Return to Laughter: An Anthropological Novel

315 Pages·1964·17.84 MB·English

by  Elenore Smith Bowen

Return to Laughter
ELENORE SMITH BoWEN is the nom de plume of Laura
Bohannan who was, from 1959 to 196.2, Lecturer in An
thropology at Northwestern University, from 196.2 to 1963,
Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Chicago,
and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Dlinois
since 1965. She spent the better part of the years between
1949 and 1953 working among the Tiv of Northern Nigeria
on grants made jointly to her husband, Paul J. Bohannan,
also an anthropologist, and herself from the Wenner-Gren
Foundation and the Social Science Research Council. She
was a Senior Research Fellow at the East African Institute
for Social Research in Kampala, Uganda, from 1954 to
1956.
Mrs, Bohannan received her B.A. degree in anthropology
and classics and her M.A. degree in German from the Uni
versity of Arizona and her D.Phil. from Oxford University
in 1951. In addition to Return to Laughter, Mrs. Bohannan
has written articles in anthropological journals and has
contributed to a number of books on Africa.
RETURN TO LAUGHTER
BY
ELENORE SMITH BOWEN
ANCHOR BOOKS
A DMSION OF RANDOM HOUSE, INC.
New York
First Anchor Books Edition, 1964
Text copyright © 1954 by Laura Bohannan
Foreword copyright © 1964 by Doubleday
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a
division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in
Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally
published in hardcover in the United States by Harper & Brothers in
1954. The Anchor Books edition is published by arrangement with
Laura Bohannan.
ANcHOR BooKS and colophon are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 64-11739
ISBN 0-385-05312-6
www.anchorbooks.com
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
50 49 48 47 46 45 44 43
To My Mother
Foreword
IN THE SUMMER of 1961 I addressed a group of Peace
Corps volunteers destined to be the first such group in
Nigeria. I discussed certain themes in American culture
in order to help this group of sensitive yet practical college
graduates understand a little less badly the cultural load
they carried as Americans. Five Nigerians took part in
the orientation program, some of whom, although not edu
cated at Oxford, would have been at home in its ambi
ance; and I thought it possible that these volunteers, in
their openness and relative lack of ethnocentrism, might
perhaps take these Nigerians as more representative than
was justified, and hence underestimate the sorts of tribal
suspiciousness, frenzy, and fear of witchcraft they might
encounter. For, unlike earlier emissaries, these students
were not going to Nigeria protected and confined by con
victions of their own cultural superiority, capable of judg
ing other cultures only from the perspective of the Ameri
can Way, and determined to bring others to that standard
if possible. Hence I was glad to find that members of
the group had read Return to Laughter (then out of
print) and I recommended in addition the African novels
of Joyce Cary, to complicate their sense of the land to
which they were going and of the social ambiguities that
might be faced there, especially by the most well-inten
tioned visitor. Peace Corps volunteers, whether teachers or
community development workers, know that they need the
cooperation of those with whom and through whom they
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will be working. I felt they would find it illuminating to
realize, in the fictional account of Return to Laughter, the
ways in which the anthropologist was used as a pawn in
the factional struggles of Chief Kako and his rival Yabo.
The haunting conflicts Laura Bohannan faced between her
sense of professional duty and her commitment to personal
decency and friendship illuminate the near-universal prob
lems of those of us caught, at some time or other-and who
is not?-between his own culture's values and those of an
other.
A good many social scientists are novelists manques,
just as a good many novelists, wedded to a documentary
supposed realism, subordinate both the reader and them
selves to a mass of undifferentiated detail. Return to
Laughter takes the form of a novel; its characters are said
by the author to be composites, its incidents fashioned by
the play of imagination upon her diary and field notes. As
a novel, its spare references to British indirect rule may
locate it in the genre of novels of colonialism. Mrs. Bohan
nan's enterprise, however, focusses less on the West African
tribe among whom she worked and lived (and still less
on the soon-to-depart British) and more on her own emo
tional hegira as a neophyte anthropologist. In this aspect
she reveals some of the human costs, passions, missteps,
frailties, and gaieties which lie behind the often too an
