Preparing students for the future?

I recently had some back and forth correspondence with a Sri Lankan colleague who I worked with when we first got here for the Fulbright. My colleague and I had been in correspondence for several months before our arrival. I thought I was clear with him, if a bit unorthodox, about the activities I wanted to do with students. As things turn out my project was hijacked by a "very important" senior person at the university. I ended up footing the bill for a van on two separate days, as well as lunch for groups of faculty and students who came along for the ride. It was certainly learning experience and it very much set stage for my work here in Sri Lanka. I left that engagement with a better, if not complete understanding of how things work in universities here.

Fast forward to the present when my colleague has asked me to collaborate on a paper he's writing that's connected to our activities of those days in September. The major thrust of those activities was taking a series of soil samples in the dry bed of a village irrigation tank (ancient human-built lake) in the Rajarata region of North Central Province. I had come to Sri Lanka a month or two before my grant was supposed to start specifically so I could study those dry lake beds before the rainy season began. 

My goal in working with students was to have them help me detect patterns in the lay of the land. Specifically I wanted to take a series of profiles of the landscape, to study several features of dry lake beds, and to get a feel for how the students perceived this valuable natural resource. The study was supposed to be a broadly based interdisciplinary endeavor in which students learned new skills of observation and critical thinking. It wasn't to happen that way. 

But it's worth mentioning that even the day when we took soil samples there were multiple features in the intimate landscape of the lake beds that were worth further study. For example, there were distinct patterns of plants that we could have mapped. These plants certainly indicated different soil types and moisture regimes. While they could not have necessarily been detected using the random sample technique that was imposed on this project they were potentially full of information. There were also regions of indentations that might have signified circulatory patterns of the water. Studying their location, depth, and spatial relations might have given us new insights into how these lake beds function. Another interesting pattern was lotus tubers growing beneath the surface of the mud. These tubers leave natural pockets in the mud. I wondered how these cavities might influence invertebrate, fish, or plant growth in the tank. How might these frequent cavities influence circulation or deposition in the tank bed? Why couldn't our students explore these further and try to characterize them instead of their mindless soil sampling?

None of these features were considered as we rampaged through a day of rigorous core sampling. It was jolly fun and lots of potential data were collected, but for my colleague and for his students it was more of the same kind of work they always do. I had come to work on "seeing things differently." I might as well not have been on the scene. 

So yesterday when I received the bare bones of paper from my colleague with a veiled demand that I help him with it I can honestly say I was a bit put off. 

The text of his paper, for which he wants me to find a journal for publication, focused on conventional tank research that has been dominated by our "very important" colleague for a good 30 years. Talk about dead hand of scholarship. Unfortunately, none of what my colleague wrote, in which he generously cited the Very Important Person's literature, had anything to do with questions of tank function. In fact none of text he sent me posed questions about tank function. Nor did they mention the goals of the study.

The bare-bones text was followed by series of computer generated maps that were based on the soil samples we collected. I was unable to discern any trends in pH or the various cations he was testing for. I asked him whether he could see trends. "No sir," he answered. "I need you to help me get money for doing more tests of micronutrients and heavy metals in the soil. That will give us the data we need."

I wonder what value he thinks this paper might have. I also wonder why, having found no trends in broad brush analyses he did, he thinks he'll find information in doing fine tuned testing. I don't buy this reductionist approach and it's about the farthest thing I was aiming for in the first place. It gave some students some practice using augers and other instruments in the field but it didn't teach them anything about how to observe or analyze what they observe. Part of the problem I think is that he was aiming for a "concrete" product based on "hard science" like soil chemistry. Another problem as I see it is that university students here are not encouraged to develop skills of critical thinking. My colleague is a good product of this university system as evidenced by his own lack of analytical problem solving, not to mention the underlying subservience he showed to the big man who wanted to dominate how this research went. 

If I sound bitter it's not exactly the way I want to come across. These educational problems are not mine to deal with. They are emblematic of a society that is very much closed in on itself, enamored of a reductionist scientific technique whether it works or not, and prone to base subservience in the off the role of "important" leaders. It's a society and an educational system that needs to take a good hard look at itself and the way it is preparing students for their future. 

