The Secret Lives of Anthropologists: Lessons from the Field 2019029002, 9781138501850, 9781138501867, 9781315144580

Citation preview

THE SECRET LIVES OF ANTHROPOLOGISTS

This book addresses the difficult conditions researchers may face in the field and provides lessons in how to navigate the various social, political, economic, health, and environmental challenges involved in fieldwork. It also sheds important light on aspects often considered “secret” or taboo. From anthropologists just starting out to those with over forty years in the field, these researchers offer the benefit of their experience conducting research in diverse cultures around the world. The contributions combine engaging personal narrative with consideration of theory and methods. The volume emphasizes how being adaptable, and aware, of the many risks and rewards of ethnographic research can help foster success in quantitative and qualitative data collection. This is a valuable resource for students of anthropological methods and those about to embark on fieldwork for the first time. Bonnie L. Hewlett is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Washington State University, Vancouver.

The Secret Lives of Anthropologists Lessons from the Field

Edited by Bonnie L. Hewlett

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Bonnie L. Hewlett; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Bonnie L. Hewlett to be identified as the author of the editorial matter, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-­in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-Publication Data Names: Hewitt, Bonnie L., editor. Title: The secret lives of anthropologists: lessons from the field / edited by Bonnie L. Hewitt. Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019029002 | ISBN 9781138501850 (hardback) | ISBN 9781138501867 (paperback) | ISBN 9781315144580 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Anthropology–Fieldwork. | Ethnology–Fieldwork. | Anthropological ethics. Classification: LCC GN34.3.F53 S43 2020 | DDC 301.072/3–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029002 ISBN: 978-1-138-50185-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-50186-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-14458-0 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

DEDICATION

To those around the world who welcome us into their homes, families, and hearts. It is from them we learn how to be anthropologists, and along the way discover the true joy of the field.

CONTENTS

List of illustrations Notes on contributors Acknowledgements

Introduction: pulling back the curtain Bonnie L. Hewlett

x xii xvii 1

Part I

Paths into the field

21

  1 Learning fields Vishvajit Pandya

23

  2 Stumbling around the sacred: some personal observations Benjamin Grant Purzycki

37

  3 From the Orinoco to Sorority Row: searching for a field site as an evolutionary anthropologist Nicole Hess

54

Part II

Gendered relations and other challenges in the field

73

  4 Doing ethnomusicological research as a white woman in Cameroon and the Central African Republic Susanne Fürniss

75

viii   Contents

  5 A boss, a mother, a red antelope, and all the things in between Sylvie Le Bomin   6 Culturally appropriate solutions to fieldwork challenges among Mbendjele BaYaka hunter-­gatherers of the Congo Basin Daša Bombjaková

91

112

Part III

The observer and the observed: the metamorphosis of research, methods, and the researcher   7 My life in the school of hard knocks: how an aspiring anthropologist became a white Cameroonian Robert Moïse   8 Spā߀min, ethnographers, and mixed methods Robert J. Quinlan   9 Mothering in the field: participant observation of cultural transmission Victoria Reyes-­García 10 The quiet joy of fieldworkers in the Kalahari Akira Takada

133 135 161

182 204

Part IV

Dangerous fields

219

11 The origins of Surviving Fieldwork Nancy Howell

221

12 When all hell breaks loose: conducting ethnographic fieldwork amid gunplay, catastrophe, and mayhem J. Christopher Kovats-­Bernat

235

Part V

Ethics, advocacy, and other everyday moral dilemmas of research 13 Surviving Agta fieldwork Thomas N. Headland, with Janet D. Headland

255 257

Contents   ix

14 Do you consent to participate in this research study? Paul Verdu 15 Who owns poop? And other ethical dilemmas facing an anthropologist who works at the interface of biological research and indigenous rights Alyssa N. Crittenden 16 But what if the “field” is a mother–baby behavioural sleep laboratory? How it happened, what it is like; the good, the fantastic, and the downright ugly James J. McKenna Appendix: regional packing list and other favourite items in the field Index

279

299

322 342 348

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures 1.1 October 1983, first day on reaching Dugong Creek 1.2 January 2005, Ongee camp set up after the tsunami of December 2004 2.1 Diploma of (active participation in) throat-­singing (competition) 2.2 Shamanic order patiently waiting for member (left) to adjust headdress 2.3 View from Holey Mountain cave entrance 4.1 Recording an Aka tale-­song 4.2 First glimpse out of the hut in the morning of the second day of a circumcision ritual among the Baka 5.1 Joseph Yadéré and me playing xylophone 5.2 Mama Hélène and me at her grandson’s (my nephew) traditional wedding 6.1 Research area 6.2 Example from field notes of informants’ demands 6.3 Foreskin burial 7.1 Bapoto villagers on the Congo River observing missionary George Grenfell trying to photograph them, c. 1895 7.2 Facebook video of author dancing at wedding in Bamenda, Cameroon 9.1 On the way to Yaranda with baby Clara, September 2001 9.2 Vincent swinging Clara at Yaranda house, February 2002 9.3 Feeding the chicks at San Borja house, October 2003 9.4 Clara and Lea with some Tsimane’ friends in Santa Maria, June 2004

32 35 45 46 48 76 84 98 104 114 117 125 138 152 187 188 192 194

Illustrations   xi

10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5 11.1 11.2 12.1 13.1 13.2 13.3 13.4 13.5 13.6 13.7 14.1 14.2 14.3 15.1 15.2 16.1

The giving and taking of objects (1) The giving and taking of objects (2) A female giraffe’s spoor A giraffe and a G‖ana hunter My young San informants, N and K, and the author butchering a goat Conducting social network research, showing informants portraits of individuals, at the !Goshe village H. Isak and N. Howell in the kitchen enclosure at /ai/ai camp Chris in Port-­au-Prince Jenny and friends in front of our house, 1974 Agta dry season house, 1980 Tom and Eleden hunting wild pigs, 1974 Rachel and Steve at Muntay, 1967 Rachel with her pet monkey, 1967 Janet with her friends in Agta house with Jenny, 1973 Skin of the 6.9 m python killed by Kekek on 9 June 1970 Manuscript letter from an anonymous group of Konjo participants Bezan village of Kouen from the Tikar Country in central Cameroon, February 2011 Paul Verdu bringing back photos and questionnaires to the Bezan village of Mbonde from the Tikar Country in central Cameroon, November 2013 With a Hadza family in 2005 Conducting 24-hour dietary recall interviews in 2015 Polysomnographic technique used to study physiological changes in mother–infant pairs

208 209 211 212 214 224 225 252 260 260 262 265 266 273 274 293 294 295 304 311 331

Table   6.1 Researchers working with Congo Basin hunter-­gatherers and various cultural-­specific difficulties in the field

113

CONTRIBUTORS

Daša Bombjaková has completed her PhD in social anthropology. By a focus on indigenous metaphors, her research is centred on the role of Congo-­Basin hunter-­ gatherer social institutions of public speaking, ridicule, and play on social learning; and on dynamics of sexual egalitarianism through understanding female reverse dominance strategies. Alyssa N. Crittenden is currently an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She broadly studies the relationship between human behaviour and the environment (nutritional, ecological, political, and social) and has worked with the Hadza foragers of Tanzania since 2004. She is the co-­editor of the volume entitled Childhood: Origins, Evolution, and Implications and has published on topics ranging from diet composition, foraging behaviour, child rearing, and, more recently, on the political and health implications of a shifting food economy among hunters and gatherers. Susanne Fürniss is an ethnomusicologue at the Eco-­anthropology laboratory Paris, France, where she has been studying music structures of the Aka and Baka pygmies, first in Central Africa, and now in Cameroon. Director of Research at the CNRS, she is head of Cultural Diversity and Evolution and is a team member of the National Committee for Scientific Research. Her research interests include categorization of cultural expressions, musical systems, cultural contacts, study of historical recordings, borrowing of rituals, and vocal and instrumental polyphonies. Thomas N. Headland (PhD University of Hawaii) is Senior Anthropology Consultant with SIL International. His research interests focus on tropical forest human ecology, demography of hunter-­gatherer populations, and indigenous human

Contributors   xiii

rights. His most important publication to science is his online Agta Demographic Database (2011). His most cited book (over 900) is his 1990 Emics and Etics: The Insider/Outsider Debate. His most cited article (over 300) is his “Hunter-­gatherers and their neighbors from prehistory to the present” (Current Anthropology, 1989). He and his wife, Janet, have conducted field research among Agta foragers in the Philippine rainforest for most of the last fifty years. They have three children, all born in the Philippines and grew up living in Agta communities. Nicole Hess trained as an evolutionary anthropologist and received her BA at UCLA in 1997, her MA from UCSB in 1999, and her PhD from UCSB in 2006. She completed a predoctoral fellowship with the Max Planck Institute for Human Development’s LIFE programme in 2005, as well as a postdoctoral fellowship with the Institute for Theoretical Biology at Humboldt University in Berlin in 2007. She conducted her anthropological fieldwork in college Greek communities, and has conducted numerous experiments testing hypotheses derived from “Informational Warfare” theory, which proposes that coalitions may be useful in reputational competition (via, e.g. gossip) due to their improved abilities to collect, analyse, and disseminate relevant information. More broadly, she is interested in evolutionary perspectives on female friendship and competition, gossip and nonphysical aggression, cooperation in small groups, and affinal (in-­law) relationships. She is currently an instructor in the Anthropology Department at WSU Vancouver. Bonnie L. Hewlett worked as a registered nurse before obtaining her PhD degree in anthropology at Washington State University. She has conducted research in Gabon, Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, and more recently Ethiopia, where she was a Fulbright scholar in 2010–2011. Her research interests include: bio-­cultural contexts of infectious diseases, hunter-­gatherers, adolescent development, the health and experiences of Ethiopian orphans, and birthmothers’/fathers’ reasons for relinquishment of children. She is the author of Listen, Here is a Story: Ethnographic Life Narratives from Aka and Ngandu Women of the Congo Basin, editor of Adolescent Identity: Evolutionary, Developmental and Cultural Perspectives; and co-­author with Barry Hewlett of Ebola, Culture, Politics: The Anthropology of an Emerging Disease. She is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Washington State University, Vancouver. Nancy Howell grew up in Detroit, Michigan, and attended college at Michigan State, the University of Michigan, and graduated from Brandeis University with a major in Sociology. She was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at Harvard University in the Department of Social Relations, in the Sociology Section, and was awarded the PhD in 1968. She taught at Wellesley College, Princeton University, and the University of Toronto. She is a Fellow of AAAS in Anthropology, and was twice a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto California. She has been retired from the University of Toronto since 2004.

xiv   Contributors

J. Christopher Kovats-­Bernat is a visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Shippensburg University, and author of Sleeping Rough in Port-­au-Prince: An Ethnography of Street Children and Violence in Haiti (2008). He has conducted field research into childhood, armed violence, and Vodou in Haiti since 1994, and served as a Consultant Officer for Civil Affairs with the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH). Sylvie Le Bomin is primarily a musician, passionate about early music. She discovered ethnomusicology during her Bachelor’s degree and decided to make it her profession. She joined the team of Simha Arom at the end of her Bachelor’s year and worked with Central African xylophone music until her PhD. She continues her research career in Gabon within the framework of the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle where she works in close collaboration with population geneticists on the evolutionary biological and cultural history of Central African populations. In collaboration with life science specialists, she developed methods to study the evolution of different musical parameters (repertoires, rhythm, musical instruments, etc.). She’s the author of two books about two musical tradition from Gabon, and different publications about musical evolution. James J. McKenna (BA, University of California, Berkeley; MA, San Diego State University; PhD, University of Oregon). Rev. Edmund P. Joyce, CSC, Professor of Anthropology McKenna, and his research team pioneered the first behavioural and electro-­physiological studies documenting differences between mothers and infants sleeping together and apart and has become known worldwide for his work in promoting studies of breastfeeding and mother–infant co-­sleeping. Recently he and his colleague, Lee Gettler, coined a new word to describe co-­sleeping with bedsharing in the absence of all known hazardous factors, breastsleeping (“There is no such thing as infant sleep, there is no such thing as breastfeeding, there is only breastsleeping”, Acta Paediatrica, 2016). A biological anthropologist, and Director of the Mother–Baby Behavioral Sleep Laboratory at the University of Notre Dame he began his career studying the social behaviour and development of monkeys and apes with an emphasis on parenting behaviour and ecology. He has published over 160 articles and six books on SIDS in relationship to forms of co-­sleeping and breastfeeding, including a popular parenting book Sleeping With Your Baby: A Parent’s Guide To Co-­sleeping. He has co-­edited Ancestral Landscapes in Human Evolution, Evolutionary Medicine, and a more recent co-­edited volume Evolution and Health: New Perspectives (Oxford University Press). Robert Moïse has training in both the fine arts (BA, MFA) and anthropology (MA, PhD). He began carrying out anthropological research in the Congo Basin in 1984 and has spent over five years in the field since that time. He works as an applied anthropologist, both in the American private sector and in the Congo Basin, where he assists international organizations advocating for the land rights of local forest communities.

Contributors   xv

Vishvajit Pandya earned his Doctorate in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. He continues to be engaged in ethnographic research among Andam­ anese Islanders. Apart from contributions to books and papers in journals he has published three books based on field research. He has held teaching positions in the USA, New Zealand, and at present teaches in India. Benjamin Grant Purzycki is Associate Professor, Aarhus University, Department of the Study of Religion. He engages in the cognitive, evolutionary, and ethnographic sciences of sociality and cultural variation with a specific emphasis on religion and morality. Among other venues, he has published in Cognition, Current Anthropology, and Nature. Robert J. Quinlan’s areas of interest include human behavioural and social ecology, ethnobiology, medical and psychological anthropology, collaborative ethnographic science, cross-­cultural comparison, Caribbean, Africa, and field and analytical methods. His main focus is on the role of environmental risk in shaping human development, livelihood, reproduction, household relations, and cultural diversity. He has an active programme of cross-­cultural comparative research. He has helped develop a collaborative research project concerning environmental risk and resilience among small-­scale farmers in southwest Ethiopia. He is also involved in collaborative research concerning the evolution and transmission of antimicrobial resistance among agro-­pastoralists in Tanzania. Victoria Reyes-­García (PhD in Anthropology, 2001, University of Florida) is an ICREA Research Professor at the Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), where she coordinates the Laboratory for the Analysis of Socio-­Ecological Systems in a Global World (www.laseg.cat/en). Her research addresses the dynamic nature of local knowledge systems. Between 2010 and 2015, she coordinated an ERC Starting Grant to study the adaptive nature of culture using a cross-­cultural approach. In 2018, she received an ERC Consolidator Grant to study the contributions of Indigenous and local knowledge to climate change impacts research (www.licci.eu). Akira Takada is currently an associate professor at Kyoto University, Japan. His academic interests include caregiver–child interaction, environmental perception, and the transformation of ethnicity. He has published many books and articles, including Narratives on San Ethnicity: The Cultural and Ecological Foundations of Lifeworld Among the !Xun of North-­Central Namibia (2015). Paul Verdu obtained a Master 2 degree in life-­sciences and agronomy from the AgroParisTech in Paris in 2005. He then obtained in 2009 a PhD in biological anthropology and human population genetics under the supervision of Pr. Evelyne Heyer from the University Pierre et Marie Curie and the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle on the demographic history of Central African populations

xvi   Contributors

reconstructed from genetic data in the context of the historical binary categorization of populations into so-­called “Pygmies” and “non-­Pygmies”. After a post­doctorate in Noah A. Rosenberg lab, first at the University of Michigan and then at Stanford University in the USA, he obtained in 2012 a tenured “Chargé de Recherches” position at the Centre National pour la Recherche Scientifique and obtained his affectation to the Eco-­anthropology lab (UMR7206) located in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, where he remains.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

There are many people who have been involved in the writing of this book and the time and research it represents. I am forever indebted to the people of the Central African Republic and Ethiopia, all of whom so generously shared their stories, friendship, trust, and many long moments of their lives with me. I would like to thank the contributors to this volume for their hard work and enthusiasm. I am indebted to Marc Stratton, the editorial assistant at Routledge, guiding me through this process. To the reviewers who provided detailed comments, I extend my appreciation for their careful, insightful reading. I would like to thank Alyssa Miller for her input when this book was simply an idea we discussed while in the field in Ethiopia. I am appreciative of the excellent editing suggestions, patience, and positive comments of Scott Calvert. Many thanks for the careful reading and comments by my husband and fellow anthropologist, Barry Hewlett (and thanks for reading an early draft, Jordan!). And always, I am deeply grateful for the support and encouragement of my family.

Introduction Pulling back the curtain Bonnie L. Hewlett

“People and their cultures are messy”, an anthropologist once said to me, “and the work of trying to understand them is even messier” (Calvert, 2018). The work of anthropology is indeed “messy”, at once unfamiliar, exciting, and generally unlike what most researchers expect – perhaps in part because so much ethnographic research occurs as we sit “around the fire” living with, observing, and listening to the life stories of people throughout the world. Their stories matter. As novelist Chimamanda Adichie (2010) expresses, “Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity.” The story of how the telling of these stories came to be surely matters as well. As “participators” and “observers” of human behaviour, inexperienced researchers are often unprepared for the complexities of getting into the field, and, once there, the intricacies of living locally while living across cultures. Courses covering anthropological research educate in the ways of theory and methods, but generally lack insight into the many mundane, life-­changing, challenging, and unspoken topics of fieldwork. Whether conducting research with hunter-­gatherers, pastoralists, street children, or southern California sorority students, the authors in this book “pull back the curtain”, providing a glimpse into the everyday experiences of seasoned researchers and those they live and work with in the field. (“Pulling back the curtain” alludes to a line from the movie, The Wizard of Oz, imploring Dorothy and her friends to “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” [Langley et al., 1939].) Their stories draw attention to and capture the often hidden, intimate details of the work of anthropologists, their personal and professional struggles, successes, and failures. Each chapter highlights the methodological and theoretical frameworks used (or tossed aside) and, ultimately, lessons learned. The “secret” stories of anthropologists in the field.

2   Bonnie L. Hewlett

“It is”, lamented one contributor during the early stages of this book, “very difficult to write like this and about these things.” This was a sentiment shared by several of the authors. As researchers, we are used to writing in an “academic” style about “academic” things. It is hard to step aside and write to reveal: not only who we are and what we do, but to incorporate this within the contexts of the research we conduct, the methods and theoretical frameworks we use, and the ethical and social implications of working with and living amongst those who generously let us into their homes, hearts, and lives. Even as multitudes of scholarly journal articles, book chapters, and books are generated from field research, most of the preparation and work involved in the published (and therefore public) production occurs behind the curtain. This includes, but is never limited to, the complexities of coming up with interesting (and fundable) research questions, grant writing, obtaining IRB and ethics committee approvals, and the fits and starts (by default or design) of getting to the field. And, once in the field the challenges of seemingly mundane, simple things can be incredibly taxing, if not overwhelming. Depending upon the site, the work of fieldwork often begins with simply figuring out what water and food are safe to consume, where to live, bathe, and use the toilet. Then add to the mix the struggles involved in learning the local language(s), learning who to trust, who to be wary of, how to act appropriately, how to give back to the community, and how to deal with illnesses, culture shock, homesickness, and loneliness. Fieldworkers must also navigate local and/or national politics, wrestle with various ethical and moral dilemmas, grapple the challenges of gendered relations, issues of safety, and maintenance of mental and physical wellbeing (of ourselves and our research participants). And given these challenges, what keeps us coming back to the field? A heady addiction? A quiet joy? Adventure? Academic questions? Requirements to publish for university promotion? What sets us on the path in the first place may be something quite different from that which keeps drawing us back. Each of the chapters demonstrates the variety of ways individual researchers find their own path into and ways of being within the field. While the themes running through these essays may be similar, the stories are as unique as the writers telling them. I have tried to keep the “voices” of each contributor as close to their own as is possible, given for many English is a second, third, or fourth language. A few capitalized West/Westerners, others specifically asked the terms be left in the lower case “western”. Several also conducted research in the same areas, with the same or similar groups of people but had very different experiences, stories to tell, and ways of representing themselves and their research participants, (e.g. Bombjaková and Moïse with the BaYaka; Fürniss, Le Bomin, and Verdu with the Bongo; Takada and Howell with the San). Anthropologists venture into the field as individuals, with their personalities, cultural worldviews, and biases firmly intact. Readers of these essays may find they disagree, strongly, with the sentiments expressed by the authors, the choices they made in the field, the terms they chose to use, or the advice they give. Well, good. That is partly the point of this book. But also by pulling back the curtain of

Introduction   3

academia, we are allowed a peek inside the lives of anthropologists and those whose lives they share in the field. And we need to pay attention to the workings behind the curtain, for many reasons, but particularly as doing so helps us to better understand the men and women in front of it. Finally, it is our hope the secrets and lessons contained in the following pages bring to light not only the work of conducting research in the field, but how ordinary life around the world extraordinarily unfolds.

A few secrets I wish I’d known The first time I went “into the field”, to the Central African Republic (CAR), I discovered the following – that goat babies in the village sound like human babies and how heartbreaking their bleating “maaaa” sound is when you desperately miss your own children. And, speaking of goats, I also discovered their turds look like coffee beans, and when mixed together, as they often were, make for an interesting­tasting morning cup of coffee (Hewlett, 2012). I also found my first time in the field how alone one can feel in spite of being constantly surrounded by people. I wish I’d known how adapting to the field is a process of learning and overcoming not simply the loneliness that comes from being away from friends and family, but the aloneness and shock of being a stranger in an unfamiliar world of bewildering languages, beliefs, and customs. The field taught me that when we as anthropologists transverse the world (or neighbourhood) to learn about and from other cultures, we transverse the inner world of self as well. I wish I’d understood from the start the importance of listening to the forest, not just the people. As I adapted to life in the field, I learned over time to hear the sounds of the forest, how the forest buzzes like an electrical current, and how the animal and insect noises change in tone and frequency as the day shifts into night, and again when the night eases into day. In the forest, I saw how darkness settles from the canopy of trees on down. I learned the feel of the heaviness of air before a storm, and where on the forest trail I was by the particular smells in particular areas, the spicy, earthy damp smells of the rainforest. I’ve learned that coming to more fully understand a culture involves coming to understand an environment as well. After all, the natural environment is our background, our context, the milieu from which we’ve emerged (McCarthy, 2015; Hewlett, 2012). Fieldwork involves coming to understand and appreciate not only the language, and practices of people, but also the sights, sounds, smells, and tactile feel of the natural environment they live within. In my experiences with Aka foragers, all these various aspects of experience are as much a part of their lives as are the languages, beliefs, and practices. Ways of understanding a culture, ways of knowing, involve all of our senses. Cultural learning is multi-­sensory learning (Hewlett, 2012). Looking back, I wish I had known how much we can learn not only about, but from other people. And, it would have been helpful to have had a better understanding of how every day may present a challenge of some sort and/or an ethical dilemma to untangle. I wish I’d known that who we are in the field determines in

4   Bonnie L. Hewlett

part the research questions we choose to ask, the theoretical frameworks and methods we use, how we represent the data, and, importantly, how we represent the research participants themselves. I was taught many things in the classroom, but it was from the field I learned what it means to “participate” and “observe”. I wished I’d known becoming an anthropologist involves not only engaging all our senses, but also being open to the many experiences of stumblings and failures, sorrows and delights. And as we venture far afield (or conduct fieldwork nearby), it is when we can find humour in all of this, when we can navigate our way through unfamiliar spaces in culturally appropriate ways, when we can feel comfortable and find comfort in a far-­away home, that we know we’ve set out on the right journey. This text is designed to bridge critical gaps in the understanding of the daily lives, methodological challenges, experiences, and journeys of anthropologists conducting research in diverse cultures around the world (but see Chagnon, 1968; Cassell, 1987; Mulder, 1996; Shostack, 2000; Davis and Konner, 2011). While many texts may provide vivid accounts of the experiences faced by researchers in different locales and from different disciplines, they often present as travelogues or field stories with no underlying theme, little mention of methodology or theory, and no take away in terms of the need for adaptability and how to use this information to conduct better quantitative and qualitative ethnographic research in diverse settings. Most theoretical and empirical field method texts, on the other hand, focus on specific methods and provide a limited number of examples of what “it’s really like” in the field (e.g. Bernard, 2017). They do not “pull back the curtain” and detail the daily challenges, dangers, and delights of fieldwork, or the underlying feelings, thoughts, and experiences of the fieldworker. This lack of attention to adaptability in methods, theories, and personal wellbeing is enigmatic, given that by studying these accounts it is possible to gain an understanding of how anthropological research unfolds. The Secret Lives of Anthropologists provides not only richly detailed stories from seasoned fieldworkers, but each author also includes a description of their theoretical approach, methods used, practical advice and tips, and the individual ways they adapted to the risks and uncertainties of fieldwork. Conceptually this book is organized into parts of related field experiences, methods, and themes. Contributors briefly introduce themselves, the topic of their field research, field site, and participants, methods, and theoretical approaches. Each contributor was asked to provide a narrative of a difficult, dangerous, humorous, or unpredictable field circumstance leading to modifications and adaptations in their methodology, approach, or in securing their own personal wellbeing or the wellbeing of the people they work with. The authors demonstrate how their field stories relate to the key concept(s) of each section, provide insight into how they altered their behaviours or methods to respond to local research circumstances, and then offer what they learned about the unspoken realities of being in the field. Each chapter ends with a series of reflection/discussion questions for readers.

Introduction   5

In what follows below, I provide a brief overview of each essay to illustrate some of the major themes, issues, and general nature of that process as captured on the page. And, while I pose questions within these summaries, it would be wrong to suggest the chapters provide definitive answers. Rather, the researchers demonstrate the variety of ways individuals adapt to challenges in the field, whether the field is a laboratory in Indiana or a camp in the Kalahari Desert. Their accounts, while detailing particular experiences and perspectives, also thematically cut across the sub-­sections and theoretical orientations of the book (e.g. historical, political economic, human behavioural ecological, symbolic linguistic, and cognitive). This is, in part, what makes this a unique collection of essays. Highlighting the experiences of anthropologists, both seasoned and those just starting out, The Secret Lives of Anthropologists aims to “pull back the curtain” revealing aspects of fieldwork seldom mentioned in field courses, presenting an intimate, at times humorous, at times poignant, view of the infinitely complex world we live in.

Paths into the field Travelling to Dugong Creek in the Bay of Bengal to conduct fieldwork among the Andaman Islanders (Ongees), Vishvajit Pandya describes the beginning of his “rites de passage” (van Gennep, 1960) into the world of the Ongees and anthropological research. His long, stumbling hike through the humid rainforest, with its biting bugs and stinging leeches, filled him with nagging doubts and disturbing feelings of isolation (feelings common to ethnographers in any part of the world). Why was he there? Could he “endure”? What if he fell ill? How would he procure food and water? As yet, he couldn’t hunt and butcher wild boar, or locate edible tubers in the forest. He would be completely dependent upon the “goodwill” of the community. Less immediate, but no less troubling, questions accompanied him on his first walk down the path into his “new life” in the forest. A “sacred tenet” of anthropological research is living with the local populations, participating in their lives and observing their behaviours (see Moïse, Chapter 7). As Pandya details, it is one thing to “observe”, but how, when, and where does one “participate”? The first steps, as Pandya recalls, are the most difficult. And, overtime, he learned the “when, how, and where” of participant observation: he cut up wild boar, found food in the forest, became proficient in the language, and walked without stumbling through the “honey-­combed” forest. He found that to become eneyobe (knowledgeable), one needs to immerse oneself in the forest world of the “extraordinary, ordinary” Ongee people of Dugong Creek. In his essay, Pandya describes learning what it means to become an “anthropologist” from the actual field, through experiences of discovery, through the doing of anthropology. Vishvajit Pandya’s journey down the path and into the world of the Ongee has continued for thirty-­five years, an ongoing walk through the “learning fields”. But how does one determine what particular path to follow, what line of research to pursue in the first place? For Benjamin Purzycki, the path found him, beckoning

6   Bonnie L. Hewlett

with a song, or rather Tuvan throat singing. Given his intense curiosity about (or bewilderment of ) moral behaviour, traditional religion, shamanism, and “the sacred”, it was a serendipitous calling. Anthropological research often carries us to places we may not have chosen or even been aware of, and just as often leaves us questioning our work, our impact upon the people who “host” us, our intent, the ethics of what we do, and how we go about doing it. We are left unsatisfied with the incomplete understandings we carry away. Our self-­confidence is worn down. But if that elicits from us a humility and further zest for understanding, then we can begin to learn from the field. Perhaps finding as Purzycki did, that the broader cultural “truth” (if there is indeed such a thing), is not revealed when we rely only upon ourselves and a few “key” informants. Purzycki’s humorous chapter highlights how, as we participate together with our transnational, transgenerational human family in the “fumbling comedy” of “Trying to Figure It Out”, the complexity and wonder of lives lived and shared across cultural borders are revealed. After the first year of my own “fumbling comedy” in the field, in spite of ants, goat turd coffee, and caterpillar meals, or perhaps because of all these things, I knew I had to go back, to experience again the tranquillity and haunting beauty of the rainforest, the hot, dusty business of the village, and the kindness and generosity of the people I had come to know. I began my research in Africa by working with Aka and Ngandu youths. They readily shared their experiences of life in and at the edge of the forest, detailing their social-­emotional development, family and friend relations, issues of gender, male and female adolescents’ views of their lives. Working with the adolescents, I noticed how very often they spoke of death – those of their parents, relatives, siblings, and friends. My next field study arose from their tragic accounts of loss, and I began a comparative research study examining responses to death and loss among these two culturally distinct adolescent groups. I remember one young boy in particular who had lost both his father and mother within one week (four years before the interview). He said his mother’s younger brother provided for him, “He is like a father, he gives me food and I live with him and we go fishing.” I then asked if he had someone who was “like a mother”. With tears welling up in his eyes, he began sobbing and said to me, “No one is like a mother to me. I miss my mother.” This was the last interview I conducted on the topic of loss. I am a mother who just happens to be an anthropologist. The deaths, the losses, the tragedies these kids were relating to me became overwhelming. These young people deepened my academic and personal understanding of the nature of loss, grief, and healing but I was devastated by their experiences and saddened because the questions I’d asked often prompted their tears. Adapting in the field can mean stopping what you’re doing and moving on. At times this is necessary and ok (Hewlett, 2012). Taking care of one’s mental, emotional, and physical health (both in and out of the field) should be a priority, as there can be serious consequences for not doing so (see for example, chapters by Bombjaková, Howell, and Kovats-­Bernat). The field finds (or eludes) us, teaches us, and sometimes breaks our hearts.

Introduction   7

Armed with a provocative and insightful line of inquiry – the evolution of female coalitions, competition, and friendship – Nicole Hess began what would be a tortuous, convoluted quest for what repeatedly turned out to be (initially anyway) an elusive field site. She began her field site search with a trip to Venezuela to work with two indigenous Amazonian groups: the Yanomamö and Ye’kwana, who subsisted on fishing, hunting forest animals, and some horticulture. These two small-­scale cultures were seemingly ideal for evolutionary anthropological research. As populations living under ecological conditions much like those regularly encountered by humans in the distant past, it would be possible to study ancestrally evolved psychological, behavioural, and social adaptations. Ideal that is until politics, Venezuelan and otherwise, intervened, forcing Hess and the rest of the team out of the country. Her second attempt to find a field site failed as well but this time due to safety, the third attempt to funding. Demonstrating it takes a lot of drive and perseverance to get to the field, Hess wrote a grant proposal, which was funded, to conduct work in Melanesia. But at the last minute, she chose to step away from the funding, and a promising field site, because of what she felt to be a disturbing dynamic of power existing between her as a female student and a senior male mentor. Nicole Hess did discover a field site as her chapter ends, one she calls “unconventional”, in southern California at a Greek college sorority, where she studied female cooperation and conflict. Reflecting on her path into the field, “it was clear”, Hess acknowledged, “being a female was costly.”

Gendered relations and other challenges in the field Inappropriate conduct, abuses of power, and sexual harassment are, at times, endemic in hierarchal institutions in the US and abroad. Where histories of exploitation, fear, silence, and misuse of authority are part of the landscape, many still deny these abuses are real and happening around them. The recent dialogues about sexual abuse and harassment need to continue, as does responding sensitively, appropriately, and quickly to the needs of those who’ve been abused. Sometimes the path into the field becomes a dark, long tunnel, exacting a price no one should have to pay. We all, men and women alike, bear that cost and cannot afford to keep this part of our lives as anthropologists “secret”. “This is Susanne. She is a man. And she lost weight since the last time I met her.” So goes an introduction for the guest speaker, Susanne Fürniss, PhD and ethnomusicologist during a professional conference in Africa. Her experiences of “being a woman in the field” conducting research in Cameroon and the CAR have been at once bounded by gender discrimination and sexual harassment on one hand, and, on the other, the “true joy” of sharing the language of music with Central African musicians. Fürniss reflects on how her experiences have changed over the course of her career, sharing sage advice, “don’t have sex in the field” and raising important questions: when do we as women alone in the field rail against patriarchal and/or hierarchal systems that misuse authority, disrespect us, our

8   Bonnie L. Hewlett

expertise and experience as scholars, our very bodies? And when do we make use of those same systems allowing us special privilege and access (see also Le Bomin, Chapter 5 and Moïse, Chapter 7)? As anthropologist Scott Calvert commented after reading her chapter, “It is clearly invaluable for young female scholars just starting out, but also for male researchers, as it gives some needed perspective into what their colleagues face in the field and in academia.” Indeed, an important lesson from the field even for experienced fieldworkers is learning to, as Fürniss eloquently writes, “find the right balance between demanding and following, knowing and learning”. Often “learning and knowing” in “the field”, entails negotiating our particular sense of self, our “own” social identity with an identity reflected back to us from the “foreign culture” we find ourselves in. It is, frequently, not what we’d expect. Like an antelope, for example. Sylvie Le Bomin, a French ethnomusicologist working in Gabon was given various nicknames (being as she describes, “dragged from one gender to another”), including: Ninzona, the female creative entity; Mr. Sylvie, a female who has entered the secret bwete brotherhood of men; an antelope (referring to a woman who behaves well and pays attention to others); and a wanderer, a “too much woman” (due to her tenacity, desire to learn, one who “transcends her status as a woman”). And, finally, in the language of Fang, Mienda, a guardian of the village, of the family. Being named means becoming part of a social relationship, with all the rights, privileges, (and sometimes overwhelming) responsibilities such titles confer embedded as they are within kin and age categories. Le Bomin is not simply “an antelope” or woman–man, but a daughter, mother, grandmother, sister, a member of the community and family. Le Bomin’s chapter explores the transitions her field identity has undergone over the course of twenty-­five years of working in Central Africa and elucidates how the people she works with see her and her way of being within their cultural world. Our gendered selves, our sense of self as a woman or man (or third or fourth gendered person), how others view us, and the ways in which we navigate the gendered relations in our lives in the field arise from the cultural framework we are born into; a culture transmitted by our parents and peers, speaking of lifeways within a broad social history, symbolic, and integrated into the very fabric of our lives. Culture influences our perception and classification of reality; what being a man and/or woman means, what the roles and rules “assigned” to gender are, how men and women interact. And, as we see in the chapters by Quinlan, Bombjaková, Le Bomin, Fürniss, and several other contributors, we do not merely feel differently, or do things differently from others, but we feel strongly about our cultural ideas, ideals, beliefs, behaviours, classifications, and worldviews. It is no wonder we so often encounter challenges in the field. Daša Bombjaková shares a list she compiled of some of these “Challenges in the Field”, harvested from the ethnographies of more than fifteen anthropologists, covering a span of fifty-­seven years. Ranging from “avoidance of unwanted

Introduction   9

marriage proposals; difficulties with ethnographic interviews; gaining trust of informants; emotional responses to discriminative behaviours towards studied community; payments to informants” to “problems with sharing and gifts; and ethical dilemmas concerning giving medical help and sharing medicine”. It is quite a telling list. Many researchers have experienced most of these challenges (myself included), and a few others to boot. Bombjaková demonstrates a keen appreciation for the effectiveness of culturally appropriate responses to fieldwork challenges. It is not just the “observer”, after all, who feels strongly about their particular cultural ideas, practices, and beliefs, but the “observed” as well. And wise is the ethnographer who appreciates that what might seem to be vast cultural barriers stretching out between two cultures, is often in fact a partition quite thin and permeable when sensitively approached.

The observer and the observed: the metamorphosis of research, methods, and the researcher The key methods of ethnographic research, participating in and observing the contexts of daily life, asking questions, having discussions, collecting demographic data, are often complicated and can be challenging in ways one would never expect. Never more so for me than in 2003 when the World Health Organization (WHO) called and asked my husband and fellow anthropologist, Barry Hewlett, and I for assistance with Ebola control efforts, in a small village in the Congo (Hewlett and Hewlett, 2008). The Ebola outbreak had just started so not only were Barry and I unaware of who the contact cases were (those suspected of having been exposed to Ebola), but four schoolteachers were attacked with machetes and murdered the day before our arrival. (It was thought they had special knowledge about Ebola they were using to cause harm to others.) As we rode into the village, people began angrily shouting at us, “No Ebola here!” Our research was made even more difficult by the fact that we had to distance ourselves in various ways from the local people. Atypically we couldn’t live in the village, we couldn’t shake hands, we often had to wear gloves, we bathed in bleach water, our car was hosed down every day with bleach, we couldn’t eat or drink with the local people, we lived in controlled settings with a few other international team members. We had to take care who, where, and how we interviewed and observed people. To complicate matters even further, one healer whose help we thought to enlist in educating the populace and taking care of Ebola victims, calmly told us he had ordered the murders of the school teachers. He further informed us we could take care of the practical matters of Ebola control efforts by providing gloves and education – he would take care of the “darker matters”. These threats and limitations meant conducting our research required constant vigilance, caution, and focused attention in our interactions with others. We had to adapt our methodologies immediately because we learned first-­hand that outbreak ethnography (any research in “dangerous fields”, see Kovats-­Bernat, Chapter 12) is unlike most other anthropological settings as the risk of mortality is a daily concern. As a

10   Bonnie L. Hewlett

fieldworker, both observed and observing, one has to adapt, often on the spot, to uncertain circumstances. Armed with a degree, a travelling fellowship award, and an anthropological toolkit, Robert Moïse set out for the “learning fields” of Africa. His journey took him from the CAR, studying forest-­oriented BaYaka pygmies, to sheltering in a friend’s kitchen in the middle of a coup d’état in Bangui, capital of the CAR (prompting a change of venue). Demonstrating the variable paths to the field, from there he next began consultancy work in the American private sector and as of now is working with international non-­governmental organizations (NGOs) advocating for land rights of local forest populations in the Congo Basin. Oh yes, and not to be forgotten, a few side meanderings including becoming a social media sensation, with a video of him dancing at a Cameroonian wedding having gone viral (over two million hits), and of course his acting and filming career as Le Blanc Camerounais, a comedy co-­produced with a Cameroonian filmmaker. Moïse’s chapter illustrates how the field teaches us, mentors us, haunts us with unanswered and unanswerable questions, points the way to new analytic enquiries, and even, at times, causes us to ponder our place in an unsettled world. The field, as Moïse describes, elicits feelings of alienation, bewilderment, frustration, humour, and pain, as we are both observers of human behaviour and objects of scrutiny, continually negotiating and reinterpreting our research, our subjects, and ourselves. Ever the “school of hard knocks”, the field sometimes spits us out and demands we begin again. For Moïse, the “field”, the fumbling comedy/tragedy that is ethnographic research, not only found him, but transformed him from a young, novitiate anthropologist into a “white Cameroonian”, advocating for local land management and forest conservation in the Congo Basin. In the “learning fields”, research interests, topics, methods, theoretical frameworks, and the ethnographer him/herself are all subject to metamorphosis; we can find ourselves identified as and even transformed into le blanc Camerounais, an antelope, or, as Quinlan writes, a Spā߀min. “[I]if aliens are here”, Carl Sagan once wrote, “I want to know about them” (1996: p. 73). Sagan would have been delighted to know aliens are here and, according to Robert J. Quinlan, anthropologists are them. Or, at least, they are Spā߀min. Using an alien metaphor, Quinlan reflects on the transformation of methods, research, and the researcher, as well as the hazards of ethnographic research, the odd questions researchers often lob at research participants, the “observing and being observed” taking place in the field, and asks, “Why would anyone want me to study them?” Quinlan’s instructive and engaging chapter describes his own path into the field(s), and the multiple challenges one can face. Sound advice is woven throughout his essay: keep goals simple, failure/crash landings are inevitable, be open to experience, don’t fully trust your “own cultural perception(s)”, and remember we may be aliens to others even just a neighbourhood away. Quinlan also explains (in part) why ethnographers do what they do. Fieldwork is compelling. Fieldwork “puts everything into new perspective”. Fieldwork is addictive. And, there are, he goes on to say, “many approaches to feeding a

Introduction   11

fieldwork addiction”. Having the opportunity to work in many different sites (feeding his addiction, as it were), conducting many different studies, has given Quinlan the wisdom, and edge, of experience. Such as knowing how to ask a question, and understanding that simple responses to questions may cover up the complexity of reality, knowing “not all methods fit all populations or researchers”, and knowing, too, mixed and evolving fieldwork methodologies are dependent upon the field site, the research question, the data being sought, the skills, time, and resources available, and whether one is working in teams or alone. He also understands sometimes it is appropriate and necessary to simply leave the field, and conduct another research study in another place, at another time. The “work” and challenge for “Spā߀min”, Quinlan further suggests, is to experience fully and observe with care, so that we might see the “possibilities that others miss” (McCrae and Costa, 1997). Perhaps, much like a child. Children, Carl Sagan believed, “are natural born scientists – although heavy on the wonder side and light on the scepticism” (1996: p.  322). And, as Victoria Reyes-­García found, they make great little natural born anthropologists. Oblivious to the pressures of academic research and scholarly demands, global economic-­ political disparities, climate change, what’s culturally appropriate or not, and many other “adult” stressors, kids, as Sagan writes, “are curious, intellectually vigorous. Provocative and insightful questions bubble out of them. They exhibit enormous enthusiasm” (p. 322). Just the mindset needed for successful ethnographic research: enthusiasm, curiosity, the ability to pose interesting and insightful questions (over and over again, “but why?”), and a no-­nonsense-stumble-­down and get-­back-up approach to life. Reyes-­García (and her partner, Vincent Valdez), collected ethnobotanical knowledge data from the Tsimane’, a hunter-­horticulturalist society in the Bolivian Amazon. They “quickly fell in love” with the rural, intimate lifestyle of the Tsimane’, and inspired by the families around them decided to start a family. Soon, their firstborn, Clara, was absorbed into the extended household and cultural life of Marta, her Tsimane’ “babysitter”. As a toddler, Clara quickly picked up the Tsimane’ language, behaviours, and customs, often helping herself to food in her friends’ homes, playing with the other toddlers, and reporting on the happenings in the other Tsimane’ households. And, shockingly for her mother, Clara was calling out the names of plants, demonstrating a grasp of Tsimane’ ethnographic knowledge Reyes-­García was so very interested in. These observations of her little daughter’s easy familiarity of Tsimane’ language and culture led Reyes-­García to begin exploring the transmission of cultural knowledge. How was Clara learning? From whom was she learning? When do Tsimane’ parents start teaching their children? How does the “process of social reproduction” occur? She adapted her research, and research methods, to reflect provocative lines of inquiry based upon what she saw happening before her. Some years and another daughter later (Lea), Reyes-­García reasoned it seemed to be that children learn from other children. Siblings, like Clara, Lea, and later Ana, pass on a “considerable amount” of knowledge to each other. Mothering in

12   Bonnie L. Hewlett

the field (and inspired by observing her own children) prompted her investigation into the acquisition of cultural knowledge – how, when, and through whom does transmission occur? Continuing this line of inquiry, Reyes-­García now supervises graduate students in India and Africa, who’ve provided “further evidence of the importance of child to child (horizontal) transmission of cultural knowledge”. Anyone wanting to learn how to be a good field researcher should spend time watching little kids explore and interact with the world. As the field teaches and guides us, so too do our children. Chronicling the metamorphosis of his research interests and methods, Akira Takada tells a fascinating story of how, with detailed observations, he endeavoured to understand the “subtlety of the interactions” through which the San children living in the central part of the Kalahari Desert, derive meaning from, and construct reality through, their interactions within the immediate socio-­cultural and natural environment. Shifting from individualistic theorizing to an analytical approach he refers to as the “anthropology of interaction”, he investigates the developmental process of socialization among San children. Providing examples of this approach, Takada demonstrates how paying attention to the minute details of interaction between individuals reveals how San children learn to navigate, and “(re) generate” culturally specific activities and patterns within the social, and natural, environment. Over the course of many years of field studies in the Kalahari, Takada has observed the rapid changes occurring within San society, but writes of his new appreciation for the creative adaptiveness of the San and their “evolving”, relationship with the natural environment. He ends his chapter with advice to young researchers, whose career paths “have become far narrower”, with “high expectations for achievement” (see also Moïse, Chapter 7). His counsel is for graduate students to be themselves, like the San, adaptive and creative. Facing the adversities of (academic) life, as Takada writes, requires a willingness to be open to the “occasional deviations” from the research plan, to new experiences, to the many challenges, and quiet joy, of fieldwork.

Dangerous fields Fieldwork, as Nancy Howell clearly demonstrates, can be not only joyous, but also risky. Howell’s chapter details the “story behind the story” leading to her important study of the hazards of fieldwork contained in her 1990 American Anthropology Association (AAA) report, Surviving Fieldwork (I highly recommend it for anyone heading into the field). In bravely sharing her tragic, and very personal experience, she raises the consciousness of inexperienced researchers entering the field unaware and unprepared. Nancy Howell’s chapter provides essential knowledge about the many and varied threats to personal safety new fieldworkers (or their research participants, see Crittenden, Chapter 15) may face, even in “safe” settings (Williams et al., 1992). The perils confronted during fieldwork may include, but certainly are not limited to: infectious and parasitic disease, violence, shootings, car and plane

Introduction   13

crashes, accidents, physical and mental illnesses (Howell covers culture shock, depression, and anxiety in her 1990 report). Discussions of and preventative steps suggested for violence, terror, personal injury, illness, or death, need to begin in graduate fieldwork courses, be written about in methodological literature, and become openly shared throughout the larger academic community of field researchers via seminars, publishing, or professional meetings (see also Kovats-­ Bernat, Chapter 12). In order to engage properly and prepare students for the risks of the field, we as writers, teachers, and seasoned field researchers, need to raise the awareness of the existence of field hazards, and offer preventative measures to minimize the risks. While dangers to personal safety are site, community, and country specific, the adaptive strategies and methods of risk reduction in the field should begin in the classroom (Howell, 1990; Kovats-­Bernat, 2002). Drawing upon his twenty-­five years of experience working with street children in Port-­au-Prince, Kovats-­Bernat richly captures the intensity and stress of fieldwork in Haiti, reflexively acknowledging how often the reality of lived experience is kept “secret”, edited out of “anthropological theory, methods, ethics and text” (Kovats-­Bernat, 2002: p. 1). “Dangerous fields”, to Kovats-­ Bernat, are those field sites where the risks and threats to the “safety, security and well-­being” of anthropologists and research participants are profound, persistent, and demand the anthropologist either, “negotiate or fall victim to them”. Given the myriad issues facing the world in the twenty-­first century, anthropologists are increasingly conducting fieldwork in perilous areas, such as Port-­ au-Prince, communities fraught with conflict, violence, political instability, disease, and poverty (see also Atran, 2010). Ethnographic work carried on under these conditions, the lived experience of anthropology on the frontline, exacts a physical, mental, and emotional toll. The human self cannot reason away what has been seen, heard, felt, and experienced. We do better as fieldworkers when we are aware our lives are forever infused with the harsh lessons learned and memories of work in dangerous fields.

