At Play in the Fields of the Lord

There is little more fascinating than discovering and meeting with people from another culture, especially if that culture is strange and exotic.  It has been a theme in literature for decades, wonderfully exploited in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels in 1726, a novel containing one Lemuel Gulliver’s narrative about his four fictional voyages to remote regions of the world.  In the first, Gulliver is shipwrecked off the shore of Lilliput.  Falling asleep he is tied up by the Lilliputians, people who are less than 6 inches tall. The Lilliputians are not just small, they are small-minded, with  ridiculous customs and petty debates. At one point Gulliver is asked to help defend Lilliput against the Blefuscu empire at odds in a war over at which end of a cooked egg the shell should be broken.  If you thought that was weird, his second voyage takes him to Brobdingnag, inhabited by a race of giants.  In that story the Brobdingnagian king responds to Gulliver’s description of the government and history of England by concluding that the English must be a race of “odious vermin.”

The voyages continue, and in yet another, the third, he finds himself arriving on the flying island of Laputa, where the people are so lost in thought that they must be reminded to pay attention to the world around them. They’re so greatly concerned with mathematics and music, they have no practical applications for their learning.  Finally Gulliver visits the land of  the Houynhnms, a race of intelligent horses who are cleaner, more rational and considerate than a brutish, filthy, greedy, and degenerate humanoid race called Yahoos.  After Gulliver describes his country and its history, the Houyhnhnm concludes that the people of England are as unreasonable as the Yahoos.  Gulliver returns to England so disgusted with humanity that he avoids his family and buys horses to converse with them instead.

Gulliver’s Travels is a satire on humans, but it can be read as a children’s story, as science fiction and as a forerunner of the modern novel.  It is often read as a systematic rebuttal of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, a rather more optimistic account of human capability. It seems likely Swift was writing his fiction to refute the notion that the individual precedes society, (as Defoe’s novel about Robinson Crusoe seems to suggest).  Gulliver repeatedly encounters with established societies rather than desolate islands and uses them to lampoon various ways of thinking.  For example, the experimenters in Laputa are used to illustrate the effects and cost on society on an extreme embrace and celebration of policies pursuing scientific progress, together with a questioning of modern liberal democracies.

Alongside such fictional views of the world of others, sit the results of real life accounts by social anthropologists.  One of the early classics of social anthropology was a study carried out in the Trobriand Islands by Bronislaw Malinowski, who had decided to accept voluntary internment in the Southern Pacific during the First World War.  His monograph, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, was a wonderful piece of ethnography, observing, describing and interpreting a series of exchanges, of shell necklaces and arm bands, between leaders in the various islands.  The exchanges were concerned with status, and the objects were never ‘owned’, but looked after by the recipients before they were exchanged in the next round.

A discussion of the Kula Ring, as Malinowski described it, deserves a commentary of its own.  However, quite apart from the study and analysis, there are other less central parts of this research study that deserve mention.  One of these has to do with Malinowski himself, and a couple of photographs in the books.  They are quite stunning, and very revealing.  There is Malinowski in his tropical gear, safari suit and pith helmet, surrounded by a nearly naked group of young men and women.  They make clear, with unexpected clarity, Malinowski’s relationship to the Trobriand Islanders.  He was a Westerner, who sustained his identity in a rather idyllic tropical location, clearly and markedly separated from those he met.  He was an observer, and he could have been studying the inhabitants of a distant planet.

Those photographs speak to a view of social anthropology of which Malinowski was an exemplar.  We have moved from fictional imagination to observation, looking at another group.  However, Malinowski was a distinct and detached observer:  he could have been studying the islanders as if they were the inhabitants of one of those glass sided ant farms.   When you read his book, a marvel of observation and analysis, you know you are on the other side of a window.  You can observe what is taking place, every action described in detail, but you are doing so ‘objectively’, a scientist observing his specimens.

Some 40 years later, another anthropologist was undertaking fieldwork, this time in Brazil.  David Maybury-Lewis found himself ‘poised between two worlds’. Despite their rich heritage, the Shavante were urged to join the rural poor or follow the missionaries. “Nobody mentioned the other option,” wrote Maybury-Lewis, “that they might retain their lands and enter the Brazilian economy while modifying, but not abandoning, their own traditions.”  In The Savage and the Innocent he details his own mid-20th-century time when he met and befriended a people regarded by westerners as the ‘wildest Indians’ and ‘notorious savages’, claimed to have killed multiple previous parties of white interlopers.  However, he isn’t a Malinowski, and he neither romanticises nor ennobles the ‘savage’, but instead reveals, with empathy, what happens to people like these who do not resist western encroachment.

Key in this was his wife, Pia.  Wanting to travel, he was encouraged by a Cambridge professor to pursue fieldwork among the Indigenous tribes of Brazil, a relatively unexplored territory for anthropologists at the time.  David left for South America in 1953, and Pia followed several months later via a 24-day trip on a freight ship from Norway.  On their first visit to the Xerente, Pia noticed the deplorable racist attitudes Brazilians held towards the country’s Indigenous Peoples. David took a turbo-prop plane and Pia, due to lack of space on the flight, again followed, in a boat. “The [riverboat] captain heard that we were going to see the Xerente. He said at night he just stops in the middle of the river because they eat you. There wasn’t a horrible thing they didn’t say about the Indians,” she recalled.

After living with the Xerente for 18 months, the Maybury-Lewis’s returned to England and Pia gave birth to their first son, Biorn. When it was time for David to return to Brazil to begin his fieldwork with the Xavante, Pia’s family encouraged her to stay behind and take care of the baby, but Pia insisted on following her husband and bringing her child with her.  David, Pia, and Biorn spent several months with the Xavante over the next year.  Pia worked in the fields with the other women, carrying Biorn on her back in a sling wherever she went.  “He was a toddler. A little baby would have been easier,” she remarked.

It is probably fair to describe this as another step forward in social anthropology as David and Pia Maybury-Lewis describe what they find disturbing, annoying, and even disgusting about the Shavante and the neighbouring Sherente people, but also what the Sherente and Shavante find savage, disgusting and risible about their uninvited white guests. Maybury-Lewis’s toddler son quickly adapts to village life and helps David and Pia develop the self-critical instincts and an understanding of the anthropologist’s perspective that was to transform the ethnographies of the 1980s and 1990s.  Rather than the distanced observations of Malinowski, now the observer’s own relationships to those described are exposed, and so is our insight into an author’s awareness of limits to his own understandings.

These academic studies of other cultures are paralleled by the accounts of missionaries, studying the native populations of groups they were sent to convert.  One extraordinarily detailed account is that given by Harry Ignatius Marshall, whose 1922 book The Karen People of Burma contains rich data on the lives of these people.  For example, in Chapter XIX he includes an extraordinarily detailed account of a marriage.  Here’s one part:

 “the villagers early on the second morning of the wedding ceremonies prepare a feast of rice and chicken curry for their guests. Not less than two young roosters or two pullets are used in the preparation of this final feast, every part of the fowls being cooked, even the intestines, which have been carefully cleaned. Bits of stewed plantain stalks are included in the dish, inasmuch as the prolific nature of this plant is supposed to be communicated to those partaking of its, thus assuring the large families desired. A joint of bamboo full of liquor is also brought out. The bride and groom must then dip their fingers into the liquor and the food, while calling out “Pru-r-r k’la, heh ke” (“Pru-r-r k’la, come back”), two or three times. The elders now shout: “This day you twain, husband and wife, have become one spirit. May God take care of you. May the Just One watch over you, May the powerful Thi Hko Mu Xa (Lord of the demons) shield you. May you have strength to work and gain your livelihood. May you sleep in peace and eat the fruits of the land. May you have long life, ten children, and one hundred grandchildren.” 

Our fascination with other cultures is never-ending, whether in terms of fact or fiction.  To move to contemporary fiction, Peter Matthiessen wrote a masterly, and eventually rather dark, novel, At Play in the Fields of the Lord, which combines the study of other cultures with missionary activities and human fallibility.  This complex and amazing story is set far away from civilisation, so very far back in the jungles of the Amazon headwaters that not even an anthropologist has visited nor observed the lives the Indians of a little naked tribe which might be the last in the world still untouched by civilization (the dream of most social anthropologists).  This story explores how this remote society is ‘touched’ and how it falls undone, largely the result of the actions resulting from the allure of ultimate remoteness and almost obsessive enchantment this hidden society exerts on an assortment of Americans.

As reviewers have noted, “Matthiessen’s novel has nearly everything–a powerful plot, a rich variety of characters, a perceptive, deeply felt view of man’s yearnings and his essential ironic tragedy and a prose style that is vivid, sensuous and disciplined by his intelligence”.  At the same time, it leaves us, as do so many other accounts of societies unlike our own, feeling outside the events, as observers curiously detached from much of what is happening.  Perhaps it is always like this when we try to write about people who live in another culture, trying to make sense of another and often almost impossibly different world.

This tribe in the Amazon rain forest, the Niaruna, is depicted as utterly primitive, stone age Indians whom everyone outside wants to change. The Niaruna are seen as dangerous, both politically and morally. This is because they harass neighbouring Indians, so that the local chief is under pressure to ‘civilize’ and pacify them, or drive them across the border, or kill them, or get rid of them some other way.  To do this, he hires two cynical, rootless mercenaries to bomb the forest. One of them, Lewis Moon, a North American and half-Indian himself, bails out, and soon becomes someone whom the Niaruna tentatively accept as a god.

To add to the complexity of the story, on the edge of the jungle worldly Roman Catholic and fanatical Baptists missions are already competing for the honours of converting the naked savages to Christianity. “I am enjoying the profits of a business deal I entered into with the Lord,” exults one inspired Baptist.  The novel tells how this begins as by plane, outboard motor canoe and jungle trail a group of Americans, including two missionary families, bring about the first successful contact of the modern world with the ‘savage Niaruna’.  It’s dramatic.  At every stage of their complicated adventure, the various characters are exposed to every variety of danger, confronted by piranha-infested rivers, by the filth and disease of jungle outposts, by the treacheries of the local government-appointed official, by their enmities for one another, by drink, drugs, madness, by machine gun and rifle and pistol fire, by spears, machetes, arrows, knives, fists, and broken bottles.  If that wasn’t enough, they are tormented day and night by lusts, racial hatreds, and religious enthusiasms.  It’s a catastrophic tale, in which some die, while others find their lives dramatically altered.

At Play in the Fields of the Lord is a novel of adventure, and it’s a good old-fashioned story about adventurers going into an unknown world.  However, Peter Matthiessen doesn’t fool around with the elements of an adventure story, but rather he tells it straight. The perils of his adventurers, both physical and spiritual, are the key elements of the plot, and his tale is serious, full of modern sensibilities, and extremely engaging, to the point our excitement in wanting to know what happens next, leads to an almost unconscious acceptance of how skilful and even ingenious a story is being told.

In the first place, he makes it clear the characters assembled here are far from an accidental or coincidental group, coming together by chance while pursuing  their separate fates. Each of them has his own complicated necessity for the push through the jungle to the Niaruna tribe. Their relations with one another are characterised by their confrontations, quarrels, fights, and loves, often leading to unexpected stages in the plot. If the perils are vivid and violent, no single adventure seems to be there just for the sake of giving the reader a thrill.  Rather, the events keep increasing in intensity, until every character has been laid bare, every gun that had been hanging on a wall has been proven to be no mere ornament, and the basic elements of the novel’s opening prove themselves to be inescapable omens of fate and necessity.

Two antagonists in the story compete for the Niaruna, each wanting to save them. One is a soldier of fortune, totally disenchanted and self-debauched, but because he is, of all things, a college-educated American Indian, he is determined first of all to find some “real” Indians, and then, finding them, he is determined to lead them in what might well be a successful military defence of their territory. The other is a missionary, one of the American group determined to save the Indians’ souls for Christ. The soldier of fortune, of necessity, becomes a god; the missionary, of necessity, loses his faith and becomes the tool of secular interests. And between them, in their exchanged roles, they destroy the tribe they have so spectacularly risked their lives to save.

However bizarre and astonishing, for the reader these plot elements and complications don’t come across forced or impossible as they unfold.  The story remains to the end an adventure, with the scale and intensity of the action constantly growing almost uncontrollably.  This is no mean an achievement. If, having finished this novel, you were to turn back to the start and read the early chapters again, you would see how all this was brought about. This is a good old-fashioned writing, albeit using a plot resting on an exotic locale, combining jungle, river, sky, bars, latrines, bordellos, hog-wallows, and other sordid horrors of frontier villages.  False morality, myth, magic, the Noble Savage, man’s tragic destiny to corrupt himself and find innocence only in madness, are at the centre of “At Play in the Fields of the Lord”, a title that masks that this isn’t a comedy but a tale of bitter endless irony.  And it’s all too real …

Against Interpretation

Susan Sontag is one of those people who is surrounded by dramatically divided opinions.  She died twenty years ago, and from her first novel, written at the age of 30 years old, through to her examination of war photography, forty years later, she was constantly subjected to critical praise by some and simultaneously and often harshly denigrated by others.  She managed to write about photography, and art more generally, she completed a series of novels over her lifetime, and she was a prolific commentator and essayist.  She was an activist, the recipient of awards and prizes, and at the same time bitterly attacked as undeserving.  She was an intellectual, and, like Christopher Hitchens, another whose essays I really enjoy, her writing  ranged across several areas of non-fiction criticism as well as some outstanding fiction.  The older she became, the harder it was to be certain you really understood where she stood on various issues.  In my case, my ability to fully understand her views was challenged from the beginning.

I would like to write about Susan Sontag, but the task is beyond me.  It would take years to delve into and understand her work, her character, what drover her, and why she did what she did.  Complex, fascinating and even ‘difficult’.  If you want to know more, Melinda Harvey’s review of Benjamin Moser’s biography, Sontag: Her Life, is helpful (in the Sydney Review of Books, 1 August 2022), and is further developed in his book.   Harvey wrote, “That she was a woman who did not find empowerment in leaning in to any of the social identities she had to choose from: woman, queer, Jew. She preferred to escape from them. And there was a label that allowed escape from them: ‘writer’. Wrote Susan in her journal in 1959: ‘My desire to write is connected with my homosexuality. I need the identity as a weapon, to match the weapon that society has against me.’ This is not a million miles from Charlotte Brontë in 1849 writing to her publisher, ‘I am neither a man nor a woman but an author’”.

Despite her extraordinary life and range of writing, much of my appreciation of Susan Sontag and her views come from one book.  My copy of Against Interpretation is the UK First Edition, published in 1967.   I bought my copy in 1968.  It was one of those books that I only partly understood, and yet was immediately attracted to:  it was speaking to issues I didn’t fully grasp, but I wanted to understand.  Much of the book was critical essays on such writers as Camus, Sartre and Levi Strauss, playwrights, film directors, and even on happenings and the meaning of camp.  However, it was the opening title essay that first held me, and I have read it, reread it, and every so often go back and read it yet again.  The twelve pages of Against Interpretation ends with section 10:  one line: “In place of hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”  If I didn’t understand that, I did get the last sentence of the preceding section: “The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even if that is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”

Before I return to that specific essay, I need to explain that the reason I was acquiring Against Interpretation back in 1968 was because, glancing through a copy in Heffer’s Bookshop, I saw there was an essay inside title ‘The anthropologist as hero’, and it was about Claude Lévi-Strauss.  The man of the decade, and the essay was headed with an extract from Tristes Tropiques, the most tantalising of his books, as he considers what it means to study another culture:

“The paradox is irresoluble: the less one culture communicates with another, the less likely they are to be corrupted, one by the other; but on the other hand the less likely it is, in such conditions, that the respective emissaries of these cultures will be able to seize the richness and significance of their diversity.  The alternative is inescapable:  either I am a traveller in ancient times, and faced with a prodigious spectacle which would be almost entirely  unintelligible to me and might, indeed, provoke me to mockery or disgust; or I am a traveller of my own day, hastening in search of a vanished reality.  In either case, I am the loser … for today, as I go groaning among the shadows, I miss, inevitably, the spectacle that is now taking place.”

