by | 14 April 2004 · 10:14 pm

Morobe Field Diary, December 1976: Going-away Party

Yesterday, the Sunday before Christmas, we finally had my village party. We had it early to make way for another one next Sunday. By my reckoning it was a good one. The [M.V.] Sago took off for Kuwi early in the morning to get the pig [people tend not to slaughter and eat pigs they’ve raised themselves] while we got the church service out of the way. About the time the service ended the Sago pulled in. The pig was alive, tied to a pole and large by NG [= New Guinea] standards and well fatted. People gathered under the men’s house at this end of the village while the women went to work on the starch and a few men on the pig who died a rather torturous death due to inefficient killers. One girl cried and I would have shed a tear if I weren’t at the moment being very detached & scientific (wonderful how science allows you to get beyond your scruples).

[The young, unmarried men’s cohort — my cohort — took charge of the slaughter and whacked the pig between the eyes several times to stun it before trying to put a pig spear thru its heart, but they had enough trouble finding the heart that an older, more experienced pig hunter stepped in to put the pig out of its misery more efficiently. Its squeals had set the village dogs wild, and the initial butchering had to be done on the platform of a canoe floating far enough offshore to keep the dogs away.]

The plan was to serve the beer with the food to avoid excessive drunkenness but when we had set a preliminary two cartons before the hot, thirsty and impatient crowd of men — already starting drum-beating — somehow the momentum started and they got two more, and then two more, before the food came. They were pretty gone for the most part and up singsinging, which they resumed after eating during the mid- to late-afternoon. Within the context of Nu. society we showed rather excessive appreciation (any at all) for the women who prepared the food by distributing a carton of beer among them as well. And a couple of packs of cigarettes. And many shouts of “yowe!” (‘well done, bravo, etc.’).

After dinner I joined the singsing which went on until dark. Around 7 pm or so we broke for some more food & a wash (my third well-needed one of the day) and to let the guitar-players get their gear together. Then the “play-guitar singsing” began. Again it was my duty to dance and, after a slow start, I danced and danced. At first it was all males though I called for the young women to join in. They were too shy till one town girl started, rather bravely shy at first. Then she came up and danced with me (knowing our strange custom), then her friend asked me. They were both high school girls (grades 7-10) who I didn’t know but when I had asked their names I turned the tables & asked them and several other young women to dance — danced American style the rest of the evening.

I don’t know what time it was when we broke up. Most of the village was asleep by then (or trying to get to sleep). Today I have the pleasant melancholy feeling of having met a nice girl at a party and am getting some paperwork done while waiting to count back 11 hours from high tide to figure out when I went to sleep last nite.

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by | 14 April 2004 · 10:13 pm

Morobe Field Diary, December 1976: Intervillage Conflict

I’ve had good cause to be ashamed of my village mates lately. While I was in Lae, three who attended a school party in Kuwi chased a bunch of Paiawas looking for a fight with them. They didn’t catch any unfortunately. There was little provocation except for the general bad feeling be/ Paiawa & Siboma.

Then the pastor (of Paiewa, Kuwi and Siboma) brought word back from his trip there that the Paiawa were angry and were considering coming over for a brawl at Christmas time (when reinforcements from town will be in both villages). He advised the Sibomas not to go off into the bush separately but to stick together in doing things. For several days following that there has been constant talk of war. It really pissed me off and disappointed me. I’m not particularly worried that anyone would strike me, nor even that the Nus. wouldn’t be able to withstand an attack (they outnumber the Paiewas, esp. in young men). But I do have some vulnerable papers and stuff that I’m pretty concerned about preserving anyway.

So today, Dec. 14, the kiap [‘patrol officer’] came and told the Nus. (and presumably the Paiewas as well) that if any further trouble came up he would bring 10 police, a large boat, hold summary court and cart the guilty ones off to 6 mos in jail (which people are not fond of being in). Peace may result if Numbamis and Paiewas hold a peace meeting before the kiap in Morobe and straighten themselves out.

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by | 13 April 2004 · 6:27 pm

DDT Good! Chloroquine Bad!

On one occasion in 1976 when I left my New Guinea village to make a trip into town, my host family asked me to get medicine to kill the head lice their son had picked up while away at school. I did so, and he rubbed it into his hair and then tried to refrain from scratching his scalp as the lice ran around in their death throes. I think he may have had to “lather, rinse, repeat” to get the remaining nits after they hatched, too. It seemed to be effective, but I was horrified at the time to read on the label that the active ingredient was DDT. Nowadays, though, the reputation of DDT seems to have entered rehab.

