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- Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
Nigel Barley travels to Sulawesi in Indonesia to live among the Torajan people, known for their spectacular buildings and elaborate ancestor cults. At last he is following his own advice to students, to do their anthropological fieldwork 'somewhere where the inhabitants are beautiful, friendly, where you would like the food.' Barley explores the island on horseback and in buses jammed to the gunnels, and meets priests faithful to the old animist rituals. With his customary wit, he takes the reader deep into this complex but adaptable society. Reversing the habitual patterns of anthropology, Barley then invites four Torajan carvers to London to build a traditional rice barn at the Museum of Mankind. The observer becomes the observed. Now, it is Barley's turn to explain the absurdities of an English city to his bemused guests, in a glorious finale to a trilogy of anthropological journeys that began with The Innocent Anthropologist.
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Not a Hazardous Sport
Misadventures of an Anthropologist in Indonesia
NIGEL BARLEY
To Din
Contents
Preface
TRADITIONALLY, ANTHROPOLOGISTS HAVE WRITTEN about other peoples in the form of academic monographs. The authors of these somewhat sere and austere volumes are omniscient and Olympian in their vision. Not only do they have a faculty of shrewd cultural insight superior to that of the ‘natives’ themselves, but they never make mistakes and they are never deceived by themselves or others. On the maps of alien culture they offer there are no dead ends. They have no emotional existence. They are never excited or depressed. Above all, they never like or dislike the people they are studying.
This is not such a monograph. It deals with first attempts to get to grips with a ‘new’ people – indeed a whole ‘new’ continent. It documents false trails and linguistic incompetences, refuted preconceptions and the deceptions practised by self and others. Above all, it trades not in generalisations, but encounters with individuals.
From the strict anthropological perspective, these encounters are vitiated by the fact that they took place not in the first local tongue of the people but in Indonesian. The Republic of Indonesia has many hundreds, if not thousands, of local languages. First approaches are therefore always through the medium of the national language, and its use is a mark of the preliminary nature of the contact involved. Such contacts – over the more than two years dealt with by this book – nevertheless turned into relationships of real personal and emotional content.
Monographs are written in reverse. They impose a spurious order on reality where everything fits. This book was written in the course of the experience it documents. A quite different work could have been constructed starting from the magnificent Torajan rice-barn that now stands in the galleries of the Museum of Mankind in London, showing how the plan to build it made ethnographic, financial and museological sense. But that is not the way it happened.
Many people helped in the project that is the matter of this book. In England, the Director and Trustees of the British Museum had the vision to finance such a speculative enterprise. Without the unflagging support and understanding of Jean Rankine and Malcolm McLeod, it could have never come to pass.
In Indonesia, thanks are due to Ibu Hariyati Soebadio of the Departemen Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan. Bapak Yoop Ave and Luther Barrung of the Departemen Parpostel – all of whom led me by the hand through the official channels that I could never have navigated without their continued good will. Bapak Yakob, Bupati of Tana Toraja, Bapak Patandianan of Sospol and Nico Pasaka were ever helpful. In Mamasa, Dr Silas Tarrupadang is owed warm thanks for his unstinting hospitality and assistance. Professor and Ibu Abbas of Hasanuddin University went out of their way to help me in a time of dire need. One anti-acknowledgement is due to Bapak W. Arlen of the Immigration Office, Ujung Pandang.
I am also grateful to H. E. Bapak Suhartoyo and Bapak Hidayat of the Indonesian Embassy in London. A special vote of thanks is due to Bapak W. Miftach, also of the Indonesian Embassy in London, for his sustained support, assistance and friendship throughout this project.
The Torajan Foundation of Jakarta – especially Bapak J. Parapak and Bapak H. Parinding – took a warm personal interest in the Torajan exhibition from its inception and acted as sponsors, as did Garuda Indonesia.
Without the cheerful friendship, assistance and understanding of Sallehuddin bin Hajji Abdullah Sani, this project would not have been conceived and could not have been executed.
Above all, thanks are due to the many ordinary Torajan men and women who took me to their hearts and aided me without thought of reward or personal convenience.
Nigel Barley
1
New Departures
‘ANTHROPOLOGY IS NOT A HAZARDOUS SPORT.’ I had always suspected that this was so but it was comforting to have it confirmed in black and white by a reputable insurance company of enduring probity. They, after all, should know such things.
The declaration was the end result of an extended correspondence conducted more in the spirit of detached concern than serious enquiry. I had insured my health for a two-month field-trip and been unwise enough to read the small print. I was not covered for nuclear attack or nationalisation by a foreign government. Even more alarming, I was covered for up to twelve months if hijacked. Free-fall parachute jumping was specifically forbidden together with ‘all other hazardous sports’. But it was now official: ‘Anthropology is not a hazardous sport.’
The equipment laid out on the bed seemed to contest the assertion. I had water-purifying tablets, remedies against two sorts of malaria, athlete’s foot, suppurating ulcers and eyelids, amoebic dysentery, hay fever, sunburn, infestation by lice and ticks, seasickness and compulsive vomiting. Only much, much later would I realise that I had forgotten the aspirins.
It was to be a stern rather than an easy trip, a last pitting of a visibly sagging frame against severe geography where everything would probably have to be carried up mountains and across ravines, a last act of physical optimism before admitting that urban life and middle age had ravaged beyond recall.
In one corner stood the new rucksack, gleaming iridescent green like the carapace of a tropical beetle. New boots glowed comfortingly beside it, exuding a promise of dry strength. Cameras had been cleaned and recalibrated. All the minor tasks had been dealt with just as a soldier cleans and oils his rifle before going into battle. Now, in pre-departure gloom, the wits were dulled, the senses muted. It was the moment for sitting on the luggage and feeling empty depression.
I have never really understood what it is that drives anthropologists off into the field. Possibly it is simply the triumph of sheer nosiness over reasonable caution, the fallibility of the human memory that denies the recollection of how uncomfortable and tedious much of field-work can be. Possibly it is the boredom of urban life, the stultifying effect of regular existence. Often departure is triggered by relatively minor occurrences that give a new slant on normal routine. I once felt tempted when a turgid report entitled ‘Applications of the Computer to Anthropology’ arrived on my desk at the precise moment I had spent forty minutes rewinding a typewriter ribbon by hand because my machine was so old that appropriate ribbons were no longer commercially available.
The point is that field-work is often an attempt by the researcher to resolve his own, very personal problems, rather than an attempt to understand other cultures. Within the profession, it is often viewed as a panacea for all ills. Broken marriage? Go and do some field-work to get back a sense of perspective. Depressed about lack of promotion? Field-work will give you something else to worry about.
But whatever the cause, ethnographers all recognise the call of the wild with the certainty that Muslims feel about the sudden, urgent need to go to Mecca.
Where to go? This time, not West Africa but somewhere fresh. Often I had been asked by students for advice on where to go for field-work. Some were driven by a relentless incubus to work on one topic alone, female circumcision or black-smithing. They were the easy ones to counsel. Others had quite simply fallen in love with a particular part of the world. They, too, were easy. Such a love affair can be as good a basis for withstanding the many trials and disappointments of ethnography as any more stern theoretical obsession. Then there was the third, most difficult group, into which I myself seemed now to fall – what a colleague had unkindly termed the SDP of anthropology – those who knew more clearly what they wanted to avoid than what they wished to seek.
When advising such as these, I had always asked something like: ‘Why don’t you go somewhere where the inhabitants are beautiful, friendly, where you would like the food and there are nice flowers?’ Often such people came back with excellent theses. Now I had to apply it to myself. West Africa was clearly excluded, but the answer came in a flash – Indonesia. I would have to make further enquiries.
I consulted an eminent Indonesianist – Dutch, of course, and therefore more English than the English with his hound’s-tooth jacket, long, elegant vowels and a Sherlock Holmes pipe. He pointed the stem of it at me.
‘You are suffering from mental menopause,’ he said, puffing roundly. ‘You need a complete change. Anthropologists always go to their first field-work site and make the hard discovery that people there are not like the people at home – in your case that the Dowayos are not like the English. But they never get it clear that all peoples are unlike each other. You will go around for years looking at everyone as if they were Dowayos. Do you have a grant?’