Ethics, advocacy, and other everyday moral dilemmas of research Literally every day in the field there are likely to be not only difficulties, sometimes dangers, but certainly moral dilemmas and ethical concerns (see also AAA, 2000; Cassell and Jacobs, 1987). For instance, many times during my fieldwork in Central and East Africa, I’ve seen sick babies, children, and adults, some near death – should I give them medications or not? I’ve seen women and children being hit or beaten – how do I intervene, should I? How? Will my intervention help or make the situation worse? When working for the WHO during the Congo Ebola outbreak, we met the healer responsible for organizing the deaths of four teachers, we had to ask ourselves, given this knowledge, how could we possibly collaborate with an assassin? As anthropologists what could we recommend to the WHO what the future role of healers working with international teams during outbreaks might be?

14   Bonnie L. Hewlett

In an Ethiopian orphanage where I have been conducting research, I found most of the children there had mothers and fathers, and/or extended families. They were social orphans. Many of those same mothers and fathers expressed extreme sadness in having felt that the best choice they could make for their child’s survival was to give them away. Promised by “baby brokers”, and/or adoption agencies and owners of the orphanages that not only would their child be given a better life abroad, but the parents were assured of being able to see their children again, and they’d be given money so they could provide a better life for their remaining children. One young unwed mother saved up for a bus ride into town to visit her one-­month-old baby girl she’d relinquished to the orphanage. She was certain her child would someday return to visit her. Should I have told her the chances weren’t so great? Many of the parents I spoke to believed they were giving their children to a family, which they, as the child’s biological parents, would remain a part of forever. The grief they experienced was raw and hard as time passed and they discovered the reality: the ties to their children were forever severed. Many of the parents asked if I could find information about their child, or asked if I knew how to get in touch with the adoptive parents, or if I could somehow get a photo of their child. Do I question those adoptive parents and agencies making promises that aren’t kept? Do I try in some way to hold accountable, to question, and to make public their actions? Other babies in the orphanage had been abandoned, often alongside a busy road where they’d be sure to be seen and rescued. I’d heard about a few babies who’d been killed: do I also speak to those mothers and fathers? I learned I had to be very careful in the questions I asked about these sensitive topics. I was also given the opportunity to interview people known to be involved in child trafficking. It was dangerous, I turned it down. I learned I had to be flexible, honest, respectful, and I had to choose my battles. I think it is important to know what you can and cannot do, to know your own limits. Contributing author Kovats-­Bernat once said sometimes the best we can do is write what we experience, what we observe, and let others hear the stories we’ve been told. Thomas N. Headland, along with his wife Janet, share a few of their stories of the experiences they had raising a family in the remote Philippine rainforest. They lived on and off for forty-­eight years in an Agta village, learning the language, developing an orthography, creating and publishing a bilingual dictionary, and, while working for the Summer Institute of Linguistics, translating the Bible into the Agta language. The Headlands tell of the difficulties of “embracing” new perspectives and culture: including sleeping practices and customs of sharing of food. It is often adapting to the most basic of living practices that become the most frustrating, daily challenges to the ethnographer – sharing or not sharing, eating foods outside ones’ own food categories (e.g. caterpillars, snakes), sleeping, bathing, using the toilet … (see also Bombjaková, Chapter 6). It is remarkably easy, though unintended, as ethnographers to blunder at times in the new social milieu we find ourselves in: we often make huge “goofs”. We learn new meanings (e.g. “honour/ shame”), we learn new ways of being, new ways of understanding. In his delightful

Introduction   15

and poignant chapter, Headland confesses to a serious cultural “goof ” in front of a family whose eight-­year-old son “stole” a pen from Headland’s study. The shamed father reacted by chastising his young son, then a few minutes later chopping down his house and leaving the settlement. Headland describes this as one of his worst experiences in his many years with the Agta. The Headlands also struggled with the ways of being “contributing members” of the Agta society. Overtime, the Headlands provided medical care, advocated for the needs and lives of Agta individuals; rescuing a young girl from slavery in Manila, fending off (for a time) a logging company’s bulldozer, publishing accounts of violence directed at the Agta (including massacres, poisonings, rape, and slavery). The Headlands begin their chapter with a quote, “I have met few ethnographers who were not personally affected in some profound way by their fieldwork” (Agar, 1980). Certainly, it must also be that ethnographers affect, for better or worse, those they live with and “observe” as well. The stories from the field the Headlands share highlight dilemmas often faced by ethnographers: how should anthropologists give back to host communities? How do we reimburse research participants for their time and contribution to our research, our lives, in “culturally appropriate ways”? Paul Verdu, a French geneticist at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, recounts his experiences recruiting, obtaining voluntary consent, and compensating Central African research participants for his research project, reconstructing, in part, the “genetic histories of hunter-­gatherers and neighboring agricultural groups”. The many ethical considerations he encountered during his field study arose in part from the interdisciplinary nature of the scientific research he was conducting. Customizing an informed consent which, (1) communicated their aims and data collection procedures, (2) followed the guidelines and recommendations on the ethical treatment of human subjects; and (3) passed university review boards (IRB) and national ethics committees. While the informed consent, as Verdu suggests, can help “young researchers build their protocols … break the ice”, and, importantly, give “local participants a voice”, the document is often recommended to be obtained in “written form”. Difficult to do with a “paper-­free” non-­literate population. Thinking innovatively, Verdu adapted the written form into an oral script which he then videotaped. Once in the field, and as is often the case, other issues quickly arose, namely, were the participants really volunteering? Or is there a subtle interplay of coercion, and/or social and political pressure? How actually volunteer is volunteer participation? Ethical questions that arise nearly daily in the field, however unfortunately, often remain unresolvable. “Bulletproof ” informed consent procedure notwithstanding, Verdu then encountered the common and difficult dilemma so often faced; the consideration of “benefits and compensations”. He found even the words he used, “work” and “salary” versus “research project” and “time compensation”, mattered and determined the success or failure of participant recruitment and data collection. How does the researcher give back to the local people for their time, effort, and participation? What is the “culturally appropriate” currency of compensation? Medicine? Money? Food,

16   Bonnie L. Hewlett

clothing, pots? “Shoats”? Advocacy? How much and to whom? And do we “give back” so we can leave feeling better about what we’ve taken? Alyssa N. Crittenden, a behavioural ecologist, writes of similar issues encountered in Tanzania. During an interview with a long-­time informant, a Hadza woman poignantly recounted she was “tired of giving parts of her body to strangers”. Not knowing the research team the elderly Hadza woman was referring to, or their “collection process”, Crittenden was unsure how to respond. Asking if there was anything she could do, the woman replied, “No. Just keep coming back.” Soon others gathered around and asked for her guidance and assistance as well. Many of the issues the Hadza women brought up centred around “compensation, communication and approval of research projects by the Hadza themselves”. The interaction was pivotal for Crittenden, who began questioning the “collection and commercialization of nutritional and biomedical data from the world’s few remaining foraging populations”. Her work took on a different consideration: are there ethical ways to involve and include the host community in the research practice and process? How can informed consent be ethically articulated and obtained? Especially when, as Verdu also noted, the benefits of volunteering as researched subjects are at best limited, and at worst potentially risky. Are we forever debtors then, taking more than we will ever be able to give? Should one form of “giving back” be advocacy? Where does our responsibility towards others begin? Should anthropologists be guided by personal morals, and/or professional ethics, by “a sense of reciprocal obligation to and solidarity with those other human beings of different culture”, those whose “differences anthropologists have made the subjects of their scientific careers” (Turner, 2006)? For Crittenden, the answer was simple: she is now a part of a “small group of researchers and human rights activists” working with the Hadza community to help them obtain funding for “capacity building and the creation of their own code of research ethics”. In Crittenden’s chapter, we see how standing to combat abuses of human rights can be taken on as an ethical responsibility, an obligation based upon our “theoretical convictions” (and, of course, individual convictions, as not all researchers feel comfortable in the role of advocate), we also see demonstrated the courage we sometimes must find in the field (Turner, 2006). But what if the “field” is a mother–baby behavioural sleep laboratory in the US? And the rights you are courageously fighting for are safe sleeping arrangements and practices for millions of parents and their infants? James J. McKenna writes about the controversial area of research he has conducted within the world of paediatric sleep medicine and the struggles involved in fighting SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome) and infant sleep position subcommittee, sponsored by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) (a “powerful, ideologically driven medical committee”) and the National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). Much of McKenna’s last twenty-­eight-plus years has been spent championing the benefits and importance of breastmilk,

Introduction   17

safe co-­sleeping or what he now calls “breastsleeping” with evidence-­based, inter-­disciplinary, scientific data sets (resulting in literally dozens of peer-­ reviewed scientific papers). Defending the rights of parents and infants to co-­ sleep became an integral and critical part of McKenna’s “field” experience, as has communicating the results of that field research to the press and worldwide public; his way, perhaps, of “giving back”. And, ultimately, whether our path takes us to a laboratory in the US, a village in Central Africa, or a rain forest in the Amazon, as Paul Verdu so eloquently writes, it is important to remember “our ethical responsibility is to the people we hope to learn from and about”.

Conclusion The path into the field of anthropology begins with long hours spent reading volumes of materials, attending multitudes of classes, symposiums, and professional conferences. Armed with (hopefully) pertinent/intriguing and fundable research questions, grants (which may or may not be approved) are written to obtain funding. Jobs are sought in a narrowing and highly competitive market. All this, so that we, as field “junkies”, “Spā߀min”, “antelopes”, “patrons”, women viewed as men, or Mienda, the many identified selves that we are and become, might get into, and keep returning to, the field. The very reason many of us are anthropologists in the first place (and speaking of “the field” I am referring not only to the “place” but, more importantly at least for myself, the people). It is, after all, the field which is our true teacher. A mentor challenging us, spitting us out, demanding from us, changing our perspectives, our very selves, forever. The field teaches us to be patient, to observe, to learn how to fail and get up again. The field teaches us how to handle ourselves in dangerous situations, and, too, when it is time to just quit and go home. The field teaches us to understand, accept, and value that there are other ways of knowing and being. The field teaches us we can learn not only about but from the people into whose lives we enter first as strangers, then someday perhaps, as family. The field teaches us to remain open to experience, to learn culturally appropriate ways to negotiate and navigate as individuals through worlds unknown and foreign. The field teaches us to question our work, the questions we ask, the methods we use, the permissions we ask to be granted, the ways in which we live and interact with research participants, the cost to them, and ourselves, of our presence in their homes and communities. The field is a hard teacher, demanding that we as researchers question our personal morals, our professional ethics, and our responsibility to those who share their homes and lives so generously with us. For some researchers, this responsibility is felt as a call to advocacy. Others work to tell those stories that would not otherwise be told, to amplify those voices that are not otherwise heard, imploring others to “Look, come see!” Ultimately, beyond the lessons and stories shared in the pages of this book, and no doubt like many of the scholars and people from around the world represented

18   Bonnie L. Hewlett

here, my hope is that the work I do, that we all do, will, paraphrasing Ruth Benedict, “make the world a better place, a safer place for all”. It is up to each of us to pursue that opportunity (Fessler, 2011: p. 12). And this, I believe, is the most important secret of all.

References Adichie, C. (2010) Chimamanda Adichie: The Danger of a Single Story. Available from: www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.html (Accessed 17 December 2010). Agar, M. (1980) Hermeneutics in anthropology. Ethos. 8 (3), pp. 253–272. American Anthropology Association (AAA). (2000) Committee of Ethics Briefing Papers on Common Dilemmas Faced by Anthropologists Conducting Research in Field Situations. Available from: www.americananthro.org/ParticipateAndAdvocate/Content. aspx?ItemNumber=1835&RDtoken=61896&userID=6944 (Accessed 19 May 2019). Atran, S. (2010) Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (un) Making of Terrorists. New York, Ecco Press. Bernard, H.R. (2017) Research Methods in Anthropology. Lanham, MD, Rowman & Littlefield. Calvert, S. (2018) Personal communication. Cassell, J. (1987) Children in the Field: Anthropological Experiences. Philadelphia, PA, Temple University Press. Cassell, J. and Jacobs, S.E. (eds) (1987) Handbook on Ethical Issues in Anthropology: A Special Publication of the American Anthropological Association Number 23 [PDF file]. Available from: www.americananthro.org/LearnAndTeach/Content.aspx?ItemNumber=1942 (Accessed 19 May 2019). Chagnon, N. (1968) Ya̦ nomamö: The Fierce People. New York, Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Davis, S.H. and Konner, M. (eds) (2011) Being There: Learning to Live Cross-­Culturally. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, pp. vii, 260pp. Fessler, D.M.T. (2011) Twelve lessons (most of which I learned the hard way) for evolutionary psychologists. In: Wang, X.T. and Su, Y.J. (eds) Thus Spake Evolutionary Psychologists. Beijing, Peking University Press, pp. 281–293. Hewlett, B.L. (2012) Listen, Here is a Story: Ethnographic Life Narratives from Aka and Ngandu Women of the Congo Basin. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Hewlett, B.S. & Hewlett, B.L. (2008) Ebola, Culture, Politics: The Anthropology of an Emerging Disease. Case Studies on Contemporary Social Issues. Belmont, CA, Wadsworth Publishing Company. Howell, N. (ed.) (1990) Surviving Fieldwork: A Report of the Advisory Panel on Health and Safety in Fieldwork. Washington, DC, American Anthropological Association. Kovats-­Bernat, C. (2002) Negotiating dangerous fields: Pragmatic strategies for fieldwork amid violence and terror. American Anthropologist. 104 (1), pp. 1–15. Langley, N., Garland, J., Morgan, F., LeRoy, M., Ryerson, F., Haley, J., Bolger, R., Fleming, V., Woolf, E.A., Lahr, B., and Baum, L.F. (1939). The Wizard of Oz. Hollywood, CA: Metro Goldwyn Mayer. McCarthy, M. (2015) The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy. London, John Murray Publishers. McCrae, R.R. and Costa Jr, P.T. (1997) Conceptions and correlates of openness to experience. In: Hogan, R., Johnson, J.A., and Briggs, S.R. (eds), Handbook of Personality Psychology. San Diego, CA, Academic, pp. 825–847.

Introduction   19

Mulder, M.M. (ed.) (1996) I’ve Been Gone Far Too Long: Field Study Fiascos and Expedition Disasters (Travel Literature Series). Oakland, CA, RDR Books. Sagan, C. (1996) The Demon-­Haunted World. New York, Ballantine Books. Shostack, M. (2000) Return to Nisa. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press. Turner, T. (2006) The special relationship between anthropology and human rights. Anthropology News. 47 (7), pp. 3–4. Van Gennep, A. (1960) The Rites of Passage. Chicago, IL, University Chicago Press. Williams, T., Dunlop, E., Johnson, B.D., and Hamid, A. (1992) Personal safety in dangerous places. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. 21 (3), pp. 343–374.

PART I

Paths into the field

1 Learning Fields Vishvajit Pandya

In 1983, soon after I defended my research proposal, the Department’s Chairperson handed me an envelope containing a letter that looked like an old colonial decree. It was on the official departmental letterhead, with a golden embossed seal at the top, typed neatly and presented ceremonially with a small trimmed ribbon. That moment was probably a degree less in excitement than the actual moment in the future when the doctoral degree would be conferred on me. The content of the letter declared I was a doctoral candidate on fieldwork among the Andaman Islanders (Ongees) in the Bay of Bengal and that any help extended for my study would be much appreciated. As the letter was ceremoniously handed over at the departmental seminar room, faculty members reminded me of the cardinal rules of doing fieldwork. The first of these was never to get politically involved with any one group or individual in the context of conflict and, second, never ever get emotionally entangled with any member of the community at the field site. And, last but not least, was to keep in mind that one had to return from field and write up a thesis. This marked my “rites de passage” (van Gennep, 1960), I was now to be separated from my cloistered existence in a world class academic department and enter the space of a community of hunter-­gatherers, on an island tucked away in the Bay of Bengal, several thousand kilometres away from the Indian mainland. I was, in brief, about to meet the ninety-­eight odd Ongees who were confined to a protected Tribal Reserve on the island of Little Andaman.

The long walk into the field In September of 1983 I landed at a small sleepy port town called Hut Bay in Little Andaman. The town used to have electricity provided by a gasoline generator for five hours after sunrise and two hours after sunset. Around the eight-­square kilometre town was a government-­owned red oil plantation and a thick forest

24   Vishvajit Pandya

providing wood for the matchstick industry on mainland India. Little Andaman island’s circular coastline was surrounded by a ribbon-­like sand beach intersected by cliffs and small streams. From Hut Bay the local policeman guided me to a stream of the river Chetamaley where a dugout canoe with an outrigger was arranged for me to ride upstream to a trail to Dugong Creek, the Ongee settlement. The tehsildar, or the local district official, Mr Neel Ratna, had come to Ramakrishnapuram, a settlement on the fringes of forest, to see me off. Wearing his Khaki pith helmet and escorted by an armed local policeman, he introduced me to two Ongee men who would be my companions on the trek to Dugong Creek. It felt like a brief postcolonial ceremonial occasion. I was introduced to Totanagey and Teelai as an “outsider”, known to the senior-­most administrators, who had come to learn all about them. Totanagey, who was then a strong young man of about thirty years1 immediately asked, “so should we bring him back in two days?” The tehsildar explained that I would be staying longer and would be not only living with them but like them! He reminded Totanagey that it would be just like it had been when he came to survey their reserve for making maps. Totanagey’s next question was, if he was alone, where would my supplies come from and who would make my food? Neel Ratna, who had been convinced that I would manage without any assistance by non-­tribal orderlies, reassured Totanagey that I would fend for myself in exactly the same way as the Ongees did. “After all he is here to learn your ways, help him to learn well!” My sealed university letter was apparently of no help and my zeal to be a counter-­colonialist had compelled me not to take any field assistants. Totanagey, the strong fellow, was associated with the local Medical Department of the Andaman and Nicobar tribal welfare administration. He had learned a smattering of Hindi from his interactions with the local welfare officers. His job was to bring Ongees out of the forest to a local medical facility and offer them first-­aid material in case of small injuries or seek out a government doctor to organize medical check-­ups. Totanagey always had a smiling face and his deep-­set eyes reassured that “all was well”. Teelai, in contrast, was eldest among the ninety-­eight or so Ongees at Dugong Creek. The pepper curls on his head had turned white and he had a few strands of hair on his face, a rarity among Ongee men. On the day I was introduced to these men, Teelai was returning to Dugong Creek after getting stiches removed from his forehead at the Hut Bay government hospital. Henceforth both he and Totanagey were going to be my “Eneyobey” my teachers, guides, and points of contact for all matters pertaining to my new life in the forest. I now knew only two out of the ninety-­eight Ongees, thanks to the local tehsildar, Mr Neel Ratna. My introduction to the ninety-­six other members of the community and the unknown depths of the forest still awaited, dependent on the goodwill of Teelai and Totanagey. All of a sudden I felt as though my mind and body were overwhelmed by feelings of foreboding and anxiety and bombarded with a welter of sensorial experiences I hadn’t felt before. Was the flimsy dugout canoe safe? Was I sure that I wanted to leave the last point of the known world behind me and venture into a

Learning fields   25

place where I didn’t even know how to look for food or water? I didn’t know the language and I had no friends to call upon or family to return to. New Delhi seemed light years away from Little Andaman! Yet nothing was as quiet and peaceful as the forest I had just entered, leaving behind the small outpost of Ramakrishnapuram. The distant sound of a transistor radio from the last teashop at Ramakrishnapuram faded out as did the view of the magisterial presence of the tehsildar with his pith helmet. From this point on there was no government, no Indian state, only the possibility of the colonial romance of doing ethnography – and it was exciting. Yet I constantly asked myself was it right to just go and impose myself on the Ongees? Would I not be badgering them constantly, seeking answers to questions which may or may not be theirs at all? All this was generating an emotional, intellectual churning and turmoil in me. I began to feel the “isolating” effects of “fieldwork” even before it could begin. I had come overloaded with ethnographic ideas and expected to gather more, but with whom would I talk “anthropology”? It is only now I realize that one is never really out of “doing” anthropology. Most often fieldwork starts with the chatter of ethnography but soon enough gives way to long moments of silence when the peculiar but compelling experience of conversing with oneself takes over. These isolating moments of talking to oneself about anthropology and the experience of doing fieldwork in any location is most often a disturbing experience, a predicament very difficult to share. Yet the myth of fieldwork endures, as an exemplary human experience akin to a romantic adventure, a heroic act, or a sort of morality play wherein a foolhardy or self-­ inflicted misery is seen as a route towards self-­realization. The actual predicament of trying to accomplish anthropological fieldwork often leads to situations the fieldworker is loath to share. My cohorts and I have often wondered what happened to our classmates who returned from the field to write up their theses. Of course, some went “native” and anthropology ceased to be a “calling” for them. Just as doctors are reluctant to talk about a failed treatment or procedure, anthropologists seldom talk about the miseries and failures that confront them in the field. In fact, the extremely personal and often ambivalent experience of doing fieldwork engenders an aura of secrecy. To start fieldwork is difficult and involves the tortuous process of demolishing many pre-­conceived ideas about oneself as well as the culture and society one intends to be absorbed in. Totanagey pushed the canoe through the murky waters with a pole. As the water rushed towards the rapidly receding sea, drawn out almost forcibly by the low tide, my poetic imagination gave way to rational observation; I began to see the waters more closely. At first, I just saw a lot of waste, paper and plastic, wood, and then vast swathes of industrial sludge followed soon after by a thinner layer of dead leaves and small logs. I clinched my backpack and camera tightly to divert my mind from the dreadful thought that I couldn’t swim! I watched disturbed mud skippers scurry about and occasional crocodiles slowly swagger out of tangled mangroves and wade into the stream. I wanted to photograph the crocodiles but I was too concerned about the precariousness of my seat and the constant seepage

26   Vishvajit Pandya

of water into the dugout canoe. My fellow traveller Teelai did his best to keep bailing out the water as it trickled in. As we glided through the forest I heard small creatures constantly moving around and making sounds. I had no idea of what I was being bitten or stung by all this while. There were little red humps all over my arms. My fear lingered on the crocodiles that swam along the canoe, ergonomically designed for the Ongee, who never grow taller than five-­and-a-­half feet, and into which I could barely fit my legs. My mind conjured strange images of a smoked ham leg next to a slicer at a butcher’s counter every time the crocodiles splashed water nearby. The apprehensions were far too many and combined with thoughts of both present dangers and those that might befall in the coming days. I started thinking how I would be moved out if I fell ill. What if it was a debilitating illness that could strike me for life? Why did I come to do fieldwork here after so many mild (and stern) warnings from friends and well-­wishers? But I felt I was giving up too soon. The first steps into the field are difficult for all anthropologists and it would only be a matter of time before things would begin to look less terrifying. I resolved not to fall ill, to complete my work, and to walk back into the room where I had defended my proposal to finally present my thesis. After two hours in the canoe and still only halfway to our destination, my companions suddenly got into an intense argument and we slowed to a stop. At the end of this debate, Totanagey informed me that due to the low tide the canoe could not be pushed further and we would now have to walk. I had no option but to abide by my initiators/teachers. I had imagined that much like Malinowski among the Trobriand Islanders (Malinowski, 1922, 1935), I would just land at Dugong Creek and enter into instant “ethnographic relations” with the Ongees. But once again my romantic preconception was rudely shattered. I was completely dependent on my two new friends to at least reach Dugong Creek, and then of course would have to further surrender to their will to survive in the forest. Before we started walking towards the settlement, Totanagey asked me if I knew how to cut up a wild boar, then if I knew where to locate potatoes in the forest. He winced at my hesitant responses and soon switched into a commandeering tone and said – “Tomorrow at sunrise we will start walking back. You can return to your home, you cannot be with us if you are of no use.” I gasped at this sudden hint of rejection but realized that Totanagey was telling me that I had to have a role to play, some way of “participating” as a member of their community or else I couldn’t stay with them. He was merely confirming what was an essential component of my ethnographic training. Mere “observation” would be a very colonial hegemonic practice. To paraphrase Malinowski (1935) and Urry (1996); I could not just sit in “my tent and watch the natives go to garden”. I wondered if Malinowski ever went out to do gardening. Did Radcliffe-­Brown venture beyond his “verandah” and go hunting pigs? I had no idea how or where to dig potatoes in the Ongee forest. I loved my pork but always bought my favourite portion from the array of meats in my neighbourhood supermarket. How would I know how to hunt, kill, and butcher a wild boar? I realized that nothing really prepares you in terms of field methods and probably

Learning fields   27

methods are different in different contexts! Perhaps this was ethno-­methodology – methodology derived from the field of study. Before we started the walk towards Dugong Creek we sat around and had some water and biscuits I had brought in my backpack. The biscuits had become soggy by now and were covered with an army of fierce red ants. I realized I was in a world where I had no control. The place around me looked deceptively calm, green, and soothingly moist. But on a closer look every nook and cranny of the forest floor was alive with the sounds of ceaseless creeping, crawling, or buzzing. After a brief halt, we were on the trail again. I kept asking myself, “Why am I here? Do I really want to endure what lies ahead?” I had also begun to feel a bit alarmed when I thought of what Totanagey had told me a few hours before. Even before I could start my fieldwork or get acquainted with the Ongees, I was told that I would be sent back, as I was evidently of no use to them. They clearly saw me as a “sloppy city boy”, some administrative official from Port Blair who was just going to survey parts of the reserve and leave. They expected me to spend a few hours with them and ask them what provisions they wanted from the government. They had no idea that I was about to impose myself on them. My explicit ignorance about anything related to hunting or gathering was perhaps rightfully deemed a liability at the campsite. All my images of my own self as a student of Anthropology, trained in one the best schools in the world came to naught. I felt like a silly good for nothing that would be summarily returned to the sender without any regrets. The other thought that constantly troubled me was the realization there was no single method of doing ethnography: one had to constantly learn from the field to come up with a method. I had read the classical canon, learned about diverse cultures, written a research and grant proposal but never thought I would have had to prepare myself to hunt and gather too. One could learn how to observe but how, when, and where one might “participate” seems to me to be a far more important problem to ponder before entering the field. The thought of being sent back and the unending trail made my pace slower and heavier. I was trailing far behind my companions who walked through the thickets with astounding agility. I kept asking Totanagey how far? Each time he would smilingly stop and hack away the branches that covered my way and gesture me to move on. Teelai, who was behind me, would say irritatingly “lichuney!” (a little further ahead!), pouting his lips and motioning forward by thrusting his face out. Frequently I would find myself stumbling as my feet got caught in the vines, undergrowth, and small heaps of decayed leaves along the way. Teelai would rush from the back and extend an arm to help me move on. But they wouldn’t stop. It seemed they chose to be oblivious of my precarious situation and just kept insisting that I move along. It had been nearly three hours. While I was dragging myself, the Ongees still had a spring in their steps. As time went by I realized the reason they looked happier and spirited was because they were returning home. I on the other hand was overcome with exhaustion and gloom and pulled down with thoughts of futility.

28   Vishvajit Pandya

I tried to cheer myself by remembering that this was no punishment but an ethnographic pilgrimage. This was the same landscape in which E.H. Man (1882), M.V. Portman (1899), and Radcliffe-­Brown (1922) had learned about the Andamanese. Now, though, there was so much more to learn. Theory had changed a great deal since Radcliffe-­Brown, and so had the Andamanese themselves, now displaced from their original homes in the open forest into a reserve. There were new questions to ask and I felt hopeful I would learn something completely new, but I knew I could learn nothing until I reached the settlement at Dugong Creek. One thing I realized was that throughout this exercise of walking through the forest, my new Ongee guides and teachers were kidding me by telling me constantly that the final destination was nearby. Perhaps it was really not that nearby and they were merely goading me to keep me moving. I began to feel that all the maps were wrong and the government official who had probably never left his office had been having fun with me. I kept repeating all this, muttering and cursing all along. My new shoes were aggravating the pain I had begun to feel in my feet and the discomfort of walking through the forest without a break was compounded by tiny lice and fine needle-­like leeches that began to stick on to my body, seemingly with glee. Why was I the only one disturbed? The Ongees were attacked by the leeches too, but they seemed unperturbed. I couldn’t even feel victimized. I kept trying to remind myself that I wasn’t the only one who ever had to endure the discomfort of being drenched in sweat and blood in the hot humid forest, and that things would get better once I started doing the actual ethnographic fieldwork. After walking for about three hours, Teelai and Totanagey decided to stop and rest under the shade of a coconut grove close to the coastline now glowing in bright sunlight. Just beyond the grove was the deep green of the thick forest, out of which flowed a stream of water about a foot deep, gurgling and gushing into the calm stretch of the sea. Was this the stream we had been negotiating by canoe, or another? I had no clear understanding and was too tired to look at my maps and compass. Neither did I have sufficient command of the Ongee language to ask where we were and/or how far Dugong Creek was. By that time, I knew their answer would be “lichuney”, or simply “it’s just there”. The dark blue hues of the water and the deep green foliage were soothing to the eyes, but my body was unbearably hot. Teelai took out an old dried crab claw from his cloth bag, cleaned it, stuffed it with local tobacco (tukwegalako, a form of wild mint), and went in search of a fire to light it. He disappeared into the foliage and returned after about twenty minutes with a small piece of smouldering wood. I yearned to light my own rolled cigarette, but unfortunately the tobacco in my shirt pocket was too damp to light and I had to content myself with some green coconut water. My entrance into the field was less a rite of passage than one of pushing. I had to push relentlessly, just to keep walking. The Ongees kept on saying the camp was close by, and it felt more and more like they were playing a game, dangling a carrot. As we passed four hours with no camp in sight I kept muttering to myself that something was wrong. Either I was misinformed or my Ongee colleagues

Learning fields   29

were making a fool of me. Or perhaps the heat, exhaustion, and strangeness of the forest were making me hallucinate. I kept telling myself it was all new and I must learn to trust Totanagey and Teelai. I had come to learn from them, so it would not be right to show my frustration to them. I had walked for nearly five hours and there was no turning back. According to the district administrator and my maps it should have taken me an “easy” walk of about two hours to reach Dugong Creek, but I had been walking for almost six hours through the day, excluding the thirty-­minute break. In order to keep myself going I would stare at the dense canopy over my head, wondering how bits of sunlight struggled to filter through. The shade of the forest notwithstanding, the heat and humidity was intense. It was hard to concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes as the forest teemed with life and every now and then I would hear insects and bird calls I had never heard before. I realized that cultural shock is one thing but sensorial overload was much more overwhelming. There were new smells, new sounds, and new colours of green and blue, and, last but not least, new sensations on the skin. I had to slap, itch, brush my arms or legs every moment since entering the forest, never knowing what exactly bit or crawled over me. It was a constant distraction that tore me away from the joys of discovering a new tree, a wild flower, or a bird. There would be moments when even before I could figure out the point from which a bird call wafted into the canopy over my head, all the other bits of noise in the forest would quickly meld into a fluttering that told me that the bird had flown. As an avid bird watcher, the inability to identify the bird would leave me terribly frustrated. I realized how a lush tropical forest that exuded tremendous visual appeal on a National Geographic TV show was in reality both treacherous and irritating. On the pretext of looking and admiring as well as photographing the world I was entering, I would often try to sneak in a short break for myself. I would persuade Teelai and Totanagey to stop for a bit by pointing to my camera, then quickly try to change the lenses from wide to tele in the attempt to seek out the source of a strange and peculiar birdcall I had just heard. This would often prove to be a futile exercise but it was certainly the best way to buy a moment of respite from the drudgery of hauling my backpack and pushing my tired and sweaty body along what seemed to be a never-­ending trail. I often made the mistake of looking up at the forest canopy and losing myself in admiration of the lace-­like spread of vines or the varied patterns of leaves and forget that the ground I was walking on was full of decaying leaves that covered the bed of thick rattan. Little wonder that my feet would get trapped frequently and I would stumble. Every time I lapsed into this precarious state, however, Teelai would come back immediately and help me stabilize. These were pleasant interludes when even for a few minutes I had the leisure to admire the soaring chape-­like architecture of the forest of Gurjan trees with shafts of evening light filtering through what were reminiscent of stained glass windows. But my repeated attempts to take photographs and then losing balance were evidently a source of irritation for both Teelai and Totanagey. They

30   Vishvajit Pandya

would talk loudly among themselves in Ongee and perhaps curse me for tagging along with them for no reason. At times, they would break out into bursts of laughter mimicking my sorry state. Soon darkness began to creep into the forest as the sun disappeared into the western horizon. I saw Teelai coming with a message from Totanagey he had to translate for me. I felt a bit worried, as I was beginning to lose my bearings in the darkness. But Teelai came to offer me advice that would prove valuable for all my time in the forest. Teelai told me with the utmost patience, I must know and learn to walk like an Ongee, and not like an Outsider. He said: If you walk with your head held high, like a tall tree looking up all the time – you are bound to stumble and fall! It is always all dark around you in the forest. We learn to walk looking down on the forest floor and to avoid the hollow buttress of the tall and weak trees. We look around us all the time as what we see tells us what is about to come or to be experienced. Every part and place in the forest is filled with something. Our forest is like a honeycomb found on the strong branches of the short trees. Going around from place to place in the forest space means you need to know like us what each part of the comb contains or is filled [aloogey] with – these could be wax, eggs, or honey all of which are valued by us in the forest. To be knowledgeable [eneyobey] is also to allow oneself to be like a honeycomb. Go around the forest in circles and get yourself filled with what is contained in each part. One should not aspire to be a tall tree [talucheye], as it stands arrogantly away from ground and could fall easily in the face of a storm. No honeycombs will ever be found on such trees! Always look down as you walk the ground for that’s the right way to know the forest and become knowledgeable. By walking with your eyes on the tall trees you can only know what is above you and not what is around you. One becomes an eneyobe not by looking upwards in the forest, but by immersing oneself in it. When Teelai told me all this in 1983 I did not realize it was indeed the first step in my learning from the field in the world of the Ongees. It took me over five months of compiling meanings of each and every Ongee word I heard to truly make sense of Teelai’s lesson about the forest. What I thought at the time was a mere instruction on how to walk in the forest was an insight into the knowledge of the forest through the metaphor of honeycombs (tanja) – what Ongees regard as knowledge, what being knowledgeable means for them, and above all the process and practice of building knowledge that allows one to become an eneyobe, a knowledgeable person. I wondered about possibilities for exploring the Ongee processes of gathering and transforming information into knowledge – an ethnomethodology of Ongee knowledge-­making practice. It seemed to me that knowledge for the Ongees had implications not only for everyday survival in the forest, but as articulations of structures in practice and practices of structure.

Learning fields   31

After receiving instructions from Teelai, translated by Totanagey for me, I made some quick notes listing words and phrases like walking, tall trees, honeycombs, knowledge by looking around, as prompts in my small pocket notebook for later transcription into full field notes.

Learning from the field Shortly after another short walk of about 400 metres both Teelai and Totanagey started beating the buttresses of tall trees and shouting “Enenene chera! Inketeu! Inketeu” (Outsider coming! All go away! Go away!). I gathered we had finally reached our destination. On reaching the Dugong Creek settlement, I stood at the edge watching each one of about fifty Ongee men, women, and children come out of their “homes” to take their first look at me. Within a few minutes, I was stunned to see all of them slowly leave the campsite, leaving only a light trail of smoke from an abandoned fireplace. They had doused the fire just before they prepared to leave. For about twenty minutes I sat completely mesmerized as the Ongees appeared in front of my eyes with their bodies and faces smeared in paint, carrying bows and arrows, baskets slung around their shoulders, and children tied to their backs. It seemed as if I were swept back into 1908, seeing the same images Radcliffe-­Brown had seen and reported in his account, The Andaman Islanders (1922). It seemed there was no change in the appearance of the Ongees even from the photographic archives dating back to Portman (1899). Anthropology had moved on, its disciplinary questions and methods evolved. India was no more a colony, and I was neither a colonial administrator nor a western anthropologist. But for the Ongees too, life had changed. They had been resettled in a tribal reserve and brought under the state’s welfare programme. They received rations and primary healthcare. Many of them had regular interactions with welfare officials on a daily basis and had begun to speak broken Hindi and interacted with a fair degree of confidence with the outsider. In other words, they were no longer completely isolated, hostile, or wary of the outside world (Figure 1.1). I had thought what I would see would be substantively different from the Ongee world portrayed in the historical accounts. But at that moment it seemed that somehow the Ongee still retained the classic image of the “primitive”, “un-­changed”, and “isolated” hunter-­gatherer! Was it because they chose to retain their traditional livelihoods despite the changes wrought in their lives by the state? Or was it because the remoteness of their camp from the settlement made it still difficult for the outsiders to access the region or impose their influences on them in any radical way? Dugong Creek was a lot further out from Ramakrishnapuram, the last main settlement on the fringes of the Reserve on Little Andaman than all the estimates I had made on the basis of information collected from maps and administrators. As I watched the early ethnographic accounts of the Ongees come alive I could also feel the wary eyes of the Ongees looking upon me as an unwelcome outsider, resembling a bit perhaps the “sahibs” who had come to take their blood and hair samples many decades ago. I refer here to the Italian anthropologist Lidio Cipriani,

32   Vishvajit Pandya

who did a study on the Ongees in the 1950s (Cipriani, 1966) and set up a camp in Dugong Creek. It perhaps seemed to them that yet another intruder from the outside world had suddenly come to them. Many children and some younger women had never seen an outsider. Some appeared to be fascinated by my “large presence” and the enormous backpack I carried. The children seemed to be more at ease and some among them took a closer look at the backpack, particularly fascinated by the velcro straps that held the pockets closed. They enjoyed the new experience of peeling off the strap and sticking it on all over again. For others, the hair on my head and face were intriguing, as a physical trait Ongees rarely have body or facial hair. Some even ventured to run their fingers through it. I gave this “presentation of self ” as a gesture of surrender in the hope it would convince the Ongee to receive this outsider in their midst. For them I was an “Enen”, an outsider, much larger than them, lighter in skin tone, and long haired like their spirits. The word enen in fact has a double meaning, both “outsider” and “spirit”. The collected group surrounded me for inspection as Teelai and Totanagey gave a dramatic and prolonged account of my walk through the forest, mimicking how I dragged myself, breathing noisily, stumbling several times, and constantly asking them when we would reach Dugong Creek or how far there was to go. All the Ongees kept laughing and asked the old man Teelai to repeat the act again and again. I realized how my discomfiture turned out to be a source of unending mirth for the Ongees. Totanagey would later tell me that he along with Teelai had worked

FIGURE 1.1 

October 1983, first day on reaching Dugong Creek.

Learning fields   33

a plan to make me walk around and around the forest in order to tire me out so that I would give up the idea of living with them for several days. He said that he believed then that I was like most officials from the Andaman and Nicobar administration, who would visit them very briefly, do their study or survey, ask them if they required any provisions, and then quickly move out of the forest. Rarely did anyone wish to come and spend a long period of time with them. It clearly suited them well. When they were told that this time they would be visited by someone who would spend weeks and months with them, they were completely taken aback. He told me that their concerns deepened when they observed my awkward walk through the forest and heard that I wouldn’t be able to cut up a pig or dig up potatoes! Totanagey continued, “We wanted to know if you could really be with us and would learn our ways and not just see and go away.” I was touched by Totanagey’s candour and, despite the humiliation of being the object of jokes in the camp on my very first day, I suddenly felt that I would be accepted within the community. I let go of any desire to express my irritation or even anger at being duped into an ordeal I could have avoided. My perseverance throughout the day’s ordeal was rewarded. I now was able to look forward to fifteen months with the community during which I could learn from them not just about their “culture”, but their basic modes of survival. I knew this was going to be difficult given the fact I had to learn to navigate the forest and participate in hunting gathering activities, challenges compounded by my inability to speak the language. I would have to rely on the methodological tools of field linguistics. Teelai, a respected elder, instructed the community to treat me like a child, but an older one. I would be entrusted with responsibility. I was told that I would have to look after the young Ongees who couldn’t accompany their parents on their daily hunting and gathering trips. I was not only surprised, but also deeply grateful. This baby-­sitting role was not only an honour but, practically speaking, an excellent opportunity for participant observation among the Ongees (see Pandya, 1991). After about six or seven months of becoming connected to the community through my interactions with the Ongee children, I gradually learned to cut up a hunted boar, locate edible tubers, and walk through the forest without tripping. Early in 1985, I left my field of learning to return to the university and transform the ethnographic scribbles I had made in my pocket notebook into fully fledged field notes, which I eventually compiled together in what would become my thesis and then a book (Pandya, 1993). By the time the book was published I received news that Teelai had passed away. I could never forget how he and Totanagey had taught me to be patient, to observe, and to learn. I would also come to realize the value of what one learns from the field does not diminish even after you’ve left it. My thoughts turned back to Dugong Creek in January 2005 as the devastating impact of the earthquake and tsunami that hit the coasts of South and Southeast Asia came across the news. Massive destruction was reported for the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, including significant geomorphological changes, large-­scale

34   Vishvajit Pandya

destruction of property, erosion of vast swathes of the coastline, and entire habitats and communities swept away. A friend of mine from the US called me while I was watching reports of the tsunami on BBC television and tried to prepare me for what looked like at that moment to be a real possibility. He warned me that I might have to be ready to “get re-­trained as marine archaeologist or anthropologist as my ‘field’ may have disappeared into the seas!” I was, of course, furious at the suggestion and at the fact that a disaster such as this could generate humour. But I also felt a chill down my spine when I wondered if at all and how indeed a small group of ninety-­eight Ongee men, women, and children could have survived. The bits of news that came from the Island were horrific. Several non-­tribal settlers in Little Andaman had just been swept away by nearly twenty feet high waves that lashed on its coasts that morning. After a week of little news from the Islands since the waves struck Dugong Creek in the wee hours of Boxing Day, I finally received some encouraging reports. The local administration indicated in all probability all the Ongees were safe. It was reported they had moved away from their camps at the shoreline and taken shelter on higher ground. I felt an enormous sense of relief. Part anxiety and part affection for Totanagey and his community compelled me to visit Dugong Creek a couple of weeks later. I thought of the children and hoped and prayed they were with their parents. I recalled my times as baby-­sitter in the forest and wonderful moments I spent with the children while their parents were away. In the course of a few weeks I had become their eneyobey (teacher), but they had also become mine. I held on to these thoughts as I prepared for the journey back to Dugong Creek, now reportedly damaged and vulnerable. The tsunami had destroyed many of the creeks in the forest and brackish water rushed into the forest floors. Much of the humus on the forest floor had turned into sludge. On reaching the hilly area about seven kilometres away from the old Dugong Creek settlement I found the Ongees huddled together under a blue plastic covered camp waiting for relief supplies. Totanagey rushed out to greet me and I asked him if anybody was killed when “their land became water”. Totanagey smiled wanly and reiterated what Teelai had told me on my first visit to the field, “walk with your eyes on the ground and you will know what your next step will yield. Don’t be like a tree!” Unlike the enen (outsiders), Totanagey and a few others had observed something unusual after the earthquake. While walking along the coast they saw that the water had suddenly receded way beyond the distance that marked the waterline at low tide a few minutes after the ground shook. He said they knew that the sea had gone that far only to return and with full fury take over the land that had shaken and pushed it away. They decided then to get together and move deeper into the forest to higher ground! He told me that was how they “all are safe and alive!” (see Pandya, 2005). The practice of walking and observing the tide and water levels every day had formed an observed knowledge baseline for the Ongees (Figure 1.2). They knew the pattern well and therefore how to interpret the anomaly.

Learning fields   35

FIGURE 1.2 

January 2005, Ongee camp set up after the tsunami of December 2004.

Concluding remarks My brief conversation with Totanagey once again reminded me that my fieldwork among the Ongees that began with a long walk through the forest had never ended. Each time I revisited Dugong Creek I took with me the teachings from my first fieldwork. Fieldwork in that sense has no start and no end. I also realized there could be no “one” method for doing fieldwork, as each time one enters the field it throws new questions that demand new methods, much like each step an Ongee takes in the forest reveals a new turn and a new possibility. It is this capacity to endlessly reflect back on the field whether one is present or absent from it that imparts the excitement of doing anthropology. In the end, is not the method of doing ethnography that remains a secret, for we are open to share it with others, but the experiences of discovering that method that remain with us as “secrets” that are hard to express through words.

Questions for reflection 1 2

What would your “participation” be, and what would be “observed”? How would you explain the fieldwork you’re doing to those you are working with?

Note 1 Totanagey was connected with the government’s medical department at Ramakrishnapuram (about twenty kilometres from Dugong Creek.) He would bring patients from the forest or take basic first aid supplies into the forest. This mediating role of his made him fairly knowledgeable about spoken Hindi at the outskirts of the forest.

36   Vishvajit Pandya

References Cipriani, L. (1966) The Andaman Islanders. New York, Weidenfeld & Nicholson. Malinowski, B. (1922) Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd. Malinowski, B. (1935) Coral Gardens and Their Magic. London, Allen & Unwin. Man, E.H. (1882 [1932]) On the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Andaman Islands. London, Royal Anthropological Institute Publication. Pandya, V. (1991) Gukwelonone: The game of hiding fathers and seeking sons. In: Hewlett, B. (ed.) The Father–Child Relationship: Developmental, Symbolic, and Evolutionary Perspectives. New York, de Gruyter, pp. 263–279. Pandya, V. (1993) Above the Forest: A Study of Andamanese Ethnoanemology, Cosmology and the Power of Ritual. New Delhi, Oxford University Press. Pandya, V. (2005) When land became water: Tsunami and the Ongees of Little Andaman Islands. Anthropology Newsletter. 46 (3), pp. 12–13. Portman, M.V. (1899) A History of Our Relations with Andamanese. Calcutta, Superintendent of Government Printing Press. Radcliffe-­Brown, A. (1922 [1964]) The Andaman Islanders. Chicago, IL, Free Press. Urry, J. (1996) Malinowski’s tent. Anthropology Today. 12 (5), p. 20. Van Gennep, A. (1960) The Rites of Passage. Chicago, IL, University Chicago Press.

2 Stumbling Around the Sacred Some personal observations Benjamin Grant Purzycki

Introduction One who studies religion must anticipate and learn to accept a few minor occupational hazards. For starters, you have to come to terms with the fact that everyone else is already an expert in what you do. Everyone has an opinion, some story, some experience, or some insight into the sacred. In the field, this remains true for just about everyone except for the laity whom you wish to understand a bit better. While interviewees regularly offer more shrugs than data, everyone else is an endless font of insight and wisdom. Moreover, if you study anything remotely resembling “shamanism” then you’re signing yourself up for getting branded as an expert in it even if you deny that you study it. You also might get the distinct pleasure of bumping into people from Western countries who claim they are shamans. Finally, you might have to grapple with the pressure to show more respect to the sacred than most devout traditional religious people ever would. In what follows, I detail some examples of the aforementioned hazards in hopes of demonstrating that they make this bizarre line of work wonderful, fascinating, and often quite funny, at least in hindsight.

Why I might study religion There’s something about us – as a species – that seems to compel us to do all sorts of bizarre things in the hopes that some ethereal agent out there cares and does something about it. There are also innumerable debates and empirical projects seeking to unravel what it is about us that fosters commitment to gods (e.g. Bulbulia, 2008; Frey, 2010; Voland and Schiefenhövel, 2009; Watts and Turner, 2014). Neurological and cognitive approaches focus on the mental architecture making religious concepts possible but focus too little on content and behaviour.

