Running through the jungle

I've blogged before about the prescription narcotics I sometimes use, when I'm trapped in a New Zealand winter, to deal with an old nerve injury, and about the recurrent and very detailed - sometimes vividly detailed, sometimes tediously detailed - dreams that these drugs give me. In 2012 I watched Alfred Hitchcock show a curious movie at the University of Auckland's School of Business; the year before that I flew from the mountains of the South Island to an island that resembled Hawai'iki, stopping for a drink on the way in Northland.

Here's my latest recurring dream. As usual, my subconscious is behaving oddly: it has connected Napoleon Chagnon, a man I detest, with Margaret Mead and Marshall Sahlins, two scholars I admired, or at least thought I admired. (This superb article by David Moberg describes Sahlins' long and righteous battle against Chagnon, and explains why Chagnon's ideas about indigenous peoples are dangerous for the West, as well as for the Third World). The banyan forest in my dream comes from 'Eua, the Tongan island that James Cameron reputedly turned into a moon called Pandora.

The Fierce People

After dinner, on the lounge room
couch, I run through a banyan forest,
pursued by a noisy tribe
of anthropologists.
I don't turn my head
but I know, because I have studied the secondary literature,
that Napoleon Chagnon is waving a spear
as sharp as a syringe, and tipped
with syphilis; that sweat has melted
Jared Diamond's facepaint;
that betel juice dribbles out
Margaret Mead's puffing mouth.

"You will not find refuge
in any impenetrable forest"
I hear Marshall Sahlins explaining,
in his best lectern voice.
"The impenetrable forest
is a colonialist fantasy
abolished by ethnobotanists.
You must surrender
to analysis."

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]