Being There: Learning to Live Cross- Culturally 9780674049277, 2011007706

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Being There

Being There Learning to Live Cross-Culturally

Edited by

Sarah H. Davis and Melvin Konner

Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2011

Copyright © 2011 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Chapter 1, “A Kind of Kinship,” is an expanded version of “Against Universals: The Dialectics of (Women’s) Human Rights and Human Capabilities,” in Rethinking the Human, ed. J. Michelle Molina and Donald K. Swearer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions, 2010). Chapter 3, “Mad to Be Modern,” Copyright © 2011 Alma Gottlieb and Philip Graham from Braided Worlds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Reprinted by permission. Chapter 4, “The Evil Eye of the Anthropologist,” Copyright © 2011 Ruth Behar. Chapter 13, “Japanese Ghosts Don’t Have Feet,” Copyright © 2011 Liza Dalby. Chapter 16, “Return to Nisa,” reprinted by permission of the publishers from Return to Nisa by Marjorie Shostak. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright © 2000 by the Estate of Marjorie Shostak. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Being there: learning to live cross-culturally / edited by Sarah H. Davis and Melvin Konner. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-674-04927-7 (alk. paper) 1. Cross-cultural orientation. 2. Intercultural communication. 3. Culture shock. I. Davis, Sarah H. II. Konner, Melvin. GN345.65.R47 2011 303.48'2—dc22 2011007706

Contents

Preface vii Melvin Konner Introduction: Becoming Human Sarah H. Davis

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1.

A Kind of Kinship Lila Abu-Lughod

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2.

Saints and Outcasts: La Negrita and the Accidental Catholic Russell Leigh Sharman

3.

Mad to Be Modern 35 Alma Gottlieb and Philip Graham

4.

The Evil Eye of the Anthropologist Ruth Behar

5.

Two Women 66 Melvin Konner

6.

Graça 84 Jessica Gregg

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Contents 7.

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Insult and Danger: Anthropology among Navajos, Montenegrin Serbs, and Wild Chimpanzees Chris Boehm Shame and Making Truth: The Social Repairs of Ethnographic Blunders M. Cameron Hay

Far from Home, and Being Gnawed on by a Vervet Melissa Fay Greene

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Time Travel 139 Robert Shore and Bradd Shore

11.

Prostitutes with Honor: A Researcher with Shame Louise Brown

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A Widening Circle: Family, Collaboration, and Lifelong Ethnography in Canyon de Chelly 166 Jeanne Simonelli

13.

Japanese Ghosts Don’t Have Feet Liza Dalby

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Field Relations, Field Betrayals John C. Wood

15.

My Family’s Honor Sarah H. Davis

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Return to Nisa 224 Marjorie Shostak Contributors

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181 194

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Preface Melvin Konner

This happy collaboration began when the senior author entered a contest in which the junior author was a judge. The award was the Marjorie Shostak Prize for Excellence and Humanity in Ethnographic Writing, endowed by Shostak’s parents and given by Emory University’s Department of Anthropology to the student whose writing best follows the standard set by her acclaimed book Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman. The winning essay, paper, or thesis chapter does not have to show familiarity with Shostak’s writing, but it does have to be graceful, humane, sympathetic, honest, unpretentious, and jargon-free. The winning entry that year was about a kind of culture collision experienced by a young American woman inserting herself into a vaguely threatening Mediterranean man’s world. The cloak of professional privilege may have in some sense been there, but she did not wrap herself in it. She simply acted as a deeply curious outsider. The setting was small-town Corsica, and she was certainly an alien, but she was not yet resident, nor did the culture she was visiting stand in awe of her as some exotic, disadvantaged peoples may do. She had to accept these men’s importuning hospitality, acknowledging that it gave them power over her, yet trying to keep a certain objective distance.

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Preface She wrote as if watching herself from inside and outside at once, and of course watching them too, as best she could in the circumstance. Without becoming maudlin or solipsistic, and with eyes wide open, she recounted her experience in a poised, straightforward narrative. Her prose was exceptionally literate, yet it did not use a word that would send an undergraduate to the dictionary. She wrote with authority, not arrogance. And she did not wink across the page in the way that says, You and I are in the secret society of social scientists, aren’t we special! She seemed to say instead, You and I and the people I am trying to acquaint you with—having risked and sacrificed to acquaint myself with them first— are in the human family, and isn’t it remarkable how much we understand. Some months later Sarah approached me with an idea she wanted advice about. Suppose she were to invite anthropologists (and perhaps other authors) whose writing about fieldwork and travel she liked best to compose essays about their encounters with “their people.” Not their theories, methods, results, or interpretations, which they would already have presented in the usual academic venues—their encounters. The prose would ideally be pellucid and personal, the emotions those of a stranger in a strange world, the thoughts perhaps inchoate, or at least muted and offstage, as they are in the offing of first encounters before analysis, or many years afterwards, in the wake of the realization that analysis often does not get to the heart of things. She had a list of names, which I thought was a good one, and I suggested a few others. Delicately, I tried to bump one or two off. We talked, the conversation was good, and at some point, to my good fortune, she invited me to join her in editing this volume. We were able to interest Elizabeth Knoll, a gracious and literate editor at Harvard University Press, and we began to contact potential authors. Almost without exception the idea was met with enthusiasm, and before long some wonderful pieces of writing began drifting in. Sarah usually made the first pass, then I, and after we’d read a few essays we would meet to discuss them. These were among the most

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Preface interesting and enjoyable conversations I have had in the last few years. We were reading good writers with affecting things to say about difficult human situations, at once exotic and familiar, bizarre and intimate, hopelessly remote at first glance yet made somehow accessible by people who had spent years mastering that trick. They showed their own vulnerabilities with courage and aplomb and displayed their admiration for those they were writing about without idealization or pretense, either about the people or the enterprise. Sarah’s sensibility as a reader matched her skill as a writer, and the work moved along well. We didn’t agree on everything, but we agreed on enough, and we easily compromised on the rest. For the most part we loved what we were reading. The essays here are remarkable human documents, set down by penetrating observers in fine prose, lightly edited, thematically coherent, and deeply informative. For the young person thinking about embarking on a voyage of discovery like those described here, there will be much to identify with and to learn from. If these essays show us something of what it means to first encounter a foreign culture, they also show us something of what it means to fi rst want to. But anyone— student or not, with or without such uncommon aspirations—who wants to see and understand, without opacities of language, what it is like to be invited into the extraordinary lives of ordinary people in faroff places that prove in the end close at heart, might well begin by opening these pages.

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Being There

Introduction Becoming Human

Sarah H. Davis

When I first read Marjorie Shostak’s Nisa (Harvard University Press, 1981) and saw that I was not only dealing with a vivid life history of a !Kung woman but also Shostak’s account of her personal relationship with that woman, the world of anthropology opened up to me. Shostak does not set out to “prove” a point about Nisa, about !Kung women, or about female sexuality and medicinal practices in !Kung culture (though her work is revealing of all of these things). Rather, Nisa is an exploration of another real person’s views of the world—winding, intricate, full of ellipses and contradictions, beauty, and sometimes ugliness. The effect of Shostak’s writing is not one in which the puzzle pieces of !Kung life are fit seamlessly together for the reader, and we fi le the puzzle away as “cultural knowledge.” Rather, and much more powerfully, the effect of Nisa, and Shostak’s subsequent work Return to Nisa (2000), is that we are infected with the pulse and real sound of Nisa’s voice, her story, and the cultural world in which that story takes place. In the process we hear Shostak’s voice. We feel her fear and discomfort, her confusion and longing, and her understanding. This volume of essays is inspired by Marjorie Shostak’s approach to thinking and writing about cultural

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Being There difference, an approach that is not afraid to leave the cultural story unfinished, and thus the people who are being written about, as well as those doing the writing, to a certain extent undetermined, mysterious, and alive. i n t h e w i n t e r o f D e c e m b e r 2007, accompanied by my husband and my one-and-a-half-year-old son, I moved to a mountain village on the Mediterranean island of Corsica to conduct anthropological research on nationalism and ethnic identity. When we first arrived on the island, we frequently displayed our incompetence in both language and custom. My husband told the crèche where my son eventually started going for daily child care that he’d “revendre” rather than “revenir” for Jackson (resell rather than return to pick up). I declined a neighbor’s offer to help us move so as not to put him out and instead insulted him, compromising the relationship we had worked so hard to establish. We left our shutters open at night and didn’t do our laundry enough. I risked insult if I gave people the customary “bisous” (kisses on both cheeks) without knowing them sufficiently, and I equally risked insult if I extended a hand when it should have been a kiss. For all these blunders, we were at best laughed at, at worst rebuked. For my toddling son, these rebukes may have been confusing; for us, they could feel devastating. We’d been stung or repelled by a world that we thought we knew, that we thought we were inseparable from. Suddenly there was distance, a space between our meanings and the world in which those meanings traveled. And we sought desperately to reconnect. When living in a foreign culture, whether as an anthropologist doing research or as a traveler on an extended stay, we often don’t know how to express ourselves, how to behave appropriately, or how to contribute to society. We can feel like children. But, of course, unlike children we do not expect or easily accept being incompetent. We bristle at being corrected, scolded, and corralled. After all, don’t we know who we are? Don’t we know what is expected of us, and what it means to be a

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Introduction decent human being? Is not this the wisdom that comes with being an adult? The experience of cross-cultural living reminds us, not in an intellectual way, but in a firsthand way—full of wincing, shame, hope, and disappointment (and often laughter, both at us and by us)—that, in fact, we know very little about the way these things really are. In recent years, among cultural anthropologists, there has been much discussion of how to integrate a kind of self-reflection into anthropological scholarship. The idea has been that in addition to relating tales of difference and presenting logical analyses of these differences, it is essential to reveal how our own ideological biases necessarily influence the very questions we ask and conclusions we come to. On the one hand, this “self-reflexivity” has propelled anthropology onto a new theoretical plane: we seek to expose the preconceived frames of our studies and to achieve a more dynamic and nuanced vision of what culture is. On the other hand, this preoccupation with revealing the ethnographer’s position has, over time, created its own ideological constraints and frequently leads to writing that focuses more on anthropology and anthropologists than on the mysteries of cultural difference in particular cases. Interestingly, before the theoretical mandate to reflect inward took hold in cultural anthropology, Marjorie Shostak was writing ethnography that would be heeded as exemplary by leading postmodern scholars. James Clifford, in his review of Nisa and in his book Writing Culture, praises Shostak for presenting different voices, including her own personal voice, allowing readers to know and correct for the standpoint she herself had as a young woman trying to learn about the world. But unlike in some self-reflexive anthropology, Shostak’s voice expressed itself not in a theoretical framework but in plain words, from the heart. This voice continued in her posthumously published Return to Nisa, which is excerpted here. In it we see the anguish and adjustment of one who, facing serious illness, badly needs acceptance. Acceptance is, in the end, incomplete, but the quest for it is very, very revealing.

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Being There Being There: Learning to Live Cross-Culturally is a volume of essays in which anthropologists who have lived and worked in cultures all over the world shed academic jargon— both the authoritative voice of traditional scholarship and the extreme self-reflexivity of postmodern anthropology—and simply tell us their stories. Clearly these voices cannot escape their own historical and intellectual contexts, but these contexts don’t get in the way of the goal, which is remarkably simple: to explore the curious experiences that give rise to anthropological wonder. Ruth Behar relates what it was like to be accused of giving a local child the evil eye. Alma Gottlieb and Philip Graham let us in on what it was like to feel that their own young son was in danger as a local man became mentally unstable and fixated upon their family. M. Cameron Hay describes her struggle when she is faced with cultural norms that explain away a theft that she knows has taken place, undermining her whole understanding of truth. The powerful experiences that arise as we try to find our way through new cultural realities and reconnect to meaningful worlds are, I believe, an unsung gift of anthropological research. The anthropologist does not, as Chris Boehm shows us in his essay, simply show up on a Navajo reservation, decide to study what drives people to “madness,” collect the data, and return home with all the answers. Louise Brown does not just arrive in Pakistan to study honor in the prostitute underclass, gather young prostitutes to interview, record their answers, and transcribe them. It’s not nearly that simple. Jessica Gregg learns quickly that her desire to study the relation of disease, death, and poverty among women in Brazil is not going to be successful unless she gets out of research meetings at the local hospitals and into the cardboard shacks in a nearby shantytown. And Liza Dalby discovers that meaningful answers always hover just outside the categories she devises in her questionnaires. To get close to relevant cultural information (including, most importantly, what kinds of questions are the right ones to ask), we have

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Introduction to stretch our own boundaries, our conceptions of reality, and our expectations and beliefs. This kind of stretching is not simply an exercise in hypothesis testing or data analysis; rather, it is an exercise of our own humanity, pushing and pulling all that we take for granted in our mental, physical, and emotional makeup. And one of the hardest things to admit is that, in the end, it is only ever relatively successful. We hope that these unique and beautifully written stories transport readers into worlds of difference, bringing them the colors, the sounds, and the smells that make human worlds pulse—from Japan to Brazil to Botswana, from Montenegro to Indonesia to Mongolia. We also hope that by taking these journeys alongside the authors, with their personal and honest thoughts exposed, the stories will destabilize readers’ assumptions about the way the world is and entice them toward the experience of anthropology. i c a m e t o m e l k o n n e r with the idea for this project after he expressed interest and appreciation for an essay that I wrote about my preliminary fieldwork on Corsica. The essay, like those in this book, was a personal and straightforward take on the challenges that living cross-culturally involves. Mel and I quickly found common ground in what we both believe is important: upholding scientific rigor while preserving a respect, even a love, for the powerful effect that cross-cultural research can have on us as human beings, as well as researchers. He and I have spent the last few years seeking out anthropologists and others who have been unable to keep this important experience of becoming human out of their writing. And we have been lucky enough to spend time with their words. We were deeply moved, for example, by Lila Abu-Lughod’s description of her last encounters with a cherished friend in the field, and by Russell Sharman’s account of how his research on La Negrita in Costa Rica became a personal and transformative encounter with his own Catholicism. And we laughed—again— for example, when we read about Melissa Fay Greene’s anxiety about

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Being There monkeys in Ethiopia. In each and every case we have been inspired—by John Wood’s probing questions about the betrayal involved in writing about one’s friends from another culture; by Jeanne Simonelli’s wise reflections on the importance of her lasting relationships with the Navajo people of Canyon de Chelly as she gets older; and by the beautifully woven stories of the Shores— Rob, a son, and Bradd, a father, who relate their struggles and triumphs of cross-cultural living, thirty years apart in two distant cultures— Samoa and Mongolia. It is the experience we ourselves have had reading and putting these essays together—full of insight and emotion—that we hope to give to readers. f i n a l l y, o n a m o r e g l o b a l note, cultural differences and misunderstandings are increasingly recognized as leading sources of global confl ict—from habits and customs, to religious difference, to different visions of morality, justice, and the good. And these incompatibilities are not just present abroad but within our own nation as well, as fissures in the political landscape grow deeper. Policy makers work hard to create practical compromises that will bridge the gaps between groups. But our essays suggest that it is important to incorporate into our solutions the fact that confronting cultural difference can never simply be logical or reasonable. If it were, then visiting anthropologists would simply identify the gaps between their understanding of the world and the local ones, analyze them, and temporarily change their behavior. And if this were sufficient, then the anthropological call for self-reflexivity would have been enough. Unfortunately, what it takes to understand new, local realities is less sensible than this and far more challenging. But that does not mean understanding and resolution are hopeless. Where logic, analysis, and self-reflection fail, experience, affection, and time come into play. We do find our feet, become more or less accepted and accepting. Communication happens. And, perhaps most surpris-

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Introduction ingly, we ourselves change. Things that may have seemed simply incomprehensible take on a new light. Being There: Learning to Live CrossCulturally is a collection of sixteen essays, each of which, in its own way, teaches us that finding ways to reconnect, to become human to those we are studying, and to let them become human to us—not at arm’s length but in the thicket of mutual fear and misunderstanding—is a difficult but not an impossible challenge. And it is one that in the end puts us profoundly in touch with our own humanity, our ability to negotiate indeterminacy and apparent senselessness, despite our deep wish for a sensible world, and to survive, even thrive, as we reemerge in expanding worlds of connection and meaning.

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A Kind of Kinship Lila Abu-Lughod

A

t first we overshot the driveway. I was confused by a new structure that obscured my old house. And I still had not gotten used to the gaudy two-story structure that the old house had become in the past eight years or so since the Haj’s sons had married and started their own families, swelling the household. Turning back, we drove slowly down the bumpy lane and through the large metal gates into the empty walled yard, very familiar from my many years of living there in the 1970s and 1980s, even if enlarged in the meantime to accommodate the sons’ cars. A lone beige Mercedes of a certain age parked in front told me I was in the right place. The Haj had for years been partial to Mercedes sedans. The Haj’s oldest son—whose fresh scar from open heart surgery for a congenital heart condition had traumatized me when I was a young graduate student living with this family in the late 1970s— came out to greet me. His face looked puff y. Was he unshaven? I searched his eyes. Were they red? Then I saw the women crowding the doorway to greet me, and I hurried in. I was surprised to find not just the Haj’s two wives but his sisters, one of whom lived in El Alamein, a ways out along the northwest coast of Egypt where the Awlad ‘Ali Bedouin lived. And along

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A Kind of Kinship with all these new daughters-in-law I barely knew were several of his daughters too, ones who were now married and no longer living at home. They all looked as if they hadn’t slept well. Was my foreboding justified? About a month earlier, in New York, I’d had a dream about the Haj, a dream that had jolted me from sleep. I was worried. I was returning for a visit without having been able to contact my old friends for more than a year. I knew that the Haj, born the same year as my father, would be seventy-nine. It had been seven years since I lost my father. A photo from three years ago that was part of the revolving slide show on my computer screen showed the Haj standing with his arm around my daughter, then twelve. Whenever it came up, I looked hard at him, noticing that he was old and thin, despite the twinkle in his eye and his warm smile. The women saw the silent questioning in my eyes and told me right away that the Haj was in the hospital. He was okay. He’d taken a turn for the worse a few days ago, a week or so after they’d brought him home from a month in Alexandria where they had rented an apartment so that he could be near his doctors and physical therapist. But he had insisted on returning home, fed up with being in the city. But then, as they described to me, when he had just wanted to sleep and wouldn’t wake up, they’d rushed him back to the hospital. The Haj’s right arm and leg were paralyzed. He could talk, they explained, but “his tongue is heavy.” He had had a stroke. They told me how he’d refused to take his blood pressure medicine, instead having his camel herds brought nearby so that, going back to his roots and his youth, he could drink camel milk every morning. He was one of the last Bedouin to hold on to his camel herds, symbols of their past life. They also told me how just before it had happened, despite his high blood pressure and diabetes, he’d agreed to mediate a tense dispute between two groups, the men all shouting in the living room. Everyone, including me, always referred to him simply as the Haj, even though many besides him had made the pilgrimage to Mecca and thus deserved

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Being There the title. But he was defined by respect in ways that few others were in the region where the formerly nomadic herders and barley cultivators known as the Awlad ‘Ali tribes lived. A mediator and judge to the end, he couldn’t refuse the men when they asked him to help resolve the problem. The wheelchair in which they’d moved him around, especially when he asked to be taken outdoors to soak up the warming springtime sun, was forlornly folded in the corner of his room. The doctor, the women reported, said that he would be able to come home soon. But we were in suspended time. A telephone call to the hospital (and to the Haj’s younger son and nephew who’d spent the night with him) confirmed that they weren’t sure when he’d be released. I said I had to go see him. So after the young men returned from Friday prayers, we set off in two cars—two sons, a nephew, and the Haj’s two youngest daughters (whose births I remembered and who now startled me with their beauty and confidence, not to mention the swishing elegance of the newly fashionable black robes and face veils they put on when it was time to go). Later everyone would ask me if I had come because I’d heard the news; later they told each other that I’d dreamt of him; and later they told me that when the Haj heard the news that I had come, he had insisted to his doctor that he should let him go home right away. He even promised that he’d come back to hospital the next day if they insisted. What followed were some intense days— days of aching affection, forced cheeriness, and hidden tears, days when I had to watch this extraordinary man, now home, reduced to physical helplessness, surrounded by women and young men lifting him, feeding him, hovering around him, no longer in intense conversation, no longer telling the young people what to do, no longer sitting cross-legged in dignity. These were days when I was reminded of just how close families were in this community: grown married daughters arrived, holding the

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A Kind of Kinship Haj’s young grandchildren close to his face so each could plant a kiss on his cheek as he turned feebly toward them; other daughters propped him up in bed and fed him by hand bits of fish and salad, healthy food that his diabetes forced him to eat when he’d rather have his old desert food of dates and butter; people came into the room to see him, encouraging him, babying him. He would whisper for the young men, his sons. What he wanted from them was cigarettes. They delayed as long as possible, but he persisted. They told me that he had told them that smoking allowed him to think about the past. I couldn’t make out what he was saying most of the time, this man who had been so articulate and clear and who had told me stories and history, taught me poetry, and explained to me so much of Bedouin life, from customary law to the dynamics of his own marriages. As I sat next to his bed (everyone insisting, since my time was short and this visit precious, that I have this special place), I held his lifeless hand, looked at his grizzled face and rumpled clothes, and strained to understand him when he tried to speak. His children would urge him to talk louder. But he couldn’t. I would catch his wife’s eye as I tried to cheer him up by reminiscing to him about the evenings we’d sat together, me writing in my notebook while he talked, she struggling to keep her eyes open after a long day with kids and the stream of guests who came to consult with him about politics, money, and family tensions. After a life of respect for his gifts as a judge, a talker, and, from a young age, a charismatic leader and later “elder,” the Haj now lay there quietly in bed. He perked up when one of his nephews came in—a handsome guy, now also his son-in-law, whom I remembered as a bright-eyed and feisty eight-year-old. The young man leaned right up close to him, catching him up on the latest shenanigans in the upcoming election and answering his whispered questions. The Haj made his views known. But he was also clearly happy to see me. Our bond was a living bond that brought back the past and reminded him, me, and everyone there of almost a lifetime together. The

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Being There intensity, for all of us, I think, was heightened because of the moment when the connection began—many years ago, when we were all younger. I had been a shy twenty-six-year-old with strong feelings, a desperate urge to understand their world as I lived in it, and an unknown life ahead of me. His wives had been in the midst of the earthy pleasures and exasperations of having babies, raising children, and dealing with a husband who was complicated, demanding, and special. He had been in his prime, driving all over Bedouin territory to make deals and handle disputes, in demand, restless, on a bridge between a past tougher life that included smuggling goods across irrelevant national boundaries, recovering land mines left over from World War II, and managing his camel herds and a future full of real estate deals and agribusiness, still young enough to remember love. Our human bond was real, across so many divides that contemporary discourses about culture consider fundamental— divides whose bridging is made to seem so impossible in the discourses of “multiculturalism and empire,” to borrow Wendy Brown’s felicitous phrase.1 For one thing, it was across the divide of culture and religion, despite our mutual understanding of me as somehow of Arab and Muslim origin, even if living in ways that were strange to them. Religion was crucial for the Haj and this Bedouin community in just about every aspect of their lives. Not for me. In college, like many of my 1970s generation, I flirted with Buddhism through Zen meditation and the Tassajara Bread Book. In moments of sadness, Bach’s masses and Mozart’s requiems console me. When I pray—as I sometimes do when I feel vulnerable in situations I can’t control, like taking off in airplanes—I pray in Arabic. I recite under my breath the fatiha, the opening verse of the Qur’an. But my training in proper Muslim ritual was too rudimentary and too long ago to remember. If I say I’m a Muslim—because of the presence of my father’s family in our lives growing up, because of being assigned to the religious class for Muslims in my British primary school in Egypt and having a religious teacher to help me memorize parts of the

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A Kind of Kinship Qur’an, because for my adult life as an anthropologist I have lived with people who are Muslim and thus have developed the deepest knowledge of and the most intimate sense of that religious tradition—in fact I squirm when those in Egypt who don’t know me well solicitously and sometimes moralistically urge me to pray and to teach my children more. I squirm because I never got the habit of religion. My parents were secular, one because of a principled rejection of her religion—and all religions—as socially divisive, the other because he drifted away when he found more satisfying analyses of injustice in the world and developed an affi nity for ideologies of anti-imperial revolution after his experience of colonial expulsion from Palestine. It is not, as my tenyear-old son announced in one of our awkward discussions about God, that “I don’t believe in anything that can’t be scientifically proven”; it’s just that I got the habit of humanism instead. And to be a humanist is to understand that, for most humans, what we call religious traditions are deeply meaningful. So I respect that meaningfulness and I recognize the historical power of religious practice, debate, and identity. I found in anthropology the perfect discipline for someone in my existential state: it sanctions respect and enables understanding without demanding full participation. But I can and do participate in most ways when in the Haj’s world. I speak— or try my best to speak— the dialect of Arabic that they do, and even the strong language of Islam that is theirs. There was no one who entered the bedroom to greet the Haj who did not voice the prayer that God would make him well. His response was always “Thanks/ Praise be to God.” I too talked about God’s power and God’s will and entreated God to heal him. This is what people say in such situations, and I could only say the same things, translating my inchoate hopes and concern for him into this recognizable language. Maybe it doesn’t take more than that to place us in the same world, if the humanity of an already shared life, a real connection, is there.

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Being There There was a second divide between the Haj and me—the kind of vexed divide that has been made emblematic of the unbridgeable relations between the civilized and the barbaric, the enlightened and the backward: the divide between those who profess women’s rights and equality and those who don’t. So let me give you one more detail from this story of my return visit. When I finally had to wrench myself away to go back to Cairo, we all knew the good-byes might be fi nal. Of course, instead I said, “May I see you again in better times.” The Haj gestured for his son to come close. Protective as ever, I realized later that he had instructed him to make sure he got me safely into the minibus and stressed to the driver that he must watch out for me. A little later, I saw the Haj fumbling to reach his good hand into the top of his robes. Only his wife and daughter were in the room now. They didn’t know what he was doing and kept asking, “What do you want?” But I knew. I knew he was looking for his wallet, still wanting to give his young “daughter” some money, to take care of her, to make sure she didn’t want for anything. I was a successful academic, a married mother of teenagers, a world traveler. I was a specialist in gender studies. Even when I’d lived with them for my dissertation research in the late 1970s and early 1980s, despite being poor and having been entrusted to them by my father, I had been pursuing a PhD and living away from home, ultimately independent as no young unmarried women were in his community. But in that moment when he fumbled for the wallet that wasn’t there, I felt like the protected and loved (and loving) daughter he saw in me. It pained me to see his masculine dignity compromised— for he had no wallet and no control over things. Here was a man who had not been able to grant his four youngest daughters their wishes to go to university for fear that something might happen to them so far from home (though probably also using a complex calculus that included facts like they hadn’t attended good enough high schools to go to top faculties and none of his sons had attended university). Here was a man who lived in a household where

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A Kind of Kinship women covered themselves in public and kept their very respectable distance from men. Here was a man who had married several wives. True, the Haj had recognized the talents and educational successes of his daughters by arranging for them to marry men who, though perhaps lacking in family status or great wealth, were educated professionals rather than making them marry their cousins. True, he had shown his love and respect for his senior wife in trusting her in all matters and, only a few months earlier, enabling her to realize her dream of performing the pilgrimage to Mecca. True, he supported all his wives and children well and tried to be fair. And true, he had sheltered women whose family situations were bad and had used his moral authority to enforce their rights to good treatment by husbands or kin. But no one here had heard of the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women or wanted anything to do with what they perceived as the lax gender rules of their urban Egyptian neighbors, not to mention what they thought they knew of the West. This was not a society in which “gender equity” was part of the vocabulary of everyday life, though women defended fiercely a variety of rights. Here was a society that feminists would easily label “patriarchal” by pointing to the way women and girls were ensconced in family, though I would point out in response that men were equally so.2 And yet the Haj and I were able to be close, through a kind of kinship and a mutual recognition of complexities. His playful affection for his children reminded me of my father’s. Both were men with big public lives, my father’s in the international Palestinian community and the Haj’s in the Western Desert of Egypt. And here were girls, his daughters, whom I loved. And they loved me in their own ways. Some confided in me as perhaps an older sister, about their anxieties and medical interventions of infertility. Others were connected to me metonymically. One had as background on her cell phone a photograph I had taken twenty years ago of her father playfully hugging her when she was just two. Older women teased me and asked earnestly about

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Being There the health and news of every member of my family as their way to connect us, though they knew precious little about what my everyday life was like. I was stunned by how many details they remembered about me. I empathized when the Haj’s wife moaned as I massaged her aching lower back, and we both laughed when she complained, “Oh my knees!” as she stood up. We recognized this refrain from twenty-five years ago when I used to make her effervescent vitamin drinks to help with her indigestion during pregnancy.3 Shared times, a life lived in common, intensely for a couple of years, and stretching over thirty years. These bridged the divides, despite our different worlds, possibilities, knowledges, and aspirations. I don’t think my experience is unique; I suspect we have all experienced something of this bridging. Every intimate relationship involves this bridging. We learn about being human from such personal experiences of a kind of kinship that develops through the intense living together—the living together that can be part of anthropological fieldwork.

Postscript, December 2008 Eight and a half months later, I am driving up the same driveway, the yard now more forlorn and empty. A telephone call from one of the Haj’s daughters’ cell phone to mine—a first—had given me the news. This daughter, now living in the western city of Marsa Matruh, and with a son starting an engineering program in Alexandria (spending weekends with his maternal relatives), had been about eleven years old when I first came to live with the family. A tough girl who’d taken a special interest in disciplining my unconventional forays into the men’s guest room to talk to her father’s guests, she was the one to insist that I had to be told. Her mother and sisters thought it would be too hard to hear the news when I was alone and so far away. So many women had told me stories of the way someone had come to get them from their marital homes, telling them their father or brother or mother was ill, never wanting to break the news of death until they had arrived among

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A Kind of Kinship loved ones. If I hadn’t had the uncanny feeling that made me come for that visit last spring, they would not have had my phone number. I marveled at the technology that could now bridge our worlds. I was touched by this inclusion, and sad. I knew I had to go. So here I was going through those metal gates again. There was no Mercedes in the yard this time. The hundreds of cars that, as they later would tell me, had packed the hillside for the Haj’s funeral were gone. The men from the Western Desert, the Awlad ‘Ali in their white robes, embroidered woolen vests, and, for the men of the Haj’s generation, traditional formal wool cloaks dashingly draped; the army officers from Cairo in their stiff uniforms; the business partners in their pressed suits; and the daughters, aunts, sisters, and cousins and all those women in their networks who celebrated births and marriages and consoled each other in times of loss had come and gone. The tents they had rented to receive these men and women had been taken away on trucks. Only occasionally did tears well up or did someone suddenly turn away and sob, now that my arrival reminded them again of the loss of the Haj. The refrains were familiar, “May God have mercy on him and forgive him.” “Everyone passes.” “God decides.” I had in my suitcase multiple copies of a booklet I had made for them as a tribute to the Haj. What could I contribute as someone who had taken notes and photographs as well as written about them? I didn’t have time to collect some of the tape recordings I had of the Haj reciting poetry or telling me family stories that included how they had survived after the battles of World War II in their territory. But I did manage to find a series of photographs. On the cover of the booklet I printed a short eulogy that tried to capture some of the Haj’s virtues along lines he would have liked—talking about his honor, his wide reputation, his good judgment, his fierce family loyalty, his faith, and something about his relationship to me as patient teacher and second father. I would find out that Bedouin poets had composed poems along similar lines, theirs in the familiar dialect of the Awlad ‘Ali rather than

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Being There my stilted classical Arabic, metered with perfect rhymes and rhythms that rolled off the tongue and were already being committed to memory, even though, with the advent of Xerox machines, I was entrusted with copies to take home. Inside my booklet were twenty color photographs of the Haj. They began with ones from October 1978 when I first went to live with them. They ended with a few photographs from my last visit in April when people competed to pose with him as he lay silent and unmoving in his bed. There were some gaps marking periods when I had not been able to visit, caught up as I was in fieldwork elsewhere in Egypt and busy with my own family. I had not anticipated the way they would react to these photographs, many of which I had no doubt brought them small prints of in the past. Some didn’t want to look, for fear of grief. Others pored over the pages and discussed them. The Haj’s senior wife was most knowledgeable. The photographs they spent the most time on and talked about in detail were the early ones, not just because they loved seeing the Haj in his prime, but because these photographs contained the most information. I had taken the photographs when I was in my role as “an anthropologist,” and so they were more public than private, to use the art critic John Berger’s distinction.4 The first pages were of the Haj in the desert pastures, his rifle over his shoulder, standing with the sheep herds, or feeling the inside of a camel’s leg. These photos were from special trips he took me on when I first arrived to live with them, keen to see the vestiges of the traditional Bedouin life I had planned to document. We had gone when the lambs were being weaned; we had brought supplies out to the tanned men who lived outdoors and herded his camels for him. The photographs contained so much nostalgic history for them— of a time before the government had confiscated their guns, a time when sheep herds, not land deals or car franchises, were their mainstay, a time when desert pastures were available and there had been enough rain to produce the distinctive plants they saw in my photographs. A

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A Kind of Kinship par tic u lar favorite among the early photographs was a group shot taken in our courtyard. It documented a major oath-swearing and reconciliation that had occurred shortly after I came to live with them. Lined up around the wide bowls of rice were the Haj, his brothers, his nephews, and the men who had stood by him in this tense event, some now dead, some still neighbors. His wife pointed with pride at the eleven huge bowls of rice she had prepared for the event; no one used these kinds of bowls any more, and none of her daughters-in-law knew how to cook on an open fire. She also pointed out the Haj’s brothers bent over the bowls distributing the chunks of cooked lamb. The later photographs, on the other hand, taken on my shorter recent visits, were more like portraits and were passed over quickly. We could all see him aging. I certainly wasn’t the only one to give them their history. They had many other sources: their own phenomenal memories, their poetry, and their documents and photographs. In the ostentatiously redecorated living room (which the Haj’s sons had proudly taken charge of, even bringing in an interior designer to match the curtain fabrics to the wall color) were two new framed and enlarged black-and-white photos dating to the same day in the late 1950s or early 1960s when Libyan King Idris had come to visit Egypt. In one the Haj was riding on his white steed, its tail swishing. He was one of the Awlad ‘Ali who came to greet the king, their cultural ties, including dialect and poetry, being stronger to Libya than Egypt. In the other grainy black-and-white photograph, he was posed with the king and his guards. The Haj’s wife told me that she had insisted to everyone that these photographs were to stay hung in the living room. She didn’t care that the more religious types nowadays said it was sinful to have photographs displayed. But the photographs in my booklet gave them a different kind of history—a personal history. Among the ordinary portraits of the Haj—the less “anthropological” photographs—the ones that elicited comment were those that showed him with loved ones who

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Being There were no longer alive: his mother and his brothers. We would linger over these, and it was then that I felt how much we were bound by the shared memories of those who had been so much a part of this family but were no longer with us. We together felt their absence because my photographs indexed their once-presence in our shared lives. I also had not anticipated some of the stories I would hear about the Haj’s last days. He had never recovered any movement. Yet the stories the women and girls told me all showed how, despite his diminished physical state and difficulty in communicating, he was still aware and in control to the end. I had heard on my last visit that some months before his stroke he had gathered together all the men of his extended family— his last remaining brother and cousin and all his nephews, sons, and grandsons—to lecture them on the importance of staying united and working together. He told them which two men should now be considered the heads of the family. But more than putting his house in order, he had even taken charge of his own death. His daughters told me that at the end he had refused to take any of the daunting piles of pills he had been prescribed—he said they weren’t working. On the morning he died he had asked them to rest him on a blanket on the floor. “And take the pillow away,” he had added. They told me that his sons each came in and he looked at them, one by one. “Death has come,” he said. His wife told me that he had gestured toward the hillside where they had originally lived and where most of their family and family land remained. He was trying to tell them to hold the funeral and receive condolences there, knowing that only over there would there be enough room for the hundreds who would come. And they did come, for more than fifteen days. And over there, of course, off to the side, was that barren area where they had buried his uncles, mother, brothers, and so many of those we missed now, including some of the women I’d known whose sons now formed the core of the extended family. But the story about his mental sharpness that drew me up short was one about me. It seems that after I’d left in early April, they had

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A Kind of Kinship discovered what he’d been trying to say when he had fumbled inside his robe. His wife explained to me what I had already figured out: that he had wanted his wallet. The reason, though, was that he had had some U.S. dollars in it. Dollars were, of course, my kind of money. So perhaps his gesture was not just the generic protective generosity of a father toward a daughter that I had imagined then. Instead it was a gesture of generosity that acknowledged who I was, specifically. I was the odd daughter who was and was not like his other daughters. I came from and still lived in another place and world, even if we had become over the years parts of each other’s lives. Notes 1. Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Multiculturalism and Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). 2. For a broader discussion of how this community helps us think about women’s rights, see Lila Abu-Lughod, “Preface for the Twenty- First Century,” in Writing Women’s Worlds, xi–xxv (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). 3. For more on her pregnancy, see Lila Abu-Lughod, “A Tale of Two Pregnancies,” in Women Writing Culture, ed. Ruth Behar and Deborah Gordon, 339–349 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 4. For my reflections on photography in the field and the blurring for an anthropologist of John Berger’s distinction between public and private photographs, see Lila Abu-Lughod, “On Photographs, Fieldnotes, and Participant-Observation,” Xcp: Cross-Cultural Poetics 3 (1998): 34–41.

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2

Saints and Outcasts L a N e g r i ta a n d t h e A c c i d e n ta l C at h o l i c

Russell Leigh Sharman

M

y mother was a Catholic,” Maureen explains patiently, “but I don’t know how she became a Catholic.” It is July 2003 and I am sitting in Maureen Charles’s living room in Puerto Limon, Costa Rica. The heat is oppressive. But then the heat is always oppressive in Limon. I can remember spending Christmas Eve in this same living room five and a half years earlier sweating over large, steaming tamales wrapped in banana leaves. This day, as ever, Maureen seems unaffected by the swelter. Her freckled, dark skin is only beginning to show her seventy-one years, but it is showing no signs of perspiration. I, on the other hand, am being slowly poached on an overstuffed couch that seems designed to heighten the effects of humidity. “My mother was born in Jamaica,” Maureen continues in her lilting Limonense English, a linguistic amalgam that betrays a century of cultural politics in a few lines of dialogue. “She was brought to Costa Rica when she had about three years. She was raised with some people way up in the country. Those days we didn’t have a carretera,

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Saints and Outcasts but now the road pass through that area. The road cross between two little, um, what you call a pueblo in English?” “Town,” I offer. “Town, yes. Just those two little towns. Those days it was only the track line, the train. When she grew and was on her own, she went to the Catholic Church. All of us were raised in the Catholic Church.” I met Maureen in 1997 as I was beginning my doctoral research on the aesthetics of assimilation among Caribbean migrants to Central America. I had rented a room from Maureen’s sister, Betty, just around the corner in Barrio Roosevelt, also known as Jamaica Town for its original population of migrant laborers from Jamaica and other Anglophone Ca ribbean islands in the late nineteenth century. Limon itself, both the port city and the province that stretches from Panama to Nicaragua along the Caribbean Sea, was invented whole cloth by the United Fruit Company in the 1870s. It was a company town in a company province in a country that would find it increasingly difficult to shake off the influence of the land-hungry multinational as it swallowed up several other Central and South American territories. Maureen’s mother, like so many migrants to the banana fields of Costa Rica, grew up along the railroad engineered by the founder of the United Fruit Company, Minor Keith. For decades, the narrow gauge railway was the only connection between Limon and the highland Central Valley, where the majority of Costa Rican nationals lived. Though founded genealogically on a mixture of European, indigenous, and African ancestors, Costa Rica forged its unique nationalist self-image on a whitewashed history of European settlement. The Caribbean migrant laborers were a threat to that fabricated purity and, as such, were prohibited by law from traveling into the Central Valley on the railroad they helped build. Maureen was born just two years before a massive labor strike among banana workers in 1934 that weakened the position of the United

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Being There Fruit Company, catapulted the Communist Party to prominence in national politics, and began the slide toward civil war in 1948. It would be the last such war in Costa Rican history, abolishing the military and establishing the most stable democracy in Central America for the last half century. Maureen, of course, does not remember much of the famous strike of 1934, but she does remember the turbulent years of the 1970s as Afro– Costa Rican laborers continued to struggle for attention in a nation that persisted in viewing them as foreigners and interlopers. Not long after, a two-lane highway, the carretera, was built, replacing the railway as the only path to the highlands. But I had written about all of this already. A thesis, a doctorate, and several articles later, I had returned to Limon for something else. Something I had missed, or ignored, the first time. Now, sitting before Maureen, I steered our conversation to the topic that most interested me. “Did you ever go and visit La Negrita when you were a child?” I asked. “No,” she answered, a bit wistful, sad perhaps. “We never did.” i d i d n ’t m e a n t o b e Catholic. That is, it wasn’t entirely my choice. I remember hours (well, it seemed like hours) spent kneeling on the hard wooden pews of St. Anne’s Church in Houston, Texas, where I grew up. I remember the point, usually somewhere during the homily, when my mother would have to take me and my two siblings to the nursery because we were making too much noise and embarrassing my father. I remember Catholic school, all seven years of it; the high holy days, and the lower ones too. I remember one day in May each year when we all brought a flower for the Virgin Mary. My mother wrapped mine in a moist paper towel and tinfoil to keep it fresh until I could lay it on the altar with the others. I remember, on more than one occasion, I ate the flower before I made it down the aisle. Though for something thrust upon me I seemed to embrace it wholeheartedly, at least in those formative years. From First Commu-

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Saints and Outcasts nion through Confirmation, I was an altar boy at St. Anne’s. There was a kind of thrilling access to the holiest of holies, a familiarity with the altar and the sacristy that felt both forbidden and blessed. I recited the Our Father, the Hail Mary, and the Glory Be each night, unbidden by my parents, who seemed only really Catholic on Sundays. And for years I slept with a terra-cotta cross upon my chest, until one night it fell to the floor and shattered. For all this spiritual recall, I don’t remember precisely the moment I stopped believing, but it was in that liminal space of pre-adolescence. There was no cataclysmic moment, no breach of trust in need of repression, just a banal ebb of faith. More of a pause, really, than a full stop, but paradigm shifting just the same. I do recall reciting the Our Father and realizing in the midst of it that I had no idea what I was saying. The words, burned onto my tongue, had lost all semantic content. By the time I reached college I managed to retrieve some of that lost faith in the form of evangelical Christianity. To some, perhaps, it would seem I leapt out of the frying pan and into the fire. But it provided a connection to my childhood experience through a renewed sense of intellectual purpose, a theological orientation that breathed new life into rote practice. In my spiritual arrogance, I came to view Catholicism as the dead practice of a living religion. I was not a Catholic. I was a Christian. What does any of this have to do with the aesthetics of assimilation among Caribbean migrants to Central America? Nothing at all. Or so I assumed. “ t h e y o n l y e x h i b i t t h e V i r g i n without her clothing on the first of August.” Rosita is perched on a brown sofa in her living room. We are in Cartago, the colonial capital of Costa Rica, and home of La Virgen de Los Angeles, patroness of the nation. The air is moist but cool, as it so often is in Cartago. We are a few thousand meters higher than Limon,

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Being There nestled among the volcanic peaks of the Central Valley. Rosita is ten years younger, and several shades lighter, than Maureen but just as poised and certainly as passionate about her faith. “In the past,” she continues in quick, staccato Spanish, “it was only one woman named Mimata and another woman who was my aunt Carmencita . . . [they] were the only two people allowed to make clothing for the Virgin. And now all over the country, people come with clothing for the Virgin. So, what the priest does, he puts all the dresses on the Virgin. He puts one on, he takes it off, over and over. And the dress that the people like the most, by applause, that is the one they leave on.” She is describing the Vesticion, a ritual carried out every year as part of the celebration of La Negrita, the colloquial title for La Virgen de los Angeles. La Negrita is both an apparition and an icon of the Virgin Mary. That is to say, similar to Our Lady of Guadalupe or Lourdes, the Virgin appeared to a young girl on the outskirts of Cartago in 1635. But unlike those more widely known apparitions, she did not appear in bodily form, leaving behind some relic for devotion. She in fact appeared as a relic, an icon about twenty centimeters high of volcanic stone carved in the image of Mary and child wrapped in a cloak. The diminutive statue was taken home by the young girl, and after several mysterious reappearances in the forest where she was discovered, a shrine was built. By 1821, when Costa Rica declared itself independent from Spain (and the rest of Central America), she had become patroness of the new nation. In 1934, the year of the Limon strike, a pilgrimage to a new basilica built in her honor in Cartago was initiated and repeated every year since, bringing tens of thousands of pilgrims to the small highland city on and around her feast day, August 2. But on August 1, the day most pilgrims time their travels to arrive at the whitewashed cinder block basilica, there is a special Mass dedicated to changing the tiny cloth dress worn by the icon throughout the year. Called the Vesticion, it is the one time each year that the jewel-

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Saints and Outcasts studded armature that encases the object is removed and the icon can be viewed unobstructed. As Rosita describes, thousands of women (no man has yet to admit to participating) sew dresses to scale, hoping that theirs will be the one that is chosen. But even if it is not, any cloth that has actually touched the icon is considered blessed. Throughout Costa Rica, and certainly in Cartago, many homes will have a small shrine displaying a dress made by a member of the household that once graced the form of the Virgin, if only for a moment. My interest in La Negrita was, however, strictly academic. In the years since my doctoral fieldwork, I had continued to research the cultural politics of race in Costa Rica from a variety of perspectives. But religion remained set apart— sacred, if you will. It was an intellectual blind spot, perhaps ironically, because my faith had become such an important part of my life. It was not something I was interested in exploring with the detachment of an anthropologist. But over those same years I got to know Rosita, mostly through her children, all my age and close friends of mine. I have no doubt my facility with Catholic-speak, despite my distance from the faith, endeared me to her quickly. I found myself accompanying her to the basilica and even walking with her and her family on a pilgrimage or two. I soon found that to know Rosita was to know La Negrita, and that La Negrita held the key to a deeper history of racial politics in Costa Rica than I could have imagined. As it happens, that young girl who first found the icon in 1635 was part of a freed slave population in and around Cartago. She was clearly identified as “mulata” in all of the earliest records of the event, and the community of followers that organized around the icon was also clearly identified as “pardo,” or African, at least until the 1780s. I’ve written elsewhere about this complicated and fascinating history, but it seems clear that “La Negrita” became shorthand for this particular icon not because the stone is a rather dark green (as many claim) but because for at least the first 150 years of her adoration she was the Virgin of the

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Being There black residents of Cartago, a fact that has been conveniently forgotten in most accounts of her apparition. The girl is now described as Indian, and according to Rosita and most other devotees, the only African influence in Costa Rica came with the laborers from the Caribbean 300 years later. So it was that I began to investigate La Negrita and her connection to the larger story of race in Costa Rica. I spent hours in national archives, poring over church documents, historical narratives, and newspapers. I interviewed priests and laypeople. I even traveled to Mexico City and walked the grounds of the shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe in the pre-dawn calm, looking for points of connection that would extend my analysis of religion, race, and nationalism. But the most satisfying moments were spent in the basilica in Cartago with Rosita and her crew of middle-aged women who cared for the altar between services. We would change out the altar cloths, including those just beneath the shrine holding La Negrita, with quiet laughter and the bantering gossip of the devoted. Over the next two years, I became, in my annual visits, a kind of mascot to this sacred altar guild. It helped that I could reach higher than any of them when dusting around the shrine. It was one of those first evenings, with the basilica shuttered, quiet, and dark, as I moved about the altar along with the women, that I, without thinking, paused as I passed in front of the shrine, bowed my head to La Negrita, and made the sign of the cross. It was a reflex, a muscle memory that brought my right hand to my forehead, navel, and chest. Suddenly I was nine years old, granted access to the holiest of holies with a familiarity that seemed once again both forbidden and blessed. But I was also an anthropologist, a scholar in pursuit of ethnographic data, relying on the time-tested method of participant observation. I looked around at the women on the altar, busily sprucing up the space. They hadn’t noticed anything unusual. Why should they? If

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Saints and Outcasts they were under the impression that my accidental Catholicism was something more . . . purposeful, then no need to explain myself. It would only complicate matters. After all, I wasn’t lying, per se. Maybe I didn’t really believe in the Virgin, and maybe I was allowing them to believe that I did to gain access to this inner circle for research, but I was technically Catholic. Any priest could tell you that. But I also knew I was not a Catholic. I was a Christian. And with the sign of the cross the chasm between the two, which had seemed so wide before, was suddenly more a line, and a thin one at that. i t i s j u l y 2 0 0 5 a n d I am wandering through the throngs of the faithful in the plaza of the basilica looking for Maureen. Maureen has come to Cartago on a bus chartered by the cathedral in Puerto Limon to attend Mass at the basilica. For the week leading up to the feast day of August 2, the basilica holds a special Mass for each of the seven provinces. Today, hundreds of Limonenses from throughout the Caribbean coast have converged upon Cartago for the midday Mass said in their honor. Most will return to the humid heat of their hometowns by nightfall. As I search in vain for my friend, I am still pondering what just happened inside the basilica. Unable to find Maureen before the Mass, I spent the service near a side door on the fringes of the overcrowded basilica. The music was appropriately Limonense, mostly drums, and was provided by the band from the cathedral in Limon. The energy of the space was palpable, so much so that I almost didn’t notice the priest moving through the crowd during Communion. With that many people crowding the aisles, it’s easier for the priests to come to us. He stopped not far away, and the people around me began to file past to receive the small wafer. After two years of research, I was comfortable with my ruse of dormant Catholicism, but I had my limits. Actually taking Communion, though perfectly acceptable given my background, seemed a line I could not in good conscience cross.

