Resonance: Beyond the Words

By Unni Wikan

Resonance gathers together forty years of anthropological study by a researcher and writer with one of the broadest fieldwork résumés in anthropology: Unni Wikan. In its twelve essays—four of which are brand new—Resonance covers encounters with transvestites in Oman, childbirth in Bhutan, poverty in Cairo, and honor killings in Scandinavia, with visits to several other locales and subjects in between. Including a comprehensive preface and introduction that brings the whole work into focus, Resonance surveys an astonishing career of anthropological inquiry that demonstrates the possibility for a common humanity, a way of knowing others on their own terms.
 
Deploying Clifford Geertz’s concept of “experience-near” observations —and driven by an ambition to work beyond Geertz’s own limitations—Wikan strives for an anthropology that sees, describes, and understands the human condition in the models and concepts of the people being observed. She highlights the fundamentals of an explicitly comparative, person-centered, and empathic approach to fieldwork, pushing anthropology to shift from the specialist discourses of academic experts to a grasp of what the Balinese call keneh— the heart, thought, and feeling of the real people of the world. By deploying this strategy across such a range of sites and communities, she provides a powerful argument that ever-deeper insight can be attained despite our differences.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Jan 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9780226924489

Book preview

Unni Wikan is professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo. She is the author of several books, including Behind the Veil in Arabia, Managing Turbulent Hearts, and Generous Betrayal, all published by the University of Chicago Press.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2012 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2012.

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-92446-5 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-92447-2 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-92448-9 (e-book)

ISBN-10: 0-226-92446-7 (cloth)

ISBN-10: 0-226-92447-5 (paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-92448-3 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wikan, Unni, 1944–

Resonance : beyond the words / Unni Wikan.

p cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-92446-5 (hardcover : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-92447-2 (pbk. : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-92448-9 (e-book) (print) 1. Ethnology—Methodology. 2. Ethnology—Philosophy. 3. Ethnology—Fieldwork. I. Title.

GN345.W553 2012

305.8001—dc23

2012024216

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Beyond the Words

Resonance

Unni Wikan

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

To my mother, Bibbi Wikan

and in memory of my father, Hans-Ulve Wikan

and to

Tinius, Theodor, and Hermine

Contents

Preface: A Way in the World

Introduction

I

1. Beyond the Words: The Power of Resonance

2. Toward an Anthropology of Lived Experience

II

3. The Self in a World of Urgency and Necessity

4. Against the Self: For a Person-Oriented Approach

III

5. Resilience in the Megacity: Cultural Competence among Cairo’s Poor

IV

6. Man Becomes Woman: The Xanith as a Key to Gender Roles

7. Shame and Honor: A Contestable Pair

V

8. The Nun’s Story: Reflections on an Age-Old Postmodern Dilemma

9. In the Middle Way: Childbirth and Rebirth in Bhutan

VI

10. My Son a Terrorist? He Was Such a Gentle Boy . . .

11. On Evil and Empathy: Remembering Ghazala Khan

Epilogue: Resonance and Beyond

Acknowledgments

Appendix: On Writing

Notes

References

Index

Preface

A Way in the World

I have been privileged as an anthropologist to live and work in places as diverse as Egypt, Oman, Bali, Bhutan, and Scandinavia. Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, and people of no religious affiliation became my friends, and so many of them still remain. For I have kept going back to the places and people I once knew, always wanting a continuity of relations, always wanting to know how they fared.

In Egypt, forty years have connected me with some families in the back streets of Cairo that I have known since August 1969. It was my first fieldwork; I was young and insecure, a godsend to people craving someone sympathetic to their plight and ready to lend them an ear. With characteristic hospitality, they opened homes and hearts to me, bent on protecting this young girl who was bereft of her own family in Egypt—for who can live without a family? I intended my life with them to be as brief as possible, for the physical conditions were more than I could bear: an urban slum with plenty of what nobody wants, to use an apt description of a life in poverty. But since that initial fieldwork of eight months I have kept going back every year but two, sometimes for a month, sometimes for only a week; thus we have become a part of one another’s histories. Just ask Unni, she knows, they may say when needing a witness to their stories; we have been friends for . . . It used to be five, six, ten, then twenty years; now it is a lifetime.

