context is everything

A few weeks ago, when my housemate was due to leave town for a week, I invited another young American scholar (YAS) to spend the week with me. (YAS has never really taken up a permanent residence in Gabs, but has managed to patch together a series of house-sitting appointments and temporary housing arrangements.) My housemate returned a few days earlier than she'd expected, but the three of us managed to pass the weekend quite pleasantly until Sunday morning, when YAS moved on to her next situation.

This Thursday, I received the following email from YAS:

I left a wooden carving of a hand on your front stoop. I carved it w/ one of the sculptors at the art center :) Is it still there? If it is can you tuck it somewhere safe until I can stop by to pick it up?

I asked my wise housemate if she had seen a wooden hand on our stoop. Her response:

No, but if I had, I'd have thought we'd been f***in' bewitched!

dream time

I spent this past week at a week-long camp for HIV+ kids sponsored by the clinic that serves as one of my field sites. More about that later, but suffice it to say that Friday night, I was dreaming about wrangling twelve-year-olds. Furthermore, I was dreaming about it in Setswana. While this indicates some improvement in my Setswana, I found it somewhat annoying that I was dreaming of work -- and volunteer work, no less! Shouldn't there be some kind of law against dreaming about work?

That said, the dream I dreamt the night before had nothing ostensibly to do with work, but involved a shotgun wedding and a trapeze, so I suppose I really shouldn't complain.

guide to failure

Hmm... hiding away in the field for years at a time becomes more attractive when I read things like this.

grad student vanity

A few month's back, I was contact by a fellow scholar, inviting me join a panel on a topic at least moderately related to my research at the annual meetings of my scholarly association. What the hell? I was flattered and, as a very wise friend pointed out, it would force me to write something. So I whipped up an abstract and got it to her a month before the deadline for the general call for papers so that our panel could apply for 'invited status'

What, you may well ask, is 'invited status'? Hell if I know. It has something to do with being sponsored by a sub-group of the association. According to the organiser,

'In theory this makes our panel more “prestigious” in the program.'

Well, OK.

She continued,

' And on the more practical side, it means our panel and each individual paper is officially accepted as part of the [association] conference.'

Huh?

'Your abstracts are not being reviewed by the [association], they are accepted.'

Who can argue with that? I guess that being 'invited' by the sub-group means our papers slide through the door before general ones. I really don't know how this machinery is working around me, but I'm not going to begin to argue. Graduate students are not generally bathed in an abundance of confidence and affirmation. I'll take the 'invited status' for whatever it's worth.

I am totally giddy...

... to discover that a friend I made in Botswana back in 2004 listed me in the acknowledgements of his dissertation.

I was looking for someone else's dissertation this afternoon, and I stumbled upon his instead. We stayed in the same guest house in Gabs for a few weeks. We've had only sporadic contact since hanging out in Gabs over that winter, when he was engaged in his dissertation research in African Studies, and I was trying to figure out where my project had run off to. He was enormously generous, cooking dinner for me my first night there (and many nights thereafter). He generally made my first confusing, overwhelming, anxious trip to Botswana far less lonely than it might have otherwise been.

But I certainly wasn't expecting to find my name in the acknowledgements. That just warms the little cockles of my heart.

small world

This post is for those of you who think I might be isolated out here in 'the field'. Certainly I had thought I might be a bit isolated. I think I was expecting being in 'the field' to be an experience characterized by a lack of continuity in my social connections. I've been proved wrong on the following counts:

1. My current house-mate is friends with my former boss from when I worked at Harvard some seven or eight years ago.
   


2. Easter weekend, I drove down to Jozi to meet up with a friend from a language programme I did during Summer 2005. This friend, who is currently working for a health-related NGO in Rwanda, knows an old high school friend and ex of mine, who is also working in public health in Rwanda and who I haven't seen in six years.
   


3. That same friend I met in Jozi knows from public health school a woman who was in the same training group as I for the Peace Corps seven years ago.
   


4. The woman with whom I was in the Peace Corps apparently dated a guy who is currently in enrolled in my graduate programme. (I have no idea who this is.)
   