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Being There Then the priest began to move in my direction. Rationalizations clamored for attention in my mind as he moved closer, and it seemed as though my whole spiritual and scholarly life passed before my eyes. Rejecting the offered host would be embarrassing, but I could survive embarrassment (I was, after all, an anthropologist and used to being the butt of cross-cultural jokes). I was more concerned with what it meant if I accepted. Would it be so different from that muscle memory of two years earlier, making the sign of the cross for an icon I didn’t believe in? Wasn’t it just another bit of data to acquire through participant observation? But I knew those excuses were drawn from the same well as my posturing in front of the women of the altar guild. I knew that wafer still held some significance for me, and taking it meant more than “just doing my job.” At the last moment, I would have had to take a small step into the priest’s path for him to stop and offer me Communion. I did not. And he passed on. Later, at a restaurant across from the plaza, I meet up with Maureen. She is with her granddaughter Michelle and her housekeeper Rosa. Maureen spotted me during the Mass, but she does not comment on whether or not she saw my encounter (or lack of one) with the priest. The conversation does not dwell on the Mass itself, or even on La Negrita. Maureen is a devoted Catholic, but her interest in La Negrita has never been like that of Rosita. She is here because of the Mass for Limon, and because the new bishop of Cartago was until recently her parish priest. After lunch our small group pushes through the crowds of mostly white Costa Ricans— even on this day, Afro– Costa Ricans are a distinct minority—to the new museum dedicated to La Negrita behind the basilica. The rock upon which the icon fi rst appeared is housed in this museum, along with other relics of La Negrita’s history. There is even a helpful plaque presenting the history of the apparition in both Spanish and English. Both versions of the story describe the young girl

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Saints and Outcasts who found the icon as Indian. As everywhere in Cartago during these high holy days, there is a line of people waiting to file through. As we inch our way forward, a woman in front of us turns and, in Spanish, asks Maureen’s granddaughter for the time. She is middleaged and light-skinned, and she has a pleasant but curious smile on her lips. Michelle has no watch, so I offer the correct time. The woman ignores me. Finally Rosa responds with the same time I gave, and the woman replies, “Gracias, Negrilla.” Rosa smiles sweetly but says nothing, and the woman returns to her waiting. Michelle rolls her eyes at her grandmother and Maureen leans over to me, saying: “They used to do that kind of thing all the time. Like when people used to see a black person and pinch themselves or tie a knot in their shirt.” I had heard of this superstition among white Costa Ricans, the belief that somehow an encounter with Blackness brings good luck. I assumed it was a by-product of social change in the preceding decades when more and more Afro– Costa Ricans found their way to the Central Valley. But surely it was a thing of the past. Then I saw the teeming masses of white Costa Ricans waiting to touch the rock upon which “La Negrita” appeared, or to fi ll bottles with the spring water that erupted from that rock, or to see if their handmade dress would be chosen to grace the form of the icon for the year to come. And I realized that much of what I was witnessing was that very superstition writ large. The power of La Virgen de los Angeles was rooted in a centuries-old encounter with Blackness that Costa Ricans denied even as they glorified. It was then that I noticed the woman in front of us was wearing a perfectly good watch. a w e e k l a t e r a n d I a m sitting on the outdoor dais that was purposely built for the Vesticion. It is a stunning day in Cartago. The sun is unrelenting, but because of the altitude it is a perfect seventyfive degrees. The plaza of the basilica is a sea of onlookers, waiting for

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Being There the priest to begin the annual ceremony, to unveil the icon and allow the faithful to see her unadorned for a few precious minutes. Television cameras ring the plaza on high platforms, every station broadcasting live from Cartago, thousands more sitting at home watching. I am excited but exhausted. I’ve just spent the last few hours preparing the stage, hanging curtains, moving tables and chairs, and spreading out the altar cloths. Rosita and her friends on the altar guild were frantic with last-minute details. But now, with the Mass under way, we are seated behind the bishop in two rows of folding chairs. Pride of place. The thrill of access to the holiest of holies. Great care is taken as the gold armature is removed, and a hush falls over the crowd when the bishop holds the naked stone up for all to see. After a moment the silence is filled with applause. The actual Vesticion itself is surprisingly short. In light of the overwhelming number of dresses sewn and submitted from across the country, the priests spent the previous night dutifully trying each one on the icon and choosing the six “best” of the lot. The bishop slips each small dress over the icon, allows the crowd to admire it, and then moves on to the next one. Finally there is a clear winner, and the people show their preference with a loud cheer. This year the winner happens to be Iris, who is a member of the altar guild and sitting just one seat away from me. Rosita and the other women huddle around Iris as she weeps for joy that her dress was chosen to remain on the figure for the coming year. It is a genuine and deeply touching expression of devotion. Then a young priest beckons Iris to come forward. Someone must safeguard the dress from last year, and he gives it to her. Shocked, she cradles the dress in her hands and returns to her seat. I was not prepared for what happens next. A dozen women sitting around me swarm Iris in the middle of the ceremony, ravenous to touch the small dress. One woman snatches it from Iris’s hands, uses it to make the sign of the cross, and then hugs

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Saints and Outcasts it close to her chest. Another grabs it and does the same, then another. Several women produce cotton balls, from where I couldn’t guess, and begin touching the dress with them and secreting them away again. One enterprising woman takes out a large package of cotton balls, touches it to the garment, and returns it to her purse— apparently transferring miraculous power to all of the cotton balls to be used over time. They make such a commotion that another priest comes over and takes the dress away again. In the aftermath of the small melee, the women all look like scolded children. I sit through the rest of the Mass turning over these events in my mind, juxtaposing them with the day I spent with Maureen and my own struggle to accommodate what I just witnessed. This fervor over a dress, and its proximity to an icon that approximates an encounter with the Virgin Mary, seems so foreign to even my accidental Catholicism. Add to that the wider context of racial politics, and did I really think I could pass as a true believer? Do I really even want to? To the scholar in me it was rank superstition, and I wanted no part of it. And yet there is no denying a certain kinship with Maureen, Rosita, and the rest of the altar guild. There is still that muscle memory, that prayer burned on my tongue, that looks at this display of “rank superstition” as though I were looking in a mirror. Did I not serve at the altar as the priest at St. Anne’s transformed bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ? Did I not sleep with a terra-cotta cross on my chest for most of my childhood? Do I not even now believe in that same God? I comfort myself with the cold distance of theological “correctness,” but I am there in the midst of them. I think about allowing that priest to pass me by a week earlier, and I am troubled. Did I deny him, or myself? I am thinking all of this as I rise to my feet and move with the rest of the women. We are shuffling, slow-footed, and I am too distracted to notice why.

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Being There That is, until I am face-to-face with the bishop himself. He is holding the host before me. Rosita is at my side. “El cuerpo de Cristo,” he intones. The body of Christ. I hesitate. Then I manage an “amen” and open wide. y e a r s l a t e r I s t i l l t h i n k of that day as a turning point, both in terms of my research and the peace I’ve made with my “being Catholic.” I am still walking that thin line— I attend an Episcopal church now, the perfect cop-out for an accidental Catholic—but I have also found that is the best place for an ethnographer to be. If I hope to understand a people and place far from my experience, I must first understand myself. And if they can help me do that, so much the better. On a shelf in my office there is a plastic bottle in the shape of La Negrita still full of the water I collected the last time I visited the basilica. I use it as a prop in my lectures . . . I don’t really believe in the Virgin. But next to it is a terra-cotta cross. You can still see the cracks where I glued it back together.

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3

Mad to Be Modern Alma Gottlieb and Philip Graham

Alma: Welcome to Our Village “Goal!” the boys next to us shouted. “Which team scored?” I asked Philip, who answered, “No one’s wearing uniforms, so who can tell the teams apart?” “Then how do they know who’s on their team?” our son Nathaniel asked. “Hmmm,” I started, having no idea how to answer our six-year-old child’s perfectly reasonable question. We’d brought Nathaniel along on our latest extended stay in the Beng villages of Côte d’Ivoire, and these fi rst days he’d clung to us closely. But today, when some older boys had jostled into the compound of my old friend Amenan and passed back and forth a scratched and dirty soccer ball in need of air, collecting an audience for a game they were about to start, nine-year-old Bapu had grasped Nathaniel’s hand, then his scrawny younger cousin Medá held the other hand, and they led our son away for the impending fun. As Nathaniel smiled tentatively at all the attention, Philip and I followed. “Jouez, jouez!” a growing group of children called out as we all marched to a flat field facing some squat, concrete block buildings that

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Being There served as housing for the village’s elementary schoolteachers. Small wooden stools were found for Philip and me; Nathaniel, too young and shy to play, settled into Philip’s lap. Now, with the field filled with the cries and laughter of the players running back and forth through the dust they kicked up, we could barely follow what was going on. “Bonjour.” Philip and I turned to see a young man who had silently settled on the ground beside us without our noticing. “Bonjour,” we responded, surprised that he hadn’t greeted us in Beng. “Bienvenue à notre village,” the short young man continued, in a French that sounded like it came from the village rather than from school. He shook our hands, and I asked out of habit in Beng, “Ngwo mi si paw?”—What’s your name? Again he answered in French, “My name is Emmanuel. People call me Matatu, but I don’t like that name.” His gaze lingered on us a bit too long, his easy familiarity a  bit too easy, but then a dusty scuffle on the field diverted our attention.

Philip: Casting Spells I looked up from the table, and there was that fellow we’d met at the soccer game, the odd one. He stood too close to me, smiling, but I’d grown used to my sense of personal space being violated—the Beng standard of curiosity demanded close quarters. I went through the usual exchange of morning greetings and prepared to return to my typewriter when he backed away a few steps and brought something he held in his hand up to his face, positioning it. It looked like one of those Marlboro cigarette hard packs. Avoiding Beng once again, he said, “Bonjour,” made a clicking voice, moved a foot to his left, and clicked his tongue again.

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Mad to Be Modern The cigarette pack, I guessed, was his idea of a camera, and when he clicked again I decided to go along with the joke. I sat up straight and drained my face of all humor or expression—the typical stiff expression of a Beng person posing in front of a camera. Two could play this game of cultural reversal. A few people in the compound laughed at the sight of me. The fellow—I couldn’t remember his name—took this as encouragement and framed me in his sight again and again until the joke lost its energy, became strained. I returned to my noisy typing, the keys’ clacking competing with his clicking sounds, which he now directed toward Alma and Nathaniel. Soon enough, he gave up the game—but then pulled up a chair and sat beside me. I tried to pretend he wasn’t there, but he held out his cigarette pack for me to admire, and I gave it a glance. It had been altered somehow, and when he saw my interest, he smiled and motioned for me to hold it. He’d cut out a circular hole near the top of both sides and used the excised cardboard to fashion the raised rim of a lens. He’d even rigged up a little square in one corner as a viewfinder. Clearly his little joke was more premeditated than I’d imagined. “It’s my camera,” he said in French, “and me, I’m the prime minster.” I nodded, admired his prized creation, gave him a nod of respect, and then showed the cigarette pack to Alma, then to Nathaniel. Our son carefully examined its intricacies, then raised it and took a picture of the young man, who feigned unhappiness that the fiction of cultural reversal had been broken. He demanded his camera back and soon left the compound. “Wow, what a comedian,” I said to Alma, though I couldn’t help wondering if there was something more to this encounter; his unhappiness at the end had seemed a little too real. It wouldn’t take long for us to find out, since Amenan was already making a beeline to us, her juicy-gossip face firmly in place—at times like this, Amenan was most Amenan.

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Being There She found a seat, smoothed a few crinkles on the pagne skirt over her legs, and said, “That was Matatu. He’s mad, you know.” “Mad?” Alma repeated, unsure she’d heard correctly. “He used to be the village barber. He’s been well for over a year, but since you arrived in Asagbé . . .” Amenan paused. “Now he’s back to saying that he’s the prime minister of Côte d’Ivoire.” Alma glanced at me, her face stricken. What I thought had been a perfor mance of village stand-up now slipped from the realm of entertainment onto another stage, one on which there was little laughter. Anthropologists like to think they can be invisible while conducting fieldwork, even if they know that’s impossible. Now our simple presence might actually be triggering a young man’s return to mental illness. Or was our presence here really all that “simple”? In this village with no electricity or running water, we’d brought with us a caravan of Western goodies— examples of a world far beyond the reach of the villagers. Just on the table before me sat my typewriter, a hand pump for purifying water, and Alma’s tape recorder. Our material entourage was anything but invisible. t h e f o l l o w i n g e v e n i n g , a s w e scarfed down bowls of rice with bits of smoked fish and tomato sauce cooked for Amenan’s family by her oldest daughter, Matatu returned to the compound. After the usual call-and-response of Beng ritual greetings, we invited him to join us for dinner, but he shook his head. Over his shoulder was slung a large sack that he set down beside us, taking out an offering of oranges and pineapples. It was a generous gift, and we thanked him. Matatu smiled and announced, “I really worked hard this morning!” The flashlights on our table caught Matatu’s eye, and he picked them up one by one, admiring their various details. “C’est jolie, c’est intéréssant,” he repeated, with the air of a connoisseur. He flipped knowingly through an abridged edition of Robinson Crusoe I’d been

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Mad to Be Modern reading to Nathaniel at bedtime, then stared intently at Alma’s watch. In a spirit of exchange, he produced a weathered rectangle of a card for us to examine, from the Centre de Santé Mentale in Bouake, which recorded his name and diagnosis: manifestation psychose. Was this an admission of his madness, or did he not know what it said? Cautiously following Matatu’s lead, I said, “C’est intéréssant, c’est jolie,” and he nodded his head solemnly, accepting my appraisal. Then, as if some test had been passed, he dug deeper into his sack and pulled out what he presented as treasures—an empty matchbox, a brown zipper, two empty perfume bottles—while saying almost pleadingly, “Ce n’est pas bon?” “Oui, c’est très bon,” Alma and I replied, a call-and-response exchange we continued as Matatu took out of his bag in succession a cassette without a case, an old leather wallet, an empty medicine bottle, a crumple of tinfoil, and a discarded wrapper from a pack of cookies we’d given Nathaniel as a treat. Matatu must have found this last treasure by scrounging through the garbage at the edge of the compound. Alma and I exchanged careful glances. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, Matatu announced, “In Abidjan, I’ll drink ice water!” Before Alma and I could fashion a polite response, he reached into his bag again and drew out a tin of sardines. He opened the can and demanded a plate from Amenan, saying, “I am the prime minster of Asagbé.” After emptying the oily fish on the plate, he began eating with his fingers, gorging himself in a kind of miming, I imagined, of Big Man behavior. Between bites, he declared, “I have a car made of gold,” and, “Tomorrow I’m going to buy a bicycle and give it to my father.” Alma, Nathaniel, and I sat as if pinned to our chairs, watching in fascination, and I fought the impulse to cover my son’s eyes, afraid I might call attention to the disturbing edge of Matatu’s strange perfor mance. By then a crowd had gathered—the usual village reaction to any diverting behavior. Someone said something to Matatu in a derisive

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Being There voice. Matatu stopping licking his fingers and responded with a shout in French, “You’re a bad guy, I’m going to throw you in prison!” Everyone laughed; I grimaced inside at the crowd’s casual cruelty. Matatu pretended not to hear, but in short order he collected his bag of tricks and left. As the crowd dispersed, Alma’s college-educated research assistant Bertin, who’d been watching from a corner of the compound, walked over and said in a whisper, “It’s witchcraft that made Matatu mad.” I offered a noncommittal “Hmmm,” though I secretly agreed. The witchcraft, however, was not the village variety; instead, it had the pedigree of Western culture, and Alma, Nathaniel, and I appeared to be its inadvertent practitioners. Like it or not, we were casting spells.

Alma: Chasing behind Us The alarm beeped—too loudly—in the pre-dawn darkness, and Philip groaned in bed as I turned it off. Though this was early for us, the women in our compound were already up, some preparing a fi re for the morning meal, some marching off—with empty basins balanced on their head—to gather water at the village pump. Within minutes, Philip, Nathaniel, and I were dressed, our bags already packed from last night, and we hurried to haul our gear into the car. Amenan clucked at us that we wouldn’t wait for breakfast, but we wanted to leave as early as possible for Abidjan, where we’d stock up on medicines for the villagers, and familiar foods that Nathaniel would eat. What I didn’t tell my friend was that we hoped to leave before Matatu woke up, to avoid a scene. If he caught wind of our plan, no doubt he’d insist, in that strange imperious way he could slip into, on coming with us. We’d already disappointed him recently. A few days earlier, Barbara Brown, a development officer from the U.S. Embassy, had visited the village because she hoped to contribute funds to projects we were planning with the Beng, using the royalties from our newly published

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Mad to Be Modern book on the Beng, Parallel Worlds. I’d introduced Barbara to the Asagbé elders, and then, as we’d prepared to drive to Kosangbé for another meeting, Matatu tried to worm his way into the Embassy car. Of course—he was the prime minister! Barbara’s expression of curiosity quickly switched to alarm, and Philip had to take Matatu aside and tell him that the Embassy lady felt unworthy of his presence in her car, and that’s why he couldn’t come along. This explanation seemed to satisfy him at the time, but in the following days he’d grown increasingly moody. So now we bade Amenan good-bye and hopped in the car. We drove along the edge of the village toward the main road, hoping that the echoing, resonant clunks of the village women pounding corn meal in wooden pestles would disguise our car engine’s puttering, all the while keeping a lookout for a young man who might be chasing behind us. w e r e t u r n e d f r o m a b i d j a n i n disarray. While in Abidjan, Philip had received a fax sent to him at the American Cultural Center that his father had passed away from a long battle with cancer; the fax had reached us too late to return in time for the funeral. Distraught over the loss of this possible closure, and inspired by the need to honor his father, Philip had asked me, “Maybe we could hold a Beng funeral?” I’d immediately agreed. I knew some sort of ceremony would be necessary for my husband to work through his grief. Though we’d been to many Beng funerals as observers, not active mourners, perhaps a village ceremony—with its long lines of ritual wailing, all-night singing sessions, and animal sacrifices—might give Philip a new emotional vocabulary to help him mourn. Yet the entire drive back to Asagbé, I could see on his face his conflicted emotions about this choice, that perhaps we were traveling in the wrong direction. Now, as we shared our grim news with Amenan, she immediately met with her uncle, Kokora Kouassi, one of the Beng’s most revered

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Being There religious leaders, who then offered a prayer for Philip’s father. Soon the plans for a funeral that would extend over a few weeks were set in motion. At the first quiet moment after our arrival, Amenan took the opportunity to fill us in on local gossip. Shortly after we’d left the village, she reported, Matatu had come to our compound, asking about us. When she’d explained that we’d gone to Abidjan, Matatu announced that he’d follow us. He picked a fight with his older brother, who wouldn’t lend him a bicycle. “Matatu got angry and attacked his brother with a machete. So his family strapped him to a big log on the other side of the village. And that’s how he’s been for the past few days.” Amenan paused to let the weight of this new drama sink in. Then she added, “But he’s been struggling to free himself. He’s pulled so much, the hand that’s tied to the log has really swelled up. They’ll probably free him because of the swollen hand— even though he’s still crazy.” “My god, this is terrible!” I burst out. Philip said nothing, but I thought I could read the misery on his face. This summer in Africa he’d not only lost the opportunity to be at his dying father’s side, but he seemed to be reawakening a young man’s madness. I winced, and kept to myself another fear. What else might come of Matatu’s increasing obsession with our family?

Philip: Border Crossings I pounded away at the typewriter keyboard, its clatter and slowness intruding on the pace of the novel I was shaping, when I heard Germain arrive in the compound and offer his greetings, followed by Alma and Amenan’s responses. I decided to stay put and try to dig deeper into a scene at a bowling alley where Gladys, my fictional mother, was spooked by the face made by the three finger holes of a bowling ball.

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Mad to Be Modern Alma peered through the screen door. “Germain is here with Matatu’s father, Yao. You might want to be part of this.” I did. This was another drama I felt bound to, even a part of, however unwillingly. And eerily enough, Gladys’s descent into madness, in this novel I’d been working on for a couple of years, echoed Matatu’s present troubles. I’d grown accustomed to these sorts of eerie, border-crossing correspondences. During the various ceremonies of my father’s village funeral, Kokora Kouassi had been visiting me in the mornings to report his dreams—in which my American father appeared, now adjusting to the Beng afterlife. Though my father was being given an elaborate Beng funeral, it had never occurred to me that he would now be considered an ancestor in Wurugbé, the Beng afterlife. Knowing that the Beng believe the dead exist invisibly among the living, I found it comforting to think of my father’s spirit hovering in our compound. I left my desk and sat beside Alma on one of the chairs that Amenan had set out in a circle. With typical Beng formality, Germain began to speak for Matatu’s father, asking us to go to Bouaké to buy some medicines for his son. Though Alma and I had become accustomed to Germain—as the village representative of the country’s main political party—trying to squeeze some financial or political advantage out of any situation, I could see that, in this case, he was only here to represent Matatu’s family. I turned to Alma. “What do you think?” She kept her voice low, even though we were speaking in English. “I don’t think drugs are the answer.” “I agree, they didn’t help him the first time. And anyway, we couldn’t buy that sort of medicine without prescriptions.” “Maybe an African solution would be better,” Alma said, and she turned to Amenan. “Aren’t there good healers among the Djimini,” Alma asked, “ones who treat madness?”

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Being There “I know a Ghanaian man who healed a woman in Asagbé,” Amenan offered. “She used to be mad, but he cured her. He’s very good. He lives in a little village nearby.” Alma and I looked at each other. This might be a way to return Matatu back to his village culture. Maybe it was worth a try. Certainly it was worth discussing. a w e e k l a t e r , t h e G h a n a i a n healer Kouadio Ajei sat scrunched in the backseat of the car beside Alma and Nathaniel, while beside me sat Nya Kofi, Amenan’s husband, warning me of especially impressive upcoming potholes. As if I couldn’t see them myself. The French word for a narrow little trail like this was piste, but a true piste boasted superhighway status compared to this horror. Crevasses and faults in the dry soil constantly required maneuvering—which meant that the banks on either side of this piste, like the dry bed of a tiny stream, were close enough to scrape the car. Then there were patches of sandy soil that sucked the wheels to a stop, and Kofi and I had to get out and push while Alma gunned the engine, the healer and Nathaniel standing off to the side. Worse, whenever we came upon a five- or sixfoot-high termite mound in the middle of the trail, I had to squeeze around it— sometimes with the wheels high on the edge of one of the raised banks. It was the nastiest road I’d ever driven on, calling for constant attention to the slightest trick and trap, and the trail went on and on, kilometer after kilometer, as if it would never end. I grew sure that this was a little hell assigned to me for all my sins of weaving in and out of traffic when I drove a cab one long-ago summer in New York City. Finally, after emptying everyone from the car once again for the third or maybe fourth termite mound, some tenuous constraint snapped inside me. With the latest obstruction safely behind us, and the car full once again, off we drove. But now added to the dutiful rrrrrr of the engine came fi rst a murmur, then a full-throated string of the worst insults in any language that I could summon, a rising and falling, a

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Mad to Be Modern rolling along of a twisted eloquence that surprised even me. Once started, I couldn’t stop. There was no internal ignition key to turn and switch me off.

Alma: Buying Back the Spell Another day I might have bored a hole in the back of Philip’s head for this nonstop string of curses let loose within hearing range of Nathaniel. But I had to acknowledge that my husband’s foul-mouthed inventiveness was less a protest against this path-in-the-guise-of-a-road and more an outpouring of pent-up sadness at his father’s death back home. I decided to take diversionary advantage and talk to the healer about his life. I posed questions in English to Kofi, who graciously translated to the healer in Fante, then back in English—and Nathaniel, sitting beside me, had the rare experience of actually understanding what was said around him. The topic piqued his interest, and he joined in, suggesting new questions for me to ask. At first, since the subject of the interview was so—well, adult—the mother in me didn’t want to upset Nathaniel. But my young son seemed to have developed the same anthropological curiosity that motivated me. After all, in a ritual held during our first week in Asagbé, he’d already accepted without question his new village name of Denju—a name that marked him as the reincarnation of an important clan ancestor. “Do you know why Matatu went mad?” I asked the healer, waiting for him to invoke witchcraft, that all-purpose explanation when things go awry. “I do know,” the healer said quietly, after Kofi translated, “otherwise I couldn’t cure him. I can’t discuss it now. But I’ve spoken with Matatu.” “Really?” I hadn’t heard about any recent visits the healer had paid to our village.

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Being There “I heard Matatu speaking to me in my mind, just as a diviner would do. I could hear that Matatu speaks nonsense.” Nathaniel piped up. “What’s the medicine the healer will use?” I repeated the question to Nya Kofi, who translated. “The same I use for any mad patient, though I use a very strong version of herbs and plants for people who are very mad.” “Ah-heh,” I said noncommittally. I’d expected some ritual approach to reposition Matatu in his social universe—not an herbal cure. Maybe the healer sensed my skepticism, for he added, “I can cure a lot of other diseases, not just madness. But I also tell a patient if I don’t know the cure for whatever disease they may have.” Nathaniel joined in, and Kofi translated, “How come Matatu is crazy?” “I might find that a disease is caused by witchcraft,” Kouadio Ajei hinted ominously. “Then, one night while I’m alone in my house, I beg the witch or witches to reverse the spell. I ask what they need for this, and then I buy back the spell from them with whatever they ask as payment. It might be a sheep, some money, or alcohol—or just a chicken or some eggs.” As the healer continued, Nya Kofi translated, “Last night, I talked with the witches who bewitched Matatu.” Kouadio Ajei paused while this statement sank in, and Nathaniel’s eyes widened. “I met the witches,” the healer continued, “and they said they wanted money, nothing else.” “How come they didn’t get arrested?” Nathaniel asked me quietly. “I think he meant they met invisibly. Like in their dreams,” I explained. Nathaniel nodded, accustomed as he now was to hearing of his grandfather appearing in Kokora Kouassi’s dreams. “The witches said they’d need 200 CFAs—all in small change,” the healer concluded. “To pay them, I’ll give the money to the children in the village— one small coin to each child—and then the witches

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Mad to Be Modern will undo the spell on Matatu. Then, when I give Matatu my herbal medicine, the witches will allow the medicine to work.” “But who are the witches?” Nathaniel asked. The healer remained silent for a few seconds after Kofi translated, then said quietly, “Actually, the witch responsible for Matatu’s madness is his own mother.” Now it was my turn for my eyes to widen. I should have been able to predict this accusation: Beng witchcraft always operates in the maternal line. Still, I glanced at my son. What might Nathaniel make of this unexpected, perhaps unthinkable answer? A new set of especially bumpy bumps claimed our attention, and we were left to ponder the upsetting news in our solitude.

Philip: “Denju, Denju” Alma was off somewhere interviewing a young mother, and who knew where Nathaniel might be, scrambling around the village with his friends. Sitting at my desk in our mud-brick house, puzzling over Gladys, the mother in my novel who kept trying on different identities, I heard Matatu stroll into the compound and greet a circle of Amenan’s extended family lazing about and enjoying the rest day. If recent encounters were any predictor, soon he would come to the screen door and peer at me, pretend to take another photo with his cigarette box contraption, and, if I were lucky, that would be enough and he’d wander off to fi nd more of his constituents. Or maybe I could buy Matatu off with the gift of a coveted aspirin— a bribe to entice him to take the herbal medicine the Ghanaian healer had prescribed and that he was reluctant to take. No “African” medicine for him, he insisted— a prime minister required a Western cure. I decided to switch from my typewriter to my notebook—if Matatu didn’t hear me, maybe I could avoid another session of his ministerial adventures and proclamations.

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Being There On the other hand, I thought, maybe a visit from Matatu would give me the creative spark I needed. I was having trouble with the mad mother in my novel, not sure what she’d do next in the kitchen while her children sat frightened at the table. I heard the murmur of Matatu’s voice outside, followed by bursts of laughter from Amenan’s family at what must have been one of his wilder assertions of power and dominion. Then, increasingly, I heard his rising tone of anger, and his usual threat of capital punishment— “Je vais te condamner à mort!”—I condemn you to death! Then, stone silence. A bad silence. I pushed back my chair and walked to the screen door. Matatu held the sharp edge of his broken scissors against the neck of Amenan’s younger sister, Ti. No one moved, all eyes on that blade. “I’m the prime minister! I’m the prime minister!” Matatu shouted. Her neck arched back painfully, her eyes on him, Ti managed to say through pressed lips, “Yes, you are the prime minister.” With a satisfied grunt he stepped away from her, bent down, and rummaged through that bag of his. Everyone else went back to hushed nervous chatting, trying to pretend nothing had happened. Still feeling the adrenaline rush of fear inside me, I returned to my desk, but moments later I noticed Matatu crouching on the ground, only a few feet away from my screen door. Still searching through his magic bag, he pulled out a small wooden box. Then, with his scissors he began dismantling the little box, piece by piece, all the while singing an improvised song in an eerie, childlike voice, and I realized this song had only one word: “Denju, Denju, Denju, Denju.” Matatu hacked away at what was by then a former box, hacked it down to chips, still chanting my son’s African name while I watched in hypnotized horror, watched Matatu as if he were slicing my child with every arch and sweep of his arm. Where was Nathaniel, anyway? Off on his usual adventures in the village, safely far from the compound, I realized. But what if he came back, this minute or the next?

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Mad to Be Modern I shook off my shock, stood up, and reached for that stick of wood, the table leg that never was, which Nathaniel had collected from a carpenter. No way was Matatu getting near my real flesh-and-blood son. By now Matatu was sweeping the tiny wooden pieces into a cupped hand and returning them to his bag. Who knew what other transformations they might go through in his troubled mind before he was done with them? Matatu stood, slung the bag over his shoulder, and left the compound. Suddenly my distant son was not so safe. I rushed out of the house and saw our compound-mates staring, stunned, at Matatu’s departure. So they had seen what I had seen. “Where is Denju? We have to find Denju,” I blurted out, and then I remembered that Alma was off at an interview, oblivious to whatever Matatu might be planning. I could imagine Matatu catching a glimpse of her, sitting on a tree bark mat with a young mother and child, chatting casually about baby bathing techniques or childhood stomach complaints, and then he’d approach her, that unsettling smile on his lips. Who should I search for, protect first?

Alma: So Many Prime Ministers My interview with a new, nursing mother over, I returned to our compound where I found an agitated Philip atypically locking the wooden door to our mud-brick house. Why would he do this? “What’s up?” I asked. I listened, nearly numb, as Philip quickly recounted the two frightening scissors incidents. “Who knows what Matatu’s planning?” he blurted out. “We’ve got to find Nathaniel!” Amenan’s family had already fanned out through the village in opposite directions, searching the tracks that Nathaniel’s sandals made on the dusty paths, and before Philip and I were able to join them our son was soon returned to the compound, safe and sound. Oblivious to

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Being There the danger he might have been in, Nathaniel started happily building a new Lego construction with his friends. Meanwhile, Philip sent word to Germain, and soon a gathering of village elders convened. Matatu was truly acting erratically and violently. No one could feel safe with him around, nor was anyone convinced that village remedies—“African people’s medicines”— could help him. Quickly the elders reached a decision: they would send Matatu back to the psychiatric hospital in the city. As soon as he got word of the plan, Matatu protested so loudly he had to be restrained and tied up again. But he managed to escape and run away, and in the days that followed, too often I thought I saw him lurking in the corner of my vision. o n e e v e n i n g a f t e r w e s e t t l e d Nathaniel—worn out from another day of playing hard under an African sun—into bed and sleep, Philip and I returned to the courtyard and sat around the hearth’s dying embers. There we revisited with Amenan the latest act in Matatu’s drama, his possible fate, as we’d received word today that he had been found wandering on foot on a dirt road some eighty miles away. Exhausted and compliant, he was promptly delivered to the hospital in Bouaké. Why didn’t I feel relieved? “You know,” Amenan said, “Matatu’s not the only one.” Philip looked up from the mesmerizing embers. “What do you mean?” “A few other young Beng men are crazy too,” Amenan explained. “And in just the same way Matatu is.” “Really?” I said. “There’s another one who’s even crazier than Matatu,” my friend continued. “He went to a hospital in Burkina Faso, and they cured him with some medicines. But he escaped and walked all the way back to Asagbé! When the rice ripened, he went mad again. His family has no more money for another cure.”

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Mad to Be Modern “Have we met him?” I asked. “I doubt it,” Amenan answered. “He lives alone in the savanna. He’s not violent, though. He laughs a lot. He can speak well. And he calls himself the premier ministre—just like Matatu.” “Mon dieu!” I exclaimed. “There’s a couple more, in some other villages. They all say they’re the prime minister,” Amenan said, “and they threaten to condemn you to death if you insult them. Strange, isn’t it?” Philip and I had long suspected that Matatu’s creative delusions of grandeur, his claims to wealth, and his imagined collection of Western goods fashioned from cast-off scraps somehow meant more than the tragedy of one young man whose life had gone awry. Now, learning that Matatu was not alone in his symptoms, I wondered if this was less madness than almost reasonable despair. In recent years the government had shifted from moderate to extravagant corruption, the world commodity prices for the country’s agricultural products had collapsed, and jobs for high school and even college graduates had vanished in the smoke of development’s broken promises. With little hope to grasp at, Matatu had joined his fellow prime ministers in imagined power rather than face the near certainty of lifelong poverty. Philip seemed to have read my mind as he said, “When I think of how we showed up with all this stuff — cameras, a typewriter, even a car, for God’s sake—it must have undone the guy. Every day, we pushed in his face how poor he is and always will be. We’re lucky we haven’t driven anyone else nuts.” I nodded. Though the healer’s explanation—which was now the village’s—made sense for Beng religion and family structure, I felt hard-pressed to accept it. Amenan’s announcement that many more prime ministers populated the Beng landscape underlined for me the troubling territory between madness and the modern, and what my family’s privileged presence might have sparked in Matatu’s precariously balanced inner life.

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Being There In the silence that claimed Amenan’s revelation, I became aware of a child tearfully protesting a late-night bath in a neighboring compound, then the crackling of the hearth’s dying fire. I rested my spiral notebook on my lap, turned on the flashlight I always kept with me in the dark, clicked open my pen, and began to write.

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4 The Evil Eye of the Anthropologist Ruth Behar T o t h e wo m e n o f M exqu i t i c

Only a few months married, my husband, David, and I loaded up the car with our clothes and books and went to live in Mexquitic, a small town carved out of the craggy hills in central Mexico. David had chosen to study agrarian reform there for his dissertation, and I had gone with him out of a sense of fairness. After all, he’d accompanied me for several years while I did my dissertation research in a Spanish village. The president of Mexquitic gave us permission to live in a municipal warehouse. It was on the outskirts of town, and filthy and abandoned. We could have it for a year or two if we fi xed it up. At first we were miserable when we saw what they were offering—a long rectangular room with a high ceiling facing an enormous patio of broken cement. All the way on the other end of the patio was the bathroom, a toilet with an adjoining shower stall so close to the street you could hear the “buenos días” and “buenas tardes” of people walking by. The bathroom lacked electricity, so at night we had to find our way with a flashlight. Even during the daytime I felt scared to shower alone, so David waited outside the stall while I bathed. He’d stand around patiently until I was done, then bundle me up in two towels he’d kept warm next to his chest.

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Being There We were twenty-five and felt we were still on our honeymoon. Slowly we turned the ugly warehouse into our little nest. We found a used bed in the nearby city of San Luis Potosí. David bought strips of wood and made a table and a bookshelf. Wicker chairs from the market came next. At the FONART, the regional chapter of the national chain of handicrafts stores, I saw a wooden dresser embellished with hand-carved flowers and decided it was an extravagance we couldn’t do without. Several yards of white gauze created a canopy over our heads. On our two-burner electric stove we cooked beans and quesadillas, which we ate with avocados we divided into two halves. We were so in love that David always took the half with the pit so I wouldn’t have to bother with it. At the market I found humble but beautiful Mexican plates made of red clay. We sipped sparkling Agua de Lourdes out of tall glasses rimmed in sky blue and pretended we were drinking champagne. Our patio grew prettier each day. After David cleared away the rubble, I lined the patio with pots filled with orange geraniums and fuchsia bougainvillea. I was living in Mexico, but I spent my days writing about Spain. I was a few chapters short of being done with my thesis. I stayed indoors and tried to force myself to fi nish quickly. It was such a strange sensation— my head in one place and my body in another. David ventured out of our nest each day and met the townspeople and brought back the news of whom he’d met and what he’d seen. I was so hidden, people joked with David that he kept his young wife locked up because he didn’t want local men feasting their eyes on me. Had we been in a city, no one would have cared about the foreign woman who could be seen now and then watering her geraniums. She was neither a gringa nor a mexicana—it wasn’t clear what she was. One afternoon a group of women came to our front gate, which we had been instructed to keep locked at all times with a thick iron chain and a padlock, whether or not we were home. A local schoolteacher named Sylvia led the group. The women were curious about me, the

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The Evil Eye of the Anthropologist mysterious wife of the gringo. They had come to say hello and see if I was doing alright. I invited them inside. They came in only as far as the patio. Sylvia said they knew I had work to do. She asked what kind of work I was doing that was keeping me so busy. I said I was writing a thesis and when I finished it and presented it to my professors in the United States, I would become a doctora in anthropology. Sylvia smiled. “You must be very smart,” she said. I didn’t think I was at all. It was taking me too long to finish the damn thesis. I was plodding along, stuck in the mud of all the things I was struggling to say. Sylvia reached for a plastic bucket covered with an embroidered white cloth napkin, its fringes also crocheted in white. “We brought you some tamales,” she said. She lifted the cloth and I could smell the warm corn and chile. It was all I could do not to reach in and eat one right then and there. Instead I asked Sylvia and her companions to stay and eat them with me. They politely shook their heads. “No, these tamales are for you and your husband,” Sylvia said. “We came for a short visit. We don’t want to rob any more of your time.” I wanted Sylvia and the other women to stay longer. I was enjoying their company, and the thought of having to lock myself inside and keep writing felt unbearably lonely to me now. At the door Sylvia asked, “How is it you speak Spanish so well?” “I was born in Cuba,” I said. “But I’ve lived in the United States since I was a child.” “So you don’t suffer when you cross the border. You can go back and forth without any problems.” “Yes,” I said in a small voice. I hoped this admission wouldn’t turn them against me.

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Being There The women took their leave, and Sylvia told me to bolt the door shut. “It’s safe here, but you never know,” she said. “You’re a woman and you’re by yourself most of the day.” She waited until I was locked up inside to say good-bye and run and catch up with the other women. I hurried back to our nest, closed the door, and tore into one of the tamales. Petals of the corn husk fell away. I savored the sweetness of the dough, the cleansing sting of the chile. I imagined the hands of the women who had made these tamales, one by one. I ate another tamale and then another. Finally I sat down and began clicking and clacking at the keys of the manual typewriter. I was a fast typist. I’d learned to type without looking at the keys when I was ten years old and recovering from a broken leg. With my eyes closed, half-dreaming, I wrote a lot that day. The taste of Mexico was in my mouth. I was more anxious than ever to be done with my thesis and come out of hiding. i t t o o k s e v e r a l m o n t h s , b u t at last I finished and went back to Princeton to defend my work and receive my doctorate. On my return to Mexquitic in the summer, I barely spent any time indoors. I went from house to house getting to know the women. All of them had children, many children. If a woman couldn’t have children of her own, someone, a sister, a cousin, gave her a child to bring up. To be a woman, you had to be a mother. Sylvia, admired for being a schoolteacher who taught first-graders to read with the greatest of ease, was no exception. I watched her elegantly handle a household that included her mother-in-law, Doña Chonita, her father-in-law, Don Pedro, her husband, Manuel, who was also a schoolteacher, and their seven children. One afternoon we went with Sylvia and Manuel to a fiesta in a nearby rancho. The fiesta was being hosted by their friends, and the mother of the family, together with all the women in the neighborhood, had spent a week grinding chiles, peanuts, almonds, sesame seeds, and

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The Evil Eye of the Anthropologist chunks of Abuelita chocolate for the mole, to be served with tomato rice and tortillas. It was a warm and sunny day, but I noticed that Sylvia wore a wool serape that covered the front of her body. She was sweating from the heat and from the mole. Afterwards I sat with her in the pickup truck waiting for Manuel and David to return so we could head back to Mexquitic. She took off the serape and told me she was pregnant but didn’t want anyone to know. I asked her why. She said that at thirty-eight she felt too old to be having another child. She hadn’t expected to have any more children at her age. The pregnancy had left her feeling out of control. By the end of the summer Sylvia’s youngest daughter was born. She was a delight to the family and a surprise to the neighbors, who whispered playfully about how La Maestra Sylvia had kept her big tummy a secret from everyone. Sylvia lived in a large ancient house in the center of town that belonged to Doña Chonita. Even with the birth of one more child, there was room enough, food enough, and love enough to go around. But most women in Mexquitic weren’t so fortunate. Like the old woman who lived in a shoe, they had more children than they could house, feed, and love. Their husbands yelled a lot and often beat their wives. The men of that generation thought it beneath them to use contraception and refused to let their wives use it, because their manhood was expressed in their ability to father numerous children. Those women who had their husbands’ permission to use contraception— usually an IUD—had to have the device removed when the men went across the border in search of work. This way, if the wives had sex with other men while their husbands were away, they’d get pregnant, proof they’d been unfaithful. The young doctor from the city of San Luis Potosí, who was in Mexquitic doing her social service, was lonely and unaccustomed to living in the countryside. She felt as much an outsider as I, so we became friends.

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Being There But like the women in Mexquitic, the doctora believed a woman had the responsibility to bear children. “You should have three children,” she told me as we relaxed in the white-walled office of the clinic after she put in a long day vaccinating babies. “This is why you need to have three. Having just one child is too sad. If you have two and one dies, you’ll still only have one. Have three, and if one dies, at least you’ll have two.” She’d spent too much time in the countryside and seen that it was full of babies who’d died from poverty and malnutrition. But she also had a Mexican sensibility about life’s fragility and knew that, at the snap of a fi nger, death could come swooping down and take away a beloved child. And yet, from what I could see, infant mortality was declining in Mexquitic, thanks to the concern for public health shown by people like the doctora. One night she sent a boy running to find me. “The doctora says you should come quick,” he cried. “Don’t delay.” I was needed to help deliver a baby. At the clinic the woman was about to give birth to her thirteenth child. Despite all the practice she’d had, she was weeping and moaning. The doctora told me to hold the woman’s hand and console her. Finally the baby slipped out, covered in a chemise of muck and slime, which the doctora said were pieces of the woman’s decomposing womb. It took me two hours to get the baby clean with cotton balls. A few months later the woman became pregnant again. She had complications at birth and needed to be rushed to the hospital in San Luis Potosí. At the hospital, without asking for permission, the doctors tied her tubes. She had been bearing babies since she was fifteen. Her husband was furious. He raged at his wife, cursing and kicking her, convinced that the shutdown of her womb was a conspiracy between her and the doctors. Soon after, he left her. i wa s i n m y m i d - t w e n t i e s and felt too young to even be thinking of having children, but the more I hung out with the local

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The Evil Eye of the Anthropologist women, the stranger I felt about being childless. I wanted to tell them that I too had created something, not a baby of flesh and blood but a work of intellectual concentration, my doctoral thesis, into which I’d poured years of time and effort. A piece of my soul was lodged in that thesis too. I was scared and excited for this thesis of mine, which would soon exist independently of me. My professors had actually thought it good enough to be published. I couldn’t find any way to say all this to the women in Mexquitic, to express to them the idea that it was possible for a woman to create life with her head rather than her womb. There was a woman in Mexquitic who’d call out, whenever she saw David and me, “Adam and Eve, Eve and Adam! Are you two going to be alone forever? Who’ll heat up tortillas for you when you’re old?” A woman I barely knew, sitting next to me at a fiesta, passed me a Coca-Cola and whispered, “I know a good doctor in San Luis Potosí who can help you if you’re having problems getting pregnant.” Visiting a woman named Petra at her home, I remember she asked me my age and said, “What are you waiting for? The best time in a woman’s life to have children is in her twenties. After you turn thirty your hips get hard and inflexible.” She squeezed my hips with her palms. “Ay Dios santo, they’re already tight. Don’t wait much longer.” Then there were the legends of La Llorona, the Weeping Woman, who cried for her dead children—taken from her by the conquerors of Mexico or, in other versions of the story, abandoned or aborted by her and lamented too late. If you listened in the middle of the night, you could hear her holler worse than a madwoman. David and I had always used contraception. Neither of us knew whether we were fertile. What if, after the great care we took to prevent a pregnancy, we discovered we couldn’t have children? This question began to obsess me, and on one of our trips back across the border to Texas—where we went every six months in order to re-cross into Mexico and renew our visas—I picked up books about women’s

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Being There health, fertility, and pregnancy. I started making notes of when I ovulated. I became aware of the days in the month when I might have a child if I let myself. Meanwhile, our grant money was running out. We had been in Mexquitic for nearly three years. Did we want to stay and become expatriates? We daydreamed about buying some land and building a house. But we had no savings. Trying to be practical, I sent out applications for postdoctoral fellowships in the United States. These were prestigious fellowships, and I didn’t have much confidence I’d receive any of them. There was a curandera—a healer—in a neighboring rancho. I wanted to get to know her, but I’d been told that she didn’t want to be interviewed. She’d only see me if I went to her seeking assistance for a genuine problem. She was famous in the region for giving men spiritual cleansings and talismans to help them get across the border safely. She lived in a shack that smelled of copal and frankincense and the marigold bouquets she kept on her altar. I told the curandera I was worried about our future. I was waiting to hear about a job across the border. What if nothing came through? What would my husband and I do next? She brushed me with some herbs, performing a limpia on me, a spiritual cleansing, and told me to get three white flowers and place them under our mattress. I’d have my answer soon. I did as the curandera said. After a few weeks I forgot all about the flowers under my mattress. o n e a f t e r n o o n I w e n t t o visit an elderly woman, Doña Bartola, whom I’d gotten to know well. She lived with her daughter and granddaughter in the center of town. She was frail and suffered from tuberculosis, but she enjoyed telling me stories about her life. Her granddaughter sold enchiladas potosinas at the doorstep of their house twice a week, and we often stopped by to eat a plateful of these delicate

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The Evil Eye of the Anthropologist chile-soaked tortillas, lightly fried and topped with chopped onions, grated cheese, and sour cream. I ate the enchiladas and was invited inside the house to chat. David had an errand to do and said he’d return later. In one of the bedrooms off the central courtyard I found Doña Bartola sitting on a wooden bench next to the bed. She motioned for me to sit on the bed. A baby was asleep next to the headboard between two pillows, a little girl, maybe nine months old. We proceeded to talk, not paying attention to the baby. After a while, the little one woke up and began to kick her feet and cry. Doña Bartola continued speaking as if nothing had happened. “Her mother will attend to the baby when she’s done selling enchiladas.” The baby’s demands for attention grew. She kicked her feet with more urgency, and her wails grew louder. Doña Bartola didn’t budge. Her mother remained at the doorstep, selling enchiladas. I couldn’t bear to see the baby unattended, so I picked up the child and embraced her. She immediately calmed down. I rocked her back and forth, arranged pillows to sit her up on the bed. She waited to see what I’d do next. I tickled her feet and she cooed with pleasure. Then she got tired and began to fidget, so I picked her up again. I sat her on my lap and rocked her up and down, up and down. Doña Bartola looked on, not saying a word. When the mother finally came to look in on her daughter, the baby was happily nestled in my arms. I felt I’d done something helpful by attending to the baby and was taken aback when the mother whisked her daughter away from me without saying a word. Soon after, David returned from his errand and we left. The next morning another of Doña Bartola’s granddaughters knocked on our door. She came bearing a message. “My grandmother needs to see you right away.” I followed the girl to Doña Bartola’s house, wondering what terrible emergency had taken place. At the door, Doña Bartola awaited me. She looked somber, as did the mother of the baby girl.

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Being There The mother of the girl said, “The baby cried all night.” “I’m sorry to hear that.” Doña Bartola turned to me. “We think you gave the baby ojo. Will you please squeeze her head and wipe her with your blouse so we can be sure you didn’t mean her any harm?” I was shocked by this request, but I did as she asked. How could I have meant any harm to the baby? I still felt they owed me a thank-you for entertaining the baby the day before. But it turned out they thought just the opposite. They thought I’d spooked the little one. Given her the evil eye. Hurt her with my longing and my envy. Fortunately, by the next day, the child recovered. I was the one who felt anguished. By what right had I picked up a child who didn’t belong to me and held her so close, so tenderly? n o t l o n g a f t e r t h a t i n c i d e n t , I went to get the mail from Doña Márgara. The post office delivered all the mail for the entire municipality to her store. I learned early to be on good terms with her, because if not she withheld your mail, told you that no one had written to you, told you to come back tomorrow and see if you had better luck. I’d periodically go and buy a soda or a bolillo bun from her and pretend I wasn’t in the least interested in the mail. She had a curious way of dealing with the mail. She would dump the entire contents of the burlap bag onto the floor and then pick up the letters one by one and sort them. I watched her painstakingly go through the mail as I sipped an orange soda. When she was done, she casually passed two letters to me, which had been tucked between some bottles of cooking oil. “These are for you. They arrived yesterday.” The letters were about my postdoctoral applications. I opened them and couldn’t believe it. I’d won not one but two fellowships! The white flowers had given me their answer, just as the curandera had said they would.

