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.

Let me explain.

At the wedding, a lot of people got up and spoke about the happy couple, generally about one or the other, but mostly about my friend’s groom. The difference in treatment of the two has to do with a couple of things, one of which being the culture of the associated families and friends. The groom is from California, with many family and friend connections in Latin America and elsewhere, while my friend is a Minnesotan, mainly with Minnesotan connections. Minnesotans just don’t do what his friends and family were doing: talking about each other. At length. In front of other people.

At first I felt a little bad for her, even considered telling a story or two, but then I realized that the last thing she wanted anyone to do was to stand up and say stuff about her on her behalf, tell stories and so on. So although I was being encouraged to get up and spin a yarn, I chose not to.

The other factor, at least for me, is that our relationship is very private. Not secret or covert. Just private. I’m sure that many things have passed between us in conversation that would never be spoken by either of us to anyone else. It is just the nature of our personalities and how we happen to interact. In contrast, many of her new husband’s stories (the stories told by his extensive network of family and friends) were clearly extensions of long-running, widespread, somewhat loud and always entertaining conversations that have been going on and developing forever. For instance, he has several nicknames, and each nickname comes with an amusing story. In contrast, my friend does not really have any nicknames (nor have I ever had one for that matter).

Were I to have stood up for her, I would have to have told a couple of stories that are actually pretty funny to her and me, but that probably no one else would get or care about.

Until now.

I’ve just come across a web post on an interesting linguistically oriented blog called Rosetta Rants, located, on your local internet, here. Don’t go look yet, you may ruin my story.

So here is the story. My best friend and I were traveling with a few others in South Africa, doing research. One of the members of our party, whom I will call Suzie, was not really, it turns out, a person very much oriented towards travel in such far away lands or accustomed to experiencing such harsh conditions. She was a trooper in some ways, but her going on this trip was a bad decision. She left her boyfriend only days after he proposed (left in the sense of going on this trip, to return later…and by the way, they are happily married now with children and everything). She had not traveled before, except once, and it was a bad, homesick experience. We were, after all, in a place where 1 out of 3 (according to my own fairly extensive experience in this area) young, Midwestern, suburban white girls believe, well, that they will die or something.

Okay, now we have to hold that thought and go back in time. Some months earlier, I had been traveling in Japan on a lecture tour. While there, I found out that the Japanese have the coolest ever appliances. They have refrigerators and washing machines that make so much more sense than the American styles that it is just unbelievable. For example, their refrigerators may have four doors instead of two. Instead of a freezer on top and a fridge on the bottom, they have a freezer on the bottom, a cool but not too cold chamber on top, and the two in-between layers, each with their own door, are increasingly cold as you go down towards the freezer. Efficient and effective. In Osaka, which has suffered significant killer storms in the past, windows sometimes have shutters that resemble the metal curtains that are lowered on storefronts in urban zones, but these are to protect the windows from hurricane-force winds. And so on.

Then, they have an amazing array of toilets. Some of the toilets have a lot of buttons and stuff that you can press to get various…results.

I had been telling my friend about these appliances, and in particular the toilets. I had explained that you did not have to know Japanese to use the toilets. There were symbols on each button, and they were generally absolutely hysterical. Imagine, what symbols would you use for functions built into a do-everything electronic toilet?

Take a moment and think about that. When you’re done, return to reading this post.

…

Okay, so I drew a couple of the symbols for my friend to see what I was talking about, and we had a great laugh about that. There might have been some wine drinking going on as well. The wine in South Africa is so good and so cheap, how could there not have been? Anyway, we had a big laugh about these symbols.

So anyway, one day, we were out in the bush somewhere, and Suzie had been sinking more and more deeply into a funk about being where she was. She had started to get paranoid that some of the others on the expedition were having fun at her expense, which, honestly, we were not doing…or at least trying really hard to not do. But you know how it is. Somebody gets into a bad state and repeats the same behaviors over and over again, and it gets a little absurd. One gets alarmed at this. Then one gets a little frustrated. Then mad. Then finds it funny. Somewhere along the line one does something about it…has a talk with the girl…and believe me, I did that a number of times, with no effect. Anyway, right or wrong, and mostly wrong, Suzie got into a funk where she got a little paranoid about the rest of us.

So one day my friend and I were returning to camp, on foot, after being out looking at some rocks or something, and Suzie came running up to us in a panic. “The phone company called,” she said. (We had a cell phone.) “They said they were going to shut off service unless you call this number.” The phone company would do this whenever our minutes got low, in the hopes that we would buy more minutes, then I would enter a secret number and fix it–routine–but Suzie did not know about this. She just knew that we were out in the middle of nowhere and all communication with civilization was about to be cut off forever and we were gonna die.

So Suzie came running over to the two of us, expressing these concerns, red-faced, in tears.

“What are we going to do when the phone is shut off!?!!??” she said.

Suzie told us that she had taken down the number left by the phone company, and indeed, she was waving around a piece of paper with stuff written on it. I took the paper, and my friend and I could see a phone number written on it.

But next to the phone number was something else. See, this piece of scrap paper…the one Suzie had written the phone number on…was the same piece of paper that had one of the Japanese toilet symbols on it.

Now, my friend and me, we had forgotten about the toilets. But this symbol, shown here:

reminded us of it.

I’m absolutely certain that Suzie did not even see this symbol. It was kind of off in the corner of the paper, non-central, nondescript, almost non-visible. But my friend and I, well, that’s all we saw. We already knew the phone number was not important. It was already obvious that Suzie was panicking over nothing. If Suzie had been paying attention instead of hiding in her tent all the time, she would know about the phone. And the fact that she spent hours of time and hundreds of dollars (not all her own money) on the phone had kind of dulled us to her concerns. And so on.

And there was this symbol. A heinie with something spraying on it.

hei·nie (hn)
n. Slang
The buttocks.

We tried. We tried to hold in that which could not be held in. Had we been drinking something, it would have been Danny Thomas Spit Take time. You know, where the guy spits out a mouth full of coffee. A great wave of hysterical, uncontrollable, can’t-hold-it-in laughter overcame both of us. My best friend and I were on the ground in stitches. Suzie ran away and was not seen for several hours.

Here’s a blow-up of the toilet: