Bush League Adventures in a Mud Hut

By John Leo

Why do anthropologists bother to do fieldwork at all? Nigel Barley, an anthropologist and African specialist at London's Museum of Mankind, ponders the question in this witty memoir of his hapless adventures. Some go to grind an ax or two, as students of Margaret Mead now know. But Barley believes that most anthropologists pursue fieldwork for its cheery reminiscences and lifelong opportunities to one-up colleagues who have never traveled. Experience abroad, he says, confers a "valuable aura of eccentricity upon the really rather dull denizens of anthropology departments."

Take the author, for example. In 1978, he grandly sweeps into a Dowayo village in the Cameroons, actually telling the first bedazzled resident he meets, "Take me to your leader." From reading anthropological monographs, Barley knows how matters are supposed to go. The touring academic picks up the language in a month or so, finding many eager, friendly and articulate informants, all committed to Western notions of veracity. He finds the tribe's way of life is marked by high spirituality and harmony with nature. After a suitable time, the anthropologist is warmly welcomed into the tribe, usually after he scratches the earth with a hoe, showing that he too understands the ways of nature.

Alas, life in the bush rarely resembles literature in the hand. Barley is viewed by all as a harmless idiot, a source of money and vast amusement. He is misled by most locals and never learns whether they are lying or merely find Western epistemology elusive. Barley makes every possible mistake. He selects a youthful interpreter in a culture contemptuous of the young. He talks to women, a lunatic method of gathering information, according to the Dowayo tradition. He refuses to take off his white skin at night and stubbornly remains convinced that chameleons are not poisonous but cobras are.

The Dowayo language, which has four tones that affect meaning, is devilishly hard to get right. Barley tries to tell an important Dowayo, "I am cooking some meat," but the pitch is wrong, and his statement comes out as "I am copulating with the blacksmith." Everywhere he goes, the newcomer finds himself enmeshed in African webs of social obligation. Each time he gets into his car, a dozen villagers appear with luggage. All expect to be given a ride, plus money to spend, and most can be counted on to vomit inside the car at some point during the trip. Many Dowayos and their dogs throw up on Barley, and during the rainy season, he cleans up by jumping into a river, fully clothed, and proceeds on his way.

The Dowayos make disappointing environmentalists. They fish by heaving pesticide into streams, and ask white men to bring machine guns to dispatch the few remaining antelope in the area. To speed the growth of new grass, they set vast bush fires each year, which incinerate most of the young wildlife. Barley also fails to find the exalted spirituality expected among the primitives. The Dowayos are placid people, devoted to ribald joking, sexual freedom, wife beating and an unusual beer that Barley says "enables one to pass directly from sobriety to hangover without an intervening stage of drunkenness." Every so often, the natives erupt in frenzied skull-cult ceremonies, but basically nothing much else ever happens in the culture: "Dowayos seldom if ever seemed to do anything, have any beliefs or engage in symbolic activity. They just existed."

Even so, Barley does not patronize his hosts. After all, he concludes, they have freedom, sex, beer and self-respect. But he is not tempted to impose ideological order on the culture or to use its values to flog the folks back home. He returns to Britain ravaged by illness, permanently suspicious of * anthropological field reports and "uncritically grateful to be a Westerner, living in a culture that seems suddenly very precious and vulnerable."