Worlds Within and Worlds Without: Field Guide to an Intellectual Journey 9781501768491, 9781501768507, 9781501768514, 1501768492

Table of contents :
Worlds Within and Worlds Without
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
I
As Through a Glass Darkly
Notes from Underground
It’s Other People Who Are My Old Age
Empedocles in Auckland
Myself Must I Remake
Blue Notes
To and Fro Within the World and Up and Down Upon It
Heart of Darkness
Transitions
II
In Sierra Leone
Dankawali
Firawa and the Ethnography of Events
Return to Cambridge
III
From Anxiety to Method
A Storyteller’s Story
Barawa and the Ways Birds Fly in the Sky
I Am Another
The Philosopher Who Would Not Be King
Wilderness
Uppsala
IV
Indiana
Cape York
An Etiology of Storms
After Indiana
V
Return to Sierra Leone
Migrant Imaginaries
Existential Mobility and Multiple Selves
The Limitrophe
On the Work and Writing of Ethnography
Notes
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
R
S
T
U
V
W
Y

Citation preview

Worlds Within and Worlds Without

Worlds Within and Worlds Without Field Guide to an Intellectual Journey

Michael Jackson

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2023 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress​.­cornell​.­edu. First published 2023 by Cornell University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Jackson, Michael, 1940– author. Title: Worlds within and worlds without : field guide to an intellectual journey / Michael Jackson. Description: Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022034391 (print) | LCCN 2022034392 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501768491 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501768507 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501768514 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Jackson, Michael, 1940– | Ethnology—Philosophy. | Ethnology—Social aspects. Classification: LCC GN345 .J413 2023 (print) | LCC GN345 (ebook) | DDC 305.8—dc23/eng/20220804 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022034391 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022034392 Cover photograph: Firawa village (Northern Sierra Leone), 1969. Photo by Michael Jackson.

 It has gradually become clear to me what ­every ­great philosophy up till now has consisted of—­namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography. —­Friedrich Nietz­sche, Beyond Good and Evil

Contents

Preface xi Acknowl­edgments

xv

I As Through a Glass Darkly

3

Notes from Under­ground

13

It’s Other P ­ eople Who Are My Old Age

15

Empedocles in Auckland

20

Myself Must I Remake

26

Blue Notes

34

To and Fro Within the World and Up and Down Upon It

43

v iii    Contents

Heart of Darkness

51

Transitions 60 II In Sierra Leone

69

Dankawali 76 Firawa and the Ethnography of Events

82

Return to Cambridge

94

III From Anxiety to Method

103

A Storyteller’s Story

109

Barawa and the Ways Birds Fly in the Sky

116

I Am Another

123

The Phi­los­o­pher Who Would Not Be King

127

Wilderness 135 Uppsala 141 IV Indiana 149 Cape York

159

An Etiology of Storms

169

­After Indiana

175

V Return to Sierra Leone

183

Mi­grant Imaginaries

196

Contents   i x

Existential Mobility and Multiple Selves

213

The Limitrophe

223

On the Work and Writing of Ethnography

233

Notes 243 Index 261

Preface

As a genre, autobiography is so entangled with the modernist myth of individualism that any decision to write in this vein can be justified only if we show the extent to which we are not the sole authors of our lives or the arbiters of our fate. It is all too easy to persuade ourselves that the meanings we retrospectively discern in our histories ­were pre­sent from the outset as motives, determinants, or ­causes. Wise ­after the event, we like to think we consciously laid out the blueprint of our ­future, like an overseer on a building site and, in due course, earned the right to congratulate ourselves on a job well done. Looking back along my own intellectual path, I see ­little evidence of purpose or design, though I always have been drawn to remote places and marginalized p­ eople, which may explain my perennial fascination with the imaginative and practical ways in which ­human beings negotiate the space between worlds they call their own and worlds they regard as lying beyond their ken. W ­ hether the worlds that elude our empirical grasp are identified with divinities or the dead, ether or earth, history or myth, the Internet or the nation state, they are experienced ambivalently, as potential sources of wellbeing and as pos­si­ble threats to our very existence.

x ii    Preface

This relationship between the familiar and the foreign is not only an existential issue that all ­human beings address in one way or another; it also is an epistemological and po­liti­cal issue for anthropology. How can we accommodate individual and collective perspectives—­ethnos and anthropos, par­tic­u­lar and universal—­and avoid reducing existence to one or the other? And given the troubled times in which we live—­a widening gap between rich and poor that the Covid pandemic, the climate crisis, and entrenched racial and class prejudices have forced us all to reckon with—­how can anthropology overcome its historical association with Eu­ro­pean power and privilege and become a model for dialogical and collaborative engagement in a more equitable world? In approaching ­these issues, I place thinking, acting, and imagining on a par. Philosophy, storytelling, poetry, and ritual are all forms of techné, and I consider it impor­tant not to claim that any one of t­hese is fundamental or that we can draw absolute contrasts between entire socie­ties on the basis of ­whether ­people think abstractly or concretely, or communicate face-­to-­face, in print, or online. Ascetic practices, consciousness-­altering substances, arcane language, spirit possession, and collective effervescence through dance and soul-­stirring m ­ usic have figured throughout h ­ uman history as a common currency for transcending the bound­aries between our own and other worlds. When I was twenty-­one, my mentor Brijen Gupta upbraided me for not having a point of view. The implication was that the sooner I acquired one the better. Now, in my eightieth year, I could claim to have developed a set of opinions, if not a point of view, though I would hesitate to dignify ­these as a philosophy, as I have shied away from articulating them systematically. This book is a tentative account of how my thinking has evolved, slowly and unsurely, through a complicated interplay of personal predispositions and social circumstances. From an early age, I i­magined travel would be the answer to my restiveness, but it would take many years before this ambition was realized in my vocation as an anthropologist and in my conviction that ethnography echoes the age-­old Odyssean impulse to wander off the beaten track, subject oneself to the uncertainties of life in strange lands, and see ­whether, beyond the fears and fantasies of t­ hose settled in their ways, t­ here is something one may call a common humanity, a realization of Novalis’s romantic vision of being at home everywhere. What is freedom if not this capacity to venture beyond what is supposedly known? In seeing the world other­wise and, thereby, breaking our thralldom to the past?

Preface   x iii

Just as viewing planet Earth from space has proved life-­changing for many astronauts, so travelers and traders throughout h ­uman history have been changed by their experiences of living among strangers and adapting to life outside their comfort zones. That many such travelers have become more deeply entrenched in their prejudices is, however, a reminder that anthropologists are not immune to the habit of perpetuating cultural biases and promulgating benighted views. Ideally, however, ethnography is a form of conversation in which one’s voice is momentarily muted and one’s assumptions suspended so that other voices and views are heard and one’s own preunderstandings revised and enlarged. Becoming competent in another lifeworld and language not only gives one insight into the workings of that world; it enables one to see one’s own culture, profession, and personality askance and anew. An anthropologist may be compared to a phenomenologist who, in Edmund Husserl’s words, is “a perpetual beginner,” confronting life not as it has been interpreted hitherto but as a sensible presence that inspires won­der.1 We are thus continually returned to an interface between what is assumed to be known and all that calls knowledge into question. This view informs my approach to writing. Like George Orwell, I have an aversion to inflating one’s sentences with extra syllables, using “pretentious diction” (as if “Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones”), and cultivating an arcane style in which “a mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up the details.”2 In many ­human socie­ties, formal or re­spect languages coexist with plebeian, vernacular, or demotic forms, and t­ hese linguistic codes correspond to impor­tant social distinctions between classes, age groups, and kinship categories. A ­ fter the Norman Conquest, French became the language of the ruling elite, and in due course, Latin became the official language of monasteries and universities. We still are haunted by this division, even though the En­glish language is hybrid and e­ very sentence we speak or write involves a choice between words that belong to the discourse of ­those in power and words borrowed from the lifeworlds of the powerless. As Orwell, notes, “Good prose should be transparent, like a win­ dow pane.”3 Though one’s choice of language reflects the audience one wants to reach or impress and the social group to which one aspires to belong, it is impor­ tant to remember that all language implies a gap between the speaker and the experiences of which he or she speaks. Narrowing this gap has long been my aim.

Acknowl­edgments

For all their singularity, our lives are outcomes of fortuitous encounters, formative figures, and intimate relationships, and it is in this spirit that I acknowledge my parents, Emily and Darcy Jackson, my maternal grand­father Fred Longbottom, my elder ­sister Gabrielle Maxwell (nee Jackson), and my early role models Herman Gladwin and Bob Lowry, who showed me the importance of making thought answerable to life. I also acknowledge friends who supported me in hard times: Brijen Gupta, Gerard Macdonald, Kathy Golski, Woycieck Dabrowski, Jennifer Shennan, Judith Loveridge, Ewen Macdonald, Keith Ridler, and Vincent O’­Sullivan. I owe my first teaching position to Jan Pouwer. Hugh Kawharu offered me my first full-­time academic job when I finished my Ph.D. at Cambridge. I have Michael Young, Derek Freeman, and Roger Keesing to thank for making pos­si­ble my sojourns at the Australian National University (ANU). Without the timely interventions of Bob Tonkinson (ANU), Anita Jacobsen-­Widding (Uppsala University), Michael Herzfeld (Indiana University), Susan Reynolds-­White (the University of Copenhagen), and Robert Orsi (Harvard University), my

x v i    Acknowl­ edgments

academic ­career would not have survived its periodic disruptions. Ivan Karp helped me get two of my first books published, and, to the editors of my many subsequent books, I owe a similar debt of gratitude: Marianne Alenius, Marion Berghahn, Barbara Larson, Wendy Lochner, Reed Malcolm, Kate Marshall, Jim Lance, Priya Nelson, Penelope Todd, and Ken Wissoker. While Marcel Mauss and Claude Lévi-­Strauss made exchange synonymous with sociality, the exchange of goods and ser­vices is sometimes less impor­tant than the exchange of experiences and points of view. In this spirit of conviviality, I thank the many individuals who welcomed me into their lifeworlds: Abdul Bockarie Marah, Ali Bockarie Marah, Isata Marah, Noah Bockarie Marah, Sewa Bockarie Marah, Rose Marah (nee Tucker), Sewa Magba Koroma, and Keti Ferenke Koroma in Sierra Leone, McGinty Salt in Australia, and Te Pakaka Tawhai in Aotearoa New Zealand. Fi­nally, I lovingly acknowledge my first wife Pauline Jackson (nee Harris), my ­daughter Heidi Aisetta Jackson, my beloved wife Francine Lorimer, and our ­children Joshua Jackson and Freya Jackson, without whom my life would have been bereft of purpose and joy. Formal acknowl­edgments are due the following presses for permission to reprint previously published material: Duke University Press, excerpts from Excursions (2007), pp. 104–24, 156–60, 48–52; and Life Within Limits: Well-­ Being in a World of Want (2011), pp. 49–58; University of California Press, excerpts from Between One and One Another (2012), pp. 24–30, 167–79; The Wherewithal of Life: Ethics, Migration and the Question of Well-­Being (2013), pp. 202–08; and Penguin Random House (New Zealand) for excerpts from The Accidental Anthropologist (2008), pp. 69–96.

Worlds Within and Worlds Without

I

As Through a Glass Darkly

In the eyes of this small boy, the world lacks depth. P ­ eople move like shadow puppets against a backlit screen, acting in a play in which he has no role or interest. He lives in a world of his own thoughts and feelings, though ­these are mercurial and curiously detached from the feelings and thoughts of ­others. On Anzac Day, his school assem­bles at the cenotaph in the center of town. The marble soldier with bowed head is as ethereal as the sentiments to which the mayor and ministers pay lip ser­vice. What does it mean “to remember them” when he does not have the faintest idea who they w ­ ere? How can he reconcile the frozen figure on his plinth with the old men in suits and campaign medals trudging past in improvised platoons? What does his school motto mean—­Service before Self—­when he does not know who he is and what ser­vice he could possibly render anyone? In retrospect, I won­der ­whether it was my innocence or the culture in which I was immersed that made every­thing seem so one-­dimensional.

4    Worlds Within and Worlds Without

On the rare winter days when the mountain was not camouflaged by raincloud and stood, snow-­covered, against a cobalt sky, I thought it was a mirage. Years would pass before I clambered over its basalt slopes, crossed the Razorback, and identified Hongi’s Bluff where four nurses and two mountain guides plunged to their deaths on July 26, 1953. Sixty years ­later, Marie Mallett, who survived the accident only to be haunted all her life by the thought that it could have been her and not her friend who died, confessed that “­there was no healing for ­those involved, b­ ecause they w ­ ere not able to talk about it.” Indeed, the survivors w ­ ere told “never to talk about it—­just get on with your work.”1 As for my f­ ather, who was a member of the search and rescue party called out that day, he never spoke of the tragedy ­either. To spare his c­ hildren’s feelings, I suppose. To protect us. ­Those old soldiers with red poppies in their lapels also ­were tight-­lipped about what they had seen and suffered, even though the price of their reticence was often marital misery or madness.2 I was four when my ­uncles came home from the war. I remember the rough serge of their uniforms against my skin and the smell of crushed laurel leaves. In my teens, I asked them about their time in a POW camp in the Libyan Desert and their desperate rearguard actions in Crete, only to sense that my questions touched raw nerves or demanded answers they could not give. When my u ­ ncle Jack took his own life, the tragedy was hushed up. B ­ attle fatigue, shell shock, and trauma w ­ ere never mentioned. What lay ­behind t­ hese conspiracies of silence, ­those adult injunctions to be good, meaning “be quiet” and “­don’t upset anyone”? ­Were they unique to the provincial world in which I was raised or a legacy of the Protestant Reformation with its distrust of feeling and physicality, its obsession with sin?3 Was this cloying preoccupation with respectability born of a belief that in not talking about the t­ hings one feared they would magically go away? Like my grand­mother’s man­tra, “Least said soonest mended.” Keeping up appearances, what­ever the cost, our violent colonial past was swept ­under the rug of history. My hometown was physically and socially divided by a railway line. While the eastern and oldest part of town was mainly working class and Catholic and the western part was predominantly Anglo and more affluent, ­these categories only roughly mirrored real­ity. Despite our Protestant background and newly-­built state ­house, we lived on the wrong side of the tracks. Our

As Through a Glass Darkly    5

neighbors w ­ ere descendants of ethnic Poles who fled enforced Germanization and persecution in Northern Prus­sia in the 1870s and, through one of ­those tragic coincidences that defines the course of h ­ uman history, the dispossessed in one hemi­sphere became the dispossessors in another. At the far end of the street, opposite the Sacred Heart Church, the eight boisterous Kuklinski ­children ­were scarcely contained by the walls of their small worker’s cottage, while across from us lived the Fabishes, whose grandparents had been close friends of the Kuklinskis in Kokoszkowy, Prus­sia. The families emigrated together on the Fritz Reuter in 1876. The Fabishes’ garden was filled with camellias and chrysanthemums that Mrs. Fabish distributed within her Catholic community on All-­Soul’s Eve. Her husband Mate was in his sixties and still as strong as an ox. Twice a year, he trimmed our gnarled and unruly holly hedge with a long-­handled slasher while I raked up the leaves and carted them in a wheelbarrow to my f­ ather’s compost bin. A ramshackle and unpainted garage, housing an ancient Oldsmobile, separated the Fabishes’ home from the Murrays’ cottage where I surreptitiously read Eddie’s latest Marvel comics (which my ­mother preferred me not to read, arguing that En­glish comics like Chick’s Own and Rainbow ­were more “­wholesome”). ­These ethnic, religious, class, and cultural distinctions ran like fault lines through Inglewood, surfacing in the ugly taunts I would hear as I crossed the tracks on my way to school: “Catholic wogs, stink like dogs.” ­There ­were tensions, too, between the poor and the petty bourgeoisie, that found outward expression in the two streets that ran parallel on ­either side of the railway line. While Matai Street was lined with flourishing businesses, Moa Street—­aptly named for an extinct and flightless bird—­was a graveyard of derelict buildings, abandoned shops, and ghostly interiors. Retracing my steps along Moa Street a­ fter the passage of so many years is not unlike descending into Lewis Carroll’s looking-­glass world, where playing cards all bear an identical image on one side and disclose their real value only when flipped over. The Inglewood H ­ otel stands at the corner of the street. Advertisements for Taranaki Ale and Dominion Breweries have been painted over the win­ dows, and all the colors of the rainbow fall obliquely into the smoke-­filled bar as if through the stained glass of a church. On the sidewalk, a sulfur-­ crested cockatoo in a cage squawks, “Pretty Polly.” Do I owe it an answer? Or do I ignore it, together with the men who stumble out of the pub and call me Snow, though they do not know me from a bar of soap?

6    Worlds Within and Worlds Without

Dommett’s Furniture Showroom is a shadow of what it once was. Second­-­ hand couches and armchairs, iron frame beds, and antiquated dressing ­tables weigh heavi­ly on the floorboards that creak and sag beneath my feet. From his dingy office at the back of the shop, Mr. Dommett peers out at another customer who is “just looking.” When I ask my parents why all the other shops in Moa Street are vacant, I am told it is b­ ecause of the ­Great Depression. The words suggest a catastrophe of which Frank Dommett appears to be the sole survivor, and it ­will take me many years of remembering the armless mannequins and faded advertisements of ­women in siren suits collecting dust in the building next door to realize that the boy who pressed his face against the unwashed win­ dows of ­these dingy rooms was looking into his own soul. The abandonment was within him. ­There was something missing in his life that he could not identify but longed to find. Nowadays, I interpret this experience in the light of Maurice Merleau-­ Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, in which a dim interior space is rendered even more impenetrable by the dirty glass through which the observer peers, the reflections of his face in the glass, and the reflections of the buildings, telegraph lines, and lowering sky b­ ehind him. In this Gestalt, no one ele­ment is stable or determinant, and this is equally true of memory and the imagination. But I digress. I am forgetting that I am a child. ­Until the 1960s, most ­children’s books in New Zealand w ­ ere imported from E ­ ngland. During the war years, and for some time a­ fter, ­these imports ­were restricted, so the few books we did acquire w ­ ere precious. Among ­these ­were the faraway tree novels by Enid Blyton. The tree grew in an enchanted forest. Its upper branches w ­ ere lost in the clouds, and small ­houses ­were built in its enormous trunk. When, as an adult, I read Italo Calvino’s philosophical fable, Il Barone Rampante (The Baron in the Trees) and saw Rene Magritte’s surrealist painting, La Voix du Sang (The Voice of Blood), I again felt the presence of an archetypal image that obliquely answered my yearning to be transported to a realm beyond the mundane one I actually inhabited. By dozing off on a summer’s day, lapsing into reverie, falling down a rabbit hole, walking through the back of a wardrobe into a land of ice and snow, or being lulled into a trance by a parent reading a bedtime story, we instantly cross a threshold into another, more nourishing world.

As Through a Glass Darkly    7

Since many of the books I read as a child ­were En­glish, it was inevitable that I would fantasize E ­ ngland as a land of hedgerows, friendly animals, and fabulous cities. One par­tic­u­lar illustrated book, given to me on my seventh birthday by my ­mother and ­father, perfectly captured this mystery of elsewhere. Mr. Mole’s Tunnel, told by Douglas Collins and illustrated by G. W. Black­house, begins with the dilemma of Mrs. Mole, whose shopping expeditions to a town “on the sunny side of an enormous mountain” took “four hours to go, and five hours to come back.”4 The first illustration in the book shows Mrs. Mole setting off from Shrew Hall to the train station. Four arms of a signpost point to “Station,” “Faraway,” “Nowhere,” and “Someplace.” Mrs. Mole decides that a move to Milesaway, on the sunny side of the mountain, is the only way of resolving the situation, but Mr. Mole is unwilling to move and devises an ingenious plan for staying put and enabling his wife to travel to Milesaway in no time at all. He ­will build a tunnel ­under the mountain. In this s­ imple tale is captured one of humanity’s oldest quandaries—­how to be rooted in some “dear perpetual place” yet, at the same time, be able to tap into the resources of the wider world. As a child listening to the story of the Billy Goats Gruff, it never occurred to me that the risks they took in crossing the ogre-­protected bridge to greener pastures would not pay off. Though the story ends with the re­united ­family trotting happily t­ oward a lush meadow studded with wild­flowers, it is pos­ si­ble that, within a day of reaching this utopia, one of the goats looked back to the other side of the river and noticed that the pastures they had abandoned now looked greener than the pastures they had risked their lives to reach. This was certainly the case for my grand­mother, who came out to New Zealand in 1906 to marry my grand­father but never overcame her nostalgia for ­England. And what of the ­people ­these Anglo settlers overwhelmed and supplanted? What of the lands and connections they lost? The Ngāti Maru ­were the tangata whenua (literally “­people of the placenta”) of the densely forested lands on which Inglewood was built, and in pre-­ European times, their lands extended along the Upper Waitara River and its many tributaries. In the early nineteenth ­century, Ngāpuhi and Waikato taua (war parties), armed with muskets, caused untold havoc throughout this region. Then, three years ­after the first Taranaki Land War of 1860, Ngāti Maru lands ­were seized by the colonial government to punish the insurgent Taranaki tribes, help defray the costs of the military campaign against the Te Āti Awa chief Wiremu Kingi, and provide land for Eu­ro­pean settlement. Though

8    Worlds Within and Worlds Without

Ngāti Maru had not actively waged war against the British, they had given refuge to Wiremu Kingi, who remained with his allies for twelve years before moving to Parihaka in 1872 to live ­under the protection of the pacifist leader Te Whiti-­o-­Rongomai. When I was a boy, it never occurred to me that my friend Edward Te Mira Ngeru was heir to this traumatic past. Eddie’s f­ amily lived in a barely furnished villa at the bottom of our street. The couch was threadbare, and the linoleum on the floor was scuffed and torn. Yet I was drawn to the homeliness of this poverty, the coal range on which Mrs. Ngeru baked sweetbreads, the endearing way she spoke to me. As for Eddie’s tribal affiliation, I only learned of this years l­ ater, when Eddie became a schoolteacher and contributed vital information to the 1995 Waitangi Tribunal report on which the $30-­million-­dollar treaty settlement of the Ngāti Maru land claim was based. For most Pākehā kids growing up in the 1940s and 1950s, Māori w ­ ere reviled as dirty and diseased or regarded as exotic ­Others whose culture could be appropriated to enhance Pākehā images of national identity. Condescendingly referred to as “our Māoris,” their language was suppressed in schools, their grievances ignored, their presence scarcely remarked. I remember the black-­ clad kuia (se­nior w ­ omen) who would appear as if out of nowhere and peddle whitebait from door to door. They wore moko (tattoos) on their chins and smoked pipes. On autumn after­noons, they sat, shawls around their shoulders, flax kits at their feet, on benches outside the post office or on the curbs. At night, they vanished. Invoking Māori myth, my grandparents gave me to understand that Māori did not live in Inglewood b­ ecause they believed Mt. Egmont would one day move back to join its kith and kin in the central North Island.5 I would come to see that this was a Pākehā ruse for ignoring the fact that Māori lands had been stolen or seized. It also was my introduction to how t­ hose in power derive spurious legitimacy from lambasting the powerless as creatures of irrationality and superstition. In Savage Club concerts, parodies of haka by white men with cocoa rubbed into their skin, minstrels in black-­ face with banjos, men in tutus, ventriloquists with obscene dolls, and an aging prostitute in garish makeup clutching a battered tuba and singing Roses in Picardy belied the club’s ostensible aim of providing “rational entertainment” ­under the motto of “Tact—­Talent and Tolerance.” Dismayed by this racist mockery and mystified by Eddie’s sudden departure, I developed a sentimental identification with all ­things Māori. In the

As Through a Glass Darkly    9

same spirit with which Bob Dylan left Hibbing, Minnesota, to find somewhere he felt more at home, I sought contact with Te Ao Māori (the Māori world) as a way out of the world into which I had been arbitrarily thrown. ­After restoring an old bicycle my ­father had used during the war, I biked to Waitara where, incredibly, many of the streets w ­ ere still named for men who played major roles in the alienation of Te Āti Awa lands, including the crown’s chief purchasing agent Donald McLean, Land Purchase Commissioner Robert Parris, Governor Thomas Gore Browne, and military officers Charles Emilius Gold and Peter Cracroft. At Ōwae marae, I gleaned information about Te Āti Awa and the ­great tribal leaders Wiremu Kīngi Te Rangitāke and Māui Wiremu Pita Naera Pōmare. I took photos of Pōmare’s Sicilian marble statue, unveiled in June  1936 at the same hui that inaugurated the carved ­house, Te Ikaroa a Māui. The tekoteko figure atop the painted bargeboards is Māui-­tikitiki-­a-­Taranga, who fished up the North Island from the sea. Below him is the stylized head of Sir Māui, who pushed the government to set up a Royal Commission in 1927 to inquire into Māori grievances relating to the confiscation of Taranaki lands. Wiremu Kīngi Te Rangitāke stands at the base of the pole. From Waitara, I cycled on through a darkening and seemingly deserted landscape to the Te Rangi Hīroa Memorial near Urenui—­a canoe prow thrusting from an overgrown hillside ­toward the sea. Born of an Irish ­father and Māori ­mother, Te Rangi Hīroa’s first language was En­glish, but he remained attached to his roots. His stepmother’s m ­ other was his tutor. She taught him his whakapapa (genealogy) and history. When Kapuakore (Cloudless) died in 1908, Te Rangi was twenty-­eight. Inside her sleeping hut, he found the canoe paddle the old ­woman had used when ferrying him across the Urenui River. The paddle remained in his possession for as long as he lived, mounted on the wall of his office at the Bernice Bishop Museum in Honolulu. “It hangs on the wall of my study as my most precious ­family heirloom,” he wrote. “I have studied u ­ nder learned professors in stately halls of learning. But as I look at that paddle, I know that the teacher who laid the foundation of my understanding of my own p­ eople, and the Polynesian stock to which we belong, was a dear old lady with a tattooed face in a h ­ umble hut walled with 6 tree-­fern slabs.” With neither paddle nor guide, I had no way of reaching the Māori world, which, in any case, was more symbolic of my disaffection than socially real,

10     Worlds Within and Worlds Without

and when I started high school (in another town, to which I traveled by bus ­every day), I abandoned many of my childhood interests, lost touch with my original classmates, and became something of a loner. In my sixteenth year, this changed with my discovery of science. Maths was beyond me, but biology spoke to my love of the natu­ral world, and I like to think the collection of local ferns and mosses I painstakingly dried, mounted, and identified for a school proj­ect foreshadowed the fulfillment I would find in ethnography, since the adventure of looking for ­these primitive phyla and the aesthetic plea­sure they afforded me far outweighed the scientific knowledge I might have derived from studying their reproductive or adaptive functions. I also pursued my interest in geography, which had earned me the highest grade in the national (School Certificate) exams, much to the satisfaction of my geography teacher, who congratulated himself on this evidence of talent in a hitherto unpromising pupil. If my botanical fieldwork inspired a more scientific attitude to the natu­ral world, my attraction to geography was prob­ably born of a yearning to broaden my horizons and escape the insular world in which I felt confined. The movies offered another way out, though I became more enamored of the journalistic realism of John Nesbitt’s Passing Parade (The Ship that Died and This is the Bowery stand out in my memory) than the glitz of Hollywood musicals and romantic dramas. Clearly, however, two parallel sensibilities ­were beginning to find expression in my life: the first literary, and informed by an escapist tendency to fantasize and daydream; the second scientific, and based on empirical research. Even as I devoured adventure stories (A Town like Alice, Robinson Crusoe, Seven Years in Tibet, The Lost World, King Solomon’s Mines, Exploration Fawcett), I sought to satisfy my appetite for more scientific accounts of exotic socie­ties and foreign environments. ­Every few weeks, the New Zealand Country Library Ser­vice’s mobile van left a new collection of books with our local library, which is how I came to read Darryl Forde’s Habitat, Economy, and Society (“An introduction to the ethnography and ­human geography of non-­European p­ eoples”) and William Howells’ Mankind So Far (“Man’s History: Past, Pre­sent, and Probable F ­ uture”). I still have on file the sixth form essay I wrote, inspired by Forde’s environmental determinism, in which I argued that the difference between “civilized” and “primitive” p­ eoples lay in the kinds of intellectual and practical adaptations they had made to very dif­fer­ent environments and not intrinsic differences in

As Through a Glass Darkly    11

­ ental capacity. As for Howell’s riveting account of hominid evolution, this m would become another reason why, one year ­later, I enrolled in anthropology at Auckland University. I owe my enthusiasm for university to my elder ­sister Gabrielle who, in turn, had been inspired by our ­mother Emily, who had attended some lectures during her years in Wellington as a trainee schoolteacher. Emily always regretted that the gender and class prejudices of the 1920s denied her an opportunity to realize her dreams, and she derived deep satisfaction from seeing her d ­ aughter become the first person in our f­ amily to attend university. In January 1955, we gathered on the railway platform to see her off. I recall the cyclopean eye of the K-­locomotive bearing down on us and the suddenness with which the coal-­black behemoth thundered through the station, brakes shrieking and rods clanking, before it came to a halt in a furious exhalation of steam. As it panted and hissed in its iron harness, my s­ ister clambered up into a second-­class carriage, soon to reappear at the win­dow wiping away the grime and condensation with her sleeve and mouthing reassurances to my ­mother. My f­ ather already was at the guard’s van, ensuring that the big red wooden chest he had made for his d ­ aughter, bound with rope and addressed on e­ very side, Helen Lowry Hall, Wellington, was safely loaded. Minutes ­later, amid tears and stifled cries, with smoke and cinders engulfing us, the train pulled out of the shadows of the station. As I watched the red lanterns of the guard’s van dis­appear around the last bend before the bridge, I was filled with the exhilarating sense that I might soon be making this same journey. That winter, Gabrielle brought home a friend from Wellington. Garbed in Gothic black, Jean Watson spoke in a world-­weary drawl and entranced me with her Bohemian demeanor. Gabrielle explained that Jean was writing a novel, and she brought Jean’s portable typewriter to the dining ­table and dumped it in front of us as proof.7 It was a solid black Smith Corona. I saw it as a miniature version of the g­ reat K-­locomotives that hauled the trains through Inglewood in the dead of night, their forlorn whistles holding out the promise of voyages and rebirth. I begged to be allowed to use the typewriter, and stirred by the feel of metal keys and the authority of typescript on a sheet of white paper, I hammered out some surreptitious ramblings about the evils of racism and the prob­lem of nature versus nurture. Then, on the strength of a few fragments of a conversation I had overheard between Jean and my s­ ister, I wrote a poem.

12    Worlds Within and Worlds Without

I idolized Gabrielle. As small c­ hildren, we w ­ ere constant playmates, and when she went to university, I read and re-­read her letters home, with their descriptions of lectures she had attended, friends she had made, and books that had ­shaped her thinking. This is how I came to read Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom (1940) and become fascinated by the paradoxical nature of h ­ uman freedom, which we w ­ ill die to defend yet willingly surrender to an autocratic leader or higher power on the strength of his promises to make our lives more existentially meaningful. Yet, at the same time we venerate the rich and power­ful who, we imagine, possess absolute freedom, we resent and envy them. Even as we cede our liberty to them, we imagine the day when they ­will be toppled from their pedestals and we ­will receive their inheritance. This tension between the w ­ ill to determine one’s own destiny, ­whether personal or collective, and the tendency to submit to forces one can neither control nor comprehend would become a leitmotif in all my books. In the summer before beginning my final year at high school, I traveled to Wellington by train for a week’s holiday with Gabrielle, now married and lecturing in social psy­chol­ogy at Victoria University of Wellington. As the train threaded its way along the coast near Paekākāriki, I gazed rapturously at waves breaking over black rocks, then the train plunged into a tunnel only to re-­emerge into dazzling sunlight, the harbor and city shimmering like a mirage. Gabrielle’s apartment in Khandallah took my breath away. On the dining ­table sat a wooden bowl of oranges. In the kitchen, a coffee percolator bubbled on the stovetop. Every­thing was marvelous: the Indian durries on the parquet floor, Val’s Marxist tomes and trade ­union histories in the bookshelves, the gramophone with its stack of Weavers and Woody Guthrie ­albums, the garlic bread Gabrielle served her guests for Sunday brunch, and ­people the likes of which I had never seen in my life, urbane, wine-­drinking, energized, witty. Though utterly intimidated, I was in my ele­ment!

Notes from Under­ground

In the winter of 1957, my ­father, who had worked all his life as a clerk in the Bank of New South Wales, applied for a transfer to Auckland. I felt out of place in my new school, and as soon as I passed my university entrance exams, I went to work in a poultry mash factory with the intention of saving enough money over the summer months to supplement my university bursary. It so happened that the Poultryman’s Cooperative had been founded by a distant kinsman, Fritz Jackson, whose grand­father was the ­brother of my ­father’s grand­father. Fritz was in his late sixties when I worked in his factory, and we rarely met. That we shared the same Jackson features and the same name ­were never remarked on. Thirty-­seven years l­ater, however, when Fritz’s d ­ aughter shared recollections of her f­ ather with me, I was struck by the uncanny parallels between his story and the stories of other Jacksons, my ­father and myself included—­particularly our ability, in the face of adversity, to reinvent ourselves. Fritz originally had been a land buyer but lost his fortune in 1928 and 1929, when he became liable, u ­ nder an archaic law, for the debts of the former ­owners and mortgagees of all the land he’d ever sold.

14     Worlds Within and Worlds Without

Instead of declaring himself bankrupt, he elected to honor the law. Pera would remember her ­father slaving to scratch a living from the small farm he bought near Swanson. “My heart used to go out to him, seeing him brought so low, his heart and health broken. But I could do nothing.” A ­ fter the war, when in his late fifties, Fritz established the Poultryman’s Cooperative. The factory was unventilated and stifling. Beams and raf­ters ­were silted with flour and mouse scat. Sweat and dust collected on your skin like scabs. Trundling a handcart, I would go down into the basement for sacks of pollard, maize, bran, and grit. On the factory floor, I would unstitch the sacks and maneuver them to the edge of a steel-­lined pit, from which the mixed mash would be conveyed by an augur into a massive overhead hopper. ­There ­were three such hoppers, working twelve hours a day, and you had to shout to make yourself heard above the din. At tea breaks, I would lie among the grain sacks in the basement reading Erich Fromm, enthralled by the idea that one’s first duty in life was the realization of one’s full potential. ­After reading Notes from Under­ground, in which Dostoevsky argues that the meaning of life consists in proving to oneself that one is a person and not a piano key,1 I perversely concluded that my responsibility to create a life for myself absolved me of any obligation to o­ thers. Lew Stewart, who worked the number two hopper, was not impressed. “That’s an eighteen-­year-­old talking,” he said. “One day you’ll realize it’s got fuck-­all to do with creating yourself. You go through a fuckin’ war before you start preaching to me about creation.” But Lew w ­ asn’t ­going to tell me about his war, except to say he’d gone to university before he was called up and returned from the war to find his wife had ditched him for somebody e­ lse. It’s sobering to compare Lew and Fritz. The one whose life had become an ineluctable descent into the abyss, assisted by booze and self-­pity; the other who had picked himself up, paid his dues, and begun again. What would be my fate?

It’s Other P ­ eople Who Are My Old Age

As a boy, I was fascinated by what drew ­people to their vari­ous trades.1 What led Mr. Trigger to take up butchery and his b­ rother to become a chimney sweep? What gratification did Mrs. Peters, our draper, derive from the curiously magnified sound of her scissors on the wooden countertop as she sheered through a yard of muslin, and what, in her Eu­ro­pean past, presaged the skill with which she pulled a length of baft from a bolt and laid it along the calibrated brass edge of the shop ­counter? What ­were the secret links between their invisible and vis­i­ble lives? When I enrolled in first-­year courses in geography, anthropology, philosophy, psy­chol­ogy, and En­glish, I had no idea where this would lead me. Apart from scribbling poetry—­which my parents warned could never be a livelihood—­I had no sense of and no interest in a ­career. Though I became inspired by Jack Golson’s lectures on Mesopotamia, Bruce Biggs’s Introduction to te reo (Māori language), Michael Joseph’s anecdotes about Shakespeare’s London, and Harry Scott’s reminiscences of being a h ­ uman guinea pig in Donald Hebb’s experiments on sensory deprivation at McGill,

16    Worlds Within and Worlds Without

I never saw myself as a teacher, and would not appreciate for many years the subtle and unfathomable interplay between external influence and inner disposition that gradually gives shape to a par­tic­u­lar biography. First-­year social anthropology was taught by Professor Ralph O’Reilly Piddington. Though only fifty-­two, he appeared, in my callow eyes, ancient. With his thinning hair, rheumy eyes, and palsied hands, I found it impossible to imagine he had ever been young, let alone as idealistic and adventuresome as I ­imagined myself to be. His dogged defenses of Malinowski’s functionalism, and the rumors of his Parkinsonism and fondness for whisky, only reinforced my unsympathetic attitude.2 While his two-­volume An Introduction to Social Anthropology, already in its second edition, contained ample evidence of his fieldwork in Aboriginal Australia, I was indifferent to it. All I could see was the frail, florid-­faced man who, week ­after week, stood b­ ehind the lectern in a suit and academic gown and conducted us on a “Cook’s tour,” as he called it, of “primitive p­ eoples,” and recited his litany of ethnographic facts, “native terms,” and formal definitions. Yet, had I possessed even a modicum of discernment, I might have read between the lines of his text and divined a hidden biography. I might even have seen that his Malinowskian preoccupation with needs and functions referred not only to remote socie­ties but obliquely and intimately to himself.3 In volume one, he observes: It is easy enough, on the basis of superficial and one-­sided observation, to caricature primitive man as a fiend or as a saint. It requires the discipline of patient scientific observation to see him as a ­human being not essentially dif­fer­ent from ourselves, capable of brutality and kindness, of greed or altruism, of obedience or defiance ­toward the social order, according to the culture in which he is born, his individual temperament and the par­tic­u­lar circumstances in which he finds himself.4

This argument, that a complete understanding must take into account temperamental, cultural, and circumstantial ­factors (and that no one ele­ment determines the ­others) is echoed in Piddington’s second volume, where he reminds us that “the anthropologist in the field is a ­human being dealing with other ­human beings, and that the personal relations which he establishes and maintains with his in­for­mants are vital.”5 But rather than argue for closeness between anthropologist and in­for­mant, Piddington suggests the “personal

It’s Other ­People Who Are My Old Age     17

bias” and “distortion” that arise u ­ nder such conditions may be circumvented by “a thorough training in the scientific methods of social anthropology.” One safeguard, he writes, is to avoid interviews and place greater emphasis on observation, though ­there are dangers even h ­ ere, for participant observation risks identifying the observer “too closely . . . ​with a par­tic­u­lar social class,” embroiling him in “factional disputes,” and creating bias in his data. “At all costs,” Piddington concludes, “the field-­worker must retain his objectivity,” and he reminds us of the power of “stranger value” to maximize neutrality, maintain distance, and guarantee access to restricted knowledge.6 Like many anthropologists, Piddington extols the ideal of mutuality between ethnographer and in­for­mant but cannot bring himself to give up his privileged status as an objective man of science. Perhaps this is why, in Appendix B of the second volume of his textbook, Piddington stresses that, during most of his sojourn in the Kimberleys in 1930 and 1931, he “resided at the telegraph station at Lagrange Bay, though . . . ​made trips to vari­ous parts of Karadjeri country to witness ceremonies.” Apart from one or two hunts and fishing trips, he “did not participate in economic life,” and three quarters of his ethnographic data was obtained from interviews with a single in­for­mant, Yuari (allegedly a “deviant personality”), and much of his remaining data from Yuari’s b­ rother Nirmbdi.7 Although Piddington admits “serious defects” in his fieldwork when it is mea­sured against the general princi­ples he lays down in his text, the fault lies not with the author but with both the functionalist assumptions that informed the anthropology of that time, including, as he himself notes, the quest for a conceptually “consistent system” of kinship, and the notion that deviations from a norm reflected psychological aberrations rather than everyday strategizing and creative resourcefulness. But the most glaring omission is his own personal and po­liti­cal involvement in the Karadjeri situation—­something of which he makes no mention in his text. Ironically, this issue is not only central to the ethics and practice of anthropology ­today; it was the very ­thing I was avid to learn about.8 When interviewed by a Sydney newspaper, The World, three months ­after completing his second stint of fieldwork, Piddington made no bones about the systematic racism and degrading living conditions Aboriginal ­people had to endure in the Kimberleys. “The system of employing aborigines on ­cattle stations in the North and North-­west Australia virtually amounts to slavery,” Piddington observed and gave details of “trafficking in lubras” and the

18    Worlds Within and Worlds Without

flogging and murder of blacks by whites.9 A few months ­later, Piddington took his indictment of the police and pastoralists to the London press and, on the editorial page of The World, repeated his polemic against the abuse of Aboriginals.10 This time, he brought the ire of the West Australian chief protector of Aborigines down on his head. As a member of the committee that had approved Rocke­fel­ler funding for Piddington’s fieldwork, the chief protector’s word carried considerable weight, and in September 1932, Raymond Firth, then acting head of the Sydney University Department of Anthropology (following Radcliffe-­Brown’s departure for Chicago), rebuked Piddington and sought an assurance that he would make no further public statements “reflecting against the administration without first giving the administration an opportunity of refuting or investigating ­these claims.” ­After weighing his options, Piddington elected to defend and reiterate his views in a detailed statement. The Australian National Research Committee immediately terminated his funding, with Elkin, the new head of the Sydney Department, approving the action. The ANRC dossier on Piddington is revealing. It shows an anthropologist much more involved with the Karadjeri on a day-­to-­day, face-­to-­face basis than appears from his textbook account of his life in the field, leaving one to won­der ­whether he felt embarrassed to admit that his fieldwork fell short of the scientific standards he aspired to. T ­ oday, we might praise his engagement and activism but repudiate his notion of the anthropologist as impartial observer. Ironically, the dossier that condemned Piddington for betraying his academic position inadvertently documented the racist assumptions against which he was inveighing. D. J. Mulvaney summarizes the file as follows: Piddington was observed to drive female Aborigines in his vehicle; he was seen to transport liquor; he was “said to be addicted to drink”; he took in­for­mants away without consulting authorities; his conduct was “hardly in keeping with the position held.” Generally, the tenor of t­ hose accusations was petty. For any Broome resident of ­those times to criticise alcohol consumption was sheer hy­ poc­risy. It also revealed complete ignorance of the nature of anthropological fieldwork, while incidentally illuminating local racial attitudes t­owards Aboriginal p­ eople. One witness even seemed critical that Piddington travelled with his wife. However, his most heinous offense, commented on by two officials, was Piddington’s presence in Broome “at a convivial eve­ning when the Red Flag and Communist songs ­were sung.”11

It’s Other ­People Who Are My Old Age    19

Six years a­ fter writing his first letters in defense of Aboriginal rights, Piddington completed his Ph.D. in London u ­ nder Malinowski. Apart from war ser­vice, he would return to Australia, his country of birth, only once.12 And his fields of interest would move to “action anthropology” and French Canada. Looking back, I am left with many unanswered questions. Given Piddington’s commitment to Malinowski’s theory of needs, did he ever consider freedom from oppression to be a h ­ uman need? And in light of his emphasis on function, did the brutal realities he encountered in the field, and ­later in the second world war, ever lead him to challenge Malinowski’s ahistorical notion of functional cohesion and social continuity? And what analogies might he have drawn between the injustices he witnessed in the Kimberleys and the injustices he himself suffered in Sydney? I have left it too long to express my sense of kinship with him. For though I, too, sang the “Red Flag,” marched with a banner for a g­ reat cause, and strug­gled to bridge the gap between the Acad­emy and the World, I now ask myself ­whether I ever risked as much as he did, and imagine a kind of poetic justice in the possibility that t­ oday, in one of my classes, a student sees me as I once so mistakenly saw Ralph Piddington, out of touch with real­ity and past his prime.

Empedocles in Auckland

My second year at university is memorable for the friendships I formed with p­ eople who shared my passion for lit­er­a­ture and ideas. Though Denis Taylor, Gerard Macdonald, and I hailed from dif­fer­ent backgrounds and ­were pursuing dif­fer­ent courses of study, we all ­were unsure of our directions in life and how we could reconcile a desire to change the world with our equally strong desire to understand it. We drank heavi­ly, read voraciously, and debated ceaselessly, without finding the answers we sought. At times, we blamed our parentage, convinced that our ­fathers had failed us in some way. But when Denis told me how his ­father had clumsily pressed money into his hands on the day he left home, unable to express his feelings in any other way, or when Gerard confessed that his f­ ather had never shown him any physical affection, it was the pathos of my ­father that came to mind, not his imperfections. When I had returned home that summer from a student congress at Curious Cove in the Marlborough Sounds, I took my f­ ather into the city to see a movie. Standing ­behind him in the queue at the box office,

Empedocles in Auckland   21

I suddenly was overwhelmed by a sense of the frailty of this man who had had to suffer my bouts of drunken boorishness and my tirades against his “bourgeois values.” ­There w ­ ere also times when we lamented the narrowness of our social circle and how dependent we w ­ ere on En­glish lit­er­a­ture, Eu­ro­pean films, and American jazz. Where ­were the ­great exemplars in our own society? One autumn day, Denis persuaded me to accompany him to meet the poet R. A. K. Mason. Mason’s ­house was on the slopes of Mt. Eden, and his wife Dorothy made us welcome with a pot of tea and did most of the talking—­ mainly about the active role she and Ron played in the New Zealand-­China society. ­After tea and biscuits, Ron asked if we’d like to tag along while he wandered over Mt. Eden, filling sacks with fallen leaves. He was a landscape gardener, he reminded us, and needed the leaves for mulch. Much to our disappointment, the ­great poet did not mention poetry at all, and since Denis and I w ­ ere aware of Mason’s Rimbaud-­like repudiation of lit­er­a­ture in his early twenties, we w ­ ere reluctant to broach the subject. Mason’s taciturnity also both­ered me, for while I knew many of his poems by heart and thought of him as the equal of any of his En­glish and American contemporaries, I found it impossible to connect the writing with the man. I had expected him to manifest the genius of his poems. I had ­imagined Denis and I being transformed by our after­noon in his com­pany, pilgrims rewarded with a vision of their own f­ utures, but all we received w ­ ere some tips about making compost. That winter, I took Denis to meet James K. Baxter in Wellington. I had first met Jim Baxter through my older s­ ister, and we had exchanged a few letters and poems over the next two years. It was a windswept night in June—­a fact I remember from the first line of a poem Jim sent me a week or two ­after our initial encounter. Denis and I sat in the front room of his f­ amily bungalow in Ngaio. His wife Jacquie and their two c­ hildren remained out of sight. By contrast with our visit to R. A. K. Mason, we talked poetry nonstop—or, rather, Baxter did. Where Mason had been awkward and laconic, Jim creaked on and on like a waterwheel, churning out phrases, inundating us with images, and proffering words of wisdom. “About Ron Mason. He is a very good bloke indeed. ­Whether he can still write or not is beside the point. The poems come out of a chasm of suffering: perhaps he is better off ­free of the chasm for a while at least. He has no outer

22     Worlds Within and Worlds Without

skin. To be near him is to receive some kind of charge of acute sensitivity, rawness even, combined with the sense of the rough justice of the ­union man. A New Zealand Camus.”1 Our search was for trailblazers or f­ ather figures who might recognize us as fellow travelers and adopt us into a community of kindred spirits. Mason, Baxter, and Colin McCahon (whose drinking circle in the Kiwi H ­ otel we sometimes joined) w ­ ere preoccupied with their own strug­gles in a country McCahon described in 1958 as “a landscape with too few lovers”2 and Baxter, a ­couple of years l­ater, called Pig Island, where “the body of our common love [was] murdered by triviality.”3 We fi­nally found the mentor we ­were looking for in a self-­educated ex-­ seaman old enough to be our ­father, who had set foot on ­every continent, seemed to have under­gone more incarnations than a cat, and whose experience encompassed more history than any of us could grasp. Herman Gladwin’s vitality belied his age, leaving us to won­der what shape-­ shifting secret had allowed him to move from country to country, wife to wife, and trade to trade so effortlessly. ­There was nothing about which he did not have an original opinion. As for his poems, I had heard or read nothing like them. Twenty-­five years on, I sat with Herman during his d ­ ying days, talking of old times. He was living in a shabby suburban room where he had assembled the objects that had always defined his encampments: a model he had made of James Cook’s bark Endeavour, a shelf of dog-­eared books, a folder of poems, a suitcase full of clothes, and a bar radiator that kept him warm and on which he grilled his staple of cheese on toast. As we talked, he upbraided me for per­ sis­tently getting the facts wrong about his life: I always wanted to mythologize him. But, I protested, had he not always represented his past to us in mythological terms? In some re­spects, he resembled Ezra Pound: wiry, iconoclastic, cantankerous. He claimed to have been conceived in the rain on top of a horse-­drawn bus somewhere between London Bridge and the Elephant and ­Castle. Born in Barking, Essex, he spent his boyhood exploring the Thames marshes. His ­father was a glassblower whose work included blowing penis-­shaped hot-­ water ­bottles for use in nunneries. His ­mother died of galloping consumption when he was five. At eigh­teen, he left E ­ ngland and worked all over the world as an ordinary seaman. In t­ hose days, merchant ships still stowed canvas. One time, in San Francisco Bay, he met some New Zealand seamen and took it

Empedocles in Auckland   23

into his head to see the South Pacific. A year or two l­ater, he jumped ship in Auckland. During the thirties, he worked on and off as a painter and signwriter. He painted the old parliament buildings in Wellington and was active in the Communist Party. It was Denis and Gerard who discovered Herman. On their way to a lecture, they noticed him sitting on a bench by the fountain in Albert Park, smoking a cigarette. An hour l­ ater, re-­crossing the park, they found him still sitting t­ here, and asked him what he was ­doing. “Contemplating how one can mea­sure both mass and velocity,” Herman replied. He hastened to assure them that it was an aesthetic, not a philosophical, question. He was down to his last cigarette, and the quandary had presented itself as to ­whether he should keep the cigarette in its original form or send it up in smoke, which would then drift and dissipate pleasingly into the air. I would ­later recognize this sophistry as typical of the characters in Samuel Beckett’s Watt, one of Herman’s favorite books. Denis and Gerard told Herman that all through their lecture they could not stop thinking about him, and they asked where he lived and w ­ hether he was hungry. Herman had been living on a semi-­derelict scow, moored at St Mary’s bay. He considered himself to be manic-­depressive, so could not be trusted to do anything, but had received ­free lodgings and pin money for occupying the scow and minding it for its ­owners. With a galley and galley stove, and plenty of lumber in Winston’s yard, he was well provided for. It was perfect for an old salt. But, then, the o­ wners de­cided to hire a professional watchman, and he’d been laid off. Denis and Gerard invited Herman to their flat for a meal. He ended up spending the best part of a year with them, dossing on the sitting-­room floor, ­going to student parties, and steadily reading through the books on their shelves. With the eclecticism of a self-­made man, Herman delighted in synthesizing philosophy, poetry, autobiography, anecdote, and myth and instructing us in Hegel’s dialectics. “Every­thing begets its own negation,” he repeatedly said, as if to remind us that even youth fades into old age. In the Lorne Street coffee bar where we gathered ­every night, he held forth on Proust, Empedocles, Montaigne, Marx and Engels, Ezra Pound, e. e. cummings, and Teutonic my­thol­ogy, though his mainstays w ­ ere Beckett’s Watt and Laurens van der Post’s Lost World of the Kalahari. The latter he blithely urged me to embrace as a model for ­doing ethnography. Gerard seldom joined us for coffee. As enthralled as any of us by Herman’s homespun philosophy, he, nonetheless, kept his distance and his cool,

24    Worlds Within and Worlds Without

determined to remain, as Herman so memorably put it, “couth, kempt, and deeply gruntled.” But Denis and I w ­ ere spellbound by Herman’s impromptu expositions, his latest poem, and his cabalistic drawings. Our age difference mattered in only one re­spect. Herman had an older person’s intolerance of youth’s egoism and impetuosity. He was always berating us for talking too loudly, moving too clumsily, or acting without forethought. Once, he harangued me for setting down my coffee cup noisily in its saucer. “Even the most mundane action,” he said, “must be carried out mindfully.” One of his favorite drawings depicted a small figure hurrying across an open field. In its tracks lay a trampled daisy. Above the scene, Herman wrote “1 + 1 = 3,” by which he meant that our actions have repercussions that go far beyond the field of our immediate awareness. That heedlessly crushed daisy would, in the fullness of time, change the course of history, and the fate of any individual, like the ­future of the planet, was determined by the cumulative effects of countless such banal and thoughtless acts. It was inevitable that one day I would trample the daisy and all hell would break loose. Indeed, in a poem from this period, Herman made me the very quintessence of heedless youth: Loud man that toils and sighs remember on your young cheek the ­water from other eyes Loud man whose art is as short as the season of the ant remember the pant of the lover ­under night skies Old man dried milk skimmed of its red rimmed view confused in the river of youth remember the blue beams of the sea

Empedocles in Auckland   25 remember the pangs of thy birth of thy parting step on step over fallen timbers over old smoke Winter never forgets.4

Myself Must I Remake

If I stuck at my studies, it was ­because I could attend occasional lectures while working in the “real” world as a “seagull” on the waterfront, a postman, a builder’s laborer, a ditch digger, or a storeman.1 In t­ hose days, you could cut classes and defer submitting essays for months on end, then make good the deficit at the eleventh hour. Having “got terms,” you sequestered yourself in the university library, swotted maniacally for six weeks, and sat finals. This pattern also was born of economic necessity, since my bursary was not enough to live on. More significantly, however, it reflected a temperamental need to test the ideas I was encountering in philosophy, psy­chol­ogy, and anthropology against the empirical realities of everyday life. Working on the wharves or a building site was a way of “keeping myself honest,” as the saying went. Of not getting infatuated by “big ideas.” It obliged me to explain myself to men who thought that “­going to school” at my age suggested a reluctance to grow up. This constant switching between what Hannah Arendt called the vita activa and the vita contemplativa unsettled me, and although I lifted ­these terms from The ­Human Condition (purchased when I won the anthropology

Myself Must I Remake    27

prize in my second year), I could not see how I could reconcile poetry and prose, or philosophical reflection and practical action.2 Indeed, I would spend the best years of my academic life working out how to have it both ways. Happily, my contradictory passions met with Herman’s approval. When my academic advisers insisted I choose between anthropology and lit­er­a­ture, on the grounds that science and art w ­ ere mutually inimical, Herman urged that I do no such t­ hing. Invoking the image of a stew, he said that the more ingredients went into it, and the longer it simmered, the better it would taste. ­After completing my bachelor’s degree, I spent a year moving between Auckland and Wellington, falling in and out of love, knocking out screeds of bad fiction and poetry, and working as a ship’s steward, a research librarian, a proofreader on Truth, a clerk in the Trea­sury, and a seagull on the waterfront before enrolling for an M.A. at Auckland University. Around this time, I also met Bob Lowry, one of the g­ reat rogue elephants of the New Zealand literary and left-­wing scene. In 1931, while still a student at Auckland University, he produced Phoenix—­the literary journal with which, according to Denis Glover, “New Zealand lit­er­a­ture begins.”3 Bob counted among his contemporaries and friends Rex Fairburn, Jim Bertram, R. A. K. Mason, Denis Glover, Colin McCahon, Frank Sargeson, Allen Curnow, and Charles Brasch, and his bacchanalian parties w ­ ere legendary. James K. Baxter would remember him as: . . . ​a stone volcanic god Fed with honey and red gourds, Opening his heart like a g­ reat door To poets, lovers, and the h ­ ouse­less poor.4

For many years, Bob had been New Zealand’s most innovative typographer and had helped found the country’s finest literary presses—­Unicorn, Griffin, Philips, Pelorus, Pilgrim, Wakefield. Indeed, wrote Denis Glover in 1946, “If typography is a word that some of us now understand, the credit is Bob Lowry’s.” By 1962, however, Bob had fallen on hard times and faced bankruptcy. As a last-­ditch effort to keep his business afloat, he installed two outmoded printing presses—­a Thompson platen and a Heidelberg flatbed— in a rented basement in Airedale Street. His bread-­and-­butter work was printing the university student paper Craccum, and labels for a health food com­pany. His genius as a typographer meant l­ ittle to clients preoccupied with

28    Worlds Within and Worlds Without

having their work done on time, and many old allies wrote him off as a beer-­ sodden has-­been. Bob liked to quote Joseph Spence’s observation about Jonathan Swift lying abed ­until eleven ­o’clock in the morning, thinking of wit for the day, for w ­ asn’t he also an artist and bon vivant, not a businessman, and if ­there w ­ ere scholarships in letters to support writers, why not some handouts for a struggling typographer? T ­ here ­were times when Bob saw himself as a martyr and envisaged writing an account of his rejection and marginalization, to be titled Severed Relations. He recommended I read a book by Winwood Reade called The Martyrdom of Man, which I did a de­ cade ­later, though only ­because of Winwood Reade’s connection with Sierra Leone, where he traveled in 1868 in search of the source of the Niger. Failing in his ambition, Reade returned to E ­ ngland only to be criticized at the Royal Geo­graph­i­cal Society for the carelessness of his observations and mea­sure­ ments. Feeling unjustly maligned, Reade wrote Martyrdom as an indictment of t­ hose who conspire to destroy ­great minds and crucify true heroes. When I was twenty-­two, I may have had something of the martyr in me. I worked for Bob without a wage, ­running the letterpress machines while he comped and locked lead slugs and ink-­stained furniture into a chase, deploying the fonts for which he was renowned: Garamond, Bodoni, Caslon Old Face, Gill Sans, Baskerville, Blado Italic, Goudy, Albertus. We worked long hours, slaving to keep the antiquated machines ­going, cadging money to pay the linotypists or wheedling paper and printing ink from the suppliers. When we met a deadline, we w ­ ere so exhausted by the effort that we’d invariably blow our earnings on pub crawls rather than s­ ettle our mounting debts. One literary legend compared us to Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in Nighttown. Even as Bob faced ruin, my spirits ­were lifted by his boon companionship, and the Heidelberg was my domain. Compressed air hissed as sheets of paper ­were sucked up and fed through its dark innards. The chase slammed to and fro, and the w ­ hole t­ hing clanked like a locomotive, shunting my woes away. I watched the printed pages accumulating on the stacker like days upon days. Nothing and nobody mattered but this obstinate individual whose livelihood was on the line. In my strug­gle with abstraction, real­ity had fi­nally won out, and I published in Craccum an essay called “Juggling their Abstract Ideas,” in which I excoriated academics for their alienation from life. Bob was determined, however, that I not jeopardize my ­future. He urged me to attend my classes, even if it meant working fewer hours at the press.

Myself Must I Remake    29

­ nless we won the Golden Kiwi lottery, it would soon be a m U ­ atter of ­every man for himself. I went to lectures dressed in a boiler suit, but was dedicated only to keeping Bob’s business afloat. Often, we drove north in Bob’s beat-up Morris van and took refuge in his f­ amily’s beach ­house on the Wade estuary. Eucalyptus, pines, and mangroves cast ominous shadows over the turbid stream. I would wake each morning to the sound of Bob stoking the pot-­bellied stove in the living room and the chug-­chug of the boats towing barges of quicklime downstream. Midmorning, we would drag a dinghy across the mud to the river and row to the store, then dig for pipis and cockles on the tidal flats and return, sluggish against the ebbing tide, to steam the shellfish open, douse them in vinegar, and eat them with bread and beer. At night, as the wind assailed the pines and manuka around the ­house, and rain gusted over the tin roof, I would hear Bob walking about in the kitchen, unable to sleep. His calvary was coming, and I could not save him. In t­ hose days of early closing, you blundered out of a pub at six ­o’clock but, before heading off to buy fish and chips or a cheap Chinese meal, you ensured you had the address of a party where the drinking could continue. Often as not, the venue would be de­cided at the last minute by someone too drunk or desperate to reckon the consequences. One night, that someone was me. I had a key to the anthropology department, and on the spur of the moment, I announced ­there would be a party t­ here. A piss-up in the hallowed precincts of the university was an opportunity no one was ­going to miss. I was painfully aware of the anti-­intellectual streak in the society in which I had been raised, but u ­ ntil that night I had never suspected how many of the crowd I drank with had even deeper misgivings about the acad­emy than I did. While my discontent was intellectual, theirs was personal. They felt shamed and scorned by ­people with degrees. They could not wait for a chance to knock them off their pedestals and rub their ­faces in the mud. The room was packed. You had to shout to hear yourself speak. T ­ here was a fug of cigarette smoke. Wood splintered as bottlecaps w ­ ere ripped off against ­table edges and chair arms. Win­dows w ­ ere flung open. W ­ omen caterwauled into the night. Someone spent the best part of an hour gluing water-­filled condoms to the ceiling. Someone e­ lse drew a series of skulls on the blackboard,

30     Worlds Within and Worlds Without

depicting the fall of man—­from ape to academic. As for me, slumped in a sofa, swigging beer, I quickly ceased to give a damn. The only ­thing that goaded me into action was a wastepaper basket ­going up in flames. With my thumb stoppering a beer b­ ottle, I shook the contents vigorously, releasing a high-­pressure spray that worked effectively as a fire extinguisher. Not long ­after that, I passed out. I woke as the last revelers ­were vanis­hing into the night. Only then did the full realization of what had happened dawn on me. The room had been trashed. A smutty smudge marked the site of the wastepaper basket fire. Empty ­bottles littered the floor. The carpet was a mess of butts and spilled beer. And overhead, the distended latex stalactites defied my feeble attempts to pluck them down. It was all too much for me. I walked out of the building, went home, and sought asylum in sleep. A ­couple of hours ­later, I jerked awake with a splitting headache. I thought of catching a bus into the city and restoring the room to order before the cleaners came in, but I was overwhelmed by fatigue and indifference and sank back into sleep. At Bob’s press that after­noon, I tried to put the night out of my mind, hoping the clamor and clatter of the machines would dull my memory, but then I looked up and the head of anthropology was standing at the doorway, a clenched fist extended as though he had been knocking, or was about to knock. I climbed down from the Heidelberg and went to face my nemesis. I was surprised by Professor Biggs’s awkwardness. It gave me a curious sense of having the upper hand, and I suggested we cross the road to the Globe ­Hotel where we could talk. In the front bar, I ordered two beers and told the professor that I knew what he had come to see me about. He looked relieved, then wary. “­There’s been a lot of concern about you,” he said. “If it’s the room–” “It’s not just the room.” “No,” I said, deferring to him now. It was one of ­those times in your life when you are confronted by a story other p­ eople have been telling about you that bears ­little or no resemblance to the story you have been telling yourself. First, it seemed, I was a firebug. It ­wasn’t just the incendiary evidence from last night. A lecturer in the psy­

Myself Must I Remake    31

chol­ogy department had let it be known that, only days before, I had been quizzing him about the psychopathology of arson. I tried to explain that I was writing a story about a barnburner. But I was not yet at liberty to speak in my defense . . . Second, it was obvious to every­ one that I was not serious about anthropology. And then t­ here was the crowd I was hanging out with. And the fact that I was drinking heavi­ly. To cap it all, ­there was the question of my “friendship” with Murray Groves, the unspoken quote marks functioning, I supposed, as a euphemism for “homosexual relationship.” “I could go on,” the professor said, “but I ­won’t.” His tone of voice became colder now, and more authoritative. He had been in touch with a friend of his who was medical director at Kingseat Hospital. An appointment had been made for me to see him at Middlemore Hospital in two days’ time. Would I agree to go? It was my first experience of that subtle metamorphosis whereby ordinary unhappiness is transmuted into a pathological condition. Gradually and imperceptibly, you cease to have any say in the m ­ atter of who you are or what you want. You are reduced to an object whose morbid condition is something you had no hand in creating and can have no say in treating. You are explained away. In due course, the distinguished psychiatrist asked me what was troubling me. I told him I did not know but a lot of ­people thought they knew. I admitted I was confused about my ­future in academe. I wanted to write. I wanted to do some good in the world. I did not know how to reconcile all the competing imperatives. I added that some of my teachers clearly thought I had a sexual identity prob­lem and was a repressed arsonist, and possibly an alcoholic. On the strength of this confession, I was invited to admit myself as a voluntary inpatient for observation at Kingseat Hospital. I panicked. I saw myself classified, obliged to consort with the insane, suffer a lobotomy, and lose touch with the world. I thought of the crazy and implacable logic of the Cheshire Cat in Alice and Wonderland. “In that direction,” the Cat said, waving its right paw round, “lives a Hatter: and in that direction,” waving the other paw, “lives a March Hare. Visit ­either if you like: ­they’re both mad.”

