What I Lost in Cuba: The Journey from Ethnography to Fiction

Daniel B. Borenstein, M.D., One Hundred Twenty-Ninth President, 2000–2001

For its conclusion alone, I would not have written this fieldwork note. That conclusion is merely a truism: survey research cannot handle delicate issues. My reason for writing this note is a coincidental event, something almost anecdotal that occurred during my research in a rural Ghanaian community. That event showed how valid the truism is. It is well known from countless anthropological field reports that not all informants are as enthusiastic about anthropological research as the fieldworkers themselves. Evans-Pritchard's (1940: 12-13) recording of his conversation with an uninterested and unwilling Nuer informant has become a celebrated example of that differential.' That an informant's unwillingness to cooperate increases as the topic becomes more intimate and embarrassing goes without saying, although anthropologists have thought it worth a considerable amount of words. Interviewers who ask personal questions about delicate topics, sometimes with more sense of duty than common sense, force polite informants into lying ones. Salamone (1977) has pointed out that such lying is a meaningful form of communication and not its negation. Asking why people lie may lead to important new insights into personal, social, and cultural aspects of their lives. First, however, there must be an awareness that people are lying. Some researchers may never make that discovery. In 1971 and 1973 I conducted fieldwork in a rural town in the Kwahu area of Southern Ghana.2 The kinds of things in which I was interested were definitely delicate: family quarrels, suspicions of witchcraft, sexual relationships, and birth control practices, including induced abortion. Initially, I limited my research to the members of one lineage (abusua). I was then residing with the head of that lineage. My research approach consisted of participant ob-

Two principles underlie the attitude towards elderly people and their care in the Akan culture of Ghana: respect and reciprocity. The author argues that these principles are often in conflict with one another. Elderly people are entitled to respect because of their advanced age but they may not deserve it in terms of reciprocity. The ambivalence in the Akan attitude towards elderly people should be seen in the light of the contradiction. A culture of pretending provides young and old with the means to solve this contradiction. Outward respect is showered upon the elderly, both by younger generations and the elderly themselves, but adequate care may be withheld. A fitting funeral is the approved design for finishing off this uneasy condition gracefully. This article is based on anthropological research in a rural town in the southern part of Ghana.

Recognising and theorising poverty is a difficult task in Australia, which is among the world's wealthy nations. This paper describes incidental findings of contemporary Australian poverty experiences, mainly affecting sole parents, from a recent ethnographic research in 'Sephirah', a fictitious inner-rural Victorian community. The encompassing study investigated usage of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) by a group of low-income Australians, who were generally unable to afford to consult with professional non-biomedical health providers. Anthropological participative research methods enabled basic statistical representation of households in a poor area, and documentation of health practices and beliefs, while in-depth interview narratives described the participants' experiences of a 'poverty status'. In conjunction with financial hardship, perceived difficulties arose from structured forms of discrimination, primarily impacting sole parents and their children, as the poorest sub- group among those enmeshed in long-term poverty, and secondly, mentally ill persons. These impoverished community members, in rural towns beyond Melbourne's peripheral suburbs, had few employment and educational opportunities, and limited support services. They describe impacts of morally-informed policy and welfare enactments by government, churches, and the health system, based on an idealised discourse that attributes seemingly unnecessary and destructive interventions to a doctrine of 'duty-of-care'.

By 2030, 80% of the entire world's population will live in cities.This trend has reinforced the participation of anthropologists in the analysis of urban growth and change, defining distinctive features, appearances, qualities, and problems, as well as the emergence of unique and shared forms of urbanisms around the world.There is also a long tradition of anthropologists working in sub-Saharan Africa, for decades largely in rural townships and villages.And there are those who have combined the two, focusing their energies on African cities, observing the impact of the West, differences from the countryside, the new roles and relationships engaged in, the qualitative difference from so-called traditional society.Over the last 50 years, urbanization has become one of the most remarkable features of the African continent.Based on demographic studies, approximately 27 million people lived in urban centers in Africa in the 1950s, a time of increasing urbanization on the continent.Today, approximately 567 million people live in African cities (Kanos and Heitzig 2020; OCED/SWAC 2020).This growth is staggering and necessitates the reclassification of the urban, as new cities emerge in the interior and density has increased in existing cities.Despite these changes, and a tradition of anthropological research in and of the urban agglomeration in sub-Saharan Africa, there has been no volume published that focuses on urban African anthropology.We hatched the idea for this book at a conference, as we were conversing about our respective urban West African research.I, Deborah, was trained in the 1970s in British social anthropology, at a time when urban anthropology was broadening and focused on issues related to adaptive strategies, social stratification, social identity, and poverty.I went on to observe urban community processes in Ghana, especially in Accra, the capital located in the south, and subsequently Tamale and its environs, the gateway to northern Ghana.I, Suzanne, was trained in the 1990s with an accent placed on neo-Marxist perspectives of the urban.In anthropology, eclecticism was beginning to replace identifications with theoretical traditions, and urban anthropology was taking a turn toward spatial concerns.