Sold, to the impecunious student!

Sontag’s essay on Lévi-Strauss was extraordinarily perceptive.  If I had paid more attention to it at the time, my own understanding of Lévi-Strauss’s contribution to social anthropology would have been far clearer than it was.  It took me years to see what I had missed, as I was absorbed in reading ethnographic studies of various pre-industrial societies.  As I focussed on analyses of religious rituals, kinship categories and political systems, I was glancing past the obvious.  What he saw was, as Sontag puts it, “The past, with its mysteriously harmonious structures, is broken and crumbling  before our eyes.”.

As it happens, I abandoned pursuing ethnographic fieldwork in such tempting places as the New Guinea Highlands or the upper reaches of the Amazon.  Married, with young children, I was drawn to research in the safer, comfortable world of contemporary British business, wanting to understand the emergence of a new profession, the computer programmer.  The subject matter drew me over towards industrial sociology, as the world of social anthropology slowly disappeared from view.  As Sontag makes clear in commenting on Lévi-Strauss, what I missed in my reading was understanding his insight into ‘anthropological doubt’, the realisation of what we don’t know, and the willingness to admit that ignorance.  He was seeking to convey the importance of ignorance in the face of other people.

Sontag understood that, and she also understood that in the face of such ignorance, what we can study is how other people seek to make sense of their world.  This was the agenda Lévi-Strauss was pursuing, to find the logical structures that underpinned other cultures.  She ends her essay by concluding “The anthropologist is thus not only the mourner of the cold world of the primitives, but its custodian as well.  Lamenting among the shadows, struggling to distinguish the archaic from the pseudo-archaic, he acts out a heroic, diligent and complex modern pessimism”.   This is Susan Sontag the intellectual at work:  probing, clarifying, and at the same time unable to hold back from translating her insights into vivid images and contradictions.  It offers an insight into the person she was becoming, brilliant, controversial, with a consuming desire to say something more than others have, and in so doing establish her reputation.  Smart, spiky, and often close to going too far.

Later in Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag included some of her film reviews.  I suspect that cinema might have been the area in which this very clever observer was at her most perceptive and comfortable.  She makes it clear that she sees ‘form’ as the critical element of great art, rather than focussing on meaning as the central issue for analysis.  In examining Jean Luc Godard’s film Vivre Sa Vie, she explains that the film is a ‘demonstration’, that “something happened, not why it happened”.  The film is episodic, and it has a structure that reflects the Christian story of the twelve stations of the cross.  However, this is a secular story, and while each of the twelve sections of the film have a title, this is not to show us a path to resolution, to offering meaning to each scene, but simply as signposts:  this happened next.  For Sontag, this emphasis on form as opposed to meaning is what makes the film and its director so important in the history of cinema.

Yet another of the essays looks at ‘Happening: an art of radical juxtaposition’.  Happenings back in the 1960s were a rather different kind of experience from the musical happening that are occasionally seen today.  Our 21^st century happenings are ‘flash-mobs’, a group of people that assembles suddenly in a public place, performs for a brief time, then quickly disperses, often with their activities some strange combination of entertainment, satire, and/or artistic expression.  There are some famous examples of this to be seen on YouTube, like the unannounced performance of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy outside a Spanish bank, or the Sound of Music Do Re Mi performance at Antwerp’s Central Station.  Incidentally, these brief performances actually took weeks of planning and preparation.

Happenings were deliberately presented as if they improvised on the spot, although they, too, had been planned and rehearsed in advance.  These happenings were a form of participatory art, emphasizing an interaction between the performer and the audience.  They are like a scene from a play, but only that one scene – often a brief and problematic vignette.  In most cases part of the intention was to break down the wall between performer and spectator.  This might mean the action happens in front of you or around you and might even involve the spectators as performers.  In some happenings, everyone present is included in the making of the art.  An actor relates a brief episode, bursts  into tears, and then seeks consolation from the audience.  Most had no set rules, only vague guidelines that the performers follow with various props.  Unlike other forms of art, happenings often allowed chance to enter into the performance and were ever-changing. When chance determines the path the performance will follow, there is no sense of failure:  the performance is just what ‘happened’.

What Sontag realised was that they often have an underlying aggressive component.  Many happenings unfolded in such a way that it was unclear what was going on.  The event might take part in a darkened environment, sightlines might be deliberately blocked, or the performance space deliberately constructed in such a way that as to restrict observation, as when they took place in a long narrow hall.  Indeed, often the audience wasn’t just ‘involved’ but actually subjected to various indignities:  in some cases they were sprayed with water, doused in flour, subjected to extremely loud noises, or even had coins thrown at them.  As she noted: “This abusive involvement of the audience seems to provide, in default of anything else, the dramatic spine of the Happening”.  After all, if the audience are merely traditional spectators as in normal theatre, the event is less compelling, less of a ‘happening’.

These observations take the reader back to the opening essay, and Sontag’s comments on the topic of Against Interpretation.  It is the epitome of her style, both in its brilliance and in what it doesn’t do.  She begins her commentary by going back to Plato, and his view that art is nothing more than representation.  He wasn’t keen on art, and as a result left the appreciation of art with a distinction, between ‘form’, the nature of the representation, and ‘content’, what is being represented.  Perhaps that wasn’t such an issue when most art was mimetic, when portraits and landscapes were like many of the photographs we see today, trying to reproduce what the eye sees as accurately as possible.  However, once artists ceased focussing on direct representation, then the distinction between form and content became central.  We could no longer look at a painting without being expected to ask questions: ‘what is this artist saying to us?’, ‘what does this painting mean?’

This is the core of this essay, and of Sontag’s collection of essays.  As she explains, “The task of interpretation is virtually one of translation.  The interpreter says, Look, don’t you see that X is really – or, really means – A?  That Y is really B?  That Z is really C?”.  She explains this further by first offering some examples of how traditional texts, like Biblical stories, are now explained as allegories, this interpretation being justified by explaining its ‘true meaning’.  Her compelling example is the Biblical story of the exodus from Egypt and arrival in the promised land, which has been explained as “really an allegory of the individual soul’s emancipation, tribulations and eventual deliverance.”  And there was me thinking it was me thinking it was an account of Moses running away from oppression in Egypt and finding a new location for the Jewish people.  Silly fellow.

Sontag goes further to explain the latent aggressiveness in contemporary modes of interpretation: “The old style of interpretation was insistent, but respectful; it erected another meaning on top of the literal one.  The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs behind ‘behind’ the text, to find the sub-text which is the true one.”  This is the distinction that Freud was to make between manifest content and latent content, the true meaning of a text.  In interpreting art, often the outcome impoverishes our experience and imagination, by turning the richness of art into prosaic accounts of our world.  Alice in Wonderland is really about puberty, and Turner’s amazing painting of The Fighting Temeraire is really about the decline of Britain’s naval power, the passing of the ‘glorious’ age of sail and the growth of ‘modern’ technology in an increasingly industrialised Britain.

She writes so well.  Now with the bit between her teeth, she’s having fun, and is especially perceptive when it comes to theatre and cinema, as in this commentary of Elia Kazan’s commentary on directing Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire:

“… in order to direct the play , Kazan had to discover Stanley Kowalski represented the sensual and vengeful barbarism that was engulfing our culture, while Blanche Du Bois was Western civilisation, poetry, delicate apparel, dim lighting, refined feelings and all, though a little the worse for wear to be sure.  Tennessee Williams forceful psychological melodrama now became intelligible:  it was about something, about the decline of Western Civilisation.  Apparently, were it to go on being a play about a handsome brute named Stanley Kowalski and a faded mangy belle named Blanche Du Bois, it would not be manageable.”

How did I miss all that, and think it was about the relationship between two complex, fascinating and deeply flawed people?

Susan Sontag is far too clever to stop after making a few perceptive jabs.  She goes on to point out that there is an important task in describing works of art, but asks the reader to consider what form of criticism would comprise an approach that “served the work of art, not usurp its place?”  She makes it clear that she is arguing for a return to focussing on form.  To quote just once more, she explains that “Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art – and in criticism – today.  Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the things in itself, of things being what they are.”  Sontag was mounting an argument that addressed the need to see more in looking at art, to hear more, to feel more, as she puts it.  It is a passionate perspective, and it’s one I embrace.

Recently while I was attending a live concert at the National Gallery of Australia to hear Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata, writing about Susan Sontag was on my mind.  However, once the music began, for the next 40 minutes that was all there was.  I was totally absorbed.  I didn’t have to think about explanations, introductions or overviews of the work, why was written, the structure of the movements.  I just experienced it.  Going to art galleries now, I tend to prefer spending time in just 2-3 rooms, my time taken up with focussing on just a few paintings.  When I was younger, I’d read the commentaries on the wall or the gallery guide:  now I just look and let what I see fill my mind and shape my experience.  Sontag was right.

Transitions

It seems like the very distant past, but when I was a student of geology in my final years of high school, I found myself torn between alternatives.  On the one hand, I was fascinated by palaeontology and the study of fossils, trying to understand the creatures they had once been, and how they had changed and evolved over time.  This appealed to me as a collector, brought up on organising anything from postage stamps, butterflies, or engine numbers, to keeping a tally of birds seen, or places visited.  However, equally attractive was ‘big picture’ geology, which focussed on rocks, the geomorphology of changing landforms and underlying physical structures over millions of years, where making sense of these changes also involved analysing materials through the tools of mineralogy and crystallography.  I knew that if I continued with geology at university, I’d have to specialise in one area or the other.

It didn’t happen, but that contrast between the two facets of geology was to replicate itself at university when I began to study social anthropology.  This was at a time, not that long ago, when people studying social anthropology found themselves caught between two approaches to describing other cultures.  One was the anthropologist as ethnographer, examining the behaviour of the participants in a given society, observing how various activities, social, economic, political, practical and ritual all worked together to establish a functioning society.  This drew on that British collecting tradition, with the researcher embedded in and even participating in tribal life, documenting somewhat idyllic accounts of pre-industrial lives by presenting pictures of societies where everything worked together in a functioning whole.

Famously, this theme of observing and explaining ‘primitive’ (pre-industrial) peoples was greatly influenced by Bronisław Kasper Malinowski, usually described as a Polish-British anthropologist and ethnographer, he of the pith helmet, tent and cooking pots living among nearly naked islanders.  He was born in Poland, but the British had an early claim on his thinking, as he said it was after reading James Frazer’s crazy compendium The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion that he decided to become an anthropologist.  In June 1914 he left England for Australia, initially for a planned expedition to Papua (as Papua New Guinea was then known).  Soon after his arrival things became complicated. Although Malinowski was an ethnic Pole, he was a subject of Austria-Hungary, at war with England.  To avoid internment if he returned to Europe, he stayed to carry out field studies.  Of these, it was his time in the Melanesian Trobriand Islands that led to his monograph, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, a study which remains a significant contribution to social anthropology.

Across the Channel, perhaps unsurprisingly the French pursued a different approach.  They were social anthropologists as ethnologists, taking the data collected by those British field researchers and comparing and contrasting different cultures.  Their interest was in the identification of underlying cross-cultural processes, such as incest taboos, religious rituals and types of political system, in identifying universal invariants in human society.  They saw the anthropologist’s task as analysing concepts, cultural oppositions and symbols as a way to revealing deeper meaning.  If ethnographers like Malinowski provided the raw data, then people Marcel Maus and Claude Levi-Strauss sorted out what it all meant.

Among these analysts was Arnold van Gennep, a Dutch-German-French anthropologist, whose 1909 book The Rites of Passage was to burst on the scene in an English language translation in 1960.  He made clear the importance of ‘transitions’:

“The life of an individual in any society is a series of passages from one age to another and from one occupation to another. Wherever there are fine distinctions among age or occupational groups, progression from one group to the next is accompanied by special acts, like those which make up apprenticeship in our trades. Among semicivilized peoples such acts are enveloped in ceremonies, since to the semi-civilized mind no act is entirely free of the sacred. In such societies every change in a person’s life involves actions and reactions between sacred and profane—actions and reactions to be regulated and guarded so that society as a whole will suffer no discomfort or injury. Transitions from group to group and from one social situation to the next are looked on as implicit in the very fact of existence, so that a man’s life comes to be made up of a succession of stages with similar ends and beginnings: birth, social puberty , marriage, fatherhood, advancement to a higher class, occupational specialization, and death. For every one of these events there are ceremonies whose essential purpose is to enable the individual to pass from one defined position to another which is equally well defined. Since the goal is the same, it follows of necessity that the ways of attaining it should be at least analogous, if not identical in detail … Thus we encounter a wide degree of general similarity among ceremonies of birth, childhood, social puberty, betrothal, marriage, pregnancy, fatherhood, initiation into religious societies, and funerals. … Because of the importance of these transitions, I think it legitimate to single out rites of passage as a special category, which under further analysis may be subdivided into rites of separation, transition rites, and rites of incorporation. …  Rites of separation are prominent in funeral ceremonies, rites of incorporation at marriages. Transition rites may play an important part, for instance, in pregnancy, betrothal, and initiation; or they may be reduced to a minimum in adoption, in the delivery of a second child, in remarriage, or in the passage from the second to the third age group. …. Furthermore, in certain ceremonial patterns where the transitional period is sufficiently elaborated to constitute an independent state, the arrangement is reduplicated. A betrothal forms a liminal period between adolescence and marriage, but the passage from adolescence to betrothal itself involves a special series of rites of separation, a transition, and an incorporation into the betrothed condition. …”

Van Gennep realised that rites de passage had an important place in pre-industrial societies.  They marked culturally significant transitions, central to social cohesion.  These moments reminded everyone that some within the group had reached a significant point in their life journey, having arrived at a key stage in their progress from birth to death.  Physical changes mattered, as did age, but at least as important were changes in social status, as when a person became a young adult, established an important relationship, or became a mother or an elder.

The concept of rites de passage was of great interest to social anthropologists.  However, reading today about studies of these changes in less developed societies seems a throwback to a world long gone.  Van Gennep was writing more than 100 years ago.  Life in a far more complex today, with vastly more people in Western societies.  The processes to sustain rituals and other unifying social processes have changed.  That isn’t news.  Back in 1956, William H Whyte wrote about The Organisation Man.  It was evocative and nostalgic.  He documented the conformist post-war industrial system, companies run by business executives with no time for individual issues or status transitions, focussed on jobs for life tailored to fit in with business needs.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, his sense of nostalgia led White to hope everyone would have, or could have, more freedom.  For him lost rituals and traditions mattered.

White was documenting an industrial culture where rites de passage had become less important.  Was this because marking changes in status was no longer as critical as it had been, given an industrial society appears to work more like a factory?  Perhaps, but, twenty years later, Gail Sheehy in her 1974 book Passages sought to set things back on track, writing about the ‘predictable crises of adult life’, and the inevitable personality and sexual changes we go through in our 20s, 30s, 40s, and beyond.  Observing the consequences of capitalist conformity, she realised we were no longer addressing changes central to our social lives, especially when an individual was an adult:

“Studies of child development have plotted every nuance of growth and given us comforting labels such as the Terrible Twos and the Noisy Nines. Adolescence has been so carefully deciphered, most of the fun of being impossible has been taken out. But after meticulously documenting our periods of personality development up to the age of 18 or 20—nothing. Beyond the age of 21, apart from medical people interested only in our gradual physical decay, we’re left to fend for ourselves on the way downstream to senescence, at which point we’re picked up again by gerontologists.”

