Fieldwork: A Novel (32 page)

Martiya was very small behind the podium, but she spoke with a wonderful authority.

Martiya continued: Some of the
tsi
were associated with places, like the
tsi
who dominated the mountain on which Dan Loi was situated, the
tsi
who ruled the village, and the
tsi
who lived on the big rock behind the village. Almost every place had its own proprietary
tsi
. Other
tsi
were as-

sociated with natural phenomena like thunder or rain; and still other
tsi
with biological entities, like rice, trees, various animals, and even human beings. The
tsi
associated with human beings the Dyalo called
ts'aw-wo
—a word which Martiya translated as "souls," and such
tsi
might be associated with men and women both living and dead. The latter category is what the occidental refers to as a ghost.

One of the consequences and fundamental underpinnings of the Dyalo spiritual system was the odd and provocative idea that, to the Dyalo,
there were no accidents
.

Martiya's thinking on these matters was substantially influenced by a rereading of the great English ethnographer E. E. Evans-Pritchard and his studies of witchcraft among the Azande of the Sudan. The peculiarity of Azande thinking, Evans-Pritchard argued, was that, like the Dyalo, the Azande had no notion of bad luck; rather, they ascribed
all
ill fortune to witchcraft, from the most trivial, a stubbed toe, to the most grave, a sulky wife or death. Whatever went wrong, went wrong because a witch had cursed the action. The Dyalo were not great believers in witchcraft—although witches did exist among the Dyalo—but the Dyalo, like the Azande, were unable to admit the possibility of accident, simple bad luck. Indeed, there was no word for "luck" in Dyalo. If an otherwise inexplicable bad thing happened, it happened almost always because a spirit was angry; if a spirit was angry, it was because somebody had angered a spirit.

Things that to the occidental mind were clearly bad fortune or happenstance, the Dyalo automatically interpreted within a chain of spiritual cause and effect. In Martiya's village, a young woman stumbled and fell into a cooking fire, burning herself badly. A man in the village raised pigs; a pig wandered off into the forest and was lost. A village woman, an expert weaver, produced a garment that snagged on a branch and unraveled. In all three cases, what Martiya would have called bad luck, or misfortune, the Dyalo called the work of the spirits. Why did a young woman known for her grace stumble at precisely that spot and fall into the fire? To fall at another spot would have been benign. A spirit seized her and pushed her. Hundreds of pigs were raised in the village; every now and then a pig would be lost in the forest. But they were almost always found again. Why not this one? A venturesome spirit took the pig's soul. The weaver was a woman of the highest skill. Her garments from twenty years ago were still in use. Why not this one? She had been distracted by a spirit. The young woman who stumbled was thought to have angered the fire spirit by eating corn near the fire pit. The owner of the pig erred by allowing the pig to wander in the vicinity of the Old Grandfather shrine: it was inevitable that something would go wrong. The weaver's mother had been careless, failing to present the household spirits with their breakfast.

"Think about this for a minute! Just think!" Martiya said. "If you think that everything that goes wrong in the world is caused by some bad spirit—and if you think these bad spirits are all around you—think how nervous you'd be all the time. You can ask the spirits to do this or that, but you can never be sure that they'll listen. Think how different your mental world would be if you thought that even moving a rock in your taro patch could anger the spirit who might make your taro come in badly, or give your daughter an incurable illness, or just put your wife in a really bad mood for a month. The fact that the Dyalo live in this world, surrounded by invisible enemies everywhere—and they do it with so much good humor and such grace—they're the bravest people I know."

Karen recalled the quiet that came over the room when Martiya was done speaking. Then a woman in the audience raised her hand. It was clear from her straggly appearance that she was a Berkeley resident rather than a member of the department, and this woman explained that she had come to the lecture attracted by the word "spiritual" on the flyer. She asked Martiya how her time with the Dyalo had affected her personal spiritual practice.

"My personal spiritual practice?"

"Yes, how you relate personally to the Goddess and other spirits."

Martiya thought about the question a moment, and then said, "I learned that I liked to slit the pig's throat and watch him bleed."

The little woman blanched.

To Martiya's intense surprise and displeasure, the scholarly community of the University of California at Berkeley had not, in fact, been waiting with bated breath for the results of Martiya van der Leun's expedition to Dan Loi. The frustrating thing was not that this was a big blow to her ego—on the contrary: she was smart and sensitive enough to realize that anthropologists had come home from expeditions to the farthest corners of the globe every single week since Malinowski had come home from the Trobriands; and that another graduate student coming back was not grounds for a university-wide day of rejoicing and celebration. No, what really frustrated Martiya was that she still didn't understand the Dyalo, not at all, and all the time she was in Dan Loi, her Curiosity had been growing day by day, and she had imagined that when she got back to Berkeley she'd be able to put all her field notes out on the table with some really smart people, and she'd finally be able to figure out all the things about the Dyalo that she couldn't figure out in the field.

She had a thousand questions. She didn't know why she had been moved into Farts-a-Lot's house and not some other. She didn't know what happened to the shaman when he entered his trance. She didn't really understand why the Vampire clans at the foot of the hill were poor; and she didn't really understand why it was so shameful for husband and wife to plant rice together in the rice fields. She had given Lai-Ma her running shoes, and it took almost a week to convince Lai-Ma that she hadn't meant to offend her. She didn't know why Lai-Ma had been offended. Most of all, she wanted to understand the
dyal
. She wanted to know why the Dyalo engaged in this complicated ritual to plant rice, and what they were thinking when they engaged in it. She thought that there were answers to all these questions, which literally kept her awake at night, but she didn't know them. She didn't even know what
kind
of answer would satisfy her. She only knew that for all of her hard work in Dan Loi, she hadn't yet grasped the Dyalo point of view, understood the Dyalo relation to life, or realized the
Dyalo
vision of the
Dyalo
world.

So that was the first thing that really bothered Martiya: all the time in Dan Loi, whenever things got tough, really tough, she had thought to herself that she was just the sharp end of the steel spear of scholarship, and that when she got back to Berkeley, all the other scholars and anthropologists and students of human behavior would help her understand the things she couldn't understand herself. Instead, Martiya found herself positively
shunned
in the department for having visited a preliterate society. The winds of anthropological fashion had shifted while Martiya was in the field, and preliterates were out: the hot young anthropologists were heading off to study South African diamond mines and Swedish ceramic factories and the corporate headquarters of AT&T. That's where the excitement was, and when Martiya tried to interest her colleagues in a rousing discussion of magical rites preceding the rice planting, she met with a palpable lack of interest. Instead, what they talked about in the graduate lounge and at the dinner parties and in the coffee shops were tenure and jobs and grants and absurd theories by trendy French
philosophes
. There was a time when nothing had thrilled her more than department gossip and the pitched battles between the various academic camps. Now, back from three years in Dan Loi, these debates bored her to death, and she could not make a connection between the generalities of theory and people like Lai-Ma, George Washington, and Farts-a-Lot.

One evening several months after coming back from the field, she went out on a date with another of her classmates. He was just finishing up his thesis, which dealt with the influence of the Catholic Church in a village in southern Mexico. She had read a draft of his thesis, which argued that the villagers had incorporated traditional magical practices into the Catholic liturgy. The facts that her classmate had assembled were fascinating, and reading the thesis, Martiya had been able to imagine the hot, dusty plain of Chiapas, the whitewashed adobe church, and the ecstatic peasants in tears carrying the cross through the village just as their forefathers many generations before had carried the icons of Aztec gods. But when Martiya asked her friend just what the natives
felt
as they carried the cross, it was clear from his stream of jargon and theory that he had no deeper insight than Martiya. She felt as if she were talking to a blind member of the Department of Art History, who could recount every detail of Caravaggio's life and describe every symbol in every painting, but who had never actually seen the canvases or felt the power of his art. The encounter left her increasingly sure that what she was looking for was at odds with what the Department of Anthropology could offer, at odds with what the
discipline
of anthropology could offer.