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The Evil Eye of the Anthropologist No, we weren’t going to be expatriates after all. There was a life, a purpose, calling to us back on the other side of the border. t h e 1 9 8 5 e a r t h q u a k e i n M e x i c o City was brewing as we packed up the car again, filling it with all the Mexican pots and glasses we could squeeze in, and headed to Baltimore. I’d strung together a one-year fellowship at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and a three-year fellowship at the University of Michigan. We knew our destination for the next four years. In Baltimore we sublet a house from an Orthodox Jewish couple. They got around the restriction of having to sleep in separate beds during the wife’s menstrual cycle by placing two single beds side by side. David and I marveled at this arrangement. In those days a single bed was big enough for us. We slept in each other’s arms all night. I didn’t notice it right away, but as time went on, I started to feel a little off-kilter in the mornings. I felt desperately hungry, and yet when I tried to eat I couldn’t get anything down. I felt sad, I felt delirious. Everything inside me and around me seemed lopsided. What was happening? Why did I feel drunk all the time? Were these physical sensations the result of my nerves? I was feeling pressured to appear smart and poised, to say brilliant things at the various academic events I was expected to attend. I needed to prove I’d been worth the fellowship, and I was experiencing a terrible bout of impostor syndrome. Or perhaps I had a real illness— some form of cancer that was attacking my bones and blood? I went to the local health clinic expecting to receive frightening news about my health. Instead I learned that the women I’d come to know in Mexquitic had done their magic on me. I was pregnant. I was twenty-eight, two years to go before I turned thirty. My hips, I hoped, were still flexible enough to allow me to carry a child. Early in the pregnancy I suffered from nausea and headaches, but during the second part I was relaxed and happy and no longer so

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Being There worried about what my colleagues thought of me. David brought me breakfast in bed each morning—an omelet and toast. As my belly grew and I felt the baby kicking way up into my ribs, I knew my child was going to have long limbs. I got a burst of energy and became very productive, sending several academic articles out for publication. Summer began and we packed up. Before I left the borrowed house, I glanced back at the two adjoining single beds where our son had been conceived. I knew exactly the moment I’d gotten pregnant—when in the heat of passion we’d skipped the condom. How badly I must have wanted a child! Our only swerve from contraception had resulted in pregnancy. Doña Bartola had seen that longing welling up in me before I’d seen it in myself. I drove our car all the way to Ann Arbor, Michigan. David followed behind in a U-Haul. We had acquired more things and there wasn’t room for them in the car. I barely fit behind the steering wheel. We stopped every two hours so I could go to the bathroom. In Ann Arbor during the months of June and July, I cried every day. I’d wake each morning and weep. Maybe it was hormones. Maybe La Llorona was haunting me. Or maybe I was crying out of fear of what would come next in my life. Could I become a mother and still read books and dream of writing my own? Or would I be forced to give up the life I knew to attend to the little one’s needs day and night? What did I know about being a mother? The world was full of dangers, everything from lightning and murderers to burning fires and ghosts. And there were dangers, too numerous to name, cleverly hidden from view. Beautiful roses had cruel thorns. Did I know how to protect my child from the evil eye? I was so worried that when it came time to give birth, I couldn’t let the baby out. I was in labor for three days. A midwife attended to me at the hospital and she managed to convince the doctor not to give me a C-section. But the doctor had to wrest my child from me with forceps. The midwife said in the past I would surely have died in childbirth.

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The Evil Eye of the Anthropologist Finally my son was born—at exactly a minute after midnight. I’d been clenching my teeth for several hours. My jaw was stiff, and I couldn’t speak. My tailbone cracked during the contractions, and it hurt beyond words. Rage burst from my heart, rage at the universe, at God, for the body-breaking labor assigned to women since the expulsion from Eden. Then my son was placed in my arms. He had scratches and bruises from his perilous journey through the birth canal. He was awake and looked at me with eyes that seemed to say he knew, he knew what I’d been through, he knew and he was sorry. He was a messenger from another world. The women in Mexquitic had sent him to me. This gift. This angel. Had it been up to the women in Mexquitic, they would have sent me many more. But I decided only to have one child. When I returned later with my son and told them now I was also a profesora and had to teach lots of students and read lots of books and write my own books in order to make a living, they nodded and tried to understand. At least finally I was a mother, so I no longer posed a threat—I wouldn’t gaze at any of their babies with wolfish eyes. I have never stopped reading, and I have to say that the three books I wrote after my son was born are far better than the thesis I wrote before he came into the world. I passed on my love of books to him. Now he’s my most trusted reader and critic of the books I try to write. But when he first arrived, I didn’t know how things would turn out later. I needed to be sure he was really a gift, really an angel. And so I named him Gabriel. Note Thanks to Sandra Cisneros, David Frye, Sarah H. Davis, and Melvin Konner for their comments on earlier drafts of this essay. The memories of fieldwork I tell about here came back to me while I was visiting Tepotzlán in January 2009.

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5 Two Women Melvin Konner

When I think of Marjorie, two images come to mind. In each I see her face in profile, eyes wide and bright, looking off to my right. In one she is twenty, dressed for winter, about to step up into the Sugar Bowl, a nondescript Greek-owned breakfast-and-burger place a block from Brooklyn College, where left-leaning kids like us drank coffee and talked about race and peace. Her cheeks are red, a faint wisp of water vapor whitens the air around her mouth, and a domed black hat crowns her head. Love at first sight? I don’t believe in it. But at first sight a compelling sense of possibility? Undoubtedly. In the second image, five years later, she is driving a Jeep truck across northwestern Botswana, on a track barely distinct from the surrounding sand and brush. Her cheeks are flushed a bit with the Kalahari heat, a sheen of sweat lights her brow, and her frizzy brown hair is pulled back by a small, improbable red ribbon. She is smiling slightly with the thrill of determination to make this harsh environment her own. She did, and we did, to the extent that it is possible for two young urban Americans who were transplanted— or, rather, transplanted themselves—to a flat, empty, sandy world dotted with thorn bushes and the occasional acacia tree, home to eland, gemsbok, duiker, giraffes,

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Two Women leopards, lions, Herero cattle herders, Tawana scrub farmers, and the !Kung,1 or Bushmen, among the last hunter-gatherers on earth. Each of these three peoples held its fascination, but we were really only interested in one of them. They called themselves Jun/twasi, “the real people,” and they pursued their way of life in this landscape more or less as they had for millennia, with aplomb, skill, courage, grit, and a high-spirited leaning into the future. They complained constantly, trying to seem angry but often unable to suppress a trace of a smile. These complaints were our culture shock. Mi !ki baba. I’m dying, man. I’m thin unto death. Don’t you see me? Give me food. Give me sugar. Give me tobacco. Make me live. Other anthropologists had established this kind of quid pro quo with them, at the same time trying to avoid changing their culture. This, in the end, was a fool’s errand, and ethically you are caught between a rock and a hard place. You don’t, indeed, want to change the culture, but don’t you owe them something for the trouble of being studied? And aren’t you fabulously rich compared to them? And isn’t stinginess their ultimate sin? Thanks to prior research, we knew they were not starving, and that the discourse of complaint was a cultural style, something like the laments of elderly people in New York about their aches and pains and errant grown children. Yet the real shock of contact was not so much cultural—we admired their culture and wanted to learn all we could about it—but economic. In a matter of days we had gone from living in a shabby apartment in Cambridge’s Central Square to pitching a tent in a part of remote rural Africa where we were the richest people around. We had things, which we either had to withhold or give away, each in its way a bad idea. In a culture where even an infant bringing food to its mouth will be confronted with the word “Na,” meaning, “Give”— not to deprive it, certainly, but to inculcate giving as deep as it could go—we were rich and stingy, trying to find a path between the purchase

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Being There of goods and services on which our culture ran and the web of reciprocal obligations that governed theirs. We never, of course, managed to be woven into that web. But it wasn’t for lack of trying. Two stories. When Marjorie and I first began our fieldwork in 1969, we lived in a tent a few minutes’ walk from the village-camp at Dobe, following the practice of several anthropologists before us. This seemed wise, since it avoided the much greater impact we would make if we were closer. But we wanted to be closer, and after a couple of months we felt we knew the Dobe people well enough to ask them to build us a grass hut like theirs, among theirs. One of our new friends did that, in exchange for some reasonable compensation, and we moved in. However, our grass hut was about twice as tall and wide as their typical shelter, which is about large enough for a couple with two or three children to lie down in, and not nearly tall enough to stand up in. We had not asked for this, but the man who built it considered it proper for such important guests. Unfortunately, it violated the logic of grass hut architecture, and in the fi rst substantial rain its dome became a sort of cistern, collecting water that in due course collapsed onto our bedding. We had been guilty of hubris only by proxy, but hubris it still was, and the Kalahari slapped us down. Rebuilt smaller, it worked, and we were glad to be there. We felt safer among the scattered fires, bone-thin dogs, and alert, adept hunters who could rout a prowling hyena or lion long before we would even know it was there. We felt comforted by the late-night human voices chatting softly, almost musically, around one or two of the fires, punctuated by imploding clicks, even when our sleep was disturbed by the rare outburst of anger. I came to think of hunter-gatherer history as one interminable encounter group, which doubled as entertainment, the flickering flames and voices riveting our friends, and their ancestors, and ours, in ways that we with our video boxes cannot match or imagine. As we gradually became more adept in the language, we could pick out phrases and then sentences in the narrative of a day’s hunt or the

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Two Women tracks some women saw while gathering, or a debate about whether the rains as yet justified moving away from the permanent water hole. But more often the conversations were about whether this young couple should separate, or that woman should forgive her husband’s adultery, or whether a dispute about meat distribution could be resolved without splitting up the group to avert a confrontation. This, you might say, was the soap opera of hunter-gatherer life, but people were living it, not watching it. There was also music, played on a thumb piano or mouth bow, a solitary, meditative sort of music, sadly melodic but uplifting, played by a solitary man or woman sitting by a fire apart from the others, usually not for anyone but himself or herself. And sometimes, when someone was ill, or people were seeing each other again after separation, or a kudu had been killed, a few women’s voices would enter a telltale yodeling harmony, clapping in complex syncopated rhythms, which meant that if conditions were right there would be a trance dance. Then we would not stay in our hut but join at a respectful distance along with other spectators, sitting back a bit from the circle around the fire. Some months into that phase of our fieldwork, we were talking with some of our friends about this sojourn in their midst, fishing for compliments on our grass-hut life, when one of them said, well, but you have a mattress to soften the ground. So we dispensed with our two-inch slab of mostly flattened foam rubber. After a time we had that conversation again, and someone said, but you have a tarp to lie on, to keep the moisture away. Of course, they slept on animal skins, which if anything were more comfortable than our tarp. But this time we were not so obtuse as to miss the message: Who are you to think you can live the way we do, or remotely experience the challenges of our lives? So we stopped pretending. m a n y m o n t h s l a t e r I h a d become an apprentice in the trance dance and, perhaps because we were known and more or less

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Being There trusted, that did not seem to offend them. Yet this was their central and ancient religious ritual, as testified by a circle etched in stone by centuries of dancers’ feet on a ledge near the Tsodilo Hills rock paintings eighty miles north. Women sat around a fire clapping syncopated rhythms—very hard to master, even for musical Marjorie—and singing songs, sometimes wordless but always named, in voices that had a yodeling sort of quality but were much more melodic and lovely than the Swiss shepherds’ legendary calls. Men wrapped dance rattles around their lower legs and traced a circle around the women’s choir as the flames rose and blazed. They made a sound like Mexican maracas, and there was some fancy dancing and rattling, but not by the men trying to enter trance. Their steps were monotonous pounding, delivering a shock up through the shaft of the body to the base of the skull once a second or so for hours, and combined with focusing on the sounds and gazing straight ahead or into the fire, especially after years of experience, a trance would ensue. There was no doubt of its authenticity. The first time I saw a man fall out (“like death,” they call it) I thought he had had a heart attack. He was middle-aged, my friend and mentor, and I was very worried, but I soon learned that the whole discipline of trance-dancing was experiencing danger under exquisite control. Other men, in trance or not, converged on him and held and rubbed his body until he was revived into the intermediate state I was to see many times. His soul might be elsewhere, traveling to the realm of the spirits to argue on behalf of the ill, but with what remained of his strength and mind, he could move around the circle, laying hands on everyone, participant or spectator, woman, man, or child, quivering, releasing long sighs through lightly closed trembling lips, and finally shrieking to shatter the night, as the particles of illness sent from the spirit world were sucked out of someone’s body, through the healer’s hands and arms to be shot out from the nape of his neck back into the spirit world from which it had come.

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Two Women This was painful to the healer, as was the boiling up of medicine in his sides during the trance, and the willingness to endure pain was part of what conferred healing power. So was risk. When the soul leaves the body during the trance, there is a chance it won’t come back. And men in trance, especially younger ones with less control over the power, sometimes ran in straight lines at top speed into the bush to trip or crash into thorns and trees, and they often put their heads into the fire or heaped red coals over their heads with their calloused hands. To learn, you put yourself in a pair of those hands, and in my case they belonged to !Khoma, the same man whose heart I’d stupidly thought had given out. He was by far my best friend among the people, and the only one with the wisdom and humor to transcend the gulfs of culture and resentment and treat us as if we were really human— strange, but human. This despite the fact that more than once, when I had crawled under the Jeep to bang the drive train with a wrench or was fiddling with the tape recorder, !Khoma put his hand to his face, shook his head, smiled, and said, You people. You people are gods. But he treated me like a man, a big and powerful but young and ignorant man, and then, when I begged him to teach me not only the details of his language and culture but the basics of trance itself, like a pupil. I would drape myself over his body, not quite but partly being carried on his back as he rose and fell and steadied himself into trance, so that I could absorb his power. That night I was experiencing something new, something stronger than I had before, and when he let me  stand and dance on my own in the midst of that strange music beside the rising blaze in the dark, I became frightened. The trance apprenticeship requires complete trust, and I had put myself in !Khoma’s hands, but now he had let me go—not let me down, but let me go in a necessary step toward doing it on my own. We were some distance from Dobe, having driven to a villagecamp to combine forces for the dance, and in my truly dazed and fearful state I began to fear for Marjorie—without reason, but reason was

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Being There not at hand. As the fear crested in the midst of all this strangeness, I ran away from the fire and the singing and the dance, jumped into the cab of the truck, and drove off at top speed only to run up on a tree stump and stop with my wheels spinning. I had done the white man’s equivalent of tearing off into the bush. After they ascertained that I was safe and the general hilarity died down, the dance continued— several men, after all, were in trance, and much was at stake as always. The following morning the justified jokes resumed, but there was also a new kind of respect in some women’s eyes as they said that I had really begun to trance. m a r j o r i e u s e d t o s a y t h a t she married me because I promised to take her to Africa, and I don’t think that was entirely a joke. She took to it perfectly. She loved nature, and we were wedded to it for twenty months that first trip, and for another six months four years later. She thrilled to the Kalahari’s vastness, the stretches of sparse yellow grass and thorn scrub dotted with occasional trees, the constant possibility of seeing wild antelope or hares bounding free and afraid, the rare but more than faintly scary prospect of lions. She scanned that world relentlessly for wild creatures, and she was so often successful that the people began to call her chi-ho, meaning, “thing-see.” More than once she spotted a flash in the brush that proved to be a rabbit or a duiker before they did. But as much as the natural world calmed and thrilled her, the people were her greatest fascination. She was not an anthropologist, or even one officially in training, but she had the instinct and the gifts in ample measure. She focused on their strange yet familiar humanity with piercing curiosity, immersed herself in the language—including the language of emotion— and began asking questions that made people uncomfortable. She had always done this, and some of our social acquaintances back home withdrew from her gingerly, but here she had a knowing smile that opened people up. Across the cultural

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Two Women abyss they would laugh at her and then at themselves, shrug, and begin talking. She had come with the intention of studying how children learn music. While it was a rich and complex musical tradition, there did not seem to be a very interesting developmental process; children learned by being in and with the music as they grew, experimenting playfully, not by practicing or being taught. She took thousands of photographs and proved a very gifted photographer. Every year, even now, some are reprinted throughout the world. One much-loved black-and-white photo showed three women with children on their backs crouching in a mongongo grove to pick up fruit and nuts. Another, in gorgeous color, shows the head of a little girl with a big smile on her face and a garland of small purple flowers, a sign of the joy of the first good rains. But in any case it was women’s lives that Margie was most drawn to, and in the opening and recording of their lives she found her métier. A year into our stay she could ask almost anything without embarrassment and understand the answers, and she had spent many hours with each of eight women, while the tape recorder “grabbed their voices.” I knew better than she did that anthropological life histories were not a compelling genre. They tended to be either wooden recitations of ethnographic facts orga nized biographically or tendentious, theoretically driven psychological studies. Margie was doing something different. She did glean and order many ethnographic facts, but she was interested in stories, and that meant stories of childhood freedom and maternal responsibility, getting used to a man in a marriage and even to love him, yet not precluding the occasional gaze across the fire, lasting a beat too long, into the eyes of another man. There were stories of hard work and family but also of intrigue and anger. They did not cohere as narratives in the manner of the great works of fiction we’d read in college. They were messy, often inchoate human lives, slipping away when you tried to embrace them but fi lled with purpose and meaning.

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Being There Enter Nisa. She visited from another area miles away with her husband and the niece and nephew in her care and set up a hearth and makeshift home not far from us, hoping to find some sort of work or benefit that might flow from these rich white visitors who had stayed so long and were so relentlessly curious. Margie used the word “feisty” to describe her, and it was also something she said proudly about herself. Their initial encounters were almost clashes, with Nisa seeming to say that Margie had been wasting her time with those other women and had better talk to someone who could really tell her things. Margie found Nisa too forward by half, and sometimes difficult to believe. Nevertheless she began the interviews, and they were gripping. This woman was not just the most dramatic narrator, she was the most articulate, spontaneous, and serious. “Fix my voice on the machine,” she would say, “so that my words come out clear!” She loved the task of telling stories of her life, and they were indeed stories, lively, vivid, moving, funny, altogether engaging. She recounted her life as a child in the bush (“The rainy season has come!” she remembered shouting, “We’re going to eat caterpillars!”) She recalled, somewhat comically, the three adolescent marriages that she ran away from, the lifelong partner she came to love, and the three children she bore and lost. She also told of flirtations, adulteries, details of sexual encounters, fights, killings, her lasting jealousy toward her younger brother, at whose birth she was weaned, and occasional physical punishment in childhood. Many of these stories seemed at odds with what we knew from studies by other anthropologists, and Margie agonized over whether to believe them. I had already begun to think that what she was doing was very important, and I knew that Nisa was special even against that impressive background. I said, “The words that come out of her mouth are facts, whether or not they are true. When you write about them you can surround them with comments that express your doubts. You can talk about the ways she is unrepresentative. You can

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Two Women try to corroborate or disconfirm her stories, and write about those efforts. But you can’t change her narrative. Her words are the raw data, and they will be of interest to the anthropological world.” That at least I knew, and was right about, but in fact both Nisa’s and Marjorie’s words were of interest to a much larger world than that. During the first few years after our first field trip, Margie lived with Nisa’s and the other women’s words as she transcribed and translated the tapes, an extremely laborious effort with very little support. Countless questions arose, not just the aforementioned about validity and representativeness but also about the ethics of revealing certain things. Many if not most of these were resolved during our second field trip in 1975. Corroboration was possible for most of the cases of violence and some of the infidelities, and the sibling and other rivalries turned out to be no surprise as other research went on. Romance, it turned out, was not just one of Nisa’s experiences; others felt it too, and other researchers found that sexual jealousy sometimes led to homicide. As for the ethics, Nisa understood the tape recorder very well, and she recorded not only her permission but enthusiasm for sharing her stories with the world. She agreed on the pseudonym, although she was later to make clear that she wanted her real self, even her real name, N!guka, to be identified with the book. It was published in 1981 and eventually translated into eight languages (it was much loved in Germany, where it was part of a series of pocketbooks called Neue Frau). It made Marjorie’s and Nisa’s names part of the history of anthropology and women’s studies. And part of the proceeds made N!guka a rather rich woman as Margie sent her, through other anthropologists, the money to build a small herd of cows. w e h a d t h r e e c h i l d r e n , M a r g i e did some teaching and lecturing, we moved from Cambridge to Atlanta, and we talked about how we might possibly find our way back to northwestern Botswana,

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Being There but time has a way of getting away from you. As Nisa often says in her narrative, we lived and lived. Then one day in April 1988 Margie asked me to feel a lump in her breast. Her prognosis was said to be good at first, but she felt her life threatened, and she dreaded above all that she might have to leave her children. The two older ones, nine and six, had been breast-fed for over two years, according to the custom of Nisa’s people, but the youngest had to be abruptly weaned at fifteen months. Margie’s breast was full of milk when it was cut away from her. She had little desire to be separated from the children for any reason, but she felt that if her life was to be shortened, she could not fail to make one more trip to Africa. The story of that trip was told in Return to Nisa, published after Margie’s death and excerpted in this book. I will just say here that in her vulnerable state she sought Nisa’s compassion and healing help, and that after disappointments reminiscent of the great gaps that had always existed between them, and between us and Nisa’s people, Margie did get a response from her in the form of a healing dance. Neither Nisa’s nor anyone else’s healing power could halt the progress of the disease, but Margie took comfort from it. s o m e h o w, w i t h h e r l o n g i l l n e s s and my decade of single fatherhood— and before that, medical school, starting an academic career, and becoming involved in other kinds of research and writing— I did not return to Nisa’s people for thirty years. But in the summer of 2005 I got a call from our eldest, Susanna. She and her fiancé had graduated from law school and both had landed jobs at large New York firms. As was customary in their culture, they were to take a monthlong vacation before beginning their professional ordeals, and they had decided to spend it in Africa. Susanna, having explored the options of visiting Bushmen in mock-ups of village-camps, said, “Why don’t you meet us and take us to really see them?” I said, “Because I don’t have the time, and I don’t have the money.” She said, “You can take a

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Two Women week off from teaching, and we can pay your expenses; it will cost us less than one of those tours, and it will be the real thing.” Since they were each about to begin earning more than I did, I decided this was fair enough. So Susanna and Jeff, along with her brother, Adam, whom they generously invited— Sarah had started intensive dance training at Boston Conservatory and could not get away—and I went to Botswana. Which was why I was driving a Toyota Land Cruiser, grinding dead slow through heavy sand, with thorn scrub gouging tracks in the new vehicle’s white sides, thanking my stars that I had paid for zerodeductible insurance. We had driven eighteen hours from Windhoek and spent the night in Tsum!kwe, where in the morning we visited a class of !Kung elementary school pupils in a clean, bright classroom, with a !Kung teacher in a crisp yellow shirt and tie. A couple of dozen pairs of eyes looked up from their arithmetic and many small jaws dropped when I—a strange old bearded white guy— spoke to them in their language. But our goal was elsewhere. We crossed the border from Namibia into Botswana, and I began giving the speech I had prepared—who I was, when I had been there, what had happened to Marjorie, and who these young people behind me were. I don’t know if I got through the whole speech even once, because people knew me everywhere we went. As soon as I said my !Kung name, and Marjorie’s, they looked through my old face and saw the lost young one. Their eyes and smiles brightened, and we began reminiscing, each of them taking a moment to show a little sadness at the reminder—most of them knew one way or another— of Margie’s death. A middle-aged man who worked at the border station had been the strapping young son of the local Herero matriarch; his warmth was genuine. Another, at a group of mud huts close to the border, was the Tawana headman, having inherited the role from his much-revered father, an almost Solomonic dispute settler; he too was friendly and

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Being There gracious. !Kung people living and working around those huts knew me and began animated narratives, but to account for thirty years was impossible. We drove on, stopping at other groups of huts— essentially tiny Tawana villages with Bushmen hangers-on. At one we picked up an old friend who, astoundingly, was caring for a plump, healthy, fifteenmonth-old girl. Her mother—his daughter—had died in childbirth, and against both odds and advice he’d kept the baby, and kept her thriving. At another I found myself vigorously shaking the bloody hand of a very drunk !Kung man begging for something, and I recalled that Botswana has the highest HIV infection rate in the world. At !Kangwa, a mud-hut town of at least hundreds, we picked up an interpreter and guide and found out where Nisa was. !Kangwa would seem the end of the earth to most travelers, even in Africa, but to its residents the end of the earth was where she was, a few miles south along that stretch of deep sand that barely deserved the name “track.” After two hours I was becoming doubtful, when a pair of huts, sketchy even by !Kung standards, appeared around a curve. I have often since tried to imagine what Nisa saw that day. Perhaps one veterinary vehicle each month or two came groaning up to that place and churned through the sand past it without slowing, although it couldn’t slow much anyway. This one stopped in front of her and disgorged four huge, awkward white people who came waddling straight toward her in the afternoon sun. She was smaller and thinner, and her eyes were dim, but her face glowed with happy recognition when I began my speech. Beside her was a shy preteen she was caring for, the daughter of her niece and her niece’s husband. I introduced Susanna (also named N!guka, Nisa’s real name), Adam (!Khoma, after my friend and trance master), and (“this young woman has already taken a husband”) Jeff. We had come bearing gifts— swaths of cloth and bags of glass beads—but as the young people prepared to present them, N!guka was turning around and

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Two Women pulling a battered little suitcase down from a branch that was part of the hut. She opened it slowly and took out a cardboard box. In the box were photographs, and two of them were of Susanna and Adam at eleven and eight, the ages they had been at Marjorie’s last visit. We asked her to come with us to our fi nal destination, 1Teng// laho, where the Dobe people we had known best now lived. She wanted to do that— they were in some ways her people too, and she longed for more contact than she got in her tiny outpost— but she would have to wait until the child’s parents returned. We lingered with N!guka, but the sun was low, and we needed to fi nd 1Teng// laho. i t s e e m e d t o m e a l m o s t a kind of paradise, if you can say such a thing about a place where people live outdoors, protected by only the most meager shelters. But they had their own borehole, a steady source of the cleanest, most delicious water, many goats, a number of cows, some chickens, dogs as spare as ever, and close by small fields planted with corn. The borehole was in their charge, and it gave them independence. They did not have to work for Herero or Tawana, and their pastoral and horticultural life was for now self-sustaining. I was struck by the number of their possessions. Pots, jerry cans, blankets, and clothing hung on tree branches, racks, or house-poles, giving the village color. But most of all it was the children— so many, so energetic, so playful, so appealing. //Kloka, who had been the ten-year-old with the garland of rainyseason blossoms, was now a grandmother and had a baby of her own on her hip younger than one of her two grandchildren. Her father, a leader among the people, had passed away, as had his brother, another respected man. But her mother, whom I knew well and whose infant I had studied, was alive and well, as was her mother, already a matriarch in 1970. Five generations of women in one family were present at 1Teng// laho in 2005.

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Being There Another of the infants in my study in the 1970s, Kau, was now in his thirties and, due to inheritance, was considered the “owner of the place,” an ambiguous but significant designation. A lively, intelligent young man of generous spirit, he responded with enthusiasm to a photograph of himself, as a baby, in Marjorie’s lap. In it he is wearing her cowboy hat and staring at her as if she were a creature from outer space. He called his children over to see it. He proudly showed me that he could write his name in the sand. Kau gave his name to Jeff, who now had a place among the people. The next day he and Susanna trudged the Toyota back through the sand, and, fortunately, N!guka was able to climb aboard and return with them. She alighted, not without effort, on the edge of 1Teng// laho and made slowly for a knot of middle-aged women sitting on the ground and talking. Her tiny body took its place among them, and her dim eyes were quiet. Then she raised her finger before her face and began to speak. Immediately authority was in the air. Her body was eighty-five or more, but her voice was half that age, and no one could do anything but listen. It was gossip and reminiscence, but it was life, and it was riveting. Something about the way she spoke, even through her frailty, elevated an account of the ordinary to make it almost transcendent. What she said seemed important because of how she said it, and the women were doing hateh—the custom of interrupting frequently with “Eh, mama,” or “Ching /twa”—“true thing”— or simply repeating the last word or two of an utterance. It was a kind of active listening and a show of respect. N!guka went on, but at a certain point Susanna and Adam wanted to talk to her. I knew what they wanted to ask about and knew that it should not go through me. So they moved closer to her, sitting on the ground, still surrounded by the other women and some children, and through the interpreter asked about their mother. All was quiet until she spoke again, plainly moved. Using Marjorie’s !Kung name, she said, “Hwan//kla . . . Hwan//kla held me. She held

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Two Women me. She gave me things. She made me live. She asked me questions, and we had our talk. And my talk was good, I told her true things. And she held me, she held me strongly. She captured my talk on her machine, and put it on papers so people could see. She came back. She gave me cows. She held me. She made me live. Eh, that person made me live.” There was a long pause. “And now I won’t talk about her any more. I am finished with my talk about her. It makes me too sad.” In keeping with a local anthropological tradition, we wanted to slaughter a cow for a feast before we left, and I hoped that a trance dance might ensue. Since the !Kung now had their own cows, I negotiated a price that was favorable to them, in order to buy a cow with which I could then throw them a feast. Kau and the other young men, whose fathers had been skilled and deadly hunters, lost control of the cow in the kraal and had to chase it some distance into the bush. But the upshot was that the cow was properly slaughtered, and from the first pot of boiled beef Adam and I, as the owners of the animal, were given the first stewed hunks. We ate as they watched us, and Kau and the other men cooking began to eat as well. Adam finished, and I told him he had not eaten nearly close enough to the bone. “You’ll insult them,” I said, as I continued to chew closer. He tried, but in the end I took his bone and went further with it. Then the men took both his and mine and showed us the right way to strip a bone. The feast in the evening was rather grand, and people came from other villages. The trance dance began, but I was surprised to see two women enter trance and not a single man. One of the women was //Kloka of the garland. She stared off into the distance and at the fi re, in another world, and when she fell out I stupidly tried to photograph her. “/Tkhashay, wait,” said one of the women in the circle. I put my camera away, and the little girl of thirty years before, now a mature, strong woman, rose in a deep trance and began healing.

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Being There After the dance, after the people dispersed, Adam and I sat with Kau and two other men under the dome of stars softly talking. Adam wanted to know whether they missed the world of their fathers, the beautiful wild game, the craft and grace of the hunt, the ability to live off the land and in harmony with a challenging yet generous natural world. They said without sadness, “There is no more game, the cattle have driven it away, we live differently now.” Adam persisted. Do you wish you could still hunt like your fathers? Do you miss it? Was it better then, or is it better now?” It wasn’t, I think, that they didn’t understand what he was asking. It just did not interest them. They simply repeated, It isn’t possible any more. They were living in the present and looking with much hope toward the future. The next day, having distributed many more gifts, we were about to leave, and I walked what Jewish tradition calls the last mile with Margie, remembering how much she loved that place—the thorn bushes, the yellow grass, the warm breeze, and then the silence. Ever the bumbling stranger, I got slightly lost, but in due course found the village again. We said our good-byes and drove the long way back to the border, so we could drop N!guka off at her family’s outpost. She sat quietly in the backseat, between Susanna and Adam’s big young bodies. When we had finally labored our way back through the sand to her frail home, she looked so exhausted that I was worried for her. I hoped I had not pushed her too far. It was clear that she had had a good and uplifting time. Still, it seemed as if the distance from the track to her half-hut had grown to be too long a trudge through the sand, so I lifted her body and carried her that distance in my arms. She weighed as little as a child. r e c e n t l y i v i s i t e d m a r j o r i e ’s g r av e , as I do once in a long while, although our children decline: “She isn’t there.” No, but I am, and the place touches and calms me. It is green and quiet, at the edge of the cemetery. All the stones are flush with the ground so there

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Two Women are gently rolling vistas, and you can look through the holly hedge behind her grave into a backyard scattered with children’s toys. The flat red granite seems almost warm, and it is etched with that photograph of the three women bending down with their children in the mongongo grove. The plaque says Marjorie’s name, the dates, and “Mother, daughter, wife, sister, friend, and author of the anthropological classic Nisa.” On a stone bench close by are Nisa’s words that appear in the flyleaf of that book: “I’ll break open the story and tell you what is there. Then, like the others that have fallen out onto the sand, I will fi nish with it and the wind will take it away.” Following Jewish custom, I set a small stone on the large one, against its being lessened by the unforgiving flow of time. Fourteen years have passed since her death and five since the day I carried a frail N!guka to her frail home by the sand track. I’ve had no word of her, and I hope she still survives— she is of course a survivor— but I don’t see how she can much longer. If I can visit her corner of the world once again and she is gone, I will not find a gravesite. Her people, as always, will have buried her in an unmarked place in the sand. Later—I dearly hope they keep the custom—they will begin to see her eyes among the stars. But even in the sunlight I will not have to look for her; she will be everywhere. Note 1. Throughout this essay, the spelling I use for !Kung words and names attempts to make possible a pronunciation without the clicks (implosive consonants) that approximates the original sound. So “Kung” is quite close to “!Kung,” “Nguka” to “N!guka,” and so on. This is not the technically approved linguistic orthography, but I hope it will be helpful to most readers.

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6

Graça Jessica Gregg

B

razil, and perhaps particularly Northeastern Brazil, is an emphatic place: hot, loud, and raucous. I hated it immediately. Nothing seemed to exist in moderation. The beaches and the people weren’t just pretty, they were beautiful. The poverty wasn’t just severe, it was devastating. Glue-sniffing gangs of street children weren’t just sad, they were terrifying. It felt so excessive, so incapable of holding any emotion, any horror or delight, in reserve, that my WASP soul recoiled. I didn’t know how to be in that context. As a twenty-four-year-old graduate student, I was in Brazil, and specifically in the Northeastern city of Recife, to research cervical cancer and cervical cancer prevention. Recife has one of the highest rates of cervical cancer in the world. As part of my doctoral work, I planned to investigate how women with little money and few medical resources understood and coped with cancer. That might have been my fi rst problem. In a country that puts a premium on fun, especially when it is a bit wicked, I wanted to talk about disease, death, and poverty. To make matters worse, I was (and am) relatively reserved, very earnest and focused, and not generally that much fun. My first hosts, a nice upper-middle-class family I had met through connections in the School of Public Health at my university, wanted to like me, I think,

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Graça and wanted me to enjoy them and my life in Recife. But ultimately they were forced to conclude that I was boring and awkward: my language abilities were limited, I was shy, I couldn’t dance well, and I didn’t drink (though that would change). I was also so uncertain in my new context, and so afraid of screwing up—my research, my interactions, everything—that I lost some of the curiosity about others’ lives that brought me to Brazil in the first place, and that kept me both interested and interesting. So I plodded along, setting up research meetings with doctors at local hospitals, studying Portuguese, and taking copious notes and religiously keeping my field notebooks up-to-date, a hot, sweaty, and persistent soldier ant in a land of beach-going grasshoppers. Consequently, though my first few months in Brazil were not disastrous (they were too earnestly boring to merit such a dramatic adjective), they were certainly a bit pathetic. And then I met Graça. We met through Dr. Djalma, one of the physicians I had encountered in my dedicated attempts to move my research forward. Dr. Djalma headed the oncology section at the state cancer hospital. I had asked him to help me with a core piece of my research agenda, which involved moving out of my middle-class digs and into a favela, a Brazilian shantytown. In the Northeast, favelas generally form when large numbers of the poor from rural areas come to the city seeking work. Without homes, they often settle en masse on unoccupied patches of city land, building makeshift shacks out of cardboard or whatever else they can scavenge. If the settlements survive the numerous evictions that inevitably take place, eventually they become more established, many inhabitants find work, and cardboard shacks are replaced by particleboard or even brick. As they take root and grow, usually unsupported by local social ser vices, or even local public services like trash removal, favelas also generally become crime ridden and quite dangerous. Dr. Djalma thought my plan to move into one of these communities was incredibly stupid. He pointed out that I could certainly accomplish

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Being There my research while living in a nice apartment on the beach, working at hospitals and clinics and making home visits, without intentionally exposing myself to the discomfort and danger of living in a favela. And that was true. I could have. But I believed that if I wanted to really get how impoverished women in Recife experienced cancer, I had to understand the context of their daily lives. I had to understand what it was like to live in a squatter community. Also, and, to be honest, perhaps more important to my young psyche, a favela just felt like the kind of place where a real anthropologist would live. My graduate school mentors and colleagues had established their research sites in the Kashmir valley of Pakistan, in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, and in the Kenyan desert. On the scale of things exotic, I thought a favela measured up, thus my plea for help from the doctor. Graça lived in a favela abutting the cancer hospital, and she cleaned Dr. Djalma’s office and exam rooms. They had an odd relationship. On the one hand, Graça depended on him for the work he gave her and for shortcuts through the overcrowded and understaffed public health system when a family member was sick. In fact, after I had moved in with her and her family, she asked me not to mention to Dr. Djalma that they had a TV. The more wretched she seemed, the more he might be persuaded to help. But he depended on her too. She not only cleaned for him, but she was both far enough removed from his social circle and insightful and honest enough that he depended on her as a confidant about his marriage, his children, and even his problems with his prostate. Dr. Djalma had assumed that once I saw where and how Graça lived, I would be dissuaded from my plans to settle in a shantytown. Instead, I liked and admired her immediately. I had met her once, very briefly, at Dr. Djalma’s offices, but I really met her when I came to the favela for the tour Dr. Djalma had arranged. And all the things that felt so strange and wrong to me about Brazil seemed just right in Graça. Brazil is loud. She was louder. Brazilians have an opinion about every-

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Graça thing. Hers was the most emphatic. During that first meeting, she toured me through the muddy alleys that crisscrossed the favela as if she were its proud, happy, and slightly demented queen. People called out to her constantly, either just with greetings or with requests. She would answer everyone the same way. “Graça, who is that with you?” “Your asshole!” “Graça, come look at this rash. Do I need to see a doctor?” “Your asshole!” “Graça, stop! What will the American think?” “Your asshole!” I loved it, and I loved her. She charged into people and situations in a way that I didn’t, particularly at that moment in my life. Literate and smart, Graça accompanied neighbors to the doctor, gave birth control shots, and cleaned diabetic wounds. But she never did things sweetly or gently. With an excess of energy, she just naturally took charge and took over. d u r i n g t h e f i r s t w e e k a f t e r she had agreed to my nervous suggestion that she let me live with her family while I conducted my research, she took me with her to visit a neighbor who had been committed to the state mental hospital after hearing voices telling her to kill herself. The neighbor’s given name was Fernanda, but Graça and everyone else called her by her nickname, Filha, meaning “daughter.” The hospital, located in the middle of the city, was run-down, dirty, and depressing. Arriving during the patient visiting hour, we walked into a crowded room occupied by slow-moving, chain-smoking patients and their family members bringing more cigarettes and other treats. Somewhere in her late twenties, Filha was thin and barefoot with extremely close-cropped hair and very few teeth. I don’t actually remember what

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Being There Graça brought her that day, but I remember that we were Filha’s only visitors. When she got home about a week later, Filha spent big chunks of each day at Graça’s house. Sometimes she helped with the dishes or laundry, or sometimes she just watched the TV, perched on the edge of an old green chair in the front room. She was always welcomed and never pampered. Graça pulled Filha’s oversized shorts down around her ankles when company came by, shoved her into large piles of laundry when she could, and ruminated frequently and loudly to herself and others about Filha’s sex life: the men with whom she was sleeping, what they did, and how often. Filha would look at me in horror and enjoyment and plead, “Stop it Graça!” And in the place and with the person she felt most normal and least sick, Filha got what everyone else got: “Your asshole!” I wish I was the anthropologist, I wish I was the person, I once believed I could become through enough study and effort of will: a person so curious about the world and so curious about how others live that fieldwork and life are simply a Disneyland of new and exciting experiences. But I have come to terms with the knowledge that I like to be home and around known things. I like to be with the few people I really love, and I move cautiously, extending tentative feelers for months before committing too much, personally or intellectually, which may explain, at least in part, why Graça was such a stunningly wonderful and important addition to my life. She wasn’t someone I had to get used to or get to know slowly until our relationship matured and slowly crossed cultural boundaries and we became friends. Instead, she took risks, grabbing on to me, abusing, adoring, and caring for me in the same way she abused and adored Filha and others, and I felt human and anchored to her, to her family, to that place. Graça introduced me to her friends, who became my friends; with them I learned the pleasures of drinking sugarcane alcohol while eating cheap dried strips of meat, meat that was so deliciously, horribly

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Graça fatty and tough that it was never actually completely chewed and swallowed, only masticated, and finally spit out when the last piece of extractable flesh and fat had been digested. Some of my happiest memories are of nights spent with Graça and our friend, Lena, sitting on Lena’s bed, listening to music, getting slightly drunk, and literally chewing the fat. Graça was also really remarkably brave. While in Brazil I was dating Ray, a very sweet Haitian American man, who unfortunately loved getting high more than he loved me. He generally did all his pot smoking with friends in the nearby town of Olinda, which was just a short bus ride away from the favela. Once, though, in a particularly idiotic move, he was stopped by the police as he carried pot into the favela on his way home to see me. A large black man caught in a favela with drugs—there are very few alternative endings to that story in Brazil. In this case, however, as the police were in the process of arresting Ray, Graça, who had been summoned out of bed by neighbors, came charging into the central plaza where all the activity was taking place. I had also been roused, and by the time I got there, I could hear her haranguing the officers, ordering them to release Ray, accusing them of planting the drugs, and threatening to go to the American consulate with the charges. Of course Graça knew that the drugs were Ray’s. Though she liked him quite a bit, she referred to him as the Portuguese equivalent of “that pothead” when he wasn’t around, and she had warned me that he would get in trouble if he got caught with drugs in the favela. But she defended him anyway, and as the crowd around them grew, the police seemed to give up. They released Ray, and we all just went back to bed as if nothing had happened. She was remarkable. I no longer see or talk to Graça daily. I live in Oregon. She still lives in Recife. I left, and we moved on in our lives. I have a husband and children now, a career, house payments. For a while after I left, Graça’s husband, Valdo, had a steady, relatively well-paying job, and during those good times they expanded and bricked in their home and

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Being There bought a piece of land outside the city where they kept chickens and grew mango and other fruit trees. In the last fifteen years, I have popped in with a phone call or letter every so often, maybe with some money. I love Graça, but I no longer need her in the multiple ways that I needed her friendship, her community, her comfort before. And for a long time after I left Recife, she really didn’t need me either. Then, a year and a half ago, Graça was diagnosed with ALS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a progressive neurological disease that is slowly stealing her ability to move and that will eventually steal her ability to swallow and to breathe. Now she needs me, and to her credit she is demanding that I be present. But I worry that her illness is a cultural divide we can’t cross. Fifteen years ago we were two young, healthy women on a shared adventure, certain that we would always move forward, that the future was better than the past, that we were smart and often funny, and untouchable. Now I’m afraid I won’t know how to be when I am with her and that I can’t be who and what she needs any more. But in letters, on the phone, and even now in e-mails, sent by her son from his Samba school, she makes sure I understand that I may have the luxury to imagine a future in which I failed her in some way, but she does not. So about six months ago I went back to Brazil to see her. I’d been sending money every few months to help her get private insurance and thus hopefully better health care, but it wasn’t enough, and often she used the money for household expenses and so went without medication or physical therapy. I told her that I could either spend money on a ticket to visit her or I could send more cash, and she told me to come. She met me at the airport looking unchanged, but in a wheelchair. That airport trip was almost the last time she left the house for the duration of my visit. I offered to take her to the beach, or to a hotel for a manicure or pedicure, or to rent a car for a driving trip, but she said that she was too embarrassed to be seen in a wheelchair, or dragging her legs, or, worst of all, falling.

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Graça It was a really hard and really hot visit, the two of us enclosed in, and not leaving, her still small brick house jammed between other small brick and wood houses in the middle of the tropics in the summer. She cried often, both from the pain of the cramps in her hands, and from frustration. She told me that she hates being dependent, she hates pity, she hates stares. And she hates not being in charge. She never said that she is afraid of dying or of the future, only that she is so, so frustrated by the present. There is nothing good, nothing uplifting, and nothing redeeming about what is happening to her. So I hesitate to write what I’m going to write next because it doesn’t make the situation okay, or somehow pretty. But it does reaffirm for me that Graça, despite the horrible, terrifying, progressive assault on her body and self, and despite an entire life spent in poverty and near violence, has lived, and is living, a worthwhile life. The entire time I was with her, neighbors filtered in and out of the house, checking in—never sweetly, and never with pity. Her motherin-law brought meals. Her friends would arrive home from cleaning houses and would stop by to sit, comment on the neighbors, and gossip about who was pregnant and which man had denied paternity. Filha still came by daily, and Graça still cackled gleefully when telling me outlandish lies about her sex life; but just as no one commented fifteen years ago when Filha spent hours in the house doing almost nothing, no one now comments when every day Filha helps Graça with the intimate chores of washing herself and dressing. I no longer keep in contact with Ray. We broke up not long after the incident with the police. But though he and I have gone our separate ways, he has maintained his relationship with Graça and was due to fly in from the United States to visit her a few weeks after I left. The same guy who, when I knew him, couldn’t get on a bus without smoking two joints and hitting me up for a loan first was taking the red-eye from Miami to be with his friend and defender, testimony

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Being There both to the power of time to change a person and to his unchanging love and respect for this extraordinary woman. One of my favorite memories of Brazil is of a recurrent gesture of Graça’s. We would be walking, out to visit someone as part of my research or maybe heading to the grocery store or a friend’s house, and she would place her hand through the crook of my arm and lean slightly into me, in the way that I imagine old couples and old, dear friends walk, each bearing a bit of the other’s weight. When I worry that I will not know how to be with Graça as she get sicker, that we will be divided by lives and experiences that are now mutually incomprehensible, I hold on to that memory. And I hope, and believe, that when I feel I no longer recognize Graça, when she can’t speak, can’t laugh, and can’t grab and hold me with the force of her personality, I will still recognize the comfort and responsibility of our shared burden, and that will be enough.

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7

Insult and Danger A n t h r o p o l o g y a m o n g N ava j o s , Montenegrin Serbs, and Wi l d C h i m pa n z e e s

Chris Boehm

Wherever you find human beings you’ll find “politics,” and all anthropologists, by their very calling, must act as “politicians” as we seek our way in societies that are sometimes shockingly unfamiliar. Some of our political problems arrive in the form of minor breaches of etiquette, but sometimes a truly dangerous side of local political life can impinge on our sojourns in the field. Here I tell about several experiences of this political ilk, in two different human societies and one well-known society of African great apes. When I set out with my family in 1960 to study Navajo Indians’ conceptions of mental illness, as a graduate student my assignment was to travel across their vast reservation in a pickup truck that was primitively rigged for camping and to interview medicine men about how Navajo people “go crazy,” and why this happens. The task proved daunting, for there were hints that darker forces might be involved, and Navajos are not about to discuss certain subjects with anyone— not even another Navajo.