Book sell when they make statements like these, but Sheehy had a point.  By and large many of the early stages of life were still marked by rites and symbolism.  These included birth, christening, puberty, marriage, and pregnancy.  Today, many linger on, and some have been elaborated.  Some people will hold a ‘baby shower’, an opportunity to celebrate an impending birth.  Some still hold a church christening for a child, with a party afterwards.  Some celebrate a new partnership by an engagement, to be followed by a wedding down the track.  However, these are now a matter of individual preference, no longer standard universal social processes.  Sheehy noted these remaining transitions tended to be more common in the early stages of a life.  She wanted to reframe a perspective that had become focussed on childhood:

“A new concept of adulthood, one that embraces the total life cycle, is questioning the old assumptions. If one sees the personality not as an apparatus that is essentially constructed by the time childhood is over, but as always in its essence developing, then life at 25 or 30 or at the gateway to middle age will stimulate its own intrigue, surprise, and exhilaration of discovery.” 

However, it’s been a battle.  Increasing cultural diversity meant that points of transition have become harder to identify, and often the transition points that are emphasised are those that intersect most clearly with the overarching market economy.  Today, many of these  celebrations are centred around events characterised by conspicuous consumption, using changes in status as an excuse, not a focus.  We have parties and gift giving for birthdays, for Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, for Easter (chocolates!) and for Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa, Bodhi Day and Shōgatsu – and I nearly forgot Los Posadas, New Year, and Chinese New Year – among others!  All these ‘days’ and many more are not so much about a personal change as a key day in the calendar, opportunities for fun and shopping.

In writing Passages Sheehy was attempting to get critical moments of change over a lifetime back in focus.  While she could have looked to pre-industrial societies, she observed it was our own earlier traditions that had attenuated.  She recalled Shakespeare telling us that man lives through seven stages (“All the world’s a stage” speech in As You Like It).  She could have added examples from other cultures:  Hindu scriptures described four rather different distinct life stages: student; householder; retirement, a time to become a pilgrim and begin ones true education; and finally a sannyasin, “one who neither hates nor loves anything.”

However, Passages was making further point.  If attention to rites de passage was dwindling in contemporary society, they were disappearing faster the further along the life cycle.  We still recognise and sometimes invoke some kind of transition process to deal with a baby on the way (that oddly named baby shower), a birth, children’s birthdays, adolescence, and even reaching adulthood (if only we knew at what age that happened!).  For some, weddings remain enough of a major rite de passage to be surrounded with all sorts of transitional procedures and symbols.  However, weddings also demonstrate what has changed, as many people no longer choose to get married, and among those who do, some do so ‘without fuss’, the only tasks being to change an address, employment record, or car insurance.

As usual, it is writers who are alert to these changes.   One brief but telling example of how transitions are losing their social relevance is offered by the novelist Margaret Mahy.  Mahy mainly wrote funny and chaotic adventures for young children, but she also wrote stories aimed at adolescents, especially her outstanding two prizewinning novels, The Haunting and The Changeover.  The second of these, subtitled A Supernatural Romance, concerns a sister risking her life to save her bewitched brother. It’s a coming-of-age story, an unconventional romance.  It’s a superb evocation of how transitions have now become individual.  Lucy Chant is a girl at the beginning of the story, a young woman at the end.  It is subtle, clever, but more to the point, it leaves the changes of puberty to be no more than a personal matter.

You might think that ending full-time employment deserves recognition.  Some workplaces and organisations do make a retirement an event, with speeches, gifts, and a party.  However, many no longer bother.  To add to the complexity of ‘ending’ work, there are many individuals who do not ‘retire’ so much as transition from full-time employment to self-employment, part-time work or occasional work, sometimes paid, sometimes voluntary.  It is increasingly unlikely that a person describes themself as retired, but rather will mention various activities that now take up their time as they linger on in an ‘almost’ employed state.

This persistence of being in work of some kind or other hides yet another quite different process, best described as ‘fading’.  As we lose markers of changed status for older people they ceased to be noticed, (unlike the almost revered status given to older people in pre-industrial societies).  Today an older person will tell you this fading has two consequences.  First, older people are no longer seen.  In a shopping mall, street, or other venue, they are seldom acknowledged.  Younger people will walk past a ‘senior citizen’ and are unlikely to remember they’d seen an individual there.  It seems older people are slowly disappearing!

Second, apart from within families where many remain close to dependents, older people have a smaller place in society.  The practices William White had noted haven’t disappeared, just developed.  The new stages of man are childhood, organisational life, and retirement.  Today, when older people retire, they are literally moved out to the fringe of society. In countries like Australia, the UK and the USA, they are often left to be out of the way, living in old peoples’ developments, segregated homes, largely unseen in their own little world.  Some of this is caught in that wonderfully bizarre 2015 film Youth, with its scenes of an ageing Michael Caine staying with other ‘forgotten’ people in a Swiss health resort.

This gradual disappearance is becoming clearer.  As long as retiring Baby Boomers have access to significant resources, they won’t be ignored.  Businesses continue to offer various goods and services, ranging from trips overseas to keep-fit activities and special diets to keep brains active.  However, as the baby boomers cease representing a large and affluent group in society, this will change.  Van Gennep was writing about relatively stable societies, but in contemporary societies, change is making his analysis less relevant.  Rites de passage for younger people are losing their broader social significance.  For older people these transitions are losing any importance; ideally, the older generation could just quietly fade away.

Tristes Tropiques

Studying social anthropology in the 1960s was to confront a subject in transition.  Perhaps that is too strong.  In most British university departments, the social anthropology that claimed to have its origins and approach derived from the work of Bronislaw Malinowski was still the core curriculum.  In what is usually described as ‘functionalism’, the underlying assumption was that all aspects of society, its institutions, roles, norms, and myths all worked together to sustain the social system.  Indeed, this perspective went further to claim the inter-relationship between all these parts of the social system were indispensable parts of the whole, all functioning together to make a society ‘work’.  The social anthropologist’s task was to describe these elements of a society, and demonstrate how they were learnt, linked together and sustained.  Famously, Radcliffe Brown at the University of Oxford explained that functionalism was relationship between a social institution and the “necessary conditions of existence” of a social system. He saw the function of a unit as the contribution it makes to the maintenance of a social structure, the set of relationships integrating social units.

Not everyone agreed.  There were some, encouraged by anthropologists like Edmund Leach at the University of Cambridge, who advocated a rather different perspective.  This was that immutable deep structures exist in all cultures, and consequently, that all cultural practices have homologous counterparts in other cultures.  In other words, all cultures are essentially equatable.  This approach drew in large part from dialectics, as explored by Hegel and Marx, although it has its roots back in ancient philosophy.  Hegel explained that every situation presents two opposing characteristics and their resolution, or ‘thesis, antithesis and resolution’.  Structuralist anthropologists argued that cultures also have this underlying form. Claude Lévi-Strauss was a leader in showing how opposing ideas would compete and were resolved to establish the rules of marriage, mythology and ritual: “people think about the world in terms of binary opposites – such as high and low, inside and outside, person and animal, life and death – and every culture can be understood in terms of these opposites …  From the very start the process of visual perception makes use of binary oppositions”

Who was this Claude Lévi-Strauss, a Frenchman causing so much trouble in the world of British ethnography?  His work was key to the development of structuralism. Enormously influential, he held the chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France, was elected a member of the Académie Française in 1973 and was a member of  the School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris.  He  argued the ‘savage’ mind had the same structures as the ‘civilized’ mind, that human characteristics are the same everywhere. Structuralism is “the search for the underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity”.

There’s a book to be written about Lévi-Strauss – well, of course, there have been several already.  However, I want to concentrate on just one of his own books, Tristes Tropiques.  A brilliant student, Lévi-Strauss’s adult life began in  secondary-school teaching, but in 1935 he took up a last-minute offer to be part of a French cultural mission to Brazil as a visiting professor of sociology at the University of São Paulo, with his wife, a visiting professor of ethnology.  The couple lived and did their anthropological work in Brazil from 1935 to 1939, although Lévi-Strauss only spent short periods of time in various tribes, including the Guaycuru, Bororó, Nambikwara and Tupi-Kawahib.  He returned to France in 1939, almost immediately leaving to escape the Nazis, and eventually ending up in the US, where  he was joined the New School for Social Research in 1941.  He returned to Paris in 1948.

I’m sure you don’t want to read any more of his biography, other than to note the first of his key books, The Elementary Structures of Kinship was published in 1949.   As a professor at the  École Practique des Hautes Études, he continued to publish, but it was in 1955 he became one of France’s best-known intellectuals by publishing Triste Tropiques.  It is an extraordinary book, a memoir detailing his time as a French expatriate throughout the 1930s, and his travels, an amazing mixture of beautiful prose, philosophical meditations, and ethnographic analyses of several Amazonian peoples .  It is said the organisers of the Prix Goncourt wanted to award Lévi-Strauss their annual prize, but as their award was for a work of fiction, they could not.  In my 1973 edition, the first time it appeared in English, the bottom of the  book cover states: ‘The great French anthropologist’s autobiographical travelogue, translated by John and Doreen Weightman’.  I guess it is a little more than that!

What makes this book so special?  Famously, Triste Tropiques begins with a short sentence: “I hate travelling and explorers” !  But there was more in that first paragraph:

“It is now fifteen years since I left Brazil for the last time and all during this period I have often planned to undertake the present work, but on each occasion a sort of shame and repugnance prevented me from making a start.  Why, I asked myself, should I give a detailed account of so many trivial circumstances and insignificant happenings?  Adventure has no place in the anthropologist’s profession; it is merely one of those unavoidable drawbacks, which detract from his effective work through the incidental loss of weeks or months; there are hours of inaction when the informant is not available;  periods of hunger, exhaustion, sickness perhaps; and always the thousand and one dreary tasks which eat away the days to no purpose and reduce dangerous living in the heart of the virgin forest to an imitation of military service …”

We would have to wait another ten years until David Maybury Lewis wrote a second similarly insightful book about being an anthropologist, The Savage and the Innocent:  “My wife and I lived among the Sherente for eight months in 1955-1956 and among the Shavante for slightly longer in 1958. This book is an account of our experiences; it is not an essay in anthropology. Indeed I have tried to put down here many of those things which never get told in technical anthropological writings – our impressions of Central Brazil, our personal reactions to the various situations in which we found ourselves, and above all our feelings about the day-to-day business which is mysteriously known as ‘doing fieldwork’.”

Ah, but that comparison leaves out the fact that Tristes Tropiques is both about the personal experience of fieldwork, but also it is a series of explorations in philosophy, and, on top of all that, it is also an ethnographic work, describing the cultures and the peoples he saw.  It is an extraordinary amalgam.  It is also a tantalising introduction to the many topics explored in just over 400 dense pages.  Why ‘tristes’?  What does ‘tristes’ mean?  Most commentators translate the title of the book as Sad Tropics, but I think that is inadequate:  it does have a sorrowful theme, but it is also wistful, conveying regret for what has changed and what has been lost, with an underlying sense of melancholy.  Unable to read the French, I can’t tell you how well it was done, but I’m confident the English version is true to the author’s style.

How can I explain why I think this is such an engaging, witty yet profound and thought-provoking book?  He could be witty.  Here is Lévi-Strauss in an overcrowded and very dirty boat, having left France a month before and about to arrive in Martinique:

“There were young and pretty women on board; flirtations had begun and sympathies had ripened.  For them, to appear in a favourable light before the final separation was more than coquettishness; it was an account to be settled, a debt to be honoured; a proof they felt owed of the fact that they were not fundamentally unworthy of attentions bestowed on them.  With a touching delicacy of feeling, they had taken these attentions only, as it were, on credit … So there was not only an element of farce but also a slight element of pathos in the cry which arose from every pair of lungs.    Instead of the call ‘Land! Land!’ as int traditional sea stories, ‘A bath, at last a bath, a bath tomorrow’ could be heard on every side”

Did you want to know they didn’t get their chance to have a bath!

As for the profound and thought-provoking content, it can’t be conveyed in short extracts.  It might help to explain the structure.  Those 400 pages are broken up into nine parts:  the first four are concerned with Claude Lévi-Strauss’s jouney to South America, the last with his return, and the remaining four are accounts of his visits to four tribes, The Caduveo, Bororo, Nambikwara, and Tupi-Kawahib.  However, well before we get to the ethnographic sections, the text is packed with wry, perceptive, irreverent and deeply thoughtful comments.

Arriving in São Paulo, he says, “Some mischievous spirit has defined America as a country which has moved from barbarism to decadence without enjoying any intermediary phase of civilisation.  The formula could be more correctly applied to the towns of the New World, which pass from freshness to decay without ever being simply old.”  Nice one, and having managed to lump New York in with São Paulo, he points out that “it is not the absence of traces of the past which strikes me; this lack is an essential part of their significance.”  He goes on to observe that with the passing of time American towns degenerate, built to be renewable “that is, badly”!  Like stands in a fairground, he continues, ending with the observation that New World towns are “untamed, wild, perpetually young but never healthy”.

Just before he, and we, meet the Caduveo, Lévi-Strauss offers a sombre warning: “What frightens me in Asia is the vision of our own future which it is already experiencing [the devaluation of man by man].  In the America of the Indians, I cherish the reflection, however fleeting it may now have become, of an era when the human species was in proportion to the world it occupied, and when there was still a valid relationship between the enjoyment of freedom and the symbols denoting it”.  What would he add 50 years later?

Among the sections on different ethnic groups, those on the Nambikwara are the most detailed, and provide a good introduction to Lévi-Strauss’s method.  The first chapter starts with a fascinating discussion on how he chose the glass beads he would take with him from Paris.  Any social anthropologist would understand his dilemmas, but for other readers this is a telling way to convey something of the realities of fieldwork.  Soon after, we are taken through an extensive analysis of what is known of migration between the ‘Old World’ and the New: detailed and illuminating, he concludes the problems are vast, the information we have is small, and there is almost no certainty about who came when and where – “nothing is possible, so all is possible.”  After this speculation we read on to find we’ve arrived in South America, only to learn about the real and seemingly interminable problems in getting organised to set about making contact with any one of the groups he wanted to study.

He sets the scene well: “Imagine an area as big as France, three quarters of it unexplored, frequented only by small groups of native nomads who are among the most primitive to be found anywhere in the world” only to continue “and traversed, from one [side] to the other, by a [single] telegraph line … over a distance of several hundred kilometres”. He goes on to add that the telegraph wire became useless almost as soon as it was put up in the early 1920s, an impressive if foolish attempt to create communications across a vast area, just at the time when such telegraph lines were becoming obsolete. Eventually, (many pages later), Lévi-Strauss has met the Nambikwara, a small group of some 20 people divided into six families and sets up camp.  Almost impossible to believe, but he found he was two weeks behind a group of three Jesuit Fathers, who’d arrived in the same area.  They quickly disappear in his account, as a mere three paragraphs on the missionaries are followed by a description of the native group, and we’re reading about the Nambikwara, and how they describe the seasons.  This is ethnography by jumping in, just as the experience must have been for Lévi-Strauss.

