Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Possessed prose

2010; Wiley; Volume: 16; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1467-9655.2010.01660.x

1467-9655

Jeremy MacClancy,

Asian Studies and History

Barley, Nigel . Island of demons . 388 pp . Singapore : Monsoon , 2009 . $15.95 (paper ) Beatty, Andrew . A shadow falls: in the heart of Java . xvii, 318 pp . London : Faber , 2009 . £12.95 (paper ) There is no popular anthropology. There are popular anthropologies, an enriching variety of genres as long and well established as their academic counterparts. That variety includes personal (and fictionalized) fieldwork accounts; accessible works broaching questions of the day; introductions to the discipline for the non-academic; ethnographic satires of the reader's home community; and so on. This diversity of formats is a powerful boon to anthropology, and needs to be recognized as such. For popularizers, by definition, spread the word; they are the ones who disseminate information and learned opinion formulated inside ivory towers. At the same time, they broadcast word of the discipline's existence and help to fill our ranks with hopeful recruits. As it is, there are still many who say they had not heard of social anthropology before stumbling into university. Imagine how much greater still their number would be without the Colin Turnbulls and Carlos Castañedas of our enclosed world! Dutiful, successful popularizers, for the sake of spinning a buck, bear fruit from the groves of Academe. They tell us what some members within the public suspected but had not the knowledge to state authoritatively. In this way, the more reformist of popularizers can dovetail personal and public interests to advance key debates of their day. In the late nineteenth century, they argued against the dictates of religion; in the early twentieth century, they campaigned against racism and cultural absolutism. Yet Talal Asad famously criticized his predecessors for their ambivalent embrace of colonialism. He couldn't have said the same of some of the popularizers. In the late nineteenth century, Rider Haggard got his mate Andrew Lang to provide him with the ethnographic information to make his portrayal of Africans more credible: he did not want to perpetuate the more unthinking stereotypes of difference. In 1890, Adolf Bandelier prefaced his Native American novel The delight makers with the comment: I was prompted to perform the work by a conviction that however scientific works may tell the truth about the Indian, they exercise always a limited influence upon the general public; and to that public, in our country as well as abroad, the Indian has remained as good as unknown. By clothing sober facts in the garb of romance I have hoped to make the ‘Truth about the Pueblo Indians’ more accessible and perhaps more acceptable to the public in general (Bandelier 1971 [1890]: xxiii). My list of examples could go on. Instead, I turn to two recent, very different examples from this range of genres. Walter Spies is among the brightest coloured of all those who have flitted about anthropology's flame. Born into the avant-garde zone of Moscovite high society, he continued in the same milieu first in Berlin, then Dresden, finally creating his own version in 1930s Bali. By turns choreographer, composer, ethnographer, photographer, ethnomusicologist, he is above all remembered as a painter and Balinese host of the global glitterati (Noël Coward, Charlie Chaplin, the Woolworths heiress Barbara Hutton, among others) and leading intellectuals (Miguel Covarrubias, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Jane Belo, etc.) of his time. Thanks to his studies, pictures, and entertaining of others, he played a key role in popularizing Bali as a Shangri-La in the South Seas. To his critics, Spies reduced local life, presenting it in over-simple, exoticizing terms, which mainly helped sell his primitivist paintings. They also charge him with gearing local artists towards a dulcified style palatable to Western buyers; ossifying one particular dance routine at the expense of others; and helping produce a successful 1932 film, Island of demons, which packaged local life in the distorting frame of a dramatic thriller. At this rate, Spies's palette can appear almost as dark as it is bright. Barley's Island of demons is his tale of Spies's time in Bali, as remembered by Rudolf Bonnet, a fellow expatriate, painter, homosexual, and founder of a Balinese school of painting. They lived alongside for most of the 1930s. Barley's Spies, though enamoured of Indonesia, is no bug-eyed innocent abroad. In fact, Barley presents him as a knowing manipulator of the Europeans and Balinese dignitaries around him. Ready to deploy his charm to keep his lifestyle afloat, he is even prepared to bed a wealthy German female, suspecting rightly there'll be a cheque by the pillow when he wakes. As a portrait of the modern artist at work, Barley's one of Spies rings cynically true. Of course the author makes hay, at combine-harvester rates, with the multiple ironies of local multicultural manners. To locals, life is a hardworked aesthetic exercise in keeping demons at bay; to ignorant visitors, it appears a simple pleasure-paradise; to aesthete residents, it is a real-life Eden threatened by colonial barbarians who act in demonic ways; to the Dutch colonialists, it is a space to be capitalized and protected from the corrupting ways of promiscuous pederasts, sexual devils in European guise. And