‘Not yet. But I can probably sort out some funding.’ (The saddest thing about academic research is that when you are young you have plenty of time but no one will give you any money. By the time you have worked a little way up the hierarchy, you can normally persuade someone to fund you but you never have enough time to do anything important.)
‘Grants are wonderful things. I have often thought that I would write a book about the gap between what grants are given for and what they are actually spent on. My car’ – he gestured through the window – ‘that is the grant to get my last book retyped. I sat up all night for six weeks and did it myself. It is not a very good car, but then it was not a very good book. I got married with a grant to enable me to study Achinese. My first daughter was a grant to allow me to visit Indonesian research facilities in Germany.’ Academics. The culture of genteel poverty.
‘You got divorced recently. Did you get a grant for that?’
‘No … That one, I paid for. But it was worth it.’
‘So where should I go?’
He puffed. ‘You will go to Sulawesi. If anyone asks why, you will explain it is because the children have pointed ears.’
‘Pointed ears? Like Mr Spock?’
‘Just so. We have him too.’
‘But why?’
He puffed smoke like an Indonesian volcano and smiled mysteriously. ‘Just go and you will see.’
I knew I was hooked. I would go to the island of Sulawesi, Indonesia, and look at the pointed ears of the children.
There may be pleasure in the remote anticipation of a journey. There is none in its immediate preparation. Injections. Should one really believe that smallpox has been ‘eradicated’? – a nice, clean, hard-edged word that was infinitely suspicious. Rabies? How likely were you to be bitten by a rabid dog? Yes, but you can catch it by being scratched by a cat or pecked by a bird. Gammaglobulin? The Americans swear by it. The British don’t believe in it. Ultimately, you make an arbitrary choice like a child grabbing a handful of sweets. How many shirts? How many pairs of socks? You never have enough to wear but always too many to carry. Cooking pots? Sleeping bags? There will be moments where both will be indispensable but are they worth the suffering involved in carrying them across Java? A review of teeth and feet, treating one’s body like a troublesome commodity in a slave market. A time to look at guidebooks and the previous works of ethnography.
Each seemed to tell a different story. Planning a route was impossible. They could not be reconciled into a unified vision. According to one, Indonesian ships were floating hell-holes, the nadir of degradation, filthy and pestilential. Another viewed them as havens of tranquillity. One traveller claimed that he had travelled tarmac roads which another traveller declared to have been cancelled. Travel books were as much works of fantasy as grant applications. My Dutchman probably wrote them. A secondary problem was that you could never be sure of the values of the writer. One man’s ‘comfortable’ was another’s ‘absurdly expensive’. In the end, the only thing to do was go and look.
There is a stage at which maps appear essential. In fact, they merely give a spurious sense of certainty that you know where you are going.
Map men are the true eccentrics of the book trade – wild-haired, glasses-pushed-up-on-forehead sort of people.
‘A map of Sulawesi? Charlie, we’ve got one here wants a map of Sulawesi.’ Charlie peered over a stack of maps at me. Apparently, they didn’t get the Sulawesi type here every day. Charlie was the glasses-pushed-down-to-tip-of-nose sort.
‘Can’t do you one. We’d love one for ourselves. Do you a pre-war Dutch one with nothing on it. Indonesians have the copyright you see. Frightened of spies. Or you can have an American Airforce Survey but it comes on three sheets six foot square. Lovely bit of cartography.’
‘I’d hoped for something a little more convenient.’
‘We can do you East Malaysia Political. You get the rest of Borneo Physical Features up the far end and four inches of South Sulawesi to make up the square. But I suppose if you want to go more than ten miles from the capital, that’s not much use. We can do you a street map of the capital with directory.’
I looked at it. How often had one studied these ambitious tangles of streets and avenues that resolved themselves on the ground into hot, dusty little villages with only one real road.
‘No. I don’t think so. Anyway, the name’s changed. It’s not called Macassar any more. It’s Ujung Pandang.’
Charlie looked shocked. ‘My dear sir. This is a 1944 map.’ It was too. The directory was in Dutch.