Oman, a sultanate in southern Arabia, was my second anthropological venture. I first went there with my husband, Fredrik Barth, in March 1974, to do the fieldwork for my PhD in social anthropology. We spent seven months in the town of Sohar, once a fabled cosmopolitan seaport on the monsoon routes to India and East Africa but reduced to a drab, overgrown village by the time we got there, and one month in the desert town of Bahla in the interior. My two periods of fieldwork there ended in February 1976, just in time for me to get back to Norway to give birth to my child. Then there was a gap of twenty-four years, for reasons beyond my control, before I was able to return in February 2000. Now I can die in peace, for I have seen you again, said Latifa, my closest friend, when I finally reappeared out of the blue. She told how every time she had spotted foreigners in the market—Sohar had become a beautiful and thriving city again—she had hoped I would be there.

We had parted when we were both just about to give birth to our first child. For me, it was a singular experience, but Latifa was the mother of nine when we met again. Her sister Mariam had ten children, another only six; our lives have diverged, and I am made aware of sources of happiness quite different from the professional woman’s career I chose. In 2010, I was back in Oman for the fifth time in this millennium.

Bali was a family venture. We went there—Fredrik, our son Kim, seven years old, and I—in December 1983. We settled in with a large Balinese family in the northern town of Singaraja, once capital of the Dutch colonial regime in Bali, and ventured out to a wide field of villages. By 1989, I had spent twenty months doing fieldwork on the island, partly with my family, partly alone, sometimes taking just Kim. In my book Managing Turbulent Hearts I tell how once, when I arrived alone, everyone asked Where is Kim? so often that forever afterward I brought him along. A child can open hearts and homes; Kim did for us. After 1989 I never did real fieldwork in Bali, but I have gone back several times to see friends, some of whom now live in Jakarta. What I have learned on these visits has shaped my anthropological understanding and in some cases has been incorporated into my works. After my last visit, in April 2010, I have a twenty-six-year perspective on some lives and developments.

Bhutan—an anthropologist’s dream because it is extremely difficult to gain access to, and because of the sheer beauty of the land and the richness of its Buddhist Lamaist culture—opened up to Fredrik and me in the spring of 1989. It had been his dream, not mine, to go there; I felt I had more than enough with my enduring engagement in Egypt and Bali. But in 1985 we had been invited in on a brief visit, and in 1989 the opportunity came to do anthropological fieldwork under the auspices of UNICEF and the government of Bhutan. It was to be the beginning of an enduring romance with a place and people that also brought its disillusions, as romances usually do.

By May 1994 I had conducted twenty months of fieldwork in Bhutan, mostly for UNICEF but some for the World Food Programme (WFP) and some for a Norwegian company, Norconsult, engaged in hydroelectric development. So my experience as a consultant was very diverse, ranging from mother-child health to education (monastic and secular) to rural development. With Fredrik I was also a key person in the first Workshop on Religion and Health in 1989, which sought to bring together parties that had not been speaking with a view to combining traditional and modern medicine; it was a great success and got long-term development projects going.

The crux of it all: you could not work in Bhutan as just an anthropologist, you had to be useful and count yourself lucky to get in and around at all. I worked partly together with Fredrik—Kim came with us twice—but mostly alone, and always with the freedom to go where I wanted. The Bhutanese authorities laid no restrictions in our way. Then for six years I could not go back, but in 2000 and 2002 I was able to return for brief visits, in 2000 together with Fredrik. The remoteness of the land and the expense of traveling there have perforce cut my contact with Bhutan more than with Bali or the Middle East.

Time Takes Its Toll

You may wonder why I keep talking about going to a country—as if this were the only way of keeping contact. Well, it was, and to some extent it still is. None of my longtime friends in Cairo communicate by e-mail, nor do my friends in Sohar; none of them know how to do it, though some would have access to the Internet through their children, if they wished. With a couple of Balinese friends I e-mail from time to time, as also with one or two in Bhutan, and once in a while we talk on the phone, as I do with friends in Egypt and Oman. But nothing compares with meeting face to face, seeing the changes, noting the continuities, visually taking in all the different clues to how and who we are or have become, even when it means hearing an old woman in Oman ask me right up front, Why has your chin sunk so? and then say, as an aside, How she has aged!

You have to see for yourself how the hijab—the Islamic scarf—gently covers all traces of age on the neck, and provides a face-uplifting effect, to appreciate that you need not take her remark to heart. But believe me, I don’t like it.

Perhaps this is why some anthropologists are reluctant to go back to the people they once knew through fieldwork: it makes it more difficult to think of yourself as forever young.

