Fieldwork

by Mischa Berlinski

  Nothing more and nothing less.

  Same thing for the Dyalo word for "roof." Three words, one meaning.

  And the Dyalo word for "water."

  And the Dyalo words for "light," "rock," and "tree."

  Gradually, very gradually, through numerous such frustrating examples, it dawned on Martiya that there were upwards up of three different lexicons all in use in the same Dyalo village, all under the linguistic penumbra of "Dyalo." A similar distinction exists in English when we refer to "pork" and "pigs": two words, one object, depending on the context. But in Dyalo this distinction was far more prevalent than in English: just about every noun had three forms. There was the lexicon of ordinary speech, as in "Would you pass the rice, please?"—which, incidentally, is not easy to say in Dyalo, a simple tonal error resulting in an extremely offensive sentiment; and the poetic lexicon, which the Dyalo tended to break into just whenever subjects of anthropological interest might arise, such as mythology, religion, history, law, government, or philosophical belief; and the spirit lexicon, reserved exclusively for descriptions of, and conversations with, supernatural beings. Martiya realized with dismay that she would need to learn all three if she was to understand the life of the village.

  The problem in Dyalo wasn't just memorizing things or learning to mimic tones. Sometimes the language simply worked in weird ways. One day, Martiya decided to learn the names of colors. It seemed to her a sane, sensible, limited goal for a rainy morning in a very small hut. By chance, Martiya had brought a set of colored pencils with her up to the village, a present from her father, eighty colors lined up in two neat rows, with charcoal and an eraser. The lacquered box had been a source of constant fascination to the children, and she offered them, via Vinai, a bribe: they could play with her pencils if they would teach her the names of the colors. It would be hard to say who in the end was more frustrated. The problem, Martiya quickly learned, was that the Dyalo seemed to have no abstract color terms, words like "red" or "green," which cover a broad range of shades. Rather, the Dyalo color world was painfully precise. Every Dyalo color took its name from an object in the natural world. In Dyalo, the light green pencil was the pencil the color of moss. The dark green pencil was the pencil the color of palm. The red pencil was the pencil the color of betel. There were eighty pencils, and hence eighty distinct Dyalo colors, and amazingly, every Dyalo tribesman seemed in absolute agreement which object in the natural world corresponded to which color. When Martiya pointed to the white pencil and said it was the color of rice, she was immediately corrected: it was cloud. When Martiya protested that the green pencil was not, in fact, the color of moss, and demonstrated this with a piece of moss from a nearby tree, the entire hut burst into giggles. Of course not! It's the color of moss in dry season! The names were arbitrary and needed to be learned one by one. Needless to say, Martiya did not learn the Dyalo colors in a morning.

  Martiya persevered. She began to get the hang of the tones, and her notebook slowly filled with Dyalo words and phrases, which she wrote in the international phonetic alphabet, using arrows to indicate tonality. This script was itself a source of wonder and fascination to the Dyalo, who had seen the clever lowland Thai write things down and then recall them later with perfect accuracy; but nobody in Dan Loi had ever imagined that the Dyalo language, too, could be handled the same way. Martiya's literacy was regarded as a remarkable skill, and there was considerable debate in the village how it was that Martiya, who could hardly say a word in Dyalo, could nevertheless write in the language, the latter of course being considered an infinitely more sophisticated achievement than the former: even the Lahu monkeys, after all, could learn to speak Dyalo, albeit always with that unpleasant Lahu accent. When Dyalo from other villages came to visit Dan Loi, Martiya was inevitably trotted out like a show pony to display her strange and impressive facility. It was considered excellent evening entertainment. "Tell my sister what I told you about her husband," Lai-Ma would say at a family gathering; and Martiya, eager to please, would flip through her hard-sided notebook and read back, in Lai-Ma's own words, just what Lai-Ma had said. The Dyalo simply could not get enough of this, "Koo-koo," they said, which was their way of saying, Brava!, like opera aficionados applauding a particularly impressive aria.

