Fieldwork

by Mischa Berlinski

  The euphoria was as real and unexpected a thing as the tears. She'd be walking back from the fields in the late afternoon, alone on a mountain path, she'd climb over a rock and see the big green valley spread out below, and suddenly her delicate stomach would rise up behind her lungs and constrict her breath with a happiness so intense she could feel it. Just like her unexpected bursts of sadness, these unexpected bursts of concentrated happiness were a new thing, unanticipated and strange.

  Martiya had the good fortune to arrive in the village at a time when both men and women still wore the traditional dress, and in the early evenings, when Martiya saw the villagers wandering barefoot back from the fields in their hand-woven clothes—the women in their brightly colored shifts and flashing silver jewelry, long black skirts fringed in brilliant crimson and gold trailing to their ankles; the black turbaned men in simple gray tunics, their only adornment always across their shoulders on a rattan string, the jaw of some tiger or bear dead now many generations, a family heirloom—sometimes when she saw the villagers, Martiya thought that she had tumbled off of the Earth itself. This was a different world. Farts-a-Lot was an exception, with his thick beetle brow and tiny suspicious eyes, but the Dyalo were generally a handsome people, tall, with dignified faces and rich black hair. They moved gracefully and were athletic and strong. They had features that were familiar but which she couldn't quite place: not cute like the Thai or hard and nervous like the Lahu, but mysterious and aristocratic, with pale skin somewhere between the color of honey and the color of wheat bread, high cheekbones, long noses, and elegant arching lips. Now that Martiya had been in the village six months, she started to notice that the Dyalo never slouched, and they used their bodies in just slightly unfamiliar ways: the men walked barefoot to the rice fields with their backs very straight but their legs slightly bowed; the women threshed the paddy into the large bamboo baskets with an explosive motion of their hips and shoulders; in the evenings, everyone squatted on their heels and rocked. They were an intensely attractive people. Martiya liked Dyalo hands, which were long-fingered and muscular. The Dyalo had adopted the Thai game of takraw, a cross between volleyball and Hacky Sack played with a small woven bamboo ball, and Martiya thought that there was no more charming sight in all of Asia than when, in the late afternoons, the young men leaped like graceful acrobats to kick the fluttering ball over the high net. Then Martiya stood with the Dyalo girls, all dressed in their colorful handmade shifts and bright white headdresses, all of them laughing and shouting "Koo-koo" at every graceful point.

  While the young men played and the young women watched, Martiya and Vinai went from hut to hut, taking genealogies. This was an essential piece of anthropological drudge-work. Anthropologists tend to see the drama of family life as little more than a complicated game played by complicated rules; only by working through dozens of family trees could an outsider decipher just what conventions governed courtship, marriage, kinship, inheritance, legitimacy, incest, and relations between clans. Martiya liked the way the genealogical work balanced gossipy love talk, with its inevitable talk of beautiful brides, with the underlying rigor of the genealogical chart, which kept the conversation focused and disciplined and forward-moving, like an escalator. She soon found herself trying to juggle:

  the members of at least two dozen Dyalo villages, if not more, whose descendants and offspring married and moved from one village to the other, and intermarried occasionally with other tribes from other villages;

  organizing themselves in accordance with

  painfully complicated conventions that determined which clan members could marry with one another;* given that there were between twelve and fifteen clans (depending on whether the Bird clans were considered three separate clans or only one), there were thus between 144 and 225 separate relationships to consider, all on a continuum between forbidden and desirable;

  every potential match governed by

  at least a dozen seemingly arbitrary rules for auspicious, inauspicious, and incestuous marriages; for example: a girl who marries her father's nephews was considered to have married well, but marriage to her mother's nephews was absolutely impossible; marriage within the village was discouraged but not forbidden; and so on;

  and

  the institution of bride-price, by which the groom's family compensated the bride's family for the trouble and expense of raising the

  *To summarize something that took Martiya upwards of two months to realize: a clan was an extended family, and membership in the clan was passed in the same way as family name in Western culture—it was inherited from the father. Lai-Ma had been born in the Bird clan, but upon marriage entered into Farts-a-Lot's Fish clan. Her daughters would leave the clan; her sons would stay within it. Just what a clan really meant to its members, what bonds of emotional loyalty the clan demanded, what protections the clan offered—these were questions it would take Martiya years to answer.

  daughter; a sufficient bride-price seemed reason to ignore or violate some but not all of the other marriage rules;

  never forgetting

  all of the natural drama of the human heart, which overwhelmed by passion and desire, inevitably produced exceptions to any and every rule Martiya thought she had established as an absolute of Dyalo romantic life.