Money being, as ever, in short supply, it was time to phone around the bucket-shops for a cheap ticket. One could not reasonably hope to find one to Sulawesi. The best thing would be to get to Singapore and hunt around.
What is astonishing is not that fares should vary from one airline to another, but that it is virtually impossible to pay the same fare to fly by the same airline on the same plane. As the trail cleared and the prices declined, the names of airlines seemed less and less real and more and more revealing. Finnair suggested a vanishing trick. Madair was expensive but suggested a bout of wild adventure. In the end, I settled for a Third World airline described as ‘all right once you’re in the air’. In an attic above Oxford Street, I rendezvoused with a nervy little man who looked like a demonstration of the disastrous effects of stress – wizened, twitchy, biting nails, chain-smoking. He was surrounded with huge heaps of paper and a telephone that rang incessantly. I paid my money and he began writing out the ticket. Ring. ring.
‘Hallo. What? Who? Oh dear. Ah, yes, well. I’m sorry about that. The problem is that at this time of the year all the traffic is going East so there will be a problem in getting a seat.’ There followed five minutes of placatory explanation to someone on the other end of the line who was manifestly very annoyed. He hung up, bit his nails and returned to writing out the ticket. Immediately, the phone rang again.
‘Hallo. What? When? Oh dear. Ah, well. The problem is that at this time of year all the Asians are heading West so there will be problems getting a seat.’ Another five minutes of soothing noises. He sucked desperately on a cigarette. Ring, ring.
‘Hallo. What? Oh dear. I am sorry. That’s never happened before in all the years I’ve been in this business. I certainly posted the ticket to you.’ He picked through a wad of tickets, put one in an envelope and began scribbling an address.
‘The trouble is that at this time of year, most of the Post Office is on holiday, so there will be delays.’
It was with the direst forebodings that I pocketed my ticket and left the office.
And so I arrived at pre-departure depression. Having taken a turn about the room with the beetle-carapace rucksack, I unpacked it and threw half the contents out. I needn’t have bothered. When I arrived at the airport, there was no room on the plane and no other plane for a week. I rang the pre-stressed travel agent.
‘What? Who? Well, that’s never happened before in all the years I’ve been in the business. The problem is that at this time of year the extra planes are held up by the monsoon. But I’ll give you a full refund. I’m putting it in an envelope now.’ When the cheque arrived, several weeks later, it bounced.
It is said that every positive term needs its negative to sharpen its definition and fix its place in the wider system of things. This is perhaps the role of Aeroflot in the airline world – a sort of antithetical airline. Instead of effete stewards, burly mustachioed wardresses. Instead of the fussy congelations of aircraft cuisine, fried chicken. Between London and Singapore, we ate fried chicken five times, sometimes hot, sometimes cold, always recognisable. Rather than lug my luggage back home, I had opted for the only cheap flight that day – on Aeroflot.
Some strange smell like oil of cloves had been introduced into the air supply. It was particularly pungent in the lavatory – a place entirely devoid of paper – and as a result of it, people would emerge red-faced and gasping. At moments of stress, such as landing, cold air streamed visibly from vents in the ceiling as off dry ice in a theatrical production. This terrified the Japanese who thought it was fire and whimpered until a wardress shouted at them in Russian. Thereafter they were not convinced but at least cowed.
The only relief from the bouts of fried chicken was the changing of planes in Moscow. Emerging in late evening from the miasma of cloves, we were made to queue on the stairs under 20W bulbs as in a municipal brothel. Wardresses rushed among us inquisitorially shouting ‘Lusaka!’ Or was it ‘Osaka!’? Japanese and Zambians jostled each other without conviction. Our tickets were minutely examined. Our luggage was searched. A scowling young man checked our passports, reading them line by line with moving lips. He insisted on the removal of hats and glasses. Myself, he measured to check my actual height against that alleged in my passport. I cannot believe that the figures matched.
