River Town Chronicles Read online

  Pat took Lori to school, hoping to enroll her in First Grade. The Principal wanted to have her tested before she enrolled in class. As part of the test, she was asked to draw a picture of a typical family and their house. The results alarmed the school psychologist, who reported that all of her drawings of family settings involved “stick figures living in mud huts.” The psychologist concluded that Lori was “culturally deprived.” When Pat tried to explain that we had been living in River Town and that Lori was simply depicting what she had experienced there, the Principal wouldn’t listen and sent Lori back to kindergarten to start life over again. It seemed a perfect example of the cultural prejudice and narrow mindedness that infects our educational system, and indeed our whole way of life, where wider cultural experiences are penalized instead of celebrated.

  I continued to teach in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell, and was awarded tenure in the Department. But I never really adapted to life there, resigned my position after seven years and moved to rural Vermont, where we lived for thirty years in an old farm house on the side of a mountain. There, we raised a garden, chickens, a couple of horses, cows, and a pig we named “bacon.” The children continued school in Vermont and participated throughout their high school years in the highly competitive junior alpine ski racing program in Vermont. They eventually went on to college and to lead their separate lives. Tim started a small electronics company, eventually sold the company, and now works for a larger firm, traveling to all parts of the word in connection with his business. Brian received his PhD in Anthropology and Cognitive Science and works as a researcher in the field of medical informatics. Lori (the “culturally deprived” one) received her PhD in Cell Biology, and is a cancer researcher at a major cancer research center in the U.S. I went on to start a small cottage industry and to teach Anthropology from time to time at a local college. Pat became the Library Director in a small town in northeastern Vermont. After thirty years of harsh Vermont winters, Pat and I finally called it quits and moved to the Pacific Northwest.

  Looking back some forty five years later, I realize now that we took our chances and could have drowned as a result of our experiences in River Town. But in reality, there is nothing unique about these experiences for the people who live there. That we were able to share life with them is something that has shaped my understanding of culture in ways that could never have been anticipated. The current that pulled us helplessly, but willingly, out to sea eventually loosened its grip on us, and allowed us to be washed back on shore with a much richer understanding of ourselves and others.

  EPILOGUE

  MUCH HAS CHANGED since I first lived in River Town nearly forty-five years ago. These chronicles are actually a piece of history now. I imagine River Town is much more modern these days, enjoying the advances in technology and economic development that much of India has experienced since my stay there. I suppose satellite dishes, air conditioning, computers, kitchen appliances, and automobiles are common in River Town, though I’m certain many of the lanes in River Town are still too narrow to accommodate an automobile. But I don’t know the significance of all these changes. I suspect that the fundamental social practices that made River Town what it was also continue today. Just because River Town becomes part of a larger world economy does not mean that it loses what defines it, anymore than importing Japanese cars and Chinese toys have made Americans “more Japanese” or “more Chinese.” The residents of River Town will still celebrate arranged marriages, speak their local dialects, marry their daughters into their husband’s household, maintain their particular food preferences and restrictions and worship their own gods and goddesses.

  Much has also changed in the field of Anthropology. When I was a graduate student at Berkeley in the early 1960s, my mentors had done their field work in small, homogeneous societies in villages in Africa, the Amazon, or New Guinea. I read the classics by Malinowski, Levi-Strauss, and Radcliffe-Brown, among others. The emphasis was on the analysis of closed systems, isolated from the outside world. I found that the theories derived from these analyses didn’t really apply to a complex society like that of River Town.

  The generation of Anthropologists who came after me turned away from the study of culture altogether, dismissing the concept of culture as a misguided focus on “the other.” Instead, their interest turned to activist concerns about human rights, equality and political and social transformations that would signal the coming of a new world order. I think that we now know that while these concerns were well intentioned, they didn’t really add to our understanding of the deeper nature of other cultures.

  I found both of these trends in Anthropology (the analytical and the activist) to be of little help in navigating the realities of River Town. The analytical approach wasn’t of much use because River Town was too complex in terms of caste relations, languages and religious beliefs to be contained within a single, all encompassing theory. As far as dismissing the concept of culture in favor of a coming egalitarian political or social order, one had only to stand in a crowd in River Town trying to explain western concepts of marriage and the family to realize that what one (the anthropologist, in this case) assumes to be self-evident truths turn out to be fuzzy thinking from the point of view of others who hold a different set of what they consider to be self-evident truths. So it is with these opposing viewpoints within Anthropology in mind that I decided to throw out the debates and present, instead, what I experienced in the form of a chronicle of the people, places and events of River Town.

  Forty years later, I realize that my biggest regret is having lost contact over the years with Ram Swarup, bhabhi, their children and other friends in River Town including Kaga and the mochi. My chronicles are nothing more than an account of the time Pat, Tim, Brian, Lori and I were graced with the opportunity to live amongst them and experience the pleasures and perils of River Town with them.