“Oh, look, a tooth. A human tooth.”

Ooops.

One never knows when one is going to run into a burial, but I can tell you that there certainly is an optimal time for it, and a preliminary test pit is not the optimal time. Better to find the burial later on when you are more prepared. But, well, that is how it goes sometimes.

So I came up out of the hole to have a look. I looked. Aha! I thought to myself. Finally, something I know more about than these guys!

“Nope, not human.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I am. Look at this tooth. Then look at these teeth,” opening my mouth and showing him all my teeth. “Eee aee ing ihn ere at ooks ike is?”

“Nope. You’re right, it’s not human.”

“Hey, you can be so stupid sometimes,” chimed in another of the guys. “That’s a monkey tooth. I’m sure of it. Of course, how would you know, since you’ve never been close to a monkey!”

That got a laugh, because monkey is one of the main thing these guys hunt, so to say another man has not been close to a monkey is a dig at his hunting abilities.

And it was indeed a monkey. But it prompted me to resume an ongoing conversation that archaeologists tend to have with the local people on a regular basis.

“So, how would you feel if we found a human, say an Efe (Pygmy), buried here or somewhere?”

“Mbore!” was the answer.

Mbore means…nothing, used up, meaningless, having nothing to add, uninteresting. Was my question uninteresting?

“What do you mean: Mbore?” I asked, seeking clarification.

“Mbore. When you are dead, you are mbore. Who cares what happens to your body! We’ll dig up all the bodies if you want!”

Which, really, is an idiomatic way of saying, “We don’t care about no stinking bodies” but just in case, I asked…

“…All of the bodies? Do you know where all of the bodies are buried? Any bodies?”

“Nope, not out here. Just back near the villages.”

Right. Me too. I knew as well where most of the recently dead people were buried, more or less. Why, I even buried some of them myself. But out here in the forest, there must be some places to avoid (recent burials) as well as some places to investigate (ancient burials). (As it turns out, another archaeologist who went to the Ituri Forest after I did managed to find some of these burials, and one was even found in the vicinity of the test pit I was digging at the moment. And he was prepared, reasonably well-funded, and found very interesting results. But that is another story.)

Burial is one of the most basic cultural practice for most peoples, and there are occasions when the method of burial is an excellent indicator of cultural boundaries or geographical centers. Archaeologists pay close attention to this sort of thing, which is why I thought it fascinating when I investigated the written literature on Pygmy burial practices and found out that they have in historic times in this one region practiced pretty much all the different kinds of treatment of the dead known. To these folks, burying the dead was like trends in music in the West. Every decade seems to have its own way of doing it, and some decades are remembered more fondly than others.

I also found it very interesting to read about finding the body of Navy Captain Michael Scott Speicher. Speicher was shot down and killed in Iraq during Gulf War I, and in fact, he was the first casualty of the war. His body was never recovered. It was not initially found at the crash site.

It turns out that local Bedouin had found his body and, as is their custom, they buried it. Nice of them to go through the trouble. His body was not found until someone asked around, and someone said, “Oh, that body? You’ve been looking for that body? The Bedouin buried it! Over there!”

On hearing this news, President Barack Obama remarked that this is “a reminder of the selfless service that led him to make the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom.” On hearing the news, I thought, “Jeezh…how often do they just not bother to ASK???”

People tend to ignore the Bedouin, and there are other people around the world who get ignored as well. I wonder how may U.S. “MIA” soldiers died in Vietnam who were buried there by people who were being ignored. Has anyone asked?

The MSNBC piece reporting this notes that “Sands hid fate of Gulf War pilot.” No, not really. Not seeing what is really there…the military not seeing it, the governments of Iraq and the U.S. not seeing it, and the press not seeing it…hid this event from our eyes.

So, after establishing that the tooth was a monkey and not a person, we went back to digging and sifting. Then, I asked the same question I’d asked a half dozen times before.

“Hey, the villagers, they lived in this cave during The Troubles, right?” I was referring to the Simba Rebellion when everyone fled the roadside villages.

“Yes, they did. They came to live with us Efe. We tried to help them.”

“A lot of people died, right?”

“Everybody starved, Greg. Most of the children and old people died. Lots of people died.”

“So I’ve heard.”

Dig…dig…dig…dig….

“So…where are the bodies buried?”

Silence for a while.

“Look, another bone. I think this one is an antelope.”

I never did get an answer to that question.

So, on behalf of the President of the United States and the Secretary of War, as well as the family of Captain Michael “Scott” Speicher and the press, all of whom seem to have become inexplicably discourteous, I would like to thank the Bedouin for having properly treated his body according to custom.

