Q&A
A recent Q&A about Lost Among the Baining:
What can you tell me about the name “Baining”?
Actually, the name “Baining” tells you a lot about the people and their history. “Baining”—which rhymes with “shining”—is the name that was given to them by their historical enemy the Tolai, and it’s a derogatory word meaning “bush people,” something like “hicks.” This certainly isn’t what the Baining called themselves: the Northern Baining, the group we lived with, call themselves “chachat,” which means “people.”
But nowadays, even the Baining—outside their own community, at least—accept the name they were given by the aggressive people who took their land, raided their villages, and—before it became illegal—enslaved and ate them. To me, this name makes it pretty clear that the quiet, peaceful Baining are the underdogs of the Gazelle Peninsula.
Shortly after starting on Lost Among the Baining, you expressed the belief that you and your husband’s experience in New Guinea was one of the only things that held your relationship together all those years. Do you believe that if you’d chosen not to go with Jeremy, you two might not be together today?
An interesting question. I do think that the experience held us together because it was so powerful and we felt that someone who hadn’t been there simply couldn’t understand. And it’s possible that if Jeremy had gone to New Guinea while I stayed behind, probably in New York, he might have felt that way about me. We might have been in such different places in our lives that we’d have gone our own ways.
But if the shared experience held us together, it also came between us. We behaved pretty badly toward one another on the trip, and we returned with a lot of anger and guilt that wouldn’t have been there if Jeremy had gone alone. And though obviously I can’t really know, we were so close before the trip—joined at the hip, as I say in the book—and we’re so close now, that it’s hard for me to see us separating.
Back in college, when we were first married, we used to make dark jokes about how high the divorce rate was among anthropologists. It can be rough going for couples in the field, even if they don’t have as difficult a situation as we did—you’re so dependent on each other. The fact that we stayed together through all of that makes me think that we had a pretty strong bond to start with, and we wouldn’t have split up, no matter what.
Before the fieldwork trip you consulted several people in an effort to gain some knowledge about the Baining. Did their negativity at all create a self-fulfilling prophecy?
I don’t think that everyone’s negative warnings and comments mattered equally. Most of them became part of the challenge, and we enjoyed that. But I think for Jeremy, Gregory Bateson may well have had an effect. When Bateson said that after 40 years, he still got depressed when he thought about the Baining, we dismissed it as part of what was obviously a bad trip—after all, he also said some extreme things. For instance, he implied that the Baining didn’t speak their language well, which was bizarre.
But Jeremy was a graduate student in anthropology and he is essentially modest. Bateson was a big name in the field—actually, he was a big name in several fields, by then—and I can see that Jeremy might have worried, perhaps subconsciously, that if someone as brilliant as Bateson had failed miserably, as Bateson himself put it, what were the odds that he would succeed?
One of the main struggles for you and Jeremy was never knowing what was truly going on with the Baining. You both had a sense that the Baining culture was missing something essential to most cultures. But then you began to wonder if in fact you were the ones missing something. Why was that lack of understanding so difficult for you?
I think the problem was that, as one friend put it, we came to the Baining with expectations. These were partly the expectations that anthropologists set up, and partly ones that we, as Americans, as Westerners, brought with us.
Most of the societies anthropologists had studied had some form of religion, elaborate kinship systems, political structures, rituals—initiation rites, marriage rites, and so forth. We found no evidence of these things among the Baining. They had no Baining religion, no sacred ties to their ancestors, no leaders or shamans.
They did have one elaborate ritual with extraordinary masks that they put on every few years, but it seemed to arise out of nowhere. And even here, they had nothing to say about the purpose of this ritual—it wasn’t a harvest or fertility ceremony or sacred in any way. They said only that it was very hard work preparing for it and that it was very important to them. So from an anthropological viewpoint, the Baining didn’t fit into the recognized patterns.
But of course we wondered whether there was actually much more to their culture that they simply weren’t telling us—after all, however much they welcomed us, we were outsiders. So our question was, were the Baining really missing all the things anthropologists—and we—thought made up a culture, or were we just missing what was there?
For Jeremy, as an anthropologist, the struggle was figuring out whether the Baining were truly anomalous, or whether he just wasn’t doing his job. For me, the struggle was more existential. What I saw was a cultural void, and I wondered whether this emptiness—as I then saw it—was the truth about life. I found that very frightening.
