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Payson Sheets offers this recap of his summer fieldwork:

Chris Dixon [Co-PI] and I received a NSF grant for research at Cerén, El Salvador, but the mass murders there make it impossible to return. I spent July and early August with Chris, Rachel Egan, and Tom Sever (NASA, then U AL Huntsville) in the area of Arenal Volcano in Costa Rica. We were greeted by an earthquake and then a volcanic eruption, perfect welcoming’s. We were successful in the objective of finding and confirming an ancient footpath dating to c. 700-1200 AD, but going in a puzzling direction. We followed it out and discovered a new trail network connecting springs. There are ethnographic indications of natives believing that springs symbolize the origins of life: human, animal, and vegetative. This is Chris’ topic. Then we dug deeper and found an occupied paleosol hundreds of years earlier. Then we dug deeper (2.5m) and found another paleosol with fire-cracked rock from boiling water, charcoal, and then found the floor of an ancient house, perhaps 3000 years old. The four postholes indicate it is 5-6m in diameter. We will excavate it next year.

Report of an important discovery:

This summer an interdisciplinary team of specialists (James Cordova, Michelle Goman, Mary Pye),��under the umbrella of ��ƷSM����ӰƬ, recorded and explored a group of��unreported caves in the upper basin of the Balsas River, Guerrero, Mexico. Most of them��demonstrate an extraordinary history of��human occupation. We will be presenting our results��in the��near future��in different venues, but in the meantime, I would like to call your attention to one of these caves.

The Cave of the Governors of Techan, a shallow cave that was carved to create a monolithic sanctuary��with four were-jaguars in high relief��displaying��Olmec style iconography (circa 1000-600 B.C.). This is the first cave with Olmec style monumental sculpture located in��Guerrero, the cradle of the earliest maize in the American continent.����

A brief note was published by a :

I include a preliminary artistic depiction…[below] --Gerardo Gutiérrez

Dear All:

Eric and I had a good day – really, really hot, but “no problem”!�� Attached are a few pictures.

I depart from Delhi in just a few hours, so this will be my final fieldwork communiqué.

After two cool days in Coorg, Nilam and I descended to the steamy coastal city of Mangalore, in western Karnataka, a place celebrated in Amitav Ghosh’s novel “In an Antique Land.” ��It doesn’t quite have the same antique charm these days. ��There wasn’t enough time to tackle a real ethnographic encounter with the local matrilineal Bants, but we had an interesting tour of the city with a contact who is a patrilineal Beary. ��We also saw a famous Jain temple in Mudubidri, about 40 km north of town and a famous Sufi saint’s dargah at Ullal about 10 km to the south.

Determined to experience a journey on the Indian Railways, we booked two berths in a 6-berth AC compartment on the West Coast Express from Mangalore to Chennai. It left Mangalore at 10:30 PM and reached Chennai Central at 2:30 PM the following day: 16 hours in close quarters with the family of a professional cricket umpire returning from a Hindu pilgrimage to the goddess Mukkambikkai. When it was running, the AC made a huge racket, and the windows were so dirty that we saw none of the scenery. To cap it off, we had a big argument over prices with the railway porters and the taxi driver in Chennai.

Upon arrival, we discovered it was the beginning of a 4-day holiday in Chennai, so several of the bookstores we had planned to visit (eg. Higginbothams) were closed, and MIDS was utterly deserted. Chennai was also significantly hotter (97 F) and more humid than when we were last there in February. ��Despite all this, we met a number of our previous Chennai contacts including Kombai S. Anwar, the Tamil Muslim documentary filmmaker. I was invited to join a Tamil Muslim discussion group on the topic of “Sufism vs Wahhabism” and I gave a powerpoint presentation on my fieldwork in Tamilnadu and Kerala at MIDS before flying to Delhi. ��Nilam, meanwhile, had a long shopping list of items to procure and bring back to Colombo, a number of which were only available at a special folk-medicine dispensary in Adyar.

Here in Delhi, I gave a powerpoint talk at the Indian International Centre on the problems of Muslim identity in contemporary Sri Lanka. ��I also met the president of the newly-founded South Asian University, Dr. Kavita Sharma, and I spent a delightful evening at the home of Dr. Charu Gupta, a well-published Indian historian. Today, Friday, I finally made it to Khan Market and Janpath for some gift shopping, followed by lunch at the Imperial Hotel. ��I took the new Delhi Metro subway system and found it to be smooth, quiet, and cheap. ��It was also crowded, but that means it is working as planned.

I’ll conclude with some photos from this last phase of my fieldwork in India.

Dennis

Dear All,

This message comes to you from Madikeri (British: Mercara), Coorg, at a blessedly cool elevation in the western ghats. It’s where the south Indian coffee beans are grown, and where many generals in the Indian Army were born.�� At our home-stay bungalow there are large slugs crawling on the bathroom walls, but the cook from Darjeeling serves us wonderful steamed momos. This widespread labor migration from NE India to the deep south is something I had not expected to see.�� They are running direct trains now from Assam to Kerala (4 days travel time).

Nilam and I flew from Colombo to Trivandrum on March 15, where we stayed three days at the Centre for Development Studies guesthouse.�� It was an opportunity to meet some CDS faculty as well as do a little extra fieldwork among the matrilocal Catholic fishermen along the coast.�� I also wanted to see the famous Padmanabhaswamy temple of the Travancore kings, which – it was discovered recently – has a subterranean treasure chamber containing 200 years of royal payola to the deity worth an astonishing amount.�� There are now guards at the temple carrying AK47s.

We arranged a car & driver in Trivandrum and headed directly north all the way to Calicut, which is where the Muslim matrilocal marriage belt begins. Our party was joined by a Malayali grad student, and the three of us worked as a team for about 10 days. ��We’ve been staying in whatever Indian hotels we can find, and each seems to have some unique problem. In Tellicherry they started chiseling the concrete floor above our room with sledgehammers, so we checked out the next day.

For those of you utterly captivated by kinship, the Muslim households in coastal towns like Calicut, Tellicherry, and Kannur are organized in multi-family houses, with each daughter and son-in-law receiving their own marital bedroom. As families expand, additional rooms are added: I visited one old house with 16 bedrooms. Ownership of these rooms is passed from mother to daughter, and diverging branches of the matrilineal family are often present under the same roof on different floors & down different corridors. ��Nowadays, however, many of these huge houses are falling into disrepair, and many bedrooms are vacant because the couples are living elsewhere (e.g. Dubai, Australia). Nevertheless, some of the houses are quite grand, and there are efforts to preserve them as architectural heritage.

My fieldwork in north Kerala has focused on the Muslims, who are currently the only community following a clear matrilocal marriage rule. Unlike in Sri Lanka, where the Muslims are generally egalitarian, I’ve found some very clear social stratification in north Malabar, including the Koya elite in Calicut, the hereditary matrilineal Keyis in Tellicherry, and the Arakkal royal family in Kannur.

For diversion in Kannur, the three of us went to see a current Malayali hit movie: “100 Days of Love.”�� With the male ticket queue extending into the street, I learned how to chat up women in the female queue to persuade them to buy tickets for us.

My application to visit Androth Island (Lakshadweep) was ultimately denied, which has given me a little extra time to visit Coorg and catch up on writing my field notes.�� I’ll release the car & driver Tuesday in Mangalore, and take a night train back to Chennai with Nilam.

I’m attaching some photos taken over the past two weeks.�� I’ll send them in two emails in order to minimize upload/download problems with the photos: look for Coorg report 1 and Coorg report 2.

Warm regards to everyone,

Dennis

Dear Family & friends,

Phase I of my project is nearing completion. On Thursday Nilam and I drove from Nagercoil TN to Thiruvananthapuram (a.k.a. Trivandrum) in Kerala, stopping to see the historic (14th-18th century) palace of the Travancore Rajas at Padmanabhapuram.

