The Innocent Anthropologist Read online

  The Innocent Anthropologist

  Notes from a Mud Hut

  NIGEL BARLEY

  Contents

  Title Page

  Map

  1 The Reason Why

  2 Be Prepared

  3 To the Hills

  4 Honi soit qui Malinowski

  5 Take me to your Leader

  6 Is the Sky Clear for You?

  7 ‘O Cameroon, O Cradle of our Fathers’

  8 Rock Bottom

  9 Ex Africa semper quid nasty

  10 Rites and Wrongs

  11 The Wet and the Dry

  12 First and Last Fruits

  13 An English Alien

  About the Author

  Copyright

  1

  The Reason Why

  ‘Why not go on fieldwork then?’ The question was posed by a colleague at the end of a somewhat bibulous review of the state of the art of anthropology, university teaching and academic life in general. The review had not been favourable. Like Mrs Hubbard we had taken stock and found the cupboard was bare.

  My story was a familiar one. I had been raised in the institutions of higher education and drifted more by chance than design into teaching. University life in England is based upon a number of untenable assumptions. First, it is assumed that if you are a good student you will be good at research. If you are good at research, you will be good at teaching. If you are good at teaching, you will wish to go on fieldwork. None of these connections holds. Excellent students do appalling research. Superb academic performers, whose names are never out of the trade journals, provide lectures of such stultifying tedium that students vote with their feet and disappear like dew in the African sun. The profession is full of devoted fieldworkers, skins leathery from exposure to torrid climes, teeth permanently gritted from years of dealing with natives, who have little or nothing of interest to say in an academic discipline. The whole subject of fieldwork, we effete ‘new anthropologists’ with our doctorates based on library research had decided, had been made rather too much of. Of course, older teaching staff who had seen service in the days of empire and ‘just sort of picked up anthropology in the line of business’ had a vested interest in maintaining the cult of the god to whom they were high priests. They had damn well suffered the trials and privations of swamp and jungle and no young whippersnapper should take a short cut.

  Whenever pressed in debate over some point of theory or metaphysics, they would shake their heads sadly, draw languidly on their pipes or stroke their beards and mutter something about ‘real people’ not fitting the clear abstractions of those who ‘had never done fieldwork’. They evinced genuine pity for these deprived fellows but the matter was perfectly clear to them. They had been there, they had seen. There was nothing more to say.

  After several years teaching the received orthodoxies in a department of anthropology of no particular academic distinction, the time was perhaps right for change. It was far from easy to determine whether doing fieldwork was one of the unpleasant tasks like national service that might quite properly be suffered in silence, or whether it was one of the ‘perks’ of the business that a man should feel grateful for. Colleagues’ opinions were of no real help. Most had had plenty of time to enfold their experiences in a rosy glow of romantic adventure. The fact of past fieldwork is something of a licence to be a bore. One’s friends and relatives are a trifle disappointed if every subject from doing the washing to treating the common cold is not larded with a sauce of ethnographic reminiscence. Old stories become old friends in themselves and soon nothing but the good times of fieldwork remain bar a few awkward islands of unreduced misery that cannot be forgotten or submerged in the general euphoria. For example, I had a colleague who claimed to have had the most marvellous time with agreeable, smiling natives bringing gifts of fruit and flowers by the basketful. But the inner chronology of the stay was provided by statements of the form, ‘That happened after I got food poisoning’ or ‘I wasn’t too steady on my feet at that time since I still had the festering boil under my toes’. One suspected that the whole business was rather like those cheery war reminiscences that make one regret, against all better knowledge, not having been alive at the time.

  But perhaps there was something to be gained by the experience. Tutorials would never drag again. When faced with the obligation to talk about a subject on which naturally ignorant, I should be able to reach into my ragbag of ethnographic anecdotes, as my teachers had done in their day, and produce some long-winded story that would keep my pupils quiet for up to ten minutes. A whole range of techniques for squashing people also becomes available. The memory of one occasion, as ever, returns. I was at a conference, dull even by normal standards, making polite conversation with several of my betters who included two very grim Australian ethnographers. As if by some prearranged sign, the others withdrew leaving me starkly exposed to the antipodean horrors. After several minutes of silence, I tentatively suggested a drink in the hope of breaking the ice. The female ethnographer gathered her face into a vile grimace. ‘Nah!’ she cried, mouth twisted with disgust, ‘we’ve seen too much of it in the bush.’ Fieldwork has the great benefit of making such phrases available; they are quite properly denied to lesser mortals.

  It is the use of such turns of phrase, I suspect, that has conferred that valuable aura of eccentricity upon the really rather dull denizens of anthropology departments. Anthropologists have been very lucky in their public image. Sociologists, it is well known, are humourless, left-wing purveyors of nonsense or truisms. But anthropologists have sat at the feet of Hindu saints, they have viewed strange gods and filthy rites, they have boldly gone where no man has gone before. The reek of sanctity and divine irrelevance hangs about them. They are saints of the English church of eccentricity for its own sake. The chance of joining them was not to be lightly rejected.

