Exit Mokenland

Does that title count as cheesy? It's really Erica's cheesy judgement that I'm afraid of, explaining my last title, which was a response to the title before that which I started feeling like was cheesy. Erica is an unforgiving judge of the cheesy. Sometimes I end up being the cheesy when I'm trying to be the cool or the poignant, and it doesn't work out. Like how it doesn't work out sometimes when I'm trying to be the funny. Or when I'm trying to speak the English.

I just came back from my last trip to a Moken village, said goodbye to everybody ("I'm going already"), told them I wouldn't be back for a while and they all told me that that was too bad because they would probably be dead by then. "Lies!" I retorted, drawing a hearty guffaw.

When I think back on the months over the last two years that I spent with the Moken, it's amusing to track the change in the way that I related to them. I think I can break it down into three or four distinct phases:

1. Total objectification: Thoughts in this stage included things like: These people are so poor! These people are so primitive! I wonder what they think of me?! They all seem nice...are they just pretending? I wonder what they eat? I wonder what they're saying about me?

2. Anthropologist stage: This is the stage where I begin communicating with them and having limited interactions, but I inevitably completely over analyze every interaction. I.e., there's inevitably a continuous inner monologue going on. Like last year, when Epan (first main consultant) and I were taking a break on the fish farm, and he decided to drop a line in the water to try and catch lunch, maybe. Thrilled, I thought I was witnessing a truly fascinating and undoubtedly anthropologically significant event: a sea-nomad fishing. And so I sat there, watching him sit squat holding a line with a bare hook on the end in the water.

Me: Epan, what are you doing?
Epan: Fishing.
Me: What is that called in Moken?
Epan: (In Moken) Fishing.
Me: (nodding seriously in agreement).
***Epan jiggles the hook a bit.***
Me: What are you doing now?
Epan: Still fishing...
Me: No! Jiggling the hook like that, what is that called in Moken?
Epan: (maybe gives me a funny look) Fishing.
Me: (Nodding seriously again.)

I never left this stage last year, for the record. Another example: towards the end of that stay, I thought I'd buy some Thai fisherman's pants and wear them around to try to make the Moken men more comfortable with me, who often wore such pants (as do Thai fishermen). Wearing the pants is no easy task, however, as there's a semi-elaborate tying thing that you have to do to put them on, and even then when you sit down and stand up again you usually have to retie them. Well I couldn't even get them to stay on normal, and needless to say, I got a lot of funny looks as I was walking around holding up my pants and occasionally running off holding up my pants to retie them but trying to look casual about it. The funny thing is that I don't even they noticed anything strange about my wearing the pants in the first place (they were just normal pants to the Moken), they just wondered what was wrong with me that I couldn't seem to keep them on.

3. Semi-Enlightened Friendship: This is the stage this year when I actually started living with the Moken and getting to know them (i.e. learning their names) but I still analyzed conversations, etc. after they took place. I was still very conscientious about social taboos (where are few and far between among the Moken), and still said a lot of relatively weird things in conversation. For example, I would insist on saying "Thank you" in Thai after being given something because there's no equivalent in Moken, or instead saying "Very good!" in Moken because there's no word for thank you. The Moken must have considered me very expressive. Or when I would eat some dish at mealtimes, I would keep saying "Very delicious!!!" after eating each dish, for no good reason, even when it's not true, just to be polite, even when nobody else at the table was saying no such thing. But this was all before I realized Moken don't worry too much about being polite. They are fortuitously saved from the cumbersome linguistic accouterments of advanced civilizations, content instead to just say something when there's some actual information/gossip to share. Only occasionally do you say something obvious, usually only when you're leaving. But you don't say goodbye, you just say, "I'm leaving already." But that's actually helpful, because it clarifies that you're leaving and not just, say, going to the bathroom.

