River tangle

"Every landscape appears first of all as a vast chaos, which leaves one free to choose the meaning one wants to give it. But over and above agricultural considerations, geographical irregularities and the various accidents of history and prehistory, the most majestic meaning of all is surely that which precedes, commands and, to a large extent, explains the others. A pale blurred line, or an often almost imperceptible difference in the shape and consistency of rock fragments, are evidence of the fact that two oceans once succeeded each other where, today, I can see nothing but barren soil. As I follow the traces of their age-old stagnation despite all obstacles - sheer cliff faces, landslides, scrub or cultivated land - and disregarding paths and fences, I seem to be proceeding in meaningless fashion. But the sole aim of this contrariness is to recapture the master-meaning, which may be obscure but of which each of the others is a partial or distorted transposition."
- from Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques

Eating in bed

What has eating to do with sleeping? The latter often follows the former, and certain foods are said to put you to sleep or disturb your dreams.

But there are further oblique associations.

Notice that diners tuck in a heavy meal. They do so after covering themselves with a napkin, a word derived from the Old French nappe, for tablecloth. It’s doubtful, though intriguing, to think that the word “napkin” is linked to nap, the short sleep one enjoys after tucking in.

A sheet or bedspread is in many ways like a table cloth. Both are regarded as linen, whether actually linen or not. Both bedspread and table cloth may have a soft nap, or fuzz, to them. A table, like a bed, is covered with a cloth, and then food is spread atop it: I can still hear my uncle complimenting my grandmother for a “fine spread” at the family picnic.

One crumbs a table, thus eliminating crumbs from it, and tries to keep crumbs out of a bed. We are laid to rest and food is laid on the table. Perhaps the idea in both cases is that food and body alike go down on a flat surface. This may link eating with death as well as sleep, death being a particularly deep sleep in our imaginations.

It wasn’t so long ago that before burial a body was laid out on the kitchen or dining-room table.

Many pray before eating just as they pray before sleeping. Many hope to pray before dying.

We plant a bed of lettuce, eat a pig in a blanket, stuff ourselves like a firm mattress, rest our dough before we bake it, lay a table, retire to the dining room.

The two most intimate places in a house are the bed and kitchen table. Where we eat and where we sleep are deeply associated with home, comfort, and domesticity. We are refreshed by food and sleep. When we don’t get enough of either we experience a disorder.

We do, however, think it is rude to sleep at the table and eat in the bed. Here eating and sleeping part ways.

Whose story?

One of the ethical dilemmas of anthropology involves the telling of other people's stories.

There's the matter of privilege. Who is in a position to tell the story, and who is in a position to be told on? Whose business is it to visit other people without a compelling invitation and write about them?

On the other hand, there's the matter of not telling, of not even bothering to know another person, another culture. Is ignorance an ethical alternative? Should we live in a siloed world?

Of course not. Yet the world is slant, and the way privileged whites write about others, often people of color, may help to tilt the pitch.

A way out of this dilemma might be to own the stories we tell: the anthropologist - the fieldworker - writes her or his own story, her or his own experience, shaped inevitably by both the writer and others who share the writer's life. We're not telling another's story. We're telling our own.

The problem with telling other people's stories comes down to a question of ownership: Whose story is it? Who gets to tell?

Perhaps this is the impulse to memoir and fiction in anthropology, the desire to own not just the privilege but also the authority to tell the story.

My fear is this only defers the dilemma. I may be entitled to tell my own story, but I am privileged to have experiences that give me interesting stories to tell. That's an advantage few of the people I write about enjoy.

Here perhaps is another way out of the dilemma.

If I am privileged to travel (around the globe, around my neighborhood), then I have an obligation to use my privilege to help erase uneven advantages.

How else will slants be eliminated, or at least lessened, if we don't know about each other, even that others exist?

There's a reason to do what we do. It comes with responsibilities.