  To be fair, there was also the possibility to be considered – slight though it might be – that fieldwork would make some great contribution to human knowledge. On the face of it this seemed rather unlikely. Fact-gathering in itself has few charms. Anthropology is not short of facts but simply of anything intelligent to do with them. The notion of ‘butterfly-collecting’ is familiar within the discipline and serves to characterize the endeavours of many ethnographers and failed interpreters, who simply amass neat examples of curious customs arranged by area, or alphabetically, or by evolutionary order, whatever the current style may be.

  Frankly, it seemed then, and seems now, that the justification for fieldwork, as for all academic endeavour, lies not in one’s contribution to the collectivity but rather in some selfish development. Like monastic life, academic research is really all about the perfection of one’s own soul. This may well serve some wider purpose but is not to be judged on those grounds alone. This view will doubtless not sit well either with conservative academics or those who see themselves as a revolutionary force. Both are afflicted by a dreadful piety, a preening self-importance that refuses to believe the world is not hanging on their every word.

  For this reason, outrage was quite general within the discipline when Malinowski, the ‘inventor’ of fieldwork, was revealed as a rather human and flawed vessel in his diaries. Even he had been infuriated and bored by ‘blacks’, tormented by lust and isolation. It was widely felt that the diaries should have been suppressed, that they were a ‘disservice to the subject’, that they were gratuitously iconoclastic and would lead to all manner of disrespect for the elders.

  This reveals a rather intolerable hypocrisy on the part of the purveyors of the art and should be remedied at every opportunity. It is with such thoughts in mind that I undertake the writing of this account of my own endeavours. There will be not
hing new here for those who have undergone the same experience but I shall dwell precisely on those aspects that the normal ethnographic monograph punctuates out as ‘not anthropology’, ‘irrelevant’, ‘unimportant’. In my professional work I have always been more attracted by the higher levels of abstraction and theoretical speculation since it is only by progress here that the overall possibility of interpretation moves closer. Keeping one’s eyes firmly fixed on the ground is the surest way of ensuring an uninteresting and partial view. This book may, then, serve to redress the balance and show students and, it is hoped, non-anthropologists, how the finished monograph relates to the ‘bleeding chunks’ of raw reality on which it is based, and convey something of the feel of fieldwork to those who have not had that experience.

  The idea of ‘doing fieldwork’ was now planted in my mind and the seed would grow as such things always do. ‘Why should I want to do fieldwork?’ I asked a colleague. He made an expansive gesture that I recognized as belonging to his lecturing repertoire. It was used on occasions where students asked questions like ‘What is truth?’ or ‘How do you spell “cat”?’ Enough had been said.

  It is a polite fiction that anthropologists are consumed with a fire to live among one single people on the face of this planet whom they believe to be guardians of a secret of great relevance to the rest of the human race, and to suggest they work elsewhere is like suggesting they might have married anyone but their unique spiritual soul-mate. In my own case, my thesis had been written on Old English material in published and manuscript form. As I put it somewhat pretentiously then, I ‘travelled in time, not space’. The phrase mollified my examiners, who nevertheless felt obliged to wag their fingers at me and warn me to work henceforth in more conventional geographic areas. I thus had no loyalties to any particular continent and, not having specialized at the undergraduate level, I was not repelled by any particular locale. Judging personally on the basis of completed work as the reflection of the people studied rather than as the image of those who had studied them, Africa seemed by far the dullest continent. After a great start with Evans-Pritchard the work tailed rapidly downhill into pseudosociology and descent systems as functioning wholes, rallying a little as it was dragged screaming into the consideration of ‘difficulf’ topics such as prescriptive marriage and symbolism, but basically remaining true to its ‘plain and sensible’ persona. African anthropology must be one of the few areas where dull pedestrianism is advanced seriously as a claim to merit. South America looked fascinating but I knew from colleagues that working there was notoriously difficult politically; moreover, everyone seemed to be working in the shadow of Lévi-Strauss and the French anthropologists. Oceania would be a soft option in terms of conditions of life but somehow all Oceanic studies ended up looking much the same. Aborigines seemed to have the monopoly on fiendishly complex marriage systems. India would be a splendid location but to do anything sensible would require sitting down for five years to learn enough languages to make any contribution at all. The Far East? I would go away and look up what I could.

  Such evaluations may, indeed, be qualified as superficial, but many of my contemporaries, and subsequently students, have operated precisely along these lines. After all, most research starts off with a vague apprehension of interest in a certain area of study and rare indeed is the man who knows what his thesis is about before he has written it.

  I spent the next few months noting stories of government harassment in the Indonesian area interspersed with general news stories of atrocities and destruction all over Asia. In the end, I tended rather towards Portuguese Timor. I knew well enough that I was interested in cultural symbolism and belief systems rather than in politics or urban socialization and Timor seemed to show all sorts of interesting possibilities, with its various kingdoms and prescriptive alliance systems, where marriage with a certain kinclass was required. It seems to be a rule of thumb that neat symbolic systems often turn up most clearly where such phenomena occur. I was about to settle down and work out a project when the newspapers suddenly became full of stories of civil war, genocide and invasion. Whites apparently went in fear of their lives, starvation loomed on the horizon. The trip was off.

