Fieldwork: A Novel (30 page)

Now one more digression tacked on to this already digressive path.

In the final chapter of
Argonauts of the Western Pacific
, entitled "The Meaning of the Kula," Malinowski, although he could not explain the
kula
, nevertheless argued that the
kula
is not a novel form of human activity, and that in the fullness of ethnographic time, it will not prove unique to the Trobriand Islands. Ethnographers will find that other societies also practice the
kula
, or at least things very much like the
kula
. He wrote: "And we may be on the lookout for economic transactions, expressing a reverential, almost worshipping attitude towards the valuables exchanged or handled; implying a novel type of ownership, temporary, intermittent, and cumulative; involving a vast and complex social mechanism and system of economic enterprises by which it is carried out."

We need not look far. My stepfather is a gastroenterologist by day but by night a passionate collector of rare and first editions of books concerned with polar exploration and the nautical exploration of the Pacific Northwest. My stepfather devotes enormous time and energy to his collection, and invests substantial sums of money in it. I will provoke no family quarrels by saying that when my stepfather reflects on the things in his life that give him real pleasure and satisfaction, those gilt-edged, leather-bound volumes are not very far down on his list. In his library there are editions so precious they cannot be touched or read; such books often have a surrogate
reading
edition, a perfect facsimile of the original, but are worth substantially less. There are books valuable precisely because the pages have never been cut and therefore
cannot
be read (
"a reverential, almost worshipping attitude towards the valuables exchanged or
handled"
). He has Shackleton's memoirs, and George Vancouver's, and a first edition of Apsley Cherry-Garrard's
The Worst Journey in the World
, signed by Apsley Cherry-Garrard himself. My stepfather is a member of a community of equally committed collectors of rare books devoted to polar exploration and the nautical exploration of the Pacific Northwest (as it happens, two distinct but overlapping sets) whose members trade letters and e-mails and phone calls. They travel great distances to meet with one another and discuss and exchange rare books (
"involving a vast and complex social mechanism and system of economic enterprises by which it is carried out"
). It is something of a closed circle, this little world, and books pass from one collector's hands to the next. A collector will buy a book, hold on to it, sell it to another collector, and then, much later, buy it again (
"a novel type of ownership, temporary, intermittent, and cumulative"
).

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

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?

Although the institution of the
dyal
had no parallel in Martiya's personal experience, she was aware that similar practices were to be found in other parts of the world. In Martiya's small library of books, she had a paperback abridged edition of James Frazier's
The Golden Bough
, where, in a chapter titled "The Influence of the Sexes on Vegetation," Martiya read about similar rites. The Pipile of Central America "kept apart from their wives ‘in order that on the night before planting they might indulge their passions to the fullest extent; certain persons are even said to have been appointed to perform the sexual act at the very moment when the first seeds were deposited in the ground.' " Similarly, "in some parts of Java, at the season when the bloom will soon be on the rice, the husbandman and his wife visit their fields by night and there engage in sexual intercourse for the purpose of promoting the growth of the crop." Analagous rites could be found also in Leti, Sarmata, in the Babar Islands, in Amboyna, and among the Baganda of Central Africa—and even in Europe, where Frazier notes the custom, found in Ukraine and Germany, of asking married couples to lie down and roll over the newly sown fields "to promote the fertility of the crops."

It was one thing to read about such things in Frazier; another thing entirely to see them with her own eyes. What piqued Martiya's curiosity most intensely was the total reluctance on the part of the villagers of Dan Loi to discuss any aspect of the
dyal
with an outsider. One by one, Martiya had delicately asked questions of her favorite informants throughout the village; but even the old women who would gladly chatter for hours with Martiya about every other facet of village life, from childbearing to inheritance law to intimate secrets of the Dyalo bedroom, shied away when asked to discuss the
dyal
.

The more Martiya studied the
dyal
, the greater the importance of understanding the custom seemed to her. It was a counterexample to some of the most important rules of Dyalo life: it was the only time in which the normally strict rules governing associations and the segregations of clans were relaxed. Partners in the
dyal
came from every and any clan, and were mixed up in no easily discernible way. The rice harvest was one of the only rituals, rites, or festivals in the Dyalo calendar binding far-flung Dyalo villages together. Martiya asked herself: How were the planting partnerships formed? Was the
dyal
a way of legitimizing and discharging sexual tension within the community of Dyalo villages? Fidelity was generally prized by the Dyalo and adultery commonly considered shameful—did the Dyalo make an exception for the
dyal
? In her time in the village, Martiya had already seen several feuds erupt as the result of an adulterous liaison, including one which had led to violence. Did jealousy ever ensue as a result of the
dyal
? How did husband and wife greet each other at the end of the
dyal
? How and when was the
dyal
explained to children?

What did the Dyalo think happened when the rice was seeded? Why didn't the opium, the maize, or the gardens require similar rituals? If a woman became pregnant as a result of the
dyal
, how was the offspring treated? The sexual act at the heart of the
dyal
—was it ritualized? Was it accompanied by any particular prayers or magic rites?