Fieldwork

by Mischa Berlinski

  "Uh-huh."

  "Okay, all that I understand. Here's the thing I don't understand. You told me that a year and a half, two years later, she came back to Thailand. That would be … 1979 or so."

  "That's right."

  "So the thing I don't get is—why did she come back to Thailand?"

  The question was not spontaneous. I had written it down on a Post-it note and attached it to the telephone in anticipation of Karen's call. I had thought about this a lot. I knew that Martiya spent two and a half years in a Dyalo village, and returned to Berkeley in 1977; and I knew that after eighteen months back home, Martiya decided to return to Thailand and live in a Dyalo village. As courageous as the decision may have been, it was also very unusual: Martiya was, by all accounts, a smart, ambitious student, a leader in one of the very finest doctoral programs in the world. Her thesis adviser was the legendary Joseph Atkinson. And at an age—thirty-one—when pressures to succeed and form a life and make a place for oneself in the world are not inconsiderable, Martiya decided that her life, her real life, the place where she wanted to be, was a tribal village in the north of Thailand. She was no longer interested in being an academic: she returned to the village no longer under the aegis of the Anthropology Department. The government no longer covered her expenses. Joseph Atkinson specifically advised her not to go. And this time, she went without a return ticket. So I wondered: Why did she go back?

  Well, Karen said, redirecting the great eighteen-wheeler that was her conversation, she had asked herself the same thing. And this was her take on the situation.

  Everyone in anthro knows it, it's an open secret, but coming home from the field is as tough as going out. Maybe even tougher. When you go out on the road, you're you; and when you come back, you're not you anymore, but they're still them. You get off of that plane thinking that the world is a big strange place and your brain is just churning, trying to figure it out, and even if the place where you're coming back to is the Department of Anthropology, your brain is still churning faster than everyone else's. It's like a chainsaw hitting a steel spike.

  It had been hard for Karen coming home from the Philippines, but one thing had made it easier: Ted. She had met Ted just two days after she got back to Berkeley, and being swept-off-your-feet, can-I-possibly-get-enough-of-this-man madly in love—especially in love with someone like Ted, who knew how to love a woman, she had to say that about Ted, he did know how to love a woman, except that he didn't seem to know how to love just one woman—it was like somebody had turned up life's intensity meter all the way to maximum. Ted had listened to Karen talk about the Philippines for hours and hours, the two of them lying naked on Ted's bed, and Karen had to admit it, although she hated to, Ted had been a good listener. Christ, Ted was so goddamn smart, that was the thing: Ted had just homed in straightaway on what made her village hers, and how it worked, and what was interesting anthropologically, and what was interesting humanly, and after spending ten straight days in bed talking with Ted, it was like Ted had been there with her.

  But Martiya didn't have Ted—and although not having Ted could only be considered a blessing in a woman's life, sometimes Karen wondered whether Martiya would have ended up Martiya the Tragic Murderess, if Martiya the Frustrated Grad Student and not Karen had sat next to Ted that day in the library. Because for Martiya, the hardest thing about coming home was that when she finally got back to California, after almost two and a half years in Dan Loi, nobody seemed much interested in the Dyalo at all. This was a keen irony, because after two and a half years complaining to Karen in letter after letter that she was bored, as soon as she left that village, she could think of nothing else.

  She had figured that, at the very least, the other anthropologists in the department would want to ask her a million questions, but most colleagues just used her return as an excuse to tell stories about their experiences in the field—and those stories, unlike her own, were very boring.