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Being There Also included in our entourage was a well-educated young interpreter named Howard McKinley Jr., who is still a good friend. Howard was the first Navajo ever to go to an eastern prep school, and late in his teenage years he had aspirations to be a writer, similar to aspirations that drew me to anthropology. After about a month of working together, Howard told me that I was doing well for an outsider, for his people lumped white people into two categories: missionaries there to destroy their ancient religion, or foreign spies assigned to break the code-talkers’ code. He explained why I was doing well. When we approached isolated homesteads to ask questions or visit, scarcely without thinking I had emulated Howard in several ways. One was to allow a goodly number of minutes to pass before getting down to business, which involved sitting on one’s haunches on a front porch and simply letting time go by in a culture that lacked my own society’s “time is money” orientation. I rejoiced in the compliment, but I rejoiced prematurely. Howard had an uncle who was a medicine man, and when we’d first called on him he had gotten started talking about something called “mountain wise.” This had seemed quite promising, even though Howard thought it might have something to do with witches, which is the scariest of all topics for Navajos. The uncle had invited us to come back after he performed a “sing” over someone who was ill a few days distant from his house, and we were counting the days as we prepared for the return visit. When we were gassing up the turquoise-colored pickup truck in Gallup, New Mexico, I asked Howard if we might bring his uncle a treat of some kind, and in the supermarket we picked up a sizable watermelon—at that time of year the ultimate in luxury food for Navajos. Then, after many miles of traveling over a road that was better called a track, we arrived at Uncle Joe’s six-sided hogan. In anticipating a second interview with a trusted kinsman of Howard’s, which promised again to be free of the usual awkward pauses and changing of the subject, I was all but ecstatic. Earlier in the summer another anthropologist, Jim Boesch, and I had grown restive

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Insult and Danger with respect to the cross-cultural research project we were working for. What was being attempted was the comparison of five Southwestern cultures with respect to mental illness patterns, and our assignment was to study the Navajo by applying standard Western psychiatric categories such as “paranoid,” “schizophrenic,” “manic-depressive,” and “catatonic” to their behavior. We finally convinced Bert Kaplan, the PhD psychologist running the show, that we needed badly to understand Navajo concepts so we could start by seeing how they labeled different types of mental illness and conceived of the causes. Kaplan finally gave us a free rein, and we were out to prove our point. The summer was short, and on a far-flung reservation the time required to locate and meet with busy medicine men was daunting. A breakthrough with Uncle Joe could carry the day. In our usual fashion Howard and I pulled up a respectful distance from his uncle’s house to wait for someone to acknowledge us. Etiquette. We were invited in, and we sat on the front porch again in the usual fashion, passing the time of day comfortably and not yet getting down to business. Perhaps ten minutes into the process I remembered the gift watermelon in the back of the truck. Knowing what a treat it was, I got up off my haunches and hurried over to the truck to get it and present it to Uncle Joe. Through Howard the watermelon was briefly acknowledged, and then we sat in silence again. After a considerable time Howard began to speak with his uncle in Navajo. There was a lapse in the conversation, and then it took up again. After this had taken place several times, Howard gave me a meaningful look and told me that we’d better be getting on our way. I was stunned. As we bumped our way back over the rough dirt trail the faux pas was explained to me. Giving the watermelon as a gift was well and good, but the appropriate time would have been later, after the interview, as a sign of gratitude and appreciation. As it was, I had acted precipitously and prematurely, and in trying in effect to barter for the interview, I had made what to Uncle Joe was a “power move” and had

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Being There stepped into the role of pushy outsider. My overly aggressive mistake proved to have been irremediable, for several times, later in the summer, we drove to Uncle Joe’s hogan and each time we were told the same thing by his wife. Joe was performing a ceremony somewhere far away and would not be home for weeks. That, Howard told me, meant that he did not wish to see us. I pondered my own misconduct. I knew that the politically egalitarian Navajo had been proud warriors who raided for slaves before the American army finally pacified them with the help of a truly ruthless Kit Carson, and I knew that as a proud people who had been conquered they had continued with an egalitarian lifestyle: not only was the use of personal power controversial, but people had to bend over backwards not to give the impression of being either aggressive or ungenerous. Unfortunately, in wanting to be generous I had in fact been overly aggressive. And Jim Boesch and I never did get to the heart of the matter of exactly how Navajos conceive of people becoming crazy. w h e n m y f a m i l y a n d I went to study the Mountain Serbs in Montenegro three years later, we sought out an isolated tribe that happened to be four and a half hours by foot from the nearest road. To get there you had to follow a path along one side of the steep Moracha river valley, with clear turquoise water rushing far below, and often the sides of the trail were dangerously precipitous. Walking the four and a half hours up the trail the first time I’d visited Upper Moracha Tribe, my traveling companion had pointed out several places where people were found dead at the base of cliffs, and foul play had been suspected. Now we were going to live in the tribe. As my four-year-old daughter, Jenny, proudly led one of our heavily burdened pack horses, I had to admonish her to stay away from the path’s edge. By evening the four horses were unburdened, and we were settling down in a stone house with no electricity or plumbing but an abundance of scorpions in the walls. In the days that followed, as I met

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Insult and Danger my neighbors it struck me that this Serbian culture was utterly different from that of the Navajos, even though both were former egalitarian warriors. The Navajos had seemed, above all, quiet and self-contained, as well as wholly low-key and unaggressive in their relations with others. The Montenegrins were noticeably different in their personal style: people were quick to engage with you in conversation and quite aggressive in many of their manners— especially when it came to imposing hospitality on a guest. If you told them you’d eaten your fill, they kept on coming at you, relentlessly, and it was a long time before I learned that I’d have to be aggressive to the point of rudeness—at least by my own standards—to make them desist. Eventually, though, I became fairly adept at avoiding overeating. I did so by saying abruptly “I can’t” and then breaking off eye contact to stare out the window. Equally aggressive was the Montenegrin style of joking, and of course even when anthropologists learn the indigenous language fairly well, as I did, being able to understand jokes was near the top of the difficulty ladder. At the very pinnacle was making jokes oneself, for in this culture an aggressive joking style was combined with a profound sensitivity to personal reputation and honor. I learned that in the past people had been killed because of pushing a “joke” too far, this because the verbal barbs had crossed from the realm of aggressive humor to that of dire insult. Montenegrins have enormous voices because while herding their sheep they crave company and shout conversationally from mountainside to mountainside by using their hands to waft their words, one syllable at a time. I once heard a verbal duel between a feisty older woman, over six feet tall, and an adolescent young man, which was carried on at a range of fully a quarter of a mile. The epithets were far from joking, obscenely colorful, and balanced in their intensity. A booming phrase that sticks in my mind was: “I fuck your father’s father in the teeth a thousand times,” and there were dozens of creatively

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Being There colorful variations, all with built-in escalations and meta-escalations. That particular quarrel never became physical, for both parties were using equally obscene insults and playing by the same rules, but I knew that there was a continuum that ran from good-natured joshing, to balanced insults and ripostes, to provocatively one-sided insults that could impinge on honor and lead to physical conflict. As a political animal I remained cautious about even entering this arena. Toward the end of a two-year field stay, when my family had already gone back to the States, I still felt constrained in my caution about joking. In many other areas I was fitting in with Montenegrin culture quite well, and basically I was feeling culturally competent except in this matter of aggressive joking. When people directed their jokes at me, I would just grin and bear it—and then, afterwards, I would fi nd myself coming up with rapier-like ripostes in the privacy of my own mind. Little did I realize that I was practicing for the real thing. One day I was passing the hillside spring, which provided water for the settlement I lived in, and a large group of women had gathered to talk and kid around while they washed clothes or filled the large wooden water barrels they placed on their backs to carry water back to their households. A very aggressive middle-aged widow named Milanka taunted me with a totally predictable joke. Was the American “sneaking around the village” now that his wife had gone back home? Milanka was particularly aggressive in her joking style, and generally she was thought to have a violent and unpredictable nature. This meant that if I wanted to test my cultural competency, she was one of the very last people to try it with. For some reason, however, I chose this situation to emerge from the shadows. The decision to return fire was not a wise one, given what I knew about Milanka. Sturdily built and fairly tall, she had penetrating, hostile black eyes, and people tended to watch out for her because, an infor mant told me, she had once been involved in a big to-do with her brother, one of the tribe’s respected

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Insult and Danger elders, and had seized a knife and cut him “from his neck to his asshole”—to paraphrase colorful local usage. In short, all the tribesmen thought the woman was scary. Scarcely realizing myself what I was up to, I shot back at Milanka: “Yes, indeed, I am ‘going around the village,’ and in fact I don’t need to go very far because there’s a beautiful widow who lives just a little way above this spring.” I said this with a wholly serious expression, and as I spoke I pointed up the hill to the widow Milanka’s house where it stood all by itself. The entire group of women and girls burst into gales of laughter, and the merriment had a peculiar intensity because Milanka was so merciless in her unduly hostile teasing of others; indeed, people feared her violent disposition so much that most of them, men and women alike, tended to absorb her gibes rather than come back at her. The laughter also was pointed because for two years I had been a special butt for Milanka’s jokes, and now the political worm had turned. This event was one that surely would be gossiped about widely in our settlement with great mirth, and no one knew this better than Milanka as she visibly forced a smile. Eventually I wrote a book about traditional feuding in tribal Montenegro and thereby learned a great deal more about insults and the damage they can do in this culture. In retrospect, the budding intuitions that led me to engage in a potentially risky riposte seemed culturally appropriate, but at the same time the entire enterprise was foolishly risky. In this warrior society people—and men in particular—needed to be able to return verbal barbs, for everyone looked down on the meek. But at the same time they needed to carefully calibrate the content of their ripostes and be careful to not inflict a serious moral assault on the other person’s honor. Traditionally this could lead to still stronger words and then a killing, followed by a protracted and bloody feud between the two clans. These were still taking place in remote highland districts just three decades before my visit.

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Being There I knew intuitively that Milanka had a very good reputation for sexual probity and, therefore, that a joke in this particular area should not be hitting a raw nerve. Speechless, she did turn red in the face when I maligned her just as she had maligned me, and for a few minutes she was quite visibly disturbed over losing out in public to a victim who normally behaved so meekly. And when she finally managed a smile of sorts, I confess that I was relieved. In a sense this was the pinnacle of my field experience, for joking is probably the most difficult aspect of a culture for an alien to learn competently. Afterwards I was privately congratulated by a number of people, who told me I had chosen just the right way to return the jest. By local standards this meant that I hadn’t backed down, and at the same time I hadn’t provoked a serious incident. After gloating briefly over my newly found competency at being a Montenegrin, I closed that particular door as soon as I opened it, resolving never to play the joking game that hard again. m y n e x t a n e c d o t e a b o u t b e i n g a cultural alien in Montenegro does not involve local customs of etiquette, but it does involve politics. It has to do with the many things that anthropologists don’t know, and may never discover, with respect to how they are being perceived by the usually quite hospitable communities that host them. When I fi rst selected Upper Moracha Tribe as my field site, museum colleagues in Montenegro’s old capital, Cetinje, told me I had chosen a maximally dangerous place to go: fairly recently in their history these people had been tantamount to pirates, and reputationally they were still the worst of the “Mountain Tribes” of Montenegro and Southern Hercegovina. One colleague, Museum Director Jovan Vukmanovic´, had even offered me the use of his illegally owned pistol—which I had to decline, knowing that as an American privileged to do research in a militantly “socialist” country I would be summarily expelled if discovered with a firearm. The offer did make me think a bit, especially

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Insult and Danger because I was making fieldwork a family affair, but I decided that with a very strong government in control of what was then Tito’s Yugoslavia, I really hadn’t much to worry about. When I arrived in Upper Moracha Tribe, I discovered from locals that my adoptive tribe of almost 1,800 souls in fact had somewhat less of a political “reputation” than an adjacent one, and that some years before the small government police station had been moved from Moracha to that other tribe, which will remain nameless. In this context I was told pointedly that there had not been a single homicide in my chosen tribe since World War II, a matter of almost two decades. However, there also were tales of probable victims found at the bottoms of cliffs along the long, isolated trail that led to the highway, and people seemed wary of traveling the path at night, and specifically of meeting people from other tribes at night. Again I took these to be exaggerated fears, and basically I came and went as I pleased, with my family or by myself. In this isolated mountainous area I felt far more threatened by the possibility of getting lost (I am geographically dyslexic, an unfortunate “gift” for an anthropologist) or by a sudden snowstorm’s catching me en route to somewhere (in this region, two meters of snow can fall in twenty-four hours) than by the likelihood of being murdered for my wealth—though I’d been told that an American passport was worth the dinar equivalent of $1,000, a small fortune. If there were real dangers, I remained blissfully unaware of them— until the very end of my field stay. During my third hot summer in Montenegro I was preparing one cool evening to hike four houses down the trail to my Land Rover and then drive to Belgrade. I was making my preparations, packing a knapsack, and looking for a flashlight to light my way, and at the time a good friend was paying me a visit, a local tribesman who was a highly respected singer of heroic epics. Jovan—John in English— saw me lift up my shirt and slip a sizable hunting knife into my waistband, and to my utter surprise he said, “Kristifore, don’t ever let anyone in this tribe

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Being There know that you are carrying that knife when you travel!” Thinking that perhaps people thought foreigners were not allowed to own knives, I asked him, “Why?” To my amazement I heard that everyone in the tribe believed me to be an American spy, and that they assumed that American spies had weapons beyond all belief to protect themselves. Thus no one would dare attack me. But if it got out that all I carried was a knife. . . . In an instant my complacent sense of my own political situation in the tribe was shattered. In fact, I was in culture shock, and at first it wasn’t even the danger I was reacting to. I had lived comfortably in Moracha for fully two years and had spent long days interviewing people about innocent matters such as their morals and superstitions. I was obviously an anthropologist, and I hoped an anthropologist of goodwill. I knew the Montenegrin secret police thought I must be a spy; that was their Cold-War job. But if my neighbors and friends thought the same thing, this came as a dire blow to me, for I had grown up in a milieu in which you trusted people until you had good evidence to the contrary. I certainly trusted Jovan, my friend, the singer of heroic epics. Jovan was a well-respected, manly man by Montenegrin standards, honest and forthright, and renowned for lifting huge amounts of weight. And there went out a special sympathy to him because he was childless in a culture that holds sons and heirs as the be-all and end-all of life. Jovan was a paragon of decency; he had a direct way of looking at you and a great deal of dignity. He was highly respected as a singer of warlike ballads, and it was said that when he gave full voice to his singing the flames in kerosene lanterns would tremble and go out. Jovan and I had a relationship of mutual trust. I knew that Jovan wouldn’t betray the secret of my vulnerability, but all of a sudden I was worried. It seemed that I had been taking foolish risks, for even by daylight there were stretches of miles along the lonely path on which there was no habitation nearby, even though

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Insult and Danger one met with people coming the other way every once in a while. Traveling by night was suddenly scary, and I had a family to support back home. Later that evening, wishing neither to swelter walking down the valley under the sun’s heat nor to appear a coward, I walked the long walk down to the Land Rover as usual and met not a soul—though I thought I saw a few in the shadows. Later, thinking things over more calmly, I was struck by the apparent enigma of being a supposedly knowledgeable anthropologist. I had stayed in the field far longer than many ethnographers, and I was pretty competent in the language. And yet here was a major fact about how I was being perceived by my tribe, which I never would have known about had it not been for the hunting knife at my waist. After that, for my few remaining months in Moracha, I always made the hot trip to my Land Rover by day, when there would be ample company on the trail. I acted as though the danger was real—but I always wondered, even after I left the field. Was there actually any peril, as Jovan had warned me? Had Jovan perhaps been testing me to see if I really was a spy? What else was there that I didn’t know and would never learn? Were these “people from other tribes” really dangerous, or was this view a holdover from the old days in Montenegro when banditry was a way of life? I had a lot to think about, and I never really sorted it out. Ten years later I returned to the field, hoping to do summer fieldwork, but the political atmosphere had changed and I was denied permission to do this. Indeed, I was allowed but a single day to visit the tribe. Gossiping with one of my friends there, I learned from her that in the next tribe over, the dangerous one where honor killings still took place and which still had the policemen on duty, a pair of brothers had taken up a venerable Montenegrin raiding pattern but in a modern setting. In the old days, Christian Montenegrins who were hungry for food and honor had slipped into the mountains and mounted depredations, mostly against Islamic neighbors, stealing their sheep and

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Being There belongings and sometimes cutting off their heads as manly trophies. The booty they took was reckoned in tovars, or pack horse loads. This pair of brothers had gone out raiding against tourists, and in fact in the newspapers there had been a long string of unexplained “disappearances.” When the two were fi nally arrested, I was told that they had twelve “horse-loads” of tourist goods hidden on their premises. No one was sure how many foreigners had lost their lives, but now I was convinced that ten years before, Jovan’s concerned warning to me had been well worth considering. a n t h r o p o l o g i s t s a r e p o l i t i c a l b e i n g s , and so are the people we study. We each have our own etiquette for what should be small, routine social moves. The Navajo story about an unforgiving Uncle Joe illustrates how an ethnographer can go wrong socially in an egalitarian, noncompetitive society in which even modest amounts of personal “pushiness” can put people off, and this apparent matter of social etiquette was really a matter of “politics.” The Montenegrin joking-exchange story demonstrated the anthropological challenge of fitting into a society which is at the same time egalitarian and highly competitive, and in which behaving quietly and unassertively like a Navajo could lead to a serious lack of respect for a visiting ethnographer, while trying to hold one’s own as an alien novice was fraught with peril. I also learned that no matter how intimate we are with our close friends in the field, there may be things we will never learn. Often, surely, there are hiatuses that we’ll never know about, and some of these gaps may go beyond our personal fates in getting along in an exotic community. They may affect our findings. My next etiquette story is about fitting in with the political society of a different species entirely. After my field work with Montenegrin Serbs ended I decided to study a different species, wild chimpanzees, in central East Africa, and early in my new career as a primatologist I learned something about chimpanzee rules and regulations the hard

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Insult and Danger way, as I tried what I thought to be a harmless innovation in the way of observational methodology. When I fi rst went to Gombe National Park in Tanzania as a cultural anthropologist untrained in primatology, I accompanied Jane Goodall daily as she observed mothers and their infants for six hours at a time and explained their behavior to me as she took her notes. This work was fascinating, but I yearned for the day when I would be adept enough to follow the much larger groups, which included males, from dawn to dusk and to study the fights and peacemaking interventions I had come to Gombe to study. When I finally began to follow these larger foraging parties, I quickly took notice of the fact that the alpha male would put on daily “displays,” which meant he would intimidate an entire party of ten or twenty chimpanzees by making a frenetic show of power. First the long hair on his great forearms would begin to bristle, and next the copious hair all over his body would become erect as he sprang into action. The display, proper, was an abandoned impromptu pantomime, with the big ape silently racing around on the ground, swinging aggressively on vines, dragging palm fronds across the forest floor at top speed, uprooting saplings and throwing them into the air, scooping up large rocks and heaving them, and attacking any chimpanzee who did not run screaming to climb a tree and get out of his way. I asked my mentor what I should do when this terrifying event took place, and she said reassuringly, “Just hold on to a tree.” When I sat observing these large groups at a close distance, I felt as though I was a true alien, an invisible observer from another planet watching creatures a little bit like myself but utterly different at the same time. By this I mean that the adult chimpanzees didn’t take much note of my presence because at Gombe they have been so well habituated to humans. As I hugged my trees I did notice, however, that when the alpha male, Goblin, displayed in my vicinity, he might reach out a little and just barely graze my body with his fi ngertips as he

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Being There sped by. I felt perfectly safe, but I also knew that I was not quite “invisible.” After a few weeks of this, I began to wonder if my daily tree grabbing was really necessary. After all, even though I had seen Goblin quickly begin to attack any chimpanzee who didn’t fearfully flee his display, and to do so with alacrity, all he was doing in my case was flicking at me occasionally. One morning I was feeling unusually confident. I held my clipboard in one hand and my pen in the other and continued to stand in the middle of a smallish clearing in the forest as Goblin’s first daily display began. And this time there was to be no mere grazing with the fingertips. Far from the nearest tree I was watching just a bit nervously as the powerful alpha male began to do his thing, and suddenly a largerthan-life bristling ape was racing directly toward me at top speed and then, all at once, I was flying through the air—having been scooped up and heaved just like a small boulder. Chimpanzees are extraordinarily strong, and I figured out subsequently that I had traveled at least ten feet in the air before I landed, fortunately, on a soft patch of African rain forest soil. That was it. Goblin continued to race around, doing his aggressive thing with energy and abandon as I crouched fearfully on the ground. Then, as always, he abruptly came to a stop and just sat there as the aggression faded. As his hair sleeked and he became “small” again, I cautiously ventured to retrieve my clipboard and made for the nearest tree. As a novice I had just learned a chimpanzee rule, and learned it well. When I returned to camp that evening I told Jane what had happened, and I learned much more about the behavioral standard I had unwittingly violated. The purpose of these alpha intimidation displays, Jane told me, is to maintain the top political position in spite of having many competitors, and as long as all the males present are cowed and duly climb their trees, all is well for the incumbent alpha— and for them as well, since conflict is avoided. But should one of the

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Insult and Danger other males begin to go against the alpha by ignoring his wild and intentionally intimidating display, a deliberate challenge is being issued. In that case the alpha may have to fight for his position, and his response is likely to be a sudden attack to hopefully put the challenger down. Jane went on to tell me that even though the chimpanzees were well habituated to human observers, and so often behaved as though we weren’t there, they were in fact quite aware of us and also were aware of our gender. It was because as a male I had suddenly stopped showing deference (my regular tree hugging had been a sign of respect) that I was dealt with (in a modest way, by chimpanzee standards) as a potential political rival. My behavior had suggested I was going against Goblin’s rules, in a way at least suggestive of throwing down a gauntlet, so he’d issued me a warning. And from then on I was careful to show the proper respect to Gombe National Park’s feisty little alpha male. Chimpanzees, too, have their etiquette. o t h e r a n t h r o p o l o g i s t s h av e f a c e d p o l i t i c a l dilemmas similar to these, and many others of course. All humans are, like chimpanzees, prone to compete and to regulate their competition through dominance and submission. But humans, with their gift of culture, can become far more inventive with this gift than chimpanzees can. For instance, some smaller societies are so egalitarian that they actually kill serious would-be dominators who arise in their midst. This includes not only nomadic hunter-gatherers and many other small, “acephalous” societies like the autonomous Navajos but also betterorganized tribal groups like the Montenegrins. Of course, an anthropologist entering the field would do well to fit nicely into the social and power structures of such local communities, and to do so perfectly from the very beginning. However, one’s ethnographic mission is, in fact, to learn about those structures—and to do so in the face of possible culture shock, combined with a beginner’s

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Being There incompetence, which could become dangerous to one’s social reputation or even to one’s physical being. Every ethnographer faces this challenge. Fortunately the human cultures we study have rules of hospitality, and they often make allowances for visiting strangers who, in effect, are cultural ignoramuses when they arrive with their alien notebooks and cameras and their devotion to the science and art of ethnographic description. It was in this context that in my fifth week of field study with the Navajo I made my big mistake and, blindsided, paid for it dearly. In this Navajo disaster with Uncle Joe, there was no forgiveness by a member of a proud egalitarian nation that had been subjugated by my own aggressive forebears. In Montenegro, I was much more knowledgeable when I joked so aggressively with Milanka. Had I stopped to think, I could have foreseen that I might pay dearly if I made a serious mistake with my words and impulsively found myself actively engaged with one of the most unpredictably dangerous persons in my community just because her gibes had been annoying me for two long years. Without thinking, I had followed an unspoken local etiquette, which stipulated that retaliation in kind was socially acceptable. In retrospect, I am both proud of my cultural competency and regretful that I took such a chance with a personality that everyone else was watching out for very carefully. The tale of Jovan’s warning about the woefully inadequate hunting knife I was carrying made it painfully clear to me that after two years of cordial field living an anthropologist could still be politically in the dark about something as important as his own personal safety. And subsequently I had to wonder why other good friends of mine in the tribe hadn’t warned me about dangers out on the road. But then, of course, if they thought I must be a spy with James Bond weapons— who could perfectly well take care of himself—they would have been too polite to mention any of this.

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Insult and Danger I wonder, from time to time, what other tribal secrets there may have been, that to this day remain beyond my ken. Anthropologists tend to assume that there are virtually no secrets in the smaller, constantly gossiping communities we have been prone to study, but there are at least two pieces of information I was privy to with these Serbian mountaineers, which I believe to have been, otherwise, tightly held secrets. In one case my favorite informant, a seventy-seven-year-old woman named Milena Lukovac, who was a pillar of the community, told me about a local man who caught his wife in flagrante delicto. First he made a sound “mrsh!” to make the man leave, which is how you tell a dog to get out of the house in Montenegro, and then, in characteristic Montenegrin fashion, he beat his wife soundly. This is the kind of story Montenegrin gossips delight in, yet none of my trusted informants had mentioned it, and Milena told me she’d never told anyone after the husband himself had confidentially related it to her, so I’m quite sure they were in the dark. Her general reticence to gossip and her personal virtues were what made her a trusted pillar of the community. The other instance of secret keeping involved a young man’s telling me that he was having a totally clandestine affair with his cousin, whom he badly wanted to marry. I have kept this confidence now for fortythree years and of course will not identify him further. He badly wanted advice, and I told him the two of them should leave the tribe and go to the city where their identities would not be known, and that second cousins need not fear birth anomalies. However, both of them feared the urban scene with its unhealthy living standards, and, because they were conveniently neighbors, they had decided just to carry on as they were. I have no idea what the final outcome was for these two young people, who in a sense were unknown aliens in their own society. As a visiting anthropologist, I was a known alien. Finally, my experiment with Gombe’s alpha male Goblin made it clear that I was not, in fact, “invisible” to chimpanzees who had been

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Being There well habituated to humans for over two decades. At one point, early in my fieldwork when I was being trained in ethological techniques by Jane Goodall, I naively asked my mentor if, in trying to understand chimpanzee vocal signals, it might be possible to integrate oneself into their group life and learn the meanings of these signs actively. I was thinking in terms of the traditional role of ethnographers, which is to both observe and participate culturally, at the same time. Jane’s answer was that I should not fantasize any further; chimpanzees routinely aggress against one another, and they have bodies that are built for this. The implication was that I couldn’t afford to make a single mistake in such a situation, and in fact that is precisely what I had already done when I ignored Goblin’s display. Fortunately, in his eyes it was just a minor transgression by an alien entity that did not really add up to being a serious political competitor. Had a male chimpanzee rival done this, a really serious attack would have ensued. Jane helped pioneer a methodology that allows humans to be in close observational proximity to powerful apes, yet to be treated— almost all the time—as outsiders who are politically neutral. This works well for the study of behavior in other animals. When anthropologists study other humans, however, we must hasten to make friends with people and hear their gossip: that is the lifeblood of cultural anthropology. And in fitting into their communities both as observers and as participants, we assume a potentially difficult political role— sometimes by choice and sometimes quite unawares. p e r h a p s i t i s r e m a r k a b l e t h a t more anthropologists haven’t run seriously afoul of the communities they study. We carry the burden of a basic cultural naiveté that is inherent in our situation as friendly but exploitative aliens who basically are crossing their fingers and hoping for social acceptance. Perhaps the indigenous hospitality that is found so widely in the nonliterate world has been our main protector. But we are also favored by the fact that all people are,

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Insult and Danger in a sense, “anthropologists” who at least sometimes—if not always— make allowances for the cultural gaffes of “foreigners.” Anthropologists may be both cultural and political aliens, but by the very definition of our situation we are innocent aliens. Sometimes one’s initial naiveté is taken into account generously by indigenous people we visit, sometimes it trips us up, and more often than we are aware, surely, it enables us to proceed quite blithely in situations that, if we understood them fully, might well deter us. All of these things help make ethnographic fieldwork the unique experience it is.

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8

Shame and Making Truth Th e S o c i a l R e pa i r s o f Ethnographic Blunders

M. Cameron Hay

In the Platonic philosophical tradition, no price is too high to pay for truth. But in pursuit of one truth during fieldwork, I realized that in everyday life there are multiple truths that people must weigh and calculate on the fly—and that the price can be too high. I learned this during twenty-two months of ethnographic research among poor Sasak farmers living in a rural hamlet I call Pelocok on the island of Lombok in the Indonesian archipelago. From 1993 to 1995 I lived in a house about the size of a racquetball court with a family of eleven people. The household head was Amaq Mol, a religious leader (kiayi) who welcomed the opportunity of having me accompany him to rituals. Inaq Mol was his wife. Of their fifteen children, only five had survived. The oldest, La Nan, and her husband, Amaq Sunin, lived within our household because Sunin was too poor to independently support a family. From one of his previous marriages, Amaq Sunin had a teenage daughter, La Ani, who was being raised by his mother, Papuq Sol, in his home village. Even with the extra labor that Amaq Sunin brought into the Mol family and my cash contribu-

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Shame and Making Truth tions, the Mol household’s economic conditions improved little during my time there.1 I was fond of them, as they were of me, and we lived in our compact quarters in relative harmony until the day I sought the truth about an event connected with a circumcision ceremony. The everyday poverty of rural Sasaks contrasts with their elaborate circumcision ceremonies. Despite the fertility of the land, the population density is so high that most rural Sasaks live from hand to mouth. Money for basic foodstuffs (eggs, sugar, coffee, oil, etc.) is scarce. The average annual income per household hovered around 200,000Rp ($US91) in 1994–1995.2 Yet, as devout Muslims, Sasaks promoted their children’s health and spiritual well-being by sponsoring them through five life-cycle rituals: marriage, pregnancy, naming, separation, and circumcision—the grandest of all.3 Girls are symbolically circumcised by cutting a lock of hair. Boys are circumcised by cutting a lock of hair as well as the foreskin. Often a household would spend half of its annual income to circumcise a child. When a family decided to host a ceremony, they sought other families to join them, defraying the costs and increasing the size and prestige of the ceremony. Occasionally, one of the area’s wealthier farmers would put together a circumcision for thirty or more children. These were enormous affairs that involved hosting hundreds of guests. Most of the time, ethnographers work in the nuanced minutia of everyday life. In comparison, rituals are visual and intellectual feasts. As my research questions revolved around issues of health, the health protecting qualities of circumcision intrigued me. Thus, when I learned there was to be a large circumcision ceremony a few months after starting fieldwork, I asked an amateur photographer named Parni, from the island’s capital, to help me document it. The morning of the circumcision, La Nan and her stepdaughter were charged with supervising siblings at home until afternoon. When I left early for the ceremony with Amaq and Inaq Mol and Amaq Sunin, I asked La Nan to bring Parni with her. Later Parni arrived,

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Being There changed from jeans into a locally appropriate sarong, and gave La Nan his wallet containing 40,000Rp (about $US18) and two photographs of himself with friends to be locked in a wardrobe. He watched her lock it up, and, taking the key, she brought him to the ceremony. The ceremony was the event of the year. For months the host had been planning, saving, and accumulating forty-three children from over thirty families to join in the event. Four Sasak gamelan troupes— gamelan is an Indonesian musical ensemble characterized by metallophones, drums, and other percussion instruments—had been hired to entertain and distract the children. An estimated 3,900 guests had come for the festivities. There were teams of people cooking rice and making stews. There were other teams to fill the 1,130 plates, serve them, wash them, and refill them for the next group of guests. After the meal the plates were rewashed and refilled with bananas and other ritual “dessert” foods. I asked Parni to walk around and take photographs of the cooking, the music groups, and the vast numbers of people. I was not so free to wander. Amaq Mol was ner vous about my safety, mentioning that there were too many strangers for me to safely leave his sight. Strangers are considered sources of potential danger because their hearts are not known and may intend harm.4 As a woman and a “child” in his family, I could not disregard Amaq Mol’s admonishments in such a public space. I was largely restricted to supervising the preparations by Amaq Mol’s side and sitting with him and the other kiayis on the covered bamboo platform where the Qur’an was read, the sacred prayers were said, and the children came to be circumcised. Without Parni I would not have known about the mundane activities that kept most of the guests engaged: the worries that they would run out of food, the young people’s flirting, the older people’s gossip, and the dignitaries’ political jostling. Later, after apprising me of the things he had seen and heard, I paid Parni for his help and he gathered up his things. As he was departing,

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Shame and Making Truth Parni pulled me aside to say that half his original money and the photographs were missing from his wallet. He said he didn’t care about the money, but I should be aware of the theft. I was not surprised. After all, hadn’t I found many of my things—including underwear!— strangely in the hands of La Nan? One of the younger Mol boys had even told me that his sister regularly went through my things and took my change for lipstick and sweets. But I was embarrassed that a guest who had come to do me a favor was a victim of theft in my household. I reimbursed the money and he left. When I was later alone with La Nan, I repeated what Parni had told me. She claimed that her stepdaughter, La Ani, who had already left for her own village, must have taken it. La Nan offered to speak with La Ani the next time she saw her. A few days later, La Nan said that she had spoken with her mother, and they were certain that La Ani had taken the money. I dropped the issue. A month later, La Nan returned from a visit with her stepdaughter and suddenly Parni’s photographs appeared, stuck into the woven bamboo wall that gave my corner of the house the illusion of privacy. La Nan reported that she had found them on the road. Then she told me that she had spoken with the stepdaughter about the theft and that the girl had denied everything. A year and a half later there was another large circumcision ceremony, and again I needed help. Parni agreed to return, and, for the first time, the stepdaughter would also be returning to enjoy the festivities. I didn’t want a repeat theft, so I asked La Nan if it would be appropriate for me to ask La Ani directly what had happened. La Nan told me to do so if I liked. Uncertain, I spoke with Inaq Mol, who said she had never heard of the incident. She called in La Nan, who explained that La Ani had stolen Parni’s money. I asked if it were a good idea for me to speak with the girl, emphasizing that I just wanted to prevent a recurrence. She also told me to do as I liked. After La Ani arrived, I again privately asked Inaq Mol, and she said to go ahead if I wanted.

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Being There I missed all the warnings. I should have remembered that they had otherwise used the phrase “lamunde meleh,” if you want to, only when they disapproved but did not feel they could not tell me “no.” I had heard the phrase often when they felt the proposed actions were beneath me, such as helping out in crop planting, rice harvesting, and sitting with the ill. While I tried to avoid embarrassing the household, I did not care for the pedestal they attempted to keep me on. In everyday life and in order to do my job as an ethnographer, I was used to overriding the disapproval of “if you want to” and going about my ethnographic work of participating in the daily activities of people. In every other case there had been no negative consequences other than we-told-you-so laughter at the frequent cuts and blisters I bore after my labors. So in this case, instead of hearing disapproval, I just heard their words that said I could go ahead and confront the girl. I waited until La Ani was alone in the kitchen hut. I recorded this conversation, and all the ones following it, in my field notes in English that night. Cameron: Do you remember Parni, the photographer, from when you were here before for that circumcision? She smiled, a sweet open smile. I doubted she was the culprit. My suspicions rested on La Nan, whose minor thefts (nyalet) had not subsided in nearly two years. I was playing along with La Nan’s shift of the blame onto her stepdaughter. I plunged ahead. Cameron: He is coming again, and I am afraid. Then, he had money stolen from his wallet, while his wallet was in the wardrobe. I do not care about the money; I only want to know what happened so that it doesn’t happen again. I am too embarrassed that it happened to a guest in my house. Do you remember anything about it? La Ani, in a startled and indignant voice: No. I believed her, but asked: Didn’t La Nan come and talk with you about it? La Ani, shaking her head, replied: Never.

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Shame and Making Truth Aha, I thought. Then, my well-conceived plan to keep this quiet was disrupted by La Ani’s grandmother coming in to the kitchen hut. La Ani, directing herself to Papuq Sol, began to tell her in an anxious voice that I had accused her of theft. I tried to intervene, knowing that a match was being thrown into kindling, but to no avail. Papuq Sol spoke heatedly and loudly: La Ani is not a thief. She has a good heart. She has never taken anything in her life. Then she screamed out the doorway for a boy to get Amaq Sunin, her son and Ani’s father. I urgently backpedaled: I didn’t say that she did anything. I simply don’t want it to happen again. Papuq Sol: She doesn’t know how to do such a thing. She would not take the money. She did not do it. She has lived with me all her life and she has never taken anything. Not a thing. Not from my house or any house. Her heart is good. s u n i n c a m e i n . T h e g r a n d m o t h e r told him of my implied accusation. Sunin turned to his daughter and asked her what she knew, which was nothing. Yes, she remembered that Parni had given La Nan his wallet and had watched La Nan lock it in the wardrobe. But La Nan had taken the keys with her. She had never even held the keys. Sunin was quiet and deadly serious when he turned to me, saying: She was not the thief. Her heart is good. I will go talk with La Nan. As Amaq Sunin went off, the grandmother, still fuming, called Inaq Mol into the kitchen hut. Jerking her eyes at me, the grandmother said: She says my granddaughter is a thief. La Ani is not a thief. She is a good girl. She would not do such a thing. She has lived with me all her life and has never done such a thing. Inaq Mol: Of course she did not. I believe you. La Ani is a good girl. I apologized again and again, affi rming that La Ani was a good girl.

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Being There Gradually, the grandmother calmed down. Poor La Ani, who had panicked, drawing forces around her to fight for her, was quiet, huddled in the corner, while we three women praised her honesty again and again. She no longer saw herself as accused, but I had ruined the festive occasion for her, and I felt guilty. The tension faded, and the issue seemed to disappear as we cooked and exchanged gossip about which dignitaries would be at the circumcision. No one mentioned it for two hours, and I was relieved that it hadn’t escalated. My relief was premature. Amaq Sunin came and took me inside the house to talk alone. He asked me quietly all I knew of the incident, and I told him honestly, leaving out only my discoveries of La Nan’s other petty thefts. He called in La Nan and asked her if she had stolen the money. She was silent. Inaq Mol came in. Amaq Sunin repeated the story, speaking over La Nan’s pleas that she didn’t do it. Sunin asked about the photos. Nan said she had found them in La Ani’s bag. He said she lied, because La Ani had never had them. Nan was silent. Sunin was silent. Inaq Mol turned to me, saying in a normal voice: It looks like your sister took the money. Your sister is a thief. I ask your forgiveness that your sister did this. I am embarrassed (malu) in front of you that this should happen in my house. I am sorry La Nan stole his money. She was the one. I will repay Parni. I am so embarrassed [at this moment a neighbor, Amaq Hin, slid in the open doorway and sat on the floor, and as he did so, Inaq Mol did not pause but her voice rose until she was shouting at me although we were only sitting three feet apart] that this should happen in my house. Something like this has never happened in my house before. Never. Never before you came to this house. [Two more neighbors, Amaq Unni, followed by Inaq Mysoon, ducked in and sat next to Amaq Hin] I took you in as my own child. I cooked for you. I watched out for you. I let you live in my house. You lived here for two years, and I am fond of/love Eron (this was one of

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Shame and Making Truth my nicknames in the village).5 Now you say that this has happened! You say that there has been theft in my house. There has never been theft in my house. It is not possible. It is not possible. La Nan has a good heart. She is not brave enough to steal. There has never been any theft here. It is not allowed. Yet you come in and say something like that. It is not possible. I took you in as my own family, I gave you everything I had. The best meat, the best chicken. And you eat and eat and never give anything back. I love you as my own child, so I took care of you. You don’t experience gratitude. You are not polite. Two years you are here eating my food, and you give nothing. You have lots of money, and you have never given us any, but it didn’t matter because I am fond of you. But now you do this. And you have never given us any money. You don’t give us any money. You are pelincik (sly, crafty, tricky, untrustworthy, and by implication, ungrateful). By this point I was shaking with fear that I’d severely tainted my rapport just three months before the end of the fieldwork, and also with indignation at having the tables turn so unexpectedly and, I felt, unjustly on me. I managed to answer her shouting in a quiet voice: It is not true that I never gave you any money. I have given you a million rupiah since I came. I give you money all the time. Just yesterday I gave you 40,000Rp. Inaq Mol: You lie. There is no million rupiah. If you had given a million rupiah, I would be rich. There would be glass in my windows. I would have meat to cook. I would wear new sarongs. You give us nothing. You don’t know anything. You are pelincik. I replied, naively thinking that listing gifts would protect me from the accusation: That is not true. Your words are not fair. Every week since coming here I give you 10 or 20,000Rp, and every time I go to town I bring back sacks of food. Last year I gave you 150,000Rp for the onions. I bought new sarongs and shirts for the entire family. For every ritual, I have given you 40, 60, 80,000Rp like I did again yesterday. I have given you a lot of money. I eat only a handful of rice a day, and

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Being There I never eat meat or eggs. If there is meat, the children get it. I work with you in the kitchen hut. I work with you in the fields. Inaq Mysoon: Yes, she only eats a bit of rice (speaking at the same time Amaq Hin and I were speaking). Amaq Hin, soothingly, over my anxious voice: It is true, she always comes back with bags of food to give you. Amaq Unni: Yes, she has given you money. 10,000 a week—that would add up over two years. Amaq Sunin generously added: Yes, it is true. With the onions, with all the weekly gifts, she has given the family a lot of money since she arrived. Inaq Mol, angrily: Then why am I still so poor? Look around you. Is this the house of someone wealthy? I would be wealthy if she had given me that. She does not give me anything. Amaq Sunin: She gave us all the money for the circumcision tomorrow. She bought new earrings for my baby. Amaq Hin: Eron is fond of you, Inaq. But Eron, you were wrong to say something was stolen from this house. You were wrong to make your mother malu. It is not allowed. Inaq Mysoon: You must be silent. Silent. Amaq Unni: You were wrong. You should not talk about it. The neighbors here were taking on the role of teaching the errant anthropologist, who indeed should have known better than to think that a private discussion could remain private. But I was completely taken aback by the turn of events, and though I had witnessed Inaq Mol’s anger before, I had never been the recipient of it. By scolding me publicly, the neighbors were simultaneously acknowledging that I was in the wrong (although for slightly different reasons than those given by Inaq Mol), and that I still needed socialization. By taking over the scolding from Inaq Mol and reshaping it, they gave both Inaq Mol and me an opportunity to calm down from our defensive stances, showing insightful skills at dissipating high emotions.

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Shame and Making Truth Amaq Hin continued: You must be silent. It is not allowed to make your mother malu. It is not possible something was stolen from this house. Amaq Unni, piping in: It is not possible that something is stolen from this house. People are not brave to steal from here. Inaq Mysoon: No one is brave to steal from here. Amaq Unni: It is not possible. Amaq Hin: The people in this house are good. It is not possible that they would steal. You were wrong to say so. It was someone else who came in and took the money. Amaq Unni: Yes, strangers came in. Amaq Hin: There were strangers everywhere that day. It was the day of a big ritual. Amaq Unni: Two young men, they came in and took the money while everyone was away at the ritual. They came in and took the money. That is the way it happened. Amaq Hin: Yes that is what happened. Two young men from far away, they saw no one was in the house, and they came inside and stole the money. Amaq Unni: People who are bad (lenge). It always happens at times of rituals. Too many strangers are here. That was the way it happened. Inaq Mol: La Nan and La Ani, they went to get more water. We were all at the ritual, and they went to get water for the cooking. That is when they came in. The wardrobe was not locked, and they took Parni’s money. That is the way it happened. Amaq Hin: Of course. Of course. Two strangers came in and took the money. They waited until La Nan left, and then they came in. The photographs fell to the floor when they took the money, and some children found them. Amaq Unni: The children found them and played with them. Later, La Nan saw the children playing with the photos, and she asked for them. She did not know what had happened.

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Being There Cameron, seeing my chance of escape: Yes, that must have been the way. I am sorry Inaq. It had never been my plan to make a problem. Inaq Mol, speaking to others: Eron was wrong. This is all her wrongdoing. It is not allowed to be like that. She should have told me immediately when it happened. Why wait two years? Cameron: I told La Nan when it happened. I did not know what to do. Inaq Mol: Only tonight do I learn about it. Eron is very pelincik. Cameron: I am sorry Inaq. I was wrong to say anything. I did not know. I am sorry La Nan. Amaq Sunin, Amaq Hin, Amaq Unni, Inaq Mysoon, I ask for your forgiveness. I was wrong. Two men from far away came in and took the money. That is what happened. I am sorry. Inaq Mysoon: Do you remember the two men sitting on the barugah (covered bamboo platform) that morning. No one knew where they had come from? Inaq Mol: Yes, it must have been them. Where were they from? Amaq Unni: Somewhere far away. They didn’t speak the dialect of Pelocok. They spoke the dialect of people from B [a neighboring village]. . . . There are a lot of thieves in B. Inaq Mol: People from B . . . don’t know how not to be thieves. The tension in the room fell. Inaq Mol sent La Nan to get some coffee; after serving it, she went behind the green curtain hiding her sleeping platform and stayed there. We drank and they talked about the funny dialects of people from far away. I sat with them, distantly listening as their conversation drifted into harmless waters, my heart still shaking. Should I leave the house the next morning to live elsewhere or try to stick it out? Did Inaq Mol really think I was ungrateful? Should I shower her with money, although it would mean having to leave the field immediately? What a nightmare my quest for the truth had become. In retrospect, it is easy to suggest that the blunder was that of a novice. But after eighteen months in the field I could hardly be consid-

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Shame and Making Truth ered a beginner. I spoke the local language reasonably fluently and was a warmly welcomed participant in everything from births to deaths, political discussions to private confessions of anxiety. I could exchange jokes and understand glances. In this case I knew enough to ask others’ advice before proceeding, to speak about serious matters privately, and to never make direct accusations. And while I knew that Sasaks ideally tried to avoid confl ict, in reality yelling arguments between people were relatively common. Some people never showed overt anger, but others did fairly regularly, yelling at older children, at siblings, or at spouses typically for errors resulting in financial or food loss, for perceived hoarding of resources, or for perceived infidelities. Anger primarily surfaced when something truly important to one’s well-being was at stake. But I had never made anyone obviously angry with me by asking questions. If I asked a question they did not want to answer, people were excellent at redirecting a conversation. Furthermore, I knew that Sasaks consider theft wrong and take great pride in being responsible for guests’ well-being. Yet while not publicly condoned, thievery was a normal part of life. To my knowledge, no large-scale thievery was ever committed by local people on local people. Small-scale pilfering was another matter and, given the level of poverty, not even surprising. In Indonesian and Sasak languages, malu is the word that means shame, deep embarrassment, to lose face. Sasaks typically avoid situations in which they could feel malu. For example, because everyone is impoverished in the local area, no one was malu regarding the grunginess of one’s clothing or the holes in one’s sandals that one couldn’t afford the modest school fees for one’s children, or that there was typically no sugar for coffee and no protein on one’s plate. Yet one would be malu to not bathe or wash clothing regularly, not keep one’s household and compound tidy, not give help or food when asked, or not invite any visitor for a meal—even if that means borrowing from others and going hungry oneself. And one would be extremely malu to steal from guests.

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Being There Inaq Mol did not say at the outset that I did not have the right to pursue this particular truth, but she perhaps should have, because the only possible outcome was making someone malu. As long as my potentially embarrassing questions were heard only by family members, as long as shame was not public, Inaq Mol was malu but not angry. But when, as neighbors often did, Amaq Hin slid in the open door to visit, shame shifted to anger. In public, my quest for the truth in Inaq Mol’s eyes must have threatened the very foundations of her family’s honor. As her family was my host family, my quest for this truth was also betrayal. Given that from where Inaq Mol stood the social universe in which meaning traveled could collapse should that truth be known, I indeed earned her anger. I apologized profusely and willingly accepted moral culpability for seeking truth when, in retrospect, I should have been silent. Also, I myself was shamed and indignant at the accusations of stinginess. Neighbors scrambled for strategies, for ways to resolve the situation so that no social standing would be lost for anyone. Amaq Sunin was surprisingly fair. Inaq Mol turned on me with a hostility that shocked and hurt me. La Nan let Inaq Mol fight the battle for her even though she had much at stake once the discussions became public affairs: both her social reputation and potentially her marriage— Sunin could have divorced her for the offense, I realized in retrospect. Inaq Mol took the insult upon herself rather than let La Nan take it, pointing to different truths as she did so. One truth was that maintaining social standing outweighs the value of social niceties toward guests. However much Inaq Mol was embarrassed by the realization that her daughter had stolen from a guest, however much she valued her relationship with me, at the moment that the neighbors came into the room she faced the potential of public humiliation. Facing what she must have seen as the most immediate crisis, she lashed out at me, changing the truth she had just admitted into not only a lie but an assault on her. The neighbors saw the larger picture of what was at stake for all of us—Inaq Mol, La Nan, Amaq Sunin, and

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Shame and Making Truth me. To protect everyone’s social standing and to mend the breach with me, interestingly, what was needed was a new truth that could explain a past event. Inaq Mol’s accusations also point to another truth that is more difficult to sweep away: a relatively wealthy and privileged outsider was living with her family and not giving them everything she had. From my standards, a reserve of personal property was essential to doing my work; I couldn’t hand out all my belongings or all my funds and continue fieldwork. But the money I had in reserve and had meted out over the course of my stay was a reserve of financial security for me. Inaq Mol lived in a world of intense poverty that I was only visiting. Even the windfall of hosting a relatively generous anthropologist was not enough for her to pull her family into the fi nancial security of the locally well-off. From this perspective I was indeed pelincik. The utter wealth disparity between me and the people with whom I worked was a truth that haunted my fieldwork and is a problem that continues to haunt anthropology. But, amazingly, the brutality of inequity too could be subject to social repair. I had weathered the brunt of the quake, but I arose the next morning fully expecting aftershocks. I was concerned that I would meet anger at every turn for the harm I had done and might still have to leave the field early. Instead I was greeted with unusual solicitude, and no one even hinted at the night before. Inaq Mol took extra pains to share neighborhood gossip with me, offering tea at every turn. The next day I left for town to buy more film. I had planned to return by nightfall but fell ill and didn’t return until the following day. Upon my arrival Inaq Mol asked why I was so late. I explained that I’d been ill. She said, “I was ill too. Ma’af (I’m sorry).” I had been ill with fever; Inaq Mol was telling me that she felt ill at lashing out at me—that she generously did not hold me personally accountable for the poverty in which she lived. A week later I was walking on the distant edge of my compound. Inaq Mysoon called to me to join a group of women. As I sat she asked

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Being There me, “Isn’t it so that Inaq Mol accused you of not giving them any money?” Cameron: Yes, that is so. Inaq Mysoon: Those were her words, but it is not true. La Remoch: They have become rich off of Eron. Inaq Serinun: Before you came, Eron, they had nothing. Nothing at all. Inaq Mysoon: She gave them all that money. She has always been very generous. La Nan is licik (sly, stealthy) to take the photographer’s money. Inaq Hull: She has a bad heart. She was always that way. She comes into my kitchen hut and takes things. La Remoch: Her brother says she steals from you, Eron, all the time. You must be careful and protect your money, Eron. Inaq Mysoon: Yes, you must be careful because La Nan is a little thief. But it’s not allowed to say anything. You must be silent. You made Inaq Mol malu. That is not allowed. William James argued that people have multiple temporary truths that go along on the credit system until someone tries to cash in on them.6 By asking questions to cash in on one truth I was unable to stop that truth from infecting other truths—like social standing and honor—in ways that threatened the fragile fabric of the social universe. This experience brought home to me a more brutal truth that often anthropologists are privileged visitors in worlds of poverty— worlds in which petty theft must be a frequent temptation, and in which condemnation of lapses is at best inappropriate. Amazingly, the sharp edges of each of these truths were blunted by social generosity in making new truths to reestablish social relationships. The strength and creativity of neighbors committed to the well-being of others was potent enough to hold together the fragile fabric of this social universe. And I was taught how the credit of these new truths could be estab-

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Shame and Making Truth lished gently through daily practice in maintaining relationships and valuing people more than the details of past events. Notes 1. It is difficult to explain why their economic condition did not improve drastically. The family’s possessions— clothing, furniture, mats, cooking utensils, etc.—became more numerous and their diet more nutritional with my infusions of cash and food. Otherwise they were not much better off when I left than when I arrived. This may have been because the majority of the cash I gave them was used in hosting more elaborate rituals, changed into consumable luxuries such as candy, palm wine, and rolled cigarettes, or invested in crops that failed. 2. These figures are based on an exchange rate of 2210Rp to $US1 in 1995. For more on Pelocok’s economics, see M. Cameron Hay, Remembering to Live: Illness at the Intersection of Anxiety and Knowledge in Rural Indonesia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 29–55. 3. Sasaks arrange rituals in this order because they say that marriage begins the life cycle. 4. Outright physical violence is relatively rare, but other forms of violence are much feared. See Hay, Remembering to Live, 116–122. 5. In the local dialect, Inaq Mol said, “ku sayang Eron.” The emotion word sayang is commonly used to express the loving relationships between parents and children, siblings, and best friends. 6. William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908).

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9

Far from Home, and Being Gnawed on by a Vervet Melissa Fay Greene

The first time I visited East Africa, in November 2001, I got bitten by a monkey. I’d bounced across the arid, rocky center of Ethiopia with a thirty-something taxi driver named Selamneh Techane and with my future daughter, five-year-old Helen, to reach the hot springs resort of Sodere (sah-der-ray), a hundred kilometers southeast of Addis Ababa. Helen sprawled across the hot backseat, asleep, and I struggled to stay conscious in the front, blinded by equatorial sunlight multiplied a million times by sand and dust and superheated air. Occasionally there was a town, like the dusty towns of the Old American West—wooden storefronts, hand-painted signs—and then we pushed on across more miles of blank sky and hot rock. Finally we reached Sodere, the popular weekend destination for Addis urbanites: a scattering of dry trees, weedy grass, picnic litter, peeling picnic tables, and a slow brown river. I guessed it was an old oasis—there was water here, and shade, relief from the twin blasts of heat from the sun above and heat from the rock below. And—after the week I’d spent visiting orphans, many of them terminally ill—I was relieved to see healthy, middle-class Ethiopian children in this park. They kicked soccer balls, ran about in

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Far from Home, and Being Gnawed on by a Vervet swimsuits, enjoyed ice cream cones, or napped on shaded quilts under the loving gaze of their parents. Busy populations of vervet monkeys and of gelada baboons bounced in the trees and bounded between the picnic tables, making the children scream with delight and terror. “You have monkeys like we have squirrels!” I cried in excitement. Each vervet’s black triangular face drooped from a fluff y snow-white eyebrow line; each wore a soft-brown crew cut, with a fringe of long hair shooting out from its ears and sideburns. Young ones toddled over to picnickers, and adult monkeys and baboons swung low from the trees, reaching out for snacks with leathery fi ngers. The baboons had impossibly long, dark, hour-glass-shaped faces; abundant straight black and tan fur fell across their shoulders to their waists, cape-like, as if for a night out at the opera. Selamneh had bought gava nuts, still dangling on their branches, from barefoot country kids along the blindingly hot route. Refreshed by the leafy breeze in the park and eager to meet the monkeys, I ran back to the taxi for the nuts. I placed one on my palm, knelt, and held out my hand. I encouraged Helen to do the same. Helen was shy and adorable, with huge eyes, a high, smooth forehead, and a complicated hairstyle of little braids, rubber bands, and plastic beads. She’d lost both her parents in the HIV/AIDS pandemic. I’d come to Ethiopia to report for the New York Times Magazine on conditions among Africa’s AIDS orphans and to meet Helen, with whom my family had been matched by an international adoption agency. She, the clever Ethiopian child, stepped quickly behind me, away from the monkeys. Sensing her reasonable alarm, Selamneh swung Helen onto his shoulders and backed away while I leaned down to offer treats. The upright monkeys swaggered over on splayed feet and daintily removed the nuts from my hand, the whisk of their claws across my palm sending a chill down my neck. In the previous week I’d visited foster homes and orphanages in Addis Ababa and surrounding towns. I’d played with children in

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Being There courtyards full of HIV-negative orphans (as Helen was) and in others brimming with HIV-positive orphans. The latter, equally silly and affectionate, were— on closer inspection—beginning to unravel. When the little kids stopped their jump-roping or ball-kicking, one saw bald spots and open sores and mushrooming molluscum; one saw too-thin legs and too-large heads on bony shoulders; one noticed that there were no older children in these compounds at all, as the lifesaving anti-retrovirals hadn’t reached Africa yet, and the life expectancies of these children were short. Helen, Selamneh, and I wandered along the muddy Awash River, scanning for crocodiles and hippos. We sat on a couple of old cement benches under a fine-feathered acacia tree and enjoyed a mild sour wind from the river marsh. Helen poked out her feet to admire the red plastic sandals I’d bought her at a shop in Addis; she was very giggly. I wouldn’t be able to take her home to America with me on this trip; I would return for her in several months when all the paperwork was complete. She radiated a quiet happiness. I still held the gava nut branches. Suddenly a huge vervet, a monkey the size and weight of a two-yearold boy, dropped out of the tree onto my left side, looked me straight in the face with glittery copper eyes, bit me hard on the upper arm— breaking through blouse and skin— deliberately snatched the branch of nuts out of my hands, and leapt back into the tree. I sat stunned, trying to grasp what had just happened. Africa? Monkeys? AIDS? “Can I get sick from this?” I managed to ask Selamneh, my heart racing. Helen began to cry. “No,” he said. “Monkeys do not carry disease.” Oh, you think not? I thought snidely. Every theory of the genesis of HIV begins by noting its similarity to Simian Immunodeficiency Viruses [SIVs]— carried by forty different species of African primates. “It’s nothing, it’s nothing,” I told Helen, but she had jumped to Selamneh’s bench and was scrambling up his arm to his shoulders,

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Far from Home, and Being Gnawed on by a Vervet probably doubting the street smarts—maybe now even the life expectancy— of the tall, thin non-Amharic-speaking white woman who’d been identified as her new mother. I bought a bar of soap from the kiosk near the entrance to the hot springs, undressed to my underwear, and shyly descended ancient mossy steps into a tiled enclosure sloshing with warm mineral water. It teemed with nude Ethiopian women, chatting and shampooing, gleaming and sloshing, laughing and rinsing. The ladies instantly stopped what they were doing to look at me. I smiled feebly at everyone and then turned my attention to the bleeding teeth marks on my upper arm. If vacationers constantly got bitten and died here, I was telling myself, Sodere would probably not be such a popular resort. Under a starry night we drove back across the dry rocky landscape toward the capital, my fears rising. It was near the end of my ten-day trip. Two days later, buckled into my window seat on Ethiopian Air, the irony wasn’t lost on me that unlike the millions of sick people on this continent, unlike the hundreds of infected children I’d met, I was free to lift off, circle above the mountaintop city, and fly west toward health care. I left a message on the answering machine of an old friend who is a top physician at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) here in Atlanta. “It’s the silliest thing,” I chuckled, “but I just got back from Ethiopia and I seem to have been bitten by a monkey. It’s nothing really. It’s already healing. I just thought I’d mention it.” He called right back. “Stay where you are,” he ordered. “I’m going to talk to people about East Africa and talk to people about monkeys and get back to you.” Then he called back to report: “There are rabid monkeys in East Africa. You have to get rabies shots.” “What?” I protested. “John, no, I don’t think the monkey was rabid.”

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Being There “Well,” he said, and then posed one of the most interesting questions anyone has ever asked me: “Was the monkey acting rationally?” I thought: the huge vervet wanted nuts, I had the nuts, he jumped down, and he stole the nuts. “Yes.” “Hold on, let me double check with the monkey people,” he said, and I held on, trying to picture “the monkey people.” He returned: “Start the shots immediately. It’s a series.” “John, I’m supposed to go out of town to a wedding this weekend.” “Melissa,” was all he replied. “The monkey was rational,” I muttered to myself, pushing through the double glass doors into DeKalb General Hospital. They don’t get a lot of monkey-bite cases at DeKalb General Hospital. In fact, I was their fi rst monkey bite case. I feared they were going to refer to me as “monkey people.” I returned three times for the series of rabies shots, the fi nal one involving a needle the size of a dueling sword administered into my hip while I placed both hands on the examining table to support myself. I came home one day that week and found a prerecorded message on my answering machine: “This is DeKalb County Animal Control. We’ve had a report of a rabid feline in your area. Please exercise caution.” My first reaction was: “A rabid feline? Are they talking about me?” My second reaction was: “Bring her on. I’ve had my shots.” Fearless, I volunteered to take out the garbage that night after dark. At the dinner table I announced that I was founding an in-house support group with our dachshund and our rat terrier, open only to Family Members Who Have Had Their Rabies Shots. Meanwhile, I learned from adoption agency staff that the children at Helen’s orphanage were referring to me as “the woman who got bitten by a monkey,” as in, “Do you like your new mother-the-woman-who-got-bitten-by-a-monkey?” Most of all I felt really stupid and embarrassed that I flew 7,000 miles to Ethiopia, went jolting for six hours across a rocky plateau

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Far from Home, and Being Gnawed on by a Vervet from Addis Ababa to Debre Zeit to Nazret to Sodere, and wandered the grounds of a dusty public park among hundreds of vacationing Ethiopians; while, as far as I know, out of the thousands of people I encountered on the many legs of the journey, I, the English-speaking American journalist, was the only person to get bitten by a goddamn monkey. The intuitions, and the folklore, I lacked and the signs and the clues I missed as I blundered across a foreign landscape, not only with respect to endemic monkeys but with respect to a hundred daily subtleties and interactions, provided nonstop the reminder: I’m far from home. My New York Times Magazine story appeared in December 2002, and I was widely encouraged to consider a full-length book on the subject of Ethiopia’s orphans of HIV/AIDS. I began commuting to Addis Ababa. I absorbed manners, clothing, and food traditions; I made friends, stayed in Ethiopian homes, and tentatively explored a few neighborhoods; but I never mastered more than a few pleasantries in Amharic, nor gained the ability to navigate the dusty, colorful, complicated populous city, nor managed to swallow more than one bite of a berbere (red pepper)-seasoned stew before gulping water and applying ice to my lips with a look of stunned distress on my face. On the streets, especially at night, my white face leapt out at people, as if I shined a flashlight under my chin in that old summer-camp way. I wished I could blend into the street crowds. If only I were an African woman who could wrap herself in a handwoven cotton dress, a habesha qemis, or drape a long white shawl, a shash, over my head to fall modestly over my Western slacks. I would navigate the always-packed streets (teeming, day and night, with humanity and with herds of donkeys, goats, cattle, and sheep) modestly, slipping by on thin flip-flops rather than tromping upon the heavily buckled and thick rubber-soled sandals I’d bought at R.E.I. I was there, I was in Addis Ababa, the name exotic, the street scenes vivid and rich; I was in it but not of it. I wanted to go to the sorts of places those slender women with downcast eyes

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Being There were going when they turned down an alley or climbed a mud embankment; I wanted to know the people in those huts of tin, those cabins of mud and straw, the hole-in-the-wall wine shops. Still, when I became a guest in one of those places, sitting on a low cot consisting of blankets spread upon planks of wood, or offered the only chair in the room, everyone was always looking at me. Continuing to try to grasp the uniquely individual impact, the personal tragedy, of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, I spoke one day with Getachew. A hand-wringingly humble man of about forty, dressed in fi lthy rags, he showed up weekly for handouts at a foster home I was covering. One day I asked if I might visit him at home sometime. He was stunned, crushed, confused, overwhelmed. Looking around to make sure he’d not misunderstood, that I was truly addressing him, he bowed deeply and begged me to join him immediately. Selamneh and I hurried behind Getachew down the hot gravel road. After about three-quarters of a mile, Getachew climbed up a weedy embankment onto a cool mud path that led into a tightly packed slum neighborhood. Dwellings of wood, burlap, tin, and cardboard leaned together. Getachew threw back his shoulders and led me on winding paths between and around the hovels as if he were a drum major and I was a brass band. He was right to be proud. Flabbergasted children and bewildered adults stopped what they were doing to stare at us, at me. A crowd of people began to follow us to Getachew’s mud hovel. I believe people thought he was in trouble in some way, perhaps being arrested. When we ducked and entered his tiny room, the onlookers crowded around the doorway and squeezed their faces through the one round window hole that had been carved in the mud wall like a porthole in a ship. Getachew angrily scolded and shooed them away, but my paparazzi returned immediately. I sat on the only chair in the house, Getachew sat on his mud bed, and Selamneh stood half in, half out of the door.

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Far from Home, and Being Gnawed on by a Vervet Widowed by HIV/AIDS (having infected his wife), Getachew lived with a bright, big, healthy seven-year-old son in the squalor of profound poverty. The boy entered now and shook my hand, and then stood staring at me from close range. Scraps of magazines and newspapers papered the mud walls. The father and son owned almost nothing. They seemed to share the same filthy clothes—huge on the boy, small on the father. And yet Getachew had grown up in a middle-class brick house; in fact (he showed me through the window) his parents and siblings and their spouses lived in the big house right in front of us. He was no longer allowed to enter it. He’d been sent as a young soldier to the front lines of his country’s endless war against Eritrea. There, far away from his young wife and infant son, he’d visited the huts of the camp prostitutes. After several years he’d finally returned from the front, but he was sick with HIV/AIDS. Though his young wife welcomed him, his parents and siblings shunned him. They’d banished him and his family to this mud hovel in their own backyard beside their latrine. Whenever Getachew used the latrine (a hole in the mud), his parents sent their maid out from the house to throw ashes on his droppings. When their young daughter-in-law died, the older couple didn’t attend her funeral. Getachew’s aging parents continued to regard him and their grandson as untouchables. Beside Getachew’s wood-plank bed was a teetering old bedside table. And tied by a filthy string to the bedside table was a rooster. The string looped around his ankle. “Oh!” I said idiotically, trying to help us all (me, Getachew, the son, the crowds in the mud lane outside) feel at ease. “What’s your rooster’s name?” “Min?” asked Getachew. What? “This is a nice rooster!” I enthused, trying to pet it and then trying to avoid being pecked on the hand. “Does it have a name?” “Min?” What? asked Getachew again. And the people jostling for a view outside the window and door asked one another, “Min?”

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Being There I gestured to Selamneh to translate; unfortunately, he did. There was no other possible answer for Getachew to make other than to repeat: “MIN?” I abandoned that particular conversational gambit and tried to find something else to admire. Later that night it hit me: the rooster was a food product, not a pet. He wasn’t Getachew’s animal companion, he wasn’t a he. He was on deck for the stew pot. In short, the rooster did not have a name. What if Getachew visited me in Atlanta? I asked myself that night. What if he opened the refrigerator and pointed to a package of ground beef, began stroking it, and politely asked, “What is its name?” But Getachew forgave me my foolishness. Getachew was eager for me to turn to his son, who now held out scraps of paper for my inspection. He attended a part-time night school for destitute children; he wanted me to see his schoolwork! He was learning to read and write, he showed me. He was doing sums! I studied each page carefully and looked up beaming, nodding, and complimenting; the boy and the man absorbed my praise with shared pleasure, exchanging smiling eye contact with each other. I hugged the child while he looked down in shy happiness. Then he carefully sealed the papers in a used plastic bag and lifted the packet to a tin shelf attached to the mud wall. The reason we travel far from home, I believe—journalists, anthropologists, business travelers, and tourists—is not only to savor what is different but to connect with what is the same. We should not be distracted for too long by the surface glitter of difference, the strange flavors, exotic customs, extremely limber dancing, communication by drum, social hierarchies, and spiritual divinities, without connecting on a deeper level with core truths of human intelligence and human sensibility. In Ethiopia I saw women giving their children away. I saw HIVpositive women breast-feeding their babies. I saw mothers and fathers compelling their toddlers to beg on the streets. I met a man who wore

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Far from Home, and Being Gnawed on by a Vervet his small son’s clothes. I saw an old lady spit chewed-up boiled beans into a baby’s mouth. This was not motherhood as I knew it! But one travels afield not to judge or to cringe, but to learn and to recognize. Sampling the exotic, or the supposed exotic, is nowhere near as rich as connecting across boundaries of geography, language, or history. The women who gave their babies away were dying. They lived in sub-Saharan Africa in the epoch of AIDS and had no access to health care or to lifesaving medicine. Data suggests that most were probably infected by their husbands; some might have been beaten or turned out of their houses for testing positive. The women whose children were begging were doing everything in their power not to starve and not to see their children starve. The HIV-positive women breast-feeding their babies had no access to formula or to bottles, nor to clean water and sterilization techniques. Their choices were to feed their babies contaminated breast milk, to let the babies starve, or to place their babies under a tree and run away, as many did, in order to save the children’s lives. And the old woman chewing up beans and spitting them into the mouth of an obviously malnourished little boy was without resources. Later I would learn that “kiss-feeding” is common throughout the developing world, but I had never heard of it. A young granddaughter had laid the baby on the floor of the old woman’s mud hut and had run away. The old woman was a wood carrier. She hiked into the hills surrounding the increasingly deforested city every day, gathered kindling, and hiked back into the city at dusk, bent over at the waist. She was a human pack mule, barely earning the coins to purchase the calories required to survive and to return to the retreating forests the next morning. And now there was a baby to feed. She tied the baby to her front so she could lay the wood on her back; the extra calories required to carry his weight nearly defeated her, but no additional coins were earned by this extra work. All she could afford was beans. She took the cooked beans into her own mouth and made them into mash for her starving

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Being There great-grandson; she leaned over him with full cheeks. He weakly opened his mouth like a baby bird, and the old lady, like a mama bird, darted close, shared the food, darted close again. She kept him alive. I flew to Ethiopia for the first time as a middle-class suburban mother of five. I’d been around the block a few times with motherhood, or so I thought. My husband and I had five children: four by birth and one by adoption. (Helen would be our sixth child, and within a few years three older Ethiopian orphaned boys would also join our family.) As a mother of five I was used to being sought out for parenting advice. I knew all about childbirth, breast-feeding, imaginative play, pets, wilderness adventures, pre-literacy activities, schools, summer camps, library books, and the “family bed.” I’d been a classroommother, a PTA officer, and a Brownie Scout leader. Sometimes I tossed off short pieces for Parenting or Mothering magazines. Oh, I knew all about motherhood! In Ethiopia, I began to discover just a few tidbits of information I’d missed along the way, like what to do if you and your child are at risk of starving to death or if you are homeless, shunned, or terminally ill. What if your child is terminally ill and there is no clinic? Getachew— sick, excommunicated, and penniless—somehow was raising a glowing boy, smart at school, polite at home. I felt honored to have met Getachew and his son, and to have met the elderly firewood carrier who kept her great grandson alive with chewed beans. I was grateful that these people looked past my foibles, like getting bitten by a monkey or introducing myself to poultry. They did with me as I did with them; they reached past my peculiar-seeming, exotic-looking actions to connect with what, in me, was most deeply human and really not so unusual at all.

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10 Time Travel Robert Shore and Bradd Shore

Twice upon a time, we left home for parts unknown. In 1968, just after finishing college, Bradd Shore joined the Peace Corps. A bad war, an unpopular president, and an intimation of possibilities in far-off places led him to Mataˉvai, a picturesque Samoan village at the edge of the sea in a remote corner of a remote island in a recently independent Pacific Island nation. He learned how to live in a place where the pulse of life resonates to the equatorial heat, where village life is slow-cooked. Almost forty years later, in 2006, following his college graduation, Robert Shore, Bradd’s son, also joined the Peace Corps. A bad war, an unpopu lar president, and an intimation of possibilities in far-off places led him to Battsengel, a small village in western-central Mongolia, a landlocked nation in central Asia that had only recently emerged from eighty years of Soviet hegemony. He learned how to live in a place where bitter cold reigns for nine months of the year, where, often, the only retreat from the backbreaking work of nomadic life is a cup of salty milk tea with friends and family. He confronted a place seemingly frozen in time, a place that, in time, would reveal the warmth of human life within. Separated by four decades, 6,500 miles, and a generation, these twin journeys trace a double helix of outside insight, a tangled history of time travel.

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Being There * * * “ va s t ” i s p e r h a p s t h e m o s t overused word in travel writing about Mongolia. Westerners struggle to process a place where stretches of steppe, winter, and time seemingly go on forever. Mongolians have a single word, tsag, for clock and hour, as if the object and its measure are somehow interrelated but the distinction ultimately unimportant. The words for “month” and “moon” are also the same. Neither of these doublings is unique to Mongolian, but there they seem exceptionally appropriate. In Mongolia, time is less the ticking of a second hand than the endless expansion and contraction of daylight and the brief moment of midday. I sat on the floor of my yurt with Baigalmaa, one of our school’s three English teachers. She had come by to welcome me to Battsengel, and as one of the only people around who could speak any English, she had probably been sent to check me out and report her findings back to the rest of the village. I had run through all of my practiced greetings and pleasantries and shown her every picture and doodad I had brought from home. After an hour, we resigned ourselves to sitting in silence. She seemed at peace, but I shifted uncomfortably, desperately scanning the yet unadorned walls and ceiling of my felt tent for a conversation piece. I decided to make the lull in conversation the conversation. Ta odoo bored yum uu? “Are you bored?” I asked, using the English for a Mongolian word I had yet to learn. She asked what it meant. “Bored is when you have nothing to do,” I offered, in broken Mongolian. “Oh, we call that resting.” “Well, not exactly,” I said. “You have nothing to do, and that makes you unhappy.” “Oh, you mean sad. But why are you sad?” “Because you have nothing to do.” “You are sad because you are resting?” Dumbfounded by the surprising sense of her circular logic, I gave up. Sensing my frustration

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Time Travel and an impasse of understanding, she put the issue to rest: “No, I’m not bored,” she said.

t h e s a m o a n w o r d f o r t i m e is “taimi,” on loan from English. So are the words for “minute” and “second.” But Samoa has its own time: itula¯, the hour. Literally it’s “a side of the sun.” No stretch of time I know rivals its sheer sluggishness, especially in the late Samoan afternoon, when the world feels on the verge of thermal collapse. Pa’ia’aua Fa’asino sat immobilized by the afternoon heat, staring blankly ahead. Now and then with a practiced flick of his wrist, he fanned away swarming flies. Patriarch and chief of my new Samoan family, Pa’ia’aua was also a district school inspector who had used his influence with the Department of Education to get his family one of the first crops of American volunteers. Every family of standing wanted a Pisikoa of their own. We were a hot commodity. Now and then the old man turned in my direction and muttered “It’s really hot!” No one was inclined to do much of anything. Except me. Appalled by the very idea of empty time, I kept trying to fill it. I tried reading, but couldn’t concentrate. I got out my schoolbooks, spread them out on the floor, and tried to get ready for my next day’s classes. But I found myself drifting off. “It’s just 3:30 in the afternoon,” I thought, “I can’t go to sleep now. What a waste of an afternoon.” Fighting the urge to close my eyes I muttered to myself, “Do something, anything!” Anything except nothing. i a r r i v e d a t t h e m a r k e t at 5:00 p.m., just to be safe. No car had ever left before 5:00. A driver and friend, Mendee, saw my towering approach— six feet, two inches tall, and six feet, six inches tallwith backpack all wrapped in goose down—and waved me over. “Rob teacher, come to my car. We are leaving right now.” After four years of observation, Mendee had learned how to construct an irresistibly seductive sentence, against which inexplicably hurried foreigners were usually powerless. Of all of the adjustments required of long-term visitors to Mongolia— taste bud realignment to accommodate an innards-heavy diet, wardrobe selection to survive temperatures that can reach fifty

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Being There degrees below zero, and listening skills to make sense of a language that seems to fall apart in the mouth of the speaker—nothing tests the senses more viscerally than the resetting of inner clocks.

j u s t a f t e r m i d n i g h t I wa s awakened by the voice of one of the kids from my family. “Psst, Psst! Get up. The bus is coming.” I stumbled out of the bed, grabbed my travel bag, and, to the hissing light of the Coleman lantern, was led across the grass to the dirt road that ran through Mataˉvai. The child had been posted there to flag down the bus for me. You could see the headlights coming from a mile away as the old wooden bus bumped and lurched its way along the coast road around the bend from the next village to the west. Climbing onto the bus, I quickly surveyed the scene. It was nearly full. The passengers looked weary. The aisles were filled with bundles of mats, a couple of boxes of herring, baskets of taro and breadfruit, and a live pig tied up for the ride. Every few minutes the pig would squeal and try to turn over. As I entered, a girl around ten or eleven got up from her seat and moved to someone’s lap toward the back of the bus, making room for me near the front. “Pisikoa” someone whispered to their neighbor, using a newly coined word for us that would quickly become the new Samoan slang for “sweetheart.” Pa¯lagi! “White guy,” one of the kids called out. A baby started screaming in terror. We were on our way to the wharf at Salelologa, where we would catch the early morning copra boat to Apia. On a map the trip to the wharf wasn’t actually all that far, maybe thirty miles. But in those days the road wasn’t yet paved, and the ride through the jungle and the lava field and village after village took hours. It seemed endless. At one point the bus turned off the main road and lumbered its way a mile or so up a steep side road. Suddenly we stopped. Except for the headlights, it was utterly black. For what must have been an hour we just sat, waiting. Except for me no one seemed to be bothered by the fact that we were sitting there in total darkness and nothing at all was happening. Within ten minutes, the mosquitoes started to zone in on the buffet of human flesh that had landed in their midst. “Mosquitoes!” exclaimed a middle-aged woman, exasperated. I was glad to see that she, at least, looked unhappy. Some passengers covered their heads with colorful cloths. Others slapped themselves. The driver put his head down on the steering wheel and went to sleep.

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Time Travel Despite the uncomfortable hard seat and the unrelenting mosquitoes, I was just beginning to drift off when I heard voices coming from somewhere just beyond the bus. A lantern appeared in the distance, revealing the outline of a thatched hut just ahead. An elderly man made his way to the bus, followed by a small boy dragging an oversized suitcase almost as big as he was. Someone was tying baskets of green bananas and taro onto the roof of the bus. Our new passenger made his way down the aisle, stepping over the baskets, and took what must have been the last empty seat. Then the driver, newly awake, turned the bus around and very slowly made his way back to the main road. Once again we were on our way. “I wonder,” I remember thinking, “if we’ll get to the wharf on time?” Whatever that meant. m y e x p e r i e n c e i n M o n g o l i a h a d taught me how to make instantaneous calculations about the probable speed of cars based on the physical condition of the car, the ratio of possible seats to people, the quantity of packed goods, and the gender makeup of the passengers. A quick scan of cars suggested that Batjargal’s jeep— peeling periwinkle, packed with cases of imported Russian beer, fifty-kilogram sacks of flour, and all-female passengers—would be leaving soonest. I gave Mendee a passing handshake and said that I had already made plans with Batjargal, who caught on to my ruse and seemed to take great pleasure in conspiring with an outsider: “Yes, yes. Rob teacher will come with me. We have many things to talk about.” He put his arm around my shoulder and shot me a satisfied smile. There would be waiting. I would be annoyed at having to sit idly by as whatever invisible forces aligned to eventually signal to the driver that we had reached a state of readiness, but annoyance would be mixed with self-satisfaction at having bested the system, and every minute in transit saved would be its own individually wrapped victory. In Mongolia, tires follow rock-riddled paths toward patchwork. Even if Mendee’s “right” had been paired with “now,” according to standard English logic the journey back to Battsengel—the semi-nomadic community of 2,500 where I taught English to the children of herders—

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Being There would be harrowing. Seventy kilometers over craggy earth in a Russian jeep was sure to keep a speedometer’s needle bouncing between nine and ten o’clock. These obstacles would be exacerbated by inevitable and interrelated stops for vodka, the bathroom, and car sickness.

t h e n e w m a r k e t i n A p i a was also Samoa’s main bus station. Brightly painted buses, basically wooden frames and benches screwed onto a truck chassis, collected passengers bound for districts all over the island of Upolu. Some buses sported just a sign announcing their destination. Others added a poetic name and logo, some in English, others in Samoan, all as colorful as their paint jobs: Tolufugaˉla’au “Three Flowers,” Sunrise Transport, Road Star, Queen Poto Transport, and so on. The one I was looking for was called, rather prosaically, “The Bus of the Boat.” Its destination was Mulifanua Wharf on the western tip of the island where we could catch a boat back across the channel to the island of Savai’i where I was living. Finally my bus arrived at the market. It was empty, and I was the first passenger to get on. It was at least twenty minutes before anyone else climbed aboard. My fellow passenger was a very large woman in a bright-blue flowered dress. She must have weighed over three hundred pounds. As she slowly made her way down the aisle of the near-empty bus, she looked at me and raised her eyebrows in greeting. Talofa, I said, greeting her back. She smiled, clearly amused to be speaking Samoan to a paˉlagi. “You must be a Peace Corps.” “Yes,” I answered. “I’m a volunteer.” “Where are you living?” she asked. I told her I was living on the island of Savai’i in the village of Mataˉvai, in Safune district. “Wow, Safune’s way out in the back of Samoa,” she said. “My husband has family in Safune,” she said as she slid beside me. I took a deep breath, trying to make myself smaller. “Do you have a Samoan wife yet?” she asked, laughing. “Not yet,” I said, trying to smile. I exhaled. Before long the bus began to fill up, and an hour or so after I first got on the bus, the driver started the engine, shifted into gear, and we were on our way. Well, not quite. We circled around town for a while, hunting up passengers. Then we headed for the coastal road that wound its way out of town toward the wharf. For the remainder of the trip my companion and I sat in tight communion, two of us that might as well have been four of us, on a wooden bench scarcely big enough for any one of us. No space was too tight. Even when the bus seemed full, there was always room for one more.

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Time Travel Everyone talked and laughed. Samoans seemed to take a kind of comfort in the crush of bodies. Jammed into the corner of my seat, I slid my right arm out the window to gain a few inches and make contact with air. “So, who are you staying with in Mataˉvai?” my new friend asked. I inhaled, and tried to remember. i wa s g i v e n t h e f r o n t seat and a rosy-cheeked bundle of baby to hold. I flipped through my cata log of time-passing techniques: music—three hours with batteries fully charged, reading—forty pages in large print, and small talk—various combinations of about a thousand words. Batjargal had his own methods of passing time, most of them involving squatting, leaning, and smoking. It was unclear whether by the color of the sky or the now-dashed hope of running into an old friend, but Batjargal decided it was time to go. Our six women passengers crammed into the backseat. In Mongolia, however, going can be any point on a continuum. There were still preparatory tasks to accomplish and people to pick up around the center of town. We were not going directly, but we were on our way, the tires rolling ostensibly toward home. After a period of apparently secret negotiations the women in the back announced, “We are hungry,” and they asked whether I would join them for dinner. The negotiation was not whether we’d be stopping but, rather, party of how many. Though hungry, I declined, thinking that waiting in the car might persuade them to eat more quickly. I marked time on my iPod: 1:47 of battery life at 8:00 p.m.

t i m e c a l c u l a t i o n i n t h e A m e r i c a n sense may not matter much to Samoans. But watches matter a lot. For pastors, chiefs, and other notables, displaying a fat watch on their wrist is a lot more than a matter of timekeeping. It’s a great mark of status and of being up with the times. If you were stuck for what sort of gift to get someone important, a watch would always be received with pleasure. Halfway through my Peace Corps stay I was packed and ready to head to Faleolo Airport for my flight to Fiji during school break. Suva, Fiji’s capital, is, by Samoan

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Being There standards, a real city. It’s not an overgrown town like Apia but has the makings of a South Pacific metropolis. And it’s a duty-free shopper’s paradise. I had left my Samoan family in Mataˉvai and, for the past couple of months, had been living in a small house built on the school compound by the local district school committee. The previous day I had “arranged” for the bus to the wharf to pick me up at my house. As I waited for a bus, Penisula, one of my fourth-form students, appeared at the door. He greeted me “Ta¯lofa Peleti.” I was “Mr. Shore” during school hours, but after school I became Peleti again. Seeing my suitcase, Penisula asked in English, “Where are you going?” I answered that I was headed for a holiday in Fiji. “Oh, Fiji!” Penisula said. His eyes lit up. “When you come back from Fiji, bring me a gift.” “What kind of gift?” I asked. “A watch. Bring me a watch!” he pleaded. Suddenly Penisula’s hopeful smile turned to panic. “I mean,” he said, “a real watch.” “No Timex please. Get me a Seiko Automatic.” And so I knew that the Seiko Automatic had arrived in the islands, and not a second too soon. a f t e r a n h o u r a n d a half of Kerouac’s On the Road on tape, and the partial freezing of the tip of my nose, I went into the restaurant to check on the women’s progress. Sixteen-ounce beer cans, recently relieved of their contents, dotted the table. Conversation had risen noticeably in both pitch and volume. “O-Rob-ooo, we are very happy. Come drink with us.” My manners stepped aside and made way for surprise and irritation. I made a show of checking the time on my cell phone, which read 9:30 p.m. I said that I only had to pee and asked if they were almost done. The largest woman of the group responded with an expert conversational check: “You are a very angry person. If you sit with us and drink beer, Rob-ooo, you will be happy like us.” Trapped, I sat and tried to recover my damaged sense of social grace. I drank one beer and excused myself to the bathroom. I stayed in the bathroom as long as someone who might have actually had to pee and walked past the table and out without diverting my gaze from the door. As I left I heard a deliberately unhushed, “He really is an angry person.”

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Time Travel I returned to the car and Batjargal returned the baby to my lap. He asked what had happened inside. I said that the women were drinking. He laughed as he lit a cigarette. “Their husbands aren’t here, so they are having a nice rest.” Apparently the ratio of women to men is only a helpful measure in a mixed sample. My methods of car selection still needed refining, but there would be plenty of time to polish them. I stewed, my battery power gone and my pages diminished. In taking their time, these women were wasting my time. What I failed to understand was that, for Mongolians, it was our time.

s i x y e a r s h a d p a s s e d s i n c e I first stepped off the DC3 in Samoa as a new volunteer. By 1974 I was a graduate student in anthropology and had just completed eighteen months of fieldwork in Samoa. Before returning home I had come to New Zealand to do some archival work and was staying with Samoan friends in a small house in Grey Lynn, an Auckland suburb, then popular with the Islanders. One day I received an invitation to the wedding of the daughter of my good friend and star informant, Pesetaˉ Gatoloai. His daughter was training as a nurse in New Zealand and had met her Samoan fiancé there. Their wedding was taking place in Auckland. After the church service I was invited back for a big celebratory meal at the house of one of the bride’s relatives. After eating, everyone adjourned to the living room for the opening of the wedding presents. The couple had gotten quite a lot of gifts, and they were stacked high in a corner of the living room. One by one the presents were opened, the cards read, and expressions of gratitude offered around the room. A rather large box was opened, revealing a sizable plastic moose-head cuckoo clock. When, a few minutes later, a second moose-head clock was unwrapped, I took it as a bizarre coincidence that two guests would have chosen the same tacky present. By the time the sixth oversized moose-head clock was unveiled, to the apparent delight of all, I felt I was in the presence of a mystical experience, a truly transcendental vision of time. But then again maybe it was just the work of culture in one of its more mysterious manifestations. It takes time, and maybe cuckoo clocks, to understand Samoa. *

*

*

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Being There a n e s p e c i a l l y r o u g h p a t c h o f Mongolian “road” roused me from momentary slumber, and though I was certain it hadn’t been long, I asked Batjargal what time it was. He tapped on the spidered glass that covered the display clock on the dashboard. “It’s broken. It never worked,” he said. I took out my cell phone, which had by this point also run out of batteries. Batjargal asked a dapper-looking man who was passing by in a pin-striped suit. The man looked down at his gold watch and looked over at me: “11:30,” he said in a showy display of English competence. The women emerged from the bar. Their form resembled that of the classical swirling cartoon fight—riddled with dust, stray lines, and conversational asterisks. They piled back in the car and sarcastically asked if I had been waiting long. I was silent. “Was it difficult?” a faceless voice asked from behind me. “No, I’m just tired,” I said. Joking and storytelling continued in the back as we pulled into the gas station—the last step before the trip home. Eventually the voices fell to slumber as the pavement turned to crumble, and the crumble gave way to dusty hillside stretches of pasture. “It’s a flat tire.” I guessed it was around 1:00 a.m. Silence and forward progress had improved my mood. “I’ll help,” I offered. I gave little more than emotional support. Batjargal attended to the flat. “Why are Americans always in such a hurry to go places?” he asked. I considered the question, thoughtfully, but in terms that I might be able to translate. “Did you have some work tonight? Maybe you wanted to meet with a secret girlfriend,” he half-joked. Neither was true. “No, I was just tired,” I said. He seemed to take this as an acceptable but blatant lie. I reconsidered. “Americans like to choose,” I said. “If I am waiting for everyone in a car, I don’t have many choices of things to do.” Batjargal mulled over the idea for a moment. “What choices would you have made?” he asked. “I could have sat with friends. Or read a book.” He cocked his head at me in amused confusion. I had sat with him—a friend. I had read a book.

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Time Travel I arrived home and tried to unload my things without waking the women in the backseat. I said good-bye to Batjargal. He nodded and got back in the car. As he drove off, he leaned out the window and said, “Rob teacher, now you can go meet your secret girlfriend.” In my oneroom, circular, felt-covered home, I laid back and stared incredulously at my Brookstone alarm clock, which read 3:37 a.m. How many hours had the trip taken? How much sleep was I likely to get? How many hours earlier had Mendee’s car arrived? I set my alarm clock and went to bed.

Recursions Mongolia 2007: Forty years after Samoa, I should have been prepared for my visit to Peace Corps, Mongolia. But time plays tricks. The Mongolian landscape was infinite, a world apart from the islands of Samoa. It was a new place, and a new time. We arranged for a jeep and driver to pick us up at our hotel and take the three of us to visit Rob’s Mongolian family. In his day the father of the family had been a national wrestling champion. The jeep showed up a couple of hours late. We drove out of town and then for miles on the empty steppe. The road became track and then nothing. Without any discernable landmarks, how on earth did the driver know where to go? But eventually we saw in the distance the family’s tents and, just beyond, their herds of yaks, sheep, cattle, and some horses. The whole family was waiting for us, and they welcomed us with broad smiles. They were obviously glad to see Rob, and they told us that in America we might be Rob’s parents but here in Mongolia they were his family. We all laughed and posed together for a family snapshot. Now he had taken on the job of Rob’s personal trainer to get him in shape to compete in the local wrestling competition that is the hallmark of the annual Naadam celebration. Rob was forced to don a traditional but vaguely humiliating Mongolian wrestling suit that looked like a cross between a bikini and a harlequin costume. After a brief demonstration of Mongolian wrestling techniques, capped by an eagle dance, we were escorted into the cook tent for a meal. A sheep had just been slaughtered and gutted in our honor and its organs were boiling away in a large pot. We sat in a circle around the tent and smiled at each other. Though we lacked a common language, the warmth of the welcome needed no words. Then, finally, we were each handed a bowl of steaming sheep

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Being There innards floating in a grayish soup. It was what Mongolians call “giddes.” Even the word lingers in memory. “You don’t have to eat it,” Rob assured us, nervously. “But it’s really good,” I lied. Linda nodded in agreement, chewing slowly. My spoon carefully skirted the pancreas and the lungs. But the heart, the heart was something unforgettable. s a m o a 2 0 0 0 : A d e c a d e b e f o r e my trip to Mongolia I joined my father for a reunion tour of sorts around New Zealand and Samoa. We were staying with the Petaias, my father’s surrogate Samoan family, at their house in Vaivase. The Petaias were a family of some stature, and their house had many of the amenities of modern life. Woven paddles spun hypnotically above us on ceiling fans. The midday heat outside was oppressive, unfair even. After three weeks, the novelty of ocean and jungle had worn off. There was little to do but carve out horizontal human-size spaces and chat-nap with a rotating sample of my dad’s Samoan friends and family. Conversation was simple— the old days, who had died, who would be married, Britney Spears. Subjects were separated by a refrain we all took turns reciting and elaborating upon: “It’s hot outside.” “Yeah, really hot.” “Maybe hotter tomorrow.” The heat from outside crept in, and I began to doze off. My father looked over at me and, with minor concern for my adolescent sensitivities, asked, “Are you bored?” I looked around and considered Samoa’s extended lull between midmorning and sunset, the business of the day consisting of three meals, intermittent housework, and long stretches of time—time spent with people. I struggled to think of what I might have done to pass the time at home. These stretches of time that had seemed empty at first, suddenly, strangely, had become the substance that made a day seem full. “No, I’m not bored,” I said. “I think I like this.” Samoa was my first experience with time travel. I should have learned. But I was very young, and time plays tricks.

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11 Prostitutes with Honor A Re s e a rch e r w i t h S h a m e

Louise Brown

Mariam is not the prettiest girl in Heera Mandi, and she is certainly not one of the most accomplished. Like the best nachnewalli (dancing girl) she applies her makeup thickly and ties gungaroo to her legs so that the bells stitched onto the pads reach halfway up her calves, but even though she stamps her feet with all the energy of an authentic kathak dancer, her perfor mances reveal no trace of classical training. When she talks she does so in Panjabi, never the polished Urdu or English of Pakistan’s elite courtesans. People living in the other small, dilapidated apartments surrounding the courtyard mimic the way Mariam and her family talk. They say their accents are jangli—from the jungle—and add that they have come here from a farm, bringing their coarse peasant manners with them. Mariam, her parents, and all her many brothers and sisters are known as the “Village Family”—and it is not a compliment. But despite all this, and despite her slightly tooslender figure, Mariam is good at what she does. She is climbing Heera Mandi’s sex work hierarchy very fast. One afternoon I watched her prepare for a visit to a “promoter” in the brothel quarter. He is an agent who takes girls to the Gulf states,

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Being There where they dance and sell sex. Mariam had been to Dubai and Abu Dhabi many times in the two years since she had left her village and she had profited handsomely from it. The evidence was stacked haphazardly all around us in cardboard boxes containing DVD players, televisions, mobile phones, a talking doll, and a set of heated rollers. An old woman who was a friend of the family sat cross-legged on a chair and looked at Mariam throwing a burqa on top of her bright-pink shalwaar kameez. The girl pulled a veil over her hair and adjusted the nikab—the piece of fine black mesh—that covered her face, hiding her features and obscuring her view of the world. The friend chewed on her pan, giving me glimpses of her two remaining long, betel nut– stained teeth. She looked slightly puzzled. “Why don’t you just use a dupatta [shawl]?” she asked. “Because I’m a prostitute with honor,” Mariam retorted. Honor is not usually associated with the residents of Heera Mandi. Shame, its evil twin, is more commonly heaped upon the residents of Lahore’s oldest, most famous red-light district. The women living in this crumbling ghetto are considered by mainstream Pakistani society to be the lowest of the low. They are stigmatized as gandi kanjri— dirty prostitutes—who are the corrupters of good men. Some of the women working in this corner of Lahore’s walled city have migrated here. They have been divorced or widowed or have escaped abusive relationships at home and have no other way of making a living thanks to Pakistan’s social system, which grants female independence only to a tiny minority of elite, educated women. Many other sex workers in Heera Mandi have been born into the trade. Their mothers and grandmothers were in the profession, and the occupation is passed down through the generations along with the stigma. The daughters of prostitutes inevitably become prostitutes, and so when a girl is fourteen or fifteen years old she enters the trade, usually at the point when her mother retires from selling sex and instead takes up the role as manager of her daughter’s career. It is a cycle that is almost impossible to break.

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Prostitutes with Honor In a society that places a high value on female chastity, where sex outside marriage is technically punishable by death, and where men are judged on the control they can exercise over the sexuality of women in their family, it is no surprise that the women of Heera Mandi are vilified. And yet despite, or perhaps because of, the contempt that is shown to them, the people of the brothel quarter still manage to make a life that is full of meaning— one that has its joys and triumphs as well as its share of miseries and humiliations. Of course I expected this to be the case when I began my research almost ten years ago. Sociologists and anthropologists are well versed in the importance of subcultures and their value systems, which are often subtle variations or even reversals of value systems in mainstream society. It would have been peculiar if a place as old and as busy as Heera Mandi did not have a vibrant subculture and a way of interpreting the world and its own place within it. And I would have been amazed too if a brothel quarter in which hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people live and work did not have a status hierarchy. All red-light districts I have visited have their pecking orders, their notions of who is successful, who is respected in the community, and who carries themselves with something akin to honor. Within weeks of arriving in Heera Mandi I had begun to appreciate the crucial part that honor plays in this place customarily associated with shame. But what I did not expect, and what I only belatedly came to realize, was that the notions of honor that circulated in this stigmatized ghetto would label me as shameful. I had assumed I would be immune from shame in the context of a brothel. Although I was well aware that many in mainstream society would question my respectability, assuming that I was guilty by my association with prostitutes, I thought I was safe from the criticism of people who lived within the brothel quarter. After all, I was privileged by my whiteness. I was an academic, a feminist, and someone who did not sell sex. But to my surprise, among the women who were to become my closest informants

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Being There and friends, increasingly, I, and not the sex workers of Heera Mandi, was deemed to lack honor. Initially I was pitied as a divorced woman who had not remarried, and later I was criticized for not using my sexual capital—what remained of my youth and looks—to earn money and gain status. These were things I never expected when I began my research. I have come to realize that some of the most interesting and insightful things we learn are things that never crossed our minds when we began, mainly because they were not within our frameworks of reference. I had anticipated that my gender and my sexuality would impinge on fieldwork: how could they not? And yet they entered into my research in a way I had not predicted. Thanks to my friend, Maha, and her family, I have become privy to a new moral code, and while my exercise of cultural relativity has not led me to accept the verdict made upon my shameful behavior, I have to concede that my critics do have a point. Explaining that I do research in a brothel quarter is guaranteed to generate intense curiosity, even among people who otherwise feign little interest in sociology. They are often disappointed to find, however, that sex itself—the actual physical acts that are sold by the women and transgendered workers of Heera Mandi—is a minor and not very important part of my research. It is the context, the mundane, everyday life of the brothel—its rituals, the perfor mances of status, and the minutiae of social interaction—that give my work its substance and, for me, its value. Many assume, wrongly, that it must have been difficult for me to gain access to the brothel quarter and to stay in its midst, first in a rented room and then with a family of traditional courtesans. I have been there, on and off, a few weeks at a time, for almost ten years now, a regular participant at parties, social events, and in the ordinary, often astonishingly dull, grind of brothel life. Gaining access to this world was not hard: anyone who has spent time with sex workers knows that they are some of the most sociable people in the world. They have to

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Prostitutes with Honor be; unfriendly prostitutes do not get much repeat business unless their specialty is domination or ritual humiliation. Contrary to the myth that sex work is an easy or glamorous career, most of the women in Heera Mandi lead quite routine lives—at least routine in the context of a brothel. They wait for customers to telephone, text, or drop in, and they spend a lot of time getting ready for men who may not even turn up. It is tedious, and at times I am sure my visits were a welcome distraction from the relentlessness of beauty regimes or the boredom of constant waiting. I possessed another advantage too in establishing myself in the brothel quarter and in gaining some acceptance: I was a Westerner, an embodiment of social capital, and a link to the prestigious world of the international traveler. I would be introduced to friends, family, and clients with a familiar and incorrect refrain: “This is my friend from America.” England, it was clear, did not have the same prestige. Participant observation requires immersion in an often unfamiliar environment, but it also demands humility; even if we learn a new language and join in rituals and daily practices, we can never gain insider status. Although I learned some Urdu, and a variety of swear words in Panjabi—vital in a brothel where every sentence appears to include the words “cunt” and “sister fucker”—and although I wore appropriate clothing, a shalwaar kameez (baggy trousers and a long tunic) and a dupatta (shawl) on my head, I could never hope to pass for an insider in Heera Mandi. Wearing a dupatta is an art form, a trial for those who have not been tutored from an early age in how to wear the thing elegantly and effortlessly. I have dusted the streets of Heera Mandi countless times as the shawl unravels and trails behind me. Such ineptitude is the staple behavior of foreigners trying to fit in to cultures they barely know, but even on those few occasions when I was totally covered from head to foot in a long black burqa and a face veil, people knew I was not from around there. I fancied it was my disguise, a way to move around

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Being There unhindered by my pale face. No one was fooled. I was clearly the foreigner, given away, I am sure, by the way I walked. We carry evidence of our origins and our socialization in our every movement, and mine were evident even under a tent of black viscose. I was a resident in the brothel district in the sense that I stayed with a local family. I ate with them, visited local shrines with them, met the clients, and danced at parties, yet for all my efforts to fit in I may as well have been from another planet. Few businesses are as cutthroat and as unforgiving as selling sex in Heera Mandi. Girls are in their prime at eighteen and over the hill at twenty-five. Short careers and a competitive market generate intense hatred, jealousy, and a hierarchy that is in constant flux. Even the most attractive woman knows that there is always a younger, more beautiful girl ready to enter the business and usurp her place as the favorite of the wealthiest patrons. At the top of Heera Mandi’s hierarchy are young women who will earn the equivalent of $4,000 for a night’s work. At the bottom are those who will earn a hundred rupees (around $2). The gulf between the highest- and lowest-paid entertainers is vast, and easily traversed, usually downward. To be a successful sex worker requires youth, beauty, and sexual skills, and in terms of these qualities the girls in Tibbi Gali, the lane in which the cheapest brothels are found, compare favorably with girls earning hundreds or even thousands of times as much. What sets the elite girls apart is their possession of forms of capital that increase their status, their izzat (honor), and their prices. Successful women in Heera Mandi deploy economic, social, and cultural capital. Earning a lot of money creates a virtuous circle. Top courtesans wear expensive clothes and fabulous jewelry, and their chauffeurs drive them around Lahore, Islamabad, and Karachi in new, airconditioned cars— preferably four-wheel drive vehicles equipped with gizmos and gadgets. These women have to look expensive in order to meet clients in five-star hotels and to perform the role of a high-status

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Prostitutes with Honor courtesan that elite men purchase partly to show their own success. Within the brothel quarter a woman’s financial health has to be demonstrated by conspicuous consumption of consumer goods, by the employment of a large number of servants, tailors, beauticians, and dance masters, and by generous support of local Shia feasts and processions on important religious occasions. Women who do these things, and are very visible in their benefaction, are accorded izzat and a high status in the community. Cultural capital is required by any girl hoping for a high-flying career. Historically in South Asia there has been a close link between prostitution and the performing arts. Being a female entertainer, and therefore a public woman who was the antithesis of the secluded and respectable wife, was synonymous with selling sex. At the apex of this traditional form of entertainment were women who were trained for years to sing and dance. Seventy or more years ago Heera Mandi sparkled, and in its heyday the sons of respectable families were sent to the kothas (perfor mance rooms) of elite courtesans for training in the traditional arts—an appreciation of ghazals (light classical songs) and kathak dancing—and for an education in the language of love. Poets and writers sought inspiration from the quarter’s luminous beauties, and both landowners and the intelligentsia were enchanted by stylized, and expensive, romance. There was honor in some of this; the most sought-after courtesans were lovers of influential men, and the accomplished won plaudits for their singing and dancing. Women in Heera Mandi no longer undergo years of grueling training in order to develop the traditional skills to entertain their customers, but the most successful still undertake a crash course in kathak so that when they perform in dancing shows for the Pakistani elite they can demonstrate their links with the courtesans of a vanished, supposedly more romantic age. Social capital—the access to social networks and connections—is vital to a woman’s career in the sex trade. It is not what sex acts you

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Being There sell that matters but to whom you sell them. Women who are the mistresses of powerful men accrue honor by their association with wealth and status. In mainstream society, women’s social status is determined by the men to whom they are closest: their fathers, husbands, and, later, if they are widowed, their sons. It is similar in Heera Mandi: a sex worker’s status is established largely by the type of men she entertains. Social standing is important in this; a man who is from an ancient, noble family or who has a top position in the judiciary, the army, or the government is seen to be a good catch, partly for economic reasons, but an industrialist or a man in trade will do just as well, providing that he is rich. What is absolutely crucial in determining a courtesan’s honor is how much a client will pay for her. Buying beautiful young women is a status symbol for many of Pakistan’s elite men— proof of their sexual and financial potency. At any one time there will be only a few local women catering to these elites; a woman’s career at the top is remarkably short-lived, and she is soon replaced. Many of the most beautiful girls will have a series of patrons before their— usually very rapid—fall from favor. These sex workers will appear with clients and their friends at private parties, held in houses owned or rented by the elite for this very purpose— strictly separate from the men’s family life, or at least the life of females in their families. The interaction at these parties makes it clear who is a courtesan’s latest patron, and there is a constant reshuffling of both male and female hierarchies. Courtesans compete for the wealthiest, most powerful men, often trampling their rivals with cutthroat ambition, forming liaisons with the most generous patrons. Interestingly, the women tell me in confidence that they would prefer to have sex with some of the younger, attractive men, but they put business and honor fi rst. A few of the more daring (or foolhardy) will conduct affairs— clandestine even within the clandestine world of the sex trade—but they pursue these desires for lower-status men at a risk to their reputations among the clients.

