Bewitched, bothered
and bewildered
Readers know they’re in for a rollicking time when a supposedly serious-minded
academic starts with a blunt admission about his former profession.
‘Ethnography’, says Dr Will Buckingham when introducing Stealing with the Eyes, is ‘that curious
brand of high-minded intrusiveness amongst peoples too polite, or too
powerless, to tell you to go f*** yourself.’
Subtitled Imaginings and Incantations in Indonesia, on one level it’s about a young British graduate’s
adventures in Tanimbar late last century.
Ostensibly he went in search of three carvers and to learn more of adat, a word with more definitions than
dictionaries.
It can be culture, magic, ritual,
wisdom, tradition, a reason for doing unreasonable things, an excuse for
avoiding people and places, and a jumbled mixture of the lot. Adat is ever-present in rural Indonesia but
in Tanimbar it’s most fertile for here the dead walk, women give birth to
octopuses and witches are the root of all wrongs.
The island is isolated, 570 kilometers southeast of Ambon in the Banda Sea, though not so distant it couldn’t be reached
by Europeans brandishing Bibles, guns and empty barrels to fill with exotic
foods for shipment and profit.
After the Second
World War it became a center for ‘primitive’ art, drawing collectors and a few
tourists. A booklet for craftsmen by a normally prurient government suggests
‘differences in the sexes of sculptures should be made explicit. The sexual
organs should not be seen as shameful or pornographic.’
A weird place, and a fine location for a thinker to learn more
about himself, his purpose and Western values, not always well scrutinized by
its practitioners:
Books based on academic theses usually include sparkling tributes
to the kind folk encountered during research. These glowing acknowledgements lead
outsiders to think they’ve missed a perfect world where none are bitchy and
bastardly, grasping and lying; mistakes are seldom made and rapidly forgiven. Generosity
is unqualified.
Apart from setting tone through observation, the best about Buckingham’s
prose is its apparent honesty. Written
more than two decades after working on a project with Ambon’s Pattimura University,
this memoir squints at self and society from afar:
‘Curi mata: stealing
with the eyes. The accusation was inescapable. What else did Westerners do, the
whole world over, if not this? They roved here and there, taking other people’s
lives and homes as things to be photographed, consumed, ferried back home.
‘Wasn’t anthropology itself no more than a vast enterprise of
stealing with the eyes? Wasn’t the entire world, under the guise of knowledge
and science, a cabinet of curiosity for the West?’
Buckingham finds the required ‘informants’ but anthropology
isn’t run in a sterile laboratory. By
showing interest the newcomer warps reality, just as a TV news crew’s presence
can encourage thugs to change a demo to a riot.
He does meet helpful people, but also gets snared by petty
feuds; he’s misinformed, manipulated and exploited. A statue promised as a gift
because the artist was being guided by his ancestors turns into a demand for
money and a most discomforting episode where Western understandings collide
with local expectations.
Such events rarely appear in scholarly works unless buried
under obfuscating jargon, which Buckingham avoids. He gets seriously sick and is treated with a
range of traditional cures from pills, to massage, to group therapy. None work; the fever eventually extinguishes,
though later returns.
Buckingham heads to Ambon
to sort out visa hassles: ‘The bureaucratic demands of the Indonesian state were no less
binding and complex than the adat demands of
the ancestors.’
But should he return to Tanimbar?
He’d made friends, garnered information, improved his Indonesian but was
running out of money. His inquiries had been led off the textbook track; oral
history gets embellished according to the moods of the myth’s custodians. Are
there any certainties? Time for a
rethink:
‘What
sicknesses and discontents, I wondered, had I brought to Tanimbar? And now that
I had left, drifting away with wind and tide, what greater discontents would I
bring by returning? What do you here in this poor
land? These were questions to which I could find no good answers.’
But he does
go back, this time to the village
of Tumbur where he’s
visited by the self proclaimed ‘best sculptor in the village’. And indeed Damianus Masele doesn’t exaggerate.
Buckingham’s tape-recorder,
the anthropologist’s equivalent of a doctor’s stethoscope proving
qualifications, spooks informants so he discards the device – only to find the
artist demanding to be recorded.
He’s asked to
sign a document absolving Masele of blame should the Englishman be struck by
disaster after seeing a sacred object, but instead chooses not to view; had adat taken hold?.
The villagers
think of Westerners as men with guns and women in bikinis. Both frighten: ‘Sex
and death. Death and sex. Tanimbarese dreams of the West, and Western dreams of
Tanimbar. The two were almost-perfect mirror images.’
Back in
Britain Buckingham gets seriously sick again, leading him to abandon higher
study and turn to writing – which seems to bring release. Then he discovers his old notes:
‘Tanimbar
carved me. It refashioned and remade me in ways that eventually put paid to my
relationship with anthropology, this queasy enterprise at the tag end of
colonialism.
‘It is thanks
to my time in Tanimbar that I found myself eventually heading down new paths,
as a sculptor of sorts myself, but one who worked in words rather than in wood
and stone, fashioning stories and tales from fragmented dreams, recollections
and imaginings.’
And it’s
thanks to this book that we can also ponder the world’s ways, learn and
discover without having to be tested by Tanimbar and bewitched by adat.
Stealing
with the Eyes by Will Buckingham
Haus
Publishing, London,
2019
231 pages
First published in The Jakarta Post 5 August 2019
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