‘Why not?’
I was hungry for it. I ached for a new idea, a new thought in my head. I made the tea quickly, scooting around Bani as unobtrusively as I could in that small corner of the house.
Nell began reading as soon as I set the pot and cups down on the trunk. On the first pages Helen declared Western civilization’s lack of understanding of other peoples’ customs to be the world’s greatest and gravest social problem. By page twenty she had brought in Copernicus, Dewey, Darwin, Rousseau, and Linnaeus’ Homo ferus, swept around the globe a few times, and asserted that the notion of racial heredity, of a pure race, is bunk, that culture is not biologically transmitted, and that Western civilization is not the end result of an evolution of culture, nor is the study of primitive societies the study of our origins.
In this first chapter she had laid down in simple honest language many of the tenets our generation of anthropologists felt but had never put on the page so clearly. But it was impossible to stop there. We took turns reading. We devoured her words. It felt as if she had written the book for us and only us, a fat message that said: Carry on. You can do this. This is important. You are not wasting your time.
The most intoxicating drug could not have had a stronger effect on me. A few chapters in and Bani was standing over us, speaking loudly. Apparently he’d been trying to tell us dinner was ready. We took the book with us to the table which had been set with linens and platters of food. Fen took over the reading, managing bites between sentences, and I supposed we didn’t appreciate the meal sufficiently, for Bani left without saying goodbye or doing the washing up.
Fen read on, standing up in the little kitchen area, while Nell and I cleaned the dishes. When he got to the part about where Helen accuses Malinowski of treating his Trobriands as generic primitives, he fairly screamed it. And then he looked up from the page, eyes ablaze. ‘Is it my imagination or did she just take down Frazer, Spengler, and Malinowski in those three pages?’
We laughed all three as one loud person. We were giddy with her iconoclasm, her courage, her ambition. Fen read on. Primitive societies, she allowed, were easier to study than our more complex Western civilization, much like the beetle was easier for Darwin when establishing his theories than the human being.
‘Rot!’ Nell yelled at the page. ‘We’ve had that beetle argument a million times. And I always win. But she puts that in there anyway.’ She pulled a short pencil out from somewhere in her hair and made to cross out the last sentences.
‘Hey ho,’ Fen said, blocking her. ‘Let her have her full say before you start blanking it all out.’
We moved back to the sofa and I brought out a jug of Kiona ‘wine’ that tasted like sweetened rubber. Fen passed the manuscript to me and I began reading. This section was about the Zuni of New Mexico, who carved out an existence and an ‘attitude towards existence’ that was completely at odds with the rest of the tribes of North America, who often used drugs and fermented cactus juice to ‘get religious.’
‘I’m feeling a bit religious myself,’ Fen said. ‘This wretched stuff is potent.’
Nell didn’t say anything—she was scribbling notes on a pad—but her cup was half empty and her cheeks blazed. The top of her pencil was wet and chewed.
Other tribes danced until their mouths frothed or they had seizures or visions, but the Zuni simply danced to methodically alter nature. ‘The tireless pounding of their feet draws together the mist in the sky and heaps it into the piled rain clouds. It forces out the rain upon the earth.’
Nell was nodding as I read. ‘Beautiful,’ she said.
‘Terrible!’ Fen hopped to his feet, pointing at the page. ‘That’s it right there. That’s the line she can’t cross. She loses all her authority right there.’
‘She is bringing us into the moment,’ Nell said. ‘Into the heart of the culture.’
‘It’s a fake. She knows full well the pounding of the feet doesn’t bring the rain.’
‘Of course, Fen. But she is capturing right there how the Zuni see it, telling it from their point of view.’
‘That’s just sloppy. It’s catering to a mass audience and not the scholar. She’s too good to make that mistake.’
This last shut Nell up.