38   Benjamin Grant Purzycki

Many ecological approaches also minimize content, but make up for it in that they measure benefits that contribute to human sociality and reproduction. And, while cultural approaches might focus on the content of beliefs and rituals, they often lack the kind of methodological and analytical rigour that affords comparative and replicable assessments. What attracted me to anthropology was that its holism appealed to my lack of attention span; I could try to do it all. With so many layers, causal webs, perspectives, and timescales to consider, it’s easy to get lost. And being lost is never dull. Personally, I find religion to be one of the weirdest things that people do. Since I was a child, I’ve wondered: why bother? For me, the only exciting thing about going to church was pretending lightning was coming down through the ceiling during transubstantiation. That got boring fairly quickly. The rest was an utter chore that made no sense. My parents were sensible enough to let me stop going when I told them as much. Now, I vacillate between stubborn agnosticism and militant atheism. The former rears its noncommittal head when I have to remind myself that I know very little, and, most of the time, I barely understand what people are referring to when they ask if I believe in something. Is there a god? I don’t know, I guess it depends on what you mean. The latter is especially frothy when I read yet another abhorrent thing people do in the name of religion. They’re trying to remove scientific education again? What lunatics! Like many social systems, religion is rife with interesting conundrums: it’s universal but variable and it seems both inherently conservative and flexible. But religion also has some unique Gordian knots worth chopping. For instance, religious postulates are wildly improbable but their associated behaviours’ effects seem remarkably practical. And, people fluctuate between holding the sacred in ultimate esteem and being fairly lackadaisical towards it, or even institutionalize disrupting its activities. Moreover, it is clearly a phenomenon best assessed with attention to both our biological and social endowments. Professionally, these make the challenge of understanding religious systems quite fun. Despite flirting with studying topics like chimpanzee cognition, humour, indigenous law, human rights, and philosophy of mind, I could never shake studying religion. At this point in my education, I can’t even deny that I might have some genetic attraction to it. Professionally, I focus on two nagging things about religion: (1) around the world, aspects of religious beliefs and practices seem to mediate human interactions with the natural and social worlds, (2) religion functions like an adaptive technology rather than being some cognitive glitch or merely an artefact of history. These possibilities inspired me to wrestle the beast of religion. My utter lack of faith in the quality of human inference-­making (especially my own) motivated me to be a social scientist who collects and analyses data.

Luck, fast and dumb For the first couple of years of my PhD programme at the University of Connec­ticut, I hemmed and hawed about where to do fieldwork. I considered doing some work

Stumbling around the sacred   39

in South America until a fellow graduate student lamented how difficult it was to get rid of her parasitic worms. I bombed that section of undergraduate zoology due to an acute case of revulsion. I had early aspirations to work in Indian Country but was never too aggressive about it and the politics involved in working there seemed insurmountable. But my field site would soon present itself. I’m a serial obsessive, but one constant is my love of music and the general manipulation of sound. I had heard David Hykes and The Harmonic Choir years before, a choir well known for its production of overtones, high frequencies that emerge out of normal vocal tones. One day late autumn, out of a need for a distraction, I got the urge to learn how this remarkable feat was physically possible, so I did a web search on “physics + overtone singing”. I quickly found three things that inspired another obsession: (1) an article that actually addressed the physics of overtone singing (Levin and Edgerton, 1999), (2) a video of an otherworldly example of “Tuvan throat-­singing”,1 and (3) the story of physicist Richard Feynman and his editor Ralph Leighton’s attempts to reach Tuva (Leighton, 1991). I vowed to figure out this strange phenomenon myself. For me, it was just another exciting thing to learn about. During that time, I lived in New Haven and commuted to Storrs, carpooling with two lovely humans who were in the same department. We had a fun, jocular relationship, and we regularly discussed our latest interests. Armed with my latest obsession, on one winter commute I regaled them with all I was learning about overtone singing and revealed it was my plan over winter break to learn how to do it. They encouraged me in typical big-­brotherly (i.e. playful and patronizing) fashion. I practised whenever I commuted alone and over break whenever I was home alone (because I love my wife). Soon after, I could belt out a few notes. This was good enough for me; I was more interested in learning how it worked than in perfecting the art. The first day back from break, my two carpool companions and I got into the car. One, in his inimitable style said: “So, Ben. How’s the throat-­singing coming along?” I said, “I can do a little.” What I hadn’t anticipated was doing it towards a windshield in a full car effectively harnesses the overtone back into your face. I think we were all a little surprised (for different reasons, perhaps); they immediately said “You should do your fieldwork in Tuva! They’d get a kick out of that!” My immediate response was: “Well, I don’t study music, and I guess that’s what they’re known for.” But I looked further and quickly realized it was ideal for a lot of what I’ve been interested in: a post-­Soviet colony with an ethnic majority undergoing a cultural renaissance. And it’s the only polity on earth with “shamanism” as an official religion. And they have weird music. And they have revitalized their language. It was a no-­brainer! I quickly collected everything I could on the region and committed to try to get there. I started tracking down researchers who worked in the area and received supremely helpful emails. I contacted a Tuvan ethnomusicologist to enquire about working there, who extended a very enthusiastic invitation to the Republic. It was on. Soon after, I ploughed into my adviser Rich Sosis’ office and said: “I think I’d

40   Benjamin Grant Purzycki

like to go to Tuva.” In reference to Feynman and Leighton’s adventure, he said “Cool! Tuva or Bust! Don’t forget about that grant application.” There was a call for grant applications for Oxford University’s “Cognition, Religion and Theology Project” organized by Justin Barrett, a leader in the field of the cognitive science of religion. I hadn’t originally intended on applying for a few really bad reasons: (1) I’m nobody, (2) I would have to figure out a budget, and (3) the deadline was fast approaching. Because he was an excellent adviser, Rich responded (I’m liberally paraphrasing): (1) true, but that’s a terrible reason not to apply, (2) that’s life, and (3) then you’d better get to it. So, despite being a nobody with more excuses than time, I drafted a proposal and we went through a few drafts together, managing to submit it by the deadline. A few days later while on campus, I found out that this nobody with too little time was awarded full funding to pursue a dream concocted just a few months prior. The grant wound up paying for four field trips that would firmly plant me on the path I now find myself. When I got home that day, I excitedly told my wife: “Sweetheart, we’re going to Tuva!” She replied: “What’s that?”

Studying the sacred What does a key informant unlock? Again, part of my attraction to Tuva was it was clearly in the midst of a cultural renaissance; with the Soviet system largely behind them, they were making their marks on the global music scene with throat-­singing (Levin, 2006), they were publishing books in the Tuvan language, and virtually half the population consisted of reindeer, camel, or horse-­riding herders, and they were Buddhist-­animistshamanists free to express their traditions. It’s really inspiring that a broke, post-­Soviet region has not only maintained its traditions, but proudly harnessed and adapted them. One example of this expression is the Tuvan music scene, full of festivals and events that are perfect for getting a lot of people from all over the republic to answer all sorts of inane questions about spirits. At one of these festivals, I was introduced to an individual through a mutual acquaintance whom I trusted completely, but I had already heard of her reputation as a top-­notch, experienced, on-­the-spot translator. After discussing my focal questions, we began our trial run of interviews. She was remarkably adept in grabbing people when I would have just shuffled around, red-­in-cheek; recruitment was effortless and random. Despite this major asset, I quickly realized that these adjectives also adequately summarized her editorializing during the interview process. I’m not sure how ubiquitous it is, but I’ve noticed a kind of modesty when engaging with traditional people while in Talking about Sacred Things Mode. In this mode, some folks end sentences with a ritualized “They say” or “So it is said.” Tuvans also often did this. This strikes me as an institutionalized form of demonstrating the suspension of one’s ideological commitment to things. Whether or not

Stumbling around the sacred   41

it functions that way generally is another question. There’s something rather modest, though, about acknowledging that a big part of one’s belief system is trans-­generational gossip. Charles Eastman (Santee Dakota) characterizes the American Indian traditions as “a mingling of history, poetry, and prophecy, of precept and folk-­lore” (1980). In Tuva, I would regularly ask people if they believed the spirits are out there. A very common reply was a shrug, with an appeal to the ancestors’ practices; that’s what our ancestors said and did, so that’s what we do. In contrast, this translator’s style immediately struck me as noteworthy; this is someone who wants what she says to be taken as representative. “The spirits don’t care about litter”, she would say, “that is what we believe.” During our practice run with the interview, she made many sweeping statements about “Tuvans believe X” and “we do Y”. This wasn’t uncommon there, but it was curious to me just how confidently she expressed these views: “The spirits never harm, hurt, or punish people, they only protect them.” In my experience out of the field, it is prudent to proceed with caution when someone claims or signals that their view is the view, especially if you value your own independence of thought. One of my areas of interest is the role gods play in our moral behaviour. Not all gods are purported to care about morality. The cultural anthropologist in me asks: How can religion contribute to treating other people nicely if a god doesn’t care about it (Purzycki, 2010)? The cognitive scientist in me often responds: Why does it matter? If a god is thought of using the same mental systems used for making sense of humans, they probably trigger moral cognition anyway (Purzycki et al., 2012). The evolutionary ecologist in me asks: Why does that even matter? What matters is behaviour and how that translates into mutualistic relationships (Purzycki and Arakchaa, 2013). The point of conveying all of this is that I was asking about people’s specific beliefs, while trying not to prime them with concerns of morality. During our interviews, my translator would start by asking participants: What do the spirits care about? What pleases them? What angers them? This was perfect until – during interviewees’ throat-­clearing – she would interrupt with what became the inevitable and immediate follow-­up: They don’t care about how we treat each other right? They’re not like Jesus Christ who cares about being good and bad, right? They don’t care about litter and stuff like that, right? If it weren’t made clear enough in my training, this hit an important point home for me: the reason why we use reproducible methods is precisely because relying on ourselves and a handful of “expert” informants is woefully inadequate for many of the questions in which we’re interested. While I knew I would ultimately employ more systematic data collection methods, the problems with relying on “key informants” (see Bernard, 2011: pp. 150–152) were only crystallized. Later I collected and analysed ethnographic data that systematically asked participants to list what pleased and angered the spirits (Purzycki, 2016). The most salient thing that my sample claimed angered the spirits? Littering. Do spirits punish? Yes. Are Tuvans more inclined than not to claim that these spirits know and care about how

42   Benjamin Grant Purzycki

we treat each other? Yes (Purzycki, 2013). If we go by the assumption that cultural consensus is cultural “truth” (Batchelder and Anders, 2012), my translator was simply wrong. In my view, her confidence made her error all the weightier, particularly when it came to adding her own confounding flourishes to the open-­ ended qualitative interviews. While this authoritative confidence needed tempering in the interview process, she was unquestionably helpful in recruitment. Without her, I would have conducted far, far fewer interviews, made fewer connections, and not been able to appreciate the region nearly as much as I did. Confident, gregarious people can be wonderful recruiters as they are relatively less reluctant to engage with others, and not sheepish about taking others’ time. Indeed, they enjoy it! I suspect, however, that if they are to pursue science, a necessary regime of training, training, and once again training is absolutely necessary to temper such inveterate auto-­insertion and self-­promotion. As in most contexts, the loudest and most loquacious speak first, often, and last. How else are they to sell their wares?

On qualifications and authenticity On my most recent trip, I was at the Üstüü Xüree festival, an international music festival in Tuva organized to raise funds to rebuild the Buddhist temple that the Soviets destroyed. Given Tuva’s association with shamanism and polyphonic throat-­singing, it attracts seekers of all sorts, many of whom are all too quick to signal their oneness with the cosmos and/or seek out a shaman to give them a certificate of authenticity proclaiming they, too, are shamans. On one day, right in the centre of the camp, stood a white man with red dreadlocks, arms outstretched, apparently praising the magnificence of a beautiful double-­rainbow. He stood for a very, very long time, completely taken by this moment. Of course, since he was standing in the centre of the circular area (which didn’t actually afford him the best view of the spectacle), anyone near the centre had to see him in all of his worshipping glory. I was waiting for the moment when his outstretched arms gave when a Tuvan friend of mine – a fairly devout Buddhist and shamanist – snuck up behind me. I knew he was at the festival, but we weren’t camping together. He leaned in close to my ear and whispered, “Someone should tell that guy that rainbows are only sunlight shining through the water in the air.” Years ago, there was a concerted effort among scholars of American Indian issues to expose “white shamans” for what they were: culturally misappropriating frauds who charged fees for their shamanic wisdom (e.g. Churchill, 1996; Hobson, 2002; Rose, 1992). As an undergraduate, I read some of these works, and they successfully cultivated a sense of indignation in me. This kind of thing still bothers me, but now that I’ve had to dip my toes into the murky waters of the New Age movement while plunging into studying a traditional religion first­hand, I recognize that it’s complicated. When I was an undergraduate, this kind of fakery bothered me because it was deceitful and predated upon people who

Stumbling around the sacred   43

clearly felt they needed something by exploiting an already vulnerable population. As I got older, I could appreciate a shaman’s perspective a little more; I imagine it might be a little frustrating to have spent your entire life studying something and working hard to live up to the expectations of that position only to have outsiders turn up feeling entitled to the same credentials without having done the requisite homework. But more recently, and from the perspective of someone just trying to make sense of how people deal with the divine, I appreciate such outsiders are often just doing their awkward best to get closer to it than I’m willing to. In an early excursion out of Kyzyl, the capital city of Tuva, I shared a van with some other foreigners on their way to a throat-­singing festival. We were hosted by a bigwig at the Ministry of Culture who went with us along with her driver. I sat in the passenger seat in the front next to the driver. He and I hit it off immediately and I learned a great deal of Tuvan from him. In addition to my wife and some Japanese and Russian throat-­singing enthusiasts, there were two Europeans – a man and a woman – who were on a “shamanic journey”. The man seemed to be the typical guru type; predatory but insecure, long bleached hair with skin tanned to a strange plum purple. The woman might have been under his tutelage, but I’m not entirely sure. When they weren’t complaining, they picked on the way people ate, they criticized “fake” shamans, talked endlessly about the “shaman’s way”, and were remarkably unconcerned with anyone or anything other than their quest. Throughout the landscape of Inner Asia, many sacred places are marked with cairns and/or Buddhist stupas that are clear and present targets of devotional practices. These appear along roads as well. Initially on this trip, we stopped at these sites only occasionally. This was great, we were all getting a sense of the place, experiencing how the two Tuvans in our caravan worshipped, and taking welcome breaks on the side of mountains. Eventually, however, the two “shamans” started demanding we stop at every one, which meant stopping about every thirty minutes on a trip that would have taken about three or four hours normally. This sullied the experience mostly because they would perform some small ceremony or proceed to take a walk or scale a small hill while the rest of us would wait for them. And to top it all off they would engage in their version of throat-­singing which was considerably screamier than what I was used to hearing. Largely due to these breaks, we arrived hours after the sun went down. We were then shuffled into the community centre’s main room and sat down at the table reserved for guests of honour. I’m generally allergic to being in the spotlight, so at this point I was red in the face, speechless, and a bit overwhelmed. Eventually, there were speeches and we all participated. When the European shamans got up to the microphone, they told the village in all sincerity that they came to Tuva to have a “shamanic journey”. Upon hearing this, the translator turned to me and asked me what that was! I shrugged. They continued for a while until – glory be to all that is sacred and holy in the universe – the woman performed an ear-­splitting ritual performance. People looked at each other awkwardly. Some winced. It lasted a very long time.

44   Benjamin Grant Purzycki

I learned later in that trip that for the rest of their time in Tuva, these two shopped around until they finally found someone to give them a certificate authenticating their status as shamans. While writing this chapter, I looked them up online. The woman pitches herself as a shamaness – “the voice of shamanism” in her home country in fact. The man does much of the same, though with a more diverse repertoire of traditions to sell. They both sell CDs, conduct seminars and workshops, even ones about healing sexual issues! Hearing her voice while suffering from a sexual dysfunction is probably a bit like rubbing your arthritis in nettles; you stop worrying about the original source of suffering by focusing on the novel, burrowing pain. And, the shamaness’ website notes that she has a “shamanic work permit from Russia”! To think that I was in Tuva when she earned it! To put this into perspective, you can get a certificate for just about anything there. A friend of mine purchased his “computer programming” credentials directly from the person who prints official certificates. At the time, this friend could barely navigate email. For the throat-­singing festival during which I met these shamans, my wife and I both earned diplomas (see Figure 2.1) for “active participation” even though we did nothing for it other than pay a fee (and I spent the entire time interviewing people outside while she listened to throat-­singing at all levels of professional investment). Upon seeing my diploma, a friend of mine smiled and remarked that “Russia likes its paper”. They’re not the only ones.

Relax, it’s only sacred Being a non-­religious and scientific cultural anthropologist who studies religion has its pressures. In anthropology, we learn/teach the virtues of cultural relativism: “Don’t judge, understand.” Because I study religion, I often felt that I had to be extra careful about making sure I wasn’t saying and doing the wrong things around participants. My strategy now is to do my best not to be disrespectful behaviourally while internally remaining completely bewildered by the fact anyone is actually entertaining the possibility spirits and gods are out there. In some cases, this means I take the sacred way too seriously. I mean, it’s the sacred. Rappaport (1999) holds the “essence of the sacred … is unquestionableness” (p. 344). However, in many of the world’s traditions, humour is an integral part of religion. Ritual clowns disrupted ceremonies, “fomented anxiety, denial, distortion, and avoidance in their onlookers. They personified disorder, deviancy, contrariness, and unpredictability” (Lewis, 1990: p. 141). Cross-­culturally, mythological tricksters and fools are often held to have been responsible for language, fire, and important rituals that make humans what they are (Hyde, 1998). In many articulations of indigenous traditions, then, the sacred is a domain of crea­tivity, disruption, and change. The sacred isn’t unquestionable, it’s the source – and target – of novelty. While Tuvans don’t have such tricksters in their pantheon, there were many moments I had there that suggested to me they might consider getting one.

Stumbling around the sacred   45

FIGURE 2.1 

 iploma of (active participation in) throat-singing (competition). Image proD vided by the author, who did nothing to earn it. Notice the bald eagle, a species with a range limited to North America.

Shamans are people too The curious thing about the study of shamanism is it almost always focuses on shamans in their roles as shamans. Similarly, religious studies scholars study religious leaders and texts. It’s curious because what makes any social system possible is much, much more than the titular figureheads. Spiro et al. (1987) remarked “it is certainly a strange spectacle when anthropologists, of all people, confuse the

46   Benjamin Grant Purzycki

teachings of a philosophical school with the beliefs and behaviour of a religious community” (p. 194). Contemporary cognitive scientists of religion characterize this discrepancy as “theological incorrectness” (Barrett, 1999; Slone, 2004). But the same goes for any leaders in religious “schools” or traditions; they’re probably leaders because they have something that separates them from the laity. As such, we should also not confuse the thoughts and dispositions of organizations’ leadership with the organization itself. While I met enough of them for a minimal sample size for succinct study, I only interviewed a few shamans – two in any real depth. I have attended quite a few ceremonies, but my focus was always on the laity’s reception, knowledge, and inferences about their traditions. I quickly learned, though, that shamans clearly drew from a vast repository of information that qualified them as “specialists”. The laity didn’t specialize in this fashion, despite hearing myths and stories. In other words, the universe from which shamans drew their inspiration was rich, remarkably well-­defined, and beyond the immediate grasp of the laity. In fact, the gulf seems so wide it’s amazing to me a tradition like shamanism – and its academic study – is so often pitched as contingent on these figures while completely ignoring their clients. One shaman mapped out her take on the shamanic worldview for me, including a great discussion of its interconnected realms and many beings. One of these was

FIGURE 2.2 

 hamanic order patiently waiting for member (left) to adjust headdress. Photo S taken by author in Kyzyl, Tyva Republic.

Stumbling around the sacred   47

“Kurbustu-­Khan”, the governor of the Upper World. While writing my dissertation, I learned that this term is derived from the Manichaen “Hormusta” (or Persian Ahura Mazdā), introduced to the region during the Uighur Empire lasting between ce 744 and 840 (Foltz, 2010; Heissig, 1980; Le Bosquet, 1912; Zhou, 2001). There’s something remarkable and wonderful about a shaman in southern Siberia introducing you to an otherwise unremarkable term only to later find out it’s tied to the proto-­Christian wisdom tradition of Persia introduced to the region around 1,500 years ago. Curiously, in one study (Purzycki and Holland, in press), I found that out of a sample of twenty-­six Tuvans who listed all the deities and spirits they could think of, only one listed this deity, despite him being the top dog in the Upper World hierarchy. Compare this to the Buddhist lama–laity dynamic. Most Tuvans consider themselves Buddhist, but the Buddha is typically thought of as a god who punishes people for immoral behaviour. I asked a monk just how prevalent this belief was and he replied nearly everyone in the republic believed this. He characterized it as a form of “spiritual illiteracy”. Considering people refer to monks as teachers there, my assistant at the time asked him whether or not monks try to correct it, and his reply was that monks didn’t see it as their responsibility to accurately convey the doctrine! We also never really hear about the backstage goings-­on of sacred theatre. While popular perception insists that monks are supremely graceful, enlightened beings who have some deeper insight into reality than we normal people do, like most humans, they have their crutches too. I was part of a ceremony sanctifying a bit of land in the taiga. Hours later, the presiding monk and I were sitting on the side of a hill and he asked if I wanted any snuff. Do I? I thought. I held out my hand and he poured out a little pile. I snorted it happily, relishing the moment of snorting powdered tobacco on the side of a southern Siberian mountain with a Buddhist monk. After his dose, he explained to me it helps sharpen your thinking. I replied I completely understood, and pulled out a packet of cigarettes. I offered him one and with a surprised look, he declined: “Lamas don’t smoke.” As for shamans, despite what their public personas (and scholarly portraits) would suggest, no amount of magic can free a shaman from a stuck zipper. Once, I was waiting for a friend in the capital city of Kyzyl in a back-­alley lot. As I was sitting outside waiting for him, a group of people came out of the building next door with a few chairs and bundles. As they unwrapped the bundles, it became clear that they were a shamanic order getting ready for a ceremony. I continued to smoke, listening to their bickering and banter. One was especially punctilious about his headdress, adjusting it for maximal comfort (Figure 2.2) while the rest were laughing and teasing each other. Another episode happened during a friend’s family’s annual sanctification ritual out in the woods. This was an all-­day affair, and I was supremely humbled and honoured to be there. I initially felt a little out of place, but the family welcomed me with the kind of hospitality that Tuvans pride themselves on. During the height of the ceremony, we were sitting solemnly around the altar. Some folks had

48   Benjamin Grant Purzycki

their hands together, heads bowed, and the only thing we could hear was the shaman’s drum and her calls to the spirits. The scent of burning juniper filled the air and the entire affair was intoxicating and relaxing. Part of some shamans’ accoutrements are horsewhips. Near the end of ceremonies while everyone is in the midst of a trance-­like state induced by the steady rhythm of the drum, shamans will lightly whip each individual on the back, startling them out of their trance. As I was early in the rotation, I got to watch everyone else get whipped back into the ceremony. Soon, the shaman approached a child, who was remarkably relaxed and quiet for the entirety of the ceremony. The shaman lightly tapped him with the whip. The shocked little guy looked around at everyone with a face that conveyed What the hell did I do? after which he proceeded to cry with righteous indignation. We all doubled-­over in laughter. When the shaman finished up, she looked at me with a twinkle in her eye and whispered “That sure was fun.”

My rebirth With some newfound friends, my wife and I had ascended an especially sacred mountain in central Tuva during my first trip there (see Figure 2.3). One of them was quite proficient in English, and we were getting a sense of how feasible a long-­term working relationship would be. She repeatedly referred to the mountain

FIGURE 2.3 

 iew from Holey Mountain cave entrance. Photo taken by author in central V Tyva Republic prior to getting stuck.

Stumbling around the sacred   49

we were climbing as a “holy mountain”, and I would try to speak Tuvan. I kept referring to it as a “sacred mountain” (ydyktyg khaya) in Tuvan while asking questions, and she politely answered them until eventually, she said: “You keep calling this ydyktyg khaya, but I said it was holy.” Confusion. I replied in English: “Well, in English, there’s not really that much of a difference between ‘sacred’ and ‘holy.’ Is there in Tuvan?” She replied: “No, in Tuvan it’s called üttüg khaya, a holey mountain … as in, a mountain with holes.” There was a cave through one of the peaks. In fact, I was the only one in our group who had completely missed that going through this hole was the entire purpose of climbing the mountain. Before I could embarrass myself further – she must have seen some follow-­up questions on the tip of my tongue – she noted we were almost to the cave. The cave itself was remarkable. People had wedged wishes written on paper into its walls, and the floor of the tunnel had dolls, toy houses and horses, passport covers, among other things symbolic of the desires that motivated others’ pilgrimages. In the wall of the cave (one hole), there was small passage (another hole) about three feet above the floor. It twisted and turned a little, but if you successfully climb through this passage, Tuvans say, you are a good person and you get your wish. I said: “There’s no way I can get through there.” My wife quickly went ahead and climbed through without a problem. She goaded me into trying, so I did. It wasn’t the most comfortable thing I’ve ever done, but it was manageable. Imagine pulling yourself out of a rock orifice trying to plant yourself – head first – on to a scree path about a foot-­wide hanging over the side of a southern Siberian mountain. It was manageable until I was almost out and my shoe got wedged in between two rocks. I couldn’t pull my leg forward or reach down because one-­third of my body was in a stone orifice with the other two-­thirds hanging over the scree. I couldn’t slip my foot out of my boots partly because I couldn’t move my leg and partly because I was wearing boots designed to stay on my feet in all conditions. Shallow me thought “Oh shit, they’re all going to think I’m a bad person now.” Thankfully, my wife ran back around and pulled my foot out of the hole. I escaped, wondering about our friends’ verdict: “You’re a good person … with a little help from your wife.”2 After the foot-­stuck-in-­stone-trap incident, we went through the tunnel and there was an altar for the local spirits of the mountain. When you’re taking in the fact you’re on the top of a sacred mountain in southern Siberia, with a sweeping, majestic view of mountains, steppe, and taiga, paying respects to some bodiless agent seems so natural. Basking in being a part of such bigness, a vast and undulating system composed of meso- and micro-­systems composed of nanosystems is about as much of a religious experience as I’ve ever needed. There are no gods, no agency behind it all, and no real conversation to be had with them. Some moments are no less inspiring. Still, that sense of awe, for whatever reason, translates to a kind of respect that goes beyond friends and family; it extends to the grass, the birds, the stars, and the atmosphere. That was indeed a sacred place, and I didn’t need it explained to me that reverence and some form of observable appreciation was in order. We didn’t

50   Benjamin Grant Purzycki

have much with us, but we did have some dried apricots, so we put some on the altar for the local spirits of the mountain. Almost immediately, small eagles dived down, brushed us with their wings, grabbed the apricots, and disappeared around the other side of the mountain. It was the first time I’d ever witnessed a prayer of mine unquestionably and directly addressed by an external agent. My vocabulary and writing style simply cannot convey how beautiful this moment was. I was thrilled. “Was that the spirit of the mountain?” I asked, childlike in my wonderment. My friend looked at me straight in the eyes with a curious expression and said, “Uh, nope. That was a bird.”3

Conclusion Through a series of bumbling manoeuvres, I have managed to study the sacred professionally. In my field site, I learned to appreciate a far, far more relaxed view of it than I did when I arrived. After years training and studying in a climate of political correctness and the perpetual encouragement and training in cultural sensitivity, it’s not entirely surprising I would be so sheepish about talking about spirits and rituals with people trying to re-­establish their post-­Soviet identities. When I got to Tuva, my trepidation was met primarily with warmth, humour, and encouragement to do my work without worrying too much. Whenever I asked how my research could be of some use, people were happy to know that someone was documenting how people thought about their traditions. If anything, I worried too much and overshot just how careful I needed to be. I have to admit to feeling sheepish about, for instance, getting invited to a family’s ceremony and going around counting their offerings, measuring their BMI (body mass index), and assessing how this all might be related to social cohesion. Though, in hindsight, I’m pretty sure that it would have been just fine. If there are some lessons to be learned in all of this, I submit that they are more general than specifically applicable to navigating the sacred. One is that if you really want to make sense of anything – especially something as elusive as the sacred – confidence is the mating call of the foolish. In his contrast of those searching for the origins of humankind and those dismissive of the quest, Darwin (1871) observed that “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge” (p. 18). Similarly, commenting on the assuredness of Douglas MacArthur and Joseph Stalin, Bertrand Russell laments that “One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision” (1961: p. 694). Whether you’re a scientist or a committed believer, there is wisdom in these refrigerator magnet aphorisms. In a related sense, it is also a mistake to conflate the sacred – however construed – with the stern, strict, and serious. I certainly wasn’t the only one clumsily bouncing around religious terrain. I’d go so far as to say that it’s nothing if not rife with disorder and chaos. It can be quite welcoming and accepting too; the divine delightfully allows dilettantes and professionals alike to participate in the fumbling comedy that is Trying to Figure It Out. From know-­it-all cultural liaisons

Stumbling around the sacred   51

and know-­nothing anthropologists to the laity and shamans both ersatz and real, we’re all magnetized by the divine, its representation, and others who share our lunatic curiosity.

Acknowledgements In addition to helping free my feet, my wife Jessica McCutcheon deserves general thanks for accepting my long absences in the field and while I was in residence as a postdoc. Many thanks go to her for edits and suggestions on this chapter. All of my Tuvan assistants and friends deserve unending thanks as well for keeping my feet on the ground while in the field. The bulk of these experiences are drawn from memory, so some (many? most?) details are most certainly incorrect. I have also purposely altered or left out details for narrative purposes and to ensure that events and people – including myself – were not presented in nearly as silly a manner as they actually were.

Questions for reflection 1 2 3 4

In the field, the line between the personal and professional blurs. In practical terms, what does “respecting others’ traditions” actually mean? Is there a general model regarding its implementation? What are your views on cultural appropriation? Is it a problem that cultural anthropologists are uniquely poised to address? Should they? If so, why and how ought they? The author describes his own spiritual “rebirth” only to end it with a crude, earthly statement. What is the stylistic or rhetorical intent? In the conclusion, the author warns about excessive confidence. How does this warning relate to the chapter’s vignettes and the parties involved in them? How does it relate to convictions more generally in science, religion, and politics?

Notes 1 “Tuvan Throat Singing.” Available from: www.youtube.com/watch?v=DY1pcEtHI_w (Accessed 30 January 2018). 2 I’m proud to say that I’ve since gone through it on my own. But honesty compels me to note that there were rumours of a woman who – prior to my second visit – had to get surgically removed by widening the canal a bit. 3 Note that in telling this story years later to another group of Tuvans, one woman interrupted me before the punchline, and excitedly said “That was the spirit-­master of the mountain! What fortune!” I replied that I’d been told it was just a bird, to which she replied that the spirit was acting through the bird. Fair compromise.

References Barrett, J. (1999) Theological correctness: Cognitive constraint and the study of religion. Method Theory Study Religion. 11, pp. 325–339.

52   Benjamin Grant Purzycki

Batchelder, W.H. and Anders, R. (2012) Cultural consensus theory: Comparing different concepts of cultural truth. Journal of Mathematical Psychology. 56 (5), pp. 316–332.  Bernard, H.R. (2011) Research Methods in Anthropology. 5th edition. Lanham, MD, AltaMira Press. Bulbulia, J. (2008) The Evolution of Religion: Studies, Theories, & Critiques. 1st edition. Santa Margarita, CA, Collins Foundation Press. Churchill, W. (1996) From a Native Son: Selected Essays in Indigenism, 1985–1995. Cambridge, MA, South End Press. Darwin, C. (1871) The Descent of Man. Princeton, NJ, Penguin Classics. Eastman, C.A. (1980) The Soul of the Indian: An Interpretation. Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press. Foltz, D.R. (2010) Religions of the Silk Road: Premodern Patterns of Globalization. New York, Palgrave Macmillan. Frey, U. (ed.) (2010) The Nature of God: Evolution and Religion. Marburg, Tectum. Heissig, W. (1980) The Religions of Mongolia. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul. Hobson, G. (2002) The rise of the White Shaman: Twenty-­five years later. Studies in American Indian Literatures. 14 (2/3), pp. 1–11. Hyde, L. (1998) Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art. New York, North Point Press. Le Bosquet, J.E. (1912) The evil one: A development. Harvard Theological Review. 5, pp. 371–384. Leighton, R. (1991) Tuva or Bust: Richard Feynman’s Last Journey. New York, W.W. Norton & Co. Inc. Levin, T. (2006) Where Rivers and Mountains Sing: Sound, Music, and Nomadism in Tuva and Beyond. Bloomington, Indiana University Press. Levin, T.C. and Edgerton, M.E. (1999) The throat singers of Tuva. Scientific American. 281, pp. 80–88. Lewis, T.H. (1990) The Medicine Men: Oglala Sioux Ceremony and Healing. Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press. Purzycki, B.G. (2010) Spirit masters, ritual cairns, and the adaptive religious system in Tyva. Sibirica. 9, pp. 21–47.  Purzycki, B.G. (2013) The minds of gods: A comparative study of supernatural agency. Cognition. 129, pp. 163–179.  Purzycki, B.G. (2016) The evolution of gods’ minds in the Tyva Republic. Current Anthropology. 57, pp. S88–S104.  Purzycki, B.G. and Arakchaa, T. (2013) Ritual behavior and trust in the Tyva Republic. Current Anthropology. 54, pp. 381–388. Purzycki, B.G. and Holland, E.C. (in press) Buddha as a god: An empirical assessment. Method and Theory in the Study of Religion. Purzycki, B.G., Finkel, D.N., Shaver, J., Wales, N., Cohen, A.B., and Sosis, R. (2012) What does God know? Supernatural agents’ access to socially strategic and non-­strategic information. Cognitive Science. 36, pp. 846–869.  Rappaport, R.A. (1999) Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge, MA, Cambridge University Press. Rose, W. (1992) The great pretenders: Further reflections on white shamanism. In: Jaimes, M.A. (ed.) The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance. Boston, MA, South End Press, pp. 403–421. Russell, B. (1961) The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell. New York, Simon & Schuster. Slone, D.J. (2004) Theological Incorrectness: Why Religious People Believe What They Shouldn’t. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Stumbling around the sacred   53

Spiro, M.E., Kilborne, B., and Langness, L.L. (1987) Culture and Human Nature: Theoretical Papers of Melford E. Spiro. Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press. Voland, E. and Schiefenhövel, W. (eds) (2009) The Biological Evolution of Religious Mind and Behaviour. New York, Springer. Watts, F. and Turner, L.P. (2014) Evolution, Religion, and Cognitive Science: Critical and Constructive Essays. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Zhou, X. (2001) The transformations of Manichaeism under the Khocho Uyghurs. Journal of Central Asian Studies. 5, pp. 2–15.

3 From the Orinoco to Sorority Row Searching for a field site as an evolutionary anthropologist Nicole Hess

Evolutionary anthropologists are researchers who invoke evolutionary principles in developing and testing hypothesized relationships among biological, psychological, social, and ecological variables. Methods can include the collection of quantitative data through, for example, experiments, surveys, anthropometric and health measurements, social network analysis (SNA), genetic sequencing, or even mathematical modelling. Evolutionary anthropologists can also collect qualitative data using ethnographic and interviewing methods. The common denominators in evolutionary anthropology are studying humans and using evolutionary theory to develop testable hypotheses about them. An additional, highly desirable, feature of evolutionary anthropological research is that it be conducted among people who live under ecological conditions similar to those regularly encountered by humans in the ancestral past. The logic is, if the physical and behavioural adaptations possessed by humans evolved while ancestral humans lived as foragers in communities probably no bigger than 100 individuals, then these adaptations can best be elucidated by studies conducted among the few remaining small-­scale hunting and gathering populations that exist in the world today. As a graduate student in evolutionary anthropology the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), I had questions about the evolution of friendship and cooperation among human females – a topic that I felt had been overlooked by previous researchers in evolutionary anthropology and other evolutionary social sciences (e.g. the closely related field of evolutionary psychology). Evolution-­ minded researchers were convincingly arguing that cooperation in males was actually a form of competition – cooperative competition. In the struggle to reproduce, ancestral human males competed over mates. Because multiple, cooperating aggressors are more likely to win contests than individual aggressors, men who formed coalitions won more fights and mates, and their resulting offspring inherited

Searching for a field site   55

this inclination to form coalitions. Researchers thought this might account for why human males experience coalitional sentiments and engage in cooperatively competitive behaviours. This male-­oriented theory for the evolution of cooperation and coalitional psychology, to me, could not sufficiently explain the mental processes and behaviours underlying human female cooperative competition. Across small-­scale societies, preparation for and engagement in coalitional physical aggression (e.g. raids or warfare) are almost exclusively male activities.1 However, in my observation, women and girls, too, experience strong sentiments regarding their interactions and relationships with same-­sexed others, including close allies and clear rivals. Do the feelings, thoughts, and behaviours underlying female competition, cooperation, and friendship also have an evolutionary explanation? And, does female cooperation serve competitive or aggressive goals? A few evolutionary researchers had already proposed that female humans form bonds with one another towards benign ends. For example, the often-­cited “Tend-­and-Befriend” account of human female bonds (Taylor et al., 2000) suggests that women and girls cooperate in mutual care and nurturance, and that friendships are an extension of maternal care, which has obvious deep evolutionary roots for all mammals. Another evolutionary account of female cooperation argued that close bonds might function to protect females from male aggression. These accounts gelled well with an assumption that social scientists had been making for at least a century: whereas males are aggressive, females are nice, and use aggression defensively if at all. The assumption in the social sciences of the aggressive male and the nurturing female persisted until the 1970s, when social scientists began to recognize patterns of another kind of aggression displayed by children. This suite of behaviours appeared to be aimed at harming others, but did not involve the use of physical aggression to inflict bodily damage, such as hitting and pushing. Gossip, ostracism, criticism, dirty looks, and giving the silent treatment are examples of these nonphysical forms of aggression. Three constructs encompassing these behaviours include indirect aggression, relational aggression, and social aggression (reviewed in Hess and Hagen, 2019). Most studies on these forms of nonphysical aggression have focused on children in Western school contexts. Based on reviews of the literature, including meta-­analyses, what we know about nonphysical aggression is that, in children, whereas males use physical aggression much more than females, females use nonphysical aggression slightly more than males. We also know that, for males and females, using nonphysical aggression is strongly correlated with using physical aggression. Emotional and social maladjustment (e.g. depression and criminal activity) are not strongly or consistently predicted by patterns of nonphysical aggression. Many researchers point out limitations of even these robust findings, however. Physical aggression is often conspicuous and measurable, where the victim and the aggressor can be identified. Nonphysical aggression is often quiet, hard to spot, circuitous, and often intentionally concealed. Does what has been measured accurately represent what really happens? In addition, research on nonphysical aggression has largely included reports of

56   Nicole Hess

perpetration and victimization by teachers, parents, peers, and oneself, and most studies have been conducted on children in Western societies; do findings generalize outside these populations? Nonphysical aggression seemed to have a lot in common with the phenomena of female coalitions, competition, and friendship; I wanted to explore these topics in adults in non-­Western societies. As an undergraduate at UCLA exploring potential graduate programmes, I emailed several professors with my thoughts on female competition, asking for their insights. One response from a very esteemed feminist evolutionary anthropologist came back in a typed, snail-­mailed letter. She offered encouragement and felt this was indeed an understudied topic among evolutionary researchers. She also issued a firm request that I not conduct my research among undergraduate women in the US. In the winter of 1998, I joined two UCSB PhD students (one of whom I later married) and an advanced undergraduate for a one-­month trip to Venezuela to work with two indigenous Amazonian groups. The Yanomamö and the Ye’kwana subsisted using horticultural practices and by hunting forest animals and fishing. These were small-­scale cultures, and working with them would fall right in line with what was expected of an evolutionary anthropologist. At the time, I had not yet developed my theory for female friendship as competition, but I needed to move forward with finding a place to conduct longer-­term research in the future. There was a lot of physical, logistical preparation required for this visit to the Venezuelan Amazon – pricey plane tickets, arrangements for travel within Venezuela, several vaccinations, various research-­relevant supplies like skinfold callipers, cameras and a lot of camera film to be used for documenting dental health (this was prior to the age of digital photography), entertainment for downtime (e.g. a deck of playing cards), etc. We brought much of our nutrition in the dense forms of multivitamins, protein bars, and beef jerky. Sriracha sauce and salt were to be our main sources of flavour. We planned to buy bulky carbs like rice and pasta once we got into Venezuela, reserving precious, limited space in our travel gear for other items. Having briefly attended a field school in Costa Rica to study the behaviour of nonhuman primates, I already had some of the clothing and equipment, such as waterproof notebooks and pens. Our small team of Santa Barbara anthropologists was going to conduct research at the invitation of Jaime Turón, the elected mayor of the Alto Orinoco Municipality of the state of Amazonas, who was a Ye’kwana. Turón was a friend of UCSB professor Napoleon Chagnon, the well-­known anthropologist who had conducted decades of research with the Yanomamö in Venezuela and Brazil, whom he famously described using a term the Yanomamö used to describe themselves, “fierce”. Working with local indigenous leaders in the Santa Barbara area, Chagnon and several of his graduate students had hosted Turón and his associates, and Turón was returning the favour by inviting Chagnon and his students to work in Amazonas. I was lucky to get to join this trip. The four of us assembled our supplies in eight large Action Packer™ boxes (with padlocks), as we each had two free check-­ins for our flights. All eight were

Searching for a field site   57

packed to the maximum weight of fifty pounds. Over the course of the trip, we came to refer to these unwieldy boxes as “cajas”, uttered with fatigue and exasperation. The hard, black, plastic boxes with the grey lids and the snap-­on red handles had also functioned some nights as our beds while in Venezuela. We each had a half of one caja for personal belongings, with the rest of the space reserved for communal goods. (Among the personal items, some among us may or may not have smuggled in some arguably-­worth-its-­volume chocolate.) We transported a fold-­up solar panel and cumbersome motorcycle battery to charge our sole laptop computer. The devices were to be assembled when we got to our field site, and we did not have a streamlined, pre-­manufactured charger that one would use today. We had also procured tens of thousands of dollars-­worth of medical supplies from Direct Relief International, conveniently headquartered in Santa Barbara, which took up much of the communal space. The wholesale value of the mostly first aid supplies was low (we students contributed substantially to their purchase), but the items were quite valuable on the market and very much needed by people in rural areas with low access to medical care. The medical items were ones requested by Jaime Turón, and included bandages, gauze, antiseptics, and, most importantly, worm pills: Albendazole is a fast-­acting anti-­helminthic that rids the body of ascariasis, giardiasis, filariasis, and other parasitic worms, and we had enough to deworm villages. We would be donating these supplies to a clinic in the area. I didn’t speak Yanomamö or Ye’kwana and was unlikely to learn either sufficiently to communicate with locals in their indigenous tongues. But, many spoke the language of their colonizers, Spanish. My knowledge of Spanish vocabulary was mediocre, and of Spanish grammar quite small, but my pronunciation was great, having spent a fair amount of my early childhood listening to my Mexican grandmother and great-­grandmother gossiping about the neighbours. It was unlikely that I would be able to study gossip and female conflict and friendship by directly interviewing informants, and my plan was to simply get some research experience assisting my colleagues with their projects, which included simple measures of health, like height, weight, and skinfold thickness (delicate callipers and a very accurate and huge scale were also in the cajas). Our research protocols had been approved by UCSB’s Internal Review Board (IRB). I was going to observe women and girls while assisting in collecting the health data, in the hope I would gain some insight into female friendship. I had read up on the Yanomamö in Chagnon’s publications, and the Ye’kwana in Ray Hames’ PhD dissertation. We knew that patriarchal views were strong in local indigenous groups as well as the governmental and religious groups that interacted with the Yanomamö and Ye’kwana (members of the Venezuela government, Catholic missionaries, and Protestant missionaries). So, my partner and I wore silver wedding bands and pretended to be married in order to avoid the problems associated with being a young, single, foreign woman in a new place. We had chosen our travel time to fit in over UCSB’s winter break to avoid missing teaching assistant (TA) responsibilities. When we arrived in Venezuela in December, 1998, Hugo Chávez (a Venezuelan military officer turned fierce leftist

58   Nicole Hess

politician who sought to bring about a socialist revolution in Venezuela beginning in the 1990s) was running for president of Venezuela. But we didn’t consider whether Venezuela’s upcoming election would have an impact on us – we would be out in a remote region of the Upper Orinoco at the invitation of local leaders and did not expect the federal government to have any concern with us. We first flew from Los Angeles to Florida, where our cajas did not get automatically checked through. This was prior to 9/11, and luggage check-­in was a relatively simpler process. However, our suspicious-­looking, unassembled motorcycle battery-­solar panel-­computer complex had to be examined by multiple parties, which meant unpacking our cajas and repacking them. This would be only the first time our belongings were searched. Our next stop was Caracas, Venezuela’s capital. Caracas had a lot of graffiti, much of it commenting on the current political state: there was perceived corruption by the rulers, and presidential candidate, Hugo Chávez, intended to bring change. There were also people in the streets of Caracas vocalizing their dissatisfaction with the current government. We checked into a hotel, then went to a university to meet a contact from whom we purchased snake anti-­venom. The next day, we took a domestic flight from Caracas to Puerto Ayacucho, the capital of the state of Amazonas. Puerto Ayacucho’s airport had a gift shop selling items made by indigenous groups, including baskets, beaded necklaces, painted pots, and small, carved wooden sculptures of local fauna, like monkeys and jaguars. On the airport’s walls hung several portraits of indigenous individuals in traditional dress, many of whom were young women, painted on black velvet. Our host, Turón, and his affiliates met us at the airport and escorted us to Puerto Ayacucho’s nicest hotel. Over the next few days, while we waited to be issued our research permits, we waited at the hotel, and ate a few meals around town (mostly fish and rice, and I was convinced the extremely bony whole fish were piranha). We also visited a local swimming spot, some shallow rapids that flowed over immense, smooth boulders. We were accompanied by Jaime Turón’s son and some other men much of the time, and our hosts clearly wanted us to enjoy their home. None of us were interested in swimming – a bathing suit was not packed with the two fast-­drying, mosquito-­resistant outfits in my limited caja space. I was just antsy to collect some data, but, looking back, I think this was a time when a more experienced and farsighted anthropologist would have taken the time to schmooze. Regardless, I was female, and probably would not have gotten very far in terms of making long-­term connections. After a few days of hanging around Puerto Ayacucho, we received our permits. We gathered our immediately needed belongings and headed to Toki, Jaime Turón’s natal village. Toki is a large, riverside Ye’kwana village with its own, small airplane landing strip. Our team of four flew in two small Cessnas, each of which could seat a pilot and two passengers. Because the planes were so small and weight was a factor, we shipped some of our cajas by boat to Toki, including our bulkier food items. Worried the medical supplies might be stolen on the boat journey, we arranged to have them flown in later. We were graduate students