On 11 April, the New York Times carried a story by Tina Rosenberg headlined, What the World Needs Now Is DDT:

[The book] ”Silent Spring” changed the relationship many Americans had with their government and introduced the concept of ecology and the interconnectedness of systems into the national debate. Rachel Carson started the environmental movement. Few books have done more to change the world.

But this time around, I was also struck by something that did not occur to me when I first read the book in the early 1980’s. In her 297 pages, Rachel Carson never mentioned the fact that by the time she was writing, DDT was responsible for saving tens of millions of lives, perhaps hundreds of millions.

DDT killed bald eagles because of its persistence in the environment. ”Silent Spring” is now killing African children because of its persistence in the public mind. Public opinion is so firm on DDT that even officials who know it can be employed safely dare not recommend its use. ”The significant issue is whether or not it can be used even in ways that are probably not causing environmental, animal or human damage when there is a general feeling by the public and environmental community that this is a nasty product,” said David Brandling-Bennett, the former deputy director of P.A.H.O. Anne Peterson, the Usaid official, explained that part of the reason her agency doesn’t finance DDT is that doing so would require a battle for public opinion. ”You’d have to explain to everybody why this is really O.K. and safe every time you do it,” she said — so you go with the alternative that everyone is comfortable with.

”Why it can’t be dealt with rationally, as you’d deal with any other insecticide, I don’t know,” said Janet Hemingway, director of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. ”People get upset about DDT and merrily go and recommend an insecticide that is much more toxic.”

So DDT is now making a comeback, but Chloroquine, the antimalarial I took in New Guinea, is now anathema. (And it wasn’t all that effective for me. I got a bad case of Plasmodium vivax while there, and another within a year of returning from fieldwork.)

On 8 April, the Independent carried an alarming story by its health editor, Jeremy Laurance, headlined WHO failures led to hundreds of thousands dying from malaria, say medical experts.

Two of the world’s most powerful medical organisations have been accused of medical malpractice for knowingly promoting useless drugs that have led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children.

The World Health Organisation and the UN Global Fund, which was set up to buy drugs for poor countries, have allocated millions of dollars to malaria medicines that are no longer effective against the disease, a group of specialists said. They claim negligence by the two organisations contributed to a rising death rate from malaria, which has doubled in a decade in some parts of Africa because of growing resistance to older drugs.

The WHO launched its Roll Back Malaria programme in 1998 with a target to halve the number of deaths by 2010, but six years into the 12-year programme deaths have risen from between 600,000 and 800,000 to over one million annually, of which 90 per cent are in children under five.

Amir Attaran, of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, who made the accusation of malpractice in The Lancet with 12 malaria specialists from Britain, the US, Africa and the Far East, said yesterday: “I am angry because I know hundreds of thousands of kids have died for nothing; possibly millions. It is really negligent for these organisations to have made no progress towards the target in six years. Why should anyone connected with the programme still have their job?”

In 2003 the Global Fund, acting on advice from the WHO, spent $41.4m (£22.5m) on the outdated anti-malarials, chloroquine and sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine, which have been rendered useless by growing drug resistance, but only $18.3m on artemesinin-based therapies, which are effective.

Countries worst affected by malaria in sub-Saharan Africa have proved reluctant to buy the new artemesinin drugs because they are more expensive at $1 to $2 a dose, 10 times more than chloroquine. Although they get help from the Global Fund, they fear they may be left to foot the bill themselves. As a result, patients treated with the outdated drugs in Africa outnumber those given the effective artemesinin drugs by more than 10 to one.

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by | 12 April 2004 · 9:10 pm

Inside the Information Bubble during the Ethiopian Famine

In 2003, Vintage Books issued a new edition of Robert D. Kaplan’s Surrender or Starve: Travels in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea (a collection of his magazine articles published in 1988 by Random House under the title, Surrender or Starve: The Wars Behind the Famine). The only thing added to the new edition appears to be a December 2002 postscript on newly independent Eritrea. But that hardly matters. While reading the book last year, I was struck by how little has changed, either in Western news reporting or in international relief efforts, over the past two decades.

