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| We're back to the hot weather for a few days it seems. The promised start date of
the 15th of July for the monsoon has come and gone with no monsoon. I have begun
ironing out some of the wrinkles with my census
team. I attended 2 different wedding parties and saw the mayan (mehndi) for the first
time. I got a glimpse of what the Punjab must have been like 50 years ago at a bull
race. There isn't really much more to say about the heat I guess. It's still here and it's still annoying some days. I won't bore you anymore with that. My census team now numbers 7 people. 1 supervisor, a Malik who is working for free (he's my partner in many little translation projects and does it out of curiosity and enjoyment-- not for money), plus 6 interviewers. The first batch of interviews had a few problems: interviewers didn't write down what informants told them but rather what they believed to be the truth (ex. a man said he spoke Urdu in the home but the interviewer wrote Punjabi since he believes the man speaks Punjabi in the home), interviewers didn't really understand what I wanted by an example of Malik help, natural speech turned out not to be such an easy concept to get across. With the help of Malik Bilal Mehdi, my Census Team Surpervisor, we had a long meeting with everyone and I gave out 5 revised questionnaires to everyone to go out and make all their mistakes now so they can be corrected before I let them loose on the village. Everyone has expressed a strong desire to have their name on the website and as they are a good team I think they probably deserve it. So here goes. My team consists of: Census Team Supervisor: Malik Bilal Mehdi (Bhaloti/Qatana Gujar) Malik Rashed Ali (Bhaloti Gujar) Mr. Mohammed Imran (Mian) Mr. Mohammed Mannan (Mian) Mr. Mohammed Nasir (Grouma Gujar) Mr. Qaisar Nawaz (Kashmiri) Mr. Fazal Rehman (Molyan Pathan) I attended Baba Saftar's daughter's waleema in T'hat'ha Khalil. His daughter is now married to his sister's son. His sister's 2 sons combined their wedding parties at one occasion so I discovered that in fact I was attending 2 marriage parties at one waleema. In the village this week the big social occasion was a wedding among the Kashmiris. Mr. Khizar Mahmoud got married this week. It's embarrassing to admit but I've known this man since April or May of 1998 and didn't know his name until I showed up at the mayan (mehndi) and saw that it was him they were pouring oil onto. The mayan (in Urdu mehndi) is the fun night of the wedding (they are all supposed to be fun but this one is supposed to be particularly fun). There were supposed to be singing and dancing girls but at the last minute that got cancelled. The wedding was terribly useful for me because I learned that many of the people I like a lot in the village are Kashmiri and how they are related to each other. It is far too early to say something like this with any conviction at all but it strikes me that perhaps caste identification is less strong among Kashmiris since I've managed to be good friends with all of these people for over a year without knowing their caste. With most other people the question of caste tends to come up rather quickly either from themselves or from someone else identifying them to me as an X. As I say this is only a vague sort of conclusion I'm drawing based on really no evidence (since I haven't been looking much at Kashmiris up till now). At the mayan I was pleased to see that I am not the only one who doesn't like live rounds of ammunition being fired into the air. People accepted one clip from a pistol (for good luck maybe?) but then started telling the shooter that was enough and to stop. Of course he ignored them and fired off three or four more clips but it was reassuring that there are many Pakistanis who are aware that bullets that go up must come down. I don't like spending the next 15 minutes wondering where those bullets came down. I have now attended all public or semi-public parts to a Pakistani wedding: nikka, mehndi, bharat, waleema. I have them all on video tape (though not all very good quality video) and have enough examples that from now on all weddings I attend are for personal reasons because they are a friend's wedding and not for anthropological reasons. Since I'm not going to write about wedding rituals I will leave the fleshing out of details to other anthropologists. The bull race was a spur of the moment thing. I was in front of one of the hotels on my way to watch some cricket when Mr. Madded Khan (a Gujar who befriended me last year and who has one of the brightest and wildest grandsons in the village) took me by the hand and said I was going to a bull race with him. We wandered through the fields seemingly headed for no where. Indeed we ended up in the middle of the fields with nothing around. As we neared the bull race spot more and more people were making their way through the fields on foot. There had been no advertisement of this in the form of posters, or radio or newspaper but somehow word of mouth was enough to get it all together. I saw a large crowd of men sitting and standing around the edge of the field where the races take place. There were a few of the more traditional zamindars from the area (who'd come on foot like everyone else) and many of the very poor men of the village and the nearby dhoks (hamlets). The bull race was interesting but I'll leave the description for now. I arrived to late to watch very much but saw enough to know that I should try and make the next one with my camera. I have set a deadline of August 15 for census completion. That leaves me the remainder of August to process the census data and try and transcribe as many of the recorded interviews as possible (out of 300 households in the village I want 50 recorded interviews) before I select a smaller sample size to do a more complete survey. The smaller sample will be probably be around 15 houses but in part it depends on time and energy. As I get closer to my departure date my time becomes more precious and people become more demanding of my time. Everyone seems to want 3 day chunks of my time to go off on vacation to various parts of Pakistan. Mostly they understand my reluctance to agree but not always. So I will endeavour to keep everyone happy with me and NOT go off for a dozen 3 day jaunts to Swat or Murree. |
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