“As a general rule, I would advise sobriety. I don’t know your personal habits, but if you are fond of narcotics or drink, I would suggest you avoid it as much as possible in these next weeks. Of course, it is expected that you drink, if you can, with them, when they drink. But even then, you should not become intoxicated. Loss of control may make you appear ridiculous or offensive.
“Since we have seven females—myself included—in our group of ten, I think a brief digression on the role of the female in the field might be pertinent. You should all dress as you dress at home, comfortably and conservatively, If it becomes hotter, you need not wear undergarments—slips, brassieres, briefs—since the men on the Sirens have no avid curiosity about your private parts. As you have already seen, concealment hardly exists here and all are natural about their appearance. Most communities of this sort dislike pugnacious women, overwhelming women, humorless women. I would keep this in mind at all times.
“Now we come to a delicate subject, one which frequently concerns women in the field. I refer to cohabiting with the natives. We’ve been set down in a society where sexual activity is casual and fluid. There is a minority school of anthropology that believes you should welcome rather than avoid romantic entanglements. Certainly, cohabitation with a native can be easy, simple, unobjectionable. The native population may not look down on you for it, in fact may be rather pleased. Despite the possibility that such an affair may give you knowledge as well as pleasure, I must point out the drawbacks. If your affair is secret, then the fact of it will inhibit your scientific writings. You will be unable to report the truth. If your affair puts you in competition with a native woman, you may cut yourself off from the rest of the community. There is yet another problem. I will illustrate it with an example. Years ago, when Adley and I were in Africa, we had with us three graduate students, two males and one female. The female became quite attracted to one young colored native, and she cohabited with him. She did so openly. The other colored tribesmen were delighted. She was behaving as their women did, and moreover, because she was a white visitor with power and prestige, they regarded her affair as the height of democratic practice. The problem here was not that she upset the natives—she was conforming with their way—but that she upset the male members of our team. They were disturbed by her action, and resented her, and innumerable political difficulties in our own group resulted.
“So let me say this final word about cohabitation—and I address all but Mary. You know the profits, you know the pitfalls. I cannot guide you further. I am not one, you will find, who would call any such conduct scandalous—that is for laymen—for, to me labeling anything like this as scandalous is a value judgment, and I cannot and will not make one. You look into your hearts, into your consciences, and perform as you think right.
“While I am discussing our behavior, there is an area where I wish my moral judgment to prevail. I want each of you to pledge, to yourself, to me, that you will not plot to alter any aspect of this society for selfish purposes. In the pioneer days of anthropology, there were certain individuals—the German ethnologist, Otto Finsch, who was in the South Seas off and on between 1879 and 1884, was one of these—who disrupted tribes with their offensive, unwanted Don Juanism. There were similar individuals, in times past, who made natives drunk on Western whiskey to goad them into recreating old orgiastic and erotic practices. I will not permit friendly natives to be seduced by offensive love-making or alcohol to satisfy our needs for research. A few years ago, Harvard University sent a team into the Baliem Valley of Dutch New Guinea to study primitive activity. According to missionaries, this team, eager to obtain motion pictures of every phase of native life, fomented a local war in which lives were lost in the interests of research. I have no idea if this really happened, if it is true, but it was widely publicized, and I want no such accusations made of a team led by Dr. Maud Hayden.
“In fact, I will not even permit minor provocation. I know that so respectable an investigator as Edward Westermarck—whom Adley and I met before his death in 1939—employed elementary magic tricks in Morocco to awe the Arabs and acquire information from them on their morals. I simply won’t condone tricks of any kind. Childish firecrackers become dangerous explosives in the wrong hands.
“Above all, I won’t have any Leo Frobeniuses on this study. He did brilliant anthropological work on Africa, but his methods and prejudices left much to be desired. He talked down to the priests at Ibadan, exploited the poor people in acquiring their religious possessions, wormed his way into a secret murder society and then exposed it, and treated African natives as an inferior race, especially the partially civilized ones whom he contemptuously spoke of as ‘trouser niggers.’ I absolutely won’t have that here. I won’t permit exploitation, emotional or material, of these fine people, and I won’t allow, as far as I can control it, a feeling of superiority among any of us toward them.