tiseptic reports of social scientists. In a recent article, the
British philosopher, J. W. N. Watkins, argues that only
by bringing the human person back into scientific reports
can specialists in one field share the intellectual adventures
of those in another, and hence truly understand their
hypotheses and forms of thought. He writes:*
Paraphrasing Descartes, we may say that one method
is to take the reader into your confidence by explain
ing to him how you arrived at your discovery; the
other is to bully him into accepting a conclusion by
0 J. W. N. Watkins, "Confession Is Good for Ideas," The Lis
tener, vol. LXIX, April ~963, p. 667, at p. 668.
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parading a series of propositions which he must ac
cept and which lead to it. The first method allows the
reader to re-think your own thoughts in their natural
order. It is an autobiographical style. Writing in this
style, you include, not what you had for breakfast on
the day of the discovery, but any significant considera
tion which helped you arrive at your idea. In particu
lar, you say what your aim was-what problems you
were trying to solve and what you hoped from a solu
tion of them. The other style suppresses all this. It is
didactic and intimidating.
Watkins is talking principally of the natural sciences; what
he says about the investigator's confessional colleagueship
applies with perhaps even greater weight to those fields
where the observer's participation inevitably evokes certain
orders of data and closes off other orders. Yet anthropolo
gists have been moving rapidly away from the tradition
of being somewhat stoical and self-deprecatory aristocrats
{necessarily gifted amateurs and rapporteurs in some areas,
since they were seeking to embrace an entire, often van
ishing culture), and moving toward the tradition of mid
dle-class scientism, entering a tribe to map its kinship
structure or linguistic patterns and to bring back fungible
data for cumulative comparison. In this role, they aim to
be distracted as little as possible by the personalities and
particularities of their tribe, which is no longer •theirs'" in
any case in the older British style of •royal" anthropology,
but shared with their university colleagues, and fragment
ing in the face of Westernization.
Still, anthropology remains a collective endeavor in
methods as well as in data, for all field workers belong to
the club of the initiated and exchange experiences infor
mally, if at times guardedly, although rarely in their pub
lications. But outsiders, including students, cannot share
this in-group understanding, and to that extent science as
a large cooperative process suffers.
In addition, anthropology by its very nature requires
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the cooperation of those being studied, and Return to
Laughter suggests how great is the dependence of the field
worker upon such cooperation. Thus, the opening through
which this cooperation is gained tells much for the later
fate of the venture-something which William F. Whyte
makes candidly clear in his autobiographical appendix
to the second edition of Street Corner Society. Beyond that,
whom one sees first, and is seen with; whose wife gets
sick, and who Uves or dies; where one's own hut or camp
is located; with what sympathy or paranoia one's aims are
interpreted-all such matters are of course largely in the
laps of the gods and witches, and can be guided by the
field worker only in Umited degree. In fact, Return to
Laughter emphasizes again and again the way in which
"her'" tribe corrected Mrs. Bohannan's initial apprehen
sions, at times being more tactful and patient than she
herself, and at other times shouting in the way we are all
tempted to do with those who are only deaf because they
do not know our language.
But it is no less important to see that, as in other
branches of science, mistakes can be creative: they produce
crises, fruitful enmities, and embarrassments, and make
personal relations more dramatic than if one were always
the smooth and poised observer. (In my own judgment,
non-directive interviewing is often less useful than a more
dialectical and argumentative approach, which may un
der certain conditions evoke different levels of feellngs and
behavior than the conciliatory and somewhat passive ap
proach, which also has its uses.)
For Peace Corps volunteers in the field, as well as for
anthropologists, there are hazards as well as opportunities
in isolation. It is a strain to have to be always on guard,
surrounded by curious if friendly people (or in rare in
stances shunned); as Mrs. Bohannan writes:
But above all else, it was only in the privacy of my
hut that I could be my real self. Publlcly, I lived in
the midst of a noisy and alien life. If I wanted con-
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