The past two weeks have required energetic fieldwork, but I have to say the results are surprisingly good. ��Just about every local “contact” we have chased has generated solid case studies of matrilocal marriage patterns, first with the coastal Marakkayar Muslims in Karaikkal and Kayalpattanam, then with the inland Hindu Nangudi Velalars and Kottai Velalars in Tutukkudi and Srivaikundam. The latter two castes are known mainly from the colonial gazetteers of Tirunelveli and a couple of articles by Louis Dumont. In each of the coastal Muslim settlements (Karaikkal, Nagoor, Kilakkarai, and Kayalpattanam) Nilam and I have managed to find local people who have taken us into their (matrilocal) homes and given me permission to take photos that would not be allowed in “public.” Inevitably, we are shepherded around by men, not women, and it has been hard to talk with women without men listening and interrupting, but still we’ve heard quite a bit of peripheral commentary from women. ��In the Hindu and Christian houses, women have sometimes been our main interlocutors.

My introductory patter in Tamil has gotten more polished, and I have also been trying to speed-read Tamil billboards as we pass them on the road. In this case, traffic jams have tended to improve my literacy. ��One nice thing has been my ability to email photos to the people we have spoken with. ��There is someone with a smartphone in just about every Indian village these days.

Our arrival in Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of Kerala state, means that all of my enhanced Tamil linguistics will be of little use when I start traveling north from here on March 16. ��Tamil and Malayalam (the state language) are similar but only partially mutually ntelligible, so I will be communicating in English and a mash-up of three languages. ��Nilam, however, is surprisingly good at communicating in mixed Tamil and Malayalam.

Nilam and I both feel the need to take a break from the fieldwork. ��We fly to Colombo on Sunday morning, where I look forward to washing my clothes and spending some quiet time writing on my computer. ��We’ll drive his family car across the island to the east coast on Friday the 6th for about 4-5 days of focused fieldwork, then back to Colombo to prepare for Phase II in India. ��I still have not heard whether the Indian Govt will give me permission to visit Androth Island in the Lakshadweep archipelago (a restricted travel area).

Over the past 10 days my rhinovirus has moved south in synchrony with the road map: sniffles in Pondicherry, runny nose in Ramanathanpuram, cough in Kayalpattanam, sore throat in Nagercoil. ��I am hoping there won’t be any trouble further “south” for me in Colombo. ��I am staying hydrated with Kingfisher lager whereever the religious authorities permit it to be sold.

D

Nagoor home tour, February 16, 2015

Asalaam alaikkum from Adirampattinam.

If you can pronounce my greeting, you will automatically receive bonus blessings from Nagoor Andavar, the Sufi saint whose dargah shrine is at the center of the Tamil Muslim town where I have been working for the past couple of days.

Instead of a diary report, this time I thought I would simply show you some of the amazing old Muslim houses I have glimpsed in Nagoor.�� The oldest & richest homes consist of a series of 3 inner courtyard rooms (open to the sky) in a row, stretching back from the front verandah which is right on the street.�� There is a large bedroom to the right of the verandah which is reserved for the senior man in the family, while other family bedrooms are located off the inner courtyards. Each courtyard room has a raised marble platform around a sunken central floor where the rainwater drains away. Each courtyard room has a name and a designated activity: “main” courtyard for social events, “inner” courtyard for private family activities, “cooking” courtyard for food prep.�� At the very back of the house there is a laundry and washing room with a private well, and beyond that there is a coconut & banana grove for drying laundry and defecation. Even some of the oldest houses now have inner attached toilet & baths, and room AC. But the wildly colorful paint schemes and the massive teak pillars remain. I also saw several homes with large safes for storing jewelry and precious stones, since many families are in the gem trade.�� I will also include a few photos of a 1920s-era Muslim mansion that struck me as having French colonial influences, which makes sense since Karaikkal (next door to Nagoor) is a former French colony.

With that introduction, I will let the photos speak for themselves.
Dennis

Asalaam alaikkum, friends & kindred.

Beth and I got back from India on Tuesday, and the jet lag has worn off for me . . . ��but not for Beth. She is still going to sleep at 4 PM and waking at 2 AM.

The Sufi shrines conference I attended, sponsored by CAORC and the US Embassy in Delhi, was generally successful, despite quite a few last minute cancellations and visa denials. The venue was Hotel Kailas, the only accommodation available at the Ellora Caves not far from Aurangabad, Maharashtra. ��The hot water was tepid, but the beer was ice cold, and we had the entire hotel to house the conference participants.