The truth was that many in the Western community in the Ethiopian capital, who served as the West’s eyes and ears during the famine and provided the media with much of their information, did not want to admit the truth. Whatever nightmares the word “Ethiopia” may have conjured up in the United States, “Addis” was a nice place to be. (The same could not be said about capitals elsewhere in Africa, where the suffering in the countryside was far less.) The mountain climate was only partly responsible for the pleasant ambiance. As the headquarters of the Organization of African Unity, the Ethiopian capital was relatively clean, with good roads, a plethora of new public buildings, and well-manicured parks. The Hilton Hotel was one of the best managed, centrally located Hiltons in the world; the Hilton’s heated, outdoor swimming pool served as a magnet for the foreign community on weekend afternoons.

As for the food, millions may have been starving in the adjacent countryside, but for foreigners, “Addis” was one of the better places on the continent to eat: a well-prepared charcoal-broiled steak, Nile perch, and Italian and Chinese cuisine were always available. Not only was the Hilton equipped with several fine restaurants, but around the city there were several more. No nearby, heartrending scenes spoiled the repasts; just as walls of stone blocked off the sinister reality of the Dergue [the ruling party “Committee”], walls of corrugated iron blocked off the equally unpleasant reality of the slums. Nor were there many beggars in Addis Ababa; far less than in Egypt, for example, where nobody was starving. Christopher J. Matthews, in his article in The New Republic (January 21, 1985), made one of the most insightful comments ever about Ethiopia’s capital: “In a country where millions were starving, there was no sign of anyone begging or hustling to survive. I began to wonder. The price of coming into town must be higher than the price of staying away. If the price of staying away in the barren, dying parts of the country is near-certain death, the price of coming into the city must be even more terrible, even more certain.”

Matthews, perhaps without being aware of it, had stumbled close to the central fact of 1980s Ethiopia, a fact that many foreigners who actually lived there and many of the journalists who interpreted the famine for the public failed utterly to grasp–Ethiopia, in the manner of Syria and Iraq, was a modernizing and controlled praetorian police state, with a single tribe or ethnic group on top, supported by the most brutal and sophisticated means of repression. For the officers in charge, preserving the integrity of the empire against rebels was a far more uplifting and important goal than fighting famine was. The Soviets, the only great imperialists of the nineteenth century to have survived the twentieth, understood this. They helped, through massive arms shipments, the Dergue achieve its more important goal; the United States helped in the less important one.

As Matthews perceived, like the walls around the palace and around the slums, there was a wall around the famine, too. Destitute peasants were rounded up and arrested even before reaching the city limits. While Eritreans, Tigreans, and others in the northern provinces died by the hundreds of thousands, the markets of the Amhara fortess of Addis Ababa were brimming with grain. The price of it may have risen dramatically, but at least it was there. In Asmara, too, the government-held, fortified provincial capital of Eritrea, food was abundant because it was strategically necessary for the regime to keep the local population pacified. According to a confidential report by a Western relief agency, the “dedicated and efficient” RRC [the Dergue’s Relief and Rehabilitation Commission] was virtually starving the worst famine regions in Wollo, while at the same time pouring food into the embattled, militarily vital areas of Tigre and Eritrea and stockpiling it outside Addis Ababa….

The sanitized reality of the Ethiopian capital, a condition that only the most chillingly brutal of regimes could create, helped make the place especially attractive for its foreign residents. “Addis” was a plum posting for a relief official. The situation in the country was “absolutely horrifying” and thus “in the news,” which translated into prestige and career advancement for those on the scene. Few seemed to want to rock the boat when rocking the boat could get you thrown out. In the Hilton lobby, it was easier to criticize the Reagan administration than it was to criticize the Dergue.

In 1921 the nascent Bolshevik regime in the Soviet Union was shaken by a great famine that its own ruthless policy of crop requisition had caused. Foreign aid was essential and the U.S. proved to be the most generous. Herbert Hoover, who seven years later would be elected president of the United States, spearheaded an effort that put food in the mouths of more than 12 million peasants. The regime survived to inflict even greater famine in the following decade.

But in Ethiopia and in the United States, nobody paid attention to this legacy. In the February 7, 1985, report on the famine, issued by the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and Refuge Policy and arising out of Senator Kennedy’s 1984 visit to the emergency feeding camps, six previous famines were listed in the table entitled, “Famine in Modern History.” The famines in the Ukraine, which were the largest of all, were not included in the list.

