Monday, April 23, 2007

Bayankhongor Nights


Really it's nothing of the sort - not that there aren't nights (see picture above, which preceded a night), but not like the boogie ones. I haven't written my wrap-up on this homestay yet, but it was much improved from the one in Dadal. I mean, I was living in a ger! My family was on the tale end of their winter pasture. (Usually they move 5-6 times per year.) My mother: Mjidorj. My father: Baatar. My brother: Batorgil. My 2-year old relative next door: Sumo! He looks like Davaadorj, one of the two really solid Mongolian sumo wrestlers right now.

Maybe I'll be able to offer some more engaging reflection later, but I've been fairly unreflective lately. That's part of the lack of blog postings, and probably related to some of my hesitations about this here program. Another day, another day. Isn't that a nice silhouette, though? Credit Emily Terrin. We did lots of herding. I am a master with the wooden staff, and I milk goats like, well, not terribly. I'm having trouble getting my photos onto my camera, so I'm relying on others' for now.

I Was Sick in Dadal, Sorry


Therefore I didn't take many pictures. I did have to write an essay afterwards, though, which may in fact stand in for more analysis here. Should I post it? It would be my usual self-aggrandizement taken to a whole new level. I do like whole new levels, though. Okay I'll do it. Fine! You'll notice it's a little heavy-handed in places, a little too afraid to let my "experiential learning" speak for itself without the helping hands of secondary sources. Alas. Our Academic Director didn't notice, though.

The smiling guy at the top is Ganbat, my host-father while I was in Dadal. Dadal is a soum in Hentii aimag, a province in the northeast of Mongolia. Our homestay sites were about 25km from Siberia, but it wasn't unbearably cold. I took the picture at the top of the mountain that sort of towered over the cabin we - Ganbat, Uranchimeg, and I - were living in. At the top, there is an "oboo," which is a place where Mongolians making offerings to "gazariin ezen," land spirits that watch over the natural environment. We scattered some offerings, and we placed more stones on the oboo. You've probably seen pictures - the piles of stones generally arranged in a small pyramid.

Enjoy the reading. Please don't hate me. Also please don't make fun of me. We are a fragile people, we...people.

"Finding and Losing New York in Dadal"

Anthropologists seem to believe that inspiration emanates from strange sources. In a way, one could argue the entire field is oriented around this possibly banal maxim, this belief that significant meaning may lie not in the obvious places⎯the libraries of the world, for example, or newspaper and television sources⎯but in marginal, or marginalized, spaces. How else could Claude Levi-Strauss, the field’s pre-eminent cultural anthropologist, get away with ending his masterwork Tristes Tropiques with his notoriously feline conclusion? “The essence of what (our society) was and continues to be,” he argues, deeply submerged in his famously urgent, lyrical style, may best be located in the consideration of a mineral, the perfume of a flower, “or in the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity and mutual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat” (415). So ends what many believe to be the central work of modern anthropology⎯and so ended, as well, my two weeks of living in Dadal, in the cabin of a talkative Buryad named Ganbat.

Indeed, the only difference between Levi-Strauss’ challenging conclusion and what I would consider the critical experience of my time in Dadal is the animal in question. For me, it was interaction with a lamb that opened up for me a sense of social essence, though whether my newfound grasp was upon this Buryad community or my own New York City is difficult to say. On my last evening living with Ganbat, I joined him outside, as I had done on most nights, for the closure of the day’s outdoor chores: picking up manure, milking the cows, distributing the hay for the animals, watering the horses, and herding the animals to their specified places. As we rode away from the cabin, herding some of the cattle towards a feeding location about a kilometer from Ganbat’s fenced-in space with the cabin, the sun was hung low on the horizon, already a fuchsia ghost of its midday self. The sky was all sherbet hues, the breeze crisp and cold on my face as we trotted the horses behind the cattle. Certainly a place rich in sunsets, I thought to myself as we eventually turned back towards the cabin.