Bringing It All Back Home

Scandinavia is home; I live in Norway. I would never have imagined that I would do anthropological research in my home region; what beckoned was always the remote and strange. But in 1995 I ventured into a career of doing public anthropology that endures. It was undertaken in a spirit of civic duty. I felt obliged, as a citizen, to address issues that were urgent in the context of immigration and integration of new populations into Europe, issues that my knowledge, especially of Islam and Muslim societies, prepared me to speak about. Public authorities and agencies frequently called on me for advice on matters, small and large, that required special cultural knowledge but that academics in general would avoid, due to their sensitive nature. So I undertook research on immigrants in Norway. I was also called on as an expert in some court cases, which gave me an interest in legal anthropology.¹ Now for nearly two decades I have been a public figure, addressing issues through the media and other channels, bringing my anthropological knowledge to bear on matters of social justice, welfare, equality, and human rights.

Most of this work has been in Norway, my home country, but in Sweden and Denmark my knowledge and expertise are being used as well. Two of my books have been translated into Swedish and one into Danish, and I have written op-eds, appeared in the media, and given public lectures and workshops in both countries.

In retrospect I believe that my experience of doing applied anthropology in Bhutan may have prepared me for my career as a public anthropologist in Scandinavia. In Bhutan I had learned that I could make a difference. Anthropological knowledge could be put to use in practical ways to improve people’s lives. I had also learnt to tackle sensitive issues vis-à-vis authorities and persons in power. And I had learnt the inestimable value of hard facts: you have to know your numbers, as many of them as you can, to convince others of the reality of what you are describing. Stories won’t do—though they are important too, but for different purposes, different ends. In short: Bhutan taught me to speak up and to take courage. Crucially for an anthropologist, I had also come to understand that acting in the world requires you to take a position, however hard it is to weigh the pros against the cons. Inaction is sometimes the worst course. Sitting back and waiting for problems to go away, or refusing to see them for what they are, can backfire in very bad ways.

Essentially, what moved me to act in the Scandinavian context was a deep feeling of social injustice. The integration of immigrants was proceeding poorly. Welfare colonialism—putting people on welfare rather than seeking to let them use their capacities and talents to gain self-respect and social esteem—was often practiced. I was alarmed too that loose on the streets² was a concept of culture that tended to treat people as if they were products of culture rather than agents in their own right. A misguided respect for culture was also being used to undermine the rights of the weaker members of immigrant groups, especially women and children.

I did not anticipate at the time, could not have anticipated, that my work in Scandinavia would confront me with my hardest anthropological challenge ever: trying to understand what motivates people to kill their own child—for the sake of honor. It was not remote lands that, in my experience brought me up against myself, so to speak. It was home. Yes, admittedly, the protagonists in the cases I explored had a Middle Eastern or South Asian background. But they were Swedish or Danish or Norwegian too by the time of these fatal events.

The world has grown smaller over the forty years that I have been in anthropology—but clefts have opened up, compelling me to ask questions about moral values and ethics that felt far less pressing for the cultural relativist anthropologist I once aspired to be.

Life’s Contingencies

My anthropological career has been shaped by life’s contingencies more than by any conscious plan on my part. The one decision I did make was to go to Bali after engagement with the Middle East for over twenty years (I had spent a year in Alexandria in 1964–65, before studying anthropology). I felt I needed a different perspective; I was losing the ability to be surprised. The Muslim Middle East was becoming too familiar; I needed to get out of the region to be able to see it with new eyes.

Fredrik preferred to return to Papua New Guinea, where he had done fieldwork in 1967–68, before we met. We decided to give it a try together and spent four months, together with Kim, in the jungles in the far interior. It was a dead end for me, though Kim loved it. Coming out of the Arctic Ocean (I grew up on an island), I found the rain forest suffocating; I had also learned to adore the sun, as one does after those long dark winter months up north, and there was pitifully little sun in the rain forest of Papua New Guinea. It rained 14 meters a year in the area where we lived in a tiny one-room hut on stilts with no amenities and with a treacherous river to cross to get out and get some food (to add to the taro). I remember a craving for dry bed sheets; after three months not even my normal craving for chocolate could compete with my desire to sleep in dry sheets. The tiny village we lived in was fascinating; I remember how the women breastfed their pigs. But I could not share my husband’s and son’s entrancement with the wild and primitive environment (or life). To their loss, I wanted to move on. Fortunately, Fredrik was able to do some work on his own afterward, which resulted in his Cosmologies in the Making (1991), after his earlier Ritual and Knowledge among the Baktaman of New Guinea (1975).

Before going to Bali, I had also given Yemen a try: I went there for a month in 1980, after finishing my PhD, to consider whether doing a third Arab society (after Egypt and Oman) would be fruitful. I decided against it. There was a lot of good anthropological work going on and no need for me.³

(Perhaps I was also spoiled. I had been the first anthropologist to do fieldwork in Cairo, and with Fredrik, the first in Oman. Yemen was no virgin land but an anthropologists’ den, or so it seemed.)

But why then did I settle for Bali? If any place had been overrun by anthropologists, this was it. But they had worked in the south. Fredrik and I decided to go north, and formulated a project that made the decision seem well grounded. To be truthful, I was yearning for a beautiful place to be. Beautiful and comfortable. Life in the back streets of Cairo had been rewarding but taxing. The area was slumlike, the stench and filth were overwhelming, and I was constantly worn out. Only my love for the people, and their kindnesses to me, kept me going. Sohar, the town in Oman where we had worked, had been a perpetual sauna with temperatures never below body heat and no fans, no running water, no nothing. We had staggered about on foot in temperatures of up to 52 degrees C (125F) in the shade, and were marked by it for years thereafter.⁴ I felt I owed it to myself to go to Bali.

Religious Identity Is Only a Part

In terms of religion, the places I have worked were Muslim (twice), Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian, if we take them in chronological order and foreground the predominant religion in each. Egypt and Oman are both Muslim states in the Sunni tradition, Bali has a 90 percent Hindu population, Bhutan is a Buddhist kingdom in the Mahayana Lamaist tradition, and Scandinavia is overwhelmingly Protestant Christian.

So I can say with confidence that in my life as anthropologist I have befriended Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and Christians (as well as animists and people of no religious affiliation). Putting it this way is misleading in a sense, however, for they were people first and foremost, individuals with their own distinct experiences and background.

In this time and age when identity is so often used to bracket people into broad categories and collectivities, we will do well to remember that basically, other humans are like you and me: persons first and foremost. We all have multiple identities based on our various characteristics and belongings—gender, age, work, ethnicity, religion, hobbies, and so on. But in the deepest sense, to have an identity means to be unique: no one else shares exactly your experience and memories; each of us is alone, in an existential sense.

So when I nevertheless make the point that my fieldwork took place among Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and Christians, it is because it is in my experience to have knowledge of this particular combination of religious traditions to draw on. My knowledge did not develop by reading religious texts, or through talks with religious specialists, though I have done some of that. My way of understanding how Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism—which were the religions unfamiliar to me—have affected the lives of people I know has been more complex: living among them, with them; seeing and hearing how they made sense of their experiences and life projects; learning in everyday life how their beliefs set their stamp on intimate relations, career management, macropolitics, visions of life and death.

My use of comparison in these pages reflects my exposure to various religious traditions. Indeed, without this experience I could not have appreciated what connects people across different religions.

At a time in history when it is all too easy to fall back on the notion that people are products of religion, driven by core ideas that propel them to behave in prototypical manners, it has been in my experience to meet persons—many of them strongly religious—who struggle as hard with life decisions as I do, without any detailed religious script to follow. I will let you meet some of them through this book.

Resonance is the key word that will take us on this journey. I did not learn to think by way of it until my fieldwork in Bali in the late 1980s. But in retrospect I see that this orientation to shared compelling human concerns has been present all along in my work as an anthropologist. I shall spell out later what it means. Here I’ll simply note that resonance has to do with empathy and understanding, with what fosters comprehension across clefts and boundaries, with enhancing the relevance of matters seemingly out of touch or reach.

Psychic unity is that which makes us imaginable to one another, Richard Shweder wrote (1991:18). Without resonance we will be captured by illusions, Balinese friends explained to me. Resonance for me is a tool for the task of deciphering the meaning of lived experience across time and space. It is only in retrospect that I realize how fundamental it has been for me from the very beginning. Age does bring some rewards.

How It All Began

The writings assembled here are my way of doing a work that became my life. It’s a way in the world, a venture from the Arctic Ocean island where I grew up, 300 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle, through Egypt, Oman, Bali, Bhutan, and then back to Scandinavia. I asked myself, when I started contemplating this book a decade ago, if there was a common thread, if I could discern a link between what I was and what I became. And now, writing from the vantage point of four decades in anthropology, I see it clearly: I wanted to reach out. I wanted to see the world. An uncle was a sailor on the Seven Seas, my grandfather had fished salmon in Alaska, missionaries came back from Madagascar and gave slide shows to show us Africa. I was intensely keen to go beyond those magnificent blue mountains across the fjord from my home on a Harstad hill. But anthropology, who had heard of anthropology? All I knew was that I wanted to see the world, to do whatever it took to achieve that ambition. Had my eyesight permitted, I am sure I would have taken wing and trained as an airline pilot. (I still remember the exhilaration when as a nine-year-old I boarded a small seaplane to go to the eye doctor in Tromsø, a day’s journey by boat.) Instead I planned to go into the foreign service, but fate intervened and offered me an invitation to Alexandria for a year; a great-uncle on my father’s side who worked for the United Nations had just been transferred to Egypt and needed someone to teach his children Norwegian. It changed my life.⁵

I had actually traveled before this. I had spent a year in the United States as an American Field Service exchange student at seventeen. I had even been on the lawn of the White House and met President Kennedy in the summer of 1963! But in my mind’s eye, and in the story I tell, my life as a traveler did not begin until I embarked on my journey to Egypt. It was there and then that I developed the intense desire to go beyond surfaces, images, facades to know what the world really looked like from different cultural perspectives.

I remember walking in villages and meeting women dressed as I imagined they did at the time of Christ, who strode the same path as I, and wondering: what did the world look like from behind those eyes?

Lost in Translation

Forty years in anthropology—it is time to look back, but also forward. The field is changing; the kinds of problems anthropologists address nowadays and the ways many orient themselves have changed dramatically since I did my first research in 1969. But I believe—and this is the reason for this book—that there is an unchanging core to doing anthropology: good, proper fieldwork. It does not mean, if it ever did, working only in specific local sites with a view to understanding the native’s point of view; globalization, transnationalism, new technologies and ways of communication are the stock-in-trade of anthropology nowadays and will remain so. Yet from my perspective—as someone who has worked on numerous research issues including poverty in the megacity, homosexuality, grief and bereavement, traditional medicine, honor killings, and human rights—there is no shortcut to understanding cross-culturally, no way other than to take the deep breath that fieldwork, as I see it, requires.

Language is essential to understanding; I could not have accomplished what I did in the Arab world without verbal fluency in Arabic or, in Bali, without a good command of Indonesian and some Balinese. And yet I have written, and I stand by this point, that having the language can actually get in the way of understanding (see chapter 1). By that I simply mean that one might get hung up, stuck on the words. Academics in particular tend to be word-mongering. My research in various parts of the world has impressed upon me the importance of silence and nonverbal communication.

But if nonverbal cues to understanding are essential, it is also true that linguistic competence is invaluable (see Kulick and Schieffelin 1997). I think it needs to be said more forcefully today than twenty years ago when I wrote Beyond the Words: The Power of Resonance, which was a forerunner for this book in laying out perspectives I further explore here (see chapter 1). The speed with which English is becoming a worldwide medium of communication, especially among the younger generation, means that it is much easier to get around knowing just English than it was at the time when not a soul in the Cairo back streets where I worked knew English, nor did Omani women. Today everyone is eager to learn English, and I know poor families in Cairo who send their children to English-speaking kindergartens, at a terrible cost, to give them a stake in the future. As a teacher of anthropology students, I worry that learning the local language of the people they work with does not seem to be so important to students today.⁶ Does it matter when there are always interpreters ready at hand?

It matters tremendously. Something is always lost in translation. I speak from experience. In Bhutan, I communicated in English, which is the primary language in school and thus is well known among the younger people and some of the elders too; I did not learn the national language, Dzongkha, or any of the other local languages (about twelve in all). My research required me to move around the country, and I did not have the energy to start learning a new language, particularly in a politically charged situation where language was a matter of identity politics. But I was all too aware of what I was missing by working with interpreters, though some of them were good.

It availed me that I have a lot of experience in translating between different languages and hence am attuned to problems I might otherwise have ignored. In school we had to study four foreign languages—English, German, French, and Old Norse—and in university a full semester of Latin was required. We also have two official Norwegian languages, in a population of four million plus, both of which we had to learn. So language has been part and parcel of my upbringing. I write books and articles in Norwegian and English; I started with the latter after I found that being translated into English could have excessive costs—not monetarily so much as in the loss of one’s own voice and one’s own meanings. This can happen even with the best of translators.

I cherish language, and I have had the deep and satisfying experience of working with translators in Swedish and Danish for some of my books. Even with languages so close to Norwegian there are basic differences, nuances of meaning and ways of expression that simply cannot be conveyed in the other language. So I am glad, in a way, that I could not check the Japanese or Portuguese or Kurdish translations of some of my books. I am keenly aware that with translation, you have to compromise.