over all gathers the ever-darkening cloud of impending world war. However the main goal Barley wants to score here is aimed at academics. For much of his book, he presents Spies and Bonnet as a contrastive pair to the anthropologists they befriend and assist. We lecturers might teach budding researchers that fieldworkers are meant to be culturally sensitive, but Barley's Margaret Mead is an over-ambitious, arrogant workaholic who fails to see beyond her methodological frame: a sin all the worse now that her approach seems so deeply out of date. Pointing out subjects for Bateson to shoot with his camera, she comes across as more Salem witchfinder than culturally aware guest. The huddle of Mead, Jane Belo, and Beryl de Zoete is made to appear more like a vicious circle of back-biting gossips than as a productive team of broadminded intellectuals. Barley's point here is just how very much fieldworkers can miss. Pompous purveyors, or even prisoners of their own categories, these much-travelled but hidebound academics fail to appreciate cultural dimensions beyond their stunted emotional reach. When Covarrubias intones the stilted terms of Anthrospeak, Spies replies in the emic. When Mead chides Spies for exoticizing, our man pleads back, ‘I think that what you are saying Margaret, is that it is wrong to fall in love’ (p. 312). Towards the end, Spies and his Balinese jailor dance, collide, collapse, laugh, hug: Bonnet reflects, ‘It was a flow of sheer common humanity, without barriers of culture or language, a moment in which there was no room for misunderstanding’ (p. 333). Barley leaves it patent he could not say the same of Mead or any of her band. And that, in many ways, is the signature tone of this book. Passage after passage is devoted to homoerotic paeans of male Balinese bodies; the joys and fears of homosexual loving in steamy, tropical settings; the understanding that can come from coupling across cultures. How little the intellectuals grasp! This erotic tone is underlined, at times overly, by a (usually imaginative) series of sexual double entendres. One gay film director is so poor ‘he hadn't two extras to rub together’ (p. 176); a freshly dead bed-swerver is remembered as guilty of ‘few sins of commission, maybe a few light ones of emission’ (p. 195); the cat-loving, sexually active Jane Belo is known by her indigenous neighbours as ‘Mrs Pussy’ (p. 293). The book is Barley's best novel yet. His phrases are well turned, his style light. He might make knowing jokes, as a nod to the learned, but none are so recondite as to make an unconfident reader feel like a gatecrasher to a private party for the over-educated. He is frank in the foreword that he plays fast and loose with the historical record: in his book Mead, not Bateson, is the one who beds Belo. Barley's targets are well chosen; most of his darts strike close to the bull's eye. He reminds us how blinkered fieldworkers can be; that profound cross-cultural understanding is not confined to ethnographers. Indeed, the opposite: the articulate book-smart may be confining themselves. Barley is now prematurely retired, and spends half each year on Bali. At various times when reading this book, it struck me as a sharp swansong by a practitioner making his exit. To me, it was sincerely difficult not to see Islands of demons as a parting volley by one now free to state what he thinks of his former discipline and its pretensions. Listen to the closing reaction of Bonnet, now an old man, to a doctoral student pumping him for data on Spies: The anthropologists, having rejected Walter as a sadly naïve eccentric, all those years ago, were now feasting on him cannibalistically, stripping the flesh from his bones, boiling those bones down to gluey prose. They vaguely perceived him as the answer to something but could still not see the question (p. 386). My only carp is the printing. For, in a novel as clever and playful as this, it can be difficult to distinguish wordsmithing and sexual innuendo from typos. Could any reader (Google is no help) please enlighten me: what might ‘omnifutuant (p. 276), ‘towert’ (p. 296), and ‘cryptoterpischoreanism’ (p. 230) mean? Or are they a departing comment by Barley on anal academics who'll turn to the dictionaries to see what they mean, if they even exist? A further example: when Spies, on the piano, ‘improvised some gentle bespoke variations on Balinese themes, cressing the keys breaststrokelike’ (p. 297), is that a misprint of ‘caressing’ or a novel gay term I don't understand? Beatty's book is the latest example of a classic genre: the personal fieldwork account, the ‘I was there; this is what happened to me, and around me’. At their best, these accounts are a winning combination of evocative scene-setting, persuasive portraits of locals, telling anecdotes, and the odd bigger issue or three. Good fieldwork tales humanize the seemingly different, whether tribals in a village or the homeless in a city; expose the logic in the apparently irrational; detail the obstacles, trials, and mistakes of middle-class whites who want to live like locals, so enabling readers to identify with the protagonist. They may also uncover grand truths in the smallest of settlements, and at the same time underline the existence of exceptions to every generalization. For even in tiny groups variety is maintained. Not everyone thinks the same, nor will they. At their worst, however, fieldwork accounts are vainglorious exercises which perpetuate ignorant stereotypes, or even invent new