As Ganbat gathered my saddle to bring it indoors, his wife, Uranchimeg, who had been milking cows, pointed to the lamb we had been keeping inside the cabin⎯its mother had been refusing to nurse, so Uranchimeg had taken to feeding it from a bottle. I picked it up⎯it, like all of our family’s animals except for one dog, lacked any particular name⎯as my host-mother and father headed inside. For a moment, a moment that for all I know could have lasted quite a long time, I held the lamb as I kneeled on the grassy dirt of Ganbat’s yard. My grainy leather gloves acted the coarse movement of my hands over the lamb’s curly white coat. Even through my quite weathered gloves, softened by ski lifts and hardened by duct tape, I could feel the warmth of the lamb’s barely rounded underside, the knobby spine of its only lightly padded back. Slowly I moved my left hand to the lamb’s face, gently turning it towards my own as I squinted into the sunset rays coming low and piercing over the ridge in the distance. Unlike Levi-Strauss’ visual communion with his cat, though, the glance I shared with the lamb was brief, its eyes quickly averted like those of a nervous child. I stood up, hoisting the lamb in my arms as we faced the last glow of sunset. The lamb, poor and small in its cradle against my chest, was quiet as I made my⎯our⎯way inside Ganbat’s cabin.

As had happened several times already over the course of my stay with Ganbat, the evening light sent rushing a flood of reflection, a chorus of arias singing the wandering thoughts of days spent in immersion. Again, Levi-Strauss is here before me. “And so,” he writes, “it is when…(the sun’s) disc outlines mountain summits like a hard, jagged leaf, that man is eminently able to receive, in a short-lived daydream, the revelation of the opaque forces, the mists and flashing lights that throughout the day he has dimly felt to be at war within himself” (63). The war within me, the mild conflict that surfaced in the lamb’s dark, swirling eyes, had something to do with distance⎯the literal and spatial distance between Dadal and my now-native Manhattan, and the more symbolic, narrative distance between the two apparent extremes, one rural and one urban. One particular image asserted itself against the eyes of the lamb: that of the Statue of Liberty, that great marvel of mossy green that keeps watch, torch aloft, over New York’s harbor.

It is just such an image, in fact⎯and it is very much an image⎯that graces the back cover of a book I gave to Ganbat’s family, a collection of tourist-oriented photographs telling a visual story of New York City. I’d purchased it in Times Square, and now it rested on the cabinet of a Mongolian herder. The focal point of the photo of “Lady Liberty” seems to be her eyes, which like the rest of the statue are set in what appears to be a severe granite, unfeeling and cold to the touch, the huge sculpture cast in a way that harmonizes with its eyes, to which the French sculptor neglected to apply any detail: majesty without empathy, grandeur without feeling. Like the Balinese cockfight for Geertz, the photobook I gave Ganbat depicts a story people tell themselves about themselves: this picture of American liberty, however, is only surface-deep (448). Unlike the lamb, alive, warm, and responsive to my touch, the Statue of Liberty exists behind an antiseptic, even impenetrable, veil of myth. This treasure of American mythopoeic consciousness lives not in our hands but on glossy pages, framed by photographers and guarded by price tags.

So it is that I found the central truth of my time with Ganbat less in structured instances of data collection, valuable as those moments were, and more in the strange comparison of two sets of eyes⎯the one animal, the other carved. New York City, concrete jungle that it is, began to seem, for me, a landscape no less strange than that of the Mongolian steppe, a place with stories⎯told by us, about ourselves⎯no less fantastic than the Buryad creation myth. Therein lies, perhaps, one of the great values of interaction across boundaries: the ability to regard both sides as unfamiliar. How else to achieve the critical insight necessary for an ethical life? In a passage often cited by the literary scholar Erich Auerbach, the twelfth-century Saxon monk St. Victor of Hugo extols this sense of deterritorialization. “The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner,” the monk writes. “He to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land” (Said 185). This preparedness to regard all things as foreign is a huge part of what I now carry with me from my stay in Dadal.