In my research on Scandinavian court cases, I know I am missing out on essential information when relying on interpreters. It helps me to know Arabic, since languages like Persian, Kurdish, and Turkish contain many Arabic words and so I can sometimes check on the translation provided in court. My point stands: only if you have had to cope with problems of translation will you realize how much your understanding suffers by relying on English, or using interpreters, when the medium of expression is different. Some things are simply untranslatable.

This Fadime, what she did to me, I don’t know how I can ever make you understand! exclaimed the father who had killed his daughter in Sweden in 2002. He was right. Even with the best of translators, much of what he said in his defense in court would be lost on us (the Swedes), who harbor different understandings of the world. Language is a medium of thinking, feeling, and reasoning. Resonance will take you some way toward understanding, but I needed to understand the distinctive meaning of the Kurdish word namus—honor in a special sense that neither the Swedish heder nor the English honor can convey—to be able to grasp what Fadime’s father was trying to say.

But How Do You Do It?

If you want to understand what a science is . . . you should look at what the practitioners of it do, wrote Clifford Geertz. He went on to say that grasping what anthropological analysis amounts to as a form of knowledge . . . is not a matter of methods (1973b:5–6)—something I do not entirely agree with, though I see his point and have been deeply inspired by Geertz. I think method is more essential to anthropology than we like to admit, perhaps because it is so hard to teach. It is in that spirit that I do this book, to show that anthropological analysis cannot do without good method, and that we will be losing relevance vis-à-vis other disciplines if we do not take this fact to heart.

This book compiles writings from a span of thirty-five years so as to provide a view of one anthropologist’s way in the world in the hope of enlightening others. The impetus to do this book has come from two sources: students in various countries who keep asking me, "But how do you do it?" and my own need to take stock. After forty years in anthropology, it is time to look back and ask, yes, how did I do it?

By this I mean not just method—how did I work to produce my data so as to gain insight in people’s lives?—but also, what were the underlying premises? What were my guiding orientations? In short, how did I live my life as an anthropologist? For this is what it is all about: a life lived more than a work that was performed.

Looking back, I sense that there is continuity from beginning to end. I could not know for sure as I began to assemble the writings that would go into the making of this book, for I have practiced a pattern of not looking back in regard to my own work. Whereas my relations with friends in the field have been marked by a deep inability to let go, in regard to my own work I kept my distance, perhaps to save myself from the self-chastisement that would ensue for not having managed better.

But there is a time and place for everything, and this is the time to look back. The question "But how do you do it? How does one go about it?" prompted me; I kept hearing it from students when I served as a visiting professor at Harvard in 1995 and 1999–2000; at École des Hautes Études in Paris in 1996; at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1997; on lecture trips in Japan, Taiwan, and elsewhere recently. Another congenial experience was an invitation to give the Jensen Memorial Lectures at the Frobenius Institute of the Goethe University Frankfurt in 2000.⁷ The lectures, a series of seven, were public events at the House of Literature in Frankfurt, and it was suggested that I speak on the theme of emotions. So I took a broad look back in time and tried to bring together insights learned from fieldwork in Egypt, Oman, Bali, Bhutan, and Scandinavia under the title Emotions: Experience and Expression—A Cross-Cultural View. And since emotions are what life is all about in a certain sense, this provided a fortuitous occasion to reflect upon many matters of theory and method, as well as my own stance. To Balinese as to many others, emotions are the wellspring of rationality. Cognitive through and through, emotions are vital for proper judgment and decision making, especially in the social field. So this invitation to speak on the emotions was in fact a gift. It prompted me to ponder a broad range of human experience, across time and place, and to take stock of what my own contribution to its knowledge might be.

Another experience impelled me to go back in time and think critically about what I had done: in 2000, at long last, I was able to go back to Oman after an absence of twenty-four years. In preparation for that I reread the book I had written shortly after my early fieldwork there, Behind the Veil in Arabia, and never opened again. It both annoyed and pleased me, which is how it should be. But the most striking revelation was resonance: I sensed a deep continuity with where I now stood in the perspectives applied and the basic orientation to fieldwork: even when I would distance myself from some of the roads taken and some of the ways I positioned myself in regard to major anthropological theories, I still sensed their impact.

Less of a neophyte, I stand my own ground. But from beginning to end I have been driven by a certain vision of what anthropology should be. And when I hear someone asking me, "But how do you do it?" or hear people telling me that there is some special quality to my work that they appreciate, it is this that I hear: my persistence has borne fruit. So permit me to take a dip back in time and give you a snippet of my biography. Its relevance for now is that it speaks to the theme of continuity and the basic orientation that set its stamp on everything I have done in anthropology.

A Different Career Track

I have only one year of formal training in anthropology. For the rest, I am self-educated, more or less. My study was in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen in 1967–68. It was a full-time program, and we had fabulous teachers and guest speakers. The department was internationally renowned.

Further, I have been privileged to have a master mentor on the home front, since I married an accomplished anthropologist, Fredrik Barth, in 1972. But this also presented me with a challenge: I needed to hammer out a platform for myself in order not to be perceived as just the wife. And I needed to do it in counterpoint to a person whose anthropology I had been shaped by and deeply admired. I believe this special experience spurred my desire to make my own mark as an anthropologist.

Much of what I have learned has been by trial and error, and by going my own way. When I became a certified scholar at last, it was also by an unconventional route: the Norwegian University system permits anyone to submit a thesis for the doctoral degree provided she can defend it in a several-hours-long public defense; two public lectures and publications equivalent to a magistergrad are also required.⁸ There are probably only a handful of Norwegians who have ever done it this way. But the reason I chose to work in counterpoint to the system was that I did not want to compromise on my vision of what anthropology should be: a means to render lived experience in experience-near terms.

And the reason I had opted out of academia by withdrawing a thesis that would have earned me a magistergrad was that the time did not seem ripe for my kind of endeavor. There was too much emphasis on high-flown language and on fancy theories that drove a wedge between you, as reader, and the people portrayed. Or this is what I thought.

So I rewrote my magister’s thesis and published it as a book for the general public, Fattigfolk i Cairo (1976). It was published in English as Life among the Poor in Cairo (1980). And only after its reception proved highly positive did I decide to stay in anthropology ⁹ at all (reviews appeared in, e.g., the Times Literary Supplement and the Guardian, besides major Norwegian media). I had been on the verge of leaving the field to study medicine. The nice reviews of the Cairo book convinced me that I had a part to play after all. And so I embarked on the dr. philos project that eventuated in the book Behind the Veil in Arabia: Women in Oman (1982). It opens with the following words:

This book has been written with two kinds of reader in mind: primarily the general reader with an interest in Arabia or in gender roles, and secondarily my anthropological colleagues. I have tried to portray the lives of [people in Sohar] in everyday terms and to avoid words and expressions that are poorly understood beyond social science circles. I have also attempted to let the material speak, to address questions and issues that seemed to arise from the material itself, rather than problems that academic anthropology has come to judge important. ([1982] 1991a:ix)

In other words, I wanted to make it more than clear that I would make no concession to academic anthropology, even for the sake of a dr. philos degree. It was a question of take it or leave it for me. In these introductory remarks I further reflect that the fruit of my endeavor may have become something of a monster: a book too academic from the general reader’s point of view and too disorganized and ‘superficial’ from the anthropologist’s point of view. But the reason might not be only of my own making:

The gap between anthropologists and general readers is immense, not only between our languages, but also in our ways of thinking about the world. This I think most unfortunate. If anthropologists are to help make a better world, they must be able to communicate with that world. What is more, I think it would be most beneficial to our discipline if we subjected ourselves to the rigor of rethinking the world in everyday terms with the opportunities for new discoveries which such a venture entails; anthropologists often seem to mystify themselves, as well as their readers, by using excessive jargon. Finally, I also suspect that one can expect to grasp the lives of people more clearly by using the kinds of words which people themselves use. (ibid.:ix–x)

Experience-nearness indeed! But if some of the reflections above seem outmoded or self-evident by now, I could not even begin to answer the question But how do you do it? without setting them out, invoking the very words I used to position myself in counterpoint to academia as I submitted Behind the Veil for the dr. philos degree. The effort bore fruit, and I became the first female anthropologist in Norway to earn the degree, in 1980. (Three male anthropologists had gone before me. It was still very unusual for academics in the social sciences and humanities to complete this highest degree.)¹⁰

For me, the greatest satisfaction was that I had done it by going my own way. But without full backing on the home front from my husband, and without financial support from the Norwegian Social Science Research Council, which banked on me though I did not even have a BA, I would not have persevered.