Searching for a field site   59

paying out of pocket for the trip, and boat transport was much cheaper than flying, but it was also more dangerous, as the segment of the Orinoco that flowed past Puerto Ayacucho bordered Colombia on the west. FARC (Fuerza Alternativa Revolucionaria del Común) was a guerrilla movement that was strong in Colombia at the time, and the trade of illegal drugs in the area was a concern. We had to send our caja padlock keys with the boat cargo, as the cajas were certain to be searched for drugs. We arrived in Toki by way of its bumpy, unpaved landing strip. On the walk to the village from the landing strip, we were shown some large tanks holding immature fish caught in the river; once large enough, they would be food for the villagers. We next passed the village’s largest and centrally located communal building, where important meetings took place, but also where children gathered to watch videos on the village’s only generator-­driven TV/VCR setup. The five or six times we walked by the communal building over the next few days, we noticed that village children were watching the same, repeating ten-­minute clip of a Hollywood action film, Legionnaire; the kids, gathered close around the screen, were mesmerized by Jean-­Claude Van Damme and the explosions. Our team was placed temporarily in the house of a family that was away from the village for several days, and firmly reminded to put a lock on the door to protect our belongings when we left the house. (The lock, fit for a suitcase, was symbolic if anything.) Posts inside the house supported chinchorros (hammocks), used for sleeping, sitting, and lounging. Chinchorros were quite comfortable once the right contortions were achieved. An outhouse was several yards from the house and had its own protective lock. Our closest neighbours were several feet away in a similar building, with other buildings located more distantly apart. It was a short walk to the river’s edge where we would acquire drinking and cooking water (to be sterilized with iodine tablets), and where we would bathe. Every afternoon at about 3 P.M., a short storm would pass through the village, bringing a breeze and coolness to an otherwise heavy, hot atmosphere. I would periodically see two little girls walking past our house, sometimes holding hands. There were my female friends. This would be my field site. Sadly, it was all downhill from there. After several days in Toki, it came time to take a weekly dose of our anti-­ malaria medication. Appropriate malaria medications vary by location, and, at the time, mefloquine was the most effective prophylactic for the region. Our food had not arrived by boat and we were eating the few items of food we’d stashed into our Cessna-­transported cajas – teriyaki beef jerky and dark chocolate for me. I swallowed my huge, chalky mefloquine tablet with a little food and a lot of water, then went down for a nap during the afternoon’s cooling storm. I woke up just as the storm ended and the heat and humidity resumed. I was gripping my blanket, and felt fearful and clumsy, but also strangely aggressive. The physical objects around me appeared to be in disarray because my eyes were not keeping up when my head turned. Jaw clenched, nauseated, and breathing erratically, I stood up unsteadily, uncertain if I was dreaming. This lasted for several minutes and was probably the paranoia that is sometimes a side effect of mefloquine; hallucinations

60   Nicole Hess

are another side effect. Coincidentally, this experience happened right as some other visitors were arriving in Toki – visitors who brought the beginning of the end of our short venture to the field. During the time that we were travelling from Caracas to Toki, Hugo Chávez had been elected the new president of Venezuela. He had won the majority of the votes of all of Venezuela’s states except the state of Amazonas, which held the country’s largest indigenous constituency. Wanting to understand why he’d lost there, Chávez sent a team to Amazonas to find answers. The team that arrived in Toki included various government officials, some representatives from the Catholic church (the dominant religion in Venezuela), some reporters, some armed members of the Guardia Nacional, and a man who seemed to be in charge. They wanted to know what we were doing there and demanded to see our permits. They had us unpack all of our cajas and searched our belongings for any data that we had collected. We had not yet collected any data. They examined our passports carefully and wanted to take them to some other location for more inspection. We would not let them leave with our passports. They decided that we would have to leave Toki and told us to repack our searched cajas and board the military boat on which they had arrived. I was scared but also angry, perhaps amplified by the mefloquine. Because the river was low (it was the dry season) and the river was rocky, our weight was again a concern. They wanted to split up our team and take us out separately. We refused. So, we all loaded into the boat, along with our cajas, and were forced to take the risk of running into rocks. By the time we all loaded the boat with our cajas, it was dark out. We were travelling down the Orinoco by moonlight. All of the soldiers were with us – mostly young men who were friendly, laughing, and also armed. It was a long journey and the boat was moving faster than it should have been given the weight, rocks, and shallowness of the river. My partner told me that the boat might capsize, and that if it did, I had to forget all the cargo and swim to a rock or the banks. What?!?! Now my life was in danger here? And what about the piranha? We had purchased emergency evacuation insurance, was this a valid time to use it? Who did I think I was trying to be an anthropologist? Sure enough, we hit some rocks at high speed. The boat was in the air for what felt like several seconds, then it slammed down hard on the rocks. We were now stuck, but had not capsized. We waited while the soldiers figured out what to do. It was beautiful, moonlit night there on the Orinoco. The soldiers were working hard to get the boat unstuck, standing chest-­deep on underwater boulders, using ropes tied around their waists and shoulders to jostle the boat. I worried about them and the piranha. There were probably crocodiles in there too. But they had their guns, right? Never in my life did I imagine experiencing these conditions. After several hours, the soldiers successfully manoeuvred the boat off the rocks. We continued down the river and were eventually unloaded, with our cajas, after dawn on the shore of the town of La Esmeralda. We were obviously hungry and tired, and we did not know what the next step was. I was thankful that the soldiers were so pleasant. A lot of them were just young men doing their jobs. We’d had

Searching for a field site   61

conversations with them. They wanted to know if various ridiculous claims about the US were true. We’d laughed with them. We had also figured out that the person who seemed to be in charge was, unsettlingly, a former student of Chagnon’s who had had a falling out with him years ago. We were stuck in La Esmeralda for a week, waiting for a plane to come in that we could catch to leave. The Guardia Nacional placed us in a Swiss-­built biological research station that was not in use for the season. It was odd to see a Swiss chalet-­style building with its tall, sloping roof in the middle of a tropical rainforest that would never see snow. Our belongings were searched countless times: we had to unpack our cajas, lay everything out on the ground to the satisfaction of anyone from Chávez’s team, then repack the items. They were looking for data, but we had already demonstrated in Toki that we had not collected any. The former student of Chagnon’s from Chávez’s team had made waves over who should be allowed to conduct research on indigenous Amazonians – anthropologists from foreign countries? officials from the Venezuelan government? Catholic missionaries? Protestant missionaries? no one? – and over what kind of research should be allowed. Our being searched repetitively seemed intended to demonstrate that Chagnon’s affiliates were not supposed to do research there. We got it. At this point, we just wanted to get home. While waiting in La Esmeralda, we met several Yanomamö individuals, including Cesar Deminawa, an infamous figure from Chagnon’s ethnography. Decades prior to our visit, Deminawa had acquired several shotguns from Christian missionaries that the missionaries intended to be used for hunting. Instead, Deminawa used them to murder several Yanomamö enemies, in the process gaining substantial social status as an unokai. So here was this murderer whose hand I had just shaken, wearing Western-­style clothing. Eventually two small planes came into La Esmeralda, specifically for us, sent by Jaime Turón. We loaded up our cajas and headed back to Puerto Ayacucho. This flight felt much longer than the flight to Toki. Our pilot read a comic-­book version of bible stories as we flew over the dense Amazonian forest. At the airport, we again saw the velvet paintings of the Yanomamö girls. At this point I looked pretty good myself – now smoking cigarettes, I was tanned, slimmer, and fiercer than I was a few weeks prior. We hopped from Puerto Ayacucho to Valencia in Venezuela, then to Aruba, and finally to Los Angeles, arranging flights one airport at a time. While hopping airports near the border of Colombia on our unplanned, early exit from Venezuela, it wasn’t our electrical kit that needed so much scrutiny, nor were officials looking for data. Now our belongings were being searched for drugs, and the focus was on our 100-plus plastic, airtight film canisters. Unpacking, opening, closing, and repacking these potentially cocaine-­containing canisters nearly caused us to miss connecting flights at least twice. There was no wi-­fi with access to Travelocity to help us arrange our exit more efficiently – we just tried to head generally north and west from one airport to the next. It was not inexpensive. We arrived at LAX on Christmas night. My grandpa, who picked me up at the airport, remarked at how our team of four so adroitly manoeuvred our heavy cajas into formation for loading.

62   Nicole Hess

Back in Santa Barbara, we learned that the medicines from Direct Relief International had ultimately arrived by plane in Toki at about the time the soldiers arrived. The villagers hid the supplies at first, and once the commotion of the election died down, Jaime Turón saw that they were given to a local clinic, as planned. The trip was not a total loss, but it was clear that, with regard to my doctoral research, another field site would have to be pursued. Shortly after returning to Santa Barbara, I did briefly pursue another site in roughly the same area of the world, to take place that spring. But, I was warned early on by a trusted senior colleague that my safety as a female person might be at risk there. I backed out of the trip before buying a plane ticket, using some excuse about lack of funding or my health. I didn’t want to tell the faculty I would have been accompanying about my real concern. I switched from South America to East Africa for my third attempt at a field site. A colleague from my undergraduate days at UCLA had conducted years of fieldwork with the Hadza in Tanzania, and there was the possibility that I could join one of his upcoming trips. The Hadza are hunter-­gatherers living on the African savannah, an ideal field site for an evolutionary anthropologist. I started Swahili classes at UCLA. I had family in LA, my hometown, and could easily drive between UCLA and UCSB for weekly classes. The Hadza did not speak Swahili, but those with whom I would work in getting to the Hadza did. I could learn Hadza once I was in the field, and the person I would be joining assured me that Hadza was easier to learn than French or Spanish. A venture to East Africa was more expensive than South America, and I couldn’t fund another field visit myself. I applied for an NSF (National Science Foundation) grant, knowing there was a low probability of getting it. My theor­ etical perspective and research plan were not sufficiently developed to count as excellent science worthy of NSF funding, and, at the time, applying evolutionary theory to human behaviour was a controversial matter anyway. I also applied for a grant from a local chapter of Rotary International, an organization of businesspeople that conducts charitable work around the world. Rotary International was keen on supporting projects in Africa, and a colleague in the Anthropology Department at UCSB had recently been awarded a Rotary scholarship to conduct research in India. So, I put in the effort to apply. Applying involved more than just a written statement of intended research. Rotary was primarily interested in the humanitarian aspect of its scholars, and the promotion of international understanding needed to be woven into my research plan. I also needed to attend several weekly lunch meetings of the local Rotary Club, learning about their principles and getting to know some local representatives. There would be a few rounds of interviews, and I needed to portray myself as an ambassador. I don’t recall exactly when or why I made any cuts to continue on in the scholarship contest, but I knew that I was among three final candidates when I was told the final interview would take place in Solvang, a schmaltzy Danish-­style town about an hour’s drive north of Santa Barbara. If I won, Rotary would pay for my travel and research, and also connect me with Rotary International representatives

Searching for a field site   63

in Tanzania, which might be helpful in getting permits and establishing longer-­ term access to the field site. My association with Rotary would also mean I was not just a student from an American university showing up to collect data, but a Rotary Ambassador there at the invitation of local businesspeople, with the intent of fostering international understanding. The person who won the scholarship was a tall, blond, good-­looking man, younger than me, who spoke of his planned ambassadorship with adept self-­ assuredness. He was an undergraduate at a community college, and he had long-­ standing ties with a local Rotary chapter. I came in second place, and also did not get the NSF grant. Lacking sufficient funds to travel with my UCLA colleague on his next trip to work with the Hadza, I abandoned the attempt to get to Africa. To review, my first field attempt failed due to politics, my second due to safety, and my third due to funding. I still needed to get to the field and get my boots muddy like a good evolutionary anthropologist. For my fourth attempt at establishing a field site, I looked to a yet another far-­off part of the world, the Pacific. A new faculty member had joined our department and had a long-­established field site in Melanesia. The indigenous people of the region subsist by foraging for seafoods and growing starchy food crops on a small scale. At this point in the theoretical development of my research, I was exploring the role of gossip in female relationships and was studying SNA methods for quantifying this phenomenon. The professor was interested in using SNA methods in his research, and we talked about collaborating. After several meetings, he told me about an internal university grant for faculty, for which we could apply to fund my visit to his site. I wrote the proposal to collect basic social network data on the members of several small villages with whom he had worked for years. This would be preliminary work to map out social relationships, and it could be used to contribute to later studies involving networks and gossip (my interest), and network and resource transmission (his research interest). I wrote the grant proposal, he edited and submitted it in his name, and he was awarded the grant. The funds were used to buy me a (very expensive) plane ticket to the site. The funds would also pay a local family the professor knew for me to stay in their house and receive meals. The people with whom I would be working spoke a pidgin of English, and I was able to access a dictionary of the pidgin, which I began to study. Pidgins have smaller vocabularies and simpler grammatical structures than long-­established languages, so it would be easier to learn how to communicate directly with indigenous people of this site than with the Yanomamö, Ye’kwana, or Hadza. This all happened very quickly, and once we made the major plane ticket purchase, I started to step back and look at what I was doing: I was a young, unmarried woman about to take a long trip to the middle of nowhere, where I had no established social ties, with a man who was new to the department and about whom I had limited background information. This was over a decade before the 2014 revelation of shockingly high levels of sexual assault and harassment in the field by senior male mentors towards junior female students among physical anthropologists. I decided to avoid such potential problems by taking my partner

64   Nicole Hess

with me to the field, he and I paying out of pocket for his plane ticket and expenses. Before purchasing his ticket, my partner wanted to meet with the professor to talk about the trip. I was expecting the two to become fast friends and find research interests in common. Instead, the professor became angry, essentially forbidding my partner from collecting data and asking any questions of the field informants, and threatening retaliation if he did. It was as if the professor thought my partner were a spy intending to steal data from “his” field site. My partner assured him that he was only going to assist me with my data collection and had no intentions of collecting his own data or establishing his own field site in the area. Anthropologists certainly don’t “own” their field sites, but my partner really did not have any interest in doing his own research there, and this professor had no right to forbid him from doing research if he wanted to.2 My partner was disgusted at the negativity that had been directed at him, but would go if I wanted him to. I did, so I went to talk to the professor myself that day. The faculty person was clearly agitated and said “I don’t give a fuck about your boyfriend.” I bowed out of the trip right there, telling him that I felt his attitude was an indicator of potential conflict in the field. I viewed him as too excitable, proprietary, and concerned with being in charge. In Venezuela, even with team members who were friendly, cooperative, and equal, unexpected circumstances caused substantial difficulties. What if unexpected challenges and conflict came up while at these remote islands in the Pacific, where flights were rare, and I had only this person to rely on? After this meeting, the professor sent me an angry email, in which he threatened to tell the chair of the Anthropology Department, my PhD committee members, and the Graduate Division that I had abandoned the project and wasted his grant money. I beat him to it and immediately forwarded that email to my advisers, then went to talk to them. As the actual author of the grant proposal, I viewed the effort and money as mine to lose, though the grant was technically in his name. I told my advisers I did not want to be alone in the middle of nowhere with that person. My advisers agreed with my decision, and, fortunately, I faced no penalties other than wasted preparation for yet another failed field attempt. Years later, I learned about some very problematic encounters this professor had had at the university, and that he was ultimately fired. Bullet. Dodged. In the summer of 2001, my partner accepted a short postdoctoral fellowship at a research institute in Berlin, Germany. With no immediate obligations in Santa Barbara, I accompanied him. While there, I gave talks on my experiments on gossip, and was fortunate to be awarded a stipend to continue working on this research in Berlin for the duration of the summer. (Ah, what if Berlin could become my field site?) Over drinks at hip Berlin cafes along the Spree River on warm summer evenings, I had conversations with students from various European countries who were also studying at the institute. We exchanged ideas and facts about college experiences in the US versus Europe. These conversations were an interesting anthropological exercise in that I came to view the US college experience from that of an outsider. One feature of US colleges that my European colleagues viewed as quite strange was the presence of college Greek communities.

Searching for a field site   65

When I returned to Santa Barbara to work as a TA in the fall of 2001, I told my PhD chair about my new idea for a field site: I wanted to study female cooperation and conflict in college sororities at a location I could access on my own, someplace in southern California. After several failed attempts to get to a small-­scale, kin-­ based society that practised hunting and gathering or horticulture, I was taking things into my own hands, looking to a local subculture where female friendship was essentially formalized. I went from small-­scale indigenous societies and the possible presence of female friendship abroad to an industrialized, state-­level society with a guarantee of female friendship in my backyard. Conducting research with sorority informants would be facilitated by the fact that I grew up in southern California culture, and spoke their language. Fluent in the vocabulary, grammar, slang, and subtleties of California English, there was no question that every word I would hear and overhear while embedded in the Greek community would be understood. Studying gossip content was now a possibility. My adviser put me in touch with a former student of his who was now a high-­ ranking administrator at Southern California University (SCU). I met with her to see if the idea seemed feasible. She felt it was and put me in touch with SCU’s Director of Greek Affairs. I planned to conduct in-­depth interviews with informants about their experiences of conflict and cooperation in the Greek community, and also collect quantitative survey and social network data. Alongside this venture to a new field site, I would continue to run psychological experiments among Greek and non­Greek university undergraduates. Anthropological fieldwork, I had learned, was risky and costly, and I needed something quantitative and concrete to show for my efforts. Finally, I would participate in the Greek community as much as possible, gaining insight into its structure and the daily life practices of sorority women. SCU’s Director of Greek Affairs confirmed what I had distilled from the academic literature on college Greek communities: because sociologists, psychologists, and other social scientists had sought and revealed the negative aspects of Greek life (e.g. hazing, binge drinking, eating disorders, elitism, plagiarism, homophobia, racism), Greeks were reluctant to participate in social science research. The Director of Greek Affairs told me that I would need to earn the trust of the SCU Greek community if I wanted to get in and do research. He told me that the process of recruiting new sorority members – Rush – was about to begin.3 And, fortunately for me, Greek Affairs needed a volunteer not affiliated with any specific sorority to help run the computer program that matched potential new members to specific sororities.4 Because I was not in a sorority myself as an undergraduate, I had no loyalties to one particular sorority or another, so was unlikely to unfairly prioritize certain houses in their pursuit of the highest quality rushees. You read that correctly: because there were fairly obvious status rankings among sorority houses, as well as perceived variation in the desirability of new members, there were numerous formal rules in place to prevent houses from having unfair advantages or disadvantages in Rush. Ultimately, my observations of Rush revealed considerable competition and cooperation among sororities, among those trying to join sororities, and even among individuals within houses.

66   Nicole Hess

The Director of Greek Affairs put me in touch with the governing body of the Campus Panhellenic Association (CPA), a group of elected and appointed representatives from different sororities responsible for running the coordinated recruitment process for the campus’s eleven National Panhellenic Conference (NPC) sororities. Founded in 1902, the NPC is a confederation of twenty-­six sororities in the US and Canada that governs, administrates, and supports its members.5 During Rush, the CPA organizes and monitors the recruitment activities of specific sororities at a local level; this includes a responsibility to punish sororities if they violate formal rules surrounding recruitment. Aside from providing a safe environment for sorority members and potential new members (e.g. zero tolerance for “hazing” practices), one of the most central concerns during Rush is that all sororities are treated equally – that one sorority does not have an unfair advantage in recruiting the most desirable new members. Sororities vary in wealth, academic standing, athletic ability, congeniality, conviviality, physical attractiveness, having social ties to particular fraternities, and other reputational dimensions. It was so important that no sorority use their reputational advantages to unfairly recruit new members that an official book existed detailing the rules of Rush, as well as the punishments for rule violations. The NPC updated this book of formal rules yearly. As a Rush volunteer, I was allowed to accompany potential new sorority members, or rushees, as they visited different sororities. Rushee groups are led to house visits by women from different NPC sororities called Rho Chis (rhymes with bow ties), or Rush Counsellors. Rho Chis are sorority members who have temporarily disaffiliated with their sorority and undergone training to serve as advisers to rushees. In fall 2000, SCU had about 350 rushees, and each needed to visit all eleven NPC houses at least once. These rushees were divided into thirty groups, each assigned one of thirty CPA-­trained Rho Chis. Rho Chi groups would walk together through the residential area around SCU and visit each house for parties, where rushees met and mingled with sorority members, watched skits and dances, and assembled small crafts for philanthropic causes; during parties, rushees might also be served light refreshments. Rushees want to make good impressions at parties, displaying their social status and skills, and maximizing their presentation with the right clothing, makeup, hairstyle, facial expressions, gestures, and posture. These daily high-­intensity visits to up to eleven houses include a great deal of walking between houses, often in attractive but uncomfortable shoes, in the late September midday sun.6 Almost all of the women I later interviewed reported that their Rush days were physically and emotionally exhausting. Rho Chi leaders must encourage rushees to stay with the Rush process despite this strain, partly because of the responsibility Rho Chis have to the NPC of ensuring that each sorority has equal access to all rushees. With regard to house versus house competition during Rush, all the members of one house competed with all the members of other houses to attract the most desirable new members from every fall’s pool of rushees to their own house.7 Numerous lines of evidence support this conclusion. For example, the sororities with the best reputations routinely reach “quota” during Rush, that is, they recruit

Searching for a field site   67

the maximum number of new members that their house can hold (up to about 100), where all seniors who graduated the previous spring are replaced by freshmen in fall. When a house fails to make quota, members are disappointed, and a house experiences a reputational drop. How short a house is of reaching quota is proportional to a house’s reputational drop. In extreme cases, a sorority may cease to exist on a campus if it cannot replenish the number of members needed to effectively run a house, as well as their membership dues. The top houses never fell short of quota, whereas the bottom houses regularly fell short to the extent that financial operations of the house were in peril. At the beginning of my research, one house had “folded” due to insufficient membership. The rulebook exists because the tens of thousands of Rush events over the last 100 years had indeed generated real conflicts of interest among houses. The rulebook is used by the CPA to monitor and punish sororities who broke the rules of Rush. As one example, the rulebook stated that sorority women were not allowed to wear matching outfits or accessories during Rush. When I asked women why, some indicated that being rushed by seventy-­five people in matching outfits was intimidating to rushees. Other informants said instead that if everyone wore the same thing, it would indicate to rushees that all house members could afford the same item of clothing or jewellery, indicating the level of wealth of a house. One year, the members of one house reported a neighbouring house to the CPA because they had observed and photographed all the members of that house wearing matching, expensive boots during Rush. The offending house had to pay a fine for this infraction and attempted to retaliate by reporting the first house to the CPA because all of its members wore black skirts and jewel-­toned tops for the second-­to-last night of Rush. It was unclear if this behaviour violated the spirit of the rules, so the CPA dismissed the case. As another example, one house’s members were known to regularly wear expensive, semi-­matching Tiffany brand silver charm bracelets during Rush. Another line of evidence for competition among houses during Rush is the requirement that Rho Chis be disaffiliated from their sororities. The disaffiliation is instantiated by a Greek-­wide ceremony the week before Rush, where all thirty Rho Chis get on stage, perform skits and songs, and take a pledge of impartiality for the duration of Rush. I attended a disaffiliation ceremony in the fall of 2000. The audience was full of men and women from the Greek community who cheered very loudly as the ceremony unfolded. During Rush, Rho Chis must not reveal their membership to rushees under any circumstances, so they may not talk about their sorority or wear clothing or jewellery showing their membership. Further, every sorority has a framed “composite” photo of its current members displayed in the house, and the faces of any Rho Chis from that house must be physically covered during Rush parties. I also observed substantial within-­house cooperation: members were working together to attract the best rushees to their sorority. Within a house, some members could dance, do gymnastics, or sing beautifully. Other members were humorous, warmly engaging, and had excellent conversational skills. Houses cooperated

68   Nicole Hess

internally in organizing to maximally display these talents. During a party, a rushee interacts with recruiting, active members of a house, sometimes called rushers. When Rho Chi groups enter a house, each rushee will be greeted by a rusher and escorted from the house’s entry to another room where they will get acquainted (perhaps to the house’s dining room or library). Here, the rushee might be seated at a carefully decorated table, sometimes set with fresh flowers. The rushee and rusher will strike up a conversation. During the conversation, another rusher will approach, introduce herself, join in, and “bump” the previous rusher.8 Elegant refreshments may be served to rusher/rushee pairs by another house member, such as petit fours and cucumber water. A show might begin on a stage set up by other members. Dancing, singing, and skits may be performed, accompanied by props and recorded music.9 Near the end of the performance, rushees might be invited to join in onstage. Sorority members may have different but coordinated roles in “putting on” Rush, but one activity where all members worked together was “bursting”. Bursting is the very loud and enthusiastic singing of a house’s traditional “bursting song” while clapping to it rapidly in unison. Being bursted at by large numbers of well-­rehearsed young women is an almost overwhelming experience, and the term “rush” originates from the feeling that one is being rushed by a powerful force in witnessing a bursting song. Though they may not be fully aware of it at first, individual rushees are engaged in incontrovertible competition for limited “bids” (formal membership invitations) from the most desired sororities. Rushees tried to make themselves as appealing as possible to houses, insofar as this could be achieved during limited and structured visits to different houses over the week of Rush. It is not surprising that quickly evaluated features like hairstyle and wealth (as determined by, for example, a specific brand of expensive bracelet) were so central to one’s self-­presentation. On the first day of Rush, each rushee visits every house, and as the week goes on, rushees visit fewer and fewer houses as determined by a mutual selection process. If a rushee is invited to all houses on day two, she must narrow down the houses she will visit. If a rushee is only invited back to one house on day two, she visits only that house, because the other houses have given her a low ranking, effectively not inviting her back. Here is what one freshman said about her positive Rush experience: I loved going to the different houses. It was tiring. Rush is so tiring, just talking with all the people and so many times the same things, the same conversations, especially like the first day when you’re breaking ice and you’re just starting to, to go in and it’s like “What’s your major? Where are you from? Where do you live?” Eh, you know. So but, like I would really get excited when we were going to Kappa Lam you know. And it was really, I love stuff like this. We’d all meet with our Rho Chi groups and your Rho Chi would give you your thing that said where you’ve been invited back to … And I kept getting asked back to every house so it was good it was like … encouraging the whole way. And I finally narrowed it down to Delta Nu and Kappa Lam.

Searching for a field site   69

Here is how the mutual selection process works. When a day’s parties are over, each rushee ranks the sororities she visited on a scantron that she submits to her Rho Chi, who then gives her rushee group’s stack of scantrons to Greek Affairs. Rushees sometimes feel overwhelmed in making their rankings; they are choosing what group of women will become their closest friends for the next four years. I often saw rushees crying over their difficult decisions. Some rushees would “suicide” a house, meaning they would only rank it highest, leaving other houses with no scores; this effectively prevented them from getting invited back to any house the next day unless their top house invited them back. Back in each sorority, more ranking is going on, this time with each rushee getting scored by the women who rushed her. In one house, for example, multiple rushers use a five-­point scale to indicate how much they want a rushee to become a member of their house. Averages of these scores are used to rank all the rushees from that day’s parties. This ranked list gets submitted to the Greek Affairs office by midnight, where a computer program reconciles each sorority’s rankings with each rushee’s rankings (this is the program I had volunteered to run, bias-­free). If a house goes past midnight in generating its ranked list, the rulebook states it must pay a steep fine that increases by each overdue minute, because, for things to be fair, all sororities must have the same amount of time to make their rankings. Here is another woman’s more negative account of Rush and the assessment of rushees: I hated Rush more than anything, both going through it and putting others through it. When I went through, it was the most exhausting week of my life, everyday you go to tons of different “tea parties” and have to talk to a million girls about stupid shit and try to impress them. I came home every night and cried. I swear it’s a method of brainwashing, because they break you down over the week and leave you so vulnerable, and then on bid night they sing to you and try to woo you into their house and tell you that you were meant to be a part of them, that you’ve found your “sisters”. Such bullshit. Then once you’re in, you find out what Rush is really like. The girls that don’t have a chance are kicked to the corners during the tea parties, while the girls you want are introduced to as many different people as possible during the twenty minutes that they’re at your house. Then at night they read off every girl’s name, and people just rail on them: she’s fat, she’s stupid, she’s from my hometown and a total dork. Or, they’ll say shit like “she’s really rich and has a ski cabin, she’s obviously PiTheta material, she’s a legacy.” Blah blah blah. For hours! It was pure hell, I ended up feeling like the biggest bitch in the world, surrounded by the biggest bitches in the world. It’s a sick situation for sure. You can quote me on that one! I also wanted to understand friendship, conflict, and cooperation at the interpersonal day-­to-day level, outside the formal activity of Rush. Throughout 2002 and 2003, I interviewed over 50 per cent of the members of the largest sorority at SCU,

70   Nicole Hess

Delta Nu (an NPC sorority that had 104 members when I began my research). Over 90 per cent of the sorority also filled out surveys with qualitative and quantitative components, such as a relational aggression instrument regularly used by psychologists. I phoned and asked everyone that I could reach for an interview. I paid twenty dollars an hour for 180 hours of interviews of about sixty women, where all informants gave me permission to tape record their interviews. My semi-­structured interview included key questions about informants’ within­house friendships, and what conflicts they had experienced within the house. I think my informants disclosed this sensitive information, in part, because they wanted to vent to a listener who knew their peers, yet was required by SCU’s IRB to keep member identities, interview content, and the sorority’s identity confidential. Conflicts usually involved genuine conflicts of interests, and I often heard different “takes” on the same events from different members. I realized that conflicts were sometimes due to misinformation or the withholding of vital information (due to, for example, sworn secrecy) that could have otherwise resolved the conflict. But, I could not disclose the content of one person’s interview to others. Informants talked extensively about close, within-­sorority friendships best described as cliques. Members of these small groups almost always joined the house during the same semester and were about the same age and year in college. Members of cliques would strongly support one another when one member had a conflict with a house member outside the clique. Members of these close, within-­ house friendships were keen to maintain one another’s reputations when they were maligned by another house member, for example, by pointing out an alternative interpretation of a behaviour or event, providing defence or an alibi against a negative accusation, correcting the dissemination of inaccurate information, and even confronting an accuser on behalf of a close friend. Evolutionary theories of human female cooperation suggesting benign functions for relationships among women and girls would predict that women were providing their close friends with a shoulder to cry on or telling them things were okay and that they were loved. In Delta Nu, I saw women putting their heads together and figuring out how to undo the reputational harm that had come to their close friends, and even bringing harm to the reputation of the friend’s accuser or rival. The support was strategic, confrontational, detective-­like, and coordinated, where women worked together – coalitionally – to impact the reputations of those involved in the conflict. This research helped me develop Informational Warfare Theory, which posits that one function of close friendships is the coordinated collection, analysis, and dissemination of reputation-­relevant information, with the aim of increasing the reputations of oneself and one’s allies relative to the reputations of competitors in the community. To conclude, I spent half of my time as a graduate student just trying to get to the field. These efforts involved substantial work, money, and vulnerability. When I was depending on the networks, politics, funding, and, for lack of a better word, personalities of others to get to the field, I failed, and it was clear that being female was costly. When I turned to depending on my own local network ties and paid more

Searching for a field site   71

attention to my research topic than to the ecological ideals of my peers, I found a rich ethnographic experience, and was able to collect both quantitative and qualitative data. I learned more about Greek culture and the female relationships in it than I ever would have learned working with women and girls via an interpreter in the Amazon, the Pacific, or East Africa. There may be unfair disadvantages surrounding getting to the field, collecting data, and working with untrustworthy colleagues, but perhaps these costs can be offset by making the most of one’s specific set of situational and interpersonal skills in conducting research. There is value in discovering unconventional field sites for anthropological work.

Questions for reflection 1

2

3 4

If you were starting out as a grad student, what would influence your choice of a field site, and why? Would it be your personal interest in a particular culture or region, your theoretical or methodological interests, your language skills, a trusted adviser’s ties to a particular site, or funding opportunities? Are the benefits to cultural or scientific knowledge that might come from your informants’ willingness to share information justified by any potential risks of their confidentiality being breached? What measures would you take to protect the confidentiality of your informants? How heavily should risks to a person’s short- and long-­term physical and mental health, safety, financial state, and comfort factor into their academic research endeavours? What are several pros and cons of doing research on people from one’s own culture?

Notes 1 Females do sometimes aggress as individuals, and they occasionally cooperate in aggression when it is defensive, but they generally do not engage in offensive coalitional aggression (attacks). 2 The university can prevent research from being conducted. Research that involves humans cannot be undertaken without approval from a university’s IRB, and my partner didn’t put in a proposal to them because he did not intend to do research. The professor had no reason to be concerned. 3 The term Rush has been replaced with “Formal Recruitment” at most universities, but I will use Rush, as that is the term my informants most often used when talking about the process. 4 Men’s fraternities use a different recruitment system. 5 SCU’s Greek Affairs office worked with non-­NPC sororities as well, which include historically ethnic, minority, and multicultural sororities and fraternities, but these are not overseen by the CPA. 6 Many Rho Chi leaders carried emergency flip-­flop sandals with them to loan to rushees whose feet hurt from walking all day in painful shoes. 7 Outside Rush, it is inarguable that sororities continuously compete with each other for good reputations. At SCU, a handful of the eleven NPC houses made up the “top four” tier and were preferred by high-­ranked fraternities as partner-­hosts for Thursday night parties during the first few weeks of the semester.

72   Nicole Hess

8 Later, interviews with informants from one house told me that “bumping” is fascinatingly orchestrated, revealing competition within the house for placement in high-­ranked bump groups. 9 The rulebook explicitly prohibited smoke machines and coloured and strobe lights during parties; white lights were okay.

References Hess, N.H. and Hagen, E.H. (2019) Gossip, reputation and friendship in within-­group competition: An evolutionary perspective. In: Giardini, F. and Wittek, R. (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Gossip and Reputation. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Taylor, S.E., Klein, L.C., Lewis, B.P., Gruenewald, T.L., Gurung, R.A.R., and Updegraff, J.A. (2000) Biobehavioral responses to stress in females: Tend-­and-befriend, not fight-­ or-flight. Psychological Review. 107, pp. 411–429.

PART II

Gendered relations and other challenges in the field

4 Doing Ethnomusicological Research as a White woman in Cameroon and the Central African Republic1 Susanne Fürniss

In this chapter, the author draws on her experiences as a woman researcher in the field and offers advice on how behaviour might be appropriately adjusted in common field situations. She discusses respect and the establishment of clear boundaries between the researcher and the people with whom she works, with particular reference to gender discrimination, sexual harassment, and simply being fed up, financial solicitations, and authority, but also highlights the moments of true joy which may emerge from close collaboration with local musicians. The first part addresses issues of being a woman in the field, and how these changed or stayed the same of the course of her career. The second focuses more on negotiating local people’s perception of the author’s work as “a man’s job”.

Being a woman in the field For my first two trips to the Central African Republic (CAR), I was part of a research team consisting of three French men and myself. The men were my professor, one of his colleagues, and a Master’s student who was younger than me. We travelled with two Land Rovers, because we had a lot of technical equipment and were accompanied by a Central African research assistant and a cook. Gender issues were present both within the team and in our interactions with local authorities and village people, but never with the Aka Pygmies we were working with. Later, when I was a scholar myself and working alone or with younger students under my charge, these issues also mainly occurred with people we were not directly working with.

Married/unmarried and travelling alone It is crucial for us to introduce ourselves not only as scholars, but also as private persons. In many regions, people have very little personal experience with white

76   Susanne Fürniss

FIGURE 4.1 

Recording an Aka tale-song. Central African Republic, Mongoumba, 1989.

Source: © V. Dehoux.

women. Their image of Western femininity is constructed with elements from two incompatible extremes: the women they may encounter in the region – mainly religious sisters – on one hand, and videos and magazines on the other. Needless to say, the latter do not provide a well-­informed image of the values and the behaviours of an average Western university student. They present young women as singles, more oriented towards sex than the construction of stable unions and families. In order to position herself in between these extremes, it might be necessary for the young female student or scholar to let people know that she is already involved in a relationship back home. A young woman meets less confusion or advances when she presents herself as married. In the rural areas I have worked in, girls often marry before they turn twenty, and an unmarried woman the age of a typical Western PhD student is rare. It is good to have a photo of a boyfriend or a husband or a man she could present as such. This was the case during my first field trips as a student, but still – as I was travelling with three men – I was perceived by the local interlocutors as a subordinate to one of these males: either as the student of the oldest man of the team – which I was – or as the wife of one of the members of the team. One night, we were staying in a “case de passage”, a small house dedicated to passing travellers in the town of Mongoumba, next to the residence of the Sous-­ préfet, the Deputy prefect of the district. He was absent when we had gone to introduce ourselves and came over later to greet us one night while we were having dinner. After talking a while with the professor, he looked at me and asked, “Is he

Doing ethnomusicological research   77

your husband?” – “No.” Then he looked at the younger researcher: “He, then?” – “No, neither.” With a sceptical look at the youngest man, he said, “So it is him, your husband?” – “No, Sir, none of them are my husband. I am not married.” The astonished reaction appeared to be a deep failure to understand how I could not be married, I was twenty-­nine, and how an unmarried woman could travel so far and work in such circumstances with three men, none of whom were her husband. From my actual point of view, I could add that he certainly imagined that I had sex with at least one of them … Travelling alone might be understood as a search for adventure. Whenever I travelled alone some men felt encouraged to make advances at me even knowing that I was married (see also Bombjaková, Chapter 6, this volume). The first time I conducted fieldwork alone I was thirty-­four, a tenured researcher, married, and the mother of a one-­year-old boy who had stayed in France with his father. Nevertheless, a man I hardly knew proposed to me by saying “Stay with me. You’ll write to your husband that you won’t come back again.” When I answered that I had a child, he just said “That is even better.” Looking back, this was a very harmless exchange during which a Central African man tried to hit on me. It was just a game. Still, at that time I was irritated. I have nothing against flirting, but this case didn’t even really qualify as flirting to me. I had the impression that the man didn’t really care about me or my loved ones. I thought knowing I was a mother should clearly establish a limit and be a reason for him to back off. How could he ask a mother to leave her child? Years later, during discussions about girls and women, both in the CAR and in Cameroon, I understood the value of a woman rises when “she has given”, i.e. when she has shown she is able to have children. I always have problems with this expression, because it reflects the idea of reducing womanhood to reproduction, which is, from my Western point of view, totally unacceptable. Still, in these African countries, it is considered normal for even young women to have children. Many girls who go through the education system finish high school with a child, be they married or not.

Advances Even if a woman is an academic, travelling without a man to whom she “belongs” raises questions and prompts certain men – from all walks of life – to make advances on her. In Cameroon, it is particularly difficult for an Occidental woman to stand the pervasive sexism expressed in words, looks, postures, and gestures.

Police and other authorities It is especially difficult for me to deal with this attitude in situations where I am personally affected and when it occurs in very delicate interactions with administrative authorities I depend on. Every time our vehicle has to stop at a police checkpoint, I feel nervous. In several instances these stops lead to tense discussions

78   Susanne Fürniss

in which I am expected to account for any positive contributions, or lack thereof, my work as a French scholar would make towards the development of the country. Often, this is a hidden request for bribes, which, although not a demand towards women in particular, is made all the more difficult to deal with when the dimension of gender is added. I once took my twenty-­year-old daughter on a field trip to Cameroon.2 I was fifty-­five. We travelled in a vehicle from the French research institute IRD. There are regular police checkpoints on the roads where you have to show your passport. Twice, young policemen took our passports, looked into the vehicle, saw me sitting in the front next to the driver and my daughter in the back. Then we heard them say while they were staring at her: “Is she your daughter? May I make her acquaintance?” Or, “How old is she? Is she married? Does she have a boyfriend?” They did not talk to her directly, but to me, her mother, as if it were I who decided who she should date. A similar awkward situation occurred the first time I went to Cameroon in order to work with the Baka Pygmies. I was travelling with a younger woman who accompanied me as a photographer and videographer. I was thirty-­nine, she was ten years younger. Again, we were travelling in an all-­terrain vehicle with a driver from the IRD. On the way, we had to obtain a signature of the deputy prefect in order to move on to the Baka village. We met him in the morning of the Youth-­ and-Sports-­Day, a national holiday on which pupils and bands parade all over the country. The deputy prefect told us to attend the parade. During the reception that followed, he stood in the middle of a room full of people sitting all along the walls when I went to him to ask for his signature. I wanted to arrive at our destination before nightfall. In response, he grabbed my butt and said, “You, you’ll stay here tonight”, using the French familiar form “tu”. I was a tenured researcher and had shown him my official research permit, though. The only answer I was able to muster was “Oh, Monsieur le Sous-préfet, I don’t think I will.” But how to get my signature? I was really lucky to have met, earlier that day, another official who was a superior of the deputy prefect. He also attended the reception and so I asked him to give me the permission to leave. When I went back to the deputy in order to inform him that I was authorized to leave and that he had to sign my paper, he jumped up and shouted, “Who said that?” In my head, I was laughing with malicious joy for my victory when I indicated to him the person he had to obey. Two weeks later, he came to our Baka village and bothered my colleague asking her if she wanted to “taste a Cameroonian” offering her his sexual services against a trip back in an air-­conditioned car. I had to intervene with authority as “head of the mission” in order to make him release my colleague’s hand. These situations are terrible, because men with authority take advantage of you. How to react? What to do if you want to follow your road and continue the work you set out to do? Is legitimate indignation a solution? I am not sure, but I can only offer the answer I have arrived at personally, which corresponds to my very intimate being-­in-the-­world and to what I have observed and what I have unconsciously integrated as means of communication and conflict resolution in such

Doing ethnomusicological research   79

contexts. My twenty-­nine years of experience in Central Africa have taught me to keep a low profile in these situations: I want my passport back, I want the signature I need, and I want to hit the road in order to do my job. This is what I am there for. So, I put things into perspective and my pride in my pocket and try to make a gentle joke in order to lighten the atmosphere while showing that I shall certainly not give in. I’ll finish this section with a joyful anecdote: I was driving in the CAR when I did not recognize the stop sign for a police checkpoint. Thanks to the people accompanying me, I stopped at the very last moment. I was ready for a check though. At the end of the meticulous inspection of the vehicle and my research material, I had to go alone into the office and was asked to pay a horrendous fine. I didn’t have enough cash in my purse, but I had money in a belt under my clothes. So, I asked the policemen for a place where I could take off some clothes in order to get the money. I sensed something like panic in the reaction of the men. What? The white lady wants to undress? They asked me how much I had in my purse and came to the conclusion that this should be the amount of the fine.

Academia I must admit that I am still astonished – and in fact quite fed up – that although I am now over fifty, I am still the target of inappropriate words and gestures. If it were only men in the villages I work in or friends in the capital, it would be easier to handle. But this happens in academia, with colleagues, with whom I would like to work in the framework of potential institutional collaborations. I was at a conference with African colleagues. At such events, everybody takes photos with everybody, mostly putting an arm around each other’s shoulders or waist. I was standing next to a colleague whose academic activities I respect a lot. And suddenly I feel his fingers rub and pinch my sides, several times. I was free enough to tell him to stop, but he started again at other occasions, kneading my fingers every time we met or shook hands. Such a situation is obviously not special to Africa and would not be worth mentioning here if there were not an underlying issue. A scholar needs a research permit to conduct fieldwork. This permit is determined by a partnership with local scholars. It is yet another instance of this very common situation experienced by millions of women in the world in which we must weigh our dignity against our professional interests. A riposte, no matter how well-­deserved, can risk compromising institutional support. Male colleagues also have problems with potential research partners, but they are mainly concerned with various forms of financial or material requests that – needless to say – a woman also may encounter in addition to sexual harassment. Lack of respect for women and their bodies may also be expressed verbally. The following, very dense, example addresses not only this issue, but also raises the question of whether, in a professional world dominated by men, it is necessary to behave like a man in order to be respected.

80   Susanne Fürniss

I was invited to give a talk at the university. I was introduced to the audience that was composed of colleagues and students with these words: “This is Susanne. She is a man. And she lost weight since the last time I met her.” I was choking with indignation: did I hear right? When I was given the floor, I politely thanked the professor and then gave the only answer I found in that situation: “But professor, would you have introduced me in the same way if I had been a man?” And then I started my talk with my full academic pedigree – two Masters in Music and Acoustical Phonetics, a PhD in Ethnomusicology and an HDR3 in Ethnology – in order to try to restore some semblance of authority that I was entitled to claim. Two issues, authority and gender, merge in this example. As a senior researcher, my status is equivalent to a professor’s and, in Cameroon, this is an enviable social status that affords real academic power.4 In this academic hierarchy, an individual’s title informs others how he/she should be treated, the level of deference and respect that individual ought to be accorded, regardless of his/her actual competencies. There is therefore an obligation to address a person of high status not only with his or her personal name, but also with the appropriate title. This is an important rule to learn for a foreigner. Me? I was simply introduced as “Susanne”. An explanation might be that for me the quality of a work is more important than the status of the person who accomplishes it. I do not behave as if my academic status made me more valuable than any other person. I am quite conscious that, in this domain, I clearly don’t act like someone of my position is expected to in Cameroon. I suppose this might be interpreted as de-­valuing myself. The fact that I am a woman also bears on my status outside academia. It often happens in meetings attended by “Mr Congressman”, “Father”, “Mayor”, and “Majesty”, I am “Susanne”. It is as if familiarity and simplicity were incompatible with respect. But, the fact that this colleague had completely ignored my title was, for me, a lesser offence. I was put off by the mention of my weight. I perceived this remark as an intrusion into my personal and intimate space. I know that in Cameroon weight is an external sign of wealth. I was several times encouraged to eat a lot in order to put on weight so that my husband would be happy and satisfied that I was well fed by the people I work with in the field. The expression “an administrative belly” refers to a man whose high social status is reflected in his waistline. I’ve never heard this expression applied to women though. I had lost weight. Had I therefore lost my status? I must admit that I have no answer to this question and still do not know what was meant by that statement. The third point of offence in this example was the comment that I was “a man”. The expression angered me so deeply that I stuttered as I began my talk. What did that mean? Can a woman not achieve what I do? This seems exactly to be the opinion of my interlocutors. When I brought this point up after the talk, someone told me that he had perceived this as a compliment, because only a man could do what I was doing, going alone to remote parts of the country where even many people from the capital would never go. So, finally, I learned this was a kind of promotion, I was considered as being more than a woman, because I “had the balls” to go there …

Doing ethnomusicological research   81

Good morning, sister! Religion – i.e. Christian denominations of any imaginable stripe – is omnipresent in the areas I work in. A minority of people are Muslim, but most of them are linked in one way or another to a Christian church. Incidentally, during my first years of fieldwork, I was always dismayed to see several “churches” in the same small village, most of them mere huts with a sign posted in front. But that’s a different story … Especially among the Pygmy populations, the Catholic missions still constitute one of the most reliable social programme networks, running schools and infirmaries, dedicated in no small part to the Pygmy population. Thus, the Catholic clergy are quite present, particularly nuns, as it is the female clergy who carry out this important work. Although some of them are Africans, most of the sisters I saw were European women. Therefore, most of the white women in the 1990s and early twenty-­first century in my research areas were Catholic missionaries. Peace Corps volunteers have also been in the region, and nowadays one can expect to meet more white women working for environmental or development programmes. It took me some time, though, to realize the only white women who stay for long periods of time and who live in daily contact with the local population still are religious women. Thus, it is not astonishing, that to most people white women are immediately assumed to be, or at least associated with, holy sisters of the mission. When I meet people on the road or in another village who do not know me, I often hear them say “Good morning, Sister!” Having been raised in a northern German protestant family, this has irritated me for a long time. And somehow, it still does. I am not Catholic! I am not religious! It is not only the fact that I am a white woman alone in the African countryside that gives the impression I must be a nun. It is also my hair and style of dress. Like me, sisters wear knee-­length dresses or skirts, cover their shoulders, and wear sturdy sandals. Like me, they typically have short hair. I had a good laugh once when talking about this with a taxi driver in Yaoundé. He looked at me and said: “No, you can’t be a nun. You don’t wear socks with your sandals.” As the Christian references generally make me feel uncomfortable, I have a tendency to gently provoke people. As an answer to the appellation “sister”, I now often respond: “No, it’s Madam”, or “No, I am not your sister” as a direct response to the French salutation “ma sœur” (my sister). I know this is a bit childish, but it is a way of dragging a grain of sand on to the train tracks in hopes of derailing the pervasive assumption that every white person must be a practising Christian. By identifying myself as a non-­believer with a Lutheran protestant background, I often evoke incomprehension: How could one possibly live without believing? Without going to church on Sundays? The astonishment is even greater when I reveal that my husband is of Muslim heritage. How can he accept that I do not convert? How can he accept that I make this journey alone, that I work alone among men?