  Joseph Atkinson gave Martiya exactly three hours of solid, serious attention. He invited her out for dinner a week or so after she got back, and took her to a good restaurant in San Francisco, some place with flickering little rainbows on the very white tablecloth where the candle-light refracted through the heavy crystal. The food struck Martiya as tasteless, after Dyalo food, and a little heavy, but she didn't complain: at least Atkinson was giving her the chance to tell Dyalo stories. Martiya knew she wasn't conversing, she was delivering a monologue, but she had wanted to tell someone all this stuff for such a long time. She talked about the huge New Year's feasts, when the village exploded in dancing for three days, with wild drumbeats all through the night, and the complicated games by which the Dyalo young men paid court to the Dyalo maidens; and she told him how thrilling it was when, after almost two years, she could finally start to understand Dyalo poetry. When old Sings Soft had recited Dyalo love poems on a warm summer night under a full moon with all the village crouching low, not daring to breathe or even sigh, she had cried. She had seen Dyalo children born and Dyalo die, and they had started coming to her, of all people, for medical advice. She had so many more stories to tell, too, about the Yunnanese opium traders who came on muleback, and the flash that came when Martiya finally figured out the east-west/life-death/sunrise-sunset symbolic system that— well, it pretty much organized everything—and the time that the shaman who looked like George Washington exorcised her when she had this persistent headache, and damned if she didn't get better right away. But then she and Atkinson had dessert and coffee, and although Martiya would have liked to talk more, Atkinson took her home, and from that point on, whenever Martiya tried to tell a Dyalo story, Atkinson just said, "Save it for the thesis, kiddo."

  Like all graduate students returned from fieldwork, Martiya was given the opportunity to lecture on her findings. There were exactly eighteen attendees for her lecture, entitled "The Ministry of Ghosts: Bureaucratic Form and Function in Dyalo Spiritual Life," and two of those attendees, Martiya well knew, went to every lecture, on account of the little buffet the department set up afterward, with takeout from the Chinese restaurant on Shattuck Avenue. A third was Karen. Even now, when Karen lectured on animism to her undergraduate students, she found herself using examples from that lecture. If Martiya had stuck with it, Karen said, she would have been a superstar.

  No one who lived with the Dyalo, Martiya began, could fail to note the very frequent references in Dyalo conversation to the things called tsi. The word meant, more or less, "spirits" in English, but the word had a somewhat greater range of meaning in Dyalo: in certain contexts, the word meant "god," as when the Dyalo spoke of Wu-pa-sha tsi, the creator of the wind, water, rain, and thunder, while in other contexts, the word had a strictly technical sense, as when the Dyalo spoke of someone afflicted with "wu-neu tsi," or a headache.* All of the various tsi were invisible to the Dyalo, at least with the eyes, but nevertheless were absolutely real to the people of Dan Loi. To deny the existence of the tsi was to deny one of the most basic aspects of the natural world. Not long after she arrived in the village, Martiya asked how many tsi there were in the world. "There are as many tsi in the world as clouds in the sky or grains of rice in the fields," was the response: the tsi were uncountable, and the question made as little sense to the Dyalo as the question, "How many bacteria are there in this room?" Lots.

  Martiya was very small behind the podium, but she spoke with a wonderful authority.

  Martiya continued: Some of the tsi were associated with places, like the tsi who dominated the mountain on which Dan Loi was situated, the tsi who ruled the village, and the tsi who lived on the big rock behind the village. Almost every place had its own proprietary tsi. Other tsi were as-

  *And then there was the usage invented by the Walkers to describe their God: Ye-su-tsi.

  sociated with natural phenomena like thunder or rain; and still other tsi with biological entities, like rice, trees, various animals, and even human beings. The tsi associated with human beings the Dyalo called t
s'aw-wo—a word which Martiya translated as "souls," and such tsi might be associated with men and women both living and dead. The latter category is what the occidental refers to as a ghost.

  One of the consequences and fundamental underpinnings of the Dyalo spiritual system was the odd and provocative idea that, to the Dyalo, there were no accidents.

