Anthropologist

Karl Heider – On the second morning, before I set out to visit even more remote traditional villages, I am chatting with my guesthouse host and casually mention that my interest in visiting Minangkabau villages – more let’s say than waterfalls, which surprises her – grows at least in part from the fact that I was once an anthropologist and that I lived for a time in a Moslem peasant village in Bosnia in the early nineteen sixties. Upon hearing this, a older gentleman sitting nearby gets up and introduces himself to me, saying he couldn’t help overhear my comments and of my interest in the Minangkabau, and that he is a retired anthropology professor emeritus who has studied and written about the Minangkabau for half a century. Okay. I know that most westerners will take this as only a random synchronistic event, no matter how opportune or nice it is. But for me it is a clear example of the further involvement of the guides, no less a sign that a snowy owl or crows my path. I love the guy instantly. His name is Karl Heider. Google him. And not only has Karl studied and written about the Minangkabau, but he has also lived with, filmed, and written about the Dani people who live in the highland valleys of Indonesian New Guinea – you know, the folks you see in National Geographic running around mostly naked raising pigs and yams – and he’s flying from here in Bukittinggi back to the New Guinea highlands – to Wamena explicitly – to see how the Dani are doing. And I’m headed to visit the Dani – in Wamena – in less than a month, although we won’t overlap. And I cannot begin to say how exciting this encounter is for me, how magical and affirming it is to be chatting in a manner I haven’t chatted with anyone since leaving anthropology and the academic world in 1967. I have almost total recall of names, scholars, theories, anthropologists who studied Indonesian peoples, scholars interested in personality, culture, emotion, childrearing practices, all things Karl is interested in and is as knowledgeable about as anyone on the planet. We talk about Mead, Bateson, Kluckholm, and Geertz, all of whom we both admire. We talk about theoretical anthropology versus observational ethnography. I tell Karl how much I love the film about the Dani, “Dead Birds,” which I own a copy of and Karl tells me he was on the expedition that filmed it.
I feel as if I have met an alter ego of mine, a manifestation of the person I might have become had I stayed on the anthropology track. We are both in our seventies. Anthropology excites and informs us. Only Karl is the real deal and I am a “what might have been.” It all intrigues and excites me. I regret I won’t get more time to spend with him. I pepper him with questions. I ask him for a synthesis of his findings and beliefs. We talk about the Dani, the Minangkabau, post-partum sex taboos, even peanut vendors. I ask him the broadest deepest questions I can. And good ethnographer that he is Karl tells me he deals on the micro and not the macro level. (He has published a text on yam planting among the Dani!) And after I can hold Karl no longer I dive into Google seeking all I can about him and about his work.
Later that day I’m out in the field again, visiting villages, thinking about which ones Karl visited living here in the sixties with his wife and three young children, seeing more than I saw the first day, eating even stranger foods, holding babies, having real and deep conversations, or so they seem to me. I’m in fucking Sumatra!! Did I say I was having a good time?