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3 Jefferson’s Ardor Every discipline has its own mythology—those stories we tell about ourselves and our origins. For anthropologists, the myth inevitably harkens to one of our illustrious ancestors, Bronislaw Malinowski, who because of the accident of World War One, spent years in the Trobriand Islands, where he was technically a foreign detainee under the watchful eye of the English but was in fact living with and studying his “natives.” Before Malinowski, anthropologists mounted expeditions in which groups of scientists with differing kinds of expertise traveled through native territory, making maps, gathering artifacts, transcribing myths, collecting vernacular terms. There was a certain inevitable distancing in such research. The natives—like the artifacts, the maps, the word lists—were more like objects than subjects. Malinowski’s chance confinement in the Trobriands made for a very different kind of research. As he later wrote in the book that quickly became one of the canonical works of anthropology, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, “The ethnographer’s magic” entailed living “without other white men right among the natives.” The goal of such fieldwork was to transform “a strange, sometimes unpleasant, sometimes intensely interesting adventure” into a systematic analysis of a society. To do this the anthropologist had not only to learn the local vernacular and eschew scheduled interviews in favor of spontaneous conversations, but also to take advantage of serendipitous events: “it must be emphasized that whenever anything dramatic or important occurs it is essential to investigate it at the very moment of happening.” Since Malinowski, we have always recognized that good anthropology owes a lot to serendipity. You go to the field with a particular set of questions in mind. You plot out, via various applications for funding, what the contours of your research will be. When you get there, it is not as you expected, or you are confronted with a dramatic event that calls out to you to be interpreted, understood, explained. Before my wife and I went to live with the Lauje, we had already decided that our research would focus on local religious beliefs 57 Anthropology and Egalitarianism 58 and practices and how they were related to the Lauje position in a global system of capitalist exchange. We already knew that Lauje could not, according to religious injunctions, sell foodstuffs, but that they participated in the cash economy by selling shallots and garlic. However, we did not know anything about the community-wide curing ceremony known as momasoro, with its focus on a Lauje king whose office had not been officially recognized by the Dutch in the colonial era or later by the Indonesians. In fact, that rite had been banned by local government authorities because they said it was a violation of Islamic principles. Knowing nothing about the momasoro, which was at once a political and a religious ceremony, we did not anticipate how much of our work would concern the fraught relationship between local religious practices and state-sanctioned Islam. But because this relationship was a chief preoccupation among Lauje, and because this preoccupation was so clearly distilled in the momasoro, that is what we focused on as well. Fieldwork depends on serendipity. You know what you want to study before you go. When you get there, you must always be prepared that something else may become more significant. When I went to Monticello, I was interested in the way public history sites not only represent our nation’s past—they are embodiments of our egalitarian heritage—but how a visit to such a site is also an enactment of egalitarian values in the present. Monticello, as museum and tourist destination, was a Geertzian model of and model for reality. The unexpected serendipity had to do with the controversy surrounding Sally Hemings’ and Thomas Jefferson’s sexual liaison and specifically with a dramatic attack on Monticello by a group of African Americans who used this controversy as a platform to talk about racial inequality. Race was not at all on my mind when I went to Monticello. Once I had spent a few months there it was almost all I could think about. The equality question had become, because of the serendipity of events, the race question. The race question bothered those who work at Monticello because the museum , like most American heritage sites, wanted to be broadly inclusive. Yet in the early 1990s, like almost all plantation sites, most visitors were white and a very few were black. Part of the reason for this...

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