Upon returning to America what in particular gave you a sense of culture shock?
What was hardest, I think, was re-adapting to a world where everything was so busy: everyone talked about everything, and everyone looked for and found meaning everywhere. We’d spent sixteen months immersed in a world where most people didn’t like to talk, where a visit was mostly silence, where what mattered was daily life—getting taro, getting firewood, cooking, eating, hanging out.
We’d gone native to a large degree, we lived as the Baining did, and I think we could no longer separate ourselves from the Baining. We’d become some form of hybrid. Coming to the States, to San Francisco, I felt that life around me—all this busyness—was unnecessary, and that all our social and cultural activities and artifacts were a sham. I felt entirely outside American life, everything seemed so phony. I was pretty depressed.
How did you move past that depression and into a more positive life outlook? Did raising your son help as you first thought it would?
Raising my son did help—there’s nothing like a baby to immerse you in actual life. But the main thing, I think, was getting back to something familiar, to remind me of who I’d been, to remind me that I wasn’t actually a Baining—that I too had once been someone who had talked about things, and looked for meaning.
Going to graduate school at that point was helpful, because school was something I knew, something I’d been good at. But the most helpful thing, I think, was moving back east. I’d grown up in New York, I’d gone to school in Cambridge, and for me, San Francisco was another foreign world. I’d never lived there, I didn’t know anyone, and since I was already disoriented, I had trouble managing. And California is really very different from the east coast world where I’d grown up—more different, I think, than London, where we’d lived after college. I did much better when we moved back to the Cambridge area.
Once, when attempting to write about the Baining, you encountered your young self in those field journals and what you found was upsetting. What were your thoughts during the process of accepting your 22 year old self?
A lot of what I found was just what anyone might find going back to their young journals: you see that you were so self-centered, so full of yourself, so dramatic, and that you couldn’t perceive what now, from an older perspective, seems obvious. If you’re in a good place when you’re reading back, I think you can enjoy that young person and laugh at their failings and woes. You’re no longer that immature: you have distance.
But when I was reading my New Guinea journals, hoping to write about the experience, I still hadn’t worked out the problems I’d had when I was writing them. I’d moved on in my life, but in terms of New Guinea, I was still the same person, still caught in the same attitudes and fears. It was only after we came back from our second trip to New Guinea—when I had come through to the other side of the experience—that I could return to that young woman and laugh. And that was when I was ready to write my book, which is filled with that self-mocking humor I finally found.
Though it took many years, you finally arrived at an appreciation of the Baining culture. How did that appreciation assist in the writing of this book?
It took me years to fully understand the cultural assumptions and limitations that I’d brought with me to New Guinea. There we were, very young, from New York and San Francisco, straight out of Harvard, coming from a culture where a certain kind of ambition was paramount.
To me, as I've said, Baining life seemed empty: there was so little they had, so little they seemed to want or need. And though I respected this—I thought that their barebones interpretation of life was right, and that our own culture in the West was artificial--it frightened me. I think the Baining have frightened other Westerners as well—I think that they frightened Bateson, an extremely intellectually ambitious man, who couldn’t fathom what he saw as a severely limited culture.
But eventually, after returning to New Guinea, I came to see that my interpretation was wrong in the first place. The Baining didn’t have what anthropologists, or we, expected a society to have. But Baining lives weren’t empty, they didn’t see them as empty. My perspective was limited. Cultures differ profoundly, and it was I who was unable to grasp the aims and pleasures of their lives, the satisfactions of their peaceful, egalitarian society, their fluid family life, their matter-of-fact acceptance of life.
I’ve been fascinated by reader responses to the Baining as I describe them in my book. Some people see a society that has, and needs, so little as lacking. But others see this people’s easy-going culture as a kind of paradise. So our assumptions aren’t merely culture-bound, they’re personal as well.
I think that seeing all of this freed me enormously. I think these insights gave me the distance—from the Baining and from my younger self—that I needed to write the book.
Do you have any writing projects you’re working on now?
Yes—I’m working on a book about travel, a subject that fascinates me. But it’s only at the beginning, and it’s too early to talk about it. I think—at least for me—that talking about a piece of writing too soon is likely to squelch it, and then it doesn’t get written!