82   Susanne Fürniss

In the beginning, I tried to stay away from church representatives in order to make clear that I was not affiliated with them, as I was there for scientific reasons. In the last decade, though, I have learned to appreciate and make the best of the Catholic network, both for housing and in the search of competent musicians. I supervised the PhD of a Cameroonian Catholic priest (Essélé Essélé, 2016), did ethnographic fieldwork with him, and had to argue for his research with both his bishop and the members of his parish. I now enjoy discussions about the place of traditional music and rituals alongside Catholic practices and feel that I am generally understood and accepted for who I am and what I do.

Doing a man’s job In recent years, I’ve always had sufficient financial support to travel more safely, with a vehicle and driver. I’ve also gotten older and have clearly graduated to the status of “mature woman” being currently called “Ma mère” – my mother (see also Le Bomin, Chapter 5, this volume). Consequently, being a woman carrying out her fieldwork without the company of male colleagues is no longer an issue.

Working on both sides In order to conduct comparative ethnomusicological research, i.e. comparing the musical heritages of different ethnic groups, it is necessary to work in many localities. When arriving in a place, one is immediately directed towards the local authorities – public or traditional ones – who in general are men. So are most of the ritual authorities and practically all instrument players. Thus, when working on musical heritages, one mainly deals with men and therefore gets introduced into social systems of music making from a male point of view. It took me some time to become aware of this intrinsic bias, which – at the time I was learning the ropes as an ethnomusicologist – was not at all perceived in French ethnomusicological academia. In my experience, a female scholar is likely to collect more or less the same kind of information as would a male colleague. Access to ritual or other esoteric, confidential knowledge, is limited by passage through initiation rites rather than by gender per se. The limits extend gradually as you show your integrity over the years. Thus, a female scholar and a non-­initiated male scholar have equal opportunity to learn about male rites and male-­dominated social institutions. In other respects, female researchers have an advantage over their male counterparts, since they also have access to the female spaces within these societies that men do not. Being a mother has particular advantages, as having gone through the experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood confers a certain status and allows for very personal exchanges among women. I was sometimes astonished at the parallels between Western daily life and that of the Pygmy communities, chiefly in the responsibilities of family and health care. In the Pygmy context, I often give various items in addition to money as a compensation for their work with me. One time, in 1994, I also brought condoms among other goods such as

Doing ethnomusicological research   83

knives, spear points, pots, tobacco leaves, sewing needles, etc. I started to give them to men, but the women said “No, give them to us, because otherwise our men would never put them on. You know how they are, don’t you?” Several times, I had the impression school supplies, clothes, and sometimes even money was best used for the entire family when it was given to a woman, “You know the men drink all the money” was a phrase I often heard. But I must admit that I was never integrated enough into the families to be able to verify that statement. Establishing strong ties with women is valuable not only in that it opens up access to female domains of knowledge, but also because it provides an opportunity for their voices to be better heard.

Being the “head of the mission” Being responsible for a group of people travelling together (minimally my driver and I, but sometimes also a student), manipulating technical equipment, and conducting scientific research are activities that, in the view of many people in Africa, position the white female researcher in a customarily male position. It is she who makes the decisions concerning not only the research agenda, but also the living conditions she accepts or not. There is no ethical or practical contradiction between on the one hand working to integrate oneself into the society and on the other making firm decisions about whether to accept or refuse living in some particular person’s house, to eat what they offer her or not, or to follow them in their daily life. Such decisions should be conditioned by the object of her research, by the period of time she will stay in a place, and by her personal capacity for adaptation. Aside from issues of gender, “white privilege” is another aspect of doing research in Africa and many other areas of the global south that should be acknowledged and discussed. It was in the CAR that I first encountered the phenomenon of white privilege, which has often lent undue authority to my words and actions, allowing me to open doors I would not otherwise be able to. It is a bit difficult to accept that, although I neither embrace nor endorse it, I nonetheless benefit from it. I am still astonished at how easy it often is to gain access to people, and to organize meetings and interviews. I had to learn to manage this situation and to find the right balance between demanding and following, knowing and learning.

Being courageous As I hope to have shown in the story of “being a man”, it takes courage to conduct fieldwork alone as a woman. I must say that I always felt safer alone than during my first field trips with a relatively large team. My experience is that once I am “adopted” in a village, the owners of the house I am living in, the neighbours, and the people I am working with keep a close watch on me and my affairs. The technical equipment an ethnomusicologist needs, as well as the amount of good clothes and things for daily life may encourage the idea that this lady must

84   Susanne Fürniss

FIGURE 4.2 

 irst glimpse out of the hut in the morning of the second day of a circumcision F ritual among the Baka. Cameroon, Ndjelo, 1999.

Source: © C. Lussiaa-Berdou.

be rich. The very fact of being there is proof of a researcher’s wealth, regardless of his/her relative wealth in their home culture. It is difficult to avoid solicitations, both financial and material, to which we must respond with tact and firmness. Sometimes this may bring us into more or less dangerous situations of negotiation. An important Baka initiation ritual took place in a forest camp, a three-­hour walk from the village. I had been invited by the ritual leader and had given my contribution to the ceremony: rice, tobacco, and some money. I was accompanied by a local non-­Baka assistant. Members of the extended family arrived and were irritated by my presence. Arguments were sparked. I heard that they wanted me to pay a lot of money, like a Japanese film team that had been there a month earlier. I refused to do so, because I had contributed to the ceremony according to the demands of the leader. But the quarrels continued and there was a real risk of a discord between the family members. I knew that my guide had his fields and a small hut at a walking-­distance of twenty minutes. So, at three in the morning, I decided to leave in order not to jeopardize the success of the ceremony. We got up, took our affairs and walked away, directly into the forest. After five minutes, a young man came running behind us and asked us to come back. The ceremony continued, the spirit danced, and a Baka man came to inform me that the spirit would ask me to give some more money. That’s what the spirit did and I agreed to add the small amount of money he demanded. This situation was not really dangerous, because no threat weighed on me. Other people had crossed the forest and the night to come to the ceremonial place,

Doing ethnomusicological research   85

I had myself walked the distance from my guide’s hut, I was well-­accompanied, and we had good flashlights. There was no reason to be afraid. In another situation, I was perhaps more reckless, as my behaviour could have led to a physical attack. I was attending a healing ritual of the Beti-­Eton one evening, together with my student, who was also a priest in the nearby town. That day, we had negotiated our access to this event; although I was not the person who had ordered the ceremony, I had to pay quite a lot of money. The ceremony started, everybody drank a lot of alcohol, and the healer walked on embers. After some time, there was a discussion about the presence of the priest, and suddenly the music stopped again: the white lady would have to pay more if the ceremony was to go on. It was out of the question for me. There was a sick person, the ceremony should take place regardless of my presence. So, again, I just walked away, alone this time, in the middle of the road, going back to the house I stayed in. Again, they asked me to come back. But after a while, the dancer took a machete and whirled right in front of my face, staring at me with glassy eyes. He was clearly provoking me. What to do? Should I show the fear I felt? I did not want to give in, and instead started a power-­struggle, standing there, upright, fixing my gaze on him. After a short moment, a man stepped in between us and positioned himself in front of me. The tension fell and the ceremony went on for a while longer, but without enthusiasm. The next day, the patient was dead. My behaviour is certainly not a model. Actually, I must admit that I acted rather without thinking, as an accident could easily have happened. I should have stepped back immediately. The dancer was not in a normal state after having drunk a lot of alcohol and probably taken drugs. While in the situation, I reasoned the man would not dare attack a white lady in the presence of a priest.

Doing analytical ethnomusicology I am an ethnomusicologist. I collect data through observation, taking written notes, taking images with photo and video cameras, as well as making sound recordings with professional-­grade equipment. I record music in its context, when people play in the evening, when there is a ritual ceremony, or when women sing in the kitchen. But I also make analytical recordings out of context. The work of an ethnomusicologist is unusual for people in Central African villages. Musicology – as much as ethnomusicology or anthropology – is a Western science. The questions an ethnomusicologist asks would not often occur to an African musician. Moreover, for African musicians the “grammar” of music is implicit, i.e. there is no formalized language to describe it. Therefore, it is necessary to adapt the Western musicological discourse and method of investigation in order to make a musical analysis in collaboration with African traditional musicians possible. When recording polyphonic music or complex rhythms, my colleagues and I typically record each singer or percussionist individually, one by one (Arom, 1991). This technique allows us to transcribe the music and to describe its characteristic features – essential for accurate music analysis. As music is normally only

86   Susanne Fürniss

played in context and not taught in any formal or analytical way, this recording technique creates unfamiliar situations for the musicians. Therefore, the ethnomusicologist has to be able to establish trust and to lead the musicians with a certain authority through the recording sessions. Directing a recording session is a delicate exercise. One has to conduct – not unlike an orchestra conductor – the entrances and exits of each group of musicians, indicating to them when to vary their play and when to stick to the very minimal pattern of their part. Wherever I have worked, the instrument players have been men and the singers often a group of women. This is very common in Africa. Some of my female students have told me that, due in large part to their young age and student status, it was not easy for them to be firm towards older male musicians. Personally, I was lucky to have learned this method with men, my professor and his colleague, in real fieldwork situations, because it allowed me to observe and imitate their demeanours, attitudes, and tricks. Those experiences were inspirational for me and gave me confidence once I was on my own. In all my fieldwork experiences, it is always the analytical recordings that provide the moments of utmost joy. During a recording, the communication with the musicians is mainly through eye contact. In analytical recordings, each hand holds a microphone, and it is better not to speak so as to avoid contaminating the recording. All we have are our head and eyes to indicate to the musician when to start or to stop. During a recording of all musicians playing and singing at once, we use our eyes to distinguish the individual parts and to ask whether the parts are being played as they should be. When the session is going well, the intensity of the gaze I share with the musician is pure delight. I have the sense of meeting him totally in the act of playing. I understand what he is doing, and he knows that I understand and appreciate it. Even if earlier there had been arguments or misunderstandings, in that very moment, there is only the music and the player’s mastery and the joy of following him through his musical progression. At times I feel intense satisfaction when he reveals each note as I expect him to, and then at others when, on the contrary, he innovates a musical surprise. It is the same with the singers. I initially hold them back from exploring any variations, signalling with my gaze that this dull procedure is necessary for the poor European lady to catch the basic structure of their part. Then, when I’m sure I’ve got it, I give the sign to let leave to all their art – this is the very moment where I am not a stranger anymore or a scholar, where the fact that I don’t speak their language no longer plays a role, but where two musicians are just having fun together. I have so many overwhelming memories of this kind that still give me chills. This is why I accept all inconveniences and lack of comfort in the field. This is why I do my job. And what is even more thrilling, is that many musicians consider this completely unusual exercise a positive experience. I worked on the Aka song repertoire that is accompanied by a harp-­zither. This instrument has three strings on each side of a central bridge, each section being plucked by one hand. I made six recordings for each song: the singers and the instrument together, each of the three song parts, and, then, the right- and left-­hand parts of the instrument separately.

Doing ethnomusicological research   87

There were children making a lot of noise. I was disturbed by the fuss and stopped the recording, saying to the player, “Ndolé, please send the children away, they make too much fuss.” But Ndolé said to me, “No, Susanne, they have to stay. We normally never do what we are doing here. They have to learn.” This experience is one of my most important ones in terms of recognition of my work by the musicians themselves. Although the ethnomusicological approach is Western, although certain colleagues might perceive the separate recording of parts as a deconstruction, and although these recordings take place out of context, they nonetheless capture and illuminate the deep implicit structure of the musical material the musicians play with. As such, the situations I cause give the musicians the opportunity to make explicit – through playing rather than through words – the foundational principles of their music. Thus, these recordings open up valuable possibilities for the transmission of ancestral knowledge, giving all those present opportunities to learn and to strengthen their musical skills.

Having experience The fact that I have gained experience with African traditional music makes it possible for me to be more efficient during my work with the musicians and to establish a basis of collaboration based on mutual expertise. Working with Pygmy cultures, I have several times observed astonishment when the musicians realized I had not come only “to see the Pygmies dance”, as this is most often the case with white people, but also with other people from the urban centres. An anthropologist had published an article on the creation of spirit rituals among the Baka (Tsuru, 1998). His article contained a map with the villages he worked in. As the musical aspect had not been treated, I wanted to investigate how ritual creation works in the realm of rhythm and polyphony. I went to one village where the recent creation of a certain ritual had been identified and asked the people if they would play and sing for me another day. When I came back on the set day, there were two young drummers and some singers, just enough to show how the music works. They started playing and I saw that the two drummers basically played the same rhythm. I asked, “Is what they play correct?” – “Yes, it is correct.” “Hmm, I had the impression they played the same thing. Could you play again, please?” They played again in the same way and I pointed out what I perceived as being the same thing – “Yes, you are right, it is the same thing” “Would one drum be enough to play this rhythm correctly or do you really need two drums?” – “We need two drums.” “So, I think that what they played is not correct, because in my experience there should be two different rhythms if there are two drums.” Suddenly, an older man came from behind, pushing one of the youngsters aside with his elbow and said “I’ll show you.” He and the other drummer then played the complete version with the two different rhythms. It was not an hour since I had met these musicians. We hardly knew anything about each other. And still, I knew enough to make them understand that I could evaluate what they were playing. My experience came from the music I had already studied in other parts

88   Susanne Fürniss

of the Baka area. This is the kind of authority I have no difficulty embracing; on the contrary, it makes me happy because my authority in such instances does not derive from simply being white or a professor, but from a culturally recognized musical competency that permits me to get closer to the musicians I work with. I experienced a similar thing among the Bagyeli when discussing spirit dances with a traditional healer. “We Bagyeli don’t have spirits”, he said. I could not help laughing,  Don’t tell me that! You know, I worked in the CAR among the Aka who have mokondi, dio, edzengi, I worked with the Baka in East Cameroon, they have jengi, mokondi, emboamboa, ebuma, etc. I really would be very astonished if it was true that you don’t have spirits! He looked at me for a very long time, his gaze gradually turning into a smile: “Why do you ask if you already know the answer?” And he then started to tell me more about the Bagyeli spirits. Ethnographic enquiries are sometimes like betting. Your experience might help you predict answers or reactions, as was the case here, but sometimes you are wrong. It is crucial to be humble enough not to insist on what one knows if it finally turns out to be wrong or inadequate. The Baka have borrowed a ritual to accompany the boys’ circumcision (Fürniss and Lussiaa-­Berdou, 2004). The rhythm is based on nine values on which they superimpose four regular handclaps. This is totally against my experience, according to which there should have been twelve values for four handclaps or only three handclaps for nine values. So, I said, “You have an arithmetic problem, it’s impossible to divide nine by four.” They laughed and said, “Well, that is your problem. For us, this is how it is.” It took me years to accept the facts that: (a) it was really only my problem that these folks had somehow developed a time structure without a simple ratio between meter and rhythm, which was totally unheard of in African ethnomusicology, and, (b) this is really how the rhythm is played by the Baka. For years, I thought I had made some critical ethnographic mistake. It was only when I noticed that my recordings from 1999, 2000, 2002, and 2006 all showed exactly the same phenomenon that I could accept it and address the theoretical issues that went with it (Fürniss, 2008).

What lessons to learn? It is obvious the first thing you learn when doing fieldwork is that you have to zigzag between value systems and that your own values are not necessarily those of the people you are with. In Central Africa, as a young woman, you may be perceived as inferior to men, but the older one gets the more balanced the relationships are. It is most important not to allow these things to get to you, to affect your interior sense of self. Ambiguities, remarks on gender relationships, flirting both subtle and aggressive – in many cases what many Western women would call

Doing ethnomusicological research   89

sexual harassment – are frequent in Cameroon. It therefore seems vital to me that any woman researching in the area creates for herself an armour in order not to jump up each time she hears sexist remarks or smacking. We are in the field in order to conduct our research. We stay for a while and then go back home again. We are not in that place to educate people, or act as women’s rights activists. We are there to do our job as anthropologists. I am glad I have never experienced any real danger to my own or my companions’ integrity. Nor have I ever observed violence against Cameroonian women. I don’t know how I would have reacted if I had. Not dramatizing this kind of situation is a question of experience and should not be confused with passivity or staying quiet. On the other hand, neither are we in the field to have an affair. As I mentioned, for rural Cameroonians the popular image of the Western woman – as if ever such an essentialized type existed – is constructed through magazines, Brazilian soap series on TV, and cheap, often quite erotic, video clips. I’ve heard young men say on several occasions that white women are always ready for sex. This means that a female scholar has to behave without any ambiguity. *Do not sleep with someone* is one of the first pieces of advice I offer my students. Even flirtation is not an option when doing fieldwork. Yes, one may be flattered, but it is not recommended at all to start a relationship in the field. Even if such an opportunity might be tempting, a fieldworker – woman or man – should not take advantage of it. This would create misunderstandings and complicate the research situation considerably. Our behaviour should never be such that it can be interpreted as an invitation. This includes a certain dress code, which excludes wide necklines, visible G-­strings, or bras. It is about not mixing up the registers: we’ll go for vacations and adventure after we are back from fieldwork. Another confusion which should not be made is to mix up authority with authoritarianism. It is sometimes necessary for success in research and the researcher’s wellbeing to be firm and this might be difficult for female students. Even in Western societies women have a tendency to try to “be nice”. The fear of being perceived as dominant in an interracial context can thus lead a young female researcher to accept situations she feels uneasy about or where she has the impression of losing her freedom of decision. She should be conscious, though, that she must not feel obligated to accept everything from the people with whom she works. Firmness is also necessary to meet the aims of her research. It is she who is responsible for not losing sight of her objective in order to obtain the data she needs for her research project. In the ethnomusicologist’s case, conducting analytical recording sessions demands an attitude that allows the female researcher to direct male musicians. But being firm does not mean to disrespect people and they know this. It is the experience that will help her to find a middle-­way between her way of proceeding and the paths on which the musicians would like to lead her. Within this balanced space where each partner makes a step towards the other with respect, I found the possibility to express from time to time my own point of view. Being provocative about religion, insisting on a woman’s liberty to choose whether to be married or not and to whom, to be a mother or not, is part of my

90   Susanne Fürniss

personal little battle. As much as I have to question my values, I sometimes ask my interlocutors to question theirs. Thus, the encounter between persons from very contrasting geo-­cultural backgrounds gives each of them the opportunity to think about what she or he would take for granted if they had not met.

Questions for reflection 1 2 3

If you are a practising religious person, are you ready to separate your personal faith and your anthropological research? How will you react if someone asks you to give him your batteries, or shoes, or mosquito net because he needs them? How will you refuse to give what is vital to you? Have you already thought about how to express your femininity without external signs like make-­up, trendy dresses, or jewellery?

Notes 1 I want to thank Bonnie Hewlett and Scott Calvert for their hard job to turn my strange English into a colloquial academic expression. 2 I would like to thank Miriam Furniss-­Yacoubi for her trust in me when allowing me to write about her difficult experience. 3 Habilitation à diriger des Recherches, a French diploma that is necessary to access the status of senior researcher or tenure track professors. 4 Several times, I have heard female students make allusions to sexual harassment by their professors and the deal that goes with it, known colloquially as “NST”, short for “notes sexuellement transmissibles” – sexually transmitted grades. This is a play on the abbreviation MST, which stands for “maladies sexuellement transmissibles” – sexually transmitted diseases.

References Arom, S. (1991) African Polyphony and Polyrhythm: Musical Structure and Methodology. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Essélé Essélé, K. (2016) Continuities and sound innovations of the funeral ceremonies of Éton of southern Cameroon. [Continuités et innovations sonores des cérémonies funéraires des Éton du Sud-­Cameroun.] PhD Thesis, University of Paris Ouest Nanterre. Fürniss, S. (2008) The adoption of the circumcision ritual bèkà by the Baka-­Pygmies in southeast Cameroon. African Music. 8 (2), pp. 94–113. Fürniss, S. and Lussiaa-­Berdou, C. (2004) Ritual circumcision among the western Baka of Cameroon. [Beka. Rituel de circoncision chez les Baka occidentaux du Cameroun. Available from: www.vjf.cnrs.fr/lms/sf/accueil.htm (Accessed 23 September 2019). Tsuru, D. (1998) Diversity of ritual spirit performances among the Baka Pygmies in southeastern Cameroon. African Study Monographs. Suppl. 25, pp. 47–84.

5 A boss, a Mother, a Red Antelope, and All the Things in Between Sylvie Le Bomin

Introduction There is no universal manual, no sure-­fire advice, no recipe for how to make fieldwork a success every time, like a cake, even in the best of conditions. What’s more, there’s no guarantee that a method or protocol effective in one context will translate into another. After twenty-­five years of experience in central Africa, the Central African Republic, and Gabon, it’s obvious to me that each new field site is a unique experience. The success of meetings between people who, five minutes prior, did not know each other, who in some cases had little idea about each other’s existence, and who hadn’t necessarily even sought to meet in the first place, depends on a complex alchemy of personalities, principles of life, and skills that one cannot be trained for, yet is just as much a part of a field researcher’s work as anything else. One of the difficulties is that we do not necessarily understand at the moment why this human relationship, necessary for the success of our research, works or does not work. With hindsight, I can identify what the criteria which may favour or be an obstacle to this relationship might be. Of course, these criteria are dependent on the socio-­historical context in which one finds oneself. These contexts generate systems of representation just as much for the researcher as for the populations in which he works, representations which imply the classification of the one and the other in categories to which specific attributes are given. In the case of Africa, there is no doubt that the colonial and post-­colonial context has led to the establishment of a pattern of relation that is still extremely difficult to break, particularly that of dominating and the dominated. This is without a doubt the biggest obstacle I encountered in my first years of research in the Central African Republic. Continuing my experience in Gabon in the context of different issues

92

Sylvie Le Bomin

with a comparative aim, I found myself in a socio-­cultural context that allowed me to put in place different strategies to facilitate exchanges with the populations studied. If, little by little, I have benefited from social integration at different levels (gender, family, community), my status as a Western woman with the representations it conveys necessitated permanent adaptations of my behaviour and my way of life. Thus, my path has led people to give me different identities progressing from the outermost, “the white” to that of Mienda, guardian of the family. The following text presents this human path, which, often overlooked in the context of scientific publications, is no less decisive in the issues explored and the results obtained. I am an ethnomusicologist. I did my first fieldwork in the Central African Republic when I was twenty-­four years old and continued to work there regularly for the next four years, splitting my time between two different populations living in two different villages. I’ve been doing research in Gabon for eighteen years now, continuing to look at Pygmy and non-­Pygmy populations from a comparative perspective (Le Bomin et al. , 2016). This has led me to work with numerous groups in nearly every region of the country. My experience is therefore solely with Africa and, more precisely, central Africa. The populations in which I have always worked are of an oral tradition. This means that musical knowledge, like all knowledge, is above all implicit – rarely verbalized, and in the rare instances when it is, it is typically done through metaphor. This is not to say, however, that these musical traditions do not obey strict organizational rules. These populations are mainly rural, making a living from agriculture, fishing, hunting, and gathering. In the Central African Republic, most groups speak Ubangian languages, while various Bantu languages are spoken in Gabon, French being the national language in both countries. In the rural environments in which I typically work, the living conditions are rudimentary – there is no running water, no electricity, and no gas. Some researchers have circumvented these conditions by residing in the city and shuttling their informants to town for interviews as necessary. This approach does not comport with my conception of anthropological fieldwork, as to me it seems essential to live among the people with whom I work if I am to have any chance of understanding their culture and society – never mind the basic practical concerns of efficiency!

Am I really a woman? As researchers in traditional African social environments, there is no doubt that our position in the village, the methods we employ, and even the degree to which we achieve our research goals are predicated upon our gender. A woman will be assimilated into the roles assigned to women in that particular community, with all the constraints and opportunities those roles afford, and likewise for men. The first impact of this assimilation even before considering work as such, is in the living conditions. First, it’s about finding a place to sleep. Depending on the capacity of

A boss, a mother, a red antelope   93

the village, the choice of village authorities, and, also, to a lesser extent, the researcher’s preferences, one will usually find herself in a small house or a room in a family residence. Living in this residence, whatever it is, involves performing everyday tasks – body care, etc. – as a local woman does or should. Thus, I wash at times and in places reserved for women. Moreover, to the extent my skills and my will allow, I become integrated into the daily life of women – from agricultural production, to river fishing, to collecting shellfish along the river banks, to preparing meals and childcare. The expectations local people have of us to fulfil these roles can make it difficult for us to do our own work. Indeed, my research has little connection with most local women’s daily activities, except for some that may involve special songs for dam and bail fishing, water drums, or the preparation of certain foods. My fieldwork consists in collecting the knowledge and know-­how related to the musical activity. The acquisition of data (recordings, questionnaire, terminology) therefore requires working and being in contact with those involved in musical activity – which includes men, women, and children. Some musics are practised in mixed groups, but many are produced only by specific categories (brotherhood, young children, men, women) within the community. Different songs and dances are associated with different sorts of activities, some with quotidian chores and others with healing ceremonies, mourning, male or female initiation rites, hunting, ancestor cults, spirit cults, or with the birth of twins. To record musics, to understand their meanings in the community, thus requires derogating from certain normative attitudes in the community. In the majority of cases, the recording process involves bringing together a certain number of specialists, asking them questions, asking them for their opinion on topics that are often not addressed by the community as part of the usual modus vivendi. Moreover, it is very rare that knowledge is transmitted generally to the collective, as knowledge is generally acquired implicitly through observation and repeated participation in the activities traditionally undertaken by members of different socio-­religious subgroups. As such, it would be a mistake to assume it is more difficult to gain access to male knowledge than to female knowledge. The contexts in which I record and interview are, quite frequently, outside what would be permissible for local women according to local standards, especially when it comes to working on musical practices related to exclusively male “secret societies”, into which one must normally be ritually initiated. The situation is definitely incongruous and it is in this case the anomalous identity of the Westerner that makes the situation possible. Local expectations for my conduct and the social roles into which I have been assimilated have no doubt influenced my activity in the field in every context in which I have found myself, but I never thought of not being myself anymore. I have, however, learned to accept compromise between who I am in my culture of origin and who I am in the culture of the other. This process has given rise to unforgettable experiences that have helped, over the course of twenty-­five years of fieldwork, to establish my ethnomusicological way of life.

94   Sylvie Le Bomin

To be “patron” and becoming “ma fille” My first research concerned the music of the Banda Gbambiya, an ethnic group located in the northwestern region of the Central African Republic, in the prefecture of Ouham. They belong to the vast Banda group, the largest linguistic group in Central Africa. Comprising roughly fifty dialectically distinct subgroups that range across a geo-­cultural continuum in the central-­eastern territory of the country, the Banda were the subject of several decades of linguistic research under the direction of France Cloarec-­Heiss (2000) and ethnomusicological research led by Simha Arom and Vincent Dehoux of the Laboratory of Civilizations with Oral Tradition (Lacito). The aim of my Master’s research, derived from data collected in the field in 1989 and 1991 by Simha Arom’s team, sought to answer existing hypotheses about the nature of the scalar systems of their xylophones (Arom, 1991). The corpus put at my disposal consisted on the one hand of six hours of video recordings of experiments carried out during two research periods with the Banda Gbambiya as well as acoustic measurements of intervals, and, second, audio recordings of their musics in context. It was through these videos that I first encountered the village of Bakaba, where I would live and work for twelve months of my life, and the xylophonists with whom I would work for the next four years. At the end of the first year of my Master’s programme, Simha Arom, who was then director of the ethnomusicology team of Lacito, and Vincent Dehoux, who was doing his research on Central African xylophones, obtained the funds necessary to get me into the field and pursue my inquiry into the systematics of music for xylophones of Banda Gbambiya. The main objective of my thesis research was to understand the processes through which novices learned to play the instruments, and what that could teach us about the relationship between concept and practice within an oral musical tradition, and about the conceptual principles of these musical systems more generally. During the preparation of my first fieldwork, I was swamped with anecdotes, advice, and instructions from Lacito members who worked in the Central African Republic. I had never travelled outside Europe and I had no idea of ​​the living conditions that awaited me in this small village. Immediately upon my arrival in the capital city, Bangui, I began learning about certain local traditions. Searching through my luggage at the airport, I found all my left shoes missing. I was told I had to go and pick up the errant shoes at PK5, a place everyone knew to go to buy whatever had been stolen a few hours earlier. I convinced myself that in that context, nothing should be taken too seriously and that everything was possible. Twenty-­five years later, I would qualify the first point a little, but I remain convinced of the second. A few weeks later, I was dropped in the village of Bakaba, forty kilometres south of the nearest town, Bossangoa, where I would live for three months. This large village is located at the edge of the National 1, the only national road in the country at the time, where only a few cars, less than a dozen, ran each week.

A boss, a mother, a red antelope   95

The village had hosted other Western researchers. Vincent Dehoux, who was conducting a comparative study of music for the xylophone worked there (1993), and then the team of Simha Arom, who worked on the musical scales of the Central African Republic (Arom, 1991). These field trips were accompanied by a Central African research assistant, Séverin Gourna, who was as much a translator as he was a research facilitator. The relational context between the French and the Central African, some thirty years after independence, was quite brutal. In all the companies I have seen, Central African employees only performed minor tasks, the term “Boy” was still used for domestic workers and it seemed to me that Westerners present often behaved in ways they would not have with subordinates in their own country. Relationships were characterized by domineering attitudes, dominant behaviour, and discrimination. For me it seemed obvious that Westerners (mostly French) were imposing systems of production very clearly designed to minimize the profits of Central African subordinates and to maximize their own. Some seventy years after the passionate denunciations made by André Gide (1927) and Marc Allégret (1987) of brutal and one-­sided colonialism, I found the same contempt and a flagrant lack of consideration among Westerners for the knowledge and know-­how of local people. I have encountered cohorts of volunteers from the Peace Corps and similar organizations, who had come on a mission to “teach” the Central Africans how they should live (the majority of them less than half the age of the people they sought to teach), become ill after only a few months due to their failure to respect basic rules of food, and even bodily hygiene. It did not even occur to them that these populations had their own rules of operation and ways of managing their environment that had allowed them to endure. I was perceived as quite the “original” for explaining to one that raising a pig farm in a village populated by Hausa traders and Fulani (two Muslim populations) was probably not a good idea, and to another that women cared very well for their children, even if they did not do it in the Western way. At the time, very few thought any model of human social organization other than that which they could imagine at eighteen or twenty years old could exist. The most amazing aspect for me was undoubtedly their imperviousness to the culture of others, their refusal to accept that cultural differences were not something negative to be overcome, but that cultures other than their own made valuable contributions in the way of knowledge, and diverse ways of life offered important visions for potential paths of development. I will never forget the remarks two young French Catholic volunteers made as I explained to them that the musical scales in the Central African Republic are composed of five notes in an octave rather than the seven, as is found with typical Western scales: “Then there too, they are poorer than us.” Basically, it did not bother Westerners to consider these populations as less intelligent and unable to live properly. Had not an early twentieth-­century explorer written that Banda has a brain that develops until puberty and then regresses … In any case, the white man was the “Patron” the one who knows even when he is

96   Sylvie Le Bomin

uninformed, the one who is right even when he is wrong, and the Central African merely a subhuman, called by a name often screamed and accompanied by unqualified qualifiers. So, I became “Patron”, or “Madame”, but never “Sylvie”, except at the very end of my last field trip, and then only by some of the oldest musicians. One day I pointed out to one of the musicians that he called my colleague, Séverin Gourna, by his first name, but did not call me by mine – and despite the fact we were neighbours! Rather than adopt the familiar name for me, he chose instead, to my great despair, to revert to calling Séverin “Monsieur”, not thinking of calling a Western woman by her first name. Even though I had bought my little hut in the village, witnessed the births of several children, some of whom would bear my name, I was nonetheless called “Patron” or “Madame” during the entire twelve months I spent in this village over a period of four years. This produced a certain isolation for me, since being seen as an equal in my relationships with anyone in the village was inconceivable. This also complicated communication with the musicians, who were at first compelled to defer to me regardless of whether I was right in any particular matter, rather than explain the endogenous version of things. The numerous contradictions in the data were the most visible symptom of that deference. The funny thing is how those contradictions arose from my own monumental methodological error in the collection of terminology. I had learned from my linguistic teachers the basics of Banda notation in the international phonetic alphabet and I knew the importance of tonality in the language. France Cloarec-­Heiss was particularly interested in the linguistic data I could bring back to her, because although a specialist in the many dialects of Banda, she did not have any data on the Gbambiya. I was therefore in charge of collecting the data using the Linguistic Inventory Questionnaire prepared by Luc Bouquiaux and J.M.C. Thomas (1976). This I did conscientiously, repeating each word three times, then asking Gbambiya to whistle the tones of each word, and recording everything to make it available to France. When I came back from the field, it was with great enthusiasm that I got involved in linguistic transcription work with France. However, while the phonemes did not pose a problem, the whistled tones for single words varied from one version to another. We discovered then that I had made the mistake of repeating the word myself to the informants who would then whistle the tones. They had whistled the tones as I had pronounced them, not as they were actually pronounced. The “white” being always right, my informants had deferred to me rather than point out my errors. However, little by little, I began to establish emotional ties with some of the musicians. In particular, I began a friendship with a man named Joseph Yadéré, the village xylophone maker and one of the greatest musicians I have had the honour of working with in my entire career. At least seventy years old at the time, he first made his xylophones available to me without me knowing anything. He sometimes came to the recording sessions as a spectator when I still didn’t know who he was. Then, one day, irritated by the hesitations of the musicians present, he showed me in less than an hour that the models I was looking for in the Gbambiya xylophone music really did exist (Le Bomin, 2005).

A boss, a mother, a red antelope   97

Endowed with a great sense of humour, and equally uncompromising discipline, Joseph would become one my greatest teachers – it was not long before our friendship found its footing and a bond was forged between us. I then became ma fille – two of the only words he knew in French. This filial connection was reinforced by the position I adopted in certain circumstances. Indeed, when I arrived for my second field trip, Joseph undertook to rebuild his instruments entirely. I was out of work, unable to make any recordings, the most crucial data I had come for. So I sat next to Joseph to watch his work for long hours. I gradually learned to anticipate his gestures and his needs without a word between us. I was able to assist him like any other young man in the village – this in spite of being a girl, let alone a French girl. Though, without realizing it at the moment, I had changed my position. I had gone from being the boss who knows everything, who handles sophisticated equipment and commands men older than she, to that of apprentice xylophone maker, without sex, without colour, adopting silent observation as the only way of learning and acquiring knowledge. There is no doubt that the Banda Gbambiya of the village had never seen a Westerner in this subordinate position and it did not fail to surprise more than one. Little by little though, the villagers, who also included Hausa traders and Fulani, realized that I was not a “white” like the others. This helped me to combat the deeply prejudiced attacks made on me by the local authorities at the time (was it not just a matter of course?), who were trying to discourage the musicians from working with me by arguing that I was there to steal their music and make money with it by various means. In some way, I believe, they were only levelling at me the same judgments they had of all Westerners and their activities but could not normally make so public because those others were “vrais Patrons”. When I defended my thesis, Luc Bouquiaux, a member of the jury and a linguist who also worked in the Central African Republic, remarked to the audience that I had the merit of having worked in a difficult region. Knowing nothing else at the time, I did not understand why. Certainly, the Gbambiya were reputed to be somewhat “recalcitrant” in the region. The members of Simha Arom’s team called them “hackers”, because of their ability to make difficult work that in other populations did not pose much of a problem. The Catholic authorities had given up sending priests to the village. And perhaps the leaders of the cotton company would have better understood why cotton did not grow in this area, though it did forty kilometres further north, if they had been told that the Gbambiya had boiled the seeds so as to avoid this new invention and the French exploitation of their land and people sure to accompany it. By gradually adopting a position of apprenticeship, and therefore of humility, by not hiding my enthusiasm for certain products of the local cuisine (inconceivable for Westerners of the time, and still difficult for some twenty-­five years later), and by sharing with them the knowledge I gained about their music, I created a climate that allowed me to do my job and to do it with an unparalleled pleasure. I thus broke the endogenous image of the white woman and became a whole person,

98   Sylvie Le Bomin

FIGURE 5.1 

Joseph Yadéré and me playing xylophone.

whom the Gbambiya could appreciate or not for herself, rather than as a caricature or stereotype. In the end, although my method of work did not involve learning to play the xylophone, I ended up mastering certain pieces that Joseph Yadéré and I loved to perform together (see Figure 5.1).

The ethnomusicologist and the xylophone mother bar This filial relationship between Joseph Yadéré and I had a much more important implication than the emotional bond and the investment he put into his participation in my work on xylophone playing. I must say that, caught up in the whirlwind of the requirement to finish my thesis, to produce the calibre of work worthy of my team members, I did not at that time realize all the implications and consequences of my work. As I mentioned, the opportunity to learn the process of repairing xylophones was a major turning point for my status in the village. That episode drew me to ask Joseph Yadéré to build a xylophone orchestra for me to check some hypotheses concerning their tuning, the importance of timbre, but also to understand the chaîne opératoire, which had never been observed by Westerners. I thus obtained funding from the French Ministry of Culture, which allowed me to finance the fieldwork and to make a film on xylophone construction in collaboration with Laurent Venot (De l’arbre au xylophone, 1997). The traditional rule among the Gbambiya is that a xylophone maker builds only one orchestra in his life, the spirit of the forest only allowing him to take all the necessary materials once. Then the xylophone maker is allowed to repair his

A boss, a mother, a red antelope   99

instruments piecemeal. Joseph and I therefore negotiated the conditions for this construction. It was decided that the xylophones would join the Musical Instruments collection at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, and that, in exchange for his guidance, we would provide him with a new tin roof, something that would alleviate his long suffering under leaky straw roofs. In truth, however, the process was less about these simple exchanges, and much more about the transmission of knowledge. For me it was about making a film, to observe the construction of this instrument, and to bring back the orchestra to be appreciated in the West. For Joseph, it was a question of passing on his knowledge to his chosen successor – his nephew – but also to me. A man of formidable intelligence, Joseph certainly understood that most of the young people of the village did not necessarily fancy taking the time to ensure his know-­how would be passed on, but by allowing me to observe, to capture his process on film (we got twenty-­six hours of footage total), and to bring back his orchestra, his knowledge would be preserved for untold generations. His choice of apprentice was signalled in the transmission of the “mother bar” – the lowest tune bar in the soloist xylophone, particularly significant because it is the one each xylophone maker manufactures for his successor. It is this bar that serves as a diapason to tune all the bars of the four xylophones that make up the orchestra. For me, the most important aspect of documenting the construction of the mother bar was that this clearly demonstrated, contrary to what ethnomusicologists of the time thought, that the notion of absolute pitch did exist in these communities, as this bar was tuned precisely to the pitch of the corresponding bar in the maker’s own orchestra, which had in turn been tuned to its predecessor. I realize now that by crafting this bar for me, Joseph was appointing me as his eventual successor, but, more profoundly, as the conservator of the fundamental knowledge of xylophone making. The barrier of language had undoubtedly been a brake on our exchanges, but the most crucial gaps in our understanding were overcome in this powerful and expressive act. I am even more proud today, in light of the devastation the civil war in this region has wrought, to have finalized a film De l’arbre au xylophone [From the Tree to the Xylophone], dedicated to Joseph Yadéré, which was awarded the “Special Mention of the Jury” at the Bilan du film ethnographique.

White girl, mother, grandmother, and novice in Gabon My arrival in Gabon meant a new cultural and musicological context in which to work and along with it a certain degree of freedom. My thesis was complete and I had to figure out which direction I would take on my research. I no longer had the pressure of having to prove myself among my colleagues who also specialized in Central African music. I felt compelled to embrace my independence and orient my research towards those themes that personally intrigued me most, allowing me to explore how these themes were expressed in this new Gabonese cultural environment.

100   Sylvie Le Bomin

I actively sought to avoid reliving the “colonialist” experience I had suffered in the Central African Republic. My new research programme was an opportunity for me to lay a foundation for working in close collaboration with the research community of my host country, a project that was as close to my heart as the research itself.1 For me this point was key, not only to collaborate with Gabonese researchers as much as possible, but also to learn local methods and skills. I was fortunate the Gabonese university system was well disposed to my ambition, and I received a particularly welcoming reception at LUTO – Laboratoire Universitaire de la Tradition Orale – at Omar Bongo University in Libreville. Without going into details, I will say that the impact of collaboration with this institution on my work in Gabon has been immense. I would like to pay tribute to some Gabonese colleagues who sought to introduce me into another system of thought, disturbing at times, and challenging in ways that, objectively, have always been beneficial. None of our work in Gabon could have been so productive without the major contributions of Jean-­Emile Mbot, Florence Bikoma, and Albert Yangari.

My Gabon modus vivendi Over the course of eighteen years of fieldwork in Gabon, most people I have met have immediately placed me into socio-­cultural categories that assign me particular attributes, attitudes, and obligations. The most numerous and perhaps the most powerful are categories of kinship. As I’ve grown older, I’ve traversed several age categories. This was done through two processes, social and affective co-­optation. Unlike in the Central African Republic, social cooperation in Gabon is almost automatic. From the moment I or my colleagues begin living together with a family, we become daughters, aunts, mothers, sisters, or grandmothers. These categories provide guidelines in a sense for how we are to be viewed and treated. But affective relationships inevitably emerge as well, and it is in this dimension that I develop my personal status with individuals and their families. I become, on an emotional level, their girl, their mom, auntie, sister, and within the last ten years, their grandma. The people who accompany me into the field are integrated into these kin systems through me. My students become the grand­ children of my mothers and fathers, my colleagues become the uncles and aunts of my nephews and nieces. These different categories are not innocuous, neither in day-­to-day life, nor in the context of work. They carry with them in all cases rights and responsibilities. I have no doubt obtained a certain authority, but that is as an elder, not as a Westerner vis-­à-vis the African. I behave according to the norms appropriate to my age when I ask a person of a younger generation to perform a task for me. Not doing so would be seen as unnatural, a major social mistake. It is just as natural for me to remonstrate a younger person for inappropriate behaviour – there is nothing of neo-­colonialism or racism in such acts. Also embedded within age and kin categories are implicit rules for whom one is responsible for protecting as well as whom one ought to be protected by. So, in

A boss, a mother, a red antelope   101

each village, I must work out the age class relative to everyone else. Pygmy villages are the exception to the rule. There, I am the mother of everyone. At first I was somewhat dismayed by this, as it was hard for me to imagine that people of my age or older could think of me as their mother. Truth be told it bothered me quite deeply because it seemed to me that it was a way of putting all the responsibilities on my shoulders. This seemed to me all the more incongruous when one considers the particularly harsh living conditions in these communities. It is as if suddenly all the heaviness of life falls to me. Thus, Wowo, a Baka man from the Minvoul region of Gabon told me I had a protective duty towards each of the members of the Baka group that I had brought with me to the French cultural centre in Libreville for a cycle of lectures and a concert. Since then, I have learned to reconcile strangely contradictory experiences of Pygmies as at once chronically dependent on the non-­Pygmies, including myself, alongside whom they live, and at the same time capable of surviving in the most hostile environment I know. It is clear that being considered a mother and now as a grandmother is not just a matter of age. The knowledge and know-­how I have acquired are as much if not more at play. The core of my knowledge is, of course, in my domain of research – music. But as music is integrated into nearly every socio-­religious context in these communities, I have also acquired in the course of my work insight into diverse cosmogonies, some of the “secrets” of “secret” brotherhoods, fishing techniques, and much else. My skills also extend to the culinary arts. I often go from kitchen to kitchen, the favourite place of women, where I have learned different recipes of Gabonese cuisine. It would be a lie to pretend that we can work on music all day, every day, and I often spend my free time walking around from one kitchen to the next as women prepare their meals and work on their basketry. In this way, I have acquired these skills through which I have strengthened my name and further integrated myself into my adoptive communities. Nowadays, I am no longer just someone who quietly listens and learns in the field. I am a woman whose substantial experience and knowledge isn’t easily dismissed; on the contrary, it has in fact afforded me a respected position in the community as a counsellor and confidante, someone who understands a broad range of situations and dilemmas and can consistently lend sound advice. This is why I am referred to as “mom” even by people older than me. It is not a designation related to the fact that I have offspring (which I do not have elsewhere), but to the fact that a set of traits, obviously more important, are present in me.

“La blanche” and the bishop In certain circumstances, my culinary knowledge has been a major asset in validating my integration into local communities. Working with diverse communities has allowed me to learn recipes in one population that had disappeared in others. Gabonese people are very attached to their traditional cooking, particularly to ceremonial dishes intended to confirm various social alliances, especially affinal

102   Sylvie Le Bomin

ties. Such are wrapped wild atanga fruit, the preparation of which involves first collecting the flesh of these fruits, seasoning it with salt and chilli, wrapping portions of it in marantaceous leaves, then smoking the wraps until the juices flow out and the dough has a firm consistency. This dish is known in the majority of Gabonese populations as a dish for camps or ceremonies, but somewhat neglected in some areas where grated atangas are favoured. I learned the recipe from the Ngom of southern Gabon and had several opportunities to cook it in different Fang subgroups in the north. It was in one of these subgroups that my mastery of this recipe convinced a group of women I had been working with for a long time to put a local religious authority, who had shown to me a non-­negligible dose of contempt and racism, back in his place. Welcomed to the village for a ceremony, he particularly appreciated the wrapped atanga, noting he had not eaten that dish for a long time and he appreciated that the women of this village had kept this knowledge. When he asked who the woman was who still knew how to prepare it, it was in the spirit of humour and delicious revenge that they turned to me, responding “la blanche” – the white one – a particularly disdainful racial epithet some Gabonese use to refer to Westerners, which these women never called me by, but which corresponded in every way to the attitude he had had shown towards me a few hours earlier. Thus, it was a very clear and satisfying rebuke these women had made on my behalf.

