Journeys to the Edge: In the Footsteps of an Anthropologist

To the Very Edges of Our World

To the Very Edges of Our World Have you ever wondered what it feels like to be an anthropologist plunging into an exotic culture? The delights and terrors may be hard to imagine. Let me share some stories about the eighteen months I spent doing fieldwork with hunting bands in the tropical forest of India. These include accounts of dancing under a full moon in a circle of smiling faces, hunting wild boars with spears, coping with elephant herds and army ants, and waking at dawn to find a venomous snake zipped into my seven-by-seven-foot tent. How different my stories are about fourteen and a half months spent with native Canadian hunters in Canada’s northern forest. In that research I faced a bitter arctic winter in the wilds, 105 miles from a road. Yet, again, there are delights as well as terrors to describe. Not every project has involved extreme challenges . I have tales to tell of less worrying exploration in the cities of two of Asia’s great civilizations, Hindu India and Japan—with their refined sculpture, music, and perspectives on the world. And even that is not the full extent of the travels I am ready to recount. Imagine what it would be like to take your family to such places. Much of the time, my own family, including children, lived with me in the field, or nearby. These family experiences are part of what I wish to share. Along the way, I met one of the world’s most peaceful and egalitarian peoples, hunters who live quietly near the equator in a thorn forest. I also witnessed spirit possession at night, two magical fights with the strangest apparent consequences, temperatures cold enough to turn 3 heating oil into jelly on a stormy winter night, and travel nightmares galore , including a family trip alone on arctic sea ice during a December vacation. The anthropologist must be game for any and all of it. Yet anthropologists are not a breed apart. Like you, many of us feel an interest in exotic ways of life when we are starting our careers, and we are likely to have a bit of an adventurous streak. But we go into the field more innocently than most suppose. While well prepared for our scienti fic routines, we are seldom ready for a fraction of the personal pitfalls and challenges that await us. The time we spend in the field entails almost constant improvising. Unlike TV’s Angus MacGyver and Hollywood ’s Indiana Jones or Lara Croft, we find ourselves muddling through crises as most ordinary people tend to; the last thing you can expect from us is an aptitude for crafting instant solutions to problems on the run, as the screen adventurers do. It tends to be lucky breaks as much as wits that see us through. One thing anthropologists can be sure of is that, when strangers learn our occupation at parties or in airport lounges, they start pressing for details of our travels. They ask how we find the opportunities and the funding. “Don’t tell me people pay you to do that!” they say, with awe. They wonder what motivates us to study folk who dwell in jungles, tropical villages, ancient cities, deserts, and arctic wilderness. Inevitably, their main question will be, “What is such work really like?” Rare is the anthropologist who is not eventually turned by these inquirers into a storyteller. Given the situations that most of us have faced in our travels, and being scientists, few of us find the need or inclination to do more than describe memorable events as we, ourselves, experienced them. What I offer you here are just such plain, factual tales. I think you will find they need no artificial embellishment. Beginnings Although I was born in England and attended high school in a New Zealand Maori (Polynesian) community, in western Canada, and in Kansas, the tale of my anthropological ventures really begins in Philadelphia , where I attended graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania . Throughout my undergraduate years, I enjoyed reading about hunters and gatherers—people such as Polar Eskimos, Pygmies,Australian Abori4 Journeys to the Edge gines, the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, Japan’s Ainu, or the denizens of the Kalahari Desert. When offered the chance, I wrote papers on them. Yet I thought of this as a romantic, personal interest, something...