Martiya invited Karen for coffee, and the two women talked. It was an irony, Martiya said: eighty years after Bronislaw Malinowski told all the anthropologists to get off the veranda of the mission house and go and live with the natives, the only people in all the world who seemed to share Martiya's obsessive interest and fascination with the Dyalo were a family of missionaries huddled in Chiang Mai, waiting for the world to end.

Uh-huh
, said Karen, who years later would feel extremely guilty about her response.

Karen spent a little more than two weeks in Dan Loi.

She followed Martiya's routine. In the early mornings, Martiya took Karen around the village, stopping in at one hut after another.
This
was how fieldwork ought to be done, Karen thought: patiently, over years. A little Dyalo village was a microcosm of the world, and every hut had its drama: in one hut, an old woman lay dying; in another, a young girl, frightened by the prospect of moving to her new husband's village, sobbed at her mother's side; and in a third, a husband teased his wife, the couple laughing. Karen had never seen this side of Martiya before, when in those dark huts that powerful, passionate personality diminished itself and a calm tenderness stole over her flashing eyes. It was
inspiring
, Karen said, all that intelligence and curiosity focused on this tiny village. Martiya still bubbled over with questions, even after all those years in the mountains.

One sleepy morning, Karen decided to lie in bed a little longer as Martiya went out about her rounds. Martiya's hut was not what Karen had expected. She had remembered Martiya's epistolary descriptions of dreary and primitive Dyalo huts, but on her return to Thailand, Martiya had built for herself a new house, simple but comfortable, two light and airy rooms under a high-arched ceiling. There was a bedroom, and now, in the early morning, Karen lay in bed and watched the sunlight filter in through square windows to fall in long white rectangles across the bamboo-tiled floor. The view extended out over the whole of the valley, light green mountains darkening in the distance, each bend in the mountains suggesting to Karen intrigue and mystery. For a few moments, Karen imagined staying with Martiya here in the mountains: getting someone to sell the Ford Pinto and wire her the money, not even bothering to resign her lectureship, just staying, building herself a hut, if not in this village then in the next one over.

When she was awake, Karen went into the other room of the hut, where Martiya kept her desk. This room, which Martiya called her study, stared out at the village itself. Long silk
tai-lue
tapestries, one red with blue, one yellow with green, one black with silver, hung along three walls; the other wall was dominated by a floor-to-ceiling bookcase. Martiya, Karen said, read voraciously, and every month her father sent her books from California. On Martiya's desk, there were three lilies in a glass bowl.

Karen was seized by a sudden desire to snoop, and she began to look through the volumes of hard-sided notebooks on the bookshelf. Martiya seemed to be writing a book. On the flyleaf of one of the notebooks was written a title, "The Dyalo Way of Life," and from what Karen could tell, the book was a memoir of daily life with the Dyalo. Karen thought of Colin Turnbull's famous memoir of life with the Pygmies,
The Forest People
. Karen read Martiya's memoir all through the morning, and when she was finished, she was convinced that the completed manuscript, still only a fragment, would be one of those rare literary documents that created for the reader the life of a whole people. She had spent several days now in a Dyalo village, but nothing that she had seen made the Dyalo come alive like Martiya's account. Hearing Martiya's footsteps on the terrace, Karen returned the notebook to its proper place and went with her friend to make lunch in the cooking hut.

After lunch, every afternoon in the heat of the day, Martiya and Karen went swimming. There was a small clear pool at the base of a steep waterfall an hour's hike from the village. Although the pool was small, the water was deep, and local legend held that at the very bottom of the pool was a rock in the shape of the seated Buddha. To touch this rock was a means of making merit, of ensuring oneself in however small a degree a more favorable reincarnation. Karen was a strong swimmer; even so, she was never able to swim down deep enough to find the rock and examine it. But Martiya claimed to be able to do it. The trick, Martiya said, was to dive into the pool from the rock ledge that overhung the waters. Martiya dove and disappeared into the darkness, and Karen became slightly nervous waiting for her friend as the waters smoothed over and became calm, with Martiya still someplace deep underneath. Only when the waters were perfectly still did Martiya burst up out of the water, panting for breath, the sun reflecting off her dark hair and lean, flat face.