The ghosts of The Farm Show haunt Canadian theatre still, more than three decades after it established a template for collectively created intervention theatre by moving into a rural township, recording its meetings with local farmers and their families on audiotape and then turning those exchanges into a reflexive theatrical report that “bounces along one way or another and then it stops” (Theatre Passe Muraille 19). Most recently and famously, the making of The Farm Show has provided the narrative platform for Michael Healey’s wildly successful play The Drawer Boy, which since its premiere in 1999 has won the Governor General’s Award for Drama and has been produced in theatres across Canada, the United States, Great Britain and New Zealand. The Drawer Boy testifies to the formative impact of The Farm Show as a critical point at which our present idea of “Canadian theatre” emerged as a cultural practice. The line between the two plays tells a story of cultural growth, of radical youth constructing a theatre method that has since developed into a professional system capable of exporting its history in plays like The Drawer Boy. But there is another line that leads from The Farm Show into the present and that offers a more radical narrative. Following that line, we can see how one signal historical moment can produce two radically different theatrical futures, which speak to opposing understandings of the relationship of theatre culture to national presence.

NORBERT BLEI: PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS OUTSIDER David Pichaske Southwest Minnesota State University "Knowing that as long as I consider myself a writer, I am doomed to live a life separate and apart, somewhere halfway between home." —Norbert Blei, Door Way The relationship between place and art, always troubled forAmerican writers, became especially difficult in the second half ofthe twentieth century when competing literary traditions extended concurrently our consciousness of the local environment, of a multiplicity of localities around the world, of another multiplicity of historical moments both local and international, of an infinity of possible environments in time and place future, and—were this not enough—of life removed from the dross of time and place, lived in the abstraction of language or idea. Some writers make a cosmos of the pond (or the lake, or the town, or the county) and travel the universe without ever leaving home. These are indeed the lifeblood of any nation's literature . Other writers float upward to placeless abstraction. Still others skip blithely from neighborhood to fashionable neighborhood, home and abroad, sometimes even visiting the place about which they write. Their work is the real sludge in the system, and some long, snowy winter, a literate Montana cowpoke will do us all a favor by inventorying the dated clichés, misrepresentations, and general inanities of The Horse Whisperand its progeny. As a locality, the Midwest has not been particularly privileged of late, and the current Norton Anthology ofLiterature, a reasonably accurate indexofthe academic literary stock market, contains the work of not one living rural Midwesterner except Louise Erdrich. Thus the Midwestern writer looking to advance in the world is especially tempted to leave home, although he is by heritage and proclivity a realist, and realism requires fidelity to details oflocale and motivation appropriate to place. The result is, in Lisel Mueller's words, "the forked desire to break the roots and simultaneously preserve them."1 A pattern of repeated escape and return—ascent into success in the wide world and contact with high culture, descent into anonymity and the home place—is enacted again and again in the writing and careers of Midwestern authors, especially those born in what Fitzgerald once 216David Pichaske called "the lost Swede towns" of the prairies and plains. In the first chapter of Lake Wobegon Days, Garrison Keillor's small-town narrator enrolls at the University of Minnesota and attempts immediately to redesign himself into a man of the world: "European was a better deal," Keillor writes; "If I could be European, I'd be right where I wanted to be as a person."2 At the chapter's conclusion , Keillor gives up dreary, English-class irony and the clever essays he thinks his composition instructor would appreciate, and returns to Lake Wobegon. "Whatever its faults," he decides, the home place "is not dreary" (22). Out ofthis collapse, Keillor made a best-selling novel. Explaining a poem titled "Watering the Horse," which begins with the line "How strange to think about giving up all ambition," Robert BIy recalls escaping Madison, Minnesota, for Harvard and New York, then collapsing, "a hopeless failure," into his "crummy little place."3 This process was traumatic, but it gave BIy the gifts of sight and insight which made him a famous poet. And then there is Bill Holm in The Music ofFailure: "At fifteen, I could define failure fast: to die in Minneota, Minnesota. . . . No, I would die a famous author, a distinguished professor at an old university, surrounded by beautiful women, witty talk, fine whiskey, Mozart."4 Holm too escapes only to return: "I aged from twenty to forty, found myself for all practical purposes a failure, and settled almost contentedly into the same rural town which I tried to fiercely to escape" (57). His gift was a dozen published books and a job at the not-very-old and not-very-witty Southwest Minnesota State University. In ascending, a writer builds connections with the larger world and sharpens his sense ofwhat he is by confronting what he is not; in falling, he discovers his self and develops those dissonant chords in a minor key which characterize great writing. These...

Comparison has been at the core of anthropological epistemology, methodology, and even ontology for the past century, though various theoretical approaches have diversified perspectives on its place in anthropology. Worldwide cross-cultural comparison has been marginalized since the interpretive turn and the semi-death of grand theory in anthropology. However, comparison has not disappeared from anthropological research. Some scholars propose regional and contextualized comparison in place of ＂comparison for generalization.＂ Many acknowledge that comparison is inevitable and inherent in anthropological fieldwork. Such ＂implicit comparison,＂ though widely recognized among anthropologists, is little examined, and how its practice and process impact on the construction of anthropological knowledge is understudied. Based on my fieldwork experiences in studying bridewealth exchange rituals among the Langalanga, Solomon Islands, this paper examines the dynamic relationships between anthropological ＂comparisons＂ (especially implicit comparison) and fieldwork, ethnographic data gathering and interpretation in anthropological knowledge construction. I argue that the process can be characterized as ＂interwoven comparison.＂ Moreover, this paper argues that in spite of the universality of comparison in human beings, comparison varies in different socio-cultural as well as historical and political contexts. In-depth study of local concepts of comparison what, how and why people compare, and the role comparison plays in local epistemology-can contribute to our understanding of local society and culture.

'House' (ofie) in the Akan culture of Ghana is the most common metonym for people living together. Mefie (my house) means 'my family'. A house is someone's identity, it is a sign of security and happiness. A house is the concretisation of social relations and the sentiments accompanying them. A house, not least of all, is a status symbol. Building a house is building a powerful symbol. A house is something to which people attach some of the most cherished virtues of their culture: respect, love, memory, 'home' and beauty. In this article, building a house is seen as one of the most important achievements in a person's life. It provides elderly people with respect and security. The article is based on anthropological research in the rural Ghanaian town of Kwahu-Tafo.

Kenneth Mather was born on 22 June 1911 in the ancient rural town of Nantwich in the southeast of the county of Cheshire, England, a county noted for its flat fertile plains, its agriculture and salt mining. Kenneth’s paternal ancestors had lived for several generations in Prestwich, part of the great industrial area of the city of Manchester, some 40 miles away, until his grandfather, John William, left the area to work in the mainly ecclesiastical town of Beverley in Yorkshire and later in London and finally in Nantwich (since 1890). Kenneth’s father was born in Beverley in 1888 and brought up from the age of two in Nantwich where he lived, worked and married a local girl, Anne Mottram and brought up a family of two, Kenneth the first born and Barbara. Kenneth’s paternal grandmother, Kate Wilson was born in Bridlington on the east coast of Yorkshire where, her father, John Mowbray Wilson, was the organist of the main Church of England church. On the maternal side, the grandparents John Mottram and Ellen Allman were born and lived in the country south of Nantwich and both had an agricultural background. Kenneth’s genes, therefore, came from urban Manchester, rural Cheshire and the Viking-ridden northeast coast of England; not so spaciously isolated as the stocks of the fruitfly ( Drosophila ), Oregon, USA, and Samarkand, USSR, which were to be used in his selection experiments, but both sufficiently genetically different to produce the exceptional recombinant.