  Thank God, Martiya thought, the Dyalo weren't polygamous.

  The genealogical work inevitably provoked questions about Martiya's own love life, and at first Martiya was not sure just how to explain her particular position as an unmarried, independent adult. There was simply no place in the Dyalo mind for such a remote and isolated creature. Indeed, so strange were the looks that Martiya received when first questioned about her marital status that to save the time and trouble of explaining the complicated kinship rules of her own culture, she invented a fictitious husband waiting for her back home. It had started out as a simple white lie, on a stifingly hot and humid afternoon when her patience was low, but very quickly Martiya realized the advantages of the story. Some of her most successful attempts at building rapport with local women had been when she had discussed her wedding, her bride-price, and her relations with her in-laws, a subject that was almost an obsession among Dyalo women. Martiya named her husband Pierre, for no reason at all, and Pierre, which the Dyalo pronounced "Pell," very quickly became something of a character in the village. Like all villagers everywhere, the people of Dan Loi were naturally gossipy, and stories about Martiya's man were legion: Pell was as tall as two Dyalo men, with a head of brilliant blond hair and the strength of a water buffalo; Pell was so wealthy that he ate pig every day, which was necessary on account of his ferocious sexual appetites. On one of Martiya's visits to the lowland, she bought a magazine with photographs of Hollywood celebrities, and clipped a picture of Robert Redford. "This is Pell," she told the women when she came back to the village. The women puzzled over the strange figure, trying to interpret the photograph and the man. Nobody in the village had ever seen blond hair before, or knew that humanity came in such a pale color. Is he a ghost? they asked—and it took Martiya a moment to realize that the question was asked with absolute sincerity.

  The stories became more elaborate as time went on: Martiya, the villagers said, had been forced to flee from her own village because Pell had beaten her so cruelly; but he had beaten her so cruelly because she had taken a lover. As these stories spread through the village, women whom Martiya hardly knew now sought her out and invited her to tea in their huts, where they asked her one question over and over again: Was it true about the size of the white man's penis?

  Absolutely, Martiya said.

  As big as this? the women asked, and spread their hands apart.

  As big as this, Martiya said, spreading hers wider.

  Koo-koo, the women said.*

  Martiya could only take about two hours of genealogical work a day before she began to fear that her brain might explode. (And her back: the Dyalo did not have chairs, and these conversations with Dyalo matrons would be conduct
ed either sitting directly on the hardwood floors of Dyalo homes or teetering on the edges of tiny stools. Martiya would balance her notebook on her knees, while the Dyalo women would engage in household busywork: finely chopping peppers and onions, sorting herbs, preparing poultices of medicinal leaves, tying together brush grass to make brooms or roofing tiles, or weaving industriously at a loom.) The stories she heard were frequently of the so-my-sister's-second-cousin-decided-to-marry-her-father's-brother's-third-son type, and it took all of Martiya's mental discipline to remember that behind these dry accounts of interlinked clans, there were couples; and behind the couples, humanbeings who lived and loved.

  Or were there? Did the Dyalo see anything the way she did? The Dyalo, after all, didn't even have a word for "love," a fact Martiya recalled from her readings about Dyalo life before leaving Berkeley, and con

  *I'm not making this stuff up. Really. See Otome Klein Hutheesing, Emerging Sexual Inequality Among the Lisu of Northern Thailand: The Waning of Dog and Elephant Repute (Leiden: Brill, 1990), pp. 147–53, for a discussion of what the author calls the "big phallus complex" among the Lisu, another of the northern Thai tribal peoples. I can confirm that it is, in fact, true about the size of the white man's penis.

  firmed upon arrival in Dan Loi. Perhaps, Martiya thought, the Dyalo simply had no notion of romantic love at all.

  Just when Martiya had convinced herself that the gulf between her emotions and the Dyalo's was unbridgeable, like social intercourse between cats and porpoises, somebody would inevitably tell her a story that would suggest entirely the opposite. There was, for example, a couple who lived on the far edge of the village. The wife had elegant high cheekbones, long wavy black hair, and a distracted, flirty, inefficient saunter, as if her neighbors' thatch huts were shop windows and in place of two buckets of water, a pair of invisible shopping bags from Saks Fifth Avenue dangled from the ends of her long arms; in her letters to Karen, Martiya always called her "Miss Dan Loi." Her husband had the spare good looks of the star of a Hong Kong kung-fu movie. They made a pretty pair, and were expecting their first child.

  The gossip about the couple was this: in her village, two days' walk in the direction of the rising sun, past Scary Mountain and Wild Pig village, she had been the eldest daughter of a wealthy family, her slender arms covered from wrist to elbow in silver bangles. He, by contrast, came from one of the poorest families in Dan Loi, one of those families who lived on the far edge of the village and, in the last few weeks before the rice was harvested, lived only on jungle roots. That kind of people, that kind of story: when they met, the instant ardor of the couple was matched in intensity only by the disapproval of her family. Of course the match was prohibited—or, rather, the boy was told that if he wished her hand, he would need to compete with all the other suitors for her bride-price. Her father was stern, her mother sterner, her grandmother sternest: such a boy, they sniffed, was entirely unsuitable. There were considerations of clan, and another far more appropriate suitor, a fat patrilateral cousin, had sniffed in her direction. Now the story took the wonderful, the utterly human, twist. The girl, saying nothing, secretly began to meet her lover in the jungle; and every time they met, she gave him a handful of silver. She gave him all her bangles, and then stole her sisters', and then her mother's, and then her uncompromising old grandmother's. She took everything in the household that wasn't nailed down, including a piglet, and gave it to her lover, and in this way, she stole her own bride-price from her own intransigent family. The marriage followed forthwith. Really, what choice did anyone have? Martiya herself was charmed by the story, and charmed also by the laughter of her Dyalo informants as they recounted the story.

  No sooner had Martiya decided that the Dyalo were no more distant from her emotional experience than second cousins twice removed than they would present her with striking evidence to the contrary. It was late at night, and Martiya was lying on the hard floor of her thatch hut, when a loud scream pierced the wet night air, a repetitive throbbing moan that lasted upwards of a minute. She had been in the village several months. It was one of the eeriest noises Martiya had ever heard. She lay under her rough blanket, wondering whether she should investigate. The noise repeated itself a few minutes later, and Martiya asked herself: What would Malinowski do? She had almost convinced herself that Malinowski seemed the kind of man who valued his sleep, when the strange voice howled again. In the dark, she dressed herself, while the other occupants of the hut slept through the noise. With the aid of her flashlight, she wandered through the village. The dogs of the village barked as she passed. She found Vinai's hut and woke him from a deep sleep. Together, Martiya and Vinai traced the noise to a hut on the edge of the village. The hut was lit by a flickering yellow hurricane lamp. Vinai told Martiya to stay outside, and went inside; a moment later he came for her. She might watch, he said, as the shaman's demon rider came upon him.

  The shaman was a middle-aged man, slightly stooped, with a distinguished face that resembled nothing so much as a very tanned and Asiatic version of the picture of George Washington on the dollar bill. (Martiya was so struck by the likeness that she had shown a few of the villagers the dollar bill. She was startled to discover, as the Walkers had discovered, that the Dyalo, who had no tradition at all of portraiture, had tremendous trouble interpreting the engraved image. They looked at the bill with no greater level of comprehension than if she had written down the binomial formula, and when she asked them, "Isn't it strange how the shaman looks like the headman of my country?" the villagers looked at her in a way that made it clear the dollar bill wasn't the only thing that was weird. After all, the shaman was so much larger. But the resemblance was clearly there: the high forehead, that distinguished Virginia jaw, even the jowls.) She had seen the man just a few day before, in the communal kitchen: he had smiled at her in a friendly, dignified, presidential way, had asked Vinai what she was doing here, and then ambled off.