What can you tell me about the name “Baining”?
Actually, the name “Baining” tells you a lot about the people and their history. “Baining”—which rhymes with “shining”—is the name that was given to them by their historical enemy the Tolai, and it’s a derogatory word meaning “bush people,” something like “hicks.” This certainly isn’t what the Baining called themselves: the Northern Baining, the group we lived with, call themselves “chachat,” which means “people.”
But nowadays, even the Baining—outside their own community, at least—accept the name they were given by the aggressive people who took their land, raided their villages, and—before it became illegal—enslaved and ate them. To me, this name makes it pretty clear that the quiet, peaceful Baining are the underdogs of the Gazelle Peninsula.
Shortly after starting on Lost Among the Baining, you expressed the belief that you and your husband’s experience in New Guinea was one of the only things that held your relationship together all those years. Do you believe that if you’d chosen not to go with Jeremy, you two might not be together today?
An interesting question. I do think that the experience held us together because it was so powerful and we felt that someone who hadn’t been there simply couldn’t understand. And it’s possible that if Jeremy had gone to New Guinea while I stayed behind, probably in New York, he might have felt that way about me. We might have been in such different places in our lives that we’d have gone our own ways.
But if the shared experience held us together, it also came between us. We behaved pretty badly toward one another on the trip, and we returned with a lot of anger and guilt that wouldn’t have been there if Jeremy had gone alone. And though obviously I can’t really know, we were so close before the trip—joined at the hip, as I say in the book—and we’re so close now, that it’s hard for me to see us separating.
Back in college, when we were first married, we used to make dark jokes about how high the divorce rate was among anthropologists. It can be rough going for couples in the field, even if they don’t have as difficult a situation as we did—you’re so dependent on each other. The fact that we stayed together through all of that makes me think that we had a pretty strong bond to start with, and we wouldn’t have split up, no matter what.
Before the fieldwork trip you consulted several people in an effort to gain some knowledge about the Baining. Did their negativity at all create a self-fulfilling prophecy?
I don’t think that everyone’s negative warnings and comments mattered equally. Most of them became part of the challenge, and we enjoyed that. But I think for Jeremy, Gregory Bateson may well have had an effect. When Bateson said that after 40 years, he still got depressed when he thought about the Baining, we dismissed it as part of what was obviously a bad trip—after all, he also said some extreme things. For instance, he implied that the Baining didn’t speak their language well, which was bizarre.
But Jeremy was a graduate student in anthropology and he is essentially modest. Bateson was a big name in the field—actually, he was a big name in several fields, by then—and I can see that Jeremy might have worried, perhaps subconsciously, that if someone as brilliant as Bateson had failed miserably, as Bateson himself put it, what were the odds that he would succeed?
One of the main struggles for you and Jeremy was never knowing what was truly going on with the Baining. You both had a sense that the Baining culture was missing something essential to most cultures. But then you began to wonder if in fact you were the ones missing something. Why was that lack of understanding so difficult for you?
I think the problem was that, as one friend put it, we came to the Baining with expectations. These were partly the expectations that anthropologists set up, and partly ones that we, as Americans, as Westerners, brought with us.
Most of the societies anthropologists had studied had some form of religion, elaborate kinship systems, political structures, rituals—initiation rites, marriage rites, and so forth. We found no evidence of these things among the Baining. They had no Baining religion, no sacred ties to their ancestors, no leaders or shamans.
They did have one elaborate ritual with extraordinary masks that they put on every few years, but it seemed to arise out of nowhere. And even here, they had nothing to say about the purpose of this ritual—it wasn’t a harvest or fertility ceremony or sacred in any way. They said only that it was very hard work preparing for it and that it was very important to them. So from an anthropological viewpoint, the Baining didn’t fit into the recognized patterns.
But of course we wondered whether there was actually much more to their culture that they simply weren’t telling us—after all, however much they welcomed us, we were outsiders. So our question was, were the Baining really missing all the things anthropologists—and we—thought made up a culture, or were we just missing what was there?
For Jeremy, as an anthropologist, the struggle was figuring out whether the Baining were truly anomalous, or whether he just wasn’t doing his job. For me, the struggle was more existential. What I saw was a cultural void, and I wondered whether this emptiness—as I then saw it—was the truth about life. I found that very frightening.