32    Worlds Within and Worlds Without

“But I d ­ on’t want to go among mad ­people,” Alice remarked. “Oh, you c­ an’t help that,” said the Cat: “­we’re all mad ­here. I’m mad. Y ­ ou’re mad.” “How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice. “You must be,” said the Cat, “or you w ­ ouldn’t have come h ­ ere.” I told the psychiatrist I would give his “invitation” serious thought. But my mind was already made up. I had to get away. I ­didn’t know where, but some kind of decision had been reached without me deciding anything, and I knew it was now or never. I wrote a letter to Professor Biggs, quitting the M.A. program, and then, with Bob’s complicity, charred the edges of the envelope with a lighted match before sending it off. “The irony ­will be lost on them,” Bob warned. “You could set the Thames on fire and they w ­ ouldn’t turn a hair.” This happened a long time ago. The ransacking of the anthropology department, first construed as pathology, became my­thol­ogy, though years passed before I had any inkling of this. It was only when I applied for a position at Auckland University many years a­ fter my fabled auto-­da-­fé that the full force of ­these fictions was brought home to me. My application was rejected ­because I had once tried to burn down the very department in which I now proposed to teach! Some years a­ fter this, in Australia, the story resurfaced. An anthropologist accosted me at a party and demanded I tell him the story about how I burned down Auckland University. The myth was nonnegotiable. I disappointed p­ eople when I tried to tell them the truth. They gave me reproving looks, as if I w ­ ere keeping something back or trying to put one over on them. The story had more legitimacy than I had, and, like a parent who can neither fathom nor control an unruly adolescent, I had to face the fact that the story I had fathered was no longer my own. As for Bob, who had himself entered my­ thol­ogy as a stone volcanic god, he failed to survive the tragedy of falling short of the heroic role that had been foisted upon him. Almost a year a­ fter he was declared bankrupt, the same crowd that had trashed the anthropology department laid waste to Bob’s ­house on One Tree Hill during another wild party. The tragic news reached me in Australia in a letter from a friend. Last Tuesday week I heard from a fellow I drink with in the pub that Bob Lowry was dead. Since this man said that he’d got the news from John Yelash, I was suspicious, so I rang 32 Gladwin Road in Auckland, and ­after some trou­

Myself Must I Remake    33 ble struck a time when someone was t­ here. Tina, Barry Crump’s ex-­wife, answered: it was, as she said, “all too true.” When I first rang ­there’d been no one home ­because every­one had been at the funeral. I heard ­later that Irene had left him (­after so long, and so much happened to them both!) some two weeks before. It must have been the last straw for Bob: so he took an overdose of sleeping tablets. Now this man we knew and loved so much and thought to be so indomitable is ash at Waikumete. Just like that. It shook me. More than I would have thought; and somehow, for some reason or another, I felt guilty.

Blue Notes

Wrapped in the icy silence of clouds over the Tasman Sea, I could momentarily forget myself. For the space of a few hours, I was out of time. Exhilarated by my first experience of flight and without any knowledge of phenomenology, I scribbled notes on the tension between objective facts and subjective experience. “You know that millions of p­ eople have flown before, but you have never experienced flight ­until now. In effect, you are savoring something akin to the experience of the first aviators. At the same time, you are aware that you ­will never have this experience again. You ­will fly a thousand times in your life, but this par­tic­u­lar experience w ­ ill never be repeated. From now on it w ­ ill only exist as knowledge.” From my temporary high, I was rudely returned to earth and the prospect of finding work in a country where I knew no one and had barely enough money to survive a week. Thanks to my membership in the New Zealand Printer’s Union, I found a job in Melbourne working the night shift on a rotary offset press. Then, ­after several weeks of checking job ads in the Age, I successfully interviewed

Blue Notes   35

for a position with the Aboriginal Welfare Board and was sent to the Mildura region in the northwest of the state to evaluate the housing needs of Aboriginal families living in riverbank humpies or on local rubbish dumps. A few weeks ­later, I was posted to Gippsland, where many Aboriginal families lived in sawmillers’ shacks and worked as roustabouts in the mills. Nowa Nowa was a small mill town. Winter and summer, the odor of eucalyptus mingled with smoke from the sawdust kilns. The bush was filled with the piping of bellbirds, though nearer the mill you heard only the diesel generator and the droning chinngg of the breaking-­down saw. Most of the p­ eople I met had grown up on the Aboriginal station at Lake Tyers. Their parents and grandparents had been settled ­there forcibly at a time when it was believed that Aboriginals ­were doomed to extinction and official government policy was “to smooth the pillow for the ­dying head.” Their three-­ room weatherboard shacks ­were permeated by the smell of damp sackcloth and woodsmoke. Each was furnished with a ­table and chairs, a battered couch, and wire-­wove beds. The floorboards ­were covered with cracked linoleum. ­There was neither electricity nor sewerage. ­People did their cooking u ­ nder lean-­tos and drew w ­ ater from rusty corrugated iron tanks among the trees. “We know we disgust you,” Dulcie said. “You Welfare Board ­people, we know what you think of us, of our ­houses, always trying to straighten us out, make Gubbas out of us.1 It’s always been whitefellas telling us Koories who we are, what we have to do. W ­ e’re sick and tired of being told w ­ e’re black boongs, or that ­we’re not Aboriginals ­because we ­don’t know any Aboriginal language, ­because ­we’re half-­caste. ­We’re not half anything! ­We’re ­people, ­we’re black ­people! What we call ourselves is our business. You call yourself what you want, but ­don’t tell us who we are, how w ­ e’re supposed to live!” Dulcie always looked angry, even ­after ­she’d given me “a piece of her mind,” as she put it, and apologized b­ ecause she d ­ idn’t mean me personally. If she was not complaining about her leaking w ­ ater tank, which was “more holy than righ­teous,” she was forever berating her neighbors for shambling along the street with their heads bowed as if they had no right to use the local shops or go into the pub. Her maternal grandparents hailed from Lake Tyers, her paternal grandparents from Eden. She lived with a whitefella whose name happened to be the same as mine. They had two kids. About my namesake I knew next to nothing, except how he came to walk with a limp. His foot had been crushed in a logging accident. Unwilling to

36     Worlds Within and Worlds Without

see a doctor, he’d tried to set the broken ankle himself. For his pains, he ended up with a deformed foot, lost his job, and drifted to Nowa Nowa, where he met Dulcie. “The white bloke with the gin wife,” the white mill-­hands called him. He wore a grimy boiler suit and spent much of the day drinking cheap sherry in the bush with his Koorie mates. In fact, since the publican at Lakes Entrance refused to sell liquor to Aboriginals, Mike was their main source of supply. Dulcie had sort of ­adopted me, possibly ­because my name was the same as her de facto’s, possibly ­because I looked as lost as he did, and I often drove to Nowa in the eve­nings to play a few games of Hundred-up or Jackpot with them. Mike always sat out of the lamplight, morose and taciturn, not caring if he won or lost. The booze seemed to send him deep into himself, or to some other wilderness like Nowa Nowa, where he could hide and not be hurt. If Dulcie left the room b­ ecause one of the c­ hildren was coughing or crying in its sleep and I tried to make small talk about the weather or my day’s work, Mike would wince as if I was rubbing salt into a wound, and he’d breathe an audible sigh of relief when Dulcie came back to the ­table and picked up her cards. It was usually late when I left Nowa Nowa and drove my station wagon down to the lake. I’d write up my daily report for the Welfare Board, cook some beans and bacon over a driftwood fire, and go to sleep in the back of the Holden, listening to the wind in the ti-­trees and the thud of distant surf. Each day, I drove along bush tracks, logging roads, and highways, visiting Aboriginal families, helping p­ eople file social security claims, taking sick ­children to hospital in Bairnsdale, and keeping my rec­ord of inescapable misery. 15 June. Floodwater has gone through the bean-­pickers’ huts at Wirtgwirri. I go down to see if t­here’s anything I can do. A w ­ oman sloshes through the mud, hugging her cardigan across her breasts. She brings tears to her bloodshot eyes as she talks to me, dragging on the cigarette I’ve given her and waving a limp hand at the drowned bean fields. “I’m not used to this, Mr. Jackson. I’m decent. I’ve lived at Lake Tyers all my life, but now we have to come h ­ ere. Look!” She gestures at the waterlogged mattress, the suitcase covered with silt, the clothes hung out to dry on the trees. “Look at that and ask yourself, do you think I can get used to that? I’m a self-­

Blue Notes   37

respecting person like yourself, Mr. Jackson. You understand, ­don’t you? You know what this does to you—in ­here!” She pummels her breast with her fist. “We went to Eden for a few days, and when we got back the floods had gone through. Up to the windowsill it was! Look—­you can see the mark. We lost every­thing. When I went into town to get my endowment, I had to wear an old pair of sandshoes. Honest, Mr. Jackson, just having to go up t­ here like that, it does something awful to you. I have to drink. You have to, to keep yourself together.” She gazes out over the desolate fields. “I want to get a live-in job. I’m ­going to help myself. I mean, it’s no use cadging off the Board all the time, is it? ­You’ve got to help yourself—­and believe me, Mr. Jackson, I want to, I want to help myself. I mean . . .” She takes a last pull on the cigarette and throws it away. “Like I told you, Mr. Jackson . . . ​look, you d ­ on’t mind if I bum another one off you, do you? . . . ​if I have to, if I have to live h ­ ere much longer . . .” Her voice trails off and she is choking back tears . . . ​“I’ll drown myself in the creek. I’m not ­going to live ­here and get drunk and Stan go off and leave me all the time. I’m not ­going to do that anymore. I’ve got my self-­respect, like anyone ­else . . .” I give her my pack of Lucky Strikes and a ten-­shilling note and tell her I’ll be back tomorrow with some clothing and bedding. 17 June. Abel Morgan would regularly get drunk on port and meths, staggering home at night along the railway line. It was only a ­matter of time before a freight train rode right over him. This morning, a Bairnsdale cop delighted in giving me a gruesome description of how Abel had been dragged fifty yards along the track, his arms severed, his face scraped off on the ballast. “This time he ­really got smashed!” I turned and walked out of the police station. I had to find Doll Morgan and take her to identify her husband’s body. I touched her elbow lightly and guided her into the hospital. ­People w ­ ere staring at the grief-­stricken Aboriginal w ­ oman. “­Shall I go in with you?” “No,” she said, “I’ll be all right.” ­Later, in the car, she said, “It ­wasn’t him, it ­wasn’t ­really him. It was his clothes. But he was so mangled. I c­ ouldn’t look at him. I c­ ouldn’t bear to look.” I asked if she wanted to go home.

38    Worlds Within and Worlds Without

“No, take me to Sale,” she said. She had relatives t­ here. She d ­ idn’t want to go back to Nowa Nowa. That after­noon, I attended the Magistrate’s Court to plead on behalf of an Aboriginal boy charged with car conversion. It was my first time in court. I was ner­vous. I sat near the back of the courtroom, waiting to be called. The young defendant stood in the dock, eyes downcast. I’d never met him, and the clerk of the court ­hadn’t informed him that a welfare officer was ­going to assist in his defense. The police prosecutor read the charge and a second­hand car dealer was called to the witness stand. I could not stop thinking of Doll Morgan’s distressed face as she stood at the curbside in Sale, wringing her hands and looking desperately up and down the street, unable to make up her mind which way to go. Then I began imagining what Abel must have looked like in the morgue, shrouded in his blood-­stained clothes, with his arms missing and his face erased. I took out my cigarettes and lit up. The magistrate pounded his gavel and bawled, “What is that man d ­ oing smoking in this courtroom!” I was flabbergasted. I w ­ asn’t aware that smoking was prohibited in a courtroom. It ­wasn’t a church. “Remove that man from this court!” Before I could say anything, a cop was manhandling me from the room. “I ­didn’t know you ­couldn’t smoke,” I protested. “I’m a welfare officer. I’m ­here to speak for that Aboriginal boy.” “Oh yeah!” The cop bundled me through the main doors and out onto the stone steps, threatening to charge me with being in contempt of the court. “Then charge me! B ­ ecause I hold your bloody court in deep contempt!” “Beat it, mate.” I drifted away down the street, muttering ­under my breath, and ditched the dossier in a litter bin that read YOUR HERITAGE. KEEP AUSTRALIA CLEAN. 10 July. The gossip about Olga Mainwaring was that her h ­ ouse was always full of blow-­ins, that her kids went hungry and never had shoes or warm clothing, and that she screwed around and spent her benefit on grog. I drove to Genoa and found Olga’s h ­ ouse. In the yard was a rusty truck chassis and a Hill’s hoist. I followed a muddy track to the back door.

Blue Notes   39

Olga’s hair was tousled, her eyes heavy from sleep. She carried a child on her hip whose nostrils ­were gummed up with mucus. When I said I was from the Aboriginal Welfare Board, she frowned and mumbled something to herself. Then she went ahead of me into the dining room and cleared a space on the sofa among piles of crumpled clothes so I could sit down. “You ­can’t get anything dry in this weather,” she said. I took out my notebook and went to work. How many ­people did she have living in the ­house? Where ­were the other kids? W ­ ere they attending school regularly? Did she know that her ex-­ husband was claiming custody of the ­children on the grounds that she was incapable of looking ­after them? I scribbled down her desperate answers. A big mob of relatives had blown in last week. They got drunk and smashed t­ hings up. She ­couldn’t do anything to stop them. The cops had to come and throw them out. “The kids have been sick, that’s why ­they’ve been off school. Ernie d ­ oesn’t ­really give a bugger about the kids. He’s never given me nothink. He just wants them so he can get back at me, that’s all.” A ­couple of days ­later, I was in Melbourne. Olga’s ex-­husband worked as a porter at Flinders Street Station. He spoke of his Aboriginality as if it was some kind of criminal rec­ord. Now he was a reformed man. “I d ­ on’t drink,” he said. “I got me own place. I keep me nose clean. Olga c­ ouldn’t look a­ fter the kids if she tried. She ­can’t even look ­after herself. She’s always got blow-­ ins ­there, white blokes from the mill, parties ­every night. You seen it, the place is a pigsty. You got to cut yourself off. It’s the only way. ­Those black bastards’ll rip you off for every­thing ­you’ve got. You want to keep a job, you got to stay clear of them. That’s what I do—­stay well away.” I filed my report. A few weeks ­later, the court ordered that the Mainwaring ­children be placed in the custody of their f­ ather. I returned to Gippsland. The rain had not let up for days. The coast was invisible for spume, and the smoke from the sawdust kilns had draped the forests in torn sheets. I already had forgotten about Olga and her c­ hildren. At Nowa Nowa, I waited on the narrow veranda, watching the rainwater cut channels in the black earth. I knew Mike and Dulcie w ­ ere home. Why ­didn’t they answer my knocking? Then Mike opened the door wide enough to tell me to fuck off. “­You’re an arsehole, mate,” he said, “and Dulce d ­ oesn’t want to see you.”

4 0     Worlds Within and Worlds Without

I would have jammed my foot in the door and demanded to know what was ­going on had Dulcie not appeared and shoved Mike aside. “You better come in,” she said grimly. The three of us sat around the t­ able. I offered them both cigarettes, but they shook their heads. Their f­ aces w ­ ere full of anger and grief. What had happened? What had I done? Olga was Dulcie’s niece. I had taken away her ­children. Olga had been drunk for days, wandering down the logging roads and along the beach. Now nobody knew where she was. “­You’re young,” Dulcie said. “You ­don’t know us. ­You’re only young. You ­don’t understand.” She said it like a lament for the dead. Rainwater was dripping from the ceiling into an enamel bowl on the floor. Mike got up from the ­table and went and leaned against the door jamb. He stared into space. I knew he was waiting for me to go. “­We’re not once-­upon-­a-­time p­ eople,” Dulcie said. “You c­ an’t take a ­mother’s ­children from her just cos she’s having a hard time of it, just cos her ­house is a bit messy. All the years ­we’ve had our kids taken away, ripped from our bosoms, stuck in white homes. We thought you knew better, we thought you knew us, we thought you cared about us. We thought you was dif­fer­ent.” “I’ll get the c­ hildren back,” I said. “How you goin’ do that? T ­ here’s a court order. How can you undo what’s done? Poor Olga, we d ­ on’t even know where she is. Poor doll, wandering around like that in the rain . . .” She fell s­ ilent as the rain gusted across the iron roof like a flung handful of stones. “I dunno why you bother to talk to the bastard,” Mike said. “He’s young,” Dulcie said. She ­wasn’t saying it to Mike or to me. “He ­doesn’t know us. He’s only young. He d ­ oesn’t understand.” We sat for a long time, the rain pelting down, the lantern spluttering, Mike standing over us with his arms folded. “­There’s always two stories,” Dulcie said, “two sides to every­thing. Always two stories, the outside one and the inside one. You only heard the outside one. You ­didn’t even know t­ here was another story inside that one.” I went back to Melbourne. I did what I could, but the court order was not revoked. I sought out pubs frequented by Aboriginals—­sleazy back bars with

Blue Notes   41

cement floors, tin ­tables and chairs, the beer passed through a hole in the wall so that drinkers in the public bar would never have to see an Aboriginal face. Sometimes I thought of Mike’s stories. I thought of driving north and losing myself in the inland, where the place names ­were all meta­phors for abandonment—­Broken Hill, Oodnadatta, Abminga, Bundooma, Coward Springs . . . At closing-­time, we staggered out on to the street. Match flames flared between cupped hands. Shocks of black hair. Swaying figures. Men kicking the hub caps of parked cars. ­Women with matchstick legs and socks down around their ankles, spitting abuse at passers-by. “Whattaya want? Ya cunt! Ya dead cunt! Fuck off!” Then the cops pounced. “I’m a welfare officer,” I bleated as they pitched me into the Black Maria. “And I’m the fucking Queen M ­ other!” At Fitzroy police station, I lined up with the Aboriginals. The only white. It made no difference. I relinquished my ­belt and shoelaces like every­one e­ lse, and emptied my pockets. I was slung into a cell with three Aboriginal men, none of whom I knew. All night, we huddled u ­ nder thin blankets on the floor. The cell reeked of urine and booze. We could not sleep for the cold and the cops coming in ­every hour or so and kicking us on the s­ oles of our feet, goading us to fight. Along the corridor, a w ­ oman wailed wearily, “Ope the door, ope the door, ope the door.” In the morning, we ­were taken into the court. I found myself standing next to Carl. I asked him what would happen. “Plead guilty,” he said. “If you plead not guilty, you have to wait a month for a court. Maybe wait in jail.” The charge was Drunk and Disorderly. “Guilty,” I pleaded when my turn came. “You ­will address the court in the proper manner!” “Guilty, your honor.” “Convicted and discharged. Next!” ­After reclaiming my ­belt, shoelaces, and car keys, I walked out into the daylight, blinking with disbelief. The Aboriginals w ­ ere waiting for me in the park across the road. I joined them and we pooled what money we had. Carl, Ned, Jock, and Danny wanted to buy some takeaways and grog. I was content to sit and watch a group of Chinese ­women ­doing tai chi.

42    Worlds Within and Worlds Without

“When ya g­ oing back to Gippsland?” Ned demanded. “I wanna lift.” “I’m not sure I’m g­ oing back.” “­You’re a proper welfare officer now,” Carl laughed. “You got a conviction.” I laughed too. “Sure,” I said. Then they drifted off, saying t­ hey’d see me around.

To and Fro Within the World and Up and Down Upon It

It was not ­until I was on board a ship between Sydney and Genoa, reading Van Gogh’s letters to Theo, that I began to see how my vacillation between trying to change the world and understand it had brought grief to ­others and myself. One letter was particularly illuminating. Vincent wrote it in the winter of 1880 ­after a period of estrangement from Theo. He is preparing to become an evangelist among the coal miners of the Borinage region, west of Mons, and is anxious about how he can be “of use in the world.” To commit himself body and soul to the poor, he feels he must cut himself off from his ­family, to “cease to exist” for them. He neglects his appearance, goes hungry and cold, and gives the ­little he has to peasants and workers. But who is helped by this self-­ abnegating sympathy? What good can come of this identification with the oppressed? Vincent feels imprisoned and melancholy. Thwarted in his efforts to alleviate the misery of humankind, he ends up trying to annihilate his own suffering by identifying with the suffering around him. But no one is helped by this; nothing r­ eally is changed. In this act of martyrdom, the martyr simply

4 4    Worlds Within and Worlds Without

has made his guilt dis­appear by a sleight of hand, donning the sackcloth of ­those he had set out to save. Vincent’s letter helped me see that my identification with Aboriginal ­people was not born of an aspiration to improve their lot but of a desire to bear witness to their lives. Quite simply, it was not in my nature to be a social activist. Just as Vincent’s zeal to alleviate the suffering of the peasants and miners was gradually eclipsed by a passion for painting peasant life, I was discovering my calling as a writer. From Genoa, I took the overnight train to Paris, arriving at dawn the day ­after the deaths of Edith Piaf and Jean Cocteau. ­After buying a plan de Paris at a kiosk near the Gare du Lyon, I walked west along the Seine, past the zoo, t­ oward the Latin Quarter. Though almost penniless, I was feverish with excitement. I was fi­nally where I thought I belonged. That my literary hero Henry Miller had left Paris in 1940 and Blaise Cendrars, whose books I was now reading in the original French, had died in 1961—­the same year as Céline and Hemingway—­were facts I chose to ignore. When y­ ou’re twenty-­ three, truth is poetic. And yet, despite the poetic license in Miller’s Tropics or the autobiographical novels of Cendrars, ­these authors ­were dedicated to writing with immediacy and transparency. To this end, literary conventions and moral considerations ­were cast aside. George Orwell compared Miller to Jonah “inside the w ­ hale.” But it was precisely Miller’s Rabelaisian gusto, his happy knack of immersing himself in the stream of everyday life without the slightest urge to create an orthodox narrative or reach any conclusion, that captivated me. “The truth is,” Cendrars notes, “few ­people know how to live, and ­those who accept life as it is are even rarer.”1 It was a windless autumnal morning, the sun shining but the air already cold. The leaves on the plane trees w ­ ere brittle and rusty. T ­ here was a mulch of fo­liage on the damp pavements and footprints of petanque players on the chalky paths. On the boulevards, waiters in long black aprons w ­ ere setting up t­ables and wicker chairs, and the air was filled with the smell of chrysanthemums, Gauloises cigarettes, and fresh coffee. I strolled along the quais, browsed in Shakespeare & Co, tasted my first espresso, ate my first croissant, and sought out neighborhoods that ­were familiar from my reading. Armed with a copy of Cendrars’s Trop C’est Trop that I bought in a bookshop near the Sorbonne, my first port of call was 216 rue Saint-­Jacques.

To and Fro Within the World and Up and Down Upon It    45

­ ere, Cendrars had lodged when he was my age, designating the Hôtel des H Étrangers, which stood on the site in 1910, his true birthplace. The quarter where Cendrars came into his own had older associations, too. Sharing a room with his f­ uture wife, Féla, and translating letters and documents for a pittance, Cendrars reveled in the coincidence that Jean de Meung had composed his thirteenth-­century masterpiece The Romance of the Rose in the same h ­ otel, and that, moreover, François Villon and Restif de la Bretonne, the two writers with whom Cendrars identified at this time, both had lodged ­there. When you are on your own and new to a city like Paris, it is impossible to be still. The streets are obsessional. You walk them from daylight u ­ ntil long ­after dark. You collapse onto a sagging bed in an attic room but cannot sleep. It is not the noise of the street four floors below but your remoteness from all ­those other lives that fills you with envy and despondency. In a cheap notebook, you rec­ord your misgivings and memories. You are determined to spend tomorrow looking for work yet know it w ­ ill be no dif­fer­ent from ­today. And all the while, you are intoxicated by this sense that you have fi­ nally found a place where you belong—­the students filling the sidewalk cafés along the Boul’Mich, the smell of Moroccan couscous and Balkan charcoal-­ grills, coal barges chugging upriver, the autumn sun on your face as you forage among the bookstalls along the quais . . . Eating baguettes and gruyère, I lived like a pilgrim. One day, I walked to Clichy in search of the Ave­nue Anatole-­France where Henry Miller completed writing Tropic of Cancer and began Black Spring, sustained by the belief that if Miller had overcome penury and made it as a writer h ­ ere, so, too, would I. But Miller’s Paris had been reinvented many times since he lived ­there. Now, it was Miles Davis’s turn, and Juliette Gréco’s. Now bebop and existentialism defined the moment with buzzwords like angst, mauvais foi, ennui, l’absurde, and chic . . . ​words I picked up in passing and filed away for ­future use. One day, having wandered south of Montparnasse, I suddenly recognized a ­couple of street names . . . ​rue d’Alésia, rue de la Tombe-­Issoire . . . ​and stumbled upon the Villa Seurat where Miller was living when Tropic of Cancer was published in 1934. It was ­here, at number 18, that Miller and Cendrars first met. For me, at least for the moment, it was the end of the road, and that night I took the boat train to ­England.

4 6    Worlds Within and Worlds Without

Crossing the Channel via Dieppe-­Newhaven, I derived some consolation from the knowledge that Henry Miller had once travelled this same route. But as the lights of Dieppe vanished into the darkness and salt spray and rain lashed my face, the full force of my destitution overwhelmed me. In Paris, I had walked the streets in a dream. In London, the streets exuded a dankness that seeped into my bones, weighed me down, and brought me to the edge of despair. A ­ fter sleeping rough in the Embankment Gardens for two nights and drifting through the city hungry and hallucinating, I happened on a Welfare Office for the Homeless, where I received vouchers for food and two nights’ lodging. As fate would have it, the man who interviewed me was intrigued by my Australian experience and university background and invited me to apply for a vacant position as a welfare officer. Within a week, I was handing out vouchers for a bed in a Salvation Army hostel and a meal in a transport café and recording the life stories of the dossers who found their way to our office ­under the Hungerford Bridge. It was not long before their experiences so enthralled me that I began to entertain the idea of writing a sequel to Jack London’s The ­People of the Abyss, an account of his experiences sleeping rough and staying in work­houses in the East End in 1902. Even t­ oday, I have vivid memories of the vagrants who shared their stories with me. James Burnside, with his epilepsy, psoriasis, and naive optimism. “When I land a job, I’ll buy some decent clothes and get back to being a chef again.” Or blind Lilian Goodgame and her deaf companion. She spoke for him and cared for him as though he w ­ ere her child, and he, in turn, steered her through the crowded streets. She wore a woolen coat with a cheap brooch pinned to the lapel. Her thick-­lensed spectacles magnified her lifeless eyes. Or Mary Overland, encrusted with dirt and oppressed by unmitigated sorrow. She used to be a nurse. One eve­ning, she came home ­after her night shift was cancelled and found her husband in the toilet being fucked by a transvestite. In a state of shock, she walked out of the ­house and kept on walking. She never went back. She had not seen her c­ hildren for seven years. She was obsessed by her own degradation and shame—as though she had wronged him. “It’s too late now,” she told me. “I’m too embarrassed to get in touch.” The remorse of the dossers intrigued me, their abjection and self-­lacerating guilt. A few of them celebrated their freedom, telling me that they owned nothing and w ­ ere beholden to no one. But I w ­ asn’t fooled. You could see it was all a mask, a desperate attempt to feel ­free by ­doing unto themselves what ­others had done to them.

To and Fro Within the World and Up and Down Upon It    47

My sympathy for t­ hese individuals led me to share my meager wages with them and, on one occasion, to spend a night in the Camberwell Reception Centre in an effort to understand why so many dossers preferred sleeping ­under the arches to the routines of a “spike.” It did not occur to me that I was ­doing ethnography, but how ­else might one describe this experiment in participant-­observation? You w ­ ere admitted in the eve­ning. On entering, you w ­ ere directed into a changing room where you ­were ordered to strip naked. Your clothes ­were then taken away for fumigation. Next, you received a blanket and a mug of milky tea and directed to the dormitory. It was like a factory floor from which the machinery had been replaced by row upon row of narrow cots. You sat ­there, wrapped in a blanket, cold, without privacy, unnerved by the bronchial coughing of broken men and the occasional foul-­mouthed protest of someone who’d gone berserk and had to be ushered away. You slept fitfully if at all. At dawn, a­ fter retrieving your clothes and receiving another mug of tea with some chunks of bread and margarine, you ­were turned out onto the street. Apart from handing out bed and meal vouchers, I would occasionally be sent to Newington to interview war veterans who might qualify for a place in a British Legion home. Many of ­these men had been waiting half their lives for such a chance. Some had been gassed during ­battles on the Western Front in the First World War and could hardly find breath enough to answer my questions. All unburdened their stories as if I ­were the first person ever to listen to them. Some spoke of being demobbed only to find themselves unemployed. O ­ thers, whose nerves w ­ ere shot, would describe their terror when a phone rang, or of waking at night in a cold sweat to find a putrescent head staring at them from the darkness mouthing their name. I was reminded of the way Cendrars speaks of the war in the opening pages of L’Homme Foudroyé—­a book written during the Second World War about the First, ­after a long silence. “And the eclipse that I observed on that occasion was an eclipse of my very being, and I still won­der how I survived that terror about which I have, u ­ ntil now, spoken to no one . . .”2 With my writing at a standstill, I de­cided to try my hand at painting, undoubtedly influenced by my m ­ other’s letters, in which she recounted her strug­gle to paint abstract landscapes and her forays with my f­ ather into wild New Zealand in search of inspiration.3 My own endeavors would, however, be continually frustrated by my landlady, an el­derly French spinster with a passion for Esperanto who seldom changed out of her velveteen gown and

4 8     Worlds Within and Worlds Without

bedroom slippers and kept her thinning hair permanently in curlers. I suspected she had suffered a terrible disappointment in life and had never recovered. Arriving home at night, I would find notes on my bedside ­table, chiding and cautioning me. Dear Mr. Jackson, 1. Please clean your paint spots off the wooden partition. 2. The drawers are only for clean underwear. Not even semi-­clean clothes must be put t­ here. I have given you extra coat hangers and put every­thing in order. 3. Please do not leave your smalls lying around.

At other times, I was enjoined to make my bed ­every day, to put some padding ­under my typewriter (the racket of my writing was disturbing other lodgers), and to desist from using foreign coins in the gas meter. I was about to find somewhere ­else to live when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. I saw the first grim notices scrawled in black crayon on newspaper stands near the Bond Street tube station. Every­one was desperate for details. An old newspaper vendor was consulted as if he ­were a seer. I went down Bond Street and found a pub where ­people w ­ ere clustered around a radio, listening for updates. When I got home, it was late, but my landlady had been waiting for me. She was beside herself with grief. In her eyes, Kennedy had been the hope of the f­ ree world. Kennedy and Esperanto, that is. She asked if I ­wouldn’t mind making her a coffee and sitting with her awhile. She talked for hours among her volumes of Pushkin, her Esperanto texts, and issues of the Peking Monthly. She talked about Brittany, where she grew up. About why she had studied En­glish rather than Rus­sian (her Rus­sian teacher made a pass at her). About the reason she had come to live in E ­ ngland (her En­ glish fiancé was killed in the first year of the war). And, fi­nally, and tirelessly, she talked about Esperanto. If every­one in the world spoke the same language, ­there would be no grounds for ­human misunderstanding, assassinations, or wars. With hindsight, I think I would have shared rather than scorned her idealism, for what is the point of anthropology if it ­doesn’t have something to say about our common humanity rather than simply focusing on our ethnic or cultural differences? If our goal is coexistence, then, surely, the point of depar-

To and Fro Within the World and Up and Down Upon It    49

ture for our conversations would not be the t­hings we disagree on but the ­things we have in common, even if ­these are as banal as showing sympathy to someone who is suffering and supporting someone who is alone, ­because their experience has been or ­will one day be ours. Next morning, Mlle. Parraige knocked at my door and said she wanted to take me to Camden Town market. She had noticed how shabby my clothes ­were; it was high time I dressed in something decent. No sooner had she bought me an expensive Swedish suede jacket, Oxford trousers, and new shoes than I de­cided I would have to find somewhere ­else to live. Iris Murdoch begins the second chapter of ­Under the Net by declaring: “­There are some parts of London which are necessary and o­ thers which are contingent. Everywhere west of Earls Court is contingent, except for a few places along the river.” As if respecting this existential cartography, I found a room in Hammersmith. Unconsciously, however, I was yearning to move as far as pos­si­ble from the En­glish winter and the lower depths. One night, I dreamed I was in India. I had no doubt as to the source of the dream. It belonged to the day the MV Fairstar docked in Bombay, the day I first set eyes upon the East. The experience had affected me as deeply as it had Marlowe in Conrad’s Youth, coming from the sea to a place of “danger and promise,” where “a stealthy Nemesis” lay in wait. India was the opposite of every­thing I had known. Crowded, noisy, and fecund, it held me in thrall. I spent an after­noon wandering around the city before losing my way in the red-­light district around Falkland Road, locally known as the Kamathipura. Street ­after street was lined with cages in which frail girls, like birds, had been sold into slavery for the price of a cassette player or tin roof. Pimps pursued me wherever I turned. “You want jiggajig, Sah? Sahib, sahib, sahib, you like leetle girl? Sah? Yes, Sahib, I can do, Sahib?” To escape the wheedling and pestering, I walked into a cinema and bought a ticket. I was ushered to an upstairs seat and found myself watching a film of the ­great Persian epic of Sohrab and Rustum. I had never before seen an Indian film. Although I c­ ouldn’t understand Hindi or read the Urdu or Ma­la­ya­lam subtitles, I was seduced by the ­music, one song in par­tic­u­lar. Sohrab and his sweetheart are by a river. Sunlight sparkles on the w ­ ater. They are singing to each other before Sohrab goes off to do b­ attle with his f­ ather.

50     Worlds Within and Worlds Without

As I woke from the dream, this song was r­ unning through my head. I ­didn’t want to lose it. I d ­ idn’t want to break the spell. I was convinced that, as long as I held the ­music in my mind, I would be connected to the exotic world I had glimpsed for a moment then lost. I walked out into the London streets and walked all night, singing the song softly to myself so I would remember it. I kept it alive in my head all day as the mist lifted from the river, as trains crashed and racketed above the roof of the welfare office, and tramps came and went with their hard luck stories and stricken f­ aces. Inevitably, the song slipped away, though I found it again forty-­five years ­later on YouTube and also discovered that the vocal m ­ usic for the movie had been pre-­recorded by Lata Mangeshkar, perhaps the most famous playback singer in the history of Bollywood. The song that haunted me was called “Yeh Kaisi Ajab.” It was banal, yet watching the beautiful actress Suraiya lip-­synch Lata Mangeshkar’s quavering vocals, I saw how this ­music and its setting could have bewitched me at twenty-­three, much as Conrad’s Marlowe was bewitched when he first set eyes on the East. I also like to think that this ­music played a part in my decision to accept an offer from the United Nations Association to work as a volunteer with the UN Operation in the Congo (ONUC).

Heart of Darkness

For several years, I had been in limbo. Breaking away, hitting the road, living rough, only to return to the place I set out from to lick my wounds and prepare for another foray into the unknown. But I was increasingly depressed by the realization that, no ­matter how far I traveled from home, my old self went with me, refusing to be sloughed off by the trick of changing my surroundings. As Horace observed, “They change their sky but not their soul who cross the ocean” (Caelum, non animum, mutant, qui trans mare currunt).1 And so, while excited by the prospect of Africa, I feared becoming one of Joseph Conrad’s restive characters, drifting from one remote island or port to another, no sooner arrived than departed—­whether in flight from or in search of something that slipped through the fin­gers of the mind like sand. A burly Dutchman met my flight and drove me into Léopoldville in a jeep. Buffeted by a warm wind off the plain, I scanned horizons that stretched away forever, like the sky. Breathing it all in, I was certain that this was where I had always wanted to be.

52    Worlds Within and Worlds Without

That month, the last units of the UN peacekeeping force w ­ ere pulling out. With only the UN police remaining, groups of armed dissidents began infiltrating the country from training camps across the river. In the waterfront ­hotel where I rented a room, I would wake at night to dull and distant explosions. In the h ­ otel bar, the talk was, by turns, panicked and resigned. One heard the latest news about les plastiqueurs, the rebel advances, the evacuations, and the ineptitude of the national Congolese army. Then came the gallows humor. “Did you hear about the hippo and the mosquito? The mosquito wanted to cross the river but could not swim. So he asked the hippo if he would be so kind as to ferry him across on his back. The hippo hesitated. ‘What’s to stop you stinging me when w ­ e’re halfway across, so that I drown?’ ‘Well,’ said the mosquito, ‘I would drown, too, ­wouldn’t I?’ So the hippo figured he had nothing to fear and set off across the river with the mosquito on his back. Halfway across, the mosquito stung him. The hippo began to flounder. ‘Why,’ he spluttered, ‘did you do that? Now ­we’ll both drown.’ ‘C’est le Congo,’ said the mosquito.” Casting about for scapegoats, the government ordered the immediate expulsion of all Brazzaville-­Congo citizens. Several hundred camped for a week ­under the mango trees by the ferry landing a stone’s throw from my ­hotel, the ­women lethargically cooking manioc and maize meal on charcoal braziers while breastfeeding their infants, the men sitting with their eyes glued to the slow-­moving river and the even slower-­moving over­burdened ferries. The exodus made no difference. Reports continued of rebel groups closing in on the capital. ­Stopped at a roadblock, a Belgian ­woman who had survived the Kinshasa riots four years before told me, “It’s the end. It’s absolutely insupportable. For me it’s the end!” And she began comparing the vari­ous rebel armies in terms of their barbaric proclivities. I should be warned, she said, the Mulélistes in the Moyen-­Congo ­were among “les plus sadiques.” As for me, I could think only of the sadism of the Congo’s colonial administrators ­under King Léopold of the Belgians, not to mention the shambles the Belgians had left a­ fter their precipitous and ignominious departure in 1960. Reminders of the exodus w ­ ere everywhere: boarded-up cafes, abandoned plantations, the rusting hulks of the Otraco river boats, the black-­market trade in ivory from elephants slaughtered around Lac Léopold 11, diamonds from ­Kasai, and cigarettes, liquor, and vehicles smuggled across the river by UN personnel. Indeed, the world in which I moved seemed so burdened by the past that I felt it was inevitable that the cycle of vio­lence would soon began again.

Heart of Darkness   53

Though assigned to monitor UN-­sponsored community development programs in the Interior, I quickly became disenchanted with the ideology of aid and development and wondered how Africa could aid and develop me. At the Stanley Memorial high above the Congo River, with the sky inflamed by the setting sun, my thoughts often turned from the alarmist reports of insurgencies in Kivu and Kasai to my own past, and when the rains came, I retreated to my ­hotel room and wrote a novel as much to prove myself capable of the sustained and lonely ­labor demanded of any writer as to unburden myself of recurring dreams of my grandparents’ early married life ­after their migration from ­England to New Zealand in 1906. I ­imagined that, in leaving what they called “the old country,” they w ­ ere oppressed by nostalgia as well as unsettled by the nondescript town in which they had to make their home. In writing about their separation trauma, I wrote about my own, for was I not both enthralled and intimidated by the vast hinterland out of which the ­great river flowed, and ­were not my dreams of New Zealand reminders of how deeply ambivalent I felt about passing from the life I had known into this new but unknown life that I now associated with Africa? As islands of hyacinth slipped past in the swift-­flowing river, I broke off writing my novel to work on a piece called The Livingstone Falls, conjuring the thunderous and unnavigable stretch of ­water between the Stanley Pool and the lower reaches of the Congo. I cross a fragile and swaying bridge between two islands, buffeted by spray. I greet two ­women who are gathering driftwood, their babies asleep on their backs, their voices drowned by the noise of the river. I find myself in a disused quarry and won­der if I have stumbled on that “vast artificial hole” that Conrad describes in Heart of Darkness, whose purpose was “impossible to divine,” but whose remorseless excavation had cost the lives of countless Congolese, chained together in forced l­ abor and in death. A dead Mamba lies on the trail, an embodiment of that old injustice. I drive back to the city and a café on the Boulevard du Trente Juin. Peddlers show me ivory amulets, carved tusks, bone ornaments blackened with shoe polish, hand-­painted postcards, black market cheese, canned fruit and cigarettes.2

My supervisor at the Département des Affaires Sociales was an En­glishman with a passion for butterfly collecting. One weekend, we drove to a village called Bibwe in the Bas-­Congo. From ­there, we trekked to the forested slopes

54     Worlds Within and Worlds Without

of a small mountain—­Pic Mensi. The En­glishman laid out his baits in a forest clearing—­fermented mangoes mixed with his own feces. Then we watched and waited as rare blues, ­every bit as brilliant as the ultramarine win­dows of Chartres Cathedral, fluttered through shafts of sunlight before settling ner­ vously to feed. Such beauty on a piece of shit! The En­glishman netted several and showed me how to ­gently squeeze the life out of their bodies before transferring them to a collection box. Each one, he explained, was worth a small fortune on the Eu­ro­pean market. Another piece of the Congo turned to profit. We camped that eve­ning on a grassy plain near the mountain. As night fell, a young man passed up the track, holding a thumb piano and playing a tune that seemed to mingle with the stars. In the ­middle of the night, I woke to hear an animal splashing across a stream and crashing into the forest beyond. Unable to sleep, I walked out into the grassland and lay on my back, looking up at the stars. I was ecstatically happy. And yet, when I contemplated the conditions that had made that moment pos­si­ble . . . ​the En­glishman’s passion for butterflies whose beauty seemed less significant than the price they would fetch in Brussels, the fruit pulp and fecal ­matter he had so carefully prepared to capture them . . . ​and the sheer contingency of ­things . . . ​ the swallowtails that survived his net b­ ecause they had no value, the lives of insects sustained only for as long as it took to breed, and the myriad ants gutting the fallen bodies, tearing the veiled wings, along the forest trail . . . ​ all this conspired to suggest that my happiness had been won at someone ­else’s expense and that, simply by being in the Congo, I was participating in and, perhaps, perpetuating a history of terrible wrongs. Not long ­after my excursion to Pic Mensi, a dusk-­to-­dawn curfew was imposed in Léopoldville. At ONUC headquarters, several “nonessential” personnel packed up and flew back to Geneva or New York. Travel outside the city was banned. Some of the Haitian stenographers at Le Royal responded to the curfew by throwing all-­night parties. It was fun while it lasted. A welcome distraction. I would drive my jeep home at dawn. P ­ eople would be walking along the side of the road with basins of manioc, firewood lashed with lianas, and bundles of clothing balanced on their heads. For a moment, Africa re-­enchanted me, and I wanted to drive without stopping, as far into the interior as I could go. I had a companion for a while. A girl I met in a nightclub called Le Carousel. Une fille de joie. We would spend the eve­nings drinking and

Heart of Darkness   55

dancing in the h ­ otel bar and the nights at cross-­purposes. I tried to persuade Sophie to take me on a visit to her natal village, but her life was off limits to me, like her real name. Then I met Dominique at one of the Haitian parties, and thought I was in love with her. But love was as elusive as the interior I yearned to see firsthand, the village worlds I longed to enter, the rites I wanted to see, the masks I wanted to try on, the drums I wanted to hear. Dom was French and married to an entrepreneur. They had an apartment in Parcembise, the suburb inhabited in colonial times by Léopoldville’s élite. Its streets w ­ ere shaded by jacarandas. Villas ­were enclosed by high walls, topped with broken glass and barbed wire. B ­ ehind wrought-­iron gates, guard dogs bared their fangs, salivated, and barked at Congolese passing up and down the street. The air was scented with frangipani and bougainvillea. I could not get used to the contradictions. The beauty and order whose price was such insufferable in­equality. The civilizing mission that masked racism, vio­lence, and madness. How could I be in love with someone whose lifestyle was like a studied insult to the servants who made it pos­si­ble? How could I attend the cocktail parties at Dominique’s when the man who served us drinks had to support his f­ amily on the pittance he was paid? How could I stand in the same room as the gangly Australian complaining about the roadblocks, telling us that the Congolese had been in the trees so long that they all wanted to be branch man­ag­ers? How could I give friendly pats to the dog that had been trained to fly at the throat of any and ­every black man? And how could Dom re­spect a husband who was ­doing every­thing in his power to obstruct her ­brother’s marriage to his Rwandan fiancée? Though I had been drawn into this social milieu on account of my whiteness and my work, I, nonetheless, tried to stand apart from it. Like Sophie, I suppose, keeping her thoughts, her ­family, her name to herself. It was about this time that the Congolese prime minister Moïse Tshombe hired an Irish-­born mercenary, “Mad” Mike Hoare, to lead a group of 300 South African mercenaries against the rebel Simbas in eastern Congo. Though the rebellion was momentarily and violently suppressed, it took a terrible toll. As the mercenary columns drove along laterite roads between tall brakes of elephant grass and through remote villages, they made no attempt to discriminate between friend and foe. An African was a savage: stupid, ungovernable, and untrustworthy. And so the mercenaries opened fire on whoever hindered their pro­gress, was seen as a potential threat, or simply happened to cross their path.

56    Worlds Within and Worlds Without

With Kasai “pacified,” I was dispatched to the region on a reconnaissance tour, to see ­whether any ONUC proj­ects had survived the insurgency. On the C-130, I was the only passenger. Far below, the shadow of the aircraft was tugged across gulches and grassland. I made out red dirt paths, thatched ­houses, gardens of manioc and maize. Our cargo comprised bales of chicken wire and a Volks­wagen Beetle, eye-­bolted to the floor. Whenever the plane dropped into an air pocket, the VW was thrown violently upward in its chains. I flicked through my supervisor’s notes on the community development proj­ects she wanted me to check out. Sunlight streamed through the win­dow, and I began to fall asleep. Then I was jerked awake as we descended through raincloud and unstable air. The airstrip was in shadow. Tufts of grass sprouted from cracks in the tarmac. T ­ here ­were no signs of life. We unloaded the VW. The Swedish pi­lot filled it with petrol from a forty-­ gallon drum. I climbed into the car, switched on the ignition, and the engine spluttered reluctantly into life. As I drove off, the pi­lot gave me a perfunctory wave before ducking ­under the wing of his aircraft and disappearing. In the city, the silence was unearthly. I found the Imokasai building and parked the VW. ­There ­were playing cards strewn over the foyer. A radio crackled with static. From time to time, a voice broke through with news from Léo or E’ville. Sitting in front of his receiver, headphones hanging around his neck, the UN radio operator squinted through cigarette smoke. “It d ­ oesn’t sound too good,” he said. “The rebels are moving back into Lusambo.” He said he was ready to destroy the radio equipment and move out at a moment’s notice. In the next room, I found the UN Chief of Area Operations drinking percolated coffee from a plastic cup. “It’s fuckin’ crazy,” he drawled. “You ask for fuckin’ supplies and they send you fuckin’ chicken wire! What the fuckin’ hell am I supposed to do with chicken wire?” He screwed up the consignment notice and tossed it away in disgust. “Is ­there any chance of my getting a jeep?” I asked. “What do you want a jeep for, pal?” “I need to go to Lusambo and check out a proj­ect t­ here. A school.”

Heart of Darkness   57

“You crazy? B ­ ecause the area’s ­under ANC control ­doesn’t mean a goddam ­thing. ­They’re all as jumpy as jackasses. Anyway, what the hell are you ­going to do with a school up t­ here? Teach?” I looked around. The boxes of vehicle spares, the copy of Playboy. In the next room, the radio spat and crackled. “So is t­ here a spare jeep I can have?” “Pal, you can have my job and kiss my arse if you want. Sure, you can have a jeep. ­There’s a four-­by-­four in the yard. Ask Hank for the keys. And tell him where y­ ou’re ­going and how long you expect to be gone.” Hank, still squinting through smoke, pointed to a bunch of keys on a hook on the wall. “­Don’t get raped!’ he sang out as I left the room. At the edge of town, the road degenerated into a rain-­eroded track. At the first ANC roadblock, the officer in charge banged the muzzle of his automatic ­rifle down on the metal ledge of my seat. I handed him my laissez-­passer and carte d’identité. He looked at them without a word and signaled for the barrier to be raised. The jeep churned through quagmires and strug­gled uphill. It was hot and clammy. P ­ eople moved into the grass as I passed, steadying their headloads, alarmed. I ­stopped at a village to ask for directions. A small boy tugged at my trousers. “Des pierres, monsieur, des pierres.” He opened his fist and showed me a handful of uncut diamonds. He wanted to exchange them for a cigarette. I drove on, reaching Lusambo at dusk. The school had been destroyed by termites and rain. I sat on the porch of the town chief’s ­house, trying to swallow the chikuanga his wives brought me to eat . . . ​“lumps of some stuff like half-­cooked dough, of a dirty lavender color . . . ​wrapped in leaves,” as Conrad described it in Heart of Darkness. A man approached. His clothes w ­ ere filthy and ragged. His bare feet w ­ ere like charred wood, the toes unsightly stumps. He dumped a bamboo creel and two traps on the porch at my feet. “Monsieur?” he said. He pulled a strip of liana from the neck of the creel and dragged out a dead porcupine. He turned the porcupine over. One paw was mangled and bloody. Its two, sharp, rat-­like teeth jutted upward.

58    Worlds Within and Worlds Without

I reached down and touched the inert body. It was cold, like the rain. “Monsieur?” he said again. For days, I drove down deserted roads through brakes of elephant grass, the bush swathed in mist. As I saw it, the UN’s development program was ­little more than a new mask for what Conrad had called the “civilizing mission.” Like Kurtz’s vainglorious enterprise, it simply disguised and euphemized Eu­rope’s long-­standing desire to control Africa’s wealth, and I found it hard to rid my mind of King Léopold’s savage dominion—­the amputations and castrations as punishment, the millions enslaved or shot in the course of Belgium’s quest for rubber, gum opal, and ivory. As a volunteer worker, I should not, perhaps, have felt so deeply implicated in this wretched history, yet without my disquiet, this history may have claimed me. In Elizabethville, I checked into the H ­ otel Léopold II, with its anachronistic balconies, deserted dining room, and thin Corinthian columns that recalled a regime that had gone for good. Over the city, thunderheads w ­ ere massing. P ­ eople walked past me on their way to the market. A group of w ­ omen moved slowly down the center of the road, keening for the dead child they ­were carry­ing on a wooden litter. As the first heavy drops of rain pattered down through the pendulous flowers of the jacaranda trees, the storm light became tinged with lilac. I felt strangely ­free, as if the Congo’s bloody strug­gle for in­de­pen­dence had been, obliquely, my own. But as with any revolution, the new is never ushered in without the old being ruthlessly excised and destroyed. For an individual, rebirth is an ordeal to be endured, a social death. Old ties are cast away, one turns one’s back on one’s parentage and one’s childhood. Bridges are burned, and t­here is no turning back. This is no less true for a country attempting to radically reinvent itself. The old must be erased if the f­ uture is to arise. So declared Chrisophe Gbenye when he ordered the execution of every­one who was literate or had worked for the Belgians: “We must destroy what existed before, we must start again at zero with an ignorant mass.” Like Pol Pot in Cambodia a generation l­ater. The trou­ble with revenge is that it binds one ever more tightly to the past that one is determined to leave b­ ehind. Vengeance is not revolution. Revolution ­frees us from our thralldom to the past by inaugurating a new kind of relationship with it. Not long before leaving Kasai, I was invited to spend a few days with a group of Franciscans at a former Belgian coffee plantation they had brought

Heart of Darkness   59

back into production with the assistance of twenty to thirty young Baluba men, all of whom had lost their parents and families in Kasai’s bloody strug­ gle to secede from the Congolese state. Each day, we worked. At night, we filled the large, barely furnished living room of the old Belgian homestead and watched movies (I remember Jean Marais in Le Bossu) or talked. I experienced a camaraderie I had seldom known before. One night, I went down to the Lulua river with some of the young Congolese to watch the hippos come ashore. As darkness fell, the black grassland was suddenly filled with the shimmer of fireflies, as if stars had disintegrated and fallen to earth. Then we heard the hippos clambering up the muddy slipways along the riverbank. Dark holes in the glimmering, fallen sky, they moved about as if unaware of our presence. Another night, rummaging about for something to read, I found an uncut copy of Claude Lévi-­Strauss’s Les Structures Élémentaires de la Parenté, and read with growing fascination about the rules of reciprocity that underlay all ­human interactions. ­These revelatory passages resonated with the kinship I felt for the refugees with whom I was living and working. I felt I had fi­nally found my path.

Transitions

I used to think that my years of wandering and disorientation ­were the result of some flaw in my character. Why c­ ouldn’t I be like my peers, confidently pursuing their goals in life and accepting the world into which they w ­ ere born? What was the source of my dissatisfaction? What was wrong with me? I now know that it is as fruitless to blame oneself for one’s failings as it is to blame one’s surroundings. The relation between the world within and the world without is uncertain; each partly determines the appearance of the other, and life is a dynamic interplay between being an actor and being acted upon. While I did not feel at home in the provincial town in which I grew up, I constantly return to the landscapes around it, in my imagination and in my poetry. And though I rebelled against academic conventions, repudiated Aboriginal welfare policies in Australia, and railed against foreign interventions in the Congo, ­these experiences ­were the base metals from which my worldview was forged. When I left the Congo, I felt sure I had found my path. But certainty is as transitory as doubt, and four years of detours and digressions would pass before I returned to Africa to begin fieldwork for my doctorate at Cambridge.

Transitions   61

Even my repudiation of aid and development work was far from straightforward. ­After returning to Léopoldville from Kasai, I had been summoned to a conference in Le Royal—­the apartment building the UN had commandeered as their center of operations. The newly appointed head of ONUC’s Département des Affaires Sociales was disturbed by reports he’d heard of my criticisms of the proj­ects to which I had been assigned, and also with my association with the Franciscans. He gave me a choice between “buckling down and justifying my existence” or returning to ­England. I admitted to having become disenchanted with the UN mission, which I regarded as a covert extension of Amer­i­ca’s Cold War against Soviet influence in Central Africa, and mentioned the discrepancy between the proj­ects that existed on paper and the real­ity on the ground, but I had lacked the courage to quit. Now that my fate was being de­cided for me, I rued my moral inertia. It was my first taste of bad faith, of how readily we allow o­ thers to choose on our behalf only to blame them when the consequences prove disastrous. A ­couple of days l­ ater, Joost Kuitenbrouwer, who had picked me up from Ndjili when I flew in from London ten months ago, dropped me off at the airport. As I entered the terminal building, I was surprised to run into Mrs. Gifford, whose husband had terminated my contract. She was on her way back to ­England. Her ­children ­were in a boarding school ­there, and she was ­going to visit them. I had met her briefly at a cocktail party when she and her husband first arrived in Léo. She appeared to be sympathetic to my desire to live closer to Congolese ­people and not impose Western values on them, and she seemed to have a genuine, if maternal, interest in my welfare. Now, with a long wait for our Sabena flight, we fell into conversation. I was curious to know why her husband was not ­there to see her off. She said she was aware of the circumstances that had led to my abrupt departure and she apologized for her husband’s insensitive ­handling of my situation. “What w ­ ill you do now?” she asked. “I would like to return to Africa in some dif­fer­ent capacity. Not go prying into places where I have no business to be.”1 It was soon evident, as we talked, that Mrs. Gifford shared my misgivings about the kind of work to which her husband had dedicated himself. My first thought was that Mrs. Gifford was, like me, skeptical about foreign interventions in the affairs of poor nations, or the manner in which Euro-­American

62     Worlds Within and Worlds Without

and Soviet interests had turned Africa into a Cold War conflict zone. But her criticism was more personal, and I was taken aback that she should confide to a twenty-­four-­year-­old stranger her disillusionment. Before their posting to the Congo, the Giffords had spent several years in Cyprus, also with the United Nations. During this time, their two older ­children ­were in an En­glish boarding school, but the two younger ­children, age four and six, had been with them in Cyprus. “We are both Christians,” she said. “In fact, we met at a church social. But I am afraid we differ in what our faith requires of us. For my husband, it demands unconditional devotion to the wellbeing of ­others, even to the extent of taking refugee c­ hildren into our own home, regardless of the health risks to our own ­children. It may be that I have never fully understood Christ’s example. But ­there is a limit, especially for a ­mother, to what she can give ­others without compromising her own ­children. Even sending our two ­daughters to boarding school was, for me, an act of abandonment. Our sensitive, vulnerable seven-­and eight-­year-­old girls, packed off to E ­ ngland filled me with such guilt. But my husband was, and remains, adamant. It ­will do them no harm. He was sent to boarding school at the same age. It toughened him. It prepared him for the work he now does for the greater glory of God. But tell me, ­Michael, is God’s glory greater than the happiness of a child, or the bond ­between a m ­ other and her ­daughters?” I was too young to have faced this moral quandary. The question was beyond me. Mrs. Gifford saw my difficulty. “I am so sorry. What am I ­doing, offloading my tribulations onto you? You have enough to worry about. How thoughtless of me.” We w ­ ere sitting on an upholstered bench. A d ­ ying aspidistra, an unswept parquet floor, and a slow-­moving ceiling fan provided a tawdry backdrop to what was now happening around us. Huddled in a group, ­silent, unobtrusive, and shell-­shocked, ­were thirty or more nuns recently rescued by Belgian paratroopers from the rebel-­held city of Stanleyville. Also distracted, Mrs. Gifford looked at the refugees and felt ashamed. “What they must have been through,” she said. I envied them. I had seen only the aftermath of war. And I, too, felt ashamed that I was leaving the Congo unscathed, that I had avoided my baptism of fire.

Transitions   63

I told Mrs. Gifford of my journeys to the interior. I cannot remember how she responded, though I think I know why I confided in her. My experiences echoed her own. It was my clumsy way of telling her I understood her dilemma. Had I known, at this time, of George Orwell’s essay on Gandhi, I might have mentioned it. For the seeker a­ fter goodness ­there must be no close friendships and no exclusive loves. Close friendships, Gandhi says, are dangerous, ­because “friends react on one another” and through loyalty to a friend one can be led into wrong-­doing. This is unquestionably true. Moreover, if one is to love God, or to love humanity as a ­whole, one cannot give one’s preference to any individual person. This again is true, and it marks the point at which the humanistic and the religious attitude cease to be reconcilable.2

If it came to a choice between a close friendship and an abstract princi­ple, I knew which I would opt for. We did not board the aircraft together, or sit together, or seek each other out at Le Bourget to exchange addresses. I remember the throng of reporters and cameramen trying to interview or photo­graph the nuns and priests who had been rescued from Stanleyville. I remember the sudden cold, my regret at having left the Congo, and the long taxi r­ ide to my old h ­ otel at 8 rue de la Harpe in the cinquième. From Paris, I went to ­England for a ­couple of months, thence to Greece where I taught En­glish to Polytech students. On returning to New Zealand, I had vague thoughts of working in Māori welfare but, in the course of an awkward interview, I was informed that Māori ­were not to be compared to Aboriginals or Africans. My ­limited experience of Māori affairs and my lack of fluency in te reo also counted against me. I began to entertain the idea of ­going to Vietnam as a war correspondent, but knew it was another distraction, another escape. When I met Pauline, all ­these possibilities ceased to exist for me. But love is as liberating as it is binding, and it took me some time before I accepted what it means to give oneself wholly and unreservedly to another. I felt our meeting had been predestined, and I told her how I had hitchhiked from Elizabethville to the border between Northern and Southern Rhodesia only to have the white immigration officials prohibit me from crossing the Zambezi. With my

6 4    Worlds Within and Worlds Without

passport now bearing a stamp that gave me seven days to leave Northern Rhodesia, I began my long trek back to the Congo. For hours on end, I sat in the dissembling shade of an acacia waiting for a car to pass. The sun beat down. I was parched. Nothing moved in the stony landscape. I picked up a pebble and made it a talisman. Days l­ater, in the last town before the border, looking for something to read, I bought a copy of Rider-­Haggard’s She in a local con­ve­ nience store. It nourished the idea that had taken root in my mind, that I was destined to meet someone who would change my life. Throughout my travels across Eu­rope, I kept the pebble and the book, which I now showed Pauline. I ­don’t think she believed in omens, and she was appalled that I should identify her with the mysterious white queen Ayesha, the all-­powerful “She-­who-­ must-­be-­obeyed,” but the spirit of my story held true. Emotionally anchored, I began to recover the sense of vocation I had felt when recording the grievances of Gippsland Aboriginals, listening to the hard-­luck stories of the homeless in London, hearing a Hindi lyric in a dream, talking with Baluba refugees in Kasai about fetishes and initiation scars, and reading Lévi-­Strauss. I found work as a relief teacher in a Wairarapa High School and hitchhiked back to Wellington ­every Friday to spend the weekend with Pauline. In my f­ree time, I wrote poems about the Congo and an essay on the Congolese painter Albert Nkusu and translated some of the shorter works of Blaise Cendrars.3 In Auckland the following year, I began my master’s degree in anthropology and began applying the princi­ples of structural analy­sis to Māori myth and art.4 Then, having fallen u ­ nder the spell of Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy, I proposed for my master’s thesis a study of the social and psychological impact of literacy on Māori in early nineteenth-­century New Zealand. I wanted to test McLuhan’s hypothesis that technologies of communication determine ­human sensibilities and worldviews. Does the transition from orality to literacy entail a complete transformation in consciousness in which words cease to sing, intellectuality becomes divorced from feeling, the arts of memory atrophy, vision is privileged over all other senses, thought becomes in­de­pen­dent of conventional wisdom, and the reader is alienated from his or her community?5 Many authors argued that oral cultures enshrine a mode of existence in which social life eclipses the life of the mind, like Walter Benjamin who lamented that modernity privileges information pro­cessing over storytelling,6 an echo of Socrates’s conviction that writing is a phantom, undermining memory and poisoning the mind.7

Transitions   65

Rather than uncritically accept t­ hese dichotomies, I sought to trace the dynamic oscillations between foregrounded and backgrounded modes of thought and life, interpreting them situationally rather than essentialistically. Though many Māori ­were momentarily seduced by the mystique of literacy and eagerly disseminated New Testament texts throughout the country, they abandoned the new technology when it proved inefficacious in combating the diseases decimating their population and the colonizers alienating their lands. Having completed our master’s degrees, Pauline and I successfully applied for scholarships to Cambridge, where we arrived at the beginning of Michaelmas term in 1968. Within days, I met my supervisor, Jack Goody, in his rooms at Trinity College and wasted no time in telling him how impatient I was to begin fieldwork. “Where do you propose to go?” Jack asked. “Sierra Leone,” I answered, much to my surprise. During the year I spent in Melbourne, I’d become friends with a Jamaican expatriate and his French-­Canadian wife. Patrick and I had kept in touch, and he wrote me in the Congo to say that he and Monique w ­ ere exhausted from protesting the Vietnam War and fighting racism in Amer­i­ca and ­were contemplating moving to Africa. Where would I suggest they go? For some reason, I suggested Sierra Leone, even though I had no idea where it was. This offhand advice had weighed on my conscience so that, when I blurted out “Sierra Leone” to Jack Goody, I was subconsciously making amends to Patrick. by taking my own advice. It proved to be a fortuitous decision.

