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2
PREPARING THE MIND,
FORGETTING THE BODY
When Leela Dube wrote in 1975 that anthropology was to
be an integral part of the content of her marriage, I could empathize. Like
her, I too was married to an anthropologist. Unlike her, I would not allow my
husband to go to the field with me. That was simply not an option.
Marriage, dissertation, learning Swahili and iciBemba,
paperwork and preparation, moving from state to state, and then leaving
altogether was like jumping into an abyss. From January 1973 when I left for
the field until July 1974, I was alone.
Before I entered the Lenda valley and during my visits
to missionaries I heard a lot of dreadful stories about how travelers were
beaten up in Lenda owing to the continued practice of instant vengeance. I was
warned not to travel alone. One of the anthropologists who taught me the local
language back in the States, described the people as being morose, unfriendly,
and paranoid. The worst horror stories centered on the Zangavan pedicle which
one had to cross if one took the shorter route into the valley. One was warned
of bribery and theft, of the presence of aggressive guerrillas, as well as
uncontrolled and unpaid Zangavan soldiers.
Naturally, I travelled alone. Indeed, at that time, I
found stories like that told by Leela Dube in India, which persuaded her not to
travel alone, offensive. She wrote:
I was told about the plight of a woman sociologist
who, only a few years before, had come to Chhattisgarh to collect folklore but,
feeling insecure because of the behavior of petty officials and the
ununderstanding and indifferent attitude of the people, had had to go back
without achieving her objective. An unmarried woman travelling alone in these
areas was inconceivable to the people. I therefore decided to conduct my field
investigations under the protective umbrella of my father-in-law (1975, p.159).
On one hand, if it is the case that the woman
sociologist was truly incapacitated, then the above quotation is a serious
indictment against Indian men. They must be very different from the men in
Lenda. Lenda male officials, police, and villagers were always curious and
sometimes a nuisance, but none ever forced themselves on me, nor would they,
once I explained what I was doing, seriously hinder my work. On the other hand,
if the story is only half true, then it says something about the difference
between women researchers.
First, I must admit that I tempted fate. Second, I
usually worked with the assumption that no man would want to force himself on
me. Third, I entrusted my life to the people and it soon became very clear that
there was always someone among them who felt protective of me. Fourth, let me
say it, I was naive and usually so filled with a love and zest for life that my
sincerity was contagious. I really believe that this four-fold attitude,
however dubious, helped me through many awkward situations. Still, one must
assume that a researcher tells the truth. Which leads me to emphasize once
again that Lenda men must be different from those of central India. Perhaps the
fact that the Lenda are a matrilineal people had something to do with that.
There is one further point of difference between Dube’s
experience and my own. She consistently emphasizes her awareness of herself as
a woman. “My being a woman …” or “I must follow the norms of behavior which the
people associated with my sex, age, and caste,” or “I was a Brahman and a
woman,” or “I did not have to neutralize or minimize my femininity but
presented myself as essentially a woman; even to men I was a woman interested
in their women (ibid).” This constant reference to her femininity within the
space of three pages must mean that she perceived herself and the people
perceived her very differently from the way I perceived myself or from the way
the Lenda perceived me. Only once when I thought myself to be in real danger
did I use, unsuccessfully I might add, being a woman as an excuse to free
myself from a tricky situation. Usually, I was oblivious to gender. That is, I
was aware that I am anatomically a woman. I also observed that the Lenda were
aware that I am anatomically a woman. But that fact seemed to carry no other
meaning. At least, it had nothing to do with my research. It had only to do
with love making. This again says something simultaneously about the Lenda and
my perception of gender.
But let us
pause a moment and contemplate once more Dube’s story about the unsuccessful
woman sociologist and Dube’s persistent reference to her own gender and social
status. Somewhere in that story and in those references, is the essence of
human dis-ease and the failure of social science; and that dis-ease, and that
essence, is determinism. Formally we no longer believe Leslie White who wrote
that “Human beings are merely the instruments through which cultures express
themselves … In the man-culture system, man is the dependent, culture the
independent, variable” (White, 1959, p.148–149). Informally we have long since
capitulated. Had we not capitulated, we should surely have developed a theory
of freedom, especially, personal freedom. Political freedom in the form of
Marxism, Humanism, Liberalism, are all different forms of benevolent
determinism. Sometimes the right to determine is placed into the hand of a
class, or a party, or a revolutionary movement, more often it is left in the
hands of churches, public opinion, parents, teachers, and so on, ad infinitum.
Instead of teaching students how to explore the nature of freedom and
responsibility, we encourage rebellion, wild rampages against house, furniture,
and the establishment, and then we stand by as society unleashes its whips and
thrashes them back into submission. Instead of re-instituting prayer, I
thought, perhaps we should start each class with the following words:
Man being
condemned to be free carries the weight of the whole world on his shoulders; he
is responsible for the world and for himself as a way of being … It is
therefore senseless to think of complaining
since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are
(Sartre, 1956, p.707–8).
Yes, these
are the harsh words of a radical individualism that I will come to reject. But
open your ears, my friends, and listen. Do you not hear complaints upon
complaints? The student complains about his teacher, the child about its
mother, the wife about her husband, the black man about the white, and vice versa.
What have we learned? Certainly, not that by choosing our project we will have
chosen for the world (Sartre, 1956).
Having clarified why I went to the field alone, how I
preferred ignoring gender, and where Sartre’s ideas
were useful, let us now look more closely at my arrival in Lusaka. The air was
moist and warm on January 2, 1973, the day of my arrival. The sky was grey as
if to symbolize the mixed blessing that my field work experience would become.
People of all colors speaking different languages filled the airport. An
employee from the Institute for African Research met me and drove me to my
place of residence. He warned that the Institute was isolated and too far from
the city but did not explain how colonial its atmosphere was. Under colonialism
one set of buildings and facilities were built for Europeans and quite another,
little shacks without electricity or indoor plumbing for Africans. To this day,
the arrangement symbolizes the presence of apartheid tendencies then, even
among British intellectuals and colonial officials who employed Africans as
clerks, drivers, and maintenance workers but were satisfied to keep them in
inferior shelters. No doubt, my initial response to this differentiation in
accommodation was like that of every liberal American. Since black researchers
from Nigeria and Ghana shared the latter premises with us we soon learned to
live with current realities. The goal was research.
My
neighbors, the Taters from Maryland, he an economist, she a poet, showed me
what to eat and where to shop. Even in city stores a lot of food looked
unfamiliar or unsanitary. As one shopped one felt oneself devoured by hungry
looks from hungry young boys. I was always overcome with guilt as I left the
store with filled shopping bags. This guilt and the unpleasant pressure of
inadequate transportation, of difficulties with money transfers from Canada to
Lusaka, the inability to find a Lenda speaker so that I might continue to
practice this language while in the capital; all this stress and strain,
isolation and monotony, this unbearable uncertainty about the success of this
venture, burst forth one day when I tried to open my door and found it stuck
because under its wide bottom lay a squashed but twitching frog. I felt my endurance
giving way to revulsion and yet I stared at the fluids of its body as they drew
themselves out, flattened and spread across the floor, and then I screamed
until the Taters came running convinced that my bungalow was on fire.
The incident
of the squashed frog is a beautiful example not of neurotic projection (Jung,
1968, p.153), as of thematic unity. It was as if the fluids of the frog were
charged with my feelings of anguish about Bob, poverty, humanity, life and
death, as if in this viscous substance of a dying life, any kind of life, were
condensed all the psychic meaning of uncertainty, horror, torment, and
impermanence of life. This slimy fluid was, as Sartre (1956, p.771) noted,
neither material nor psychic. Rather, it transcended the opposition of the
psychic and physical and revealed itself to me “as the ontological expression
of the entire world” (ibid). All this was the result of one innocent,
unsuspecting motion of my arm. Here is how I recorded the effects of seeing the
squashed frog in my personal journal:
… The image
stayed with me. And for a moment I felt recognition. A vague shadow whisked
across my brain of writhing passion and defeat.
I thought of
Bob. His face looked drained. I stood there stamping my feet as if crushing his
will and spirit. I yanked open the door and walked through with resolve.
I thought of
Zambia, of the rich and the poor. And of the boy by the entrance to the supermarket.
He stood there squashed against the wall, his stomach caved in, looking
furtively at bulging shopping bags of rich customers. And I turned away. In
each letter, I described the twitching frog as if it were just another
sensation. And I knew my friends must think me crazy to be in Zambia and focus
on such trivia.
There are
the rich and the poor. The poor live in picturesque but destitute shanty towns,
in houses of mud walls, with pieces of tin and wood and plastic on the roofs.
And everything is held in place by stones. I see lined faces and ragged
clothes. And the stench of perspiration and polyester drive me away.
And then
there are the houses of the rich, sprawling bungalows hidden behind lush
growth, guarded by houseboys against thieves. And the faces are young and
smooth, and the clothes fashionable and shapely. A chauffeur opens the door and
a child slides out of the limousine and struts firmly to school. And I want to
bury my nose in its black curly hair and draw in the scent …
Out came feelings
of guilt about having left Bob behind and my inability to see each as
self-sufficient. Out came feelings of frustration at not being able to do
anything about Zambia’s poverty. Out too came the admission that sweat in
polyester was repulsive and that clean, polished, and deodorized bodies were
pleasant. As cerebral as my goal was, the body refused to be forgotten.
These kinds
of outbursts accompanied the beginning of my field work. While they may have
been unpleasant they were also revealing because in them I saw the start of the
process of resolving many contradictions with which my life, lived on several
continents, was riddled. I bore them, as Jung seemed to when he wrote about a
thirty-four-year-old American woman, a very competent analyst, who had got into
a disagreeable transference situation with her patient, sought Jung’s help, and
experienced similar transference with him.
I saw the
climax coming and knew that one day a sudden explosion would take place. Of
course, it would be a bit disagreeable and of a very emotional nature, as you
have perhaps noticed in your own experience, and I foresaw a highly sentimental
situation. Well, you just have to put up with it; you cannot help it. After six
months of very quiet and painstaking systematic work she couldn’t hold herself
in any longer, and suddenly she almost shouted: ‘But I love you!’ and then she
broke down and fell upon her knees and made an awful mess of herself.
You just
have to stand such a moment. It is really awful to be thirty-four years old and
to discover suddenly that you are human (Jung, 1968, p.166–7).
My outbursts
were not as severe nor of the same nature. But Jung’s association of “love”
with disagreeable emotions and “break down” with discovering that we are human
was worrying. Disturbing too were the linkages he made within the process of
moving from a lack of self-awareness to growing awareness only to “elope” with
“Chinamen” or “Negroes.” While it was written in the 1930’s, and while we must
for the moment overlook, if not excuse, Jung’s own strong and embarrassing
prejudices the statement is remarkable:
We often
discover with Americans that they are tremendously unconscious of themselves.
Sometimes they suddenly grow aware of themselves, and then you get these
interesting stories of decent young girls eloping with Chinamen or with Negroes
… It is the same phenomenon as “going black” or “going native” in Africa
(p.166).
Did I have
this tendency, I wondered? Whatever, I saw it as being a politically liberal
attempt to achieve absolution for bad deeds committed by previous generations
that cannot, however, be absolved in this manner. To my mind, scrutinizing
strong emotions helped recognize that, like it or not, body and mind both
played into our research—as did the “dangerous” yearning for love. We are
merely whole persons. Nevertheless, I got the point; emotional expression in
matters of research was experienced as particularly disagreeable by people in
the professions. In my emotional make-up, however, I identified with east
Europeans like Tolstoy for whom life was art. What increasingly taxed my
patience were liberal programs; to me they began to look more like
rationalizations of the cerebral cortex which sat on wings and for which the
whole body of human emotion and anguish was non-existent.