On being a pathologist—passing on the torch of knowledge

”Human Conditions II: Those Men in Her Life”, staged by the Greenray Theatre Company in 2006, dramatizes the life of its female protagonist, Yuki. This epic production, spanning over sixty years from the 1940s to the present day, swept Taiwan with its humor and warm sentiments. According to playwright and director Wu Nianzhen, the play is intended to pay homage to all Taiwanese grandmothers, or an older generation of Taiwanese females, who are strong, accommodating, and resilient in encountering changes of various kinds. On the surface, this play offers a view of the life story of the female protagonist growing up in the Japanese colonial period through her relations with the men who play a decisive role in her life. At a deeper level, the play weaves a national narrative through its representation of important historical moments. It is what Fredric Jameson calls national allegory. This paper first briefly examines important constructivist theories of nationalism and revisits Jameson's concept of national allegory in the Taiwanese political context. Then it investigates how this work presents Taiwan, focusing on the selection and representation of historical events, the dramatization of ethnic relations, and the construction of Taiwaneseness or Taiwan spirit, all of which are critical elements of narrating a nation. More importantly, this paper compares the tropes of ”women-as-nation” in this play with other post-colonial cultural imagery. Yuki embodies the trinity of history, culture and the moral values of the people, completing a Taiwanese national narrative. However, this construction follows the traditional postcolonial nation-building model in which the male intellectuals privilege resistance against foreign oppression over resistance against other types of internal oppression arising from class, gender, and sexual differences. Only at the cost of the female subjectivity in a patriarchal society is Yuki able to re-present the nation.

The Trials of Thomas Morton: An Anglican Lawyer, His Puritan Foes, and the Battle for a New England

Éric Zemmour, the rabble-rousing extreme-right candidate in the 2022 presidential elections, deliberately sparked controversy by claiming that Pétain had not killed off the Third Republic, but had secretly prepared a French revenge against Germany and had protected French Jews. Zemmour’s interventions were the latest reminder that the painful memory of France’s années noires is still a live issue some eighty years after the Liberation. Books on the Occupation may focus on a particular city or region, or may analyse a specific institution or a particular stratum of society. Or they may, as with Chris Millington’s latest book, offer an overview of the period as a whole. Millington has wisely chosen not to write yet another chronological history of Vichy; he has opted instead to organize his material under a number of themed headings. Throughout the book he fully incorporates notions of gender, colonialism, and ethnicity as he highlights the impact of events in France on the people and institutions of the French empire. In the first chapter, on the trauma of May–June 1940, Millington debunks a number of persistent myths about why France was defeated. Subsequent chapters are devoted to ‘Vichy’, ‘Collaboration’, ‘Resistance’, ‘Persecution’, and ‘Liberation’. Millington raises issues both within and between these, questioning, for example, the usefulness of the notions of ‘resistance’ and ‘collaboration’ within metropolitan and imperial contexts. Influenced by Philippe Burrin (La France à l’heure allemande, 1940–1944 (Paris: Seuil, 1995)), he prefers ‘defiance’ and ‘accommodation’ except when designating the tiny minority who were indisputably collaborators or resisters. In a final chapter, ‘History and Memory’, which precedes a short conclusion, Millington offers an excellent historiographical survey of the period from ‘Mythologizing the Resistance’ (1945–69), through a time of ‘Inconvenient Truths’ (1971–95), and concluding with ‘Diversification and Revisionism’ (2000 onwards). In making sense of Vichy, Millington rightly emphasizes the need to ‘grasp its diversity in space, time and composition’ (p. 52), which he qualifies by underscoring three important constants: Pétain remaining head of government throughout the Occupation; Vichy’s permanent quest for a peace treaty; and the exclusion and persecution of perceived enemies from the very beginning of Vichy’s existence. While few would contest that ‘The regime fully directed its energies into undoing the “damage” inflicted on France during the country’s years of democracy’, the assertion that follows — ‘Persecution was therefore Vichy’s raison d’être’ (p. 179) — is debatable. Persecution was certainly a means to an end for Vichy but not necessarily its raison d’être. Millington is to be praised for having covered the events and issues of this extremely complex historical moment in under two hundred pages without falling into the trap of oversimplification. This lively, stimulating new addition to the study of the années noires will be welcomed by the general reader, while old hands will find much to mull over in the text and are likely to discover new references in the extensive notes.

The 1960s and the 1970s marked a generational shift in architectural discourse at a time when the revolts inside universities condemned the academic institution as a major force behind the perpetuation of a controlling society. Focusing on the crisis and reform of higher education in Italy, The University as a Settlement Principle investigates how university design became a lens for architects to interpret a complex historical moment that was marked by the construction of an unprecedented number of new campuses worldwide. Implicitly drawing parallels with the contemporary condition of the university under a regime of knowledge commodification, it reviews the vision proposed by architects such as Vittorio Gregotti, Giuseppe Samona, Archizoom, Giancarlo De Carlo, and Guido Canella, among others, to challenge the university as a bureaucratic and self-contained entity, and defend, instead, the role of higher education as an agent for restructuring vast territories. Through their projects, the book discusses a most fertile and heroic moment of Italian architectural discourse and argues for a reconsideration of architecture’s obligation to question the status quo.