On the mesa above the Ellora cave temples there is the historic Sufi & royal necropolis town of Khuldabad. with dargah tomb-shrines dotted across the landscape. The most famous dead saints here are from the musical Chishti Sufi order, so we arranged to sponsor a qawwali Sufi musical performance right inside one of the dargahs, where this kind of music is meant to be performed. There are some very famous Persian & Urdu historians and poets buried here as well. ��It is said that, by licking sugar from the threshold of their tombs, one acquires the saint’s eloquence and memory. I say, anything to prevent Alzheimers.

The embassy flew us down to Chennai for the final 5 days, where I gave a couple of academic presentations. It was useful for me to make some professional connections there in preparation for a 2 month fieldwork project I am planning in Tamilnadu & Kerala in February 2015. As always, I was captivated by the Tamilnadu State Handicrafts Emporium, where I took some of the final photos.

Dennis

Photos taken at the annual flag-raising ceremony at the Jailani Sufi shrine in the central part of the island of Sri Lanka. The militant Buddhist monks, in collaboration with the government Archaeology Department, have recently torn down a number of Muslim buildings at this site, arguing that it is a sacred 2nd century BC Buddhist monastic center. However, the Muslim pilgrims came anyway, and the event had the same highly-charged energy as before. ��In these photos, you can see how everyone is trying to touch or grab the flags, which are believed to be energized by the power (barakat) of saint Abdul Qadir Jilani.

Here are a few more photos showing what I have been up to in Sri Lanka for the past couple of weeks. ��It has actually been an unpredictable mix of topics, ranging from Hindu wedding ceremonies, to Sufi Muslim saint veneration, to low caste upward mobility, to diasporic constructon of new religious centers. ��And along the way, there are always unexpected photo opportunities of one kind or another. ��Here’s a sample of images, each with a brief explanation.

My next objective is to climb the multi-religious pilgrimage route to the top of Adam’s Peak, where Adam fell to earth from Paradise, and where the Buddha and Lord Siva are also said to have touched down. ��After that, I intend to relax and do some sightseeing in the Kandyan Hills.

Salaam, Ayubowan, Vanakkam,

Dennis

��

February 27, 2014

Dear family & friends,

Here are a few snapshots of Kuala Lumpur street scenes and the Hindu Temple at Batu Cave on the northern edge of the city.

We are getting ready to drive south to Melaka (Malacca) tomorrow morning. ��I’ve spent the past two hours studying the maps to figure out how to escape KL’s octopus of ring roads and crazy multi-level intersections. ��Thank goodness they don’t allow 3-wheel tri-shaws on the streets of KL.

Dennis

Michelle Sauther, Associate Professor of Biological Anthropology, is currently embarking on a new study in South Africa. The site, called Lajuma, is a unique, highaltitude mist veldt. She and her colleagues, Dr. Frank Cuozzo (University of North Dakota), Dr. Krista Fish (Colorado College) and Dr. Sauther's student, Mike Strinden are studying the dental, disease and behavioral ecology of nocturnal greater galagos (locally called bushbabies, due to their plaintive cries that sound like human infants).

Dear All,

It is 2:30 PM in Akkaraipattu, Sri Lanka, and Nilam and I are dozing in our room after a heavy chicken biryani lunch at BMH Hotel (i.e., restaurant). The marriage interviewing project is beginning to shape up, now that I have become acquainted with how to operate my digital voice recorder. [I have sent a separate plea for technical help with audio file conversion to Grant.] ��So far, I have interviewed 7 couples about their matrilocal marriage “stories,” plus interviews with a low caste temple priest, a high caste sorcerer, and a Sufi sheikh. My introductory Tamil patter is getting more polished each time. Nilam and I have borrowed a pair of external computer speakers from his niece so we can listen to the interviews together on my laptop. Still, as the recording time steadily adds up, I am worried about the arduous process of translating and transcribing all of this babbling in Tamil, a portion of which I do not immediately understand. ��When Nilam and I get back to our room at the ANH Guesthouse, we are generally exhausted by the interviewing and the withering heat, so we have not been devoting enough time to actually listening to the recordings and extracting the useful passages. If I could only obtain some cold beer in this “dry” Muslim town, I’m convinced the dialog transcription process would move along much more efficiently.

This morning I interviewed my old Sufi Sheikh friend, Makkattar, about his constant use of a cellphone to confer blessings and curative incantations to his followers, some of whom live in Denmark and New Zealand. He claims he receives 1000 cellphone calls every day from disciples and seekers asking for his divine blessings via cellphone. ��His followers regularly give him the latest model cellphones as a devout gift to their Sufi master, and he in turn passes his used cellphones on to his favorite followers, who treasure the worn-out equipment that has touched his saintly ears and transmitted his saintly words. ��He said he has gone through 50 cellphones in the past ten years, each one acquiring barakat from heavy use. Spiritually speaking, this is a win-win form of recycling. ��I am thinking this might be a good topic for an article in the New Yorker, inshallah.

Meanwhile, I will attach a few photos of the people I have been interviewing about marriage.

Love to all from the lower latitudes,

Dennis

7 June 2012

Dear friends,

My month of research in Sri Lanka is winding up, and I thought some of you might be interested in a quick final report along with a few more photos.

My main goal was to collect some individual first-hand accounts of how young Tamils and Muslim couples in Akkaraipattu are getting married in the period since the tsunami (2004) and the defeat of the Tamil Tigers (2009). I already have tons of detailed fieldnotes on marriage and kinship from my fieldwork in the 1970s, so a comparison with contemporary marriage practices may indicate what sorts of social and cultural changes have occurred over the past 40 years. Using a digital voice recorder (technology I have seldom used in the past) I interviewed about 10 young Tamil couples and 10 Muslim couples, inviting them to share their “marriage story” (திருமண கதை) with me if they wished.�� In most cases, it was like turning on a fire hydrant: the stories gushed forth so quickly that I sometimes I didn’t have my recorder ready.�� The utter counterproductiveness of IRB “informed consent” regulations is immediately revealed in situations like this. The first newlywed Tamil couple I visited for an interview were married last May, and I was present at their wedding. In fact, I even appear in their professionally-produced wedding video!�� However, when I visited them again this time to see their new baby and ask for their marriage story, they froze up and became apprehensive when I recited my long statement in Tamil about confidentiality and informed consent, and in the end, they declined to be interviewed. The clumsy IRB consent protocol had signaled something ominous and frightening, precisely the opposite of what is required in ethnographic fieldwork.�� So I quickly learned to let people pour forth their marriage stories first, then assured them afterward about confidentiality.�� Then, of course, many of them were disappointed to learn that their true names would not appear in my book.

What I have been generally discovering is that traditional arranged marriages and Dravidian-type cross-cousin marriages are still very common, but love marriages and inter-caste marriages are clearly on the rise. The wedding rituals for the Hindu Tamils and the Tamil-speaking Muslims have changed in different ways over the past 40 years, the results of both Hindu Brahminical influence and Muslim Islamicization (and also TV and Bollywood movies).�� However, the matrilocal marriage residence and dowry property system remains intact, with parents of a daughter required to provide a dowry house to attract a suitable son-in-law to live with her.�� This works great for most brides whose parents are sufficiently wealthy to at least provide a house-building plot, but for the poorest women it gives them no means of attracting a husband. (Men generally do not inherit parental property: it all goes to women as dowry.) The solution in some cases is for the daughter to work abroad in Saudi Arabia or the Gulf as a housemaid for years at a time, sending her wages back to Sri Lanka to get her own dowry house constructed. In many cases, the wife retains exclusive ownership of the dowry house throughout the marriage, and her husband is in some sense her house guest.�� Of course, there are lots of variations and exceptions, and there are some delightful stories of how love marriages got launched through cellphone and text messaging mistakes.

A secondary topic I explored on this trip is the variety of student artwork painted on the external masonry walls of schools in the eastern region of the island.�� I have promised to come up with a paper about this “wall art” (சுவரோவியம்)�� for the Madison South Asia conference in October 2012, so I have been snapping photos of these student paintings everywhere I see them.

I will attach some photos with this message to give you a glimpse of my fieldwork milieu, concluding with a focus on nutrition.

With sweaty best wishes from Sri Lanka,

Dennis

26 May 2012

Dear All,

We had a truly amazing day in the field — we saw a single social group of silvered langurs with more than 50 individuals.�� This is amazing because it is a very, very large group for langurs anywhere (and they range throughout southern and southeast Asia and Indonesia.�� Also, it is amazing because as recently as 2008 it was thought that no more than 30-40 members of this species existed in Vietnam.�� I have seen more than 100 the past couple of days.�� I will send some pictures soon.

Regards,

Bert

��

28 May 2012

Dear All,

On Tuesday we drove from Ho Chi Minh City to Kien Luong, Kien Giang Province on the western edge of the Mekong Delta.�� We have been working on a silvered langur conservation project in this area the past few years.�� It is interesting (at least to me) for a host of reasons.�� 1)�� Silvered langurs were first noted to live in this area in 2000 by my colleague Hoang Minh Duc (check out the picture of Duc watching langurs).�� 2)�� Until 2009 it was thought there were less than 40 silvered animals in this region of Vietnam – a relic population on a few limestone hills in Kien Giang.�� 3)�� In 2009 we confirmed the presence of more than 220 silvered langurs in this region – the largest confirmed population of this species anywhere.�� 4) We are working with (and against) a Swiss concrete manufacturer on the conservation project.�� And 5) the 100 or so silvered langurs that live on the hill at Chua Hang are quite easy to observe because they are used to hearing and seeing humans – humans that are nearby to visit a pagoda (Chua) and to enjoy the beach (see the beach picture).

�� I must write that the beach looks nicer in the picture that it does close up – lots of liter and the water is not clean this time of year.�� It is a pleasant place to work just the same – while it is hot and humid there is also a pleasant coastal breeze.�� Also while we end up walking a few miles each day – it is on nice paths, not bush whacking through the juggle.�� On Wednesday and Thursday we saw more than 60 animals pretty amazing – they are easy to observe and do not flee from humans (as most primates in Vietnam do – and for good reason, they are hunted even though this activity is illegal throughout the country).�� I’ve seen lots of feeding behavior – green mangoes, a couple of other types of small fruit, leaves, and buds (I’ve included a few pictures).�� I’ve also seen animals grooming one another (an important social behavior), seen some babies – many langurs are characterized by having babies that are a dramatically different color than parents – I’ve included a few photos of youngsters from yesterday – they are bright yellow/gold rather than dark silver.�� While most of the observations the past couple of day have been of the animals in trees we also watched a group of more than 30 pass over a limestone cliff face for 30 minutes (out of more than 8 hours of observations) and I have included a few pictures.�� Finally, it seems that the monkeys watch us as we watch them – I’ve included a couple of pictures of this also.

Regards,
Bert

Hi All – a note from the tea fields:

Our UN Research team has been interviewing in the “upcountry” of Sri Lanka lately. We’re talking with women who pick tea leaves all day and men who labor on the tea plantations.

Most of the people we talk with live in line rooms that were built by the British when they planted tea here, when Sri Lanka was “Ceylon.” The room dimensions are about 10′ x 10′ where I was this morning – a misty, remote, high-altitude location in a poorly managed tea estate where about 15 families live in line houses, sharing just one water tap.

The road wound on and on through expanses of tea bushes, and in many places was washed away so that it was difficult to traverse. The women pluck tea leaves from early morning until the daylight begins to fade, wearing a plastic tent over their heads so the rain will run off while their arms are free to pick leaves. They earn less than two dollars a day for 200 kilos of tea leaves. If their sack of leaves weighs less than 200 kilos, their wage is cut in half.

Elders are dependent upon their younger family relations to care for them, as there are no pension plans. We’ve been listening to descriptions of extreme domestic violence, child abuse, and violent fighting between neighbors that is linked to cramped housing, alcoholism, grinding poverty, lack of education, among other unmet needs. We hope our report will lead to legal aid and education programs here.

It is actually chilly in this high region of Sri Lanka. When they offer me a hot cup of tea during our discussions, I drink it with a new awareness.

Our next research area is in the north of Sri Lanka, where the civil war has currently displaced 235,000 families.

We do have time to rest in between our intensive interviewing; there are cute puppies at our bungalow.

In friendship,
Pat