Free Fieldwork: A Novel by Mischa Berlinski Page A

bushels drying in the midday sun, the humid air earthy, like a root; and the sleepy, sweating water buffalo reluctantly plowing the fields. Her descriptions of Thailand, Atkinson admitted, were clichéd, but no less touching for the fact.
    Atkinson gave Martiya a letter of introduction to an elderly Thai anthropologist at the University of Chiang Mai. He treated her intention to live in a Dyalo village as a silly eccentricity. He had been able to study the Karen adequately, he maintained, on visits that lasted at most a day or two, and she would not find tribal living to her taste. Did she realize, he asked, that the Dyalo had neither electricity nor running water? And the food! One need not even mention the food. The thatched roof of a Dyalo hut would leak in the rainy season. The Dyalo themselves smelled bad, although this would be less oppressive to a
farang
. Martiya was persistent, however, and her Thai host eventually conceded: if she insisted on wandering down the path of folly, the least he could do would be to recommend a guide. In this way she was introduced to a young Dyalo man named Vinai, who spoke a rough-and-ready English in addition to his native Dyalo and fluent Thai.
    Choosing the right village is an essential part of the anthropological adventure, and for almost three months Martiya and her guide wandered the mountains of northern Thailand. They traveled by motorbike and on foot, first along the paved arteries which pulsed out from Chiang Mai, then branching onto the network of dirt roads which led from village to village. Where the roads ended, they walked, along paths which, Vinai maintained, had once been the migratory routes of wild elephants. Martiya got a sense of the new world in which she found herself. The Akha, she learned, wore silver headdresses, and exposed their twins, thinking them possessed by evil spirits. Karen virgins dressed in white. The Hmong lived at the summits of the mountains, and while the Hmong greatly admired the Yao, they enslaved the Lahu. The Hmong had grown rich as opium traders and the Lahu were often opium-addicted. The primitive Mrabri no one ever saw: they had never learned to build houses and drifted through the jungle like ghosts, taking shelter every night under makeshift lean-tos. Under every T'ai Lue house there was a loom. The Lua were sullen and stared at Martiya suspiciously. Everyone, her guide said, admired the poetry of the Lisu and the quality of their singing. The Mao were quiet folk and, like the Swiss, spoke slowly. Martiya and Vinai roamed from the Burmese to the Lao border, looking for the ideal village to study. In the end, Martiya settled herself in a Dyalo village called Dan Loi, not far from the Burmese border, and set to work.
    The field did to Martiya what the field always does: it scoured her and revealed the person underneath the encrusted layers of culture and ingrained habit and prejudice. Martiya came back to Berkeley three years later, tanned and strong, and began to write. She showed a few of the chapters of her doctoral thesis to Atkinson. They were superb, he said, absolutely superb. First-rate analysis, a deep connection with the subject, and intensely well observed. But Martiya wasn't convinced: she complained that she hardly
knew
the Dyalo and was being asked to write their definitive story. Every graduate student—every
good
grad student, Atkinson qualified—feels that way, but Martiya for some reason felt it more keenly than most. Atkinson told her that he understood, that it was only after he had defended his Doyo village from a raid by a neighboring tribe, actually holding a spear in his hand, that he felt he understood the people, that he could write about them.
    "So what should I do?" Martiya asked.
    Write the thesis, kiddo. It's just three hundred pages of blah-blah-blah.
    After about a year, she told him she wanted to go back to Thailand. She needed more data. Atkinson told her that he couldn't oppose this idea more profoundly.