5. An advisor of mine put me in touch with a team of MBA students who are working on a short-term project in Botswana. It turns out that the leader of this team and his wife are acquainted with another of my advisors, who lives on the other side of the U.S. (And no, they're not at all in the same discipline.)
   


6. One of these MBA students went to undergrad with a guy who's in the cohort below me in my graduate programme.

I swear that I'm not making this up. I'm not even bothering to include ordinary, run-of-the-mill connections among historians and social scientists who work in Botswana. The world really is that small.

Boxing Day

These videos should not be watched by my mother, or by your mother, or by anyone else out there who doesn't think genitalia are funny.

For the rest of you: Who doesn't appreciate a good parody?

The call.
The response.

someone else's ritual

Friday night, a doctor friend of mine who is dating an Israeli man invited me to shabbas dinner. When was the last time I went to a shabbas dinner? Um... surely sometime since college, but I'm only coming up with Seders, so maybe not.

So, having been given you some indication of the seriousness with which I take this particular ritual, you might be wondering why I went. One reason is probably the fact that I spent most of March wandering around with Seder melodies in my head that I never got to use. (I didn't do any work at all either to get myself invited to a Seder or to organise one myself. I actually have dreams - big dreams - of organising a Seder someday, but I get very nervous about the idea because I don't think I would actually know what I was doing.)

Another reason is that I have very fond memories of shabbas dinners at MHC. This was back in the day when religious life on campus took place mainly in the basement of a fabulous (if impossible to heat properly) 60's-style-architecture cement block overlooking Lower Lake called Eliot House. The basement of Eliot was also home to the the Grind, the student-run coffee house, and was thus one of my regular haunts.

But I got into shabbas dinners at MHC through the back door of the Kosher/Halal Kitchen, which served dinner on Wednesday evenings, sometimes followed by a lecture or activity of some sort. The KHK served the tastiest food on campus by far -- and the activities weren't bad, either, in their attempt to bring together Jewish and Muslim students and find some common ground. The food for shabbas dinners also came out of the KHK in Eliot House. Was I there for the food? In part, yes... the food, the melodies, and the -- for lack of a word that doesn't conjure up LOTR -- fellowship.

Shabbas as I knew it at MHC was a pretty eclectic thing, I realize now -- though at the time, I had nothing else against which to compare it, and it seemed perfectly normal. People's views on what was appropriate ritual behaviour for women, and whether and how openly queer Jews ought to be included, varied. But the fact remained that women led everything, conversations about the relationship between Judaism and feminism were ongoing, and the only rabbi with whom I've ever had anything approaching a personal relationship is an out lesbian and ordained (I think) under Reconstructionism.

Anyway, so what was my heretical, half-Jew (depending on your view of things) ass doing Friday night? Mostly keeping my mouth shut. My doctor-friend gave me a run-down of the ritual on the drive there, so I knew that only the men would be praying, that the conversation would be primarily in Hebrew, that there might be some strong opinions offered. According to my friend, her boyfriend's brother thought Reform Judaism was heretical. No oranges on the Seder plates here. Eat your heart out, Judith Plaskow...

In attendance were my friend, her boyfriend, the boyfriend's younger brother, their mother (who doesn't speak much English), and me. Another Israeli man who I had met while brunching with my doctor-friend arrived a little later, after the prayers that come before the meal had been said. There was some brief back-and-forth establishing: a) that my mother was Jewish; b) that my father's family was from Eastern Europe but were not Jewish; c) that my mother's family were Ashkenazim; d) whether my mother's family observed; e) how Jewish I looked.

Hearing the prayers again was a strange experience, in part because I'm used to a different pronunciation, but also because I'm not used to hearing them chanted. Shabbas at MHC involved a lot of singing, which was a major draw for me, and when I woke up today, I found I had some of those shabbat melodies rattling around in my head. Instead, the prayers were intoned in a style I found more reminiscent of the Muslim call to prayer: somewhat nasal and droning, though not unpleasantly, and rather sonorous. (Someone is probably going to letter-bomb me for that comparison, but whatever.)

We went through the blessing of the wine: the cup passed among the men by seniority and then the women, also by seniority), and the bread. (I had my ears out for these blessings, since they're among the few I really remember.) I had a strange moment of not knowing how this blessing would be done, because at MHC, the bread was blessed with everyone at shabbat either touching the bread or touching someone who was touching the bread. In this instance, the younger brother blessed it, and then broke it for the rest of us.