Nevertheless, I became harder, became also the
observer of distancing myself from intimate ties back home. Noticed it with
several perceptual transformations. First, my relationship with Bob shifted
from the concrete to the abstract. More importantly where I assumed that our
relationship was equal in the past, I now noted its paternalism. Second, it was
not Zambian culture, or later Lenda culture, that I found puzzling. What became
puzzling was Zambia or Lenda nature. In the past, nature seemed dependable, now
I perceived it as contingent. Finally, my distant German past and immediate
American one first came to be merged in recurrent dreams and later reversed as
I began more and more to relive the former and repress the latter.
I noted the change in my relationship with Bob as I
reflected about his letters. At first our exchange was rather funny: I would
comment about killing spiders and he would suggest letting them live because
they fed on other vermin; I would describe that rice contained bugs and their
eggs, and he would suggest that I float them out. More and more advice arrived
with his letters: reminders to keep a daily journal, to do good archival work,
to carry an identity card identifying Bob as next of kin because we used
separate names, and so on. When I wrote that I had to buy a car, he wrote back
advising against it, even one of Bob’s colleagues included a letter
advising against it. I bought a car anyways and our correspondence only meant
an increase in sweat, worry and nightmares.
I wondered
why Bob should have turned himself into a father figure and what I did to
contribute to this change of role. I concluded that two behaviorisms were at
fault. First, my letters invited his sympathy and second, he forwarded my grant
money. It was easy to change the latter, in future my money would be forwarded
directly from the Bank of Montreal to the Commercial Bank of Lusaka. In the
event of delay or shortage I found it advisable to approach my mother for help.
There were several advantages to this arrangement. My mother did not like
writing letters and, given her experience in bringing me up, she had long since
been convinced that I was stubborn and usually did what I thought was right and
with a keen sense of survival. I was after all a refugee and a product of war.
This my American husband never understood and it would be the unseen thorn in
our relationship.
Nevertheless,
seeking Bob’s sympathy was almost unavoidable. There were real problems and
advice, even when rejected, was useful. At moments of mischief, I told myself
that I wrote as I did because I feared that too much positive or negative news
might persuade Bob to jump into a plane and fly over. It sounds fantastic,
callous, perhaps, even cruel. But something was happening, and I needed
solitude. I know that if I could have wiped away our marriage with a magic wand
I would have done so. I was also aware that saying this closed the possibility
of being moral or making a moral decision.
But then, it
was not Bob who bothered me. Rather, in the Lusaka environment, free among my
equals who were all preoccupied with similar worries, the oppression of
marriage hit me “like a ton of bricks.” Even when “happy” couples passed
through our research quarters I pitied them. I would find myself observing
their every demeanor, nonverbal signs and signals used to keep the other in
line. Back home I found it amusing. Here I felt repulsed. The recognition of
subtle controls between man and woman merely raised this question. Can I make
competent decisions alone or not? Certain is, I must risk it.
It occurred
to me then that during times of mental growth and change, one must be alone.
Naturally, one talks and relates to many people, including the opposite sex,
but there is a quiet, respectful understanding that this time is special, that
it will pass, and that much will have to be understood before it does. In such
an environment, even the love-making between a man and woman is different. The
strong grip of possessiveness is absent, and conversation continues into the
early morning hours and is forever renewed and forever primary. For once sex
appears to be quietly integrated into one’s personality, and so comfortably
settled is “it,” that the question of its dominance simply does not arise. At
least, that is how I imagined it.
What
surprised me even more than my changed perception of marriage, was my changed
perception of nature. North America had just emerged from the “age of the
flower children” to a “new freedom.” As I left the US, concerns about ecology
and conservation were popular among the masses, indeed, were becoming a new
religion. I fully expected to confirm the correctness of that attitude but
already in Lusaka nature came to take on new meaning. Perhaps it had something
to do with the deep lines on women’s faces or with the presence of death in the
shanty-towns near the Institute. Maybe it is just that life’s contingency
confronted me, as it were, in the nude.
I expressed this recognition of contingency, along
with my other frustrations, to my mother. It must be understood that my mother
was the only one to whom I could express such feelings openly. She and I and
many others grew up surrounded by death and decay, familiar with hunger,
surrounded by deformities and ruins. She knew that life sprang forth even
amidst devastation. Above all, she understood that I was not seeking her
sympathy but that I was trying to understand:
February 14, 1973
Darling Mama:
I feel weary. Weary, weary, and weary. I’m taking my
decision-making too seriously. If I don’t become more fatalistic, if I don’t
learn to say, “to hell with everybody, to hell with all great expectations,” if
I don’t learn this, Mama, my brain will explode.