Mother Hélène’s daughter My first fieldwork in Gabon was with the Fang Ntumu population in the city of Bitam. The Fang, who constitute the ethnic majority in Gabon, live mostly in the Woleu Ntem province in the north. I was accompanied by a student, Roland Petron Essono Obiang, who comes from the area (see Figure 5.2). We resided in the house he lived in with his mother, Hélène, then sixty years old. Welcoming me into her house, Hélène instantly adopted me as her daughter, and I remain an integrated member of her vast family to this day. She had been raised by her father with the idea that, regardless of marriage, she should remain autonomous. Thus, unlike the vast majority of women of her generation, she completed school and received her diploma. She married Roland’s father, who became the first Gabonese prefect of the city of Bitam after Gabon achieved independence. In the 1960s, high-­ranking Gabonese officials were sent to attend a school of administrative affairs in the suburbs of Paris. This is how, in 1968, Hélène found herself a resident of the town of Maisons Laffitte, where she became a fan of Sylvie Vartan and Johnny Hallyday, whose songs she still listens to. Why all these details, you may ask? Well, because my name is Sylvie and I was born in 1968, the same year Hélène suffered a miscarriage, and because a few decades later my father finished his career as General Secretary of Town Hall in the town of Maisons Laffitte. Thus, in the mind of my mother Hélène, I am a reincarnation of the baby she lost in Maisons Laffitte, whom she would have named Sylvie or Johnny, depending on sex. Our reunion could not be simply a matter of chance, such is her

A boss, a mother, a red antelope   103

conception of our history. As a result, I have a sister Félicité, three brothers, numerous brothers- and sisters-­in-law and a whole slew of sons, daughters, nieces, nephews, and now even grandchildren. I also have a plot of land on the family property to build my house. While I am an avowed atheist, Hélène is an extreme believer, convinced that many of her fellow creatures are wicked wizards and that the only environment sufficiently safe for me to work is within the family. Unfortunately for me, musical knowledge among the Fang is specialized within groups scattered throughout the area. Soon enough, Mama Hélène found herself grudgingly obliged to let me go from village to village, though she did her damnedest to extend her protection and control by threatening the driver who was to accompany me with grave consequences if anything should happen to me. It could have been a considerable drag on my work if I had allowed myself to be trapped under her exaggerated, albeit well-­intentioned, protection. My will to preserve my own autonomy allowed me to prospect in the region of Bitam as I pleased. The house was centrally located close to a main road, which allowed me to get to different areas in the region without too much difficulty and have access to the villages where groups of traditional musicians lived. At that time, there was no inventory of these groups, so being centrally located meant I could avoid wandering nomadically, searching for them from village to village. In addition, living in the city, I was able to benefit from sharing information with contacts I made through Mama Hélène, and tapping into their social networks. Moreover, even now, Hélène does not hesitate in repeating to whoever will listen, particularly her many church sisters, when her daughter from France is at home. She has also endeavoured to put me in touch with people worthy of her trust. That’s how I went to live in the village of Mendoung, home of Thomas Edou, father-­in-law to my sister Félicité, and father of Maxime, my brother-­in-law. Thomas was then about eighty years old, still living with three of his wives and a number of his very copious offspring. He was known among Gabonese historians for his knowledge of Fang traditions and passion for Fang oral literature, in particular his mastery of the Fang migration narrative. When the car dropped me off for a ten-­day stay in this village early in the morning, the women were getting ready to go fishing in one of the rivers winding through the forest. With an urge to rejoin community life, I resolved to leave immediately with them without even opening my luggage. Having known these women for no more than five minutes, I could not have been aware that they were true workaholics. I soon came to understand that, for them, Western women do not meet any of the qualifications of a real woman – they have the reputation of being lazy, unfit for everyday tasks, of having everything done for them in well-­staffed homes, completely incompetent in everything related to the production of food. One of the recommendations a Fang mother makes to her son is not to marry a “white” woman, widely considered incapable of meeting her duties to ensure the survival of the group – namely, having many children and producing enough food to feed her family, which extends well beyond her husband and children. It was

104   Sylvie Le Bomin

thus certainly the cause of these women’s astonishment when this young white woman, whom they had welcomed mainly in the spirit of reciprocity between in-­ laws, joined them on their fishing trip. I never much enjoyed being raised in the countryside in my youth or going to summer camps as a teenager, and, as you might imagine, this was another thing entirely. Crossing the equatorial forest is nothing like a hike. It is more like a trek, walking in deep mud, wading across rivers, crossing tree trunks and roots as big as the trunks themselves. But for me what is most difficult to bear are all the insects for which humans are an irresistible meal (mosquitoes, flies, carnivorous ants, etc.). I am often asked if I have ever encountered dangerous animals during these trips in the forest. In fact, I have met very few, but I sometimes think I might prefer them to the insects, which abound in this lush environment. I remained stoic in the face of their incessant attacks, but it nevertheless cost me much itching afterwards. Famously irritating bites from certain species of fly and stings from small ants that flare up at strangely precise hours plagued me for days.

FIGURE 5.2 

Mama Hélène and me at her grandson’s (my nephew) traditional wedding.

A boss, a mother, a red antelope   105

Taking part in the lives of these women from the outset greatly facilitated my work, as it was they who possessed the singing repertoires I sought to understand. Moreover, my fishing experience attracted the attention of Thomas Edou (a feat of some importance, as men of his age do not typically interest themselves in the work of women), who undoubtedly concluded that, with me in the village, his days were clearly going to become less boring. The work of food production and preparation consumed nearly every moment of the day for the Fang women in that village, and they therefore had little time to devote to me and my work. So, we established a programme where they joined me at the end of the day to make recordings. Not being able to accompany the women in their daily pursuits, I became the quotidian companion of the one who would become Papa Thomas and his acolytes. Prohibited from alcoholic drink because of their many and varied diseases, I was their pretext and their means of countering these interdicts, which they particularly appreciated. In return, they invested in my work, finding their youth in drum performances that accompanied women’s songs. We made the recordings in the evening and my dads gave me private lessons in the Fang language and Fang traditions during the day. I was able to collect a magnificent corpus of songs in a certain tranquillity, which has not always been the case in other contexts. This particular arrangement allowed me also to collect a number of ancient songs possessed by these elderly men alone, their only remaining testimony bequeathed to me by the thin voice of Papa Thomas and his acolytes. Deceased ten years later, Papa Thomas could not be the witness of the baptism of his great grandson, who bears his name and resembles him like one drop of water resembles another, and to whom I am godmother. As Mama Hélène says, there is no chance.

The novice and the Myene people My experience with the Myene people, begun in 2004, is a testimony to the trials through which an outsider must sometimes pass to win access to the insider’s knowledge. My ethnomusicological interest in the Myene was, on one hand, in determining the extent to which shared musical traditions might indicate a common origin for three Myene subgroups – the Orungu, the Nkomi, and the Galoa – and, on the other, in documenting current diversity in the musical traditions of these groups. The Orungu are mostly settled around Cape Lopez, in the city of Port Gentil and the villages of the canton Océan. The Nkomi live in the area around the lagoon that bears their name and the Ogooué river where they join the Galoa, who inhabit the Lakes region and the city of Lambarénée. In the last few years I have also worked with the Mpongwe, who are from the region of the capital, Libreville. One of the peculiarities of the Myene is that their original territories, mainly coastal, have become the two capitals of the country: Libreville, the administrative capital, and Port Gentil, the economic capital. The populations in these cities (primarily the Mpongwe and Orungu, respectively) have long been in contact with

106   Sylvie Le Bomin

Westerners because of their coastal location. Their various customary chiefs in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were the original signatories on the majority of commercial and territorial treaties with Western powers. This ancient contact with the West is also evident in the languages, which contain words of English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish origin (Raponda Walker, 1995). For many Gabonese then, the Myene are the most Westernized ethnic group, those most detached from any traditional religious universe. Indeed, it can be difficult to imagine that one’s neighbour or, say, the director of one’s bank, or even one’s minister, might be deeply engrained in a traditional ritual system, practised mostly out of sight, when the outward face they present is one of modernity, especially when the majority of Catholic congregations in the country comprise mostly ethnic Myene and Fang. Many are reluctant to admit their belonging in initiatory brotherhoods, even to their closest friends. While in Port Gentil, my friends referred me to one of their friends, who in 2003 had been engaged by a local political authority to produce a book and a disc on the musical heritage of the Myenes of Port Gentil and Lambarénée and asked him to facilitate my integration into “his family”. With a great kindness and unfailing availability, he drove me from one house to another, where we’d visit with his acquaintances over tea in one of the living rooms of the house, sinking into huge leather armchairs. Accustomed to doing research in rural contexts, I was disoriented by this situation where everyone conversed in very cordial tones, paying polite attention to my explanations of my research programme, and what I would need to accomplish it. But, if the conversation began in French, it quickly switched to Myene, giving me the sense that I may have well been a piece of furniture. I was out of my element, to be sure, unsure how to proceed in this atmosphere, which seemed to me like meetings of the city’s high society. After several days, I knew all the local elites, I had drunk a lot of tea, but my work had not advanced an inch. The way forward was totally obscured for me, as I couldn’t conceive of how I would manage going from house to house by myself to find informants willing to contribute to my work, as one can do in a village. I did, however, have a certain amount of information, gathered from Pierre Sallée’s archives,2 that I thought might be a starting place. I knew the names of the repertoires he had recorded, the names of the informants, and those of their neighbourhoods. Of course, forty years later, only the names of the repertoires and some of the neighbourhoods remained. Tired of living room visits, which could not have been more sterile and discouraging, I decided to retrace the path of Pierre Sallée to see what I might find. I went to the mayors of the boroughs who, little by little, sent me to see people with links to the musico-­ritual activity of the community. Indeed, Myene musical practice is fundamentally collective and associated with a complex ritual system. What I would gradually come to understand, to my dismay, was that all the people I had met in those famous living rooms had been potential informants. What I couldn’t appreciate at the time was that they had viewed me as a potential nuisance, and therefore had no interest in talking with me or inviting me into their

A boss, a mother, a red antelope   107

world. After hearing the conditions under which I preferred to work, and then reading off my laundry list of research items – questionnaires, song recordings, text translations, etc. – all of which could only be sources of continual worry and bother, it had seemed to them much more in order to put me in a corner and wait me out rather than to try to imagine how consulting with me might work, or how they could introduce me into their world without threatening trust and cohesion within the group. Fundamentally, the question was who would be willing to begin revealing all these more or less hidden practices, knowing that once I began, I might wish to push the boundaries into unanticipated areas, and perhaps become too invasive. Because, even if my concern was primarily musical, everyone knew that my questions would inevitably touch on much more profound issues of identity construction in the community, and that this knowledge could not be made accessible to just anyone. And for the moment, although a friend of friends, I was anyone, and I had to stay under control. Curiously, I was perhaps a little less so with the administrative authorities, who were just doing their job by giving me the names of various contacts. They were thus the ones who had initially directed me towards the masters of various initiatory brotherhoods. And, since most of those masters lived in the sorts of environments to which I was more accustomed, I was able to start my work in a familiar way, sitting on a wooden stool and not in a huge leather armchair. In the end, I was more comfortable, and so were they. I discovered the extent of Myene musical traditions as it intertwined with a complex and intense ritual system, organized according to the principles of Myene cosmogony. I, of course, had no conception of this system when I set out. I was a neophyte, a novice who had to prove herself. Knowing what I know about the extent to which Myene social and even political life is intertwined and embedded within this musico-­ritual system, the precautions taken by the friends of the friend of my friend seem in hindsight entirely justified. The Myene spirit world is inhabited by three categories of spirit, the boundaries of which are not, however, watertight. These are the abambo (spirits of the dead), imbwiri (geniuses of nature), and mbumba (protector spirits, whose sex complements that of their charge) (Bourdès Ogouliguendé, 1972). Each category is divided into subcategories, whose distinctive features are defined either by their position in the cosmological hierarchy or by the nature of their constituent entities. Although ritual practices related to this cosmology all require an initiatory phase, two forms with different purposes emerge: initiatory practices and practices requiring possession. In initiatory rites, such as njembe (female initiation), okukwe (male initiation), or bwete (male initiation),3 initiates learn rules for living in harmony with the norms of the community. Passage through these rites in entirely voluntary. In possession rituals, healers seek to identify the nature of the spirits thought to be intervening in the lives of their patients, by way of, for example, a physical malady or a psychic or social disorder. Music is considered as the main vector of the communication between these entities and the living. The song texts function primarily as memory aids,4 whereas the musical sounds address the spirits

108   Sylvie Le Bomin

directly. Thus, patients are directed and led by the music and sung text into a trance state, enabling the spirit to make its nature and motivations known. Because of the fact that all Myene belong to various initiatory brotherhoods and the community’s overall involvement in ceremonies, musical knowledge is shared by the whole community. But not all Myene necessarily care to share it with a foreigner, me, about whom they know nothing. In fact, it makes sense to present only the surface of things to an ethnomusicologist who arrives like a hair on the soup, plainly has no idea of ​​the system, and who, without recognizing it, had been in contact with the principal vessels of traditional Myene knowledge for weeks. By building my own network and attending ceremonies whenever and wherever I could, I gradually learned about this complex system. With time, I no longer had to ask permission to attend ceremonies – I was invited naturally. Before long I was invited to the preparatory phases of a great ceremony of collective reconciliation. Dressed all in white as is the custom, and terribly early as usual, I gradually saw arriving not only the people whom I worked with, but also all those members of high society with whom I had had tea and who, to my great shock, turned out to be the masters of ceremony. Among them, of course, was the friend of my friends. It was then tacitly decided that I had proved myself and my work took a new turn. Now a recognized member of “the family”, I was invited to ceremonies in the villages from which various clans originated. These are located on the other side of the Ogooué estuary from the city and can only be reached by canoe. At this moment, my work was met with real enthusiasm and this gave me the occasion to collect all the data I needed. I gained access to the hidden face of the Myene, one not shown to the passing foreigner. The oldest initiates have tried to share with me the origin stories of different practices and patiently explain to me their complex cosmology. What is more, certain intellectuals of Myene heritage contributed to my work by providing me with their own research on Myene traditions, much of it informed by their own parents. Thus, after having passed my own initiation of sorts, I practically collapsed under the data that seemed to pour in from all sides, almost always accompanied by some direction or other for how it ought to be appreciated and presented. For the Myene, my duty to do scientific work in my discipline was incidental. Now, I had to produce a document that faithfully captured their traditional musico-­ritual system, paying proper tribute to the depth and breadth of knowledge contributed by all involved. Nine months later, in collaboration with my anthropologist colleague Florence Bikoma, we were able to present a book that met both the requirements of our own disciplines and those of the Myene (Le Bomin and Bikoma, 2005). While I was visiting Port Gentil in the summer of 2017, my favourite “Akaga” (Akaga is the name of the Mother of the Ivanga sisterhood) informed me that since then she has been consistently referring to our book, to anyone inquiring about Myene traditions. What follows is a brief summary of what I learned. I had to be extremely tenacious and sometimes intrusive to achieve what I did with the Myene. In discussions with colleagues or students, some have raised questions about the ethics of my approach. To me, though, this view is somewhat

A boss, a mother, a red antelope   109

narrow and ethnocentric. I learned in the Central African Republic that each community protects its secrets with its own locks, and one must always search for an appropriate key. My approach was indeed somewhat incongruous in the context of the social and ritual system I encountered among the Myene, certainly the most hermetic I know of in Gabon. While I never encountered straightforward refusal from a potential informant, the Myene proved to be masters of evasion, and I was the object of various strategies, more or less polite, of avoidance. Even in the Central African Republic, where Western privilege remains largely unquestioned in many communities, I am still convinced people are fully capable of making the decision to work with me or not. My training in ethnomusicology has taught me that I am in the field to do a job. I am free to choose whether I will give up in the face of difficulty or persevere and do my best to honour my contract. But, as in many other learning contexts I’ve encountered, in the end people usually wait until I show interest before showing me theirs.

Conclusion Finally, I cannot help but reveal some of the nicknames that have been assigned to me in the field, especially in populations where I spent extended periods. These nicknames, which owe nothing to chance, testify to the way people have viewed my way of being and living with them. In Tsogho, where I worked mainly on the bwete male initiation brotherhood, I am Ninzona, the female creative entity. It is embodied by the harp, which is the fundamental musical instrument of ceremonies, the instrument of speech. She is the only female entity to enter the secret of men, the bwete brotherhood. So, for some insiders I am even Mr Sylvie. The knowledge I have acquired about this initiation practice strictly reserved for men has, for some, definitively dragged me from one gender to another. The Myene, of whom I have spoken above, and whose broad dispersion obliged me to go on a pirogue (canoe) into a vast territory, called me Ibolangana. the one who moves all the time, whose whereabouts you can never be sure of. Let’s say this moniker agreed with how I think of myself. My name Anzuna, offered by my old daddy Ongom, is that of a red antelope, the most beautiful antelope in the Ongom tradition. This name refers to a woman who behaves well, who pays attention to others, and especially to the older men around her. Luli a mukasa, the “too much” woman, is the nzebi nickname given to me by the Bongo pygmy women of the Koulamoutou region. They’ve named me according to my tenacity and desire to always go further, to know more – not exactly the conduct of a woman – hence I am the one who transcends her status as a woman. Finally, my beloved Henriette from the Gongwe village gave me the pretty Fang name of Mienda. I am, for her, the one who takes care of the village, of the family, in the African sense of the term of course. These different nicknames show how much the researcher would be naive to believe that he is the only observer of the other on his field. By the way, who told him it was his field?

110   Sylvie Le Bomin

Questions for reflection 1 2 3

Would it be wise to explain a few of the “secrets” from both male and female secret societies with African students of both genders as a way for them to understand there is no “magic” involved? How might you talk with informants about spirit possession if you do not believe in it? Is it possible, or advisable, for a researcher to try to become a member of their informants’ culture?

Notes 1 This collaboration led to the organization of symposia, joint publications, participation in publishing, collection acquisition and exhibition, installation of the LUTO sound archives storage laboratory, co-­directing a research programme, continuing education since 2000 at Omar Bongo University, supervising UOB Masters students and super­ vising PhD students from UOB. 2 Pierre Sallée is a French ethnomusicologist who worked for Orstom in Gabon in the 1960s. 3 These two forms of initiation are borrowed from the Tsogho that the Myenes have encountered in the forest projects in the centre of the territory. 4 The texts of the songs most often describe the ritual that is in progress.

References Allégret, M. (1987) Carnets du Congo, voyage avec André Gide. [Notes on the Congo, a trip with Andre Gide.] Paris, Presses du CNRS. Arom, S. (1991) L’étude des échelles dans les musiques traditionnelles: Une approche interactive, Analyse Musicale 23, ‘Analyse et expérimentation – En hommage à Simha Arom et à son équipe’, pp. 21–24. Bouquiaux, L. and Thomas, J.M.C. (1976) Enquête et description des langues à tradition orale [Investigation and description of languages with oral tradition] Volumes 1–3. Paris, SELAF. Bourdès-Ogouliguendé, J.A. (1972) L’évolution du statut de la femme gabonaise: du droit traditionnel au droit modern. [The changing status of Gabonese women: from traditional law to modern law.] PhD Thesis, Université de Paris. Cloarec-­Heiss, F. (2000) Dialectal measurements in very large dimensions: Application to a dialectically heterogeneous region, the Banda area. [Mesures dialectales en trois dimensions: application à une aire dialectale hétérogène, l’aire banda.] In: Wolff, H.E. and Gensler, O.D. (eds) Second World Congress of African Linguistics Proceedings, Leipzig, p. 18. De l’arbre au xylophone (1997) [film] Directed by: Sylvie Le Bomin and Laurent Venot. Paris, CNRS AV. Dehoux, V. (1993) Les modèles polyphoniques dans les musiques pour xylophones de Centrafrique. [Polyphonic models in Central African xylophone music.] Polyphonies de tradition orale, histoire et traditions vivantes. pp. 149–158. Gide, A. (1927) Voyage au Congo. [Voyage on the Congo.] Paris, Gallimard. Le Bomin, S. (2005) Étudier une musique instrumentale par ses processus d’apprentissage. [The study of instrumental music through its learning processes.] Revue de Musicologie. 90 (2), pp. 179–192.

A boss, a mother, a red antelope   111

Le Bomin, S. and Bikoma, F. (2005) Musiques Myènè: De Port-­Gentil à Lambaréné (Gabon). [Myènè Musics: From Port-­Gentil to Lambaréné (Gabon)]. Paris, Sépia. Le Bomin, S., Lecointre, G., and Heyer, E. (2016) The evolution of musical diversity: The key role of vertical transmission. PLoS ONE. 11(3), p. e0151570. Available from: http:// doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0151570. Raponda Walker, A. (1995) Dictionnaire Mpongwé–Français. [Mpongwe–French Dictionary.] Fondation Raponda-­Walker, Les classiques africains.

6 Culturally Appropriate Solutions to Fieldwork Challenges among Mbendjele BaYaka Hunter-­Gatherers of the Congo Basin Daša Bombjaková

Introduction Even though most ethnographers in the social anthropology tradition will attempt some reflexivity on the nature of their informants and the limitations of their fieldwork, these sorts of discussions often take the form of “funny fieldwork stories”, prior-­fieldwork supervisor-­to-student advice, or student “couleur” conversations. This chapter aims to discuss the challenges that I faced during my fieldwork with Mbendjele BaYaka hunter-­gatherers of the Congo Basin as well as strategies I employed to overcome them. These sorts of discussions are important, since they can have an impact on the nature of data collection and on how methods and techniques are adjusted to particular cultural contexts. While to various degrees, I experienced most of these issues (see Table 6.1), this chapter aims to address four major problematic areas. First, I will describe how I dealt with informants’ behaviours that felt overwhelming. Second, I will address issues that arose while conducting interviews. Third, I will explain my method to cope with unwanted male attention (see also Fürniss Chapter 4, this volume). Lastly, I will show what the impacts were of my consistent fear of lacking data. Before moving on to the discussion, I will briefly introduce the study group and field site.

Mbendjele BaYaka Mbendjele BaYaka are hunter-­gatherers of Congo Basin, commonly known in the academic literature by the general term “Pygmies”, a term which has derogatory connotations. Yaka1 is a self-­ascribed ethnonym, the Bantu prefix “Ba” indicates the plural (Köhler and Lewis, 2002). Recent studies estimate that there are as many as 920,000 Pygmies living in Central Africa. In general, there are four main Pygmy groups: the Western group (Gyeli, Bongo, Kola, Zimba, Aka, Baka);

Culturally appropriate solutions   113 TABLE 6.1  Researchers working with Congo Basin hunter-gatherers and various cultural-

specific difficulties in the field

Challenges

Publications

Avoidance of unwanted marriage proposals

Turnbull (1961: p. 141)

Difficulties with ethnographic interviews

Aunger (1994, 2004) Turnbull (1965: p. 233) Leonhardt (1999: p. 31) Lewis (2001: p. 19) Meehan (2005: p. 74)

Emotional responses to discriminative behaviours towards studied community

Kidd (2008: pp. 19–25)

Fieldwork challenges during Ebola outbreak

Hewlett and Hewlett (2008)

Negative impacts of hiring Bilo interpreters

Carpaneto and Germi (1989: p. 9) Lewis (2002: p. 13)

Issues of farmer-Pygmy jealousy

Grinker (1994: p. xiii)

Gaining trust of informants

Paulin (2007: pp. 167–168)

Payments to informants

Turnbull (1961: p. 30) Doremus (2015: p. 77)

Informants’ expectations on researcher based on previous visits of Europeans

Lewis (2002: p. 16) Kisliuk (1998: p. 22)

Difficulties in learning language of informants

Lewis (2002: p. 17)

Problems of asking questions

Lewis (2002: p. 19)

Problems with sharing and gifts

Kisliuk (1998: p. 23)

Ethical dilemmas concerning giving medical help and sharing medicine

Peacock (1985: pp. 73–74)

Eastern group (Mbuti, Efe, Asua, Sua, Kango); Twa group (Tua, Toa, Cwa, Boone, Langi, Chua); and the group of BaYaka (Olivero et al., 2016: p. 9). Mbendjele, along with Aka, Luma, Mikaya, Ngombe, and Baka belong to the BaYaka group (Köhler and Lewis, 2002). Woodburn made the distinction of contemporary hunter-­gatherer societies as being either immediate-­return or delayed-­return in respect to people’s work effort, which yields either immediate or delayed results (Woodburn, 1982, 2005). According to this classification, Mbendjele have an immediate-­return economic system – they are present oriented and consume most of their production as soon as they produce it. Immediate-­return systems produce the “closest approximation to equality known in any human societies” (Woodburn, 1982: p. 431). Mbendjele males and females are autonomous, have active political voices, participate in group decision-­making, have control over their sexual and reproductive bodies, and have

114   Daša Bombjaková

equal decision making in marriage. The emphasis on personal autonomy – the belief that no one can force another to do anything against their will – even extends to children. The Mbendjele acknowledge the variation in the skills and abilities of individuals. However, they impose egalitarian economic relations through actions that force group members to share with each other. These actions lead to immediate consumption, and prevent accumulation and saving. Everyone has the right to demand access to material objects, and demand sharing is a way to get these objects. Demand sharing is an institution of distribution, a tool for promoting egalitarianism controlled by the recipients rather than donors. It is the right of the members of the group to demand and it is the obligation of donors to give/share in return (Peterson, 1993; Lewis, 2002).

The fieldsite My eighteen months of research (August 2013 to March 2015) took place in the villages of Bangui-­Motaba, Sombo, but mainly in Djoubé (Bobanda) and the surrounding forest camps. Djoubé, situated at 2° 25’ N latitude and 17° 28’ E longitude, lies within the Likouala Department of Congo-­Brazzaville, on the bank of Motaba River – a tributary of the Ubangi-­Congo River (see Figure 6.1). The Mbendjele maintain a semi-­nomadic lifestyle. The fishing season begins around September or October, at which time the Mbendjele return to the Motaba

FIGURE 6.1 

Research area.

Culturally appropriate solutions   115

river. While the main subsistent activities are gathering, fishing, and hunting, they move closer to Bantu farming villages around December, where some families cultivate various crops of their own, including plantains, sweet bananas, cassava, taro, sweet potatoes, papaya, and chilli peppers. Their fields are situated within the range of approximately two to three kilometres’ walking distance from the village. In June or July, however, the honey collecting season begins and the Mbendjele return to the forest to focus almost exclusively on hunting and gathering. The Mbendjele maintain a patron–client relationship (Bahuchet and Guillaume, 1982; Takeuchi, 2014) with Djoubé’s village-­dwellers – fishermen and slash-­andburn farmers. While Mbendjele speak Mbendjee Yaka, a dialect of Aka (Bahuchet, 2012), the farming population speaks Bondongo (a Bantu language). Within the revitalized classification of Guthrie’s Bantu languages typology, Mbendjee Yaka (Aka) are categorized as C104 and Bondongo as C142 (Maho, 2009: p. 25). Mbendjele call their neighbouring agriculturalists Bilo – village people. I will employ this Yaka term to avoid ascribing names that would refer to the people’s modes of subsistence, or the language they speak (Köhler and Lewis, 2002: p. 281).

Informants’ “overwhelming” behaviours How does one deal with the behaviours of informants in the field that feel overwhelming? I found crying or getting upset to be ineffective, and often even ridiculed by merciless, exaggerated imitations of my facial expressions; or repeatedly re-­enacted as some sort of funny story in a form of theatrical performance. While imitating someone or something is in general a distinctive feature of the Mbendjele sense of humour, these mocking theatrical re-­enactments are an Mbendjele social institution with a distinct name – mòádʒò (Lewis, 2002, 2009, 2014a, 2014b). For example, women, especially elderly women and widows, imitate someone’s inappropriate behaviour, repeating these dramatic performances until the person being made fun of begins to laugh at him/herself. In my experience, employing mòádʒò was a very effective strategy to deal with others’ behaviours that felt overwhelming; primarily the informants’ demands on me to share. As mentioned above, Mbendjele practise demand sharing. In the field, this sort of sharing should not be misunderstood as some sort of harmonious or charity act. If asked, it is an obligation of the donor to give. The refusal to share is understood as offensive and impolite: Mbendjele egalitarianism is assertive. It is not someone’s right to refuse or withhold items that they are not immediately using, but the right of the demander to have. This is what Mbendjele politeness involves – responding to all demands to the extent that you have nothing left for yourself. (Lewis, 2002: p. 79) I shared a lot, but I did not feel comfortable making demands of others; however, I was also disappointed afterwards that “nobody shared with me”. As Widlock

116   Daša Bombjaková

puts it: “Those who do not ask, appear not to need anything.” (2004: p.  63). Townsend had a similar issue while conducting research among the Baka Pygmies: Accepting people into my home at times when I would have preferred solitude was a part of this, as was learning how to share around the leftover food from my cooking without awkwardness. Learning how to ask people to share with me when I needed something was difficult, especially not offering anything in return. (2015: p. 196) Figure 6.2 is a photo of my jottings. It may seem very unorganized at first glance as I used several different pens (one of them was non-­waterproof ); and a child was trying to write in the notebook (see the upper part of the picture). However, there is a list of my informants’ demands for my upcoming trip to Sombo (Thanry). While Angele requested a big bucket, Zingo and Niatali wanted cooking pots. Jeameni wanted a machete; Boko wished to get some trousers, preferably jeans; Bodiembe would had been happier with a radio. Bokoba with Atanda, Kakandji, Anganda, Kumu, and Adiambo desired clothes, preferably shorts. On top of it, mother of Bé requested a little plastic bathtub so Bé could take a bath anywhere. These sorts of demands for gifts occurred with each journey to get supplies. Additionally, I paid women who shared their meals with me on a regular basis; provided rice, salt, sugar, coffee, pasta; and gave away a large portion of my clothes and cosmetics. In other words, my sharing habits were getting out of hand. Misunderstanding how demand sharing works in practice also made me feel as though people demanded too much from me. People in camp knew about the stash of food in my tent and they simply demanded it from me. The following is an example of perhaps one of the simplest forms of mòádʒò that I employed to address these demands: Bɔ̀bílà was a man known even amongst the Mbendjele as one whose demands on me were rather excessive. Throughout the course of one day he asked me to make more coffee, because he didn’t get enough in the first round. He also asked for cigarettes, then to borrow my knife. In the afternoon “the hunger was touching him” so he asked me to cook rice. And in the evening, he asked if I would buy palm wine from the Bilo, as he had gone through his own. Because we were in the forest camp, it was easier for me to perform mòádʒò, knowing that everyone would see and hear me easily. My performance was very simple. Basically, I imitated the quality, melody, and manner of his voice when he demanded things from me. I pierced the ordinary camp activities with mocking statements or I would approach several individuals in the camp, going to a person cooking and ask for a cigarette. Then I would approach another person resting on the mat and ask for wine. Each time, I would imitate Bɔ̀bílà’s voice, manner of walking, and facial expressions. This performance caused hilarity, and even Bɔ̀bílà laughed. To my surprise, it was extremely effective. As a result, Bɔ̀bílà stopped with his persistent demands for several days.

Culturally appropriate solutions   117

FIGURE 6.2 

Example from field notes of informants’ demands.

The following example also illustrates how I used mòádʒò to deal with (non) sharing issues. At one point, I had been in the forest for too long. At least, I felt it that way and I craved something other than forest food. At the same time, I was upset with my adoptive grandmother because while I was taking a bath she ate all the fish we had collected that day, not leaving me any. I still had a few packets of tomato puree and spaghetti in my tent. But to prepare these sorts of foods you need a fire. Therefore, you cannot consume it in the tent where nobody can see you.

118   Daša Bombjaková

I had already made spaghetti with tomato sauce a few times and satisfied everyone’s demands, but not my own. I wanted to prepare tomato soup, and I wanted it for myself. The only idea which sparked in my mind was to do something strange or “ostentatious” in a way to justify why I did not share. I joined the others outside my tent and waited until the women finished preparing the food and everyone had eaten. That way I figured no one could say they were hungry and demand more food from me. I took an onion, ten pieces of garlic, and spices that I had previously packed in glittery and shiny paper. Everyone watched me. I made my own fire and began to slice garlic. I carefully took each clove, pretended to measure it with the tip of the knife, and cut it in a peculiar way. At that moment, people stopped and came closer to see what I was doing. I fried the garlic, added onion, mixed in the tomato puree and poured in some water. Some children were excited when they saw a package of spaghetti lying next to me on the mat. They cried out: Lósó 9.rice[LG]

kàkwí! 9.different

“A different (kind of) rice!” Mbendjele love rice, especially this “different type of rice” – pasta. Kàsá! cook.IMP

Búsɛ́ 1PL

dìá! eat.PRS

bé-má 8-food

té! NEG

“Cook! We eat!” I replied: B-été 8-there.is.not “It’s not a food!” À 3SG

dìé be.PRS

tò just

bwáŋgá! 9.medicine

“It’s just a medicine!” They were very disappointed and the women looked at me in a suspicious way. They had seen me preparing spaghetti with tomato sauce before. I decided to exaggerate my movements again. This time, I opened a shiny package containing nothing but black pepper powder, but it looked mysterious. I knocked three times on the shiny package and each time took just a tiny pinch of pepper and added it to the soup. I did this at least seven times, if not more, to emphasize that this was medicine, not just tomato soup. After the last shiny package manoeuvre, they gave up and I was able to eat the soup slowly. Perhaps I could just simply have said “no”. However, I did not want to listen to comments about what a mean person

Culturally appropriate solutions   119

I was and how I did not know how to share. But still, I was upset. They always knew when I ate sardines in my tent in secret and were upset. And I was upset with grandma, who had eaten my share of the fish that I had helped to catch. While these examples of mòádʒò are rather humorous, I used another form of public speaking, mòsámbò, in those cases when I could no longer deal with the constant demands. Mòsámbò is an Mbendjele public speaking protocol, a problem­solving, organizational, and pro-­egalitarian institution (Lewis, 2002, 2009, 2014a). As Lewis puts it:  Through mòsámbò camp members inform the camp of what they have done, express their opinions, advise camp members, share news of general interest, and seek a consensus, or not, about what the camp will do and who should do what. (2014a: p. 231) The following presents an example of my mòsámbò speech through which I tried to deal with my informants’ demands to share. This was not my first attempt at public speaking, so I already knew the rules of this type of speech. Here is a transcription: Ɔ́kà! listen.IMP “Listen!” Búnɛ́ 2PL

bà 2PL

dìɛ́ be.PRS

bìɛ́n good[FR:bien]

námú 1SG

támbí! NEG

“You are not good with me!” Bá-tò bà óŋgà, bá-tò bà óŋgà, bá-tò bà óŋgà, bà 2-person 3PL ask. 2-person 3PL ask. 2-person 3PL ask. 3PL PRS PRS PRS sùŋgɛ́ help.SUBJ

té! NEG

“People ask, people ask, people ask, but they would not help!” Dwá Pókólá!2 Dwá Pókólá! Mò-ndɛ́lɛ́ dwá Pókólá! go.IMP Pokola! go.IMP Pokola! 3-white.person[LG] go.PRS Pokola “Go to Pokola! Go to Pokola! White go to Pokola!” Yá come.IMP

nà with

mbɔ́ŋgɔ́, 9.money[LG]

nà with

“Come back with money, with a lot of things!”

b-éndà 8-thing

b-íké! 8-a.lot

120   Daša Bombjaková

Bá-tò 2-person

bà 3PL

dìɛ́ be.PRS

nà with

mà-kí! 6-laziness

ndìngá want.PRS

tò just

óŋg-ɛ̀ɟi! ask-GER

“People are lazy!” Bɛ́nɛ́ 3PL

bà 3PL

“They don’t want to work; they are just demanding!” Nà At

kútú tomorrow

àmɛ́ 1SG

dwɛ́! go.SUBJ

“I go tomorrow!” Lì-kútá? 5-lie[LG] “Is it a lie?” Lì-kútá 5-lie[LG]

té! NEG

“It’s not a lie!” Àmɛ́ 1SG

dwɛ́ go.SUBJ

nà at

kútú! tomorrow

“So I go tomorrow!” Mò-sámbò 3-public.speaking

m-àŋgámú 3–1SG.POSS

má 3.DEM

mò-sìá. 3-finish

“My speech is over.” Mòsámbò is cathartic. After shouting out my concerns and complaints, I felt better – and that felt more important than whether people changed their demanding behaviour or not. Mòsámbò, thus, is a culturally specific way for releasing tension and a specific medium for sharing what is on one’s mind. While simply shouting at people to stop their demands to share would meet with disagreements, provoke disputes, or draw mockery, mòsámbò turned out to be the most suitable strategy. People truly respected my concerns and stopped demanding as much, at least over the next several days.

Dealing with unwanted male attention3 Dealing with unwanted romantic or sexual attention is one of the concerns for the fieldworker to be prepared for – mainly in cases when the researcher stays in the field by him or herself. One of the strategies I had heard about from other seasoned

Culturally appropriate solutions   121

researchers was to simply explain that I was already married. And to make sure the information was more veritable, I wore a wedding ring. Unfortunately, this proved to be ineffective in the field. If I were truly married, where was my husband? It was simply weird my husband would not come to visit me or that we did not have children. Several months into my fieldwork, one young Bilo man began to visit me. At first, it did not seem suspicious at all. As time passed, however, he kept showing up more frequently, and kept coming with gifts – one day it would be palm wine, another plantains, then sweet yams. While I was pleased to have a good Bilo informant and an opportunity to learn more about their culture and perspectives, my suspicions began to rise. Attentive ethnographic listening can be misinterpreted as an invitation to intimacy (see also LeCompte and Schensul, 2015). It was interpreted in this way by my Mbendjele informants. After all, if I did not want him, why did I accept his gifts? I would hear my Mbendjele friends whispering, gossiping, and eavesdropping on our conversations. Mbúmà, an elderly and wise Mbendjele woman who I had a close relationship with, warned me: “He wants your vagina!” I tried to explain that there was nothing to be worried about. However, news of the “white” girl marrying a farmer in Djoubé was just too attractive to be ignored. Even the boatmen passing by the nearest village made sure that all the people from the region knew about my apparent betrothal. I was anxious as to how this might impact my research and reputation in the eyes of the Mbendjele. I couldn’t let this play out – decisive action was called for. It was early in the evening when I approached Mbúmà, whispering to her, “Call the elderly women. We meet at the water. I will go first and wait for you there.” And to make sure that everyone knew about it, I said: “It’s a secret! Stay quiet like a fish!” I grabbed my machete and one of the sparklers I had acquired earlier to play with the Mbendjele children, and rushed to the meeting. As I began clearing leaves and branches from a small patch of ground, the group of four women joined me. All of us were silent and synchronized – anything I did, the women carefully observed and imitated. I took the sparkler and plunged it into the earth. I spat three times, and the women followed suit. I had a hard time overcoming the urge to laugh when I saw the confusion on their faces, and even more when I began speaking in Slovak, my native tongue. I was saying, “I would like to be able to share this moment with people who could understand what I am saying, as I know all of them would find it funny.” Afterwards, I looked at the women and said:  This is the knowledge which elderly and wise women from my village shared with me. From now on, my vagina is closed and Bilo cannot enter. I can eat food from Bilo and I will not fall for him. I can take food from Bilo and share it with Mbendjele. When I got back to the tent, I heard the women whispering all the details of the ceremony to the rest of the group. My vagina was closing, and that would be the word

122   Daša Bombjaková

spread by the passing boatmen from now on. Western explanations did not work with the people I lived with. By employing the Mbendjele method of communication – a theatrical performance of mòádʒò – I effectively delivered the message and continued enjoying my fieldwork while being able to receive gifts and share them with the Mbendjele community without suspicions, doubts, or gossip.

Issues with interviewing Interview data is often equated with ethnographic research (Atkinson, 2015). However, conducting interviews, especially semi-­structured ethnographic interviews (Bernard, 2011; Spradley, 1979), can clash with the Mbendjele notion of individual autonomy according to which asking questions is rude or ill-­mannered (Lewis, 2002: p. 19). On several occasions, I received either no answer to my enquiries, or participants hesitated for a long period of time before they delivered their responses. Leonhardt had a similar experience with the Baka, who: “do not automatically assume an obligation to either reply, or if they do, to necessarily reply to the question asked, if they are uninterested” (1999: p. 31). As some of my participants revealed at a later stage in my research, they tried to construct the answers they thought I would like to hear. For example, once I asked an expectant father, Lùné, what an Mbendjele father did when his child was born. He explained to me that the father takes the baby in his hands and walks through the village to introduce the newborn into the community and the spaces of the village. I was surprised by his answer, because I remembered a passage from Lewis (2002), which states: Most actions the Mbendjele carry out that we would call ritual or religious, are woven into daily life so subtly that they are almost invisible. Thus, after the birth of a baby, there are no elaborate ritual procedures. The father simply sleeps in the mother and baby’s hut for at least three days to acknowledge his paternity … These events occur so informally and without any apparent fuss that they are easy to miss. (pp. 126–127) Some months later, Lùné’s wife Àɸélà gave birth to a baby girl. I was present during the delivery and for the rest of the night. Afterwards, I kept an eye on the behaviours of the family and the whole community for the following few weeks. But Lùné never took the baby for the walk. Each time I saw Lùné, I asked him if he had already gone for the walk, and he always answered me with a smile: Nà At

kútú! tomorrow

“Tomorrow!” After a few weeks, I asked him why he did not walk with his child. He began laughing and later he explained that only Bilo did that, not Mbendjele. Then I asked why he did not tell me about it:

Culturally appropriate solutions   123

Mò-ndɔ́ nà òɸɛ́ ndìngá Bó àmɛ́ kìá bó, àmɛ́ kìá Bó 3-problem of 2SG want.PRS DEM 1SG do.PRS DEM 1SG do.PRS DEM mùlɛ́lɛ́ when

mò-átɔ̀ 1-woman

àŋgámú 1SG.POSS

à 3SG

bòtá give.birth.PRS

mò-nà! 1-child

“Because you want me to do this, and to do that when my wife gives birth to a child!” Even among themselves Mbendjele do not “investigate” the justifications people use in their decisions, unless serious issues arise. Therefore, a researcher’s attempts to conduct an interview can intrude on Mbendjele perceptions of what forms conversations and inter-­personal relationships should take. For Lùné, it was weird that I asked such a question. And his decision was to give an answer that he thought would please me. The following example also illustrates this point: Bɔ̀kɔ̀bá and Àndʒɛ́lɛ́ surprised me one day when a group of young BaYaka, holding a radio that was playing loud Lingala music, approached us as I was following Bɔ́kɔ́ (Bɔ̀kɔ̀bá’s brother) around while he was making a knife. One young man had black pigment painted around his eyes. I stood up and asked: “What do you want?” “Money!” “Why?” “Because of ɓòkúbá.” This word wasn’t on my vocabulary list, so I looked at Bɔ̀kɔ̀bá and Àndʒɛ́lɛ́. They looked at each other with smile, Bɔ̀kɔ̀bá took me aside and said that he wanted ɓòkúbá for his son Àŋgàndá, and then pointed to his penis making a gesture as if he were cutting it. I was shocked and unprepared for that, but I asked how much it cost. “A thousand.” I said okay. At that moment, Àŋgàndá was smiling. One of the older, more experienced boys said that he wasn’t going to be smiling for much longer. From that point on, everything happened very fast. Bɔ̀kɔ̀bá grabbed Àŋgàndá, who was already crying for his life. The father did not say anything, neither smiled nor cried – his face was very serious. Other men who were around took a mat and went behind Bɔ̀kɔ̀bá’s hut. Six men held Àŋgàndá. The professional circumciser used a new razor to cut the foreskin. During the act, two adolescent boys drummed on empty containers, which we usually use for fetching water. It all took about four minutes. Àŋgàndá was screaming and when it finished, the drumming stopped. Then Bɔ̀kɔ̀bá took his son to their hut and Àndʒɛ́lɛ́ took a bucket of water to clean him. Afterwards, they held him over the fire to stanch the bleeding. Àndʒɛ́lɛ́ also applied a special medicine to the wound. Bɔ́kɔ́ took Àŋgàndá’s foreskin and hung it on the branch of a nearby cocoa tree. He remarked: Búsí 1PL

kúndà bury.PRS

“We bury it tomorrow.”

nà at

kútú. tomorrow

124   Daša Bombjaková

Bɔ̀kɔ̀bá and the other men sat in front of the hut, chatting, smoking and drinking wine. I thought that this would be a good opportunity to talk about circumcision in general and so began interviewing them with Carlos,4 as he was a man and could open up the topic more easily than me. The men dutifully explained that every man in the village underwent circumcision and each one buried his foreskin under his own plantain tree. They also explained in graphic detail that the plantain was a symbol of manhood and each man needed to tend his plantain tree so that he could perform well in his sexual life. When I asked about their own plantain trees, they would point out nearby trees. They emphasized that only men can consume these plantains, women can only cook them. If a woman eats the fruits of his husband’s plantain tree, it would harm their marital sexual life. Additionally, Bɔ̀kɔ̀bá explained that now Àŋgàndá had become a man and was not a boy anymore. One of the signs of being a man was that he would now eat food from the same plate as other men. I carefully wrote down everything they told me and felt very satisfied with the valuable and interesting information we had gleaned from this event. After a few months, however, one man happened to pass through the village, saying he carried out circumcisions. I soon noticed he did not have the markings of black pigment around his eyes. And, after the circumcision, the family did not bury the skin – neither did they plant a new plantain tree. I could not sleep that night and so decided to visit an elderly man who had participated in my earlier interview. I asked him why it was that this family had not buried their son’s foreskin under a plantain tree. The man stared at me blankly before suddenly bursting into tears, laughing so wildly that he had trouble breathing. With tears in his eyes he told me: Òɸé 2SG

ndìngá bó want. that PRS

búsí ɸóɸá, búsí 1PL talk. 1PL PRS

ɸóɸá Talk. PRS

íké íké nòɸé! a.lot a.lot 2SG

“You want us to talk, so we talk to you a lot, a lot!” This man did not hesitate to call on the others who had taken part in the interview. Throughout that night, the quiet was broken by peals and roars of laughter. I wasn’t the only one who could not sleep. It is possible that these Mbendjele men were just entertaining themselves and took pleasure in inventing these “typical Mbendjele circumcision traditions”, while enjoying wine and tobacco together. Additionally, as this elderly man said: “I wanted them to talk.” They had sensed how keen I was to obtain as much data as possible. They did what they thought I was expecting them to do. Following certain simple principles made it easier to prevent my informants from formulating answers designed to please me or to reinforce my opinions or ambitions. First, I refrained from showing excitement as I asked my questions. I tried to avoid creating a special “interview atmosphere”. By this I mean that

Culturally appropriate solutions   125

I would not sit down and ask the questions as if I were interviewing. But if something special happened like the circumcision, I would first observe what was happening and listen to people’s conversations. Later in the day, when the “special event” was over, and I was in the forest with the women, I would start asking questions. So, for example, as I made a fish-­dam with Mbúmà, I would ask her questions. As I was emptying the dam with Àɸélà, I would ask her one or two questions about the event. Then as I rested on the shore with the young mother breastfeeding her baby, I would ask her one or two questions. Later in the night I would be listening to the mòsámbò and see if the event was mentioned and ask someone who was standing close by, “Is the mòsámbò about the event?” Children were also always amazing sources of information – I would ask one or two questions to children playing nearby. I would no longer “sit down” to “talk” and ask many questions. I would just ask “by the way”, not showing too much interest. If I showed I was too interested in something and wanted to talk a lot about it, my informants would then start making up stories. These short and “in situ” interviews were contextualized in ordinary activity, limited and reduced by cultural conventions that see questions as an invasion of someone’s privacy and autonomy. This approach made the talk more natural and less contrived, adapted to my informant’s expectations and cultural context. After the circumcision, foreskin was placed on top of the hut for several days and no one seem to do anything about that. Probably, men would never even bury Àŋgàndá’s foreskin if it was not me asking every day if they are going to do it, as they promised on the day of Àŋgàndá’s circumcision. Bɔ̀kɔ̀bá and his adopted son Bémbà just buried the foreskin. Àŋgàndá was not present during the “burial”. The plantain tree stood there for several months, but no one seemed to “take care” of it as was explained to me.

FIGURE 6.3 

Foreskin burial.