(I totally missed the washing of the hands, by the way. It came up before I realized it. My doctor-friend said to me that I could go wash my hands, if I liked. But the other people doing so, my friend not among them, were already halfway back to the table by the time I figured out what was going on.)

The meal itself was lovely, but the conversation was almost entirely in Hebrew, so my friend and I didn't have much to contribute. We eventually finished the meal, and then finished the shabbas prayers. And that was that.

I have to say, I really missed singing along. I think I've known for a long time I'm not cut out for this 'observant' stuff. I don't see myself ever really engaging in any religious ritual on a regular basis for non-ethnographic reasons. I have too many qualms built up about religious practice generally for me to participate without freaking out a bit, regardless of what kind of arguments can be made about who I might be and how entitled I might be to participate. That said, should I find myself at shabbat, I want it to be a shabbat where I get to participate in the parts I like best.

Your tautona...

So, there's a particular genre of conversation I have with Batswana (and sometimes with other folks in Botswana, such as Zimbabweans, Australians, etc.) regarding our (i.e., America's) tautona. (This is a contraction of the Setswana words for big lion, and is used to designate political leaders, e.g., presidents.) Anyway, the conversation usually takes the tone of comic teasing, but the underlying sense is something like: Your tautona -- what is he thinking? (Sometimes people will offer this question quite explicitly.) Is he crazy? What is he doing? Why does he love war so much? Why is he killing so many people?

My housemate had a friend in town visiting from NYC, and we took her out to Gabane (an outlying village I've mentioned before) for some sight-seeing. Gabane, like most (if not all) villages in Botswana has a chief (kgosi) and a kgotla (or customary court). We drove through the village and parked outside the gate, which had a large sign with the figure of a buffalo's head on it. (The buffalo is the totem of the Balete, who are the people who live in Gabane.)

By the way, if you want to quibble with someone about the term 'tribe' -- and believe me, there is much quibbling to be done -- you can check into H-Africa and argue it out with them.)

The other side of the sign, inside the fence surrounding the kgotla, showed the lines of descent of the dikgosi (chiefs) of the Balete going back several generations (I forget how many), as well as the names and years of the age regiments.

An age-regiment, or mophato, was formed around an initiation school (bogwera) for boys who were roughly contemporaries. Age-regiments could then be organised for collective labour, training, battle, or, under different circumstances, being sent off to the mines together. The female counterpart was known as bojale.

Missionaries, as you can imagine, were not so fond of this rather un-Christian behaviour, and the schools haven't really been done for decades now. There's been some talk lately of reviving bogwera, but I'll save that for another post...

We walked into the kgotla, past the pen for cattle that are impounded as fines in cases heard by the chief, and greeted the women who were sitting on chairs under a tree in front of the kgotla. The kgotla itself was an open, shaded space, with some shade cloth strung against the slanting sun. We walked up to the offices at the far end of the kgotla, and found the chief, sitting on a chair on the porch, with some ladies sitting on a bench next to him. My housemate, who had lived in Gabane some years ago and knew the kgosi, greeted him, clapping her hands together and making a little curtsey. I had been drilled in this style of greeting over and over two summers ago during intensive Setswana, and was familiar enough with it to approximate it.

I also had just enough Setswana to follow some of the exchange that followed between my housemate and the kgosi. My housemate explained that her friend had come from America, and that we wanted to look around and take some pictures. The chief remembered my housemate from when she had lived in the village, and there was some inquiring after and well-wishing towards various batho ba Gabane. What I remember vividly is that the chief brought up Iraq and Bush. I don't remember exactly how he brought them up; only that he do so, and the general sense was, 'What the hell?'. My housemate replied something to the effect that people? leaders? ditau tse ditona? in America like to kill too much... and I think that was a satisfactory conclusion to the exchange.

This isn't an every day thing, but it is definitely an on-going thing. A couple of guys with whom I was chatting brought up the fact that the death penalty is legal in Botswana, and that their tautona could essentially kill someone if that person had something wrong. My response to them was that our tautona kills people whether they've done anything wrong or not...