II

In Sierra Leone

During my first few months in the field, I, undoubtedly, cut a ridicu­lous figure. Linguistically inept, socially disoriented, anomalous in appearance, and preoccupied by questions the point of which no one could grasp, it was inevitable that I would end up in the com­pany of misfits. But even misfits have stories to tell—­stories that shed light both on the forces that shape a ­human life and the ways ­those forces are suffered, resisted, and re­imagined. Besides, Mamina Yegbe Marah would inadvertently offer me insights into the magical uses of literacy—­the subject I had designated for my doctoral research at Cambridge. Though my research assistant Noah Marah pointed out that Mamina Yegbe was possibly senile and that I should not set much store by what he told me, I felt at ease in the old man’s com­pany and often sought him out at the town chief’s h ­ ouse near the Kabala market, buying him packets of tobacco in gratitude for his tolerance of my stilted Kuranko. “The world began in Mande,” Mamina Yegbe said, alluding to the ­great empire that dominated the West Sudan between the twelfth and sixteenth

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centuries. “But yesterday and t­ oday are not the same. What­ever sun shines, that is the sun in which you have to dry yourself. We are now in the era of the white man’s rule.” He remembered when this era began, before the Cameroon War (World War I), and recalled the names of Palmer and Captain Leigh, who built the barracks at Gbankuma before the British moved to Falaba. He also described the first barracks at Kabala, built on the site of ­today’s town market, and told me when the frontier with Guinea was fixed and when the Court Messenger Force and the Chiefdom Police ­were inaugurated. And he recounted how annual hut taxes w ­ ere paid to District Commissioner Warren—or Warensi, as he was known—­initially two shillings and sixpence, l­ ater increased to five then to nine shillings, and, fi­nally, to one pound five shillings, and one pound ten shillings per head. “In ­those days, ­people ­were happy,” Mamina Yegbe said. “We ­were happy with our government. All the chiefs had their favorite ­music, and whenever the chiefs assembled, the jelibas (praise singers and xylophonists) would play. Chiefs Belikoro, Konkofa, Sinkerifa—­I knew them all.” At the district officer’s compound one morning, I was working through a stack of intelligence diaries and daybooks from the colonial period, hoping to corroborate Mamina Yegbe’s recollections of local history. Around me, the clerks w ­ ere busy with their own bureaucratic chores, filing memoranda, moving dog-­eared files from the “out” tray on one desk to the “in” tray on another, sharpening pencils, or fetching ice-­cold Coca-­Colas for the D.O. Before being permitted to inspect the rec­ords, I had been obliged to submit five copies of an application, all typed, signed, sealed in official envelopes, stamped, and countersigned. It was not long, however, before I was ruing the effort, and my eyes wandered to the whitewashed wall where two wasps ­were adding yet another accretion of moist red clay to their nest. Beyond the barred win­dows of the office, the leaves of an enormous mango tree hung limp in the heat. I closed the daybook and made to go, already anticipating a few relaxed hours talking with Pauline over a ­simple lunch of bread and hard-­boiled eggs. At that instant, two clerks deserted their desks and asked for a lift to the market. As I switched on the ignition, I caught sight of Mamina Yegbe sitting ­under the mango tree, smoking his Bavarian pipe with the hinged metal lid. “Do you want a r­ ide?” I called and gestured in the direction of the market.

In Sierra Leone   71

Mamina Yegbe clambered up into the front seat of the Land Rover beside the clerks. He was wearing an embroidered tunic and a blue silk cap with a tassel. Sitting bolt upright with a smug expression on his face, he clutched a large manila envelope marked in capital letters ON SIERRA LEONE GOVERNMENT SERVICE. The envelope was embellished with ornate signatures and sealed in several places with red wax. It resembled a Saul Steinberg drawing. The clerks ­were clearly amused by the envelope. “What’s the joke?” I asked. The first clerk winked at me, then nodded ­toward Mamina Yegbe, who was gazing straight ahead. The other clerk dodged the question by suddenly recognizing two friends sauntering along the road. “Mosquito!” he yelled. “Heh! Peacecorps!” And he hung his arm out the win­dow of the Land Rover. The thin, gangly youth, who answered to the first description, and his companion, wearing faded jeans with frayed cuffs, lifted their arms to wave, but the dust in the wake of the vehicle enveloped them. ­After dropping the clerks at the market, I sought to satisfy my curiosity about the envelope. “What is it?” I asked. The old man continued to gaze at the road ahead but raised a fin­ger to his lips. He, then, got down from the Land Rover and, without a word, dis­ appeared into a crowd around the kola nut traders. That night, I drove back into Kabala from our ­house at One-­Mile to buy some cold Fanta at Lansana Kamara’s bar. The bar was a shabby and poky corner room that opened onto a veranda and the marketplace. It was furnished with several warped and dusty shelves, a battered deep freeze, and five armchairs with polystyrene foam bulging out through rents in the red vinyl upholstery. The jangling strains of a hi-­life hit issued from a dilapidated rec­ ord player at one end of the bar. “I ­really love you, Fati Fatiii . . .” Lansana Kamara did not particularly like hi-­life tunes, and whenever business was slack, he would get out his rec­ords from Guinea and, with tears welling up in his eyes, listen to the stirring refrains of praise songs from old Mali. On the walls of L. K.’s bar ­were several fly-­specked calendars showing beaming Africans in open-­necked shirts holding aloft ­bottles of Vimto, Fanta, or Star beer. L. K. disdained such drinks. With a lugubrious air, he poured himself another large Martell brandy and a Guiness chaser.

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I bought what I wanted and was about to go when I noticed Mamina Yegbe in the corner, surrounded by several boisterous youths, among them the two clerks from the D.O.’s office. One of them made a remark I did not catch, but it drew a burst of taunting laughter from the o­ thers, and the old man shrank back as if from a blow. I saw that Mamina Yegbe was still holding the big envelope, only now it had been ripped open and bits of sealing wax littered the floor among the beer b­ ottle caps. When the old man saw me, he seemed to regain his composure, but before ­either of us could speak, one of the clerks confronted me with bloodshot eyes and beery breath. “He says it’s from Seku Touré and Siaka Stevens!”1 the clerk roared. “That envelope! He says ­they’ve given him a big country in Guinea and a million pounds cash! He says he’s coming to the D.O. tomorrow to collect it!” Every­one broke into laughter. Then they looked at me, waiting for my reaction. The clerk became irritated. “He says he’s g­ oing to be appointed to a high position in the government!” he shouted, as if I had failed to understand the situation. “It’s all in the letter!” I glanced at Mamina Yegbe, who raised a fin­ger to his lips and smiled ingenuously. I appealed to L. K. for a clue as to what was ­going on, but L. K. simply smoothed his knitted singlet over his enormous belly, lowered his eyes, and took another sip of brandy. The clerk, exasperated by my stupidity, lurched over to the old man, wrenched the envelope from his grasp, and shook out its contents onto the bar. L. K. dolefully moved his glass to one side as his customers pawed at the sheaf of papers, spreading them out so I could see what they ­were. I recognized several old G.  C.  E. examination papers, some official memoranda and letters, and a page from my field notes. I could not think how it had come into the old man’s possession. Stabbing at the papers, the clerk drew my attention to a bundle of advertisements for Surf washing powder. “This is the letter from the prime minister!” the clerk hooted. “­Can’t you see what it is?” I recalled a Volks­wagen Kombi that had turned up outside the market a few days before. A large display packet of soap powder had been fitted to the roof rack, and a loudspeaker blared out hi-­life tunes. Four or five men in sunglasses and pale blue shirts had gone about distributing leaflets and

In Sierra Leone   73

occasionally giving away sample packets of Surf. In the after­noon, the vehicle, still crackling with canned ­music, dis­appeared in a cloud of dust up the road ­toward Falaba. “Yes, I can see what it is.” I knelt to pick up the papers that had fallen on the floor. They w ­ ere already smudged with red dirt from the clerks’ shoes. The jokers appeared embarrassed by this crazy show of sympathy for the old man. They backed out onto the porch, making half-­hearted gibes and clutching their b­ ottles of beer. L. K. stared morosely at his Guiness. “Do you want a ­ride home?” I asked Mamina Yegbe. “Awa, let’s go.” I looked down the unlit street, thinking that the generator had gone again and wanting to say this to Mamina Yegbe. I also wanted to ask the old man, now sitting in silence in the Land Rover beside me, if he still intended to pre­ sent his letter to the D.O. and claim his fortune, but it might have seemed like another taunt. What s­ imple faith we all place in the power of printed words, ­these fetishized markings on a page—­the clerks, this benignly deluded old man, and me! The headlights picked out the mosque and the grove of palms beyond it. “I’m g­ oing to Dankawali on Friday,” I said. Mamina Yegbe made no response. “I’ll come and see you before I go.” In the darkness, the town gave forth the sounds of its invisible life: a dog yelping, a domestic altercation, a radio badly tuned, an inconsolable child crying, a motor scooter spluttering down a potholed lane, the drubbing of an initiation drum. I drew up outside the ­house with the broken veranda where Mamina Yegbe lived. “Ma sogoma yo, good night,” I said, as the old man got down. Mamina Yegbe stood on the roadside in the glare of the headlights. “In the old days, ­people w ­ ere happy,” he said. Then he turned and drifted into the darkness. Almost all his life, Mamina Yegbe lived ­under a colonial regime. He had ­imagined it to be like chieftaincy—­a source of order and benevolent power. If the g­ reat Belikoro could conjure thunderstorms at w ­ ill and slay his enemies with lightning bolts, then surely the British Crown or the presidents of Sierra Leone and Guinea could pay him his due and make good what he was owed.

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The clerks in the D.O.’s office who so mercilessly mocked him w ­ ere no less in thrall to magical thinking. Indeed, it was the maddeningly elusive nature of fortune in the post-­colonial world that compelled them to perform their derision of Mamina Yegbe so publicly. What intrigued me about both Mamina Yegbe and his persecutors was the interplay in their imaginations of two forms of external power; the first associated with chieftaincy, literacy, and the nation state, the second with forces and influences far less easy to pin down. ­These ­were the powers of god, the ancestors, and djinn, of witchcraft and magical medicines, of charismatic leaders like the fabled Belikoro (“Mighty elder”), of fate and fortune. Powers that obeyed their own mysterious logic and could not be fully comprehended, commanded, or controlled. Anthropologists sometimes call such powers “super­natural” or “mystical,” but it is often impossible to separate spiritual and temporal power even in modern socie­ties, and I would become increasingly fascinated by the interplay of t­ hese dif­fer­ent forms of power in ­people’s everyday lives and imaginations. I would hear rumors of a fabulous town called Musudugu (“town of ­women”) that lay somewhere in the hazy savannah regions to the northeast. ­There ­were no men ­there, only ­women, and they ­were in possession of the most power­ful magical medicines and im­mense wealth. In Firawa, I would meet a young man who believed Islam held the key to worldly success. ­After several fruitless months digging and panning for diamonds in the alluvial fields of Kono, Abdulai had returned home, baffled and disappointed. “My hands are empty,” he told me. Some years before, he had consulted a Koranic diviner who had given him good advice. He had then gone to Kono and made enough money to fund his elder ­brother’s pilgrimage to Mecca. Now the same diviner told him that his run of bad luck was about to end, but this was conditional on him sacrificing a sheep to Allah and sharing the meat among his neighbors. But even ­after dutifully following the diviner’s instructions, Abdulai was nagged by doubts, and he asked me if I could explain the cause of his fluctuating fortunes. In 1983, with the country approaching bankruptcy, I would meet Mohammed Fofana, who joined the army as a young man, seeing it as a kind of initiation. “The army gave you discipline, made you a man, made you feel a real force. In ­those days,” he told me, “a soldier was like a white man in the villages; he commanded g­ reat re­spect.” ­After a few years in the military, Mohammed drifted south into the diamond districts. When ­things d ­ idn’t pan out, he be-

In Sierra Leone   75

came more and more dissatisfied with his lot, lambasted the bribery, bias, exploitation, and cronyism he saw in the government, and began to dream of radical po­liti­cal change. Thwarted in ­these endeavors, he sought to bolster his flagging sense of self by transforming himself into an elephant, the totem of his clan. In the course of interviews with students in the Kabala High School during the rainy season of 1970, I discovered that every­one aspired to be a doctor, a ­lawyer, or an engineer, and that none would countenance the idea that even tertiary education would not guarantee them an exalted position or the wealth and prestige that supposedly came with it. The schoolboys wore white gloves and let their fingernails grow long. They spent hours each day laundering their uniforms, lacquering their fingernails, and ­doing their homework, comfortable in the belief that they would never have to farm or strug­gle for a livelihood as their parents had done. Even if you landed a job, as Noah had, teaching in the District Council school in Kabala, you ­were often paid sporadically or not at all, and had to make a farm to feed your f­amily or rely on money your wives earned as traders. Noah spent a lot of his spare time playing checkers with friends. I sometimes thought of that board of painted squares with ­bottle top ­counters as an image of his world. The tried and tested moves ­were no longer paying off, and his hopes dwindling that a mentor or super­natural intercessory might improve his lot. All t­hese fantasies and aspirations alluded to economic, po­liti­cal, and spiritual power, and begged the question as to ­whether it was pos­si­ble to reduce the meaning of any ­human life or lifeworld to a single determinant. One ­thing was clear, however: all power was ambiguous; it could serve self-­ interest or the common weal, cause chaos or create order.

Dankawali

One of my first forays into Kuranko country was a day trip to the village of Dankawali in the section chiefdom of Kamadugu. ­Every detail of this day remains vivid in my memory, including the half hour Noah and I w ­ ere ­stopped at the top of a steep forest track as a troop of olive baboons moved slowly into the bush from a stream at the foot of a steep hill. ­There ­were two or three females in the group, each with several young, and the alpha male stood his ground u ­ ntil they w ­ ere safely off the track. When we drove from the bush on to open savannah, we glimpsed other baboons patrolling the granite ledges of a nearby inselberg, and Noah explained how this was also the abode of djinn. In fact, the first road through the area was completed only in 1961–1962 a­ fter a red sheep was sacrificed to the genii loci. I was to hear much more about the djinn (nyenne) ­later that day. piquing my interest in how Kuranko social consciousness permeated the natu­ral environment so that the lifeworlds of djinn and certain totemic animals mirrored the ­human world in many ways. But before I could begin to satisfy

Dankawali   77

my curiosity, introductions had to be made to the village chief and his big men, and reasons given for our visit. All went well, and I received gifts of kola and a lengthy explanation as to its meaning. It was the first food in the world. The kola was the tree of life in the Garden of Eden, which is why it is the first food a child is given—­masticated and placed in a newborn’s mouth. And it is kola that seals a betrothal. This is also why kola is given to a stranger, to incorporate them into the community and signify a desire for their wellbeing. He or she who neither gives nor receives kola is “not a person.” “We have a saying,” Noah explained, “Nyendan bin to kile, a wa ta an segi, which describes how the nyendan grass we use for thatching bends before you as you walk through it and bends back when you return.” Thus, greetings, goodwill, and gifts move to and fro within a community, keeping the paths open, keeping relationships alive, including one’s relationships with the ancestors. ­After a meal of rice and chicken, the elders took me to a grove of trees along the Milimili Stream, where they recounted how the first chief of Upper Kamadugu became power­ful and prosperous by allying himself with a djinn. Since Moré Musa Kargbo’s time, however, no chief has enjoyed its f­avor, though all have waited for it to reappear and grant its boons.1 ­Every year, a ­sacrifice of a cow or sheep is made to the djinn. Village ­women catch and cook large quantities of fish and bring it with cooked rice to the men before withdrawing. To ensure t­here is no ill w ­ ill or unresolved grievances among the men—­for this would “spoil” the sacrifice and offend the djinn—­kola is split and cast on the ground. If the two cotyledons are odd, then something is amiss (“­woman palaver” or adultery is commonly cited), and confessions enjoined to cool and repair the relationships that have been darkened by mistrust. If all is well, the Sisay, who are joking partners to the Kargbo rulers, proceed to utter incantations (haye) or chant suras to the djinn, before the men eat half the food ­under a large lenké tree that stands at the streamside grove; the remainder of the food is left for the djinn who, I was told, invariably eat it that same night.2 Still in the forest glade, the elders pointed out a site downstream known as Mansa Milimili (Chief Milimili) where twin djinn lived. It was known as Nyenkinanké and assumed the form of a long snake. Upstream, t­ here was an even deeper pool where twin crocodile djinn lived in a stone box beneath the w ­ ater. When a chief or big man was near death, passersby might hear the creaking of the lid as the stone box opened to receive the spirit.

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Not only did the princi­ple of reciprocity govern relations between chiefs and djinn; it informed relations between the living and the dead, rulers and commoners, and parents and c­ hildren. In return for the re­spect accorded them by underlings, powerholders ­were duty-­bound to protect and nourish ­those in their care. But I was curious to know what happened if a parent was negligent or withheld care. What if a chief or big man ignored or exploited ­those who looked to him for protection? What if an ancestor or djinn was indifferent to the sacrifices offered to it? And I wondered how long and how patiently the chiefs of Upper Kamadugu ­were prepared to wait for the reappearance of the djinn who helped Moré Musa in his campaigns against the Kissi and the Sofas in Upper Guinea. That night, as if in response to my questions, an el­derly man called Nonkowa Kargbo recounted a story which, had I been more aware of the ominous effects of President Siaka Steven’s shadow state in Sierra Leone, I might have seen as relevant to understanding both local and national po­ liti­cal relations. Once upon a time, Hare got himself a yam to plant. He showed it to Hyena and asked for his advice on how to plant it. Hyena said, “First boil it, then peel it, then put it in the ground.” Hare did as he was told, but that night Hyena came and unearthed the yam and ate it. So the yam never grew. It w ­ asn’t long before Hare realized he’d been duped. He de­cided to take his revenge. Hare pounded some rice flour (dege), mixed it with honey, and smeared it over his body. ­After lighting a fire and lying down beside it, Hare sent word to Hyena, his elder ­brother, to say that he was ill and that Hyena should come and examine him and tell him if he was ­going to live or die. Hyena came. He said, “What is this stuff all over your body?” Hare said, “It is my sickness. ­Will you taste it and tell me ­whether I ­will live or die?” Hyena licked Hare’s body. “Eh, younger ­brother, this sickness of yours is very sweet!” He kept licking the rice flour and honey from Hare’s body, saying, “Younger ­brother, this sickness of yours is very sweet!” Fi­nally, he said, “Younger ­brother, could you show me how you became so sick?” Hare said, “All right. But you must go home now and return in the morning. Then I w ­ ill show you how I contracted this illness. But before you go, elder b­ rother, can you tell me w ­ hether I ­will live or die?” Hyena said, “You w ­ ill live, and I w ­ ill come and visit you again in the morning.”

Dankawali   79 That night, Hare washed the rice flour and honey from his body but kept it within reach; when Hyena came in the morning, Hare told him it was the residue of his sickness. Hyena ate it up without a word. Hare then said, “Now, come back again tomorrow and I ­will tell you how I contracted this illness.” When Hyena returned the next day, Hare said, “Elder b­ rother, I w ­ ill now show you how I became so ill.” Hyena listened attentively. Hare told Hyena to call his sons. Hyena did so. Hare then told Hyena to have his sons collect some firewood. They did so. Hare said, “Elder ­brother, do you think you ­will be able to endure it?” Hyena said, “Yes, I ­will.” Hare said, “Well, have each of your sons bring a long pole.” This was done. Hare ordered Hyena to light a big fire then jump into the flames. “When you cry, Get me out, get me out!” your sons should use their long poles to push you further into the fire. But when you cry, “Push me in, push me in!” then it w ­ ill be time to pull you out. Do you understand?” Hyena said, “Yes,” and immediately jumped into the fire. When he cried, “Get me out, get me out!” his sons pushed him further into the flames. Fi­nally, when he was good and roasted, he cried, “Push me in, push me in!” whereupon his sons pulled him out. They took him to his h ­ ouse and laid him down ­there. Hare said he would come and see him in a c­ ouple of days. When Hare came to visit Hyena, t­ here ­were flies everywhere. Hyena had begun to putrefy. Hare said, “Something stinks around h ­ ere!” ­People said, “It is Hyena, your elder ­brother. He is very ill.” Hare then said, “Well, this sickness is just like the boiled yam. My elder b­ rother told me to boil and peel it before planting it in the ground. I did what he told me to do, but he came in the night, dug it up, and ate it. Now, if a boiled yam can grow, then my roasted elder b­ rother ­will live!” And with that, he jumped through the win­ dow and was gone. Soon ­after, his elder b­ rother died.

Unaware of Noah’s vexed relationship with his elder ­brother, I innocently asked Nonkowa, through Noah, if elder and younger ­brothers often found themselves at loggerheads in everyday life. Nonkowa’s response was edifying. The elder b­ rother sometimes abuses his authority and neglects the welfare of his younger b­ rothers. The younger b­ rother is often made to run errands, fetch w ­ ater, and summon friends for his elder b­rothers. But the younger ­brother also may seek the support, protection, and friendship of one elder ­brother if another fails him, and younger ­brothers may sometimes outsmart the elders by playing them off against one another. The elders fear the possibility that a younger b­ rother may cause rifts or quarrels among them by telling

8 0    Worlds Within and Worlds Without

one that another insulted him or refused him help. By enlisting the support of a sympathetic ­brother, he can cause dissensions among his elder ­brothers. That is why the elder should not underestimate the younger and why elders look ­after the younger ones. As Nonkowa implied, p­ eople in positions of authority do not always exercise that authority wisely or well, and underlings are sometimes driven to redress situations of inequity or injustice by underhand means. Cunning and disguise not only figure as tactics in everyday life, as Nonkowa observed; they also are motifs in fantasy, dream, ritual, and myth, as the ubiquitous stories of Hare and Hyena vividly illustrate.3 It also was clear that reciprocity was double-­edged: at once a rationale for exchange (an expression of mutual regard) and a justification for revenge (settling a score, getting even). In Kuranko stories, Hyena (Fa Suluku) embodies and parodies established authority. Doltish and inflexible, he allegedly walks head down, mindless of what lies ahead. By contrast, Hare (Fa San) embodies quick-­wittedness and ingenuity. While the purblind elder is wont to abuse his power, the cunning youngster, in the role of trickster, sees that justice is done and the moral order restored. What appear to be s­imple and risible tales of sibling rivalry are ethical commentaries on the recurring dilemma of how to bring vitality and viability to the social order by drawing on peripheral powers that are potentially inimical to it. But how can one be open to the wild and often licentious energies, symbolized by Hare, while preserving the status quo, exemplified by Hyena? Clearly, recourse to antinomian powers, personified by Hare, are justified only when a person in authority has abused his position through fraud, chicanery, or greed. The wild must serve the moral order, not subvert it. Rebellion can be justified; revolution cannot. Already, at this preliminary stage of my fieldwork, I was discovering that ­there was no absolute discontinuity, ­either epistemological or ethical, between the world I was entering and the world I had temporarily left ­behind. While it was tempting to draw a contrast between a “premodern” communitarian ethos and a “modern” individualistic one, the first projecting sociality onto the extra-­human world and the second predicated on clear distinctions between ­things and persons, objects and subjects, ­humans and nonhumans, I sensed deep continuities between my own world and the Kuranko world, evident in a common concern for reciprocity, social justice, and striking a balance between secular and antinomian powers. And yet, when I ponder the repercussions of industrialization and the growth of cities in eighteenth-­century

Dankawali   81

­ u­rope, the Eu­ro­pean colonization of Asia and Africa, twentieth-­century E mass migration and globalization, and the impact of digital technologies and social media in the twenty-­first c­ entury, I ask myself ­whether the impact of modernity on small-­scale traditional socie­ties might one day be reversed and the rural village once again become the most socially ­viable form of ­human life on earth.

Firawa and the Ethnography of Events

A few days before Christmas, Noah and I crossed the Seli River and began our trek to Firawa, Noah’s natal village. Our path had been trodden by generations of bare or sandaled feet. The air was filled with filigrees of burned elephant grass that settled on the path like colons and commas, punctuating our way. Occasionally, the conical thatched roofs of a farm hamlet appeared above the tawny grassland, and we met men and ­women toting bundles of firewood or sacks of rice on their heads. They exchanged greetings with Noah while peering at me from beneath their headloads. When Noah was asked who I was, he told them I was an old pen friend. As for me, I was in a state of trance, as if passing from one incarnation into another. A succession of grass-­covered plateaus was foreground to the bluish haze of the distant Loma Mountains. Saurian rock formations such as I had never seen before ­rose out of the landscape yet appeared to recede as we approached them. Noah said that when a man from a ruling lineage is about to die, you may hear snatches of xylophone ­music borne on the wind, and the creaking of granite doors as the djinn who inhabit the inselberg prepare to receive another soul into their midst.

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On my second night in Firawa, a group of men, w ­ omen, and ­children gathered on the porch of Noah’s ­brother’s h ­ ouse to tell stories. As Noah summarized each story for me, I was struck by recurring scenarios and leitmotifs. A marginalized or maligned individual—an orphan, an oppressed ju­nior wife, a status inferior—­journeys into the bush where he or she is cared for by djinn. Empowered and enriched, the erstwhile victim returns to the village that spurned him or her and receives the recognition or blessings he or she is due. The djinn, therefore, resembled the figure of the daemon in Eu­ro­pean thought: distributors and redistributors of ­human destinies. As the days passed into weeks, I began to understand the ramifications of the contrast between village (sue) and bush ( fira) in Kuranko discourse. The bush was construed as a wild but fecund force field surrounding the settled space of the village. This was not only ­because rice—­the staple of life—­was cultivated in farm clearings in the bush, or b­ ecause medicinal plants w ­ ere gathered and game animals hunted in the bush; movements between town and bush ­were allegories of life itself and called to mind the classical Greek antinomy of nomos (law) and phusis (life). While community coexistence depended on binding l­egal and moral laws, personal fulfillment in life depended on more than slavish conformity to established norms, dutiful role-­playing, or adherence to tradition. Every­one needed to feel he or she was actively involved in making and maintaining the lifeworld to which they belonged. Almost all Kuranko stories involved journeys between town and bush. As such, the moral customs (namui or bimba kan), laws (seriye or ton), and chiefly power (mansaye) associated with the town w ­ ere periodically placed in abeyance and the wild ethos of the bush, associated with animals, shape-­shifters, djinn, and antinomian possibilities came into play. Moreover, Kuranko stories ­were told at night or in twilight zones that lay on the margins of the workaday, waking world. ­There was a close connection, therefore, between the evocation of antinomian scenarios, states of dreamlike or drowsy consciousness, and the narrative suspension of disbelief. Kuranko tilei (fables, folktales, fictions) played with real­ity and entertained possibilities that lay beyond convention and custom. Perhaps this is why I was so entranced by them and recorded so many: they spoke obliquely to my own search for a path in life and to the ethnographic proj­ect itself, also a venture into the unknown that holds out the promise of rethinking one’s familiar world from an unfamiliar point of view. In Firawa, I began to realize that what­ever knowledge I might wrest or distill from my sojourn ­there was less impor­tant than the change that might be

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wrought in myself, and although it was ironic that I had found my way to a place so many young Kuranko men ­were bent on leaving, we all shared the same urge to go beyond the world in which we had been raised in order to one day return home, materially, spiritually, or intellectually transformed. My fieldwork reflected the rhythms of dry season village life rather than any academic agenda, and while every­thing was grist to my mill, certain critical events helped bring into focus some of the ideas that would subsequently inform my writing.

Event 1: Apollo 11 A few months before Pauline and I left E ­ ngland for Sierra Leone, NASA succeeded in putting two men on the moon. I sat up all night at my Cambridge college watching the tele­vi­sion coverage, and by the time the two bulky, silvery-­gray figures of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin fi­nally ascended the ladder to the LEM and “achieved re-­ingress,” dawn was breaking. When we arrived in Sierra Leone, the country was in the grip of a conjunctivitis epidemic. Locals called the eye disease Apollo, though when a second wave of the epidemic swept the country, a distinction was made between Apollo 11 and Apollo 12. I was told that the American moon landings had disturbed the dust on the surface of the moon. Just as the sand-­laden Harmattan blows south from the Sahara in the dry season, obscuring the sun and irritating one’s eyes, so this cosmic dust had brought its own peculiar discomfort and disease. Several villa­gers ­were ­eager for me to clarify some of the anomalies in the accounts they had heard of the Apollo missions. Some suspected ­these accounts ­were untrue; no ­human being could travel to the moon. ­Others opined that white men deployed witchcraft to travel vast distances at ­great speed. Still ­others, believing the moon to be no bigger than it appeared in the night sky, asked me to explain how a rocket large enough to hold three men could come to a standstill alongside the moon and allow the men to get out and walk around on its surface. One man demanded to know why the Americans wanted to go to the moon in the first place; what sinister designs and global repercussions did this presage? I had already noted this same suspicion of Americans in Kabala, where p­ eople refused to let Peace Corps volunteers photo­graph them. Anx­i­eties clustered around the rumor that

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photos showing ­women with bare breasts would be used by whites in the United States as racist propaganda for the oppression of African Americans on the grounds that they ­were uncivilized. ­These anx­i­eties reflected an age-­old ­human endeavor to control traffic across the borderlands between familiar and foreign lifeworlds. How could foreign imports (medicines, wives, and commodities like salt, cloth, kerosene, and seeds) enhance one’s wellbeing rather than endanger it? It was not that Kuranko had once lived in splendid isolation, for their history indicated a perennial strug­gle to be open to rather than overwhelmed by Islam, market forces, colonial administrations, and post-­colonial governments. The Apollo stories, like stories of witchcraft, memories of the slave trade, accounts of the Sofa invasions in the late nineteenth c­ entury, and the experience of epidemic diseases, betrayed a deep ambivalence ­toward the outside world. This ambivalence often emerged in my conversations with Tala Sewa Marah, the Firawa section chief. ­Under successive colonial administrations, many Kuranko chiefdoms had been amalgamated, including Barawa, which had been assimilated into the larger polity of Nieni. Although Tala Sewa and his council of elders dealt with infractions of customary law, serious criminal cases had to be tried by the district court (located in Kabala, some thirty miles away). While Tala Sewa was not averse to petitioning the government in Freetown for help in developing his chiefdom—­specifically a bridge over the Seli River and a road that would connect Firawa with the Kabala market— he never seemed comfortable with outsiders. Even with me, the first Eu­ro­ pean to make his home in Firawa, he often appeared baffled when I explained that I had neither the contacts nor the resources to help with the building of the bridge or road. Nevertheless, he welcomed my efforts to speak Kuranko and tolerated my presence in the court gbaré. And I came to admire the dedication and care he showed in his chieftaincy (mansaye). Some days he was in the court gbaré from early morning u ­ ntil late after­noon; at other times, he moved around the village, dispensing advice, expressing concern, settling minor disputes. Once, for example, a hunter broke both his legs when a felled tree pinned him beneath its branches. A local medicine master made splints and advised the hunter what to do to help heal the bones. When the hunter failed to pay the fee, the medicine master sought Tala Sewa’s help. Tala Sewa then “begged” the hunter and contributed to the fee from his own pocket. “A lesser chief would not have dared do such a h ­ umble t­ hing,” the hunter told me. “But Tala Sewa has such

8 6     Worlds Within and Worlds Without

g­ reat humanity [morgoye] that he can do such t­hings and lose nothing of his authority [miran].” H ­ ere, then, was a man who commanded re­spect rather than demanded it, who worked as hard on his farm as any of his subjects, and whose modesty stood in stark contrast to the autocratic and corrupt ways in which chieftaincy was exercised in some other Kuranko chiefdoms at that time. But most of all, h ­ ere was an example in which an ethos of care permeated the sphere of administrative authority, effectively integrating the morality of kinship and the exercise of chiefly power.

Event 2: Noah’s Box During my first weeks in Firawa, my curiosity was piqued by the small flags of white cloth that hung from poles outside ­houses, and the miniature bells attached to some of them. Noah described them as sarake (sacrifices) or kandan li fannu (enclosing/protecting ­things). Like the mysterious objects ­people placed on the lintels of ­houses, tied to fences around gardens or farms, wore around their necks, or sewed into their clothing, they ­were said to seal off vulnerable social spaces from witches and enemies. The bound­aries of individual bodies, h ­ ouse­holds, compounds, villages, and chiefdoms w ­ ere all symbolically protected in this way. Since I was constantly being told that personhood (morgoye) was synonymous with trust and transparency (symbolized by whiteness), I was astonished to find that ­people w ­ ere so preoccupied with social opacity (“white teeth/black hearts”) and with safeguarding themselves against the forces of darkness. What was the source of ­these anx­i­eties and what was the logic under­lying the defensive techniques ­people used to allay them? Despite the traumatic history of the Kuranko ­people (the very name allegedly derives from the Kuré tree, whose bark is so hard it cannot be cut through) and the countless anecdotes men told about faithless wives, scheming ­women, and witches who allowed their coven to enter their ­house and take the life of a sleeping child, fear of the unknown was not always reducible to past events. Neighborliness is not sweet (siginyorgonu ma kin), ­people would tell me, as if resigned to the fact that even the intimate relationships of kinship and friendship often are riven by dissension and distrust. F ­ athers and eldest sons ­were frequently at odds, co-­wives competed to secure ­favors from their husband, marriages failed, elder b­ rothers and younger b­ rothers quarreled,

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friends fell out, and fadenye (literally “father-­child relationship,” that is. the relationship between ­children of the same ­father but dif­fer­ent ­mothers) was notoriously vexed. Noah surprised me one day by saying that he was teaching his son Kaimah to trust no one, not even his f­ather. I was even more perplexed when Noah showed me the contents of the box he kept u ­ nder his bed. It was his own private arsenal of protective devices. A ­ fter ensuring that the door to his room was securely bolted, Noah showed me a gbogure (padlock), acquired from a mori man some years ago. A page containing Qu’ranic suras had been folded lengthwise and wrapped around the padlock. When the mori man closed the padlock, he wound white, red, and black threads around it, all the while reciting suras and repeating the name of the person he was magically tying or locking up. The padlock has the power to disarm, immobilize, or silence an adversary, Noah explained, particularly in a court hearing. He then showed me yuluba (rope)—­a knotted cord with a noose at one end. The cord is smeared with cow’s milk butter, a sura is recited, together with the name of one’s intended victim, and the rope pulled through one’s clenched hand, tightening the noose. The victim is, then, magically restrained. A third device, known as a fele, was made of twisted white and black thread. Placed on the threshold of a room or h ­ ouse, it has the power to disarm an ­enemy in the same way ­water (which is “white”) washes away dirt. A fourth medicine was called nisi—­a generic term for w ­ ater into which suras from a slate have been dissolved. The decoction is rubbed on the body. Noah also had several leather sachets (sebe) containing suras. ­These allusions to the symbolism of color, in which white signifies self, black signifies the anti-­self, and red designates the ambiguous zone between ­these extremes, made me aware of the deep ambivalence that informed interpersonal relationships. I would won­der why a self-­confessed non-­Muslim like Noah should consult a Muslim expert and attribute more power to foreign fetishes than local ones. Clearly, the impulse to open oneself up to the world at large yet protect oneself from its dangers was not unconnected with the question of how one might draw on the generative potential of the bush to revitalize the village without imperiling it. The question of how to balance closure and openness, guardedness and trust also had a direct bearing on my relationship with Noah. It was clear to me now why villa­gers saw me as Noah’s djinn, a creature of the wild he somehow had persuaded to assist him but easily might be his undoing. What, I asked myself, was the color of our relationship?

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Event 3: Making Palaver Strolling around the village one after­noon, I came upon a group of men and boys engaged in fervent debate. In Kuranko parlance, they ­were “making palaver,” which is to say speaking their minds about a contentious issue. Unlike a moot or court hearing, no one played the role of mediator, and no one summed up the discussion and delivered a judgment. In this instance, the altercation began ­earlier in the day when the m ­ other of one of the young men kindled her fire with wood that her ju­nior co-­wife (the ­mother of another of the disputants) had carried some distance from the bush. Although the ­woman’s husband had spelled out the rights of his se­nior wife in this ­matter, the ju­nior wife’s son felt his ­mother had been treated unfairly and refused to let the ­matter rest. When I arrived on the scene, the discussion was in full swing and a small crowd had been drawn into it as curious bystanders. On ­these occasions, I usually kept my distance. But Noah typically lost no time in getting involved and voicing his opinion, which he soon was ­doing on this occasion. ­After several weeks in the field, I had grown exasperated by palaver—­ which I dismissed as pointless quibbling—­and was irritated that Noah spent more time in such trivial pursuits than in helping me with my research. When I expressed my impatience and frustration, Noah said I should not take palaver too seriously. “­People and their neighbors quarrel (morgonu be i siginyorgoye le kela),” he said. “It’s what p­ eople do.” And he reminded me how much I liked palaver sauce, or plasas, pointing out that the numerous spices used in this West African stew w ­ ere like the numerous opinions voiced in palaver. The more ingredients ­there ­were, the better the taste of the stew or the enjoyment of a discussion. I took Noah’s observation to suggest that palaver could be considered a prototypical form of ritual (like a faculty meeting!) in which emotionality and sociality ­were equally at play. ­After every­one had pitched in with his or her own opinion, a rough consensus would emerge, much as it did in a storytelling session. It was as though ­people sought to have it both ways—­expressing their personal thoughts and feelings while working out a rapprochement with customary law. But why not simply invoke ancestral protocols, as the f­ ather had done in this case? Why, I asked myself, should ­people expend so much time and energy engaging in vehement debate if the resolution of the issue has a pre­ce­dent in tradition? The answer that began to form in my mind would become fundamental

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to all my subsequent work, for I now realized that a social order can be existentially ­viable only if it is felt to echo every­one’s need to participate in its creation and re-­creation. The urgency of this need ­will differ from person to person, both emotionally and socially, depending on his or her situation and status. Accordingly, any social order is permanently ­under pressure to accommodate or contain potentially opposing imperatives—­the need for circumspection and consensus on the one hand and the need to speak one’s mind and express one’s feelings on the other. Making palaver, I now realized, was like gossip—­a microcosm in which this balancing act was performed. And though vexed by deviance, contrariness, and variable degrees of commitment, the pluralistic world of the village periodically produced a semblance of unity through such ritual praxis. Not only did this line of thinking constitute an intellectual breakthrough for me; it transformed my relationship with Noah. How could I have allowed myself to assume that he was at my beck and call simply ­because I paid for his ser­vices? How could I have been so blind to his status in a village where his lineage had ruled for hundreds of years, not to mention his obligations to his kin and their expectations of him? As an outsider bent on acquiring knowledge of his lifeworld, I had treated him as a source of information. Now, as I committed myself to improving my social skills and participating more fully in the life of the village, Noah became a friend rather than a hireling, and for the first time, I began to see Kuranko society from the inside out rather than the other way around.

Event 4: Consulting a Diviner ­ fter four weeks in Firawa and with no means of communicating with A Pauline in Kabala, I had become increasingly concerned for her wellbeing. Although Noah’s wives had promised to keep Pauline com­pany and help her with marketing, and she was busy with her dissertation research on the Icelandic f­ amily sagas, I was worried that in the event of a medical emergency her life and the life of the child she was carry­ing might be in jeopardy. My anx­i­eties came to a head one eve­ning when I went out to the latrine that stood in the grassland b­ ehind the ­house where I was staying. The silence was suddenly broken by several Senegalese fire finches flitting around me. Aware that, for Kuranko, ­these small, crimson birds embodied the souls of ­children

9 0     Worlds Within and Worlds Without

who have died in infancy, I became convinced that Pauline had had a miscarriage and that her life was in peril. That night, I slept fitfully, and in the morning, I confided my fears to Noah. He, too, was missing his ­children and wondering about his wives; perhaps it was time for us to return to Kabala. That after­noon, Noah announced he was g­ oing to see a diviner and invited me to accompany him. A diviner is “one who lays out pebbles”—­beresigile—or reads palms (bolomafelne, literally “hand-­on-­looker”), though other divinatory techniques include mirror-­reading and consulting the Qu’ran. Bokari Wularé used river stones. We ­were taken indoors and sat on ­either side of a raffia mat spread on the clay floor. ­After observing Bockari divine for Noah, I asked if he could read the stones for me. I half expected Bockari to scoff at my request, but he responded without a word, and began following the same procedure he had followed with Noah. “Why have you come?” he asked. Noah spoke for me. “He wants to find out about his wife. She is expecting a child. He is worried about her. He wants to know if all is well, and if all ­will be well.” Bockari emptied some stones from his small monkey-­skin bag and, with the palm of his hand, spread them across the mat. Most w ­ ere river pebbles: semilucent, the color of rust, jasper, and yellow ocher. Among them w ­ ere some cowrie shells, old coins, and pieces of metal. When I handed Bockari the fifty cents for the consultation fee, he mingled it with t­ hese objects. “What is your wife’s name?” “Pauline,” I answered, pleased to have understood the question. Bockari found difficulty with the name but did not ask for it to be repeated. In a soft voice, he addressed the stones, informing them of the reason I had come. Then he gathered up a handful and began to chant. At the same time, with half-­closed eyes, he rhythmically knocked the back of his cupped hand against the mat. Very deliberately, he laid out the stones, some in pairs, some singly, o­ thers in threes and fours. “All is well,” Bockari said quietly, his attention fixed on the stones. “Your wife is well. She ­will give birth to a baby girl.” Without pausing, he proceeded to lay out a second pattern. “­There is nothing untoward. The paths are clear. The birth ­will be easy.”

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To see what sacrifice I should make, Bockari laid out the stones a third time. “Your wife must sacrifice some clothes and give them to a ­woman she re­spects. You must sacrifice two yards of white satin and give it to a man you re­spect. When your child is born, you must sacrifice a sheep.” Bockari looked warily at me, as if wondering ­whether I would do what the stones demanded. “To whom must I address the sacrifice of the sheep?” I asked in En­glish. Noah translated. “To your ancestors,” Bockari said. Though reassured by Bockari’s insights, I could not resist pressing him to explain how he arrived at them. “How can the stones tell you what to tell me?” I asked, again relying on Noah to translate. “They speak, just as we are speaking now. But only I can hear what they are saying. It is a gift that I was born with.” “Could I acquire that gift?” “A person cannot tell if a bird has an egg in its nest simply by watching it in flight.” I told Noah that I did not understand. Bockari fetched the loose sleeve of his gown up onto his shoulder and frowned. “You cannot go looking for it. It comes to you.” ­There was a silence. “Come, let’s eat,” Bockari said, climbing to his feet. He stowed his bag of stones between a rafter and the thatch, then wrenched the raffia door open. The sunlight blinded me. When we ­were seated in the yard, we took it in turns to wash our hands before Bockari’s wife brought us an enamel dish, piled high with rice and peanut sauce. “How did you get the stones?” I asked. “And the words you say to them—­ did someone teach them to you?” Bockari finished his mouthful of rice. Then, as if amused by my curiosity, he said cryptically: “If you find fruit on the ground, look to the tree.” I must have looked perplexed, but Bockari continued. “I began divining a long time ago, in the days of Chief Pore Bolo. I was favored by a djinn. I saw a djinn, and the djinn told me it was g­ oing to give me some stones so that I would be able to help p­ eople.” “Where did you see the djinn?”

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“In a dream. They came in a dream. ­There ­were two of them. A man and a ­woman. They had changed themselves into h ­ uman beings and w ­ ere divining with river stones. They called to me and told me their names. They said, “We are ­going to ­favor you with a dif­fer­ent destiny.” They showed me a certain leaf and told me I should make it into a powder and mix it with ­water in a calabash. Then I was to get some stones from the river and wash them in that liquid. When I woke up next morning, I went to the river and found that leaf and ­those stones. I did every­thing the djinn told me to do.” “Would I be able to find that leaf?” “Eh! I cannot tell you about that!” “The djinn, then; did you see them again?” “Yes, I see them often. E ­ very Thursday and Friday night they appear to me in a dream. Sometimes they say to me, ‘Are you still h ­ ere?’ ” “Do the djinn speak to you through the stones?” “Yes,” Bockari said, as if pleased that I fi­nally had understood something of what he was telling me. “When you address the stones, you are not speaking to the djinn?” “No! I am speaking to the stones.” A frown creased Bockari’s forehead. Hitching up his sleeve, he scooped a ball of rice from the calabash and slipped it deftly into his mouth. I had finished eating, but not my questioning. “Do you ever give anything to the djinn?” Bockari swallowed the rice and washed it down with some ­water. “From time to time, I offer them a sacrifice of white kola nuts.” I could see Bockari was tired and that Noah was exasperated by my questions and the difficulty of translating them. I got up to go, and Noah followed. In Kabala, I shared my experience with Pauline, who was as reassured by Bockari’s confident predictions as I had been, and I wasted no time in making the sacrifices I had been directed to make to ensure the birth of our d ­ aughter went smoothly. I was curious, however, to find myself acting as if I had embraced the assumptions on which Kuranko divinatory praxis was based. Could this be compared to an agnostic turning to God at a critical crossroads in life, or an alcoholic admitting his or her powerlessness as a first step on the road to recovery? Was ­there a necessary relationship between belief and action, or w ­ ere beliefs best seen as coping mechanisms whose efficacy was only arbitrarily connected to their epistemological status?

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Five years would pass before I published my praxeological account of Kuranko divination. Although I would refer to my consultation with Bockarie Wularé, my findings reflected numerous conversations with diviners and their clients, and my conclusions would run ­counter to the prevailing epistemological approach to divination in anthropology. Influenced by the rationality-­ irrationality debate, many anthropologists asked how diviners ­were able to maintain credibility and protect the plausibility of a diagnostic system that was, at best, hit and miss. By contrast, my focus was on the experiences of clients who did not know what to think or do when faced by a perilous journey, a difficult childbirth, a troubling dream, a grave illness, a sudden death, an impending initiation, or even building a new h ­ ouse and making a new farm. What appeared to be submission to a higher power was a prelude to regaining control over one’s own life. W ­ hether the power attributed to djinn or diviners was real or illusory was irrelevant. What mattered was that it entailed real effects. In so far as a diviner’s prognosis alleviated anxiety and restored a sense of agency, it did not necessarily inspire retrospective interest in ­either the existence of djinn or the veracity of the diviner’s methods. My interpretation was consonant with the pragmatist tenor of Kuranko thought. The critical issue was not w ­ hether a story told, a prognosis offered, or a sacrifice made met some abstract standard of rationality but ­whether it encouraged hope, bolstered one’s spirits, and offered a new way of thinking about a recurrent dilemma. As William James put it, truth is what “happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a pro­ cess.”1 This is true not only of ideas and concepts but of quasi-­persons like ancestors, djinn, witches, divinities, and totemic animals, all of which are potentially good to think with. ­These quasi-­beings give objective form to inchoate experiences in the same way concepts do. While phi­los­o­phers tend to identify concepts with rationality, dismissing spirits as symptomatic of primitive, concrete, or infantile consciousness, I became persuaded that ideas and images both figure to some degree in ­human cognition as means of making life thinkable and manageable, particularly in critical situations.

Return to Cambridge

We sailed from Freetown on an Elder Dempster ship that had a long history of carry­ing colonial administrators out to Britain’s West African colonies and bringing them home again, often at death’s door and with all their cultural prejudices intact. As for Pauline and myself, a­ fter Noah’s b­ rother Ali rushed up the gangway minutes before it was pulled away, bringing oranges for our six-­month-­old ­daughter, Heidi Aisetta, we wondered when we would experience such warmth again. Our qualms ­were only increased when, within hours of sailing, our dining room steward asked if we had any objections to being seated with “the black girl” who, it turned out, was on her way to ­England to complete her nursing degree. A ­couple of nights ­later, we accompanied Mary to a dance, where we w ­ ere introduced to several Nigerian students who also w ­ ere studying in Britain. The old-­time dance ­music appealed to the middle-­aged whites on board but left us cold, and I asked the disc jockey if he had any hi-­life rec­ ords we younger passengers could dance to. No sooner had we hit the dance

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floor than the c­ ouples we had displaced began complaining about the “coon tunes” and demanding a return to “real ­music.” Our Nigerian companions ­were more amused than outraged. They had experienced worse in Britain, and in any case, their ­fathers ­were shareholders in the Elder Dempster Com­pany, which had been purchased by the Nigerian government in 1961. That we gravitated ­toward the West Africans on board was, undoubtedly, ­because we had lost touch with p­ eople who looked like us and we did not want to be reminded of the colonial nostalgia and class snobberies of the country to which we w ­ ere returning. As the Aureol waited for mountainous seas to moderate before it could safely enter one of the sea roads into Liverpool, I went on deck. Clinging to a rail, I watched as the ship was lifted high on the ­running swell before falling precipitously into a trough. A high wind tore streamers of spume from the crests, blinding me with spray and giving me a foretaste of the battering I would experience at Cambridge. We docked in the after­noon, and our Land Rover was unloaded and cleared by customs a c­ ouple of hours ­later. We immediately drove into Liverpool, found a Mothercare shop where we bought winter clothes for Heidi, and continued on to Cambridge, where, ­after living for two weeks in Pauline’s college, we found a h ­ ouse to rent in Girton. I was impatient to get my dissertation written and turn my hand to more creative writing, but Pauline was ­behind schedule on her dissertation, and Heidi demanded time and attention. We, therefore, agreed to divide the day into three parts: one for Pauline, one for me, and one for ­doing ­things together as a ­family. I remember sitting at my desk surrounded by field notes and tomes from the university library, convinced that my dissertation could never be written by working only three hours a day. My initial attempts to draft an outline brought me to the edge of despair. Pauline fared ­little better with her three hours but, instead of throwing up her hands and declaring the task impossible, she quoted her favorite man­tra from cybernetics—­a man­tra I would come to adopt as my own—­no advantage without limitation. Instead of imagining how I might gain more ­free time, I now accepted the limits imposed upon me and worked within them. Before the week was out, I had learned to ignore the impulse to take a break or think too far ahead, and learned to focus solely on the m ­ atter at

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hand, even if all I had to show for a morning at the typewriter was a single well-­made sentence. Time was annulled. I did my daily stint and left it at that. In fact, I had stumbled onto the routine I would stick to for the rest of my writing life. On shipboard, I had scribbled a few lines that anticipated my thesis. I have become convinced that h ­ uman beings do not suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune without protest, and that achieving at least the illusion of having a hand in determining one’s own destiny is an existential imperative. Contrary to the assumption of structural functionalism, we do not move through life mindlessly, occupying preestablished positions, performing predefined roles, wholly governed by external constraints. We seek a decisive role in shaping our own lives, even though we may appear to perpetuate an order made by o­ thers at other times.

This view was succinctly captured in a Kuranko adage, dunia toge ma dunia; a toge le a dununia, literally “the name of the world is not world; its name is headload.” Exploiting oxymoron and pun (dunia [world] and dununia [headload] are near homophones), the adage implies the world is like a headload, the weight of which depends on how a person chooses to carry it. I had first encountered this idea in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Under­ground (“it seems to me that the meaning of man’s life consists in proving to himself ­every minute that he’s a man and not a piano key”), and I would find it echoed in Marx’s comment that “One must force the frozen circumstances to dance by singing to them their own melody”).1 Now I discovered that Jean-­Paul Sartre had written in a similar vein in Search for a Method and in Saint Genet, arguing for a dialectical relationship between the power of the world to constitute us and our power to constitute the world. Although we are all conditioned by our histories and circumstances, no two individuals live their conditioning in exactly the same way. “We are not lumps of clay, and what is impor­tant is not what p­ eople make of us but what we ourselves make of what they have made us.”2 ­Whether h ­ uman beings strug­gle against their lot or resign themselves to it, they conspire in their own destinies. I had discerned variations on this theme in the anxious questions I was asked about Apollo 11, in the palaver that seemed to make mountains out of mole hills, in initiatory role reversals that turned the world upside down as a prelude to re-­ordering it, in the suspension of disbelief in Kuranko stories, and

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in strategies of self-­empowerment through divination and sacrifice. Although ­people paid lip ser­vice to the ancestral order of t­hings, they would use their wits to loosen the ties that bind without breaking them. Young men would migrate to the diamond districts or urban centers in the south, but periodically return home to offer sacrifices to their ancestors, and to marry. Divorce would break the ties of in-­lawship that bound the village together, but love affairs flourished in the shadows. Po­liti­cally marginalized men sometimes allied themselves with djinn or used sorcery to gain power, and even the rule of primogeniture would be waived if a rightful heir was an autocrat or a fool. And in the antinomian figure of the trickster, folktales extolled wiliness and cunning but made it clear that such devious tactics ­were justified only when they ­were used to restore the common weal rather than serve personal gain. The ­human condition was paradoxical. Even as men and ­women strug­ gled to experience themselves as actors, they stoically and patiently accepted their lot. And even as they sought to be open to the world at large, they took care to protect themselves from its baleful influences. While the social order had to be defended against refractory h ­ uman emotions, power­ful djinn, wild animals, enemies, and witches, the antinomian powers of the bush ­were vital to the generation and regeneration of village life. I also experienced t­ hese competing imperatives. In the field, I had strug­ gled to acquire fluency in Kuranko, been unable to understand many events, and sometimes felt socially anomalous and out of my depth. I had tried to downplay my uncertainty and confusion by imagining I knew what was ­going on, and even concluded that anthropological theorizing was simply a magical strategy for reducing anxiety in the face of emotionally overwhelming experiences rather than a rational means of revealing the deep structures that underlay empirical real­ity. As I sought articulations in Western lit­er­a­ture and philosophy of the ideas that had emerged from my fieldwork, I kept returning to the compelling Kuranko image of the relationship between town and bush. Captivated by the Kuranko “folk model,” I asked myself why I should seek analogues of it in Western thought. Why risk disparaging the Kuranko imaginary by looking elsewhere for a more experience-­distant model? Was my preference for the jargon of social science over the idioms of indigenous thought a throwback to the colonial assumption that Western science was superior to primitive superstition? Did drawing an analogy with the cybernetic model of entropy, in which a closed system decays and dies ­unless reenergized by

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feedback from the environment, add anything to the Kuranko model? And did comparing the psychoanalytic contrast between libidinal drives and societal constraints shed light on the bush-­town dynamic?3 A generous answer to ­these questions would be that distancing oneself from phenomena that are too close to be seen clearly is justified only as long as one places all interpretation on a par and refuses to make any one epistemologically superior to all the ­others. But an even more engrossing possibility emerged—of invoking indigenous models to critique Western ones. My years of working in welfare and aid and development, together with my experience of academe, had thrown into sharp relief a prevailing Western assumption that the dilemmas of existence can be resolved intellectually (by means of reason) and practically (by means of advanced technologies). By contrast, Kuranko dilemma stories, all of which dramatically depicted recurring quandaries in everyday life, offered ingenious solutions without, however, suggesting that the strug­gles of existence could ever be permanently resolved. This aporetic spirit that John Keats called “negative capability” (the capacity to be “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching ­after fact and reason”) and that Albert Camus called “lucid indifference’ would prove pivotal to me, both in my life and my work.4 But for the time being, my challenges ­were more institutional than intellectual. Though Edmund Leach’s iconoclasm appealed to the rebel in me and I admired his essays in structural analy­sis, I could not accept that unconscious patterns and pro­cesses w ­ ere more significant than the dilemmas and strug­ gles of quotidian existence. Nor could I reduce life to log­os as Meyer Fortes and Jack Goody did in their studies of systems of ritual and belief, kinship and marriage, and inheritance and succession. And while Jack’s collaborative work with Ian Watt on orality and literacy was the reason I had been made his advisee, I had grown disenchanted with essentializing antinomies between “us and them,” ­whether based on technologies of communication, modes of thought, or forms of marriage. Thankfully, Jack left me to my own devices, and I completed my doctorate within six months of returning from the field. Although I continued to attend anthropology seminars at Kings, it was a relief not to feel that one had to take sides in the ongoing factional and intellectual debates within the profession, such as alliance versus descent and structuralism versus structural-­functionalism. To augment our dwindling income, I taught courses for the Board of Extramural Studies, and Pauline tutored students of Old Icelandic at Trinity. We also gave up our h ­ ouse in Girton and moved to a flat in Bridge Street,

Return to Cambridge   9 9

Cambridge. Just as the billboard eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg gazed over the Valley of Ashes in The ­Great Gatsby, so a pair of bespectacled eyes on a painted shingle hung over the doorway of an optician’s shop below our flat surveyed Magdalene Bridge and the Cam. Perhaps they also ­were watching over us, for we ­were fortunate in finding a neighbor to babysit Heidi for several hours ­every day, and I was making steady pro­gress on my first book. But sooner or ­later, I would need a full-­time job, and in the summer of 1971, I was interviewed for a lecturership in social anthropology at Edinburgh University. I was one of the last applicants to be ushered into a dark wood-­paneled room where faculty w ­ ere seated at a long t­ able with copies of my dossier in front of them. Given their weary demeanor and awkward introductions, I concluded that a decision had already been made and that nothing I might say in response to their questions would change their minds. When I left the interview, I gave the departmental secretary the address of the bed and breakfast where Pauline, Heidi, and I would be staying for the next few days and breathed a sigh of relief that the charade was over. It w ­ asn’t. On returning to Cambridge a­ fter three days of unseasonably warm weather on the Fifeshire coast, we found several tele­grams on the floor inside our front door. The first informed me that I had got the job. The second and third appealed to me, with increasing urgency, to let the department know ­whether I accepted its offer. The fourth informed me that the salary was negotiable if this was the issue that was delaying my response. ­After a quick conversation with Pauline, I called Professor Littlejohn from the public phone box near the Magdalene Bridge and thanked him for the offer—­which had taken me be surprise—­ before politely declining it. When asked if the salary was the sticking point, I said no, that was not it. Then what? I said that I had been disappointed by the interview. To this day, memories of my churlishness oppress me, and though neither Pauline nor I had warmed to the idea of living in Scotland, I still cannot fully understand the alacrity with which I turned down this job offer. That I at once determined to find funds for a return trip to Sierra Leone suggests I was desperate not to lose the connection with Africa I had sought in the Congo and fi­nally found in Northern Sierra Leone. One after­noon, I ran into Meyer Fortes on King’s Parade. Despite the fact that he hardly knew me, Meyer was ­eager to know of my plans and prospects. I told him I was teaching anthropology for the Board of Extramural Studies, tutoring a few students at St. Johns, and applying for research grants. He

10 0    Worlds Within and Worlds Without

immediately invited me to come and see him. He managed a small fund and might be able to help. Thanks to Meyer, I made my second fieldtrip to Sierra Leone, and though the months away from Pauline and Heidi w ­ ere emotionally trying, the data I gathered helped me develop the event-­centered, phenomenological approach to which I was now intellectually committed. A few weeks ­after my return to Cambridge, I received a letter from Hugh Kawharu, who had supervised my master’s research at the University of Auckland. He had recently been appointed head of the new Social Anthropology and Māori Studies Department at Massey University and wanted to know if I would consider taking up a se­nior lecturership in the department and help him develop an undergraduate program in social anthropology. It took Pauline and I less than a day to realize that New Zealand was where we wanted to be. The Manawatu would be a healthy environment for Heidi, and we would be home, close to f­ amily and old friends.