The girl behind me was French and garrulous, eager to tell her life-story. She was going to Australia to get married. ‘I expect it will be all right when I get there,’ she said gamely. Having a well-developed sense of humour, she found my being measured exquisitely funny. ‘They measure you for a coffin?’ she suggested cheerfully. The scowling young man did not appreciate her levity and sent her to the back of the queue to stand in line again. It was just like being back at school. In fact the whole transit area recalled drab, post-war school-days. Stern ladies wheeled trolleys of chipped cream enamel, meaty faces set in disapproval. Surely these were the very women who had dispensed fatty mince at my primary school while discussing the problems of rationing. The broken lavatories of the airport recalled the outhouses of the school.
Younger women in olive-green uniforms saluted soldiers sauntering about with rifles. They had the air of those on important state business. An air of guilt and insecurity seemed to invade the Westerners. We all felt improperly frivolous and facetious, like gigglers at a funeral. One day, perhaps, we would grow up into sober citizens like these people.
All the shops were shut, thus preventing us rushing in to buy nests of Russian dolls and books on Vietnamese collectivisation. More adventurous souls discovered a bar upstairs where fizzy mineral water could be bought from a dour man with no change.
We had all been issued with squares of cardboard on which someone had written ‘diner 9.00’. There was an area of tables and chairs so here we all sat down looking more and more like refugees. At ten o’clock the school-dinner-ladies emerged, adjusting their headscarves for action. But, alas, there was no mince for us. They served a copious and leisurely meal to themselves, consumed before our envious eyes with great lip-smacking gestures of content. For once, no chicken seemed to be involved. The ladies disappeared and went into a prolonged bout of off-stage plate-clattering. Shortly before our plane was due to leave, they surged out triumphantly with the enamel trollies. One served us two slices of bread, a tomato and black coffee while two others shooed us into tight groups and examined tickets. When all expectation of more had been abandoned, we were served a single biscuit on magnificent china.
Beneath us, in the space before the departure gates, a lively floor-show was in progress. Two tourists, English by the sound of them, were banging on the glass door of the immigration office. They had tried pushing it. They had tried pulling it. They did not know it was a sliding door.
‘Our plane!’ they shouted, indicating what was indeed a large aircraft parked just the other side of the plate-glass window. Passengers could be seen embarking. A rotund official in a sackcloth uniform stared out of the window, his back turned towards them, and worked hard at ignoring the noise they were making.
‘You phoned us to come to the airport,’ they cried. ‘We’ve been waiting a week for a plane.’
Finally, the disturbance grated on his nerves and, unwillingly, he slid the door open an inch to peer at them like a householder wakened by knocking in the small hours. They thrust tickets at him in justification. This was a mistake. He took them, peacefully closed and locked the door, set the tickets on the end of his desk and resumed his untroubled contemplation of the plane. A wardress appeared at the top of the steps, looked briefly around, shrugged and went back inside.
‘Call someone,’ the travellers pleaded. ‘Our luggage is on that plane.’
In response, the official deftly slid the tickets back under the door and turned his back again. The hatch of the plane was closed, the steps wheeled away. The travellers began hammering on the door in renewed desperation. The official began to smoke. We watched for a full ten minutes before the plane finally roused itself to trundle off. By then, the travellers were sobbing.
Pharisaically, we turned away. Our own plane had finally been called. Following this little morality play, no one wanted to be late. We bayed around the doors like pagan hordes at the gates of Rome. Occasionally, a wardress would appear behind the glass doors and we would surge forward. Then she would disappear again and leave us stranded in foolishness.
The resumed flight brought no relief, only more fried chicken. A bumptious Indian paced the plane, telling all and sundry that he was an admiral in the navy and only travelled by Aeroflot for security reasons, not out of parsimony. In one corner sat a Seasoned Traveller. She dismissed all offers of chicken with a disdainful wave of the hand, having had the foresight to provision herself with a selection of cheeses and a good loaf. At her feet stood a bottle of wine. On her lap rested a stout novel. Most outrageous of all, she had soap and a toilet roll. We regarded her with the undisguised resentment of those faces at the windows of old folks’ homes. We took pleasure in the fact that, as we began our descent to Singapore, a green-faced man emerged from the lavatory and kicked her wine over.
Singapore. The Lion City. Its current symbol – current because everything in Singapore is subject to a ruthless process of revision and improvement – is the merlion, a sickly, coy confection of lion and fish worthy of Walt Disney. Down by the harbour, it belched a spume of dirty water for the sole purpose of being photographed doing so by tourists.
