Traveling with Sugar. Amy Moran-Thomas

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СКАЧАТЬ It was a context in which being any kind of white person left one with an unshakable sense of complicity, crucial not to disregard and impossible to escape.

      I did not know how to process that sense of underlying danger and inequality. Here I was trying to understand medicine in the context of Garifuna notions of death while also becoming paranoid about my own. I lost twelve pounds in four days to an acute illness in April, then got pneumonia. And shortly after someone had tried to break into the nearby window, I found out that I was—by sheer coincidence—working in a clinic built on the exact place where an earlier white anthropologist who worked in the village had lived. I did not find out until late in my research that he was murdered in Belize. The figure of the killed anthropologist was therefore a disciplinary legacy in both places where I worked, which I came to feel unwittingly but inescapably connected to somehow. Just by choosing to stay in the midst of bad omens, I found myself also touched by a kind of Thanatos, which felt entwined with the offerings to the ancestors and other dead unfolding around me.

      At some point, this unsettling context of my fieldwork became more than the methodological realities of my research, but also a central heuristic through which I was coming to understand the things I saw in Belize: medicine in the communities where I lived; the way people I knew there sometimes thought of their illnesses as inevitable and the imminence of death as intractable; the way this intimacy often became part of how they communicated with their ancestors through rituals, food, and songs; and the way people bore their losses, by redefining love and communication as something that only grew more powerful in the face of death. Maybe this was participant observation in a way too: I came not just to observe but also to partially participate in an intermittent reckoning with death.

      For me, these methods came to feel like a postscript of obsessively studied mistakes—some of which I observed in global institutions’ policy documents, occasionally witnessed and at times felt complicit in, or myself felt mistaken for engaging with in the first place. Of course, to some extent errors are part of human relationships themselves and therefore inherent to anthropological research, perhaps even part of the conditions for ethnographic possibility and its “troubled knowledge.”³⁷ Carl Jung believed that “mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth,” while Salvador Dalí wrote of mistakes, “Understand them thoroughly. After that, it will be possible for you to sublimate them.”³⁸ Yet that does not change the fact that I still considered or experienced certain events as mistakes, whether witnessed or my own. Many of their consequences are unfixable. But I like to think that maybe they can be appended in a limited way through what I write about them now.

      If the following chapters started out with methods from the classic anthropological genre of life histories, many slowly turned into death histories—a painfully apt term I owe to Jim Boon.³⁹ Some of these stories are just fragments someone wanted to share. But others, more sustained collaborations with those I at times came to think of as friends, are perhaps more like elegies.⁴⁰ Garinagu have always written beautiful elegies, sung on disquieting scales across porches and in living rooms as well as ancestral temples. As Roy and Phyllis Cayetano describe, in such Garifuna lyrics, “people and events can be recorded in songs like little pictures which become public property and remain, long after the former becomes a matter of history.”⁴¹

      There is a certain sense in which my writing now feels like a partial mirror held to such gestures of memory. Just looking at my field notes when I work at night, hearing the voices of dead friends from Belize in interview tapes, and looking at pictures from this project became an experience of constantly encountering ghosts and trying to find ways to engage the dead and their memory. The attempt feels heavily borne because of my sense of helplessness and complicity in being unable to prevent their deaths.⁴² Yet at this point, finding a way to tell these stories feels like part of my own ethical response to what I saw—maybe the only one still available. Trying to write feels not only like a postscript to the ethical dilemmas I encountered during fieldwork, but also like a gesture toward appending the lives of these untimely dead. These chapters are offered as corrigenda in the (hugely insufficient) sense of a place where they might still be alive.

      But I cannot write about normalized death from the outside; there is no outside. I could only study the unequal systems I was caught in together with others and note our vastly different positions within them. Many understood the imminence of their own deaths much better than I did at the time, testing me as a channel to an imagined public record or wider stage with agendas of their own. Gestures of transformation pressed against the jagged edges of things that none of us could change, the playful and painful bound together. I never managed to shed the contradictory roles that have been part of playing the role of ethnographer since colonial times, though I tried to perform them more collaboratively: aspiring mediator, tolerable resource boon, academic authority, implicated naïf.

      In some especially tense moments, I sometimes found my face freezing into an overwrought smile in an effort to appear at least well intentioned in my foolishness. Garinagu men wear masks with smiles like these when they dance the Jankunu dance around Christmas, with seashells stitched to their knees. They make the white masks out of cassava strainers painted pale pink and decorated with forced frozen smiles, satirizing the colonial absurdity of slave-owning white people and uniformed soldiers.⁴³ Above their whiteface the dancers wear hats decorated with garish paper flowers and bits of mirrors. But maybe these Wanaragua masks also capture more than they mean to, or at least something they do not purport to be rendering. There is a certain helpless white smile of someone who wants to be good but does not know how to face the violence of the past they are tied to, which resembles both the mocking Jankunu mask and my strained smiles in those moments. (Upon meeting a stranger, many old Garinagu women will stare down your cursory smile and not return it until they know you well enough for you to deserve it. I admired the wounding honesty of this habit.)

      Masked character in Jankunu (Wanaragua) performance.

      I have learned a great deal from the writings of anthropologists who work to unmask systems of structural violence. But for my own project, I gradually felt a more disquieting truth when acknowledging that I did not even know how to unmask myself.

      SLOW CARE

      Many of the individuals I met in Belize came to number among the millions of worldwide deaths now attributed to diabetes each year.⁴⁴ Somehow, the slow-moving quality of chronic conditions like diabetes—what U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon once called a “public health emergency in slow motion”—seems to make it only more daunting to imagine reversing its spread in the future.⁴⁵ A range of disturbing statistics suggests that today’s policy approaches have not slowed the rise of global diabetes rates or mortality; to the contrary, these figures appear to have accelerated worldwide each year they have been tracked. According to the latest projections of the International Diabetes Federation, the condition “affects over 425 million people, with this number expected to rise to over 600 million within a generation.”⁴⁶ No health institution that I am aware of predicts that current interventions might be able to curb the problem on a population level. In this light, there is global resonance to what was probably the single thing I heard repeated most often by the Belizean and Garifuna individuals with diabetes who contributed to this project: “It is my children I’m worried about.”

      Every story in the rest of this book is really the same story that Mr. P taught me to see—chronic strains that slowly cause bodies to fall apart and the people trying to keep each other together. In fact, each chapter retells that same story again, from a different angle. When it comes to diabetes, this repetition is no narrative accident. Fatigue and relentless repetition are the defining features of what makes diabetic sugar harrowing—people trying to stave off bodily loss and failing organs day in and day out, year in and year out, over and over again, utterly foreseeable, likely coming anyway.

      It СКАЧАТЬ