126   Daša Bombjaková

The fear of lacking data In contrast with the methodologically related fieldwork issues discussed above, in this last section I reflect on obstacles produced by my internal emotional and psychological state – specifically, a persistent fear of having insufficient data. It was perhaps the most persistent problem I encountered, and it continued to plague me throughout my year-­and-a-­half in the field. While seldom discussed directly in written anthropological accounts (but see Davies and Spencer, 2010; Fay, 2007; Jackson, 2010: p.  41), many of my fellow graduate students in anthropology expressed having similar anxieties. In my case, the fear was so strong that it had adverse, and sometimes serious, impacts on my decision-­making and research strategies, nearly leading to fatal consequences. I struggled with this fear mainly after realizing the end of my fieldwork time was drawing near and the amount of data I had collected so far seemed small. I felt compelled to work harder than before. This meant I rose earlier and went to sleep later, often skipping meals and spending little if any time in self-­care (like bathing or treating insect bites). In such a harsh environment like the humid rainforest, this was very risky behaviour. I attended four funerals within ten days and became completely exhausted and sick. Normally, funerals and the accompanying feasts last about three days. Thus, the funerals seemed never-­ending. The last funeral I attended was for an elderly Bilo man. Even though I felt weak and preferred to stay in my tent, I went to visit the family of the deceased. As soon as I arrived, the eldest son asked me to return for my camera to take some images. As I walked back, I got soaking wet. It had been raining for four days and none of my clothes were getting drier. There were a few children playing in and out my tent – nothing was where I had left it. I quickly took off my clothes, changed into something less damp and stayed around the fire, shivering feeling cold, and thinking of re-­ joining the funeral as soon as I felt better. Several Mbendjele men came to my tent – one by one – to urge me to come back. They were sent by the Bilo family – the deceased man should be buried as soon as possible, but they needed those photos. I said, “I do not feel good. My body is tired. I will come soon.” But I left and took the camera. I entered the room where the body was. It was so dark I had to use a flash to take proper pictures. The flash of light made everyone standing by the coffin look scary to me. I said to the deceased man’s son that I needed to sit down. He took me to the front room, where the kitchen was and gave me a cup of tea, which he said should help me. As I looked around I noticed there were photos of deceased people on the wall and it made me feel even more sick. I apologized for not feeling well and went back to my tent. I was so happy to see that the kids were playing in a different way – they were holding my wet clothes close to the fire attempting to dry them. I fell into a deep sleep, but soon some elderly women were attempting to get into my tent. They sat around and observed me: “Sorcery!” Or: “She drank that tea!”

Culturally appropriate solutions   127

I drank a lot of water and some oil from my canned sardines. Suddenly, I felt great again, even ecstatic! Instead of planning my departure so I could recover fully, I joined the women’s ritual ceremony. “Funerals do not happen every day!” I thought to myself, “I have to work now and if I do not feel better tomorrow, I will leave the day after tomorrow.” That was a commonplace justification of my irresponsible behaviour. Throughout the night, I was singing and dancing with unusual excitement and enjoyed being praised and respected by the women. When everything was over, I went back to the tent to sleep, still full of almost ecstatic feelings. But weird and very vivid dreams, perhaps hallucinations came to me. A few days earlier, I had gone with some children to the forest to a place where there were many orange trees. We took baskets of them, and I kept one basket in my tent. Most of the oranges had already been eaten by the children, but I kept looking for oranges for hours, as it seemed. I imagined peeling them, squeezing the juice right into my mouth, I even felt my palms were sticky. I saw those oranges, they were there, but when I went to reach for them, my hands would go right through them. I felt thirsty and drowsy. That night I finally came to realize that if I did not make a quick decision, I would die there. My Mbendjele friends sensed the same. They gathered around my tent and discussed what should be done: “She is dying!” “Where will we bury her?” “Enough! She will not die, I will take a canoe and we paddle to Thanry!” “Police …” “… prison …” In the morning, one well-­respected Mbendjele elderly man approached me, saying “You have to leave! Now! We don’t want to go to prison!” I finally understood I had jeopardized not only my health, but the security of my informants as well. I quickly arranged for a canoe and left everything behind. I took only my notebooks and electronics. A wise ethnographer would have left and sought treatment for the illness immediately with the promise of a quick recovery and return to the field. Instead, I spent several weeks in bed. Eventually, I lost more time and data than I could possibly imagine due to my irresponsible participation in the ceremony that night. I studied at one of the best universities, I had an excellent health insurance policy, and satellite phone with regular phone credit top-­up. I had completed a high-­quality wilderness medical training course prior to going to the field. Admittedly, deep down I knew I had malaria and I knew I should seek help, but why didn’t I? My diary from those days tells a clear story. My fear of not having enough data led me to the belief that I would feel better the next day, which was my major justification for repeatedly postponing my search for medical help. While this example does not illuminate any solutions to such problems, instances of such behaviours should be discussed and shared as a warning for other student-­ fieldworkers.

Discussion The question I asked myself before writing this chapter was: what would I have loved to know before going to the field with the Mbendjele? I had these sorts of

128   Daša Bombjaková

conversations with my supervisor Jerome Lewis and they were very helpful. But the clash of theory with reality is always hard to cope with, and this section seeks to make those difficulties explicit. I hope that my above-­mentioned struggles and the ways in which I tried to cope with them illuminate key aspects of the cultural models that Mbendjele use. I suspect that most other researchers have experienced these types of situations when studying Central African Pygmy groups but have not described them in their publications.

Acknowledgements This research was supported by the hunter-­gatherer resilience project (Leverhulme Programme grant no. RP2011-R-­045), and some of the ethnographic examples presented here appeared in my PhD thesis (2018). My special thanks go to my supervisor Dr Jerome Lewis for fieldwork preparation and help in addressing issues that emerged throughout the field. I also thank to Carlos Fornelino Romero for assisting in the ethnographic fieldwork, and Lee Johnston Jr and Freddie Weyman for commenting on the English style and grammar of this chapter. Finally, I am deeply indebted to the Mbendjele community of Djoubé for opening their hearts and allowing me into their lives.

Linguistic transcriptions and transliterations The glossing style employed follows Leipzig Glossing Rules: Conventions for Interlinear Morpheme-­by-Morpheme Glosses (Comrie et al., 2015). Studies concerning Yaka sociolinguistics (Combettes and Tomassone, 1978; Duke, 2001) and grammar of Bantu languages (Nurse and Philippson, 2003) were also guides and sources of inspiration.

List of abbreviations 1SG 2SG 3SG 1PL 2PL 3PL DEM GER IMP LG NEG POSS PRS SUBJ

First Person Singular Second Person Singular Third Person Singular First Person Plural Second Person Plural Third Person Plural Demonstrative Gerund Imperative Lingala (Congolese lingua franca) Negative Possessive Present Simple Subjunctive

Culturally appropriate solutions   129

Questions for reflection The following presents questions that touch upon the fieldwork issues outlined above. Hopefully, this exercise will help you to prepare for similar situations in future or lead to a re-­evaluation of similar incidents from your past fieldwork experiences.

Informants’ overwhelming behaviours 1 2

Reflect on the possibilities of using humour in your field. What sorts of joking would be (in)appropriate and why? List specific problematic situations, in which these jokes would be effective. Among themselves Mbendjele use mòsámbò to communicate problems. Think about your studied community. How do people resolve conflicts? What speech styles do they employ?

Issues with interviewing 3 4

How would you ensure reliability of your interview-­drawn data? How would you determine when your informants tell you what they think you want to hear? What would be the cues to look out for?

Unwanted romantic or sexual attention 5

Think of culturally sensitive ways of saying “no” in your studied community. How does it differ from the culture/community that you come from?

Fearing lack of data 6

7

How do you think I could have made my health a priority and not postponed asking for help? What could be helpful to put in place and avoid this prior to fieldwork? Considering being alone in the field, what could have made me ask for help earlier? What would be your self-­care routine in the field? Write a list of practices which you would do to maintain your physical and mental health.

Notes 1 Yaka is singular, BaYaka is plural. 2 Pokola is a logging town where I used to buy supplies. 3 This story was also published in Anthropolitan, a University College London anthropological journal for students (see Bombjaková, 2016). 4 My friend Carlos Fornelino Romero was with me in the field at that time and helped in data collection.

130   Daša Bombjaková

References Atkinson, P. (2015) For Ethnography. London, SAGE. Aunger, R. (1994) Sources of variation in ethnographic interview data: Food avoidances in the Ituri Forest, Zaire. Ethnology. 33, pp. 65–99.  Aunger, R. (2004) Reflexive Ethnographic Science. Walnut Creek, CA, AltaMira Press. Bahuchet, S.  (2012) Changing language, remaining Pygmy. Human Biology.  84, pp. 11–43 Bahuchet, S. and Guillaume, H. (1982) Aka–farmer relations in the northeast Congo Basin. In: Leacock, E. and Lee, R.B. (eds) Politics and History in Band Societies. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 189–211. Bernard, H.R. (2011) Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches. 5th edition. Lanham, MD, Altamira Press. Bombjaková, D. (2016) Culturally appropriate solutions to unwanted male attention: A Congolese example. Anthropolitan. 13, pp. 18–19. Carpaneto, G. and Germi, F. (1989) I mammiferi nella cultura zoologica dei Pigmei Mbuti nello Zaire nord-­orientale. [The mammals in the zoological culture of the Mbuti Pygmies in north-­eastern Zaire.] Hystrix, the Italian Journal of Mammalogy. 1, pp. 1–83. Combettes, B. and Tomassone, R. (1978) Les pygmées Biaka de Bokoka: approche linguistique. Paris, Délégation générale à la recherche scientifique et technique, Comité Gestion des ressources naturelles renouvelables, Groupe Méthodologie écologique. Comrie, B., Haspelmath, M., and Bickel, B. (2015) Leipzig Glossing Rules: Conventions for Interlinear Morpheme-­by-Morpheme Glosses. Available from: www.eva.mpg.de/ lingua/resources/glossing-­rules.php (Accessed 2 March 2018). Davies, J. and Spencer, D. (2010) Emotions in the Field: The Psychology and Anthropology of Fieldwork Experience. Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press. Doremus, M.J. (2015) Three Essays on the Effectiveness of Voluntary Forest Certification. PhD dissertation, University of Michigan. Duke, D.J. (2001) Aka as a Contact Language: Sociolinguistic and Grammatical Evidence. MA thesis, University of Texas at Arlington. Fay, M. (2007) Mobile subjects, mobile methods: Doing virtual ethnography in a feminist online network. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung. 8 (3).  Grinker, R.R. (1994) Houses in the Rainforest: Ethnicity and Inequality among Farmers and Foragers in Central Africa. Berkeley, University of California Press. Hewlett, B.S. and Hewlett, B.L. (2008) The Anthropology of an Emerging Disease. Belmont, CA, Thomson Wadsworth Publishing. Jackson, M. (2010) From anxiety to method in anthropological fieldwork: An appraisal of George Devereux’s enduring ideas. In: Davies, J. and Spencer, D. (eds) Emotions in the Field: The Psychology and Anthropology of Fieldwork Experience. Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, pp. 35–55. Kidd, C. (2008) Development discourse and the Batwa of South West Uganda: Representing the “other”: presenting the “self ”. PhD dissertation, University of Glasgow. Kisliuk, M. (1998) Seize the Dance: BaAka Musical Life and the Ethnography of Performance. New York, Oxford University Press. Köhler, A. and Lewis, J. (2002) Putting hunter-­gatherer and farmer relations in perspective: A commentary from Central Africa. In: Kent, S. (ed.) Ethnicity, Hunter-­Gatherers, and the “Other”: Association or Assimilation in Southern Africa? Washington, DC, Smithsonian Institute, pp. 276–305. LeCompte, M.D. and Schensul, J.J. (2015) Ethics in Ethnography: A Mixed Methods Approach. Lanham, MD, AltaMira Press.

Culturally appropriate solutions   131

Leonhardt, A. (1999) The Culture of Development in Bakaland: The Apparatus of Development in Relation to Baka Hunter Gatherers. A dissertation presented to the Faculty of Princeton University in candidacy for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ. Lewis, J. (2001) Forest people or village people: Whose voice will be heard? In: Barnard, A. and Kenrick, J. (eds) Africa’s Indigenous Peoples: “First Peoples” or “Marginalized Minorities”? Edinburgh, University of Edinburgh, pp. 61–78. Lewis, J. (2002) Forest Hunter-­Gatherers and Their World: A Study of the Mbendjele Yaka Pygmies of Congo-­Brazzaville and Their Secular and Religious Activities and Representations. Doctoral Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science, University of London. Lewis, J. (2009) As well as words: Congo Pygmy hunting, mimicry and play. In: Botha, R. and Knight, C. (eds) The Cradle of Language. Oxford, Oxford University Press, pp. 232–252. Lewis, J. (2014a) Egalitarian social organization: The case of the Mbendjele BaYaka. In: Hewlett, B.S. (ed.), Hunter-­Gatherers of the Congo Basin. New Brunswick, NJ, Transaction Publishers, pp. 219–245. Lewis, J. (2014b) BaYaka Pygmy multi-­modal and mimetic communication traditions. In: Dor, D., Knight, C., and Lewis, J. (eds) The Social Origins of Language. Oxford, Oxford University Press, pp. 77–92. Maho, J.F. (2009) NUGL Online: The Online Version of the New Updated Guthrie List, a Referential Classification of the Bantu Languages. Available from: http://goto.glocalnet.net/mahopapers/nuglonline.pdf (Accessed 17 January 2018). Meehan, C.L. (2005) Multiple caregiving and its effect on maternal behavior among the Aka foragers and Ngandu farmers of Central Africa. PhD dissertation, Washington State University. Nurse, D. and Philippson, G. (eds) (2003) The Bantu Languages. London, Routledge. Olivero, J., Fa, J.E., Farfán, M.A., Lewis, J., Hewlett, B.S., Breuer, T., Carpaneto, G.M., Fernández, M., Germi, F., Hattori, S., Head, J., Ichikawa, M., Kitanishi, K., Knights, J., Matsuura, N., Migliano, A., Nese, B., Noss, A., Ekoumou, D.O., Paulin, P., Real, R., Riddell, M., Stevenson, E.G.J., Toda, M., Vargas, J.M., Yasuoka, H., and Nasi, R. (2016) Distribution and numbers of Pygmies in Central African forests. PLOS One. 11, p. e0144499. Paulin, P. (2007) The Baka of Gabon: The study of an endangered language and culture. In: David, M., Ostler, N., and Dealwis, C. (eds) Proceedings of FEL XI, Working Together for Endangered Languages: Research Challenges and Social Impacts, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 26–28 October 2007. Kuala Lumpur, University of Malaya, pp. 163–171. Peacock, N.R. (1985) Time allocation, work and fertility among Efe Pygmy women of northeast Zaire. PhD dissertation, Harvard University. Peterson, N. (1993) Demand sharing: reciprocity and the pressure for generosity among foragers. American Anthropologist. 95 (4), pp. 860–874. Spradley, J.P. (1979) The Ethnographic Interview. New York, Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Takeuchi, K. (2014) Interethnic relations between Pygmies and Farmers. In: Hewlett, B.S. (ed.) Hunter-­Gatherers of the Congo Basin. New Brunswick, NJ, Transaction Publishers, pp. 299–321. Townsend, C. (2015) The emergence of inequality in a former hunter-­gatherer society: A Baka case study. PhD Thesis, University College London. Turnbull, C.M. (1961) The Forest People. New York, Simon & Schuster. Turnbull, C.M. (1965) The Mbuti Pygmies: An ethnographic survey. Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History. 50, pp. 141–282.

132   Daša Bombjaková

Widlock, T. (2004) Sharing by default? Outline of an anthropology of virtue. Anthropological Theory. 4 (1), pp. 53–70.  Woodburn, J. (1982) Egalitarian societies. Man, New Series. 17, pp. 431–451.  Woodburn, J. (1997) Indigenous discrimination: The ideological basis for local discrimination against hunter-gatherer minorities in sub-Saharan Africa. Ethnic and Racial Studies. 20, pp. 345–361.  Woodburn, J. (2005) Egalitarian societies revisited. Property and Equality. 1, pp. 18–31.

PART III

The observer and the observed The metamorphosis of research, methods, and the researcher

7 My Life in the School of Hard Knocks How an aspiring anthropologist became a white Cameroonian Robert Moïse

The first week I spent in Africa raised questions that would take me the better part of two decades to answer. Questions raised during the next few months would exercise my mind for an additional decade and change the course of my life. Yet, unlike many anthropologists who work in Africa, I did not find Africa – it found me. Actually, the same could be said of anthropology. It all began innocently enough.

Finding my way to “the field” Nearing the end of my undergraduate education in fine arts at a local state university in California, I was accepted into the graduate programme at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a prestigious art school thousands of miles away from the sleepy suburbs in which I had grown up. At the end of each academic year, the school held a juried competition for graduating students, the winners of which received fellowship awards. By some mixture of fate and luck, I managed to win the top prize the year I graduated – a travelling fellowship for arts-­related research abroad. The fellowship, established in the 1930s, was surely intended to provide an opportunity for the budding young artist to immerse him/herself in the work of the great masters of Europe, to gain the inspiration necessary for a career as a professional artist. In my case, however, nothing of the sort interested me: inspiration for my artwork had always come from the reading of ethnographies of non-­ Western cultures – in particular, those of so-­called “hunter-­gatherers”. Thus, I decided what I should do with the fellowship was to go live with a group of hunter­gatherers and do anthropological fieldwork, focusing on an arts-­related topic. I first tried to arrange a trip to Australia, to carry out fieldwork with Aboriginal communities. But as that effort was withering on the vine, I attended a conference in which a well-­known anthropologist from a prestigious east-­coast university

136   Robert Moïse

gave a talk on his work with Mbuti “Pygmies”1 in the Ituri region of eastern Zaire (present-­day Democratic Republic of the Congo.) After his talk, I tried to solicit his help in locating a field site in that area and he politely told me to send him a research proposal. Although I had taken some anthropology classes as an undergraduate, I knew absolutely nothing about writing a research proposal and so what I put together was undoubtedly “sub-­par”. Apparently horrified by the prospect of having some foolish art student tagging along at his field site, he responded by declaring that Zaire was now closed to foreign researchers. At the same time, he mentioned that he had a colleague with a field site in the Central African Republic (CAR) – over 700 miles to the west – and suggested I contact him. As it turned out, this colleague was more encouraging and helped arrange for me to go work with BaYaka Pygmies in the forests of CAR. Meanwhile, around the time I graduated from art school, a friend asked me if I could join an African dance class she was taking, as it was completely lacking in male students. Although I knew nothing about dancing, I had played the drums since I was a child, so I figured that if I was going to pick a musical form to try to learn to dance to, one that was percussion-­based made good sense. Through that experience, I befriended a group of Ghanaians – the first Africans I ever knew personally – and started going to their parties. I found them to be very friendly, the food was great, and, from the perspective of a drummer, the music could not have been better. So when the opportunity for doing fieldwork with hunter-­gatherers in Africa came up, it seemed like a natural convergence of my varied interests. Thus, I quickly developed an arts-­related research topic: an exploration of traditional BaYaka story-­telling and dance. After the usual fiascos of trying to make it to “the field”, a colleague, Marion McCreedy, and I found ourselves on a plane headed to Bangui, the capital of CAR. By chance, another passenger on the plane was a French researcher who had done extensive research with BaYaka and whom we had gone to Paris to meet with before heading to the field. During the course of our conversation on the plane, he asked us where we were going to stay in Bangui – a reasonable question, as we were arriving after dark. However, being totally naive about life in African cities, we replied that we would simply find a taxi to take us to a hotel. Knowing quite well how things worked in Africa, he was immediately dismayed. A few moments of silence ensued, during which his mind was presumably racing about what should happen next. Very graciously, he offered to let us stay at the research station belonging to his organization until we found our bearings and located a place to stay. The only caveat was that it was a full ten kilometres from the centre of town, where all the offices and stores were located that we would need access to, and we would be without transportation. Having lived in Chicago for the previous few years, we replied, “No problem, we’ll take the bus.” It was during our first week at the research station that I was confronted with several of the grand enigmas of African culture that would perplex me for subsequent decades. It was also during this time that it dawned on us, just as it had on Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, “we’re not in Kansas anymore”.

The school of hard knocks   137

“Participant observation” or life under the African microscope? Our problems started with the issue of transportation. There was indeed a public bus – an old, cast-­off municipal bus imported from Italy – but it made only a couple of runs to town each day. The other option was to take “bush taxis”, the transport all locals used. As they passed, however, they would be crammed with human bodies – from twenty to forty people in a vehicle the size of an airport van that would carry a maximum of seven passengers in the US. In addition, they would fill up at a market a few kilometres up the road, so there was never any space left once they reached the research station. Being used to taking buses in Chicago, we opted for the public bus. But since the timing of everything in Africa is very elastic, it was best to wait by the side of the road for the magic moment when it would pass by. It was during our first day by the roadside that we learned the local term for “white person”. As we arrived at the road to wait for the bus, crowds of children formed, screaming, pointing at us, laughing and chanting, “Munju! Munju! Munju!” Clearly, it was a source of great excitement and spectacle for them to see white people on the road that doubled as their habitual playground. The term “Munju” is a deformation of “Mbunju”, which is an Africanization of the term that French colonials used as a greeting: “bonjour”. Thus, “Munju” defined that group of people who greeted one another with the word, “bonjour”. Meanwhile, from the occasional vehicles that would pass by with adults going to town, a second loud refrain would rise up, “Eh! Munju à pied! Munju à pied!” – i.e. “Whiteman on foot!” That is, for the adults the spectacle was not the simple fact of us having white skin, but the notion that we, as inheritors of that noble skin, had such a miserable financial situation that we could not even afford our own personal vehicle, let alone a driver to take us around. Not surprisingly, it did not take but a few days of this routine for me to start questioning one of the sacred tenets of anthropological fieldwork: participant observation. The Polish anthropologist, Malinowski, introduced the concept during the 1920s, exhorting the colonial anthropologist to “get up off the mission veranda” and go “live with the people” (Barley, 1983; Malinowski, 1950 [1922]). Of course, the idea made a certain amount of sense, as far as it went. Since the profession of academic anthropology comes under the umbrella of  “social science”, and one of the primary things that scientists do is “observe” phenomena, it follows that anthropologists would engage in the “observation” of something. Malinowski’s innovation was to add the “participant” piece to the equation, emphasizing the fact that one’s subject matter – human beings – are not easily placed under a microscope for observation, nor are the secrets of their cultural life easily penetrated from the mission veranda. To arrive at a deeper understanding of another culture, one had to “participate” in its bearers’ daily lives to such an extent that these cultural mysteries would start revealing themselves. In the ensuing decades, anthropologists embraced the notion and integrated it into the practice of their discipline, making it, in fact, one of the cornerstones of their academic identity – allowing

138   Robert Moïse

them to distinguish themselves from other academics such as historians, who spent the bulk of their time in archives perusing documents, or sociologists, whose need for large sample sizes often steered them towards dependence on large-­scale surveys and statistical data. Be that as it may, the reality of the African context was that most all the observation that was occurring was of the anthropologists by the Africans, rather than the reverse. It was what I would come to refer as “life under the African microscope”, as every gesture, every article of dress, every item brought from America, was the object of intense scrutiny and endless commentary in languages I did not understand. Thus, if one was living in a village of 100 people, it meant that 200 eyes were trained on oneself, while one had only two eyes to train on its inhabi­ tants (see Figure 7.1). The African microscope has posed itself as a constant theme during all my field experiences – one that I have never been able to escape whenever I am in Africa.

“Yes, boss”: the mysteries of African hierarchy The Central Africans with whom I had the closest personal contact during this first week of culture shock were two older men, Jerome and Blaise, who acted as cooks, security guards, and all-­around assistants at the research station. Once we had introduced ourselves and began engaging in conversation, I noticed they always addressed me as patron, rather than as “Robert”, the name I used to introduce

FIGURE 7.1 

 apoto villagers on the Congo River observing missionary George Grenfell B trying to photograph them, c. 1895.

The school of hard knocks   139

myself. The French term, patron, can be roughly translated as “boss”, especially in a work context, but it has a range of meanings. In contrast to the social relationship between employer and employee that Westerners would be familiar with, the relation of patron and employee, or “client”, differs in two fundamental respects: (1) the nature of the social relationship and (2) its extent. When one is in such a relationship on the patron side, one quickly discovers that any problems that befall one’s client are one’s own. If the client, or a member of his/her family, falls ill and requires treatment, one will be asked to pay the costs of the treatment. Should any other misfortune befall them or their family, one will be the first to be asked to solve the problem. Of course, one can refuse, or make a partial contribution to address it, but what actually transpires in any given situation is not of great importance for present purposes. What is key to understanding the patron/client relationship in an employment context is that the logic underlying it comes from a well-­established tradition of social hierarchy in the cultures of the Congo Basin, and elsewhere on the continent, that have been described as “les sociétés des grands et des petits” (societies of the big and the small) (Fallers, 1973; Price, 1974; Schatzberg, 1988). Within the extended family, members of the ascending generation are expected to provide support to those of the younger generation who are not their children (uncles helping nephews, etc.). In addition, the eldest sibling in a nuclear family, especially if male, is expected to provide support for younger siblings once they come of age. Furthermore, “big men” who are leaders in villages will take on needy youth as clients to grow their following, just as they will take on families of Pygmies as clients to provide increased access to forest resources (Geschiere, 1982; Vansina, 1990). In this way, the position of un grand (a “big” person), whether sought out intentionally or ascribed by the circumstances of fate and biology, may involve considerable expenditure. In return, one receives the unquestioned respect, and elaborate forms of deference, displayed by those lower down the social hierarchy, along with access to various resources and services. Once I noticed that Jerome and Blaise insisted on addressing me as patron, and I consulted my French/English dictionary to learn that it meant “boss”, I was horrified. After a couple days, I told them, “we have to talk”. So, I sat them down and explained how, in my country, there is a strong belief in the equality of the races and that people have struggled for many years to have Blacks be recognized as equals to Whites. For a black person to refer to me as “boss” was deeply disturbing, not only because of our belief in equality, but also because I knew that, in African culture, age is greatly respected. That is, since they were thirty years my senior, if any of us should be using that term it should be me using it to address them. After listening respectfully to my lecture on the values of equality, they both replied, “Oui, patron, on comprend” (Yes, boss, we understand). It was only with time, once I carefully weighed the costs and benefits of a relation of equality between us versus one of social hierarchy, that I came to understand

140   Robert Moïse

the logic of their insistence on calling me “boss”. As older African men, they certainly had no shortage of friends. What they lacked, or sought to increase, was their attachment to a foreigner with white skin, who, by default, had to live at a level of wealth and comfort that far surpassed their own. If  I was their patron, they could come to me in times of trouble and, when I returned to my country, I would certainly leave them a nice gift. Furthermore, I might even invite them to America one day or marry one of their daughters, ensuring that the flow of resources from my end would become a life-­long proposition. Being young, white and naive, I wanted to be “friends” with Africans, along the lines of the egalitarian friendships I enjoyed with my Ghanaian friends in Chicago. Yet they seemed to want nothing more than to have me become their white patron, for access to all the resources and benefits it would bring.

Has anyone seen my agenda? After obtaining the necessary official authorizations to do research in the countryside, it was time to head to the village. It was at this point that the plot thickened, exposing us to ever more perplexing behaviour. The first item on the agenda was to find a local community to carry out our research with. Although I had expected this to be a fairly simple matter, it ended up consuming nearly four months. Our plan was to begin by doing a survey of BaYaka communities in the vicinity of Monanga, a large Bantu village in the forests of southwestern CAR, visiting BaYaka communities along the way. From this we would select the community that made the most sense for our research (Monanga was chosen because it was the village for which the friendly colleague of the Ituri researcher had given us contacts at the local level). As the survey unfolded, certain villages were unfit as field sites because we experienced a marked lack of hospitality due to the fact that we did not come bearing gifts. This was one of our first introductions to the “gift economy”, which became another perennial feature of all my field experiences, but which we, as Americans, failed to understand. In the forest societies of the Congo Basin, as elsewhere on the continent, the traditional economy operates according to the principle of exchange. Here, one can identify at least two distinct spheres: (1) the gift economy, regulating interactions between strangers seeking to create and maintain relationships of alliance and friendship and (2) the economy of “demand sharing”, regulating relations in the more intimate settings of social life among known individuals (Peterson, 1993). Both operate according to the logic that, to live with others, and to maintain social relationships with them, one must share material goods and resources. That is, one cements social relationships through exchange and, without it, one is providing the other party with the opportunity to conclude that one is not acting in good faith. In addition, even though transactions in both spheres are regulated by social norms for what constitutes appropriate generosity, these are subject to continual negotiation and re-­interpretation, all of which makes it very difficult for the

The school of hard knocks   141

unskilled foreigner to know if he/she is giving enough, too much or too little. Furthermore, one’s exchange practices serve as one of the fundamental bases for judging one’s character. Thus, it is the stingy person – the hoarder – who is inevitably seen in a negative light and becomes the object of ill will, acts of sorcery, and, consequently, misfortune. All of this creates an atmosphere of eternal ambiguity, especially for the foreigner, who is never sure if he/she is doing things right or drastically wrong. Needless to say, we made our share of mistakes in this realm during our search for a field site. Yet the major factor in the extension of our survey was our surprise that all the BaYaka communities we visited had farms, in which they grew basic staple foods – cassava and plantains. This prolonged our search for a field site considerably, as we were continually hoping that, just around the next bend, we would finally stumble upon a community of “true” hunter-­gatherers – those completely lacking in what social scientists refer to as “food production”. At the same time, the agriculture issue served as my initial introduction to the problematics of Pygmy identity: were they the independent, egalitarian “hunter-­gatherers” we had read about (Lee and DeVore, 1968; Turnbull, 1961; Woodburn, 1982), simple “farmers”, the socially inferior “clients” of Bantu patrons, which local Bantu took for granted (Turnbull, 1965), or something else? This question, which was to haunt me for over a decade, is explored in the next section. What is significant for present purposes is the fact that, as our survey dragged on, it became increasingly difficult to ignore the fact that no one at the local level seemed to be taking our research agenda seriously. Nor did they have any interest in respecting our pre-­conceived script for how each of the two parties – researchers and subjects – should comport themselves. In fact, we found that our agenda became almost meaningless. During the soul-­searching this occasioned, I began developing strong feelings of identification with the plight of the foreign missionary, who sacrifices the comforts of home to go forth to the remote corners of the world to spread the “good news” of the gospel (Beti, 1971). That is, after a long period of familiarizing myself with the relevant anthropological literature to enable me to carry out my research agenda, once I arrived in the field I discovered that people could care less about the work I had come to do. Amidst the various pressures of life under the African microscope, the continual efforts of entrepreneurial Africans to make me into their white patron, and the myriad ambiguities and frustrations of trying to keep my head above water in the gift economy, I was continually having to remind myself of why I had come there at all. Like the foreign missionary who finds solace in the “fellowship” provided by interacting with other missionaries, I found myself regularly re-­reading my research proposal as well as seizing any opportunity to talk with other researchers. In his classic exposé of the ironies of fieldwork, The Innocent Anthropologist, the British anthropologist, Nigel Barley, provides an evocative description of this lack of interest in the researcher’s agenda by those he/she is surrounded with in “the field”:

142   Robert Moïse

In my time in Africa, I estimated that I perhaps spent one percent of my time doing what I had actually gone for. The rest of the time was spent on logistics, being ill, being sociable, arranging things, getting from place to place, and above all, waiting. (1983: p. 99) Of course, this is in stark contrast to the approach conventionally employed in grant applications for fieldwork, in which the funds-­hungry, aspiring doctoral candidate is obliged to create the most grandiose research agenda possible, in order to convince prospective funders they will get the maximum “bang for their buck”. The roles attributed to Whites, especially by local Bantu, also contributed to the invisibility of our research agenda. Aside from being perceived as universally wealthy, Whites were seen as either “saviours” or “destroyers”. As our research assistant explained to me a few months into our fieldwork: Here, no one understands things like students coming to do research to get their degree and hanging around for a few months, or a few years, without becoming involved in our lives. When my mother found out I was working for you, she told me, “Whites come here for two reasons: either to save us or destroy us.” There was plenty of historical precedent for such a view, to be sure. “Saving” Africans was always the role assumed by missionaries, and later taken on by development NGOs (non-­governmental organizations), while a whole range of Whites – from colonial administrators and traders to contemporary multinational corporations and conservation organizations – have caused no shortage of destruction. In addition, since the role of academic researcher is not one that exists within the forest societies of the Congo Basin, locals do not understand it and tend to presume the worst – that one is bent on their destruction. That is, a seemingly harmless activity like scholarly research perplexes them, as they fail to identify the researcher’s actual interest in the endeavour: by living in a rural village for one to two years, just what is he/she hoping to gain? Since there is no precedent for it in the local setting, the assumption is usually that it must be a cover for something else – trading in ivory, diamonds, etc. (Hewlett, 2000).

Pygmies: hunter-­gatherers, farmers, clients, or entrepreneurs? Once we were settled into our field site, a BaYaka community of about seventy-­ five individuals, my original research agenda quickly evaporated. As it turned out, BaYaka oral traditions required a knowledge of the language that would have taken years to develop, while BaYaka dance did not present itself as something I was really equipped to analyse (lacking the training to do so). At the same time, life in a BaYaka village offered plenty of material into which one could sink one’s analytical teeth. Most every night, as people were sitting around the fires in front

The school of hard knocks   143

of their houses, there were lively discussions, consisting of stories told about the day’s events, general joking, and the making of plans for the following day’s net-­ hunt, a collective activity involving the entire community. In addition, since the success of this collective effort was considered to depend on the maintenance of healthy social relations within the community, whenever hunting success faltered, it inspired public speeches to diagnose the problem: people were not sharing meat generously enough, some were harbouring bad feelings (anger, resentment) towards one another, etc. These were followed by the performance of various ritual activities the next day to re-­establish social harmony so that hunting success could return to normal (Moïse, 1992). Such activity resonated strongly with why I had become interested in anthropology in the first place. From an early age, I had considerable misgivings about the world in which I had grown up, in particular what I considered to be the arbitrary, even sinister, role played by power in modern societies. Once I began reading ethnographic accounts of social life in hunter-­gatherer communities, I felt I had discovered a parallel universe: a form of society that seemed to be free of the machinations, and institutions, of power. Since my funding was not tied to a strict research agenda, I was able to change my analytic focus and decided to explore political life within the “egalitarian” setting of a BaYaka community. Although this change of analytic orientation ended up working out for the best, the challenges of life in the field continued unabated, as did the analytical quandary we had stumbled upon: were BaYaka “hunter-­gatherers”, “farmers”, “clients” of Bantu “patrons”, or something else? For those operating out of the analytical models of  “hunter-­gatherer studies”, a sub-­discipline of anthropology that emerged in the 1960s (Lee and DeVore, 1968), so-­called “food production”, is anathema, as it disqualifies a social group from membership in that small set of societies considered to be contemporary “hunter-­gatherers”. For example, when first confronted with the prospect of Pygmy agriculture, Colin Turnbull, the British anthropologist whose writings on the Mbuti provided the model of Pygmy social life embraced by this sub-­discipline, noted: they [the members of a Mbuti community] had begun to make their own plantation in the forest. This was the worst possible news; once the Pygmies have plantations their hunting-­and-gathering existence is made impossible. They become tied to one place and do not have time to follow the game. (1961: p. 32) Of course, one of the founding myths of the modern West turns on the figure of the mobile “hunter-­gatherer”, whose kind wandered in the obscurity of the natural world until their collective life was saved by the miracle of technological development. In this scenario, hunter-­gatherer societies spent a good forty millennia combing the landscape in search of their evening meal until, at long last, they “discovered” food production, finally enabling them to relax, settle down, and take up that long arduous task of developing the “arts of civilization” (Childe, 1937;

144   Robert Moïse

Coetzee, 1988). Although the field of hunter-­gatherer studies offers much more sophisticated models of this “transition”, it still considers the rise of food production to be one of the fundamental watersheds of human history, with its subject matter illuminating the cultural forms preceding this development (Myers, 1988). Yet my own experience in the field, as well as more recent archaeological research, suggests the distinction between those who “produce” their food and those who simply “collect” it is not the great divide imagined by modern mythologies based on technological discovery and subsequent cultural change (Neil et al., 2016; Scott, 2017). First, food “collectors” can employ various techniques to ensure ongoing reproduction of the resources they exploit. Thus, the methods used by Baka Pygmies to collect wild yams, a staple carbohydrate, have been described as a form of “para-­cultivation”, in which they take considerable care to harvest them in such a way that they reproduce the following season (Dounias, 1993). Second, human populations can cycle back-­and-forth between modes of production over the long term, as they respond to changing environmental conditions (Scott, 2017). Third, in many cases, populations that made the transition to food production were seeking to maintain their cultural institutions in the face of changing conditions, rather than these institutions being revolutionized by technological “discoveries” (Bar-­Yosef, 1998). On the other hand, Pygmies in the Congo Basin have maintained close relationships of exchange with Bantu farming groups for millennia and are certainly aware of the technical details of cultivation. The fact that, since the arrival of agriculturalists in the Congo Basin forests, local Pygmy groups have mostly preferred to trade for agricultural staples rather than produce them is not due to a lack of knowledge of farming techniques, but is a cultural preference, whose logic lies outside the realms of economy and technology. Given these alternative models of the beginnings of food production,2 what exactly were the factors that led BaYaka communities in the area of my fieldwork to begin growing agricultural staples in the decade before my arrival? After a half century of suffering under a brutal colonial labour regime (Bahuchet and Guillaume, 1982; Conrad, 1988 [1899]; Gide, 1962 [1927]), which provided the raw materials for industrial production in nineteenth and twentieth century Europe, the Bantu farming societies of the region were encouraged by the colonial administration to produce cash-­crops (primarily coffee and cocoa). In the post-­independence era, these same crops provided local Bantu with the economic base necessary to gain access to the rudiments of a modern lifestyle: Western education, medicines, clothing, etc. Although this change was generally seen as a positive step by most Bantu, finally allowing them to enjoy some of the fruits of modernity, it considerably increased their need for agricultural labour during the dry season, when the work required for coffee and cocoa production was carried out. For those Bantu families that maintained alliance relationships with local BaYaka, they turned to their “clients” to fill this labour gap, necessitating prolonged residence of BaYaka in the vicinity of the Bantu village. Given that relations between Bantu patrons and BaYaka clients can be problematic, this generally

The school of hard knocks   145

led to increased levels of social conflict between the two groups during this period of the year. Another feature of the post-­independence era was the introduction of logging activities in the region, which created population centres that came to rely on trade in wild game to satisfy their protein needs. As the primary producers of forest products in regional society, BaYaka hunters came to fill this niche in the local economy, as mobile traders would come to their hunting camps in the forest to trade basic commodities (salt, clothes, alcohol, etc.) for game meat. The increased levels of social conflict during the dry season, coupled with the ability of BaYaka groups to maintain access to basic commodities without leaving the forest, led many of them to create farms of staple foods, which were previously supplied by their Bantu alliance partners (also see Guille-­Escuret, 1998). By lessening their economic dependence on their partners for agricultural staples and basic commodities, BaYaka were able to reduce the level of social conflict in their lives and spend more time in the forest, where they enjoyed a much greater degree of autonomy. Thus, the move to create farms of basic agricultural staples was an effort to increase their independence and reduce the “trouble” caused them by local Bantu. In this way, it was not a technological “discovery” that led to the adoption of farming, but the desire to pursue the time-­honoured value of autonomy and maintain a forest-­based economy. Taking this insight one step further, an alternative model emerges for why Pygmy groups have prioritized hunting-­gathering modes of production over the longue durée (Braudel, 1987 [1958]) of Congo Basin history: they provide them with maximum autonomy – one of their primary cultural values – and allow them to gain a livelihood by making use of the vast repertoire of forest knowledge that is their cultural heritage as indigenous peoples of the region. Yet given the inherent difficulty of letting go of well-­worn ideological frameworks, I did not develop such an understanding at the time. It was only much later, after graduate training and considerable reading on my own, that I came to consider BaYaka farming as a “social movement” that developed as a generalized response to a new set of historical constraints and opportunities (Moïse, 2011). My long-­standing interest in “hunter-­gatherer” social life, coupled with this initial field experience in CAR, ended up being sufficient to turn the tide in my personal life and convince me I should try to pursue a career in anthropology. After applying to a handful of graduate programmes, the forces of fate and luck again took me under their wing and I was accepted at New York University. Although I lacked any significant formal anthropological training at the outset, I managed to negotiate the myriad hoops constructed for the would-­be PhD and was eventually able to secure funding for my doctoral research. This I attribute not only to the theoretical training I received in the course of the graduate programme, which was invaluable, but also to my initial fieldwork experience, which allowed me to make concrete the large body of theoretical literature I was obliged to absorb as well as endure the disciplines of graduate school, the combination of which was sufficient to discourage even the most highly motivated individual operating out of an artistic sensibility, as I was.

146   Robert Moïse

The disciplines of graduate school behind me, I found myself in CAR once again, ready to carry out my doctoral research. My research agenda remained focused on political issues among BaYaka, but rather than exploring internal politics within a local community, I planned to examine the relation between “Pygmies”, as members of a distinct social category, and various “others”: their Bantu neighbours, international NGOs, and the state. Yet, in keeping with the rest of my field experiences, Africa had other plans for me. Three months into my fieldwork, I found myself hiding in a friend’s house in Bangui, with the radio and television cut off, sounds of gunfire echoing throughout the neighbourhood, and military jeeps with machine guns rolling down the street outside. I was in the middle of a coup d’état. As it turned out, the disaffected faction of the military that attempted to assume the presidency was unsuccessful in their efforts – it would take them a full seven years of repeated attempts before they would finally achieve their goal. However, the experience of this first attempt was sufficient to remind me, once again, that I “wasn’t in Kansas anymore” and that I should find an alternative field site for my research. Once I had regrouped, I found myself in Cameroon – one country to the west – trying to carry out the same research agenda with Baka Pygmies in the southern forest region. Baka differ from BaYaka in various respects, but one important difference lies in the realm of economy: the Baka economy is based on individual and small group productive activities, rather than collective net-­hunting.3 This meant that the symbolic elaboration around the collective life of the net-­hunting group, as well as the various political negotiations required to inspire a set of highly autonomous individuals to participate in a collective enterprise (Moïse, 1992), were conspicuously absent among the Baka I lived with in Cameroon. Another key difference between the two communities was that my Baka friends did not live deep in the forest, at a safe distance from harassment by outsiders, but in a road-­side settlement built by the local Catholic mission in the 1970s as part of a project for Baka “development”. As a result, they had access to various elements of modernity – education, basic medical services, contacts with the national society, etc. – that the forest-­oriented BaYaka I knew in CAR completely lacked (Moïse, 2003). At the same time, a common element between the two groups, to which BaYaka farming turned out to be my first exposure, was what I came to refer to as their “entrepreneurialism” (Moïse, 2011). This, too, I only had an experiential appreciation of during my fieldwork, but in the course of subsequent years of analysis and reading – especially of historical sources – I came to see it as a key feature of how Pygmies have “made history” since the arrival of Bantu agriculturalists in the region (Moïse, 2014). Whenever historical conditions have been favourable, Pygmies have sought access to regional resources by (1) migrating to locations where they can access them, (2) adopting whatever modes of production are necessary, and (3) forging alliance relations with whatever outsiders are useful. Over the longue durée of Congo Basin history, this has manifested itself in the widespread adoption of the languages of their farming neighbours, likely intermarriage

The school of hard knocks   147

between the two groups – especially in the early phases of their interactions, before the material conditions for later social hierarchies were established – and the frequent presence of Pygmies in the courts of pre-­colonial kingdoms, where they served as hunters, personal assistants, ritual specialists, musicians, dancers, and story-­tellers (Moïse, 2014; Schweinfurth, 1874; Seitz, 1993; Vansina, 1978). In the context of the Catholic development project that was my field site, Baka “entrepreneurs” took advantage of modern opportunities to create soccer teams that competed at regional and national levels, some musicians travelled to the capital city of Yaoundé to perform on Cameroonian television, various individuals engaged in labour migration in an effort to acquire first-­hand experience of the national society, and some individuals made use of their education to seek out gainful employment. Yet in contrast to conventional development efforts, in which states and/or NGOs attempt to impose such activities on an entire population, the Catholic mission, run by a Dutch anthropologist-­turned-priest, adopted an enlightened approach, providing access to modern resources and opportunities without attempting to impose them on Baka as a whole. As a result, such activities were entirely the result of individual initiative, while the majority of Baka at the mission settlement continued to pursue a forest-­based economy, facilitated by the fact that the forest territories they used were still rich in resources. In this way, Baka at the settlement could be as “entrepreneurial” as they wanted to in relation to the national society, while still enjoying a firm economic base in the forest.

Things fall apart: initiation into the life of an applied anthropologist Once I had completed my PhD, I made a brief attempt to pursue the career path that was considered by many of my professors as the only viable route to a moral career (Fortes, 1987) in anthropology: becoming a university professor. Yet for various reasons – the incredible shrinking academic job market, shifts in the demographics of those winning teaching posts, my own shortcomings as an academic, etc. – the only teaching position I was able to find was as an adjunct professor. Once I had settled into the routines of adjunct work, it did not take long before I came to view the teaching profession as a highly stratified, almost feudal, system in which the “serfs” – teaching assistants and adjuncts – carried out much of a department’s teaching load, while the “lords” – tenure-­track professors, arranged into a hierarchy of status grades (assistant, associate, tenured, emeritus) – were allowed the leisure time, much like the European warrior aristocracies of the feudal era, to engage in ongoing competition and internecine warfare on the battlefield of the academic meritocracy. Never having been one to enjoy being overworked and underpaid, and never having had much of an appetite for intense competition, I came to the conclusion that life in the Ivory Tower was probably not for me. This choice was also facilitated by the fact that, while a graduate student, I stumbled into an alternative occupation for the aspiring anthropologist – doing what is referred to as “applied” or “practice” anthropology.

148   Robert Moïse

Initially, my pursuit of this alternative anthropological career manifested itself in consultant work in a realm that its members euphemistically refer to as the “private sector”, but which most outsiders refer to as the “corporate world”. At the time of my entry into the field of applied anthropology (the 1990s), this sphere of the economy was anathema to many academics, who tended to comfort themselves with the belief that, in earning their daily bread, they were part of the “solution” – i.e. “making the world a better place” through inspiring young minds to “make a difference” – rather than part of the “problem” – i.e. aiding and abetting the highly centralized, corporate giants who enjoy a stranglehold on the contemporary economy. Of course, such a moral stance is not without its ironies, given the fact that one of the primary social functions one performs in an academic institution is reproducing the labour force upon which these same corporate giants depend. Such moral considerations aside, my major motivations for pursuing applied work were quite simple: (1) I was now receiving financial compensation that was commensurate with my labour investment; (2) the work I was involved in included a much greater degree of ethnographic research than one is allowed in an academic setting; and (3) I learned a great deal about a range of social categories of Americans as well as how bureaucracies function (and do not). At the same time, one of the principal downsides to consultant work in the American private sector was that I was nowhere near Africa. To compensate for this lack in my new professional life, I greatly increased my social contacts with African immigrants in the US, joining their cultural associations and making the various social events mounted by their communities – weddings, funerals, baby showers, birthdays, graduations – the focus of my social life. Once again, I was back to thoroughly enjoying egalitarian friendships with Africans and, rather ironically, I discovered that much of the treatment I had received during my African field experiences, which I had always attributed to the colour of my skin, was in fact due to the country I came from. That is, Africans coming from America are subject to many of the same demands I am, whenever they are on the continent. In addition, I discovered the considerable generosity that Africans can display when they have a stable economic base (in the American context, gainful employment): hosting parties for crowds of hundreds, participating in saving associations to acquire the capital to carry out large-­scale projects back home, and so on.