More on the Congo here and here.

Then, the writer totally surprised me by noting (I paraphrase) that “unlike the Pygmies, who live in these forests and are of perfectly proportioned shape and appearance, these subhuman creatures were rather grotesque.”

The traveler was a college-educated westerner with a late-Victorian attitude about Africans. The idea that all Africans are at least a little subhuman would have been a starting point for him. Throwing in a tribe here and there with especially cannibalistic or otherwise uncouth tendencies would be typical. Running into a group of individuals that looked to him almost like a separate species would be notable, and he did in fact make note of it, but this would be something he would take in stride.

Reading this made me wonder about two totally different and to some extent opposed lines of thought. On one hand, I thought, “How can people think such things are real…this guy was obviously seeing something he expected to see. Why? How does that work?” On the other hand, I thought, “What if his observations were essentially accurate, aside from the racial judgments he made. What if he really did encounter a bunch of people with bow legs and funny-looking bodies?”

Then, in the next paragraph of this monologue, a possible answer came. Shortly after the above mentioned description, the traveler mentions that one of these strange heathens, with the bow legs and the disproportioned body, traveled with him as a servant for a while. Then, at the end of that leg of the trip, after serving quite well for being such a subhuman and all, the traveler wanted to leave this misshapen wretch with some sort of extra payment for services. A tip. But the wretch had withdrawn to the forest never to be seen again (by the traveller), apparently uninterested in recompense.

Bingo.

Or at least, maybe bingo. I have an experience that may in fact match that of this ca. 1900-vintage traveler. Actually, a few such experiences. But as a post- (way post!) Victorian anthropologist, I have a slightly different take on the situation.

When I lived in the Ituri Forest, I often lived with the Pygmies for stretches of time. There were two modalities of living with them. In one mode, I would throw myself on their mercy and more or less live exactly as they lived, staying in the same kind of hut they lived in and doing whatever they did, or at least watching them do whatever they were doing, and trying to stay out of the way at the same time as observing and learning things about their lifeway. In the other modality, I stayed in a small dome tent (a cloth version of their hut) and was a bit more involved with the logistics of camp life, because during at least some of that time (several weeks over the course of many many months), it was more like they were living with me. I would hire a small number of Pygmy men, and maybe have one villager with us as well, and another anthropologist, and we’d be doing something like digging an archaeological site, measuring trees, counting monkeys, or whatever.

During some of these forays, especially in the first modality when it was only me (no other anthropologist) travelling with them, and I was living in their lifeway, more or less, I was assigned a wife. Sort of. This happened a couple of times, with different groups, and different individuals. In each case the person whom I eventually came to understand was serving the role of Mrs. Gregoiri (one of my Efe names was Gregoiri, which I admit is not too original) was a man with pretty severe polio.

These were men who could not carry out many of the activities in which the men normally engaged with respect to hunting and other forest activities. Even moving from camp to camp might be a challenge to someone whose legs were very shortened and deformed and who had, essentially, a kind of polio-induced dwarfism. For the most part, these men had outstanding manual skills. They could shoot an arrow as well as any (or better) and were outstanding at making things that the other men also made, but that the polio-afflicted men would make with utmost skill. What they lacked was stamina in the field.

Their condition meant that they would be unlikely to marry. It meant that they would be in camp with the women anywhere from now and then to almost always as the men went off to hunt. It meant that their social and economic gender was unique. And it meant that when someone had to be assigned to keep the big pasty white guy who was always tripping on tree roots and poking himself with sticks from harming himself, well, this person was the obvious choice.

I remembered, rather poignantly in fact, on reading the aforementioned traveler’s notice that the strange deformed subhuman left without any special recompense, that this is what happened to me as well. It was a bit of a privilege to hang out with the visitor, as would be the case in most cultures, and the visitor seemed to overlook the person’s affliction, which is something that many visitors may not have done.

The polio that came through the Ituri Forest of Zaire must have come through at roughly the same time because all the men who had it were about the same age…my age, actually. This population of forest dwelling people must have been very susceptible to it. And the Pygmies were notable for either refusing or just being bad at accepting long-term treatment or hospital stays, so even if there was some help available for them in those days, it may have ended up rather ineffective. Many must have died.

I need not mention that I never saw a subhuman deformed race. I did see some men who were being very good to me, keeping me from getting killed by the snakes, the elements, by getting poked to death or falling off a cliff into quicksand, or whatever one may think of as the dangers of the African Jungle. And they didn’t want any special pay for it.

Those marriages were short lived. But they were good marriages.