“If you cannot respect these people, you should not remain here. As Evans-Pritchard has said, you must make an intellectual and emotional transference to the natives you study, try to think and feel as they do, until their society is inside you and not merely in your notebooks. I remember a few lines from Evans-Pritchard that I once memorized. ‘An anthropologist has failed unless, when he says good-by to the natives, there is on both sides the sorrow of parting. It is evident that he can only establish this intimacy if he makes himself in some degree a member of their society …’
“Concerning participation, Malinowski felt that there was some information no amount of questioning could ferret out. You must research—he used a wonderful phrase—‘the imponderabilia of actual life’—that is, make yourself a part of daily living on the Sirens, know the feel of a native’s toil in the brush, know his vanities and dislikes, know how he cares for his body, know what his mind fears, know what goes on between his spouse and himself, and his offspring and himself. To attain this transference, we owe it to ourselves not to become ingrown, groupy, a special isolated club from faraway. The danger in coming here as a large team is that, after the day’s work, we may tend to retreat to one another’s company exclusively, seek one another’s companionship, instead of devoting this time to the community.
“Someone—I think it was you, Rachel—wondered how we could repay the people of the Sirens for their time and trouble. We owe them something. What do we give them in return? We cannot pay them. If their help is put on a wage basis, we destroy much of the reciprocal interpersonal relationship. Gifts, given excessively, can be as harmful as money. I should suggest that an occasional inexpensive present, a gadget, some of our food, toys for the children, offered spontaneously, would be all right. More than that, I think helping them, in any way that we can, might be more acceptable—oh, if Marc or Sam assisted them in constructing a hut or gathering food, or Harriet treated the ailing, or Rachel gave advice where it was wanted, or Mary taught games—all of that would be a form of repayment. Too, I would suggest we reciprocate all specific hospitality tendered us. Last night, my family and I were the guests of Chief Paoti. Presently, we shall find the occasion to have him and his family as our guests, to be treated to our American foods.
“A few last tips. Orville asked me how we handle a situation where someone on the Sirens offers us something we cannot accept. This often comes up in the field. When Westermarck was among the Arabs, they offered him several wives. He did not want to reject them outright, so he cleverly told them that he already had a half-dozen wives at home and simply could not afford to support more. Out of hospitality, a family may try to give you a child to adopt or a grown daughter to take as mistress or wife. The easiest way to handle this is to tell that family that in your own society, taking someone else’s child for your own, or a mistress, or another wife, is strictly a tabu. You invent you own tabu as you need it, and it is hardly a lie. This will be understood, and you will have offended no one.
“One final word, and then I promise you, I am through. Most of us are social scientists, and we ask
ourselves why are we here, suffering anxiety in this unknown atmosphere, enduring physical discomforts, and fighting exhaustion from gathering data all day and recording it until the dawn hours? You may be in the sciences, and here in the field, for material reasons, of course. It is one way to make a living. Because of what you see here, you will advance in your profession, make money in business or government or by publishing. But advancement is the smallest motive. There are bigger ones. There are scientific, humanitarian, and philosophical motives that drive you. You want to acquire knowledge, and pass it on. All the breadth of human behavior is your discipline. You want to refresh yourself, obtain a different world view, in a new culture. And yet, there is even more. There is a kind of romanticism in us that goes very deep. We are romantics with restless intelligence. We are not armchair people. We are not what Malinowski called hearsay anthropologists. We like the glamour and stimulation of other environments. We cast aside routine to explore exciting new worlds, to enter briefly into the lives of, and become part of, exotic peoples.