Things fall apart II: the land crisis in the Congo Basin Although I managed to make ends meet as an applied anthropologist in the private sector, the bottom dropped out of the corporate research economy with the arrival of the economic crash in 2008. In the soul-­searching occasioned by economic collapse, I decided I should try to forge some kind of career that combined applied anthropology with the ethnographic setting I knew best: the forest societies of the Congo Basin. However, since I lacked specialized knowledge in a relevant

The school of hard knocks   149

technical field – agricultural development, public health, etc. – I could only focus on the particular cultural sphere within that setting I was most familiar with: life in the local village. After casting my net among organizations working in the Congo Basin, I managed to find work with international NGOs that advocate for the land rights of local forest communities. The reason such advocacy had become viable is due to a series of tectonic shifts at the global level. As the global economy slowed down in the late 1970s and early 1980s, prices for the cash-­crops on which Congo Basin national economies depended dropped sharply, throwing the countries of the region into economic free-­fall (Makki, 2004). The solution developed by the economic powerhouses of the time – the former colonial powers, plus the United States – was to initiate a creditor/debtor relationship with the national governments of the region, which, quite tragically, has never gone away. As part of this new “debt regime”, policy-­making for all important spheres of Congo Basin national life, including forest management, was placed in the hands of Western bankers – in particular, the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF ) (Ferguson, 1990; Hancock, 1989). This seismic shift in Congo Basin policy-­making made perfect sense to what the Enlightenment economic theorist, Adam Smith, referred to as the “masters of mankind” (Smith and Cannan, 1937 [1776]) – that opaque configuration of economic and political power that has sought to shape the fate of the lands and peoples of the planet since the rise of the modern West. Yet the effects it has had on local livelihoods in the Congo Basin forests have been devastating. Operating out of the strictly monetary logic employed by most bankers, the WB and the IMF have viewed the forest landscape as a means of generating revenue for the cash-­strapped governments of the region. In practical terms, this has resulted in a policy of forest “management” based on industrial extraction: primarily logging, but also mining and industrial agriculture (Horta, 1991; Lewis and Nelson, 2006; Mining Review Africa, 2018; Oakland Institute, 2018; Rainforest Foundation UK, 2004). Due to pressures from environmental interests, this ecologically destructive policy, formulated in the 1980s and 1990s, was leavened with a parallel effort at forest “preservation” through the creation of vast “protected areas” (PAs) run by equally vast Western conservation organizations. The grand irony of the protection effort is that, from the perspective of local livelihoods, conservation parks are even more destructive than industrial extraction: whereas the latter simply degrades the forest environment, the logic employed by the former is that the only way to protect a landscape is to clear it of its human inhabitants.4 As a result, the creation of over fifty PAs in the Congo Basin has produced vast numbers of “conservation refugees” (Dowie, 2009; Duffy, 2010; Survival International, 2014) – local communities whose lands and livelihoods have been taken from them in the rush to “protect” the forest. In this way, the current international regime of forest management has come to bear a striking resemblance to the colonial management regime, with its primary focus on extraction, its policy-­making apparatus situated in Western capitals, and

150   Robert Moïse

its basic lack of knowledge (or concern) about the effects produced by its policies at the local level (Moïse, 2017; www.rainforestvoices.org). Given the various similarities between these two management regimes, it is tempting to consider the process that has unfolded in the Congo Basin, and elsewhere on the continent, as what could be called the “re-­colonization” of Africa. Yet if one takes a broader perspective, such an assessment would be in haste. Industrial extraction of raw materials in the former colonial periphery operates according to the same logic as the transfer of economic security out of the industrial centres of the West and into various cheap-­labour zones around the globe: the strictly monetary logic of neoliberalism (Harvey, 2005). The consequent shredding of the social contract in Western industrialized nations has had equally devastating impacts on the livelihoods of many, transforming the very nature of politics in these countries. The new anti-­establishment “populism” – expressed on both the Left and the Right in the last US election, as well as in various European elections and referendums – is nothing if not a strong repudiation of this neoliberal logic (Jakupec, 2018; Zürn, 2018). Furthermore, this seismic shift in the nature of Western political life is not unlike various expressions of populist anger on the African continent, which have contributed to the undermining of the formal economy, the rise of militias, and civil wars. From the perspective of the country in which I write this essay, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), these various political transformations have in common a strong repudiation of the economic/political status quo and a willingness to sacrifice all in the hopes of creating an alternative. In 1992, the political scientist, Francis Fukuyama, described the neoliberal historical moment as the “end of history”, since, with the Soviet Union now dismantled, Western, market-­based “liberal democracy” no longer had any rivals (Fukuyama, 1992). Yet, instead of the market-­based utopia that some globalists imagined, what we have witnessed looks more like what I refer to as “the great unravelling”: the slow unravelling of the social order that the West built up over the last few centuries (Derrida, 1994). When one combines this historical trajectory with the pressures placed on the global atmosphere by these same market logics, one thing becomes abundantly clear: although it may be true that global capitalism has no current rivals, it does have at least one enemy – itself. While recently in Mbandaka, a small city on the Congo River, I met a lawyer from Virginia who has taken up the life of an expatriate on a small island off the coast of Japan, helping local communities develop solar-­based sources of energy. As we talked, he gave his assessment of the current historical moment: “America seems to be collapsing – like the Fall of the Roman Empire – and we are now entering the Dark Ages. The challenge now is to find the bright spots in that darkness.” Given my own proclivities and personal history, where I have searched for a bright spot is in the realm of African music and dance. Yet this effort has also taken an unexpected turn, initiated, once again, by Africans themselves.

The school of hard knocks   151

Laughing to keep from crying: the rise of the white Cameroonian When I was in Maryland in the fall of 2015, I spoke with an Anglophone Cameroonian friend of mine who told me she was getting married that December in Bamenda, the capital of the Northwest Region of Cameroon. Since I was going to be in Cameroon at the time, I told her I would go to the wedding if she sent me the details. In mid-­December, once the date for the wedding neared, I boarded a local bus to make the all-­day trip from Yaoundé to Bamenda. Two days later, I was sitting inside a Presbyterian church, listening to the pastor’s sermon about the values required for a creating a stable matrimonial union and watching the various rituals featured in any wedding in the Western world. Once these were concluded, we left the church and stood in the tropical sun, taking pictures, socializing, and making plans for the evening’s reception. Although the reception was a bit slow in getting started, my patience was rewarded when, after the meal was served, the DJ began playing some danceable music and people started heading for the dance floor. To me, it was an African party, like any other, and I took up my usual position: spending a couple hours riveted to the dance floor, with occasional breaks to take swigs of Guinness and dry off my sweaty forehead. But to the videographer who had been hired to film the event, it was a golden opportunity: to shoot extended scenes of the Whiteman dancing. Two weeks later, I was back in Yaoundé, on Skype, when I received a message from a Cameroonian friend who I knew when she was studying in California: “Robert, you’ve gone viral.” After a short exchange, I clicked on the link she sent me and landed on a Facebook page where the videographer had posted a three-­ minute video of me dancing at the wedding, which now had over 200,000 views (see Figure 7.2). Not only was this level of interest in my dancing shocking, I was perplexed by the languages used for the hundreds of comments that had been made on the post: English, French, Pidgin, and Swahili. The first three could be attributed to the Cameroonian community itself – the country has a French-­speaking majority, with an Anglophone minority that uses Pidgin as a lingua franca – but Swahili? After further reading of the comments, I came to understand the apparent path of transmission. Once the video was posted by the Cameroonian videographer, it was shared with his Cameroonian family and friends living abroad who had other African friends in the cities where they lived, some of whom were East African, who then sent it back home to their family and friends, who made the comments in Swahili. Not only was my dancing of interest to over a couple hundred thousand Africans, my image had criss-­crossed the globe numerous times without my knowledge (Wesch, 2008). A couple weeks later, the same videographer edited another version of the wedding footage, which ended up in the hands of a Nigerian DJ in Denmark, who reposted, it, causing it to pick up over 500,000 views in one week. The following year, when I was at a Nigerian party in San Francisco, a Nigerian music promoter filmed me dancing with his phone. He posted it on his Facebook page the next day

152   Robert Moïse

FIGURE 7.2 

Facebook video of author dancing at wedding in Bamenda, Cameroon.

and, within a week, it had 10,000 views. It was then reposted a few times and, within a couple months, it had over 2.2 million views. As time went on, other videos circulated, more than I have been able to keep track of. Dance in the Congo Basin is not only a beloved pastime, it is also highly “democratic”. On the dance floor, there are no social distinctions: men, women, young, and old – from grandparents to children to babies on their mother’s backs – all participate, making it a democratic context within a hierarchical social world. Traditionally, the dance space is shared not only by all ages and social groups, but by a range of ontologies: the living, the dead, and other spirits. It is a timeless, liminal space, in which individuals across a range of social categories, ontologies, and historical moments gather to create a state of communitas (Turner, 1969) through the shared experience of music and dance. With the introduction of social media and smart phones, many Africans began circulating amateur dance videos within their social networks, both at home and

The school of hard knocks   153

abroad. These can include anyone from children to adults to soldiers on the dance floor, showcasing various genres, both popular and traditional, and documenting various types of events: weddings, parties, and so on. Thus, circulating videos of a Whiteman dancing to African music was well within established practice. Still, the level of interest was rather baffling. Up until that time, nothing I had done in my life had ever attracted the attention of two million people. Why exactly was my dancing so fascinating to Africans? After further reading of comments on the posts, things became clearer. The ability of a Whiteman to “master” an activity normally reserved for Africans presented a riddle: how did this African cultural knowledge seep into the terrain of white identity? Some argued I must be an African albino. Others were convinced I had a Nigerian wife whose daily serving of Nigerian food had allowed me to make the transition. Still others reasoned that, since there are Whites in South Africa, I must be South African. Finally, some proposed I was an ancestral spirit reincarnated in the body of a Whiteman. In this way, my ongoing pursuit of the anthropological principle of participant observation, coupled with my life-­long history as a percussionist which gave me a certain facility in matters rhythmic, allowed me to gain sufficient cultural competence to become an object of fascination, confounding African cultural categories. For Africans, this Whiteman was “good to think with” (Lévi-Strauss, 1963). Yet, on a personal level, I found the circulation of my image across the world without my knowledge or consent deeply disturbing. As a musician who passed much of his life before the arrival of the Internet, I considered it to be akin to what used to be called “bootlegging”: the surreptitious theft of an artist’s material that was then distributed without his/her permission. In addition, it partook of other negative aspects of bootlegging: with the exception of the initial Bamenda wedding videos, these amateur videos were poorly shot and presented without the least bit of editing. Since, as a dancer, I have never been anything but an amateur, I inevitably have my good and bad moments. Yet most of these videos have included everything, without the slightest effort to favour good over bad. Given my personal pride as an artist, I was presented with a quandary: what can I possibly do to exert some influence over my new public image? While in Cameroon in 2016, I shot footage for a couple of pilot episodes of a YouTube comedy series that a Cameroonian filmmaker and I had been discussing since I met her in California a couple years prior: Le Blanc Camerounais (The White Cameroonian). The main character is an individual who looks every bit a Whiteman, but who possesses all the cultural competencies of a Cameroonian, which he uses to nullify their attempts to take advantage of him, and even outsmart them, all for comedic effect. At this point, two episodes have been shot and edited, but continue to be mired in copyright negotiations. Yet, once these issues are resolved and the videos are posted on YouTube, will they have the same popularity as the amateur dancing videos posted on Facebook? Will they allow my artistic integrity as a dancer to African music to finally be vindicated? Will they help me embark on a new acting career for African audiences? These are among the various hopes I have entertained, spurred on by the surprising popularity of the Facebook

154   Robert Moïse

videos. Yet, perhaps these are mere fantasies and my imagined career as The White Cameroonian will prove to be simply another exercise in self-­deception. Regardless of the outcome, one thing is clear: although I will have some degree of input into the matter, the fate of The White Cameroonian will be in African hands.

What is anthropology? The profession of anthropology, like other social sciences, proceeds by the incremental accretion of data gathered by individual researchers working to advance professional knowledge and theoretical understanding of its subject. In this process, the researcher acts as an “agent” of the profession. For its part, the university functions as a site to support the researcher and to provide a space of refuge for the contemplation of the profession’s subject matter, not unlike how the institution of the monastery functioned for the medieval church. In addition, the university facilitates the transmission of professional knowledge to the population at large. At a more global level, the profession manifests itself in a vast network of university departments spread across the landscape of the national society, operating in conjunction with various professional associations and infrastructures. Scholarly learning is text based and the individual adept gradually accumulates professional knowledge through the methodical study of a corpus of texts, directed by mentors within the profession. In addition, the pedagogical process in anthropology culminates in a period of direct experience of the actual object of study, situated in the global landscape outside the network of professional settings, imagined as “the field”. In contrast, learning in the field proceeds by the gradual accumulation of individual knowledge through interpersonal interactions and everyday events, some of which conform nicely to the researcher’s agenda and conventional data-­gathering methods, but many of which result from the profound disruption of same. Such disruptions can come from a variety of sources: cross-­cultural misunderstandings, conflicts between the researcher’s agenda and that of his/her subjects, and various identity projections, operating in both directions. In such interactions, analytical pre­conceptions, research plans and agendas, taken-­for-granted cultural assumptions, and social identities can all be overturned, inspiring a considerable degree of soul-­ searching and re-­calculation, hopefully leading to the development of more appropriate models and approaches. In this process, emotions of alienation, frustration, bewilderment, and confusion are the order of the day, all of which are considerably magnified, at least for those carrying out conventional fieldwork, by the geographic circumstances of field research: the individual researcher is alone, negotiating a foreign culture in a setting often thousands of miles from home. In the field, the researcher is continually falling down, getting back up, dusting him/herself off, and continuing on his/her way. It is in all these respects that the field constitutes a site of learning comparable to what is commonly called, “the school of hard knocks”. In the course of my career as an anthropologist, the disruptions of this school of hard knocks have been legion, but once I have taken the time to reorient my

The school of hard knocks   155

analytical pursuits in accordance with the realities of local cultural practice, these have always led to a more complex understanding of my subject. My understanding of social hierarchy in the Congo Basin developed over the course of decades, but it was the initial disruption of my egalitarian pre-­conceptions caused by the desire of the staff at the research station to turn me into their patron that started the learning process, which was further reinforced by the continual performance of hierarchy in the contexts of everyday life as well as the dynamics of the Bantu/Pygmy relationship. In similar fashion, my understanding of both Pygmy identity and how Pygmies make history developed over the course of decades, but it was the initial disruption of my pre-­conceptions about “hunter-­ gatherers” caused by the rudimentary agriculture of the BaYaka communities I first visited that started the learning process, which was further reinforced by my experiences in Cameroon with Baka who enjoyed greater access to the resources of the national society. Although, by its very nature, “the field” presents itself as a school of hard knocks, some of the knocks I have endured in the course of my career could be attributed to the place in which I ended up doing fieldwork: the African continent, more generally, and the Congo Basin, in particular. Yet an equal portion of these have come from a very different source: the historical moment we are living through, which I have referred to as the Great Unravelling – a gradual historical process shifted into overdrive by the market logics of neoliberalism. The global environment of post-­war economic growth, coupled with the ethic of social responsibility emerging out of the cultural movements of the 1960s, produced a boom in the profession of anthropology, as university departments, and tenure-­track teaching positions, sprang up like mushrooms after a spring rain in the fertile soil produced by that historical moment. Yet by the 1990s and early 2000s, when my graduate school cohort and I were attempting to obtain teaching positions, the market logics of neoliberalism were already at the helm, steering the ship of state in a very different direction. The consequences for the profession of anthropology were the neo-­feudal structure I encountered as an adjunct and the incredible shrinking academic job market,5 pushing ever-­increasing numbers of anthropology PhDs into what, in equatorial Africa, is called the “se débrouiller” economy, in which individuals are forced to “make do” (se débrouiller) with whatever resources and options they can scavenge from their environment: those with Masters degrees and PhDs driving taxis, unpaid government officials turning to corruption, the unwashed masses forced to become underpaid wage slaves or turn to various illicit activities: smuggling, scamming, thievery, prostitution, etc. (MacGaffey, 1986). The corollaries of this process in the First World have been increasing sectors of the population under- or unemployed with the flight of manufacturing jobs overseas, vast numbers of American university students graduating with dim employment prospects and massive debt, the emergence of the so-­called “gig economy”, harsh austerity measures imposed on indebted governments and their citizenries, and the rise of anti-­establishment populist movements on both the Right and the Left.

156   Robert Moïse

Thus, as the moorings of Western culture are swept out from under our feet, what has been a structural feature of the anthropological enterprise – encountering the school of hard knocks in a foreign cultural environment – has now become a generalized phenomenon, as the world as we knew it has itself become a foreign cultural environment. In short, none of us “are in Kansas anymore”. Like the rising waters predicted for a future shaped by global warming, the masses are increasingly plunged into the rising seas of poverty, while small island spaces – urban nodes in the global economy, tiny groups of elites – enjoy unprecedented prosperity (Ferguson, 2006). In such an environment, it is no accident that the three richest individuals in America possess as much wealth as the bottom half of the national population (Oxfam, 2018). In several respects, the world of DRC – militias, crumbling infrastructure, tiny power centres monopolizing vast percentages of the nation’s wealth – seems to be the harbinger of things to come. Moreover, in the First World – especially in the US – the market logics generating this historical trajectory so permeate public discourse that, as Fredric Jameson put it, “it is now easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism” (1991). Although there is little hope of dispelling this First World ideological haze anytime soon, locally based, non-­capitalist institutions, still active in places like the Congo Basin and in growing movements for local management, do offer alternatives (Institutions for Collective Action, 2018). In this process, anthro­pology has a key role to play. Yet, for anthropology to play such a role, and to engage in a meaningful relationship with a fundamentally transformed world, its scope must be greatly enlarged. In my own career as an anthropologist, my professional travels have never been confined to the conventional boundaries of the academy. I have moved back and forth between the world of scholarship and the field, while wearing various professional hats: scholar, filmmaker, dancer, ethnographic consultant for the American private sector, and ethnographic advocate for the rights of Congo Basin peoples. Although my own biography might represent an extreme case, anthropological knowledge has always informed my professional life, even though I never took up permanent residence in the academy. Moreover, if anthropology is to move beyond its historical moorings in the university and be applied to social problems (Liebow, 2018), a variety of institutional configurations can be imagined, as it informs advocacy work, social planning, natural resource management, medical practice, and so on. At the same time, the effort to enlarge the scope of anthropology would be remiss if it failed to recognize the fact that anthropological processes permeate social life, particularly in pluralistic cultural environments. My learning of this lesson was, again, initiated by the disruptions posed by my so-­called “research subjects”: beginning with the continual efforts by those I encountered in the field to place me under the African microscope, further manifesting itself in their ongoing efforts to discover the true intentions behind my presence among them – as saviour, destroyer, or other – and culminating in the initiatives of Africans across the globe to appropriate images of my dancing as a means to reflect on the meanings of white (and African) identity. Of course, ethnographic reflections are the stock-­in-trade of travel writing, from Roman explorations of the “Barbarians”

The school of hard knocks   157

they encountered in the course of empire-­building to European imperial reflections in more recent centuries to contemporary examples (Pratt, 1992). Yet ethnographic reflection is in no way limited to imperial encounters. It is a fact of cross-­cultural interaction and has a very long history – likely as long as human history itself (Wax, 1971). The interactions I have had with Africans throughout my lifetime has made this abundantly clear, as they have always studied me as much as I have studied them. In short, we have always studied each other.

Questions for reflection 1 2 3

What accounts for the (sometimes vast) discrepancy between the actual experience of fieldwork and the description of it presented to the budding anthropologist in the course of his/her academic training? How does one gain knowledge in the course of fieldwork and how is this similar or different from how one accumulates knowledge in other spheres of life? What value does anthropology have outside the academic setting?

Notes 1 In this chapter, I use the term “Pygmies” to refer to members of the various ethnic communities in the Congo Basin identified as Pygmies by outsiders. The advantage of this term is that most readers know who is being discussed, but the disadvantage is that it is also used pejoratively in certain contexts. For practical purposes, then, I employ “Pygmy” as a general term, but make use of ethnic terms – Baka, BaYaka, etc. – whenever possible (also see Waehle, 1999: p. 3). 2 Despite evidence to the contrary, researchers in the field of hunter-­gatherer studies have considerable incentive to reproduce the notion of the contemporary “hunter-­gatherer”. Since funding for their research depends on the food collector/food producer dichotomy, those within the sub-­discipline are obliged to embrace it, thereby contributing to a certain “fetishization” of the cultural category. In addition, various writers operating within the sub-­discipline have come to describe this kind of social difference as being based not on forms of technology and economy so much as cultural institutions and values (Barnard, 2002; Bird-­David, 1990; Myers, 1988). 3 Due to the environmental degradation caused by logging in recent years, net-­hunting has decreased considerably among BaYaka. 4 This approach to conservation, based on the creation of “people-­free landscapes”, is largely a result of the imposition of models drawn from the American national park system on to the lands of the Congo Basin (Duffy, 2010; Jacoby, 2014). 5 When I left graduate school in 2003, it was estimated that approximately 50 per cent of anthropology PhDs were obtaining teaching jobs, many of which were adjunct positions. The numbers now are even bleaker, with one estimate being 16–21 per cent of graduates now able to find tenure-­track teaching positions (Platzer and Allison, 2018).

References Bahuchet, S. and Guillaume, H. (1982) Aka-­farmer relations in the northwest Congo Basin. In: Leacock, E. and Lee, R. (eds) Politics and History in Band Societies. Trans. Van Wyck, S.M. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press and Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, pp. 189–211.

158   Robert Moïse

Barley, N. (1983) The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud Hut. Long Grove, IL, Waveland Press. Barnard, A. (2002) The foraging mode of thought. In: Stewart, H. Barnard, A., and Omura, K. (eds) Self- and Other Images of Hunter-­Gatherers. Senri Ethnological Studies 60. Osaka, National Museum of Ethnology, pp. 5–24. Bar-­Yosef, O. (1998) The Natufian culture in the Levant: Threshold to the origins of agriculture. Evolutionary Anthropology. 6 (5), pp. 159–177. Beti, M. (1971) The Poor Christ of Bomba. London, Heinemann. Bird-­David, N. (1990) The giving environment: Another perspective on the economic system of gatherer-­hunters. Current Anthropology. 31 (2), pp. 189–196. Braudel, F. (1987 [1958]) Histoire et sciences sociales: La longue durée. Réseaux. 5 (27), pp. 7–37. Childe, V.G. (1937) Man Makes Himself. London, Watts & Co. Coetzee, J.M. (1988) White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa. New Haven, CT, Yale University Press. Conrad, J. (1988 [1899]) Heart of Darkness: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Sources, and Criticism. Kimbrough R. (ed.). New York, Norton. Derrida, J. (1994) Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. New York, Routledge. Dounias, E. (1993) Perception and use of wild yams by the Baka hunter-­gatherers in south Cameroon. In: Hladik, C.M., Hladik, A., Linares, O.F., Pagezy, H., Semple, A., and Hadley, M. (eds) Tropical Forests, People and Food: Biocultural Interactions and Applications to Development. Paris, UNESCO, pp. 621–632. Dowie, M. (2009) Conservation Refugees: The Hundred-­Year Conflict between Global Conservation and Native Peoples. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press. Duffy, R. (2010) Nature Crime: How We’re Getting Conservation Wrong. New Haven, CT, Yale University Press. Fallers, L.A. (1973) Inequality: Social Stratification Reconsidered. Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press. Ferguson, J. (1990) The Anti-­Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Ferguson, J. (2006) Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Durham, NC, Duke University Press. Fortes, M. (1987) Religion, Morality and the Person: Essays on Tallensi Religion. Trowbridge, Redwood Burn Ltd. Fukuyama, F. (1992) The End of History and the Last Man. New York, Free Press. Geschiere, P. (1982) Village Communities and the State: Changing Relations among the Maka of South-­Eastern Cameroon since the Colonial Conquest. London, Kegan Paul International Ltd. Gide, A. (1962 [1927]) Travels in the Congo. London, A.A. Knopf. Guille-­Escuret, G. (1998) La révolution agricole des pygmées Aka: De la structure dans l’événement et réciproquement. Homme. 147, pp. 105–126. Hancock, G. (1989) Lords of Poverty: The Power, Prestige, and Corruption of the International Aid Business. New York, Atlantic Monthly Press. Harvey, D. (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York, Oxford University Press. Hewlett, B.S. (2000) Central African government’s and NGO’s perceptions of Baka pygmy development. In: Schweitzer, P.P., Biesele, M., and Hitchcock R.K. (eds) Hunter-­ Gatherers in the Modern World: Conflict, Resistance and Self-­Determination. New York, Berghahn, pp. 380–390. Horta, K. (1991) The last big rush for the green gold: The plundering of Cameroon’s rainforests. Ecologist. 21 (3), pp. 142–147.

The school of hard knocks   159

Institutions for Collective Action. (2018) Available from: www.collective-­action.info (Accessed 13 April 2018). Jacoby, K. (2014) Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation. Berkeley, University of California Press. Jakupec, V. (2018) Development Aid: Populism and the End of the Neoliberal Agenda. Cham, Switzerland, Springer. Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC, Duke University Press. Lee, R.B. and DeVore, I. (1968) Man the Hunter. Chicago, IL, Aldine Publishing Co. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1963) Totemism. Boston, MA, Beacon Press. Lewis, J. and Nelson, J. (2006) Logging in the Congo Basin: What hope for indigenous peoples’ resources, and their environments? Indigenous Affairs. 2006 (4), pp. 8–15. Liebow, E. (2018) No more passive bystanders, please. Association News. 59 (2), pp. e80–e82. MacGaffey, J. (1986) Fending-­for-yourself: The organization of the second economy in Zaire. In: Ntalaja N. (ed.) The Crisis in Zaire: Myths and Realities. Trenton, NJ, Africa World Press, pp. 141–156. Makki, F. (2004) The empire of capital and the remaking of centre–periphery relations. Third World Quarterly. 25 (1), pp. 149–168. Malinowski, B. (1950 [1922]) Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. New York, E.P. Dutton. Mining Review Africa. (2018) Planning for Iron-­Ore in Cameroon. Available from: www. miningreview.com/planning-­iron-ore-­cameroon/ (Accessed 14 April 2018). Moïse, R.E. (1992) A mo kila (I refuse!): Living autonomously in a Biaka community. MA thesis, New York University. Moïse, R.E. (2003) Loved ones and strangers: Society, history and identity in equatorial Africa. PhD dissertation, New York University. Moïse, R.E. (2011) If Pygmies could talk: Creating indigenous development in equatorial Africa. Before Farming: The Archaeology and Anthropology of Hunter-­Gatherers. 2011 (4): pp. 1–23. Moïse, R.E. (2014) Do pygmies have a history? Revisited: The autochthonous tradition in the history of equatorial Africa. In: Hewlett, B.S. (ed.) Hunter-­Gatherers of the Congo Basin: Cultures, Histories and Biology of African Pygmies. Piscataway, NJ, Transaction Publishers, pp. 85–116. Moïse, R.E. (2017b) Whose commons is it, anyway? The struggle between local and global commons in the Congo Basin. Paper prepared for the XVI Biennial Conference of the International Association for the Study of the Commons. Utrecht, 10–14 July 2017. Myers, F.R. (1988) Critical trends in the study of hunter-­gatherers. Annual Review of Anthropology. 17, pp. 261–282. Neil, S., Evans, J., Montgomery, J., and Scarre, C. (2016) Isotopic evidence for residential mobility of farming communities during the transition to agriculture in Britain. Royal Society Open Science. 3, p. 150522.  Oakland Institute. (2018) Herakles Farms is Destroying Rainforests and Local Livelihoods in Cameroon for Palm Oil Plantations. Available from: www.oaklandinstitute.org/ herakles-­f arms-destroying-­r ainforests-and-­l ocal-livelihoods-­c ameroon-palm-­o ilplantations (Accessed 14 April 2018). Oxfam. (2018) Reward Work, Not Wealth. Available from: www.oxfam.org/sites/www. oxfam.org/files/file_attachments/bp-­reward-work-­not-wealth-­220118-en.pdf (Accessed 13 April 2018).

160   Robert Moïse

Peterson, N. (1993) Demand sharing: Reciprocity and the pressure for generosity among foragers. American Anthropologist. 95 (4), pp. 860–874. Platzer, D. and Allison, A. (2018) Academic Precarity in American Anthropology. Available from: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1310-academic-­precarity-in-­american-anthropology (Accessed 13 April 2018). Pratt, M.L. (1992) Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London, Routledge. Price, R.M. (1974) Politics and culture in contemporary Ghana: The big-­man small-­boy syndrome. Journal of African Studies. 1 (2), pp. 173–204. Rainforest Foundation UK. (2004) New threats to the forests and forest peoples of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Briefing Paper. London, Rainforest Foundation UK. Schatzberg, M.G. (1988) The Dialectics of Oppression in Zaire. Bloomington, Indiana University Press. Schweinfurth, G.A. (1874) The Heart of Africa: Three Years’ Travels and Adventures in the Unexplored Regions of Central Africa from 1868 to 1871. New York, Harper & Brothers. Scott, J.C. (2017) Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. New Haven, CT, Yale University Press. Seitz, S. (1993) Pygmées d’Afrique Centrale. Paris, SELAF. Smith, A. and Cannan, E. (ed.) (1937 [1776]) An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. New York, Modern Library. Survival International. (2014) Parks Need Peoples: Why Evictions of Tribal Communities from Protected Areas Spell Disaster for both People and Nature. London, Survival International. Turnbull, C.M. (1961) The Forest People. New York, Simon & Schuster. Turnbull, C.M. (1965) Wayward Servants: The Two Worlds of the African Pygmies. New York, Natural History Press. Turner, V.W. (1969) The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-­Structure. Chicago, IL, Aldine Publishing Co. Vansina, J. (1978) The Children of Woot: A History of the Kuba Peoples. Madison, University of Wisconsin Press. Vansina, J. (1990) Paths in the Rainforests: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa. Madison, University of Wisconsin Press. Waehle, E. (1999) Introduction. In: Biesbrouck, K., Elders, S., and Rossel, G. (eds) Central African Hunter–Gatherers in Multidisciplinary Perspective: Challenging Elusiveness. Leiden, Netherlands, CNWS Publications, pp. 3–17. Wax, R.H. (1971) A historical sketch of fieldwork. In: Wax, R. (ed.) Doing Fieldwork: Warnings and Advice. Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, pp. 21–41. Wesch, M. (2008) An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube. Available from: www. youtube.com/watch?v=TPAO-­lZ4_hU (Accessed 13 April 2018). Woodburn, J. (1982) Egalitarian societies. Man. 17 (3), pp. 431–451. Zürn, M. (2018) How the Taming of the Class Conflict Produced Authoritarian Populism. Democracy Papers. Available from: https://items.ssrc.org/democracy-­papers/how-­thetaming-­of-the-­class-conflict-­produced-authoritarian-­populism/ (Accessed 2 May 2018).

8 = min, Ethnographers, SpA¯ßC and Mixed Methods

Robert J. Quinlan

An alien introduction Most Americans wouldn’t let a foreign anthropologist (just learning English, no less) into their home for an extended stay and extensive observation. What would it take, methodologically, to get inside an average American household? What about an alien from another planet? I imagine an American says, “Well, ok. That sounds interesting.” Spā߀min: a kind-­of person you would let live with you and study your ways of life just so you might learn why they are here and what they might ask. I suggest Spā߀min is pronounced “SPACE-­min” (like ramen or shaman) where “ß” makes the “ss” sound as in German, and “€ ” makes no sound at all but changes everything. Spā߀mins show up with advanced technology and demonstrable wealth-­n-power, and they ask strange (improbable) questions: “No, I love my dogs, but I don’t sexually reproduce with them. Do Spā߀mins have sex with their dogs? I mean, why would you ask me that?” Sometimes Spā߀mins ask stupid (near offensive) questions, but, because they are aliens, people tend to forgive them (until people get sick-­n-tired of aliens). An alien metaphor is useful because it describes one dimension of self-­reflection about fieldwork. An ethnographer can take on multiple identities (e.g. Le Bomin, Chapter 5, this volume; Moïse, Chapter 7, this volume). However, we rarely explicitly ask this simple question: why would anyone want me to study them? I imagine to be studied by an anthropologist like me, a person who travels near unfathomable distances to study quotidian happenings, feels something like a visit from an extraterrestrial. And sitting in an e’ɲepá village typing on my laptop, shaded by a hat of synthetic fibres, slathered in SPF-­50 to protect my sensitive skin from a tropical sun, must be a little like being a Spā߀min. In fact, I suspect most Americans are aliens in just a few blocks, a town, neighbourhood, or sleepover away from their own household.

162   Robert J. Quinlan

Crash-­landings My spā߀ship crash-­landed many times. On our third trip to South America (around 7º N, 66º W in Venezuela), in the beginning of the dry season in 1996, my colleague (and wife), Marsha, and I hit the road for our dissertation fieldwork in Estado Bolívar. We encountered a fairly common hazard among anthropologists (see Howell, 1990; Howell, Chapter 11, this volume). I didn’t see the danger sign lying in the roadside bushes, nor did I see the trench the rain had cut through the road until we hit it: “Oh shit, Oh Shit, OH SHIT!” We’re rolling over! The next thing I knew, we were upside­down, buckled into our light-­duty SUV. Marsha had blood seemingly dripping up from her head, and I was shouting “Marsha! Marsha! MARSHA!” Marsha coming­to was the first glimmer of relief. Somehow, we unbuckled and slid out of our crumpled wreck. (There is nothing so disorienting as being upside-­down in a machine.) Marsha crawled out and was sitting upright in the dust, holding her bloody head, hurt but stable, “I’m alright. I think … I’m ok” she said. I was standing utterly dazed and humbled, with a mouth full of Guiana dirt and a thirst like no other. A boy on a bicycle was the first to help us. Assessing our wreck, he asked if anyone was dead. I had to respond in my clunky Spanish, as Marsha, who is fluent (or elegant even), was much more disoriented than I. “No!” I had to think about each syllable, and then blurted out: “Mi mujer esta … herida!” (“My woman is … wounded!”) I remember struggling to find the words mujer and herida. There are better words, I thought. Is it herida or jodida? No, jodida means fucked, but she was not that bad. Language has never come easily to me, and in that moment of literal shock, that awkward phrase was all I could muster; it would have to do to make the point. After some minutes, a malaria control officer stopped to help, and he took Marsha to a doctor for medical attention. I remember holding my shoe in my hand, surveying the debris. Everything we had was scattered like trash in the bush, and I repeated aloud to myself these words: “We can still do this. We can still do this. We can still do this.” As if an incantation. We did continue on that field trip, at least until a tenacious infection in my eye sent us home three months later. I remember our egress and at least two nagging questions: What kind of fool am I? And exactly what is it we think we’re doing? These questions might serve me well over the coming decades, but I have no definitive answers to either. Within a year, we were back in the field, elsewhere. Why did we keep going? Because, like junkies, nothing, not even a dangerous overdose, would keep us from our mind-­altering experience. Since then, I’ve become risk-­sensitive and superstitious about fieldwork. If something does not go wrong early on in the field season, then look out, because something is going to go wrong in a big way. In other words, be grateful for small problems, because, somehow, they make big ones less likely. Don’t ask me how, that’s just how it works. Crashes are inevitable. The question is how to be flexible, to rebound, and increase the probability of eventual success. I couldn’t give you a decent roadmap

= min, ethnographers, and mixed methods   163 Spa¯ßC

for recovery, but I suggest a sort of Spā߀min rule of thumb: success depends on formulating goals appropriate for your position on Earth – a computationally expensive proposition to be sure. Hence, keeping goals simple helps ensure post-­ crash success.

Culture shock, personality, and metaphorical triangulation There is some deep, peculiar cultural and psychological stuff going on in ethnographers. They can be introverted or extroverted, agreeable or irritable, conscientious or loose, neurotic or mellow, but they must be open to experience. Here I refer to a “five-­factor model” (FFM) of personality, which, though useful for describing the anthropologists, may be more complicated for cross-­cultural comparison (Gurven et al., 2013; Lukaszewski et al., 2017). In a nutshell, the FFM describes five broad aspects of personality in formally educated people. Openness seems the most relevant for fieldwork. Openness, like a kind of inherent relativism, is also associated with rejection of cultural and moral norms (Manson, 2017). Personality psychologists McCrae and Costa (1997) distil the character of people high on openness thusly: They are all dreamers with keen imaginations, seeing possibilities that others miss. They are sensitive and passionate, with a wide and subtle range of emotional responses. They are adventurous, bored by familiar sights, and stifled by routine. They have an insatiable curiosity, as if they retained into adulthood the child’s wonder at the world. And they are unorthodox, free-­ thinking, and prone to flout convention. … Openness is seen in the breadth, depth, and permeability of consciousness, and in the recurrent need to enlarge and examine experience. (pp. 825–826) Ethnographers are so “open” that they devote their lives to their hankering to experience the world in entirely different ways. Unlike any other academic endeavour, educated people1 become possessed by a drive to be with “remote” people, and thus they become ethnographers. We share this: just a hint that a life and a place very different from one’s own exists or existed somewhere is enough to want to see them, and to tell everyone “look here”. We bow to academic authority long enough to reach local authorities in the field. Teetering on a knife-­edge between the bookish and the experiential, ethnographers, scientists, and humanists alike, do not fully trust their own cultural perception – that’s the whole point. What is so compelling about fieldwork? The process is often painful, and yet it can produce deep insight and satisfaction. For me, culture shock in the first days of fieldwork is the heart of the addictive experience. It can be an unexpectedly big challenge to figure out simple things like how to bathe myself or learning to poop on the ground with a pack of dogs as onlookers. Fieldwork puts everything into a new perspective. During the first days of new fieldwork, I often lie awake late at

164   Robert J. Quinlan

night thinking to myself that my plan can’t possibly work as I imagined. How do I make this work? In the first days of fieldwork one’s old ideas about everything make no sense, and over time they slowly give way to a new synthesis. Culture shock includes a dose of anxiety or even panic, and profound disorientation, but as it passes, a deep sense of acceptance and satisfaction emerges as confusion gives way to new knowledge. You might realize that your research plan was all wrong or that your theory (or life) was not what you expected. The new synthesis is always incomplete, sometimes so much so that it is not useful to anyone other than the ethnographer. But if you keep at it, even failures become useful eventually. And if your addiction to the field is like those of so many ethnographers, then “keeping at it” is inevitable. One of my favourite Modern anthropologists, A.F.C. Wallace, proposed a “mazeway” metaphor to describe a process by which an environmental shock changes perception. Culture is like a “mazeway” (Wallace, 1957). The “maze” is a local environment with patterns, turns, dead-­ends, and one or more useful routes to a reward or goal. The “way” is the representation of the “maze” in the mind of a person or people. When things are stable and familiar then the “way” gives us an easy map of the “maze”, and we hardly have to reflect on it in day-­to-day life. Just imagine for a moment something simple like getting to your work place or school: once you have settled into your daily routine, then you need not think about it (you “know the way”). Getting to where you need to be is almost automatic – the result of patterned practice (see Roepstorff et al., 2010). If you really need to think about what you’re doing, then the “way” gives you a basis for your plans as a point of departure. In life and fieldwork, we learn the mazeway by living in it and talking about it with people who share it. A shock to the maze leads to “disintegration” of the “way” (old patterns of thought), precipitating a kind of cognitive reorientation. Fieldwork is a self-­ imposed environmental shock in that your old “way” doesn’t make sense anymore. Re-­synthesis occurs as you learn the new maze, and things begin to make sense again, for a while. During re-­synthesis in fieldwork, everyone and I are special, and we all contribute to a new ethnographic representation – “real life” is not always like that. Each approach to fieldwork has risks and rewards, and collectively we can at best produce a provisional representation of people. That’s why we must “triangulate”. Triangulation, in anthropology, is the use of information from multiple methods and multiple people to check the accuracy of ethnographic perception (Bernard, 2017). Triangulation, for me, is a notion borrowed from navigation. If you can take a bearing (compass direction in degrees) from three known points, then you can locate your position on a map with some accuracy. The more bearings you take, the more confidence you might have in your position. You need at least a simple map indicating known points to begin your trip. In the beginning of the twenty-­first century we can choose from among many simple maps as “aids-­to-navigation” – many more than earlier ethnographers had, and

= min, ethnographers, and mixed methods   165 Spa¯ßC

hopefully fewer than future colleagues. Collaborative triangulation gives us multiple perspectives to assess our position in the “maze” from which we might advance. An ethnographer brings together people with their own “ways” for map points well known, and together we increase the reliability of our shared sketch of the world.

Mixed methods and thinking in teams There are many approaches to feeding a fieldwork addiction. My way has always been non-­traditional, working in teams of varying sizes – though more and more anthropologists work like I do. Traditional, solo, “lone-­wolf ”, “cowboy” (of any gender) ethnography is useful, depending on the expanse of the intended audience and skill of the ethnographer, but the breadth of things I might like to explore – with limited skills, time, “bandwidth”, and resources – requires collaboration. Of course, even solo cowboys collaborate (see Lassiter, 2005 for examples), but that’s a somewhat different story. I’ve had the good fortune to do different kinds of fieldwork in different sites: a community study in a rural Caribbean village (Commonwealth of Dominíca); an aborted study of Carib “forager-­horticulturalists” (Panare in Venezuela); a regional comparison of maize and enset farmers in an Ethiopian ethnic group (Sidama); and a cross-­cultural comparison of antibiotic use and livestock management (Maasai, Arusha, and Chaga) in northern Tanzania. Each of these studies involved trade-­offs in detail versus generalizability, and each used mixed-­methods (Small, 2011; Driscoll et al., 2007) – qualitative and quantitative – to different degrees and to different ends. These trade-­offs are usually driven by specific questions, not to mention the demands of larger collaborative projects. Working in teams has benefits and costs: benefits include the immediate processing of multiple individual experiences in similar contexts, a kind of triangulation. Team fieldwork is a conscious application of “parallel distributed processing” where a group of minds think about and communicate angles or dimensions of the same or related questions (Griere and Moffat, 2003; Kronenfeld, 2012; Theiner et al., 2010; Tollefsen, 2006). In a close-­knit well-­functioning field team we “cleave” to collect our data, and then we convene later to discuss all we experienced since last we spoke. That conversation sets up the next hypotheses or focus of attention. There are costs, however, to teamwork. We can be easily distracted by our teammate’s attention, and it can make learning a new language more difficult.

Mixed methods in Dominíca Early in my research career, I was lucky to work with Mark Flinn on his long-­term community study of family ecology and stress in rural Dominíca (Flinn et al., 1996, 2012; Flinn and England, 1995). Community studies allow anthropologists to delve into a relatively small group of people in great detail. An opportunity for

166   Robert J. Quinlan

triangulation “on steroids”, researchers can check and cross-­check each bit of information over time with multiple methods, multiple “informants”, and multiple “investigators”. This in-­depth, high resolution fieldwork can, at best, produce highly reliable data, and perhaps, at worst, allow researchers to begin to understand how different modes of anthropological perception can complicate or clarify a signal in one’s data (Shweder, 2017). The in-­depth, multifaceted nature of community studies with relatively small samples affects data analysis. Sociologists working with a large national sample, for example, “fly on instruments” regarding the interior details of their dataset. Even when working with data from their own culture these analysts often have no sense of the on-­the-ground nature of any particular correlation because the data are spread across many communities, even more households, and thousands of people (Low, 2015). In contrast, with a small sample from an in-­depth community study, each correlation can be cross-­checked in the analyst’s mind and notebooks as she proceeds: for example, an inverse association between the number of adult kinswomen in a household and average fertility from a large sample study is just one correlation that might then require another huge and expensive study to sort out. The big sample analyst might suppose that there are economic or nutritional factors suppressing fertility in “matrifocal” households. In contrast, the same association from a multi-­method ethnographic study, where the analysts know each person and each household, immediately suggests that reduced fertility is related to cooperative childcare among co-­resident kinswomen. Dominícan (pronounced: Dom-­i-nee-­cuh, with the accent on ee syllable) women I’ve known state the situation succinctly with words like this: “Maybe someday I’ll have a baby of my own, but for now there are my sisters’ children to love – it doesn’t make sense for me to have my own.”2 Knowing the people well makes a big difference in the inferences one can draw from the data and in imagining the next steps for research with more sophisticated and contextualized hypotheses. In rural Dominíca, I had the opportunity to use (and to observe colleagues use) multiple methods in a group of people I knew in detail – more detail than I might know about American colleagues with whom I’ve worked for over a decade. For me, the Dominícan community study had two foundations around which other data collection revolved: key informant interviews and participant observation (see Bernard, 2017, the “methods bible”). Among other techniques, we also used formal direct observation for quantifying behaviour, self-­report surveys, free-­lists, hormone assays, anthropometry, developmental screening tests, economic games, time-­line and event history interviews, and peer reports through a village genealogy of well-­known neighbours. In a “face-­to-face” community you can use key informant interviews for peer assessments as a source of quantitative data because everyone knows everyone else. The procedure is relatively simple: if you have a list of community members that everyone knows, then you can ask several key informants to answer specific questions about each person in the community (see Rivers, 1900), e.g. who their

= min, ethnographers, and mixed methods   167 Spa¯ßC

siblings and cousins were/are and where else they have lived. For some questions, you can “score” people on a scale – like how much and how often they slur their words from drinking alcohol – and compare responses among multiple informants to assess reliability. We have detailed these methods elsewhere (Quinlan and Hagen, 2008), for now I want to address some more intangible issues. How you ask the question makes a big difference (Lightner et al., 2017) and the best way to ask something depends on the context. Early on in Dominíca, I focused on parenting and “investment” in sons versus daughters. Under what conditions might parents prefer children of one gender over the other? With this question in mind, I began interviewing, often informally, about preference for sons or daughters, and differences in ways people treat boys and girls. These interviews revealed near universal reports that people treated their sons and daughters the same, there was no preference. Though everyone agreed that boys and girls should be treated the same, they also generally agreed that daughters were “easier” than sons. To be “easy” in Dominícan English Creole (DEC) has several meanings, best captured in examples of the negative “not easy”, which is an utterance one might hear daily. The meaning depends on the context and the emotional expression of the speaker. Imagine a group of friends relaxing in the yard or on the porch, after the day’s work is done, chatting and exchanging jokes (liming in the West Indies). The conversation is pleasant and one person gets on a roll with a funny story.  I heard on the BBC Radio that a furniture company in England, called the Sofa King, had its advertisement banned after twelve years on the television! The ad said the Sofa King has prices so low. How low are they? “Our prices are Sofa King low!”  To which, after a moment of reflection, everyone bursts into laughter, and someone says to the storyteller, “Man! You not easy!” Hence, “not easy” can mean clever (or awkward) in conversation, sometimes in a penetrating and humorous way. “Not easy” can have more sinister meanings too, especially regarding aggressive behaviour. In general, mothers say that girls are easier – they tend to be less troublesome. I’ve often heard an exasperated Dominícan mother exclaim about a son or daughter, “That child not easy.” In Dominíca, even asking a specifically framed question yielded similar results: “How old were your children – your sons and daughters – when you weaned them?” Everyone said they weaned sons and daughters at about the same time, around one year. Framing a question is tricky. My prompt was in the context of informal interviews about gender bias. However, when Marsha asked the question in the context of a long household health history interview prompting more specific recall, a pattern of gender bias in weaning emerged. The locally perceived average age at weaning was accurate at about twelve months (Quinlan et al., 2003), but within community variation emerged through quantitative analysis of mixed methods data. The long household-­health history interview asked informants to recall major health events over a specific time-­line, moving backward through

168   Robert J. Quinlan

time. Marsha asked each mother of our sample’s 101 children, what were the most memorable illnesses for each child, their visits to the clinic, use of traditional medicine, illnesses that did and didn’t involve a visit to the clinic, and other major events like the child’s health as an infant, vaccination, and age at weaning. In the course of these interviews most mothers allowed us to view each child’s clinic card that included the dates of visits and well-­baby milestones that we used to cross-­check key informant accounts. Often, we went through the clinic records with the mother and the clinic cards were photographed (actually videotaped) for later data entry. With this framing, we detected large variation in age at weaning within families, and gender biases emerged. Mothers in our sample tended to wean sons earlier than daughters by an average of about six months, and that difference was statistically significant with a p-­value of