This is for all you nascent researchers about to head off to remote places to engage in your very first fieldwork and for all you eco-tourists or educational travelers about to embark on a trip through strange lands afar.

When I was preparing to start my graduate research in Africa, I was already very experienced in fieldwork, but all of it was in the United States, and although there is cultural variation across the land even in old New England and New York, the work I was planning was at a field site in Africa originally selected precisely because of its extreme remoteness. So I needed advice.

I had three people advising me. One was a professor in my department who had done a lot of work at this site. His advice was extensive and detailed and had a lot to do with the logistics and mechanics of running the research base camp, where I and a fellow graduate student would be replacing a couple from Montana who had been living there for a year. Another was my main adviser, Glynn Isaac, who had visited this research site briefly (just long enough, apparently, to contract what would later prove to be a fatal disease). Glynn, a very experienced field archaeologist, really only had one piece of practical advice for me: “You’re going to a rain forest. Better bring an umbrella.”

The third was my “co-adviser,” later to become my primary, and eventually only, adviser, the primatologist, Irv DeVore. DeVore had also been to this field site and, in fact, helped to set it up a few years earlier. And he had considerable fieldwork experience, having been one of the select few who invented modern methods of fieldwork in primtalogy and what might now be called biosocial anthropology. His advice was more extensive and turned out to be (as I was to learn would always be the case with DeVore) most valuable.

He told me about a thing he called the “Hurricane Lantern Effect.”

It is so named because of the primary exemplar of the effect, the events on which the central parable are based, concerned hurricane lanterns.¹

You arrive, new and naive, at a remote, already established field site to relieve experienced researchers harried and haggard from months in the field and ready to go home and with little truck for the newbie. (You are the newbie.) The first evening, you observe the daily ritual of bringing the hurricane lanterns out, cleaning them up, trimming the wicks, and filling them with paraffin. On the equator, where you certainly are when you observe this ritual, the sun goes down very quickly at very close to 6:00 p.m., so these lamps are critical to provide you with a few hours for dining, socializing with comrades, and finishing off your notes from that day. You are not living in a Michael Creighton book, so there are no generators to run perimeter lights or to charge flashlight batteries and power satellite uplinks to HQ. Just some kerosene-powered lamps and no flashlight batteries.

As you observe this ritual, you notice that the person engaged in the task is clearly doing it wrong. The process itself…the order in which things are being done…is inefficient. The way in which the funnel is used, the kind of container used to store the paraffin, the choice of device used to trim the wicks, and so on–all can be improved. You wonder how it is that these people could have survived here a year being so stupid about something as basic as maintaining and lighting the hurricane lamps they use every day.

So this goes on for a few nights, and finally you can stand it no longer. You speak up and provide the Lamp Meister with a suggestion or two as to how to better carry out this task. At first all you get is an unintelligible grumble and you are not sure whether he’s heard you. So you throw in another handy tip for good measure.

Suddenly, the Lamp Meister puts down the lamp he’s working on, stands up and says, “You know, you’re right. You obviously know what you are doing and I don’t. Why don’t you just finish up what I’ve started here and this can be your job from now on.”

Now, hold on a second. Most of you are thinking that the “Hurricane Lamp Effect” is where you screw up and get yourself assigned an onerous task by opening up your big mouth. But were you thinking this, you’d be wrong. It is much, much more than that. You need to bear with me on this.

So, satisfied that your suggestions were acknowledged as excellent but a bit worried about the grumpiness induced in the now-former Lamp Meister, you dive in and take over the task. By the time you are done with the evening’s lamp maintenance, you have spilled a bit more paraffin than you had hoped, and your hands smell like petroleum product, and two of the five lamps are burning really funny and putting out a lot of smoke. But you chalk this up to nuances missed by you as a product of your inexperience and don’t think much about it.

The next night, when you take over lamp duty, you get similar results, but this time you’ve spilled less paraffin. The reason you’ve spilled less paraffin is because you altered your procedure slightly in a way that avoids this waste. The next night, the lamps smoke less. Again, this is because you’ve made another change in your procedure. The next day, you drive the researchers whom you are relieving to the airport, and when you eventually return to the base camp (a couple of days later), you resume your hurricane-lamp duty. This time, you get even better results because you, once gain, alter your procedure a little.

Over the next several weeks, in fact, you refine and adjust the process of maintaining the lamps, and now you normally do not spill a drop of paraffin or get any on your hands. You can really appreciate this because that four day trip to and back from “town” is what it takes to get more paraffin, so you understand the value of every drop saved and the tragedy of every drop wasted. The lamps are now working so well that you only need to light them at the beginning of the evening, and they stay lit and burn evenly, without smoke, for hours. One night, your camp is invaded by army ants, and you really appreciate the fact that you can sleep outdoors with a lamp burning, set at low, steadily burning all night, allowing you to check periodically for invading insects. This only works because you are the man. You are the Lamp Meister.