I bought a
Datsun 1200 from Peresa. The chap is quite fatalistic. On the way to the
service station we passed two accidents. “We die fast in Zambia,” says he. The
sun beat down on us. Sweat and blood, Mam. Sweat and blood and wailing.
And after
all this bleeding flesh we go to sign all these papers. A world ordered by paper,
a paper world.
I look at
the shrubbery near our house. Tough, knarred branches are crawling in, cracking
the stone, straining for space. And I hear the wailing from the poor section of
town. Another death of course. A paper world, a temporary world and the shit
comes piling in. And we’re to assign it meaning.
I had
forgotten that life was so temporary. How could I have forgotten, Mam?
The letter expresses the burden of being responsible
and alone. Fatalism looked like a promising relief with its nonchalant assent
to mortality in a world of short lives. But that attitude had to be suspended
for the sake of research, personal struggle, and a more joyful and free human
future.
Finally, there were my recurrent dreams. Repeatedly
the U.S. was compared with Germany. Sometimes it was their wars that were
compared, sometimes their people. Always, amidst fantastic colors and fantastic
events I was faced with a major decision centered on freedom. I was usually
offered a choice between fascism and radical freedom. What was required of me
was to rupture my past. Sometimes I would be faced with several choices because
each time that I thought I had grasped freedom another hurdle was put in my
way. Usually I was on the brink of opting for radical freedom, once and for
all, when I would wake up covered in sweat. The following is one such dream:
In my dream, several people were comparing the U.S.
and Germany after their respective wars (Vietnam, World War II). We were in a
plush bar and I commented to that extent. A fellow next to me responded, “Oh, you
should have seen Germany after the war, the whole capital was dressed and
furnished in white to give it a look of innocence after the atrocities.”
The dream
then shifted, and I found myself in a position where I and all the other people
had to decide between fascism and freedom. For some reason, many people chose
constraints and found themselves standing in line joining the will of the government.
It was my turn to choose and I “swam” free of the crowd singing “I want
freedom.” When I made it through and past the crowd, an official came up to me
and said, “A very important person wants to see you,” and he took me to the
front of a line of people into a place off to one side. There I had to wait
again, and while waiting, I saw a child who had also chosen freedom and was
waiting with us. The child was playing with some sort of cuddly animal which
disappeared in the bushes.
Searching
for her companion, whom she didn’t want to lose, the child looked around
furtively, and slid through the shrubbery into freedom. While I continued to
wait, an elderly woman came by, gorgeously dressed. She stood in front of a
mirror and kept on saying how absurd it was to emphasize dress like this. This
expensive dress was absurd, absurd. I moved away from the crowd with the
realization that freedom lay beyond the shrubs, not in this line of waiting
people. Then I awoke.
Only
recently have I learned that this juxtaposing of earlier with recent life
events in the dreams of traveling academics is a common experience (Andersen,
1971). Agar who summarizes Andersen’s research of American academics traveling
in India states that she “outlines a change in dream content from an initial
retreat to earlier life events, followed by the establishment of a ‘secondary
identity’ that allows dreams with mixed, but clearly distinct American and
Indian elements” (Agar, 1980, p.51). The latter type of mixture would occur in
my dreams too.
Before I take the reader into the Lenda valley, a word
about prejudice is in order. Prejudice haunts us all. Even the most just and
humane are not free of being prejudicial. James Michener whose novels fall into
the category of relaxed reading and, perhaps, have no place in our discussion,
prides himself because he does not make “dam fool
statements about other nations and other cultures” (1971, p.325). He thinks he does not. In fact, the very selection of his characters is a vagrant
display of prejudice. For example, his Nordic characters, those that are
allowed some speech in The Drifters, are beautiful blondes better to
look at than to listen to. Germans appear only as men and then as Prussian
generals with Prussian haircuts or with Prussian personalities, whatever they
are. The only nation that has both sexes speaking for it is the USA, although
we also hear a little from the British male. Some characters are given only
physical beauty and, yes, the ability to copulate “coolly” as
is becoming a cool Nordic blonde. Nature for once is “rational.” Some
characters only speak in commands and, yes, they drink beer, but without the
usual accompaniment of colorful sentiments. Culture here is wholly
“authoritarian.” All this prejudice and bias comes from a man with a
considerable sense of equanimity. What is he justifying and by what authority?