Strings attached

A few days ago, I participated in an exercise, part of a day-long retreat among people working against racism. The exercise involved one person holding a ball of yarn, declaring an observation about how racism had affected her or him, then tossing the ball to another in the circle while holding on to the end of the yarn.

As the ball passed back and forth, often across the diameter, the string formed a web. The group was made up of black and white participants, whose experiences with racism were all different but related, and the yarn linked us all. It was a lovely illustration of a hateful and insidious subject.

What we all noticed, but gave no formal voice to, was a curious pattern, made all the curiouser given the subject of our discussion.

There were eight of us in the circle, five white and three black. The yarn passed from the first person, a white woman, to me, a white man, and I tossed it to another white man, who tossed it to yet another white man, who tossed it to another white woman, who finally tossed it to a black man.

The last white woman may well have done so anyway, but if she was going to pass the yarn to someone who had not yet received it, she was compelled to pass the yarn to a person of color.

So here we have a kind of segregation, surely inadvertent, surely an accident, but of what?

It was only after I had passed the yard to the white man that I noticed the emerging pattern. I told myself I had simply passed to someone across from me – but there were two African Americans also across from me. One of them, a black woman, sat next to the white man to whom I’d tossed the yarn. Why hadn’t I passed it to her? And even if it was a matter of seating, why had we seated ourselves in that way, such that across from each of us was a white person?

Another explanation could be that there were five whites and three blacks and that meant the odds were greater to toss the yarn to a white person, even if the decision was random (which these sorts of human decisions never are). I don’t buy the odds as an explanation. It might have been true if there had been a hundred whites and three blacks, but five and three isn’t that wide a spread.

My thought is that this is one of the ways race works, through a sense of familiarity that affords a link, makes a relation - in this case, the passing of a ball of yarn - easier. It’s like the principle of the path of least resistance, or water seeking a lower level. It needn't be much. It need only be a little bit easier. A little makes all the difference.

Without our even being conscious of it, our arms tossed the ball to the safer "other" in the circle across from us, the one with whom we most identified, or the one who seemed most receptive; at this point my words fail me. I don't know the factor, or factors. It doesn't really matter. Let’s just call it an affordance. The decision involved no malevolence or bigotry: all of us in the room knew and liked each other.

And still the pattern appeared: Until we became conscious of the pattern, whites tended to pass the ball of yarn to other whites.

Of course, it saddened me. I am embarrassed to report it.

But the outcome also encouraged me. For once we whites became aware of the pattern, the pattern changed, the exchange thereafter was interracial, and thus equitable. So in the end the exercise was a lesson in the hard work of race matters, showing us the importance of awareness, consciousness, attention.

The woman among us who led the exercise pointed out the significance of the color of the yarn: red, like the color of all of our blood.

 (Photo by Obsessessed - Vampire [sic])

The Folklorist: Imponderabilia

I am burdened by an obsession with the bewildering patterns of the mundane: a fallen branch of oak lies far from the nearest oak, and I am bothered the rest of the day trying to figure out how it got there. Perhaps a wagon moving tree cuttings dropped it as it passed. Perhaps a hiker picked it up elsewhere and discarded it here. Perhaps a great wind....

There is an archaeology to this, discerning events by their effects. How did that big tree with a Z curve get that way? I imagine some hunter bending a sapling as a sign to a cache of meat, that the sapling survived and now has a turn to its trunk. Might be a buffalo stepped on the root. Who knows?

On the walk today the dog and I were in the forest near our neighborhood and she shat uncustomarily close to the path. I brushed her dirt away into the duff with a fallen branch, then hurled the branch even farther. This is what got me on the idea of a branch being far from its source.

What if where I’d tossed it was beyond where it might have fallen? What if some passerby noticed the branch, saw it couldn’t have arrived there on its own, and wondered how it got there?

