［ここだけの話06 / Just Between Us06］

Things Felt, Things Perceived

The Metaphysics of Fieldwork

コロム、フランク・J（人類学研究所・非常勤研究員）
Frank J. Korom（Part-Time Research Fellow, Anthropological Institute）

Anthropologists have often discussed the doing of fieldwork as a rite of passage, during which the individual researcher goes through a serious of emotional and psychological "re-wirings" that result in the emergence of a newly constructed person at the end of the research period. Some have gone so far as to describe it as death and rebirth in the bush. Others have even changed their religious affiliation while doing intensive periods of fieldwork, the most famous case being Victor Turner's conversion to Catholicism in 1958. Such extremes test the boundaries of rationality, forcing us to open ourselves up to the possibility of experiences that may not be explained using logic. Sometimes they may remain unexplained indefinitely. In other words, fieldwork, here defined as participant observation, an empathetic quest for neutrality, sometimes transcends rational thinking. In this short essay, which is primarily anecdotal, I will describe several experiences during fieldwork in Sri Lanka that led me to question myself as well as the rational boundaries of my thought. I then reflect on the implications of illogical or irrational reflections while engaged in ethnographic fieldwork.

I am a seasoned researcher who has done ethnographic fieldwork on and off for more than three decades, mostly in South Asia, but also in the Caribbean, North America, and Europe. I have never had a "meltdown" in the field despite such traumatic events as war, natural catastrophes, and divorce. I have always therefore thought of myself as being in control not only of myself but my surroundings as well. Disciples of the Sufi shaykh named Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, better known simply as Guru Bawa (teacher father) or simply Bawa, however, warned me in Philadelphia before leaving the United States for Sri Lanka to do research on their teacher's origins that I might experience things that I have never encountered before, experiences that will remain unexplainable after my return; experiences that had led some others to go insane. I laughed and shrugged my shoulders, thinking to myself, "let's see." Naturally, I didn't take their warnings to heart, but soon after arriving on the island-nation, peculiar things did start happening that forced me to question the nature of reality.

I had arrived in Sri Lanka, a place itself that is surrounded with legend and lore, in 2010, shortly after the prolonged civil war there between government forces and the so-called Tamil Tigers (LTTE) had ended in May 2009. Things were still tense everywhere with the military being omnipresent on virtually every street corner in the cities and along stretches of highway in the countryside. Jaffna, the main city of the Tamil-speaking minority was still an occupied battle zone that required special permission to visit. Mine fields had not yet been cleared, but I felt that I needed to go there to collect data on Guru Bawa, who established his first ashram (religious commune) there before eventually moving to Colombo, then the United States in 1971. Bawa himself was a speaker of Tamil, as are most Muslims in Sri Lanka, yet the people who surrounded Bawa in the 1950s when he first settled in Jaffna were primarily low-caste Hindus and a smattering of Catholic converts came to him to be healed or seek council.

Prior to arriving in Jaffna, I had travelled extensively around the island, visiting places where Bawa is said to have resided during his long and enigmatic career before being "discovered" by cosmopolitan Muslims who began to reform his image into one of a Sufi preacher. Much of what I heard as I moved about from here to there were stories of his miracles, such as communicating with the deceased, curing incurable diseases such as chronic cancer, raising people from the dead, appearing in two places at once, levitating large objects like lorries, and even changing physical bodies in his own lifetime as a technique to achieve longevity by transferring his soul. Indeed, many people believed that he was as old as Noah, even though he is said to have given up food after more than four decades in contemplative isolation, during which he lived in trees and caves. His only form of visible sustenance was smoking cheroots and pipe tobacco, claiming as he did that it was Allah that provided him with the only nourishment he needed. In one location, where a Sufi saint was buried, villagers recounted how Bawa came and realigned thesaint's tomb to face Mecca after engaging in discourse with the corpse lying within. Locals were so frightened by the rumble and sound that they temporarily abandoned the village. After weeks of hearing such spectacular and miraculous stories, I flew on a military supply plane to Jaffna from Colombo, which was a miraculous feat in itself, since the plane was a decrepit Ukranian vessel purchased cheaply by the Sri Lankan army when their war coffers neared depletion.

The façade of Bawa's ashram in Jaffna

The road from the Jaffna airport to the city center was a bumpy ride in a bus with blackened windows so as not to be able to peek outside. It was a long stretch of no man's land. Once alighting, the military presence was felt everywhere, even in the abandoned minarets of mosques and the seventeenth-century Portuguese fort where the military had set up its headquarters, just a short distance from the ashram founded by Bawa. An elderly woman who had stayed there throughout the war years runs the commune, which remained open throughout the conflict after Bawa left for the United States. Despite noticeable bullet holes on the exterior, the actual structure itself survived the war without any major structural damage. This in itself was perceived to be miraculous by Bawa's local devotees.