“Above all, above everything, whatever the diverse routes that brought all of us together and to this morning, we are here for the very reason that brought Bronislaw Malinowski, so alone, to Boyawa, an island of the Trobriands, near New Guinea, one August morning in 1914. His motive, I suspect, was not different from your motive or mine. ‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘through realizing human nature in a shape very distant and foreign to us, we shall have some light shed on our own.’
“To this, I say—Amen. To you, I say—let us begin.”
* * *
Marc Hayden stood uncertainly in the middle of the reception chamber of Chief Paoti’s hut, where Courtney had left him while he went into another room. Marc could not remember the chamber from the night before. The floor was composed of slabs of stone that had been made slippery by exposure to the sea, and here and there, representing chairs he supposed, were thick palm mats for sitting. Except for the charcoal-gray stone idol in one corner, the room was barren.
Marc moved closer to the idol to inspect it. The head and body were distortions of a male, probably a god, and one had the impression that this had been a drunken collaboration between Modigliani and Picasso. Backing off from the grotesque idol with its elongated head, Marc could see why it repelled him. The representation, despite the weird features, was that of a phallus four feet high.
Filled with disgust by this reminder of the obsession of the village, Marc turned away. Impatiently, he circled the room, snubbing the idol. His mood was still dark. From the arrival of Easterday’s letter, so long ago, it seemed that things, small things in small ways, had gone from bad to worse. He was sick of the heavy chains that held him to anthropology—had always hated the dull slavery of it—and he envied one like Rex Garrity, a free soul, big with life, running the world up and down at his command as if it were a yo-yo. An adventurer like Garrity, Marc knew, had no chains. He was not one of the herd. He had identity. Moreover, he was in a popular business where one could become not only known but wealthy overnight. Garrity himself, the evening of the Hackfeld dinner, had given Marc this vision of what was possible, had hinted at a partnership, and for a moment had allowed Marc to soar with him above the earth-rutted, bound-in academic world of anthropology, a world where Marc could never be as much as his mother or father and would always be less than himself.
Once again, he resented Matty for brushing off Garrity, separating him from Garrity’s potential, keeping him manacled to her as a pseudo-Adley. The resentments multiplied: Matty holding him for her slavey boy, Matty continuing her spiritual marriage to the mediocre and pretentious man he had had to call father, Matty forever lecturing him. She had been lecturing him, not the others, but him, a half-hour ago, in her silly office. Who was all that lofty talk for—about Leo Frobenius and his superiority toward natives—if not for him? Reviewing it, Marc damned Matty for her tiresome objectivity and liberalism—the trick she had of putting everyone on the defensive and making herself, alone, the pure person and pure scientist. Damn her.
And while he was about it, Marc, in his mind, damned his wife, too. Claire was a growing disappointment. In the last year, she had become too demanding—in her eyes, those goddam cow eyes—in her silences, those goddam condemning silences—too demanding, and too cloying, and too sticky, and too female. Like Matty, like so many females, she was a guilt-giver—exactly—an automatic guilt-giver, so you felt always off balance, always as if you had not done enough, always unsure and unsettled and anxious. Most of all, Marc resented her recent behavior. She was displaying a side of her that he had long been suspicious of, but had not seen in the open. Her preoccupation with sex talk at home had been disquieting enough, but the sluttish display of last night was unforgivable. Parading those big tits, actually sticking them out to get a rise out of that young ape Moreturi and that phony bum Courtney, had been nauseating. She was only acting out her hostility to her husband. And this was the whore who wanted to be a mother. Thank God, he told himself, he had not let her browbeat him into that further self-imprisonment.
Marc revived the incident of this morning, and became more furious. First, the bare tits, then the shorts and bare ass. What next? Next, one of those grass skirts so that all the men could see all there was left to see. The bitch, the unwholesome, goddam bitch. And now she had Matty on her side, all those bitches did, with license to fornicate. He mimicked his mother’s voice in his head: “Certainly, cohabitation with a native can be easy, simple, unobjectionable.” Christ.
