Nigel Barley - Not a Hazardous Sport: Misadventures of an Anthropologist in Indonesia

A NTHROPOLOGY IS NOT A HAZARDOUS SPORT . I had always suspected that this was so but it was comforting to have it confirmed in black and white by a reputable insurance company of enduring probity. They, after all, should know such things.

The declaration was the end result of an extended correspondence conducted more in the spirit of detached concern than serious enquiry. I had insured my health for a two-month field-trip and been unwise enough to read the small print. I was not covered for nuclear attack or nationalisation by a foreign government. Even more alarming, I was covered for up to twelve months if hijacked. Free-fall parachute jumping was specifically forbidden together with all other hazardous sports. But it was now official: Anthropology is not a hazardous sport.

The equipment laid out on the bed seemed to contest the assertion. I had water-purifying tablets, remedies against two sorts of malaria, athletes foot, suppurating ulcers and eyelids, amoebic dysentery, hay fever, sunburn, infestation by lice and ticks, seasickness and compulsive vomiting. Only much, much later would I realise that I had forgotten the aspirins.

It was to be a stern rather than an easy trip, a last pitting of a visibly sagging frame against severe geography where everything would probably have to be carried up mountains and across ravines, a last act of physical optimism before admitting that urban life and middle age had ravaged beyond recall.

In one corner stood the new rucksack, gleaming iridescent green like the carapace of a tropical beetle. New boots glowed comfortingly beside it, exuding a promise of dry strength. Cameras had been cleaned and recalibrated. All the minor tasks had been dealt with just as a soldier cleans and oils his rifle before going into battle. Now, in pre-departure gloom, the wits were dulled, the senses muted. It was the moment for sitting on the luggage and feeling empty depression.

I have never really understood what it is that drives anthropologists off into the field. Possibly it is simply the triumph of sheer nosiness over reasonable caution, the fallibility of the human memory that denies the recollection of how uncomfortable and tedious much of field-work can be. Possibly it is the boredom of urban life, the stultifying effect of regular existence. Often departure is triggered by relatively minor occurrences that give a new slant on normal routine. I once felt tempted when a turgid report entitled Applications of the Computer to Anthropology arrived on my desk at the precise moment I had spent forty minutes rewinding a typewriter ribbon by hand because my machine was so old that appropriate ribbons were no longer commercially available.

The point is that field-work is often an attempt by the researcher to resolve his own, very personal problems, rather than an attempt to understand other cultures. Within the profession, it is often viewed as a panacea for all ills. Broken marriage? Go and do some field-work to get back a sense of perspective. Depressed about lack of promotion? Field-work will give you something else to worry about.

But whatever the cause, ethnographers all recognise the call of the wild with the certainty that Muslims feel about the sudden, urgent need to go to Mecca.

Where to go? This time, not West Africa but somewhere fresh. Often I had been asked by students for advice on where to go for field-work. Some were driven by a relentless incubus to work on one topic alone, female circumcision or black-smithing. They were the easy ones to counsel. Others had quite simply fallen in love with a particular part of the world. They, too, were easy. Such a love affair can be as good a basis for withstanding the many trials and disappointments of ethnography as any more stern theoretical obsession. Then there was the third, most difficult group, into which I myself seemed now to fall what a colleague had unkindly termed the SDP of anthropology those who knew more clearly what they wanted to avoid than what they wished to seek.