Social anthropologists used to describe their subjects as ‘primitive people’, and this is certainly the case for the Nambikwara.  They had few possessions, almost no clothing, bows and arrows, some knives or pieces of iron obtained through barter, all easily carried in one simple plaited basket.  Pottery was largely unknown, and even canoes were non-existent.  They even slept naked, huddling together near are dying fire on cold nights.  Language was a major challenge, with several dialects which, back in the late 1930s, had not been translated.

The challenge for the outsider is to describe what can be observed, and slowly find words and ways to ask questions.  In a chapter on family life, Lévi-Strauss describes a world in which young children are left to play among themselves, but well before puberty life becomes what he describes as an ‘imitation’ of adult behaviour.  Girls spin and cook, boys start to hunt.  As he describes it, “the fundamental, and at times tragic, problem of the Nambikwara, which is the search for food, and the active part they [the children] are expected to play”.  Almost everyone, except the very young, is engaged in surviving.  In case that sounds almost inhumanly primitive, we later read about the social life of the people, stories, adventures and dalliance.  It might be a marginal existence, but there is also joy, drama, and time for games.

Lévi-Strauss wrote with a poet’s skill.  An account of relations between men and women, husbands and wives ends with description of night time, people sleeping on bare ground, husbands and wives ‘closely intertwined’ and aware of each other’s care and support.  This follows a quote from a foreign colleague, who saw the Nambikwara many years later, and witnessed the effects of disease combined with the foolish enthusiasms of missionaries.  Without any substantial impact from the outside world, Lévi-Strauss saw people who lived on the margin but were happy and integrated.  As is so often the case, the later observer saw what contact with our advanced civilisation had done:  Nothing new:  we see it in Australia when we witness the many dire effects of our world on that of the indigenous Australians.

Perhaps one last observation from this so-called ‘autobiographical travelogue’.  Like most anthropologists, Lévi-Strauss was interested in power, and how a tribe is managed.  In formal terms, he learnt that political power was not hereditary, but the process was that as a chief began to feel ill, or too old to continue, he would choose his successor.  An autocracy?  That was the apparent process, but he soon observed reality was more complex.  The choice of a successor was made by quietly sounding opinions within the group.  Even that process was not the final determinant.  Once identified as a preference, a chosen individual might reject the offer of chieftainship, and the process would have to be repeated.  Not an autocracy, not a democracy, but a real, messy, and practical working approach.

What makes Triste Tropiques special, a work which precedes Lévi-Strauss important work on symbols and systems of thinking?  Although it appeared after some of his more academic analyses, it consolidated his reputation.  It is raw ethnography, often coloured by his personal preferences and concerns, an insight into a gifted observer and even more gifted writer.  It is an extended reflection on life, on society, on how we think, on what we share with other people, and above all on what we can learn about ourselves by looking at the lives of others.

Here and There – New Zealand

I am not really clear why I have spent so little time in New Zealand.  Just across the Tasman Sea, some 2,000 kms from Melbourne, it is, apart from Papua New Guinea and the Melanesian Islands, our closest neighbour.  As another part of the former British Empire, it is also an English-speaking country, and, I have to admit, more English than England in many ways!  It is a stunningly beautiful country, with mountains, glaciers, hot springs, beautiful beaches.  You would think it would be the place I would go to most often when wanting to travel overseas, but compared to places like Hong Kong, Singapore, or Malaysia, I have hardly ever been there, just a few  times in forty years.  On a small number of occasions it was a stopover for a trip from Australia to the west coast of the USA, and I think the only reason we would be in Christchurch was because we were flying with Air New Zealand.  Apart from stopovers, there were at least two real visits, which I’ll come to in a minute.

But, first, why so seldom?  Is it a matter of perceptions?  It’s not a nice characteristic, but Australians tend to disparage New Zealand.  It’s a country with just over 5m people, and 26m sheep, its lowest in 70 years and down from the grand total of 70m in the 1980s.  Five sheep for every person.  It’s a feature that has led to all sorts of unfortunate jokes, as well as a national desire to triumph over New Zealand in every possible way.  As in so many other respects, we decide to criticise most determinedly those who are most similar.  I suppose my defence has to be that if I was going to travel overseas, I wanted to go to better known places (hence those visits to the US over the years), or for work (which largely focussed on SE Asia).  Looking back, it almost appears to be a case of avoidance, and I’m embarrassed.

Enough apologies.  I have been to New Zealand for at least a couple of real visits.  These were two very different experiences, both from many years ago, and both stick in my mind.  Perhaps they will explain how I see the country.  The first time I was there for a substantial visit, I was part of a group from the National Trust of Victoria.  I think the trip might have been described as ‘international liaison’, and we did have some meetings with local heritage groups.  At the same time, we had the opportunity to go the northern part of the North Island, enjoying a brief holiday as well as seeing some of the more famous Māori landmarks.  Our travels began in Wellington, and from there travelled north to Whanganui, Hamilton, Auckland, Bay of Islands, and even right up to Cape Reinga.  As far as I can see the only thing, we missed out on was Cambridge, and that was only a few miles away from Hamilton!

Time for an important disclosure.  I went to Hamilton at the wrong time.  When I was there, travelling up northwards on the North Island, it was for an overnight stay.  However, Peter Jackson hadn’t arrived, Hobbiton didn’t exist, and frankly, Hamilton was a boring place.  Now I read visitors can go to the Hobbiton Movie Set near Hamilton.  There’s only one of the cinema sets that remains intact from the filming sessions, comprising some of the Hobbit homes as they appeared in both The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings.  Apparently, the decision to establish The Shire near Hamilton was because of the visual character of the Alexander family sheep farm.  Who would have known?  Today you can take a tour, see the remaining Hobbit homes, and also learn about the filming, go on trips to see some of the other locations, as well as appreciate the ingenious use of perspectives to make the visually great look truly spectacular.  Will I go there now?  It is tempting, but it’s not on my current plans.

Further north, I did get to see several famous tourist sights, including Te Puia within the historic Te Whakarewarewa Geothermal Valley.  With some small bits of my geologist past still in my mind, I did enjoy seeing the geyser Rotorua, along with the associated and very smelly mud pools, hot springs and silica formations.  Naturally enough, these geothermal wonders were accompanied by various other tourist delights, combined with the national schools of wood carving, weaving, stone and bone carving. Te Arawa are the local tribe of this area who have shared these treasures with visitors for over 170 years and proudly continue that tradition today.  However, I just liked the mud and steam.

An interesting visit, but our eventual destination on that trip was Bay of Islands.  Waitangi occupies a headland draped in lawns and bush.  This is New Zealand’s most significant historic site, as it was here, on 6 February 1840, following prolonged and at times less than cordial discussions, 43 Māori chiefs signed the Treaty of Waitangi with the British Crown.  It was a start, and the Treaty was eventually agreed by over 500 chiefs.  It was the birthplace of modern New Zealand.

The Treaty and a rapprochement between the indigenous Māoris and the British weren’t an easy achievement.  Today much of this is summarised in the visitor centre, the modern Te Kongahu Museum of Waitangi, which hadn’t been build (or even planned) when I was there.  However, there were plenty of places where I found out about the place of the Treaty in the past, present and the future hopes of Aotearoa New Zealand.  They provided a warts-and-all look at the early interactions between Māori and Europeans, a series of the events leading up to the treaty’s signing, with the long litany of treaty breaches by the Crown, the wars and land confiscations that followed, and the protest movement that led to the current process of redress for historic injustices. Many taonga (treasures) associated with Waitangi were previously scattered around NZ.  Now the museum is the repository for a number of key historical items. One room is devoted to facsimiles of all the key documents, while another screens a short film dramatising the events of the initial treaty signing.

Though it sounds unlikely, the Treaty House was shipped over as a kit, sent from Australia and erected in 1834.  It was intended as the four-room home of the official British Resident James Busby. It’s now preserved as a memorial and museum containing displays about the house and the people who lived here. Just across the lawn, the magnificently detailed meeting house Te Whare Rünanga sits.  It was completed in 1940 to mark the centenary of the treaty. Its detailed carvings represent the major Māori tribes, and it is the location for visitors to see  cultural performances.  These start with a  haka pöwhiri (challenge and welcome) outside, and then continue inside with waiata (songs) and haka (more dramatic war dances).

In some ways, equally impressive was the 35 m long, 6-tonne waku taua (war design canoe), Ngätokimatawhaorua, also built for the centenary. An accompanying photographic exhibit details shows it creation from gigantic kauri logs.  It is, quite simply, an extraordinary object.

I travelled further north, to Cape Reinga.  In the Northland region, the walk to the lighthouse offers what are correctly described as incredible panoramic views of where the Tasman Sea and the Pacific Ocean meet.  I was told that on a clear day you might be lucky enough to see the Three Kings Islands on the distant horizon.  I wasn’t that lucky!  It’s a site steeped in Māori tradition.  Cape Reinga is seen as the end of the road in both a literal and imaginative sense.  It is the end of State Highway 1.  However, in Māori tradition, the spirits of the dead depart the world from this place, making it the most sacred site in Aotearoa.

Contrary to expectation, Cape Reinga isn’t actually the northernmost point of the country; that honour belongs to the inaccessible Surville Cliffs, which can be spotted to the right in the distance. In fact, it’s much closer to the westernmost point, Cape Maria van Diemen, immediately to the left, improbably close by, as New Zealand is rather like a boomerang in shape, curving away to the west.  Did I linger on, enjoying the view?  No I didn’t, because it Cape Reinga is a magical part of the world, of which the views play only a small part.

While New Zealand isn’t immune to tensions and troubles derived from its past, it makes an interesting contrast to Australia.  Its history before settlement is well documented, celebrated and has become integral to the country.  While there are some ethnic tensions and challenges, you have the sense the Māori ‘belong’ in a way that indigenous Australian aborigines still do not in many Australian eyes.  Australian has a long way to go.

I am sure there are many reasons for the difference, but the stronger political organisation of the Māori peoples, together with the establishment of a Treaty back in the 19^th Century certainly helped.  Key to this is the fact the Māori were themselves relatively recent immigrants, Polynesian settlers arriving in canoes during the 14^th Century.  It seems likely there was no indigenous human population before then, unlike the Aboriginal people in Australia who have been in in Australian since 50,000 BC, and possibly much earlier.  Moreover these Polynesian immigrants brought with them a system of chiefs, and a political system that embraced the independent but related groups across the whole of the country.

In Australia, the British dealt with hundreds of apparently disconnected small groups.  Contact between groups was limited, and there was only a very loose sense of their comprising one ‘people’.  In contrast and based on what we know today, it seems likely the Polynesian settlers initially lived in small tribal groups, with a rich culture shared between the groups, and strong traditions of warfare.  The arrival of Europeans from the early 1800s had a major effect on these early communities and helped the local Māori groups become better linked among themselves.

While the Treaty of Waitangi signed in 1840 established British law and government, it could not prevent warfare in the 1840s and 1860s as Māori defended their lands and local authority. After the wars Māori lost land through confiscation and sale, mostly to British settlers.  The contrast between the two countries was fateful.  The British took over Australia, crushing any local resistance, and effectively denying the Aboriginal peoples any sense of ‘ownership’.  The British were dominant in New Zealand, too, but in this case, they had to meet with and organise their differences with a strong local community.

If this visit to New Zealand was to offer interesting comparisons with the situation in Australia, another visit provided quite a contrast.  On this occasion, I was working, mainly in the South Island, with an international company, and I was part of a group visiting agrichemical and natural gas sites.  This wasn’t about culture, nor was it about politics.  This was business.  My role was as a training executive for the company, and I was being asked to look at workplace improvements and the impact of new technologies.

We could have been in one of many other countries across the globe.  Inside the gates, we were in company territory.  The embedded culture was a company culture.  The management was traditional bureaucratic systems.  Our ‘leader’ was the local representative of the Head Office chief executive.  Once we entered the plant, we had left New Zealand to all intents and purposes.  It was – and would still be – a strange transition.

To get to the plant, we had flown the Christchurch, and then taken a second flight in a small private airline aircraft.  We flew over largely unoccupied land, a little north of the snow laden ski fields of the South Island and ended up in a small town’s airport on the flood plain of one of the many rivers running west across the landscape.  I kept wishing we were in a helicopter and could hop down to have a look at the mountains, gorges, valleys and forests we flew over.  Instead, by the time we arrived at the plant, it was as if that world didn’t really exist.  Perhaps it was a vast set created for another New Zealand cinema epic, a company succession drama, perhaps.  For some of my colleagues, all that differentiated this plant from others was that it took a long time to get there!

Looking back at those two visits offers a telling contrast.  In one case, I was able to see the beauty of the country, and, more importantly, engage in understanding some of the unique history and resulting culture of Aotearoa/New Zealand.  I could compare and contrast New Zealand with Australia and appreciate the impact of history on the two places, and how events over the preceding decades- similar in some ways, and very different in others – had shaped the contemporary countries.  In the other case, it was as if I hadn’t travelled at all.  What I saw was the ‘universal’ company culture, the way the business ran its operations, managed its staff, and designed its operations.  I could have been in a plant in France, the USA or Malaysia.  Only different weather and the odd glimpse of houses and people outside the company premises would have given me any insight as to where I was.

This is one reason why writing about ‘here and there’ makes relatively little sense for the employees of major corporations.  They are never ‘there’.  They are stuck inside the company’s world, with brief moments of transition.  If I had been asked by my partner what New Zealand was like based on this visit, I would have been stuck, except for being able to describe some of the physical geography and the weather!  In fact, I bought a couple of gifts at Christchurch Airport on my return.  Evidence of where I had been?  I suppose so.  A window into New Zealand?  Certainly not.

Work visits like that one convinced me of two things.  First, if I wanted to travel, I should keep business as far away from other activities as I could.  Equally important, even if I was travelling for work, I should go to only one or two places, and make sure I stayed away from the corporate offices, and also make sure I spent some time absorbing where I was.  Would that enhance my business effectiveness?  In some (probably small) ways, it did.  I would better appreciate the overall culture in which business was being conducted, and why issues to do with family, bribery, place and corruption had a different meaning and application to those same issues ‘back home’.  In a different way, and far more important, spending time in another place helped me retain my sense of our common humanity, seeing so many people like me, and yet people so different in how they talked about and perceived their world.  Good international company staff do that, learning about diversity and culture:  many, probably most, are simply living in their familiar world wherever they are.

Living in Australia, we are in a privileged position (in many senses, of course).  Specifically, what I mean is that we are lucky in having another remnant of the Empire close by.  We should spend time there, learn about what is similar and what is different, and ask ourselves why this is so.  New Zealand is both like Australia, and unlike it.  The similarities are important.  The differences are critical.  They offer a window into how societies work, why they follow different paths, how they confront and succeed or fail at dealing with difference.  I have often quoted the line that the most important we learn from travelling is seeing ourselves more clearly:  in seeing ourselves in the mirror of difference, we also have to opportunity to turn that set of insights into identifying what needs to change, into improving how we live with others, and how we can and should do better.

Here and There – Canada

When I started this account of some of my travels, I was quite sure I didn’t want to visit Canada ever again.  I’d had a strange relationship to the country, as two visits there were associated with disasters, and they had coloured my perception of the place.  The first was nearly 50 years ago, and the second thirty years later.

The late 1960s and early 1970s was a time of rebellion in the UK.  I use the word ‘rebellion’ carefully, as it was a time when children rebelled against parental control, students rebelled against university curricula, and artists or every kind rebelled against past practice.  Some talked about revolution, and read Marxists, French intellectuals and even German theorists, but most of us just wanted to get on and do stuff differently.

In 1971, I arrived at the University of Edinburgh to join what was then a typical ‘odd’ department, the Centre for Research in the Educational Sciences.  You didn’t know there were educational sciences?  Nor did the department, as it was really a refuge for new thinking of one kind or another, all such thinking loosely (very loosely) connected with education.  There were a couple of staff interested in new approaches to learning and curriculum development, largely influenced by work on learning organisations and various quasi-Marxist writers in South America and later in Europe and the US.  Others were interested in medical education, in rethinking educational administration, and even intellectual preferences!  The head of the Centre was Liam Hudson, who had been a researcher in Cambridge, and was famous for his work on the different approaches, practices and lifestyles of what he called ‘convergent and divergent’ thinkers, a categorisation that loosely overlapped with a division between those interested in and working in the sciences, and those involved in the arts.

What was I doing there?  I had been studying social anthropology, but as I didn’t want to go to uncharted part of the world for 2 years of fieldwork (I was married with three young children). Instead I wandered into social psychology, the emerging career paths of computer programmers, and just about anything else that looked interesting.  I had already started doing some work in medical education, especially in the rethinking of the traditional medical school curriculum.  Yet another area of research involved cyclicity, and that linked me to the studies being undertaken on Edinburgh on dream recall.  Once there, a small nudge from the researcher suggested we could look at whether dreams were affected by cyclical change.

My first idea was to study dreaming and dream recall using the sleep laboratory at the university.  The research methodology was simple:  you covered the participants (guinea pigs?) heads with sensors and woke them as they were experiencing rapid eye movement (REM) sleep.  After answering, “What were you dreaming about?’, you allowed them to go back to sleep.  Amazingly, participants did not remember being woken during the night.  The sleep laboratory researchers were interested in the themes that dominated dreaming (the work was undertaken in the Department of Psychiatry).  Well, I thought, why not see if the nature of dreams was affected by other changes:  clearly, we should study women’s dreaming and relate recall to the stages of the menstrual cycle.  A great study that never happened, as having women as sleep laboratory participants was not allowed (this was in the early 1970s).

To cut a long story short, I came up with another proposal.  How about seeing if the contraceptive pill affected the recall of dreams.  This was still relatively early on in the use of oral contraceptives, and back then various brands had quite different levels of progestogen and oestrogen, and some had no oestrogen at all.  As part of a survey of a number of issues germane to the Centre’s work, we put together a survey to be administered to undergraduates at the university.  It included questions on dream recall, the use and types of contraceptive pill, alongside others concerned with psychosomatic illnesses, field of study, and several background characteristics.  By infiltrating the annual matriculation process at the university, we were allowed to set up at the entrance to the room where every student was required to matriculate each year.  The result was a very high response rate (well over 90%): the students had nothing else to do while they waited!  It would be impossible to get approval to such an approach today, and I doubt the survey would pass muster.  However, the data was fascinating.  There were clear links between reported levels of dream recall and chemically different types of contraceptive pill.  Dream Recall and the Menstrual Cycle, appeared in the 1974 Journal of Psychosomatic Research.  It was to be my most cited academic paper.

Now, at this point you might wonder what this has to do with Canada.  Did I say the Centre was creative?  No, it was a hothouse, and as far as I was concerned, it was positively throbbing with UST (yes, unresolved sexual tension!).   Is there such a thing as a 10-year itch?  I had several staff.  One was the research assistant who worked on the dream recall study, and other projects.  We became more and more involved with each other.  We would be invited to the head of department’s house some evenings, to have a glass of wine, listen to what was often very sexy music (Roberta Flack’s Reverend Lee, and Will You Still Love Me in the Morning), and sometimes, just sometimes, talk about the projects.  It was a hothouse atmosphere; I suspect we provided an excellent experiment for observation.

Losing any sense of reality one night together, we decided to to tell our current partners we were going to split up with them.  I had been accepted to present a paper at a conference in Montreal, and we planned to go there together; we saw it as a good way to make the break.  In fact, what happened was we learnt that plans made in the aftermath of passion are often ill-thought, and frequently wrong!  The next day we were both snapped out of our fantasy plans.  To salve my bruised ego, I decided I would drink every malt whisky available in the University Staff Club, in three days:  I did, ten glasses at lunch time and ten in the evening.  I got to the end and was sick with alcohol poisoning for days.  To this day, I can’t stand the smell of scotch, and certainly have tried to avoid drinking another drop, except in a cocktail.  All told, a fateful example of a delayed seven-year-itch (just a few years late!).

Let’s leap ahead by 30 years.  In the early part of 2006, my youngest daughter was in Year 10.  My (second) wife had been having a bad time.  We’d been in Canada the previous summer, and on our way back she had experienced a really bad bout of ‘flu.  From then on, it seemed her health was up and down; I think she had treatment for pneumonia twice.  She was finding it hard to walk up hills, even medium ones like the one that ran from the centre of Melbourne up Bourke Street to Liverpool Street, Parliament House and beyond.  She put it down to her weight, but this was more than a weight problem, and she was referred to a lung specialist in Malvern, who arranged for her to have a bronchoscopy.  She had cancer, and we were told her life expectancy was around three months.  Unfairly, I blamed Canada for her illness.

My wife was very determined to do everything to beat the cancer.  Quickly admitted for surgery, it became evident her cancer was aggressive and had grown in the short period between diagnosis and her operation.  She died just three months after her initial diagnosis, and two months before our youngest daughter’s sixteenth birthday.  How do you survive a blow like that?  You have to move forward, of course.  I went back to work, and my young daughter, who must share some of my character, went back to school.  I proved to be a master at suppressing my emotions, and it’s only been recently I’ve been able to admit to the grief.

Stop!  Perhaps it is time for a reset on this account.  Two times Canada had figured in disasters, and for a long time it meant that I could see no point in going there.  I suppose I am a slow learner, but in the past few years I have been able to put the past in a more balanced perspective.  The first visit, fifty years ago, was nothing more than thinking about using a conference trip for a foolish affair.  I did go to Montreal, presented a couple of academic research papers, and I saw little other than the hotel conference room and restaurant.  I went alone, and I avoided a disaster.  That idea was already lost to the past!

The second visit, which took place the year before my wife died was wonderful.  Before leaving for Canada, which was part of a longer visit to North America,  I had researched what we could do.  I had no particular desire to go over to the east, but the West Coast and the Rockies beckoned.  Indeed, a primary school friend’s father had waxed eloquently about the trans-continental train journey he had taken, from Vancouver all the way to Toronto.  We didn’t want to go that far, but I discovered we could go from Vancouver to Jasper by train, and then drive back to Vancouver through part of the northern Rockies.

The summer of 1995 was cool, at least in Vancouver.  We drifted around town for a couple of days, and then went to the railway station to catch the Canadian, run by Via Rail Canada, a crown corporation with a mandate to run intercity passenger services.  We were to be travelling in the train’s original stainless-steel coaches built for the Canadian Pacific Railway forty years earlier.  It was cold at the terminus, and both my wife and daughter looked grim.  At last we boarded and found we were in the last coach, the rear half of which was the club car!  Warmth, at last.  Going forward to the next carriage, we could go upstairs into an elongated bubble on the roof of the coach, totally glassed in, and idea for viewing.  We spent most of the daylight there.

As railway journeys go, this has to be one of the most spectacular, especially for the first 24 hours going through the Rockies.  We went through the improbably name Kamloops during the night, (sleeping well after cocktails in the club car), a city whose name is the anglicized version of the Shushap word ‘Tk’əmlúps’, meaning ‘meeting of the waters’.  Despite playing a key role in trade, especially fur, it was decimated twice over, first by smallpox and later by TB.  Slightly boggle-eyed, around mid-day we arrived in Jasper.

From Jasper, we hired a car and travelled along the spine of the Rockies to Banff.  Close to the city was the spectacular Lake Louise.  A small town, initially settled in 1884 as an outpost for the Canadian Pacific Railway, Lake Louise is 1,600 m (5,200 ft) above sea level (I later learnt it is Canada’s highest community).  The nearby lake, framed by mountains, is one of the most famous mountain vistas in the world; I would have been even more impressed if I hadn’t already seen Maroon Lake with the Maroon Bells mountains near Aspen.  Lake Louise is famous for the famous Chateau Lake Louise, a stunning older hotel building, constructed by the Canadian Pacific Railway, and later taken over by the Fairmont group.  Well beyond our usual price range, but we had to go there.  Finally we worked out way back down to Vancouver.  I had expected the Rockies to be spectacular and the scenery was stunning.  However, I hadn’t expected to see snow in the middle of summer, and there it was.  Near Revelstoke we walked over to the foot of a glacier, a mere 100 yards from the road.

I’m not a fan of Vancouver, but it does have some wonderful places to visit.  The second highlight of our time there was to go by ferry to Victoria on Vancouver Island.  Yet another friend to blame, this time one who had told us we needed to see the Butchart Gardens.  The story of the gardens is unusual.  Robert Butchart manufactured Portland cement, and in 1904 he and his wife Jennie established their home, Benvenuto, near his quarry on Tod Inlet some ten miles north of Victoria.  In 1907 Isaburo Kishida, a sixty-five-year-old garden designer from Yokohama, Japan, was commissioned to build a Japanese Garden.  Then, in 1909, when the limestone quarry was exhausted, Jennie set about turning it into a Sunken Garden, which was finally finished in 1921. In 1926, they replaced the tennis courts with an Italian garden and in 1929 they replaced their kitchen vegetable garden with a large English Arts and Crafts style rose garden.  The quarry on Vancouver Island had totally disappeared.

Since then, the gardens have become a major tourist attraction.  They now include a Children’s Pavilion with its Rose Carousel, decorated by a menagerie including thirty animals ranging from bears to horses, ostriches, and zebras, intended to mirror the world of visitors to the Gardens. The designs were hand-picked by the owner, in consultation with an artist from North Carolina. North Carolina?  Yes, where I was to move six years later!  

If that isn’t once connection too many, there are several bronze statues displayed in the gardens.  One, of wild boar, was cast in Florence  and is a replica of a 1620 bronze cast by Pietro Tacca. It is called ‘Tacca’ in honour of the sculptor and, just as is the case with the original, its snout is shiny from the many visitors rubbing it for luck.  As a result, the boar has acquired a dull green patina, except for the nose.  I’ve rubbed both Il Porcellino snouts!  Yes, the gardens were as extraordinary as my friend had suggested.

It must have been a cold summer that year.  Did the cold aggravate my wife’s cancer?  She was sick after the trip, and it was the first of a number of times.  However, I don’t think I can claim it caused her cancer, which was most likely the result of the chemicals her previous husband used in his carpentry activities (he was to die a few years later with similar symptoms).

Since I have decided to retell the story of visits two Canada, now I have to make another admission.  I had been there between the conference visit in 1974 and the Rockies visit in 2005.  My other major visit was also for a conference, in this case to Winnipeg, Manitoba.  I was presenting a keynote address on what back then were called ‘native peoples’.  The situation of Australia’s indigenous population was of great interest to Canadians, as they have a large number of indigenous tribes, especially given the many settlements to be found along the West coast of the country.  Way back in my undergraduate days I had read about the potlatch, the extraordinary mass and often destructive feast held by the Kwakiutl and other tribes in order to demonstrate their wealth and power.  I wanted to learn more.

Did I say Vancouver was cold?  It was warm compared to Winnipeg in November.  Winnipeg was so cold that car drivers who wanted to park outside shops in the downtown area would plug their car engine block into a heater made available as part of the parking meter.  In fact, it was so cold that shopping was a challenge if you attempted to go on foot from your hotel to the local shops.  It wasn’t the walking that was the problem, it was managing what you should wear.  The minute you stepped outside, it was bitterly cold, so thick pullovers, coats, scarves and hats were standard gear.  However, once you entered the shopping mall, everywhere was summery warm.  This meant you had to take off your jumper, coat, gloves and hat – and carry them, making you even hotter!

I introduced this account stating I didn’t want to visit Canada again.  Rubbish, truth demands honest admissions.  I have enjoyed every visit and would love to go back!

 Centuries Of Childhood

There was a time, back in the 1960s, when any student wanting to show they were conversant with the latest thinking would be quoting French authors.  Social anthropologists would be referring to books by Claude Levi Strauss, fascinating analyses even if he wasn’t much of an ethnographer.  For Marxism and political theory, it was Jean-Paul Sartre (everyone I knew read Sartre, and some of them even seemed to understand him).  For post-modern philosophy and psychoanalysis, it was Jacques Lacan, and for deconstructionism it was Jackie Derrida (in the case of these two, no-one I knew claimed to have really understood either of them).  In the midst of this group of increasingly self-referential and complex theorists, up popped Philippe Ariès.  At last, here was someone I could understand, even if what he had to say was controversial. He made me think!  Sixty years later, I still am.

When Philippe Ariès’s Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life appeared in English in 1962 (the original French edition was published in 1960) it was, for a while, one of the most cited and divisive overviews of changing views of childhood ever written.  Ariès wasn’t a professional historian.  In fact, he was an archivist for the Institute of Applied Research for Tropical and Subtropical Fruits in Paris.  However, in his spare time he was an amateur historian, with a particular interest in the history of the family. He was especially concerned with countering conservative claims that the twentieth-century family was going into decline; rather he wanted to show the family as we know it today, a private, domestic circle founded upon the idea of mutual affection, was a relatively new concept. He argued that ‘childhood’ emerged around the seventeenth century, or rather it was ‘discovered’ then.

This ‘discovery’ was predicated on another, much-debated point: Ariès argued that “in medieval society the idea of childhood did not exist”. This claim, which has seen some support and considerable disagreement ever since, is more complex that it might appear.  As various writers and translators have pointed out, the English translation of Ariès’s text uses the term “idea” where Ariès himself had used the term ‘sentiment’.  The difference between these two terms is crucial.  ‘Sentiment’ has two meanings: ‘the sense of a feeling about childhood as well as a concept of it’. Ariès did not intend to claim that individual medieval families did not show affection for their children, but rather childhood was not recognised and valued as a distinct phase of human existence in the same way it is today. Given this, he claimed there was less separation between adults and children in medieval society.

That was a point that made good sense, as far as I was concerned.  I had just read The Order of Things, by Michel Foucault, with its extraordinary and deeply engaging chapter on Las Meninas, the 1656 painting by Velázquez, currently in the Prado Museum in Madrid.  It is a painting which must have become one of the most widely analysed works in Western art, given its complex and somewhat enigmatic composition.  The painting  raises questions about reality and illusion, and the uncertain relationship it creates between the viewer and the figures depicted.  It deserves a blog of its own, except there is no way in which I could improve on Foucault’s comments.  However, as I began to read Centuries of Childhood, I had the image of the five-year-old Infanta Margaret Theresa in my mind:  if you know the painting, the Infanta is looking at you, surrounded an entourage comprising two maids, a chaperone, a bodyguard, two dwarfs and a dog.  She is a miniature adult, in dress, in pose, even in her hair style.  No ‘child’ there.  It is an image apparently supporting Ariès’s thesis.

I doubt many people read Centuries of Childhood now.  However, while his views have been largely discounted or ignored, they are worth a second look.  Briefly, Ariès begins by arguing that changing notions of chronological age affected the development of Western European notions of childhood.  For example, we think it is very normal for a child, indeed for individuals in general, to know his or her age and date of birth. Yet, according to Ariès, most people living before the eighteenth century did not know and were not concerned about their exact age.  He suggested that the “curious passion” for recording dates and calculating ages is a recent development, an outcome corresponding to the rise of exact account-keeping by the Church and State during the eighteenth century.