After Moscow it was unmistakably part of the free world but also a place of control and order. The city state’s social charter invokes the name of Raffles, commemorated in place-names all over the island. But its founder, saviour and benevolent despot, Lee Kuan Yew, goes uncommemorated. It is a republic and Lee Kuan Yew is its king. British names have been retained everywhere. To visit the air base is a joy. Bland Chinese officers sit outside bungalows called ‘Dunroamin’, on roads called ‘The Strand’ and ‘Oxford Street’. Singapore has felt no need to obliterate its colonial past. Like everything else, it has been smoothly absorbed.
If Lee Kuan Yew’s name is not omnipresent, his personality imbues all levels of the state. You may not cross a road except at a traffic light (fine $500), or spit (fine $500), or drop litter (fine $500). It is believed that all problems can be solved by making more rules. Again, as in Moscow, the school is the analogy by which we understand all authoritarian systems. Not, of course, the breeding grounds of vice, violence and criminality that are modern English schools, but those strangely innocent institutions of the post-war years. Public spaces are neat and well-tended, every scrap of ground becoming a park. In the huge, terrifying tenements, all the lifts work and are spotlessly clean. Singaporeans, mysteriously, do not bemerde their own surroundings. Even public telephones work. It is a shocking contrast to the squalid self-mutilation of urban London.
It is above all a city dedicated to earning a living. Many have praised the industriousness of Singaporeans. But it is a curious form of industry that seems to consist largely of traders sitting in shopping centres, surrounded by goods made in Japan and sold largely to Westerners. Even by British standards the rudeness of salesmen is astonishing, despite a personal ‘Smile’ campaign by Lee Kuan Yew. (Again one thinks of the school – the headmaster rising to his feet in assembly, ‘I should like to say a few words about the general lack of cheerfulness in the school.’) The English spoken is extraordinary. In this polyglot mix of Chinese, Indians and Malays, some people seem to have ended up with no first language at all.
I stayed with a Malay family in one of the high-rise blocks of steel and concrete that have replaced the old, friendly wooden shacks in which Malays once lived in insanitary ease. By conscious policy, the races are mixed. On one side Indians, on the other Chinese. The corridors are awash with the odours of contesting spices and incense sticks for various gods. Different tongues quack and growl in the stairwells. Inside, five adults and two children dwelt in three small rooms and a kitchen, all spotlessly clean. Stay in a hotel? Nonsense. There is room here. You are as one of our family.
Malay hospitality is overwhelming. The only burden is the obligation to eat three times as much as you would wish.
It was my first opportunity to try out the Indonesian language – almost. Malay and Indonesian are in the same sort of relationship as English and American. The television picked up both Singapore and Malay broadcasts from across the causeway that divides the two states. On the Singaporean channel, only good news. Bad events were a truly foreign phenomenon. Singaporeans were shown in a harmony of multi-ethnic progress. See – the new underground. Behold – more land is being reclaimed from the sea. On the Malaysian channel a darker, handsomer people were demonstrating Muslim virtue. The foreign news was of Mecca and new mosques. ‘Are you sure these are not Israeli oranges?’ someone asked behind me.
Telephone calls within the city are free. In ten minutes my air ticket to Jakarta had been fixed at a third of the price I would pay in London. I began to feel like a bumpkin.
We settled back to watch a Malay melodrama that seemed to consist of scandalously obvious wives cuckolding their virtuous husbands who were away at the court. The adulterous act was signified by the closing of the bedroom door.
‘Listen how she laughs, that one. She is not a virgin.’
‘Look. Now she smokes. Wah!’
Sadly, I was unable to understand a word of the film but the anthropologist is schooled from a tender age to sit through dull seminars, boring conferences, incomprehensible presentations. Patience was rewarded. After the infliction of many wrongs on her poor husband, the wife’s crimes were denounced by the rajah. The court spoke a dialect close enough to Indonesian to be intelligible. The enormity of her crime at last was revealed. She had stolen the rice given her for her stepchildren and sold it to buy perfume. Wah!