SOURCE: Robert Kaplan, Surrender or Starve: Travels in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea (Vintage, 2003), pp. 37-39

This is one reason my regular list of news links includes only regional news aggregators, and not any of the major international news media.

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by | 11 April 2004 · 1:21 pm

The Wider "War on Opium" in Early 19th-century China

David Bello, the author of several works on opium in Qing-dynasty China, has an interesting revisionist take on the Opium Wars (1839-42, 1856-60) that results from looking at the whole expanding Chinese empire and not just at where that empire intersected with the expanding British empire.

The opium-smuggling trade that Britain pursued on the eastern seacoast of China has become the symbol of China’s century-long descent into political and social chaos. In the standard historical narratives of both China and Euro-America, opium is the primary medium through which the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) encountered the modern economic, social, and political institutions of the West. Consequently, opium and the Western powers’ advent on the Chinese coast have become almost inextricably linked. Opium, however, was not strictly a Sino-British problem geographically confined to southeastern China. It was, rather, a transimperial crisis that spread among an ethnically diverse populace and created regionally distinct problems of control for the Qing state.

Bello notes that opium was a problem for the whole Qing (Manchu) realm, at least as much on its expanding interior borders as in its coastal cities. (He has a book coming out in 2005 in the Harvard East Asian Monographs series under the title Opium and the Limits of Empire: The Opium Problem in the Chinese Interior, 1729-1850.)

The Manchu empire had been rapidly growing, especially under the reign of the Qianlong emperor (1736-95), during which China extended its control into Turkestan (part of which remains in Xinjiang), Burma, and Tibet. This imperial expansion was financed by transferring more money from farflung localities into central coffers, forcing cash-starved local and regional officials to seek alternative sources of income.

By the end of the 1830s at the latest, southwestern opium cultivation had become a part of the network of informal funding that had arisen since the 1720s to compensate for the diversion of revenue from locality to center.

In this manner, the state itself became addicted to opium, and this dependency was a primary reason for the failure of central government prohibition in many interior localities. From the state’s perspective, the opium problem ultimately concerned revenue, both in Qing China, which was spurred to action only by its conviction that drug consumption was responsible for a hemorrhage of silver abroad, and in British India, which also made a futile attempt to prohibit “illicit” production and trafficking in order to protect its own state monopoly. Opium, in the form of economic and political power, was as psychologically compelling to merchant-capitalists, bureaucrats, and politicians as it was physiologically compelling to drug consumers.

SOURCE: David Bello, “The Venomous Course of Southwestern Opium: Qing Prohibition in Yunnan, Sichuan, and Guizhou in the Early Nineteenth Century,” The Journal of Asian Studies 62:1109-1142.

NOTES:

  1. “In 1881 the inspector general of customs in Shanghai, Sir Robert Hart, reported that imperial consumption of native opium equaled that of foreign imports. Most of the reports on which he based this conclusion identified the southwest, particularly Sichuan, as the main source of native opium” (Bello, p. 1134, n. 24)

  2. Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy, a geographer at CNRS argues in an article in Crime and International Justice 15 (1999), that opium production in today’s Golden Triangle in modern Burma, Laos, and Thailand dates no further back than to the end of the 18th century and that it only began to supply the worldwide market after elements of the Kuomintang took refuge in 1949-50. Since that time the opium industry in the Burma Triangle has only grown as various governments in the region, including Myanmar, have made efforts to reduce or eradicate opium production.

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by | 10 April 2004 · 1:33 pm

East Timor: The World’s Newest Country

The Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Hawai‘i has made freely available online (in PDF format) a brief, 33-page high-school level workbook, East Timor: The World’s Newest Country, by Flo Lamoureux.

The purpose of this book is to provide students with an overview the world’s newest nation–East Timor. The narrative begins with a section on pre-colonial Timor and continues through the Portuguese era. It covers the 25-year period when Indonesia governed the entire island of Timor. After a varied and violent past, on September 27, 2002 this little known state became the United Nation’s 191st member. In addition to an accounting of important historical events, the book covers language, education, religion, women’s issues and government. The Center for Southeast Asian Studies wishes to acknowledge Dr. Douglas Kammen who carefully read and edited an early draft of the book. His experiences in East Timor significantly enriched its contents.

The workbook is loaded with provocative discussion questions. Here are the questions for the history section.