That the seed of this epiphany lies in Levi-Strauss is no unhappy coincidence, his work having deeply informed my own understanding of the anthropological project. Nevertheless, the role of literature in conducting fieldwork, anthropological though that literature may be, would appear to be a minor one, one that logic suggests I should consign to a lesser role upon my own increasing comfort with field research. If, as Levi-Strauss suggests, social science properly takes place in the hinterland of experience⎯with the diamond, the flower, and the cat marking his beautifully weird landscape⎯then the refuge of the printed word becomes instructive more at some later point. For now, though, it seems crucial to acknowledge the extent to which Tristes Tropiques, as truly affective works are wont to do, plays the lens in analysis. Recollection, after all, necessarily requires mediation: the present leaves no moment past untainted by a sentimental film. On that last night of my stay with Ganbat, then, as the stream of reflection flowed towards me beneath the softening fluorescence of sunset, I did nothing to refuse the wave of memory⎯the memory that suggested, in fact, that I had found, and lost, New York in Dadal⎯and the conflicting images it stirred up. I gave way, I gave in, and I surrendered, unwittingly proving yet another of Levi-Strauss’ truths: “Remembering is one of man’s great pleasures…Memory is life itself, but of a different quality” (63).

(Works Cited)
Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. Basic Books: New York, 2000.
Levi-Strauss, Claude. Tristes Tropiques. Penguin Books: New York, 1992.
Said, Edward. Reflections on Exile. Harvard University Press: United States of America, 2000.

Right, Blogging


I knew I was supposed to be doing something this past month and a half. For all of you out there starved - and I mean starved - for new material, feast your beady eyes on the photo above, credit Angela Eastman. Here at SIT Mongolia, we believe in perpetuating stereotypes, and the foreigner's love for the prayer flags does not remain unexamined.

The picture was taken on a ridge just beyond the city's edge. That's UB down below. No other city in Mongolia comes vaguely close in terms of any statistical indicators - size, population, etc. Almost half of Mongolia's entire population, in fact, lives in UB. More thoughts soon to follow, I swear.

Thursday, March 08, 2007

In Mongolia: Reflections on Early Days

It is true: I am in Mongolia. I arrived on February 25 after a day-long delay in Beijing. Currently we of the SIT program are in Mongolia's capital, Ulaanbaatar, living in a student hostel of the University of the Humanities. When we're lucky, we have hot water. I've taken two warm and one cold shower since arriving. We've been going through various sorts of orientation exercises - like a drop-off at the black market and a meeting with the US Ambassador - and beginning our first unit: Politics, Economics, and Social Change. This thematic unit has basically meant lectures from civil society and government figures; and we've supplemented all of this with language training in Mongolian. (They claim it is the secondest hardest language to learn in the world. So far I'm inclined to agree.)

On Saturday, we embark on a two-day journey to Dadal, in Hentii aimag, or province. There, we'll spend two weeks in a homestay with Buryad families, "Buryad" being a phrase that (possibly) comes from the Old Mongolian for "People of the Forest." They reside in log cabins, though they're still considered nomadic, as they have different camps through which they rotate throughout the year. It is a wooded region, so I've been told. This is the birthing season (cows), so we'll be assisting in tasks related thereto.

Thus, a location-focused schedule:

2/25 - 3/9: Ulaanbaatar
3/10 - 3/23: Buryad homestay
3/24 - 4/6: Ulaanbaatar
4/7 - 4/21: Homestays in Bayankhongor and Kharkhorin
4/22 - 5/7: Ulaanbaatar
5/8 - 6/8: ISP Period, location TBD