  With time her father's genes asserted themselves, and Martiya made progress. She came to appreciate the flowery formalism of Dyalo, the polite phrases which made intimate village life possible. When she proposed to walk to the fields with Lai-Ma, she learned to say, "If I walk with you, will it slow your pace?" and anticipate Lai-Ma's shy, pained reply, "Certainly not. Add your legs to mine." Then Martiya would say, as Vinai had coached her one thousand times the night before, "The buffalo on four legs walks faster than the chicken on two," and they would set off. The Dyalo had a myriad of such set interrogatory phrases for every aspect of life, and there was something elegant, Martiya felt, in the polite verbal dance which accompanied the simple act of passing a cup of tea or excusing oneself from the room.

  When both Martiya and the children grew restless in the mornings, and the children, long since bored with the name-a-thing game, started throwing clods of dirt at one another, Martiya would check in with Lai-Ma, her hostess. In Berkeley, they had been agreed: fieldwork should be done in the fields. Only after a long day of shared labor would a villager ever really look upon you as a sister, a goal which was already seeming to Martiya less desirable than it once had. Nevertheless, every morning Martiya would seek out Lai-Ma and make her ritual offer to help with household chores or work with her in the fields. The first dozen times Martiya offered, Lai-Ma had looked shocked. "But it is so boring to work in the fields," she said. "If I were rich like you, I'd never go into the fields." A few times, Martiya had insisted, and discovered immediately that Lai-Ma was right: working the fields was boring. It was hideously boring. It was backbreaking, slow, agonizing labor. Martiya spent a few days hunched over a hoe, and gouged a nice chunk out of her foot, which only through the grace of God did not become infected. Martiya came back to the village muttering that she'd never try that again, a decision widely approved of by the villagers: if there was any one point on which the people of Dan Loi were agreed, it was that field labor was strictly for the birds—or for the Lahu monkeys. There was a Lahu village just an hour's walk from Dan Loi, and all the villagers of Dan Loi who could afford it, rather than go into the fields themselves, tended to hire Lahu day workers. This was Martiya's first ethnographic discovery. As a Republican, Martiya thought this an eminently sensible system. When Martiya asked why the Lahu were willing to work the fields, she was told that it was because they were stupid, like monkeys; when she came to know the Lahu better, she agreed. She wondered how these observations would be received by her dissertation committee.

  Lai-Ma was a thin woman with a lined face and a slight limp; her nickname, apparently acquired in a more agile childhood, meant Fast Feet, a fact that Martiya found intensely sad. Lai-Ma was the hardest-working member of the household—indeed, as far as Martiya could tell, the only worker in the household, Farts-a-Lot never seeming to employ his well-honed machete—and she induced in Martiya a considerable sense of First World guilt and discomfort. (This discomfort was intensified by Lai-Ma's habit of taking Martiya aside and saying, "Oh, am I tired! How my bones ache! How I wish I were rich like you and could do nothing all day!") Hauling just one plastic petrol-jerry of water up the hill was enough to exhaust Martiya, but Lai-Ma would inevitably carry two, one in each hand, and on her back in a plaited basket, a dozen hollow bamboo tubes each overflowing with water, the whole heavy load held in place with a tumpline across her forehead. Thus burdened, Lai-Ma would move along the muddy path like a turtle or an elderly yak, taking slow, heavy steps, grimacing slightly. Martiya felt like a freeloader every time she saw her in the course of the day. When Martiya had left California, with the very first installment of her grant money, she had bought herself a pair of expensive running shoes, and she had imagined loping along mountain t
rails at dawn, as the silver mist broke over the valleys. The sight of Lai-Ma working was enough to make the idea seem vaguely obscene, and the shoes stayed tucked away in Martiya's backpack. If Lai-Ma was not carrying water, she was carrying on her back an enormous pallet of lumber for the fire, or she was stooped over the washing pit scrubbing wet clothes, or hunched over a hoe in the garden she kept beside the house, or limping off to the fields, or pounding rice. Martiya was not a large woman but she felt clumsy and awkward in Lai-Ma's presence.

