Grandma's a Witch

Raymond Fisman, a professor at Columbia University, told a recent seminar: “In Meatu, there are veritable witch epidemics now and again – certainly any time there is a bad crop year. Witches are the scapegoat of first resort. He suggested that “witches” were killed to make resources stretch farther. “Who are you going to knock off? You want the person who is the greatest consumer of household resources relative to that which they produce . . . it turns out that it’s grandma.”

That being from an article on witch-hunts in India's Assam and West Bengal, where there have been about 750 witch-killings in the last five years. Considering the current state of the economy, I think we all know what needs to be done on Thanksgiving.

Parricide aside, I am assembling my fieldnotes from India and hope to soon have here for you a reflection on my experiences and attempts at ethnographic methodology. I must balance this work with my job-search, however, which has proved fruitless thus far. Contract-killing has taken quite a hit in the downturn, and as such I have not found any postings in the papers or even craigslist. However, my application to the School of the Americas has been accepted with a full scholarship! I guess I'm at a crossroads...

Reflexive Contradictions

Yesterday I spoke vaguely of the many contradictions I've observed in India. Today I hiked up to Pothamedu; since it was Sunday I was able to hike through a tea and cardamom plantation. I stopped near the top at a tea station and spent some time talking with folks. On my way back I reflected on the contradictions inherent in my own being here.



I am traveling through places considered by Western standards to be quite underdeveloped, but I am in many ways sponsored on this trip by a system based on the continual economic and militaristic exploitation of such lands and peoples to ensure its own comfort,

Entrenched in Munnar

I have developed a kind of aural spatial perception of traffic over the last few weeks, enabling me to give just enough room for a rickshaw or car to pass without looking, or to know when to dive into the muck or off a cliff in the event of an approaching bus. Sometimes, however, the buses have deceptively high-pitched horns, leading one to believe a mere motorbike is encroaching. Both Sarina and I have had the occasion to look behind us casually only to behold the monstrous visage of "BABY JESUS" lettering the top of a hellbent deluxe-AC bus barrelling down on us. Needless to say this has scarred our psyches in ways unfathomable to the imperial proletariat.



The bus ride up the mountains to Munnar lasted approximately 4.5 hours, careening up through innumerable switchbacks and narrowly missing downward-bound traffic with remarkable accuracy. Regarding the ordeal with enormous levity, I began to question my sanity when I noticed the nervous terror etched into the miens of the local passengers, who numbered fewer and fewer the higher we climbed. One old woman seated directly in front of me leaned out to spew chunks; Sarina was listening to her IPod behind me and no doubt thought the spray to be a refreshing monsoon sprinkle. If I ever require extensive knowledge of momentum, inertia, topography, or surface tension, I will immediately seek a Keralan bus driver over say, a physicist or engineer. It is no wonder that the state provides a plurality of drivers to the rest of India, as well as to various Middle Eastern countries. I suspect that roller-coasters will be rather hum-drum from now on.



I saw my first wild monkey on a tree branch during the trip up.



I now much more fully appreciate the class in Collins' Ethnographic Field Methods in which we covered methodology informing theory and theory informing methodology. And studying anthropology has overall given me a subtle awareness of commonality and difference,

Cuz It's Hot... Cuz It's Hot... Cuz It's Hot Baby, Cuz It's Hot

As you might know if you're reading this, I will be trying to keep a public record of my travels through India at the request of friends and family. In the morning I will leave, and I should arrive in Delhi early evening on Wednesday. I'm not bringing my computer, or a phone, or much of anything really. I've learned from past travels that those things rarely come in handy, and I go pretty light these days. This will be my first excursion into a non-Western country.

My primary purpose will be preliminary research regarding an ethnographic research proposal I wrote as an undergrad. The proposal was an attempt to combine my academic interests in anthropology of religion, symbolic anthropology, urban anthropology, neoliberal "globalization," and the history and philosophies of India with my personal interests in the occult and Ganesha. The idea is to collect ethnographic data via the method of long-term participant observation on Tantric sects devoted to Ganesha/Ganapati, especially ones who have grown in or relocated to urban environments. My efforts in the next six weeks will be devoted to answering the following questions: