The Importance of Being Seven Read Online Free PDF

enjoyed that post, but it had been funded by grants that had eventually dried up. Anthropology was vaguely exotic, and spoke little of the everyday social reality with which the bureaucrats felt the social sciences should concern themselves. So while investigations into familial structures among the Nuer might be all very interesting – though not necessarily for the Nuer themselves, to whom all this was just the way they did things – in the eyes of those who dispensed academic largesse it was not quite as compelling as a study of job centre accessibility in Airdrie. The Nuer and the residents of Airdrie are indeed quite different – both groups have considerable merits, and rich traditions – but for Domenica the Nuer had the slight edge in terms of anthropological interest.
    This was a result of the lure of the distant and the different – she knew that very well. And she knew, too, that the days of anthropological condescension from the West towards everybody else were over, and rightly so, a matter that she had discussed with Angus Lordie on more than one occasion.
    ‘Do they send anthropologists to Scotland?’ Angus once asked.
    ‘Of course they do,’ replied Domenica. ‘The notion that it’s we who study them is quite abandoned now. We are all the object of anthropological interest – potentially. All of us. Even you and that malodorous dog of yours, although strictly speaking he’s nothing to do with anthropos.’
    Angus ignored the gibe at Cyril but thought about Domenica’s broader point. ‘So would you get anthropologists going to, say, Saltcoats?’ He paused, and then added, ‘Not that I’m suggesting that there’s anything wrong with Saltcoats. It’s a great place, of course.’
    Domenica nodded. ‘I knew an American anthropologist who went to do field work in Glasgow,’ she said.
    There was something about the tone with which she said this that interested Angus. Had something untoward occurred? ‘How did he get on?’ he asked.
    Domenica looked out of the window. They were having tea in her kitchen in Scotland Street and she was staring at the view of the chimney pots on the other side of the road. We did not needthese chimney pots any more, now that we no longer used our fires, but how bare, she thought, would rooftops seem without them.
    ‘How did he get on?’ She repeated Angus’s question. ‘Not too badly, to begin with.’
    ‘And then?’
    ‘Well, there was an incident. He was head-butted.’
    Angus felt a momentary shame; a shame for Scotland. There was so much we had to be ashamed of: too much drinking, too much aggressive swearing, too much head-butting … And what did people do about it? Nothing, he thought. Because it was unfashionable, uncool, to protest the values of civilisation, those discarded, despised notions that actually made life in society less like Hobbes’s nightmare.
    ‘I’m very sorry to hear that,’ he said.
    Domenica nodded. ‘He was a very agreeable man,’ she said. ‘He came from Chicago, I seem to recall, and he had that typical mid-Western politeness about him. He wrote to me for a few years after his return to the United States, always referring to what he described as his very happy memories of Scotland. He never talked about the head-butting.’
    ‘They are very considerate people, Americans like that,’ said Angus.
    They were both silent, as there was nothing more to be said. Did anybody actually apologise, Angus asked himself.
    For her part, although she recognised the merits of work in one’s own back yard, Domenica continued to be attracted by radically different societies and by not-too-prosaic projects. Her last piece of research, which she had then written up in several well-received scholarly articles, had taken place in the Malacca Straits. She had gone there to investigate the domestic life of contemporary pirates, and she still remembered with affection the welcome that the pirate households gave her. Some of the pirate women