  After Lai-Ma had indicated with an inhibited, anxious smile that no, she really didn't need a large, clumsy farang trailing after her all morning, Martiya liked to take a little stroll about the village. This was the counting hour. Before leaving Berkeley, Joseph Atkinson had given her a piece of advice. "When in doubt, count something," he had said. Martiya spent her first months in the village ferociously counting everything. She counted the number of huts in the village, and she counted the pigs, which was actually quite tricky, she discovered, given that the pigs tended to look alike in her eyes and, being free-roaming in a Dyalo village rather than penned, would move about in the course of a porcine census. There were fourteen pigs per household, on average, and the chief purpose of the pigs was not, as might be expected, to augment the village supply of chops and bacon, but rather to provide sacrificial victims for the spirits, should the need arise; that the pigs were so tasty was considered a fringe benefit. There were a number of households segregated from the rest of the village and down the ridge: these households, which were all associated with the accursed Vampire clan, did not raise pigs, Martiya noticed. When she asked why, she was told that it was because they were poor; when she asked why they were poor, she was told that it was because they had angered the spirits, hence the accursed status of their clan; and when she asked in what way these households had angered the spirits, she was reminded that these people could hardly expect spiritual favor, not having sacrificed any pigs. She wrote all these details down in her notebook.

  Counting the people of the village was rather more difficult still than counting pigs: the Dyalo, too, were inconveniently free-roaming, and also unfortunately tended in Martiya's eyes to look alike. The simple question "How many people live in your hut?" admitted no direct translation. For one thing, the word "people" was typically translated into Dyalo as "souls"—but the Dyalo believed, very generally speaking, that women had seven souls, and men nine. If you have no idea what this means, neither did Martiya, who was accustomed to the occidental notion of one man, one soul. The Dyalo were deeply confused by the question "How many souls live in your hut?" Souls to the Dyalo were fragile things: a soul might well be lost, or have wandered off, or a foreign soul might have come to roost in the hut. Martiya wasn't sure why souls would get lost or where they went or what it meant that they had gone. More bewildering still—and here again, I will summarize briefly in lapidary ethnographic fashion what Martiya herself summarized for Karen in rapid epistolary style, but what in truth was only teased out of the Dyalo gradually, like a sliver from a calloused foot, question by delicate question, oblique hint by oblique hint—was the Dyalo belief that the souls of the recently dead, rather than going to the place where the souls of the dead go, would for a time enter and possess their best beloved. Where else would they go? the Dyalo asked. It's so lonely to be dead. So a husband who recently lost his wife would be reckoned to possess both his own nine souls and the seven souls of his wife. For this reason, the Dyalo gave the grieving wide latitude for eccentric behavior. Martiya learned this when one of the village women—someone from the far side of the village, whom Martiya didn't know well—began running through the village naked at night. Martiya naturally asked why she did this, and it was explained to her that she had recently lost her small child. Running naked through the village was the expression of her dead child's souls. This, too, went in the notebook.

  In the end, counting the villagers of Dan Loi, a fact which would eventually occupy only one sentence on the first page of Martiya's proposed ethnography of the Dyalo, took six months, as Martiya was forced to record the villagers in her field notes one by one, often lurking like a private detective outside certain huts to count just how many children went in and out. With Vinai's help, she grouped the villagers by age, by clan, by gender. She counted the calories ingested by an average Dyalo family, and tried to estimate protein intake. She counted chickens and bullocks. The average distance of the walk to the rice fields was somewhere between forty-five minutes and an hour. Opium fields were slightly farther away.

