SERIOUS PLEASURES

One of my great pleasures is raggedy old paperback textbooks in arcane fields like Cultural Anthropology.  It used to be that people told stories about other people without dragging a lot of analysis and politics into it.  They just laid out the givens of the ecology, some history, and then gave you vignettes.  “Other Fields, Other Grasshoppers” (1977) is edited by L. L. Langness, a retired professor married to another anthro prof and living just over the Rockies a ways.  I think I had to shell out a little more money than usual.  I mostly spend a dollar for a book plus four dollars for postage.

There are familiar people here:  Colin Turnbull, Peter Freuchen, Peter Nabokov, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, Carlos Castenada, Oscar Lewis.  One grows to know the anthros as well as their chosen cultures.  The best ones are not all that objective, but take positions that are at least implied.  Castenada is almost proselytizing.  Elizabeth Marshall Thomas turned her observations to animals -- with good results.  Peter Freuchen married one of his subjects.  Colin Turnbull made everyone angry by showing the Ik as a dreadful people, distorted by starvation.  People are not nice once they get deprived enough, as holocaust survivors will testify.   Sympathetic inquirers understand that until the persons concerned get angry at the inquirers.

An interesting example was on “All Things Considered” this morning.  A female Norwegian journalist Åsne Seierstad, went to Kabul, entered a bookstore wearing a burka which allowed her to pretend to be local, and became close enough friends with the bookseller Shah Muhammad Rais, owner of the bookshop at the Intercontinental Hotel and another near the Mustafa Hotel, to invite her to live with the family for a few months.  She “novelized” the best-selling book, published as “The Bookseller of Kabul.”  But Rais said he was identifiable anyway, that she misinterpreted everything -- which caused him grief -- and sued Seierstad in Norway.  He won.  He also wrote his own version called, “Once upon a time there was a bookseller in Kabul.”   Not a best-seller.  The crux of the problem is that Rais sees himself as liberal and progressive but Seierstad portrayed his treatment of his two wives, one teenaged, as anything but.  Seierstad did not expect that Rais would be sophisticated enough to hire a lawyer to sue her and use the ensuing furor to apply for asylum in Scandinavia.  Neither of them seemed to have predicted that the first book would be bootleg-translated into Persian and a source of local foment.

It appears that Seierstad needed a little more training as a social anthropologist.  (She is noted as a war correspondent.)  One of the first things to figure out is how people see themselves.  “Truthiness” (to use Oprah’s concept) has to do with whether the reporting fits the preconceptions of the reader -- probably also the agent, the editor and the publisher, to say nothing of reviewers and interviewers.  “The Bookseller of Kabul” fits the hyper-feminist culture of Norway when it says that Rais is a tyrant in his household.  It fits Seierstad’s opponent-based world-view.  It does NOT fit Rais’ self-image as a savvy, educated, in-touch-with-the-world urban merchant.

How do we ever get a true notion of each other?  So many assumptions, so little communication.  I’ve seen perfectly ordinary Native American men slip into stereotypes, either far more ignorant and primitive or far more “spiritual” and generous than they are.  I remember when Cosmopolitan magazine sent a writer to Browning to see what NA women thought about NA men.  She disguised “Peaches” as “Cherry.”  Of course, we all knew who she was.

The anthropologists in this text who impressed me most were the ones who were with their people more than weeks or even months.  Rena Gazaway http://wotantue.us/GGU/Duddie lived with the people of a tiny isolated Appalachian community for years.  Her book “The Longest Mile” (1969) portrays lives worse than those of people living on the streets, because the community was locked together in mutual ignorance.  She slept in urine-soaked beds with huddles of their children, ate their abominable food (US commodities, which become dumping grounds for outdated and surplus food of low quality) and recorded their ideas.  They had little concept of what she was doing -- just took her at face value and appreciated it when she intervened in small ways.  (She had been trained as a public nurse.)

The moral dilemmas of people crossing cultures, whether by travel or by walking up the street to visit a Section 8 house, are huge.  Normally we manage our decisions by consensus within a group that has more or less settled on a “way” to do things, with beliefs that support them.  Usually the “way” is defended enough and works well enough for the “ecology” to continue itself over time and become beloved, part of the identity of the people.  (Rena took a fourteen-year boy home with her to the comfortable city.  He hated it and went back home.)

But then the economy changes -- something comes, like the Internet, or something leaves, like Anaconda Copper Refinery -- and the whole system falls apart into misery and confusion.  How can outsiders help when the strongest wish of the people involved is simply to restore what they know?

The impact of television and the internet on this problem has been mixed.  On the one hand, people are aware that there is an outside world and that one can successfully go out there.  On the other hand, they get the idea that there is only one “other” world: the one in sit coms.  Gotta have a sofa like that.  Gotta dress like that.  What do those people do for work?  People in sit coms go out to eat.

There are still American people living in hovels, lucky to have a working radio.  Have you read about the snowbanks melting in New York City, revealing abandoned sofas full of rats?  Did the rats move with the sofa or come there at the curb?  I’m talking the USA.  If you want to talk “third world,” that’s a situation of such different dimensions that it’s a different kind.

Or is it?  “Forcing” people to buy health insurance is laughable to someone living in a cardboard box, waiting to die of AIDS and TB and malnutrition but still proud enough to fight off attempts to grab them and reform them against their will.  Sooner or later the do-gooders just can’t stand it anymore.  

What ever happened to Rena Gazaway?  What happened to those stunted children and near-medieval adults?  There’s an interesting discussion at  http://wotantue.us/EvPsy/Comm.Week3    They say Rena was herself raised in what might be called a hillbilly hollow, though not one as catastrophically pathological as Duddie's Branch. She left the hollow behind and became Rena Gazaway, R.N., M.A., Ph.D.

So I don’t want to read any more about the “hollow.”  I want to read a book about Rena Gazaway and how she made her getaway.   What’s even more interesting is how she found the courage to go back.  Most of the escapees from poverty I know are terrified of slipping back into that trap.  They try to ignore all that -- even deny it.