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Prostitutes with Honor Women achieve success and honor by associating only with wealthy men and by becoming a sign by which men can judge themselves against other men. The women display their wealth as a mea sure of their success and an advertisement that tells potential clients they are worth buying because other wealthy men have done so. It is a self-reinforcing cycle while it lasts: until the appearance of exclusivity wears thin, the clients grow bored, or the girl loses the freshness of youth. In Pakistan’s elite prostitution scene, sex workers are akin to brandname goods. The trouble with being a branded good, however, is that no one wants to buy it when it begins to lose its cachet, and once a woman slips in the hierarchy and accepts even marginally lower-status, less wealthy patrons, she is on the slippery slope to early retirement or a career entertaining many men for little reward. Relationships with a very small number of competing males in the highest social circles are the key to career success and to honor in Heera Mandi. The women must walk a tightrope to achieve this, simultaneously selling sex but contriving to remain exclusive. Ultimately, and inevitably, they will fall from this tightrope. They can only hope that they have earned enough money during their balancing act to see them through the less lucrative times ahead. One of the best examples of the link between a woman’s honor and the importance of her clients came during a visit to Heera Mandi in 2004, four years after I began my research. At this point I had become very close to one family in par tic u lar. Maha was a courtesan down on her luck. She had been beautiful and sought-after, but age and a love of ghee-laden curries had caught up with her. She no longer had rich men at her beck and call, and her “husband,” a long-term client, had expelled her from the home he maintained for her in a respectable suburb and had sent her back to the brothel quarter in which she had been born and bred. After years of plenty, Maha and her five children were living on a dollar a day.

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Being There Nena was Maha’s second daughter, a sweet fourteen-year-old with a quiet, graceful beauty. In the monsoon season of 2001 she was busy training in kathak, even though Maha could not afford the dance master’s fee and had taken out a hefty loan to finance the investment in Nena’s career. Several dalal visited the apartment to watch Nena going through her paces: they relaxed on the mattress on the floor, leaning against cushions, and were fed morsels of food that Maha had ordered from the local restaurants and the bakery that specializes in pineapple cake. They were doing what all good dalal do: checking out who was ripe and ready for the business; who was going to catch the eye of wealthy men, and who was going to net them a half or two-thirds of the price the client would pay for taking the girl’s virginity. Sheikhs in the Gulf states pay a premium for girls like Nena— virginal girls with big almond eyes, blue-black hair, and pale skin. So when it was arranged for Nena to be sent to Dubai to “marry” one of the most powerful men in the Arab region, it should have come as no surprise to me, but of course it did. My application of cultural relativity did not stretch so far as to easily accept this child’s dispatch to Dubai, even though I knew it was common practice for the cream of Heera Mandi’s teenage girls to be sent to Dubai for defloration by elite men. As researchers we are not supposed to intervene in the cultural mores and practices of a community except to avert truly terrible consequences, but even here the parameters are not clear. Nena’s trip to Dubai would save her family from destitution. And even if she remained in Lahore and was not sent to the Gulf, Nena, as the daughter of a prostitute, was doomed to a life of prostitution as surely as if it was a building block of her DNA. But the most disorientating thing about this whole sorry story was that Maha and the rest of her extended family were pleased about the impending sale of Nena’s virginity—and it was not just because of the value of the payment. They were delighted because Nena’s first patron was known to be one of the movers and the shakers in the Gulf, and in the wider Arab

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Prostitutes with Honor world. He was a man whose position ensured the elevation of Nena and her family in the brothel quarter’s hierarchy, an elevation that had practical effects in the price Nena, her sisters, and even her cousins could charge for their services. Within the brothel subculture nothing but good could come from being the virgin bride of Sheikh Khasib, but for me as a researcher it was a profoundly disturbing event. For a while I lost my professional moorings: I was too close to the people involved to be objective, too familiar with Western human rights discourse to simply accept the trafficking of a minor, yet too well versed in the brothel quarter’s concepts of honor to make a well-informed judgment on what I should do, or how I should feel. Eight years on I still do not know the rights and wrongs of this case. Pakistani society stigmatizes the women of the brothel quarter for selling sex and for their promiscuity. Ironically, these very women frequently disparage their neighbors as cheap whores, even though they all do precisely the same kind of work. In their sadder, reflective moments some of the women I know best have internalized and reiterated these damning judgments and applied them to themselves. Malika, a woman in her early fifties, who in her younger days famously entertained an entire cricket team at an after-match party and then complained that there were insufficient customers, grew sad as she recounted her life. “I am a bad woman,” she said, explaining that for this reason she could not go to the shrine of Data Sahib (an important Sufi saint). “I am gandi [dirty],” she confessed. Most of the time, however, the women of this area draw their cue not from the hypocritical values of mainstream society that stigmatize the people who sell sex and not from the customers who purchase it but from complex subcultural values and notions of subcultural capital that inform life in the brothel community. It was these values that I failed to heed, or failed to comprehend, during my fi rst visits.

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Being There The sex workers of the district entertain many hundreds of men in their careers and, some claim proudly, many thousands. Yet while I do not sell sex it has become increasingly obvious that I am not perceived to be a paragon of virtue by the people I am studying. I do far too many things that contravene acceptable standards of female behavior, not necessarily because I do things that are shocking by comparison with women in wider society (though I probably do that too) but because I contravene standards of female conduct within the redlight district. My most important infractions are my connections with men. For a start I talk to men and engage them in some form of relationship—I call it friendship—without there being any kind of monetary compensation. When I first stayed in Heera Mandi I rented a room in the home of Iqbal Hussein, a restaurant owner, a son of a courtesan, and a celebrated artist who has built his career painting local women. I know Iqbal well—he is a friend—and even when I moved out of his home to stay with Maha and her family I frequently returned to spend an evening with him on the roof terrace of his restaurant. To my mind it is one of the most beautiful, evocative places on earth. As dusk descends and the azan (call to prayer) is heard, the lights on the enchantingly beautiful Badshahi Mosque are turned on and the smell from the mutton chops sizzling on the barbeque drifts up to where I sit with Iqbal, four stories above the busy streets. From their own roof terraces women in the brothel quarter have seen me sitting with Iqbal, unchaperoned, and the rumors have spread that I spend too much time with men, that I drink alcohol and have illicit relationships with men who are not my husband or my clients. Maha is very clear about this: a woman can be married and have sex with a man because that is a legitimate transaction: it is approved by wider society. And, within the brothel subculture, a woman can have sex with a man who is not her husband, providing she is paid for it. In this case the money compensates for the stigma of doing something

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Prostitutes with Honor prohibited in mainstream society. But to fall in between these two—to fraternize with men who are neither husbands nor clients—is wrong. It is proof of a lack of honor. If a woman’s honor is largely contingent upon her wealth, and wealth is associated with being exclusive, I had contravened some very basic rules. A sex worker I knew well asked me why I spent so much time wandering around the streets like a loose (low-status) woman. During the ten years that I have been going to Heera Mandi I have been involved at some level, usually not very seriously, with three different men. Maha and her family have taken a keen interest in all of them, but while that interest was first marked by excitement at what they assumed was my impending marriage to a rich man, I have disappointed them by failing to marry and failing to become rich. It is not as if I have lacked advice. Six years ago Maha and I were on a long-distance train journey to visit the shrine of Shabaz Qualandar in Sindh province. Maha was in a bad mood, spoiling for a fight. The train rattled along, and Maha eyed my wrists and neck which, unlike her own, were bare of jewelry. I wore only a watch with a little leather strap. “Louise,” she began, “you are a mental case. Where’s your gold? It’s really bad. Where is your izzat? If you have no money and no gold, people will think you have no izzat.” She pointed at my watch. “Look at your watch. How much did that cost? It’s kharab [rotten, spoiled]. It should be gold.” “Find yourself a rich man and then say you want jewelry. You need bracelets, earrings, and a necklace. All gold. Remember, big love: big money.” In the context of Heera Mandi this is good, solid advice, and I have been castigated quite rightly for throwing away a woman’s most valuable commodity—her sexual capital— on men whom I neither married nor gained from financially. In a place where women survive

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Being There by trading their sexual capital, this is seen not just as wantonly foolish but also as a dereliction of duty. As a mother, and a divorcée, I should have acted more responsibly in earning the money, social capital, and status that could benefit my children. When I was last in Heera Mandi, just a few months ago, Maha sighed as she looked at a photograph of the man I was currently dating. She raised an eyebrow and gave Nena a knowing glance. It was not simply because the man was of Pakistani origin and had a skin color that Maha considered low class, but because I termed him my boyfriend. “What is wrong?” I asked. She shifted uncomfortably. “Louise, husbands are good. Tamash been [customers] are good. Rich men are good. Boyfriends are bad, and you’ve had too many.” She was exasperated by my stupidity. While I thought I was being independent by paying my way and not being financially supported by a man, Maha and the other women of Heera Mandi have judged me as cheap because, to them, a woman’s status is defined by the man she marries or by the men who pay to have sex with her. There is no halfway house. It was bad enough that I had brought dishonor on myself, but I had compounded the problem by encouraging my own daughters to repeat this shameful behavior. During the time I have spent in Heera Mandi, my daughters, Rosie and Lorna, have grown into young women, now twenty-one and nineteen years old. When I first started visiting the neighborhood Maha would talk about how she planned to come to their weddings. She was excited about the prospect of an English wedding and dreamed of how we would all dress in fabulous clothes, the bride glorious in white silk and satin, her husband—inevitably a man of extraordinary financial means—resplendent and accompanied by his many acolytes. So it came as a grave disappointment to Maha and her family when my daughters turned fifteen or sixteen and no suitable husbands had been found. I had failed to carry out my maternal responsibility to ar-

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Prostitutes with Honor range worthy marriages for them. Not only this, but I allowed them to have boyfriends. Maha gasped and looked askance when I described Rosie’s current romantic interest, a delightful boy studying at a British university. “He’s a student?” she gasped. It was as if I had said he was a prison inmate. What she meant was that he was young, penniless, and likely to remain so for a number of years. Rosie was wasting herself on a halfgrown youth without resources. She had determined her price—and it was a low one. Both she and I lacked respect for ourselves. We used our sexual capital without thought for its value, we were failing to amass wealth and social status, and, as a result, we were careless with our honor. I reflected that Maha had sent her own daughter to Dubai at fourteen years of age to be deflowered by Sheikh Khasib. In Heera Mandi it was without doubt that Maha, not I, was considered to have done the right thing by her daughter. I suppose it is the prerogative and the limitation of the outsider to question such a verdict. The very ability to question this judgment defines me as not belonging. Despite all the time I have spent in Heera Mandi, and in the company of its women, I remain a tourist in the community I research, and ultimately I do not have to live by its rules. For the sake of my honor, by my own standard, I am much relieved.

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A Widening Circle Fa m i ly, C o l l a b o r at i o n , a n d L i f e l o n g E t h n o g r a p h y i n C a n y o n d e C h e l ly

Jeanne Simonelli

I was in bed, almost 10:00 p.m., thinking about phased retirement, when my cell phone sang out an old Beatles tune. You say you want a revolution, well, you know . . . I flipped it open; the music stopped and the voice on the other end said, “Jeanne, it’s Carla. We set the date for the wedding. I wanted you to know right away.” Carla. It was late in North Carolina, but 2,500 miles away, on the Navajo reservation, families were just finishing dinner. Carla’s call was a surprise; I pictured her twenty years earlier, a smiling child easily scaling the rock walls of Canyon de Chelly, Arizona, with a string of biligáana (non-Navajo) students and others struggling to keep up behind her. And now she was getting married. But it shouldn’t have been a surprise, since my own children were both adults, off into their own lives. Her mom, Margarita Dawson, with whom I’d collaborated, and I were both grandmas. I was a grandma in the way reckoned by the Euro-American kinship system: the children of my children are my grandchildren. Margarita was a grandma as determined by Diné (Navajo) kinship: the children of my sister are

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A Widening Circle also my children, and their children are my grandchildren. And because she and I were “sisters” in the complex and intertwined paths of our lives, after two decades, all the grandchildren on distant sides of the continent belonged to both of us. Carla’s phone call brought me back to those first months at Canyon de Chelly, when Margarita and I worked together as park rangers at the national monument, eventually starting a book project together: Crossing between Worlds: The Navajos of Canyon de Chelly. How had we learned from each other, shared our culture and resources? What did it mean for each of us, and for our ever-changing families? I lay back against the soft down of my pillow, closed my eyes, and almost felt, again, the warm canyon sun creep across my cheek.

Origin Stories This story began with my daughter, who loves horses as only a young girl can, and with my own passion for mesas. Rachel and I live in a small community in rural New York, a place of sweet, gentle, green hills where brief summer is followed by endless November. In the winter of 1990 the gray was particularly damp and dense, the snow forgot to fall, and the deep turquoise skies of Arizona and New Mexico drifted in and out of my waking dreams. (Simonelli 1997: 1) So begins the prologue to Crossing between Worlds. It is also the prologue to a transformational part of my life, as an anthropologist and as a person making her way through an increasingly complex world. I would learn later that there is no such thing as coincidence, only serendipitous synchronicity, and that was what was at work during the bone-chilling winter of 1990. After five years of teaching in rural New York, I accepted a position as seasonal park ranger at Canyon de Chelly National Monument in northeastern Arizona. It was a dream I’d had for years, and one that could be realized on the academic

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Being There calendar; both eleven-year-old Rachel and I were free to travel during the summer. I came to Canyon de Chelly to be a ranger, not an anthropologist . . . [but] as I walked through the deep, saff ron-hued corridors of the canyon, I pondered the remains left by prehistoric dwellers and exchanged shy greetings with grandmothers clad in long velvet skirts. The anthropologist in me was fascinated by the struggle of my Navajo friends to create a balance between the two cultures. Questions began to form in my mind. Could the volume of tourism be increased without altering the age-old cultural terrain? Could the Navajos continue to use the canyon’s resources to meet their physical and spiritual needs without altering the natural and archaeological landscape? . . . How did the Navajos view the process of change . . . ? (Simonelli 1997: 2–4) Canyon de Chelly is in the northeastern corner of Arizona. The National Park Service is in the canyon as a guest of the Diné people, who have made their home there since the early 1700s. It remains both a place of residence and a location of great sacred significance. Each year the number of visitors to the area increases, as the canyon’s fame spreads worldwide. The legislation establishing Canyon de Chelly as a national monument in 1931 gave the National Park Ser vice primary responsibility to “preserve its prehistoric ruins and features of scientific or historical interest.” Visitors are still encouraged to experience the canyon’s scenic and archaeological beauty, but they are also reminded that they are on Navajo land and must respect the privacy of the residents. One of my Navajo coworkers at Canyon de Chelly was Margarita Dawson. Of those working with me, she was perhaps the most involved in maintaining that balance between tradition and change. Like

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A Widening Circle me, she had an adolescent daughter, though eighteen years ago we were still both following our youthful inclinations. Grandmotherhood was for the generation above us. We worked together for that summer and toward the end began to talk about our lives and that of the culture we were each born into. While teaching at the State University of New York at Oneonta, I had collaborated with Charles Winters, who also taught at the university, on Too Wet to Plow, a photo-ethnography documenting a time of change and conflict for the dairy farmers of rural New York. Before leaving Canyon de Chelly that summer I asked Margarita if she and her family would be interested in collaborating on a similar project, to explore the questions forming in my mind about the changing shape of Navajo life. The book would also provide a permanent record for Diné children growing up and into the twenty-fi rst century. Armed with a copy of Too Wet to Plow, she agreed to present the project to her extended family. Six months later, Charlie and I arrived together to begin the work. Gaining permission from the National Park Service’s superintendent meant moving through a federal bureaucracy with all its levels and lengthy forms, made even more complex by the uneasy relationship between the park and the people. Gaining permission from the family had its own nuances of cultural complexity, which required a working understanding of kinship within Diné families. When I met Margarita’s family I was amazed by how many sisters she had. Her mom, Karen, it seemed, had an extraordinary reproductive career. Paying attention, it became clear that I was also meeting other moms: “my mom, Karen” was sister to “my mom, Irene.” In addition, theirs was one of the last generations to practice sororal polygyny, where two sisters marry the same man, so under a European kinship system, some of Margarita’s sisters would have been half sisters. Even more complicating to the outsider, the Diné use a system known anthropologically as the Crow kinship system. It is particular to

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Being There matrilineal descent societies; all of your mother’s sisters are also your mothers, and all of their children are also your siblings. Kin terms designate specific relations within the categories of mother or sibling. Critical to our project was that Margarita’s family would maintain editorial control. Given the extended family networks, a lot of voices had to be heard. As work progressed, I sent the text to Margarita. She read it to her family and reported their comments. At one point they had not wanted to use their real names, and they were also concerned about the Spanish-sounding names I’d given them. “This is the twentieth century,” said Aunt Noreen. “We want twentieth-century biligáana names like Sue or Joe.” Later they decided to stick with my original choices. Noreen also was a stickler for accuracy. “Why didn’t you include the part where Margarita went to the bathroom in the dark at the yei’ bi’ cheii’ dance and sat down right on the prickly pear?” she asked. Margarita commented on the manuscript and corrected my errors. The publisher’s editorial process also altered the text, and after each edit Margarita made more observations. This was an unusual process for an anthropologist, and it extended to the photographs as well. Final photo selections were made with the consent of the people pictured. Some shots were left out of the original version for reasons that cut across cultural values: “Can you crop this at my chest, so I look thinner?” asked Margarita’s sister, about a playful photo of her at their Black Rock home, in a clown mask next to Karen. In the end the final decision was left to Irene. She was the mom of all moms in this matrilineage, a medicine woman and keeper of centuries of wisdom. After much thought she concluded that the book was a good thing. The world was changing so quickly that their children would not remember the old ways. This would stand as a document for them. Thousands of images and frequent flyer miles later, the book was published. Charlie and I made good on our promise of a copy for each

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A Widening Circle person or family appearing in the text. Some of Charlie’s best images never made it to publication, though we did bring prints back to the family. This was important to us; the track record for photographers and ethnographers working in Navajo country had not been good. “Edward Curtis photographed my family when he was out here,” said an angry and protective son, referring to one of the images in Curtis’s 1903 Vanishing Indian series. “He never paid us. Ansel Adams photographed my mother in the 1950s, and he never paid us.” He paused and looked Charlie in the eye. “And you don’t have enough money to pay us to use my mother’s photograph.” On the day scheduled for book distribution, Margarita gathered family and friends in her Tsaile home. We’d spent the day driving up and down the two rims, dropping off copies at the homes of many of the “elderlies,” as this respected generation is called, who’d been part of our interviews. We returned to Margarita’s that evening for another gathering. She fl itted back and forth between her guests and large fry pans filled with hot Crisco, preparing a batch of Navajo tacos. Charlie alternated between cutting potatoes for a well-liked casserole and shooting new images. A group of grandmas in their velveteen best flipped through copies of the book, pointing at each other’s photos, and smiled their approval. They talked among themselves, relaxed and animated, and finally, Margarita translated. “They say that they really like the way the book came out, but next time, for the next book, they’d like to dress up in the old way, and get the wagons out, and take pictures of how things used to be.” I shook my head and we rolled our eyes at each other. We’d tried so hard to represent Navajo life as it was becoming, to capture and preserve a document for the young people to have. This was Irene’s intent when she finally signed her photo release, as life was changing at such an incredible pace. I turned to Charlie, and he grabbed his camera and took a shot of all of the women together, laughing and reading.

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Being There That day we got better images than in all of our years of fieldwork. We commented about this to Margarita. She noted that there was something special about biligáana finally making good on a promise.

Cycles The book’s publication in 1997 ended one cycle of interaction; it also corresponded with changes in each of our own life cycles. My Rachel, the little girl who made her mark as a biligáana wrangler at Canyon de Chelly, became a typical teen. Margarita’s daughters had also come of age. These were not easy years, and we talked about it often on the phone. We also talked about my mother’s continuing journey into dementia. With clinical medicine at a loss for any way to ease her slide back to childhood, Margarita suggested a Navajo ceremony. But Mom was tumbling faster than we hoped, and travel was impossible. Finally, in 1998, she passed on into a kinder place, and my dad was not far behind her. He had no expansive cadre of daughters surrounding him, as Margarita’s family does, only one, and I guess it got pretty lonely for him. With their passing, Karen, my Navajo mom, reminded me of the great web of Navajo kinship. She gave me an enveloping hug. “My daughter has no mother,” she said. “I have no sister.” Karen’s pronouncement cemented and clarified the growing kin relationship between our families. If Margarita was my sister, I was Karen’s daughter. If I was her daughter, my mother was her sister. And all of our other relatives, siblings, and progeny were also family. Taking care of the land is a large part of traditional Navajo kin responsibility. Navajo land (Dinétah) is located between the Four Sacred Mountains, one to each of the four directions to which one prays and gives honor during daily life and ceremonies. The east direction, where our Father Sun emerges every morning, is especially important, and Karen was pleased that her family now included members positioned on the easternmost coast. We were there, keeping watch over the east direction for her and for the kin ya aani (Bitter Water Clan).

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A Widening Circle The East Coast branch of the family also honored our kin responsibility to care for the family land at the junction of Canyon del Muerto and Canyon de Chelly. Over the years students joined me as we worked on New York Fence and North Carolina Fence. We cut brush, dug irrigation ditches, and even mudded the roof of the hogan that Margarita and Tim built down in the canyon. Bringing students into the kinship circle was almost essential to have enough hands for the work. Our own children had grown, left home, come back, and left again. The promise that Charlie and I made to come back and photograph, at the very least, a calendar of images of canyon life as the grandmas remembered it was never fulfilled. But we did update and revise Crossing between Worlds, bringing it into the twenty-first century, after serious consultation with those whose story the book tells. Many of the elderlies who were alive in 1997 had passed by the time we began to choose photos for the 2008 version. Could we use their images? The Diné do not dwell on the bad things that have happened to them. To keep open those sadnesses is to open the door to more of the same. Moreover, they do not dwell on death. To solve this dilemma, Margarita and I did what any contemporary author of collaborative Navajo ethnography would do: we asked our mother. Karen said no, best not to look back. We should only look forward to a better future.

Legs Hanging Over Karen had another important role in shaping the second edition, when she dictated the introduction to the book. She wrote: I’ve learned to open the pages to Crossing between Worlds book without help now. When I look at the pictures, it brings me ho zho’—beauty. It helps me make my past clear; the book is one of the best things that ever happened. . . . The yei’ bi’ cheii’ farm land in the canyon is better to see now. I feel my grandmothers

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Being There and their grandmothers are happy, it brings joy to my heart. I am very thankful for my daughter, Pete and my son (in-law) Tim who work and improve the yei’ bi’ cheii’ canyon farm. About six years ago my clan uncle said, “My legs are hanging over the death world, it won’t be long before it arrives for me.” There’s some things my elders said that I won’t forget. Nature seems to be different too; it doesn’t feel the same way like it used to be twenty years ago or so . . . But my future is my grandchildren, I love them dearly. . . . My children that live in the east, Charlie and Jeanne probably have grandchildren now, I wish I could see them, I can just imagine that they have beautiful green eyes and beautiful shiny hair. I just wonder how many grandchildren they have now. Maybe some day they will come and speak to me, I also love their children. . . . The Canyon and the wonderful book Crossing between Worlds brought us many wonderful friends from all over the world; my heart goes out to all of them and their loved ones. Now, all my people, especially my great grandfather, will be happy because we now have lots of relatives. (Simonelli 2008: xi–xiii) Having lots of relatives, kin relations cemented by the marriage alliance, has always been a critical facet of Diné survival. Kinship implies and determines responsibilities and obligations. But ensuring that the next generation will be able to meet those obligations, be guardians of sacred land and sacred stories, has become more and more difficult. Many of the elders of the clans are seeing their legs hanging over that death world. Irene felt her mortality when she signed the photo releases that allowed the book to see publication. Like so many of the Diné people, she suffered from diabetes, with all of its side effects. The move from

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A Widening Circle a traditional diet to mainstream commodities and fast food has taken its toll on the Navajo nation. Though Margarita’s generation has substituted Crisco for lard in frybread and moved from Coca-Cola to Diet Coke, the obesity that is a by-product of poverty yields diabetes, kidney failure, and heart disease. We visited Irene as she started to walk toward the canyon of the next life. She acknowledged the need to document a way of life being transformed so that her great-grandchildren might know it. She had seen almost a century of transformations, never sure which changes were good for the Diné, or which were the trickster tools of Coyote, whose meddling and conniving often led her people astray. As a respected medicine woman she was reluctant to pass on what she knew, even to her daughter, Margarita, until she was certain it would serve them in the twenty-first-century world. Yet even as the old ones were leaving this world, new children were being born into our families. I became grandma first, as my older daughter started her own family. I called Margarita to tell her she was a grandma in the east direction. Next she became grandma at home, as her kin daughter began to have children. Eventually they collapsed a generation and Margarita became mom for the little boy who would be called “great-nephew” under the mainstream kinship system. Bringing a toddler back into the nuclear family was not easy. At Margarita’s house Spider-Man and Tyrannosaurus rex vied for living room floor space with recliners and the other accoutrements of the mature set. Margarita looked understandably tired in January 2008, when we shared a meal at an unusual Navajo pizza party at her Tsaile house. She, Charlie, and I had begun work on a new book, about sacred landscape, geared to Navajo middle-school children. We were writing and photographing in the four seasons, and this was our winter visit. While Carla hummed a Neapolitan folk song and tossed frybread dough up and around with truly Italian finesse, I talked about the upcoming presidential elections with the rest of the family. Many of the Navajo

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Being There are longtime Republicans, but whom would they vote for this time? Would they go with the notion of elder wisdom and vote for John McCain? Would they follow their matriarchal traditions and vote for Hilary Clinton? Or would they see a shared history in oppression and vote for Barack Obama? As we talked the family elders recalled past elections, and Karen laughed and launched into a story of canyon resident voting practices. “When we got the vote, candidates would pass out materials, and clans talked about it around the fire. After much discussion, we determined that while the mule was steadfast, it was not a productive animal, and that was not a positive thing. The elephant, on the other hand, was a hard worker, and it could produce lots of offspring. So we decided that we would vote for the elephant. A few years ago, I decided that the mule, though not productive, was also hard working, so I switched my vote to the mule. That spring, eight mules were born at Black Rock, so this seems like the right political road to follow for the future.” Karen never got to vote for the mule. Karen Clark, medicine woman, matriarch of the Clark family, kin ya aani, the Bitter Water Clan, passed over on May 3, 2008. Charlie had just concluded photographing a spring sequence. He was barely home when the phone rang. We lost our mom. We cried together, all of us, over the phone, but Ma Bell does grief in such an unfulfilling way. Charlie and I bought the flowers. Over 1,000 people came to pay their respects at the Tsaile Chapter House. Even Karen’s daughters did not realize the breadth of her touch. But I couldn’t come to the funeral. Always the anthropologist, I was off to the other side of the world. I could hear my own daughter’s voice from the past: How come you are always 2,500 miles away when I need you the most? I had always intended to be there when Karen passed, to express my deep sorrow at the appropriate moment. Now we would all have to relive it when I finally made a visit.

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A Widening Circle I called my home family to let them know our other mother had passed. My older daughter was saddened. Her children, Karen’s east direction great-grandchildren, would never get to meet her. In August I visited the family at Canyon de Chelly with my daughter, Rachel, the eleven-year-old horse lover who brought me to the canyon in the first place. “We lost our mom,” our sister said, hugging me deeply. Her tears were soaked with sadness. “You lost your mom,” I thought at first, not really thinking. And the story was told of how it was an unexpected passing. The family went to sow the spring corn, planting multicolored kernels, the seeds of history. And Karen was Mom, treating everyone as if they all were children, complete strangers to a cornfield. “Put three in this hole, a yellow in that, blue in the next,” she said. And she was content that the new season would follow, knowing perhaps that her time had come, her legs were hanging low over the edge. You lost your mom. Thinking back I remembered a past embrace, with the tears of two cultures mingling, hearing Diné words I did not know, but understood, when my own mother passed. The web of family was reaching east and I realized then, as now, as kin becomes kin: the mother of my sister is also my mother. We lost our mom. Karen was buried in a traditional ceremony at the family cemetery, with all of the things she would need to make her immortal journey. Her own horse, Shirley, was pregnant, and when the burial was over, the horse had foaled the beautiful Paint, the first in the family in decades. Rachel and I camped near the foal, under the misty night canopy, next to a warming fi re. We said ha gon ee (good leaving) to Karen. Rachel, now a cardiac nurse, helped settle some of the doubts the family had about what had caused our mother’s death. Symptom by symptom, she could tell them what had happened, offering some closure. It was a good visit, but it was not fieldwork—not the new book project,

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Being There and not the work my university had given me money to do the past winter. The notion of the researcher as observer is one-sided and fl at, and our relationship had become a deeply entwined exchange of knowledge and emotion. Margarita thought long and hard about continuing with the work we had started. Though it is not traditional to maintain a set mourning period for a loved one, she felt the need to pass the four seasons quietly, to remember Karen in each of the earth’s turnings. I told her that this reminded me of what I’d learned about the Jewish custom of burying the dead—waiting a full year before coming together again to unveil the tombstone, four seasons later. It seemed like a good idea to her, since they had funds left over and were considering erecting a monument. Such is the way that cultural traditions come together, modify and change with the times. Such are the ways that we remember.

The Widening Circle In cultural systems that reckon the passage of time as cyclical, where past, present, and future do not play out linearly, you get to come back to the beginning. Yet the point that you return to is not the same, as in a circle; it is a spiral. We can look across to where we began, but we can also see how we have gotten to where we are: at the same point in the circle, but not in the same place. Carla’s wedding, like Karen’s remembrance, will follow traditions, but it will also be different. Though Irene passed over before she could be certain it was right to share parts of her knowledge with Margarita, she and Karen will be present through the teachings the whole family has lived. But years of interactions with the resident aliens who have walked the canyon and slept under its starry canopy will also contribute to how this ceremony plays out. For Margarita’s family there have been many long-term visitors; not just one anthropologist, but ethnographers, writers, poets, and environmentalists. Like me, they have given and they have received.

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A Widening Circle As I worked this fall for the presidential campaign of Barack Obama, Karen’s words were with me, as were the teachings of the Zapatistas, the other culture in my anthropological life. Handing out ballots at early voting in North Carolina, I explained the process to both Democrats and Republicans, mules and elephants, on opposite sides of the political fence. “We welcome our enemies,” the Zapatistas had taught me. “Then maybe next time, they will think twice before they harm us.” I thought about the Zapatista children I knew who had been born into the movement, for whom Zapatismo is the social fabric they have always known. Like them, our grandchildren will grow up surrounded by a different social fabric than any generation before them. It will be the music that engulfs them, and, like Margarita, spending a year mourning, this is how the trickster works within our midst. This is how cultural change takes place. My mom, Karen, would marvel at the amazing world that her grandchildren have inherited. “The mule” has indeed been productive: an African American is president, and a white family sits vigil over one of the four Diné sacred directions. Surely there is hope in this globalizing world. We grow into our unfolding roles, new members are born into our family communities, and others pass on. What do we learn from longterm fieldwork? The truth is that I’ve learned more from the people with whom I’ve worked than I have ever learned about them. They are with me as kin, as elders, as advisors. Margarita had once written in a poem: The past or the future I saw yesterday, your calico skirt sweeping the land, or was it your mother weeping the land desperately for you. Yesterday I saw your brown soft speaking face looking four directions, then you disappeared. . . .

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Being There I saw your calico skirt sweeping the land, now you are dancing, laughing with the land. Yesterday or tomorrow I will also dance with my mother. The generations will dance at Carla’s wedding, including those who a century ago were strangers, enemies, aliens; feet moving in soft rhythm around a widening circle of kinship, friendship, and understanding. References Simonelli, Jeanne M. 1990. Too Wet to Plow: The Family Farm in Transition (Charles D. Winters, photographer). New York: New Amsterdam Press. ———. 1997. Crossing between Worlds: The Navajos of Canyon de Chelly (Charles D. Winters, photographer). Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research Press. ——— (with Lupita McClanahan). 2008. Crossing between Worlds: The Navajo of Canyon de Chelly (Charles D. Winters, photographer). Revised 2nd ed. Long Grove, Ill.: Waveland Press.

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13

Japanese Ghosts Don’t Have Feet Liza Dalby

M

y first attempt at conducting fieldwork took place in a rural island community in Japan’s Inland Sea. It was a disaster. Though competent in language, I ran aground on invisible shoals of unspoken social understandings. In retrospect, I sent unclear signals as to whether I was a researcher, a visitor, or a guest. Successful fieldwork necessitates negotiating all these roles and more. One is always an outsider, but one must at the same time understand and often behave as an insider. Several years later I conducted my doctoral thesis research on geisha. This time I was keenly aware of the exquisite balancing act of treading the boundaries, of being both inside and out. As I became more drawn in to the community, I was ultimately invited to participate in it as a practicing geisha myself. This gave me an unparalleled position from which to understand the geisha world from the point of view of the women themselves. At the same time it was precisely my outside perspective that made it possible to describe the parameters of geisha society by asking the questions that rarely occur to insiders themselves.

My First Fieldwork Experience: Japan’s Inland Sea It was the middle of August 1973, the summer of my fi rst year as a graduate student in Stanford University’s Department of Anthropology.

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Being There I had ended up on a small island in the Inland Sea, that narrow, almost lake-like stretch of ocean separating three of Japan’s four main islands. The Inland Sea is dotted with even smaller islands, some inhabited, some rising like green gumdrops from the calm waters, too small for even a fisherman’s hut. The first typhoon of the season lashed the deck of the ferryboat where I stood, blinded by rain and tears, fleeing the disaster of my first experience of fieldwork. My island had two villages, one at either end. It appeared to be a textbook example of what sociologist Emile Durkheim called (somewhat counterintuitively) “mechanical solidarity”—a small, cohesive group with shared beliefs, activities, and kinship ties. To an outsider’s eye the communities on this island in the Inland Sea were about as homogeneous as it was possible for a human group to be. People grew tangerines or fished, and every family had its own vegetable plot. Men and women worked side by side with none of the stereotypical Japa nese female deference to male authority. I had an introduction to a local elderly couple who let me stay in an empty room above a detached building in their garden. Since this summer experience was supposed to be “practice fieldwork,” I had come prepared with a set of questionnaires drawn from my advisor’s research project. But I was curious about everything, and I took my first foray into fieldwork literally. From Mrs. H. I learned how to gently hoe potatoes without impaling them. From Mr. H. I learned how to drop a line of octopus-pots along the seafloor. I discovered the dilemma of the firstborn sons. Eldest sons in small Japa nese rural communities like this one are historically the inheritors of the family fields. Once this meant they were the favored ones. Younger sons (and of course daughters) were expected to leave and make their own way. But by the time I arrived in the early 1970s, the option of going to vocational school, or even college, and getting a white-collar job in a city was looking more attractive than staying on the farm. Even so, an eldest son felt morally obliged to remain on the

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Japanese Ghosts Don’t Have Feet farm. Even worse, the farm girls who once got a plum by marrying eldest sons now preferred to move to the cities themselves. And since the wife of the inheritor gets the mother-in-law, most island girls I met were planning to neatly sidestep both problems at once by shunning marriage to first sons. These young men were desperate. I interviewed every islander who would take the time to talk to me about their life. One young man, an eldest son, as it happened, was always eager to be interviewed. At one point he even suggested that he would be happy to offer me a life as a farm wife. His mother was okay with the idea of an American daughter-in-law. She had noticed how interested I was in all the old customs— unlike the modern young island girls who were bored to tears by it all and couldn’t wait to hop a boat to the nearby cities on Shikoku. He knew it was unlikely that I would say yes, but he thought it worth a shot. As I say, his prospects were desperate. During the summer I tagged along to the village cemetery for the Buddhist holiday of Obon. On this day, people invite the ancestral spirits to journey back from the netherworld to the homes of the living. That evening there would be a huge bonfire with dancing and drinking throughout the night. Trying to be a good ethnographer, I followed up. “How often do you visit your ancestral graves?” I asked one elderly woman, turning on my tape recorder. “What sorts of things do you bring?” She thought a moment, counted on her fingers, and mused aloud, “Last week I went three days, I guess. No—it was four. But I didn’t go Friday even though I was already on my way, because . . .” She went on for five more minutes. I began to realize that transcribing these conversations was going to be quite a chore. But at least I now understood that on this island, visiting your ancestors at the cemetery was like visiting your relatives next door—a casual, everyday sort of occurrence. And in the middle

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Being There of summer, the O-bon holiday was the one time the ancestral souls reciprocated and visited you. People made little effigy horses and oxen by sticking toothpick legs in cucumbers and eggplants, setting them in front of the altars for the ancestral spirits to ride. “Japa nese ghosts don’t have feet,” explained one woman. “That’s why we give them animals to ride on.” “And what about American ghosts,” she inquired politely. “Do they have feet?” As I was thinking how to answer, she continued, “And in America how often do you visit your ancestors’ graves?” It wasn’t that Americans don’t bring flowers to cemeteries, but I felt that anything I put into Japa nese would simply not carry the right nuance at all. Most of us just don’t think of our ancestors in the same way that Japa nese Buddhists do. This experience gave me my first important insights about doing fieldwork. I realized that interacting with infor mants as an anthropologist was also interacting with a social individual, and the relationship thus set up, however brief, was reciprocal. If I was going to poke and probe with personal questions, I had better be prepared to be probed myself. And then I had an uncomfortable thought—what if some of my own questions were the cultural equivalent of being asked, “Do American ghosts have feet?” It became clear that your unspoken frame of reference will inevitably shape the answers you get. Most people, being polite, will fill in the blanks of a questionnaire, for example, but the result will not necessarily reflect anything meaningful. I learned that when interviewing or formulating a questionnaire, it was important to leave room for answers and information to creep in sidewise. Often I discovered that what people really cared about was something hovering just outside the categories I had devised. In 1973, Japa nese farmers were angry at the government for forcing open local markets to import fruit. On “my” island, Mr. H. was ada-

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Japanese Ghosts Don’t Have Feet mant that California oranges were his adversary. He thought the market for Japa nese mikan (tangerines) would be flooded by the American imports. Had he ever eaten an orange, I asked. “Never. It’s my enemy,” he growled. Thus, and almost by accident, I discovered that he assumed that an “orenji” and a mikan were the English and Japa nese names of the same fruit. This cast his heated opposition in a rather different light. Nobody would buy an orenji if they wanted a tangerine, I said. The famous Iyokan mikans from the island were in no danger of being swamped by oranges. Yet all the while I went along talking to people and taking notes, I didn’t notice that my host family was becoming quieter and quieter. Then, one afternoon, Mr. H. exploded. To me, the outburst was a thunderclap out of nowhere. To him, he felt he had been extraordinarily patient but had reached the end of his rope. The couple called me on the carpet. Mrs. H. was upset that I did my laundry once a week instead of every day like a well-brought-up girl should. I would monopolize the washing machine for an entire afternoon, and then hog the clothesline, she accused. I was aghast. Why hadn’t she said something? “If you were a proper human being, you would understand these things without being told,” Mr. H. scolded. But that was small potatoes. By far the worst thing I had done was to talk to people from the other village. “But you never told me I shouldn’t,” I objected, stung at the unfairness. “If you were a proper human being, it would have been obvious to you,” he rebuked me. “Now you’ve put me in a position of obligation to all those people.” I was totally humiliated. Holding back tears I slunk out of the room and went to pack my things. Black clouds were building on the horizon. I took the last ferry off the island that night. Later I heard from others that Mr. H. was surprised that I left. If I had been a proper human being I would have known that the

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Being There appropriate response was to apologize and beg forgiveness—which would have been magnanimously granted. Painful as it was, I learned from this too. Mechanical solidarity is not always as harmonious as it may look from the outside. The invisible boundaries of social knowledge in this village society were drawn so tightly that an urbane Japanese person from Tokyo might even have stumbled in a similar way. In retrospect, I regret not having made a more graceful exit from this fieldwork situation. Yet it’s also possible that I became sensitized to these unsaid boundaries precisely because of the traumatic manner in which I collided with them. By the time I had finished my course work and exams and was ready to go back to Japan to conduct my PhD research, I was determined not to embarrass myself again.

Fieldwork as a Blue-Eyed Geisha In 1975, I returned to Japan to study the place of geisha in modern Japa nese society. I wrote my thesis, and subsequent book, Geisha,1 on this topic. Starting out in Tokyo, then moving to Kyoto, I began my research by interviewing as many geisha as I could. These interviews always took place during their daytime off-hours when they weren’t sleeping in after a late night or busy attending dance or music lessons. Yet, after six months spent gathering interview notes, I had still not yet figured out a way to observe geisha being geisha. So one evening, when I was offered the opportunity not only to learn the etiquette of geisha behavior but actually put it to use, I could hardly refuse. This time I was keenly aware of crossing the boundary between researcher and participant, but I justified it by making sure that I was always open about my reason for doing so. In other words, I was not trying to “pass” as a geisha, but, rather, in the attempt to experience their working life, I would demonstrate my commitment to the idea that their culture was worthy of serious study. The geisha not only accepted this reasoning but agreed— certainly none of their number were planning to write such a book, but they all thought it was a

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Japanese Ghosts Don’t Have Feet good idea. In the Japa nese media I was always called aoi-me no geisha, “the blue-eyed geisha.” For the record, my eyes are hazel, but that was beside the point. Since one of the most striking features of the first Europeans the Japa nese encountered was their weird blue eyes, the term became a synonym for Westerners in general. A blue-eyed geisha was an oxymoron that no reporter could resist. i t s t a r t e d o u t a s s o m e t h i n g of a lark. Through a family friend I had been given an introduction to Kiyo Hasui, a former geisha, who, then in her mid-fifties, ran a kashizashiki—an upscale facility where geisha entertain wealthy businessmen. She was one of the pillars of the community called Pontochô,2 where she had once worked under the geisha name Ichikiyo. A Kyoto geisha community is woven together by the language of kinship. All the geisha are “sisters” to one another, and women like Kiyo Hasui, in positions of authority, are called “mother.” She knew everyone who mattered in Kyoto—all the geisha, every important business leader, and all the politicians. She also was friendly with the artists, Kabuki actors, and tea-masters. And they all knew her. You couldn’t walk three steps down the streets of Kyoto with Hasui-san and not be greeted by someone. Kiyo Hasui took me under her wing. I lived in a small upstairs apartment attached to her house. In this world of women, daughters fit easily; sons have trouble.3 As it happened, Hasui-san had a son who was in his early twenties at the time I was there. It’s not easy being a Japa nese boy in a world without role models, in which all the authority figures are women. He had his own group of friends and was never much in evidence around his mother’s establishment. I slipped into that place in her life where a daughter would naturally have fit. The more time I spent with Hasui-san, the more I learned. She told me about her own life, the rivalry and cooperation of the different communities in Kyoto, and how geisha helped Japanese businesses function

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Being There smoothly. I went everywhere with her, and people got used to seeing us together. She introduced me to all the geisha who came to parties at her establishment, the Maruki.4 Later she let me help the maids bring in food and drink so I could watch the geisha talk with guests. Sometimes they performed short exquisite dances and songs. She also introduced me to Kimihatsu, the music teacher who taught the geisha to sing and play nagauta shamisen. I had been studying this kind of music since I first went to Japan as a high school student, and I always looked for a teacher whenever I was back in Japan for more than a few months. From the geisha perspective I was already an advanced student of nagauta when I began studying with Kimihatsu. The biggest difference from my previous lessons was that Kimihatsu worked entirely from memory without any scores. She expected me to do the same. One night in January I was sitting at the heated kotatsu table after a banquet at the Maruki, drinking and relaxing with “mother” and three or four geisha. We had already consumed a fair amount of sake when Hasui-san suddenly came up with the idea that since I could play the shamisen, I ought to come out as a geisha myself. The others noisily agreed, and that night they came up with a plan. Hisaroku and Ichimitsu were tall, so they could supply me with a wardrobe of handme-down kimono and obi. Ichiume was closest in age, and something of a cutup— she could be my older sister. I should be sponsored at the Dai-Ichi tea house, where all the geisha whose name began with the “ichi” character (including my “mother,” Ichikiyo) had trained. On this note, I began my geisha career as Ichigiku, younger sister of Ichiume. Among all the young geisha I found her the easiest to talk to, and by this time we had become friends. I knew she was secretly hurt by her nickname “Pumpkin,”5 for her round face and goodnatured naiveté. She didn’t mind being mentor to a hazel-eyed American who would follow her like a puppy and copy her every move. Hasui-san suggested that I learn to play ko-uta—another style of shamisen music, shorter and more suitable to the atmosphere of par-

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Japanese Ghosts Don’t Have Feet ties. She introduced me to her own teacher from the Kasuga school, and I began my lessons in that. Ichiume and I worked up a selection of pieces that she could dance to, while I accompanied her solo on voice and shamisen. To be perfectly honest the experience was a lark, but I took it seriously. My geisha mother and sisters had shown an extraordinary amount of trust in allowing me to join them like this. I was determined not to embarrass them. Ironically, the things that a Japa nese girl finds most difficult when she first becomes a geisha were the things that were easiest for me. Broadly speaking, geisha training covers three different types of skills. Foremost are the traditional arts of dancing and music. Unless a girl wants to train as a dancer or musician, there is really no point in being a geisha at all. In this area I had a head start with my shamisen. The second skill is something like the old-fashioned notion of deportment. It includes how to wear and move in kimono, how to speak properly, and how to behave toward the other geisha. Mastering the art of moving gracefully in kimono was, for me, the hardest part of my geisha experience. This is a hierarchical and hidebound world. Customers come and go, but your fellow geisha have to be faced every day. Those below (younger, newer) have many occasions to show deference to those above. Unless they were born into this world, this is a trial for young Japanese would-be geisha as well. As a foreigner, I was forgiven a lot of mistakes. I tried to always follow my big sister’s lead, and sometimes we both blew it. Ichiume might spend too much time talking to some cute young office worker sitting at the low end of a banquet table rather than with more important clients at the top. She would have to be nudged by “mother” or one of the older geisha. Luckily for me, as an outsider I was not expected to know these things, and I could be forgiven for asking naïve questions that a native Japanese would be embarrassed to ask. The third element of training is how to behave with customers. There are no classes in this. A new geisha learns by watching her older

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Being There sisters on the job. Apprentices (maiko) begin to learn how to be sassy. They gradually cast off any reticence that has been drilled into them since childhood. Once these apprentices have graduated to be young geisha, they are expected to be even more outgoing. Most garrulous of all are the older geisha in their fifties and sixties. They are the ones who keep the guests in stitches. Luckily, for the graduate student American geisha chatting at parties was not a problem. I did not have to unlearn any kind of cultural shyness in order to talk and joke with socially prominent older men— the only difference was doing it in Japa nese. While I never attempted to hide my status as the foreign geisha, at the same time my goal was to blend in as much as possible. Truly blue eyes would have made that difficult. Blonde hair would have made it impossible. Having the pale complexion of my English/Irish heritage, I was lucky that my hair was the darkest brown can be before it’s called black. And I had one other advantage. I could hold my liquor. Geisha pick up all sorts of little tricks to make it appear as if they are drinking with customers,6 while managing to limit their intake of alcohol. I learned the tricks but rarely needed them. One of the best ways to do fieldwork, I discovered, was to simply observe everything that went on when people relaxed and forgot you were an outsider. During the year I spent as Ichigiku I gained a geisha’s understanding of the nuances of kimono. In fact, learning the meaning of kimono from the vantage point of the geisha opened my eyes to the rich symbolic vocabulary enfolded in traditional clothing. Simply being immersed in what geisha chat about among themselves made me realize that in order to grasp the import of their remarks I had to understand how all the rules of kimono fit together in a system. Something an outsider might only give cursory thought to—a geisha’s kimono— ended up sparking my next research project, a study of clothing and culture in Japanese history.7

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Japanese Ghosts Don’t Have Feet I also learned to appreciate the traditional ideal of feminine beauty that the geisha represent to Japa nese. Most Americans find the look intriguingly exotic, but not necessarily attractive.8 I came to see the balance the traditional stiff hairstyle gives to the formal kimono. I saw how the dead pale white makeup with tiny red lips could be suggestive and alluring. No pretense of a natural look here—it was more like an intriguing living mask. The kimono properly worn hides the contours of the body completely. It’s more like a package, beautifully wrapped in a carefully thought-out composition of seasonally appropriate colors and motifs. And this artful composition moves! Watching a geisha glide into a room, sit on the tatami mat, pour a cup of sake, and rise effortlessly—is a vision of disciplined and honed art. This is what the Japanese connoisseur appreciates about geisha. And the best of them are funny—good company, a sympathetic ear, and skillful conversationalists. Geisha today are living anachronisms. Even in Japan now, many young people find “the geisha look” old-fashioned and off-putting. Many modern Japa nese women have come to hate the word “geisha” as embodying a stereotype of docile servility. The style of beauty that geisha preserve is more and more out of sync with modern ideals. On the other hand, this has been their salvation. By resolutely clinging to an outmoded tradition, geisha scooped themselves out a tiny, elite niche in Japan, and an almost mythic status in the rest of the world. I was transformed by my own experience of geisha fieldwork. Perhaps I took the concept of “participant observation” further than many anthropologists, but in retrospect it was essential in understanding the complicated relationship geisha have with Japa nese society. And the older I get, the more I think about those elderly geisha who manage to preserve their saucy elegance and interest in people and life. Their skill at drawing others out did not diminish with age, and the care and pride in their appearance is something I can only aspire to. An exgeisha, even a blue-eyed one, is not a bad thing to be.9

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Being There Notes 1. Liza Crihfield Dalby, Geisha (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). In 2008 the book was reissued in a twenty-fifth-anniversary edition with an updated preface on the state of the geisha in the twenty-first century. There is more information about the book, plus links on my website, www.lizadalby.com. 2. In 1975 there were six geisha communities (hanamachi) in Kyoto. Together they were referred to as rokkagai: Gion, Gion Higashi, Pontochô, Miyagawachô, Kamishichiken, and Shimabara. Now Shimabara is no longer counted as a geisha community, so the group of five remaining hanamachi are called gokagai. 3. Although geisha may not marry, it is not uncommon for them to have long-term relationships with a patron (danna), and to have children. 4. In Geisha I thought I needed to change the name of the Maruki, so I called it “Mitsuba.” In retrospect, that was unnecessary. Kiyo Hasui had the old building torn down in 1992, selling the land to a developer who raised a six-story modern building on the site. She retained the top two floors, one of which was an elegant modern tatami-matted banquet room that continued to function as a venue for geisha entertainment. Kiyo Hasui died in 1996. 5. Arthur Golden told me that he was inspired after reading this to give the nickname “Pumpkin” to the character of a beleaguered young geisha in his novel Memoirs of a Geisha. 6. For example, a customer may pour sake into his own cup and offer it to a geisha. She may pretend to drink it but then adroitly empty the contents into the water of a “rinsing basin” that is on the banquet table. Etiquette demands rinsing a cup before handing it back, so the action is quite natural. 7. The result was Kimono: Fashioning Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993; paperback ed., Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001). 8. The fi lm Memoirs of a Geisha showed the nature of this problem. For the story to work, the fi lm had to depict the heroine Sayuri as stunningly beautiful. The director and producers had to believe this themselves in order to make their audience believe it. The problem was that a real geisha’s beauty is something of an acquired taste, and try as they might, they just couldn’t acquire that taste. Exotic? Yes. Alluring? No.