Upon returning to America what in particular gave you a sense of culture shock?
What was hardest, I think, was re-adapting to a world where everything was so busy: everyone talked about everything, and everyone looked for and found meaning everywhere. We’d spent sixteen months immersed in a world where most people didn’t like to talk, where a visit was mostly silence, where what mattered was daily life—getting taro, getting firewood, cooking, eating, hanging out.
We’d gone native to a large degree, we lived as the Baining did, and I think we could no longer separate ourselves from the Baining. We’d become some form of hybrid. Coming to the States, to San Francisco, I felt that life around me—all this busyness—was unnecessary, and that all our social and cultural activities and artifacts were a sham. I felt entirely outside American life, everything seemed so phony. I was pretty depressed.
How did you move past that depression and into a more positive life outlook? Did raising your son help as you first thought it would?
Raising my son did help—there’s nothing like a baby to immerse you in actual life. But the main thing, I think, was getting back to something familiar, to remind me of who I’d been, to remind me that I wasn’t actually a Baining—that I too had once been someone who had talked about things, and looked for meaning.
Going to graduate school at that point was helpful, because school was something I knew, something I’d been good at. But the most helpful thing, I think, was moving back east. I’d grown up in New York, I’d gone to school in Cambridge, and for me, San Francisco was another foreign world. I’d never lived there, I didn’t know anyone, and since I was already disoriented, I had trouble managing. And California is really very different from the east coast world where I’d grown up—more different, I think, than London, where we’d lived after college. I did much better when we moved back to the Cambridge area.
Once, when attempting to write about the Baining, you encountered your young self in those field journals and what you found was upsetting. What were your thoughts during the process of accepting your 22 year old self?
A lot of what I found was just what anyone might find going back to their young journals: you see that you were so self-centered, so full of yourself, so dramatic, and that you couldn’t perceive what now, from an older perspective, seems obvious. If you’re in a good place when you’re reading back, I think you can enjoy that young person and laugh at their failings and woes. You’re no longer that immature: you have distance.
But when I was reading my New Guinea journals, hoping to write about the experience, I still hadn’t worked out the problems I’d had when I was writing them. I’d moved on in my life, but in terms of New Guinea, I was still the same person, still caught in the same attitudes and fears. It was only after we came back from our second trip to New Guinea—when I had come through to the other side of the experience—that I could return to that young woman and laugh. And that was when I was ready to write my book, which is filled with that self-mocking humor I finally found.
Though it took many years, you finally arrived at an appreciation of the Baining culture. How did that appreciation assist in the writing of this book?
It took me years to fully understand the cultural assumptions and limitations that I’d brought with me to New Guinea. There we were, very young, from New York and San Francisco, straight out of Harvard, coming from a culture where a certain kind of ambition was paramount.
To me, as I've said, Baining life seemed empty: there was so little they had, so little they seemed to want or need. And though I respected this—I thought that their barebones interpretation of life was right, and that our own culture in the West was artificial--it frightened me. I think the Baining have frightened other Westerners as well—I think that they frightened Bateson, an extremely intellectually ambitious man, who couldn’t fathom what he saw as a severely limited culture.
But eventually, after returning to New Guinea, I came to see that my interpretation was wrong in the first place. The Baining didn’t have what anthropologists, or we, expected a society to have. But Baining lives weren’t empty, they didn’t see them as empty. My perspective was limited. Cultures differ profoundly, and it was I who was unable to grasp the aims and pleasures of their lives, the satisfactions of their peaceful, egalitarian society, their fluid family life, their matter-of-fact acceptance of life.
I’ve been fascinated by reader responses to the Baining as I describe them in my book. Some people see a society that has, and needs, so little as lacking. But others see this people’s easy-going culture as a kind of paradise. So our assumptions aren’t merely culture-bound, they’re personal as well.
I think that seeing all of this freed me enormously. I think these insights gave me the distance—from the Baining and from my younger self—that I needed to write the book.
Do you have any writing projects you’re working on now?
Yes—I’m working on a book about travel, a subject that fascinates me. But it’s only at the beginning, and it’s too early to talk about it. I think—at least for me—that talking about a piece of writing too soon is likely to squelch it, and then it doesn’t get written!
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