Mischa Berlinski - Fieldwork

Now imagine trying to explain the point of all this to an illiterate Trobriand Island anthropologist, who has no idea what all the scribbles on the page mean, has never seen a book, and has no idea at all that he lives on a spherical planet with two ice-capped poles explored by brave men whose endeavors make for thrilling reading. The Trobrianders have never even heard of ice. Malinowski, whose pale skin was little suited to the tropical sun, was no less handicapped than this imaginary Trobriand anthropologist in his first attempts to beat back the Curiosity, which was like a brushfire in his soul: he knew nothing of Trobriand magic and magical ways, of Trobriand myth and cosmology, of the relations between distant Trobriand islands and tribes who engaged in this reciprocal gift-giving, of the wily ways of the sea and how to pass through the dangers of the deep in an outrigger canoe. All of these were essential to understanding the kula . No wonder the most difficult question of all — why? — escaped his penetrating analysis.

Martiya was hardly better suited to her self-appointed task of understanding the Dyalo when the Curiosity took her; but of course I was hardly better suited to my self-appointed task of understanding Martiya.

I did not find out what the dyal was for a long time, but rather than make the reader wait, I will interrupt briefly to explain this interesting custom, which will form such an important part of Martiya's story. I wish to preface this description with a reminder that I am not an anthropologist, have never seen the dyal , and do not speak Dyalo; what I offer here is at best a second- or third-hand description.

The Dyalo language makes a formal distinction between the plant and the spirit that animates it; but the distinction is tonal and hard to reproduce in English, so I will make the same emphasis through capitalization: rice is a plant, a physical thing; but Rice is a spirit. The two exist in much the same relationship as humans and their souls: the spirit animates the thing, is eternal while the thing is not, passes from one thing to the next, has personality and will. Spirit and matter live in symbiosis: without spirit, matter is lifeless; without matter, spirit is restless, frustrated, and cruel. The Dyalo believe Rice "makes good" the rice at the moment the rice seed is planted. The rice seed, after all, is an inert thing: it sits for years in the rice barn and does nothing. But placed in the earth at the right time of the year, the seed germinates, and a miracle ensues: the rice plant grows. This miracle is the work of Rice. And the dyal , the villagers of Dan Loi believed, was what was necessary to convince Rice to do his fruitful work.*

The Dyalo plant rice seed at the very onset of the rainy season. It is the hottest and most humid time of year. The previous few months have seen the fields prepared for planting: the Dyalo have tromped through the hills and chosen good sites. They have slashed the jungle down and cut the trees. What remained or was too tough for their machetes, they have burned, and for weeks, the mountain was black with smoke. The jungle itself, a Dyalo proverb says, is Rice's first demand.

The very survival of a Dyalo family depends on the success of the rice planting. Bear in mind that rice is among the most difficult of all crops to raise successfully, especially in the mountains: mountain soil is often poor in nutrients, particularly nitrogen; the climate is unstable; and rice is a notoriously temperamental grain. Over the course of ten

*Linguists disagree about the meaning and etymologies of the words "dyal" and "Dyalo." The debate, roughly summarized, boils down to whether "dyal" means "the rite of the Dyalo people," or whether "Dyalo" means "the people who do dyal " — that is, whether the people are named for the rite, or the rite is named after the people.

thousand or more harvests, the Dyalo have noticed that rice fails with terrifying frequency. Two Dyalo, encountering one another on the path, do not ask, "How are you?" They ask, "Is your Rice happy?"

Planting rice is a two-person, four-day job, more or less. The lead member of the planting team, who is always male, works with a dibble stick, a long bamboo pole attached to a metal plow head. His job is to dig the holes into which the woman, following behind, will drop a handful of rice seed. When the Dyalo had planted the opium poppies in December, husband and wife had worked as a team, an arrangement that seemed sensible enough to Martiya, the marriage, and by extension the immediate family, being the basic unit of Dyalo economics. For the rice planting, however, the men and women throughout the Dyalo country pair themselves up according to a very different system — the dyal .

Here is how the dyal appeared to Martiya her first year in the village.

The dyal began with the quiet departure of all of the married men from the village. One morning, the village awoke as normal. Martiya had breakfast with Lai-Ma, as usual, then went to talk to George Washington about the difference between the jungle spirits and the village spirits, one of the fundamental distinctions in Dyalo spiritual life, a continuation of a conversation of several days' standing. So quiet was the departure of the men — no goodbyes, no ceremonies, no sacrifices, no chanting — that Martiya hardly noticed them slip off into the forest; but by evening, the village was only women and children, with the exception of George Washington himself, and a few men too old to travel, who sat around looking dejected and sullen.

That evening, the women dressed themselves in their finest clothing. They prepared elaborate meals. The mood in the village was suddenly light and gay. One of the women began to sing, and another woman, from another hut, joined her: the song was passed from hut to hut, one woman taking up the melody, others repeating the chorus. That evening, strange new men began to arrive in the village — Dyalo men who had left their villages to come to Dan Loi. Some of these men Martiya knew: they came from nearby Dyalo villages; but others were strangers, and when she asked about them, she learned that they had traveled upwards of a week. Some had even surreptitiously crossed national borders. Yet they entered the village with odd familiarity, greeting the women as old acquaintances.

For the next week, the women of Dan Loi and their gin-kai (the phrase, appropriately enough, means "rice partner") planted rice during the day and feasted at night. For the duration of the week, the gin-kai lived as surrogate husbands: each lived in the house of the man he replaced; together with his "wife," they worked his fields; they ate the foods his "wife" prepared. They were addressed by their women always in the verbal form reserved for intimate family. These rice-planting partnerships, Martiya learned, were not transient things: men and women would always plant rice with the same partner, season after season, year after year, but it was taboo to see these planting partners the rest of the year.

At the conclusion of the week, the gin-kai took their leave of the village. The rice crop had been planted. By nightfall, the men of the village began to return. The dyal was thus concluded.

The dyal was like hitting the anthropological bingo: by the time the last man had wandered home, Martiya saw in the dyal not only a doctoral thesis but an article in Anthropos .

It was Martiya's strong suspicion that the women and their rice mates were sexual partners. Martiya didn't know the right word to describe the rite. Was it adultery? A kind of bigamy? She wondered: Was sex an obligatory part of the dyal , or something that just sometimes happened? Why did successful planting require such a liaison?