ones. Think of Turnbull'sThe mountain people (1973), a well-crafted, bestselling, gross misrepresentation which, when exposed as such, destroyed his reputation. As the Ik said, were he to return there, they would ask him to eat his own faeces. No such bad luck for Beatty. In A shadow falls, he comes across as a dedicated, sensitive fieldworker, aware of his partisan inclinations. But they are so seductively presented it is very hard not to sympathize, most of the time. In 1992, Beatty and his young family went to live in a Javanese village for eighteen months. In 1995, they returned for a further year. The place he selected was a particular blend of religious traditions, from a long-rooted Javanese mysticism to a newly imported Islamic orthodoxy. At the start of their stay, tolerance, mutual respect, and a pervasive concern for village harmony continued to hold sway. By its end, an imposing, puritanical version of Islam was gaining more and more adherents. Years before they came, villagers had killed villagers in the name of creed. By their departure, fatal encounter had returned, this time in the name of witch-killing. Harmony was only ever achieved against a backdrop, however near, however far, of the threat of violence. Beatty is frank in his dislike of the shift towards puritanism. He details, to his evident distaste, his conversations, run-ins, and arguments with proponents of the new way. With similar exactitude and by way of contrast, he also dwells on the mundane syncretism and principled pragmatism of those in the ever-shrinking middle-ground. Patent pride of place goes to the disquisitions and dialogues of his more mystically oriented friends; that is a philosophy he can chime with. Perhaps his favourite image is that of the tiger spirit, who can possess in a seemingly random fashion almost any villager and turn him or her, under trance, into the literal mouthpiece of ancestral protest. Even reformist Muslims kneel and submit to his chastisement. For the moment at least, the author suggests, the spirits can still hold sway. The words of the possessed retain their power. At times I wondered whether Beatty's lack of empathy for the proselytizers wasn't loading his prose. But then I remembered the umpteen biographies and autobiographies of missionaries to Melanesia that I had to read years ago for my doctorate, and guessed he probably was not exaggerating. Throughout, Beatty shows himself a gifted writer, with a graceful turn of phrase, which made me pause on many pages. For example, dispensing with ‘the brittle certainties of the zealots’ (p. 154), local animists practise ‘a decorous informality, a fresh-air faith’ (p. 128). Better, ‘How could you be a hard-liner when nothing was straight?’ (p. 241) His verbal dexterity is all the more a surprise and delight as there is little suggestion of it in his earlier, very well-regarded pair of fine-grained academic ethnographies. He is now writing an account of his doctoral fieldwork among a once-headhunting group on Nias. I look forward to it greatly. In sum, both these books are exemplars of their genres. Both are magisterial demonstrations of conveying, beyond the conventionally ethnographic, other ways of life. Each is a real pleasure to read through, each a provocation to thought. Barley made me ponder, to what extent are his anthropologists caricatures? To what extent can a rigorous anthropology portray the almost ineffable? Beatty forced me to think, which side would I have been on, if I had been forced to choose? Could I have resisted the seductive charms of a gentle mysticism? I am sure my former supervisor Rodney Needham would have recommended both books to research students, for perusing off-duty, on vacation, or ‘in the bath, dear boy’. And yet, isn't print almost passé? Aren't physical books close to their sell-by date? The rise and rise of the Net, e-books, iPads, and all the other associated technology is fundamentally altering very fast the once dichotomous terms of the academic and the popular. Formerly inaccessible tomes are today available to anyone, right now, anywhere on the connected globe. Surfers can follow academics' discussions on their blogs, and start their own user-communities, developing their own scholarly, learned style. Three examples. First, I read a very informed, international discussion about Beatty's book, with his own considered comments to his critics, by keying into indonesiamatters.com. Second, today the descendants of the once-studied can post their protests and generate debate over past, partial representations of their forefathers (see, for instance, some Lepchas' outrage at Gorer's depiction of their grandparents' supposed sexual practices). Third, an anthropologist's almost-dead words can be revitalized in surprising ways by unexpected groups. For instance, New Age on-liners have revived the anthropologist John Layard's once-forgotten, Jungian analyses of Celtic mythology. Thanks to their tech-savvy efforts, Layard's words live again. Anyone, so long as they have access to a computer and the Net, can check out and contribute to any of these continuing conversations. In other words, the very terms of the academic and the popular are being steadily re-moulded, in an evolving process we need to trace, and participate in. Who knows what new varieties will arise? Jeremy MacClancy writes on the history of anthropology and popular anthropologies. At present he is finishing a book on the mutual evolution of the academic and the popular in British anthropology.