Marc realized that he was no longer alone. Courtney had returned. Quickly, Marc hid his anger, and quickly, he slipped on his professional smile.
“He’ll see you now,” Courtney was saying. “He’ll be right out. No ceremony necessary with Paoti. Just straight talk. I’ve told him your needs. He’ll tell you what is possible.”
“Thanks. I certainly do appreciate what you’ve—” Courtney, at the door, curtly interrupted. “Nothing at all. Forget it. I’ve got to get back to your mother’s hut and give the others a hand.”
He was gone, and Marc, relieved, could hate again.
But immediately, Chief Paoti was in the room. “Good morning, good morning, Dr. Hayden.” Paoti, bare-chested and barefooted, wore a plain white breechclout. Although frail to the eye, he advanced with bony vigor.
“Good morning, sir,” said Marc. “It’s awfully kind of you to help me.”
“I find one always helps others—others—to help one’s self. It is in my own interest to make certain that you receive the best impression of my people.” He sank down upon the thickest palm mat, and crossed his matchstick legs. “Sit, please, sit,” he commanded.
Marc settled uncomfortably on the mat across from the Chief.
“Mr. Courtney tells me you wish to spend some time interviewing one of my people.”
“Yes, I need an informant, an articulate person who is highly conversant in your history, legends, customs, someone who will speak with honesty and enjoy discussing your life here.”
Paoti chewed his gums. “Male or female?”
Inexplicably, Paoti’s use of the word female plucked a fresh chord of memory in Marc. He heard again the primitive music of the night before, and it enkindled the image of the native girl on the platform, the one with the distended red nipples, slash of a navel, shimmering flesh, and shapely calves. Her figure hovered behind his eyes, wriggling sensuously. Tehura, that was her name, Tehura, of the round heels.
Paoti, wrinkled hands folded in his lap, had been waiting patiently, and Marc blurted, “Female.”
“Very well.”
“Preferably a young person,” Marc added. “Since you will be my mother’s informant, I am sure that she will have a complete picture of your society from the point of view of a senior male member. As a matter of contrast, I feel I should have the point of view of someone younger, perhaps a girl in her twenties.”
“Married or unmarried?”
“Unmarried would be better.”
&nbs
p; Paoti considered this. “There are so many—”
Marc had made his decision, based on the fantasies in his head, and it was now or never. “Sir, what I have in mind is someone like—like your niece.”
Paoti showed a glimmer of surprise. “Tehura?”
“She seemed to me exceedingly articulate and intelligent.”
“That she is, yes,” said Paoti. He was still thinking.
“Of course, if you have any objections—or you feel she might be uncooperative or shy—why, then, any other would—”
“No, I do not have any objections. As for Tehura, she is decidedly outgoing, one of our young who is as headstrong as a brave young man, ready for anything that is new …” His voice had trailed off, as if he had been speaking to himself. Then he fixed his eyes on Marc. “Exactly what do you have in mind for Tehura? What will be your procedure?”
“Informal talks, nothing more,” said Marc. “An hour or two at the most each day, every day she is free. We will sit as we sit here, and I will ask questions, and she will answer them. I will take extensive notes. That’s all there is to it.”
Paoti appeared satisfied. “If that is all—very well, she will be capable. Of course, the decision to cooperate must come from her. However, if she knows I sanction it, she will no doubt be agreeable … When would you begin?”
“Today, if possible. Right now. We’ll need a few short sessions to break her into this, put her at ease.”
Paoti turned from Marc, cupped one hand at his lips, and shouted, “Vata!”
Like a jack-in-the-box, a skinny boy of fourteen popped out of the next room. He came on the run, bent in a half-bow to Paoti, and went to one knee before him. Paoti spoke in Polynesian, in a cadence that made Marc think that he was reciting a long poem. After a full minute, the boy Vata, who had been inclining his head all the while, murmured one word of assent, straightened, and retreated to the wall.
The Three Sirens Page 30