III

From Anxiety to Method

In the antipodean summer of 1973–1974, thanks to an initiative by my friend Michael Young, who I had gotten to know at Cambridge, I spent about eight weeks in the Department of Anthropology in the Research School of Pacific Studies at the Australian National University. Derek Freeman, then head of the anthropology program at RSPacS, had brought together an exceptional group of anthropologists, including George Devereux, Meyer Fortes, Adam Kendon, and Peter Reynolds, whose research interests encompassed biological anthropology, ­human ethology, kinesics, and psychoanalysis. Though ­these fields ­were comparatively new to me, it was George Devereux’s work that made the most profound and enduring impression. Like Meyer Fortes, George Devereux was only a short-­term visitor, and I had already been in the department for several weeks before he arrived. During ­those weeks, his book—­From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences—­was passed around. Every­one appeared nonplussed by it, and I ­don’t think anyone both­ered to read it from cover to cover. But when the book

10 4     Worlds Within and Worlds Without

came into my hands, I was instantly enthralled. ­Here at last was an anthropologist who sought a universal perspective yet did justice to the idiosyncratic and cultural contexts in which the universal makes its appearance. Other thinkers possessed the same scholarly breadth and erudition as Devereux but, to my mind, none, with the notable exception of Gregory Bateson, so successfully showed how one might integrate anthropological and psychological approaches to the ­human condition. I felt as though Devereux was addressing and offering solutions to the very prob­lems I had been struggling with in my own work—­methodologically as well as philosophically. First was the relationship between Western and non-­Western worldviews, and the question as to ­whether Western philosophy and science ­were, by definition, more insightful than any o­ thers. I discovered that, during Devereux’s first two periods of fieldwork among the Mohave, his bias was anti-­analytical and non-­Freudian but, on his third field trip in 1938, he realized t­here w ­ ere many arresting affinities between Mohave folk models of psychopathology and Freudian psychoanalysis. T ­ hese affinities persuaded him to undertake systematic psychoanalytic training. As he put it in his memoirs: “I remained an anti-­Freudian ­until, in 1938, my Mohave in­for­mants taught me psychoanalysis, as Freud’s patients had taught it to him.”1 Second was the question of reflexivity—of the reciprocal interplay of the intrapsychic and the intersubjective—or, as I phrased it at the time, the twofold movement that takes one out into the world of o­ thers and returns one, changed, to oneself. For Devereux, understanding this dialectical movement was imperative if anthropology was g­ oing to be truly methodical, but it had to be managed and monitored by techniques that involved the complementary use of psychological and so­cio­log­i­cal models. Third, I found myself in complete accord with Devereux’s insistence on the value of Heisenberg’s uncertainty princi­ple for anthropology: interactions between observer and observed, object and instrument, are constitutive of our knowledge of all phenomena. This meant that anthropologists had to make choices of method and theory, not on the basis of an objectivist princi­ple of representing real­ity but on the basis of ethical, po­liti­cal, and artistic commitments to practical truths—­truths that might make for a more equitable world or held out the promise of enriching rather than impoverishing our lives. Fourth, Devereux lent credibility to my view that much of the experience-­ distant rhe­toric and theoretical model building we do in anthropology may be understood as analogous with intrapsychic defense mechanisms—­subterfuges

From Anxiety to Method    105

for coping with the stressful effects of fieldwork and the messiness of everyday existence. Anthropological systematizing could be placed on a par with pretty much anything ­human beings do to bring a semblance of order to their lives—­ attributing causation to inanimate ­things, furnishing a ­house, exchanging gossip, writing a book, building a community. In other words, what­ever their dif­fer­ent epistemological or moral status, scientific and magical modes of reasoning provide alternative strategies for coping with the panic all ­human beings experience when confronted by the unresponsiveness of ­matter—­the sheer otherness and unmanageability of many of the forces that impinge upon us. Fifth, I found in Devereux’s psychoanalytic arguments for the psychic unity of humankind a justification for the kind of anthropology I intuitively sought to develop. Structural linguistics had shown that the meaning of any word reflects, to some degree, the meaning of ­every other word in a language, and t­hese meanings are constantly changing. The same is true of persons. Our sense of self is contingent on our relationships with other selves as well as our own inner histories. We are, therefore, several and mutable rather than singular and stable, and each person is potentially a complete specimen of Man and each society a complete specimen of Society.2 Sixth, and perhaps most momentously, I found in Devereux’s focus on the politics of how ego bound­aries are revised and drawn (rather than on how egos may be defined) a way around the static schemata of bounded entities—­ selves, social groups, cultures, nations, ethnicities—­that dominated cultural anthropology in the seventies. Inspired by ­these articulations of my own inchoate views, I wrote an essay on the figure of the last-­born to complement Fortes’s famous essay on the first born, using the concept of the chiasm.3 My essay hinged on the insight that myths and folktales are constructed chiastically, which is to say they are composed of two halves that are turned against each other, inverted and reversed like court cards.4 The story of Cinderella, for example, pivots on a contradiction between social positions and moral dispositions. A virtuous and beautiful girl (known variously as Cinderella, Rashin Coatie, Aschenputtel, Finetta, Zezolla, and Yeh-­hsien) is initially living in degraded circumstances while her spiteful and ugly stepsisters enjoy the privileges of the well-­born. The story involves a crossing-­over (“chiasm” is from the Greek χιάζω, chiázō, “to shape like the letter X”), in which moral beauty is transferred to the high-­ status position (Cinderella marries a prince) and ugliness is transferred to

10 6    Worlds Within and Worlds Without

the low-­status position (the stepsisters fall from grace). Thus, the tale contrives, through literary legerdemain, an ideal congruence of moral virtue and elevated status. Po­liti­cally speaking, the rebellious impulses associated with marginalized p­ eople are made to support rather than subvert the status quo. That Kuranko folktales exemplify this princi­ple may be ­because all the folktales ever told can be traced to the dawn of humanity and reflect recurring existential dilemmas. For instance, in our relation to ­others, we are si­mul­ta­ neously aware of ourselves as possessing social identities and personal qualities. Depending on our interests and our point of view, we can play up a person’s social identity—as a ­father or ­mother, as rich or poor, as black or white—­ thereby rendering their idiosyncratic personality relatively insignificant, or we can play up their ­human qualities—as caring or uncaring, congenial or antisocial. The question of how anthropology can balance ­these perspectives, descriptively and analytically, remains a burning issue for our times. My regard for Devereux’s work was so ­great that, when I was introduced to him, I was lost for words. I remember the day vividly. A group of us w ­ ere sitting around a t­ able in the garden at University House eating lunch. George had only just flown in from France, and in the dazzling sunlight, he looked etiolated, jetlagged, and utterly out of place. I sat close to him, wanting to hear what he had to say. He was holding an unlit cigarette in a tortoiseshell holder, and his first remark was a request: Did anyone know where one could buy a Cricket lighter? His had run out of fuel. I volunteered at once and spent the next half hour ­going from one kiosk to another in the city ­until I found a Cricket. Years ­later, reflecting on this Canberra after­noon, George would use his disoriented frame of mind—­“a combination of influenza and severe jet-­lag”— to illustrate how consciousness continually moves in and out of the ­here and now and between engaged and detached extremes. I noted that whenever I was not the recipient of a stimulus directly addressed to me—­that is, whenever I was not directly spoken to—­part of my mind began to dream. Thus, I knew that I was sitting at a ­table and eating; I was also aware of my host’s presence, but only in a remote sort of way. With my eyes open, part of my mind was periodically slipping “sideways,” into a dreamlike, at least hypnagogic, state—­for the first, and I hope the last, time in my life, for it was not a pleasant experience. Also, though I was able to set in motion the machinery of my good upbringing, I could hear myself say please and thank

From Anxiety to Method    107 you as if I w ­ ere only a suitably programmed computer. At least twenty-­four hours elapsed before I could once more apprehend t­ hose I met as multidimensional persons and not as mere “partial objects.” So far as I know, I did nothing silly during the first twenty-­four hours, but I also know that e­ very person and ­thing I encountered during that period was experienced as unidimensional and non-­symbolic and that successive events w ­ ere apprehended as discrete: not as sequential, not as components of a temporal pattern. My time perception was not that of the historian but that of the chronicler.5

Despite seeing me as unidimensional and non-­symbolic, George must have divined in my eagerness to place myself at his disposal a desire for intellectual apprenticeship. In any event, this is what happened. I accompanied him back to his third-­floor room in University House—­realizing, as he rested awhile on each landing and complained about the stairs, that he suffered from acute emphysema. Over the next few days, I devoted myself to proofreading articles and ­running errands for him, and hearing him out as he regaled me with stories of academic politics in Paris, of the indifference of the university establishment to his ideas, and of his current psychoanalytic explorations of dreams in classical Hellenic lit­er­a­ture. Perhaps, too, I sensed an affinity, born of our lonely childhoods, though the troubled circumstances of his ­were more po­liti­cal than parochial. He was born in 1908  in the trilingual, tricultural town of Lugós, then part of Hungary. At the end of World War I, the town passed into Romanian hands and George’s lyceé became officially Romanian. This meant that one year he was told the Hungarians had defeated the Romanians; the next, he was taught the opposite. Experiencing a growing sense of cultural contradiction and an abhorrence of the hy­poc­risy of identity politics, he found “affective sincerity in g­ reat m ­ usic” and turned, for objective truth, to the study of mathematical physics at the Sorbonne in 1926. One year before Heisenberg’s breakthrough, he abandoned physics for anthropology. I also think I identified with George’s sense of marginality—of often finding himself in countries where he did not feel completely at home or feeling that he was ­going against the grain of what was considered impor­tant or fash­ ion­able in his field. “One of the reasons for my huge written output,” he once confided, “is the fact that for all ­those years I had no one to talk to. So I wrote.”6 Elsewhere, as if foretelling what lay ahead of me, he said: “Considering all ­things—­even the years of ­actual starvation, the lifelong insecurity of

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employment, no retirement income . . . ​thirty-­five years in outer limbo, I deem myself fortunate on two capital scores: I have made no compromises and I have done work that passionately interested me.”7 ­After Canberra, I saw George twice, on visits Pauline and I made to Paris in 1979 and 1982, and we corresponded frequently. One after­noon, he astounded us by playing one of his own compositions on his ­grand piano. On another, he showed me some his old fieldnotes—­evidence of how much work he had still to do. Most memorable, however, is that long-­ago Austral summer when ideas seemed to materialize out of thin air or b­ ubble up out of the earth, as from a spring, and come in dreams when the intense, undisturbed heat of the after­ noons was filled with the brittle odor of eucalyptus, the screech of gallahs and parakeets, and the chug chug of w ­ ater sprinklers on dark green lawns.

A Storyteller’s Story

My years in the Manawatu ­were among the happiest of my life. Pauline and I explored the hill country to the north and the Pohangina Valley to the east. Wellington was two hours away, the coast was within easy reach, and ­because I was, at least initially, the only Pākehā in the Department of Anthropology and Māori Studies, several of our closest friends ­were Māori, including the Kawharu f­amily, whose d ­ aughters w ­ ere Heidi’s age, and Te Pakaka Tawhai, with whose ­family we spent two memorable summers on their East Coast farm, shearing all day and returning in the eve­nings to hearty meals prepared by Paka’s ­mother Pi and his ­sisters, and afterward being entertained with stories by Paka’s b­ rother Joe. Some days, Paka would take us on excursions to some of the g­ reat carved h ­ ouses (whare whakairo) of Ngāti Porou. My childhood dream of becoming more familiar with Te Ao Māori was fi­nally being realized. During term-­time, however, I focused on my writing. I’d converted a wash­house in the back of our h ­ ouse into a study and worked t­ here ­every morning before cycling to the campus for my after­noon classes. Pauline

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taught En­glish at Palmerston North High School, and Heidi was enrolled in the nearby Terrace End Primary School. ­After completing my first two books, I embarked on my third, which was to be a study of Kuranko ethics and storytelling.1 But no sooner had I begun sorting through my fieldnotes in preparation for writing Allegories of the Wilderness than I came across several transcribed conversations I’d had with the famed storyteller Keti Ferenke Koroma in 1970 and 1972. T ­ hese brought me to ponder the hidden links between Ferenke’s stories and his life. When he was ten or eleven years old, Ferenke’s maternal grand­mother died in Kamadugu Sukurela, and he and his ­mother traveled ­there for the funeral.

On our way back to Kondembaia, my ­mother said, “Now, Ferenke, we have come from your grand­mother’s funeral but your elder s­ ister is not h ­ ere. I want you to go and tell her what has happened. Tell her to come.” But my ­mother had a severe headache and I said, “I’m not g­ oing. Y ­ ou’re not well. I’ll go when you are better.” But my ­mother said, “Go,” and I had to accept it. “Yeh,” I said, “that is that.” I left Kondembaia on the twenty-­ninth of the month before Ramadan. I reached Alkalia on the first day of Ramadan. I went on to Tongoma where I told my elder s­ ister Tina about the death. My brother-­in-­law said, “Now, this is the fast month. You must wait h ­ ere u ­ ntil the fast month ends, then you can go home.” So, I stayed. I was unaware that in my absence my ­mother’s headache had become worse. In the ­middle of the fast month, my ­mother Keti died. She died while I was away. I knew nothing of it. But my ­father was with her til the end. On the last Friday of the fast month, my f­ather went to pray. The w ­ omen had already cooked rice for the prayer day. On his way to the prayer ground [selikenema], he began to ­tremble. The faithful ­were already at their prayers, sitting in rows. My younger ­brother Bile went and supported my f­ ather and said, “­Father, you cannot go and pray, you are trembling. Let us go back home.” But my ­father said, “Leave me be, nothing w ­ ill happen to me. Let us go.’ ” But he began trembling again. The prayers ceased. ­People said, “This man has a fever.’ ” They took my ­father home. He died that day. It was a terrible t­hing. From Friday, through Saturday, ­until Sunday no one could bury him ­because his death had been so sudden and so strange. At that time, my f­ ather’s elder b­ rother was paramount chief, but the white men had summoned him to Freetown. He was in Freetown when his b­ rother died. He was told of his b­ rother’s death as he was on his way back home. He

A Storyteller’s Story   111 told the district commissioner what had happened. The  D.C. gave him his own sympathy gift [woro nani, literally “four kola”]. Then my elder f­ather came on h ­ ere and met the burial party. Every­one was crying. They w ­ ere crying for me ­because I was the eldest son. I had gone to my elder s­ ister to tell her of our grand­mother’s death, and my ­mother had died. Then, on the last day of the same month, my ­father had died. Both of them had died while I was away. It was a terrible t­hing, a strange t­hing. Every­one was crying. They said, “Ferenke has not come yet, Ferenke has not come yet, Ferenke has not come yet.” I was still in Tongoma. My heart was beating loudly, loudly, loudly, loudly. Then I said, “Let me go home.” My brother-­in-­law said goodbye and I started off. From Tongoma, as far as Diang Sukurela, I heard nothing of the deaths. Every­one kept the news from me. I arrived home and suddenly found myself in the ­middle of the funeral rites. ­There was nothing I could do. What Allah had destined had happened. I knew that my ­father was the man who brought me into the world, but my elder f­ ather was the one who was now responsible for me. I knew he would take care of us. My f­ ather had gone, but the man who had been married to my m ­ other before him—­Chief Samaran Ba­la—­was still alive.2 So I was not broken-­hearted, and my elder f­ather has been without fault. He has found wives for me, and I now have my own ­children. He sends me on errands, but he has never wronged me. I do what I want. Indeed, I feel my ­father never died. Even had he lived, both he and I would have been in Chief Ba­la’s hands. So my heart is at peace.

Ferenke’s tone of resignation is typical of the way Kuranko villa­gers speak about life and death. It is said that no sacrifice can avert one’s fate, and that your destiny is in your ­mother’s hands ­because receiving the blessings of one’s patrilineal ancestors is conditional on how your m ­ other behaves t­ oward your f­ ather. Of an incorrigible individual, ­people w ­ ill say, “He came out of the initiation lodge ( fafei) like that,” implying that if initiation did not make a man of him, nothing w ­ ill. Yet t­ hese fatalistic comments are more characteristic of how Kuranko explain life in retrospect than how they actually live. In myth as in real­ity, one’s position in life can be changed by one’s disposition and one’s actions. Adversity came to Ferenke in two ways: the loss of his parents when he was a small boy, and his lineage’s loss of the chieftaincy in Diang. As in other Kuranko polities, the ruling clan in Diang was divided into two h ­ ouses that competed with each another for the paramount chieftaincy,

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often bitterly and sometimes violently. Years before Ferenke was born, his ­father’s elder b­ rother Samaran Ba­la had been chief, but a­ fter Ba­la’s death, the chieftaincy devolved to the Magba line. As a result, Ferenke was born into a marginalized lineage. But while he lacked po­liti­cal power, his intelligence made good the loss.3 Indeed, it was his innate faculty of insight and understanding (hankilimaiye) that not only enabled him to weather the vicissitudes of life but create and tell stories. To start with, my great-­great-­grandfather was a chief. Down to my grand­father, they ­were all chiefs. U ­ ntil my f­ather, they w ­ ere all chiefs. Now, when you are born into a ruling h ­ ouse you w ­ ill be told many t­ hings. If you are a fool, you’ll be none the wiser, but if you are clever, you ­will scrutinize every­thing. And when you lie down, you ­will think about them. If you do this, it is good. This is how I think of ­things, though it is only Allah that gives thought to a person. When you are told something, it is good if it stays in your mind. What I have to say about the stories is this: I only think of them. They just come into my mind, just like that. I am not asleep. I am not in a dream. But when I think of them, I put them all together into a story.

In another conversation, Ferenke explained this in another way: We say kina wo and kina wo [near homophones]. They are not one [the first means “beehive,” the second “elder”]. If you hear kina [elder], he knows almost every­thing. But if you hear kina [beehive], it does not know anything. The elder could be found in the younger and the younger could be found in the elder. Even if a person is a child, but behaves like an elder, then he is an elder. If he thinks like an elder, then he is an elder. Even if a person is old and se­nior, if he behaves like a child then he is a child. Therefore, this m ­ atter of se­niority [ fisamantiye] comes not only from the fact that one is born first, or from the fact that one is big and strong; it also reflects how a person behaves. For example, you ­will see some old men who have nothing; they are not called “big men” [morgo ba, “elders”]. But some young men have wealth; ­because of that they are called morgo ba. Therefore, what­ever Allah has put in your head or hands w ­ ill make you what you are. I am speaking now, but some of t­ hese words of wisdom [kuma kore, literally “venerable words”] which I am explaining to you are not known by every­one. You may ask a man and he may know of them. But I have explained them. Therefore, am I not the elder? T ­ here are some elders who know of t­hese ­things, but I have explained them. Therefore, if you hear the word kina, you should know that it is hankili [intelligence] that r­ eally defines it.

A Storyteller’s Story   113

As Ferenke made clear, while the gift of intelligence or storytelling “came from Allah,” it was Ferenke’s choice ­whether he used it to support or subvert the social weal. The composition of his narrative “The Abuse of the Killing Word,” is instructive.4 Ferenke explained that the germinal idea, of how the power of life and death came to be in the hands of Allah rather than h ­ uman beings, simply came into his head. Subsequently, working on his farm and lounging in his hammock at home, he tried to come up with a plot that would bring the idea to life. Many ele­ments in this story are derived from the traditional repertoire, and its structure, like its moral conclusion, is fairly conventional. But the composition of the story, like the per­for­mance of it, depends on individual judgment and acquired skill. An ethical perspective informs both the composition and content of Kuranko stories since a person is held responsible for managing the relationship between inner dispositions and outward be­hav­ior, or between what, in Kuranko terms, is “found” or “encountered” and what is “made.” This dialectic between given endowments and constraints and chosen attitudes and modes of comportment lies at the heart of Kuranko ethics. As Keri Ferenke wryly commented: “I could never stop thinking of stories, yet I could stop myself telling them. If I am asked to tell a story, I cannot stop thinking of one to tell, but I can stop myself telling it.” In short, though it is predestined that he create stories, he can inhibit this inclination should social propriety demand it. An apparent paradox arises ­here. Though the social order was created by Allah and the “first p­ eople” ( fol’ morgonnu) long ago, it is recapitulated only by dint of purposeful ­human activity in the ­here and now. The ancestral values on which the Kuranko set such store do not come into being, generation ­after generation, of their own accord. At the same time that it is necessary to play up the vital role of each individual in the construction of social real­ity, it is also necessary to play down that role lest the omnipotence of Allah and the ancestors be called into question. The powers of individual initiative and praxis (associated with the bush) are, thus, regarded ambivalently b­ ecause, though the social order (associated with the village) depends on such powers, they also contradict the ontological priority given to the collectivity. The very existence of the ­human subject as one who “stands out” or “emerges” must be eclipsed by a conception of the subject as one who is a part of, not apart from, the group. Keti Ferenke resolves this paradox in three ways. First, though he is the author of his own stories, he attributes their inspiration to a transcendent

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rather than a personal source. Second, he allows his stories to pass into tradition without acknowledging or boasting about their origins in his experience as a singular individual. Third, in his stories, he is careful to extol individual insight and judgment in relation to communal values and conventional wisdom. If Ferenke exaggerates the importance of individual initiative over blind obedience, it is not ­because he wishes to vaunt his own creativity but ­because he knows that, while the foundations of the social order ­were laid down by ancestral fiat, the continuity of that order demands the intelligent engagement of individual actors. This refusal to take social real­ity for granted explains the scathing attacks in many of his stories on shortsightedness, stupidity, and dogmatism: a chief who uses his authority for selfish ends, a Muslim zealot who sees ­little beyond his beads and book, a ­father whose greed makes him negligent of his ­children, a ­woman obsessed with sex, a man whose avarice blinds him to the needs of his closest friend. It is neither slavish adherence to given norms nor the unbridled expression of self-­interest that makes for a v­ iable social order but actions informed by social intelligence. Ferenke’s blind spot was his misogyny, and it is pos­si­ble that his numerous cautionary tales against ­women’s wiles reflect the crises in his own marriages. His first wife hailed from Kamadugu Sukurela, his ­mother’s hometown. When his wife was five or six months pregnant with their first child, she pestered Ferenke to make love to her. They ­were living on their farm at the time, and Ferenke was due to make a trip back to Kondembaia. His wife begged him not to go and tried to persuade him to stay and sleep with her. Ferenke’s refusal was justified, since it is widely believed that sexual intercourse during pregnancy may endanger the life of the fetus. He made his trip to Kondembaia as planned, leaving his wife in good health. But ­later that month, she fell ill and, during her illness, confessed to having tried to kill Ferenke by witchcraft. She said s­ he’d felt humiliated when Ferenke had refused to sleep with her. She had enlisted the support of a coven of witches and tried to harm him. When the coven failed to find him, the witches turned on her and beat her with blows to her back. Ferenke recalled that during her illness she had been unable to sit up straight and had suffered severe back pains. The eve­ning, ­after she had confessed to witchcraft, she suffered a miscarriage (she had been pregnant with twins). Ferenke’s elder ­father Samaran Ba­la suggested they take her back to Kondembaia but she died that night. It is tempting to see Keti Ferenke’s insistence on the need for vigilance and forethought in the light of t­ hese traumatic events. Appearances are misleading,

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relationships are inconstant, and the truth is elusive. He develops this theme by invoking the Kuranko contrast between kenema (open to the public) and duguro (hidden, “in the ground”). Keti Ferenke relies on two narrative stratagems in exploring this theme. The first is to privilege friendship (dianye) over kinship (nakelinyorgoye) and, thereby, emphasize chosen over given ties. While kinship implies identifications and obligations that are immutable and incontrovertible, the bonds of friendship are ad hoc and negotiable. Thus, to discuss prob­lems of mutuality, loyalty, trust, and integrity in terms of friendship rather than kinship is to stress the critical role of individual discernment and judgment in the construction of a ­viable social order. The second stratagem is to emphasize a person’s intelligence over his or her social position. Rather than evoke socially prescribed roles and rules, the focus is on individual praxis: how one uses one’s head and one’s own initiative in creating conviviality. My affinity for Ferenke went beyond our common passion for storytelling and, undoubtedly, reflected our marginal positions in our respective socie­ ties. But when I wrote in my preface to Allegories of the Wilderness (1982) that my book “reflects a hidden biography and an anonymous kindred,” and that it was “to this milieu that the book properly belongs,” I was only dimly aware of how close to home this observation came.5

Barawa and the Ways Birds Fly in the Sky

When awarded a year’s sabbatical in 1979, I returned to Firawa, this time with Pauline and Heidi. Noah and three of his ­children, Kaimah, Aisetta, and Jeneba, joined us. Within hours of our arrival in the village, the old medicine master Saran Salia Sanoh insisted we occupy his ­house, and he recruited his nieces and nephews to replaster the walls with white clay and to repair the porch. ­After installing mat ceilings and some borrowed sticks of furniture, we moved in, though hardly a day passed that Saran Salia did not come by for cups of tea and idle talk, or simply to sit in our hammock and doze through the heat of the day. When I first met Saran Salia, in 1970, he was unmarried, living alone, and had been appointed leader of the young men (keminetigi) by the Barawa chief Tala Sewa Marah. Saran Salia invariably had several uninitiated boys living ­under his roof, protecting them from witchcraft and sorcery to which ­children are particularly vulnerable. But despite his formidable reputation as a medicine master (besetigi), he came to see me at Noah’s b­ rother’s h ­ ouse one morning,

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complaining of sharp pains in his arm and shoulder. The reason was obvious; his right hand was swollen with septicemia. Among the medicines I had brought with me from Cambridge was a supply of penicillin. I gave the old man two tablets, and twice a day for the following week, I tracked him down and ensured that he took his pills. To my g­ reat relief, the swelling subsided and his pain went away, leaving me to won­der ­whether, for all his expertise in magical medicines, he would see me now in a new light and agree to talk to me, with Noah’s mediation, about his life as a medicine master. I see him now, standing in the compound and looking at me. His hair is grizzled, his few remaining teeth are kola-­stained, and he is holding a stave across the back of his shoulders, his hands hanging loose at ­either end. With his shoulder blades drawn back, his head is forced forward so that when he peers at me it is as if we are party to some conspiracy. While Pauline home-­schooled Heidi, I began to explore issues I had wanted to broach with Saran Salia nine years ago but had not pursued ­because they touched on some of the most secretive and sensitive aspects of Kuranko life. But Saran Salia was Noah’s classificatory m ­ other’s ­brother (berin), which gave Noah the right to presume an intimacy with him, and even take certain liberties that would have been totally inappropriate with an elder of his own lineage. Without this privileged familiarity, it would have been impossible for Noah to ask Saran Salia the questions to which I sought answers. Our first conversations ­were about his early life.

From my birth, I was in the hands of my elders. Year ­after year, we made our farms, u ­ ntil I donned the clothes of manhood. My parents favored me. I was eating sweetly [I was well looked a­ fter]. And when my parents died, my elder ­brother Malfore Sanoh looked a­ fter me, and I was eating sweetly t­ here as well. ­After he died, I chased ­after Kome [a power­ful djinn]. I drew the Kome rope for twenty-­eight years, ­until my ­brother’s son, the Alhaji, told me, “Leave it!” And so my hand left it. Then Chief Sena Lai of Bandakarafaia made me his messenger [worli]. I was sweet t­ here, and when he died, his younger b­ rother Damba Lai made me his messenger. I lived sweetly t­ here ­until he died. Then this child of mine, the Alhaji, called me to Firawa. He said, “You can live sweetly h ­ ere.” So he made a farm for me, cooked rice for me, and ­until ­today ­there has been no hardship on my head. Even when my wives died, the Alhaji and his ­brother Lahai built this ­house for me and said, “­Father, live ­here; you ­don’t have to farm any more. You are unable to work, so live h ­ ere and rest.

118     Worlds Within and Worlds Without Let us feed you. You are old. Live sweetly.” So ­things are good. And as for you [meaning me], you like me, and I like you. You like my c­ hildren, and my ­children like you. If you have come to ask me to tell you all I know from my childhood up to now, that is what I w ­ ill do.’

Though Saran Salia voiced no complaints about his childhood, the deaths of his parents not long ­after his initiation marked a tragic turning point in his life, leaving him fearful and uncertain. One morning, our conversation turned to his childhood fears—of the djinn, of witches, of the masters of the korte medicines, and of the dead. Saran Salia gave me to understand that initiation teaches one how to master such fears and, by extension, master one’s emotions—­acquiring fortitude (yuse gbele, literally “a hard heart”), bravery (kerenteye), self-­confidence (kalai nyerela, literally “belief self in”), and new understanding (hankili kura). But becoming master of the Kome cult involves more than controlling one’s own fear; it means becoming an object of fear oneself. As a boy, Saran Salia had been fascinated by Kome. He both feared it and felt it was “something out of the ordinary.” During his initiation, he was impressed by the gifts the Kometigi (Kome master) received and the power he commanded. “When I first saw it, I wanted to be it,” he said. “As Kometigi, every­one fears you, but you fear no one ­because you have been immunized against all the harmful medicines.” Saran Salia’s decision to become Kometigi was precipitated by the breakup of his first marriage. Another man ran away with his first wife with the connivance of her ­father. “That man taunted me. ‘Show me that your iron can cut my iron!’ he said to me. ‘If you are a man, then do what you ­will!’ I said, ‘Me?’ ­There and then I took up the Kome rope. You understand? Whoever sees Kome, dies!’ ” Shortly ­after this confrontation, Saran Salia’s errant wife, her lover, and her ­father died. Though I pressed him on the m ­ atter, Saran Salia would neither admit nor deny that he had used his power as Kometigi or his knowledge of magical medicines to kill them. But he did use a cryptic phrase that I would return to time and time again in the years that followed: “­There are many ways that birds fly in the sky.” Over the next few days, Saran Salia spoke to me at length about his three-­ year apprenticeship in Guinea during which he acquired a comprehensive knowledge of curative, prophylactic, and lethal medicines. He explained that

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he had forsworn the use of lethal medicines like korte and refused to place his knowledge at the disposal of clients wishing to avenge slights or redress injustices through sorcery. Although I admired Saran Salia’s decision to use his skills to cure and protect rather than kill, I found it impossible to know ­whether his choice had been influenced by the deaths of his wife, her lover, and his father-­in-­law, or w ­ hether, for that m ­ atter, it is pos­si­ble for anyone to confidently say that their decisions are made freely or ­under duress. What we call f­ ree ­will is often more apparent than real—­not a plan we formulate and follow but a series of minor adjustments of which we are barely conscious.1 To invoke Saran Salia’s image of the myriad ways birds fly in the sky, we might note that, “A single bird’s tendency to align and remain close (but not too close) to her peers can create a swirling flock that appears to be moving with a collective mind.”2 But a murmuration of starlings, a crowd of ­people, or cloud formations are inadvertent consequences of countless actions and reactions that are the real prime movers. Saran Salia, Noah, and I ­were talking one morning about the powers of a Kometigi when Saran Salia confided that he was no longer ­free to practice medicine. Much to his chagrin, his classificatory sons had invoked Islamic law and obliged him to renounce his old practices as a precondition for them taking care of him in his old age. “But even now,” he said, “when the xylophones and flutes play the m ­ usic of the Kome and sing its songs, I long to dance.” And Saran Salia began chanting in a quavering voice: Sembe, sembe, sembe le, Kome la, eh Kome wo; n’de min i le nyonto ken yen . . . (Kome has g­ reat power; its equal has never been seen). Sensing that the time had fi­nally come, I broached the question I had wanted to ask Saran Salia nine years ago, when I first came to Firawa: “What is Kome?” Saran Salia’s voice became a hoarse whisper. “Kome does not come from the bush. I am Kome. I dress myself up. It is me they dress up. If our eyes met when I was like that, you would fall to the ground in fear. But I am old now. I cannot do it anymore.” The force of this s­ imple declaration should not be underestimated, for uninitiated boys and ­women believe that Kome is a “bush ­thing” ( fira ro fan) and certainly not a mere mortal. As for me, I should not have been surprised by this disclosure that super­natural power was a necessary illusion. This was not, of course, the way Saran Salia saw it. In the same way Keti Ferenke used fictional scenarios to sharpen ­people’s awareness of the consequences of

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unethical be­hav­ior, so Saran Salia regarded the quasi-­human figure of Kome as a power­ful means of social control. Djinn, and stories about djinn, invoked the exotic in order to think critically about the quotidian. Their real­ity derived from their practical utility. Saran Salia explained how he acquired his special powers during his seven-­ year apprenticeship with a medicine master called Yamisa in the Malian town of Sigiri. If you are to draw the Kome rope, you must first wash yourself thoroughly. You go downstream, and your teacher [karamorgo] goes upstream. He changes himself into a snake. It comes t­ oward you through the ­water [With his forearm and bent wrist, Saran Salia showed me how it swam with its head above the surface]. It wraps around you. A ­ fter it has wrapped around you, your teacher comes and tells you to leave it. He then takes some leaves and the head of a person who has been dead for seven days. He places the leaves and the head in a fire he has lit in a hole in the ground. You sit in the smoke. The smoke fumigates [literally “steams”] you. It immunizes you [literally “you imbibe the steam”] against all harmful medicines. If anyone tries to fight you, he ­will die.

I ­later discovered that it is the gown that is fumigated and, thereby, acquires the power to retaliate against an assailant. But the wearer of the gown is always in control. “If flies s­ ettle on me, they die,” Saran Salia explained. “If a person slaps me, he ­will die. But if I go like this [Saran Salia slapped his thigh, signifying that he, and not the gown, was retaliating], the gown w ­ ill cool and the assailant ­will not die.” I was bewildered. I found it hard to picture the events Saran Salia had described and was not sure I would want to witness them even if invited to. But Saran Salia’s willingness to share this knowledge with me bound us in a kind of conspiracy, for this was far from common knowledge. Perhaps he did not expect me to understand. ­After all, Kuranko w ­ ere as aware of tubabu skepticism as they w ­ ere of Islamic dogmatism. Perhaps this is why Saran Salia opened up to me, out of re­spect and affection, and not ­because he thought I would accept or approve what he had to say. It was something given in exchange for the regard I had shown him, on a par with his allowing my ­family to live in his h ­ ouse. But this liking also was born, I think, of the fact that I recognized him as the person he was in his own eyes. Badgered by his classificatory sons into giving up his lifelong roles as besetigi and Kometigi, he, none-

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theless, could, in my com­pany, find at least the semblance of re­spect his own kinsmen withheld from him despite their attention to his physical needs. That ­there are limits to our capacity for comprehending each other’s worldviews was made very clear the following day in a conversation that began with Noah asking his ­uncle to fumigate a gown for him. “You ­will provide the cloth?” Saran Salia asked. “Yes, I ­will bring it to you t­ oday.” Then Saran Salia looked at me. “If you want, I ­will also do it for you, and you can take it with you when you go back to your own country.” “But could I become a Kometigi and use the korte medicines?” I asked, half-­joking. “That is impossible. You could not take the medicines to your own country. Besides, you are not used to Kome. If you saw it, you would shit your pants in fright!” “If you have that fear deep down,” Noah explained, “korte w ­ ill act. But if you d ­ on’t believe it, it w ­ on’t act on you. If you have the fear in you, ‘Oh t­ hey’re ­going to shoot me with this korte,’ you w ­ ill die then. But you must have that fear of it.” And so the line was drawn. This was not my habitus. I could not enter it through an act of intellectual effort alone. As Noah had pointed out, certain ­things are pos­si­ble only when you are a part of a community that shares the same convictions, just as many actions are efficacious only when supported by faith in their efficacy. This faith is not something one can acquire or feign; it comes from being raised in a par­tic­u­lar culture, an outcome not of formal instruction but of mimetic learning. We encounter other cultures as we encounter other persons, both in terms of the ideas with which we conventionally frame our views of real­ity and in terms of mutual interests. Thus, love and friendship (dian’morgoye or kentiye) are f­ ree of the social duties and obligations that characterize kinship and affinity, and t­ hese elective affinities often transcend the bound­aries of age, gender, ethnicity, and belief. For Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, “the other is not shut up inside my perspective of the world, ­because this perspective itself has no definite limits, ­because it slips spontaneously into the other’s, and ­because both are brought together in the one single world in which we all participate as anonymous subjects of perception.”3 How ­else can we account for the fact that we are drawn to some

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p­ eople far more than to ­others, and that this attraction is often immediate? Was my affinity for Noah, Mamina Yegbe, Keti Ferenke, and Saran Salia a reflection of our shared sense of being underlings, “cut out,” as Noah once put it. Did this attraction to the margins, this disenchantment with the center, reflect similar travails in early childhood, the sort of experience that Sue Monk Kidd alludes to when she writes of “the wounded places down inside ­people that sought each other out, that bred a kind of love between them?”4 Often, I just sat and whiled away the time with Saran Salia. He would grate kola on a tobacco tin lid that he had pierced with a nail. I would boil ­water and make tea. That was all, for I had learned that sociality may be consummated in silence and can do without words, just as e­ very writer learns that it is sometimes more effective to let ­things be shown rather than spelled out. The day before we left Firawa, Heidi went into the bush with some friends. ­After capturing several small birds by making a sticky gum from the sap of a tree and embedding seeds in it, the c­ hildren returned to the village with the birds in a makeshift cage of raffia stalks. The boys then tied string around the birds’ feet and spun them around like bullroarers. When a bird was exhausted from its efforts to escape, the boys cast it aside and found another. Heidi came into the h ­ ouse with one of t­ hese battered birds in her hand. She asked me how she could revive it. I thought the bird was bound to die, but suggested she take a sliver of raffia and use it to drop w ­ ater into the bird’s beak. When she went outside, I braced myself for her return, heartbroken at not being able to save the bird’s life. A few minutes ­later, she came to me with empty hands. Her face was aglow, her chest heaving with ecstasy. She was so overcome she could hardly speak. She had done what I suggested. Fed the bird droplets of ­water. Without warning, it suddenly flew from her cupped hand and fluttered around the compound for a few seconds before disappearing into the sky.

I Am Another

In my early twenties, I had envisaged a form of writing that integrated social science with lit­er­a­ture, and juxtaposed images with ideas.1 When I returned to New Zealand a­ fter our year in Sierra Leone and the UK, I was determined to fi­nally realize this dream. But writing Barawa proved to be more than an experiment in ethnographic writing; it was an attempt to come to terms with the shadows that the colonial era still cast over anthropology. In London, I spent a week in the British library reading the journals of Alexander Gordon Laing (1794–1826), the Scottish explorer who, in 1822, narrowly missed “discovering” the source of the Niger, which lies in the heart of Kuranko country. Almost fifty years l­ater, in 1868, a thirty-­year-­old En­ glishman called William Winwood Reade arrived in Sierra Leone, determined, as he put it, “to open up a new region . . . ​to have a red line of my own upon the map [and] associate my name forever with [the Niger’s] course, and earn a place in the history of Africa.” Physically and mentally exhausted, and thwarted by local rulers at ­every turn, Reade did not reach his goal. Back in ­England, he presented an account of his travels to the Royal Geo­graph­i­cal

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Society only to be taken to task for his lack of firsthand observations and precise mea­sure­ments, and was reminded of the ­great value the society set upon the discovery of the source of the Niger and the calculation of its height above sea level. Mere descriptions culled from African in­for­mants w ­ ere worthless. Moreover, he was told that his lack of scientific data was regrettable, and his romantic inclination and impetuosity ­were unsuited to the business of exploration. Humiliated by this condescension, Winwood Reade withdrew from society, forgot about Africa, and wrote an encyclopedic denunciation of the established church. The Martyrdom of Man was published in 1872 to scathing reviews. When I came to read Col­o­nel J. K. Trotter’s account of the expedition he led to the source of the Niger in 1895, I was struck less by the explorer’s egoism than by his imperious and mercenary allusions to the country’s potential for exploitation and the plethora of quantitative data on altitude, air temperature, latitude and longitude, and distance marched each day, all of which reflected a predilection for scientific objectivity which, since the Enlightenment, had become Eu­rope’s magical means of giving legitimacy to its predatory expansion and sense of cultural superiority. W ­ ere anthropology’s knowledge claims informed by similar assumptions? The question that haunted the pages of Barawa was ­whether, and to what extent, I was heir to the legacies of men like Laing, Reade, and Trotter, for whom Africa was a means of making their mark on the world or exploiting its riches for their own gain. When I had raised t­ hese misgivings with Noah’s ­brother S. B, he brushed them aside. “As a politician,” he said, “I am constantly tempted to profit from my position rather than fulfill my obligations to the ­people who elected me. You learn to balance t­hese t­hings off against each other.” As for my ethnography, S. B. reminded me that my “ferensola book” (The Kuranko) had helped mobilize Kuranko in the 1977 elections, and my writing helped foreigners see Africa in a more enlightened way. He also suggested that the ethical dilemma of reconciling self-­interest and communal wellbeing was a universal preoccupation. In a memorable Kuranko story related by a young man called Sulimani Koroma in the dry season of 1972, the ethical dilemma of seeking one’s fortune at the expense of ­others or using it for the common good is dramatically depicted. The story revolves around a small drum known as yimbe that is played during initiations.

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At the time the story begins, this yimbe drum is in the hands of the hyenas in the bush. But hearing it night a­ fter night, villa­gers become entranced by its sound and pre­sent an ultimatum to their chief: “If you do not bring the drum to us in the village, we ­will go into the bush.” Concerned to keep the community together and maintain his authority, the chief promises “a hundred of every­thing” to anyone brave enough to bring the yimbe from the bush to the town. A young man decides to try his luck. ­After saying goodbye to his ­mother—­who fears she may never see her son again—he sets off on his quest. Deep in the bush, he encounters a cannibalistic djinn. But the djinn, impressed by the young man’s audacity and courage, decides not only to spare his life but to help him by giving him a fetish, with instructions on how to address it in time of need. The djinn also gives him an egg, a live coal, and a piece of bamboo. That night, the young man reaches the village of the hyenas. Though wary, the hyenas offer him food and lodgings and accede to his request to be allowed to sleep in the court­house where the yimbe drums are kept. In the m ­ iddle of the night, he steals the sweetest sounding yimbe and flees. Hyena Sira, the canniest of the hyenas, who has not slept for fear of what the young man might do, rouses the other hyenas and leads them in pursuit of the thief. However, each time the hyenas threaten to overtake him, the young man summons the fetish. The first time, it tells him to throw down the bamboo, which becomes an impenetrable forest that Hyena Sira has to gnaw her way through. The second time, it tells him to use the live coal to set fire to the grass; Hyena Sira quickly douses the flames by pissing on them. The third time, it tells him to throw down the egg, which turns into a g­ reat lake that enables the young man to reach the safety of the town with the yimbe drum. Now, the djinn had given the young man the fetish on condition that he kill a red bull and offer it as a sacrifice to the fetish when his quest was ended. But the young man forgets his promise, and when Hyena Sira, disguised as a seductive young w ­ oman, comes to the village and entices him to accompany her home, he follows her with no thought for his safety. Once ­they’ve crossed the lake, Hyena Sira leads the young man into an ambush. As the hyenas close in for the kill, the young man shinnies up a tree and summons the fetish for help. The fetish says nothing. Desperately, he summons it again. Again, no response. It is then that he remembers his broken promise and declares he ­will sacrifice two bulls to the fetish if it saves

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him. As the hyenas are about to tear him limb from limb, the fetish breaks its silence. It tells him to take a branch from the tree. It turns into a gun. The fetish then tells him to take some leaves. T ­ hese turn into bullets. He fires on the hyenas and they flee for their lives. The young man returns home and makes the promised sacrifice to the djinn. Three lessons may be drawn from this story. First, our lives are never our own; we are beholden to ­others for our very existence. As Merleau-­Ponty puts it, “we are collaborators for each other in consummate reciprocity. Our perspectives merge into each other, and we coexist through a common world.”2 Second, the coherence and continuity of a community depends on decisive individual acts. ­Every person bears some responsibility for the society in which he or she lives. Third, our humanity is fully realized only through the ordeal of a second birth or reawakening. In Kuranko initiation, it is not the ordeal itself that possesses this transformative power; it is the neophyte’s response to the ordeal that ­matters. As Friedrich Nietz­sche famously put it, increscunt animi, vivescit virtus (the spirit grows, strength is restored by wounding), which is why “the value of a ­thing sometimes lies not in what one attains with it, but in what one pays for it—­what it costs us.”3 But what if the wounding is so ­great that we cannot endure it, let alone recover from it? What if our journeys into the bush ­don’t culminate in a return to the town? What if our infatuation with the ethereal estranges us from the earth, and the ­imagined makes us forget what is real?

The Phi­los­o­pher Who Would Not Be King

Eight years before his death in 2007, Richard Rorty wrote, “I have spent 40 years looking for a coherent and convincing way of formulating my worries about what, if anything, philosophy is good for.”1 Had I known of Richard Rorty’s doubts when I met him in 1982, I might have confided that I was asking myself what, if anything, anthropology was good for. Was ethnography, as Barawa implied, simply an oblique projection of one’s own intellectual and cultural predispositions, or could it help one get beyond oneself and think or see differently? Though renowned for his groundbreaking critique of philosophy as a quest for the foundations of true knowledge, or an accurate repre­sen­ta­tion of the essence of the world, and his MacArthur “genius award,” Dick Rorty immediately struck me as socially unsure of himself and nonplussed whenever the talk turned from academic to mundane ­matters, such as Australian wines, the films of Werner Herzog, or the best Viet­nam­ese restaurant in Canberra.2 We w ­ ere visiting fellows at the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University: myself, Dick Rorty, Don Hirsch, Zygmund Baumann,

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Paul Connerton, Russell Keat, Patrick McCarthy, and ­others I got to know less well. I was writing essays on Kuranko ethnohistory, ontological meta­ phor, and embodiment, profiting from long conversations with Paul, who was writing his book on bodily social memory, and Russell, who was preparing his critique of Merleau-­Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. It was my hatha yoga practice that had inspired my explorations of body consciousness; unfortunately, it also had turned me into an obnoxious fundamentalist who believed that the respiratory and psycho-­physical disciplines of yoga enabled one to achieve a cleaner relationship with the world, and that discursive thought only muddied the ­waters. Rorty objected to the essentialist overtones of my view, arguing that efforts to ground knowledge in the body or the mind, in reasoned discourse or strong intuition, ­were equally misguided. And he cautioned me against explaining any h ­ uman experience in terms of some prior cause or first princi­ple. In my defense, I pointed out that a philosophical argument against foundationalism could not be transferred to the real world, since all ­human beings have recourse to notions of firstness, foundations, and fundamentals in their everyday lives. If it is existentially the case that life is insupportable without such notions, what is the point of making philosophical arguments to the contrary? Moreover, I felt that the Deweyan argument, to which Rorty subscribed, against Platonic dualisms like body-­mind, true-­false, and subject-­object left unconsidered the way we deploy ­these antinomies to capture dif­fer­ent modalities of experience. Making epistemological claims for such distinctions is problematic, but recognizing the phenomenological differences they communicate was, I thought, vital to understanding ­human experience. Nowadays, however, I have fewer qualms about Rorty’s cautions against intellectual arrogance and reductionism b­ ecause t­ hese are the very traits that inform imperialist and racist mentalities. Beyond the philosophical issue of ­whether we can ever truly represent what lies outside our minds—­whether ­human thought can mirror nature—­lies the much more pressing issue of ­whether the insights of thinkers can change the world. When Rorty’s parents broke with the Communist Party in 1933, they turned to the po­liti­cal philosophy of Leon Trotsky, even sheltering John Frank, one of Trotsky’s secretaries, for several months following Trotsky’s assassination in Mexico in 1940. “I grew up knowing that all decent ­people ­were, if not Trotskyites, at least socialists,” Rorty would ­later write, reflecting on the influence of his parents. For even as a boy, he believed that the very “point of being ­human was to spend one’s life fighting social injustice.”3 One won­ders ­whether

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this shy, bookish, and precocious twelve-­year-­old appreciated the ironic contradiction between his desire to reform the world and his reclusive personality that would incline him to understand the world from afar. In an interview that first aired on Dutch TV, Rorty is asked to describe himself as a child. Appearing almost ingenuous, Rorty searches for the right words. “Shy, withdrawn, ingrown,” he says carefully. “Um, constantly afraid of being beaten up in the schoolyard. Hm. Not playing much of a role in any activities. Hoping to get away from school as soon as I could.” “Why? ­Because . . .” “I just felt awkward and unable to join in t­ hings.” “For what reason? ­Because . . .” “Dunno. It’s just a fairly early memory of being asocial.” Watching this video, I not only identified with the picture Rorty was painting of his boyhood self; I was struck by his offhand manner. His refusal to reduce his shyness to some sinister cause, to find fault with his parents and upbringing, to judge his be­hav­ior as e­ ither negative or positive. But the interviewer is determined to pin him down, to fathom this solitary be­hav­ior and use it as a key to unlock the secrets of the man. “The schoolyard, then. Y ­ ou’re standing alone, or . . .” “You know, actually my memories a­ ren’t very strong u ­ ntil about the age of eight or seven . . . ​something like that. I was always being moved from school to school. I think I went to seven or eight dif­fer­ent primary schools. In each one I would always won­der if I was ­going to make any friends, and then never did.” “But do you know why? This shyness, where did it come from?” “Dunno.” “Did it accompany you all your life, or . . .” “I’ve never been very easy in my dealings with ­people. I’m a lot better than when I was a child, but still I tend to avoid parties ­because I c­ an’t think of any small talk to make.” “As a shy boy, escaping the schoolyard, escaping the o­ thers in the classroom, ­going from school to school seven or eight times, you might suppose ­there’s somebody who reads books in the silence of his room, at home? Am I correct?” “Yeah, yeah. According to my parents I pretty much taught myself to read when I was four or thereabouts and spent most of the rest of my life reading books.”

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If Rorty is bored or irritated by the interviewer’s probing, he is at pains not to show it. He listens to the question and tries to answer it, even if the picture he is allowing to emerge is of a nerd who felt indifferent to the rough-­ and-­tumble of the world. “The world in t­ hese books, was it perhaps more impor­tant to you than the world outside?” “Yeah, much more. The world outside never quite lived up to the books except for a few scenes in nature, animals, birds, flowers.” Rorty is alluding to his childhood passion for collecting wild orchids, flowers that may have attracted him ­because they ­were “hard to find,” “socially useless,” and made him feel, at certain Wordsworthian moments, that he had been “touched by something numinous, something of ineffable importance.”4 But the interviewer wants to know “what kind of world” this boy was “creating by reading books and combining them.” “Oh, fantasies of power . . . ​ah . . . ​of control . . . ​um . . . ​of omnipotence. The normal childhood fantasies . . . ​um . . . ​you know. Turning out to be the unacknowledged son of the king, that kind of ­thing.” “Power. Control. The control and power you missed in the schoolyard?” “And I think I was basically looking for some way to get back at the schoolyard bullies by turning into some kind of intellectual and acquiring some kind of intellectual power. I w ­ asn’t clear how this was g­ oing to work.” “Did you manage to come back to them as the intellectual?” “No, I just lost touch with them by living in a world of intellectuals.” “­After primary school, did the situation remain the same, that is, you w ­ ere escaping, escaping into a world of books and fantasy?” “Well, actually, I was very lucky, ­because when I was fifteen I went to the university. And it was a par­tic­u­lar program in a par­tic­u­lar university where no one talked about anything except books, so it was, you know, ideal for me, and it was the situation in which I felt more or less at ease and in control of ­things.” “Was t­ here any feeling in your childhood or early adulthood that you would become a phi­los­o­pher?” “I think philosophy was somewhat accidental. I think that I could equally well have become an intellectual historian or a literary critic, but it just happened that the course I was most intrigued by when I was sixteen was a philosophy course, and so I sort of kept taking more and more philosophy courses and signing up for more and more degrees.” “Why ­were you intrigued?”

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“I think ­because of the sense of mastery and control you get out of philosophical ideas. You get the impression from reading philosophy that now you can place every­thing in order or in a neat arrangement or something like that, and this gratifies one’s need for domination.” The interviewer, it seems, is determined to have the last line. “Compensation for shyness?” “Yep.” If the truth of a statement lies neither in its correspondence to a preexisting real­ity nor in its logical coherence but in its capacity to help a person cope with life, to carry him or her into a more fulfilling relationship with o­ thers, what kind of truth is established by this interview? Given Rorty’s philosophical position, his reclusive childhood did not cause him to become a thinker, doomed to converse with himself ­because no one would talk to him. Rather, what he is telling the interviewer is that books and philosophy w ­ ere not escapes from the harshness of the world but ways in which he managed his relationship with it. “I wanted a way to be both an intellectual and spiritual snob and a friend of humanity,” he writes, “a nerdy recluse and a fighter for justice.”5 In pragmatism, he would find a ­viable compromise between the life of the mind and the life of the social activist. And by placing philosophy on a par with art and craft, storytelling, religion, birdwatching, and coping strategies, he could si­mul­ta­ neously puncture the pretensions of academics who regarded intellectual cleverness as intrinsically superior to all other forms of cleverness and affirm a solidarity with men and w ­ omen whose skills w ­ ere practical, social, or aesthetic. Pauline and I invited Dick and his wife Mary to our h ­ ouse for dinner, and since Dick and Don Hirsch ­were close friends, we invited the Hirsches as well. It was a convivial eve­ning, and though I have a clear memory of cooking Indian food, I cannot now recall much of our conversation. A few weeks l­ ater, Dick and Mary invited us to their ­house for a meal. They had rented a monocrete bungalow in Deakin, and their two c­ hildren, Patricia and Kevin, w ­ ere getting ready for bed when we arrived. From the start of the eve­ning, it was clear that Dick had elected to play the role of host. Moreover, I had the distinct impression that he’d had to persuade Mary against her better judgment that this strict division of ­labor was a good idea. Not only did he cook and serve the food; he ensured that our wine glasses ­were filled and that we ­were properly introduced to the other guests, which included Tamsin and Ian Donaldson. Even now, almost forty years ­after the event, I retain a poignant memory of Dick’s determination to

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prove himself equal to the occasion. But what moved me most was his obvious strug­gle with tasks that most of us take for granted—­cooking a ­simple meal, bantering about the weather, commenting on current events, discussing travel plans. It was clear that none of this came easily to him. Perhaps he had never before cooked a meal for eight guests. The food was not very good, but the determination to please was overwhelming, and we responded as parents might respond to a child bringing them breakfast in bed, the toast burned, the egg underdone, the tea cold. I d ­ on’t want to appear condescending, for when I l­ater reflected on the eve­ning, I felt only admiration that someone should push himself so hard to perform tasks that did not come naturally to him. For it seemed to me that the ­labor of producing a meal was greater, for him, than the l­abor of writing an essay on Dewey’s critique of metaphysics. ­After Canberra, I did not see Dick Rorty again, though we corresponded for a c­ ouple of years. He sent me an inscribed copy of Consequences of Pragmatism, and I reciprocated with a copy of Allegories of the Wilderness, which also appeared in 1982. And when Pauline died in September 1983, Dick sent his condolences with a phrase that captured the passionate ac­cep­ tance of contingency without which it is difficult to survive any loss, yet communicated the sense of hope without which it is impossible to envisage a ­future: “I only wish t­ here was something useful I could do.” As it turned out, his work proved to be more useful than ­either of us could have ­imagined for, in the months a­ fter Pauline’s death, I spent several hours ­every day methodically reading and taking notes on the collected writings of William James and John Dewey. Had Richard Rorty not introduced me to ­these writers, I would, perhaps, never have realized how directly and profoundly pragmatism speaks to our strug­gle to recover a raison d’être in the face of catastrophic loss. Unlike Boethius, who I also read at this time, I found no consolation in thought as “the one true good”; rather, it was the realization of the limits of thought that enabled me to yield to the natu­ral pro­cesses of grieving and, like Dick Rorty and his orchids, find renewal through my affinity with the natu­ral world. One can never know for certain how one’s actions or words ­will influence ­others. But sometimes it is a person’s strug­gle to be good or decent that impresses more than his or her achievement of t­ hese virtues. Sociability does not come naturally to some of us. But what I learned from Kuranko initiation and the clumsy role reversals associated with this rite of passage was that social identity was, as Kuranko themselves admitted, a gown one put on and a

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role one played, and it could easily be dropped or discarded. What sustained the per­for­mance and pretense of social life was the vital necessity of community existence, without which no individual could survive. Something similar may be said of our worldviews. Although ­these pictures of the world are artificial, as Rorty points out, and the wider world largely beyond our linguistic and intellectual grasp, it is in ­those moments when thought strug­gles to become worldly or the world seems to conspire in our strug­gle to understand it that we most clearly see the impossibility of the unity of mind and ­matter, but we find in that disappointment a sense of oneness with t­ hose who have traveled the same path, engaged in the same strug­gle, and come to the same conclusion. Rorty once wrote that “the meaning of one ­human life may have l­ ittle to do with the meaning of any other h ­ uman life, while being none the worse 6 for that.” But it is gratifying, nonetheless, to recognize affinities, sympathies, and common ground when divergent backgrounds, affiliations, and intellectual capacities lead one to expect none. In such recognitions, we realize the usefulness of Rorty’s observation that discovering unity beneath appearances may be less exciting that discovering that comity is compatible with radical and contradictory variousness, and that ­there is nothing necessarily wrong with bringing Trotsky and wild orchids together in a single story without first explaining what they have in common. Not long before his death in June 2007, Richard Rorty wrote a piece called “The Fire of Life,” in which he meditates on being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and speaks of the consolations of poetry.7 He concludes, “I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not ­because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. ­There are no such truths; ­there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is ­because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts —­ just as I would have if I had made more close friends.” I take Rorty to be saying something more than that poetry and friendship provide plea­sure. He is saying that they carry us across the threshold of the self into richer and stranger regions than any we have known alone. Philosophy needs the language of poetry to enter the penumbra—­that force field around us, partly lit, partly in shadow, that shapes who we are yet defies our attempts to fully control or comprehend it. ­Whether we refer to this realm as natu­ral, spiritual, historical, po­liti­cal, or virtual is less relevant than its inescapable ambiguity. It enthralls us to the same extent that it eludes us. And though it may

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unsettle and even destroy us, it may become a source of generative power. May this not also be a justification for ethnography? For, as Rorty notes, it is enough to describe and testify to the lives of o­ thers, as far as we can, on the grounds of our solidarity with them. They are not misguided creatures in alien worlds but ourselves in other circumstances.8 But to invoke poetry, or speak of the consolation of wild orchids, may be to risk rendering the world too benign and to leave its inequities unremarked. During his first trip to India, Rorty spoke to a fellow philosophy professor who also was a politician. A ­ fter thirty years attempting to help India’s poor, this man confessed that he had found no solution to the prob­lem. “I found myself,” Rorty writes, “like most Northerners in the South, not thinking about the beggars in the hot streets once I was back in my pleasantly air-­conditioned ­hotel.”9 But back in Amer­i­ca, recalling his experiences, Rorty’s conclusion is that all the love and talk in the world—­the technological innovations, the new ge­ne­tics, the power of education, the politics of diversity—­“­will not help.” Is this defeatist? A confirmation that, for us, the poor w ­ ill always remain unthinkable? And where does such a conclusion leave us? Withdrawn into the safe confines of our own small world, immunized from the perils of entering the world with which we claim solidarity, consoled by poetry? Or inspired to return to the streets ­until we find one person whose life is changed, no ­matter how imperceptibly, by his or her encounter with us, so that the question is no longer ­whether solidarity can be thought into existence but how it is actually brought into existence by our everyday choices of what we do? For, in spite of being aware that eternity is infinite and h ­ uman life finite, that the cosmos is g­ reat and the h ­ uman world small, and that nothing anyone says or does can immunize him or her from the contingencies of history, the tyranny of circumstance, and the accidents of fate, ­every ­human being craves some modicum of choice, some degree of understanding, demands some say, and expects some sense of control over their own existence.

Wilderness

In the wake of tragedy, some ­people stay put while ­others go in search of somewhere ­else to begin again. When Pauline died, I took the latter course, unaware that in d ­ oing so I would lose touch with close friends, become estranged from my homeland, and strug­gle to find work. Yet, despite my unassuageable grief, I felt I had been returned to a time when my life was full of boundless possibilities. ­Because we had been happy in Canberra in 1982, it was only natu­ral that Heidi and I should return ­there, especially since an old friend, Bob Tonkinson, had managed to negotiate a half-­time, temporary position for me in the Department of Anthropology at the Australian National University. Although Bob and his wife Myrna soon left Canberra for jobs in Western Australia, they introduced me to Kathy Golski and Woj Dabrowski who, together with Ranajit and Mechtilde Gu­ha, p­ eople I had befriended in 1982, became my intellectual and emotional mainstays. Over the next eigh­teen months, I threw myself into teaching and writing, and when two full-­time permanent positions w ­ ere advertised, I felt sure I would be offered one.

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In this confident frame of mind, I left Heidi with her best friend’s f­amily and flew to Sierra Leone for a few weeks of fieldwork. But I had underestimated the delayed impact of grief and soon found myself identifying with Mary Kingsley (1862–1900), whose pioneering explorations of West Africa had been precipitated by personal loss. ­Until she was thirty, Kingsley lived with her parents in Cambridge, ­England, and had almost no life of her own. What she knew of the world she gleaned from her f­ ather’s library and from his accounts of his frequent travels. In the fall of 1888, when she was twenty-­six, her ­mother became seriously ill. Not long afterward, her f­ather’s health began to fail. She would l­ater describe the following four years as “work and watching and anxiety, a narrower life in home interests than ever, and a more hopelessly depressing one, for it was a long losing fight with death all the time.”1 Of herself, she writes, “I was no more a ­human being than a gust of wind,” and when her parents died within six weeks of each other in 1892 and t­here ­were “no more odd jobs any one wanted [her] to do at home,” Mary Kingsley turned her attention to her f­ ather’s unfinished anthropological work on primitive law and religion. Opening his atlas, she toyed with the idea of ­going to South Amer­i­ca, considered Ethiopia, then settled on West Africa. Her mindset was typical of someone bereaved. Confessing more feeling for the world of mangroves, swamps, rivers, and the sea than the world of ­human beings, and indifferent to her own ­future or fate, she “went down to West Africa to die.”2 I was not hoping to die but to recapture the life I had lost. But the country to which I returned was on the verge of economic collapse and social chaos. In Freetown, S. B. and Rose cautioned me against traveling upcountry, but I was determined to visit Noah in Koidu and return to Firawa. ­After a few days in Koidu, where Noah was working as trade inspector, I pressed on to Firawa alone. I had let myself believe that the familiar roads would bring me to a place where Pauline was still alive. The idea was as illusory as the way the ­great inselberg of Sinakonke (“gold mountain”) appeared to recede over the horizon as I walked t­ oward it. Though t­ here was now a bridge across the Seli River at Yirafilaia and trucks ­going to Firawa, I chose to journey on foot, as I had in the past. The swamps gave way to forest. The forest gave way to savannah.

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As the sun emerged from the mist, I began to recognize places where we once had ­stopped to rest. A granite tor, haunt of a female djinn, where ­people brought offerings of fruit and kola. A grove of locust trees, the pods like withered penises. I heard a suluku bird calling its name forever in the grass. Suddenly, as I slaked my thirst with w ­ ater from my flask, Pauline was standing beside me. I had only to turn and offer her the flask and she would take it, and I would watch her drink, and the w ­ ater would spill from her mouth and run down her neck, her dark hair cropped, her cotton blouse unbuttoned, and she would smile as she passed the flask back to me. Once, I thought I heard her call my name. At the foot of steep clearings in the bush, ­people had begun the harvest. Men w ­ ere threshing sheaves of rice on the tamped earth. Puffs of dust ­were spirited away by the wind as the ­women winnowed. When I sang out to them, the men and ­women paused in their work and threw back greetings without asking who I was or where I was ­going. I had the feeling I was a ghost, moving like cloud shadow over tawny grass, or like mist across the surface of a stream. And the ­people bending to their tasks among the rice stubble ­were ghostly, too. Oblivious to the chaos in the south. In Firawa, I sat in the shade of a mango tree with Tala Sewa and his elders. It, too, was a replay of the past. Chief Sewa relayed his remarks through a praise singer who shouted “nomor!” in approval of every­thing his master said. ­People w ­ ere happy I had come back. I was welcome to stay for as long as I wished. No harm would come to me. I was their “stranger.” Yet for all the customary assurances and goodwill gifts of grain, the f­ aces of the old men ­were grim. For two years, p­ eople had not had enough to eat. At harvest time, strangers came and ordered the villa­gers to sell their rice. T ­ hose who refused ­were threatened. It was government policy, so the strangers said; the directive came from the president himself; the army would intervene if ­there was any re­sis­ tance. So ­people sold much of their rice for a pittance, knowing it would be resold on black markets in the south. And when the hungry time came, ­people had to eat cassava and yams, and when t­ hese crops ­were finished, they starved. “Why should this happen?” one old man demanded to know. “The president says we must place our destiny in his hands, just as we place our destiny in the hands of Chief Sewa ­here. The president says he is ­father of the nation. He ­will take care of us. But if this is true, why does he force us

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to sell our rice, denying us the profit, leaving us so ­little food that our ­children waste away and die? And why should he let strangers come and threaten us? ­Isn’t life harsh enough?” I spent that after­noon at Abdul’s h ­ ouse, sitting at the end of his porch, lulled by the jabber of his sewing machine. Then, in the gathering dusk, I walked to the other end of the village to find the h ­ ouse that Saran Salia had given Pauline and Heidi and me when we lived in Firawa five years ago. The ­house was a charred ruin. Fossicking among the debris, I found some fragments of tortoise shell, a few broken porcupine quills, a handful of cowries, a ­couple of crumpled horns, a trace of mica in the ash and rubble. ­These ­were all that remained of the healing arts the old man had practiced and which had, perhaps, died with him. I sat on the fire-­blackened porch where we had spent so many hours talking together. Fire finches flickered like lost souls in the gutted rooms, tapping out— or so I i­magined—­some message from the afterlife that I was too dumb to decipher. I strolled across the abandoned garden we had made together and found the bedraggled palm from which he had cut a bunch of bananas on the eve­ning of our departure—­a meta­phor for kinship. I stood awhile in the darkness. Insects shrilled in the grass. I thought, if I ­were patient enough, if I had faith, he would appear out of the shadows, leaning on his stave, a conspiratorial grin on his face, his hand outstretched . . . ​­There are many ways that birds fly in the sky . . . I returned to Canberra only to discover that I had not made even the shortlists for the positions I had applied for. Stunned, I appealed to the head of the department for an explanation. “The consensus in the department was that you are not ­really committed to anthropology,” he said. When I asked how this impression had been formed, the professor hinted at a rumor that I had been teaching “the anthropology of self-­development.” I asked how such a farcically distorted view could have arisen. Did it have something to do with the course I taught on hermeneutics and critical theory? The head was unwilling to discuss the ­matter further. With hindsight, I should not have been so mystified. Anthropology was my vocation, and I had lived, breathed, and written it with as much passion as anyone I knew. But creative writing had commanded an equally imperative place in my life, and though I had long ceased thinking of them as mutually

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antipathetic, many anthropologists took a very dif­fer­ent view. Faithful to the positivist precepts of British empiricism, they recoiled from any intermingling of science and art, or even science and philosophy. Broke and embittered, I began work as a plongeur in the kitchens at University House. Sweaty, greasy, and dejected, I stood at a stainless steel sink filled with scalding w ­ ater, scrubbing and scouring aluminum pots, pans, trays, and utensils and stacking them in the automatic rinsing machine. I had done this kind of work when paying my way through university, but now found it unbearable. It was not the menial nature of the work as much as the irony that the only job I’d been able to find was on the campus, and that, as I toiled away in the kitchen, the swing doors to the bistro would open whenever a waiter came through, revealing my erstwhile colleagues at intimately lit t­ables making small talk over glasses of red wine. My boss was Rena. She had emigrated to Australia twenty-­eight years ago and married a Yugo­slavian. Greece had changed for the better, she said, but she would never go home. “Life is hard,” she told me, “but you ­can’t complain.” Over the next four years on the dole, determined not to complain, I found consolation in the story of Arnold Van Gennep, whose 1909 work on marginality (Les Rites de Passage) curiously echoed the author’s own situation. Twelve years a­ fter the publication of his pioneering monograph, Van Gennep could find no academic position and settled in the South of France where he raised chickens for the rest of his life, living in straitened circumstances and known locally as “the hermit of Bourg-­la-­Reine.” Yet he “did not decline into sour resentment, or even display in his writings any patent bitterness; on the contrary, trou­bles and setbacks never perturbed him: he set them aside and completely forgot about them.”3 Now a semi-­scholar myself, I pondered the g­ amble I had taken in leaving my job in New Zealand and risking every­thing on securing a tenured position in Canberra. Was it all, as Dostoevsky said, the expression of a perverse desire to demonstrate to myself that I was not a victim of circumstance but the master of my own fate? But what if Dostoevsky’s cele­bration of risk was simply a rationalization of his own addiction to gambling, his compulsive need to “be in the zone,” as gamblers say, momentarily immune to the stresses of a bad marriage or the strug­gle to pay the rent? Was I at the mercy of a compulsion to run away when the ­going got rough, imagining I could start over in a new place with a clean slate? Had I been drawn to ethnography as romantics are drawn to places where time has supposedly “stood still,” their

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fantasy of personal regeneration reinforced by the fact that, as they travel further and further from the Global North, their currency increases in value ­every time it is exchanged, leading them to hope, like the hapless Keawe in Robert Louis Stevenson’s fable The ­Bottle Imp, that they ­will become healthier or happier as a result. In such dreams of “fantastic reparation,” material and spiritual values become conflated.4 Thus, redemption means buying back something one has temporarily given up and making amends or compensating for some moral fault. It is not only gold and silver that rise and fall in value but our sense of self-­worth, our own wellbeing. For Georg Simmel, money is the most “striking symbol” of the flux and inconstancy of ­human happiness. But Simmel also points out that, ­because of its ephemeral character, money resembles God, culture, or natu­ral law, for it appears to transcend the trade and traffic of our quotidian world as “a mea­sure of ­things” that cannot themselves be mea­sured and, therefore, serves as a symbolic constant.5 In my case, ­family and friends ­were my dearest possessions. My points of anchorage. My sources of constancy, and the very mea­sure of who I was. Devoting my energies to Heidi’s wellbeing, my writing, and my yoga practice filled my days, though I also was sustained by edifying conversations with Ranajit Gu­ha (the f­ather of subaltern studies), by my adoption into Kathy Golski and Woycieck Dabrowski’s circle of Polish friends, and by meeting Michael Herzfeld, who shared with me early drafts of Anthropology through the Looking Glass, in which he compares the relationship between the Greek state and its peripheries to “statist” anthropology and its counternarratives.

