By May 2017, the slaughter facilities of 21 of the 22 outlets had been permanently removed, but one recalcitrant dealer was seen bringing back his slaughtering equipment to the marketplace. Moreover, restaurants and shops were still selling dog meat in 2018, and it will take time for all dealers, restaurants, and shops to completely stop engaging in the trade, in what has been the temple of South Korea’s dog meat consumption since the 1960s.

For opponents of dog meat consumption, the abolition of dog slaughter at Moran Market was a huge success. The market has vague beginnings, though. According to the city’s official tourism webpage, it was built in 1962, and certainly after Japanese colonization (1910–1945). This is important, because many traditional markets throughout the country, such as Namdaemun Market and Noryangjin Fish Market, were developed under Japanese administration, and their infrastructure and general organization have remained unchanged ever since. This is not the case for Moran Market, a traditional Korean market selling a large variety of commodities, including live animals such as dogs, cats, chickens, ducks, and rabbits. The fact that these traditional markets resisted the influence of the Japanese administrative infrastructure adds to the fact that they are havens of cultural and national independence, where customers can, more or less, freely buy, sell, and eat cats and dogs; such freedom imbues these spaces with a sense of national identity and pride. After closing the dog meat stalls at Moran Market, Seoul’s city authorities then announced that from 2019 there would be no further slaughtering of dogs at Kyŏngdong Market in Tongdaemun (a northeastern neighborhood of Seoul). Outside Seoul, Kup’o Market, a large marketplace in Pusan, is now facing similar pressures from civil society, as local residents complain about its noise and smell, and report illegal slaughtering methods.

Indeed, government surveys in the 2000s have revealed a growing rejection of dog meat consumption among the younger South Korean generations (Jeffreys in Oh & Jackson, 2011). Although the numbers that follow are to be treated with care, the propensity for dogs to be slaughtered for food in South Korea seems to have gone into decline since the early 2000s: while in 2002 the figure was reported to be at roughly 3 million dogs (Jeffreys in Oh & Jackson, 2011), in the early 2010s both Korean Animal Rights Advocates (KARA) (Current Situation of South Korea’s Dog Meat Industry, 2012) and pro-dog meat author Ann (2010) estimated between 1 and 2 million dogs were being consumed each year.⁴ These figures also match those gathered by KAPS (2008). As of 2020, KARA estimated the number of dogs consumed each year to be just under 1 million (2020), a third of what it was estimated to have been nearly twenty years prior. However, when observed in situ, the practice has far from disappeared, and the most tenacious adversary for those opposing dog meat consumption is the significant flow of individual customers who put tremendous pressure on dog meat dealers to properly prepare dog meat under the counter (we shall see what properly prepare means later in this introduction). Such pressure is an unfair burden on the dealers because the legal status of the trade is highly ambiguous and open to interpretation.

Cats, too, are commodified in South Korea. The cat meat trade is even more difficult to research because the practice itself is even less institutionalized and, thus, less well-known within South Korea, than that of dog meat. Moreover, to my knowledge, there is virtually no academic study of the practice, and one can only hypothesize that cat meat consumption emerged in the aftermath of the rapid industrialization that took place in South Korea between the 1960s and the 1980s. Until the 1960s, most South Koreans lived in rural areas, subsisting through farming and/or fishing and living in close proximity to animals. Until then, cats lived as strays, keeping mice away from the crops and perhaps occasionally being eaten by humans, but nothing indicates that either companionship or seeing them as a food source was ever the primary modus operandi. By the 1970s, thanks to Pak Chŏnghŭi’s export-oriented industrial policies (1962–1981), South Korean society had changed from being overwhelmingly rural and agricultural to assuming an urban profile. Between 1945 and 1985, the urban population of South Korea grew by 65.4% (Savada, Shaw, and Library of Congress, 1992) as South Koreans migrated in vast numbers to cities in search of professional and financial opportunities (J. Kim, 2012, p. 443). This rapid industrialization changed South Korea forever, with many aspects of social life transformed, from social structures to social values and behaviors, including human-animal interactions. As traditional values and rural lifestyles collapsed, the idea of working with or living in close proximity to animals was largely dismissed, especially by younger generations in pursuit of an urban lifestyle. As rural dwellings were abandoned, so were semi-owned cats (and dogs). Previously domesticated or semi-domesticated strays quickly became a feral burden on people living in newly developed urban areas. When people relocated from large village houses to small apartments, the semi-domestication of cats, that is, having them enter the hearth of the domus (Toukhsati et al., 2012), was no longer a part of everyday life.

