4160

Mischa Berlinski's Fieldwork

The novel we're reading for book club provides an anthropological investigation (fieldwork) for several interesting species--The Walker family [Christian missionaries], the Dyalo [fictious tribe based on a mix of real people that Berlinski researched], a beginning anthropologist [Martiya, anthropologist daughter of a Dutch linguist], academics, and to a lesser degree, couples who live together, stringers for magazines, American and European ex-pats, former college friends digging out letters from their basement storage and memories, Asian towns and prisons, teachers of English in exotic lands and linguists who create written language, whether Christian or academic. I fully expected Berlinski to speak ill of the Christians and laud the anthropologists, but it was just the opposite. He is neither, but definitely sees the anthropologists the more strange and misguided of the two, although both Martiya and the Walkers believe in the reality of evil spirits.

"The thirty years in China had seen the Walkers [Christian missionaries] occupy a dozen houses, all of them drafty, dreary places, with dirt floors and sod walls; and Laura had lived in them prepared to leave at a moment's notice should the good Lord need the Walkers elsewhere. She had lived the last fifteen years in the Mission House in Abaze, which was filled with spiders and simply did not get clean no matter how she scrubbed it. Laura never complained about her choices in life, but for thirty years now she [had wanted a real house like her sister in Kansas]. . . No Dyalo had ever thought to build a house with wooden walls--a Dyalo home had thin walls of thatch and woven bamboo--and organizing the labor in the wild country was a difficult job. . . The Dyalo wouldn't even consider the idea of working for wages; and if a man gives you his time as a gift, Laura felt, she really couldn't complain if he decided to take a week off. . . She was more than 50 years old, and although everyone helped, in the end, Raymond, Paul, and Laura built most of that house themselves." p. 111

"Farts-a-Lot [Martiya's host in the village, in whose hut she lived] kept a row of bottles of homemade rice whiskey, neatly lined up. In each bottle, there was some repulsive embalmed animal: a snake, a scorpion, a centipede, a few huge termites. These were added to the whiskey . . . to increase his potency, which, to judge by certain late-night mutterings was faltering. . ." p. 178 "The taste of the morning soup, more than the strange costumes and songs, and the weird language and the panoply of rites and sacrifices to please mean spirits, . . .that soup made Martiya feel as if she was living with the people from National Geographic. The vile soup was recycled day after day, and spiced with bitter herbs and a creepy brown fungus; it tasted as if everything that was the Dyalo and Dan Loi had been distilled into a concentrated broth; it seemed almost alive, slithering on her tongue like an oyster; it was as intense as eau-de-vie. All morning long, no matter how many times she brushed her teeth, Martiya could taste the forest on her teeth." p. 179

"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 naive notion that tribal peoples 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 [her host] 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." p. 188

Martiya thought that when "she got back to Berkely, all the other scholars and anthropologists and students of human behavior would help her understand the things she couldn't. Instead, Martiya found herself positively shunned in the department for having visited a preliterate society. The window of anthropological fashion had shifted while Martiya was in the field, and preliterates were out. . . It was an irony that 80 years after Bronislaw Malinowksi 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 waiting for the world to end." p. 251-252