Uppsala

In 1987, I received a morale-­boosting invitation from Anita Jacobsen-­ Widding to participate in a symposium titled African Folk Models and Their Application at Uppsala University, Sweden. ­Because leaving Australia would spell the instant termination of my dole, I gave Heidi access to my bank account and trusted she would have enough cash in hand to manage in my absence. Then I headed off to Sweden without a cent in my pocket. Of my first jet-­lagged hours in Uppsala, I remember ­little, apart from the embarrassment of being invited to a breakfast with several distinguished anthropologists and having to explain why I was not ordering anything from the menu. With what masochistic pride and pig-­headedness one protects oneself from the ignominy of penury! Fortunately, on confessing my predicament to Anita, she not only got me an advance on my honorarium; she had it increased, and I immediately wired Heidi some money and bought myself a three-­course meal.

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The university had reserved a third-­floor room for me at the ­Grand Hotell Hörnan, overlooking the River Fyrisan and the twin towers of the cathedral. ­After a sound night’s sleep, I woke before first light and set out to explore the town. The cobbled streets ­were wet from overnight rain, and as I crossed the Fyrisan, I experienced a strong sense of déja vu. Convinced I had been t­ here before, I racked my brains trying to identify the associations. Then I realized this was where Ingmar Bergman had filmed several scenes of Fanny and Alexander. ­Here was the weir where the two c­ hildren feared they might be drowned. ­Here was the cathedral. And ­here was the street that ran past the theater where Oscar Eckdahl was actor and man­ag­er. Oscar’s Christmas speech to the staff and players of his theater captures the sense that our private worlds are embedded within wider worlds that impinge on us in ways we cannot always withstand or understand. My only talent, if you can call it that, is to love the ­little world inside the thick walls of this play­house. And I’m fond of the p­ eople who work in this ­little world. Outside is the big world, and sometimes this ­little world reflects the big one so that we understand it better. Or perhaps we give the p­ eople who come ­here the chance of forgetting for a while, for a few short moments, the harsh world outside. Our theatre is a small room of orderliness, routine, and love.1

Oscar sees the relationship of microcosm and macrocosm as a relationship between the secure space of hearth and home (the theater is, above all, a familiar place) and the harsh, open space of the world. Each person is enclosed within a f­ amily, each ­family within a community, as a seed is lodged within its hull. T ­ hese social contrasts suggest existential contrasts between what can and cannot be endured, known, or grasped. My mind was on fire. A myriad of ideas instantly crystalized, all variations on the theme of microcosm and macrocosm. I was less interested in the Hermetic emphasis on how the part mirrors the w ­ hole (and vice versa) than in the gap, the aporia, the tension between one’s personal world (eigenwelt), the social world of which one is intimately a part (mitwelt), and the encompassing world we sometimes refer to as the natu­ral environment or the cosmos (umwelt). W ­ hether one speaks of the relationship between self and other, place and space, domus and polis, center and periphery, bush and town, or even the relationship between one’s specific ethnic or gendered identity and one’s com-

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mon humanity, an existential question is broached as to how we can negotiate the relationship between t­ hese realms in a way that is nourishing rather than nullifying.2 Closing oneself off from the world is not an option, for one’s very existence depends on the ties that bind us to significant ­others, and ­others to us. Yet, complete openness to the world is equally insupportable. Sigmund Freud writes compellingly of this strug­gle between closure and openness, observing that all organisms, from the lowly amoeba to ­human beings, need to both absorb ele­ments of the world beyond their bound­aries and protect t­ hese porous bound­aries from invasive and life-­threatening forces. Filtering, monitoring, and controlling traffic across body bound­aries, e­ ither through practical or imaginative strategies, is crucial to the life of any organism and gives rise to the recurring ­human dilemma of how to be open to ­others while guarded against them.3 But as cybernetics reminds us, the relationship between openness and closure is never settled but subject to constant assessment and readjustment as contexts change. The same is true of the relationship between our biographies and our worldviews. Michel Foucault did his primary research for Madness and Civilization while living and teaching in Uppsala in 1955, but it w ­ asn’t ­until much l­ater that the thinker who had erased the subject from the anonymous field of discourse “like a face erased by sand at the edge of the sea,” acknowledged himself as the hidden subject of his life’s work and admitted that his philosophy (log­os) implicated a biography (bios).4 In June 1984, during Foucault’s d ­ ying days, one of his closest friends, the young artist Hervé Guibert, recalled Foucault “evoking his childhood and its dreams” and volunteering “what he felt to be the deepest truths about himself.”5 ­These truths centered on three primal scenes or “terrible dioramas.” In the first, Foucault, as a small boy, is led by his ­father, who was a surgeon, into an operating theater in the hospital at Poitiers, to witness the amputation of a man’s leg. The f­ ather’s motive was, apparently, to “steel the boy’s virility.” In the second diorama, the boy walks past a courtyard in Poitiers in which a w ­ oman has been living for de­cades on a straw mattress. She is locally known as “the Sequestered of Poitiers,” and the boy experiences an unforgettable chill as he passes by. The final scene takes place during the war years. The life of the precocious young student is suddenly interrupted by an invasion of arrogant young Parisiens, “naturally smarter than anyone e­ lse.” “Dethroned, the philosopher-­ child is seized by hate, damns the intruders, and invites ­every curse to rain

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down upon them.”6 Soon a­ fter, ­these Jewish ­children, who had found temporary refuge in Poitiers, did, in fact, dis­appear in transports to the death camps of the Third Reich. James Miller glimpses in t­ hese scenes many of the themes that preoccupied Foucault for the duration of his professional life: wanton power (the ­father forcing his son to witness an amputation); erotic transgression (the w ­ oman on the mattress had been confined in a pitch dark room by her ­mother and ­brother, given ­little food, mired in her own shit, plagued by lice, maggots, and rats, and driven insane allegedly ­because she had given birth to an illegitimate child when she was younger); and crushing guilt (for the fascism Foucault had discovered in himself, and the fate of the powerless students he had wished to dis­appear).7 Miller’s analy­sis is confirmed, if only obliquely, in the final interview Foucault gave before he died. In a Nietz­schean vein, he confesses that all his work amounted to a kind of autobiography, and he abjures the “rhetorically evasive” form of philosophy in which he had disguised the truth about himself.8 This leitmotif would haunt me throughout my stay in Uppsala. One after­noon, for instance, I visited the garden of Carl Von Linné at Svartbäcken. Linnaeus lived in Uppsala most of his adult life; his ambition was to create a systematic taxonomy for all known animals, plants, and minerals. But what was it, I asked myself, that determined his “deep-­seated, almost compulsive need for clarity and order,” his passion for cata­loguing and sorting into groups and subgroups every­thing that passed through his hands? And what led him to turn from empirical studies of wild nature to a taxonomic systematizing that made order and the artifice of structure the greater imperative? Even his private correspondence reveals this systematizing zeal, this unshaken belief that he was “a prophet called by God to promulgate the only true dogma.”9 Late one night, I shared my preoccupations with René Devisch, who taught at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium and also was attending the Folk Models symposium. In René, I discovered a kindred spirit, and the story he shared was a compelling example of the interplay between biography and ethnography. In 1972, a­ fter a few weeks of progressively mixing with the p­ eople of the Yitaanda territory, I was given a double identity. I came to be considered as a reborn chief Taanda, namely N-­leengi, who, in 1939, had been led into exile.

Uppsala   145 Moreover, I appeared to them to be a good omen as I often reciprocated hospitality with the offer of first aid medical treatment, an activity which throughout my stay took up an average of two hours a day. Perhaps reassured by this aid, my hosts came to domesticate somewhat the unpre­ce­dented and intrusive nature of my presence by ascribing to me a capacity to divert evil or danger. They first had perceived me as a sauf-­conduit during a fatal thunderstorm one eve­ning in late January 1972, when lightning set fire to the h ­ ouse of chief Taanda Karata’s successor, N-­noongu. Kapata was alleged to have sent the lightning—it was the night preceding his death—in an attempt to kill his successor. Upon my arrival in the area at the beginning of January, chief Kapata had been in mortal agony, and I was solicited for medical help. B ­ ecause of my association with Swa Kapata, p­ eople believed that he had reached his exceptionally old age in anticipation of my arrival. During a council following his burial, I became in some way assimilated with Kapata’s pre­de­ces­sor. Surely unaware of the etymology of my first name—­“René,” literally “the reborn”—­a delegate from the regional chief N-­nene associated me in a kind of mythic narration with Taanda N-­leengi, reborn from death. The Belgian colonial administration had taken N-­leengi into exile at Oshwe far away in the Kwilu region, some five days’ walk eastward, where he had died upon arrival in 1939. He was accused of having participated in the anticolonial revolt of the Bamvungi prophetic movement. Somehow, this position made my anthropological interest in the ancestral past of the Yaka appear as something genuine to the tradition. As I experienced t­hings, this event initially added to my confusion in the field, and only ­later did it make sense when I discovered how one’s biographical and genealogical pedigree can be redefined to conform to a consensus with regard to one’s succession as titleholder.10

This final remark carried very personal connotations for René, who had been named ­after his ­mother’s beloved younger ­brother, who died during her pregnancy. The son of a ­woman so grief-­stricken that she i­magined her child to be the reincarnation of her dead b­ rother, and who named, nurtured, and dressed him as though he ­were, indeed, this Other, René was obliged to inhabit a “double identity.” During psychoanalysis in l­ater life, exploring the paradoxical ways in which t­hese reincarnations and overlapping identities had confounded him during fieldwork, as well as the uncanny thematic correspondences between his theoretical interests and his own biographical circumstances (his first two books ­were on death and ritual rebirth), René de­cided to contrive his own symbolic death and shed the identity that had been foisted on him in infancy by his grieving ­mother. He, thus, assumed the name

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Renaat—­acknowledging his Flemish patriline, declaring his self-­determined rebirth and signaling a shift in intellectual orientation t­oward the bodily and visceral realities he had, thus far, neglected. When the symposium ended, I spent a further week in Uppsala giving a series of lectures on William James’s radical empiricism, the method that would inform the collection of essays I was now putting together, partly in the hope that it might secure me a job, partly as a capstone to my haphazard academic c­ areer. The Heideggerian pun (lichtung) in my title (Paths ­Toward a Clearing), and the numerous references to Adorno, Bourdieu, Dewey, Devereux, Foucault, Lévi-­Strauss, Merleau-­Ponty, Rorty, and Sartre attested to the key influences in my thinking, homage to my precursors. I got lucky. Ivan Karp persuaded Indiana University Press to publish Paths and Michael Herzfeld, with whom I had become friends during his months as a visiting fellow at the ANU, negotiated a position for me at Indiana University.

IV

Indiana

I had mixed feelings about ­going to the United States. While an academic position would guarantee funding for fieldwork and cover Heidi’s fees and living expenses at the Canberra School of Art, I was apprehensive about being separated from her and my close Canberra friends, as well as from Katherine A., with whom I had shared my life for the past three years. Besides, having completed Paths and published my first novel, I assumed my academic life was ­behind me and that my f­ uture lay in writing fiction.1 My first impression of the United States was that it was, itself, a work of fiction. It was Halloween in Los Angeles, and the server in the airport coffee bar had purple glitter on her face and was dressed like a pumpkin. Confused by accents I could not understand, a deaf ­woman who handed me a card that read “Smile,” and evidence everywhere of a consumer culture that had run amok, I could not give myself one good reason why I had left Australia. I felt as I was described on my Green Card—­a non-­resident alien—­and lines

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from Malcolm Lowry’s Pre­sent State of Pompeii came to mind like a warning it was still not too late to heed. .

This pre-­eminently, is where you d ­ on’t belong. Is it some g­ reat ruin that brings upon you this migraine of alienation—­and almost inescapably t­ hese days ­there seems a ruin of some kind involved—­but it is always something that slips through the hands of the mind, as it ­were, and that, seen without seeing, you can make nothing of: and ­behind you, thousands of miles away, it is as if you could hear your own real life plunging to its doom.2

To add to my consternation, I arrived in Bloomington to discover I had been assigned to the Department of Religious Studies, not Anthropology. When I confessed to having no background in religion (which I associated with the g­ reat faith traditions and, therefore, alien to both my personal and professional experience), my colleagues ­were taken aback, having assumed I knew exactly what courses I would be offering and how I would contribute to the study of religion in Africa. Sitting in my empty office one morning and staring out the win­dow, I heard what I ­imagined to be someone speaking Kuranko. B ­ ecause my door was open, I quickly realized I was not hallucinating. In a nearby classroom, with its door also open, a young African man was teaching a group of ­students elementary Bambara, a Mande language cognate with Kuranko. I loitered outside the room, and when the class ended, I introduced myself to the instructor, Kassim Kone. Kassim became a close friend. To this day, I have a Bamana mud cloth (bògòlanfini) by the renowned Nakunte Diarra on my office wall, a gift from Kassim when he graduated, and a perpetual reminder of how he inadvertently came to my rescue in 1989.3 A few days ­after my encounter with Kassim, Katherine phoned from Sydney to say she had de­cided to join me in Bloomington. It was an extraordinary ­gamble on her part, and an act of love, and we immediately fell to discussing how we could create a ­viable life together in the United States. B ­ ecause of civil war in Sierra Leone and ­because I did not want Katherine to have to submerge her identity in mine, we de­cided to embark on fieldwork in Aboriginal Australia, where she had already been engaged in research.

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For me, it was like being born again. The elation of starting over in a place and with ­people new to us both would find expression in my 1995 book At Home in the World, where I explored both the ways in which the world into which we are born becomes a world we call our own and the ways in which the outside world sometimes encroaches so violently on us that our autonomy is all but destroyed. Two events helped capture ­these contrasted experiences. During our first days in the desert, before we fell in with Warlpiri and no longer had much time to ourselves, I was impressed by how quickly the neutral and anonymous space of the world gets transformed into a place we think of as our own. You turn off a desert track, drive across spinifex, bumping over the rough ground t­oward a desert oak, stop the vehicle, get out, build a fire, boil a billy, lay out your swags, and within half an hour an area that had no prior or particularly personal associations begins to take on meanings that are uniquely yours. Every­thing you do and say and feel in that place intensifies this almost proprietary sense that you and the place are now inextricably linked. This transformation, whereby something we think of as impersonal and other—as an “it”—­becomes something we experience as personal—as “ours”—is one of the miracles of h ­ uman life. Millions of h ­ uman beings share the same language, yet each and e­ very individual w ­ ill, at any given moment, be creating, within the par­ameters of a strict syntax, combinations and permutations of timeworn words that capture and communicate the phenomenological quiddity of t­ hings as he or she experiences them. The same is true of stories. The narrative forms known to humanity are finite and ubiquitous. Yet in the ways we adopt and engage with ­these master narratives, we communicate experiences that we feel are singularly our own. As for other ­human beings, we see them simply as ­faces in a crowd, as an anonymous mass, u ­ ntil we enter into dialogue with them. Forthwith, a stranger suddenly possesses a voice, a history, a name . . . ​ and what transpires between us may change our lives. But what of the obstacles to this ­free exchange of points of view—­the engrained prejudices we do not even know we have, the inequalities of power and wealth that put us at odds with one another, and the racial and gender ste­reo­types we inherit from our history? Can ethnography overcome ­these impediments to mutual understanding or is it doomed to perpetuate them? Where we might speak of ­human existence as a relationship between diametrically opposite domains—­being and nothingness, self and other, culture and nature—­Warlpiri speak of an interplay between patency (palka)

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and latency (lawa). This echoes the interplay in Māori thought between tupu (the unfolding or potentiality of ­every living ­thing) and mate (the pro­cess of weakening, sickening, or diminishing). Nothing is static or fixed in t­ hese lifeworlds. As one life comes into being, another life fades away. Both life and knowledge, thus, wax and wane in accordance with one’s changing relationships with o­ thers or with the world. Meanings and identities are never fixed essences but emergent properties, which is why places can sometimes appear to be persons, objects act as if they w ­ ere subjects, animals behave like ­humans, and strangers come to be friends. Where we might invoke Hegelian dialectics, Māori and Warlpiri deploy organic imagery. For Māori, the flux of existence is likened to the waxing and waning of the moon, the withering up of a fern frond and the uncurling of a new one, the ebb and flow of the tide, the swelling and collapsing of a wave, the inhalation and exhalation of the breath, or the lighting and d ­ ying of a fire.4 For Warlpiri, palka connotes being embodied in pre­sent time (jalanguju palkalku). Lawa suggests the opposite. The words apply to both the social and ecological rhythms of presence and absence. Anything that has “body” is palka—­a rock hole or river with w ­ ater in it, the trunk of a tree, a person whose belly is full, country where game is plentiful, a person who is pre­sent. But if a rock hole is dry, a stomach is empty, tracks are erased, or a person faints, falls asleep, goes away, or dies, then ­there is lawa, absence. Just as persons disperse then gradually come together again (pina yani), so ceremony can bring the ancestral order back into being, fleshing it out in the painting, song, and mimetic dance of the living. Giving birth to a child, singing up the country, or dancing the Dreaming into life are all modes of “bringing forth being” (palka jarrimi). And the passage from evanescence to renascence is like the passage from night to day. This worldview also pertains to what we call history. That which has been always leaves a trace. While the body of the land carries the imprint (yirdi) of ancestral journeys and epochal events, it also bears traces of the living as they move about upon it in the course of their own lives. By the same token, ­every individual’s body is the site of a merging of mythical and biographical time. A man may reincarnate traits of a Dreaming ancestor, and his body ­will come to bear scars (murru), such as initiatory weals on the chest and “sorry” marks on the thighs that are manifestations of the Law. Yet every­ body carries idiosyncratic scars—­from broken limbs, burns, fights, and aging—­that recollect irregular and singular events. It is the same with names.

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A nickname commemorating some incident in one’s life w ­ ill complement the Dreaming name one inherits from a pre­de­ces­sor. Worlds within and worlds without—­whether defined spatially or temporally—­are, therefore, in continual flux. One cannot be reduced to the other, ­either by claiming that the external world determines a person’s inner life (or vice versa) or that the past entirely determines the pre­sent. Although the Warlpiri men I worked with held that the Dreaming was eternal, it was clear that they also lived in History, and that their relationships with both ­were not static but dynamic. A single dramatic event brought this home to me. Following heavy rain in the desert, a gasoline tanker heading to a remote gold mine got bogged down on a dirt road. ­After radio calls for help, the mining com­pany dispatched a grader to haul the tanker out of the mire and create a detour. In ­doing so, a desert walnut tree was knocked over and destroyed—­a tree that stood on an impor­tant Warlpiri Dreaming track where, according to mythological accounts, an ancestor-­hero, Yunkuyirrarnu, and other initiated men camped with their wives and several uninitiated boys during an epochal journey from the north. ­Because I had firsthand ethnographic knowledge of this locality, I was contracted by the Central Land Council to investigate the mishap and find out if the “­owners” of the site wanted to seek compensation for damages in a court of law. Once word got around that I was investigating the destruction of the site, I had only to mention “that watiya” (that tree) and ­faces would darken with sorrow and anger. Billy Japaljarri, an eccentric individual at the best of times, looked at me as if I w ­ ere warungka (socially inept, crazy) and should not need to ask. “We all sad for that watiya,” he said. “Every­one is full of anger and sorrow, specially the kirda and kurdungurlu” (­those who ­were patrilineally and matrilineally related to it). “The tree was tarruku (sacred),” Wilson Japangardi said. It was not ­really a tree, but the life essence—­the pirlirrpa—of a person. The tree was the yuwirnngi, or Dreaming spirit, of Yunkuyirrarnu. “Every­one was grieving for that old man,” Wilson said. ­Later, I talked to Clancy Japaljarri, who bore the same name as the Dreaming hero. “If you spoil a Dreaming place,” Clancy explained, “you destroy the ­people that belong to that Dreaming place.” His argument was that the loss of the life (pirlirrpa) of the tree entailed a corresponding loss of life among t­ hose who called the tree “­father.” Both the tree and ­those who held this patrimony in trust shared the same Dreaming essence. This was why the “­fathers” of the

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damaged site w ­ ere so worried. They felt someone would sicken and die now that the tree was dead. Their anxiety was compounded by a suspicion that perhaps they had not done every­thing in their power to safeguard the site. The words they used conveyed emotions of feeling sick in the stomach and filled with a sense of inner worthlessness. Indeed, the remorse went so deep that ­there had been talk of ­people singing themselves to death. Clancy kept using the word wajawaja-­mani, which suggested not only the loss of the tree but the loss of a link to the past. “We feel the same way when a person passes away,” Clancy said dolefully. “We pity that person, we feel g­ reat sadness for them.” Clancy touched his abdomen to show me where t­ hese emotions w ­ ere most deeply felt. He paused for a moment, then added: “I’m sad now. I c­ an’t show my ­children that tree. My ­father told me that Dreaming . . . ​ but I ­can’t show it to my son.” Old Lumi Jupurrurla spoke of the Yunkuyirrarnu site as mukanypa nyayirni—­“­really sacred.” It was something “money c­ an’t buy.” “That proper dear one,” he told me, “ ’im dear one.” It was exactly the same way one spoke of a person who was near and dear. But this value does not consist solely in the sedimented meanings of the past at a place one thinks of as sacred; it depends on the generative activity of ­people in the ­here and now, and we owe to Marx and Engels the insight that ­labor and begetting are both reproductive activities. In the meta­phor of birth, Warlpiri recognize the same connection. Hunting and gathering, food sharing, initiation and marriage, bearing and rearing ­children are all expressions of a mode of activity at once social and visceral—­ the activity of bringing life into being and sustaining it. The Warlpiri meta­ phor for this life-­sustaining activity is of “growing up.” To “grow up” (wiri jarrimi) implies a pro­cess of nourishing and strengthening. The meta­phor holds good for rituals of increase, the activity of making boys into men, raising ­children, and upholding the Law. The “sacred” is synonymous with this generative power. For Warlpiri, the value of any site is given to it cumulatively through the vital and concentrated activity of ­those who hold that place in their care. This implies social value, since caring for a site or performing ceremony at the site involves creating and affirming relationships among ­those who call the site “­father” (­those patrilineally related to it), ­those who have “drunk the breast milk of that place” (­those matrilineally related to it), and contemporaries and countrymen on whom have been bestowed honorary rights of ritual affiliation. A site, thus, assumes

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an ethical and economic value proportional to the social value placed on the networks of p­ eople who perennially perform the ritual work of reembodying and reanimating—in stories, songs, body paintings, and dancing—­the inherent vitality of the place. In the absence of this activity, a site does not cease to possess value; rather, its value becomes latent. If the site is rarely visited and ceremony never performed t­here, this latency and silence may take on negative connotations. The site may be seen as the haunt of ghosts, an object of sorrow and loss, a subject of fear. In other words, the intersubjective relation between ­people and country loses its vitality in the same way that country becomes lifeless if the spinifex is not periodically fired, a body wastes away through lack of activity, or the bonds of kinship fall into abeyance when ­people lose touch with one another, or the deceased become dangerous shades. But perhaps the most compelling insights Warlpiri in­for­mants gave me concerned the existential ground of their feelings for the destroyed site. Displays of grief over the bulldozed tree ­were a way of impressing upon me not only the social value invested in the site but the existential loss p­ eople had suffered in having their voices ignored, their land trampled, their views unrecognized, and their pleas dismissed. How could ­people make good their loss? I asked. On this question, Clancy was adamant. Miming the stabbing action of a spear, he made as if to eviscerate himself. Just as the belly (miyalu) was the seat of a person’s life force, so a sacred site was the miyalu of the land where the life force of a ­people was concentrated. The whitefella who had disemboweled the sacred site should suffer in kind, paying for his error with his own life. That was the Law. More realistically, Old Jangala said, “We got to hurt t­ hose whitefellas, so ­they’re more careful in ­future. We got to make them pay.” “We say money is the whitefella Dreaming,” Clancy explained. “They make a lot of money, they want a lot of money, so if they have to fork out money, that teaches them a lesson.” “How much are you asking them to pay?” Clancy named a sum. Given every­thing he had told me, it seemed a paltry amount. But neither blood vengeance nor financial compensation ­were the real issue, which became very clear when I spoke to the older men at an initiation camp a few days ­after they had performed ceremony at the site in the presence

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of the white miners, showing them rarely seen “sacred” objects in an attempt to impress upon them the seriousness of what had happened. Interrupting the card game that was ­going on, I asked if the miners had understood what was revealed to them. “­Those kardiya [white p­ eople] alonga Granites, ­don’t understand yapa [Aboriginal p­ eople],” Joe Jangala said. “­Those miners have to go through yapa first,” Frank said. “Sometimes they ­don’t ask no one alongside them. When whites get the OK to come on, they think they are f­ ree to do what they like.” The anger cut deep. Japanangka turned from his cards. He was wearing a T-­shirt in the Aboriginal colors of black, red, and yellow. His curly white hair was dirtied to rust, and the stubble on his chin was like mica. He, too, had taken part in the ceremony. “Did they catch that man who knocked that tree over?” he wanted to know. “Did they get im? What they goin’ to do to him? They bin punish im yet?” Pepper Jupurrurla saved me from having to come up with an answer. Tossing in his cards and struggling to catch his breath, he embarked on one of his long-­winded explanations of the Law. “In the old days you signaled with fire smoke if you wanted to cross other ­people’s country. You waited ­until you ­were asked. Same if you shared in other ­people’s ceremony. You got to be invited, you got to be asked. But in t­ hose days, we c­ ouldn’t stop t­ hose whitefellas. We had to be friendly, to get tobacco, matches, and tucker, so we tried to work along together. But they too strong for we.” “We got to put a stop somewhere,” Joe broke in. “We know we bin robbed. Whitefellas have to wake up to themselves, to Aboriginal ­people. They got to work with Aboriginal p­ eople and try to make a deal with us when t­ hey’re ­going through Aboriginal lands. Whitefellas have to go through Aboriginal ­people first.” Frank Jungarrayi tilted the Stetson back on his forehead. His voice was harsh and deliberate. “We gotta push im properly. We worry for that business all the time. We worry too much ­because they bin knock down sacred trees for us. R ­ eally worry. They got to pay up. We want that money now!” Frank’s vehemence triggered an angry chorus. The card game was over. Even Zack was awake and listening. “This ­isn’t bullshit,” Joe rejoined. “We not just making this up.” “White p­ eople cheating us for money,” Japanangka said. “Rubbish money. They gotta pay us properly.”

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­ nder this barrage, the last ­thing I wanted to do was play dev­il’s advocate. U But I needed to know what the men thought about the miner’s mitigating plea that the destruction of the tree had been a regrettable accident. The men listened as I stated the non-­Aboriginal case. Their expressions ­were obdurate and unimpressed. When I had finished, Frank was first to speak. No longer belligerent, he now seemed at pains to help me grasp something that was obvious to any Warlpiri. If a “sacred” tree simply grows old and dies, that is all right, Frank said. But if a person damages or cuts down such a tree, that person must pay with his or her own life. “But what if that person did not know the tree was ‘sacred’ ”? “Every­one knows!” Frank said. He reminded me that boys ­were taken on long initiatory journeys across the country and shown sacred places, instilled with knowledge of the Dreaming and their responsibility for the land. “But what of whites?” “­Those whitefellas knew about the tree,” Frank said. For Frank and the other men, knowledge was something you lived. It ­wasn’t something you bore in mind and never acted on, something to which you simply paid lip ser­vice. And it certainly ­wasn’t something abstract, which you wrote down on a piece of paper, filed away, and then forgot. That was why ­there was no excuse, no extenuating circumstance, for what had been done. Indeed, the destruction of the tree suggested not ignorance of its significance but negligence, calculated indifference, and possibly malice. How could the situation be redressed? Archie rolled a cigarette and lit it. ­There would have to be payback, he said. “That tree held ceremony.” Wilson explained that p­ eople had been shamed by what had happened. Kurnta connotes both re­spect and shame. Only by taking action to exact retribution could a person lift the burden of shame from himself. That was why p­ eople w ­ ere demanding compensation. The whites had acted without any regard for Warlpiri values. Warlpiri had been demeaned. By paying compensation, whitefellas would demonstrate re­spect and every­thing would be “level,” “resolved,” “square and square.” In the ultimate scale of ­things, the destruction of the tree was transitory Damage to the bedrock had not been done. Already saplings ­were springing up from the ground at the site, a sign of the vital ancestral essence embedded ­there. Even the insult and injury ­people had suffered would be forgotten once compensation had been paid and whites acknowledged their m ­ istakes. So

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ran the Warlpiri reasoning. But could one reconcile this reasoning with the scientific rationality invoked by politicians when justifying the nation’s pursuit of what they called “the general good” or “the national interest”—­a rationality they assumed to be a part of a Western cultural essence (the Protestant ethic and the spirit of Capitalism) and, therefore, lacking in Aborigines? A further misunderstanding arose from the use of abstract Western ideas to translate concrete Warlpiri images. Referring to “spirits” and “sacred sites” ignores the fact that the Warlpiri words, pirrlipa and miyalu have bodily, emotional, and social connotations that the En­glish terms fail to capture. While my interlocutors rejected the view that Dreaming sites w ­ ere like holy places or pilgrimage sites, they drew a comparison with the Pool of Remembrance at the National War Memorial Museum in Canberra and road markers commemorating the travels of early white explorers in the Northern Territory. But t­ here was a difference, for remembering was not so much a psychological pro­cess as a form of concerted physical and ritual ­labor in which ancestral life essences and traces (yirdi) lying dormant in the womb or belly of the earth ­were regenerated and re-­embodied by the living. In ritual per­for­mances, men and ­women paint their bodies with ancestral motifs, arouse ancestral essences through the rhythmic stomping of their feet on the ground, reenact episodes from Dreaming myths, and chant ancestral song cycles to the clacking of boomerangs. ­These bodily and often bloody exertions conjure images of birth and rebirth (palka jarrimi) and explain why ancestral or Dreaming sites are associated with the belly (miyalu) and with places where w ­ ater and game are abundant. They also suggest that it is not change per se that indigenous p­ eoples resist but the existential vio­lence and humiliation of being subject to changes they do not choose. Being-­at-­home-­in-­the-­world is a ­matter of striking a balance between fate and ­free ­will. For, in spite of being aware that eternity is infinite and ­human life finite, that the cosmos is g­ reat and the h ­ uman world small, and that nothing anyone says or does can immunize him or her from the contingencies of history, the tyranny of circumstance, and the accidents of fate, e­ very h ­ uman being craves some modicum of choice, some degree of understanding, demands some say, and expects some sense of control over their own existence.

Cape York

Two years a­ fter the birth of our son Joshua, Katherine and I embarked on new fieldwork among the Kuku-­Yalanji of Cape York Peninsular. Our plan was that while Katherine completed research for her Ph.D. and the Kuku Yalanji land claim, I would explore Green (ecopo­liti­cal) and Aboriginal views of the natu­ral world. The history of the lifeworld we entered had been as traumatic as any in Aboriginal Australia—­more than a hundred years of violent dispossession, entrenched racism, the brutal breakup of families, deportations, and enforced missionization. Successive generations of Kuku Yalanji had been drawn into a wider polity only to find themselves disparaged and disadvantaged within it. We pitched our two-­room tent in a bloodwood grove within hailing distance of the ­house that our hosts, the Olbars, had recently built on traditional land purchased with an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Commission loan. Traditionally, the Olbars had lived along the banks of the Bloomfield River at Banabila, so-­called ­because of the swift tidal current near the river mouth. Considered “the weakest and most friendless” Kuku-­Yalanji ­family, the ethnographer

16 0     Worlds Within and Worlds Without

Walter Roth, writing in 1907, noted that, when an impor­tant man died of sorcery, a retributive killing was demanded, and the Olbars ­were frequently made the scapegoats. A member of the ­family would be “enticed away on some hunting expedition . . . ​and then mercilessly speared from ­behind.”1 This history of persecution and a distrust of outsiders may explain why the Olbars resisted relocation to the Wujal mission in 1970. They w ­ ere almost the last to leave their land and the first to leave the mission in the mid-1990s.2 Married to Mabel Olbar and raised in another part of Cape York, McGinty Salt had his own reasons for feeling marginal, and t­ hese became apparent as I gradually pieced together his story of separation and loss. McGinty’s ­mother tongue was Lama Lama, and he grew up on Princess Charlotte Bay, fearful of whites. His ­family would avoid contact with them at all costs. As a small child walking the beaches of the bay with his ­family, foraging for turtle eggs, fishing, and camping, every­one would flee into the scrub when the police came. The police meant trou­ble. C ­ hildren abducted. Arbitrary arrests. “That’s why bama are so shy,” McGinty told me. “Hiding was your best tactic for staying safe.” When he was nine, McGinty was forcibly taken from his parents to work on a ­cattle station. The white station boss came to the bama camp one day and said he wanted the boy. If McGinty’s parents had refused, they would have risked being deported to Palm Island along with c­ hildren of mixed marriages and the so-­called “recalcitrant.” “­Couldn’t your parents have hidden you?” I asked. “We w ­ eren’t game to go and hide in the scrub. You c­ ouldn’t go far anyway.” “And if you tried to run away?” “You’d get beaten. Taken back. Nowhere to go anyway. You ­couldn’t go back home. No one was ­there. All the Lama Lama got rounded up and deported to Bamago Mission.” When I asked McGinty if he got homesick, he said he cried for his parents all the time. “Was t­ here anyone you could turn to, to take care of you?” “I tried,” McGinty said, and mentioned an old Aboriginal man who took him ­under his wing for a while. “It was a hard life,” McGinty added. “When I was young we ­couldn’t leave the station.” He saw his parents only once a year, at Christmas time. “But back then, in ­those days, we ­didn’t think ­things could be dif­fer­ent. Barna ­were shy of whites.” Only l­ater did McGinty realize how unjust ­things w ­ ere. “We had to work for

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the white bosses and station ­owners. If we had to go anywhere, we had to get permission from the police. Sometimes ­they’d say yes. Sometimes ­they’d say no. We had to stay in the same place. Always t­ hose bosses telling us what to do. They always had the upper hand. T ­ hey’d use whips, fists, ­rifles, anything, and you ­couldn’t hit back.” But once, McGinty did retaliate. His boss abused him verbally for no good reason. “Then he banged me,” McGinty said, smashing his fist into his cupped hand to drive home his point. McGinty did not react immediately, but two days ­later he approached the white boss and asked why he had punched him in the face, what he’d done to deserve that. The boss refused to explain. “He threatened to sock me again, so I asked him why he’d punched me before.” Even as he pressed the boss for an answer, McGinty was readying himself for a fight. When the boss threw a punch, McGinty leaned to one side, then walloped the boss full in the face, bloodying his nose. As the two men wrestled on the ground, blood spattered everywhere. McGinty hesitated, pained by the memory. “You s­ houldn’t ­settle arguments that way,” he said. “I reckon it’s wrong what I did.” He was taken to the Laura police station and thrown in the lockup. He feared the worse. “But t­ hings w ­ ere already changing then,” McGinty said. “We ­were getting our freedom. They let me go.” I was moved by McGinty’s refusal to be intimidated. To fight for his dignity, even if he was powerless to fight for his rights. But as he observed, ­there is also courage in refusing to right one wrong with another. Aboriginal ­people are constantly placed in such double-­binds. Damned when they adopt white ways, damned if they d ­ on’t. When McGinty qualified as a butcher, he was soon sacked ­because he proved himself more skilled than the whitefella who owned the shop. Accordingly, many Aboriginal p­ eople preferred avoidance to engagement, like the c­ hildren who drop out of white schools rather than be stigmatized for their lack of fluency in En­glish or their difficulties with reading and writing. Or the elders who attend lengthy land claim hearings in which the “hard” En­glish of the white l­awyers and the demands for evidence of a continuous relationship with their traditional land prove almost as humiliating as the original dispossession. And then ­there was the painful choice of ­whether to seek fellowship with o­ thers or ­settle for the com­pany of your own kind. For Arthur Schopenhauer, neither sociality nor solitude was completely satisfactory. Insisting that “No man can be in perfect accord with anyone but

162     Worlds Within and Worlds Without

himself” and extolling the virtues of self-­sufficiency, Schopenhauer, nevertheless, acknowledged that, for many ­people, the inner life is so empty and unsatisfying that they are driven “to the com­pany of o­ thers which consists of men like themselves, for similis simili gaudet” (birds of a feather flock together).3 Elsewhere, he makes this point with a parable. A number of porcupines huddle together against the winter’s cold only to find they cannot avoid pricking one another with their quills. They, therefore, disperse, only to be driven back together for warmth. It would seem ­there is no third way whereby the porcupines can draw comfort from being with ­others and avoid the discomfort of close propinquity.4 It is tempting to read this parable as an oblique commentary on Schopenhauer himself, by all accounts a reclusive and misanthropic individual who felt more affection for dogs than ­people and found greater consolation in philosophy than friendship. But as Freud would remark in 1921, Schopenhauer’s parable of the porcupine discloses something fundamental about intimate ­human relationships: they are characterized by both attraction and repulsion, and our desire to be with ­others is always accompanied by a countervailing search for autonomy, to not lose oneself in the other, to define oneself against convention, to not follow the crowd.5 This ambivalent attitude to social existence is echoed in the Bambara view that being with ­others “is not an ideal; it is a necessity to which men must adapt and adjust themselves.” Social life is like a bulb of garlic. “The cloves continue to cling to each other although all are equally evil smelling. It is the same with men and their communities.”6 The history of colonialism is replete with examples of the tragic repercussions of this quandary. In Australia, Aboriginal p­ eople quickly saw advantages in trade relations with whites. In exchange for sex, food, information, and ­labor, they could acquire glass to make spearheads, iron axes, sugar, flour, and tea. But relations between indigene and invader quickly degenerated. Assuming ­cattle to be game animals, like kangaroos, Aboriginals hunted them. In turn, white pastoralists hunted down Aboriginals as though they ­were animals. And assuming that the land was unowned, if not unoccupied, white settlers seized it for themselves. Initially, Aboriginal ­people stood their ground, fighting to retain their lands and livelihoods. But as they ­were overwhelmed, they ­either submitted to a marginal and dependent existence on the fringes of white settlements or withdrew into remote areas where whites ­were less willing to venture.

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Though avoiding the quills of the invader meant enormous hardship, avoidance strategies ensured survival, or at least staved off the evil day when the invader would discover, in even the most inhospitable deserts, minerals to mine and resources to exploit. It was then that the invader de­cided the ­people it had treated so atrociously w ­ ere fated not to survive. But if extinction was inevitable for the “race,” perhaps an afterlife might be found for the ­children of mixed parentage. And so began the government policy of forcibly removing “half-­caste” ­children from their Aboriginal ­mothers, making them wards of the state, placing them in institutional care, and preparing them for menial work in white h ­ ouse­holds. Aboriginal ­people did not die out. They w ­ ere herded into missions and settlements. For a nomadic ­people accustomed to living in small, mobile ­family groups, ­these overcrowded communities ­were soul-­destroying and socially divisive. Unlike the porcupines, it was impossible to keep one’s distance, to follow customary protocols for the avoidance of in-­laws or marrying “wrong-­way,” or to act on one’s own initiative. Of Wujal Mission, a Kuku Yalanji man said t­ here was so ­little room to move that one felt “like a crane standing on one leg on a ­little island.” And ­because social distance was an index of re­spect, p­ eople described their lives in ­these concentration camps as pervaded by a sense of profound shame. Only in moving away from such unintentional communities, only by returning to one’s traditional land, could one hope to recover a v­ iable existence. When Peter Fisher moved away from the mission, he elected to make his home in the forested watershed of the Daintree and Bloomfield Rivers. According to Mabel and McGinty, he rarely visited the mission. “Does that mean he d ­ oesn’t want visitors?” I asked. “I dunno,” McGinty said. I was used to McGinty’s noncommittal way of responding to a direct question, this characteristically Aboriginal strategy for ensuring that no advice was ever given that might be ­later used against you. Katherine and I de­cided to make the trip anyway. The road from the coast ­rose steeply, ­little more than a rain-­gouged track. It took us through partly cleared grazing land, past the site of China Camp (named for the Chinese, Javanese, and Malay “wages men” who mined alluvial tin in the area from the mid-1890s to the period around the First World War), past Roaring Meg Falls, and across boulder-­strewn streams.

16 4    Worlds Within and Worlds Without

We came at last to a grassy clearing, cropped by a ­couple of untethered ­horses. I parked our T ­ oyota near a barbed wire fence and gate. Beyond was a garden filled with citrus trees, pawpaws, and banana palms. Peter Fisher came hobbling through the pawpaws to the gate, but it was apparent from the relaxed and open expression on his face that he was happy to receive visitors. ­After Katherine and I had made our introductions, we sat in the small open-­sided shed with a dirt floor where Peter slept and cooked. I noticed some onions, chili peppers, salt, and plates on a makeshift c­ ounter. “I d ­ on’t eat much,” Peter said. “Tea and damper mostly, like when I was a boy.” He said he felt guilty that he had no maiyi (food) to offer us. Peter had been living in the wilderness for fifteen months. It was the site of the old Collins homestead. He’d had to clear the lantana and scrub before making his garden. The river ran nearby, so he had plenty of w ­ ater. And the ­horses kept the grass down. I expressed amazement that he had accomplished so much in a l­ittle over a year. Katherine mentioned that we had visited the falls on our way up. “Kijanka,” Peter said, using the bama word for the locality (literally “moon place”). “You have to be careful when you approach the falls,” Peter warned. The falls had the power to pull a person over the edge. He also said ­there was a rock at the top of the falls that could move to the foot of the falls of its own accord, and return to the top. When white miners began blasting with gelignite at China Camp, they killed the stone, which now lies immobile beneath the falls, bereft of life. “Same t­hing happened at Daintree,” Peter said. “­There was a stone. No m ­ atter how many times bama rolled it to the bottom of the waterfall, it would find its way back to the top. But you know how pig-­headed whitefellas can be. Well, some policemen wanted to roll the stone down to the bottom. Bama said, ‘No, d ­ on’t touch it, d ­ on’t go near it.’ But they rolled it anyway. ­After that, it stayed ­there at the bottom, dead.” I was thinking, when stone was in the hands of bama, it was not stone, it was an enchanted ­thing, animated by the re­spect it was given, the songs that perennially brought it back to life. When it was taken from them, it lost its meaning and died, like the alienated land itself, now untended and untraveled. And as one’s connection with the ancestral world atrophied, so time stood still as if turned to stone. “I can tell you some terrible stories about this place in the early days,” Peter said. “Eu­ro­pe­ans w ­ ere very bad to Aboriginal p­ eople. Bama would try to help them, but they w ­ ere always repaid with unkindness.”

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Peter’s biological f­ ather was a part-­Aboriginal man called Dick Fischer, the son of a German immigrant who mined tin for a while at China Camp. Peter never met his f­ ather b­ ecause, when his m ­ other became pregnant, she was sent away. When Peter was a very small boy, the police came to his ­mother’s camp looking for “half-­castes.” He hid in the bush, but his friend and age-­mate Oglevie was caught and taken to the Mission Station at Yarrabah, south of Cairns, where he died two months ­later, Peter said, “of homesickness and a broken heart.” As for Peter, his m ­ other dis­appeared when he was seven, leaving him in the care of his maternal grand­mother. “My granny was very good to me. She looked a­ fter me better than my own m ­ other. When I was starving, she fed me wild yams. She is buried near h ­ ere. That is why I came h ­ ere to live and to die. I have had this place in mind all my life. I wanted to be close to her.” Peter made us mugs of tea, and we shared the food we had brought with us, even though Peter’s garden could have fed a small community. ­After eating, we strolled along the grassy paths, Peter showing us his yams and taro, string beans, cabbage, tomatoes, cassava, and tropical fruit, while Katherine plied him with questions about the changes he had witnessed in his seventy-­six years of tin mining, working on pearl luggers and in the cane fields of northern Queensland, and living in places like Daintree, Mossman, Wujal, and Wonga Beach. Peter wryly observed that if you visited another camp in the old days, as we had visited his ­today, you would sit and wait beyond the perimeter with eyes downcast, saying nothing ­until the hosts approached you with food. But the worst infractions of traditional protocol centered, in Peter’s view, on marriage. “­These days, every­thing is mixed up. ­People marry just anyone, like dogs. Cousins, even in-­laws. I can tell you about one man, he married his mother-­in-­ law. When he had a ­daughter, that means he was supposed to marry her. The old ­people had it the right way. Just like with ­cattle. You keep a bull in the pen. You d ­ on’t let it in with the cows just anytime, anyhow. The breeding would be too close.” Peter also spoke of young p­ eople’s disrespect t­oward elders, their shameful indifference to the rules of in-­law avoidance and the vari­ous taboos that helped control the exploitation of natu­ral resources. His twenty-­something grand­son had spent a few weeks with him. Peter had tried to teach him the names and uses of vari­ous trees—­the wumburru (bull oak) that was good for making furniture, the gujiguji that was good for fence posts, the galkanji (spiky bark) that burned easily and cleanly—­but the young man was not interested.

16 6    Worlds Within and Worlds Without

I asked Peter if he ever felt isolated and alone in the ­middle of nowhere. “I am never afraid or alone,” he said. “I have seen God with my own eyes. He is with me. I pride myself in owning nothing. A storm could blow away this camp. It’s nothing. I ­wouldn’t worry. Not like ­those h ­ ouses ­people build. I’m nothing. I was never cut out to be a boss over anyone. I’m just a storyteller.” When it was time for us to return to the coast, Peter said: “I w ­ ouldn’t want to live at Wujal. All that drinking, smoking dope, that confusion. I worked all my life. I c­ ouldn’t just sit around like the p­ eople at the mission. I d ­ on’t need money. I never smoked. I never drank. I can buy my flour and tea at Mareeba ­every three or four months. If my ­family come and visit, that’s all right. But I never feel the need to leave h ­ ere. Never.” I felt drawn to Peter Fisher for reasons I could not, at first, fully understand. His life in his rainforest clearing, midway between a tragic past and an uncertain f­ uture, came as close as any life I had ever known to absolute ac­ cep­tance, to the peace that passes all understanding. At once anchorite and sage, he seemed more than reconciled to his lot; he appeared entirely at one with it. H ­ ere was a man whose freedom was defined by the confines of his clearing—­a clearing I could not help but see meta­phor­ically, not as an Eden re­created on Earth but as a site of clarity and peace. One might also say that Peter Fisher lived in a penumbral zone between the living and the dead, a place of ghosts. In ongoing conversations with him, and in the course of everyday life in our camp, Katherine and I ­were constantly made aware of the ways Queensland’s violent past invaded the consciousness of p­ eople in the h ­ ere and now, perpetuating fears of further injustices, clouding the possibility of a f­ uture. During one of his reminiscences, Peter described what happened ­after the death of an old man known as Sandy. When Peter was a small boy, Sandy would carry him everywhere and, at night, allow him to sleep close for protection. When Sandy died in his sleep one night, the small boy was unaware that his protector had passed away. “I’ll tell you something that’ll be hard for you to believe,” Peter said, “but I saw it with my own eyes when I was a child. ­People had come from Wujal, Daintree, Mossman, from everywhere, for Sandy’s funeral. We all sat in a line so the spirit in the body could get out. It came out like a firefly. It ­stopped at the doorway. Then p­ eople spoke to it. It then became so bright we could see our shadows. They said, ‘All right now. You leavin’ us now. You gotta go see ­father. Before you go, you see our ­people at Banabila.’ T ­ here was a big mob ­there. It

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was a bright light. He flew down that way. And they said, ‘Oh, he come down and visit us now.’ I ­don’t know if anyone e­ lse still remembers. You might ask.” It was impossible to ignore this numberless and nebulous community of lost souls. They w ­ ere like the afterimages of loved ones lost. Semi-­embodied memories. And like the past, they ­were ever-­present, hovering in the penumbra of consciousness, shadowy and repining. Dubu, or ghosts, often appear to the living as strange lights—­a trail of fireflies moving in the darkness, a torch that mysteriously switches itself on in the ­middle of the night, a bright light that for several hours uncannily follows the car in which one is driving home ­after a funeral in another settlement, a blue light hovering in the sky like a UFO, or lights flitting among the trees. In almost e­very case, ghosts are spirits of the dead made manifest—­unquiet shades that torment and haunt the living who have abandoned them, or spirits that are reluctantly making their way to the land of the dead. But ghosts not only come from without; they are formed within, projections of the inner distress of ­those who have lost loved ones. Ghosts are, to use Donald Winnicott’s term, “transitional phenomena.”7 They make their appearance in the “potential space” between inner and external worlds and are impor­tant means whereby ­people undertake the difficult passage from attachment to separation. It is in this “potential space” that p­ eople disclose their fears and feelings, review the troubling phenomena they have witnessed, and reach agreement as to its cause, its pos­si­ble consequences, and what course of action may best deal with it. In other words, standardized cultural notions about the spirits of the dead and subjective feelings ­toward an individual who has recently passed away come together to produce a provisional understanding that then serves as the basis for coping with one’s confusion and distress. Among the Kuku Yalanji, this involves sticking together (since ghosts d ­ on’t trou­ble ­people in com­pany), ensuring that proper mortuary rites are performed (notably “smoking” the deceased’s possessions by passing them over a fire and, thereby, decontaminating them), and reinforcing an avoidance relationship with the dead by not speaking their names or other­wise remembering them in public. Often, Katherine and I would be enjoined not to leave ­water standing around our tent when we away b­ ecause it might attract some errant ghost. Kuku Yalanji responses to strange lights and inner grief also demonstrate the healing power of shared experience. To be witness to unusual phenomena, or subject to disorienting thoughts and feelings, is to risk feeling dif­fer­ent,

16 8     Worlds Within and Worlds Without

isolated, and even crazy. But as soon as an experience is brought from the private into the public realm, its character is instantly changed. Assimilated to the collective wisdom of the tribe and subject to conventional interpretations, it is literally made common. It is like bringing a stranger within the social pale, or releasing a prisoner from solitary confinement—­affirmations of a shared world that is our sole source of security and sanity. Primo Levi once observed that “If one lives in a compact, serried group, as bees and sheep do in the winter, ­there are advantages; one can defend oneself better from the cold and from attacks.” But in extolling the virtues of living “at the margins of the group, or in fact isolated,” Levi goes on to say that one may, thereby, enjoy the freedom of leaving when one wants and getting “a better view of the landscape.” Primo Levi would, for this reason, have admired Peter Fisher, though t­ here is in Levi’s life story and tragic end evidence of an ambivalent attitude ­toward the loner who chooses “a winding path, forming for [himself] a haphazard culture; full of gaps, a smattering of knowledge.”8 If Levi’s reflections on other p­ eople’s trades permit no resolution of t­ hese opposing life courses, it may be ­because it is not humanly pos­si­ble to privilege one over the other as a permanent ontological possibility.

An Etiology of Storms

We sometimes experience our environments as empowering and life-­giving, sometimes as minatory and oppressive. A pandemic or climatic disaster may destroy our livelihoods, and systemic social vio­lence may withhold health, wealth, and happiness from many while guaranteeing ­these boons to a privileged few. W ­ hether we construe our surrounding world as the domain of the gods, M ­ other Nature, or the powers-­that-be, it gives rise to notions of fate, luck, or hope (classically personified as the Moirai, Tyche, Dame Fortuna, and Lady Luck,) that elude our physical and conceptual grasp. Nevertheless, h ­ uman beings typically have recourse to a variety of practical, emotional, ritual, and imaginative strategies for managing their relationships with the wider world, and my fieldwork among the Kuku Yalanji deepened my understanding of ritualization and magical thinking in everyday life. This work resonated with my early essays on Kuranko divination and tricksters and reinforced my view that we are in serious error if we ascribe ­these existential coping strategies to premodern ­peoples and continue to promulgate the illusion that modernity is essentially and consistently rational. In truth, all ­people encounter insuperable

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obstacles in life, and exploring the artful ways we get around them is one of the most urgent tasks of anthropology. As the season of cyclones and thunderstorms approached, Mabel and McGinty warned us of the danger of bloodwood limbs falling on our tent or rainwater flooding our camp. Mabel’s youn­gest ­brother, Sonny, was particularly anxious, studying the tamarind tree for auguries of a change in the weather, reading omens (a frilled lizard on a palm frond was a harbinger of storms), identifying the thunder’s location, diagnosing its sound, and commenting on which storms in the past it most resembled.1 ­Because storms ­were regarded as both social and natu­ral phenomena, they w ­ ere analyzed in terms of who was ­behind them as well as what they ­were like and where they ­were coming from. Indeed, storminess ( jarramali bajaku) was used as a meta­phor for persons who lose self-­control, often ­under the influence of drugs and alcohol, railing and shouting for no good reason, r­ unning amok. Storms also w ­ ere associated with enmity and enemies. Most tellingly, storms ­were associated with breaches of the prohibition of physical contact between son-­in-­law and mother-­in-­law. For this reason, storms that come dangerously close signify inappropriate intimacy between t­ hese social categories. Accordingly, the prevention of storms involves keeping son-­in-­law and mother-­in-­law strictly apart. This is achieved ritually and symbolically. One morning, I watched Sonny knotting hanks of grass and throwing them on a pile of ironwood bark ( jujabala) and logs of grass tree (nganjirr) before setting fire to it in order “to keep away the thunderstorm [jarra-­mali].” “The storm smells it,” Sonny explained, “and goes away.” When I asked him to explain, he simply said, “­There’s a story about that. Old p­ eople told us.” I waited for the story, but Sonny said nothing. “How does it work?” I asked. Since bama regularly burned logs and tufts of grass tree (Xanthorrhoea arborea) to keep mosquitos away—­and mosquitos come with the rains—­I wondered if this was the explanation. But Sonny explained that the grass tree and the other ­things he was burning ­were related to the storms as son-­in-­law is related to mother-­in-­law. As the storm approaches, it smells its son-­in-­law and so changes course.2 The postulated correspondence between social and natu­ral categories not only provides a rationale for ritual action to avert storms; it alleviates anxiety.

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One after­noon, following several days of heavy thunderstorms and torrential rain, Katherine and I paid a visit to Mabel’s ­sister Gladys in a nearby settlement. We found every­one huddled ­behind closed doors, listening for the approaching storm. Why this anxiety? Why ­hadn’t Gladys lit fires of grass tree as ­others did to keep the storm at bay? One pos­si­ble answer is that thunder and lightning are means of sorcery. Storms are instruments of revenge and expressions of malice and anger. ­People’s fear of storms is a mea­sure of the trepidation with which they view outsiders. McGinty mentioned an Aboriginal man from Kowanyama who came to Wujal a few years ago. B ­ ecause it was widely believed that p­ eople from southwest Cape York w ­ ere able to manipulate storms to harm enemies, it was suspected that he was a “burri-­burri man” (a sorcerer). Often, however, the fear of outsiders is less specific and simply expresses one’s distrust of anyone who hails from a world one does not r­ eally know and cannot directly control. Another reason for the disquiet in Gladys’s h ­ ouse concerned the infringement of food taboos. Though cyclones could be retribution for breaking the taboo between son-­in-­law and mother-­in-­law, they also could be caused by transgressing a “story place” or eating a prohibited plant or animal. Katherine and I did not discover ­whether anyone in Gladys’s ­family had ­violated any such taboo or if they feared some form of retributive justice, but our conversation proved edifying. Mention was made, for example, of the flesh of the parcel apple, which is pink in October; coincidentally, the season to catch stingrays. This is ­because the liver of the stingray is also pink and at its tastiest at this time and is added to meat to make it more palatable. But eating stingrays during the squally pre-­monsoonal month of November is prohibited, for it encourages destructive storms. Kuku Yalanji ritual actions and food taboos are strategies for ensuring that p­ eople re­spect social rules, as well as means of managing the exploitation of scarce resources. ­These usages also reduce uncertainty and alleviate anxiety. Can we, then, claim that our ways of dealing with catastrophic weather and ecological disaster are essentially dif­fer­ent? Widespread western anx­i­eties about global warming, environmental despoliation, and industrial pollution have given rise to vari­ous forms of eco-­ activism and Gaia consciousness, not to mention a proliferating lit­er­a­ture that celebrates the virtues of the natu­ral world and decries its desecration. Within

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the acad­emy, “the Anthropocene” has become a catchword in ­these fervent conversations about the f­ uture of planet earth. In March 2006, one of the doyens in this field—­Japanese-­Canadian scientist and environmentalist David Suzuki—­was awarded the Roger Tory Peterson medal from the Harvard Museum of Natu­ral History. In an impassioned ac­cep­tance speech, Suzuki observed that we had reached “a remarkable moment in the history of life on earth” and called upon his audience, as well as the developed world, to embrace an environmental agenda based on notions of sustainability and stewardship. In Suzuki’s global conception of humanity, his invocation of our power to determine our collective fate, and his idealism—­ predicated on the possibility of passing judgment on our times from some ­future vantage point—­one sees something of the intellectual hubris that writers as dif­fer­ent as Jean-­Paul Sartre and Pierre Bourdieu have cautioned against. For Sartre, the bombast of intellectuals is a sign of overcompensation for their lack of po­liti­cal or social power, an argument that echoes the idea that the romantic infatuation with nature is a way of escaping the unmanageable mire of urban-­industrial life.3 As for Bourdieu, his question is, “How can one avoid succumbing to this dream of omnipotence, which tends to arouse fits of bedazzled identification with ­great heroic roles?” How can one avoid what Schopenhauer called “pedantic comedy”—­the absurd pretension of believing ­there is no limit to thought, of seeing “an academic commentary as a po­liti­cal act or the critique of texts as a feat of re­sis­tance, and experience revolutions in the order of words as radical revolutions in the order of ­things.”4 To anyone committed to saving the planet from ecological and economic collapse, or bringing an end to systemic racism and structural vio­lence, it might seem outrageous to question the efficacy of social activism. It is not without irony that, despite his scathing dismissal of intellectuals who perform their denunciations of gender bias, racism, and colonialism so publicly, Bourdieu himself authored power­ful critiques of global capitalism, colonialism, and ­free market politics.5 Rather than argue that the exception proves the rule, I prefer to place the works of intellectuals and activists on a par, and to reject hard and fast distinctions between irrational and rational action, since all ­human action is in part realistic and magical. Even “real” effects may not be long-­lasting, and even “magical” actions sometimes can lift our spirits and give us hope—­effects that make life more bearable in the face of circumstances we cannot change.

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An enlightenment myth still holds many Westerners in thrall: that our po­ liti­cal actions bear no comparison to the ritual actions of so-­called traditional ­peoples, such as the Kuku Yalanji, attempting to ward off an impending thunderstorm by burning logs of grass tree. But such comparison must be made, if only ­because t­here is no guarantee that ­either rational policies or ritual pro­ cesses w ­ ill translate into radical changes to our imperiled world. While h ­ uman action always is subject to rationalization—in the Kuku Yalanji case, an argument that p­ eople can act on the forces of nature b­ ecause t­ hose forces are essentially social and, hence, susceptible to h ­ uman counteraction; in the Western case, an argument that we can avoid environmental disaster by deploying scientific data and demo­cratic pro­cesses to pressure governments into making policy changes—­­human action is motivated primarily by an existential imperative to do something rather than nothing. In a sense, then, all action is to some extent “magical” and affective, involving an ele­ment of faith and hope (since one can never know for certain the ultimate outcome of anything one does). ­Whether we call it practical, magical, or ritual, all action involves a scale reduction of macrocosm to microcosm, a shift in focus from the world at large to the world at hand. By making the local a simulacrum of the global, the global appears to become graspable and manageable. Moreover, by acting on our own emotions, our own bodies, and our own consciousness, the appearance of the world without is inevitably changed. Railing against government inertia, calling for revolutionary change, boycotting the products of slave l­abor, painting slogans on sidewalks, and recycling h ­ ouse­hold trash may not necessarily effect any change in the world, but t­hese acts change our experience of our relationship with the world. They are directly comparable to the Kuranko use of kandan li fannu (enclosing or protective fetishes) that enhance a person’s sense of ontological security. Through action, we momentarily and imaginatively become world makers, even though, from an objective point of view, we may have done ­little more than confirm our enslavement to habit or ideology, or the limits of our power. Understood existentially, strategies for transforming our experience of the world are synonymous with what may be called ritualization. As with the imagination, ritualization is best understood as a supplement to real action rather than a substitute for it—­a vital means of making life more thinkable and, hence, more manageable ­under trying conditions. As Godfrey Lienhardt observes, when a Dinka knots a tuft of grass to constrict, delay or “tie up”

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an ­enemy, or binds a stone with grass to hobble a prowling lion, he does not desist from practical action, for ­these devices are but “models” of his “desires and hopes, upon which to base renewed practical endeavour.” “Symbolic actions,” Lienhardt goes on to say, “re­create, and even dramatize, situations which they aim to control, and the experience of which they effectively modulate. If they do not change ­actual historical or physical events—as the Dinka in some cases believe them to do—­they do change and regulate the Dinka’s experience of t­ hose events.”6 Ritualization must be approached not simply as a social phenomenon that reorders and reintegrates social relations but existentially—as an ontologically “primitive” mode of action that plays upon the emotions, manipulates the body, and transforms consciousness. One effect of such action is to transfigure subject-­object relations, such that a person comes to experience himself or herself as an actor and not just acted upon—as a “who” rather than a “what.” In Sartre’s discussion of such “emotive behaviour,” he gives the example of a bunch of grapes that is out of reach. “I shrug my shoulders, I let my hand drop, I m ­ umble, ‘­They’re too green,’ and I move on.” In this “­little comedy,” played out beneath the bunch of grapes, my frustrated desire for the grapes is transfigured by the magical effect my gestures and words have upon me. In repudiating the grapes as “too green,” I “magically confer upon the grapes the quality I desire” and so change my relationship with them. But, Sartre notes, the grapes are not ­really changed by my actions, and this “emotive behaviour” is, strictly speaking, in­effec­tive. Though we “magically . . . ​invest real objects with certain qualities,” Sartre concludes, “­these qualities are false.”7 But when one writes an essay, recounts a story, speaks one’s mind, burns grass tree logs to avert a storm, or protests some social injustice, are the changes t­ hese actions effect within us necessarily false, simply b­ ecause the world without remains, like the fabled sour grapes, beyond our reach?