  Rapid consultations with contacts in the trade suggested that I would do better to return to Africa where permission for research was less difficult and conditions more stable. I was directed towards the Bubis of Fernando Po. For those who have not come across Fernando Po, let me explain that it is an island off the coast of West Africa, a former Spanish colony and administered as part of Equatorial Guinea. I began to sniff around the literature. Everyone was highly uncomplimentary about Fernando Po and the Bubis. The British scorned it as a place ‘where one is likely in late afternoon to encounter a sloppy Spanish official still in his pyjamas’, and dwelt lovingly on the fetid heat and numerous diseases to which it offered sanctuary. Nineteenth-century German explorers dismissed the natives as degenerate. Mary Kingsley noted the island as affording the prospect of a large heap of coal. Richard Burton, it appeared, had amazed everyone by actually going there and surviving. All in all a depressing prospect. Luckily for me, as I thought at the time, the local dictator began a policy of massacring his opponents, using the term in a very loose sense. I could no longer go to Fernando Po.

  At this point another of my colleagues helped by pointing my attention to a strangely neglected group of mountain pagans in North Cameroon. Thus I was introduced to the Dowayos who were to become ‘my’ people in love and hate from then on. Feeling a little like a ball in a pinball machine, I set off in quest of the Dowayos.

  A search through the International African Institute index yielded a number of references by French colonial administrators plus one or two by passing travellers. Enough had been written to show that they were interesting: they had, for example, skull cults, circumcision, a whistle language, mummies and a reputation for being recalcitrant and savage. My colleague was able to give me the names of a missionary who had lived among them for years and of a couple of linguists who were working on the language, and to point the Dowayos out on a map. It seemed I was in business.

  I began work at once, having now totally forgotten the problem of whether I wanted to go at all. The two obstacles were to get the money to go and the permission to conduct research.

  Had I realized at the outset that it would take two years of constant effort to get both together at the same time, I might have returned to the problem of whether it was all worth while. But fortunately my ignorance stood me in good stead and I began to learn the art of grovelling for funds.

  2

  Be Prepared

  I assumed the first time round that what was necessary was to show a grant-giving body why proposed research was interesting/new/important. Nothing could be further from the truth. When an inexperienced ethnographer pushes this aspect of his research, a grant-giving committee begins, perhaps on the basis of sound experience, to wonder how the research is standard/normal/a continuation of previous work. By stressing the vast theoretical implications of my little bit of research for the continued existence of anthropology, I was putting myself in the position of a man extolling the quality of the roast beef to a party of vegetarians. Everything I did made matters worse. In due time I received a letter telling me that the committee were concerned about the completion of the basic ethnography of the area, the brute collecting of facts. I rewrote my application in moronic detail. This time the committee were worried about the fact that I would be doing research on an unknown group. I rewrote; this time, they let it go. I received my funding. First hurdle down.

  The problem of permission to conduct research now became paramount, since time and money were leaking away. I had written to the relevant ministry in Cameroon about a year before and been promised an answer in due course. I wrote again and was requested to submit detailed descriptions of the project. I did so. I waited. Finally, when I had all but given up hope, I received permission to apply for a visa and proceed to Yaounde, the capit
al. I confess with some embarrassment to old Africa hands that I naïvely assumed this to be the end of my contacts with bureaucracy. I suppose that, at that stage, I pictured the administration as a group of informal ‘chaps’ doing the small amount of administration necessary with good-natured common sense. In a country of seven million inhabitants, most of it would surely be done man-to-man in shirtsleeves as in the old British Empire days. The idiom would be one of solid understatement with everyone turning his hand to what needed to be done.

  I might have learnt all sorts of lessons from the Cameroonian Embassy, but I did not. Instead I put all conclusions in abeyance, in best anthropological fashion, waiting until all the evidence was in. Having telephoned the Embassy to make sure they were open, I turned up with all relevant documents, feeling rather proud of my efficiency in having the two necessary passport photos. The Embassy was shut. Prolonged ringing raised a grudging voice that refused to speak anything but French and told me to come back tomorrow.

  I returned the next day and managed to get as far as the hall. Here I was informed that the relevant gentleman was absent and it was not known when he would return. I received the impression that asking for a visa was a strange and unusual thing. One useful fact, however, was gleaned: I could not apply for a visa without a valid return air ticket. I went to the airline office.

  Air Cameroon regarded all customers as a confounded nuisance. I did not realize at that time that this was the way all government monopolies are run in Cameroon and put it down to language difficulties. They were suspicious of cheques, cash was inconvenient. I ended up paying for my ticket in French travellers’ cheques. What other people do I cannot imagine. (One sound rule for the beginner: always deal with exotic airlines through a British travel agent. They will take payment in normal forms of currency.) While there, I inquired about trains between Yaounde and N’gaoundere, my next stop up country. I was sternly informed that this was an airline office, not a railway office, but it so happened that there was an air-conditioned train between the two. The journey took about three hours.