Something to keep in mind is that travel here is generally a two day affair. As our Academic Director likes to say, with a big smile, "Our roads are a little different here." So it's not exactly 3/9 in UB and 3/10 in Dalad; it's more like 3/10-3/11 are spent en route to Dalad. Internet will most likely be available only in UB. Academically, we're moving through four thematic units in preparation for our ISP, or Independent Study Project: Politics, Economics, and Social Change; Religion; Environment; and Nomadic Arts and Culture. I'll be helping lead discussion for Religion and Nomadic Arts and Culture. The ISP topic is of our own choosing, so I'm thinking about working through some (as yet undetermined) anthropological criticism of development discourse, exploring the interaction between Mongolia's transition to an open market economy and the parallel resurgence of Buddhism, or examining notions of "the beyond" in Mongolia's current transition period. Of course, this could all change. A Field Study Seminar and language training also take place through and within these discussions.

Otherwise, it's mostly been quite a pleasure to settle into this city, which I dare say is a fascinating place to be right now. Highlights? The black market is a really compelling reflection of the excess of the market transition in Mongolia. It's been great making a few trips there, despite getting the 8-person sandwich treatment for pick-pocketing. (They got nothing, suckers. No bag, and nothing in the pockets! Ha!) The one disco outing we've had so far - with our second to follow tonight - was incredibly fun. Dancing from 11pm till 4 in the morning. Dylan, from our program, got (extremely close to) naked for a competition at a disco we didn't know is known as a popular spot for gay Mongolians. Dylan is large, burly, and from New Hampshire. The next morning, our plan to hike a ridge south of the city at 6 am didn't quite happen. But we made it up there by about 2 pm. There are some really breathtaking mountains that ring the city, and being up within them definitely gives you the impression of being very much outside of the city. The elevation of the city is about 5,000 ft., and the mountains rise another solid 1500-2000 ft. or so. The windblown ridges, the prayer flags strung up everywhere, the wooded slopes and rocky promontories - it was like something out of an adventure magazine story about trekking in Central Asia. Below, the city looked like a lake that had collected in the valley, spread out to fill the contours of every piece of undulating land down there.

In the mornings, in these early days, we either walk or take a city bus down Peace Avenue to the SIT building. Looking down, one notices the sidewalk is fairly discontinuous, shot through with cracks, dirt, and grassy patches. Looking ahead, one sees the dour Soviet architecture cliffing the sides of the street with all of the severity of the glare of a former occupying nation. And when one looks up, one sees the mountains surrounding the city, the same "bones of the earth" - as Angela, from our program, put it - that Chinggis Khan once crossed (and recrossed) in uniting Mongolia's disparate tribes and conquering all of the then-known world. For Mongolia, it seems hard not to see - from the perspective of this newly arrived student, at least - the greatest time as past, the present time as broken, and the future as everything that uncertain can be.

Anubha made the point that my description of UB sounds like Pamuk's image of Istanbul, one in which Turkey's once-great capital is now permeated by a kind of melancholy, rooted most obviously, perhaps, in the fall of the Ottoman. And this seems, to me, a compelling comparison - with the caveat, of course, that the fall of the Mongol Empire took place much longer ago than did the collapse of the Ottoman. In that sense, time has either rooted a deeper melancholic streak in the experience of Mongolians, or time has washed over crumbling dominion with the self-reliant individualism of an insistently pasteural way of life. I, unfortunately, cannot say.

But I turn, as is my wont, to Levi-Strauss:

"If men have always been concerned with only one task - how to create a society fit to live in - the forces which inspired our distant ancestors are also present in us. Nothing is settled; everything can still be altered. What was done, but turned out wrong, can be done again. 'The Golden Age, which blind superstition had placed behind [or ahead of] us, is IN US."

(Levi-Strauss quotes from Rousseau, here, and the emphasis is his own.)

I'm having trouble with the internet connection, so I will wait to post pictures. Please forgive me! I do have some good ones to post. But for now, I'm checking out, most likely not to be able to check in again until the end of this month.