All this talk about our tautona in Botswana! Do you good people even know who the tautona ya Botswana is? Here's your chance to find out...

show me the money... or not.

From the files of a grad student obsessed with the connections between money, sex and the state comes a story that makes me ponder the possibility that not all American politicians have their heads where the sun don't shine...

States abstain from federal sex-ed funds: More are refusing grants to teach chastity, objecting to restrictions.
P.J. Huffstutter, Times Staff WriterApril 8, 2007

In an emerging revolt against abstinence-only sex education, states are turning down millions of dollars in federal grants, unwilling to accept White House dictates that the money be used for classes focused almost exclusively on teaching chastity...

Thanks

Many, many thanks to all you good people out there who checked in after reading the last post. It means so much to me.

According to my sister, my grandmother's speech has markedly improved, and now we're just waiting to hear what the neurologist has to say after looking at the MRI.

Thanks for thinking of me and mine.

new definition of "suckiness"

The new definition of suckiness is

• Coming home late at night to find out that your grandmother, several thousand miles away, has had a stroke; and
• Your sister, who is on the scene, can't reach your father, who, along with your mother, is in the Czech Republic somewhere; and
• Who, despite having purchased SIM cards, is not responding to either phonecalls or SMS messages; but
• Who is the only person who can give a detailed medical history.

OK, the real defining element of this is not being able to do a goddamn thing about it.

She's alive, she's getting medical care, etc., etc. Nothing drastic -- yet. It's just not very nice to be the person who can be reached but who can't do anything useful.

light 'em up

One of my faithful readers responded to my last posting with, "god, who smokes anymore?" The answer is: All of South Africa, practically. Imagine this: I tagged along one evening as my host went to play 'Action' (read: indoor) cricket in the basement of a shopping mall in Durban. People -- those playing, those observing, those taking a break to watch the cricket world cup on TV -- were lighting up all over the place (though not, I admit, on the 'field' itself). It was the craziest thing I've ever seen.

The mall, by the by, was called 'Game City', which I found confusing, if appropriate. There is a 'Game City' in Gaborone, but its name comes from the presence of a store called 'Game'. The mall in Durban no longer has a Game, but one can go there to play games (e.g., action cricket). There is, no doubt, some fancy linguistic term for this, but I can't think of it right now.

quintessence of Durbs

I don't care what you say. They may look like two countries that happen to share a geopolitical border, but I submit that Botswana and South Africa are actually two wildly different dimensions.

I just got back from a week in ZA. The border nearest Gaborone (on the other side of Tlokweng (a sub-district that borders Gabs) closes at 10pm. I actually didn't know when it closed, especially on a Sunday, and spent the last 150km of road in South Africa in a bit of a panic, wondering if I would be turned away. (I imagined myself staying up all night, smoking an entirely pack of marlboro lights to keep myself awake, etc., etc.) I took the number of lorries I saw on the road headed towards the border as a good sign, though, assuming they knew more than I did.

I squeaked through the border at 9:30pm. I'm getting better at going through the strange complex of institutions that is the border, e.g., writing down my car registration number on both the ZA and Bots sides of the border, filling out the forms, standing in the right lines, getting various pieces of paper stamped. It's not all that different from any other border, I suppose, and a lot less hectic than most. That said, it's easier when one is familiar with where to go and what to do. Congratulations, border, on successful interpellation! Revel in the discipline your subjects take upon themselves!

... and that set of comments, my friends, should tell you enough about the week. If it's still unclear, the following list should suffice: I read more Adorno last week than I've read in the past year; I was asked to explain abductive reasoning off the top of my head (and couldn't do it); I found myself putting forth a critique about Jan Vansina's use of evidence in Paths in the Rainforests and his conceptualization of the sign; I suggested early childhood faux pas as a means of illustrating Goffmanian 'fronts'.

Someone out there has already coined the term 'Goffmania'. You can't win them all, I suppose.

Do you see what I mean about this being another dimension?