­After Indiana

It had been Halloween when I first came to Indiana, and it was Halloween when I left for the last time. As I waited for my limo, I recalled the foreboding I had felt eight years ago, leaving my eighteen-­year-­old ­daughter in Australia and traveling halfway around the world to a place as forbidding as Siberia. Now, making the return journey, I once again sensed that I was leaving my life ­behind. But Heidi needed my support, and Katherine and I wanted our two ­children to get to know their ­sister. So, I resigned my college professorship and gambled that a part-­time temporary job at Sydney University would lead to something more permanent. “Why burn your bridges?” a friend had asked me. “If ­things d ­ on’t work out in Sydney, you should keep open the option of returning h ­ ere.” “­You’re committing professional suicide,” another said, as though she already knew the position I had negotiated in Sydney would fall through and I would find myself, for the second time in my professional life, on the dole. As I waited in a bar for my flight to be called, an overhead TV was advertising the next NFL Sunday Night game, and corporate men in shirtsleeves

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­ ere drinking bourbon on the rocks and strategizing. “The t­ hing is,” I heard w one of the young executives say, “­we’re in a transitional phase right now; w ­ e’ve got to see ourselves as in transition.” What of me? I thought. Should I see myself as in transition or on the rocks? Within weeks of our return to Sydney, t­ here was a change of government. Cuts to tertiary education meant my eighteen-­month contract would not be renewed. Like most ­people facing a dire situation, I wavered between rational action (applying for fellowships and academic jobs) and magical thinking. Although I had published thirteen books in the last twenty years, I misguidedly believed that writing another would change my fortune. My theme was relationality. Where Claude Lévi-­Strauss, influenced by Roman Jakobson’s 1942–1943 New York lectures on structural linguistics, had prioritized relations over relata (his notion of the atom of kinship and his critique of totemism brilliantly exemplified this approach), I was less interested in the formal analy­sis of relationships among “terms” than the dynamics of intersubjective life. Though I still admired Lévi-­Strauss’s demonstrations of how binaries w ­ ere mediated and myths metamorphosed, I could not accept that the forms of intersubjective life could be analyzed with or distilled into abstract logico-­mathematical forms.1 They revealed a logic, to be sure, but a logic that resembled what Maurice Merleau-­Ponty called a log­os endiathetos (a meaning before logic)—­a “wild” log­os of carnality, emotion, and sensation that the mind does not consciously constitute yet, nevertheless, informs the way we think and imagine.2 Not long ­after completing Minima Ethnographica, I was offered a fellowship at the Stout Research Centre in Wellington, New Zealand, which I immediately accepted despite the upheavals it would mean for my f­ amily. Wisely, Katherine de­cided to remain in Sydney with the c­hildren and wait to see what the f­ uture held. As a partial stranger in my own homeland and separated from my wife and ­children for months at a time, it was not surprising I should turn to fieldwork among refugees and rediscover the writings of Hannah Arendt, who came to the United States in 1941 as a displaced person. Much of what she wrote in the ensuing years bears the imprint of her experience as a refugee and of the dilemma of preserving her own identity while proving herself to be a “prospective citizen” rather than an “­enemy alien”—­giving the impression that she had left her past b­ ehind and was grateful for the opportunity to become an Ameri-

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can.3 In The ­Human Condition,4 Arendt addresses the question of how storytelling speaks to this strug­gle to exist as one among many, to be true to oneself while meeting the demands of one’s social environment. In conversations with Iraqi and Somali refugees, I was hopeful that ­people would share their experiences of what they had under­gone in flight from war and persecution, in refugee camps, and in resettling so far from home. But what I encountered was hesitancy, awkwardness, and suspicion. In part, this reflected the unspeakable experiences many of t­hese individuals had under­gone—­events that not only resisted recollection but lay beyond their power to comprehend or narrate. It quickly became clear to me that life stories often have less to do with speaking one’s mind or sharing one’s experience than with saying what it is safe or expedient to say. To put it bluntly, in extremis one often finds that the truth w ­ ill get you nowhere or get you into trou­ble. Sometimes one has to prevaricate or misrepresent oneself to get one’s way—to escape from terror, to cross a border, to be selected for emigration, to avoid racist insults and condescending expectations, and to persuade state officials to look sympathetically on one’s petition for f­amily reunions. Stories are often cover stories, defenses against danger and hurt. They downplay any disparity between the truth of one’s own experience and the truths enshrined in the dominant narratives of the state, which expects gratitude from refugees, not grievances; conformity, not criticism. Living as a citizen in a ­free country, I could indulge notions of verisimilitude and testimony, but the refugees I met ­were struggling to survive spiritually and socially in what, to them, was an alien and often demoralizing environment. To share their experience with a New Zealand writer might cost them dearly, and so they kept their own counsel and withdrew. All stories are, in a sense, untrue. They rearrange and transform our experiences. But ­these rearrangements, like the essays and explanatory models we produce in the acad­emy, may serve very dif­fer­ent interests—­and it was this emphasis on discourse as techné rather than epistemé that came to inform my approach to storytelling. The critical point is that strategies for acting on the world do not always implicate knowledge of the world. As techné, storytelling can transform our experience, stir our emotions, and effect real changes without an explicit rationale and without conforming to official narratives. Thus, when a young ­woman was interviewed on CNN ten years ­after what she called “the traumatic event” of 9/11 in which her fiancé perished, she made two compelling remarks. The first was to call into question the

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need to tell and retell the story of the event. “It’s hard to put it into words,” she said. “Maybe one d ­ oesn’t need to.” Her implication was that silence may have as much therapeutic value as speech. Then, in explaining why she would not attend the public ceremonies on the tenth anniversary, she remarked, “I ­don’t want 9/11 to define me,” thereby disengaging her story from the patriotic stories the state was building out of the traumas of ­people like her. A personal story redeems us “from alienation and impersonality, from the grip of ste­ reo­types and prejudices,” writes David Grossman. It restores our humanity in situations that reduce us to “one-­dimensional creatures lacking volition.”5 Although Arendt emphasizes the power of storytelling to connect us with ­others, finding common ground and reclaiming a public world, she remained curiously averse to the subjective and personal effects of storytelling. Basic to Arendt’s work is the axiom of h ­ uman plurality—­that we are at once unique individuals (ipse) and members of a community, of a class, a nation and, ultimately, a single species with capacities for speech and action that we have in common with e­ very other h ­ uman being who lives and who has ever lived (idem). For Arendt, politics and power concern the ways in which the private realm of individual experience can be shared and publicized, thereby creating a sense of belonging to a common world. She calls this field of inter-­experience the “subjective-­in-­between,” since existence is never merely a ­matter of what I or you say or do but what we say and do together, interacting, conversing, and adjusting our interests, experiences, and points of view to one another. Stories are like the coins of the realm, a medium of exchange, and, as such, a means of creating ­viable forms of coexistence. Stories disclose not just “who” we are, but “what” we have in common with ­others, not just “who” we think we are but “what” similar circumstances bind us together as ­human beings. While I embraced the view that storytelling is a quintessentially intersubjective activity that brings the social into being, I wanted to integrate it with Joan Didion’s view, born of her experience of bereavement, that “we tell stories in order to live.”6 Stories are a way we recount and rework events that simply befell us. We do this partly by sharing our experience with ­others in a form they can relate or respond to, thereby reaffirming and consolidating our sense of belonging to a f­ amily, a circle of friends, a community, or even a nation. But we also tell stories as a way of transforming our sense of who we are, recovering a sense of ourselves as actors and agents in the face of experiences that render us insignificant or powerless. As David Grossman puts it, story-

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telling ­counters the arbitrariness of existence; it allows one the freedom “to articulate the tragedy of [one’s] situation in [one’s] own words.” Writing affords us the same existential power, for “from the moment we take pen in hand or put fin­gers to keyboard, we have already ceased to be at the mercy of all that enslaved and constrained us before we began writing.7 I like to think of my work on storytelling as a year-­long dialogue with Hannah Arendt. It reminded me that elective affinities often transcend space and time. As Howard Eiland notes, “The history of the con­temporary can be told only by virtue of a hermeneutic swerve” that displaces us from a current real­ ity we are too close to see clearly, and leads us, via o­ thers and other times, to a new understanding of the pre­sent, as well as our concept of the pre­sent.8 Displacement can bring the same rewards as time travel, which is why my sympathies for displaced p­ eople resonated with the kinship I felt for intellectual precursors like Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, George Devereux, William James, Michel de Montaigne, and Richard Rorty. The Politics of Storytelling was published in Denmark, where I had found temporary work thanks to a fortuitous meeting with Susan Reynolds-­White at an American Anthropology Association meeting in 1999. That my book found a publisher also was the result of a fortunate coincidence. Rasmus Alenius Boserup was a student in one of my classes at the Institute of Anthropology in Copenhagen, and a­ fter a lecture I gave on storytelling, Rasmus asked where he could buy a copy of my book. When I confessed to not yet having found a publisher, Rasmus informed me that his m ­ other, Marianne Alenius, was a se­nior editor at the Museum Tusculanum Press. She agreed to publish my book.

V

Return to Sierra Leone

In the days before flying to Sierra Leone in January 2002 a­ fter being away for more than ten years, my mind was filled with images of renewal. ­There are times when we need to break with routine, to get away from it all, and start over. But how can such fantasies of a new beginning be reconciled with the real­ity of the world of which we are already and inescapably a part? How can our thirst for renewal overcome our thralldom to the past or avoid the destructiveness of revolution? In Sierra Leone, the Revolutionary United Front had laid waste to the country whose soul it ostensibly had set out to save, killing, raping, and maiming tens of thousands of innocent p­ eople. Now that the civil war was coming to an end, I was impatient to find out what fate had befallen Noah and other friends during the de­cade during which “God slept.” Besides, S. B. had phoned me with a request to ghostwrite his autobiography. Daybreak was still three hours away when my night flight from Gatwick landed at Lungi, and I followed the other disembarking passengers across the tarmac to a dismal h ­ angar that served as an arrivals hall. ­Under

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Rehabilitation, read the sign on the wall. Sorry for all Incon­ve­nience and Discomfort. ­Under dim fluo­rescent lights, I pulled my backpack from the ­table on which baggage from our flight had been thrown and let myself be pushed along by the crowd to where he­li­cop­ter tickets to the city w ­ ere being sold. I, then, made my way to the north end of the old airport building where ­people w ­ ere waiting for a he­li­cop­ter to ferry them to Freetown. T ­ here ­were British soldiers in mufti. Aid workers. NGO personnel. Businessmen from Rus­sia, Eastern Eu­rope, and Lebanon. Returning Sierra Leoneans. A few minutes ­later, unusual for January, it began to rain, and as the first he­li­cop­ter settled awkwardly onto the tarmac, its spotlights rendered the rain vis­i­ble, like scratch marks on glass. ­Because I was scheduled to take the second he­li­cop­ter, I passed the time talking to a young man from Lungi village who worked part-­time for the he­ li­cop­ter com­pany, loading and unloading baggage. When I asked Isa how the war had affected his life, he told me his ­brother had been abducted by rebels while traveling from Kenema to visit their f­ather in 1996. Though he managed to escape, he came home with a bullet in his knee, which now caused him ­great pain and prevented him from working. During the war, every­one was alone, Isa said. Every­one had to fend for himself. ­There was no order. It was still pitch dark and raining heavi­ly when the dilapidated he­li­cop­ ter in which I was ner­vously sitting crossed the broad expanse of the Sierra Leone River and followed the coast southward t­oward Lumley. When we landed, I breathed a sigh of relief and clambered quickly from the he­li­cop­ ter, whose spotlights illuminated the wet seagrass that was being battered by the down draft from the rotor blades. I had taken no more than a few steps when a young man with a broad smile walked up to me and introduced himself as S. B’s nephew and namesake. Small S. B’s instructions w ­ ere to drive me directly to my h ­ otel. “­Uncle says you are to get some sleep, eat breakfast, and then call him,” he said. “Then I ­will come back and drive you to the ­house.” ­After two hours of fitful sleep, I went to the h ­ otel dining room for a breakfast of dry bread and jam with instant coffee and a plate of sliced papaya and pineapple. Then I phoned S. B. and returned to my room only to find myself besieged by memories as unspecific as they ­were unassuageable—­the smell of the woodwork, a curious mingling of varnish and mildew . . . ​the frangipani and bougainvillea outside my win­dow . . . ​the long stretch of Lumley beach, its ocher and buff sands scoured by the unceasing tides.

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S. B’s ­house was in the hills, overlooking the west side of the city and the sea. When I entered the parlor, S. B. r­ ose from the chair in which he was sitting, heavier than I remembered him but essentially unchanged. The same odd mixture of charismatic self-­confidence and acute sensitivity. We shook hands, and he asked me about my flight and ­whether the ­hotel accommodation he had arranged was to my liking. I said I was happy with the arrangement but had been mystified when he phoned the night before I left Copenhagen to say he had booked me into a ­hotel in order that I should have “peace and quiet,” for in the past I had always stayed with him and Rose, and peace and quiet had never been an issue. When I told S. B. I was looking forward to collaborating on his memoirs, he said he already had the title for them: Within ­these Four Walls. “I have had it in mind for many years. But I am tied up ­today. We have a crisis in Parliament. One of our se­nior ministers has resigned.” And he abruptly summoned small S. B. and called for one of the ­house­boys to bring him his cap. “But ­don’t worry,” he said as he walked ­toward the door, adjusting the cap on his head. “We ­will be g­ oing north the day ­after tomorrow and we ­will have plenty of time to discuss our business then.” Within minutes of S. B’s departure, Rose entered the room. Fuller in the face and figure than when I last saw her, she was still stunningly beautiful. We embraced with tears in our eyes, marveling at how swiftly the years of separation ­were cancelled out and remembering the last time we had seen each other. I showed Rose several photos of Heidi, and of Katherine and our two ­children building a snowman with Heidi in a churchyard near Sankt Hans Torv on Christmas Day. As for Rose’s ­children, they ­were now, like Heidi, young adults, and all living in London, where they had taken refuge during the war. “But you know,” Rose said, “I was expecting that you would be staying ­here as you always do. I had prepared your room. Then S. B. told me that you would be staying in the Cape Sierra ­hotel.” I told her I also had been disappointed but did not want to offend S. B. by making an issue of it. “­There is no communication between us anymore,” Rose said. “S. B. decides every­thing, and that is that.” I must have looked distressed, for she hastily added that I should not worry. She was used to the situation and knew how to avoid confrontations. “You must come and eat h ­ ere,” she said, “whenever you like.”

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I then asked Rose about Noah. How could I get in touch with him? It had already been arranged. Noah knew I was arriving t­oday and he would come to the h ­ ouse that after­noon. Of all my reunions, this was the most emotional. When Noah walked into the room, I did not recognize him at first ­because of the glare from the doorway ­behind him and ­because he was wearing glasses. But then he emerged from the shadows and we fell into each other’s arms, clasping each other, tears rolling down our cheeks, and when we sat down together on the sofa and began to talk, we continued to touch each other, as though still unable to grasp the miracle that had just occurred. If the sights and smells of Freetown had reawakened memories of a long-­eclipsed period of my life, then seeing Noah again was as if a lost part of my soul had been restored to me. “I cannot find words for what I feel,” Noah said, “but seeing you is like being born again.” “It’s the same for me,” I said. And I had a fleeting memory of some lines I had read in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz while waiting for my flight at Gatwick the night before, about the compulsion we sometimes feel to go in search of places and p­ eople in our past we have all but forgotten, to keep a rendezvous with them and, thereby, perhaps, create some semblance of continuity in our lives. When I last saw Noah, he had been working as a trade inspector in Koidu. What had happened to him since then? “I continued to work as a trade inspector,” Noah said, “but I was transferred several times. From Koidu, I moved to Port Loko. Then to Makeni. Fi­nally, Lunsar. I was suffering from glaucoma and had to have an operation. But the rebels w ­ ere threatening Lunsar at that time, and the two expatriate doctors had to flee the town within a day of performing the second operation. They had given me medi­cation and ban­daged my eyes, but when the rebels broke into my h ­ ouse and took me captive, I had to leave every­thing ­behind. They taunted me. “Pappy, h ­ ere, drink,’ they said, and thrust a ­bottle of beer at me. I said I ­didn’t drink. They pushed a cannabis cigarette into my mouth. I told them I d ­ idn’t smoke. I said, ‘Would I eat if I ­were not hungry?’ From Lunsar, we walked to Masimera, where we s­ topped for two days. I asked if I could talk to their C.O. They said, ‘What! A civilian like you wanting to see our C.O!’ One of them lifted his weapon to show what would happen if I went on pushing my luck.”

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Four days ­later, the rebels abandoned Noah in a Temne village. His eyes ­were no longer ban­daged, and he was in a lot of pain. In the months that followed, he lost the sight of one eye and now had only l­imited vision in the other. Unable to return to school teaching and with l­ ittle hope of finding any other work, he survived in Freetown on his wits, scrounging money to buy rice and food for his f­ amily and pay school fees for his kids. That after­noon, small S. B. drove Noah and me downtown. The City ­Hotel, where Pauline and I had stayed when we first came to Sierra Leone in 1969, had been a casualty of the war, though one of the coconut palms in the forecourt had survived the fire that gutted the building. It was strange to look up at the windowless concrete space where our room had been and to think further back to when Graham Greene killed time ­here during the war, ­later describing Wilson, at the beginning of The Heart of the ­Matter, as sitting on the balcony with “his bald pink knees thrust against the ironwork . . . ​his face turned to the sea.” We drove east to Noah’s ­sister’s h ­ ouse so I could pay my re­spects to their ­mother. Physically not much more than skin and bone, (Noah was convinced his m ­ other was at least a hundred years old), Sanfan Aisetta was lying on a palliasse on the floor of a back bedroom. I had never expected to see her again, and as I touched her shoulder and greeted her, I felt as though I was reaching out across an unbridgeable gulf. Then her eyes flickered open. “How is Heidi?” she whispered, without stirring. “Is she t­here?” Aisetta had cared for Heidi when she was a baby. “No,” I said, “but she promises to be with me next time I come, and she sends her love.” When Aisetta closed her eyes, it was as though she ­were closing them on a world of unmitigable sorrow. By the time we returned through the East End, the narrow, pot-­holed streets ­were clogged with traffic and the air thick with exhaust fumes. Along Kissy Road, I saw more of the destruction left by the rebels three years before—­ the fire-­blackened laterite walls of public buildings and churches, concrete facades pockmarked from gunfire. An unbroken stream of ­people flowed and eddied around the stalled lines of poda podas, overladen lorries, broken-­down taxis, omolankeys, and white Land Cruisers. UNHCR. Save the ­Children Fund. Child Rescue Mission. Planned Parenthood. Save the Youth. Sight Savers International. I could not but won­der how many p­ eople w ­ ere actually helped by this influx of NGOs and foreign aid, and thinking of Noah’s impaired eyesight, I asked him if he had ever sought help from any of ­these agencies. His attitude was both stoic and skeptical.

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Despite all the rhe­toric of reconstruction, rehabilitation, and resettlement, he knew the odds against anyone receiving immediate benefit. “The leg that steps forward is soon enough the leg that steps back,” he said, citing the Kuranko adage. “What can one do but accept t­hings as they are, and live one day at a time without g­ reat expectations or undue hope? T ­ hings change,” he added, “but seldom ­because of anything we say or do.” In a small yard, some young men in shorts w ­ ere playing soccer with a half-­ inflated football. Whenever we came to a standstill, kids clamored at the win­dow of the car with packets of ­bubble gum and biscuits, ­bottle openers, disposable razors, key rings, and pocket calculators. Along ­every street, ­women sat at small ­tables, selling onions, tomato paste, bunches of cassava leaf, Maggi cubes, ­bottles of palm oil, bundles of split firewood, groundnuts, charcoal, kola nuts, loaves of bread, and peeled oranges. And in small booths made of lashed poles and corrugated iron, men and w ­ omen plied their trades—­making furniture, d ­ ying cloth, cutting hair, selling enamelware, shoes and sandals, stationery, and lottery tickets. So many p­ eople waiting, I thought. Waiting for a transaction or lucky break that w ­ ill make the difference between having food and g­ oing hungry. I found myself reading the slogans emblazoned on the poda podas and lorries around us: Allah is in Control. God is G ­ reat. Better Days Are Coming. Be Yourself. Re­spect Education. Never Give Up. Still With My Paddle Nevertheless. L ­ abour and Expect. No Condition is Permanent. Then, mindful of Noah’s long wait for a change in his fortunes, I asked him if he was still sunike—­ the Kuranko word for a person who was neither Muslim nor Christian. “I have never embraced any moral system,” Noah said, “and I hope I never ­will.” It crossed my mind to ask Noah why some of us need to believe ­there is some overarching or implicate order in the world that rewards virtue, punishes evil, and reveals meaning while o­ thers of us accept the arbitrariness of fate, or at least renounce the possibility of divining its hidden workings and—­ considering it as foolish to congratulate ourselves when fortune ­favors us as it is to express outrage or envy when it does not—­focus on steadying ourselves in the midst of life’s flux, struggling to embrace both the rough and the smooth with equanimity. ­ fter several days in Freetown, we prepared for a journey to Kabala to launch A the Civil Defence Force Wives, ­Widows, and War Orphans Development

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Proj­ect in Koinadugu District. But this also was to be S. B.’s triumphant return home ­after years of war and exile in Guinea. A series of last-­minute phone calls delayed our departure. We needed to hire a mini-­bus for the musicians and newspaper reporters, borrow some electrical cables and lights, and order supplies of mineral w ­ ater. S. B. asked me if ­there was anything in par­tic­u­lar I needed for the trip. Though I knew he would not agree, I asked if Noah could accompany us. “­There is no room,” S. B. said, and quickly changed the subject, asking if I wanted a bodyguard. Much to his delight, I declined the offer. It was nearly midday before the piles of suitcases, blankets, generators, amplifiers, bags of rice and onions, tins of palm oil, and cartons of enamelware, tomato paste, and dried fish ­were loaded onto the vari­ous vehicles and we fi­nally got away. I was in the back seat of a ­Toyota 4-­Runner, directly ­behind S. B and in the com­pany of two of his staunchest allies, while small S. B, who had been u ­ nder a relentless barrage of o­ rders all morning, was at the wheel. In other vehicles ­were MPs from northern districts, numerous Sierra Leone ­People’s Party stalwarts, and leaders of the Civil Defence Force Wives, ­Widows, and Orphans Development Proj­ect. The harrowing stories I would hear from ­people in the north, as well as amputees and displaced ­people in Freetown’s refugee camps, would propel my thinking in new directions. But of all the stories of vio­lence and social suffering, it was a series of conversations with “small S. B,” whose ­actual name was Sewa Magba Koroma, that was the most compelling. ­After the success of the Tamaboro militias1 in repelling the RUF from Kono and forcing them back to their base in Kailahun, the National Provisional Ruling Council (NPRC) became uneasy, since their sole justification for remaining in power was their ability to destroy the RUF. Accordingly, they dissolved the Tamaboros, who they now described as a “rogue army,” and sent their leader Komba Kambo back to Koinadugu. It is very likely that, when an RUF brigade overran Kabala in November 1994, it did so in complicity with the Sierra Leone military. Travelling over mountainous terrain and avoiding roads, this band of about seventy youths walked 110 miles in seven days, from Kalmaro, northeast of Magburaka, and entered Kabala with some of the government troops that locals had seen pass through the town in uniform only three days before. One of the objectives of this raid was to punish the town that had given birth to the Tamaboros, which explains why certain ­houses ­were targeted for destruction and why Dembaso Samura, one of

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the Tamaboro “field marshals,” was stabbed and beaten to death. The town was subsequently invaded several more times, and many ­houses pillaged and burned. I saw the destruction through Sewa’s eyes as we sauntered along dusty lanes that had once been thoroughfares, past rows of derelict h ­ ouses, and through unfamiliar neighborhoods. So many refugees had poured into Kabala during the war that the town had expanded almost beyond recognition. But we soon ­were trudging up the rutted road ­toward the roundabout, then past the mosque into the main street. Sewa had come to Kabala from Freetown in 1994 to spend some time with his ­mother Tina and his ­father, Sheku Magba Koroma II, paramount chief of Diang. I had known Chief Magba well, and had done fieldwork in Kondembaia, the main town of the chiefdom. Tina and her husband took refuge in Kabala in 1994, though not in the same h ­ ouse. “At about 4.00  in the after­noon of 7 November,” Sewa said, “we heard gunfire. ­People ­were ­running about in a panic, saying that the rebels had entered the town. I was with my cousin Sheku. We went to my dad and said, ‘­People are saying that the rebels are ­here.’ My ­father said, ‘No, it is the Tamaboros.’ But the rebels had entered the town on foot, using cross-­country paths rather than roads. By nightfall, many h ­ ouses ­were on fire, and my f­ ather was asking us, ‘What s­ hall we do, what s­ hall we do?’ Sheku and I wanted to get away from the h ­ ouse, but t­here ­were rebels moving down the street, so we stayed inside and locked the door. About 8 ­o’clock the rebels banged on the door. They shouted, ‘If you d ­ on’t open up, w ­ e’ll set fire to the h ­ ouse and you’ll burn.’ I quickly threw my f­ather’s staff [of chieftaincy] u ­ nder the bed. Then they smashed the door. The rebels saw my ­father’s briefcase. It was filled with money and gold dust.2 They shouted, ‘Whose is this?’ I said I ­didn’t know. I told them that we had taken shelter in the ­house when the shooting began. The rebels said, ‘If you had nothing to hide, why did you run away?’ ” As the rebels moved on down the street, Sewa and Sheku found themselves face-­to-­face with two young men their own age, armed with AK-47s. The one who gave ­orders was called Kujé. His sidekick was called Abu. “Fortunately,” Sewa said, “they believed my story, and did not suspect that the old Pa was my ­father, let alone a paramount chief. Had they known the truth, they would have killed him. But I think they ­were afraid of us. Only two of them against the two of us. They ­were thinking we might overpower them and take their weapons.

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“Kujé said, ‘Now w ­ e’ll kill you,’ and he shot Sheku in the stomach. As Sheku died, I pleaded with them. ‘­Don’t kill me,’ I said. ‘I’m ­going to come with you. I want to come with you.’ “They ordered me to pack a bag and to make up a headload of food. Then we headed off the way the rebels had come, along the path to Kamadugu Sukurela. We spent that night in Kamadugu Sukurela, which the rebels had already burned and looted on their way to Kabala. I was one of many captives. One of the girls was Fanta Konté, who was Miss Koinadugu. Next day, we went on to Singbian. We arrived t­here at nightfall. The town crier was in the pro­cess of announcing that the RUF had entered Kabala. He was blind. He did not realise that ­these same rebels had just entered his village. ‘So ­you’re telling every­one that we are evil?’ the rebels asked. And they shot him dead. Next morning, we left for Dalako, near Lake Sonfon. We reached t­ here at about 4:00 in the after­noon. “When the rebels said they wanted food, I told them ­there was a cassava garden b­ ehind the h ­ ouse and that I would prepare cassava for them. They trusted me now. I had been helping them talk to the other captives, especially the girls, who ­were afraid for their lives. So, they let me go to the garden alone. It was then that I made my escape. I had dreamed about it the night before. And b­ ecause I believe that dreams foretell real events, I had already de­cided to escape that day.3 I made my way to Yara, where I met the town chief and some hunters. They ­were very happy to see me and to hear that my f­ ather was alive. “One of the hunters then escorted me back to Kondembaia. “Three years passed,” Sewa said, “before the captured girls emerged from the bush. They told me that the rebels claimed to have shot me when I tried to escape. Every­one believed I was dead, like my cousin Sheku.” One remark of Sewa’s about the RUF reminded me of La Jeunesse, the young rebels that overran the Eastern Congo in 1964. Sewa described them as “only boys,” who smoked a lot of cannabis, which made them “wild.” Their leader, whose name was Mohammed and hailed from Makeni, wore a red beret and a red bandana around his neck. His companions praised him constantly. And he did not carry a gun, only a knife, and was at all times surrounded by his bodyguards. What interested me was this odd mix of bravado and vulnerability. Surely Sewa was right when he suggested that the rebels shot Sheku b­ ecause they felt threatened by the pair of them, that they killed Sheku to break Sewa’s spirit and to reduce the danger of taking two friends prisoner together.

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Perhaps, too, I thought, they felt vulnerable—so far from their homes (they had come from Kailahun in the south), and afraid of the Tamaboros (who had magical medicines to ward off bullets or kill their enemies and possessed the powers of shapeshifting and witchcraft). I also was fascinated by the character of the anarchy loosed by the RUF on Sierra Leone. More carnivalesque than chaotic, it involved many of the symbolic inversions of the normal order of ­things I had observed in Kuranko initiations. Sewa’s comments on this “grotesque realism” in which life is “turned inside out” w ­ ere particularly illuminating.4 When I asked why the rebels sometimes wore comic book masks, ­women’s underwear, or wigs, carried c­ hildren’s toys, and ­adopted nicknames like Black Jesus and Captain Blood, Sewa said, “When I was taken captive in Kabala, t­ here was one rebel who called himself Born Naked and went about without a stitch of clothing. Another was called Arab. He dressed in a djellaba and keffiyeh, like a sheikh. And then ­there was Albila’u, which means ‘dangerous ­thing’ in Mandingo, and Kill-­Man-­No-­ Law, b­ ecause t­ here was no law in existence that could prevent the RUF from ­doing what­ever they liked to you. They dressed up,” Sewa added, “­because no laws or rules applied to them; it was to show that they could do anything.” Sewa’s comment echoed a remark by an ex-­SLA combatant who participated in the 1994 Kabala attack: “I liked the army,” he said, “­because we could do anything we liked to do. When some civilian had something I liked, I just took it without him d ­ oing anything to me. We used to rape w ­ omen. 5 Anything I wanted to do [I did]. I was ­free.” ­Unless one has been caught up in a war and experienced the terror that comes of knowing that hundreds of heavily-­armed individuals are bent on one’s annihilation, it is hard to realize that most vio­lence is not primarily motivated by evil, greed, lust, ideology, or aggression. Strange as it may seem, most vio­lence is defensive. As William James observed, fear “is a reaction aroused by the same objects that arouse ferocity,” which is why we “both fear, and wish to kill, anything that may kill us.”6 This is why vio­lence is so often motivated by the fear that if one does not kill, one w ­ ill be killed, e­ ither by the e­ nemy or by one’s own superiors. Against this constant anxiety and the acute sense of fear and vulnerability that accompanies it, one conjures an illusion of power—­torching buildings, shooting unarmed civilians, firing rocket grenades, smoking cannabis, shout-

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ing o­ rders, chanting slogans, seeing oneself as Rambo, taunting and degrading the individuals one has taken captive. But all this display of might—­this weaponry, ­these amulets and lucky charms, this noise, ­these incantations, both po­ liti­cal and magical, t­ hese Hollywood images, t­ hese drug-­induced fugues, t­ hese manifestations of brotherhood and solidarity—­simply reveal the depth of one’s own impotence and fear.7 This is Hannah Arendt’s g­ reat insight—­that while military power consolidates itself in numbers, and in coordinated, automatic forms of mass movement, terrorism seeks power in implements and is driven not by might but its absence.8 And so it is that in the auto-­da-­fé, with explosions and bomb blasts, fire, noise, and mayhem, the terrorist, like a child, finds his apotheosis, achieving the recognition, presence, voice, and potency he has been denied. Like any other animal, ­human beings ­will fight to the death when threatened or cornered, but as a species, we are, perhaps, alone in imagining that our survival depends on such elusive properties as recognition, love, ethnic identity, national honor, freedom, and wealth. Only we w ­ ill feel that our very existence is endangered when our name is taken in vain, our pride is hurt, our freedom is threatened, our reputation impugned, our voice ignored, our loyalty betrayed. No other animal w ­ ill fight tooth and nail not only to see that such symbolic losses are made good but that t­hose who have allegedly taken t­hese ­things from us are, themselves, subject to all the torment, abuse, and loss we have suffered at their hands. This is why violators seldom admit to remorse. They believe they w ­ ere fully justified in their excesses; they w ­ ere only taking back what was rightfully theirs, preserving their civilization, defending their rights, upholding their honor, fighting for their freedom, and of course, obeying ­orders from above. It was never easy, interviewing villa­gers in Sierra Leone who had had their limbs amputated by machetes, to believe that in the eyes of their tormentors they w ­ ere part of a monstrous entity bent on their annihilation. When I asked Leba Keita, a young man I met in Kabala, why the RUF mutilated and killed so many innocent ­people, he thought for a moment and said, “They used to say the government was not paying any attention to them.” When I asked Patrick Koroma (son of the famed storyteller Keti Ferenke) the same question, he recalled one man from Kondembaia who had had both his hands cut off. The rebels wrote a note to the president, saying, “We rebels did this,” and they stuffed the note in the man’s shirt pocket and told him to go to the

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president. “You used ­those hands to vote for him,” they said. “Now he is bringing in all ­these ECOMOG soldiers to fight against us. Encouraging the CDF to kill us. Go to the president and ask him to give you another hand.” Although this remark appears to make an ideological point, it also is evidence that the vio­lence had taken on a life of its own, fueled by drugs, fear, and desperation. Indeed, by the mid-1990s, po­liti­cal motives had paled into insignificance despite the RUF leadership’s insistence that the sole reason for waging war was to liberate the country from oppression and corruption. When I asked Sewa if he had seen any evidence of po­liti­cal ideology when the RUF invaded Kabala, he referred to a certain Mr. Lawrence, a high school gradu­ate and slightly older man, who was second in command. But none of the other rebels explained their actions in po­liti­cal terms, Sewa said. Noah made the same observation. When he was abducted by rebels at Lunsar in 1996, he asked his captors what they ­were fighting for. They said, “Pappy [Foday Sankoh] has money for us.” They had been promised money if they won the war. “However,” Noah said, “they had no po­liti­cal agenda, no po­liti­cal motives.” Noah’s son Kaimah said the same ­thing. The ones he knew who joined the RUF saw it as a way of getting money. They went to Kono, where the RUF controlled the diamond mining. ­Others, Kaimah added, had grievances, and he mentioned young men who had been cut out of their f­ ather’s inheritance and had a bone to pick with their older b­ rothers. Another young man, called Unisa Mansaray, a young electronic journalist who had recently returned from a BBC training course in London, made a similar point. When the rebels and their Junta allies fought their way into Freetown on 6 January 1999, some came to Unisa’s parent’s h ­ ouse where he was staying. They ­were kids that Unisa had known at school, with old scores to s­ ettle, i­ magined slights, trivial grievances—­pretexts ­really, Unisa said, for the deeper grudge they bore against a government that had betrayed their dreams. When they shouted his name, ordering him to come out of the ­house, Unisa leaped from the second-­ floor balcony and fled. But his grandparents and parents, trapped inside the ­house, ­were shot and killed. Was this vio­lence and plundering of the city a case of the bush invading the space of the town, and a distant echo of initiatory death and rebirth? Certainly, the RUF leadership invoked initiation rites to justify its revolutionary method of preparing young boys in bush camps for the violent but necessary cleansing of corrupt towns, ­under such codenames as Operation Pay Yourself and Operation No Living ­Thing.9 For many of the kids who went to the bush

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and joined the RUF, this desire for initiatory rebirth as men of power (purified of the taint of childhood) may have been stronger than their commitment to the RUF cause. Certainly, their sense of impunity, of which Sewa spoke, was reminiscent of the license enjoyed by neophytes, while the abduction of c­ hildren by the RUF and their adoption by rebel leaders—­who ­were regarded as f­ athers and called Pappy or Pa—­recalls the initiatory seizure of ­children, whose ties with their parents are symbolically severed so they can be reborn, in the bush, as men. This idea that war—­like initiation, or play, or an adventure—is a moment out of time, separated from the moral space of the town, also may help explain why, ­after the war, many combatants anticipated a remorse-­free return to civilian life. But the analogy between rebellion and initiation can be pushed too far. For in initiation, as in play, the ritualized disordering of the mundane world, with its dramatic negation of hierarchy and distinction, is but a profane prelude to its symbolic reintegration—­a reaffirmation of the bonds that make a community v­ iable. Initiation is a drama of restoration, not revolution—­ which is why rebirth is its central meta­phor. In war, by contrast, disorder breeds disorder, and death is the prevailing image.10 War is playing with fire, or “playing for keeps”—­a phrase we used as c­ hildren when playing marbles to declare that gains and losses would, henceforth, be irreversible. In playing for keeps, one’s honor, one’s pride, one’s possessions, one’s manhood, one’s life are on the line. One stakes every­thing, and the winner takes all. That is why coping with terror, bolstering one’s courage, surviving to fight another day, consume one’s waking hours and pervade one’s dreams, and why any attempt to drop out of the game, or escape, is to invite immediate punishment, which, in the RUF, meant mutilation or death.

Mi­grant Imaginaries

That my reflections on revolution, vio­lence, and initiatory rebirth led me to think more deeply about migration ­wasn’t only ­because of the civil war; it was ­because Sewa moved to London in 2003 and, in sharing his experiences with me, he brought the connections between self-­transformation and social transformation into sharp relief. While revolutionaries commit themselves to a radical transformation of the world without, the mi­grant undertakes a comparable transformation of the world within, albeit by moving to another place. As with initiation, the stakes are extraordinarily high. The revolutionary w ­ ill not countenance a return to the ancient regime, the mi­grant cannot face returning home with empty hands, and the neophyte who fails the test of initiation w ­ ill be socially stigmatized for life. I had met Sewa in the aftermath of war, so it was ironic that thirteen days before I came to London to visit him, a series of terrorist bombings had brought the city to a standstill and my arrival at Waterloo Station on July 20, 2005, coincided with the discovery of four unexploded bombs abandoned by

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would-be suicide bombers on three tube trains and a bus. The city was in turmoil: railway stations ­were being evacuated, police cars with sirens wailing ­were speeding through the streets, and rumors w ­ ere spreading like wildfire. That eve­ning, the papers and TV news ­were full of talk about the identity of the bombers, as if t­ here was a causal link between the cultural vacuum t­ hese second-­generation Muslim youths experienced growing up in Britain and the allure of militant sects with their fanatical sense of certainty, their separation from normal society, and their fantasies of miraculous and vengeful rebirth. It put me in mind of the Hitler Youth, whose organizers so successfully harnessed the energy of youthful rebelliousness, replacing filial bonds with blood brotherhood and loyalty to an absolute leader. An abstracted form of belonging focused on symbols like the flag, the folk, and the nation that brooked neither dissent nor diversity and united young ­people in a cause that made them feel they mattered. Was this not also what happened in Sierra Leone when the Revolutionary United Front licensed disaffected youth to seize what they felt was owed them and take their revenge on ­those they believed had done them wrong? I had not seen Sewa for two years and was worried I might not recognize him in the crowds in and around Paddington Station where we had agreed to meet. But then I saw him coming t­oward me, his familiar jaunty walk and inimitable smile, and as we shook hands and declared how bizarre it was to be meeting up in London of all places, I found myself again astonished at the kinship we shared despite the differences in our age, backgrounds, and circumstances. ­After exchanging customary greetings in Kuranko, I plied him with questions about his ­family. Was his ­mother Tina still in Freetown? Was she well? Was Dondo (her twin ­sister) also t­ here? Was she well? And what of his b­ rother in Kondembaia? Was he still chief? And how was he faring? In Edgware Road, we repaired to a Lebanese coffee bar where we could talk without distraction. I spoke briefly about how devastated I had been by the deaths of Noah and S. B. two years ago, and pressed Sewa for news of Firawa and his own hometown of Kondembaia. According to Sewa, nothing had changed in the three and a half years since the end of the war. Villages ­were practically deserted. No one had the money to buy cement or roofing iron to rebuild their ­houses, and few could find the time and ­labor anyway. Most p­ eople w ­ ere still living on their farms. “What of Kabala?” I asked. “Every­one is t­ here,” Sewa said.

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“What of the boys that shot Sheku?” I asked. “What happened to them?” “Kujé was killed in the war. Abu dis­appeared without a trace.” Sewa ­couldn’t care less for t­ hese individuals. But hardly a day passed, he said, that he did not remember his cousin or think how easily it could have been his life that was lost on that fateful day. ­After finishing our coffee, we walked south—­passing Marble Arch and Victoria Station before turning east past Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament, where throngs of tourists ­were snapping pictures and being lectured on the sights. Sewa had brought a camera with him, and once or twice he asked if I could take his photo in front of one of ­these famous landmarks. He wanted to send the photos home to his ­mother. Halfway across Westminster Bridge, we ­stopped to take in the view. Tourist boats ­were moving up and down the river whose muddy banks had been exposed by the ebbing tide. Ahead of us lay Country Hall, where I had been interviewed for my job as a welfare worker with the homeless in the winter of 1963. A lifetime ago, it seemed, before the London Eye, the Gherkin, and Millenium Bridge had been built, before Sewa had been born, before I even knew where Sierra Leone was. As if he also was struggling with similar anachronisms, Sewa exclaimed, “You know, Mr. Michael, I am thinking that right now my b­ rothers and cousins are all working on their farms back home in Kondembaia, working hard, but I am ­here in London, walking ­these streets, living this life ­here, this dif­fer­ent life . . .” “Which is harder, life in Kondembaia or London?” “I have to be grateful to God [and] what he’s done for me. B ­ ecause I ­couldn’t imagine me now on the farm d ­ oing that hard ­labor. It’s a blessing for me to find myself h ­ ere, even though it’s hard. It’s better, you know . . .” “Why is it better ­here? What makes it better?” “Well, ­here, as long as ­you’re hard-­working, the job is t­ here. You just have to go out and look for it. But back home, the jobs are not ­there.” “What’s wrong with farming?” “Well, you know farming. Overseas, the richest p­ eople are the farmers. But back home, t­ hings are dif­fer­ent; the poorest p­ eople are the farmers. They ­don’t have the equipment, the t­ hings to do the farming; they make their farms with their bare hands, no machines, nothing. So that’s like life and death. It’s r­ eally hard back home.”

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Though I pressed Sewa to expatiate on the hardships of village life and the hardships of being a mi­grant, he could not. Was farming ­really more onerous than the menial and minimally-­paid jobs he had been d ­ oing in London as a security guard, a cleaner, a night watchman, a factory worker, or did the difference lie in the fact that farming condemned one to the repetition of time-­old patterns while London offered a sense of new possibilities? One ­thing was sure, and this was true to a greater or lesser extent with all the Sierra Leoneans I spoke to in London: although one might rail against many t­ hings about life back home—­the endemic corruption, the lack of jobs, the electricity outages and food shortages—­one missed other ­things with a passion that could not be assuaged. Sewa was often “seized” by homesickness. It “took hold” of him and would not let him go. He would become preoccupied by tensions within the ­family—­between S. B’s sons and ­sisters’ sons over the division of the estate, or the lack of “communication” among his cousins. This was why he phoned them on his mobile ­every day. Moreover, he was anxious not to lose touch with Sierra Leone or with his ­family, and was determined to return home as soon as he had completed his studies to work as a motor mechanic (he preferred the term “automotive engineer”) and pursue a ­career in politics. His ­father, the late Paramount Chief Sheku Magba II, was his role model. As a small boy, Sewa had been nicknamed “walking-­stick” ­because of the way he followed his f­ather everywhere, dogging his heels, head down, concentrating on placing his feet exactly where his f­ ather placed his, literally walking in his ­father’s footsteps. This was the “kingly way of walking” that his ­uncle S. B. had often criticized him for, thinking it impertinent that a small boy should comport himself like a chief. But Sewa had inherited more than his ­father’s way of walking; he had the right to rule and wanted to emulate the po­liti­cal even-­handedness and incorruptibility for which his ­father was known during his forty years as paramount chief of Diang. By contrast, the pre­sent incumbent, Sewa’s ­brother, was at odds with the older section and town chiefs, and increasingly embattled and unpop­u­lar. “If Sheku gave up the chieftaincy,” Sewa said, “and I was called upon to go home tomorrow and contest, I would do so, even though I am only twenty-­nine.” That Sewa was sustained emotionally in exile by the “belief” he had inherited from his ­father (by which he meant both Islam and a sense of what in Kuranko is known as bimba che—­ancestral legacy or birthright) was made

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very clear in the way he responded to my question, “Do you think of yourself as a Muslim?” “I am a Muslim. I was raised in a Muslim home. My ­father was a Muslim, and my ­mother, too. And I believe in the Muslim religion ­because . . .” Sewa hesitated, as if searching for the right word, “. . . ​a lot of the time I get bad dreams. The only ­thing that saves me when I get ­those bad dreams, ­every month or two weeks, the t­ hing that comes up straight in my mind is La illah ila Allah. Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, God is g­ reat, God is g­ reat. Then I am relieved of that bad dream. B ­ ecause sometimes I am struggling in my dream, fighting in my dream, not able to shake it off. But that is the first ­thing that comes into my mind. La illah ila Allah. I say it for a minute or so, and my fear goes and I am fine.” “What kind of dreams are ­these?” “Mostly they are fighting dreams, p­ eople trying to stab me . . .” “In ­England ­here?” “Back home. Most of the dreams I get, I find myself back home. Someone is trying to give me [poisoned] food, you know. Some bad dreams like that. But the one that bothers me the most is I’m fighting with p­ eople. It might be someone I know, maybe one of my ­brothers or cousins or friends ­will always appear in my dreams fighting me. That ­really bothers me, pains me.” I was moved by Sewa’s confession and found it difficult to reconcile ­these dark images with the cavalier optimism he usually projected. “How are they fighting you?” I asked. “Physically, sometimes, with a knife. Trying to stab me. I have to fight, you know.” “Your b­ rothers fighting you, is this fadenye?” I asked, alluding to the vexed relationship between half-­siblings in Mande socie­ties that is particularly acrimonious when wealth or high office is at stake. “Well, of course,” Sewa said patiently. “Fadenye is t­ here. When y­ ou’re from a ruling ­house every­one dreams of becoming chief, so . . . ​But no one has shown that to me yet. ­Because of the way I was raised, I ­don’t think that fadenye ­thing is a threat to me. It’s not. It ­doesn’t bother me.” “Then why are your b­ rothers attacking you in your dream?” “That’s what I ­don’t understand. The last time I phoned my ­mother, I told her about the dreams I always get; I explained every­thing to her. I also phoned my blood ­brother Abu and told him about my dreams, the dreams

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about my step-­brothers, my friends, or dif­fer­ent ­people fighting me. They said, ‘All you need to do is pray,’ so I am d ­ oing that prayer, you know.”1 We had now reached the London Eye, and I was finding it difficult to absorb or jot down every­thing Sewa was telling me. So, a­ fter Sewa had persuaded a tourist to take a photo of us standing u ­ nder the g­ reat wheel on Millennium Pier, I suggested we find a bench further along the embankment and that I rec­ord some of his story on tape. I particularly wanted to understand the guilt that seemed to inform his dreams. Did Sewa, like so many mi­grants, feel uneasy about the fact that he had been lucky enough to find his way to ­England while his peers, no less deserving, w ­ ere obliged to farm or languished in Freetown with no hope of employment and no real ­future? Was this distress compounded by his guilt at not having been able to return home for S. B.’s funeral, and even the terrible arbitrariness of the war that he had survived and his cousin and companion Sheku had not? And then ­there ­were all the debts he had incurred in London and would never be able to repay . . . The tide was turning, the Thames riding high on a brown flood tide, and as Sewa spoke into the microphone of my tape recorder, I could not help but recall my own hardships during the winter of 1963, when I worked across the river in the London County Council Office for the Homeless u ­ nder Hungerford Bridge (the old footbridge was now replaced by the Golden Jubilee Bridge and t­here was no trace remaining of the Nissan Hut where I interviewed so many lost souls). Like Sewa, I had endured penury and homesickness. But while I led a much more solitary existence, I never experienced the extreme cultural disorientation that Sewa had described. ­After finishing our recording, we caught a bus to the Angel, where Sewa had been living for several months in his girlfriend’s apartment. Sewa prepared a meal of rice with okra, chilli, and sardines, and told me that cooking was one of the adjustments he had made to life in Britain. But other t­hings about Britain w ­ ere more difficult to get used to. As Sewa and I left the apartment ­after lunch, I noticed his En­glish neighbor and his son leaning on their gate and observing us intently. No words ­were exchanged, and it was only when we ­were out of sight of them that Sewa asked irritably, “Why do they stare at us like that? Back home, I would confront them, I would tell them to stop. If they did not stop I would beat them. But h ­ ere, y­ ou’re in another man’s land; they just stare at you like that and you can do nothing about it.”

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Sewa was alluding to a Kuranko form of witchcraft called ya yugo mé (literally “evil eye”). To stare at a pregnant w ­ oman w ­ ill cause her pain in childbirth or prolong her l­abor. And it was widely thought that envious staring could destroy a person’s prosperity. ­Later that day, as I strolled back to my h ­ otel, I found myself comparing Sewa’s comments on the unflinching and minatory gaze of his girlfriend’s white neighbors with the intense preoccupation among the ­peoples of the Upper Guinea Coast with the concealed menace in the world around them that finds dramatic expression in the clandestine activities of witches and the conspiracies of enemies, as well as oneiric images of black hearts ­behind white teeth, impenetrable forests and swamps, blocked paths and murky ­waters.2 And I remembered how I felt when I first went to live in Firawa, with ­little grasp of the language and ignorant of local protocols—­the disorientation that made me so wary and anxious, not knowing what p­ eople w ­ ere saying about me or when some slight misjudgment on my part would jeopardize my already tenuous situation in the village or oblige me to leave. Is it always true that when we feel powerless and vulnerable we tend to take every­thing personally, as if ­others had nothing ­else on their minds but our foibles and failings? The following morning, I walked from my ­hotel near Paddington to Speakers Corner and into Hyde Park. Rain had cleared the air, and I sat for a while ­under some plane trees writing up notes from the day before and listening to the muted roar of traffic along Park Lane, crows quarrelling on the grass, and cyclists ticking by on their way to the West End. But my thoughts ­were of Sewa’s precarious situation. Whenever I had spoken to him on the phone from Copenhagen, he would say how hard it was making ends meet in London, but he never suggested that I might help him financially or admitted to feeling beleaguered or lost. Rather, he would enthusiastically look forward to seeing me and telling me his stories. But I had not bargained for the kind of story hed had in mind. ­After meeting Sewa at the Victoria bus station, we boarded a bus to Peckham and immediately resumed the conversation we had begun yesterday. “When I was in Sierra Leone,” Sewa began, “I was just thinking when you get to Eu­rope or overseas that’s it!” and he laughed at the absurdity of his assumption that every­thing would be easy, every­thing would fall into place. “I had completely the wrong idea. To get my visa back home, that was one step. But when you get into the place, you ­really understand what it is,

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you know. When I went to the British High Commission in Freetown for my interview, I met this consul called John. He says to me, ‘Mr. Koroma, you’ll get your visa, but make sure that ­after six months you go and renew the visa.’ I said ‘All right’ and travelled to London, where I had to enroll at the London College of Accountancy. I had wanted to study automotive engineering, but accountancy was the only t­ hing they would give me a visa for. So I went t­here, and that’s when my trou­bles began. They said to me, ‘Mr. Koroma, before you start your course, you have to pay another nine hundred pounds.’ Do you know what nine hundred pounds means?—­what it means to raise nine hundred pounds? I went to my s­ ister Aminatta. She found the money for me. I ­will never be able to pay my s­ ister back. Only God ­will bless her. Up to now, I feel guilty that I have not been able to help my ­sister. I feel bad about it. I know how hard it was for her to raise that nine hundred pounds. So I paid that money and started classes.” Sewa found work cleaning toilets in the Mandarin Oriental H ­ otel in Knightsbridge for four pounds an hour. But his Nigerian supervisor exploited the newcomer’s powerlessness and inexperience, ordering him to do extra work that included cleaning the supervisor’s own room. Mystified by the fastidious and, to Sewa, obsessive standards of cleanliness demanded by the Mandarin Oriental, as well as confused as to whose ­orders he should follow, he soon found himself ­doing the wrong job at the wrong time (polishing the brass nameplate outside the ­hotel) and was sacked. He then found work as a security guard at Tescos in Kennington, exchanging a “dirty” job for a “boring” one. But what­ever employment he found, t­ here was a limit set by the Home Office as to how much a mi­grant with a student visa could earn, and Sewa was desperately short of money. That December, six months a­ fter arriving in Britain, he had to apply to the Home Office for an extension to his visa. The cost was two hundred and fifty pounds. Moreover, he had to pay half of his college fees, (another five hundred pounds) and come up with two hundred pounds for the rent of the shared room in his ­sister’s flat. Once again, he borrowed from friends, including his girlfriend at the time. But money was only part of his worries. His u ­ ncle and sponsor, S. B., had died a few weeks before. “Doubt was in my mind,” Sewa said. “I w ­ asn’t able to see my u ­ ncle. I w ­ asn’t able to go to the burial [in Freetown]. Sad, you know. I was having all ­these prob­lems in my head.” Without a letter and bank statement from a sponsor, he could not hope to get an extension on his visa. “I had to go out, find ­people, go out, beg ­people,

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beg p­ eople. I was lucky to meet C. D., my cousin Aisetta’s boyfriend. He gave me his bank statement. So, I took this to the Home Office with all my documents, my results from college, the letter from my college, receipts, every­thing. I went to the c­ ounter and this West Indian man called Fidel Castro [Sewa laughed as he remembered the nickname he had given the official], he’s called Fidel . . . ​so I hand over my papers, you know, and then the man looks at my sponsorship letter, the bank statement . . . ​the balance is twenty pounds. The man looks at me. He says, ‘Mr. Koroma, did you check all your documents before you came to this place?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Are you sure?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘Mr. Koroma, are you sure? I’m sorry, but I ­don’t think so.’ And he brings out this statement. He says the minimum they ­will accept is two thousand pounds. ‘If your sponsor has a balance of ten pounds, how could that man support you and support himself?’ I was in tears. I said to the man, I said, ‘­Really, this man is only trying to help me. My sponsor was my ­uncle, but he passed away a month ago. I used his bank statement when I got my visa, but now he has passed away I could not get his bank statement.’ The man said, ‘OK, your excuse is valid.’ So they extended my visa. But I tell you, Mr. Michael, it was hard, it was ­really hard. Living in London without having the correct stay papers, ­you’re in trou­ble. This is what makes E ­ ngland hard, overseas hard, this paperwork. That’s why I’m working hard, ­doing my studies, ­doing the right ­thing, trying to sort myself out. I ­don’t want to get into trou­ble, ­because I am thinking all the time, if y­ ou’re living h ­ ere illegally, as an illegal immigrant, and your mum or a relative passes away, ­there’s no way you can travel. They ­don’t check you when y­ ou’re g­ oing out, no one checks you then, no one cares. The only t­ hing is your ticket, not your passport. But h ­ ere, living h ­ ere as an illegal immigrant, you are living in fear, fear of no life. T ­ hese are the t­ hings that make this place ­really hard for ­people, I mean p­ eople living under­ground . . .” What struck me was that although Sewa had a valid visa, he experienced himself as someone whose validity was constantly in doubt. He could never take his residency for granted. He seemed to live in imminent danger of making some inadvertent yet irrevocable m ­ istake, of being picked up by the police and deported. T ­ here was something dreadfully nonnegotiable about his situation. Perhaps the worst fate that can befall any h ­ uman being is to be stripped of the power to play any part in deciding the course of their own life, to be ren-

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dered passive in the face of impersonal forces they cannot comprehend and with which they cannot negotiate. U ­ nder such circumstances, some p­ eople fight desperately to regain some sense of being in control, while o­ thers submit fatalistically to the situation that has overwhelmed them—­taking recourse in withdrawal, camouflage, or self-­pity. What­ever one’s response—­action or inaction, confrontation or avoidance—­one’s experience of one’s situation ­will tend to be intensified and exaggerated. To put it simply, one becomes in one’s own eyes a hero or a victim. As Sewa and I travelled across London, I was struck by the heroic imagery in the press. Londoners would not be intimidated by terrorists. As it was in the Blitz, so it was now: p­ eople would not allow the bombers to bring their city to its knees. But this defiance and “stubborn resilience” was easy for ­those who had not suffered or lost loved ones in the terrorist attacks, and I could not help but observe that Sewa, who knew only too well the terror of war, showed no bravado but only a desire to avoid and appease. By now, the police hunt for the would-be suicide bombers was being described in the papers as “the greatest operational challenge” in the history of Scotland Yard. Six thousand officers, half of them armed with MP5 submachine guns and Glock 17 pistols, ­were patrolling tube and railway stations and city squares. All this only intensified Sewa’s anx­i­eties. “It makes me remember the war,” he said, and he told me about the only occasion he had gone to the cinema. An action movie was playing, and his girlfriend at the time insisted they see it. But Sewa could not bear the noise of explosions, gunfire, and car crashes, and had to leave the cinema. As for the police presence on the streets, it rattled him rather than made him feel secure. As our bus slowly made its way south, Sewa pointed out a red police car. “That’s the city police,” he said. “They r­ eally lay on you, no mercy.” And as another police car worked its way through the stalled traffic, its siren wail sounding to my ears like We You We You We You, Sewa informed me that, in southeast London, Sierra Leoneans interpret the siren sound as Where dem? Where dem? Where dem? since the police are constantly on the lookout for illegal immigrants. The police also went by a variety of names, Sewa explained. They w ­ ere known as “Routine Check” for a while, but as soon as the police got wise to this nickname, it was replaced by the Yoruba word Orobo. “You have to avoid them,” Sewa said, though it was not always pos­si­ble to avoid eye contact. “Sometimes you d ­ on’t know where to look. You look at them, ­they’ll get

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angry and do a routine check on you; you look away and try to move away from them, t­ hey’ll think ­you’ve got something to hide, that ­you’re r­ unning away, and t­ hey’ll make you stand t­ here while they run a check on you again.” We had now reached Camberwell Green, and alighted from the bus. Our immediate destination was Bockarie’s shop on Camberwell Road. Bockarie was S. B.’s half-­brother,3 and he sold African CDs, clothing, books, and magazines, as well as access to Internet ser­vices. When we entered the shop, the only customers ­were a ­couple of Sierra Leonean girls on one of the PCs. Bockarie’s son Junisa was ­behind the ­counter ­doing some paperwork, and ­after Sewa had introduced us, Junisa showed me the copies of some of my Sierra Leonean books that w ­ ere for sale in the shop. I signed a c­ ouple of copies of Barawa at Junisa’s request, and he asked me if it was easy to write a book and get it published. He had a diploma in business management, but was keen to write about the reckless life he had led as a teenager, hoping this would be an example to younger ­people of what not to do. ­After exchanging e-­mail addresses, I asked Junisa if he had any recent m ­ usic from Freetown; Sewa had been telling me about a c­ ouple of bands, and I would like to hear them. Junisa did not have ­these par­tic­u­lar CDs in stock, but Elvis could take us to a place where we could buy them. “Elvis” was the sobriquet of a man in his late forties or early fifties who had, moments before, appeared from the back of the shop. His trousers ­were frayed, his teeth broken, and his breath stank of rum. His real name was Mohammed. He had fetched up in London fifteen years ago and had no intention of returning home. As he led Sewa and me along Camberwell Road, he poured scorn on his homeland and excoriated Britain with equal contempt. We soon came to a block of Council flats, where Elvis took us to a locked grill door. “Sisay!” he shouted. A man wearing a white singlet came to the door and peered at us suspiciously. “What do you want?” Elvis explained our business, but Cedric was not satisfied, and it took a lot more explaining from Elvis before Cedric unlocked the door and ushered us into a narrow corridor, where we edged past a large Sierra Leonean w ­ oman sitting on a bag of rice before arriving at Cedric’s room. The room was filled from floor to ceiling with shelves of CDs and all manner of electronic gear—­ video and DCD players, fax machines, copiers, microphones, CD burners,

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and boxes of imported CDs from vari­ous West African countries. It was now obvious why Cedric had been so cagey about admitting us; he produced pirated copies of videos and CDs for sale to African immigrants in London. ­After Cedric had brought cold Pepsis for Sewa and me and a can of Guiness for Elvis, I explained what I was looking for—­copies of some of the latest reggae, rap, and hi-­life m ­ usic from Freetown. It turned out that Cedric had several se­lections. I could buy three for ten pounds. And he immediately began playing me some tracks, his face beaming with plea­sure and his gold teeth glinting as he turned up the volume. Indeed, he was so stirred by the beat that he kept rising from his dilapidated office chair and dancing on the floor space that was not covered with half-­opened cartons and recording equipment. When I’d chosen three CDs, Cedric inserted the first in his burner and started the copying pro­cess. With the ­music switched off, I asked him to tell me how long he had been in London. It was a sad story that corroborated some of the t­ hings Sewa had been telling me about the difficulty of living within the law when work was so hard to find and racial prejudice endemic in e­ very workplace. “Never ask Africans what job they do,” Cedric said. “It is too embarrassing for them to say . . . ​You just ­don’t ask. P ­ eople say, ‘I di go work now,’ but they ­don’t mention what kind of work ­they’re g­ oing to. We do all the dirty work. The work no one e­ lse wants to do. It’s a waste of time looking for anything better. If you go try, they look at your visa, they look at your black face, they hear your accent, and they turn you away. You know, we have that saying in Krio? You eyes don take load. You know what that means? Your eyes d ­ on’t carry a load, but they can see if a load is too heavy to carry. So if ­you’re from Africa, you quickly see what you can do h ­ ere and what you ­can’t do. Let me show you . . .” Cedric rummaged in one of his desk drawers and brought out a sheaf of papers, among them several diplomas from vari­ous courses in maintenance and engineering that he had successfully completed. “At first, they would say I had to have qualifications. Now they say I am overqualified or too old.” As I examined Cedric’s impressive resumé, he recounted how he was attacked by shoplifters several years ago and his back broken. This made it additionally difficult for him to find work. “I am not prejudiced, but I w ­ ill tell you a story. I was working at Tescos as a security guard. The alarm broke down. Three times it broke down and three times a specialist electrician was called to fix it. The fourth time, I told the electrician what he should do to

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get it working again. B ­ ecause I had a diploma, I knew electrics. So the electrician took my advice and left. Said nothing. No thanks. Nothing. You see. It makes you angry. It makes you upset. But you can do nothing about it. You just have to keep trying.” Cedric showed me a printed e-­mail he had received that morning. It gave the time and address where he should go for an interview tomorrow morning. “I w ­ ill go,” Cedric said. “But as soon as the employer sees that I am not only black but an African, with an African accent, he w ­ ill tell me I am overqualified and too old for the job.” “Would you have any prospects if you went back home?” I asked. Cedric laughed. “What is ­there?” ­Later, a­ fter we left Cedric’s flat and said goodbye to Elvis, Sewa said he did not want to risk ever winding up like ­these two men. “You have to get out of ­here,” he said, “or e­ lse you w ­ ill die. You w ­ ill be just like Mohammed. They ­don’t go back. They d ­ on’t keep in touch. But one day, when he’s no good, even as Bockarie’s errand boy or Cedric’s errand boy, t­ hey’ll put him on a plane and send him home. ­He’ll have nothing. No one ­will know him. ­He’ll go crazy. That’s what lies ahead of you if you stay h ­ ere, if you never get out.” At the end of the day, a­ fter writing up my scribbled notes in the quiet of my ­hotel room, I strug­gled to find the right words for Sewa’s sense of uncertainty and wariness. Some of his anx­i­eties seemed to relate to his war experiences, as if the unreal and labyrinthine city through which he moved was like the nightmarish landscapes through which he had traveled ­after his capture by the rebels. “­You’re in another man’s land,” Sewa had explained to me. “You never know when they [the police] are g­ oing to grab you. T ­ hey’ll offer you a ­free ticket home. ­You’re gone. Just like that.” In this city of pitfalls, ambushes, and hidden dangers, t­ here was, however, one place where you could let your guard down and find some sense of security and homeliness. Of Peckham, with its money transfer shops, stores where you could rent African videos, green grocers where you could buy palm oil and cassava leaf, and where you could speak Krio on the street, Sewa had said, “This place full na we; we govern this place.” Sierra Leoneans referred to Peckham as Kru Town Road ­after an old quarter of Freetown, and a well-­known night spot was called Pardi’s, ­after Paddy’s Beach Bar in Freetown’s Aberdeen Road.4 “That’s our ground,” Sewa said. “That’s the place we not scared. The southeast is our stronghold.”

