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Invitation
- Fordham University Press
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i n v i t a t i o n Undang:: ‘‘A call to be present’’ (Indonesian) Invite 2. To incite (English) When I began my first work as an anthropologist, I was lost but I did not know it. Living in Sumatra, I learned the national language and the local language; I established myself and my wife in a beautiful wooden house set on stilts in a shady village in the midst of rice fields. All this far away from everything. At that time, in 1962, this was the best anthropological practice. I had a thesis to write. I thought I was doing what was expected of me. In fact, I was merely waiting for something to happen. In the course of two years, enough did happen for me to write a thesis.. What I learned from that, however, was that my own passivity and bewilderment might, in the end, meet the expectations of others, but precisely in so doing it seemed to me that I had not pursed the aim of anthropology as I understood it vigorously enough. I should have tried harder to find something outside of expectations, as I naively put it to myself. I had not made enough of bewilderment; I had merely let it resolve itself.. The next time I had a chance, I returned to Indonesia, but to Java rather than Sumatra. I had nothing to lose, at that point, by remaining bewildered. I wanted to become actively confused rather than passively so (something easier to do than one might imagine) in order to wander away from what I had been taught. To learn Javanese I had to stop speaking Indonesian, the national language, or I would make no progress. This made me more or less mute. But it left me open to look. There is much to see in Java, and it seemed to be offered to me. I thought I should take advantage of it. There seemed to me to be numerous invitations. Most of them were, in fact, beyond my expectations. I did not know where they might take me. I decided 1 2 Invitation never to refuse an invitation, even when it led me to places I did not like. In fact, I thought to myself, I should learn to like what I dislike. I could, if not decompose myself, at least in that way put ‘‘myself’’ aside. Here, I thought, was the way to find bewilderment. All the more so since initially, at least, it evaded the need to speak. I could be present, fulfill the invitation, but without mobilizing ‘‘myself.’’ Who, exactly, was invited by such invitations was never clear. Liking what I disliked, or what at least I did not like, might be a simple reversal and thus not take me as far away from myself as I had hoped. This way of thinking (or not thinking) seemed to have reached its limit after some years of practice. I was not so sure, however, when, in 2007, I returned to the Indonesian province where I had worked in the 1960s. It was here that the tsunami struck hardest. On a wall in the city of Meulaboh, my two companions and I came across a mural. It showed an arch on which was written ‘‘Weel Come to Tsunami Area,’’ in a sort of English. It pictured aid arriving in planes and helicopters and trucks. Lined up on the shore was the welcoming committee, waving to whomever might see the mural. Amongst them, full committee members, it seemed, were hollow figures, mere outlines , apparently representing the victims of the disaster. The dead were amongst those who welcomed us. I thought, ‘‘Such an invitation goes further than I imagined.’’ Welcomed by the dead, I could, finally (if I can use that word), be beyond myself. The essays that follow show the results of this enterprise I have undertaken for some time now. The ‘‘objects’’ of anthropology have revealed themselves through the following of invitations rather than out of the aims and methods of my discipline as they have been codified. But these objects remain within the original aims of anthropology, which developed in Europe out of self-doubt brought on by interest in the other. The objections are not at all to ethnography as such but to the reformulation of the notion of differences on which ethnography depends. I set these out in the last piece. Other essays describe places where I found myself but was without...