The Burdens of One’s Observations

It was Cairo that made me the anthropologist that I am. But for my first fieldwork there, I might not have felt as compelled to go my own way. Life among the poor in Cairo, a life I shared initially for eight months and then subsequently for almost three years, taught me that I would betray the people I knew if I did not bear witness to their suffering. Carol Delaney’s phrase to bear the burdens of one’s observations (1988:292) captures well what I have in mind. I came out of my first fieldwork a shaken person, overcome and overwhelmed with the generosity of people who had taken me into their lives at no benefit to them save my friendship, though they fought a ceaseless battle against poverty and oppression. I could only hope to repay their faith and trust in me, in the smallest measure, by telling their stories.

I do not mean storytelling in the strict sense of the word. What would be required was an analysis of the political economy and day-to-day economics as well as the social organization of the neighborhood to show the constraints under which people labored and the small victories they achieved. Moreover, the stories would be pieced together from innumerable small observations of life in the round, meticulous, detailed observations of people’s day-to-day endeavors. At all times I have privileged observation over narrative, the visual over the auditory. And why? Perhaps again because of the mark left on me by my friends in Cairo.

They knew that words could be taken inside out and used to make up any story; they knew that depending on what one wanted to achieve, one framed one’s words accordingly. Thus their perspective on speech was pragmatic through and through. It did not mean they did not let themselves be taken in, or at times even painfully deceived (just like most of the rest of us); but it meant that the question of meaning was always bound up with a view to what people did with their words: what they set out to achieve.

So too with my own work: I privilege observation over narrative, action over speech, performance over rhetoric, interaction over discourse. It does not mean I do not rely on all these other types of data too; I utilize them for all they are worth when I have them and they seem relevant. I also recognize that narrative can be a superior and indispensable source of insight (and at times it may be all one can get). But I hold that actions speak louder than words, and that silence too can be an invaluable source of insight—Oman was my eye opener in that respect. And it taught me a lesson that prepared me for my later work in Bali and Bhutan.

Nonverbal Communication

Coming from Egypt, as I did, to Oman in 1974, I never expected to feel trapped by silence. On the contrary, it would have been a relief if I had been told that Omanis are quiet people, for my Egyptian friends wore me out by their loud (and sometimes lewd) loquaciousness. With them there was never a moment of silence; as far I can remember, life was always lived at fever pitch. But in Oman, silence reigned. As an anthropologist, I was driven to despair. I yearned for words, any words, to break the monotony of the days. But above all, I needed words as an entry into people’s minds and worldview. Below I explicate the challenges in terms of method that a silence-cherishing society presents. But the problem goes further, for it is not just a matter of the anthropologist being driven up a wall; local people can be too when they search for clues as to what others think or know, but all they meet with is quietude. How to break it, how to endure it, and how to handle it, or even sustain it, when things are truly at stake and silence functions as a protective shield?

The problem runs through all I have written from Oman onward; in this volume, it is especially salient in chapters 1 and 3, where I dwell on silence as a shared human predicament. Hence Oman came to have a profound effect on my life and work. It taught me to recognize silence not as a void but as pregnant with meaning, and to be attuned to nonverbal communication. Thus it prepared the way for my work in Bali and Bhutan, where nonverbal communication is of the essence. This is not to say that gestures, posture, facial expression, and tone of voice are not everywhere important. But it is clear that societies or communities differ with respect to their prevalence, and to what is unspoken and unspeakable.

In Bali and Bhutan, alertness to nonverbal communication is regarded as crucial for welfare and survival. It is not just that the (super)natural world is pregnant with signifiers that can wreak havoc with life and fates; humans can too. And thus the constant complaint by Balinese that there is so much to care about. A world of multiple compelling concerns is what they, much like the rest of us, live in. But in Bali learning to care requires learning to go by innumerable nonverbal cues that can spell the difference between health and disaster. Had I not learnt to orient myself by way of such selfsame signs in Oman, I would have been much more of an illiterate in Bali, much less able to attend to their world. Thus, though the meanings of silence in these two worlds, or among the people I met, are generally so different, both left an indelible mark on me.

And as Oman had prepared me for Bali, Bali prepared me for Bhutan. In a society with rigid stratification, the give-and-take of daily life requires constant vigilance to nonverbal signs of deference and respect. Failure to maintain such vigilance can spell disaster. Moreover, the Bhutanese live in a world with an abundance of supernatural powers at work. Coming from Bali, I had no problem in tuning in to it, though it took some effort at times. I remember once walking in a lush green valley surrounded by the most spectacular mountains in the world, and