  But now he was transformed. He was sweaty, and his limbs—he was standing up—trembled. Martiya heard strange sounds coming from his throat, nothing like the gentle voice of the man she had met just recently. He made odd barking noises, and then again, that full-throated howl which had awakened and terrified her. It was as if a larger, clumsier creature had taken hold of his body and was now manipulating it. Martiya felt the hairs on her arms prickle. The shaman began to speak quickly in a voice a full octave deeper than the man's normal voice, and when Martiya asked what he was saying, Vinai responded in an apologetic hushed whisper that he did not know the shaman-talk. The spooky performance continued for almost an hour, until the shaman suddenly collapsed.

  Of all the aspects of village life, just what happened to that man who in the daytime looked like a dead president and in the nighttime was a raving monster most aroused Martiya's curiosity. She wanted to know what had happened to him. She was in no position yet to answer the question, but the fact that she had a question that she was eager to answer was of tremendous psychological importance to her as she struggled with the language, the weather, the ubiquitous strangeness of the people, and particularly her host, whom she hated more intensely than any other human being since the sixth grade, when Alice Wilkerson put gum in her hair.

  Not long after Farts-a-Lot vomited on her notebook, Martiya went to town to get her mail. This was something she did every couple of weeks. The Dyalo women, most of whom had only been out of the mountains once or twice in their lives, were stunned at Martiya's bravery, going into the lowlands like this by herself, and even the men, who regularly went down to the plains to buy bullets for their guns, or to sell corn, thought the nonchalant way that Martiya walked out of the village, carrying nothing with her but a small pack, an extraordinarily bold gesture: How did she know that she would find acceptable food and water down there? Lowland rice, the Dyalo felt, was gross, and murky lowland water unreliable. And how did she know that the spirits would be friendly the whole way?

  The hike to the highway took Martiya a morning, but in
the dry of the cool season, it was a pleasant jaunt. In the mists and fogs of the rainy season, the mountains had been claustrophobic, hemmed in by the gray; but now the skies were blue, and Martiya could see lime-green valleys and jagged hills as she walked, and then more hills beyond, and then, in the far distance, the broad plain of Chiang Rai, which stretched all the way to Burma. She passed through two villages, both Lahu, and by now she had been with the Dyalo long enough that she couldn't help but think as she saw the Lahu that they did look just a little like monkeys. The end of the rainy season brought more flowers into bloom than existed in the imagination of the most passionate English gardener: fields of wild roses and jasmine and day lilies, hyacinths and orchids curling off of every rotting log and tree. The villagers led water buffalo along the narrow trails, their hindquarters stained red with dust. Once she got down to the main road, she only had to wait a few minutes by the side of the road before a grizzled Thai farmer in a beat-up old pickup truck gave her a lift into town, and when she told him that she was living in a Dyalo village high in the hills, the farmer spat out the window and said, "Bah! You live with those animals?"

  Martiya, as was her custom, spent the day in town. Even by Thai standards, it was a little place, nothing more than a post office, a market, a gas station, a noodle stall, a temple, and a few large concrete Chinese shop-houses—and yet, after Dan Loi, it felt like a metropolis. There was ice here, and Coca-Cola, and television. Motorcycles buzzed down the street, and music played on the radio. Martiya collected her mail and sat at the small restaurant on a real chair at a real table, and slowly went through the stack, letter by letter. Her father had written her a long letter describing the latest conference that he had attended—Piers van der Leun was a great lover of academic conferences, and spent a substantial portion of his time traveling from one to the next; and Joseph Atkinson, to tell her that he had received the carbon copies of her field notes, and in his opinion, she needed to consider spending more time in the fields. "Grab a hoe!" he wrote. Karen had written her a long, ecstatic gushing Karen-gram, consisting chiefly of a recital of the details of Karen's dreams. Her former landlady in Berkeley had forwarded a package of bills.