  • Sandalwood was the major source of income and bartered goods in Timor prior to 1500. How would sandalwood trade in the 16th and 17th centuries have differed if current international regulations related to conservation have been in effect? Compare the economic results of over-cutting sandalwood to the present day economic questions raised in the matter of drift net fishing. (For material on driftnet fishing, see http://www.nwr.noaa.gov/1salmon/salmesa/pubs/fsdrift.htm; and http://www.unescap.org/mced2000/pacific/background/drift.htm)

  • The explorer, Ferdinand Magellan, sailed under the Spanish flag. When his crewmembers landed on Timor they did not claim the island for Spain. They had previously landed in the Philippines and claimed those islands for Spain, why do you think they did not plant the Spanish flag on Timor? If Timor had been a Spanish colony and more closely connected to the Philippines how do you think that would have impacted on the island’s future?

  • The Portuguese were never able to maintain full control of Timor. The local Christianized Timorese resisted Portuguese rule and dealt with the Europeans only when required by commercial matters. Explain why the Topasses were more successful in their dealings with both the indigenous Timorese and the Portuguese.

  • It took well over a hundred years for the Dutch and Portuguese to sign a formal treaty that divided Timor between the two European nations. Since they essentially agreed to an informal division in 1777, why do you think they did not get around to a formal treaty until 1916?

  • In 1910 the Portuguese monarchy was overthrown. This was a cause for alarm among the elite class in East Timor who had developed a comfortable working relationship with the Portuguese government there. As a result of this change in the government in Portugal, a plantation economy emerged in East Timor. Compare the plantation economy with its salaried income and taxes to the economy that existed under the Portuguese monarchy where the East Timorese elite collected goods from the peasant farmers and turned them over to the Portuguese government representative.

  • Explain why the Japanese Army of occupation treated West Timor differently from East Timor. Compare this to the situation in Vietnam where the French government was an ally of Germany and hence not an enemy of Japan.

  • Give three reasons why post-World War II East Timor was such a poor region. Why do you think Portugal neglected it?

  • Explain why the Viqueque rebellion in 1959 led to Portugal exiling rebel leaders. What role did Communism play in the Portuguese government’s decision to do this?

  • In 1974 the conservative Portuguese government was overthrown and a new liberal government emerged. What policy did the new government implement that had a dramatic affect on East Timor?

  • Name the three major parties that vied for power in the newly independent East Timor? Compare their goals.

  • In August 1975 Fretilin controlled most of East Timor and the new nation’s independence seemed secure. Explain how the alliance of UTD, Apodeti and Indonesia reacted to this situation.

  • Once Indonesian troops forced Fretilin forces into the mountains, guerrilla warfare became the norm. One matter that encouraged East Timorese to join the guerrillas in the mountains was the Indonesian policy of encirclement. Explain how this policy worked.

  • Neither Australia, the United States nor Portugal supported East Timor’s struggle for democracy. Compare the reasons why the three countries did not support East Timorese independence.

  • If Indonesia built more hospitals and schools in ten years than Portugal did in 400 years, why were the East Timorese so adamant about being a separate nation?

  • Many brutal incidents took place in East Timor under Indonesian rule. What made the November 1991 incident outside a church a turning point in world opinion of East Timor’s quest for independence?

  • What role did the 1997 economic crisis in Asia play in East Timor’s independence?

  • How did the Indonesian military forces (the militia) react when Indonesia declared East Timor an independent nation? Why were the military in East Timor especially angry about it?

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by | 10 April 2004 · 10:48 am

Jungle "Hut Cuisine": Smoked Pigeons with Marijuana Sauce

In the evening we would go shooting wood pigeon among wild marijuana fields. The birds were high on the marijuana seeds and barely able to fly but fluttered helplessly in the bushes. Their spasmodic, interrupted flights, together with their strange little cries made me think of drunken people trying to waltz. We stuffed the barrels of our home-made guns with pebbles and shot the pigeons down. Just the sound of gunshots seemed to stun them and they dropped from the trees at our feet. We killed them by seizing them by the legs and bashing their heads against trees. They made an excellent dish. We cooked them with marijuana sauce according to the local recipe. Here it is — Smoked Pigeons with Marijuana Sauce: ‘Smoke the birds with the twigs of marijuana for a day. Stuff them with lemon grass, kaffir lime leaves, garlic, ginger with a pinch of salt and wrap them in banana leaves. Boil or bake according to taste.’

