Mischa Berlinski - Fieldwork

Lai-Ma was a thin woman with a lined face and a slight limp; her nickname, apparently acquired in a more agile childhood, meant Fast Feet, a fact that Martiya found intensely sad. Lai-Ma was the hardest-working member of the household — indeed, as far as Martiya could tell, the only worker in the household, Farts-a-Lot never seeming to employ his well-honed machete — and she induced in Martiya a considerable sense of First World guilt and discomfort. (This discomfort was intensified by Lai-Ma's habit of taking Martiya aside and saying, "Oh, am I tired! How my bones ache! How I wish I were rich like you and could do nothing all day!") Hauling just one plastic petrol-jerry of water up the hill was enough to exhaust Martiya, but Lai-Ma would inevitably carry two, one in each hand, and on her back in a plaited basket, a dozen hollow bamboo tubes each overflowing with water, the whole heavy load held in place with a tumpline across her forehead. Thus burdened, Lai-Ma would move along the muddy path like a turtle or an elderly yak, taking slow, heavy steps, grimacing slightly. Martiya felt like a freeloader every time she saw her in the course of the day. When Martiya had left California, with the very first installment of her grant money, she had bought herself a pair of expensive running shoes, and she had imagined loping along mountain trails at dawn, as the silver mist broke over the valleys. The sight of Lai-Ma working was enough to make the idea seem vaguely obscene, and the shoes stayed tucked away in Martiya's backpack. If Lai-Ma was not carrying water, she was carrying on her back an enormous pallet of lumber for the fire, or she was stooped over the washing pit scrubbing wet clothes, or hunched over a hoe in the garden she kept beside the house, or limping off to the fields, or pounding rice. Martiya was not a large woman but she felt clumsy and awkward in Lai-Ma's presence.

After Lai-Ma had indicated with an inhibited, anxious smile that no, she really didn't need a large, clumsy farang trailing after her all morning, Martiya liked to take a little stroll about the village. This was the counting hour. Before leaving Berkeley, Joseph Atkinson had given her a piece of advice. "When in doubt, count something," he had said. Martiya spent her first months in the village ferociously counting everything. She counted the number of huts in the village, and she counted the pigs, which was actually quite tricky, she discovered, given that the pigs tended to look alike in her eyes and, being free-roaming in a Dyalo village rather than penned, would move about in the course of a porcine census. There were fourteen pigs per household, on average, and the chief purpose of the pigs was not, as might be expected, to augment the village supply of chops and bacon, but rather to provide sacrificial victims for the spirits, should the need arise; that the pigs were so tasty was considered a fringe benefit. There were a number of households segregated from the rest of the village and down the ridge: these households, which were all associated with the accursed Vampire clan, did not raise pigs, Martiya noticed. When she asked why, she was told that it was because they were poor; when she asked why they were poor, she was told that it was because they had angered the spirits, hence the accursed status of their clan; and when she asked in what way these households had angered the spirits, she was reminded that these people could hardly expect spiritual favor, not having sacrificed any pigs. She wrote all these details down in her notebook.

Counting the people of the village was rather more difficult still than counting pigs: the Dyalo, too, were inconveniently free-roaming, and also unfortunately tended in Martiya's eyes to look alike. The simple question "How many people live in your hut?" admitted no direct translation. For one thing, the word "people" was typically translated into Dyalo as "souls" — but the Dyalo believed, very generally speaking, that women had seven souls, and men nine . If you have no idea what this means, neither did Martiya, who was accustomed to the occidental notion of one man, one soul. The Dyalo were deeply confused by the question "How many souls live in your hut?" Souls to the Dyalo were fragile things: a soul might well be lost, or have wandered off, or a foreign soul might have come to roost in the hut. Martiya wasn't sure why souls would get lost or where they went or what it meant that they had gone. More bewildering still — and here again, I will summarize briefly in lapidary ethnographic fashion what Martiya herself summarized for Karen in rapid epistolary style, but what in truth was only teased out of the Dyalo gradually, like a sliver from a calloused foot, question by delicate question, oblique hint by oblique hint — was the Dyalo belief that the souls of the recently dead, rather than going to the place where the souls of the dead go, would for a time enter and possess their best beloved. Where else would they go? the Dyalo asked. It's so lonely to be dead . So a husband who recently lost his wife would be reckoned to possess both his own nine souls and the seven souls of his wife. For this reason, the Dyalo gave the grieving wide latitude for eccentric behavior. Martiya learned this when one of the village women — someone from the far side of the village, whom Martiya didn't know well — began running through the village naked at night. Martiya naturally asked why she did this, and it was explained to her that she had recently lost her small child. Running naked through the village was the expression of her dead child's souls. This, too, went in the notebook.

In the end, counting the villagers of Dan Loi, a fact which would eventually occupy only one sentence on the first page of Martiya's proposed ethnography of the Dyalo, took six months, as Martiya was forced to record the villagers in her field notes one by one, often lurking like a private detective outside certain huts to count just how many children went in and out. With Vinai's help, she grouped the villagers by age, by clan, by gender. She counted the calories ingested by an average Dyalo family, and tried to estimate protein intake. She counted chickens and bullocks. The average distance of the walk to the rice fields was somewhere between forty-five minutes and an hour. Opium fields were slightly farther away.

Yield from an acre of rice paddy? Average number of hours of rain per day in rainy season? Distance mold travels per day in rainy season on the pages of your notebook?

Done, done, and done.

Weeks until she could go home?

"I propose fully immersing myself in Dyalo life for at least two years," Martiya had written in her grant application, "but comparable expeditions have lasted as long as four."

The word "expedition" had rung so nicely in her ears when she had written it.

Farts-a-Lot's peculiarities made for some great letters home, but the truth of the matter was that as the months passed, Martiya wasn't sure how much more she could take of the man. The way he hawked up looghies right on the floor of the hut. His cruel, stupid laugh. Those interminable grunt-a-logs which he conducted with his wife. His nighttime scratching, twitching, barking, schnirfling, sighing, and farting; his sneezing, snoring, and mumbling. His teeth and lips were black from chewing betel, and he ate with his mouth open, little balls of white rice mashed up by that big pink slug of a tongue. He was the kind of guy, she wrote to Karen, who laughed when she stubbed her toe. He just stood there when his wife's shift caught on fire once while she was making tea. That greasy, rancid smell of sweat and alcohol and pig fat — he was the only one in the village who smelled that way. The others smelled nice and earthy. Even the little kids understood that when Martiya was typing up her field notes in the evening, she needed to concentrate. It wasn't easy to transcribe Dyalo. The others might not have understood exactly what she was doing, but they let her be. But old Farts-a-Lot, he'd come over, plop himself down, and start poking at the keys on the typewriter and giggling. Once before going to bed, when she had been in the house about three months, Martiya hung her pants from a peg on the wall. She was just trying to keep things neat. The next thing she knew, it was the dead of night, and Farts-a-Lot was kicking her in the butt. It seems that he'd gotten up in the night to make the monsoon off the porch, saw the pants, and flipped. The guy could have just lifted the pants off the peg, dropped them on the floor, and explained to her in the morning that it was way-bad jungle ju-ju to keep anything that had ever touched a lady's nether regions above a man's head. Fair enough. But no , the guy had to wake her up in the dead of night, wake up the whole hut, including the kids, and have Martiya fold up the pants and put them on the floor. At first, Martiya thought it was just her, that she must be the most insensitive anthropologist in the whole wide world, but as the months passed and Martiya came to know the other villagers, she decided that she wasn't the problem here and that it wasn't just a cultural issue. Farts-a-Lot really was a creep, and she didn't want to spend another two years in his house.