Durban itself is lovely and bizarre. Much more lively than Gabs, but that doesn't take much, I suppose. It's very green and very hilly. It rained some while I was there, but most of it was a gentle mist that made even my shrubbery of hair feel soft. (My hair made a serious bid to stay in Durban.) The coffee was good, the conversation stimulating (if full to bursting with inuendos), and the sushi free (another story entirely). I smoked far, far too many cigarettes. I appreciated on more than one level the fact that some women in Durbs say goodbye to each other with a kiss on the lips. Racial politics in Durban are a thing (but I'm not the person to elaborate on that, and I'm certainly not suggesting they're somehow more of a thing than anywhere else in ZA). Bunny chow is also a thing -- and a very tasty thing, too, though the name's proximity to an American racial slur never fails to freak me out.

The friend I was visiting, his sister and I went down to the beach to look at the mess made by the 'freak waves' that hit Durban the day before I arrived. The sand had been pushed up the beach all the way to the paved promenade that separates the beach proper from beachfront shops and restraurants, some of which had been flooded when the waves broke through glass windows and doors. We joined other 'voyeurs of destruction' -- oh, yes: we went there -- peering through the mixture of dirty windows and plywood to see cooking equipment and ice cream cones mingled on the floor with sand and debris.

That said, my impression of Durban is much of more of hills than beach, of pawn shops than uShaka Marine World, of nicotine than masala pineapple. This was not the 'Durban as Playground' experience, but, knowing my host as I do, I hardly expected that, and I've no complaints.

This could be yet another chapter in a bizarre retelling of City Mouse and Country Mouse wherein urban ZA shatters whatever level of comfort I've built in Gabs. For a girl who felt like she'd switched planets rather than just crossed the border, I think I managed to conduct myself with some rudiments of grace, or at least not make a complete ass of myself. No... to be honest, I think I did make a complete ass of myself, and I am smarting from it. Smarting enough to want to break my rule about only smoking on Fridays and/or in ZA. Nothing is as bewildering to this girl as being blind-sided by her own feelings, or as embarrassing as doing a shit job of communicating them.

But Gabs refuses me the rain to go with the aesthetic of cigarettes and irony in which I might have, under different circumstances, indulged. And I could hoist my social theory sail to the wind and berate my project of self-understanding as the hallmark of a socio-historically situated middle-class, over-educated position. But I have a lot of writing to do, and, in the end, I need some data to hang my over-theorized positions on, so it's back to the daily grind of the paediatric clinic. So many cubic metres the more in my cistern / Against a leonine summer...

Jerusalem, Jerusalem...

I don't care what you say. I think Thomas Tallis' settings of the first two verses of the first chapter of the Book of Lamentations is one of the most beautiful songs of longing in the world. How can anyone listen to the voices of the choir plead with Jerusalem and not ache?

(For the Latin and translation, see here. I'm listening to the Tallis Scholars' version; read the liner notes.)

merit badge (and other news)

I just conducted my first ever on-the-record, fully consented, I-have-written-permission-to-quote-from-this interview. And it's an hour and three-quarters long.

Huh. I might just get this dissertation done after all.

... and on that note, here's an illustration of why I'm thankful to be beyond the 'pre-field' stage. (Warning: requires some time to download.)

(Apologies to members of the pre-field crowd for the gloating, and thanks for posting the link!)

In other news, that great (if confounding) theorist of post-modernism, Jean Baudrillard,is dead. Let us raise our collective glasses to a man who probably confused more people than he could begin to know. I suppose a hyperlink to his obituary in the NYT is a strangely suitable form with which to salut him. Ah, the ecstasy of communication!

the mother of invention

Happiness is winning enough at pub trivia to pay for your drinks and your dinner.

This is even happier when you realize that you haven't got your wallet on you, anyway.

And the height of happiness is the relief that you feel when, having paid your way at dinner with the winnings from trivia, you find your wallet, which you feared missing or stolen, waiting for you on the seat of your car.

(Of course, if you weren't a bleeding idiot, none of that wallet-related anxiety wouldn't have been necesary, but then you wouldn't have had quite the adrenaline rush, would you?)

offal

A friend recently passed around one of those long 'getting to know you' questionnaires that one fills in and then sends around. A friend to whom I sent the questionnaire remarked in her answers to a comment I had made:

7. What is your favourite cuisine?
probably french or italian, though i like almost anything (though now that you've brought up offal, i'm not so sure that i want to eat in botswana)

This deserves some explanation.