Although we used marijuana for cooking, smoking it was strictly forbidden by the rebels. You could end up condemned to the stocks, plagued by mosquitoes, for three nights if you did that.

When the rainy season began we caught frogs. There was some danger in this, for we were not the only party who preyed on them. We usually made sure of first killing the frog-eating snakes, and then caught the frogs afterwards. Pythons, like frogs, are quite delicious to eat. They taste like smoked salmon. We also hunted moles, guinea-pigs and rats. We hung and smoked the rodents for three days before cooking them. Rat soup, minced moles and roast guinea pigs were our common recipes. The local people liked to hang the meat of porcupines until it stank like that of a corpse before they cooked it with herbs. It tasted delicious, but we had to eat it holding our noses.

At the end of 1988 we were invited by the Karen villagers to share a Christmas meal with them. The main dish had a strange flavour — the meat in it tasted like dog meat with a strong whiff of garlic and lemon grass. After the meal, our hosts didn’t wash their fingers, but sniffed at them for some time. Before we went home they told us that we had been eating monkey. Suddenly, I wanted to throw up. For the Karen, the meat of monkey was a typical Christmas dish, like turkey or goose in the West. They believed it was a gift from God, and that even the smell should not be wasted.

Tender wild banana trunks were available throughout the year, and we used them in soups along with lentils and vegetables. Truffles and wild mushrooms were in season at the beginning of the monsoon. During the cold season, when the bamboo shoots had matured, bamboo mushrooms became available.

We had more than one way of cooking rice without pots and pans, depending on the situation we were in. It could be cooked in bamboo stems: you soak the rice in green bamboo stalks for half an hour, and stuff the open end of the bamboo with grass. Roast the bamboo slowly over the fire until the rice is cooked, then peel off the bamboo skin. In this method, the rice comes in cartridges. Another method we called ‘rebel style’. The rice is soaked in a towel, linen or sarong for more than an hour. Dig a hole in the ground, one foot deep, bury the rice bag, then make a fire on top. Steamed rice will be ready within fifteen minutes. We used this method often when the rebels were on the run.

SOURCE: From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey, by Pascal Khoo Thwe (HarperCollins, 2002), pp. 215-217

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by | 9 April 2004 · 1:20 pm

Morobe Field Diary, December 1976: Texts on Tape

Texts on tape have been eluding me and getting me worried as hell. I felt something would turn up but I wasn’t sure how and how good it would be. Well, last nite I hit a gold mine. During the day the kansol put out a story of war [WW II] coming to the area that was 1st class — well organized, clear and slow with good constructions I’ve wanted and a sprinkling of new vocabulary. And I forgot to press the record button. I was ready to bash in my head but the kansol said, “well, good, now you’ve heard it so you’ll understand it better next time: I’ve practiced telling it and you’ve practiced hearing it. Let’s go chop some poles for a smoking platform and come back and try again this evening.”

Physical labor was, along with less worry about tapes, exactly what I needed to dispel a case of hemorrhoids that was plaguing me. That done, we came back, rested up and that evening after dark I hauled out the tape recorder and the kansol told his story again — not as good as during the day but covering very much the same material and almost exactly the same length. Before his wife put her account of the preparation of food by women, another fellow came by who is chock full of stories and has a clear slow way of speaking besides. He lives in Paiewa but is visiting thank God. He told a good personal experience war story with Japanese pidgin [“A, banana sabis, ye?” = (‘banana free, okay?’) uttered by a starving Japanese straggler], conversation and dangerous experiences. He also told a somewhat shorter story about a woman who didn’t want to get married, supposedly true from before contact times. His war story is about 35-40 min. (This guy’s brother is a truck driver on the Mt. Hagen to Lae [Highlands Highway] run and is such a talker that his cab mates don’t get any sleep on the 12 or so hour ride.) Finally the kansol’s wife put her piece on tape clearly & concisely. I’ve got about 70-80 minutes of unbroken talking on the several cassettes I went thru last nite. I want to transcribe as much as I can here so I can get unstuck as I go along.

The day before, in my desperation I recorded some old men who got together to put something on tape after putting me off several times. They got together, bullshat about what they were going to say and decided they would do it better later. I got some revenge by surreptitiously recording them but it’s going to be hard to transcribe. That nite I was carrying my recorder to ask a man to tell me about canoe-building (another promise). I started talking with some kids around a fire and secretly pressed the record button. It too will be hard to transcribe but has good mixed language conversation (30 min.). [The two surreptitious tapes remain untranscribed.] So, I’m breathing much easier and my asshole itching less.