  Martiya's thinking on these matters was substantially influenced by a rereading of the great English ethnographer E. E. Evans-Pritchard and his studies of witchcraft among the Azande of the Sudan. The peculiarity of Azande thinking, Evans-Pritchard argued, was that, like the Dyalo, the Azande had no notion of bad luck; rather, they ascribed all ill fortune to witchcraft, from the most trivial, a stubbed toe, to the most grave, a sulky wife or death. Whatever went wrong, went wrong because a witch had cursed the action. The Dyalo were not great believers in witchcraft—although witches did exist among the Dyalo—but the Dyalo, like the Azande, were unable to admit the possibility of accident, simple bad luck. Indeed, there was no word for "luck" in Dyalo. If an otherwise inexplicable bad thing happened, it happened almost always because a spirit was angry; if a spirit was angry, it was because somebody had angered a spirit.

  Things that to the occidental mind were clearly bad fortune or happenstance, the Dyalo automatically interpreted within a chain of spiritual cause and effect. In Martiya's village, a young woman stumbled and fell into a cooking fire, burning herself badly. A man in the village raised pigs; a pig wandered off into the forest and was lost. A village woman, an expert weaver, produced a garment that snagged on a branch and unraveled. In all three cases, what Martiya would have called bad luck, or misfortune, the Dyalo called the work of the spirits. Why did a young woman known for her grace stumble at precisely that spot and fall into the fire? To fall at another spot would have been benign. A spirit seized her and pushed her. Hundreds of pigs were raised in the village; every now and then a pig would be lost in the forest. But they were almost always found again. Why not this one? A venturesome spirit took the pig's soul. The weaver was a woman of the highest skill. Her garments from twenty years ago were still in use. Why not this one? She had been distracted by a spirit. The young woman who stumbled was thought to have angered the fire spirit by eating corn near the fire pit. The owner of the pig erred by allowing the pig to wander in the vicinity of the Old Grandfather shrine: it was inevitable that something would go wrong. The weaver's mother had been careless, failing to present the household spirits with their breakfast.

  "Think about this for a minute! Just think!" Martiya said. "If you think that everything that goes wrong in the world is caused by some bad spirit—and if you think these bad spirits are all around you—think how nervous you'd be all the time. You can ask the spirits to do this or that, but you can never be sure that they'll listen. Think how different your mental world would be if you thought that even moving a rock in your taro patch could anger the spirit who might make your taro come in badly, or give your daughter an incurable illness, or just put your wife in a really bad mood for a month. The fact that the Dyalo live in this world, surrounded by invisible enemies everywhere—and they do it with so much good humor and such grace—they're the bravest people I know."

  Karen recalled the quiet that came over the room when Martiya was done speaking. Then a woman in the audience raised her hand. It was clear from her straggly appearance that she was a Berkeley resident rather than a member of the department, and this woman explained that she had come to the lecture attracted by the word "spiritual" on the flyer. She asked Martiya how her time with the Dyalo had affected her personal spiritual practice.

  "My personal spiritual practice?"

  "Yes, how you relate personally to the Goddess and other spirits."

  Martiya thought about the question a moment, and then said, "I learned that I liked to slit the pig's throat and watch him bleed."

  The little woman blanched.

  To Martiya's intense surprise and displeasure, the scholarly community of the University of California at Berkeley had not, in fact, been waiting with bated breath for the results of Martiya van der Leun's expedition to Dan Loi. The frustrating thing was not that this was a big blow to her ego—on the contrary: she was smart and sensitive enough to realize that anthropologists had come home from expeditions to the farthest corners of the globe every single week since Malinowski had come home from the Trobriands; and that another graduate student coming back was not grounds for a university-wide day of rejoicing and celebration. No, what really frustrated Martiya was that she still didn't understand the Dyalo, not at all, and all the time she was in Dan Loi, her Curiosity had been growing day by day, and she had imagined that when she got back to Berkeley she'd be able to put all her field notes out on the table with some really smart people, and she'd finally be able to figure out all the things about the Dyalo that she couldn't figure out in the field.