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Blinking In Red China

After leaving Bangkok on February 23, I stayed for two short nights - a very, very brief stay, even a mere blink - in Beijing. During my one full day, I took a walk from the hostel to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. My prognosis? Good: old palatial complexes. Bad: Starbucks inside the Forbidden City. Ugly: Mao's face, still over the gate to Tiananmen. Otherwise, I would withold much judgement for the brevity of my stay. What I must wonder, though, is how much the sweet Chinese people I met know about what's going on in Tibet. I'm trying to upload pictures, but I'm not being too successful right now.

The Spring Semester Reading List

Due to popular demand - thank you Sara Vogel, of course - I offer my spring semester reading list. I'm not in my room right now, but I think I'm only missing one or two books. Check it check it.

Andre Aciman, ed.: "Letters of Transit"
Andre Aciman: "Out of Egypt"
T. Adorno: "The Culture Industry"
K.A. Appiah: "Cosmopolitanism"
Siddhartha Deb: "An Outline of the Republic"
J. Derrida: "Writing and Difference"
G. Flaubert: "Madame Bovary"
Ha Jin: "Waiting"
J. Kerouac: "On the Road"
M. Kohn: "Last Lama of the Gobi"
E. Larkin: "Finding George Orwell in Burma"
Ma Ma Lay: "Not Out of Hate"
C. Levi-Strauss: "Tristes Tropiques"
G. G. Marquez: "Love in the Time of Cholera"
V. Nabokov: "Lolita"
V.S. Naipaul: "Guerrillas"
G. Orwell: "Burmese Days"
E. Said: "Orientalism"
E. Said: "Reflections on Exile"
Pramoedya Toer: "Child Of All Nations"

'Tis a long list; this much I know. Much of it is sort of catch up, as you might notice. And some of it I really have already read, like Kerouac and Levi-Strauss. Furthermore, Deb, Jin, Appiah, and Ma Lay I've finished already on this trip. I know there's at least one more book, but I can't remember it right now.

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Thursday, February 22, 2007

The Football, The Monastery, and The Ugly



After a twelve-hour train ride from Chiang Mai to Bangkok last night, I find I'm not particularly thrilled to be back in this steamed-out metropolis. I seriously feel sort of like a dumpling here, you know? Maybe not. Shrivelled, damp, claustrophobic - these are the things I'm trying to communicate. At least my room for this one night is nice, though. It actually has a window to "the outside" rather than just a hallway. That's some serious ritziness for the Khao San area. Tomorrow morning, I'll be headed to Beijing, and then from there on to Mongolia! Mongolia by Sunday. It could be a movie title.

Speaking of movie titles, the attentive reader - attentive enough to realize the obvious, at least - will notice the title I used for this post. Think of it as narrating the photos I'm posting, and then "The Ugly" just had to go in for good measure.

As for The Football, one of the Thai youth national teams - say, under-21 maybe - played an exhibition match against a really strong South Korean club at a stadium in Mae Sot. That's right: a) Mae Sot has a stadium (a sandy one) and b) two well-regarded football teams would visit it. I was surprised, too. The whole town turned out, it seemed. The sidelines were packed. I spent most of the match craning my neck over the bald head of one of the Burmese guys I worked with last summer. For the shoot-out, the result of a 0-0 tie, the whole crowd lined around the 18-yard box. It was sort of the populist thing where it's like "the people's game," where every neighborhood kid comes out to see what's up with the show in town. After the game, everyone swarmed the Korean team (which lost in the shoot-out) for pictures and handshakes, though none of that could happen until after the Korean team's prayer circle had ended - a good compliment to their coordinated dance routine during half-time set to a song "Celebrate Jesus." Turns out their club is called "Hallejulah," and their jerseys say "God Loves You." There were a few hippy-ish white missionaries (I'm assuming) who came in on their bus. Weird stuff.



Then for The Monastery, it's Doi Suthep. It's on a mountain outside of Chiang Mai, and it's definitely super scenic, beautiful, etc. But of course it was choked with tourists. After snapping the obligatory photos, I retreated to a bench down the hill a bit and finished a novel - "Waiting," by Ha Jin - while doing some journal writing. All I could here down there was birds chirping, water running (a brook? no, a water spigot, but still), and monks' robes swishing past every so often.