Mi­ grant Imaginaries   209

But outside this neighborhood, one had to be vigilant. Just as Sierra Leoneans had evolved their own argot, referring to a Sierra Leonean passport as “potato leaf” (­because it is dark green in color) and a residence permit or “stay” as “leather” (­because it is harder to get and more valuable than a passport), so they disguised their appearance to avoid becoming targets of local gangs or the police. In Freetown, young men wore American-­style basketball trainers; in London, they prefer the “normal trainers,” hooded jackets, and baggy trousers that young black Londoners wear. “You have to be in the system or e­ lse,” Sewa told me, explaining that local black gangs often pick on newcomers from West Africa, aggressively demanding, “Wot ya got on ya?” and expecting immediate payment.5 Sewa’s tactic was to mimic the cockney “Wot?” and use it repeatedly in response to the locals, hoping they would be fooled into thinking he was one of them and leave him alone. No doubt many of t­ hese tactics of changing one’s appearance, hiding one’s identity, keeping a low profile, and using a secret language with t­ hose one knows and trusts have a phyloge­ne­tic basis. But this tells us very ­little about the experiential context in which they are deployed—­what it feels like to be constantly on the defensive, or how real external dangers become translated into imaginary fears. Anyone who has moved from a familiar lifeworld and gone to live in a place where he or she is a complete stranger, linguistically inept, eco­nom­ically insecure, and socially stigmatized w ­ ill immediately identify with Sewa’s intense self-­consciousness—­the suspicion that ­people ­were staring at him, that he was u ­ nder surveillance, that he was somehow in the wrong, without rights or any legitimate identity. It was not that Sewa was seeking validation; rather, he was d ­ oing every­ thing in his power to avoid the p­ eople, situations, and incidents that made him feel as though he was a worthless nobody. What I admired about Sewa was his capacity for making the most of an environment that not only offered ­limited opportunities but constantly crossed and humiliated him. That his inner strength had been derived from his ­mother and ­father was very clear to him. They ­were, as put it, his very life (ni le wola). To speak of someone as “being my life,” or “being the world to me” is to imply that your own destiny is never simply in your own hands; it is determined by your relationships with significant ­others and by the ways in which they reflect and care for you even ­after they have passed away. In sending his ­mother photos of himself against the backdrop of the Houses of Parliament, Sewa hoped to inspire in her a validating response, in the same way that enunciating Koranic suras learned from his

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f­ ather would end his nightmares and assuage his fears. Among strangers, who Sewa simply called “­those p­ eople” (“dem ­people”), one could expect nothing but indifference, disparagement, or outright menace. “They shame me,” (An ya na moliya), Sewa would say. “They make me feel small” (An ya na dogoye). While Sewa strug­gled to keep his connections with Sierra Leone alive, his cousin Isata (S. B.’s ­daughter) strug­gled with homesickness. During the after­noon I spent with her and her two young c­ hildren, Munah and Kalil, we talked about the difficulty of sustaining the dream of returning home to live while meeting the demands of the life one has chosen to live abroad. Isata had a well-­paying position in one of London’s most prestigious private banking h ­ ouses and commuted to the city ­every weekday, leaving her ­children in the care of a live-in helper, Fodiya, who also hailed from Freetown. Yet she missed the social vitality of Freetown, the daily encounters with f­ amily and friends, the humor and ebullience of everyday life t­ here. “I d ­ on’t want to be h ­ ere in ten years’ time,” Isata said. “I want to be back in Freetown. My heart is ­there. I’m Sierra Leonean. When I come home from work, I change into Sierra Leonean clothes, prepare Sierra Leonean food. At home, we speak Krio. I’m not British and I d ­ on’t want to be. They would never accept me h ­ ere anyway.” I told Isata about the few days I spent in Paris before coming to London, staying in an apartment in the 10th arrondissement that belonged to a friend of Katherine’s. I would chat with the young men from Côte d’Ivoire who gathered around the pay phones on rue de Mazagran in the eve­ning to swap news and make palaver. I also mentioned how, ­every morning before walking to a cafe on the Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle for an espresso, I would exchange small talk with my gardien, M. Lad, who hailed from Benin. He was in his sixties, grizzled like myself, and brimming with energy and wry humor. “Not a year passes,” he told me, “that I do not go home. One must be careful not to sever the vine when harvesting the grapes.” “You know,” Isata said, “much as I try to be a part of the street life in Freetown when I go back, I am always identified as JC [‘Just Come’]. If I go to the hairdressers, I am immediately called JC. ­There’s no getting away from it. Last time we went, I bought flip-­flops, wore a gara-­dyed dress, but it made no difference. I was seen as foreign.” “What gave you away?” I asked. “It’s obvious,” Isata said. “It’s the hands. Your hands. The skin is smooth and unlined.”

Mi­ grant Imaginaries   211

On her last visit to Freetown, Isata said, two young men came up to her in Garrison Street and asked if she w ­ ouldn’t mind settling an argument t­ hey’d been having. How old was her l­ ittle boy, they wanted to know. Isata told them that Kalil was five. They w ­ ere incredulous. In Sierra Leone, a boy that big would be ten. Isata was deeply troubled by this incident. It brought home to her the gap between the rich and poor and made her won­der if the cost of the ­house that she and her husband ­were having built in Freetown was morally justified. I told Isata that I used to anguish about my own privileged status. When I confided my qualms to S. B., he said ­there was nothing wrong with improving one’s lot or even feathering one’s own nest, so long as it ­wasn’t at the expense of ­others. At the time, I had found this answer unsatisfactory, but now I would not venture a judgment, for it is for each person to work out for himself or herself what it is to live an ethical life. As we sat down to lunch, Isata said ­there was something she wanted to show me. Getting up from the t­ able, she went to her study and returned with a folder, which she placed beside my plate. “I d ­ on’t want you to read it now,” she said, “but I want to tell you what happened and ask your advice on what I should do.” “Early this year, I was promoted to the position of private banking assistant in the bank where I work. Almost immediately, the ­woman who’d been assigned to help train me for my new job became agitated and irritated whenever I approached her. It ­wasn’t just her. Other colleagues began gloating and giggling when I strug­gled to complete assignments, or they would pretend incomprehension when I communicated information in accented En­glish. But the worst I had to endure was racial harassment from a se­nior banker, who would loudly announce his preference for size six blondes, would leave ­bottles of liquid soap on my desk, and when I returned from a brief visit to Sierra Leone, presented me with a surgical mask and hand sanitizer, suggesting I use ­these in case I contaminated the office with something I might have picked up in Africa. With no one to turn to in the office, and with a growing sense that I was simply not wanted t­ here, I filed a Dignity at Work complaint, detailing a series of humiliating incidents and ending with a plea.” Isata invited me to open the folder and read what she had submitted. I am a thirty-­six-­year-­old w ­ oman who has been made to feel incompetent, threatened, degraded and intimidated. This has had an im­mense effect on

212    Worlds Within and Worlds Without my ­family life, as I have been ­going home ­every night in tears and not sleeping well, worried about ­going to work. My husband has been extremely supportive and was not happy about me carry­ing on the way t­ hings w ­ ere, but I was adamant I had to persevere and did not want to give in easily, as this is my ­career. I have been working for seventeen years of my life, apart from my years at university, but I have never been made to feel this way in any job. I have been blissfully married for eleven years with two lovely kids, a loving husband and a very happy home life, but of late I have become an emotional wreck. It was only a few weeks ago that I was so unwell that I could not go to the doctors on my own . . .

I broke off reading Isata’s letter. “You are not sick,” I said. “It’s t­hese colleagues of yours who are sick, and you must not let them or anyone ­else medicalize this issue.” Isata assured me that though the doctors had prescribed pills to help her sleep and deal with her so-­called depression, she had not filled the prescriptions. She was not g­ oing to use drugs. She was ­going to fight the case. “I think the bank is a victim of its sense of tradition,” Isata said. “Its fortunes are so tied up with this country’s colonial past that it has never hired any ethnics. Apart from me, ­there was only one man, an Indian, who ­rose to the rank of PBA, and he resigned recently, b­ ecause of harassment. And the bank has a prob­lem with ­women, too. And being taken over the Royal Bank of Scotland, a High Street bank, hurt their pride.” That after­noon, Isata and I drafted the letters I would send to her superiors, as well as the CEO of the Royal Bank of Scotland, vouching for Isata’s “integrity, intelligence, loyalty, and generosity of spirit” and urging a quick resolution of the issue. But it was with a heavy heart that I returned to my digs that eve­ning, for in all my years in Africa, I had never experienced racism, had always been warmly received into villages and homes, and had relished the effusive greetings and gossip that made up one’s day, and that Isata, in saying goodbye to me, said she now missed even more than ever. “I d ­ on’t want to go back home to make a difference,” she said, “I just want to be back home.”

Existential Mobility and Multiple Selves

The life stories I heard from refugees in Wellington and from Sierra Leoneans in London resonated with my own destabilized sense of self, moving between Australia, New Zealand, and Denmark in the space of a few years and subjecting my ­family to more uncertainty and stress than it could ­handle. Inevitably, my unsettled situation affected my thinking and made me increasingly critical of the Procrustean categories into which academics typically compress and solidify the flux of ­human experience. Although abstraction and generalization afford us magical means of gaining some purchase on real­ity, they can lead us to overlook the multiplicity and complexity of life as it is lived. My fieldwork with African mi­grants in Copenhagen and Amsterdam made me acutely aware of their ever-­changing relationships to the world in which they ­were struggling to survive and the worlds from whence they came. ­Because ­these individuals rarely, if ever, referred to themselves as “mi­ grants” or “refugees,” I was forced to reflect on the function of such category words in media and academic discourse, as well as the symbolic vio­lence involved in reducing tens of thousands of ­human beings to an anonymous mass

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comparable to a migrating herd, a plague, a flood, a pathology, or a prob­lem. On what grounds could we claim that “refugeeness” is a sui generis phenomenon covering a well-­defined class of persons, a discrete cluster of ostensive traits, or a specific field of ­human experience—as is assumed in almost ­every essay or monograph on the subject that begins by citing the number of refugees in the world t­oday, both external and internal, and invoking the 1951 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugee? Is a mi­grant’s existence essentially more precarious and perilous than the lives of ­those who regard the mi­grant as a radical other, not only rootless but shiftless, seeking to improve his lot at the expense of ­those who offer him asylum? Mi­grant stories became my way of deconstructing the hold that identity thinking has over us. They sharpened my sense of the ways in which our sense of self is continually changing in relation to changing circumstances and led me to propose that migration is a meta­phor for the mobility and fluidity of the h ­ uman condition itself.1 Typically, however, when anthropologists and social theorists write about migration, they often invoke binaries, speaking of divided selves and double-­ binds, of halfies, hybrids, and being in-­between. Subjective conflicts are said to mirror social crises, also described in binary terms, suggesting radical breaks between autocratic and demo­cratic regimes, po­liti­cal and occult economies, an orientation ­toward the past and an orientation ­toward the ­future. But to describe the self “as torn between self-­interest and collective good, struggling over desire and responsibility, negotiating contradictory emotions” may all too easily give the impression that ­human beings find ­little satisfaction in their mutability and prefer the illusion of a stable sense of self and a fixed identity.2 While it is true that many p­ eople find fulfillment in being settled in one place and possessing a single core identity, it is impor­tant to complement this view of a stable self with descriptions of h ­ uman improvisation, experimentation, opportunism, and existential mobility, thereby acknowledging that individuals often strug­gle against aligning their lives with moral or ­legal norms and seek ways of negotiating the ethical space between external constraints and personal imperatives. This capacity for strategic shape-­shifting, both imaginative and ­actual, defines our very humanity. I find it ironic, therefore, that most writers who invoke images of psychological division and historical discontinuity would not wish to make a case ­either for static, one-­dimensional personalities or monocultural socie­ties

Existential Mobility and Multiple Selves    215

in which nothing and no one changed. Why, then, should we not embrace the view that “a pluralistic universe” applies equally to both polis and persons, to states and to selves?3 Recent psychoanalytical work on the self challenges the concept of the person as a seamless, stable, skin-­encapsulated monad.4 Rather than being constant, we constantly change, like chameleons, according to our surroundings, and we possess an extraordinary “capacity to feel like one self while being many.”5 Indeed, our ability to shift and adjust our self-­state in response to who we are with, to what circumstance demands, and to what our well-­being seems to require is not only adaptive; our lives would be impossible without it.6 This conception of the self as several rather than singular has a long history. In 1580, Michel Montaigne observed: “Anyone who turns his prime attention on to himself ­will hardly find himself in the same state twice.” “­Every sort of contradiction can be found in me,” he writes, “depending on some twist or attribute . . . ​­There is nothing I can say about myself as a w ­ hole simply and completely, without intermingling and admixture . . . ​We are fashioned out of oddments put together . . . ​We are entirely made up of bits and pieces, woven together so diversely and so shapelessly that each one of them pulls its own way at ­every moment. And ­there is as much difference between us and ourselves as ­there is between us and other p­ eople.”7 In 1857, Herman Melville inveighed against the “fiction” of an in­de­pen­ dent, unique self that remains stable over time. “A consistent character is a rara avis,” he writes, and he proceeds to explain that a work of fiction “where ­every character can, by reason of its consistency, be comprehended at a glance, ­either exhibits but sections of character, making them appear for ­wholes, or ­else is very untrue to real­ity; while on the other hand, that author who draws a character, even though to common view incongruous in its parts, as the flying-­squirrel, and, at dif­fer­ent periods, as much at variance with itself as the caterpillar is with the butterfly into which it changes, may yet, in so ­doing, be not false but faithful to facts.”8 In 1928, ­Virginia Woolf touched on the same theme, observing that the selves “of which we are built up, one on top of another, as plates are piled on a waiter’s hand, have . . . ​­little constitutions and rights of their own . . . ​One ­will only come if it is raining, another [­will emerge only] in a room with green curtains, another when Mrs. Jones is not ­there, another if you can promise it

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a glass of wine—­and so on . . . ​[E]verybody can multiply from his own experience the dif­fer­ent terms which his dif­fer­ent selves have made with him—­and some are too wildly ridicu­lous to be mentioned in print at all.”9 It is not impossible that, at the same time ­Virginia Woolf wrote ­these lines, the heteronymous Fernando Pessoa was writing, “Each of us is several, is many, is a profusion of selves . . . ​In the vast colony of our being ­there are many species of ­people who think and feel in dif­fer­ent ways.”10 William James also emphasized the multiplicity of the self, noting in 1890 that “A man has as many selves as ­there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind,” and that a man’s self “is the sum total of all that he CAN call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes, and his h ­ ouse, his wife and c­ hildren, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and ­horses, and yacht and bank account.”11 Furthermore, James notes, a person’s own wellbeing is intimately tied to the wellbeing of t­ hese significant o­ thers, objects, or qualities. “To wound any one of t­ hese images is to wound him.”12 All t­ hese writers touch on what I came to call “the mi­grant imaginary”—­ our h ­ uman capacity for calling forth or bringing to the forefront of consciousness hitherto backgrounded aspects of ourselves in dealing with changing situations.13 Psychological multiplicity or plasticity is not, therefore, a prob­lem that requires a cure that returns us to a one-­dimensional, stable state that is continuous and consistent over time; it is the creative and adaptive expression of sociality itself. Our capacity for becoming other in relation to other selves is the basis for mutual recognition and empathy. It is the suppressed aspects of ourselves, seldom fully acknowledged and often actively abhorred, that enable us to find common ground with p­ eople who initially appear so radically dif­fer­ent from us that we sometimes hesitate to call them h ­ uman. Indeed, this capacity to see o­ thers in the light of normally occluded aspects of ourselves may, ­under certain circumstances, help us recognize animals and objects as sharing in the being we ordinarily attribute solely to ­humans. The psychoanalytic anthropologist George Devereux has argued for the psychic unity of humankind in just ­these terms—­that ­every individual contains the potential of Everyman, creative as well as destructive—­and that what is foregrounded in one person or made normative in one society ­will exist in a subdominant, repressed, or potential form in another person or another society.14

Existential Mobility and Multiple Selves    217

Our capacity for becoming other in relation to other selves also explains the per­sis­tence with which h ­ uman beings, from time immemorial, have moved, migrated, and mutated, adjusting to radically new circumstances despite the risks involved, the losses incurred, and the suffering under­gone. One of the commonest experiences of encountering a complete stranger, or moving from a familiar to an unfamiliar environment, or in passing from one phase of one’s life to another is disorientation. This cognitive bewilderment is variously and viscerally experienced as vertigo, nausea, nostalgia, and exhaustion. “I’m the empty stage where vari­ous actors act out vari­ous plays, living the lives of vari­ous p­ eople—­both on the outside, seeing them, and on the inside, feeling them,” writes Fernando Pessoa, who appears to have lost all sense of any core self.15 In this dissociated state, selves that w ­ ere previously foregrounded are no longer affirmed by ­others as normal or even as natu­ral, or they no longer serve one’s immediate interests. The person you once reviled may now be the person on whom you depend for recognition and succor. You may have become an adult, but the child in you cries out for comfort. You have arrived in Rome and are trying to do as the Romans do, but you crave, if only for a moment, to be able to eat your own food, in your own home, with your own kith and kin. No shift in self-­state is straightforward. To be in transition is to be in doubt and adrift, and to experience dissociation—to suddenly discover one has become a stranger to oneself. As Ibrahim Ouedraego—­a friend from Burkina Faso—­ put it, reflecting on his first bewildered days in Amsterdam, “You cannot do every­thing you want to do. T ­ here are always rules that w ­ ill stop you crossing borders, stop you ­going where you want to go, stop you finding an easier path. It’s papers that count, not words. No one trusts anything you say. You ­can’t talk to ­people directly. ­You’ve got to have papers. Even if the papers are false, they ­will count more than your words. ­There is no more truth in words.” Sierra Leonean friends in London confessed similar consternation as they strug­gled to negotiate the labyrinth of a bureaucratic state. In West Africa, one’s destiny was determined by a network of face-­to-­face relationships with ­people to whom you ­were obliged or who ­were ­under obligation to you, ­people you could, in local parlance, “beg”, borrow money, or expect a meal or a roof over your head. But in Eu­rope, one quickly discovers that one has passed from a patrimonial to a bureaucratic regime in which power resides less in p­ eople to whom one can appeal than in an impersonal force field that finds expression in a stranger’s stare, a policeman’s ­orders, a racial slur, a supervisor’s demands, or

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the letter of the law. In this inscrutable and Kafkaesque world of bureaucratic protocols, indecipherable documents, abstract rules, and official forms of validation, one comes up against what Michael Herzfeld has called “the social production of indifference.”16 The “living spirit” of community gives ground to the “dead letter” of a system that recognizes no one ­because it is nobody.17 This is not a m ­ atter of being between two worlds but of being dis-­ membered—of no longer being fully integrated into a familiar community. And so the mi­grant is obliged to re-­member himself, assembling, like a bricoleur, from the vari­ous aspects of his past and pre­sent selves, a new assemblage.18 Thus, Ibrahim oscillates between a concern for his ­father’s expectations, his ­mother’s wishes, his wife and ­daughter in Holland, and his personal ambition to become better educated—­moving continually between ­these self-­states, each of which is associated with a dif­fer­ent country, a dif­ fer­ent period in his life, a dif­fer­ent kind of loyalty, and a dif­fer­ent person. In London, my friend Sewa found alcohol use problematic. As a Muslim, and out of re­spect for his beloved f­ ather, Sewa preferred not to drink, even though this seriously compromised his En­glish social life. How could he drink beer with friends in his apartment when his f­ather’s photo­graph on the wall was a stern reminder of his lack of filial re­spect? ­ here’s one t­ hing [my f­ather] never wants any of his kids to do, and that is T drink alcohol. When I go out and drink alcohol, as soon as I come home and step into my room and see that picture, I have to run out of the room again. I want to go and take the picture and put it away, like in my cupboard or a box, but I know I have alcohol in my system so I cannot touch the picture. I have to wait for days, days, to take that picture and put it somewhere, so I can walk into my room and not see it straight away. I know it’s just a picture, but it’s like it’s him seeing me, what I’m ­doing, you know. You see, I’ve got all ­these beliefs. And when I stop drinking, pray to him, ask him for forgiveness, I know that’s the only t­ hing I’m ­doing that my dad’s unhappy about.

Sewa’s girlfriend suggested Sewa hang the photo of his ­father in the living room, now bare except for a small lacquered plywood map of Sierra Leone in which dif­fer­ent seeds—­sesame, millet, mustard, chili, and several species of rice—­had been glued to mark the dif­fer­ent provinces. But I ­can’t put pictures in the sitting room. I ­can’t imagine myself sitting ­here, holding a beer, drinking, when my dad’s picture is looking at me. So that’s

Existential Mobility and Multiple Selves    219 what’s stopping me putting the picture up. I ­can’t live in a ­house where friends ­will come and want to drink, and my dad is seeing me, I just ­can’t do that. I feel I’m d ­ oing the wrong t­ hing, that he d ­ oesn’t want me to do, even though he’s not alive in the real world, I just d ­ on’t want to do that.

“But you have made so many changes in your life, since coming to ­England,” I said. “Big changes.” “It’s true, Mr. Michael. Sometimes I c­ an’t believe myself.” Despite the anguish Sewa often felt as he tried to work out new configurations and compromises in his lifestyle, he did not “fall apart.” This is ­because, as Philip Bromberg points out, a multiple self is not incompatible with normal ­mental functioning. “A person can access si­mul­ta­neously a range of discrete self-­states that, despite their contrasting and even opposing perspectives on personal real­ity, are able to engage in internal dialogue. It is this capacity that permits oppositional aspects of self to coexist in consciousness as potentially resolvable intrapsychic conflict.”19 The mi­grant exemplifies a vital aspect of e­ very person’s passage through life—an ability to change with changing situations, conjuring multiple mindsets and calling upon multiple means for addressing manifold challenges. Thus, despite his encounters with racism in Denmark, a Ugandan friend, Emmanuel Mulamila, made a conscious choice not to see himself as African, but to redouble his efforts to apply for work on the strength of his academic qualifications and personal qualities. When I moved to the United States, I met a Mexican student at Harvard who had “converted” to Pentecostalism as he crossed the border, but as Roberto shared his story with me, I noticed that his recourse to religion occurred at t­ hose moments when he found himself at the limits of what he could endure—­thrown into a prison cell among drunks and derelicts or facing another day of thankless ­labor in the fields. Though the police or field bosses treated him like dirt ­because he was “Mexican,” Roberto negotiated his situation in his own terms, as a Christian, though at other times without any reference to God at all. ­Human existence implies continual readjustment and revision, in our memories, emotions, and imaginations as well as in our lived relationships with o­ thers and our environments. Roberto suppresses his Mexican past the better to focus on the exigencies of his pre­sent American situation. Emmanuel represses the anger that still boils up in him when he thinks of the abuse he suffered as a child, the better to meet the needs of his ­daughter. In many ways,

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this mobility and mutability of self-­awareness is both phyloge­ne­tically and ontoge­ne­tically crucial to what we call adaptability. “To live is to be other,” writes Fernando Pessoa.20 “What moves lives.”21 Perhaps this is why I found in the experiences of the mi­grants I met in Eu­rope and Amer­i­ca dramatic analogues of my experience as an ethnographer, where an ability to improvise and play with new possibilities of action and thought, experimenting with alternative modes of consciousness, not only defines the condition of the possibility of knowing ­others but, perhaps more pertinently, offers a key to achieving ­viable coexistence in a pluralistic world. ­There was a profound connection between the unsettling experiences of limitation that marked the early life of the mi­grants I worked with and their yearning to escape and begin a wholly dif­fer­ent life for themselves elsewhere. Norman O. Brown calls this the Oedipal proj­ect—­the existential imperative to discover and objectify oneself in a form other than the form first defined for one by parents, tradition, or circumstance.22 This pro­cess of becoming a person in one’s own right is, however, characterized by a tension that is never fully resolved, for the desire to become autonomous is countermanded by a yearning to be dependent. The desire to do what one wants is no less urgent than the desire for limits, and the dream of a more fulfilling life for oneself comes up against one’s sense of responsibility for and indebtedness to o­ thers. This was vividly shown in Ibrahim’s remarks about the difficulty of respecting his parents’ wishes when his heart was set on a life beyond the horizons of his natal village. ­Every in­de­pen­dent step away from their world increased the burden of guilt, the feeling that he was betraying his ­father and ­mother, and that this betrayal would bring ill-­fortune upon him. The same dilemma sometimes oppressed Roberto, who once confided, “Our stories are not success stories. They are overshadowed by guilt. Survivor guilt.” And I was reminded of ­those passages in Primo Levi’s Drowned and the Saved, where he repudiates the idea of providence and, speaking of the blind luck that determines the difference between drowning and being saved, reminds us of the terrible burden ­every survivor bears, that he “might be alive in the place of another, at the expense of another, and that he must for as long as he lives atone for this injustice.”23 For fifty years, my fieldwork among the Kuranko has provided me with culturally specific examples of how this dialectic between home and away plays out in everyday life. While one’s social identity is determined patrilineally (and one’s physiological essence derives from one’s f­ ather’s semen), one’s destiny may

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depend as much on one’s m ­ other and m ­ other’s ­brothers as on one’s f­ ather and his ­brothers. This counterpoint between a space dominated by rules and a space of greater informality, affection, and playfulness finds expression in the contrast between one’s ­father’s place ( fa ware)—­the place where one was born and raised—­and one’s ­mother’s place (na ware)—­the home of one’s ­mother’s ­brothers.24 Moreover, this tension between the patriarchal law of the f­ ather and the loving care of the ­mother not only informs the intersubjective life of the ­family but is projected in images of the polis, since rulers, ­whether local or national, are expected to embody the power to administer the law of the land as well as the power to protect and care for their subjects.25 When Kuranko say they are “in the hands of” a chief or politician, the meta­phor is double-­edged, since they are at once subject to his whims, dependent on his benevolence and protection, and in his debt. Among the Kuranko, the dialectic of obligation and choice is evident in the interplay between village and bush, for while the village is often associated—­ particularly by the youth of t­ oday—­with oppressive limitations, “the bush” signifies an encompassing, dangerous, yet potentially liberating space in which social norms are placed in abeyance, social bound­aries are transgressed, and miraculous transformations occur. The bush is an ­imagined elsewhere, a transitional space, in which the socio-­moral ties of the town can be loosened and a person can experience his relations with o­ thers in transcendental terms, mediated by m ­ usic, palm wine, money, friendship, spirit possession, laughter, love, magical mobility, and even the promise of eternity. In the long run, life beyond the village, like life beyond childhood, may promise restless youth liberation from one set of chains only to shackle them with ­others. We live, as we dream, beyond ourselves, haunted by a sense of “something missing” that often remains inchoate and amorphous since the imagination typically reaches beyond what the world actually is, or what any person can actually be.26 Money begins, Philippe Rospabé argues, as a substitute for life.27 But many ­things besides money can give transitory form to the vague sense of what ­will make good what is lacking in one’s life. When a mi­ grant speaks of a quest for a better life, we cannot presume to know what this “life” may be. Mi­grant stories, like all life stories, disclose a bewildering variety of t­ hings that have been lost or stolen or not yet found—­a loving parent, a responsive God, a homeland, social mobility, money, companionship . . . This was vividly borne home to me one morning as Roberto Franca and I talked about our childhood longings to go beyond the physical and social

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horizons that circumscribed our lives. “For as long as I can remember,” Roberto said, “the world presented itself to me as a question.” One unusually clear morning in Mexico, when he was a small child, Roberto saw a volcano on the distant horizon. By the time he shared his vision with his f­ amily, the volcano could no longer be seen, and he was told that he must have seen something e­ lse or had made a m ­ istake. “What makes some of us so fascinated with what lies beyond us?” I asked. When Roberto described how his ­mother had always yearned for a better life, I realized that my own yearnings w ­ ere, in many ways, born of my own m ­ other’s thwarted dreams to receive an education, to travel, to enlarge her horizons, and that the same continuity of a vision of elsewhere informed Emmanuel’s story and ­were summed up in Ibrahim’s comment: “From age seven, I wanted to go elsewhere. You feel it inside. You c­ an’t give words to it, but it’s a strong feeling, to go to a big town, to move elsewhere.” This sense that the world as given is not enough, or is too confining, and its corollary—­that one must choose another world for oneself, cultivating one’s own garden rather than working on one’s f­ ather’s farm—­entails a double bind that e­ very mi­grant experiences in some mea­sure yet speaks to us all, caught as we inevitably are between the circumstances that shape our lives and the lives we proj­ect and hope to create for ourselves.

The Limitrophe

During a visit to Copenhagen in the fall of 2004, Bob Orsi, who I befriended in Bloomington in the early 1990s, asked if I would be interested in a visiting position at Harvard, where he was currently teaching in the divinity school. ­Because I was facing mandatory retirement in 2005 and would not be able to remain in Denmark without a work permit, I was only too e­ ager to explore this possibility but, mindful of the debacle of my time in the religious studies program at Indiana University, I was wary of making the same ­mistake twice. But Bob assured me that several of his colleagues had commented favorably on my book on storytelling and that the school needed someone to offer courses in the ethnographic study of lived religion. So, within the year, Katherine and I ­were back in the United States, buying a h ­ ouse, settling our c­hildren into schools, and beginning a new chapter in our lives. My academic goal was to approach religion not as a sui generis phenomenon but as one of the many ways in which h ­ uman beings imagine and ritualistically manage relations between worlds within and worlds without. I, therefore, avoided invoking the world’s major religious groupings to frame my work or

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deducing religious experience from institutionalized creeds, liturgies, or articles of faith. Fascinated by the dynamic relationship between log­os (“reason,” “word,” “rational princi­ple,” “belief”) and phenomena that cannot be conceptually or linguistically grasped, I was, nevertheless, aware that what­ever I wrote in this vein would involve a deconstruction of the concepts of religion and spirituality as ­these had emerged in Abrahamic traditions and the Western acad­emy. In making this deconstructive move, I would be honoring the worldviews of the p­ eople among whom I had done fieldwork in West Africa and Aboriginal Australia, but how acceptable would it be to use their perspectives to critique prevailing paradigms in the academic study of religion? One autumn morning, driving between Lexington and Cambridge, the opening lines of The Palm at the End of the Mind came to me. I am listening to Osvaldo Golijov’s Ayre on my car stereo. Along Concord Ave­ nue, the rising sun is like a gobbet of molten glass burning through the wintering trees. As I park my car in Cambridge, Sephardic street cries and a poem in Arabic are still echoing in my head. It is only a short walk from the parking garage to my office at the Center for the Study of World Religions. Before settling to work, I gaze at the reproduction of one of Paul Cezanne’s paintings of Montagne Sainte-­Victoire that I have pinned to my wall. I can hear the wind soughing in the pines, and smell sage and thyme. I check my emails. My ­daughter Heidi has sent me a sonogram of her baby at thirteen weeks. She also tells me about an Aboriginal painter whose works I should see. On Google, I track down images of Paddy Kuwumji Jawaiyi’s emu dreamings from the East Kimberleys. I am moved by something I have no words for. What do t­ hese t­ hings have in common? This strange musical work by a Jewish composer, born in Argentina but now living in the United States. This French painter who returned time and time again to the landscapes of his natal Provence. This fetal image of my first grand­child. This Aboriginal painter whose elemental canvases take my breath away. What moves me to think that t­ hese are all of a piece? Is it that they carry me to somewhere I have never been before, or somewhere I once knew and have forgotten? Harbingers of the new, they are nonetheless reminders of something very old. I have a sense of being grounded in something I can only call “the real,” that connects my life to the life of the earth itself, its generations succeeding one another over time, its multiple geographies and cultures.1

The contrast between darkness and light is perhaps the most universal meta­phor of the relationship between ­human beings and the encompassing

The Limitrophe   225

fields of being and non-­being in relation to which their lives unfold. I, therefore, settled on the penumbral as an image to describe a hazy and indeterminate region between a world in which we experience ourselves as actors and a world where we experience ourselves as acted upon.2 The penumbral also suggests a zone where we come up against the limits of our knowledge, our language, and our strength yet are sometimes thrown open to new ways of understanding our being-­in-­the-­world, and, thus, find new ways of connecting with o­ thers. Negotiating this transitional space between what John Dewey calls “the immediate, the con­spic­u­ous and focal phase of ­things” and “­those indirect and hidden f­ actors which determine the origin and ­career of what is pre­sent” is a feature of “any and e­ very experience.”3 Thus, the Warlpiri assumption that dreams give us access to the Dreaming or the Kuranko view that the moral space of the town derives its vitality from the bush, echo our belief that reason enables us to grasp the unseen—­which is our “magical safeguard,” according to John Dewey, “against the uncertain character of the world.”4 Nor is it the world that lies about us that proves refractory to comprehension and control; it also is the world within. “What­ever it may be on the farther side, the ‘more’ with which in religious experience we feel ourselves connected is on the hither side the subconscious continuation of our conscious life.”5 Though I used the image of the penumbral of ­these ambiguous spaces between worlds within and worlds without, I also a­ dopted the hybrid term limitrophe, from the Latin limes (“boundary”) and the Greek trophos (“feeder”) and trephein (“to nourish”). Limitrophus originally designated lands that provided food for troops defending an outpost of Empire. More generally, the word denotes a borderland between contiguous national states or states of consciousness and suggests that venturing beyond the known can sometimes nourish and sometimes nullify. Gods and ancestors can bless or curse us, fortune can f­ avor or desert us, and we are always unsure ­whether our offerings to ­these quasi-­human figures w ­ ill be received, reciprocated, or rejected. But while certainty may elude us and our actions prove ineffectual, the imagination is always on call, and in the stories we tell, the rituals we perform, the fantasies we indulge, the ideas we conjure, and the hope that springs eternal, we convince ourselves that the wider world is within our grasp. In 2008, I returned to Firawa for what would prove to be my final visit to the village where I did my first fieldwork so many years ago. I was accompanied

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by my friend Sewa and my son Joshua, and we lodged with Abdul, now section chief. In long conversations with Abdul, I began to piece together a history of the Barawa Marah that would appear in my book The Genealogical Imagination (2021). At the same time, almost without my awareness, day-­to-­ day events in the village w ­ ere anticipating the chapters of another book, published in 2011 with the title Life Within Limits: Well-­Being in a World of Want. One eve­ning, I was sitting outside Abdul’s ­house with Sewa. A full moon had risen in the Western sky, a hand’s breadth from its favorite wife, the eve­ ning star. Beyond the circlet of firelight in which we sat, the village was lost in darkness. I could not see the girls on the nearby path, but I could hear their voices. “He’s ­there,” they whispered. “He’s ­there by the fire.” It was clear who they had come to see, and I goaded Sewa into action. “Come on, man, you c­ an’t just ignore them. Greet them. Call them closer to the fire. Ask them what they want!” Emboldened by Sewa’s invitation, the girls shuffled closer, ner­vously whispering among themselves. “What is it?” Sewa asked. “We have come to sing for you,” one of the girls said. And she immediately broke into song. I was instantly spellbound. Of all the girls, she was the slightest. Yet her voice was as strong and thrilling as a w ­ oman’s, and with a poignant beauty that entranced me. The bigger girls chimed in, chorusing. But it was the small girl who carried the song, its words and sentiments as audacious as they ­were moving. Each line declaimed with finality and finesse. Echoed then by the other girls, before another line, equally uncompromising, began. I’ll not accept this distance love No arranged marriage for me No m ­ atter how far away they send me I w ­ ill not stay I’ll only marry for love I ­will not marry an old man I ­will not marry for gold I ­will not marry for a big h ­ ouse I ­will not marry for diamonds I’ll only marry for love

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I lost track of time as the girls sang other songs, clapping, chorusing, making their overtures to Sewa, D. Y., and Bockarie, and waiting to be dashed. I distributed some 2000 leone notes among them and asked the lead singer her name. “Sira Marah,” she said shyly. Sewa gave the girls some more money, but now the crowd was so large that every­one wanted to sing and be paid. Small boys complained bitterly that no one wanted to hear their song. Some girls who had arrived late on the scene argued for a share of what we had given the first group of singers. It was as though every­thing Abdul’s niece Fina had told me was being corroborated before my eyes—­the fascination with love, the preoccupation with money, the competitiveness that had begun to undermine the spirit of cooperation and the plea­sure of singing for singing’s sake . . . Sira was keen to sing and dance some more, but Sewa said, “Another night. We are tired now.” But I was not tired. “Did you compose that song yourself?” I asked. “That song about not accepting distance love?” “Yes. I have this natu­ral gift. I sit, I think, it comes into my head.” “How old are you?” “I am not sure.” I guessed her to be no more than nine or ten, though her ­mother would l­ater tell me she was eleven. “Where do get your ideas about marrying for love?” “You understand me. You are like me, where you come from. You know.” “­Because I am from overseas?” “Yes. But if two p­ eople love each other, distance d ­ oesn’t m ­ atter. It’s only when t­ here is no love, and you go to your husband who lives far away, then it is hard.” “Do your age-­mates share your views?” “Some do, some d ­ on’t.” “Do o­ thers in your age-­group compose songs like you?” “We are about six, but I am the composer, the leader. The ­others give support, answering.” “You are very intelligent. I can see that. Do you go to school?” “No.” “Why not?”

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“­Because I have only my ­mother to look ­after me. My ­father went away. He has been in Freetown for four years. I never see him. So I have no school fees and no way of getting them.” “How much would you need for a year’s school fees?” “I am not sure. But I went to school for two years. From class one to class three. I did well. I passed all my exams.” “Would you like to continue with your schooling?” “Yes.” “Do you also compose stories?” “Yes. I know many, and I have composed some, too.” “I w ­ ill come and see you tomorrow,” I said. “Perhaps you can tell me one of your stories.” “I am ­there,” Sira said. Before turning in for the night, I asked Abdul to tell me about Sira. She was his grand­daughter, he said, and it was his son Kome, “a good for nothing wastrel,” who had abandoned his wife and d ­ aughter and gone to Freetown with his second wife. “But the ­mother is also useless,” Abdul said. “She does not garden, does not make a farm, does not do anything to help herself or help her ­daughter. She only asks ­others for help. Only relies on ­others.” The following morning, I went to Sira’s ­house with Sewa and Bockarie. The ­house had been burned during the war and only partly repaired. Crumbling mud brick walls eroded by rain. No shutters on the win­dows, and only one door. Sira’s ­mother’s only possessions seemed to be a mortar and pestle, a winnowing tray, a country pot for w ­ ater, and a fishing net. Seldom had I seen such destitution. We sat in the room where Sira and her ­mother slept. Sira sat on a bed that was propped up on mud bricks and covered with a floral cloth. Bockarie, Sewa, and I sat on mud bricks. The raf­ters w ­ ere branches stripped of bark and blackened by wood smoke, and the thatched roof was full of gaping holes. Sira herself wore the same dress she had worn the previous night; she owned no sandals or shoes. But I noticed that her fingernails and toenails had been lacquered, though the red polish was now peeling and worn. I was interested in something Sira had told me the night before about being able to divine, and I asked if she would tell me and Sewa and Bockarie more about this gift, and w ­ hether it was like her gift for composing songs and stories. Shyly, she answered my first question. “Two djinn showed me,” she said.

The Limitrophe   229

“What did they show you?” “They showed me how to circumcise girls.” “But have you been initiated? Have you been through biriye?” “No. “Can you tell me more about ­these djinn?” “They visit me e­ very Friday and e­ very Monday.” “Do they visit you at night, in your dreams?” “They do not come in my dreams, but in daylight, in the after­noon.” “Can other ­people see them?” “Only me.” “Can you tell me what they look like?” “They are like white ­people [tubabunu].” “Are they old or young?” “Older. One is female, the other male.” “Where do they come from?” “From the south.” “Do they resemble any white ­people you have seen?” “No. They are not like real white p­ eople. The ­woman has long hair, down to the ground.” I wanted to ask if the female djinn was a mamiwata, but I could only think of the Krio term—­which Sira did not know—­and neither Sewa nor Bockarie could help me remember the Kuranko word, though it came to me ­later—­ninkinanké. “Did the twin nyenne show you how to do anything e­ lse?” I asked. “They showed me the leaves,” Sira said, meaning that the djinn showed her how to collect medicinal plants from the bush and prepare herbal medicines. “What illnesses can you treat?” “Many. If a w ­ oman cannot get pregnant . . .” “Have you ever helped a ­woman become pregnant?” “Yes.” “Can you read ­peoples’ ­futures?” “Yes.” “What of your own ­future? Can you see it?” “You cannot see your own destiny.” “Do you use stones to divine?” “Yes. The nyenne gave me the stones, but my ­mother threw them away. She was afraid the nyenne might take me away. So I use a mirror now.”

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“Did the nyenne also show you how to divine with a mirror?” “Yes.” “And does your m ­ other approve of you d ­ oing this?” “Yes.” Thirty years ago, I might have asked Sira to look into her mirror and tell me what destiny she saw for me, what sacrifices I should offer to ensure good fortune and avoid the bad. But no prob­lems weighed on my mind, and I could not think of any reasons for asking Sira to consult her nyenne on my behalf. But Sewa and Bockarie had questions to ask, anx­i­eties to alleviate, and so I gave Sira 5000 leones and watched as she drew a small mirror from the pocket of her dress and wiped the surface with the banknote. “Bockarie first,” Sira said softly. She gazed down at the mirror, which she held in her cupped hands, resting in her lap. Her lips moved slightly. Again she rubbed the mirror with the wadded banknote, and turned the mirror around, or tilted it slightly, as if trying to catch the light, except t­ here was ­little light in the room. She continued to rub and turn the mirror around in her hands for several minutes, but from time to time holding it still and gazing into it. Bockarie leaned forward as if impatient to hear her prognosis. “­There is nothing amiss, nothing bad t­here,” she said fi­nally. “But you must be careful. D ­ on’t take anything for granted. You must take special care what you eat in places far from Firawa. And you must be prepared for bad news. Soon ­there ­will be news of another death.” Indeed, within minutes of returning to Abdul’s ­house, a group of elders from the nearby village of Barawa Komoia arrived, bringing the grim news of a death that morning. Sewa now gave Sira another 5000 leones, and again she gazed into her mirror, rubbing it, turning it, waiting for it to yield its message. “­There is nothing bad,” she said. “But you should wear a country cloth shirt with alternate white and red stripes. You should also give red kola to a respected elder of your lineage. Ara ban—­that is all.” I asked Sira what she saw when she gazed into the mirror. “The twin nyenne,” she said. “Do they speak?” “Yes.” “Why do you have to rub the mirror all the time?” “Sometimes they fall s­ ilent and d ­ on’t want to speak. U ­ nless you wipe the mirror and turn it, you w ­ on’t see them, or they ­won’t say anything.”

The Limitrophe   231

“Is the money a gift to them?” “Yes. If I show them the money, they have to respond.” Half-­teasingly—­because of the fetishization of mobile phones in Sierra Leone—­I asked Sira if the mirror was like a cellphone. Her expression did not change. “It’s dif­fer­ent. The nyenne speak, not me.” “Are you tired?” I asked, “or could I ask you some more questions?” “I am not tired.” “When I go back to my country, what would you like me to tell p­ eople about you?” “That I want to be famous. That I have ­these gifts, of singing, of storytelling, of curing, of divining.” “What is the hardest t­ hing in your life? What trou­bles you the most?” “Especially in the famine time, the rainy season [when the granaries are almost empty and the next harvest is still several months away]. My ­father never sends us anything. My m ­ other has to work for other ­people. We have no money. We have ­little food.” “What is the sweetest ­thing?” “My m ­ other’s ­sister Fatamata once invited me to visit her in Kabala. I made some money t­ here, divining.” Sira’s m ­ other unobtrusively entered the doorway, her face in shadow. I greeted her and explained that I was interested in Sira’s ability to divine. I then asked why she had thrown Sira’s divining stones away. What did she fear might happen if Sira became a diviner? “The nyenne would have taken her. She was too young to be d ­ oing that sort of t­ hing.” “When Sira was small, did you know she had special gifts?” “Yes. She had convulsions once. Her ­whole body was shaking [symptoms, it is often thought, of seizure or possession by a bush spirit].” “Has anyone in the ­family been a diviner?” “Yes. Her ­father. He was a beresigile [literally “one who sets down pebbles”6]. He still is.” “Did Sira observe him divining when she was a small girl?” “Yes.” “Did she show any interest?” “No, she never did.” “How did her ­father get his gift?” “He was born with it, like Sira.”

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“Did he have twin nyenne?” “Yes, but his w ­ ere both female.” “White?” “Yes.” “From the ­water or the bush?’ “The bush I think. I am not sure.” ­ hether Sira found love or education, or accepted an arranged marriage, or W continues to divine, compose stories, and sing, I do not know. Although I sent her cloth for a school uniform, textbooks, and school fees, Abdul’s son Bockarie, who was my intermediatory, died, and I lost touch with Sira. But whenever I ponder her fate, I am brought back to a question I have never resolved in my own life. Had I never left my natal country, would I have found the fulfillment ­there that I have found in places like Firawa, Copenhagen, Central Australia, and Harvard? The obvious answer is that the satisfactions would have been dif­fer­ent, and comparing them would be pointless. In New Zealand, I would prob­ably have abandoned anthropology and devoted my energies to creative writing, just as Sira would, undoubtedly, live a creative life even if she never fulfilled her dream of leaving Firawa. Our capacity for life, like our capacity for freedom, depends on our ac­cep­tance of limits. Fulfillment, fate, and freedom are difficult words to define. They participate in the blurriness of the forces that lie beyond our comprehension and control, like the cloud of unknowing or the mysterium tremendum of which the mystics speak.7 Even when we personify the unknown in images of the hand of fate, the ­will of God, or Dame Fortuna, we remain aware that our world and the world are not the same. But what of the vari­ous ­human worlds we call socie­ties, tribes, nations, or cultures? Do they differ so radically that they cannot be compared, or are t­ here profound existential similarities between them that are not only discoverable through direct engagement but may be our best hope of surviving as a species on planet Earth?

On the Work and Writing of Ethnography

That I have juxtaposed descriptions of persons, rec­ords of events, and interpretive passages in this book is, undoubtedly, a reflection of my lifelong search for a way of integrating literary, philosophical, and ethnographic writing. Interrupting one’s discursive prose with anecdotes from everyday life is a strategy for reminding oneself and one’s readers that interpretations are always provisional and artificial and that h ­ uman lives outstrip the conceptual frames we impose upon them. Although Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus concludes with the famous remark, “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence,”1 Wittgenstein also argues that even when a phi­los­o­pher has nothing to say he may have something to show—­obliquely, analogically, poetically. T ­ here are echoes h ­ ere of Edmund Husserl’s and Martin Heidegger’s conception of phenomenology as descriptive showing—­a method of bringing something into the light of day, of revealing what it appears to be.2 Nor should we forget that understanding is a form of imagining in which we displace ourselves from a familiar context to see it from an unfamiliar

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vantage point. This is why hospitality is the precondition for d ­ oing ethnography, since it involves temporarily forgetting oneself in order to accommodate the expectations and protocols of someone e­ lse’s world. Ethnography also is a form of conversation in which one’s own voice is momentarily subdued and one’s worldview suspended so other voices and perspectives are heard. For ­these reasons, ethnographic fieldwork and writing raise the ethical question of how our personal or cultural preunderstandings may be reconciled with the often radically dif­fer­ent preunderstandings of our interlocutors. How, in brief, can we strike a balance between ­doing justice to the ­people who accept us into their communities, sharing their life experiences and scarce resources, while satisfying the demands of the profession to which we belong and from which we make our living? In the spring of 2010, I led an ethnographic writing workshop at Slí na Bande in County Wicklow, Ireland. On the final day of our workshop, Keith Egan and Fiona Murphy led a discussion about Irish anthropology. Several participants expressed a concern that a country that had endured six hundred years of occupation and won its in­de­pen­dence at the cost of so many lives should nurture a colonial form of anthropology that exploited the cultural knowledge of ordinary ­people for academic ends. How could one move from an anthropology done to us to an anthropology done by us? How could ethnographers place less emphasis on their vaunted ability to participate in the lives of ­others and put more effort into allowing ­those ­others to participate in their research? How best could the debt of hospitality be repaid? Within minutes, the case of “The Yank in the Corner” was raised, and members of the workshop recalled local reactions to the American ethnographer Nancy Scheper-­Hughes, who did fieldwork in a village on the Dingle Peninsular, County Kerry, in 1974–1975. To the criticism that she had not consulted local ­people before publishing intimate details of their lives, Scheper-­Hughes countered that she had divulged no personal secrets and written only of what was common knowledge—­“the depressions and drinking associated with the lonely winter months, the difficulty of keeping an heir on the land, the old ­people sent off to die in institutions, and the distance and alienation between the sexes.”3 ­There was, the locals admitted, “a lot of truth in what she said, you c­ an’t deny that. But did she have the right to say it, so?”4 ­People spoke of the shame they felt, their lifeworld intruded upon, bits and pieces of themselves severed and strewn about with no consideration of the consequences.

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I saw no point in taking sides. As Joan Didion observed, “a writer is always selling someone out.”5 But it was clear why a p­ eople whose history had given them e­ very reason to be wary of outsiders, and whose isolation had only increased their sense of vulnerability, should see the preoccupations of this anthropologist as so alien and condescending. Admitting her “brashness,” Scheper-­Hughes asserted that “anthropology is by nature intrusive, entailing a certain amount of symbolic and interpretive vio­lence to the ‘native’ ­peoples’ own intuitive, though still partial, understanding of their part of the world.”6 But does this entitle us to ­ride roughshod over the interests and wishes of ­others, even though they might seem misguided and parochial? Rather than persuade ­others that our values and worldviews might be advantageous for them to adopt, we would do well to find ways of expressing solidarity with them despite our differences. Surely, forging a bond with o­ thers is more convivial than extracting data from them. Scheper-­Hughes shows sympathy and gratitude to t­ hose who offered her and her young f­ amily hospitality in “Ballybran,” but she is not prepared to place her way of seeing them on a par with their way of seeing themselves, or for that m ­ atter of seeing her. “You wrote a book to please yourself at our expense,” one man tells her when she comes back to “Ballybran” twenty years ­after the publication of her book. “You ran us down, girl, you ran us down. You never wrote about our strengths. You never said what a beautiful and a safe place our village is. You said nothing about our fine musicians and poets, and our step dancers who move through the air with the grace of a silk thread. You wrote about our trou­bles, all right, but not about our strengths. Look, girl, the fact is that ya just d ­ idn’t give us credit.”7 In the closing pages of the 2000 edition of her book, Scheper-­Hughes attempts to address the complaints and make amends. But like so many anthropologists, she wants to have the last word, to privilege her voice over the voices raised against her. “In the end perhaps we deserve each other—­well matched and well met, tougher than nails, both of us. Proud and stubborn, too. Unrepentant meets Unforgiving. And in a way villa­gers ­were right to say, ‘We ­don’t believe you are r­eally sorry.’ For in their view this would mean nothing less than a renunciation of self and my vexed profession, a move I could not make.”8 I have fewer qualms about renouncing myself and my profession, particularly if it comes to a showdown between the jargon of the ­human sciences and the idioms of ­those we subject to our analytical gaze. For me, what ­matters most are the ways in which we can engage in conversations across

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the bound­aries that divide us and transform ethnography into a “tool for conviviality.”9 For Kuranko, knowledge is essentially a means of knowing how to behave. In traditional Māori thought, knowledge (mātauranga) sustains the life of the community. Using it as a commodity for personal profit destroys its social value, its tapu. But ­every ­human community is embedded in a wider world, and, ideally, local knowledge can both affirm the identity of ­those who claim it as their own and enlarge the understanding of ­those who come to it as strangers. ­Human beings have traded with one another from time immemorial, exchanging not only goods and ser­vices but stories and worldviews. In the early nineteenth ­century, Māori assumed that trade with Pākeha would benefit them and, so, welcomed the strangers into their communities as guests (manuhiri). But the history of Aotearoa New Zealand, like the history of the Western world, has been marked by conquest, exploitation, and genocide. Treaties have been signed only to be torn up, trade deals made only to be broken, friendship offered only to be abused. If the spirit of reciprocity has, nonetheless, survived to become a basis for reparation and social justice in some parts of the post-­ colonial world, may it not also redeem anthropology? One answer to this question lies in the forms of reciprocity and hospitality anthropologists have documented in their writings, as well as enjoyed in the course of their fieldwork. Among the Kuranko, it is customary that, having received a stranger or guest (sundan) into one’s ­house­hold and given him hospitality and protection, one is expected to accompany him halfway on his journey home.10 This custom of “escorting” (blessala) or “accompanying” (kata ma so) is a telling meta­phor for fieldwork, for while one’s hosts are obliged to look ­after their “stranger,” the stranger is expected to reciprocate by respecting local protocols, by being attentive to the rules of the ­house­hold in which he is lodged and mindful of what is expected of him in return for what is given. That one’s very humanity is contingent on being accepted into this other lifeworld, albeit as a dependent and a potential risk, is shown by the excessive gratitude with which the novice ethnographer often attempts to ritually repay his or her hosts. As Weston La Barre once observed, “out of professional pride, anthropologists seldom admit the quite characteristic depression and paranoia of ‘culture shock’ they have all experienced during the first few weeks or months of fieldwork.”11 But it is not only the alien and the unknown that disorients one in the field, for one is often already marginal in the culture in which one has been

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raised and looking for validation elsewhere. That one “comes out of the field experience with a mildly fanatic love” for one’s par­tic­u­lar p­ eople, espousing a commitment to their interests and with “deeply gratifying personal friendships that over-­ride ­great cultural and age differences” is, La Barre argues, not ­because one’s true character was acknowledged and appreciated but b­ ecause the other “rescued one’s humanity” at a time when one was struggling to find one’s footing. One’s indebtedness to the other finds expression in an over-­compensatory gesture of praising the other as a friend or kinsman. I think ­there is more than a grain of truth in La Barre’s remarks, and it rings true of my earliest relationships with Kuranko collaborators. Initially, the p­ eople with whom one associates are outliers in their own lifeworld, or rank outsiders like oneself. But one’s relationships with p­ eople met in the course of fieldwork change over time, and the deepening of personal ties transforms the kind of conversations and interactions one has, as well as the kind of understandings one acquires, and ­these transformations may compromise the nomothetic proj­ect of anthropology itself—­which, in its insistence on explaining ­human thought and be­hav­ior in terms of culture, history, or global pro­cesses shies away from the idiosyncratic and affective dimensions of quotidian life. But given time and perseverance, fieldwork that begins with an overwhelming sense of distance from one’s host community may lead to an equally overwhelming sense of identification with it. But in “­going along” with t­hose on whom one’s personal wellbeing and professional f­ uture depend, one is not obliged to “go all the way,” uncritically accommodating all that is asked of one or accepting all that one’s hosts do or say. The crucial ethical demand is that one not foreclose conversations b­ ecause one presumes to know the origins, motives, or meaning of the other’s thoughts or emotions, and that one not judge the views of the other solely from the standpoint of one’s own worldview. Kuranko are keenly aware of the phenomenological impossibility of knowing other minds, and I would frequently be cautioned from asking ­people to second-­guess the motives or feelings of o­ thers. “Morgo te do ka ban,” I would be told (A person can never be fully understood). “N’de ma konto lon,” (I d ­ on’t know the inside story). “N’de sa bu’ro,” (I d ­ on’t know what’s in the belly). It ­wasn’t that Kuranko lacked complex inner lives; rather, it was impor­tant not to make one’s personal experiences public and, thereby, risk compromising the appearance of consensus and una­nim­i­ty on which communitas depended. What r­eally mattered was a person’s be­hav­ior: w ­ hether he did his

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duty, performed her role, was a good friend, neighbor, parent, or chief. This emphasis on exteriority runs ­counter to the Eu­ro­pean bourgeois focus on fathoming a person’s unconscious or plumbing the depths of their soul. Accordingly, I sought to meet my hosts halfway, pursuing my interest in individual lives while respecting their reservations about deep subjectivity. In cultivating what Paul Ricoeur calls “a favorable attitude” to the other that neither assumes to be empathic identification nor scientific impartiality, I hoped to achieve a form of “accompanying.”12 One seeks to strike a balance, so to speak, between having it all one’s own way and becoming so submerged in the lifeworld of the other that one’s own sense of self is utterly eclipsed. The indeterminate character of ethnographic research reflects this tension between a disposition to cling to habitual ways of thinking and acting (­because they are second nature and provide a sense of ontological security in an unstable world) and a desire to open oneself up to the possibility of seeing and d ­ oing t­ hings in radically dif­fer­ ent ways, even though t­ hese might initially seem “unnatural.” When I first lived in Firawa, I preferred to light my own fire to boil ­water for drinking or bathing. I regarded this mundane task as having ­little bearing on my research work and, inevitably, my method of building a fire was careless and wasteful of wood. Though villa­gers, undoubtedly, joked about my fire lighting, they did not criticize or censure me, which was remarkable considering the scarcity of firewood and the time consumed in gathering it. One day, I noticed how Kuranko ­women kindled and tended a fire, and I sought to imitate their technique, which involved careful placement of the firestones, never using more than three lengths of split wood at one time and laying each piece carefully between the firestones, then periodically pushing them into the fire as the ends burned away. When I took pains to build a fire in this way, I became aware of the intelligence of the technique, which maximized the scarce firewood (which w ­ omen had to split and tote from up to a mile and a half away), produced exactly the amount of heat required for cooking, and enabled instant control of the flame. This practical mimesis afforded me insight into how p­ eople maximized both fuel and h ­ uman energy; it made me see the close kinship between economy of effort and grace of movement; it helped me realize through diapraxis the common sense that informs even the most elementary tasks in a Kuranko village. Many of my insights into Kuranko social life followed from a comparable cultivation of practical skills. During my first few months of fieldwork, I would seek out a quiet space to write up my fieldnotes. Constantly interrupted by my

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concerned hosts, who w ­ ere uncertain as to ­whether I needed companionship or preferred my own com­pany, I moved to the veranda of the ­house where I could do my work without giving offence. However, whenever someone came by to chat or sit with me, I felt obliged to offer a cup of tea and engage in small talk. As with my fire lighting, so with my socializing—it took me a long time before I noticed how ­others performed ­these tasks, and even longer before I began emulating local usages. This meant breaking my characteristically Western middle-­class habit of making conversation with a guest and of filling silences with small talk. Among the Kuranko, neighborliness is expressed through customary greetings and the sharing of food and drink. But mutual recognition does not require deep dialogue and is best consummated in amicable silence—­the art of simply being-­with-­another, an art of co-­presence. By learning to rely on observation and imitation rather than interrogation, I went a long way t­ oward a participatory understanding of local praxis, literally putting myself in the place of the other, inhabiting his or her world. George Devereux has shown that one’s personality inevitably colors the character of one’s observations and that the “royal road to an au­then­tic, rather than fictitious, objectivity” is perforce the way of informed subjectivity.13 But subjectivity is social and somatic in character, and not necessarily synonymous with solipsism or self-­centeredness. To participate bodily in the everyday practical life of another society may be a creative technique that helps one grasp the sense of an activity by using one’s body as ­others do, just as eating as locals eat, working at the pace that locals work at, and ­going along with local protocols may carry one into an understanding that could not be attained through questioning, observing, or conceptual guesswork alone. Understanding cannot be attained simply by seeing (­either through inspection or introspection); it implicates all the senses to varying degrees and involves a bodily relationship with the objects and o­ thers around us.14 This means that ethnographic practice subsumes the allegedly disinterested understanding of epistêmê in technê, where even theory building is construed as a technique, on a par with word pro­ cessors, plows, and defense mechanisms, whereby h ­ uman beings seek to make their relations with the world and with o­ thers more practically and socially ­viable. ­There are resonances ­here of Heidegger’s discussion of equipment and equipmentality. Heidegger’s argument is that we never encounter t­hings as having a self-­evident identity. ­Things, like other ­people, reveal themselves in relation to us, just as we disclose ourselves in the ways we relate to them. Thus,

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simply by looking at a hammer, we can deduce ­little about its function. The hammer reveals its “being” only when it is picked up and put to use. In Heidegger’s words, “The kind of Being which equipment possesses—in which it manifests itself in its own right—we call ‘readiness-­to-­hand’ [zuhandenheit].”15 Heidegger goes on to say that “theoretical be­hav­ior is just looking, without circumspection.” And he argues that understanding depends on our ability to grasp the “readiness-­at-­hand” of every­thing from a ­recipe to a concept, a tool to a text. The meaning of ­these t­ hings is contingent on their use. Can we extend this argument to intersubjectivity and claim that our knowledge of o­ thers and of their lifeworlds is contingent on the ways we engage and interact with them? Such a claim implies that it is more fruitful to understand oneself and the other in relation to the situation in which we find ourselves, and that dispositions, identities, roles, and cultural schemata are potentialities “ready-­at-­hand” that come into play strategically, opportunistically, and variously as our interests shift and our situations change. To focus on ­human situations involves calling into question the view that ­people speak and act in certain ways solely ­because they are culturally, historically, or bioge­ne­tically predisposed to do so. But while explanations based on disposition are alluringly parsimonious and invoking culture gives an impression of comprehension unclouded by too much detail, deep descriptions offer far less intellectual satisfaction, partly ­because lived situations are usually too complex and fluid to allow sweeping generalizations and definite conclusions. One way out of this impasse is to learn how to draw a line between what can and cannot be expressed in explanatory language. In his Tractatus Logico-­Philosophicus, Wittgenstein remarks that “even when all pos­si­ble scientific questions have been answered, the prob­lems of life remain completely untouched,” and he goes on to say that “­there are, indeed, ­things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.”16 Gabriel Marcel made a similar distinction between a “prob­lem” that admits of a solution and a “mystery” that can never be entirely solved. A prob­lem is something met with that bars my passage. It is before me in its entirety. A mystery, on the other hand, is something in which I find myself caught up and whose essence is, therefore, not before me in its entirety. It is as though, in this province, the distinction between in me and before me loses its meaning.17 If our essays in understanding can go only part way ­toward explaining “all that is the case,” does our task then become one of judging when to tell

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and when to show?18 Much ethnographic writing is so replete with explanatory language and so bereft of sustained descriptions of life as lived that one might easily conclude that the ethnographer is seeking to mask with discursive prose a complexity he or she cannot psychologically tolerate. What passes for theory is, thus, a defense against the anxiety of the inexplicable, the ineffable, the contradictory, the ambiguous. I compare my periodic excursions into theory with pauses on a journey that allow me to catch my breath, to take stock, and plan my next foray into the field. This movement between engagement and reflection finds expression in the deliberate alternation of descriptive and discursive passages in my books, and, hopefully, guards against intellectual overreach on the one hand and unalloyed realism on the other. Although I have sometimes identified my work with the traditions of American pragmatism, Eu­ro­pean phenomenology, and critical theory, and even labeled myself an existential anthropologist, t­hese identity tags are potentially problematic. They typecast one’s thinking, give rise to erroneous associations, overlook the intellectual diversity within each field, and risk estranging thought from life. Yet it is undeniable that t­ hese schools of thought have influenced me more than any o­ thers, and for good reason. Rather than reify culture (or any of its synonyms: belief systems, cosmologies, epistemologies, ideologies, ontologies, worldviews), their focus is on the indeterminate relationship between collective repre­sen­ta­tions and lived real­ity. They hesitate to reduce experience to episteme or characterize entire populations in terms of a single invariant modality of thought or form of life. Their interest lies in the manifold ways in which norms are realized in individual lives and par­tic­u­lar social contexts, the conditions ­under which they are foregrounded or backgrounded, the differential intensities with which they are felt, and the diverse interests they serve.19 Their focus is life in media res where what is at stake differs from person to person and is subject to constant change. Echoing German critical theory and existential Marxism, their search is for a dialectical understanding of the interplay of public and private lives, polis and domus, subject and object, worlds within and worlds without. Rather than prioritize the interpretation of texts, they look to the contexts in which texts are produced, interpreted, and deployed. Beyond the life of the mind, they also consider the life of the body, the senses, the emotions, the imagination, and the material objects we fashion and fetishize in our everyday lives. Rather than isolate the ­human subject as an arbiter of meaning, a bounded self, a singular existant, they focus on what transpires between subjects and the ways in which our sense of self is

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contingent on the be­hav­iors, responses, and dispositions of o­ thers and the situations in which we find ourselves. Their concern is the ­human strug­gle for being—­the resourceful and vari­ous ways in which we work, alone and together, to affirm life in the face of death, salvage life in the face of adversity, and make life fulfilling rather than devoid of meaning. But life is always lived within limits, no ­matter how much we fantasize that life may be limitless—­ and ­these limits include the limits of our ability to comprehend and control life, the limits of our ability to endure hardship, the limits of our ability to articulate what it is we think we know, and the limits of our ability to reverse time as if it ­were like a passage of ­music we could replay endlessly u ­ ntil we got it right.

