smiling with the heart

Today in our graduate seminar on methods in cultural anthropology, Dr. Geoff Childs invited KP Kafle, a collaborator from Nepal, who runs the non-profit Nepal Seeds. Together, they have built schools, installed potable water systems, and staffed clinics in the villages where Geoff did (and continues to do) his fieldwork, and they are continuing to work on development projects there to the point that Geoff's research and involvement in community development projects are completely intertwined.

Part of the point of today's class was addressing the question: how do we give back to the communities we work in? Anthropology can be so exploitative--go in, extract your data from the marginalized poor, get out, and live your happy upper-middle class life in the US. Geoff and KP's partnership is a great example that it doesn't have to be that way.

KP is a remarkable individual who works with REI Adventures and leads foreign trekkers through the mountains. Geoff, during his fieldwork, had asked countless groups of trekkers to send some dewormers, at the very least, on their next expeditions, to the rural area where he and the villagers lived. But as Geoff remarked, for every thousand promises in Nepal, only one is fulfilled. KP turned to be that one in a thousand--much to Geoff's surprise, he sent someone on the seven-day hike to the village with one package of dewormers for everyone, and a friendship and partnership blossomed from there.

The development success story is inspiring: someone is actually using anthropology to improve the human condition! But it also stirs up that consuming anger in me, which I need to learn to temper. Why isn't more anthropology like this? Why is our discipline so closed off to the rest of the world? Why don't we disseminate our research findings more widely? Why is our rewards system set up so that we only advance our careers if we publish an article with so much theory and jargon that only 15 other people can comprehend it? Why are we anthropologists "muy buenos para oponer pero no para proponer," in the words of a Guatemalan from the Guatemala Scholars Conference (July 2011)--why are we so good at opposing but not proposing?

I know the answers to these questions...and I posed them all in class today. And I got some mixed reactions. I know not everyone's in anthropology to save the world, and it's silly to think we can as individuals. But getting to talk with KP stirred up the fire of my barefoot and militant idealism and my moral outrage with the discipline. Where is the "primacy of the ethical," as Nancy Scheper-Hughes puts it?

Russell Bernard makes a good point about ethnographic methods: we can be objective and treat our work as a science, but we do not have to be neutral.

KP greeted me with a "Namaskar." It was so nice to be greeted in that way. And then he said something that I'll never forget: There are two kinds of smiles in the world. You can smile with your teeth, or you can smile with your heart.

Transitioning into grad school has been difficult for a variety of reasons, but mostly personal. So I start this blog in the spirit of overcoming whatever first-world problems I have (not to delegitimate them completely), with a newfound love for Arthur Kleinman's work and awe of people like KP, hoping to smile at the world with my heart.