were not as capable as other workers available, but our action was supported by the gratitude of the entire village.
Third, we looked after the minor injuries of the surrounding populace with iodine, bandages, aspirin, and antibiotics and often sent serious cases to the doctors in Shatra at our own expense. When traveling to villages for ethnographic research, I always took a first-aid kit and was usually able to offer some assistance that helped establish my credentials as a person interested in other human beings. There was a certain danger in this, of course, for it was always possible that I would be blamed for the death of someone I had treated. Fortunately that never happened to me. Particularly poignant is the memory of the parents of a young boy who died when his skull was crushed in a fall. Every year they would bring me vegetables from their small garden as a thank you for “having cared enough to try and help.”
Finally, I did not expect craftsmen to spend their time and energy for nothing.* If they allowed me to watch the manufacture of an object they were making for a third party, I often ordered and paid for something similar after the session was over. If they were just making the object to demonstrate the procedures of manufacture to satisfy my curiosity, I inevitably bought the object outright. I could not bring myself to take advantage of their willingness to help me, especially in the early days of economic deprivation. This practice of paying fair market value had another advantage: it eliminated the frequent shortcuts taken in procedure and explanations when a project was not compensated.
The local people came to know me socially as the only outsider who frequently visited their villages, and they accepted me as a person as interested as they were in the problems they encountered in converting the resources of the area into a living for their families. My enthusiasm for the ethnoarchaeological project and my joy in discovering the smallest details of their everyday lives was apparent to them and in a sense flattering. They seemed to take pleasure in teaching me what they could—not, as I was to discover later, because they were concerned with my scholarly research, but because they assumed I was applying what I learned to improve my life and that of my family in rural America. Having seen a photograph of my house, which is alongside a creek, they concluded that my interest in refurbishing boats was in order that I might better repair my own boat that carried me by canal from my home to Brooklyn College. My curiosity about the details of spinning and weaving, they thought, was motivated by my desire to teach my mother and sister this necessary craft.
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