Smoky Sunrise

The hills outside the kitchen window have disappeared behind a now all too familiar smokescreen. This is how it looked when I got up this morning about three hours after a fire started over the hill from us in Calistoga. The air quality as I write this is 256 or Very Unhealthy according to my new app so, although the temperature isn't as high as predicted yet, we'll be staying inside. Since there's not a lot else to do , I'll continue with yesterday's lecture on the changing role of anthropology in a bigger, more complex society. You have been warned....

When I received my degree in Anthropology, ethnologists were running out of isolated cultures to study. Archeologists were still helping themselves to ancient artifacts and transporting them from where they belonged to museums all over. (The Elgin Marbles in the British Museum come to mind). The prevailing argument is that they are being protected from the climate and the local populace. An argument can certainly be made for this, but it also seems to me that context and location are also important considerations. 

It was beginning to dawn on my linguistics professor that the last speakers of certain languages he was deconstructing and categorizing were dying and taking the secrets of their oral traditions with them. At the same time it was beginning to dawn on me that this academic approach of separating the people from the culture and deconstructing what was left was very boring.

Years later (but still years ago), I ran across a fascinating article by Tim Cahill, an adventure travel writer, in Outside magazine which fascinated me. I wish I had saved it, for I have forgotten many details, but his basic message was thatby setting foot in a largely isolated culture, even though he did nothing more than observe it,  his presence among the people changed that culture irretrievably. He gave as his example, a visit he made to the longhouse of a tribe of headhunters in Borneo.* They had no electricity or running water but a complex oral tradition of laws and religion. They had very few possessions except for a communal collection of cooking posts and water vessels. His brief presence among them, however,  made them aware of the fact that there was a different sort of world beyond the walls of their longhouses, and the canopy and hunting trails of the rainforest where they lived. 

A quick Google search reveals that now they wear t-shirts with the logos of rock groups and beer companies and watch television powered by Honda generators. 

I am still pondering whether this is good, bad or simply inevitable....

*It is interesting to note that while many Indonesian tribes agreed amongst themselves to end the practice of headhunting as causing division and conflict among the tribes, it began to surface again when the Allied Powers encouraged the practice against the Japanese  Occupation of Borneo,  and again in the 60's when the when the Indonesian government encouraged them to purge the Chinese who were suspected of supporting Communism in Mainland China.