  Yield from an acre of rice paddy? Average number of hours of rain per day in rainy season? Distance mold travels per day in rainy season on the pages of your notebook?

  Done, done, and done.

  Weeks until she could go home?

  "I propose fully immersing myself in Dyalo life for at least two years," Martiya had written in her grant application, "but comparable expeditions have lasted as long as four."

  The word "expedition" had rung so nicely in her ears when she had written it.

  Farts-a-Lot's peculiarities made for some great letters home, but the truth of the matter was that as the months passed, Martiya wasn't sure how much more she could take of the man. The way he hawked up looghies right on the floor of the hut. His cruel, stupid laugh. Those interminable grunt-a-logs which he conducted with his wife. His nighttime scratching, twitching, barking, schnirfling, sighing, and farting; his sneezing, snoring, and mumbling. His teeth and lips were black from chewing betel, and he ate with his mouth open, little balls of white rice mashed up by that big pink slug of a tongue. He was the kind of guy, she wrote to Karen, who laughed when she stubbed her toe. He just stood there when his wife's shift caught on fire once while she was making tea. That greasy, rancid smell of sweat and alcohol and pig fat—he was the only one in the village who smelled that way. The others smelled nice and earthy. Even the little kids understood that when Martiya was typing up her field notes in the evening, she needed to concentrate. It wasn't easy to transcribe Dyalo. The others might not have understood exactly what she was doing, but they let her be. But old Farts-a-Lot, he'd come over, plop himself down, and start poking at the keys on the typewriter and giggling. Once before going to bed, when she had been in the house about three months, Martiya hung her pants from a peg on the wall. She was just trying to keep things neat. The next thing she knew, it was the dead of night, and Farts-a-Lot was kicking her in the butt. It seems that he'd gotten up in the night to make the monsoon off the porch, saw the pants, and flipped. The guy could have just lifted the pants off the peg, dropped them on the floor, and explained to her in the morning that it was way-bad jungle ju-ju to keep anything that had ever touched a lady's nether regions above a man's head. Fair enough. But no, the guy had to wake her up in the dead of night, wake up the whole hut, including the kids, and have Martiya fold up the pants and put them on the floor. At first, Martiya thought it was just her, that she must be the most insensitive anthropologist in the whole wide world, but as the months passed and Martiya came to know the other villagers, she decided that she wasn't the problem here and that it wasn't just a cultural issue. Farts-a-Lot really was a creep, and she didn't want to spend another two years in his house.

  Martiya broached the subject of a new hut with Farts-a-Lot several times. It was an immensely tricky point in etiquette, because it was chiefly to get away from Farts-a-Lot that she wanted a new hut. But Martiya was intensely mindful of Eskimo Kathy's story. Farts-a-Lot was an important man in the village, and Martiya suspected that if she offended Farts-a-Lot, her work in Dan Loi would soon be effectively over. It sometimes seemed to Martiya that half of the village was involved in bitter quarrels with the other half, and Dyalo feuds ran deep: there were people in the village who had no idea that a new baby had been born just one hut down, despite the agonized howling that accompanied Dyalo childbirth, so deep did their antipathies run. Watching the Dyalo snipe and bicker had disabused Martiya of the naïve notion that tribal p
eoples would live in peaceful harmony with one another, just as watching the villagers hack down virgin forest and set it on fire for their fields had disabused Martiya of the notion that the Dyalo would live in placid harmony with nature. But as an anthropologist, she couldn't indulge in such diverting pleasures as blood quarrels. She needed to be a neutral Switzerland, an unencumbered Sweden. Farts-a-Lot was a leading member of the largest clan, the clan of the Fish, and Martiya suspected that if Farts-a-Lot felt in any way slighted, she'd never swim with the Fishes again. Martiya could imagine the moment when she was called upon to defend her doctoral thesis and she explained to the esteemed and august members of the examining board, men who had collectively spent half a century in the field, that she had failed to interview half of the village because she had found her host irritating.