Many a time since coming to Botswana I have eaten seswaa, a dish wherein meat is cooked and then pounded until it's shredded. The consistency is about that of pulled pork, and I think it's right tasty.

There's another dish, though, called serobe, which is described on one website as, "Thoroughly washed, then boiled mixture of tripe, intestines and lungs. They are cut into small pieces with a pair of scissors before being spiced to add taste."

Well, anyway, as you might remember, I was at the Third Annual 'Son of the Soil' party last month (sort of a reclamation of Tswana tradition). I had not at this point managed to bring myself to try serobe, despite my love of seswaa. The cooked food was arranged in sort of a buffet line, with each cook serving what he or she had prepared. I went through the line, collecting beans and corn and cooked vegetables, all the while scolding myself that I ought to be a good anthropologist and eat the serobe already.

The meat pots were at the very end of the line. I told the man who was serving seswaa that I liked it, and he gave me a nice, big scoop from his pot.

The man serving serobe gave me a huge smile and said, "This is just like seswaa --- with offal!"



I didn't touch it. The homonynic relationship between 'offal' and 'awful' didn't help the matter. My housemate, who has been coming to Bots on and off for years, told me it tastes like dirt and I wasn't missing much anyway, so while I feel kinda wimpy, I can't flog myself that badly.

toasty

I'd just like to record for posterity the current ten-day weather forecast from weather.com... and yes, I'm being biased towards those of you who think in Fahrenheit:

High 93, low 65
High 92, low 64
High 95, low 64
High 98, low 71
High 94, low 69
High 94, low 67
High 94, low 67
High 93, low 66
High 90, low 64
High 91, low 65

(The celsius conversions are here.)

My housemate was looking up the average monthly temperatures for Gaborone, and was cheered by the fact that March is, on average, 4 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than February. (She's from Boston, and was sighing over a nice average annual range of 30F-80F.) Anyway, I had her look up Phoenix by way of comparison. As it turns out, Phoenix gets hotter than Gabs, but temperatuers in Gabs stay higher for more of the year than in Phoenix.

All that to say that I should be accustomed to this climate -- and I find that I seem to adjust more easily than, say, the aforementioned housemate. But this also means that I am well- trained in pining for cooler weather. I had managed to put this out of my mind until my housemate looked up the weather patterns for Boston, but now I am longing for a breezy day with a high of 60F the way a thirsty person suddenly remembers what cool water feels like going down the throat.

birthdaypalooza

Those of you in the know will know that it's not quite my birthday. This did not stop my dinner companion of last night from convincing the staff at the restaurant where we dined to converge upon me, chanting and clapping, until I stood on my chair whilst they sang to me. (The bottle of wine we split may have contributed to this affair, as may have my companion's rapport with the contingent of the staff that comes from Zim.) My dining companion then bought me a celebratory blowjob. (Hm, does that sentence count as inappropriate content?)

Upon walking out of the restaurant, we ran into a couple of the doctors I've been shadowing. They'd been drinking mojitos at the bar, and had heard all the chanting and singing but hadn't realized it was for someone they knew. I assured them the birthday fun had only just begun.

I then wimped out by wanting to go home and sleep off my half-bottle of wine, etc., rather than dancing till 4am. (Yes, Gabs has a dance-till-4am scene, believe it or not.) There's also something about living with: a) a four-year-old; and b) an adult housemate who gets up regularly at 5am, that makes me reluctant to stumble in the door, smelling of god-knows-what, at 3am. The living situation sometimes feels a bit reminiscent of being a teenager, but I do want to be considerate. I did pledge myself to some serious merriment next weekend.

But I am somewhat excused, I think, as I had rolled out of bed early that morning to go on a field trip with the 'teen club' of a local HIV clinic. We drove out to Gabane (a bit west of Gabs), where there's a set of crafts workshops, including a pottery company. The man who runs the workshop led the kids through the process of preparing the clay, using the potter's wheel, and forming figures free-hand, and then turned them loose. The kids (about 20 them, and most on them probably under 15) seemed pretty captivated. The shop will fire the objects the kids made when they're dry, and then the doctors who run the clinic will come fetch them for the kids.