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by | 9 April 2004 · 12:16 pm

Morobe Field Diary, December 1976: Swimming in Fish Names

Things are getting pretty busy for me now. Finishing up the lexicon and trying to get some of the half-dozen or more texts people haven’t gotten around to giving me. Only two weeks to work’s end and I’m paranoid that I’ve left out something important grammatically that the texts won’t solve for me. Grammatical elicitation the way we did in Field Methods class is nearly impossible with informants as unschooled as most of mine. I don’t like it or trust it anyway. I prefer texts but people are very reluctant to give me stuff off the top of their heads, especially if it’s cultural info — they want someone authoritative to accompany them in the telling or else they practice first and wear out their interest in that so they are not keen on repeating it again for the tape.

Lately I’ve worn out my patience with eliciting fish names from two huge tomes — one quite authoritative ([Munro’s 1967] Fishes of New Guinea) but with inadequate (i.e. only B&W) pictures; the other (Guide to Fishes, an Aussie book) has good pictures (in color and [of] live [fish]) but is not well-arranged and not exhaustive and shows little of the relative size so a snapper can be called an anchovy. Combine that with some hard to distinguish subgroupings of fish (esp. among goatfish, trevallies and sea bass) and imperfect but confident knowledge of most everyone and the result is an incredibly frustrating job trying to match Nu. to genera & species. I am interested in folk classification and its relation to academic classification and was prepared for some difference but mostly the correlation between the two is pretty good (after I’ve filtered out misnamings which I can often tell are wrong because they cross genus or family lines). In some families there are names for the majority of individual species — some grouped together, usually on the basis of markings when shape is the same: mottled, banded, striped; and often on the basis of habitat.

The big men [usually elders] are supposed to be the authorities (on everything: even ladies underwear if it was anything elaborate probably) but they often can’t see the page clearly. Everyone is convinced that others don’t know what they’re talking about and that a consensus (20 people going thru 20 fishnames for 3 hours is impossible) will solve everything. I’m well past the point of diminishing returns but some still come volunteer to straighten it all out for me (and give yet another name to some picture beside which I’ve scribbled 3 names already). For most now I have statistics like 4 for, 2 against (or 2 for 1 name, 1 each for the others) so I’ve told them I don’t want anything more about fish to upset me. One the whole the world of Nu. fish naming is as unsettled as the world of zoological taxonomy when it comes to species. Genera & families work out OK. I figure (or hope) my effort is worthwhile: it not only boosts my dictionary considerably but is an are that is worth comparing carefully with other Austronesian names & classificatory systems since they are most all sea people.

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by | 7 April 2004 · 10:05 pm

A Burmese Padaung View of the ‘Wild’ Kayah

Our first contact with the ‘wild’ Kayah came when we were received into a house on a hilltop owned by a shaman. He squatted by the fireplace smoking a pipe as if he were a guardian ghost of the place. He made me think of an unwrapped mummy, and he neither smiled nor spoke to us. We felt like intruders who had wandered into an ancient tomb, and soon set off to the village spring for a shower.

At the spring we waited for the villagers to finish their own shower. They included some stark-naked young women, who were unembarrassed and unashamed. As we watched them they talked to us with the familiarity of old friends. We felt ashamed at our curiousity about this (for us) novelty. When dressed, these women wore a black tunic which revealed one of their breasts. We were told later that they would not cover the naked breast until they were betrothed.

A traditional ‘wild’ Kayah woman is like an uninhibitedly colourful work of art. Her clothes are made of home-woven material in which red and black predominate. She wears black-lacquered cotton-thread rings beneath her knees in large lumps that look like twin beehives. Bunches of silver coins dangle from her neck along with a few strings of semi-precious stones. The younger women wear cone-shaped silver earrings that look like bunches of miniature carrots, while the married ones stuff their big earholes with silver cylinders. A married woman also wears a red turban on her head and a white sash around her waist. She walks like an elephant, slow and with jingling sounds at every step, reminiscent of the tinkling bells on a Burmese pagoda top. These gorgeously caparisoned females scratched their bodies liberally and spat copiously. And all the Kayah, children included, continually smoked pipes.

SOURCE: From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey, by Pascal Khoo Thwe (HarperCollins, 2002), pp. 203-204

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