Honors Program, took the 300- and 400-level courses, accomplished her yearlong honors project in ten months, graduated first in her class with a BA.
Then on to her master’s, with its first-year core curriculum and evaluation, its second-year sequence of courses in ethnographic methods and research design, and the completion of a research competency paper.
Then on to her PhD, demonstrating her fluency in Polynesian and, by then, also in Abo, a Bantu language spoken in the Moungo department in southwestern Cameroon, and in Kilivila, spoken on the Trobriand Islands. She passed the general exam, acquired training and experience in teaching at the university level, and finally, nearing the summit of the mountain she’d been climbing all those years, the creation of her own research project, which, like her heroines’, would birth new ways of understanding one tiny world, and, through extrapolation, the great big one.
It did not affect her that her friends, colleagues, and siblings, scholarship completed, had begun making serious salaries, were renting large and lovely apartments, acquiring the trappings of burgeoning achievement, because no matter what they accomplished, their lives were known, while hers would always be of breathtaking mystery, and that was the barometer by which she measured her personal success. The university gave her a stipend for teaching. Her tiny apartment, where she’d been since her junior undergraduate year, had an aura of impermanent student lodging warmed up with walls she frequently repainted in cheery colors, and, doing her part to reduce the rampant waste of fickle people, she filled with discarded furniture that was perfectly usable, stenciling on quaint polka dots and stripes when her brain required a break. It was home with a very small h and all that she needed.
And new in her life then was Valentine Osin, her Russian-Jewish lover, the two of them burning for each other from the first moment they met at the university’s omni-anthropology cocktail party for doctoral candidates. She had never before been so spontaneously attracted to a man, and never to a man who was all heavy beard and worn denim. But there was an intensity between them she had never experienced, and never thought of denying. She’d had bad luck dating nonanthropologists, and that Valentine Osin was a physical anthropologist of the Leakey variety only further increased his mammoth appeal.
That he was Jewish was irrelevant—she didn’t believe in any of it—she was sold, instead, by his accent, trimmed away and smoothed over, but retaining the hint of otherness she preferred, and by his upbringing in a town on the outskirts of a forest, and by their deep conversations, and by their impassioned sex, his swiftness, his directness, the way he could shake her up with the slightest touch, the way he stared at her as if she were a greater achievement than his eventually winning the Charles R. Darwin Lifetime Award. They were equally matched, in restless and driven natures, the desire to live unparalleled lives.
Their insistent love was only six months old when she began thinking about where she would go for her doctoral research. Her heart had pounded and her fingers had trembled when she pulled from the pages of Coming of Age in Samoa, the list she had maintained since the age of thirteen, of tribes who dwelled in untamed places. A precious list she had amended and revised, that grew smudged and torn, that reflected changes in her handwriting, the list from which she would find a people she could call her own for a while, in a place where she would put down temporary roots.
She quickly crossed out the isolated Amazon tribes. Interaction with them, the study of them, was prohibited by non-engagement policies at last put into place, to preserve their isolation and their lands; a safeguarding with the dual purpose of resisting further exploitative encroachments into the rainforest and protecting it for the environmental health of the entire planet.
But there was serious anxiety when she began crossing out contactable tribes already claimed by others.
Then near panic, until she found the name of one virginal tribe she had scribbled in pencil: the Sentineli, a Stone Age tribe on the Andaman Islands, in an archipelago in the Bay of Bengal, between India and Myanmar.
In the anthro library, she found scant research on them, which impelled her hope. All she could learn was that they were an uncontacted people who spoke an unclassified language, who used arrows for hunting, harpoons for fishing, and untipped javelins for shooting at those who dared to encroach. They had been fending off researchers since 1880, and although they weren’t necessarily cannibals, they did often display heads on warning stakes. She imagined herself the first social anthropologist to befriend that protective hunter-gatherer tribe, the first to learn their unclassified language, to capture that language in what would become the seminal Sentineli dictionary.
She wrote up her findings, her intentions, the ethical and methodologically sound research she would perform in the Andaman Islands, but when her adviser, Dr. Jin, saw Sentineli on the cover he said, “I was hoping you wouldn’t alight on them. I don’t need to read anything else. The answer is absolutely not. The tribe has been classified not merely as uncontacted, but as uncontactable and too dangerous. The Indian government would likely refuse you a permit for those reasons. Choose another tribe, in another place.”
She had called Valentine, and he was sympathetic, but the frequent futility of his work, of physical anthropology itself, eliminated his ability to understand that this was the first time she was experiencing such futility. She’d hung up, heartbroken to find herself in the wrong era. In the 1800s and early 1900s, when her heroines were out in the field, dozens of untouched tribes in unexplored locales were up for grabs. But in the hypermodern twenty-first century, with travel to remote places standard and Google mapping uncovering the most distant rock, there was no accessible tribe left whose existence had not already been the subject of cogent boots-on-the-ground participant observation, and somehow she, who missed nothing, had missed this cardinal piece of intelligence.
When she’d worn herself out crying bitterly, she searched her shelves for one of the books written by the lambent creator of modern social anthropology. Published in 1929, the title had a patronizing hegemonic tone that nonetheless encouraged one’s prurient curiosity to see what was inside. Of course, she knew what was inside, but she sat upright on her frayed old couch and read Bronislaw Malinowski’s The Sexual Life of Savages again, first page to last, as the hot pot of coffee by her side cooled to mud.
When she finished, she thought: So she would not be the first explorer on the Trobriand Islands. So she would not be following in any of the footsteps of those women responsible for directing her life path, but rather in the man’s, in Malinowski’s, who had established the imperative of researching a tribe, not from comfortable university library chairs, but out in the field with the people one was studying, engaging in their community, eating their food, taking part in their everyday lives, and she decided that wouldn’t be so bad, not at all. (She wouldn’t have admitted to her staunchly feminist friends that there was something appealing about following a pseudo father figure.) Plus, she already spoke Kilivila.
Malinowski had done all the heavy lifting there, but she would go anyway to those seemingly very happy islands in Melanesia, where sex reigned, and if luck was with her she would add to the knowledge about them her own penetrating and revelatory findings, hopefully as groundbreaking as his.
Which is what she did: two years in the Trobriand Islands, researching every aspect of the Trobrianders’ lives and how those lives had been altered and impacted by the researchers who had come before her. Then fourteen months writing her dissertation, working at the anthro library, eating dinners and having sex with Valentine. Physically, she was in Seattle, but mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and psychically, she remained in Melanesia, carrying with her the Trobrianders’ vibrancy, their lust for life, who she was there, doing the work she relished. And then she had gone topsy-turvy, crashing hard the very afternoon she successfully defended her work. After the kudos, and the back pats, and the champagne toasts with Dr. Jin and the oral-defense examiners, she walked home through campus, seeing the late-summer colors bleeding away, the greens and golds turning pale, then transparent,