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Japanese Ghosts Don’t Have Feet 9. At one point during filming I overheard two men on the light and sound crew debating whether they would want to kiss a mouth that looked like that tiny red rosebud on a white mask. They both chuckled and said they would pass. As a consultant to the fi lm, I had been arguing strenuously for a more authentic geisha look in hair and makeup, but this was the moment when I realized that could not happen. For this fi lm the most important thing was that the geisha be beautiful to a blue-eyed audience.

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14

Field Relations, Field Betrayals John C. Wood

W

e met for the first time at the Maikona, Kenya, wells. He was watering the family camels, which had come down off the plains the night before. I’d gone that day to watch, meet people, and make contact. During the dry season, which in this part of the world is all but a few weeks out of the year, nomads must drive livestock to wells to drink. According to an elaborate schedule, each camp waters its goats and sheep every five days and camels every twelve. Since wells serve a wide area, dozens of different camps visit them daily with thousands of animals. And since there are only about thirty wells at Maikona, scattered like craters across a dusty expanse the size of a few football fields, the herds are held back and watered in turns. As each group is released, the bone-thirsty animals run madly to drink what they’ve been able to smell, sometimes for hours, but not taste. Nomads move around. They’re hard to track down. If you want to meet one it’s best to find out when his or her camp is watering stock. So in addition to the herds and their keepers at the wells, there are visitors: livestock buyers, friends, family, people arranging marriages, others collecting debts, fathers catching up with sons, mothers with daughters, idlers from the settlement nearby to watch the action. All

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Field Relations, Field Betrayals the activity kicks up a storm of dust, and what with the wind the area is soon shrouded in a gritty yellowish fog. I was standing beside one of the wells when a man who’d been drawing water with a plastic bucket, the bottom of an old jerry can, climbed out of the well and handed me the bucket with a big smile on his face. He’d read my mind. Back home I’m a lap swimmer. Swimming was one of the things I’d given up for fieldwork, and I was missing the exercise. Lifting water out of a well, pouring it into a trough, bending, splashing, getting wet, and being useful were exactly what I wanted. It was 110 degrees. Getting wet was the best part. So I joined the bucket brigade. There were three of us inside the well. The man I replaced stood outside where I could see him. He mimed what I was supposed to do, which I sort of knew already from watching. What he showed me that I didn’t know was how to pace myself to keep up with the animals and the others in the well without exhausting myself. A full bucket would rise to my feet from the man on the ledge below and as I handed down an empty one I’d grab a full one and lift it over my head and pour it into the trough. Over and over. After about an hour or so the camels were fi nished drinking and it was time to move aside so another camp could water its herds. We rested in the shade of a nearby thorn tree and drank water laced with milk, which was surprisingly refreshing. It was only about a month into my project. My language was lousy. But it turned out the man who had smiled at me spoke English. And for another hour or so he answered my questions and I answered his. The others put up with all this, in part, I think, because I’d helped, which generated good feelings. A door opened. My new friend told me when he would return with the herds. I promised to help. Our meeting was accidental. But it couldn’t have been scripted more perfectly to initiate a field relationship. f i e l d w o r k , i n a n t h r o p o l o g y a n y wa y, i n v o l v e s going somewhere. That usually means leaving behind relationships

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Being There with familiar folk—family, friends, colleagues, neighbors—and building new ones elsewhere with others. We emphasize the part about building relationships. I don’t hear us talk much about the dark side of the coin: leaving, abandonment, and betrayal. When we depart for the field we turn our backs, if only temporarily, on home communities. And most of the time, after building those new relationships, we turn our backs on them and go home. I read the gesture—turning our backs—as a sort of betrayal, an abdication of a social obligation. Perhaps the word “betrayal” sounds extreme. There are, of course, degrees of betrayal. I don’t mean anything as horrible as handing over friends to the enemy or abandoning helpless children. I am thinking here of something less overtly harmful, less obviously wrong, but betrayal in the strict sense of the word. We get the word from the Latin tradere, to give or hand over, which also gives us traitor, and the archaic traditor, which was a Christian who handed over fellow Christians to Roman authorities. Interestingly enough, given the context, the same root gives us tradition. Betrayal, treason, and tradition involve handing something over to others. A traitor hands his people (or their secrets) over to the enemy. A people hands its traditions down through the generations. A man drawing water for camels hands a bucket to the next person in line. It is surprising we don’t talk more in anthropology about betrayal than we do, given the word’s etymological relationship to tradition. Doubtless many of us— probably more than would like to admit it— have sought to convince an infor mant to share some bit of secret or proprietary knowledge. Such requests ask infor mants to betray traditional knowledge in the interests of our knowing the traditions. We might have intended to keep the secret to ourselves. But we wanted in on it. Over the years I have done various stints of fieldwork, abroad and abroad-at-home, as journalist, teacher, and anthropologist. Some of

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Field Relations, Field Betrayals the happiest and most rewarding moments of my life have been spent in the field. Underscore that sentence. For though I write here about the inevitability of betrayal, I do not for a moment think we should stop doing fieldwork, for fieldwork builds relationships across cultural divides. And that, I believe, makes it worth the risks. Betrayal is, in a sense, part of being human, as necessary as passing a baton in a relay or leaving our mothers to become parents ourselves. Of course, we must be careful. We must minimize the damage. But as much as we might like to we cannot eliminate betrayal any more than we can eliminate fieldwork. Only when we recognize the often unrecognized potential for hurt and betrayal can we begin to take the necessary steps to minimize and mitigate the damage. What I offer, therefore, is a cautionary tale. So let me continue with my story about how I came, despite my best intentions, to betray my friend. t h e n e x t t i m e I s aw him he brought me an ororo, a man’s staff, made of the chestnut-colored wood of a fruit-bearing tree. All adult men carry an ororo—much the way executives in American cities wear ties. It is part of the uniform. Gabra men receive one at their wedding. Men were constantly wondering why I didn’t carry some sort of stick. I was married, wasn’t I? When we talked under the thorn tree that first time, I’d asked my new friend where I could find an appropriate tree and cut such a staff for myself. I didn’t care what kind of wood it was. I wanted a stick. I wanted to fit in. He said he would cut one for me. I figured he’d lop a branch off a tree and hand it over, and I would peel the bark, carve away its bumps, sand it, and rub it with oil. I looked forward to the task. Instead he brought me a fi nished ororo. Just like that. Over the coming weeks I visited him several times at his camp, which it turned out was only about an hour’s walk from Maikona. He killed a goat for me. From the right foreleg, he cut medicha, a strip of

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Being There skin, including the dewclaw, that a host gives a visitor to wear on his wrist to show that he has been welcomed. One day, soon after the gift of medicha, I was at the Maikona wells, watching and drawing water for camels. My new friend was not there that day. One of the others asked who had given me the medicha, which I continued to wear as a sign, I suppose, that I too had Gabra friends. “My friend,” I said, giving his name. “He’s your friend?” the other asked. He seemed surprised. The others smiled. I wondered what they found so amusing. “Ay,” I agreed. “And what have you given him?” he asked. At the time the question struck me as impertinent. It implied that friendship was measured by material exchanges. Now, remember, I was at the time relatively new to fieldwork. On this point I’ll admit to being slow. But the question troubled me the rest of the day, and as I mulled it over I realized that though my friend had been giving me things—ororo, medicha, and sek, an embroidered pouch for chewing tobacco and a leather thong to cinch it—I’d given him nothing. Of course, I’d helped water the camels a couple of times. But I’d never handed him an object, something he could keep and show others as a sign of our friendship. The next time I saw him I gave him my pocket knife. Our friendship lasted throughout the time I spent traveling near the desert wells of Maikona, where I was initially based. I met him in 1991 on my first trip and saw him last in 2001. Thanks to cell phones and the Internet we have continued to communicate, though infrequently. But when I was there we spent hours and hours talking. He was a few years older than I. He had a great interest in and knew a great deal about Gabra culture. And he was literate, had aspired once to being a teacher. That gave us something in common. Like Victor Turner’s Muchona, he was, by experience and personality, an insider who was

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Field Relations, Field Betrayals also an outsider, the classic infor mant. And he was patient. He helped me to no end with information, interpretation, and companionship. In the beginning he taught me the names of things. I remember relaxing in the back of his wife’s tent. He pointed out objects hanging on the walls inside and told me their names. I repeated, and he corrected. Later he took me to fora, the satellite camp of his family’s camels. We walked for miles across the desiccated plains, just the two of us, drank milk and blood from the camels, and sang with the others in camp late into the night (he taught me the songs). These trips to fora would become a regular practice. Once, when his family was moving camp, he asked me to carry his spear to a particular woman. This was still early in our relationship and I did not yet know that she was his wife’s mother. The woman accepted the spear from me. She thought I was flirting with her, so she fl irted back. She admired how long and straight it was. And then, when she asked, I told her it was his, and she gasped and let go of it like she’d grabbed a scorpion. A mother-in-law should not have such direct contact with her daughter’s husband. I looked across at him and he laughed. Though the family had camels, my friend was among the poor whose camp, for lack of sufficient camels, stayed relatively close to the wells and the adjoining settlement of Maikona. Thus he had access to commercial beer and illicit alcohol made from the relief maize that rich countries were always sending to East Africa. And he succumbed. Grotesquely. I have never seen another so drunk as he. When he was sober he was lovely and wise. When he drank he was pitiable. It was sad to see in a man I otherwise admired. You could never predict when he would be drunk. It was usually after he’d gotten some money—and I am sorry to say I was sometimes the source. I wasn’t the only one. He was forever borrowing money from others, and because people came to know I was his friend, they sometimes asked me to pay his debts. A group of elders once called me to a meeting

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Being There beneath the thorn tree. A man had brought a case against my friend. The man suggested that I settle the debt. I told the elders that I was not responsible, and they agreed, but they pointed out that I was his friend. They thought that, since I was a foreigner, presumably wealthy, I was in a better position than he to pay what he owed. Getting nowhere with me, they asked the complaining party to find my friend and bring him to the meeting. The man refused, saying my friend was dangerous. I said I would find him, which I did. When he came he told them he did not have any money to give, that he could not repay what he did not have. They suggested he sell some animals. He said he’d have to consult his brothers but that he thought he could sell a goat and pay the money he owed. The elders accepted that. They asked me to broker the exchange. Most of the time, of course, my friend was sober, and though on occasion people pulled me aside to question my spending time with a man they regarded as a drunk, they seemed also to admire his wit and respect his knowledge and concern for traditional life. When it came time to leave I bought a few goats to slaughter for a feast and, of course, invited my friend as guest of honor. He wondered why I was leaving after only twenty months. Wouldn’t it be better if I stayed? I told him my money had run out, which was true, but it was not the only reason I was leaving. I wanted to write up what I’d learned, resume my life back home, and my wife was also eager to return to her own career. It was simpler to blame our leaving on lack of funds. Then my friend said that if money was a problem, I had only to ask, that he and others would sponsor us. They would sell animals, do whatever it took. He said we were welcome. The thought intrigued me. But I didn’t know how serious he was, and anyway we did not stay. i r e t u r n e d h o m e a n d w r o t e a book about Gabra ritual elders. I included a chapter describing the lives of two very different men: one was Galgalo Shonka, at the time the senior-most individual

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Field Relations, Field Betrayals in Galbo, one of the principal clans of Gabra, and a widely respected old man; the other was my friend, whom I called by the pseudonym Wario Elema. I used Galgalo’s real name and biography, but in the book, as here, I mixed up or withheld details about Wario’s life to prevent others from recognizing him. The summer after the book was published, I returned to the Chalbi for more research and carried copies to share with elders and friends, including Wario, who read it and, despite the changes, recognized himself. Wario and I had discussed my plans to write about his life. I thought it was important to illustrate what happens to men who fall into the sphere of town life. But talk is abstract. Plans live in the nowhere of the future. The print in front of him was real, and it hurt. He felt betrayed. The day after I’d given him the book, he came to me like an angry ghost. He could barely look me in the eyes. He worried others would recognize him. We went through the text together and talked about all the facts I had changed, added, or moved around. Indeed, what had resulted was a composite that included several men I knew similarly situated near towns, not all of them drinkers, let alone alcoholics. But alcohol featured large in the book’s description of Wario, and though there were many drinkers in places like Maikona, Kalacha, and North Horr, where I spent time, many knew Wario and I were friends. He feared they would guess it was him. Then we talked about how people who would know to guess would already know the details about his drinking. The book revealed no secrets. In the end that wasn’t what troubled him. What hurt most, he said, was the following passage: “Wario told me countless times that he was going to quit drinking. Sometimes he would last several months without alcohol, and during that time he would tell me that he was happy, that he preferred being sober to being drunk. He once went to the government hospital in Marsabit with chronic intestinal problems. We both thought he had amoebic dysentery.

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Being There A health worker checked and found no amoebas, but he told Wario that his liver was fragile. He told Wario that drinking alcohol would eventually kill him. But as surely as the moon waxes, Wario drank again.” Wario said that this and other parts of the book seemed to say that I had no hope he would ever give up drinking. That is where I betrayed my friend. I handed over my faith in him like an empty water bucket. We spent a couple of hours in a Marsabit chai shop talking about his reactions to what I’d written in the book. Then, because I had an appointment, we took a long walk together to a farm on the mountain to visit another friend. We stopped talking about the book. We talked about other things, news of what had happened in the meantime. But as his spirits lightened, mine darkened. I was riddled with shame, a shame that lingered for quite a while, despite the pains I took to camouflage his identity, to confuse the details, to make his life a fiction in the interests of telling some other kind of truth. None of that mattered if my friend thought I’d betrayed him, if he thought I’d given up hope in his eventually drying out for good. For a few years after the book came out I returned to do research, and each time I visited Wario. We remained friends, but the ease and comfort of our initial relationship were gone. I no longer felt I deserved that level of friendship. The good news is that Wario has been sober for nearly a decade. He and his wife have two healthy children. They have acquired sufficient camels to resume nomadic life, enabling them to leave towns and alcohol behind. Wario told me this by phone, and others there in a position to know confirmed it. My friend defied the moon. My doubts were wrong. s e v e r a l e l e m e n t s o f t h e s t o r y I sketched above about Wario are included in a novel I am writing about another fieldwork betrayal involving an anthropologist and his wife. In that story the

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Field Relations, Field Betrayals wife joins her husband in the field, contracts a blood-borne disease, and several years later dies from it. The novel follows the anthropologist through the consequences, including a return to his field site on the desert, where he visits with the family of a man much like the reallife Wario. In a sense, the anthropologist is visiting the scene of the crime, where his wife was exposed to the fatal disease. My own wife, Carol, who accompanied me on my longest stint of fieldwork with Gabra nomads, is thankfully alive and well. The couple in the novel is not us. But the story is—among other things—an attempt to make sense of (and I suppose atone for) drawing her to the desert at a time that served my interests more than hers. There were times when our life in the field felt like a betrayal. It is difficult being a married anthropologist, especially if one’s partner is not an anthropologist. Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad I’m married. But anthropology does not always suit married life, and vice versa. We had agreed early on that I would do fieldwork in Kenya—where we both had lived before, and where she felt at home. But we had not openly discussed my working in Kenya’s arid north. That was a research, not a marital, decision, and I stupidly (in retrospect) had not consulted her about it. Not really. Here’s a scene from the novel—a fiction, an ethnographic fiction— that suggests the dilemma: You might have at least considered me when you picked your research . . . We’ve been through this. . . . Where both of us would be happy. We agreed, he said. We agreed to the continent, not the desert. I imagined something different. Where it’s green and normal and people don’t gawk at me or come up out of nowhere and touch my hair. Is it so bad? Not if you like dust and flies. . . . We didn’t talk about the desert. We talked about the desert.

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Being There You talked about it. It wasn’t discussed. You wanted to work on the desert. I couldn’t exactly tell you to work somewhere else. You might have asked. . . . n o t a l l c o u p l e s c o n t e n d w i t h life in the field, but I imagine most have similar conversations. One of them drops the ball, fails the other in some small or large expectation. Marriage is an imperfect relationship between persons whose interests inevitably conflict. Ideally we complement and compromise. But, on occasion, and one hopes the occasions are few, one or the other doesn’t get what she or he wants and either joins the other elsewhere or remains behind. Carol joined me. It wasn’t easy. She joined me anyway. Long ago, Georg Simmel pointed out that to be an individual one must be part of society, but that society limits, or compromises, individuality. Thus, to be an individual means handing over some of our individuality to others. There’s no other way. It is one of the paradoxes of being a social animal. The compromise of our individuality is perhaps keenest within the society of marriage. In a conversation very much like the one above, Carol told me that “human beings hurt each other, even those we love.” She made the most of lean circumstances. She used the time away from her career as a sabbatical. When the heat and dust of Maikona grew to be too much, she moved her things to Marsabit, which was cooler and where we could visit every month or so. At least we were in the same hemisphere. We muddled through. We made compromises. The marriage, despite our frailties, thrived. s o f a r I ’ v e s p o k e n o f two betrayals. There are three. The last involves you, the reader, who reasonably expects facts, not fiction, from an anthropologist. Why make up a story to address experiences between my wife and me in the field? Why omit, conflate, and mix up details—why fictionalize—in telling Wario’s story? Is the fictional

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Field Relations, Field Betrayals novel the same sort of fiction as was told about Wario? What, if anything, is the role of fiction in making sense of field relationships? One reason for making things up, at least in writing a novel about the effects of fieldwork on a marriage, was a matter of memory, reconstructing scenes about which I had not taken notes. Memory—mine, anyway— is imperfect. In order to tell a coherent story I had to fi ll in the cracks. But chinking the gaps of recollection was not the whole of it. Fiction allowed me, in the novel’s dialogue, to capture an experience more or less truly without betraying every detail. Carol and I, like Wario, are entitled to our privacy. Some things I didn’t tell because they are ours. Wario’s story is a little different. The circumstances and motives are different. He was not as intimately involved in my enterprise as Carol, and he had less opportunity to work with me afterwards when I was crafting the story. The novel is a response to a set of real experiences. But even if some scenes, like the dialogue above, are borrowed loosely from real life, it is a made-up story. The fiction in Wario’s story, however, is a matter of selection and conflation; I made nothing up. I think it was Clifford Geertz who first pointed out that ethnography was a kind of fiction, something made, if not made up. Selection and omission are as true of nonfiction as they are of fiction: none of us tells all; what we tell is always shaped by the questions we ask and the interpretations we offer. Like the poet, we “tell the truth but tell it slant.” Perhaps we should think of the fiction used here, particularly the fiction involved with relating Wario’s story, as a form of interpretation, a way of couching things that makes sense of them. What matters in Wario’s story are the following structural facts: (1) a young man with talent and an aptitude for relating to others (2) meets a foreign anthropologist and (3) helps the foreigner understand what is going on around him; however, (4) the young man has a drinking problem. (5) The anthropologist writes about the young man

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Being There and (6) the resulting text hurts him despite the anthropologist’s attempts to camouflage his identity. (7) The anthropologist experiences ongoing guilt and (8) the young man moves on with his life. What matters in the story about the anthropologist and his wife are the following facts: (1) in a marriage of long-standing closeness and affection, (2) a husband asks his wife to join him in the field. (3) She agrees, but she is not involved in all aspects of the decision to live and work in the desert. (4) She goes anyway, at a great cost to herself, (5) the husband feels guilty for exposing her to the hazards of his work, (6) she makes the best of it, and (7) the two remain happily married. Details provide verisimilitude—they give context to the relevant facts, which are not altered by fictional details any more than descriptive facts in a monograph are altered by accompanying theory and interpretation. b e t r a y a l m e a n s t o h a n d s o m e t h i n g over. With my wife, Carol, I handed over—I think only temporarily—my responsibility as a partner to work with her to make life choices that affected us both. With Wario I handed over my responsibility as a friend to keep faith in him. In recounting both cases I made things up— or, rather, I omitted details and moved others around—but I told fictions, usually in good faith, but fictions nonetheless to get at something I thought was important: a truth about the complex business of building and sustaining relationships with others in the field. The fiction I told about Wario— changing his name, including incidental details from the lives of other men, and omitting details from his own life in the interests of protecting his identity, accepted practices in anthropology—is not really so different in the end from the fiction I tell in the novel about the effects of fieldwork on a marriage. In both cases, the fictions are betrayals of one sort or another to you, the reader, who reasonably expects something else from an an-

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Field Relations, Field Betrayals thropological text. But just as becoming an individual requires a compromise of sociality, telling a story about human beings, who have interests in what we say, entails the same sorts of compromises inherent in all human relations. In anthropology we emphasize building relationships. That’s another word worth pursuing: relation, from the Latin relatus, to carry back. It makes me think of reciprocity and redemption. Both words, betrayal and relation, imply acts of holding, carrying, handing over. The difference is that, with betrayal, we hand something over to others, while with relation we hand something back to its place of origin. Doing fieldwork means leaving— and sometimes hurting— the people we care about. I wish it weren’t so. But there it is. Yet to say that betrayal is inevitable is not to excuse it or absolve us fieldworkers of responsibility. Rather, it is to remind us of the risks so that we take steps to avoid—as far as humanly possible— doing harm when we leave. Of course, fieldwork can also, and often does, mean returning to the field, carrying back. Perhaps we are better off in our discipline to emphasize relating over leaving, returning over betraying. For it is in handing things back that we can atone for our misadventures.

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15

My Family’s Honor Sarah H. Davis

A

s the monstrous ferryboat pulled into Bastia, one of the two cities on the island of Corsica, I stood with my husband, David, and my fifteen-month-old son, Jackson, on the deck of the boat looking expectantly, if with tired, jet-lagged eyes, upon the shores that would be our new home. The cluster of buildings that we approached was weathered and gray, nearly blending in with the craggy mountain scape and gray skies that rose up behind it. It looked like a photograph of a bright, Mediterranean port-city you’d see in a coffee-table book, but stripped of its color, like a ghost. Oddly, this calmed me. There was something natural, soothing, and quiet about it. In the weeks leading up to this ferry ride, we had packed up our Brooklyn apartment into a U-Haul truck, and David had driven the load south for thirteen hours to Atlanta, which was where we would return, after the adventure that we’d been anticipating for so long ended. Jackson and I had camped out in our virtually empty apartment for a few days and then one night in early December I packed the car with our remaining stuff, carefully chosen for a year of living in a small village that we had never seen and knew so little about. We met David in Washington, D.C., where I gave a paper at an anthropology conference about the Corsican traditional singing that had drawn me

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My Family’s Honor to the island for my preliminary fieldwork a year and a half before. The irony was not lost on me that the confidence with which I presented my paper’s conclusions, related anecdotes, and answered questions about Corsican life masked the very real fear that I had about our move. As an anthropologist I am fascinated by the existential transformation that living in a foreign culture can provoke— even when it is hard, which it always is. But as a mother, a wife, I had a hard time accepting the fact that I was knowingly dragging my son and my innocent husband into the trials of culture shock, where everything you do, wear, and want is somehow wrong. Worlds that were accessible and meaningful can suddenly become inaccessible and hollow. In our early weeks on Corsica I was so concerned for my little family that it was hard to see beyond them. Sometimes instead of relishing the cultural barriers we confronted, which I was there to study—the desperate inefficiency of everything, the stone-cold glances that met us in village life, the daily news of nationalist bombings throughout the island, the sounds of militant and often deeply sorrowful Corsican music wafting from bars or homes— sometimes, despite myself, instead of relishing these differences, I would see the displaced look in my son’s eyes and wish the differences would disappear. It was late afternoon in early December 2007 when we drove off the ferry in the tiny turquoise Renault Twingo we had just bought from a rather suspect used-car salesman on the outskirts of Nice. Jackson peeked out from between the suitcases to see what was coming. On our drive inward and upward from the coast, it got colder, even though the sun came out. As we got higher up, we had vast views of steely mountains speckled with bright-green patches and the occasional stray cow or herd of goats. Ancient walls came in and out of view on the lower portions of the mountains marking defunct terrace farms, old estate boundaries, shepherds’ paths, and, on occasion, the remnants of a 2,000-year-old Roman road.

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Being There When we arrived in our village, after a couple of hours of harrowing driving, it was dark. Over the phone, the night before, the cousin of our landlord had told me that if we couldn’t fi nd the small road to the apartment when we arrived, we should ask at the village bar for Ceccé Santoni’s house. When we arrived that evening I had not been given a street name or number, which meant that soon after we got there I found myself approaching the dimly lit, somewhat intimidating bar in the village square. In apprehensive French I asked the group of gruff Corsican men who were drinking at the bar where I could find Ceccé’s house. Given Ceccé’s instructions, I was taken off guard when they looked at me with blank, cold stares. Maybe I had gone to the wrong bar, I thought. Maybe we were in the wrong village. I persisted, with a bit of desperation in my voice and worry on my face. Most of the men turned away from me, back to their conversation, but finally one on the edge of the group looked at me and pointed up a steep hill in the distance, insisting he didn’t know, but maybe that was the right way. He quickly turned away, back to the conversation at the bar. I would discover in the weeks that followed that all these men were regulars at the bar. They all knew Ceccé, and the one who actually came to my aid lived literally next door to him. A month or two on Corsica and the sensitive observer cannot help but remark upon the weighty presence of what is locally referred to as the “non-dit”—what is not said, and how the principled silence manages relationships and determines reputation. For the entire time we lived on Corsica, dealing with the weight of this “non-dit” was a challenge for me—both as a researcher, desperately trying to figure out the way things worked, and, more than that, as a person, trying to feel at home. I was not used to the default reaction to my presence by people who didn’t know me, a presence that I have typically thought of as nonthreatening (it’s hard to imagine someone finding me menacing), being suspicion and a kind of disdain.

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My Family’s Honor It took me a while to realize that although the social tension that seemed to follow me around everywhere was heightened for pinzutu (outsiders), it was in fact a typical feature of social interaction on Corsica. A sort of incertitude and insecurity is constitutive of the social realm itself. Even those who are, in a sense, the most “stable” (with family roots going back as far as people can remember, connecting them to other families in the village) live with a lack of stability and consistency in their social relations. The constant work of stabilizing the social world in one’s favor is often thought about in terms of protecting one’s individual and family honor. During my preliminary fieldwork I questioned a singer of traditional Corsican music, Jean-Pierre, and his cousin, Etienne, about how they choose singing partners. “When you arrive at a gathering and begin to sing,” I asked in French, “do you ever sing with people you don’t know or don’t like?” “No,” they both answered immediately, in unison. “But,” I asked, “what if it’s not . . . not an enemy, but someone that you just don’t get on with who happens to be there. Will you sing with him?” “No,” they both repeated definitively. “You have to understand,” Jean-Pierre told me, “Corsicans are a very hospitable people, a very generous people, and a people that cares a lot about honor.” He went on, “You are never ‘sort of not getting along’ with someone. Either you like them or you don’t, period. You are either good with [bien] them or bad [mal] with them, there is no in between.” Etienne jumped in to explain that this was one of the reasons greetings are so important on the island. “If you don’t greet your friends, you may become mal with them.” Corsican life is textured by rifts and deep rivalries. Some of them date back to feuds between grandparents no longer living. On the other hand, the alliances between friends and families are equally deep and lasting.

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Being There The village square, “la place,” that lay just below our apartment is the stage on which these social dynamics are enacted, observed, and made realities. It is an 80-foot-square space between the bar and the 800-year-old church, where people pass idle hours—men play boules and sit atop the wall in small groups to talk; women sit in their own groups or walk the road to the next village. The space is not, however, as it seems at first blush, a peaceful space for leisure and relaxation. This does not mean that the village square is not convivial; it can be wonderfully warm and inviting, but not simply so. People’s entrance into la place from their nook of the village, usually during siesta, around two o’clock in the afternoon and in the evenings after dinner, when the weather permits, is followed by a careful surveying of those who are already present and a round of appropriate greetings. Bisous, the customary kisses on both cheeks, pass between family members who don’t live together (if they live together this formality is unnecessary), between close friends if one is a woman and between men if they are very close friends, and handshakes otherwise. What is important is not only the appropriateness of the greetings one gives and receives but also who is watching the interaction. People who might be quite friendly if meeting outside the view of others can be importantly restricted when others are watching. I would watch sympathetically as community members whose reputations had recently been compromised anxiously entered la place. Perhaps someone had (intentionally or inadvertently) shown disrespect to another’s family member, had failed repeatedly to reciprocate favors, or had taken advantage of a favor. These members of the community would approach the small groups perched on the stone walls or on the steps of the church trying to assess the appropriateness of their greetings, hanging between the fear of waiting until they were acknowledged (with the real possibility that this would not happen) and the fear of breaking into the group only to be ignored. But frequently, over time, the tides would turn and the ostracized member

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My Family’s Honor would slowly regain confidence, while someone else’s reputation would be imperiled. During the early period of building relationships, my husband, David, and I would run home to report to each other the bisous we had received, the smile from the bread lady (who delivers bread every morning to the villages, honking from her little truck when she arrives), and the nod from the clique of gruff men drinking Pastis and coffee at the bar. These greetings were, over time, followed by brief conversations, invitations for coffee, and, eventually, meals. Our small successes were countered for us by the realization of the instability of the relationships we thought we were building. The same people who would invite us to eat at their homes and spend all night talking would, on the street, depending on who was around, very reluctantly stop to say hello, looking over our shoulders to see who was watching. And sometimes they would not say hello at all. These kinds of reversals in relationships were hard for us. For me there seemed to be something so petty about it all, like the kind of awful social games that go on among teenagers. My “adult” education had led me to reject this kind of behavior in principle. What did I care what others thought of me? Was it not a sign of strength to be who you are? What did I care about “honor” or “reputation”? After all, didn’t I know who I was? I would often come home after having been ignored, frustrated and raging. “Screw them,” I’d holler to David. “I don’t care what they think!” Of course it makes sense that they were hesitant to let us in. We were only going to be there for fourteen months, so why should they treat us as one of them? Still, while we were living there my perspective often waned. I just wanted to make friends, to feel like myself. My frustration and judgment were paired with a kind of pitiful acquiescence. After all, I was there to make connections, to become part of the group—that was my primary goal as an anthropologist. This meant that aside from my ranting to David, I basically dealt with it. I continued to smile and extend greetings, even when I was snubbed. I

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Being There took what they were willing to give, even when I knew that the same person who was extending friendship at that instant might withdraw it the next. I suppressed my frustration and sense of indignity in the name of my research. Then, one fateful week in March, everything changed, at least for a spell, and I was forced out of my shell in an explosion of frustration. Oddly, it was in that moment that I learned that, in fact, I did—I do— understand the Corsican preoccupation with honor and reputation as far more important and penetrating than just some form of competitive social climbing. Interestingly, despite all my anthropological training that taught me about the importance of keeping my biases out of my research, it was actually by losing some of my neutrality and emerging as a person with opinions and likes and dislikes that I learned about Corsican honor. a f e w m o n t h s i n t o o u r stay, David and I decided we needed to find new lodging. Our apartment, at the top of a steep hill that we had first thought it impossible to drive up, had two flights of steep wooden steps without railings. (It is said that Corsicans have been able to preserve ancient traditions and the Corsican language, despite a history of being conquered, because village settlements are so far into the mountains, and so hard to get to, that the conquerors didn’t bother to seek them out. Certainly no one without a very good reason was going to brave the slope to get to our house.) The older Corsican apartments, like the one in which we were staying, fit together like Tetris blocks. Rather than being stacked one on top of the other, they fold into and around each other. On the front side of our apartment our living room sat directly over our neighbor’s dining area; in the rear, their bedroom was stacked above ours. We had the equivalent of a two-bedroom apartment that wound narrowly up and up over three steep floors. This was not ideal for our bold, toddling one-and-a-half-year-old. There were no baby gates, and fi-

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My Family’s Honor nally, when Jackson launched himself from the second floor staircase and gashed his cheek, just missing his right eye, we decided we should start looking to move. Letizia, our landlady, fi rst came to see us a few nights after we moved into her apartment. From the moment she arrived she talked my ear off, which, having just arrived, I was thrilled about. Here was someone who would talk with me! It is true, at times, she didn’t seem to be talking to me exactly—more like talking to herself—but I was happy to be a sounding board. Now I was worried about telling her we would have to leave, as she had expected we would stay at least until June, but one glance at Jackson’s bruised, cut cheek and I was empowered by motherly guilt. In my phone conversation with Letizia I apologized profusely— telling her about Jackson’s fall, telling her how deeply we appreciated her hospitality and the welcome her family had extended to us, and so on. We were hoping to move by mid-March to our new village, about two months from then. She was not happy. Slowly it became clear to me that this decision to move might ruin the only real relationships I’d made in our village up until that point (many of whom were Letizia’s relatives). I got a pit in my stomach. I did my very best to make her understand. Although the rental situation had been casual from the outset at Letizia’s request—no lease, no firm dates—after I hung up I continued to worry. She had not reacted well. We decided to send her a present with a note that offered to pay rent for two weeks more than I had told her on the phone, through the end of March. This seemed to appease her a bit. At the time I knew I was dealing with a tricky situation, but I had thought it was mostly about the money Letizia was losing, which we tried to remedy. I didn’t realize that having the “Americans” leave the village was also an issue of reputation, honor, and hospitality. In retrospect, the situation would have been greatly helped if we had driven across the island to Letizia’s home deferentially bearing gifts,

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Being There the rent for the next two months, and an invitation for a future dinner. Rather than presenting her with the logic of the situation, which I tried to do over the phone, I needed to show her affection and respect. But I didn’t know that then. In early March, Letizia called to tell me she might be coming to the village on the evening of the fifteenth and would like to stay in her apartment. She said she didn’t mind if we were all there together, she would sleep on the couch. I told her that, of course, this would be okay, but that we were, as it turned out, planning on moving most of our stuff to our new apartment that very day. I knew from our experience moving out of our apartment in Brooklyn a few months before that the moving day would leave the apartment a bit disorga nized. This worried me, but we had no choice. Our new lease started on the fifteenth so we couldn’t move before that, and David was leaving on the sixteenth for a two-week trip for his work. We had to do it that day. It was an unfortunate set of circumstances. I warned Letizia that the house would likely be a bit untidy, and assured her that it would be entirely “propre” (clean) by the end of the month when we stopped paying rent and officially moved out. She said she understood. This was the beginning of the end. The day after we moved into our new village, ten miles north and nestled even farther into the mountains, David flew to England. The times when I was a single parent in the field, particularly in the beginning before we established a network of friends, were difficult for me. I would shudder thinking about Jackson and me on a mountainside, on an island, in the middle of a sea. Jackson was just adjusting to the crèche where he went for day care, but he was still a bit on edge, getting used to the French and the extended hours away from me. On the days that I left him there and he pressed his face up against the glass, watching me leave, tears streaming down his round cheeks. I could hardly get out of the parking lot without crying myself.

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My Family’s Honor This would have likely been true wherever his first day care experience had been, but in those moments it was as though I could feel the threats of the mountain passes, the howling late-winter winds, and the cold glares of the people we encountered pounding into me. I trusted his caretakers, and we were more or less secure in our lodging, transportation, and so on, but no one was waiting for us, expecting us anywhere. What would I do if my car broke down (an experience that I would have to deal with a few months later), or if my bank card didn’t work? In this society in which family ties and connections mean everything, we were of little consequence, and it was amazing how subtracting one member of the family made this so much more obvious. On the day of David’s departure I got a call from Letizia, asking me to come back over to the house to have lunch with her and to help her start cleaning (she sounded mildly displeased). I told her I could come and would be happy to help, but I added, because Jackson was required to come home for lunch and a nap, it would be two o’clock, realistically, before I could drop him back off at the crèche and make it up to her. I knew Corsicans are rigid about lunch hours, which are typically 12:00–2:00 p.m., so I was explicit that I could come, but that I would be en retard. She agreed. It was almost two o’clock as I sped up the windy roads from Corte, where I had left a crying Jackson at the crèche, when I got a call on my cell phone. It was Letizia, and she wasted no time in yelling at me. She told me that when she’d arrived the previous night the master bed and Jackson’s bed weren’t ready, that the bathroom and the kitchen hadn’t been cleaned. She was really mad. I already felt drained. She kept yelling. Tears welled in my eyes. I had worried so much about exactly this. My stomach was in knots. I knew the house wasn’t spotless, but neither was it a mess. And, I couldn’t help but think I had told Letizia so many times that I was not going to be able to get to it all before she arrived. David was gone, Jackson was struggling, and I felt fragile and helpless.

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Being There As I sped, more than anyone should have over the guardrail-less mountain passes, I imagined Letizia telling Ceccé, her cousin and our closest village friend, about the situation from her point of view. I worried that she had probably complained to our whole little group of hard-earned village friends about the messy, irresponsible Americans. I wondered if they’d continue to know us. In tears, I tried to pull myself together on the last leg of the drive, knowing that I would now have to have lunch with this woman. I got there, weak, red in the eyes, and having no idea how this was going to go down. When she opened the door I saw that she had taken the kitchen apart— everything was out of the drawers and strewn all over the counters and table, and she was drying the sheets to Jackson’s bed across two chairs. She reluctantly gave me the bisous and began to walk me through the house to show me all the things we’d left undone. No matter what I said, she simply wouldn’t accept the fact that I had told her we would have it ready by the end of the month, that I still considered it our space, that we were still paying rent, and that this was entirely unfair. On top of all this, she had made an elaborate Corsican lunch for us—veau aux olives over pasta, wine, and traditional cheese, the brocciu. I was utterly confused at the contradiction of the hospitality on the one hand and the guilt and blame on the other. At the beginning I tried to defend myself, but eventually the “if you had wanted X” (past perfect), “you should have told us Y” (past conditional) grammar constructions in French got to be too much for me. I stopped trying and hid behind the language barrier, watching my French deteriorate before me. I just held on. For the next two and a half hours she talked not to me but at me. I heard about her ex-husband, her boyfriend, the clairvoyant she had gone to see, her troubled relationship with her mother, and so on. I ate compliantly. Every now and then, in the course of her stories, she would figure out a way to make a comment about the condition of the

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My Family’s Honor house, to keep me in my place. She talked for so long that we did not even get to clean. It was beginning to get dark outside, and as it edged toward five o’clock when the crèche closed, I started to get nervous. I tried to jump into the conversation to wind it down without offending her. I saw that unless I found my voice, I would never be able to get out of there. But she had a way of taking my wind-down attempts as new opportunities to discuss new and different things. It wasn’t working at all. I felt entirely powerless and controlled by this woman. I eyed the clock. My insides began to seize. Something was happening, something that had not happened since my arrival on Corsica. I was getting mad, frustrated, not in retrospect, not in the confi nes of our apartment, with David, but in the moment. I was angry, and it was surfacing, and I was going to have to deal with it. Then came the last straw. Letizia’s friend knocked on the door downstairs, and she went down to open it. I heard them talking. “Are you busy?” the friend asked. “No, I’m just having lunch with the American.” “Oh,” the friend answered knowingly. Letizia said, “Please excuse my house, it’s not normally like this. Normally there would be eight chairs around the table [we had moved one into Jackson’s room].” She spoke loudly and emphatically so I could hear “Normally my house is propre!” Then they came upstairs. Letizia introduced me as “the American.” There were no handshakes or bisous or even an “enchanté,” just grave and condescending looks my way. They began to talk in front of me, as though I didn’t understand French, continuing to talk about the house, the lack of respect, and so on. I was furious. Letizia had no right to put me in this position. She was bending the truth in a way that felt impossible for me to unbend. I felt invisible, mute. How had I become this person? I had been there for three hours letting her step on me, and I was going to be late to get Jackson. Poor Jackson! I was about to burst.

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Being There The friend kept looking over at me with unabashed disdain, the kind of look, I knew from my experience in the village square, was reserved for those who had really “messed up.” I surprised myself by glaring back at her. This was a new thing for me. Something was happening that was making it impossible for me to look away. Eventually Letizia walked her friend out. When she returned I was fidgeting nervously, angry and increasingly worried about the time. She gave me a grave look, which I ignored. She sat down, poured herself a glass of wine, and, without pause, launched into a long story about her job as a schoolteacher. I was stunned. How could she act like I was a friend a moment after she was mortifying me and giving our family a bad name? “Letizia,” I blurted out. “Are we paying you until the end of this month?” “Yes,” she answered warily. “Because it seems to me that you are very upset about the way the house is, but we are paying you a lot of money for this house and we decided to pay the second half of the month even though we aren’t going to be living here so that I can take my time cleaning the house and getting it ready.” I took a breath, but not long enough to let her get a word in. I continued, “You decided to come up and stay here, and of course that is fine, but we moved yesterday, and I should not have had to finish cleaning until the end of the month!” I surprised myself at the reemergence of my French tenses. “It isn’t fair of you to give me such a hard time.” Then, continuing to surprise myself, I stood up abruptly, and in a (perhaps inappropriately) loud voice I thanked her for lunch and told her I had to go get Jackson. I did not stop when she tried to derail me. I picked up my purse and many of the plates we had been using, and, watching her face fall and shadows of insult pass across it, I walked down the stairs, put everything in the dishwasher, turned to say goodbye, and walked out. As I walked (ran) to the car, my heart was beating quickly. I wondered if Ceccé and our neighbors were watching me from behind their

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My Family’s Honor shutters. I felt a flood of empowerment and presence, a strong part of me breaking through to the surface, demanding to be let go. It had been building over the previous months—it was the feeling that I did not count, had no voice, was only valuable insofar as I was interested in understanding the people around me, but not in my own right. That day, at that moment, all I felt was, as they say in French, “ je m’en fou!” (I don’t care!) This is my son, and I do not care about your wheat allergies, that you think you were an unwanted child, or about your promotion! As I drove as fast as I could down that windy road to pick up Jackson, out of that stifling town and down the mountain to Corte, I felt liberated in my rage, and internally (and once or twice even out loud) I continued to yell, “I don’t care!” As I calmed down a bit, something interesting happened. I was plagued by the notion that all of my hard-earned relationships might have been compromised by something so unfair, something that I should not have been blamed for. It was all so unjust. And, without warning, I began to have a deep desire. My liberated inner voice began to rant: How can she treat me like that? She has no respect for me at all. The rant continued: She is going to bad-mouth us to the entire village! She is going to ruin our . . . what was it that she was going to ruin? I thought for a second and realized: She is going to ruin our family’s reputation, our family’s honor! This was infuriating to me. It was not a petty question of popularity or social climbing. And it was not a question of my research goals. It was a question of injustice. We wanted these people to know us, to like us, for who we were. We wanted, I wanted, who we were to count, to matter. And this event had the potential to skew these things irreparably. I began to plot how I could get our story told: I would go see Ceccé; I would continue to go to the village square, even confront her publicly if I had to; I would shore up our connections, try to explain to those we knew, and if they refused to listen, I would snub them. I would not back down.

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Being There And under these strange circumstances I began to think about the village square, the preoccupation with bisous, and the notion of family honor that had so confounded me over the past few months. I smiled, knowing that if I had enough family on the island, I would surely be rushing home to tell my story, with passion and blame and anger, to rally the troops and to get as many people as I could to acknowledge the injustice of the situation. And, who knows, maybe our family would become mal with Letizia’s for the next generation. For the first time since our arrival, I felt like I was on the “inside,” seeing what it means to live on Corsica in a new way. And my anger began to dissolve as the thrill of finally understanding something that had felt so foreign to me took its place. I was repeatedly told what Jean-Pierre had told me in my first three weeks on Corsica: there is no such thing as neutrality. One can define each and every one of one’s social relationships as good or bad. The village, as well as the world beyond, is a divided world. My inclination, both given my research goals and training as an anthropologist and my disposition, is entirely counter to this. I am, I tell myself, neutral. I don’t like to fight with people, to confront people. On my enraged ride home, I learned something about my tendency to avoid confrontation and consider quick judgment irresponsible and unfounded. These “neutralizing” tendencies also mask the fact that I do have deep commitments (as passionate and fiery as the next person). And, what’s more, when they are pulled to the surface—my son’s welfare, unjust interpretations of my personhood and my intentions, and so on—I reveal myself to be, in an important sense, utterly nonneutral. I can, as it turns out, be a menace. Over the fourteen months we were there, my skin got tougher, and I learned how to demand greetings without regret, to give gifts to incur obligation and respect, to quickly return them in order to stay afloat, and even to snub effectively. And, over time, in our new village, we

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My Family’s Honor made good friends, became regulars in the village place, and, while still the Americans, we became their Americans. However, despite these adaptations, I never quite conquered the anxiety surrounding social existence on the island. Trying to stay on top of the social dynamics was exhausting, as were the highs and lows of warm acceptance and cold rejection. I have to admit, there was a great sense of relief for me when we left and returned home, to a place where every interaction doesn’t feel like it has the possibility to make or break me. But it is equally important to admit that in the moments that I embraced the menace in me (the Letizia incident was the first but not the last), I felt empowered in a way that I don’t often feel at home— explicit, bold; for a moment, I know, really know, what is important to me, and one of those things, as it turns out, is my family’s honor.

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16

Return to Nisa Marjorie Shostak

Towering beside them, I sit awkwardly in the circle of small-boned !Kung San women, shifting often, my body unused to the cross-legged position. The quarter moon drops toward the horizon, and the stars brighten as it descends. The sounds of a healing dance flood the air. Complex clapped rhythms drive the women’s songs, fragments of undulating and overlapping melodies. Each woman tilts her head toward her shoulder, trapping sound near her ear, the better to hear her part. The women’s knees and legs, loosely describing a circle, fall carelessly against one another—an intermingling of bodies and song. In the center of the circle, a fire flares as it is stoked and whipped by human breath, soon to ebb again into glowing coals. Beyond the circle, men and boys-almost-men, their tight upper bodies hardly visible in the darkness, pound the cool sand with bare feet, blending new rhythms into the song. So forcefully do they dance that a deep circle forms in the sand beneath them, enclosing us, separating us from the profane, protecting us from the unknown. Beyond, in the dark, the spirits of the ancestors are said to sit, drawn to the event to watch, possibly to stir mischief. A trancer screams at the spirits, warning them not to cause trouble, not to inflict harm. He weaves among the seated women, laying on hands to heal

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Return to Nisa those who are sick and to ward off illness from others. Hands reach out to steady his trembling legs and body, to protect his feet from the burning coals as he nears the fire. My own hands tire of clapping and drop to my lap, easing the tension bound up in following along. The melodies of !Kung traditional songs swirl around me, familiar and soothing. My attention moves off, beyond the healing dance, beyond the village with its small groups of traditional grass huts and more contemporary mud ones, beyond the half-dozen villages that used the same local well, to the vast Kalahari landscape, im mensely quiet and im mensely broad. The intense human drama enacted on the sand would go unnoticed from a plane flying above in the dark, mysterious land. A lull in the singing brings me back, to the sounds of small talk and the distant ringing of donkey bells carried on the wind. The healing dance slowly builds again, layers of song and movement both strange and familiar to me. I savor a strong feeling of well-being and peace, a sense of rest in the midst of a long and difficult journey. i n j u n e 1 9 8 9 , I l e f t my home in Atlanta to spend a month in a remote area in northwestern Botswana, on the northern edge of the Kalahari Desert. I had lived and worked in the area twice before, but had not been back in fourteen years. . . . During the first stay of nearly two years, I learned to speak the !Kung language—replete with clicks, glottal flaps, glottal stops, pressed vowels, and tones—well enough to pursue my research on the personal lives of !Kung women. Using the format of life history narrative, I asked women about their childhoods, marriages, sexuality, friendships, and dreams, delving into their experiences and feelings as only an outsider might do. Of eight women I interviewed, one stood out. More open than the others and more willing to articulate the intimacies of her life, she had a striking gift for verbal expression. . . . She knew I hoped to write

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Being There about her, and together we chose a pseudonym to protect her privacy. The name we selected was Nisa. . . . Now, fourteen years after my last trip, I was on my way back, infused with a particular sense of urgency. Nisa was now about sixtyeight years old, far beyond the usual !Kung life expectancy of fifty-five. And my own life had taken a distressing turn toward early mortality. A year earlier I had learned I had breast cancer. Although my odds were favorable and a majority of women with my prognosis survived, I was terrifyingly aware that many women lost their lives to the disease. My future had been cast into a deep, threatening shadow; the present turned in on itself as my daily experience acquired a brutal, slashing edge. t h u r s d a y e v e n i n g , J u n e 2 2 , 1 9 8 9 : Almost time to board a flight from Atlanta to London, en route to Botswana. The scope of my gesture felt overwhelming. I, “Mommy” to three small children, wife to a concerned husband, was about to leave, to be gone a month, after having been distracted for weeks. The exchanges in the airport bristled with an air of unreality: words spoken of departure and separation, of coping and managing, for the family and for myself. Each of my actions was a step toward removing me from the children who had sprung from my body, who were part of my soul, whose presence bolstered my flagging spirits. And from my husband, companion, and friend. The children were on edge, wary of the impending change, unsure of how to say good-bye. With the last travel details completed, we had half an hour: to talk, to connect, and then to go. I had tried to prepare my youngest child, Sarah, for my leaving, but at age two and a half, what did she understand of “Africa” or of a month without her mother? We ate sweets, took pictures in a concession booth, and read good-bye cards.

