Euphoria Read Online Free PDF Page B

Cambridge don, took the seat beside me, and once I gave up my sulk about the girl, we began talking. He was curious about my trip to the Galápagos, not about the birds or the caterpillars but about the Ecuadorian mestizos. He asked a number of questions I didn’t know how to answer but found intriguing and wished I’d thought to ask myself when I was there. He was A. C. Haddon, and this was myfirst conversation about a discipline he told me was called Anthropology. By the end of the ride, he’d invited me to do my Part II in Ethnology. Within a month, I’d switched over from the biological sciences. It was a bit terrifying, a bit of a free fall, to go from an extremely ordered and structured physical science to a nascent, barely twenty-year-old social science. Anthropology at that time was in transition, moving from the study of men dead and gone to the study of living people, and slowly letting go of the rigid belief that the natural and inevitable culmination of every society is the Western model.
    I left for my first field trip the summer after I graduated. I could not get away fast enough. My father had died that winter (I’d been at his bedside; I’d had a chance to say goodbye, which made it easier) and my mother clung harder than usual to me. She became both unthinkably needy and cold-blooded. I do not know if she was trying to make up for the absence of my father or if his absence had unleashed a part of her personality that had been dormant during their long marriage. In either case, my mother was both anxious for my company and sickened by the man she imagined I was becoming. She thought anthropology a weak science, a false science, a phantasmagoria of words with no substance or purpose. She was so certain and uncompromising that even short visits were dangerous to my already wobbly convictions.
    Initially I was supposed to find a tribe on the Sepik River of the Mandated Territory of New Guinea, an area which had yet to be penetrated by missionaries or industry. But when I arrived in Port Moresby I was told that the region wasn’t safe. There had been a spate of headhunting raids. So I went to the island of New Britain where I studied the Baining,an impossible tribe who refused to tell me anything until I learned their language and when I had learned their language still refused to tell me. They would direct me to some person a half day’s walk away and when I returned I would discover they’d held a ceremony in my absence. I could get nothing out of them and even after a year I hadn’t figured out their genealogy because of a plethora of name taboos, which prevented them from ever saying aloud the names of certain relatives. But it must also be said that I had no idea what I was doing. For the first month I went around measuring their heads with calipers until someone asked me why and I had no answer apart from having been instructed to do so. I chucked the calipers away but never really understood what I was meant to be documenting instead. On my way home, I stopped in Sydney for a few months. Haddon was teaching at the university and he took me on as his assistant for his ethnography classes. In my spare time I worked on a monograph about the Baining. After he read it, Haddon claimed I was the first person to ever admit to having limitations as an anthropologist, to not understanding the natives when they conversed among themselves, to not having witnessed the full-blown version of a ceremony, to being duped and tricked and mocked. He was taken by my candor, but for me to have pretended otherwise would have been chicanery, like poor Kammerer injecting India ink into the feet of his midwife frogs to prove Lamarck’s inheritance theory that characteristics acquired after birth can be passed on. At the end of the semester, I took a brief trip up the Sepik with my students to see a tribe or two, just to see what I had missed by not going there initially. I was quite taken with the Kiona, if only because