General Noriega's Toads: An Ethnographic Theater of the Absurd

Abstract

War has a way of overturning ethnographic fieldwork, preventing return, interrupting the whirl of deepening experience that gives rise to classic texts. Television, radio, newspaper, book, and magazine images emanate from sources in the region of your field site, taunting you with questionable data. Writing out the shared-time experience of participant observation seems almost foolhardy; cut off from current events, field notes may seem downright surreal. This essay tracks the sense of surreality that shadows observations from the field of ethnographic research and from the mass media. The sense of surreality, distilled in the figure of the Toad, is derived from stories the Emberd Indians of Darien, Panama, told to me in 1984 and 1985. (At that time, even radios were rare in rain forest settlements of Darien, although I once saw an old woman with a bunch of children watching MTV in the first cacique's village.) This sense of surreality is the basis for my essay, in which I incorporate my earlier ethnographic record with reports of events relating to the 1990 U.S. invasion of Panama City and the war on drugs. This strategy allows me to record some of the world's wildness in ways that exceed even the experimental boundaries of the ethnography I wrote (Kane 1994).1 For structure, I borrow Marcel Duchamp's idea of a hinge picture (tableau de charniare). Opening out or folding back, physically or mentally, a hinge picture depicts other vistas, other apparitions of the same elusive object (Paz 1973, 144). The toad-containing vistas come from diverse sources, deflected through various modes of perception and production. The hinges are interpretations pulling the vistas into conjunction. The subjects are the problematics of sorcery and the demonic absurdity of images that can turn the public tide toward war.