today in a nutshell, for the nutshell...

'Es ist die Kultur, ihr Trottel!'

On the topic why natural sciences alone may not suffice to understand humans, the German quality daily Zeit wonders today about the image and purposes of Geisteswissenschaften in the real world here, and also has a site dedicated to the (German) Year of the Human Sciences, and questions related to this. Only in German, I'm afraid!

Evening in the kitchen. A mere footnote to a footnote.

Your unbounded hospitality is unpretentious. It grounds me as it most likely has grounded every anthropologist, especially apprentices (hopefully the effect continues for senior professors, too). There is no arguing with you about whether I should not rather sleep on the couch. You make me food, and I am so grateful I could break down. You organise a car for me to move my things and you laugh at the way in which the steering wheel chirps and sings. You accept my inaptitude of that treacherous, beautiful language of yours, mocking me only sometimes for my, at times, stubborn and silly refusal to say anything I cannot say properly. Being a foreigner is an exercise in humility, in patience, in deference, and in acceptance. You may not make me feel like a foreigner, but I know I am one. I can understand the language if it is fixed in print, but often, on TV, and especially during the news, it comes at me too fast, and I get lost in the melody, making out a word here and there, and attempting to ignore the bubbling, noisy boiler in the background that decides to interrupt and colour the fast flow of words with a rumbling bass line. You translate into common patterns of behaviour. I stir my tea intently, I listen to what you tell me, I try to understand. I may feel happy, sheltered, here in this kitchen, yet I feel incomplete, I feel incompetent, I feel too-much in-the-process-of to know anything. I feel foreign, but am constantly attempting to overcome obstacles, try harder to get the information needed (what is relevant information? In what context?), get beyond grumpy guards and smile at them no matter how they respond, rework what I know, shaping and twisting and exhausting myself into a different kind of being. I want to be a sponge, but have limited take-in and take-on capacity. I learn absence. I begin to understand loyalty, restraint, appropriateness, strength. I get tired, I get ill, I happen to wake up having nerves made out of china paper. I get out of bed on certain days weighed down by an undefined reluctance, I listen to the news half asleep, make my coffee with a grumpy head, and… I finally face the dawn and the music. Often I get up and want to dance straightaway. I want to, need to, have to, work on my research, yet I need to seek isolation for documenting the social (not as silly as it sounds, at least in the kind of work I do). I hasten through the city on high-heels to the next interview. I enjoy meeting very different kinds of people with very different outlooks on life. I adopt a different attitude depending on who I meet, I ask different questions, I try to get to what it means to be this or that, and do this or the other. I am driven by the implications of my project and by learning about empathy. I am longing for my stable environment of family and friends, yet should not remain too involved with affairs far away. How can one possibly ask this? I am reliant on those far away who may have understood the workings of my being for a long long time. I cannot express to you the emotional relief of a word from them on a bad day. I am subject to friendliness, nastiness, rudeness more intensely here quite possibly because the work turns on me and becomes private. The boundaries between the routinised, I-keep-things-at-a-distance-so-they-cannot-hurt-me ‘professional stranger’ and the emotional, responsive, captivated novice are permeable. This is how I work and live. This is what I do. This is how it feels.
I have no intention, rest assured, of turning this blog into a rant about the difficulties of doing field research, but felt this entry is quite representative, so I decided to include it. And, in any case, I am enjoying what I cannot get anywhere else: licence to write about what I feel like with no external censoring authority. What’re ye gonna do abuut it? Show the anthropologist some pity. Most other people do…

radio românia cultural...

woke me up this morning with this terribly cheesy song by john waite (not sure who the woman is he sings it with). it has all the ingredients "i ain't missing you at all", something about a "frozen and broken heart", and i believe there is also a "storm" of some sort "raging". finally, cannot have a wonderfully clichéd and exceptionally unoriginal love song without "signals" or something along those lines involved. of course! popular romanticism is such a silly lovely human thing. is it? and a more general question: what is, in any case, our obsession with originality, and innovation? believe it or not, the song itself put a huge smile on my face and got up rather quickly for my standards. and yes, i am a sucker for cheesy, ridiculous love songs, and i refuse to be a musical snob, all within limits of course... no other conclusions from this, please, but this one: among other things it has done, fieldwork has shown me the value of confining your social life to a limited geographical area. why? because, if you remain there, you will miss people less than if you're all scattered in various countries...
so if you need a song that makes you happy, i recommend 'mack the knife' sung by the great ella. if, after that, you need another one, get in touch...

why i love bucharest

food and silliness

One of these nights, my friend and I (we have both been accused of being workaholics, but in fact we just love what we do. My friend is an anthropologist too, by the way) went to a brilliant chamber music concert in the Romanian Atheneum, where we spoke with a very cultured Australian traveller of Hungarian origins, who spoke to us about the fact that Beethoven considered his three quartets as very important in his oeuvre, had played on Liszt’s very own piano at the institute in Vienna, and who was not very fond of Bucharest’s failure to develop its own architectural style. After the concert we realised we were starving, and headed to a restaurant.