Which reminds me! I've been meaning to post my reading list for this semester, i.e. the books I brought with me. My list from last summer provoked some of the more interesting comments, so I want to throw them out there again. Along those lines, I just figured out why none of your comments showed up last summer. Because I have to "moderate" them! Somehow that option never made itself known to me; they just disappeared. Until now, that is, when the system was kind enough to let me know I should publish the 24 comments that had been lurking mysteriously. I'm psyched to read them.



Back to the peaceful, windowed room. Ah. The Forbidden City awaits, then a quite forbidding land thereafter.

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Friday, February 16, 2007

Applications, Acronyms, and Appearances



Tomorrow morning I leave Mae Sot to head up to Chiang Mai, where I'll be meeting with some professor-types. Hopefully I'll also see this sweet monastery on a mountain outside the town - Doi Suthep. I'll be sorry to leave Mae Sot, of course, but so it is.

This past week here in Mae Sot has been, well, something (probably) - but I'm finding it hard to characterize. I've kind of been racing to meet the deadline for my first grant application, so much of my time has been spent here in this internet cafe downloading forms and writing short little snippets about "Career Objectives" and "Personal and Academic Interests." (Carol Gluck is writing me a recommendation for the Weatherhead grant, which made me ridiculously happy.) Outside of grant applications, I've also been meeting up with a lot of the people I knew from last summer. I had dinner at a Japanese style barbecue place the other night, where I finally got to say hi to all of my students I taught. Getting to hang with them for a little, even if it was super brief, was incredibly meaningful for me. The whole "Please don't forget us" issue has weighed really heavily on my mind, so I hope I was able to communicate to them that indeed I had not forgotten them.

One of the other main things I've been up to is meeting with the different youth-focused CBO's in town: the KYO, AASYC, SYCB, PYNG, KSNG, etc. In Chiang Mai I'll meet more: the NYF, the PYO. (I'm too lazy to write out the acronyms, sorry.) I'm gathering their input for a project I'm working on through Young People For - that is, I'm trying (perhaps unrealistically) to build an international network of students doing Burma activism. I've been stumbling over its name. Perhaps the International Burma Solidarity Network? The International Burma Student Network? Also I was overhauling my resume yesterday, and I couldn't figure out what my title should be. Currently I'm Secretary General. (I kid.)

Anyway, I'm always sort of amazed by the tenor of Mae Sot, all of the latent currents of meaning flowing through this town. What am I talking about, you ask. And rightly so. I'm not entirely sure, but this town really does seem like a hall of mirrors sometimes, a place of appearances, a place of masks. On the one hand, small Pad Thai stalls serve *unbelievable* food for next to nothing. The fruit stands are overflowing with abundance, and the sunsets make wonderfully spiky silhouettes of the palm trees. In the early morning mists, novice monks in saffron robes weave through town with begging bowls in their hands. And in the night, the stars shine down on Chang-fueled conversations about Nietzsche and morality. And then there's that other hand, the one with human rights violations - nay, crises - scribbled all over it. And then just outside the Pad Thai stall you see the Burmese migrant worker begging, and you realize that the monks in Burma are monks because monasteries are the only places of learning the regime hasn't crushed. And then maybe one of those huge NGO trucks rolls by, maybe IRC, ZOA, MSF, or even UNHCR. Maybe the noise of it breaks the illusions.


The balance is a tenuous one, between the masks and the maimed, if you will. There are all these trucks in town, delivery trucks I guess. The trucks aren't all that big, but they're stacked super high, like so high I'm always wondering if they get clotheslined by either of the two traffic lights in town. And then on top of the boxes stacked so high, way higher than the cab of the truck even, there are always a few people perched, swaying wildly - to my perspective, at least - as the truck rounds a corner or swerves away from a motorbike. That's the balance I'm talking about. That's my Mae Sot: a place where chaos is avoided only by the laws of an invisible physics. The latent meaning remains latent.