  She had a thousand questions. She didn't know why she had been moved into Farts-a-Lot's house and not some other. She didn't know what happened to the shaman when he entered his trance. She didn't really understand why the Vampire clans at the foot of the hill were poor; and she didn't really understand why it was so shameful for husband and wife to plant rice together in the rice fields. She had given Lai-Ma her running shoes, and it took almost a week to convince Lai-Ma that she hadn't meant to offend her. She didn't know why Lai-Ma had been offended. Most of all, she wanted to understand the dyal. She wanted to know why the Dyalo engaged in this complicated ritual to plant rice, and what they were thinking when they engaged in it. She thought that there were answers to all these questions, which literally kept her awake at night, but she didn't know them. She didn't even know what kind of answer would satisfy her. She only knew that for all of her hard work in Dan Loi, she hadn't yet grasped the Dyalo point of view, understood the Dyalo relation to life, or realized the Dyalo vision of the Dyalo world.

  So that was the first thing that really bothered Martiya: all the time in Dan Loi, whenever things got tough, really tough, she had thought to herself that she was just the sharp end of the steel spear of scholarship, and that when she got back to Berkeley, all the other scholars and anthropologists and students of human behavior would help her understand the things she couldn't understand herself. Instead, Martiya found herself positively shunned in the department for having visited a preliterate society. The winds of anthropological fashion had shifted while Martiya was in the field, and preliterates were out: the hot young anthropologists were heading off to study South African diamond mines and Swedish ceramic factories and the corporate headquarters of AT&T. That's where the excitement was, and when Martiya tried to interest her colleagues in a rousing discussion of magical rites preceding the rice planting, she met with a palpable lack of interest. Instead, what they talked about in the graduate lounge and at the dinner parties and in the coffee shops were tenure and jobs and grants and absurd theories by trendy French philosophes. There was a time when nothing had thrilled her more than department gossip and the pitched battles between the various academic camps. Now, back from three years in Dan Loi, these debates bored her to death, and she could not make a connection between the generalities of theory and people like Lai-Ma, George Washington, and Farts-a-Lot.

  One evening several months after coming back from the field, she went out on a date with another of her classmates. He was just finishing up his thesis, which dealt with the influence of the Catholic Church in a village in southern Mexico. She had read a draft of his thesis, which argued that the villagers had incorporated traditional magical practices into the Catholic liturgy. The facts that her classmate had assembled were fascinating, and reading the thesis, Martiya had been able to imagine the hot, dusty plain of Chiapas, the whitewashed adobe church, and the ecstatic peasants in tears carrying the cross through the village just as their forefathers many generations before had carried the icons of Aztec gods. But when Martiya asked her friend just what the natives felt as they carried the cross, it was clear from his st
ream of jargon and theory that he had no deeper insight than Martiya. She felt as if she were talking to a blind member of the Department of Art History, who could recount every detail of Caravaggio's life and describe every symbol in every painting, but who had never actually seen the canvases or felt the power of his art. The encounter left her increasingly sure that what she was looking for was at odds with what the Department of Anthropology could offer, at odds with what the discipline of anthropology could offer.

  Martiya invited Karen for coffee, and the two women talked. It was an irony, Martiya said: eighty years after Bronislaw Malinowski told all the anthropologists to get off the veranda of the mission house and go and live with the natives, the only people in all the world who seemed to share Martiya's obsessive interest and fascination with the Dyalo were a family of missionaries huddled in Chiang Mai, waiting for the world to end.

  Uh-huh, said Karen, who years later would feel extremely guilty about her response.

  Karen spent a little more than two weeks in Dan Loi.

  She followed Martiya's routine. In the early mornings, Martiya took Karen around the village, stopping in at one hut after another. This was how fieldwork ought to be done, Karen thought: patiently, over years. A little Dyalo village was a microcosm of the world, and every hut had its drama: in one hut, an old woman lay dying; in another, a young girl, frightened by the prospect of moving to her new husband's village, sobbed at her mother's side; and in a third, a husband teased his wife, the couple laughing. Karen had never seen this side of Martiya before, when in those dark huts that powerful, passionate personality diminished itself and a calm tenderness stole over her flashing eyes. It was inspiring, Karen said, all that intelligence and curiosity focused on this tiny village. Martiya still bubbled over with questions, even after all those years in the mountains.