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5: Getting Involved
- University of Washington Press
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5 Getting Involved Administering my little household, sailing my boat, fishing, roaming the hills along the coast, and sampling the food and drink of generous neighbors sometimes threatened to fill up all my time. My small family quickly settled into a fairly normal routine. The children loved the ocean and played endlessly in the clean sand of empty beaches. Their favorite place, facing west towards China, was an inaccessible indentation in the cliffs at high tide. But as the water ebbed, white sand emerged, and we could get to it by scrambling over wet rocks. Here the beach sloped so gradually that the children could wade out more than 150 yards and still keep their heads above water. Kyung Sook made friends with girls her own age at the well below our house while washing clothes and gossiping. My sister-in-law, Hi Young, had a little more trouble fitting in because of her anomalous status. As an unmarried young woman from outside the village her prestige was low, but as a university graduate and close relative of an illustrious foreigner, Hi Young had a unique, even glamorous aura that was completely outside the villagers’ normal system of rank. One well-to-do family in the Big Hamlet startled us by proposing that she marry their eldest son. Each morning, while eating breakfast on my sunlit, breezy veranda, I had the renewed feeling of having somehow stepped into a scroll of a Ming landscape . There I was, a tiny figure sitting cross-legged, looking impassively out across the water to the misty mountains in the distance. Peasants with straw hats toiled in rice fields below, while junks moved with immense deliberation across the bay beyond. Probably the only truly appropriate activity in this setting would have been to get drunk and write poetry, but it was too early in the day. The big difference between my life and the abstract, two-dimensional world of Chinese landscapes was that I was required at some point to get down off my Getting Involved 75 veranda and become involved with those people in the distance who worked in the fields and on the boats. There was a stack of empty notebooks in my “study” waiting to be filled with analytical observations concerning village behavior patterns and social organization. Even though I had numerous encounters every day with all sorts of people and wrote everything up in detail in my field notes, it was becoming impossible to pretend that this easygoing existence had much to do with systematic ethnographic investigation. I had to get to work. Anthropologists, particularly English social anthropologists with extensive colonial experience in Africa and Oceania, have written elaborate guides to help the beginner get started with fieldwork. I had read some of these in graduate school, admiring the experienced ethnologist’s perseverance and resourcefulness under trying circumstances. I remembered their useful instructions for mapping a village, systematically recording the grammatical structure of a previously unstudied, never-written language, uncovering the murky secrets of kinship structure, avoiding malaria, and developing strategems for politely refusing nasty native delicacies. But these guides were not much help. I had an excellent US Army topographic map derived from aerial photographs taken during the Korean War that indicated every house, as well as paths, rice fields, forest land, but also ten-foot contour lines. Korean grammar and phonemics had already been scientifically analyzed by superbly talented linguists when England was just emerging from the Dark Ages. Lineage and family organization were of such obsessive interest to nearly all elderly males in Sŏkp’o that it was hard to get them to talk about anything else. And the one time I got really sick, the cause was not mosquitoes but ghosts. As far as native delicacies were concerned, aside from the surfeit of rice, getting enough to eat was our biggest challenge during the first few weeks in my new house. When I had lived by myself in Teacher Yi’s guest room, food had never been a problem. On the contrary, I was fed too well. Now we were trying, not very successfully, to keep house on our own. Knowing that Sŏkp’o was very poor, we brought our own rice with us when we all came down on the boat together from Inch’ŏn. We had counted, however, on being able to buy all sorts of local products, especially greens, eggs, and seafood. After all, I had plenty of money, while the villagers...