Anyway, it's been a good little stay here. I'm actually kind of looking forward to putting on my headphones tomorrow - I've been listening to The Good, the Bad, and the Queen quite a bit - and watching some Thai countryside fly by. I'm staying with friends of friends in Chiang Mai. Hopefully they'll be good people.

Enjoy the pictures.

Saturday, February 10, 2007

Reflecting on the Clock

In "Tristes Tropiques," Levi-Strauss has a phenomenal chapter about the nature of travelling. Unfortunately I don't have the book in front of me right now, but what calls it to mind for me - and it is very often called to mind for me - is that I'm sitting in a very Starbucks-like internet cafe right in Mae Sot. Why does this cafe exist? Is it "a good thing"? Why does such a large part of me dislike it? (If I dislike it, why am I here?)

Even in the six months that I've been gone, Mae Sot has grown considerably. This cafe is evidence of this, as is this *huge* grocery store towards the north end of town called Tesco. It's not exactly Wal-Mart, but it certainly smacks of A&P, or some other such large supermarket. I don't like it.

But what of this dislike? Levi-Strauss encounters a similar issue in his travels in Brazil - that is, he, too, has unsettling "run-ins with modernity" (my phrase, not his) that make him long for some time past, a time in which a "purer" existence could have been experienced. But he is wiser than I. What he argues is that had he arrived earlier, he would have experienced the same wish, the wish to have seen the society at hand another 200 or 300 years earlier. For every present, there is a purer past. It is impossible to find the right moment, in that sense. And what's more, he says - and here he is very much in his role as a fairly scientific anthropologist - that arriving earlier would mean forgoing data sets and lines of inquiry that are available to him now.

The clock, then, is an elusive thing. It can always be turned back. One can always turn it back further, and once one steps out of the time machine in that earlier present, one is still looking for an earlier present. And so it is with me. Had I arrived in Mae Sot in the early 1990s, I would have decried the state of the town as beset by damaging business interests even then - and I would have longed for the 1980s. The lesson, it seems, is to recognize oneself - not without a tinge of sadness, but not, also, without an amount of redemption - as endlessly, hopelessly contemporary, despite all wishes for the crystalline past. As Levi-Strauss says, "Yet I exist." (That is a sentence I can quote without the book in front of me.)

I haven't loaded any new pictures onto my machine yet, so I'll try to get some of those up soon. For now, I hope my sketched out - and sketchy - thoughts may be something more than rambling.

Monday, February 05, 2007

The Road Back to Mae Sot is Nice, Too


On Wednesday, I hoist a very full pack upon my back, send a wave and a smile over my shoulder and poof - I am once again in transit. I am slowly getting in what would seem to be the appropriate frame of mind for my upcoming journey, a frame of mind somewhere between constant daydreaming ("Yes, I'll take two mangos, please.") and constant clinging (to friends and family at home, that is). I will also finally begin checking out the blogs - namely Casey's and Arielle's - of my fellow wanderers.

And a wanderer is what I will be. Hopeful itinerary, forthwith:

2/7 - 2/23: Thailand (Bangkok, Mae Sot, and Chiang Mai)
2/23 - 2/25: Beijing
2/25 - 6/8: Mongolia (Ulaanbaatar and other aimags)*
6/8 - 8/6: Thailand (Mae Sot, primarily)

The picture is from Angkor Wat. I took it - and many others, truth be told - at sunrise. Think symbolism. Setting out. Levi-Strauss, anyone?

* "Aimag" apparently is the Mongolian equivalent of "province," or state - you know. We'll be traveling around Mongolia a fair amount.

Thursday, July 27, 2006

The Road Away From Mae Sot Is Beautiful



I leave Mae Sot on the nightbus tonight: Bangkok, Ko Chang, Angkor Wat, and then back to Bangkok for the flight home. I will miss this town.