The Family Tabor. Cherise Wolas
the first social anthropologist to befriend that protective hunter-gatherer tribe, the first to learn their unclassified language, to capture that language in what would become the seminal Sentineli dictionary.
She wrote up her findings, her intentions, the ethical and methodologically sound research she would perform in the Andaman Islands, but when her adviser, Dr. Jin, saw Sentineli on the cover he said, “I was hoping you wouldn’t alight on them. I don’t need to read anything else. The answer is absolutely not. The tribe has been classified not merely as uncontacted, but as uncontactable and too dangerous. The Indian government would likely refuse you a permit for those reasons. Choose another tribe, in another place.”
She had called Valentine, and he was sympathetic, but the frequent futility of his work, of physical anthropology itself, eliminated his ability to understand that this was the first time she was experiencing such futility. She’d hung up, heartbroken to find herself in the wrong era. In the 1800s and early 1900s, when her heroines were out in the field, dozens of untouched tribes in unexplored locales were up for grabs. But in the hypermodern twenty-first century, with travel to remote places standard and Google mapping uncovering the most distant rock, there was no accessible tribe left whose existence had not already been the subject of cogent boots-on-the-ground participant observation, and somehow she, who missed nothing, had missed this cardinal piece of intelligence.
When she’d worn herself out crying bitterly, she searched her shelves for one of the books written by the lambent creator of modern social anthropology. Published in 1929, the title had a patronizing hegemonic tone that nonetheless encouraged one’s prurient curiosity to see what was inside. Of course, she knew what was inside, but she sat upright on her frayed old couch and read Bronislaw Malinowski’s The Sexual Life of Savages again, first page to last, as the hot pot of coffee by her side cooled to mud.
When she finished, she thought: So she would not be the first explorer on the Trobriand Islands. So she would not be following in any of the footsteps of those women responsible for directing her life path, but rather in the man’s, in Malinowski’s, who had established the imperative of researching a tribe, not from comfortable university library chairs, but out in the field with the people one was studying, engaging in their community, eating their food, taking part in their everyday lives, and she decided that wouldn’t be so bad, not at all. (She wouldn’t have admitted to her staunchly feminist friends that there was something appealing about following a pseudo father figure.) Plus, she already spoke Kilivila.
Malinowski had done all the heavy lifting there, but she would go anyway to those seemingly very happy islands in Melanesia, where sex reigned, and if luck was with her she would add to the knowledge about them her own penetrating and revelatory findings, hopefully as groundbreaking as his.
Which is what she did: two years in the Trobriand Islands, researching every aspect of the Trobrianders’ lives and how those lives had been altered and impacted by the researchers who had come before her. Then fourteen months writing her dissertation, working at the anthro library, eating dinners and having sex with Valentine. Physically, she was in Seattle, but mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and psychically, she remained in Melanesia, carrying with her the Trobrianders’ vibrancy, their lust for life, who she was there, doing the work she relished. And then she had gone topsy-turvy, crashing hard the very afternoon she successfully defended her work. After the kudos, and the back pats, and the champagne toasts with Dr. Jin and the oral-defense examiners, she walked home through campus, seeing the late-summer colors bleeding away, the greens and golds turning pale, then transparent, and by the time she reached her apartment, her life force was gone. She was no longer the Camille she had always been.
Months passed in which her bed became her safe place, her bedroom a cave, the blinds shuttered to hide the cheeriness of the walls, the phone ringing and ringing, the messages piling up and never returned, Valentine bringing her soup, singing to her, leaving reluctantly when she did not respond to his words, to his overtures, and his patience was worn. Then in late December a knock on her door, and Dr. Jin was standing there. “So you’re here, Camille. I’ve sent you dozens of emails, left you numerous phone messages. I thought maybe you were away on a long holiday and hadn’t let me know. Then I ran into Dr. Osin and he told me what’s been going on. Dress and come to my office.”
She managed to shower, to wash her matted hair, then stared at herself in the mirror. Her eyes were cloudy and red-rimmed, and how weird that she’d forgotten their light hazel hue. She was the only one in the family without dark, darker, or darkest brown eyes, and her father used to tease her, calling her “Witch Hazel.” She’d hated that nickname as a kid, like glass shattering inside, but looking into her eyes, she finally understood what he’d been trying to teach her: that humor could coexist with seriousness, that she had needed to find the humor in herself even at that young age. She could hear him saying, “Come on, Witch Hazel, smile,” and she tried smiling at her reflection, but it was impossible. Still, with her father closer to her heart, it was a little easier to pull on dusty jeans and a wrinkled shirt and, under cover of a large orange umbrella, make her way in teeming rain to Dr. Jin’s office on campus.
“Sit,” Dr. Jin had said, handing her a fragile cup of green tea. “This happens to the most committed social anthropologists. Your world in the Trobriand Islands, kept alive through all the work on your dissertation, it’s still more real to you than this one, isn’t it?”
She had nodded.
“I know how difficult it can be to reenter one’s former life. I wish I had an instant fix for you. Sadly, there aren’t any assistant professorships available right now. I could make a few calls, to American Anthropologist, Anthropological Quarterly, Cultural Anthropology, Ethnology, Oceania, see whether they have a rare vacancy. I haven’t heard of any, but I’m happy to double-check.”
She had shaken her head slowly because it hurt to make abrupt moves in the brightness of his clean office. “Dr. Jin, I think I just need another expedition, to be back out there. Is there a new one I could join? I don’t have to lead it, just be a team member.”
It had been Dr. Jin’s turn to shake his head. “No university-funded expeditions here or anywhere for the next two years. But even if there was, based on what Val Osin tells me, months barely functioning, you wouldn’t pass the psych eval right now.
“Here’s a way you could retrench. Return to the Trobriands by diving back into your dissertation. Take yourself to the library and try turning it into a book. Not a study that, alas, few will read these days, but something for a broad audience. There are publishers who would be interested in exciting nonfiction based on the real-life adventures of a young and interesting scientist. I know a few. When you’re ready, I could reach out to them on your behalf.
“It has real potential, Camille, a young woman who investigated the sexual practices of other young women living in a very different society. It’s been a long time since Malinowski’s Savages, and other than refuted Mead, with the adolescent Samoans, never investigated by a woman.”
“I was more intrigued by other aspects I researched,” she’d said, the words falling from her mouth one by one, and Dr. Jin nodded repeatedly. “Yes, of course. And I understand. But times are different now, not much call for ethnographies. And it’s very disappointing, but sex sells. From what I’ve been told, it also greatly helps if the young and interesting scientist is actually in the book.”
A nod was the most she could muster. She placed the fragile cup of untouched green tea on his uncluttered desk and left. The rain was still teeming, but the umbrella remained rolled up tight by her side. She had no energy for any project, but an exploitive tale about the Trobrianders and sex, with herself as a character? It was exactly what she couldn’t do: replace the wildness of the Trobriand Islands with an airless library, reduce her vibrant experiences into a trite narrative, massage that extraordinary time—the raucous freedom, the exploration of others, the bonding with people so unlike herself—into something so frivolous.
When she reached home, she was soaked through, more hopeless than before.
Since that meeting with Jin, she hasn’t so much as glanced at