Notes

Preface 1. John J. Drummond, Historical Dictionary of Husserl’s Philosophy (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007), 5. 2. George Orwell, Selected Essays, ed. Stefan Collini (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 218. 3. George Orwell, cited by John Brannigan, in Introduction, Down and Out in Paris and London (London: Oxford University Press, 2021), x.

As Through a Glass Darkly 1. Helen Harvey, “Haunted by Mt. Taranaki Climbing Tragedy,” Stuff (May 26, 2015). 2. Alison Parr, ­Silent Casualties (Birkenhead: Tandem Press, 1995). 3. W. G. Sebald offers another way of understanding our avoidance of the past, and why writers are often drawn to the shadows and margins of life. “I do like to listen to ­people who have been sidelined for one reason or another. B ­ ecause in my experience once they begin to talk, they have t­ hings to tell you that you w ­ on’t be able to get from anywhere

24 4     Notes to Pages 7–16 e­ lse. And I felt that need of being able to listen to ­people telling me ­things from very early on, not least I think ­because I grew up in postwar Germany where t­ here was—­I say this quite often—­something like a conspiracy of silence, i.e., your parents never told you anything about their experiences ­because t­ here was at the very least a ­great deal of shame attached to ­these experiences. So one kept them ­under lock and seal. And I for one doubt that my ­mother and ­father, even amongst themselves, ever broached any of ­these subjects. ­There ­wasn’t a written or spoken agreement about ­these ­things. It was a tacit agreement. It was something that was never touched on. So I’ve always . . . ​I’ve grown up feeling that ­there is some sort of emptiness somewhere that needs to be filled by accounts from witnesses one can trust. And once I started . . . ​I would never have encountered t­ hese witnesses if I ­hadn’t left my native country at the age of twenty, ­because the ­people who could tell you the truth, or something at least approximating the truth, did not exist in that country any longer. But one could find them in Manchester, and in Leeds or in North London or in Paris—in vari­ous places, Belgium and so on.” W. G. Sebald, in The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W. G. Sebald, ed. Lynne Sharon Schwartz (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011), 84. 4. Douglas Collins, Mr. Mole’s Tunnel (London: Collins, 1946). 5. In Māori tradition, Taranaki Maunga once dwelled with the volcanic peaks of the central North Island. Taranaki and Tongariro fought for the ­favors of the bush-­clad beauty of Mt. Pīhanga. ­After a titanic ­battle, Taranaki was defeated and fled west, gouging out the valley of the Whanganui River to the sea. Then, guided by his guardian rock Te Toka a Rauhoto, he turned t­oward the north and rested. While he did so, Pouākai mountain extended a ridge that s­topped him from continuing his flight. Taranaki remains t­ here to this day, with his guiding rock cemented firmly in place at the marae at Pūniho, near Ōkato. 6. M. P. K. Sorrenson, “Peter Henry Buck (Te Rangi Hiroa),” in Dictionary of Zealand Biography (Wellington, 2002). 7. Jean Watson, Stand in the Rain (Christchurch: Pegasus Press, 1966), dedicated “to chance and circumstance.”

Notes from Under­ground 1. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Under­ground, trans. Andrew MacAndrew (New York: Signet, 1961), 114–15.

It’s Other ­People Who Are My Old Age 1. Jean-­Paul Sartre and Benny Levy, Hope Now: The 1980 Interviews, trans. Adrian Van Den Houten (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007), 72. 2. By contrast, Joan Metge, who studied u ­ nder Piddington several years e­ arlier, recalls him as a “gifted teacher [whose] carefully crafted lectures w ­ ere made memorable by a fund of jokes.” Dictionary of New Zealand Biography 5, 411.

Notes to Pages 16–26    245 3. One of the strengths of Michael Young’s magnificent biography of Bronislaw Malinowski is the way he teases out the connections between Malinowski’s intellectual preoccupation with functional coherence in Trobriand society and his desperate search for moral consistency in himself. In one of the last entries in his diary, he castigates himself in t­ hese terms: “I have failed to integrate myself, to create a unitary self with a solid, dependable core. I am an assortment of conflicting needs, a multitude of opposing selves, an aggregation of wants and desires, some sordid, some sublime, but none constant or true. ­After all, I am only ­human.” Bronislaw Malinowki, A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Word (London: Rputledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), 298. Cited in Michael Young, “Writing His Life through the Other,” The Public Domain Review (2014). 4. Ralph Piddington, An Introduction to Social Anthropology Vol. 1 (London: Oliver and Boyd, 1952), 14. 5. Ralph Piddington, An Introduction to Social Anthropology Vol. 2 (London: Oliver and Boyd, 1952), 543. 6. Piddington, Vol 2, 546, 549. 7. Piddington, Vol 2, 781. 8. The following account is based on D.  J. Mulvaney, “Australian Anthropology: Foundations and Funding,” in Aboriginal History 17, no. 2 (1993): 105–28, and Geoffrey Gray, “ ‘Piddington’s Indiscretion’: Ralph Piddington, the Australian National Research Council and Academic Freedom,” Oceania 64, no. 3 (1994): 217–45. 9. Ralph Piddington, “Aborigines on ­Cattle Stations are in Slavery: Anthropologist Piddington Backs World’s Probe Demand,” The World (January 14, 1932): 1. 10. Ralph Piddington, “Treatment of Aborigines: World’s Plea for Better Conditions Receives Attention Abroad,” The World (July 7, 1932): 6–7. 11. D. J. Mulvaney, 1993, 122–23. 12. Piddington’s experiences of disappointment and discrimination in the country of his birth recall the case of Vere Gordon Childe, the Australian-­born and internationally ­acclaimed prehistorian and archaeologist whose book Man Makes Himself was one of my first-­year textbooks. Childe was prevented from working in academia on account of his Marxist views.

Empedocles in Auckland 1. James K. Baxter, Letter to Michael Jackson, March 17, 1960. 2. Colin McCahon/A Survey Exhibition (Auckland: City Art Gallery, 1972), 28. 3. James K. Baxter, Pig Island Letters (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 5. 4. Herman Gladwin, In Praise of Stalin (Martinborough: Alister Taylor, 1978), 11.

Myself Must I Remake 1. W. B. Yeats, “An Acre of Grass,” Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats (Ware: Words­ worth, 2015), 299.

24 6     Notes to Pages 27–64 2. Hannah Arendt, The H ­ uman Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). 3. Denis Glover, “Bob Lowry’s Books,” undated pamphlet reprinted from Book 8 ­(Pilgrim Press, 1946). 4. James K. Baxter, Fires of No Return (London: Oxford University Press, 1958).

Blue Notes 1. Gubba may derive from an Aboriginal word for a white demon, or from the term “government man,” nineteenth-­century slang for “convict.”

To and Fro Within the World 1. “Blaise Cendrars Vous Parle,” Entretien deuxième, Ouervres Complètes Vol. 8 (Paris: Denoël, 1964), 36. 2. Blaise Cendrars, L’Homme Foudroyé (Paris: Denoël, 1945), 12. 3. My m ­ other, Emily Jackson, joined the Auckland Society of Arts when she was fifty and had her first solo exhibition thirteen years ­later (in 1972). She continued to exhibit regularly over the next twenty years and became one of New Zealand’s most respected artists.

Heart of Darkness 1. Horace, Epistles, I, xi, 27. 2. Michael Jackson, “The Rapids,” New Zealand Universities Literary Yearbook (Palmerston North: N.Z.U. Arts Festival Committee, 1966), 16–20.

Transitions 1. I was, of course, paraphrasing Joseph Conrad’s author’s note to Heart of Darkness, a story he describes as “the spoil I brought out from Africa, where, r­ eally, I had no sort of business.” 2. George Orwell, “Reflections on Gandhi,” reprinted in The George Orwell Reader: Fiction, Essays, and Reportage (New York: Harcourt, 1984), 331. 3. “Art Market: Leopoldville” and “Le Royal,” Landfall 19, no. 3 (September 1965): 231–32; “Execution” and “The Red Road,” Landfall 20, no. 4 (December 1966): 312–14; “Rhodesia and Survival,” New Zealand Monthly Review 6, no.  63 (December 1965–­January 1966): 10–11; Blaise Cendrars, “Noël en Nouvelle-­Zélande,” from Trop c’est Trop (Paris: Denoël, 1957), 109–12, trans. Michael Jackson, Comment, no.  25 (December 1965): 35–36.

Notes to Pages 64–80    247 4. Michael Jackson, “Aspects of Symbolism and Composition in Māori Art,” Bijdragen Tot de Taal-­, Land-­, an Volkenkunde 128, no. 1 (1972): 33–80. Michael Jackson, “Some Structural Considerations of Māori Myth,” Journal of the Polynesian Society 77, no. 2 (1968): 147–62. 5. David Howes speaks of this as “a crisis of intonation” and describes the “dwindling power” of traditional songs in the Trobriand Islands where older p­ eople lament the passing of a “golden age of orality” when the mea­sure of ­human greatness was the resounding quality of one’s vocal presence. David Howes, Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 64–67; J. C. Carothers, “Culture, Psychiatry and the Written Word,” Psychiatry 22, 9, 1958: 307–20; Jack Goody, editor, Literacy in Traditional Socie­ties (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968); Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Routledge and Kegan Paul: London, 1962); Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (Methuen: London, 1982); David Riesman, “The Oral and Written Traditions,” in Explorations in Communications, ed. Edmund Carpenter and Marshall Mc­ Luhan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960). 6. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968). 7. Plato’s Phaedrus, trans. Christopher Rowe (Harmonds­worth: Penguin, 2005), 61–64. See, also, Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (London: Athlone 1981), 66–94.

In Sierra Leone 1. The then presidents of Guinea and Sierra Leone.

Dankawali 1. According to local traditions, Moré Musa Kargbo ruled during the period of the Sofa invasion of northern Sierra Leone by Samori Turé. He was a staunch ally of the Yalunka chief of Falaba and helped repulse the Sofas (led by Samori Turé’s son) at Falaba. Moré Musa was subsequently appointed chief of Dankawali by the En­glish, who had helped the Kuranko and Yalunka re­sis­tance to the Sofas with arms and ammunition. However, other traditions claim that the British armed the Sofas, causing considerable local resentment. Moreover, the British may have not visited this area u ­ ntil around 1914, when the barracks at Gbankuma and Falaba w ­ ere established. 2. It is noteworthy that, in 1969, being a Muslim did not preclude offering sacrifices to djinn, but over the next few de­cades, Islamic proselytizers and zealots would prohibit all reference to the djinn in stories, ritual life, and local belief. 3. This Kuranko tale is reminiscent of a recurring theme in South American myth of the bicho enfolhado, in which Fox deceives Jaguar by smearing itself with honey and which involves a complex structure of culinary symbols. See Claude Lévi-­Strauss, From

24 8    Notes to Pages 93–105 Honey to Ashes, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman (London: Cape, 1973), 112. The “culinary triangle” of boiled/roasted/rotted marks out a semantic field in which the contrast between the boiled, peeled, buried yam and the roasted, charred, putrescent hyena is mediated by “sweet” foodstuffs, which are eaten raw. Consumed in their “natu­ral” state, honey and rice flour also are “cultural” products, the former collected from manmade oblong, woven beehives, the latter prepared by pounding rice in similarly oblong but wooden mortars. The sweet, raw substances thus mediate a transformation in the story from an unjust situation to a situation in which the injustice is redressed.

Firawa and the Ethnography of Events 1. William James, Pragmatism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), 97.

Return to Cambridge 1. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Under­ground, trans. Andrew MacAndrew (New York: Signet, 1961), 114–15. Karl Marx, “Man muss diese vertseinerten Verhältnisse dadurch zum Tanzen zwingen, dass man ihnen ihre eigene Melodie vorsingt,” Die Frühschriften, cited and translated by Erich Fromm, The Crisis in Psychoanalysis: Essays on Freud, Marx, and Social Psy­chol­ogy (Harmonds­worth: Penguin, 1973), 83. 2. Jean-­Paul Sartre, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: George Braziller, 1963), 49. Elsewhere, Sartre defined freedom as “the small movement which makes a totally conditioned social being someone who does not render back completely what his conditioning has given him.” Jean-­Paul Sartre, “Itinerary of a Thought,” New Left Review 58 (1969), 45. 3. Paul Riesman’s Freedom in Fulani Social Life (originally published in French in 1974), makes this very comparison. Paul Riesman, Freedom in Fulani Social Life: An Introspective Ethnography, trans. Martha Fuller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977). This was, incidentally, the same year I published my first monograph, The Kuranko (London: Hurst, 1977). 4. John Keats, The Letters of John Keats 1814–1821 Vol. 1, ed. H. E. Rollins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 193. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1955), 75.

From Anxiety to Method 1. George Devereux, “The Works of George Devereux,” The Making of Psychological Anthropology, ed. G. D. Spindler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 364–406 (366). 2. George Devereux, “Fantasy and Symbol as Dimensions of Real­ity,” in Fantasy and Symbol: Studies in Anthropological Interpretation, ed. R. H. Hook (London: Academic

Notes to Pages 105–113    249 Press, 1979), 23. Cf. Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto, Publius Terentius Afer, Heauton Timorumenos. 3. Michael Jackson, “Ambivalence and the Last-­Born: Birth Order Position in Convention and Myth,” Man 13 (1978): 341–61. 4. This chiastic princi­ple would be echoed in Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s model of Amerindian perspectivist cosmologies that assume that animals and spirits possess distinct perspectives, viewing themselves as h ­ umans and perceiving their lifestyles and habitats in terms of ­human culture (for example, “Where we see a muddy salt-­lick on a river bank, tapirs see their big ceremonial h ­ ouse”). Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation,” Tipití 2.1, no.  6 (2004): 3–22. Journeys into the bush in Kuranko narratives also touch on the perils of seeking extra-­human powers through trans-­perspectival encounters in which one risks being “overpowered by the non-­human subjectivity” of the other being, and permanently passing over to its side, metamorphosing into a member of its species. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia and Elsewhere (Manchester: HAU Network of Ethnographic Theory, 2012), 49. 5. Devereux, Fantasy and Symbol, 28–29. 6. Devereux, Fantasy and Symbol, 15. 7. Devereux, The Making of Psychological Anthropology, 402.

A Storyteller’s Story 1. Michael Jackson, Latitudes of Exile: Poems 1965–1975 (Dunedin: McIndoe); Michael Jackson, The Kuranko: Dimensions of Social Real­ity in a West African Society (London: Hurst, 1977). 2. Many years before Ferenke was born, Samaran Ba­la gave his wife Keti to his wifeless younger b­ rother Kona Sumban. 3. Ferenke’s preoccupation with intelligence also explains his active leadership of the Due (or Doe) lodge in Kondembaia, a lodge he described as “an association of intelligent p­ eople.” The leader of the lodge is called the Do karamorgo (Do means teacher) or Dobe, and members are known as Dodannu (an analogy with Sisibe, brooding hen, and Sisidannu, hatched chickens), and a special language of transposed syllables and muddled vowels enables initiates to communicate with each other in public without non-­ initiates knowing what they are saying. Code words and special handshakes and greetings also form part of the cabalistic lore of the lodge, and initiates are taught vari­ ous verbal and interrogatory techniques for divining the hidden intentions of strangers. Initiates also amuse themselves with wire puzzles and riddles, and Ferenke took ­great delight in teasing me with such conundrums as “How many p­ eople are t­ here in the world?” and “How many steps does a person take in the course of a day?” The answer to both riddles is “two”; in the first “men and ­women”; in the second “right foot and left foot.” 4. Michael Jackson, Allegories of the Wilderness: Ethics and Ambiguity in Kuranko Narratives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 164–67.

250     Notes to Pages 115–126 5. Michael Jackson, Allegories of the Wilderness: Ethics and Ambiguity in Kuranko Narratives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), x. When my friend Michael Young published his groundbreaking study of Kalauna narratives the year ­after Allegories appeared, he would provide illuminating examples of the “dynamic interaction of myth and biography.” In this western Massim society, e­very lineage possesses its own corpus of myths (neineya), which are inherited and jealously guarded by male leaders. When Young first sat down with Iyahalina and asked the old man for “the story” of his life, Iyahalina spoke into the tape recorder for two hours without interruption. On playing back this soliloquy, Young discerned not a single autobiographic detail in what was seemingly a sequence of familiar myths, interspersed with details about Iyahalina’s duties as a “ritual expert” (toitavealata). But when Young teasingly took the old man to task for having recounted nothing of his childhood, marriage, or work experience abroad, Iyahalina grinned and said, “Yes, like that,” implying that the myths he had told and the events of his life ­were in effect one and the same, for he clearly identified with the ancestral figures in the myths, and his own personal quest for legitimacy as the leader of his hamlet was presaged in their lives. Clearly, men like Iyahalina both introjected the dramatic structure of the myth and projected their personal preoccupations onto it. As Young puts it, “Men such as Iyahalina, who internalize their myths to a marked extent, such that they perceive their lives in terms of the idioms and ideals that the myths promote, appear to submit to them while yet exerting their own purposes through them. They thereby unwittingly modify their myths quite subtly in the pro­cess.” Michael Young, Magicians of Manumanua: Living Myth in Kalauna (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 19.

Barawa and the Ways Birds Fly 1. I am echoing cybernetic theory ­here as well as paraphrasing W. G. Sebald. “We take almost all the decisive steps in lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious.” W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2001). 2. Joshua Conrad Jackson, David Read, Kevin Lewis, Michael J. Norton, and Kurt Gray, “Agent-­Based Modelling: A Guide for Social Psychologists,” Social Psychological and Personality Science (2017): 1–9. 3. Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 353. 4. Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees (New York: Viking 2002), 184.

I Am Another 1. “Je est un autre,” Arthur Rimbaud’s famous declaration of his determination to become other than the person he has been raised to be, in “Letter to Paul Demeny,” Charlesville, May  15, 1871. Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations, trans, Louise Varèse (New York: New Directions, 1957), xxix. 2. Maurce Merleau-­Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 354.

Notes to Pages 126–143    251 3. Friedrich Nietz­sche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmonds­worth: Penguin, 1968), 21, 92.

The Phi­los­o­pher Who Would Not Be King 1. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin, 1999), 11. 2. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1979). 3. Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, 6. 4. Philosophy and Social Hope, 7–8. 5. Richard Rorty, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” in Wild Orchids and Trotsky, ed. Mark Edmundson (Harmonds­worth: Penguin, 1993), 29–50. 6. Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, 266. 7. Published in the November 2007 issue of Poetry Magazine. 8. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), xv. 9. Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, 227.

Wilderness 1. Mary Kinglsey, West African Studies (London: MacMillan, 1901), xvi. 2. Mary Kingsley, letter to Sir Matthew Nathan, cited by Stephen Gwyn, The Life of Mary Kingsley (Harmonds­worth: Penguin, 1940), 25. 3. Rodney Needham, “Introduction to Arnold van Gennep,” The Semi-­Scholars, ed. and trans. Rodney Needham (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), xi. 4. Joan Riviere, “Hate, Greed, and Aggression,” in Melanie Klein and Joan Riviere, Love, Hate and Reparation (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953), 23. 5. Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (London: Routledge, 2004), 510–12.

Uppsala 1. Fanny and Alexander, directed by Ingmar Bergman, 1982. 2. The ubiquity of ­these discursive contrasts should not be taken to mean that they mirror empirical real­ity. Concepts like inner and outer, or self and other, are simply conceptual containers for experiences that continually overflow and confound them. Consciousness is always in flux, modulating and shape-­shifting, yet at the same time prone to slice experience up into discrete and definable categories. 3. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Plea­sure Princi­ple, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton,1989), 30–35. 4. Michel Foucault, The Order of T ­ hings: An Archaeology of the ­Human Sciences ­(London: Tavistock, 1970), 387.

252    Notes to Pages 143–152 5. James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), 355. 6. Miller, The Passion, 366. 7. Miller, The Passion, passim 366–70. 8. Cf, Stanley Cavell who has long acknowledged the ways in which his philosophizing “tends perpetually to intersect the autobiographical,” observing that Wittgenstein, more than any other philosophy of the twentieth c­ entury, has shown “how it happens that a certain strain of philosophy inescapably takes on autobiography, or . . . ​ an abstraction of autobiography.” Stanley Cavell, ­Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 2, 6. 9. “Linnaeus,” in Dictionary of Scientific Biography Vol. 8, ed. Charles Goulston Gillespie (New York: Scribners, 1973), 376, 380. 10. René Devisch, Weaving the Threads of Life: the Khita Gyn-­Eco-­Logical Healing Cult among the Yaka (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993), 21, italics added.

Indiana 1. Michael Jackson, Rainshadow (Dunedin: McIndoe, 1988). 2. Malcolm Lowry, Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place (Harmonds­ worth: Penguin, 1979), 177. 3. In 2010, I received an e-­mail from a gradu­ate student at Queen’s University, Belfast, who was about to embark on fieldwork in Mali. Theodore Konkouris planned to study Mande hunters ­music and wanted to know if I could provide any insights from my Kuranko research. But his main reason for writing was rather dif­fer­ent. “I am writing to acknowledge one of your former students, Kassim Kone, who introduced me to your work. He helped me formulate my proposal when my supervisor at the time abandoned me and I felt lost and hopeless. He made suggestions, gave me courage, insight and the first Bamanankan language lessons without asking anything in return. When I asked him why, he told me how you had helped him when he was a PhD candidate at IU by proof reading and rewriting, suggesting and commenting on his thesis on a daily basis. He said that when he asked you how he could ever compensate for this, you said by d ­ oing the same for his students. I think you would like to know that he did that for me, and he was not even my tutor.” 4. While tupu is “an expression of the nature of ­things and of ­human beings as unfolded from within,” mana expresses the way in which being is realized and redistributed in the course of a person’s interactions with the environment and with ­others. J. Prytz Johansen, The Māori and his Religion in its Non-­Ritualistic Aspects (Copenhagen: Einar Munksgaard, 1954), 85. Like the Greek dumanis, mana implies “power in action.” Thus, while an insult reduces or weakens (mate) one’s honor and repute, avenging the insult recovers it—­ though at the other’s expense. Māori Marsden, “God, Man, and the Universe: A Māori View,” in Te Ao Hurihuri: The World Moves On, ed. Michael King (Wellington: Hicks Smith, 1975), 194.

Notes to Pages 160–174    253 Cape York 1. Walter E. Roth, “North Queensland Ethnography: Burial Ceremonies and Disposal of the Dead,” Rec­ords of the Australian Museum Sydney, Bulletin 9 (1907): 365–403 (387). See, also, “North Queensland Ethnography: Social and Individual Nomenclature,” Rec­ords of the Australian Museum Sydney, Bulletin 18 (1910): 79–106 (92). 2. Of all Kuku-­Yalanji “mobs” in the late 1970s, the Olbars ­were, according to Christopher Anderson, “one of the mission’s least power­ful and materially worst off,” though their isolation implied considerable solidarity. “ ‘The Olbars, out in the scrub, sticking together,’ was the way a local Aboriginal councillor once described them to me.” Christopher Jon Anderson, The Po­liti­cal and Economic Basis of Kuku-­Yalanji Social History, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Queensland, Australia, 1984, 385. 3. Arthur Schopenhauer, Counsels and Maxims, trans. T. Bailey Saunders (New York: Cosimo, 2007), 26. Arthur Schopenhauer, “Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life,” in ­Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays Vol.1, trans. E. F. J. Payne, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 321. 4. Schopenhauer, “Similes, Parables and Fables,” in Parerga and Paralipomena, 651–52. 5. Sigmund Freud, Group Psy­chol­ogy and the Analy­sis of the Ego, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1959), 33. 6. Dominque Zahan, The Bambara (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974), 5. 7. D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Real­ity (Harmonds­worth: Penguin, 1974), 18–23. 8. All quotes in the foregoing paragraph are from Primo Levi, Other P ­ eople’s Trades, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Michael Joseph, 1989), vii.

An Etiology of Storms 1. The Kuku-­Yalanji language has exact terms for the rustling noise of wind in dead or dry leaves (yanja) and for the distant rumbling of thunder in the weeks before the wet season breaks (kubun-­kubun). 2. Wild grape (kangka) vines also are burned to ward off storms, and a par­tic­u­lar species of vine (kalal) is also said to be the son-­in-­law of thunderstorms. 3. Jean-­Paul Sartre, Between Existentialism and Marxism, trans. John Matthews ­(London: Verso, 1983), 229. 4. Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 2. 5. Pierre Bourdieu, Acts of Re­sis­tance: Against the Tyranny of the Market, trans. Richard Nice (New York: The ­Free Press, 1999), and The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Con­temporary Society, trans. Priscilla Parkhurst (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 6. Godfrey Lienhardt, Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the Dinka (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961), 283, 291. 7. Jean-­Paul Sartre, The Emotions: Outline of a Theory, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948), 61, 60, 72.

254     Notes to Pages 176–193 ­After Indiana 1. R. D. Laing, “Preface,” Knots (Harmonds­worth: Penguin, 1979); Claude Lévi-­ Strauss, The Naked Man, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990), 1990), 635–37. 2. Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, The Vis­i­ble and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,1968), 169, 12–13. 3. Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees,” The Menorah Journal 31, no. 1 (1943): 69–71. 4. Hannah Arendt, The H ­ uman Condition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1958). 5. David Grossman, Writing in the Dark, trans. Jessica Cohen (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008), 49, 51. 6. Joan Didion, The White A ­ lbum (Harmonds­worth: Penguin, 1979). 7. Grossman, Writing in the Dark, 67, 68, emphasis in text. 8. Howard Eiland, personal communication, August 19, 2020.

Return to Sierra Leone 1. The Tamaboros ­were a civil defense militia made up of mainly Kuranko and Yalunka recruits. Kuranko in­for­mants gave me two versions of the etymology. Tamaboro may mean “walk-­about bag,” b­ ecause hunters never announce directly that they are g­ oing to the bush; they use the circumlocution, “I am ­going walkabout.” Alternatively, Tamaboro may be loosely translated, ta ma bo aro, which means “go and f­ ree us,” that is, from this war, this chaos. ­Under the leadership of Komba Kambo, the Tamaboros enlisted the support of hunters (donsenu) and ­others with special powers of witchcraft, shape-­shifting, and traditional hunting skills. Cf. Melissa Leach, “New Shapes to Shift: War, Parks and the Hunting Person in Modern West Africa,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 6, no. 4 (2000): 577–95; Mariane Ferme, “La Figure du Chasseur et les Chasseurs-­Milicens dans le Conflit Sierra-­Léonais,” Politique Africaine 82 (2001): 119–32. 2. An American consortium had been mining gold in Diang chiefdom for several years, though the war had forced a momentary suspension of operations. 3. Sewa l­ater told me he had sought to appease his captors and make his escape ­because, as the son of a chief, he dreaded the shame that being with the RUF would visit upon his f­ amily. 4. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). Mikhail Bakhtin, Prob­lems in Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 122. 5. Krijn Peters and Paul Richards, “Why We Fight: Voices of Youth Combatants in Sierra Leone,” Africa 68, no. 2 (1998): 83–210 (93). 6. William James, The Princi­ples of Psy­chol­ogy Vol. 2 (New York: Dover, 1950), 415. 7. In his monograph on formations of vio­lence in Northern Ireland, Allen Feldman has explored how the dialectical tension between “­doing and being done” (vernacular markers of the difference between being an active subject and being violently subject to the actions of ­others) is nowhere more powerfully expressed than in the subjective meaning of being armed. “To wield a weapon is literally to take one’s life in

Notes to Pages 193–202    255 one’s hand. In violent praxis the fate of embodiment (‘life’) is detached from the self and transferred to the instrument of vio­lence. In turn the weapon as a po­liti­cal and forensic artifact of both the self and the Other is encoded with the reversibility of doing/being done.” Allen Feldman, Formations of Vio­lence: the Narratives of the Body and Po­liti­cal Terror in Northern Ireland (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991), 102. 8. Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on Vio­lence,” New York Review of Books, February 27, 1969, 24–26. Elsewhere, in remarks that speak directly to the rebellion in Sierra Leone, Hannah Arendt writes: “If tyranny can be described as the always abortive attempt to substitute vio­lence for power, ochlocracy, or mob rule, which is its exact counterpart, can be characterized by the much more promising attempt to substitute power with strength.” Hannah Arendt, The H ­ uman Condition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1958), 203. She adds presciently: “The vehement yearning for vio­lence . . . ​is a natu­ral reaction of t­ hose whom society has tried to cheat out of their strength,” 203–4, emphasis added. 9. Paul Richards also has noted the parallels between initiation and rebellion in his account of the RUF, who sought to “manipulate to its advantage the cultural ‘infrastructure’ of rural life in Sierra Leone.” My argument, however, is that cultural pre­ce­dents for armed rebellion are not so much in­ven­ted as exploited, since t­hese cultural thought-­models for comprehending disorder and managing misrule already exist in potentia and do not necessarily have to be orchestrated to appear in presentia. Paul Richards, Fighting for the Rainforest: War, Youth, and Resources in Sierra Leone (London: International African Institute (1996, 30, 81) Several trenchant insights on the gendered symbolism of the rebellions in Liberia and Sierra Leone are to be found in Marianne Ferme’s essay on the vio­lence of numbers. Marianne Ferme, “The Vio­lence of Numbers, Consensus, Competition, and the Negotiation of Disputes in Sierra Leone,” Cahiers d’Études Africaines 38 (1998): 560–61. 10. Peters and Richards, in “Why We Fight,” argue that “confusing war and play, child combatants are heedless of danger” (183). Though young men often go to war as if it is an adventure or game, combat quickly destroys this illusion. Fear is endemic to all warfare (which is why the rebels devoted so much effort to combatting or masking it), and I agree with Johan Huizinga, that combat can be called play only when “it is waged within a sphere whose members regard each other as equals or antagonists with equal rights.” This condition changes, Huizinga observes, “as soon as war is waged outside the sphere of equals, against groups not recognized as ­human beings and thus deprived of ­human rights—­ barbarians, dev­ils, heathens, heretics, and ‘lesser breeds within the law.’ ” Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Ele­ment in Culture (London: Paladin, 1970), 110–11.

Mi­grant Imaginaries 1. When I saw Sewa in London a year ­later, and we discussed this dream again, Sewa spoke of a certain younger ­brother who had spread a story alleging that Sewa had received special powers from his ­father, which is why he enjoyed greater good fortune than his ­brothers. This, Sewa told me, was the source of the dream image of his ­brothers’ resentment and aggressive be­hav­ior ­toward him. 2. Lest I seem to be attributing paranoid obsessions to Africans that are presumably absent among Eu­ro­pe­ans, it is worth noting that questions of trust and transparency

256    Notes to Pages 206–215 pervade the ethical and epistemological discourse of the West, and that the “deceptive order of ordinary appearances” is a recurring and endemic issue of everyday life in all socie­ ties. What Henri Ellenberger calls “the unmasking trend” in Eu­ro­pean history, characterized by “the systematic search for deception and self-­deception and the uncovering of under­lying truth” may be traced back to the seventeenth-­century moralists. Henri Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (New York: Basic Books, 1970), 537. In anthropology, a similar view informs both British empiricism and French structural anthropology, hence the remarks by Claude Lévi-­Strauss that “the nature of truth is already indicated by the care it takes to remain elusive”; and “to reach real­ity one has first to reject experience.” Claude Lévi-­Strauss, From Honey to Ashes, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman (London: Cape, 1973), 57–58). In other words, anthropologists take as l­ittle at face value as the ­people they study. 3. In 2021, Bockarie returned to Sierra Leone where he became chief of Barawa and Woli chiefdoms. 4. Nigerians referred to Peckham as “­Little Lagos.” 5. Sewa separated from his girlfriend Stephanie b­ ecause of fears that her jealous ex-­boyfriend, who was half-­Jamaican and half-­English, might stab him or have one of his gang do so. “You have to be very careful of that mixed race; they are dangerous, they could do anything.”

Existential Mobility and Multiple Selves 1. Michael Jackson, The Wherewithal of Life: Ethics, Migration, and the Question of Well-­Being (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). 2. Arthur Kleinman, Yunxiang Yan, Jing Jun, Sing Lee, Everett Zhang, Pan Tianshu, Wu Fei, and Guo Jinhua, Deep China: The Moral Life of the Person, What Anthropology and Psychiatry Tell Us about China ­Today (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 5. This bias is characteristic of the so-­called “ontological turn” in anthropology, in which single aspects of self-­experience are essentialized and reified in order to characterize the psy­chol­ogy of entire cultures, much as the culture and personality school did in the 1940s and 1950s. 3. William James, A Pluralistic Universe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977). 4. Stephen A. Mitchell, Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis (New York: Basic Books, 1993). 5. Philip M. Bromberg, Standing in the Spaces: Essays on Clinical Pro­cess, Trauma, and Dissociation (Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytical Press, 1993), 186. 6. This model of multiple selfhood is not to be confused with multiple personality disorder, when, as Philip Bromberg puts it, the normally “flexible multiplicity of relatively harmonious self-­states . . . ​becomes a rigid multiplicity of adversarial self-­states” (now known as dissociative identity disorder). Philip  M. Bromberg, Awakening the Dreamer: Clinical Journeys (Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytical Press, 2006), 191. 7. Michel de Montaigne, “On the Inconstancy of our Actions,” in The Essays: A Se­ lection, trans. M. A. Screech (Harmonds­worth: Penguin, 1993), 128, 129, 131.

Notes to Pages 215–220    257 8. Herman Melville, The Confidence Man: His Masquerade (Harmonds­worth: ­Penguin, 1990), 84–85. 9. V ­ irginia Woolf, Orlando (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1928), 308–09. 10. Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (Harmonds­worth: Penguin, 2003), 327–28. 11. William James, Princi­ples of Psy­chol­ogy Vol. 1 (New York: Dover, 1950), 294, 291, emphasis in original. 12. James, Princi­ples of Psy­chol­ogy, 294. 13. Michael Jackson, Excursions (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 102. 14. George Devereux, Ethnopsychoanalysis: Psychoanalysis and Anthropology as Complementary Frames of Reference (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 74–77. 15. Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, 254. 16. Michael Herzfeld, The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Roots of Western Bureaucracy (New York: Berg, 1992). 17. Hannah Arendt, The H ­ uman Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 95, 169. 18. I am riffing ­here on Barbara Myerhoff’s theme of “re-­membering” as a strategic means whereby a person re-­aggregates and reorders the self by summoning prior and prospective selves, and collaborating with significant ­others in generating new forms of selfhood. Barbara Myerhoff, “Life History among the El­der­ly: Per­for­mance, Visibility, and Remembering,” in A Crack in the Mirror: Reflexive Perspectives in Anthropology, ed. J. Ruby (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 99–117. More recently, Michael White has used Myerhoff’s work on re-­membering in the context of narrative therapy, mediating a client’s creative construction of alternative “multi-­voiced” modes of self-­identity. Michael White, Maps of Narrative Practice (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 136–39. 19. Bromberg, Standing in the Spaces, 68. 20. Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, 91. 21. Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, 30. 22. Norman O. Brown. Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1985). 23. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Vintage, 1989), 82. Sometimes survivor guilt finds expression in a nostalgie de la boue. Wealthy or successful individuals who come from ­humble beginnings often are beset by a sense that they do not deserve their achieved status and good fortune. Plagued by a nagging guilt that they have risen above their proper station and distanced themselves from their peers and ­family in order to gain a better life for themselves, they sometimes ­will commit some petty crime, effectively committing social suicide and plummeting back into the milieu from which they came and in which they irrevocably belong. Primo Levi dedicated his life a­ fter Auschwitz to testifying to the horror, keeping the names of the dead alive. But having completed the work, he no longer had any justification for being alive, and he killed himself. And then t­here are t­hose celebrities and sports stars who come from ­humble origins, and fund schools, hospitals, and welfare programs seeking to “give back,” to cancel the debt they feel they have incurred by rising above their class and kind.

258     Notes to Pages 221–225 24. A similar contrast may be drawn between the formality of relations within one’s own generation and relations with grandparents with whom, as with the m ­ other’s ­brother, a playful or “joking” relationship obtains. 25. George Lakoff argues that this same tension between patriarchal control and maternal care informs American po­liti­cal ideologies. While liberals emphasize the responsibility of the state to care for its citizens, conservatives emphasize the state’s responsibility to protect the country and the status quo. George Lakoff, Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know that Liberals D ­ on’t (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 62–63. See, also, Ghassan Hage, “The Spatial Imaginary of National Practices: Dwelling-­ Domesticating/Being-­Exterminating,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 14 (1996): 463–85. 26. Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno, “Something’s Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing,” in Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Lit­er­a­ture, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), 1–17. Jean-­Paul Sartre, The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psy­chol­ogy of the Imagination, trans. Jonathan Webber and revised by Arlette Elkaïm Sartre (London: Routledge, 2004). 27. Philippe Rospabé, “Don Archaïque et Monnaie Sauvage,” in MAUSS: Ce Que Donner Vuet Dire: Don et Intéret (Paris: Éditions la Découverte, 1993), 35. Cited in David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years (New York: Melville House, 2011), 133. Graeber points out that this substitution of money for life explains why debts often are collected in the form of “bloodwealth,” or through the taking of life, or pain inflicted on the body of the debtor.

The Limitrophe 1. Michael Jackson, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Relatedness, Religiosity, and the Real (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 1. 2. “Our fields of experience have no more definite bound­aries than have our fields of view,” writes William James. “Both are fringed forever by a more that continuously develops, and that continuously supercedes them as life proceeds.” William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), 35. James’s relational view of real­ity anticipates D. W. Winnicott’s work on “transitional phenomena,” replacing notions of ontologically discrete domains like self and other, object and subject, inner and outer, sacred and secular, with the image of “transitional” or “potential” space as an indeterminate zone where vari­ous ways of behaving, thinking, speaking, and feeling are called forth from a common pool, combining and permuting in ever-­changing ways, depending on who is interacting and what is at stake. See D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Real­ ity (Harmonds­worth: Penguin, 1974). Also relevant to this theorizing is Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “subjective in-­between.” Hannah Arendt, The H ­ uman Condition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1958), 182–84). See also, Karl Jaspers’s notion of Grenzsituationen (limit situations) which, by contrast with altagsituationen (everyday situations) “possess finality” and are like walls “which we butt against, against which we founder” (Karl Jaspers, Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. by Edith Ehrlich, Leonard H, Ehrlich, and George B. Pepper (New York: Humanity Books, 2000), 97.

Notes to Pages 225–239    259 3. John Dewey, Experience and Nature (New York: Dover), 44. 4. John Dewey, Experience and Nature, 43–44. 5. William James, The Va­ri­e­ties of Religious Experience: A Study in ­Human Nature (New York: Signet, 1958), 386. ­There are profound similarities between James’s notion of “the more” and Jaspers’s notion of “the Encompassing” (das Umgreifende). Karl Jaspers, Reason and Existenz, trans. William Earle (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1997). 6. The Kuranko term for a diviner is bolomefelne (literally “hand-­on-­looker”) and covers anyone who manipulates or “lays down” vari­ous objects—­pebbles, cowries, kola nuts—in order to “see” what kind of sacrifice a client should make to avert misfortune or ensure an improvement in his or her lot. Muslim diviners (called moris or alphas in Krio) use techniques from consulting the Qu’ran to mirror-­gazing, water-­gazing, astrology, and oneiromancy. 7. Unlike George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s prototype theory that posits that any concept, no ­matter how capacious, can be understood through a par­tic­u­lar example (e.g., chair for the concept of furniture), fuzzy prototype theory is concerned with concepts that are so indeterminate that no empirical example can convey the full spectrum of their potential meanings. See Dirk Geeraerts, Paradigm and Paradox: Explorations into a Paradigmatic Theory of Meaning and its Epistemological Background (Leuven: Univeritarie Pers, 1985).

On the Work and Writing of Ethnography 1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-­Philosophicus, trans. Luciano Bazzocchi (London: Anthem Press, 2021), 17. 2. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: HarperCollins, 1962), 51–55. 3. Nancy Scheper-­Hughes, Preface to the 1982 paperback edition of Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics: M ­ ental Illness in Rural Ireland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), xviii. 4. From an interview with a local in­for­mant. Cited by Michael Viney, “The Yank in the Corner,” The Irish Times, August 6, 1983. 5. Joan Didion, Slouching t­ oward Bethlehem (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968). 6. Nancy Scheper-­Hughes, “Ire in Ireland,” Ethnography 1, no. 1 (2000), 117–40, (120, 127). 7. Scheper-­Hughes, Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics, 311. 8. Scheper-Hughes, Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics. 9. Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (London: Marion Boyars, 2009). 10. The Kuranko term sundan connotes “guest” or “stranger” and echoes comparable terms in African languages. 11. Weston La Barre, The Ghost Dance: Origins of Religion (New York: Dell, 1972), 52. 12. Paul Ricoeur, Living Up To Death, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 17. 13. George Devereux, From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences (The Hague: Mouton, 1967), xvi–­xvii.

26 0    Notes to Pages 239–241 14. Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1989). Don Ihde, “Scientific Visualism,” in Readings in the Philosophy of Technology, ed. David M. Kaplan (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), 469–86. 15. Heidegger, Being and Time, 98, emphasis in original. 16. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-­Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1974), 73. 17. Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having, trans. Katharine Farrer (Boston: Beacon Press, 1951), 100. 18. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 5. 19. For an ethnographic demonstration of ­these princi­ple, see “The Man who Turned into an Elephant,” in Michael Jackson, Paths T ­ oward a Clearing: Radical Empricism and Ethnographic Inquiry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 102–18.

Index

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Commission, 159 Aboriginal Australians: author’s experience with, 150–51; author’s welfare board work with, 35–42; child abductions of, 160, 163; Dreaming, 152–58, 225; Kuku-­Yalanji, 159–68, 253n1, 253n2; Piddington’s work with, 16–18; Warlpiri, 151–58. See also Australia Aboriginal Welfare Board, 35–42 abuse, 159–61 “The Abuse of the Killig Word” (Ferenke), 113 adaptability, 219–20 alcohol, 218–19 Alice in Wonderland (Carroll), 31–32 Allegories of the Wilderness (Jackson), 110, 115 American culture, 84–85 Anthropocene, as term, 172 anthropology, as discipline, xii–­xiii, 16–17, 123, 234–35

Anthropology through the Looking Glass (Herzfeld), 140 Aotearoa. See New Zealand Apollo moon landings, 84 Arendt, Hannah, 26, 176, 193, 255n8 arson incident, 29–32 At Home in the World (Jackson), 150–51 Auckland University, 29–32 Australia, 224; Canberra, 135, 138, 139, 149, 158. See also Aboriginal Australians Australian National Research Committee, 18 Australian National University, 103, 127–28, 135 autobiography, as genre, xi–­xii, 144, 252n8 Baluba, 59, 64 Bamago Mission, 160 Bambara, 150, 162 Barawa (Jackson), 123, 124, 206 Il Barone Rampante (Calvino), 6 Baxter, James K., 21–22, 27

262    Index bear witness, 44 Belgian colonialism, 52, 58 Benjamin, Walter, 64 bimba che, 199 Blyton, Enid, 6 bolomefelne, 259n6. See also divination Boserup, Rasmus Alenius, 179 The B ­ ottle Imp (Stevenson), 140 Bourdieu, Pierre, 172 British colonialism: in Australia, 8; in Sierra Leone, 70, 73, 184, 247n1 Bromberg, Philip, 219, 255n6 Brown, Norman O., 220 Burnside, James, 46 butterfly collecting, 53–54 Cambodia, 58 Camus, Albert, 98 Canberra, Australia, 135, 138, 139, 149, 158 Cape York, Australia, 159–68 Cendrars, Blaise, 44–45, 47, 64 chiasm, 105, 249n4 chieftancy rule, 111–12 child abductions, government, 160, 163 Childe, Vere Gordon, 245n12 ­children’s lit­er­a­ture, 6–7 China Camp, Australia, 163–65 Chris­tian­ity, 62 Cinderella, 105–6 citizenship, 176 Civil Defence Force Wives, W ­ idows, and War Orphans Development Proj­ect, 188–89 climate change anxiety, 171–72 collectivity, 168 colonization: in Congo, 52, 55, 58; in New ­Zealand, 7–8, 64–65; in Sierra Leone, 69–70, 73–74, 247n1. See also land dispossession; racism; vio­lence and warfare common humanity, 48–49 Congo, 51–59, 62–63 conjunctivitis epidemic, 84 Conrad, Joseph, 53, 57, 58 cybernetics, 95, 97–98, 143, 250n1 Dankawali, Sierra Leone, 76–81 Devereux, George, 103–5, 106–8, 216, 239 Devisch, René, 144–46 Dewey, John, 225 diamond mining, 194

Didion, Joan, 178, 235 Dinka, 173–74 disease epidemic, 84 dispossession, 159–63. See also vio­lence and warfare divination, 90–93, 228–32, 259n6. See also djinn djinn: about, 76; Bockarie and, 91–92; Islam and, 247n2; Kome, 117–21; in Kuranko story, 125–26; powers of, 74, 82–83, 97; reciprocity and, 77–78; Sira and, 228–32. See also divination; ritualization doing/being done, 158, 192–93, 254n7 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 14, 96, 139 Dreaming, 152–58, 225. See also Aboriginal Australians dreams, 200–201 Drowned and the Saved (Levi), 220 Due lodge, 249n3 Eiland, Howard, 179 Elder Dempster Com­pany, 94, 95 Ellenberger, Henri, 256n2 emotive be­hav­ior, 174 ­England, 46–49 En­glish language, xiii entropy, 97–98 equipmentality, 239–40 Escape from Freedom (Fromm), 12 Esperanto, 47, 48 ethnography, as genre, xii–­xiii, 127, 139–40, 234–42 Fabish ­family, 5 fadenye, 200 ­family relationships, 79–80 farming, 198–99 fate, 24, 74, 158, 169, 188, 204–5 Firawa, Sierra Leone, 82–93, 116–22, 136–38, 225–32 fire lighting, 238, 239 “The Fire of Life” (Rorty), 133 Firth, Raymond, 18 Fisher, Peter, 163–66 Fofana, Mohammed, 74 folktales, 97–98, 105–6; Fox and Jaguar story, 247n3; Hare and Hyena story, 78–79, 80; hippo and mosquito story, 52; hyena and thief story, 124–26

Index   263 Fortes, Meyer, 98, 99–100 Foucault, Michel, 143, 144 Fox and Jaguar story, 247n3. See also folktales Franca, Roberto, 219–20, 221–22 France, 43–45 Freeman, Derek, 103 French language, xiii Freud, Sigmund, 143 friendship vs. kinship, 115 From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences (Devereux), 103 Gandhi, Mahatma, 63 Gbenye, Christophe, 58 The Genealogical Imagination (Jackson), 226 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, 214 ghosts, 166–67 Gladwin, Herman, 22–24 Glover, Denis, 27 gold mining, 254n2 Goodgame, Lilian, 46 Goody, Jack, 98 ­Great Depression, 6 grief, 135, 136 Grossman, David, 178–79 Gubba, as term, 35, 246n1 Gu­ha, Ranajit, 135, 140 Guibert, Hervé, 143 The Gutenberg Galaxy (McLuhan), 64 Habitat, Economy, and Society (Forde), 10 Hare and Hyena story, 78–79. See also folktales Harvard University, 223 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 53, 57, 58, 246n1 The Heart of the M ­ atter (Greene), 187 Heidegger, Martin, 133, 146, 233, 239–40 Herzfeld, Michael, 140, 146, 218 hippo and mosquito story, 52. See also folktales Hitler Youth, 197 Hoare, “Mad” Mike, 55 homesickness, 160, 165, 199, 201, 210 L’Homme Foudroyé (Cendrars), 47 Hongi’s Bluff, New Zealand, 4 Horace, 51 hospitality, 234–36 Howes, David, 247n5 The H ­ uman Condition (Arendt), 26, 177

Husserl, Edmund, xiii hyena and thief story, 124–26. See also folktales indebtedness, 220, 221, 257n23, 258n27 India, 49, 134 Indiana, United States, 149–58 Indiana University, 223 Indiana University Press, 146 Inglewood, New Zealand, 4–5, 7 initiation rites, 111, 124–25, 126, 249n3 An Introduction to Social Anthropology (Piddington), 16 Ireland, 234 Islam, 74, 112–13, 199–200, 247n2, 259n6 Iyahalina, 250n5 Jackson, Emily, 11, 47, 246n3 Jackson, Fritz, 13–14 Jackson, Heidi Aisetta, 92, 94, 122, 175, 187, 224 Jackson, Joshua, 226 Jackson, Katherine, 150–51, 159, 175, 176, 223 Jackson, Pauline: death of, 132, 135; dissertation of, 89, 95; meeting author, 63–64; pregnancy and childbirth of, 89–90, 92, 95; teaching by, 109–10, 117 Jacobsen-­Widding, Anita, 141 Jakobson, Roman, 176 James, William, 93, 146, 192, 216, 258n2 Jangala, Joe, 155–56 Japaljarri, Billy, 153 Japaljarri, Clancy, 153–54, 155 Japangardi, Wilson, 153 Jawaiyi, Paddy Kuwumji, 224 “Juggling their Abstract Ideas” (Jackson), 28 Jungarrayi, Frank, 156 Jupurrurla, Lumi, 154 Jupurrurla, Pepper, 156 Kamara, Lansana, 71–73 Kapuakore, 9 Karadjeri, 17–18 Kargbo, Moré Musa, 77, 247n1 Kargbo, Nonkowa, 78–80 Kawharu, Hugh, 100 Keats, John, 98 Keita, Leba, 193 Kennedy, John F., 48 Khmer Rouge, 58

26 4    Index Kidd, Sue Monk, 122 Kimberley, Australia, 17, 19, 224 Kingsley, Mary, 136 knowledge, 236 kola, 77 Kome, 117–21 Kone, Kassim, 150, 252n3 Konkouris, Theodore, 252n3 Koroma, Keti Ferenke, 110–15, 119, 193 Koroma, Patrick, 193 Koroma, Sewa Magba (“Small S. B.”), 184–85, 187, 189–92, 196–210, 218–19, 226–32, 255n1, 256n5 Koroma, Sheku Magba, II (chief), 190–91, 199 Koroma, Sulimani, 124 Kuklinski ­family, 5 Kuku-­Yalanji, 159–68, 253n1, 253n2. See also Aboriginal Australians Kuranko: author’s fieldwork with, 76, 80–93; folktales of, 78–80, 97–98, 106, 124–26, 247n3; imaginary of, 96–98; on knowledge, 236; po­liti­cal and social order of, 110–15; social identity of, 220–21, 237–38 La Barre, Weston, 236, 237 Laing, Alexander Gordon, 123 Lama Lama, 160 land dispossession, 7–8, 159–63. See also colonization Latin (language), xiii lawa, 152 Leach, Edmund, 98 Léopold (king), 52, 58 Levi, Primo, 168, 220 Lévi-­Strauss, Claude, 59, 64, 176, 256n2 Liberia, 255n9 Lienhardt, Godfrey, 173–74 Life Within Limits (Jackson), 226 limitrophe and limitrophus, 225 literacy, 64–65, 98 The Livingstone Falls (Jackson), 53 log­os endiathetos, 176 log­os vs. phenomena, 223 London, ­England, 196–212 Lowry, Bob, 27–29, 32–33 lucid indifference, 98 Macdonald, Gerard, 20 Madness and Civilization (Foucault), 143

Mainwaring, Olga, 38–40 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 16, 19, 245n3 Mallett, Marie, 4 Manawatu, New Zealand, 109 Mandarin Oriental ­Hotel, London, 203 Mankind So Far (Howell), 10, 11 Mansaray, Aisetta Sanfan, 187 Mansaray, Unisa, 194 Māori, 7–9, 63, 64–65, 236, 244n5. See also New Zealand Marah, Isata, 210–12 Marah, Mamina Yegbe, 69–74 Marah, Noah: about, 69, 75, 197; author’s reunion with, 186; on djinn, 76; on palaver, 88–89; personal experience during the war, 186–87, 194; relationships and, 77, 79, 86–87 Marah, Sewa Bockarie “S. B.,” 124, 136, 183–85, 188–89, 197, 199 Marah, Sira, 226–30 Marah, Tala Sewa, 85–86, 116 Marcel, Gabriel, 240 marginality, 107 marriage practices, 165 martyrdom, 43–44 The Martyrdom of Man (Reade), 28, 124 Marx, Karl, 96 Mason, R. A. K., 21–22 Massim, 250n5 mate, 152 Māui Wiremu Pita Naera Pōmare, 9 McCahon, Colin, 22 medicine, 116–19, 229 Melville, Herman, 215 Merleau-­Ponty, Maurice, 6, 121, 126, 176 mi­grant imaginary, 216, 217, 219–22. See also refugees migration, 196–97, 202–5, 214. See also London, ­England Miller, Henry, 44, 45 Miller, James, 144 Minima Ethnographica (Jackson), 176 mining, 163, 165, 194, 254n2 misogyny, 114 miyalu, 158 moa, 5 Montaigne, Michel, 215 moon landings, 84 Morgan, Abel and Doll, 37–38 Mr. Mole’s Tunnel (Collins), 7

Index   265 Mulamila, Emmanuel, 219 multiplicity, 214–19, 256n6 Mulvaney, D. J., 18 Museum Tusculanum Press, 179 National War Memorial Museum, Australia, 158 negative capability, 98 New Zealand, 4–5, 7, 100; Māori and Te Ao Māori, 7–9, 63, 64–65, 236, 244n5 Ngāti Maru, 7–8 Nietz­sche, Friedrich, 126 Notes from Under­ground (Dostoevsky), 14, 96 nyenne. See djinn Oedipal proj­ect, 220 Olbar, Mabel, 160, 163, 170 Olbar ­family, 159–60, 253n2 ONUC, 50, 52–58, 61 orality, 64–65, 98. See also singing Orsi, Robert, 223 Orwell, George, xiii, 63 Ouedraego, Ibrahim, 217, 218 Overland, Mary, 46 palaver, 88–89 palka, 152 The Palm at the End of the Mind (Jackson), 223–24 Passing Parade (Nesbitt), 10 Paths T ­ oward a Clearing (Jackson), 146 Peckham, ­England, 202, 208, 256n4 pedantic comedy, 172 penumbra, 133, 166–67, 225 The P ­ eople of the Abyss (London), 46 perception, 6 Pessoa, Fernando, 216, 217, 220 phenomenology as descriptive showing, 233 Piddington, Ralph O’Reilly, 16–19, 245n12 pirrlipa, 158 plasticity, 214–16 pluralism, 214–15. See also multiplicity poetry, 13, 15, 21–22, 24–25, 133 The Politics of Storytelling (Jackson), 179 Pol Pot, 58 porcupine parable, 162 Poultryman’s Cooperative, 13, 14 pragmatism, 131, 132, 241 Pre­sent State of Pompeii (Lowry), 150

prototype theory, 259n7 psychoanalysis, 104–5 racism, 8, 16–18, 211–12. See also colonization rationality vs. rituality, 93, 158, 169–70, 171–72 Reade, William Winwood, 28, 123–24 reciprocity, 77–78, 80, 126, 236 reflection, 6 reflexivity, 104–5 refugees, 176–77, 189, 213–14. See also migration relationality, 176 relationships: of author, 54–55, 63–64; within ­family, 79–80; Noah Marah and, 77, 79, 86–87 religion, 223–24 re-­membering, 257n18 Revolutionary United Front. See RUF Reynolds-­White, Susan, 179 Ricoeur, Paul, 238 rituality vs. rationality, 93, 158, 169–70, 171–72 ritualization, 169–71, 173–74, 225. See also djinn Rorty, Richard, 127–34 Rospabé, Philippe, 221 Roth, Walter, 160 RUF (Revolutionary United Front), 189–95, 254n3, 255n9 Saint Genet (Sartre), 96 Salt, McGinty, 160, 163, 170 Sanoh, Saran Salia, 116–22 Sartre, Jean-­Paul, 96, 172, 174, 248n2 Savage Club, 8 Scheper-­Hughes, Nancy, 234–35 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 161–62, 172 scientific inquiry, 10 Search for a Method (Sartre), 96 Sebald, W. G., 243n3 self-­states, 214–19, 256n6 shame, 4, 46, 62, 157, 163, 210, 234, 244n3 shapeshifting, 214–16 She (Rider-­Haggard), 64 Sierra Leone, 65; author’s return in 1982 to, 135–36; author’s return in 2002 to, 183–84; civil war in, 150, 183, 184, 189–95, 196, 198, 255n9; colonization of, 69–70, 73–74, 247n1; Dankawali, 76–81; Firawa, 82–93, 116–22, 136–38, 225–32; Freetown, 210–11

26 6   Index silence, 4, 244n3 Simbas, 55–56 Simmel, Georg, 140 singing, 226–27, 247n5. See also orality social distance, 160, 161–63, 166, 167–68 social drinking, 218–19 social production of indifference, 218 Socrates, 64 Sofas, 78, 85, 247n1 sorcery, 169–71 Stewart, Lew, 14 storminess, 170 storms, 169–71, 253nn1–2 storytelling, 64, 110, 115, 166, 176–79. See also folktales Stout Research Centre, 176 structural linguistics, 105 Les Structures Élémentaires de la Parenté (Lévi-­Strauss), 59 subjective-­in-­between, 178 suffering, 43–44 suicide, 4 survivor guilt, 201, 220, 257n23 Suzuki, David, 172 Sweden, 141–46 Tamaboros, 189–90, 192, 254n1 tapu, 236 Taranaki Land War (1860), 7 Taranaki Maunga, 244n5 Taranaki tribes, 7–9 Tawhai, Te Pakaka, 109 Taylor, Denis, 20, 21 Te Āti Awa, 7–8, 9 Te Mira Ngeru, Edward, 8 Te Rangi Hīroa, 9 terrorism, 193, 196–97, 205. See also vio­lence and warfare Te Whiti-­o-­Rongomai, 8 tin mining, 163, 165 Tongariro, 244n5 Tonkinson, Bob, 135 Tractatus Logico-­Philosophicus (Wittgenstein), 233, 240 transitional phenomena, 167 Trobriand Islands, 247n5 Trotsky, Leon, 128

Trotter, J. K., 124 truth, 255n2 Tshombe, Moïse, 55 tupu, 152, 252n4 typography, 27–28 uncertainty princi­ple, 104 ­Under the Net (Murdoch), 49 UN Operation in the Congo (ONUC), 50, 52–58, 61 Uppsala University, 141–46 Van Gennep, Arnold, 139 Van Gogh, Vincent, 43–44 vio­lence and warfare, 254n7, 255nn8–10; in Sierra Leone, 150, 183, 184, 189–95, 196, 198, 255n9; terrorism, 196–97, 205. See also colonization; dispossession La Voix du Sang (Magritte), 6 Von Linné, Carl, 144 Wairarapa High School teacher, 64 Waitangi Tribunal, 8 wajawaja- ­mani, 154 war. See vio­lence and warfare Warlpiri, 151–58. See also Aboriginal Australians Watt, Ian, 98 Welfare Office for the Homeless (­England), 46–47 Winnicott, Donald, 167 Wiremu Kīngi Te Rangitāke, 7–8 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 233, 240, 252n8 Woolf, V ­ irginia, 215–16 worlds within and worlds without, 153, 196, 225 World War 1, 47, 70 World War II, 4 Wujal Mission, 160, 163 Wularé, Bockarie, 90–93, 206, 208, 227–30, 255n3 ya yugo mé, 201–2 “Yeh Kaisi Ajab” (song), 49–50 yimbe drum, 124–25 yoga, 128, 140 Young, Michael, 103, 250n5 Yunkuyirrarnu site, 153–58