If prejudice
in Michener is only mildly disturbing, in Sartre it is serious. Let us
contemplate the following passage:
The
obscenity of the feminine sex is that of everything which “gapes open.” It is
an appeal to being as all holes are. In herself woman appeals to a
strange flesh which is to transform her into a fullness of being by penetration
and dissolution. Conversely woman senses her condition as an appeal precisely
because she is “in the form of a hole.” This is the true origin of
Adler’s complex. Beyond any doubt her sex is a mouth and a voracious mouth
which devours the penis—a fact which can easily lead to the idea of castration
(Sartre, 1956, p.782).
In Being and Nothingness Sartre claims that we stand revealed even in our most
superficial behavior and that by our subjective choice we make known to
ourselves what we are. Given that we know something of Sartre through his work
and from Simone de Beauvoir, it is safe to assume that one of Sartre’s major
projects was the attainment of personal freedom. It is also safe to assume that
he defined the feminine sex in the above terms only because he found woman
alluring, indeed irresistible, and, unable to reconcile the demands of his body
with those of his mind, he decided that sexual relations with woman had to be
transcended. The above words and de Beauvoir’s description of their relation in
The Prime of Life would suggest that he succeeded.
We all face the conflict between mind and body and,
sooner or later, most of us confront the question of how to integrate our
sexuality into our personalities. None of us fear sexual activity per se, most
of us fear its possible results. Most women, but especially those who see
themselves as potential intellectuals, can perhaps empathize with Simone de
Beauvoir when she sees in the pleasures of the flesh the “threat of
being hurtled down some slippery slope to moral and intellectual ruin” (Evans,
1980, p.398). When I went to the field I was haunted by a similar fear. It is a
common one to be found even in biographies of great men or women. I was
familiar with it from the biographies of Mozart and Tolstoy. Like them I felt
that if only I could overcome that fatal attraction to the opposite sex, if
only I could overcome men, then my brain would soar freely and brilliantly
across the mental landscape unencumbered by sticky emotions. The day came; and
as I was bathing in the sweet victory of this overcoming, there appeared at the
periphery of my consciousness, barely discernible, the icy threat of sterility
and alienation. I realized then the importance of one of Sartre’s distinctions.
Freedom is an existence which perpetually makes itself; it has no essence.
Freedom is becoming not being. It cannot be taken for granted if we want a
wider sense of humanity and bring it about—but to what end?
When I first
read Sartre’s fantasies about how “we are haunted by the image of a
consciousness which would like to launch forth into the future, toward a
projection of self, and which at the very moment when it was conscious of
arriving there would be slyly held back by the invisible suction of the past” (Sartre, 1956, p.778)—or when I read about the
“moist and feminine sucking” and “the snare of the slimy” that holds and
compromises man and so on ad infinitum (p.776)—I sat back and composed similar
fantasies based on cerebral coitus, written from a woman’s perspective who like
Sartre would like to launch forth into the future without being compromised.
And then I thought the whole endeavor absurd. It might look like reverse
discrimination rather than what it was, namely, a surge toward freedom.
Instead, I decided to tell an embarrassing story that will put our brain back into
our body and all of us back on the ground.
One day I
was interviewing Mr. Ngoma, headman of Kakuso village and one of the elders of
Watchtower. We were discussing a sensitive political issue when I was jolted
out of my preoccupations by the ferocious bleating of a sexually aroused male
goat. He was in hot pursuit of a softly bleating and obviously alarmed female.