4. Normalcy: I won't necessarily claim that I'm all the way here yet, but there was a moment maybe midway through last week when I noticed I was exerting a lot less mental effort on how I was behaving around the Moken and just kind of hung out, doing my work and fieldwork sessions, taking my baths, eating meals and otherwise just sitting around talking about nothing in particular. I think this was simply a byproduct of spending a sufficiently large amount of time actually living with the Moken. What I'm trying to say is that getting here wasn't really a byproduct of my enterprising spirit, fantastic cultural insights or anything like that, it was simply a product of time. The moral is: whoopty-doo. When you actually spend time with people, you stop being fixated on how poor they are (relative to you), how the men walk around in their underwear, how they put coins in their ears, and how they constantly chew beetlenut and smoke, and you can just kind of be yourself. Man. I guess if there's an actual moral that I would tell Peter-at-the-beginning-of-last-year after this year it would just be: relax.

I'm not trying to say that I'm any sort of expert in cross-cultural interactions or anything like that, I'm just saying that in retrospect I realize that the only real obstacle to me having genuine interactions with the Moken in the beginning was my own objectification/fear of their foreignness and an occasional unwillingness to be honest with them. In the end, they're relatively normal people, perfectly normal when you consider their circumstances. It's also amazing how immaterial all the cultural things seemed in the end.

The other thing is that if there were specific little cultural things that I thought weren't good, probably about the least productive thing I could do would be to tell them that I think that doing that is bad, since that ends up just alienating myself more. If I say anything, probably it would be better just to ask about why they do it, etc., and then if there's a really big problem, think about how some sort of systemic change could be made by someone with more authority than me or as a community, because the Moken certainly won't change some longstanding cultural habit based on the advice of this weird white guy who won't go away.

In the end, a lot of the things I thought were big cultural problems simply aren't. Most noticably: numerous Thais told me before and while I was living with the Moken that I probably shouldn't eat with them because their food was not clean, etc.

***Forthcoming discussion not suitable for mealtimes, etc.***
FACT: My stool never "came loose" while with the Moken. Not once, not even a bit. In fact, I must say that I was more regular with the Moken snack-meal-snack-meal-snack daily schedule then I ever was with the western meal-meal-meal schedule. I'm saying every morning, like clockwork, B-I-N-G-O. If you don't know what I'm talking about, count your blessings.

FACT: The one time that my stool did "loosen", and it did so to a considerable, even explosive extent, was last week staying at the tourist resort eating the B100 a dish meals. Maybe my plumbing somehow got goofed up by the Moken, I don't know. But the famous "Bangkok Belly" never once struck living with the villagers. This lies well outside the realm of coincidence.

Not-unreasonable-hypothesis: Maybe the Moken, nomadic hunter-gatherers though they may be, actually ARE sanitary, and just lack western plumbing, etc. Actually, maybe cleanliness as we consider it is just a western construction mostly associated with newness, plastic, and shiny glass. Soap (which admittedly these Moken did have and some don't) and clean rainwater seemed to do a pretty good job despite the lack of tupperware, paper towels, 409, Comet, ziplock bags, refrigeration, dishwashers, cabinets, counters, tables, chairs, tile floors, etc. And it's not like I wasn't eating meat. And it's not like the meat wasn't eaten for two or three meals in a row. Freshness, I believe, was the secret.

I was actually surprised when See told me yesterday that the Moken don't like eating chicken because they suspect the chicken farmers don't do such a careful job with cleanliness. They think chicken meat carries disease. They may be right. It was just interesting to hear that opinion in light of the fact that I had been hearing before that the Moken weren't even aware that something like "sanitation" existed. Maybe they think chickens host a lot of ghosts that make you get sick, and that's their scientific explanation for it, but at the end of the day, it's not the theory that makes you well, it's the ability to make a generalization based on consistent experience. And anybody, even someone illiterate, is perfectly capable of doing that, especially if their health is at stake.

Ok... That may have ended up being a rant and I may be way off the mark or missing some major insight but I just wanted to share with you my musings on the undoubtedly culturally constructed concept of "clean."

Well I'm going back down to Krabi tomorrow for a couple more days of amazing limestone sport climbing on the beach, because I'm here and there's most definitely no climbing in Bangkok (save for the little playground in Lumpini park) so I might as well make the most of it.

I hope your Augusts have all started augustly, and that you're keeping your ears to the grindstone, so to speak. Tally-ho!