As a result, he proposed that the concept of age was quite different before 1700 from what it is today: an individual was categorised as an “infant” or a “youth” or an “old person”, but not by his specific chronological age but by physical appearance and habits.  Furthermore, what was considered “infancy” or “youth” in the premodern era was very different from what we might associate with such terms today: in the sixteenth century, for example, a child of seven years might still be considered an ‘infant’ and a man of forty years might still be considered a ‘youth’.  “Such fluid or relatively indeterminate definitions of ‘infancy’ and ‘youth,’” Ariès wrote, “were due not only to a different understanding of chronological age, but also to the tendency, in the middle ages, to view children as miniature adults.”  Just as we see in Las Meninas, medieval artists depicted children as adults “reduced to a smaller scale […], without any other difference in expression or features”.  Ariès also made another observation about children in art, that it was not until the seventeenth century that portraits of children in their daily, domestic context became “numerous and commonplace”—a trend he claimed indicated developing interest in children as central members of the nuclear household.

What was going on? According to Ariès, the high mortality rate in the premodern era caused parents to steel themselves from becoming too emotionally involved with infants who might be soon to die. Rather than conceiving of their vulnerable offspring as unique individuals, Ariès claims, Europeans followed Montaigne in assuming that young children had “neither mental activity nor recognizable body shape”; they were regarded as merely “neutral” beings poised precariously between life and death.  However, he suggested that as the mortality rate for infants decreased, there was an inversely proportional increase in the attention paid to children and, in his view, consequently in records, as with the paintings made of them.

The rise in the affection and attention paid to children, Ariès argues, produced a distinct culture of childhood. For example, the seventeenth century brought about a newfound interest in children’s words, mispronunciations, and expressions, and certain styles of clothing, as well as some games and holidays becoming increasingly associated with childhood. One example he gave was that pre-seventeenth century children wore clothes that were smaller-scale copies of those of their parents, but seventeenth century children began to be dressed in clothes that were only slightly different from those of adults. A new fashion was to dress children in robes with ribbons that were the remnants of sleeves once found fashionable by adult wearers of these robes, but later deemed outmoded: Ariès said it would seem, in effect, that new trends children’s clothing rested on the ‘hand-me-downs’ of adult fashion.

According to Ariès, the association of children with certain manners of speech, styles of clothing, and activities came about relatively concurrently with a developing notion of childhood as a time of sexual innocence.  Toward the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth century, the image of the child shifted from a sexually indifferent individual to a sexually innocent one whose purity was constantly in danger of being corrupted by immoral influences.  Such a shift took place, Ariès argued, predominately in response to the rise of the modern educational system.  Educators, most of whom were priests, were just as concerned with their pupils’ salvation as they were with any acquisition of knowledge.  They closely monitored their students’ sexual habits and behaviours and took measures to correct those that they deemed unhealthy. The result of such scrutiny, which was subsequently encouraged and disseminated by handbooks on decorum, was a trend that involved the contradictory desires to “coddle” the child, in other words to protect children’s innate innocence from evil influences, and to discipline them harshly, lest they turn to sin.

What about education?  Today, we expect young people to begin school at a relatively early age, alongside other children their own age. And we assume that, as each year passes, students will perform increasingly advanced work. Yet, as Ariès demonstrates, this approach to education is a relatively recent one.  In the Middle Ages, very few people were formally educated.   The only medieval institution reminiscent of the contemporary university or school was the “cathedral school,” where boys and men would study to become clerics. However, as the number of students and masters associated with cathedral schools increased, the institutions we now associate with the modern educational system began to evolve.  Rather than allowing students of various ages to mingle together in the classroom, educators began to divide them up into individual, age-based classes, a practice he suggested which contributed to the identification of childhood as a specific stage of life.

Inevitably, this process of separation also enabled surveillance and control.  Schoolmasters, assured of their moral superiority over their child-charges, supervised students closely.  In addition, they held their students responsible for informing on each other in order to secure confessions of weakness. Corporal punishment became an increasingly popular as a means of discipline. Eventually, the day school evolved into the boarding school, where students were subject to observation and discipline around the clock. Thus, while the medieval school made little distinction between the adult and the child, the (proto)modern school introduced a sharp divide between adult and child worlds and promoted the idea that children were subordinate beings in need of supervision and discipline.

Finally, Ariès concluded that the seventeenth century, the era in which he argues the concept of childhood first flowered, was the point at which the family, as we know it, first found ‘full expression’.  The rise of the family, Ariès writes, was the consequence of a general move in Western society from inclusiveness to privacy.  Before the eighteenth century, noble families lived in ‘great houses’ in which space was shared between children and adults and servants and masters.  Moreover, these wealthy families were surrounded by “concentric circles of relations … [including] relatives, friends, clients, protégés, debtors, etc.”.  This crowded, public life placed more emphasis on the collective than it did on the individual.

However, he argued that by the eighteenth century, “the family began to hold society at a distance, to push it back beyond a steadily extending zone of private life”. An ever-growing separation between the ‘inside’ of the household and the ‘outside’ of the greater social world emerged, and this, Ariès argued, coincided with the increasing attention being paid to the child.  Children were more often home with their birth-families, and therefore increasingly subject to family attention and affection.  Moreover, the upper- and middle-class’s growing preoccupation with etiquette led to an increased focus on the proper upbringing of children:  parents joined with schoolmasters and religious officials in appropriately ‘moulding’ the child. The child became the centre of the family’s attention.

Many critics of Ariès’s work have reacted especially strongly to his claim that “in medieval society the idea of childhood did not exist.” Indeed, commentators suggest medievalists “never seem to tire of proving Ariès to be wrong” and yet “set themselves the task of showing that the middle ages did have a concept of childhood, not perhaps the same as in later centuries, but a concept nonetheless”.   Adrian Wilson suggested Ariès’s mistake was to argue that medieval society had no awareness of young people simply because they lacked our awareness of what children were like and how they should be treated.  Another major criticism of Ariès’s study was that the great majority of his sources were poems, paintings, sculptures, and other works of art.  Ariès assumed that art directly reflected life.

Given the degree of criticism levelled at Ariès’s work, one might wonder whether there is any value in studying his history of childhood. Strangely enough, even those who voiced strong reservations regarding Ariès’s study nevertheless recommended it, if only because of its status as a foundational work in the field of children’s history.  It is widely recognized as a classic text. The degree to which Ariès has been cited by scholars in various academic fields suggests Centuries of Childhood has catalysed continuing theoretical debate.  Many who reject Ariès’s arguments on the relatively recent discovery of childhood agree childhood was experienced and imagined differently in the Middle Ages, acknowledging that material conditions, power relations, religious beliefs, and cultural mores have a profound impact on notions of childhood.  In recent times social anthropologists have added support to the view that childhood and family life aren’t universal constants,  but rather contingent concepts.

Rereading Ariès today is to encourage us to ask what difference does his analysis make?  Was it just an interesting by-way in research, now discarded or ignored, or is there still some relevance to be considered?  It could be the Medieval world assumed that there was no childhood and treated young people accordingly. Young people behaved as they were expected, and society operated on that basis.  Today, our culture assumes that young people are children.  We also believe there is a longish period of preparation of children for adulthood.  We treat young people accordingly, and they respond accordingly.  Rather than concluding that children are children by nature, surely we’d agree children are ‘children’ by our choice.  If so, we might want to rethink parenting and childhood today.  It’s not an academic point, as children seem to be maturing physically at a younger and younger age.

Another perspective on his work relates compulsory schooling.  The evidence is the industrial revolution created a factory-centred urban society, initially supported by child labour.  Industrialists responded to growing criticisms and anti-child labour laws emerged.  For the first time in Western history millions of young people were forcibly out of work. Youth became a social problem (does that sound familiar!?).   Society demanded protection from delinquency, and the solution to all these problems was mandatory schooling, forcing children off the streets into school, to keep them under control.  An extreme view?  Well, country by country there is about a 20-year gap between industrialization and child labour laws, and another 20-year gap between child labour laws and laws for compulsory schooling.  Even contemporary commentary emphasises the importance of getting the kids off the streets.  School was, and is, a form of detention, as most school children have always known!

I’ve taken part in a few discussions about Centuries of Childhood.  We usually conclude that Ariès got many things wrong.  However, most readers do agree with the proposition that the definition of what constitutes being a ‘child’ varies from one society or one time to another.  Are there alternative perspectives on childhood today?  If so, what are they?  Many questions remain about the ‘sentiment’ explored in Philipe Ariès analysis.  As society continues to change, there is every good reason to suggest our views on the status and nature of childhood should remain on the agenda for regular review and possible rethinking.

Here and There – Myanmar

I have been to several countries where I have not been able to speak the local language.  With smiles, and the fact that English is so universal, I have usually managed to get along just fine.  There is only one country which I visited where I felt a little uncomfortable:  not just because of language, although it was a challenge, but because it didn’t seem particularly welcoming.  At the time I thought the problem was largely of my own making:  looking back I can see it was my misunderstanding.  In many ways, Myanmar has had a sad history, especially in the past 300 years, and current circumstances are worse.

I had wanted to visit Myanmar for years.  Who wouldn’t.  It is the largest country by area in mainland Southeast Asia, with a population around 55m.  Centrally located, it is bordered by Bangladesh and India to the northwest, China to  the northeast, and Laos and Thailand to the southeast.  It has an extraordinary past.  There is evidence cultures existed in Burma as early as 11,000 BCE.   By about 1500 BCE, people in the region were turning copper into bronze, growing rice, and domesticating chickens and pigs; they were among the first people in the world to do so.  By 500 BCE, iron-working settlements began in the south, and rice growing settlements traded with China between 500 BCE and 200 CE.  Today, Myanmar is a member of ASEAN, although it is not a member of the UK’s Commonwealth despite once being part of the British Empire.   The country is rich in natural resources, including jade, gemstones, oil, natural gas, timber (especially teak) and other minerals.  However, despite all this, it has a long history of instability, factional violence, corruption, poor infrastructure, as well as colonial exploitation.  It  ranks 147 out of 189 countries in terms of human development.

The political history of Myanmar is complex.  The Pyu entered the Irrawaddy valley from present-day Yunnan, around the 2nd century BCE, and went on to found city-states throughout the Irrawaddy valley. They were the earliest inhabitants of Burma for whom records exist.  During this period, Burma was part of an overland trade route from China to India, which brought  Buddhism to the country.  Eighth-century Chinese records identify 18 Pyu states throughout the Irrawaddy valley, describing the Pyu as a humane and peaceful people with little evidence of warfare and who wore silk cotton instead of actually silk so that they would not have to kill silkworms.  The Pyu created a civilisation that lasted nearly a millennium to the early 9th century, when a group of ‘swift horsemen’ from the north, the Bamars, entered the upper Irrawaddy valley. In the early 9th century, the Pyu city-states of Upper Burma came under constant attacks, and by the mid-to-late 9th century, Pagan was founded as a fortified settlement along a strategic location on the Irrawaddy.

By the early 12th century, Pagan had emerged as a major power alongside the Khmer Empire in Southeast Asia, recognised by Song China, and the Chola dynasty of India. Well into the mid-13th century, most of mainland Southeast Asia was under some degree of control of either the Pagan Empire or the Khmer Empire.  The kingdom went into decline in the 13th century as the continuous growth of tax-free religious wealth ate into revenues:  by the 1280s, two-thirds of Upper Burma’s cultivable land had been alienated to religious purposes, limiting the emperor’s ability to retain the loyalty of courtiers and military servicemen. This ushered in a vicious cycle of internal disorders and external challenges by Mons, Mongols and Shans.  It was a period of constant change which lasted for nearly six centuries.

All that changed in the early years of the 19^th Century.  Can you guess who turned up?  Raids by the British from British India led to the first of several wars.  The British, alarmed by the consolidation of French Indochina, annexed the country in stages, and sent the last Burmese king and his family into exile.  Britain made Burma an Indian province, with its capital at Rangoon. Traditional Burmese society was drastically altered with the end of the monarchy and the separation of religion and state.  While the Burmese economy grew, most of the power and wealth remained in the hands of several British firms:  oh dear, that wasn’t good.  Inevitably, around the start of the 20th century a nationalist movement began to take shape.

This accelerated when some Burmese nationalists saw the outbreak of World War II as an opportunity to extort concessions from the British in exchange for support in the war effort.  Other Burmese opposed Burma’s participation in the war under any circumstances.  When the Japanese occupied Bangkok in December 1941, Aung San announced the formation of the Burma Independence Army (BIA) in anticipation of the Japanese invasion of Burma in 1942.   The BIA formed a provisional government in some areas of the country in the spring of 1942, During the war in 1942, the BIA grew rapidly, even recruiting  criminals .  It was reorganised as the Burma Defence Army (BDA) under the Japanese but still headed by Aung San.  When the Japanese declared Burma independent in 1943, it soon became apparent that Japanese promises of independence were merely a sham.  As the war turned against the Japanese, they declared Burma a fully sovereign state on 1 August 1943, but it was just another lie.  Under Japanese occupation, it’s estimated some 170,000 to 250,000 civilians died.

After the war ended, the restored British government put in place a program that focused on physical reconstruction of the country, but delayed discussion of independence.  However, in 1947 Thakin Nu, the Socialist leader, was asked to form a new cabinet, and he pushed through the declaration of independence for Burma in January 1948.  The desire to get rid of the British was so strong that the Burmese opted not to join the UK’s Commonwealth of Nations, unlike India or Pakistan.  Instability continued, as I’ll explore a little later, but to give a sense of its continuing challenges, since 2021 more than 600,000 people have been displaced across Myanmar due to the surge in violence following a military coup, with more than 3 million people in dire need of humanitarian assistance.  A deeply troubled country.

My initial appreciation and interest in Burma were the result of studying social anthropology.  As an undergraduate, one of the books that had a massive impact on my understanding of countries, cultures and change was The Political Systems of Highland Burma, by Edmund Leach.  He had been a (mature) student at the London School of Economics, his supervisor Raymond Firth, who had played a major role in rescuing social anthropology from the physical anthropologists and was a proponent of ethnographic studies where the researcher was embedded with the people he wanted to study. After some other, smaller studies, in 1939, Leach set off to study the people of the Kachin Hills of Burma.  The timing was a disaster.  World War II began, and Leach joined the Burma Army,  He was to remain with the military from the Autumn of 1939 through to the summer 1945.

It wasn’t quite the ethnographic field study he had anticipated.  Working most of the time with guerrilla forces, often behind enemy lines, the social anthropologist became an army  Major.   During his time in Burma, Leach acquired extensive knowledge of Northern Burma and its many hill tribes. In particular, he grew very familiar with the Kachin people, even serving as commander of the Kachin irregular forces.  Through what were often demanding and dangerous situations, he kept notes on the hill people, in the belief he would eventually get back to London and complete his research.  Did I say demanding?  At one point he lost all his notes to that point, but he persevered.   Once he retired from the Army in 1946, he returned to the LSE to complete his dissertation.  That was to provide the basis for The Political Systems of Highland Burma.  As for his military adventures, I haven’t yet found anything he wrote about that side of his six years in Burma during the war.

I studied social anthropology as an undergraduate, and my supervisor was Edmund Leach.  However, my involvement in social anthropology came to an end some fifty years ago, and anything other than a very brief overview of this key book would be both misleading and out of touch with more recent thinking.  Sufficient to say, ‘Political Systems’ is concerned with the Kachin and Shan population of North-East Burma.  There had been previous research studies in the region, and Edmund Leach didn’t claim that he had uncovered new or detailed data about these hill tribes.  However, he took a rather different approach, and suggested that what he saw was an “an oscillation between the Kachin ‘republican’ political system (gumlao) and the Shan ‘aristocratic’ system (gumsha)”.  In this, he drew on the indigenous concepts of territorial division, kinship, ownership, the supernatural and authority, showing how a group could and did reconceptualise itself as Kachin at one point, and Shan at another.  By and large, the Kachin saw themselves as hill-dwelling, and the Shan as the occupants of the valleys, but oscillation, or reimagining, was the key factor he analysed.

To say I was delighted when I had an opportunity to visit Myanmar would be an understatement.  Burma as the country’s official name had ended in 1989.  The name change was the result of unrest over economic mismanagement and political oppression by the government, which had led to widespread pro-democracy demonstrations throughout the country in 1988, known as the 8888 Uprising.   Security forces killed thousands of demonstrators, and General Saw Maung staged a coup d’état and formed the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC).  The role was as ominous as the title suggests.  In 1989, SLORC declared martial law after widespread protests. The military government finalised plans for People’s Assembly elections on 31 May 1989.  SLORC changed the country’s official English name from the ‘Socialist Republic of the Union of Burma’ to the ‘Union of Myanmar’ on 18 June 1989 by enacting the adoption of its ‘expression law’.

Despite this, my timing was fortuitous.  In May 1990, the government held free multiparty elections for the first time in almost 30 years, and the National League for Democracy, the NLD, the party of Aung San Suu Kyi, won the election, with 392 of the 492 seats.  It seemed change was in the air.  On 23 June 1997, Myanmar was admitted into the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.  However, the military junta refused to cede power, and continued to rule the nation, first as SLORC and, from 1997, as the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) until its dissolution in March 2011.   In November 2005, the military junta, announced it would move the national capital from Yangon (Rangoon) to a site near Pyinmana.  On 27 March 2006, the new capital was officially named Naypyidaw, ‘city of the kings’.  But almost all of that was in the future, and I arrived in Yangon in what seemed like a time of thawing.  Visitors were encouraged, and hotels were welcoming.

I was in Yangon for business.  A colleague was providing support for a local businessman, whose major source of income came from bottling and selling whisky, as well as other drinks.  As I recall, the businessman was seeking two levels of assistance.  On the one hand, he wanted advice on business development, and building links with other countries in SE Asia.  On that I had little to offer, but my colleague, leading this exercise, had a key role to play there.  On the other hand, he wanted to develop the business acumen of his board and senior staff, in large part because most of them had limited exposure to business practice overseas, let alone to being entrepreneurial and innovative.  Business in Myanmar had been sheltered by the government and its regulations, and development was under the watchful eyes of the military leadership.  This is where I could offer some help.

When I arrived in Myanmar, if one thing was striking it was the comparison between Yangon in the late 1990s and Malaysia in the 1970s.  In terms of infrastructure, they seemed remarkably similar.  Vehicles were old, often belching exhaust fumes.  Roads were poor, many (most) unsealed, with potholes and few signs, warning or directional.  Most buildings looked old, with the typical Asian pattern of numerous air conditioners poking out of walls, accompanied by steadily dripping water.  The public transport system was impenetrable to visitors, who used taxis.  Fortunately, most taxi drivers spoke at least some English.

However, the people were different.  At one level there was the same overall range of behaviours on display, from hard-working businesspeople through to largely indolent onlookers.  That wasn’t surprising.  What was distinctive was the role of the monks.  They were very visible, and, strangely, reminded me of my time in Eire where the monks there were involved in everyday life, rather than restricted to religious precincts and ceremonial activities.  Like an outsider in any country, I had little sense of their role in society, nor did I know about divisions and schisms.  Now we know the monks were divided, some in radical groups opposed to the military government, others its supporters.  At the time, I lacked the sensitivity and experience to pick up the signs that differentiated one from the other.

One curious yet symbolic event came with changing money.  The places where it was possible to use credit cards/charge cards were limited, and currency exchange was tricky.  Knowing I would want to change some money, I had brought US dollars with me.  They were new, almost untouched by hand, but the bank examined with a great deal of displeasure.  Only virgin  notes were acceptable.  Mine only just met scrutiny.

Our business meetings were encouraging.  The Yangon arm of the business was the manufacturer for both soft drinks and whisky.  The CEO was an entrepreneur, operating in other part of SE Asia, and with links to major international companies.  He was well aware that he could see needs and opportunities that most of his staff couldn’t imagine.  I think he believed we could set up a staff development program, possibly in Yangon, or in Thailand or even Singapore, and these would develop the skills and understanding needed by his key staff.  At the time we were meeting, he was carrying most of the business himself, and desperately need to grow a strong team to support him.  The discussions were positive, and we began to develop a plan for implementation over the next year or so.  It never happened.

We all know history and expectations can trick you.  When I was in Yangon, I assumed that the country was slowly developing, and the new, elected government was gently moving the  nation forward.  Could I have sensed another crackdown was about to take place?  I thought the plans for a new capital in Naypyidaw were indicative that Myanmar was going to eliminate associations with the past.  Visitors were welcome, there’d been elections.  It was easy to gloss over the fact that for most of time since independence, the country had been engulfed in widespread ethnic strife, and there had been, in effect, an ongoing civil war, as the military sought to constrain or even eliminate ethnic groups away from the major cities.

In fact, I’d been a visitor during a brief interlude, at a time when Myanmar seemed to be progressing.  In 1991 Aung San Suu Kyi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and advocated a non-violent path for change in Myanmar.  It must have been like a red rag to a bull.  Despite her efforts, democracy was fragile, and when her party won a clear majority in both houses in the 2020 elections, the military seized absolute power once again.  A coup d’état saw Aung San Suu Kyi imprisoned.  The country’s military dictatorship continues its policy of  ethnic genocide, and the hopes of the early 1990’s are entirely dashed.  I’ll never go back there.

Theodore Zeldin

Why am I attracted to people who deliberately place themselves out of the mainstream?  As an undergraduate studying social anthropology, I had the amazing good fortune to have Edmund Leach as my tutor, who relished criticising and ‘rethinking’ the work of established scholars in his field (although, inevitably, he ended up becoming a solid part of the new establishment as a result).  In years of teaching management, it was Charles Handy who was my guide, another thinker always standing back from orthodoxy, asking new, sometimes provocative questions.  His analyses often rested on asking apparently simple questions, and, in doing so, turning thinking on its head.  Another ‘rethinker’.  Although I never met him, a third enthusiastic gadfly whose work I admire is Theodore Zeldin.

To read Theodore Zeldin is to confront a fascinating yet frustrating writer.  The son of Russian Jews, he was born ‘on the slopes of Mount Carmel’ in the 1930s (which was then part of Palestine, I believe, and is to be found close to the port of Haifa).  The family migrated, and he was educated in England.  He graduated from London University at the age of 17, and subsequently took a second undergraduate degree at the University of Oxford: both with first class honours!  His PhD was awarded when he was at Oxford’s St Anthony’s, where he was elected a Fellow, and Oxford was his home from then on.  He is known as a provocative outsider, ready to offer alternative viewpoints, not to be contrarian but to help us see other aspects of key issues.  His thinking has been informed by invitations to advise decision-makers in finance, law, medicine, IT, consulting, transport, manufacturing, insurance, design, arts, advertising, retailing, energy, human resources, government, and international organisations!  He has collected awards and prizes; a recognised intellectual he cites his hobbies as “gardening, painting and mending things”.  So English, and yes, a gadfly.

When A History of French Passions was published, a book of two thousand pages, one reviewer, Daniel Little, commented “there has never been anything like it” and that “possibly nothing would ever be the same again”. It was understandable.  Instead of a traditional historical analysis of public events, it covers a huge range of emotions and concerns, from the reasons people get worried, bored, hysterical or happy, on to eating habits, drinking, and dancing; from the joys and disasters of childhood, education and marriage to behaviour between women and men, and the satisfactions and challenges in various occupations and professions.  It also examines friendship, and the ways people fall out, arguments about art, fashion and literature (of every kind); as well as covering sports, music, reading newspapers, and even facing old age and death. Not a bad range, and that’s just a sample!

His approach was summarised by Gordon Wright in The Times Literary Supplement writing: “One emerges from several days of total immersion a bit dazed, scarcely knowing what to admire more about Dr Zeldin, his energy, his erudition, his imagination or his courage.  He writes as if each and every human activity deserves equal attention and has a more or less independent vitality. The formal structures and public ideologies that are claimed to hold society together are seen as influencing only a small part of people’s lives.”  Typically, in the preface to the French translation Zeldin wrote: “My aim is to undress you”, explaining that he wished to separate people from the myths they had inherited like hand-me-down clothes: rather than concentrating his search on justice, glory or any other ideal, he makes it clear he wishes to include all of his subjects’ contradictions and hesitations in order to reveal the complexity of their individual lives.  “To avoid repeating the received ideas about the past, I have burrowed into as many aspects of life as possible, that erudition has not hitherto explored.”  So French!

The chapters of his ‘History’ comprise dozens of intimate portraits, people from every social group, emphasising the private life behind the public persona, and the motivations hidden in their ideas and ambitions, seeking to reveal each character’s unique and many-sided reality.  Largely unconcerned about class and politics he focusses on the oddities and unpredictability of human interactions, and of the battles waging between the muddled feelings inside every self, every family, every workplace.  Another preoccupation is studying the tricks people use to bend or avoid rules and regulations, often described with humour.  One reviewer suggested it was as if Zeldin combined “the interests of the novelist with the techniques of the historian.  He’s a modern Balzac, but one capable of supporting his assertions with statistics.”

In his next major book, Zeldin sought to examine the many and apparently insuperable obstacles blocking human fulfilment, the consequences of fear, hatred and greed, or the turmoil produced by conflicting emotions.  In terms of the number of copies sold, The Intimate History of Humanity is the most successful of his books, and it continues to be bought all over the world, reprinted and constantly rediscovered anew.  It’s a history he makes relevant to contemporary concerns, and he throws a spanner into the idea of an immutable ‘human nature’.  You could say Zeldin replaces stability with unpredictability.

Each of the twenty-five chapters shows how a ‘fact of life’ which seems impossible to change becomes far less inflexible when its variations through the centuries are understood.  An early chapter, on ‘How men and women have slowly learned to have interesting conversations’ is a great introduction to his style.  It begins with Lydie, a police Corporal in Cognac, who is  presented as an exemplar of public service circumspection (she had to get permsission from her captain to speak to the author, who had to ask his colonel, who had to ask his general …), but who has a personal interest in the secret police and a desire to do something out of the ordinary.  It seems Cognac is a place with limited conversation opportunities, as we find listening to the greengrocer’s wife, and another woman who has her best discussions with her dog!  Many women reveal their husbands are boring.  One commented “The men earn our living.  We think for them.”  All this is a brief introduction into a much longer examination of conversation, across time and nations, ending with the observation that conversation needs the help of midwives to help in flourish, and that generally women show more skill in this.  His parting shot:  “Only when people learn to converse will they be equal”.

Every chapter begins with a conversation with a woman discussing what she makes of life, and then introduces evidence from other civilisations, past and present, suggesting that other options might be open to her, if she only saw her problems in a wider perspective.   His is a history of the world that takes as its subject the worries and uncertainties that all humans share, irrespective of where and when they have lived, rather than chronicling the rise and fall of various empires and economies. However, what keeps me reading and rereading is the kaleidoscope of ways Zeldin shows how we can react to and learn from humanity’s endless floundering through mistakes, regrets and never-ending hopes and aspirations.  The chapter ‘Why there has been more progress in cooking than in sex’ is an example of how the juxtaposition of apparently disconnected themes can give new meaning to sexual obsessions. We begin with a Spanish woman who has grown up in France, and learnt to be flamboyant, move on to Krafft-Ebing, the Kamasutra, West African fairy tales, and a Kung bushman’s observation that “One man does not have enough thoughts for one woman”.  We end, as is the case with every chapter, with learning something fascinating, in this case we are told “the Congolese author Sony Labour Tansi wrote that eroticism is the art of ‘cooking love well’ [which] reminds one there is still a vast amount to be discovered”.

The same approach is applied in the chapter on loneliness, where the history of research into the immune system is placed alongside suffering in solitude, each illuminating the other.  Zeldin presents personal relationships as the crucial element in determining the quality of life, and asks questions like: How has the desire that men feel for women, and for other men, altered through the centuries? Why has it become increasingly difficult to destroy one’s enemies? How have people freed themselves from fear by finding new fears? Why has friendship between men and women been so fragile?   Responses to his work are revealing of its diversity.  No wonder one reviewer wrote, ‘The most exciting and ambitious work of non-fiction I have read in more than a decade’, a view supported by innumerable comments on the internet giving many  different explanations of the book’s significance.  ‘He does not speak contemptuously of anyone’.  Another commented ‘I could not figure out why the book made me feel enraged.’  A diversity of responses as wide as the book: ‘There is so much wisdom here’, wrote a doctor, ‘so many rich historical threads, reading it is like eating a chocolate cake; each chapter is entirely enough to savour for a while, but you cannot wait to go back for more’. Not everyone has enjoyed the complexity.  One reader complained that he could not find an ‘underlying message’. Another suggested that the book ‘drives the reader to get involved in every way’ and as a result make his own beliefs and thoughts open to question.’

Like me, most have found his book compelling.  One fan commented ‘I took the book off the shelf in the bookshop, opened it somewhere in the middle to read a few sentences and was hooked. The wealth of his learning is amazing, the way he weaves together different disciplines, civilisations, ideas and ages is very eloquent and beautifully executed’.  Readers who said the portraits were ‘the best part of the book’ and ‘engrossing’ were contradicted by the person who preferred ‘the historical parts’, and was ‘no fan of biography, especially biographies of unknown anonymous people I don’t know.’  Yet another reader commented: ‘It is the first book of history I fell in love with. Still in love.’ I can add to all these views by reinforcing what another writer said:  ‘For years after I read it, I could not put it back on a bookshelf. To do so was like admitting that the reading was over, while I just wanted to keep exploring everything this book offered and opened up.’ Yes, and yet there were some others who have dismissed the book as ‘waffle’ and ‘garbage’. Every response imaginable.

The National Museum of Australia, inspired by An Intimate History, translated Zeldin’s method into an exhibition of the emotions of the Australians, explaining them by delving into their memories of the past.  In support of this rejection of the convention that nations define themselves by recounting their achievements in chronological order, it quoted this passage from Zeldin’s preface: ‘You will not find history laid out in these pages as it is in museums, with each empire and each period carefully separated.  I am writing about what will not lie still, about the past which is alive in people’s minds today.’

An Intimate History of Humanity is one of the books that sits close by me in the evening.  If I am not certain I want to start another book, all I have to do is open it at random and read a chapter.  It never fails to delight, intrigue and challenge me.  How about Chapter 17, which is headed ‘How travellers are becoming the largest nation in the world, and how they have learned not to see only what they are looking for’.  I have used that chapter as a text when I am working with a group from overseas.  I ask them to think about what they might see as they travel to a new city.  After exploring ideas, I ask them to read the chapter.

Early on in the chapter, they confront Caroline.  “Caroline is not the only one in her office who is restless.  Most of the young people move on after a few years.  But she does not share their ambition.  A brilliant career is not her aim: “I did not know what I wanted to do when I left school; I feel I have done well to have reached such a high position.  I don’t wish to be managing director; I don’t have the background.  If I were a graduate of a top university, I would want to justify it.  But I am satisfied with my post.”   Unfortunately, the people she meets at work don’t excite her.  She went on holiday with an English engineer, hoping it added a touch of exoticism, but he lacked imagination:  “he was almost sad, too academic in his attitude to what is forbidden”.  Surprised?  The French are less disciplined, so she has no trouble finding a truly anarchic Frenchman.  She longs to be able “to surprise others”.