I looked up from my notes, surprised and mildly horrified, just as this
over-heated and over-extended male goat jumped across our wobbly table. Among
those surrounding me, my response was the slowest, since the noise of this
satyr was unfamiliar to my ears. Swiftly, I turned my head right and left to
check the reaction of my male companions and I noted their somewhat embarrassed
grins as if the male goat had exposed their very essence to the world. Two feet
away stood several women bent over with laughter. And then we all laughed, men,
women, and children. If nature is good to think then maleness is good to laugh.
It came from the depth of our being, this laughter, and it was good because
there is so little to laugh about and because nature had us again. There was
not a man or woman among us who would have thought that the mortar was
“voracious” without having first noted that the pestle was “greedy.”
If there were a creator, he created human beings with
two fatal flaws. First, he created us without letting us know who we are. The
human being is, therefore, continually in search of him-and-herself. Secondly,
he gave us mental tools that are inadequate to the task of sound
self-definition for we define ourselves by contrast to or in terms of the
other. In this search for individual or ethnic identity and in the inadequacy
of our tools which allow us to see ourselves only through the other as through
a lens, lies the essence of prejudice (Loubser, 1968). But if we look at it
from Sartre’s perspective there is no creator, and so the human
being is misguided in his search for self. The self cannot be discovered; it
must be made. We have made ourselves with fatal flaws, ones that lie buried in
our assumptions about the nature of the human being. We cannot know who we are
unless we create ourselves and we cannot expect self-knowledge unless we look
inside at our plans. Only when we look at the selves of others are we involved
in a process of discovery as we try to discern what their projects are and how
they inform their social actions.
Liberalism,
too, is burdened with a fatal flaw. It assumes, as no doubt it must, that what
is good for the best, the rest should have too. Hence it requires that the poor
change and assume attitudes that will transform them into members of middle or
upper classes, and that women change and assume attitudes that will transform
them into social men. It is not seriously required that men or the upper
classes change to make mutual accommodation possible. Social change ends up
being one-sided and assimilative. Yet some people seem astonished when many
women run back to the kitchen (see especially Hazleton, 1977).
On one hand,
we have for too long encouraged mysticism and shied away from hard thought. Too
many people prefer the mystical ravings of Gabriel Marcel to the unrelenting
insistence of Sartre that we must assume the burden of our freedom and with it
the responsibility for what we are. On the other, we are too willing to imitate
the hard sciences so that the individual finds one or the other of his
qualities summarized within stated generalities. An individual becomes a
collection of attributes subsumed under a fashionable concept rather than a
totality that is greater than its parts. We become identities rather than human
persons. I am surely not too wrong when I say that in North America the
individual is the group and the group the individual. Instead of working through
the painful process of trying to come to terms with disquieting aspects of our
bodied human make-up, we look for a group in which a disquieting behaviorism
becomes the rallying cry for more freedom. But is that freedom?
Finally, I
told the last story in this section because in Lenda the claim that women are
somehow more closely associated with nature and men with culture is ludicrous.
It was ludicrous to Lenda women and it was ludicrous to Lenda men. It is
theoretically erroneous because, of course, nature is culture and culture is
nature—and that is all. But is it?
 | |
| Beginning |
END CHAPTER TWO
This part of the journey still relied on Sartre's existential philosophy that taught the importance of being a self-aware person that strives to become responsible, rather than say self-pitying or seeing oneself as victim. Toward the end of his life, however, Sartre realized that the power of circumstances be they economic, political, or social in nature required that he modify his absolute mantra "man makes himself" to something more like "we can always make something of ourselves even though something was already made of us."
Think about how the concentration camps affected the lives of surviving Jews when so many of their fellows were brutally murdered. Think also about how war, flight, and running from bombs -- from becoming collateral damage -- affected the lives of other surviving German children when so many people around them were killed.
And what, pray tell me, does someone like me, having been born German and during the war, do with the latter experience that shaped her, knowing however that talking about it might look irresponsible to Jews who suffered on a vastly different scale, which suffering, furthermore, was primarily caused by the people among whom I was born.
Some of the previous blogs show how other authors dealt with such experiences -- whether referring to WWII or to recent brutal wars. Doing fieldwork was my way.