What sort of archaeology would uncover answers to such trivial puzzles? How often do items found at real archaeology digs, investigating much more important matters, get explained by the force of context, though they were anomalies, accidents, the consequences of indifference? A branch falling in the wood is not random. More haphazard. A function of complex factors: age of tree, lay of land, weather, insects, birds spreading seeds. Human willfulness. Thoughtlessness. The toss of a branch into a wood just to get rid of it.

And then there’s the matter of who cares? That’s me and my obsession. I’m much more interested in these sorts of nonessential questions that seem, however, essential to me, revealing as they do how life is actually lived, without some overarching telos.

There’s all sorts of drama that occurs just there, and there, and there in the backyard: a squabble of birds, a safari of ants, a web of spiders and flies, a symphony of leaves quivering each a little differently in the breeze. One needn’t travel half way around the world to count the cats in Zanzibar. There are plenty of cats stalking birds right here. 

Flotsam

I’ve been a fan since adolescence of the pilot, mail carrier, and writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a pioneer of a truly new place for human engagement: the air. His stories were largely about life aloft, but he was grounded in a conviction that life was struggle.

As he knew better than most, it takes great effort to remain airborne.

“...(Y)our truth,” he wrote in The Wisdom of the Saints, “is not the discovery of a formula ... because the new being, which is unity disengaging from the disparity of things, does not impose on you at all as the final solution of a conundrum, but as an appeasement of the disputes....”

This reminds me of the psychoanalytic anthropologists Gananath Obeyesekere and Charles Nuckolls, who each in their way regard culture as a compromise among competing values, interests, desires. Like Saint-Exupéry, they view human affairs always as only a temporary appeasement - a problem, as Nuckolls writes, that “won’t go away.”

The stones on a neighborhood lane, still if only for the moment, remind me of all three writers: the pattern the result of placement, gravity, and storm water, each bringing an aesthetic complexity to the result, "an appeasement of the disputes." You can see the effect of water rounding the edge of the stones, pushing the smaller ones along with fallen leaves. It was just a mound of rocks, a surface of asphalt, a flow of water, and then there was this. And after tonight's rain, something more.

Camels on the moon

Much of what I used to do when I was with Gabra nomads on the Kenya-Ethiopia border was hang out with the old men in the shade of a rare acacia. We’d sit and chew tobacco. I’d ask questions, they’d tell stories.

Sometimes they asked me questions.

“Where is your country?”

When this would come up, as it did, I’d usually point toward the northwest and say it was that way, a long long very long way. “Gudho faago!”

One day I was feeling mischievous so after I’d said it was far to the northwest I pointed to the southeast and said it was also that way a long long very long way.

This puzzled them. How, they wondered, could anyone get to the same place going in opposite directions?

Well, I said, the earth is round, so you can get to the other side going either way. I held up a round rock to explain.

They didn’t believe me. I couldn't blame them. I knew next to nothing about anything that was important. The earth did not seem round to them. It seemed flat. But for the sake of conversation, they asked the logical question: How do you know?

I said people from my country had taken a plane – they’d seen planes pass overhead but they’d never heard of rockets and I wasn’t sure I knew how to explain rockets, so I just said "plane" – that they had taken a plane far out and looked back and seen that the world was round.

In fact, I added, they’d taken the plane to the moon.

This got their attention. They’d been amusing themselves and humoring me, a foolish ferenji. I might as well have been telling them a Jack Tale.

But the moon was serious. Gabra have a solar and a lunar calendar and organize their rituals and sacrifices by the lunar calendar, marking new moons, counting days of waxing and waning. The moon is an important, recurring symbol of renewal in their lives.

So though they didn’t believe me about the earth being round or people traveling all the way to the moon, they were curious what I had to say.

“What is it like on the moon?” one of them asked.

“It’s a lot like it is here: covered in rocks and dust. It looks a lot like this.”

The old man leaned forward with interest.

“Do they have camels on the moon?”

If the moon were like the Chalbi Desert, where we rested in the shade of a solitary tree, then it would be a good place for camels.

I grew up thinking about the man on the moon. That old Gabra man imagined camels there.