From Caroline we move on to travellers.  Zeldin explains Hippolyte Taine, a 19^th Century historian, said there were “six kinds of tourists.  The first travel for the pleasure of moving, absorbed in counting the distance they have covered.  The second go with a guide book, from which they never separate themselves: “They eat trout in the places it recommends and argue with the innkeeper when his price is higher than the one it gives.”  The third travel only in groups, or with their families, trying to avoid strange foods, concentrating on saving money.  The fourth have only one purpose, to eat.  The fifth are hunters, seeking particular objects, rare antiques or plants.  Finally there are those who “look at the mountains from their hotel window… enjoy their siesta and read their newspaper lounging in a chair, after which they say they have seen the Pyrenees’.  There will doubtless always be tourists wishing to repeat these routines, but there are other possibilities.  Tourists may be content to look at places and things, but travel is also, more interestingly, the discovery of people: it is travail, it requires effort, and its reward is a transformation of both the visitor and the host.”  I had to read on!

Part of what makes his writing so compelling, so fascinating, is that accounts are full of non-sequiturs and hilarious asides.  Describing Frenchman Vincent Le Blanc, who ran away to sea at the age of fourteen in 1568 and did not return until he was seventy.  “After visiting every known continent, he at last found a wife in Brazil, but she turned out to be, as he said, ‘one of the most terrible women in the world’”!!   One of the more famous travellers he includes is Sir Richard Burton .  Zeldin tells us Burton was  an accomplished liar.  He joined the Indian army, which gave him the opportunity to learn half a dozen languages:  he began disguising himself as a Persian merchant of cloth and jewellery, which enabled him to enter the closed world of women, even the harem.  The way to get to know a people, he claimed, was to know the women.  So began a lifelong devotion to sexology, in the course of which he translated the Kamasutra, the Perfumed Garden and the Arabian Nights.  Not a boring Englishman!

Zeldin ends the chapter by commenting “After the history of nations and of families, there is another history to be written, of those who were misfits in one or the other, or felt incomplete in them, and who created new affinities far away from their birthplace.  Travellers have been a nation of a special kind, without frontiers, and they are becoming the largest nation in the world, as travel becomes no longer a mere distraction but an essential part of a whole person’s diet.  Today over 400 million people travel between continents each year.”

Finally, he adds, “The most admirable characters in the history of travel are those who have been most useful to their hosts.  A journey is successful when the traveller returns as an ambassador for the country he has visited, just as an actor is most successful when he enters into a character and discovers something of himself in the part he plays.”  Frustrating, the end doesn’t suit the beginning of the chapter.  For me, it’s not about being an ambassador, even though that’s valuable, but it’s the analogy to acting that rings true.  Visiting other countries, we’re offered the chance to learn more about ourselves, a benefit many travellers don’t grasp, even though they had the opportunity.  Zeldin, like travel, keeps my brain alight!

Here and There – Papua New Guine

I first visited Papua New Guinea at the beginning of the 1980s.  Working for Shell, I was told the local country manager wanted some training developed for the local staff.  He could see they would be replacing senior expatriates over the next few years.  I was more than a little pleased about the prospect:  it was one of the few places left for social anthropologists to study tribes in situations where the impact of western technology and systems was limited.  Lives and lifestyle weren’t the same as they had been 100 years before, but PNG was still a relatively unspoilt place.  I was no longer an academic, and when I was, I hadn’t undertaken field research.  However, the thought of what I might see was exciting.

I stayed in a Travelodge in Port Moresby and did manage to get a glimpse of life in PNG.  The local Shell General Manager had a house close by.  Scarily, it was completely enclosed by a chain link fence, sides and top, as theft and worse was common.  The streets were a mixture of disintegrating tarmac and dirt, although there was a good road out to the airport, and another to the docks.  Away from the central area, housing was flimsy, making a strange contrast against the bright clothes worn by the locals.  Close to the hotel was a market.  It was fascinating, packed with fruit and vegetables.  Quite a lot was unfamiliar, but I soon got to recognise the piles of betel nuts, faithfully chewed by most locals, who would spit the purple remains out into the street.  There were some woven goods and carved wooden items, but tourists were directed to the slightly more upmarket stores on a couple of city streets.

I wasn’t focused on shopping, but on going to look at the market, I saw one of the three sets of traffic lights in town.  It was a Pelican crossing, a British invention where the sequence of lights goes from green, to amber, to red (stop, of course), followed by amber flashing (which means stop unless there’s no-one on the crossing) and finally back to green.  I found it rather nostalgic!  However, it was also an object of fascination, and drivers would stop and admire the changing colours, whatever light was showing.  I later discovered there were two other sets of lights in Port Moresby:  there might have been more, but friends assured me I had seen them all.  The second lights were on the road to the airport.  A conventional sequence (red, orange, green, red), all equally irrelevant to drivers, who paid no attention to the colour that was showing.  The third set were at the road down to the relatively new Parliament House.  That set included a green filter, to allow traffic priority to go down that road.  Three completely different sets of traffic lights:  no wonder the locals stopped to admire them.

This wasn’t the only way in which enthusiastic westerners had intruded on the life of Papua New Guineans.  In the centre of Port Moresby, there were a few multi-story buildings.  They included the city’s two major commercial buildings.  One of these, the Steamships store, had an escalator:  I was told that when this was unveiled, they had ‘walkers’ to take people up and down the escalator, which went from the ground to the first floor.  It had been a major attraction, and it was still drawing visitors when I was there.  Although I didn’t realise this until I was told, but another well-known sight was a bank building.  This had a lift just inside the front door. Once again, when first opened it was a popular spot for observation:  locals would sit outside watching people going into the building to be ‘swallowed’ by the lift doors.  For many people, these western technologies were like some kind of dark magic.

It reminded me of a film used in teaching social anthropology.  This showed a partly cleared area out in the PNG jungle. There was a structure, with two levels of flooring, all made from branches and palm leaves.  A man would sit on the upper floor, looking up to the sky.  He had a strange device made from vine stalks, on his head.  In front of him was a trampled area, devoid of trees, about fifty yards long.  He was sitting in a ‘control tower’, listening to the aircraft flying overhead, and hoping to get them to land at their airport – that short, levelled area was a runway.  This was one of the ‘cargo cults’ to be found in PNG.  The indigenous people had seen aircraft land at the airport, and watched goods being taken off the planes.  They know this ‘cargo’ would be taken to stores and houses and observed staff filling sheets of paper.  These had to be some variety of magical spells, and people involved in cargo cults would find sheets of paper, fold them up, and send them off to be placed as orders.

It is easy to fall into the trap of believing that the local people were stupid or backward.  They weren’t.  Much of what was happening was dictated by chiefs and other tribal leaders, anxious to keep control, using the esoteric practices of the colonial invaders as actions they could appropriate and manage themselves.  Fascination with traffic lights, lifts and cargo planes soon diminished.  The consequences of some other activities lasted longer, as I saw in a second visit, but before I describe that, I’d like to say a little more about my first visit.

In order to develop a training course for Papua New Guineans I realised I would have to start from scratch.  Depending on a series of case studies from a training handbook wasn’t going to work.  I decided to develop a simulation, and created a new region in PNG, with an airport, oil terminal, sea-based unloading dock, and a scattering of villages close to the Shell facilities and the city.  Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t too unlike the real situation in Port Moresby.

Once this new geography had been explained to the participants, I allocated them roles in a Shell ‘management team’, having split them up into three groups.  Once everything was clear, I slowly revealed strategic challenges, personnel issues, and a couple of accidents (including a break in the fuel line from the dock to the mainland) for the groups to address.  Almost immediately, they began to compete against each other, even though I never asked them to do that.  It could have been a training course in Melbourne.  It was a great week.

It also had its moments.  At one point, when they were exploring a ‘disciplinary’ issue, I could see one of the participants looking very glum (he later became a general manager for Shell in PNG).  “What’s up?”  “This guy, causing trouble, all this talking, it’s the wrong way to do things.”  “What would you do?”  “Get a bit of 4×2, take him to the back of the sheds, and belt the living daylights out of him”!!  It was hard not to be sympathetic:  was I trying to turn him into a European?

Looking back years later, I am aware of how much I missed.  I did speak to the course participants outside of workshop time and learnt a little about their lives.  What I didn’t understand was the level of corruption, lost hope and misery.  All that would become evident  years later, when I was invited to work with a PNG statutory authority responsible for managing natural resources.  I already knew about the appalling behaviour of BHP at the Ok Tedi mine, the consequence of discharging around two billion tons of untreated mining waste into the Ok Tedi River from tailings which had been inadequately treated and unsafely dammed.  The failure caused severe environmental damage along 1,000 km of two rivers.

I quickly learnt BHP was far from being the only exploitative big business operating in PNG.  The task I had been given for the resources authority was to help them develop a strategic plan for the next five years.  It wasn’t hard to see they were under pressure when I arrived at the head office:  it was in a compound, surrounded by a chain link fence, topped with razor wire, and a guard with a (rather old) rifle at the gate.  The agency was worried that bands of locals would try to break into the offices, using force if they had to, seeking compensation.

As the agency’s major problem was explained to me, the reason for their concern was alarmingly simple.  A major Malaysian timber company was operating in PNG.  It would go to a village where it would make an offer for the trees surrounding the village.  At first the villagers would be reluctant, as the trees were central to their livelihood.  However, the timber company staff kept raising the price on offer (which remained very low) while facilitating the discussion with dozens of crates of beer.  Eventually, the proposal would seem too good to refuse.  All that money, instantly, for their trees.  The headman and elders agreed, signed up, and received their cash, and then the Malaysian corporation came and cut down the timber.  It was ruinous.  The money was quickly spent, much of it on drugs and alcohol, the land was rapidly cleared and horribly degraded.  I was told it would take 20-50 years to re-establish any viable arboreal agriculture on a sustainable basis.

Once I understood, I was angry.  We set to work, trying to identify ways to warn the villages, and to explain why the deal was so one-sided.  The task was huge, as there are several hundred languages spoken in PNG, and thousands upon thousands of villages scattered through the highlands.  The staff of the authority were committed but very small in number.  Language barriers would be close to impossible, and the process of getting staff from one village to another would be slow and challenging.  Access to equipment and funds was limited.  Finally, from what I was told there was every reason to believe several politicians in the government were paid by the Malaysian company to ensure little happened.

We worked hard to develop some strategies, but by the end of the exercise I was now angry and ashamed.  Angry because of what was happening, and ashamed because I knew what little I had to offer would have marginal impact:  this was the political-corporate complex at its worst.  We couldn’t stop the Malaysians.  As we were planning, they continued and are probably still at work, gradually destroying much of the natural resources of the country.

Papua New Guinea today is Australia in 1800.  It isn’t a country, so much as an administrative fiction.  It occupies half of an island.  The other, western half was Irian Jaya, part of Indonesia, more recently renamed Papua.  At just under 180,000 sq miles (Australia has just under 3m – 17.3 x PNG), it is the 3rd largest island nation in the world, after Australia and Madagascar (although Greenland, which is legally part of Denmark, is larger than Madagascar).  PNG is the 54^th largest country in the world.  It has a population of 9 m people. (Australia has 26 m).  The capital, Port Moresby, is similar in size to Canberra, Lae has around two hundred thousand people, and Mount Hagen is the 3^rd with a little under 50,000 living there.  Around 90% of PNG’s population lives in tiny villages.

Back in the 19^th Century, Australia was similar.  It had a small number of cities, and the country had been divided up into independent British territories.  Most of the country was occupied by indigenous people, almost all living in tiny bands, mainly peripatetic, with hundreds of dissimilar languages.  Few could understand neighbours living fifty miles away.   Of course, there was one major difference from PNG.  Most of the Australian land mass was desert, and only in the north of the country was there a subtropical jungle;  Papua New Guinea is wholly semi-tropical, and almost the whole of the country is forested – or it was.

The similarities go further, of course.  The British felt they had control of the whole country, and in 1901 established the Commonwealth of Australia, carving up the country into six states and one territory  The ACT, the Australian Capital Territory, was created some years later.  Most of the indigenous Australians, occupying most of the land, had no idea what was happening, possibly assuming that if they kept themselves to themselves, things would continue as they had for the previous 50,000 years.  They didn’t, of course.  In both countries disease and drugs (mainly alcohol to begin with) ravaged the local people.  The only difference is that Australia began that process long before it began to take hold in PNG.

Meanwhile, plundering of natural resources continues unabated.  Australia has been treated like a vast quarry:  dig up the ores and the coal and sell them overseas.  Bottle the gas and sell that overseas.  Allow livestock to graze and sell the animals overseas.  Grow produce and sell that overseas.  If only we could bottle the beaches, we would sell those overseas, too, but almost unfortunately (because it’s a long trip), tourists have to come to Australia to enjoy the beaches, swim off the Great Barrier Reef, and go surfing.

Papua New Guinea has been treated like another bonanza, ripe for exploitation.  Chop down the trees, sell the timber overseas.  Mine the resources, sell those overseas.  Unfortunately, the beaches are limited, so tourism is pretty small key.  There isn’t a Great Barrier Reef, and farming is hardly viable in the largely mountains terrain.  Bad luck, PNG, not all that much to be exploited, so grab what you can, then leave it to muddle along.  Let’s be honest:  Australia lives next door, and we simply don’t care.  What did I say before?  I was angry and ashamed, and I still am.  We are far too immersed in enjoying our laid-back lifestyle, living off the back of the quarry and farm, to spend much time thinking about our neighbours.  Just recently it took us a year to send the first and pathetically small number of Covid vaccines over.

Several social anthropologists have been up into the highlands of PNG and studied small communities.  Many villages are still relatively inaccessible, and some still live much as they did thousands of years ago.  Those that do have rich cultures, practice sustainable agriculture and livestock management.  Every year that goes by, more and more are drawn into engagement with ‘modern’ business, modern lifestyles and modern capitalist economic practice.  How much time do we spend helping them with managing what is an almost inconceivable transition?  Almost none, just a little less than our small investment in working with many indigenous communities in the north and west of Australia .  We are not good neighbours to the people of PNG; to be honest, we don’t behave like neighbours at all.

I should be more than ashamed.  I should be embarrassed.  I could have worked on projects or for agencies that are trying to help Papua New Guinea and its population manage the transition into the modern world, but I didn’t.  That is a pretty huge failure to put alongside what I have achieved in my working career.  It doesn’t obliterate what I’ve done, but it puts my activities in a rather unforgiving light.  Like Australia, I could have done more.

I have had the good fortune to visit Papua New Guinea on a few occasions.  I met some outstanding people, like that manager who wanted to get a bit of 4 by 2 and sort out a poor performer.  Make no mistake, he was a great manager, and became an excellent country manager for the company.  The staff of the government agency were trying to make a difference in an appalling situation, and they worked against the odds to save the villages they contacted from being overwhelmed.  They didn’t give up.  I went back to my life in Australia, and moved on to other projects, leaving PNG somewhere in my past.  I am in many ways representative of Australia and its relationship to Papua New Guinea.  We see, we understand the issues, we attempt to deal with small projects that might make a difference, but we are unable to do more than that.  The issues are too great, and we are inadequate in the face of what needs to be done.  Largely abandoned, PNG tries to move forward without us.  It’s not a good story.