Life was simple there. Vegetarian meals were communally prepared and served there. I slept on the concrete floor without a mosquito net and awoke every morning to a recorded tape of Bawa muttering zikr (prayers). It is said that Bawa also never slept, but astral travelled throughout time and space continually carrying on the "work of God," such as consoling people at the hour of their death or appearing in a hospital during difficult child labor or even participating in the parting of the Red Sea by Moses. To me it sounded like mumbling or someone talking in sleep, but to the devoted, it was not babble at all; instead, it was sacred sounds and syllables emanating from Bawa's body lying in a state of rest. Around two every morning a scent of jasmine would fill the air, which was taken as a sign of Bawa's presence. To me it smelled like the incense that was burned regularly in the ashram. But one day something happened that forced me to rethink my rationalistic explanations. A crow very distinct in shape, size, and color that I had earlier noticed when I first got of the bus that brought me into town from the airport, was perched above the entrance to the commune. Later, as I was riding a rickshaw over to Mankumban, another sacred site built by Bawa and his devotees before the war on a small island off of the Jaffna coast, I noticed that the crow was flying alongside of my vehicle. It spent the entire day at Mankumban hovering in the palm trees overhead, then followed me home in the evening, as I made my way home in a crowded bus. The next day, I told one of the elderly Hindu gentlemen who assisted with the maintenance of the ashram about this, and he totally caught me off guard by saying that the crow was Bawa. Not believing what I had heard, I asked him again, when he told me a story that went like this: "Once Bawa told me that saints like to come back to earth as crows because they are allowed to eat anything they desire." We both laughed because we knew what a trickster Bawa was in life, but after that incident, things continued to happen that made me wonder if Bawa wasn't there watching over me.

Even after I returned to Colombo after my Jaffna trip, where I resided in the abandoned home of one of Bawa's devotees, unusual things kept happening, like one of Bawa's pictures falling off of the wall at particularly poignant moments. I would have earlier though of these events as coincidental, but every time I tried to rationalize such an event, something else would happen to befuddle me even more. For example, shortly after Bawa's picture had fallen off of the wall for no apparent reason, a mysterious man appeared at the house asking for me. I wasn't home at the time, but the gatekeeper, an old Tamil Hindu who had been living at the house since it was built in the seventies told me that he had never seen the man before and, after inquiring, nobody in the neighborhood had heard of any stranger passing through that day. As if an apparition, the mysterious man never returned, nor did I ever manage to acquire any information about him. Unexplainable events like this continued to happen during my six-month stay. When I returned the following summer for another three-month period of fieldwork, I resided elsewhere that had no connection with Bawa, so the strange occurrences ceased to happen.

Bawa's falling pictures in Colombo

How do I explain such occurrences? Do I simply write them off as coincidental or hallucinatory? Or should I try to read into them something mystical, beyond human interpretation. It could very well be that as I continued to immerse myself deeper and deeper into my research on Bawa, I entered into the enchanted world experienced by children in fairy tales and mystics in meditation, or yet others in dreams. Skeptics would certainly explain my misperceptions in functional terms as responses to cultural alienation, work fatigue, battle trauma, and simply the power of suggestion, as I delved deeper and deeper into the mysteries of Bawa's enigmatic mission on earth.

To his devotees, there was no question that what I had experienced were authentic instances of Bawa's omnipresent powers, but to me, there was still a lingering sense of doubt. During my second trip in 2011, I was staying in a fishing village some hours away from Colombo, where I spent most of my time reading hagiographies about past Sufi saints in South Asia. What occurred to me as I plowed through these miraculous Persian narratives from the Mughal period was that I had experienced the same kinds of phenomena that others had experienced in medieval and early modern times when encountering powerful living saints (zinda pirs). Living saints still abound in South Asia, in fact, I learned that hagiographies were one method of achieving elevated status. A saint would achieve an authoritative position by the performance of miracles such as the ones I had experienced, yet historians are skeptical of accepting such magical or extraordinary stories of enchantment as "historical" because they are irrational from and Enlightenment perspective. Yet, Freud once coined the term kritiklose Beobachtungen (uncritical observations) to refer to those moments of experience that transport us from our logical state of mind to the dream world in which an alternative reality envelops us. Later, and closer to the present, Frits Staal also mentioned in his book Exploring Mysticism (1975) that one could never understand the effects of an LSD trip without ever having tripped. Thus, to achieve some semblance of balance between an insider (emic) and outsider (etic) perspective, one needs to take both into account. One has to, in other words, open up "uncritically" to the experience under investigation to appreciate its vitality, after which one may subject it to more critical scrutiny, but only after having experienced it first hand. Ethnographic description has its limitations, and that is why mystics often rely on via negativa language to describe that which is ineffable. Bawa often refused to answer questions that were off the point precisely because they were irrelevant or that there were no answers. This is why, in the last analysis, cultural anthropology, at least, must have a humanistic side to it, for explanatory models can only take us so far. Because culture is messy, models that favor interpretation over explanation are still necessary, albeit incomplete.

(All photos courtesy of the author)