Then one evening, after being in the field for 11 months, near the end of your hitch and ready to go home, a set of replacement researchers is dropped off by passing missionaries. You didn’t know they were coming, but you’re glad to see that the folks back home did not forget you and eventually sent replacements, even if they are three months late and your colleague…the one who came out with you…has already gone home. These new researchers really are new; they’ve never been out of the U.S. before. You are going to have to train them to do everything. What a pain.

So the first night with the n00bs, as you are heating up dinner on the central hearth, you begin your daily ritual of lamp maintenance. Halfway through the process, which you, the Lamp Meister, have perfected, one of the n00bs pipes up…with a suggestion.

“Oh, excuse me, but I think there is a better way to do that….”

You get the point.

And just to make sure, let me point out the slightly less obvious side of this point. The method you’ve developed to manage the hurricane lamps, in the end, is exactly the method you originally observed and criticized. It turns out that there is a reason for every little thing that you thought was a bad idea. You just didn’t get it then.

DeVore’s advice was good. When I first went to the field site, on the very first night, I observed as Jack Fisher (an archaeologist) took a bunch of hurricane lamps out of the storage shed, along with a container of paraffin. I watched as he cleaned the lamps, trimmed the wicks, filled the reservoir, and lit a couple of the lamps. I was in awe of the fact that he did not spill a drop. Yet I could see how one observing this procedure might criticize it, might have a few suggestions about how to do it better. But I also knew that Jack had been doing this every day for nearly 400 days, and I figured he had probably optimized the procedure as well as it could be. And I’m certain that the only reason I kept my trap shut is because I could hear DeVore’s voice in my head. “Keep your trap shut, young man. You’ll have a lot to learn…” and so on.

But then, when Jack left, it was up to me to become the Lamp Meister, and so I became the Lamp Meister, and I achieved this status quickly by understanding the Hurricane Lamp Effect. I trusted Jack, and while I probably did modify the procedure a little over time, I did that with the assumption that what was working was working for a reason. And most importantly, I did not get Jack mad at me, and I did not make myself appear a total fool (regarding this one issue, at least) in the eyes a colleague who was just then in a position to form an opinion of me.

This post and this post about tumbu flies reminded me of the Hurricane Lamp Effect. The short version of the story is that the tumbu flies lay eggs in clothing, which hatch into larvae that crawl onto your body and dig their way into your flesh, where they grow and pupate. They may be worse than botflies.

At a much later time than my first experience described above, I moved on to a different area of Africa, where the tumbu flies live. (I did not know about tumbu flies at that time.) One of the interesting practices carried out there was to always iron the clothing. The guys who did the laundry for us at the research site would iron everything. Shirts, pants, underwear, socks. Everything. Many researchers noted this and commented on how quaint the natives were. It was as though they had learned about ironing clothing during the colonial period when everybody worked for the white man, and continued this practice, almost like a cargo cult, to the present day. At least when ironing our clothing. Trying to make a good impression and all that.

I was troubled by this. I had no problem with hiring local labor to do day-to-day tasks. If you do all the day-to-day tasks yourself while on a research project, in the absence of labor-saving inventions like running water, washing machines, stoves and so on, you can’t do any of the research for which you’ve garnered rare and precious funding. So you hire local folks to facilitate. But I did not want to be treated like a colonialist, with servants running around carrying out onerous tasks like ironing my socks to simulate some sort of bygone colonial atmosphere.

So I sat down to talk with one of the “guys,” a professional Zorba the Greek capable of doing almost anything, often hired by travelers or research teams to run the domestic side of things, which involved, in our case, housing and feeding up to 20 researchers and 40 local workers. Tomah listened carefully to my concerns. Then he laughed. A lot. Tomah tended to laugh at me a lot.

“Mzungu!” he said, “Hutakukamata manano ile! Husikia!” (Roughly translated: What a dumb-ass you can be!)

He then proceeded to explain to me the life cycle of the tumbu fly, the medical consequences of infection by them and how only by ironing out the clothing–all of the clothing–could one kill the eggs, thus avoiding serious complications.

That was the first of many opportunities Tomah embraced to save my dumb ass.

1. A hurricane lamp is a kerosene-burning device with a shapely glass tube positioned over a cloth wick emanating from a reservoir filled with “paraffin”–the word, everywhere but the U.S., for kerosene.