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Return to Nisa Finally it was time. Holding Sarah on my hip, I hugged my eldest daughter, Susanna, my son, Adam, and then my husband, Mel. Slowly, reluctantly, I transferred Sarah from my hip to Mel’s. They waved as I turned and walked through the “international passengers only” security checkpoint. A few steps later I looked back at the tightly knit group receding down the terminal, already working out their new alliances, discussing dinner and treats, reassurances of continuity in the face of disorienting change. When they were no longer in view, I passed through the gate. I was alone. I was on my way. The decision to go had preceded the practical, starting with a need, the need to return: to see, to taste, to smell, to experience again, perhaps even to heal. I yearned to be surrounded by the landscape that had etched itself upon my young, impressionable soul twenty years before, that had initiated me into the beauty of its sparse, wild, and independent rhythms. And I wanted to see Nisa again, the woman whose views about life had infused my own during my years of writing and thinking about her. I had heard periodically that she was alive, the latest report received only months before. I wanted to connect with her again before her life ended, and, for reasons that were not entirely clear to me, I wanted her to know that my life was threatened. Thinking of returning to that stark world filled me with longing. For years, bearing and raising children, teaching at a university, doing research, and writing a second book had edged out most serious thoughts of a return. Then, without warning, my life had changed, and my priorities had as well. The voice calling me back to Africa, which had been lost in the clutter of those other concerns, became audible, then compelling. As it gained strength, to my grateful surprise, it displaced my despair. Gradually it garnered a powerful alliance of internal forces that enabled me to leave my family—my support and my charge—to travel around the globe on this personal quest. If my life did end prematurely, at least I

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Being There would have confronted again one of its most intense and mysterious chapters. n i s a a n d i wa l k e d t o the fi re joining the others. I had so many questions. What was her life like? Why had she moved to Dobe? How was she earning a living? Was she healthy? Was she getting along with Bo? Was she still close to her older and younger brothers? What about the two nieces she had helped raise? I also wanted to know how the publication of Nisa, the book based on her life, had affected her, especially through the cows she had bought with money from me (with the help of Richard Lee, who was then working at Dobe) five years before. Those cows had fulfilled a promise I had made to Nisa when we were last together: if I finished writing our story, and if it was published as a book, and if people liked the book and bought it, I would buy cows for her. When Richard returned from the field, he reported that Nisa had bought five pregnant cows. When Richard went back to Dobe a few years later, I again sent money, and he again returned with news: Nisa was doing well; her cows had multiplied; and with the additional money she had bought a branding iron. I had other questions as well, many concerning the life story Nisa had so generously shared years before. Had time changed her perspective? If I asked her to tell her story again, would it be similar to the one in the book? If not, what kinds of differences might I find? I had one more set of questions. Closer to my heart, and less clearly formulated, these were the ones that had propelled me back to Nisa. What was our relationship? What would our conversations be like this time? Would we still have rapport? Would she talk as freely about herself as she once had? What about sex? Did she think about it differently now? Or aging? Or death? Especially death. Had she come to terms with mortality, bearing down on her as it was on me? Would she have insight that would help me? And would she be interested in what was happening to me?

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Return to Nisa What I finally said out loud, or at least tried to say, was that I hoped she would be willing to talk to me later, when it was just the two of us alone. Then we might pick up our talks where we had left off years before. Now, on my first day and with everyone around, it was awkward—we should wait until things were quieter. “You want to talk with me again as we did in the past?” Nisa asked, to be sure she understood my fumbling words. Even as I nodded in agreement, she did the same, saying, “Yes, when there are fewer people, we will begin our talk.” I responded, speaking softly, “Even so. You and Bo are welcome guests at my camp. Whenever you visit, you will be fed. You are my people, after all, my family here.” But something more was on my mind, or rather, in my heart. It had been hard to admit as I planned my trip, but one of the attractions of returning to Africa was the chance to be healed by !Kung healers. The wish embarrassed me, and I didn’t talk about it even to friends. But I felt it nevertheless. i t wa s n ’t t h a t I s u b s c r i b e d to the !Kung belief that illness was sent by the spirit world. Nor did I share their belief that, by eliciting the cooperation of the spirits, a healer in trance could extract sickness and make people well. But the power of the tradition was breathtaking, and its drama had captivated me years before. A person in trance sets out alone to battle the unknown, the chaos lurking beneath the mundane, the disorder and darkness at the edge of our consciousness, all propelled by forces beyond human understanding. When successful, the healer wrests some measure of control over human suffering and pain, averts tragedy, reverses misfortune. These benefits come at great cost to the healer. Out in the dark, according to the !Kung belief, just beyond the circle of those attending the trance dance, sit the spirits of the dead, having come to watch, to be entertained, or to cause mischief. These spirits are partially responsible

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Being There for human misery. Only those in trance, imbued with the power to heal, can see them. Calling out into the shadows, the healers argue, moralize, and plead with these vindictive, mean, or merely bored spirits that wreak so much havoc among the living. At other times they do battle, throwing sticks while they scream at the spirits to cease their wrongdoing. In the process, the healers risk their lives. They may enter a trance state that is so profound, so deep and coma-like, that their own spirits, which are said to have left their bodies, may not return. Death can be averted only by the efforts of other healers in trance, who lay on hands, rub the unconscious body, and sing plaintive melodies appealing to the spirit of the animals of the wild, and to the Great God, the most powerful and compassionate of all.1 Their efforts are rewarded by the return of the healer’s spirit. Sound from the deepest recesses of the healer’s soul rises up, a tentative moan building in strength and finally erupting into a full cry: the cascading wail of the healer in trance. The men and women who embark on this journey are true warriors, heroes, travelers in Dante’s Inferno. They are Pamina and Tamino in The Magic Flute willingly facing the terrors of the dark side. With courage and daring, they teeter at the precipice and open their eyes—and the mysteries they discover bring comfort and relief of suffering to those who remain behind. How? By a complex process. First, they “withdraw” illness from those they heal. Inside the bodies of the healers is believed to reside a special substance or medicine called nlum. With vigorous dancing, this healing power heats up, getting hotter and hotter. When it starts to boil (“boiling energy,” it had been called), the healer achieves a fully altered state of consciousness: a trance. The body trembles, behavior becomes erratic, the mind is disoriented, speech becomes slurred or nonsensical. . . . Disorientation characterizes the early stages of trance for many healers. For novices, it may even be the primary experience. But a

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Return to Nisa skilled trance requires fiercely focused concentration. The healer peers into the “patient” to the very core, in order to locate the source of illness and discover its cause. By laying on hands, the healer dislodges the sickness he had “seen,” or “pulls” it into his own body where it is ejected through the top of the spinal column and rendered harmless. m u s i c r e s o n a t e d t h r o u g h t h e d a r k n e s s : syncopated rhythms, sinuous melodies, the voice of the drum, the occasional cry of a healer in trance. The drums beat on. The night air was cold against my back. I inched toward the fire, warming my hands. Then Nisa was there beside Nai, undoing the bandage, revealing Nai’s grossly swollen, cracked, and discolored thumb. “Working” on Nai—her only blood relative at Dobe—Nisa held the infected arm gently: laying on hands, she repeatedly threw off the illness, violently spitting it out into the darkness, crying out a plaintive wail. She used her sweat, considered a powerful manifestation of nlum, rubbing it onto Nai’s chest; she flicked her fingers hard against Nai’s sides and pressed hard, transferring the healing medicine into Nai. Then Nisa turned to Debe, to cure him. This meant she would probably go around the circle; this meant she would come to me. The singing and drumming crescendoed again, loud and furious, inspired by three in trance at once. Nisa broke from curing, temporarily, to drive her trance state deeper; she stamped dance steps into the hot sand beside the coals, staring into the fire, singing intently. She swayed, and her footing became uneven. Suddenly she was falling toward the fire. Arms reached out from behind, lightly encircling her, propping her upright, protecting her from the flames. As a cry exploded from within her, passionate and heart-wrenching, she resumed curing, first one then another, making her away around the circle. Then it was my turn. “Ah—oh—ohya—oh—oo—yeh,” went the alternating women’s voices in the sound tapestry, supported by the drum. Leaning over me, Nisa echoed the melody, her tone deep, her attention unwavering. Her

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Being There arms traveled down my chest, stopping when her pulsating hands reached the spot they had been searching for, just above my waist. With one hand in front, the other behind, she sang the refrain, loud and resonant. I closed my eyes, my senses alert to the sounds, the smells, the feel of her touch. Her “cure” culminated quickly with the healer’s scream, “Kow—hi—de—li”—the sound folding down after the first syllable—and she moved on to the person next to me. The heavens didn’t open; nor was it a miracle, the stuff of dreams. Indeed, it seemed distressingly perfunctory: I was just another body to attend to as Nisa worked her way through the group. Yet I was moved. The tension of the previous week— a week in which I had left my family and come thousands of miles to this world that was both strange and familiar— dissolved in a torrent of feeling. Tears streamed down my face. And it wasn’t just the tension that found release. In the tears also flowed some of the pain, fear, and sadness that had defined much of my life for a year. These didn’t disappear, but the tears felt cleansing, even healing. It felt good to acknowledge how bruised I was, how hard the year had been. Nisa continued around the circle. I drifted in and out, sometimes joining the clapping, other times remaining lost in thought. No one seemed to notice me. Yet this time I didn’t feel lonely. I felt grateful to be there, to be surrounded by the sounds of the dance, the fragrance of the wood fire, and the cadences of a language I loved. Most of all, I basked in the luxury of just sitting, observing as I wished. While the presence of the others supported me, they asked nothing of me, at least nothing for the moment: I didn’t have to smile to respond to social obligations, even to engage in conversation. But they allowed me in, and that was what I wanted. I breathed in the clear night air and looked up at the stars, bright in the black firmament above us. Nisa was now beside Kantla, her lover since her youth. Did others also know, as she knelt behind him, resting her body against his back,

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Return to Nisa draping her arms around him as she laid on hands in cure, that the touch was familiar to both? That it reflected a love of nearly fifty-five years? Kantla, his voice no longer clear, his body gaunt, his face somewhat sickly, spoke in low tones as Nisa cured him, commenting to anyone who would listen about where he was weak, where he was in pain. Nisa sang tenderly, embracing his thin frame, pulling out the bad, putting in the good. She remained with him a long time before returning to her niece Nai. Chuko, another of the women in trance, joined Nisa at the fire. Younger than Nisa by about fifteen years, she lacked Nisa’s centered grace. The angularity of her body lent sharpness to her movements as she went, somewhat frenetically, to one, then another, around the circle. Her hands were firm as she touched me, quivering on my chest, rubbing my sides. Ending with the characteristic cry of the healer, she continued on, making her way back to Nisa to help with Nai. A pattern of unison clapping signaled the end of one song. Laughter, joking, and general talk, accompaniments to most dances, filled the air, only to be obscured again almost immediately by the opening melody of the next song. Nisa and Chuko, unaffected by the break, continued to work on Nai. Then Nisa started around again. When she reached me, she leaned down on her knees, singing and laying on hands, rocking from side to side. When her face was close to mine, I said, “My aunt, see well what is inside. The doctors in my country found a terrible sickness. They tried to get rid of it, but they don’t know if I am cured. They said it may still kill me.” There was no sign that she heard me. Perhaps I had not made myself clear. Or perhaps she couldn’t decipher normal speech while she was in trance. Whatever the cause, she fi nished healing me and quickly moved on. Yet, from her touch, and from having spoken the words, tears again filled my eyes. Hidden from the others in the dim light, they flowed down the already charted path, unstifled and unnoticed.

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Being There Later in the dance, Nisa came around once again, as did the two other women. Each time they approached me, I closed my eyes to soak in the moment. Each time they left, I wanted more. By two in the morning I felt depleted. With the dance still going strong, I asked Bo to show me the path back to my camp. Knowing that I would probably get lost, he took a flashlight and led the way. The sounds of singing, dancing, and healing receded into the background as we pushed into the dark quiet. It was good to be with Bo. He was considerate and supportive, gentler than Nisa. He spoke of my kindness and generosity, of the cows and the branding iron I had given them. He told me they had traded many cows to get a horse, a horse that one day, when it was old enough, would be used for hunting. He even mentioned a heavy sweater I had sent him, which he was then wearing. He thanked me for caring about them and for helping them. He spoke clearly and slowly, and I felt deeply connected to him and to Nisa. The strangeness of my journey slipped away as I again began to feel part of this world. i l o o k e d o v e r a t n i s a , at age sixty-eight, going as strong and steadily as the younger women, and felt affection for her, the first since the first day of my visit. Since that day she had seemed insufferable, with endless demands and fervent reproaches, as though she didn’t realize that she and I had a unique dialogue of our own. Not that my perceiving Nisa as insufferable was new to our relationship. Twenty years before, as now, she had sat around my camp talking incessantly, commenting, asking for things, questioning me. To be sure, others with the same agenda had sat beside her. But Nisa’s presence had seemed harder to ignore. Her voice had demanded attention even when her words hadn’t been expressing demands. Back then, after days of hearing an endless litany of my faults, I finally took charge. To be more exact, I took charge of her voice. Instead of trying to close my ears to her colorful and constant verbiage, I actu-

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Return to Nisa ally asked for it. But I asked for things I wanted to hear. I asked about herbal medicines that affected reproduction and about sexual play in children. I asked about adult sexuality and about early relationships within the family. I also asked, and heard in riveting detail, about Nisa’s own life. Then it was as though The White Woman Had Finally Seen the Light. Filled with pride in her newfound role, Nisa excelled. She spoke far more openly and clearly of her own life, and the lives of others, than anyone else had— or would. Now that I had returned, how could she understand the strength of my commitment to her, or appreciate the years I had spent translating and honing the nuances of her tape-recorded words into English prose? Perhaps she felt she was just one voice among the many competing for my favor. Of course, she couldn’t deny the cows and the branding iron she had bought with money from me. But that was the past. New ground might need to be won. With my tongue still struggling to make the sounds commanded it by my brain, I had told her, as best as I could, that she was a major reason for my return. If she was willing, I had said, I would love to work with her again. That might have reassured her, as had my insistence that she come along on the bush trip. Even so, those first few days at Dobe had been difficult, and Nisa and I had had a hard time connecting. Confusion surrounded my arrival and the setting up of my camp. Our leaving for the bush two days after I arrived stirred things up even more. In addition, I had allotted time—and gifts—to shoring up old alliances and establishing new ones. Here in the bush it was different. We could live beside each other without the artifice of my visiting her compound or she mine. She wasn’t “waiting” for me, and I wasn’t “visiting” her, self-consciously taking photographs, self-consciously asking questions. Here, as we woke together, ate together, and now, gathered berries together, a new trust had formed.

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Being There I, for my part, relied on her more with each passing day. And she, for hers, allowed a gentler conversation to rise between us. r e t u r n i n g t o c a m p a t n i g h t f a l l after the porcupine hunt, I was exhausted. I had walked nearly four hours that day, following about ten hours the previous two days. My feet hurt. My body ached. And my sensibilities were overloaded. I was thrilled to be in that world—but the thrill was tempered. Perhaps a juicy, flavorful chunk of fresh game meat would have helped. . . . I was tired, and my defenses were down. Sitting in the sand, surrounded by the pace of a different millennium, my personal concerns reasserted themselves. My pain felt heavy again. The thought of returning to Dobe—to village life; to cattle, goats, and scrawny dogs; to agriculture and overgrazing; to the droning of trucks and the fearful might of armed soldiers; and to the inequity and material aspirations— was hard. The bush was freedom: visually pure, with vast amounts of space for the body, mind, and spirit. The bush was as far as I ever traveled, or wanted to, even in my imagination. Nowhere else did I find a comparable haven for my spirit when hurt, when seeking solace, when needing solitude. And although lions, leopards, chimerical porcupines, blisters, and physical exhaustion came with the territory, they didn’t lessen its appeal to a lover in love. Returning to village life was the downswing of the pendulum. It was a move toward—not away from—the life I so fervently wanted to leave behind. My trip was not yet half over, but it seemed the best had passed. Perfect freedom, pure air, supportive voices crying out in the wilderness, life pared down to the essentials—how was I to return to my “old” life after this? How was I ever to return to my family? m y f a m i l y : a s c o m p l e x a s a thought can get. What was my connection to them now? How could I be so content on my own, nine thousand miles away? Was this an artifact of the stress of cancer? Or

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Return to Nisa was this the real me? The devoted mother seemed so distant and unreal. Was it all phony? Had it all been a big mistake? I thought of my first child and remembered telling friends that having her, at age thirty-two, had added a quality of happiness to my life that I had never known before. I thought of the magic of her heartbeat heard through a stethoscope held against my belly; of my fervent dedication to giving birth without any medication, like a !Kung woman; of my first morning in labor, when a Canada goose with head high walked proudly ahead of a gaggle of babies at a quiet pond in the country—a magical omen of fecundity; and of the surprise, when she was born, that this baby had come from my insides. I thought of my second child and remembered bursting into tears— in relief and excitement—when told that amniocentesis had indicated a healthy child. And, although I had planned to wait until the birth, when the technician asked, “Do you want to know the sex?” my heart pounded as I whispered, “Yes.” Then more tears as I learned that my child was a boy. I thought of my son’s speedy birth, of his gentle singing voice, and of his talking long before he knew words. One girl. One boy. I could have stopped. Yet, five years later, I yearned again for life to grow within me. What else was so intense, so fulfilling, so passionate? At age forty-one, I too held my head high— the mother of another girl— proud of the brood I had borne. She was fifteen months old and still nursing when I received the diagnosis of cancer. Weaning her in one night, the night before my mastectomy, nearly broke my heart. What conversation could we ever invent that would match our practiced duet? And how could I give up the vision of myself, a Bushman woman, nursing her last child until the child herself chose to stop, perhaps at age five? No—the children were not the problem. They filled spaces I had not known were empty. They pushed against all limits, transforming what had been— unbeknownst to me—an angular life into a rounded

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Being There one, like an inflatable cube, infused with air, that eventually turns into a sphere. They sparked compassion and tenderness, giving out and taking in, protectiveness and nurturance, and laughter along with the tears. No—there was nothing phony there. Yet I did not want to go back. And the appeal of living solo the rest of my life frightened me. With heartbeats and singing and duets, with cubes and spheres, had also come responsibility, minute-to-minute demands, whining, fighting, and the constant tallying up and dividing of resources. The din had become so great that I no longer heard my own voice. Or had it just stopped speaking? Here, at last, I had heard it again, even if only as a whisper. And it sounded so good that I hated to think of ever losing it again— or of how much I might be willing to give up to keep it. n i s a a n d i t a l k e d l i t t l e on the drive from the bush camp back to Dobe. But as we swayed and bounced against each other in the cab of the truck, she mentioned that my breast was pushing against her. Perhaps it was uncomfortable for her; more likely, she thought it was uncomfortable for me. “That’s not really a breast,” I said, adjusting my body, our days together in the bush having made me feel more trusting. Yet I was pretty sure she already knew. Megan Biesele had carried that message, along with the one that I would soon arrive, to Nisa months earlier. “Did Megan tell you I had been sick?” I asked. “Eh, Megan told me,” she said simply, without emotion. “Well,” I said, “my doctors found a terrible sickness in my right breast, so terrible that they took my breast away.” I wondered what sense she could possibly make of that. Breast cancer is not known to occur among the !Kung, and they have no concept of it. Indeed, there is no translation in their language for the panoply of illnesses we categorize as cancer.

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Return to Nisa “Today, I am like a man on that side,” I continued, wanting her to know. “What has been pushing against you is something else, something I put in so people won’t see.” “Eh, I, too, had sickness in my breast,” she said, pointing to her left breast. How could she understand? Removal of a breast for sickness must have sounded barbaric, even primitive. It was probably as difficult for her to accept my explanation of my illness as it had been for me to accept hers concerning the death of her son: “little spiritual arrows sent by God.” “Oh, that’s not good.” I said. “But mine would not have gotten better. It would have killed me.” Then I added, “And it still may.” “Chuko and I will lay on hands and see what is there.” The words were simple, but they were ones I had been longing to hear. She would help me. The pain and fear of the previous year once again flooded in, moistening my eyes and softening my words. “This past year was awful,” I confided. “My heart felt so much pain.” Without encouraging me to go on, she said, “I will try to help.” i t i s o b v i o u s i n r e t r o s p e c t , but it took time to see it: the longer I lived in Dobe, the more personal became my interest in the medicinal trance dance. There was the drama of the dance, and its fury, and the extremes of exertion displayed by the participant. There was also its spiritual expression, with healers bearing so much in their human effort to affect fate. Being at a dance was as awe-inspiring as being at the ocean or looking out at an expanse of mountains, but in this case the awe and humility were caused by human energy. And, if, with all this, I also held some hope of being physically healed—well, why not? The next dance was one I negotiated. I had told Kxoma, in some detail, about my illness. “I have heard from others,” he responded. “I would like you to try and heal me, your wife,” I said.

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Being There “Eh, yes. I am listening,” he said politely. “Because, if this illness does take my life, I would like to know you had tried to help me. If not, would we not both feel, ‘If only Kxoma had tried . . . ?’ And if it suits you, we’ll do as we did in the past. I’ll bring a goat for those who participate.” “Eh,” he agreed, “but I fear my medicine is no longer strong.” That was all. We arranged to have the feast in his village. Kxoma would be the main healer. The day of the dance was spent attending to the details. The goat was killed without fanfare, butchered, distributed, cooked in threelegged pots, and handed around. After dark, when the singing started in Kxoma’s village, I was sitting among the women, clapping and singing. But something seemed amiss. Kxoma remained in his hut for a long time, a kerosene lamp burning brightly inside. When he finally came out, he worked himself into a light trance and went around the circle laying on hands. He touched me briefly when it was my turn, as he did the others. I waited for a slight lingering, a word, or a touch that would tell me he would take care of me, as Nisa, a few nights before, had taken care of her niece Nai. His brief healings were only a start. I wanted the hands to stay and attend to me—to seek out evil, to argue with the gods, to gain insight, to wrestle with the fates, to be concerned about my future. After three or four times around the circle he came to me, apologetically, and told me he had finished. “I have little power,” he said, “because sickness in my own body is robbing me of strength.” Feeling robbed myself, I watched as he left the dimly lit gathering and walked back to his hut. I feel desolate. And deserted. “My husband can’t help me, or maybe he just doesn’t care enough to try.” But while I bemoaned Kxoma, it turned out he was not indispensable. Kumsa-the-Hunter arrived and had already entered a light trance. The women sang, weaving sound like a shawl around him. Kumsa’s legs pounded the earth. His eyes, otherworldly, stared toward the fire.

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Return to Nisa Soon his body glistened with sweat. He swayed, turning inward, following a familiar corridor of the spirit. His eyes closed, his neck strained upward, his short melodic phrases became ever shorter. Then he slumped down, unconscious. Others tried to revive him, but the depth of his trance defied them. Finally they summoned Kxoma. The singing rose strong again as Kxoma came from his hut and entered trance. He dragged Kumsa, still unconscious, toward the fire. He rubbed Kumsa’s body with his hands, with the sweat of his brow and underarms. He knelt and pulled Kumsa’s back against his chest, rocking him, singing with words that weren’t words. The women sang as a unit, their sound thick and comforting. Kumsa lay still. Then a tremor, a shaking, as his body began reuniting with life. The tremor grew from his middle—the center of medicinal power—and flowed down a leg or arm. The force gathered, collecting and discharging until there was no containing it, and it broke out, like floodwater overpowering a dam. Just so, the rumbling that had gathered in Kumsa’s middle grew to a roar and broke into the healer’s shriek, “Kow-a-dili,” exploding through his sinuous frame. Though it was long past midnight, there were many for Kumsa to attend to. I sat beside Nisa and my namesake, clapping the simplest of rhythms, waiting my turn for his brief touch. The quarter moon moved slowly toward the west; it would set long before I left. “ m a r j o r i e ,” K x o m a s a i d t h e n e x t day, “there is some talk we need to have.” We went to an isolated spot in the sand, a place with some shade. “I am listening, my husband.” “What are you going to pay me for the curing of the other night?” “I offered your village a goat. I thought that covered it.” “The goat was small and eaten by so few, it wasn’t much help.” “What are you thinking of?” “Ten pula.”

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Being There “All right, I agree.” In fact, I didn’t agree. It wasn’t the money— Kxoma would receive gifts worth far more than ten pula from me. It was his asking, just like everyone else. I believed I had been fair: a goat was considered a present of some largesse. And what of Kxoma’s effort? The dance had hardly begun when it was finished. “So,” I thought, “I’m just another outsider to him. Just the white woman to get as much from as possible.” These thoughts weren’t new. Or unique. These thoughts in various guises are experienced universally by anthropologists. They arise on the first day of fieldwork and endure until the last. I had thought Kxoma was my friend, and I was devastated. Perhaps what I really needed was to step back. Anthropology’s number one tool of the trade, after all, is to interpret situations in their cultural context. I had been gone for fourteen years. I came and went as I pleased. Was I Kxoma’s friend? Could he count on me? Also, he was poor, while I made a splash with money and goods and a truck and dispensed favors. Then I expected him to treat me as a peer. Also, weren’t all these relationships exploitative? I wanted something from the !Kung, and I was willing to spend huge sums of money to travel to their country to get it. I collected their words, tabulated data, and gained prestige from the fieldwork. How could I expect them not to get what they could from me before I disappeared again? I told Kxoma to wait while I got the money. The words of “professional wisdom” were strong as I walked to my hut, but they were hard to hold on to. As I handed him ten pula, the hurt slipped out. “I guess my heart isn’t finished with this, it still has some talk.” This time it was he who said, “I am listening, my wife.” “I am surprised that you asked for money,” I began slowly. “I thought you and I operated differently from the others, that we gave from our hearts. And I have never been stingy with you.”

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Return to Nisa “I hear your distress. I didn’t know you felt this way.” He paused. “Next time I will make it up to you. I will not forget your words.” I was touched. Kxoma kept the money, but he also listened to me. I had no doubt that whenever I did come back, he would remember. k x o m a’s t r a n c e d a n c e h a d n o t been enough. I asked Nisa about orga nizing a drum dance. She proposed that she work on me with Chuko, another female healer, and she graciously offered to charge me less than Chuko’s fee of five pula. She would only charge three pula, “because you’re helping me so much.” How ironic, I thought. I was buying her a fifty-pula donkey and giving her a sixty-pula trunk, among many other gifts. I was giving her husband forty pula worth of jerry cans and other items. Not to mention the six cows and one horse she already had. And she was taking off two pula because I was “helping her so much.” I wasn’t surprised; I was even touched to some degree by her offer. But I was also disappointed and hurt. t i m e wa s p a s s i n g . I h a d just seven more days in Dobe. Seven days, and perhaps a few more interviews with Nisa. It was difficult to tell how well the interviews were going. Some moments seemed vintage Nisa: her narrative flair was still compelling, and the stories were still priceless. But much of what she said seemed unimportant. Even our most recent interview, about trance medicine and her powers as a healer, had been uninspiring. The end of my stay was in sight, and I wasn’t entirely unhappy about it. I was feeling the strain of people asking for tobacco, favors, batteries, gifts, matches. The honeymoon was over. If I stayed another two months, it would only get harder. I’d react more strongly to the demands. With only a week to go, I was just doing my work as best I could, trying to accept the circumstances as they were. I felt I’d done pretty well so far.

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Being There But I knew I would probably be ready to leave when the time came. I wrote in my journal: “There is no magic cure for me here—although the environment is completely soothing. Going home does not mean I’ll be sick again any more than staying here could ensure my being well. I’m also aware that if I do get sick again, I may not come back— ever. So I’m filling up the best I can.” o n t h e d r i v e b a c k t o Dobe, Nisa sat in the cab of the truck beside me. She said she wasn’t feeling well—her back and legs were aching, and she was tired. She leaned gently against me, close and trusting. We planned the drum dance for the next night. “It’s your last chance to lay on hands to help me,” I said. “Because if I die . . .” “Then I die, too,” she said. So here it was, two days before the end of my stay, and suddenly I felt close to her. She made demands always, and relented rarely, but she told things honestly and directly— as she saw them. It was a rare talent and great gift to me. p a c k i n g t o l e av e . E v e n t h o u g h I wouldn’t take much with me, the task was daunting. Orga nizing clothes and money to give as gifts, and almost everything else I owned to give away or to sell for pennies so I would not be accused of favoritism. It was my secondto-last day in Dobe. Tomorrow would be a mad house. Everyone would want to see what everyone else was getting. People would come from miles around, people I had never seen before, to harangue me, to test my armor. “Marjorie, you’re leaving and haven’t given us anything. Only the Dobe people get things. What about the rest of us?” “Marjorie,” a man who had known Mel and me years before had said to me the day before, “I want to send something back with you for Mel.” After a moment he added, “If only you would give me some beads, I could sew him a pouch.” I glared at him. His older brother,

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Return to Nisa sitting nearby, laughed and chided him: “A present for Mel has to come from you, not from Marjorie.” Leaving . . . I had essentially finished what I had come to do: Nisa and I had done nine interviews (with one more to come) and had covered most of what I wanted; I had gotten a sense of how the others were doing; I had immersed myself in the language and culture; and I had had the intense pleasure of spending time in the bush. Of course I had also had a delicious distance from my family—and now I longed for them. Mel’s letter, letting me know that they were doing well, had filled me with delight. But I was also afraid to leave. Here, somehow . . . I felt protected. Even the weather felt healing— perhaps a little too warm during the day and a little chilly at night, but clear, clean, crisp, and sweet. At home I felt vulnerable. Whatever had facilitated the grown cancer was still there. i w o k e a t d aw n t o a fierce wind. A cold front had moved in during the night. I desperately wanted more sleep, but my gut and bladder forced me outside. Half frozen, I returned to my tent, grabbed another sweater, folded my blankets in half for extra warmth, and lay awake. My last full day in Dobe, and the weather was uninviting, punishing. The tent shuddered, buffeted by the wind. Was the tent restless, ready to leave? How would I get through this day? I visited Nisa and Bo. We hugged the fire, the wind whirling sand into our faces and hair. “Is the drum dance still on in this weather?” I asked. I reminded them that I had agreed to pay six women to sing, two drummers, and two healers. There was a pause. Then Bo said, “Besa says he wants you to pay him for the use of his drum.” “Pay him . . . pay him?” By repeating the words, might I perhaps squeeze a different meaning from them? How many times had I driven

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Being There Besa to the clinic because of the festering boil on his thigh? Just the day before, I had picked him up at his hut and transported him— door to door— to the clinic and back. I knew walking was painful for him. And what of the highly coveted present I had given him? “It’s from Mel and me,” I had said, handing him a thick winter sweater. “For our friendship in the past, and for our continued friendship today.” And, of course, my hand was always open to him with tobacco and other goods. “Pay him?” I asked myself again. I can’t say I am proud of what I did next. The month of demands, disappointments, and insults finally overflowed. I turned to Nisa and Bo, mea sur ing my words, trying to quell the inner storm. “Working out the details of this dance has been very difficult,” I said. “And now Besa has asked me to pay for the drum. It has ruined my heart, and I can’t continue with the dance this way. I have helped people here in every way I could. If they see fit to ‘give’ me this dance, that will be wonderful. But I won’t pay anyone. If the dance happens, I will be generous with gifts to those who participate. If the dance doesn’t happen, that will be all right, too. After all, I am leaving tomorrow.” Nisa and Bo listened sympathetically. They always seemed willing to accept fault in others, especially others from families living on the far side of Dobe. “Nisa,” I asked. “Do you understand? I’m asking you to participate in the dance without pay. You know I have never been stingy with you.” “If that’s how you want it, I accept,” she answered. “Bo,” I said. “I have to talk to Besa about the drum, and to the women I hired, too. But I can’t do it alone. Someone has to help me, to speak for me. Are you willing to be that person?” Asking Bo in this way was one of my best moves in the field. It had taken years of learning about !Kung culture to figure it out. If I had followed the passion of the moment, I would have tromped up to Besa in his village—White Woman on the War Path—and pursued the

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Return to Nisa argument myself. However it might have ended, I would probably not have gained the use of the drum. But asking Bo to speak for me—that was how the people themselves settled differences, especially when strong emotions were involved. However unfavorable a position was, if someone held it, at least one other person— usually a closer relative— could be counted on for support. “I will try to help,” Bo said. He seemed somewhat reluctant, but the format was set and he could not have easily refused. Bo and I walked together to Besa’s camp, shouting to hear each other in the wind, rehearsing what he would say. With Bo beside me, my anger softened. His presence gave me the courage to confront Besa. Together, we were strong. It was as if he and Nisa were family I could count on. Besa was stretched out on a blanket, still unable to walk. He was wearing the sweater I had given him, bundled against the wind and cold. The late afternoon sun cast long shadows on the ground. He looked up as we approached, shading his eyes from the glare. We exchanged greetings. “We’ve come to talk about Marjorie’s thinking,” Bo began. “She heard that you were asking for money to use your drum. Her heart is miserable about this.” The two men talked. Bo spoke well, but never said anything substantial. Besa retained a dispassionate, even slightly amused stance, maintaining that he had every right to charge money. They didn’t argue, but neither did they resolve anything. I thanked Bo and said I would speak for myself. “I understand that you want to charge me for the use of your drum,” I said to Besa. “And as Bo has explained, that makes my heart feel pain. I thought that we had a friendship of many years and that we were people who helped each other. But this— charging for the use of the drum—this is new. Today is the first time I’ve seen this and the first time I’ve heard of this. Perhaps this would be appropriate for a stranger. But I am Hwantla

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Being There and we have known each other from my first days here, when I was a young woman and you were a teenager.” He challenged me: “that you have never seen it before doesn’t make it wrong for today.” “I see,” I said. “Now I fully understand. Before I didn’t. Then shouldn’t I have charged you for your trips to the clinic in the truck?” “Well,” he said defensively, “if you had wanted to charge me for riding in the truck, you would have had to negotiate that in advance. You can’t tell me afterward that there is a fee.” “You are right,” I said. “I will not charge you. But I wouldn’t have charged you under any circumstances, not before, not after— even if I had already learned the ‘new’ way. Because I thought we were people who helped each other, and who liked each other.” “This has nothing to do with liking. It has to do with money.” “Well, I don’t see it that way,” I said. “I see that I have helped you with the clinic and with gifts and tobacco. And although those things also have to do with money, I did them because I thought we understood each other. But today I see that your heart is far away from me. I am no different to you than my driver, Baitsenke, who doesn’t know your language, and who doesn’t do anything for anybody. I do not accept your proposal and will not pay for the drum. If the other drum owner also refuses, there will be no dance.” I stepped away, holding back tears, and asked Bo to say the appropriate parting words. As Bo spoke, Besa seemed cool and detached. I stopped listening, content that at least I had said what I felt. Their words floated past me, until Besa called, “Marjorie . . .” “Yes?” I realized he must have been speaking to me while my mind wandered. “I said, ‘So use my drum if you want it.’ ” “Really? That’s it?” “Mm.” “Thanks. Perhaps we do help one another after all.”

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Return to Nisa Bo and I stopped at two more villages, explaining the new rules. No, I wasn’t going to pay for the dance. I thought perhaps I had earned their support. I also had never been stingy to those who helped me. Would the singers come anyway? Yes, they replied. And what about the two drummers? Yes, they’d be there. By later afternoon, the wind was whipping loose anything not weighted down. Baitsenke drove off to fi nd fi rewood. People began gathering at my camp. Nisa arrived with Chuko, the second healer, and the drummers. Then the singers showed up, about ten women and a few young girls, dressed for the occasion: some with newly sewn skirts and tops, others with decorative beaded shapes rimming their foreheads. Most wore hats for warmth; all had blankets wrapped around them, and some of the blankets enclosed a small child as well. As the sun set and the cold settled in, the dance began in earnest. “Wo u oh, wo uoh u o,” one woman sang in the dimming light, her voice jumping the large intervals with ease. “Who u oh,” came the response, as other women complemented the melody and added their own variations. Their clapping hands— splayed wide to catch the explosive pocket of palm-to-palm air— glowed in the light of the fire. Multiple rhythms created a texture of sound as rich and luxurious as seamless brocade. Besa’s drum, decorated with wood-burned images of mountains and houses, was played by a man from Kxoma’s village. It entered with a single beat, “I am here!” The second drummer, a young man still in his teens, responded, “So am I!” And the group was off — an expert ensemble whose sound traveled out beyond us into the cold dark air. From without, the ensemble was a perfectly balanced organism, pulsating and alive. From within, it provided the context for those with healing powers to move from the realm of the everyday into the extraordinary. Nisa seemed quick to feel the change in her thought patterns, and focused her gaze into the darkness. She sang and clapped, swaying

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Being There slightly. Sweat glistened on her face; her body trembled; her upper torso shimmied; then she was on the ground, sitting slumped to one side beside the fire, eyes closed. Chuko, also in trance, laid hands on Nisa to help revive her. The music swelled again as the two women went around the circle laying on hands. They attended to everyone, even babies and young children. Nisa came to me often, sometimes with Chuko. They worked on me together— rubbing my sides, pulling out whatever sickness they could “see” and they worked on me separately. I loved the touch and the attention, and visualized the seeds of the disease flying out of me as they laid on hands. They made a number of rounds, always coming back to me. Once, toward the end, Nisa tried to carry my weight on her shoulders, moving me as she moved. I felt huge and awkward. She soon stopped, and the two healers repeatedly tapped my waist, a symbol of transferring nlum, the healing power, from them to me. When they were with me, I savored the moments, never wanting them to leave. When they returned from working on others, I yearned to lose my own boundin-reality self and be swept away by the moment, much as they— in trance—were. I closed my eyes as their hands touched me, hoping to feel the cure they were trying to effect. Would it come as warm light, as a cleansing, as a feeling of peace, or perhaps as pure knowledge— experiences I had read about in accounts of exceptional recoveries from illness? Or would it be mundane and not immediately discernible? Or would it be nothing at all? What actually took place that night, I can never be sure. I do know that the poking and touching and dragging and shaking made it difficult for me to experience anything beyond my immediate senses. Nor was there a !Kung cultural norm to experience laying on of hands as much else. Curing was seen as the work of the healer, not of the recipi-

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Return to Nisa ent. Healing dances were usually quite casual events, and people often maintained conversations while being cured. After perhaps two hours, Nisa and Chuko said they had finished. Although the wind had died down, the cold was bitter. Later that night, standing water would freeze. “We saw a little sickness in your chest,” Nisa told me. “We took it out and now it is gone. We also fired your insides with nlum. It should keep you well until you come back.” Then everyone left, to return to the warmth of their own fires and huts, and my camp was quiet. If the weather had not been so foul, who knows how long the dance would have lasted. It might have been an all-nighter, like many dances in the “old days” within my memory. But as it was, I was given what I asked for. Women from all the camps showed up, some I had known for years and others I had just met. The drummers played passionately, with few breaks and no complaints. Nisa and Chuko were sensitive guides who attended to my fears and worked hard to help me. And I, Marjorie-Hwantla, was acknowledged, my psychic pain made public. Evidently “the talk” in the villages had been that I was to be supported. Then I was alone once again, with the moon, the fire, the clear cold air, and just the faintest hint of distant bells. Baitsenke and I planned to leave by ten the next morning. I felt ready. Just about everything had been given away or sold. I had one last stash for the people who had participated in the dance. And I wanted to talk privately with Nisa once more in the early morning before I left. I had already said my goodbyes to the beauty of this place. It was so bitterly cold that I was already feeling somewhat removed. n i s a t u r n e d t o m e . “ M o t h e r ,” she said. “You are fine. Your body is well. It is very good.”

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Being There I asked, “Did you and Chuko see something?” “Yes. I saw the talk . . . I heard the talk from far away, where you live. I heard what is being said about your sickness. This is what I was told: ‘Hwantla has been living far away, and she didn’t return because the government made it too difficult. They didn’t allow her to go see you, her aunt. That is why we wanted to kill her.’ ” The logic reflected the !Kung belief that people who are not well treated or cared for are vulnerable to sickness and death. They say that the gods take such people because no one else wants them. The connection between sickness, healing, and other people’s actions is reflected in our own culture, too, in the belief that sick people who are prayed for heal better and faster than those for whom no one prays. Nisa continued to quote what she had heard the gods say while she was in trance. “But now that she had returned to you, Nisa, now that your young niece has come back, we’re leaving and are finished with her. We won’t kill her. She will go and live in her country for a while and then will return to see you. That way, she will do very well. Because we want you to be together and to see each other. If she goes and lives for a long time, if she doesn’t quickly come back to see you— that’s very bad. That’s why we said we wanted to kill her before. But your child, we will not kill her. Eh-hey!” Then she quoted the gods: “Yes, let her be. She lives over there and works and gives me things. She finds a little something and sets it aside. Finds something else, and sets that aside. Because I am old now. She saves money for me and gets me things. That’s why, when she comes here, she takes very good care of me! Next time, she will clothe me well so I am beautiful! I’ll be like a young woman! When she lives there, that’s what she does— she works to help me. “Now don’t you take her from me! Don’t trick me and take Hwantla from me. Hwantla is mine. She helps me and supports me. I

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Return to Nisa pray to you, tomorrow when she leaves, let her go in wonderful health. And when she goes and lives, let her live and live well. And work well. “Thank you, thank you, thank you. I am grateful.” Nisa paused, then went on: “And those where you live who said such terrible things—that sickness would enter you and kill you— they were being deceitful. They were tricking you. Tricking you. Because they won’t do anything to you.” She paused again. “That’s why I say, ‘Stay well,’ because you are going to be fine.” I asked, “Who did you speak with?” “I spoke with the chief, God.” “Did you see him last night?” “Mother, yes, I saw him. And he was pleased with me. And pleased with you. When I took you and carried you, he was very pleased. He said, ‘Very good, you’re doing the right thing carrying her.’ He spoke to me and I was thankful. God was pleased, very strongly pleased. And said, ‘She is yours, your child. Yes. And I won’t do anything to her. Work well with her.’ That’s what God himself told me.” “Very good,” I praised her. “Eh, mother,” Nisa said.

Epilogue It is two o’clock in the morning. A fire smolders and burns in the fireplace before me, and the air carries its pungent aroma, so different from the scent of fi res in Dobe. I am at home in Atlanta, Georgia, six years after my trip to Nisa. My husband and my three children, now aged seventeen, fourteen, and nine, sleep quietly upstairs. It is bitterly cold outside, with temperatures in the teens and a wind chill factor that makes it even colder. The moon, full a few nights ago, is high in the blue-black dome above, ragged on one side, in its cycle of decline. I wish with all that is powerful within me that I could close this book with a fairy-tale ending. I wish I could say that I had been physically as

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Being There well as emotionally healed by my return to Nisa and to Africa; that the voice that screamed “Africa!” so passionately before I left had found answers to the questions about mortality that had driven me back to the bush. It’s true that the trip was good for me. I felt happy there in a way I had not felt since my diagnosis. Also, although cancer was no less a threat in the bush, for one month I had to leave that worry behind. I reasoned that those four weeks would not make a life-or-death difference. I practiced “hands clasped together on top of the desk as my elementary school teacher used to command to ensure that our young hands, and bodies, stayed out of trouble. I stopped exploring my body for suspicious pains, suspicious areas. Rare baths at night with one bucket of hot water and sleeping in several layers of clothing helped as well. So with cancer pushed to the background, what was in front? Nisa was. During the fourteen years since I had seen her, I had given birth to three children and had published my book based on her narrative. She had bought cows with money I sent and had moved with her husband to Dobe. Despite the length of our separation, Nia had remained present in my inner life. She and I had discussed many issues over the years—all in my head of course. It was not only that I had listened to and translated her interviews repeatedly, for years. Nor was it that we had become the best of friends or like close family. It was simply that she and I had shared the most straightforward connection I had ever had with anyone before or since. And after years of immersing myself in her culture—both in the field and, at home, in my work—I found many !Kung customs and beliefs so reasonable that I had adopted them for myself. My fi rst childbirth was modeled on !Kung women’s experience. After twenty-two hours of difficult labor, I continued to refuse all medication. How else would I have understood the stories !Kung women had shared with me? How else could I have pared myself down

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Return to Nisa to the essential female I was, touching eons of female existence that joined maternal bravery with new life struggling to emerge? I was determined to meet one of the most important people in my life—my child—for the first time without dulling the experience with medication. Much of what came later was also influenced by the !Kung: nursing on demand, sharing a “family bed,” aiming for a birth spacing of three and a half years. And interpreting children’s behavior as essentially senseless: “When they get older, they won’t act that way anymore,” I would say, echoing the !Kung. When it came to friendships, marriage, attitudes toward sex, productive work, child care, divorce, leisure time the !Kung were my yardstick. “What would they say?” I’d ask myself. A !Kung phrase would come to mind, and I would smile and say quietly, “Eh-hey, my people.” Or it would be Nisa’s voice and I’d think, “Eh-hey, my aunt.” It was as if the !Kung culture and my talks with Nisa touched something beyond reason in me. As though, at the not so tender age of twenty-four years, I had imprinted on the people, on Nisa, on their way of life. Even though I didn’t like everything Nisa said, nor did I like everything about her, my heart had been captured. w h e n i wa s t r a n s l a t i n g the tapes for the first book, I laughed with Nisa, I waxed poetic when she did. But how often I wished she had been nobler, more selfless, more philosophical. In editing her narrative, I was often tempted to adjust what she said, to leave out less attractive incidents. But I resisted temptation. “Let her speak for herself,” I reasoned. “What value will there be if she sounds like me?” So I left the violence of the men in her life, her infidelities, her cover-ups, the murder of her daughter, her father’s temper, and her mother’s discontent. Publishing the book was an extraordinary experience for me. I gained respect, started teaching at the college level, lectured to a wide range of people, and appeared on radio and television. My goal was

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Being There always to make the exotic familiar. I’d speak about traditional !Kung life and show slides, then say, “But enough of the anthropologist’s voice. Let’s hear about !Kung life from Nisa.” I usually chose to read the most appealing excerpts because I wanted to present an accessible view of !Kung culture. Reactions varied. Some who read the book were reinforced in their belief that members of this socioeconom ical ly simple, or “primitive,” culture were less advanced as people than those living in industrialized nations. Most readers, however, were struck by how similar the human struggle was, no matter what society one lived in. Some of the most moving feedback of all came from Blanca Muratorio, an anthropologist from the University of British Columbia who had worked for several years with an indigenous woman in the Ecuadorian Amazon, a Napo Quichua woman of about Nisa’s age named Francisca. Blanca Muratorio sent me an excerpt from her field diary, dated July 2, 1990: Francisca saw a copy of Nisa on top of my working table. She immediately noticed, with admiration, Nisa’s beads and face decoration. “Who is she? Where is she from?” she asked. I told her Nisa was a storyteller like herself, someone for whom dreams were very important. . . . Francisca wanted to know more. I opened the book and tried to translate for her the starting quote from Nisa, thinking to myself: How can I convey meaning from !Kung to English, to Spanish, to Quichua? I translated Nisa’s words. I think Francisca understood exactly what Nisa meant. She smiled and said: “She shouldn’t be sad. In my dreams I can travel far. From the top of the hills I can see. . . . I will hear that nice woman’s voice in the winds.” Returning to Africa also had much to do with the land, its great sparseness and isolation, and the integrity of an environment only

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Return to Nisa minimally disrupted by human manipulation. It had always been too dry to be part of the competition. If I had been seeking beautiful landscape alone, the Dobe area of Botswana would not have been my first choice. Rough in terrain, with few vistas and even fewer game animals, it had to be known well to be appreciated. Had to be known well to be appreciated: a description that also fits Nisa, along with complex and difficult. But she probably would say much the same about me. Each of us wanted certain things from the other, and neither of us got as much as we hoped for. That we both got some of what we wanted made it extremely valuable. And the mortal questions? Those which had screamed “Africa!” so loudly that I left young children to search out the answers? Well, Cosmic Answers was probably off somewhere with Cosmic Woman, because I never found either of them. Nor did I fi nd Nisa-theMentor, Nisa-the- Guide, or Nisa-the-Earth-Mother. Instead, I found Nisa-the-Human. Imagine that! But the trip was one of the greatest experiences of my life. In the black of the night—with journal in hand, and fire ablaze, with blankets wrapped around my legs and scarf protecting my head from the cold, with mice cleaning freshly washed tin dishes laid out to dry, and with voices wafting close and then gone, marking the ephemeral existence of village life beyond, in the dark, with worlds upon worlds of exploding stars quiet in the dome above—I heard the beat of my own heart. Note 1. The !Kung believe in a number of supernatural beings, one of which is said to rule over the others. This being, called Kauha, I have translated as “God” or “the Great God.” The various other spirits are called Ilganwasi.

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Contributors

Lila Abu-Lughod is Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Anthropology and Women’s Studies at Columbia University. Ruth Behar is Victor Haim Perera Collegiate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. Chris Boehm is Director of the Goodall Research Center and the Departments of Anthropology and Biological Sciences at the University of Southern California. Louise Brown is Honorary Senior Lecturer in the College of Social Sciences at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Liza Dalby is an independent scholar. Sarah H. Davis has just received her doctorate from the Anthropology Department at Emory University. Alma Gottlieb is Professor of Anthropology, African Studies, and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana– Champaign.

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Contributors Philip Graham is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Illinois at Urbana– Champaign. Melissa Fay Greene is author of Praying for Sheetrock, There Is No Me without You, and No Biking in the House without a Helmet. Jessica Gregg is Associate Professor of Medicine at Oregon Health and Science University. M. Cameron Hay is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Miami University, Ohio, and Associate Research Anthropologist in the Center of Culture and Health at the University of California, Los Angeles. Melvin Konner is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Anthropology at Emory University. Russell Leigh Sharman is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. Bradd Shore is Goodrich C. White Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Emory Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life at Emory University. Robert Shore is an associate with the FrameWorks Institute, a progressive think tank in Washington, D.C. Marjorie Shostak (1945–1996) was the author of Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman. Jeanne Simonelli is Professor of Anthropology at Wake Forest University. John C. Wood is Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.

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