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| I began the week in Lahore following another anthropologist around while he met up
with old informants and friends. My reading material for the trip was a doctoral
thesis written about a small group of people in a northern Punjabi city. Upon my
return I was greatly motivated to implement some of the things I had read and seen.
I discovered that one of the younger Maliks really is getting engaged this week
(he told me a few weeks ago but I thought he was joking). Several meetings with
a scientific officer from PARC and a foreign consultant proved interesting and productive
as far as my agricultural education goes. One of the things I read in the thesis was transcripts from interviews. I have not systematically been recording interviews up till now but I found I liked the idea when I saw it in print. It allows me to cross check some of the assumptions the author made and come to my own conclusions. This of course has the danger that a single interview may contradict my ultimate conclusions but contradictions in the data need to be justified-- not hidden-- so I have begun recording interviews this week. My first recorded interview turned out to be brilliant. I had a feeling that the old man I was speaking to would come up with something good if I put a microphone in front of him and sure enough as soon as he knew he was being recorded he began recounting one of the most amusing stories I've heard so far. What I find so interesting about this particular story is that it was about a distant pir (saint) from Pakpattan and his trip to Dili (Delhi). The story was told as if the pir were someone the old man knew. While in Lahore I was told that it was sufis who brought Islam to the subcontinent and given their prominence in the area I can well believe it. I followed this with two more taped interviews-- one equally satisfying, one less so (a 15 year old boy who was delighted to be interviewed but doesn't yet have his story telling skills down). The question now is how to transcribe these. Do I do it myself immediately? Do I pay someone else to do it immediately? Do I keep amassing the interviews and worry about transcription later? The last plan seems to me to be a bad one-- the longer I put these transcripts off the more difficult it will be. My 20 odd hours of video tape waiting to be processed is a daily reminder that I shouldn't let myself get behind on these things. The young Malik who's getting engaged this week is only about 24-- so he's young by Malik standards to get married. His fiancee and her family are all going to the States right after the engagement ceremony and the official marriage (nikka) will take place in one year's time. People are calling this a 'khali nikka' (empty marriage). The bridegroom doesn't appear to be nervous about the ceremony-- nor does he seem overly excited. Having seen other bridegrooms I realize now that bridegrooms and brides are not supposed to be outwardly enthusiastic about the marriage. The girls are supposed to look a little sad and the boys are supposed to be very serious. I don't know if this young Malik will manage to be very serious on the actual day but so far he's covering up his excitement pretty well (if indeed he feels excited). Part of the reason I chose this village was because of the close cooperation between one of the Maliks here and the Pakistan Agricultural Research Council (PARC) who have very generously vouched for me in this area. This week a foreign agricultural consultant is in town so I have been sitting in on meetings with him. One difference between foreign consultants and Pakistani PARC officials is that the foreigner doesn't have the same practised way of softening criticism. He told the farmer in question that there were certain things he was doing which were costing him a lot of money and if he continued he was being foolish. After an evening of the farmer sulking a bit he brightened up considerably. This farmer has on occasion made similar comments about himself to me and so hearing them from someone else wasn't exactly a pleasure but it confirmed that he needed to make some changes. In this area it is easy to get sidetracked on issues that have nothing to do with managing a farm. While these things are of great interest to me as an anthropologist I recognise that this particular farmer wants to be a competitive farmer and consequently wants to devote the bulk of his energy to his land-- not his family politics. Somehow this has not been a thrilling week for me but it has been a good week nonetheless. I have made a more concrete plan on how I will go about conducting the research and what kind of data I want to be able to access later on-- more importantly I have begun implemeting the plan. I have learned a great deal about fruit farming and about government extension services (no real surprises but some confirmation of things I have suspected in the past). So while I sometimes miss the early days (only 4 months ago!) when things were happening so fast I couldn't possible hope to keep up with them, I realize that life slows down and speeds up from time to time. I can't ask these people to have a crisis every week just for my benefit. |
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