While living with nonhuman animals became increasingly more complicated after two decades of rapid urbanization, some people were still attached to the commodification of animal bodies for ritualistic and medical purposes. By the 1980s, city dwellers still visited traditional villages to seek zootherapeutic commodities or perform sacrificial rites (especially for the Lunar New Year and Ch’usŏk) (J. Kim, 2012, p. 444). Throughout the period, stray cat populations grew significantly both in cities and villages. With increased scrutiny on, and eventual ban of, zootherapeutic commodities derived from wild animals, such as tigers, it is possible that by the 1980s and the 1990s these stray cats came to represent convenient substitutes⁵; indeed, stray cats continue to this day to be valuable zootherapeutic commodities, as if mimicking the properties of their larger feline cousins. For instance, Koyangi soju (a traditional elixir made from live-boiled cats, ginger, nuts, dates, and alcohol) is supposed to enhance agility and combat arthritis and rheumatism, just as tiger bones are thought to.⁶

Cat meat consumption, however, is much less visible than dog meat consumption, and has no legal status whatsoever. It is also likely that cat meat production increased at the same time as dog meat consumption, because cat meat is often used as a substitute for the more expensive dog meat in soups and stews at market stalls. To my knowledge, no accurate census has ever been taken to determine the number of stray cats actually living in South Korea, how many cats are kept and bred on farms or kept domestically and illegally for consumption, or indeed how many cats are slaughtered every year in South Korea. The following figures are thus to be treated with care, but in 2012, KARA estimated that 200,000 stray cats roam the Seoul area and about 100,000 cats are killed every year nationally for consumption ([자료첨부] 길고양이 케어테이커 워크숍 후기입니다, 2012). Some stray cats are also recommoditized as soothing agents or temporary companions. They are taken to cat cafés where, in exchange for a small fee, people in need of feline interaction can go and spend time stroking the cats for an hour or two. Most of these cafés, however, are full of animals who, when no longer profitable, are often dumped in the streets. The absence of regulations, or any supervision, of the cat meat trade permits individuals to catch street cats and sell them directly to markets, or breed them at home for personal consumption. Chapter 1 will show that pedigree cats are particularly sought after in the trade, since many of the cats turned out onto the streets when cat cafés close are indeed pedigrees. Which parts of a cat’s body are consumed also varies on the basis of the reasons behind their consumption, but they are usually consumed for the properties in their bones. The rationales that motivate cat meat consumption also differ from those mobilized for dog meat consumption, where the meat and the blood are the most sought-after components.

Cats and dogs are brought together in this book because, while they are consumed in their million(s) each year in South Korea, the (anti-)imperialist and (post)colonial stances associated with their consumption (depending on whose perspective we are talking about), as well as a legal loophole that enables their commodification, means that they are the recipients of both cruelty and care in a very unique way, compared to other animal species consumed in South Korean society. Moreover, the sensationalization of the practice by non-dog/cat-eating societies overshadows the wide array of other ways in which South Korean citizens interact with cats and dogs, including that of companionship. However, it should not come as a surprise that many South Korean citizens say they are able to differentiate between cats/dogs used for consumption and those for companionship. This is the way we effortlessly conceive of horses and rabbits where I come from, for instance. I could understand, as a child, that my grandfather had horses that he deeply cared about and that my father really enjoyed the taste of their meat. I remember caring for two rabbits with my brother when we were young, and can reconcile this memory with my own consumption of rabbit meat during my undergraduate years in Paris. Similar special treatment for different species happens everywhere. That cats and dogs have a similar status in South Korea should, thus, be easily understandable to both academic and nonacademic readers. But, of course, things are not so clear cut. In South Korea, such conceptions of cats and dogs that are either destined to be eaten or kept for companionship are far too rigid to hold out in practice. As we shall see throughout this book, many cats and dogs that are initially kept for companionship, once no longer wanted or useful, are sent to slaughter and recycled for food, and sometimes even consumed by their own former guardians. But this is only one trajectory that the lives of cats and dogs can take, and their biographies are often very complex.⁷ They range from companion to livestock, and from livestock to companion or family member. These processes, which might be grossly categorized as commodification in the former case and singularization in the latter, are never linear. Like many inanimate, and some animate, commodities, individual cats and dogs in South Korea wander, back and forth, along this continuum. They are itinerant animals navigating this exchange system. Their stories and those of the ones who commoditize and singularize them, form the central topic of this book.

Methods and Scope of the Fieldwork

As an anthropologist, I conducted thirteen months of fieldwork between July 2012 and July 2013 in the Seoul area, at a meat marketplace and three animal welfare organizations, resulting in follow-up research between 2013 and 2018. My methods were qualitative and involved a mixture of (participant) observation, semi-structured interviews, and discourse analysis. I wanted to use methods that would allow me to reveal the many ways cats and dogs, throughout their lives, see their own statuses modified and negotiated while, at the same time, shedding light on a practice (dog/cat meat consumption) that had only ever been explored rather superficially and/or with a sensationalizing lens in English-speaking scholarship. To do so, I analyzed data on the consumption of cats and dogs both openly available in the public domain and in academic literature, including reports produced by NGOs, international and domestic newspaper articles, and the South Korean legislation of the trade. I subsequently designed fieldwork in the hope of reaching beyond the data, and so as to describe in detail how South Koreans today interact in practice with cats and dogs. I avoided questionnaires and surveys because there are already published studies using these methods, and those materials tend only to provide their readership with a limited insight into the actual human-animal interactions. I thus opted for (participant) observation, investigating the behaviors of, and engaging in conversations with, a variety of people who interacted with cats and/or dogs on a regular basis.

A further aim of this fieldwork was to shed light on the complexity of these interactions by including the perspectives of some of the cats and dogs themselves. This was easier to do during fieldwork at the NGOs, since records of the animals were kept and the adoption, rescue, death, or euthanasia of many of the animals were widely discussed among the workers and the volunteers. If a few days would pass before I could come back to a specific shelter, I would keep track of adoptions online through their listings, if available, and I also kept my own records for as many cats and dogs as I could, tracking their names, time spent at a shelter, provenance, and destination. A few times, when an animal urgently required medical assistance, I accompanied them as a medical team treated them. At the marketplace, in contrast, for an overwhelming number of cases it was simply impossible to find out about individual animals: dogs and cats were often cramped in cages, making it difficult to identify, and it was almost impossible to follow those that left the marketplace, if sold alive to customers. It was sadly easier to follow their fate once they had been selected by a customer to be killed by the shopkeeper on-site. I was, however, able to retrace the cultural biographies of a handful of them by engaging my human participants in narratives about the animals, particularly as they justified the value of the individual cats and dogs they had just purchased. The cultural biographies of these few cats and dogs, and of the humans that commodified/singularized them, reveal how cats and dogs occupy a very liminal space in South Korean society: any cat and dog in South Korea is always already in between the status of livestock and companion animal, even beyond death. The polemic pet vs. food distinction, widely accepted in English-language debates on cat and dog meat in South Korea, does not truly hold when examined in practice. Only a long-term, in-depth study such as this could simultaneously reveal and do justice to these social and cultural nuances.

It was very important to me to avoid any further sensationalization of a practice that had already suffered much stereotypical representation. To do so, I have tried to only include in this work the data I gathered after allowing a certain amount of time, or at least after I had established a certain level of trust with the participants concerned. This enabled me to go beyond the ready-made, automatic responses that participants tended to mobilize in initial conversations, let alone on sensitive topics, and which have been reproduced in other studies focusing on various aspects of the trade (e.g., Podberscek, 2009; or Oh & Jackson, 2011).

With my main participants (listed in the next few paragraphs), I conducted what could be referred to as semi-structured interviews, although the term interview might not be entirely accurate, as most of these interviews took the form of conversation. Nonetheless, to prepare these interviews, I reviewed my notes every day before visiting each of my observations spots, having in the back of my mind specific topics I wanted to explore further based on gaps in participants’ stories; patterns emerging across participants’ discourses, narratives and behaviors; discrepancies between publicly available study findings and those within academia, and so forth. Interviews (or conversations) were conducted in Korean, English or French. English was widely used in the NGOs (at Ayiban, but especially at SangSang shelter because of the large number of international volunteers). English/French revealed to be useful in a few settings such as at the Institut français or with participants at NGOs who had lived in Englishor French-speaking countries and had been eager to practice their language skills with a native speaker. At the marketplace, conversations were held in English or Korean, and conversations were often recorded in Korean and later translated using a translator, especially when I found them particularly complex. To ensure the anonymity of my key participants, I have chosen to use pseudonyms for the three animal protection groups I focus on the most in this book: Ayiban, Help, and SangSang shelter are not the NGOs’ real names. While many other active NGOs could have been selected, I selected these three based on their size and the demographic of their workers and volunteers. One is a large organization (Help), another one is much smaller and not widely known (Ayiban), and the last had a mixture of international and South Korean volunteers (SangSang shelter), which the other two did not. Within these organizations, I talked to as many people as I could and kept records of their ages, working schedule at the shelter, other occupations, marital status, and nationality.⁸ A series of key participants emerged from this sample, whose voices are heard most strongly in this monograph. Gaining access to these groups required dealing with participant expectations as to my presence on-site. In some