Adapted excerpts of a very enjoyable few hours:

• When I was walking to the Atheneum, this guy asked me whether my name was Deborah. I found the street much too dark to start a conversation, and just said, in passing ‘no, not me…’ and he said ‘but I know a girl called Deborah who looks just like you’… like I have forgotten who I really am, and he knows. Made me laugh later on.

…

• I like Bucharest now, and soon I will have to move again. I have moved too much lately.

• So… have you found your rhythm here?

• Yeah. I mainly know when to stop working now. I have people I can call to get out.

• Ah yes… on the weekend you should stop working, and… worry.

• (laughter)

…

• She is too busy to put me into her schedule. I don’t fit in.

• Come on, don’t speak like that, you sound desperate. Give her some time to think about it…

• Ah. It’s difficult. Everyone’s busy these days with building careers and making a living. And I don’t want to wait: I want someone to take good care of me now.

• Yeah... but give her time.

• Maybe you’ll get married here! Who knows?

• No. Impossible. I’m just here for work and I doubt that I will meet anyone marriageable in that village.

• Why not?

• They’d tire of my temper. Plus: Average age… 65…

…

• Are we talking about plastic surgery?

• Yes, ‘wifey, I think your breasts are perfect, but I would like you to have a brain enlargement.’

…

bugged

As I sit and write and think, my attention is drawn to that bit of my shoulder which suddenly requests my left hand’s attention. Scratching does not really help, but at least one thinks one is taking some kind of counteraction. Little bumps appear on my skin, red, ugly, and after a good scratch, adorned with a drop of liquid. I feel unclean. I shower and change into different clothes and chuck my old ones in the wash. Bleach is my friend. I look for the little culprits under bed, on armchair, behind wardrobe, between the cracks on walls, floors, under my neighbour’s shoes, within the crevices of my mind, but there is no sign of them anywhere. Nada. The bites swell up a bit, then fade. Nothing that will kill me, but the thought of those little mandibles that certainly have never seen a mandible brush in their lifetime. Ever heard of sting brushes? Prick brushes? Exactly. I clean the whole room thoroughly, which takes me a whole daylight. I throw out my carpets, and boil the bedding, I read up on all kind of nasty and buy kill-it-all insecticide called Cobra: venom against anything that creeps, crawls, flies, buzzes, annoys, unnerves. I spray my only room, in anger. The stench could kill a mammoth, and will most likely have some radiation content and cause three different kinds of cancer. How dare they trouble my peace? How dare they come and take over my sanctuary, my foxhole? I alone pay the rent. I refuse to cohabitate with anything that draws my blood, does not speak to me, nor share my food (or, for that matter, and let us be precise, sharing for me is defined by my explicit or implicit consent, we are not talking about stealing). As I am reviewing the seal of my fridge, the thought of paranoia does cross my mind. I was loaded for bear but not this. If at least I could see them. They would be easier to exterminate. Fleas can be crushed if you have nails. Seeing them would also ease the decision whether the best solution is indeed, extermination, or rather, 112, or immediate flight. Something that you can name makes it already more harmless, and I could determine which illnesses the bugs in the specific case are vectors for and draw up an action plan. The indeterminateness of the situation drives me up the walls, but the culprits remain unfound. The invisible has become a priority in my life all of a sudden, and I consider moving house, even emigrating because of it. I must have been stung from the inside. Something wants out! But what is bugging me?

Next time you have nothing to do look up the etymology of bugger. I was surprised by the link with ‘Bulgar’, one of these Others who do not have the right religion, and hence, must be living in all kinds of sin.

in the valley lies a bundle of villages...

these are some impressions from the village I am moving to at the end of january...

the announcement kindly asks us...

to leave the metro carriages and wait for the next one. everyone gets out quietly. piata victoriei. on the platform across the rails, a voice. the person it belongs to is hidden behind the yellow pillars, and he does not look anything like his voice. with a pronounced vibrato, he performs a mellow, plaintive type of folk song. let us see beyond the balkan soul stereotypes.
it moved me, and it may have moved others too. one young police officer was not moved and mocked the singer to his friends, who listened nevertheless.
also encountered some roma kids on calea victoriei carrying around their sheep and wishing every bypasser health and luck and also wishing for a return of some kind.
the following article is a particularly apt portrayal of the romania beyond the stereotypes of contrast, of alterity and proximity:
http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2006/09/IONESCU/13967 - septembre 2006
and also this, for the contrastive effect...
http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2-2006600595,00.html