The singing fish of Batticaloa

Signals deep not dim

Within the watery edge

In full moon's light they wonder:

Is anybody out there?

Is anybody up there?

Buzz buzz beep bleep their kine

In schools and spools they leap in time

Whirr whirr whirr ticktickticktick

Like lightning fast the singing fish

Beneath the bridge

Out in the open

We sailed at ten

Sincerely hoping

Would they swim tonight

And would they sing?

Spectacular symphonyish electric bling

We wait and quieten 

Our voices, oars

And listen, chastened 

As their crores

In their mighty multitudes try

To tell us something, these slithery fry

Oratorio of syncopation

We have heard the fishy nation!

Buzz buzz bing tick

Soprano high notes barely swerve

Among the clicks and clicking more

Unfolding messages of the crore

Are you out there? Are you up?

Can you hear us? Is there hope?

Can you read our message brightened

In the day that you call night-end?

We are here! And we are waiting!

Hear our voices! See our plaiting as traversing lagoonish depths

We call to you as if to pets

Are you up there and can you hear us?

Will you come tomorrow dearest?

At spots we stop we sport our oars

The pesces Pisces sing in crores

And millions more we cannot hear 

Their species' songs upon our ear

We sail anew upon their surface

Their world's end, their edge of darkness 

We explore but cannot say if reflecting, we have come away

With any message we can keep

Buzz buzz bling click the fishes peep

Their peeps and buzzes fill our souls

Our ears attaching to our toes

We seem as conduits for their sound

As we take the boat aground

We stagger home in rife amazement 

The ride we took, this new attainment

Hearing depths of songitude an affront to primate rectitude?

Thavarajah was our guide

And over salty water glide

We bid adieu 'til next full moon

And climb the staircase to our room

Where conflict is being kept alive and where conflict is being put to sleep

Strange thing to be in the middle of a conflict zone some years since the conflict petered out. Well it didn't "peter out" because accompanying its end were the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent civilians in the last days. These were Tamil civilians, just to be clear. The ending days of the war were a national trauma and an international trauma still being played out. Hard to say in any case that the conflict has "ended" because there are so many reminders. Reminders that are hard to find. Part of my work for the Fulbright has been to discern these reminders, to listen for distant echoes of past trauma. This may seem like a strange endeavor to you. You may ask, "why focus on the bad things happened?" Why not move forward?

I could say my work has been doubly challenged because the people around me ask these questions with their silence. People young and old are moving on with their lives. Older people carry scars and memories but they mobilize their energy and creativity to form a new social compact. They move into the past or they move into the future but they do it in the present tense. I am witness to a new world they are building literally brick by brick. And young people carry on. Whatever they know of the old world they forget when their pockets open up and they pull out their motorbike keys and buy their sodas and snacks and go to the gym and take their selfies, endless selfies on their late-model phones that may only last a few months but then they'll buy another! More selfies. More games. More apps. 

A world that long slept on a bed of pain revives in an everyday presence of life. You could say this "forgetting" and rebuilding is a form of resilience. Maybe there are many forms of resilience, many many forms of resilience produced through the acts of rebuilding, knitting together, annealing, welding, stitching, but not retelling. The scars are deep, the scabs may be delicate. The few horror stories I've heard would suggest, and people have told me this literally, that looking deeper, asking people to talk about these things, would be opening old wounds. What right do I have to do that even if I think it's right? People move along their paths and live their lives by these pathways in the way they see fit. For all I know these are deeply enculturated ways of getting over pain, maybe even the selfie cult. The selfie may be another way of looking in the mirror. And I've seen men, young men and older men all over this country spending an inordinate amount of time looking in the mirror. 

Part of the culture here is also a culture of separateness. The languages of this country, Sinhala and Tamil, are separate. Decades of suppression of English has left the people without an effective bridge language. But what I read in that bridge language, in places like the daily Mirror, make my hair stand on end. This paper, owned by Sinhalese publishers, spews hate toward Tamils almost every day--and that's in the special "northeastern" edition! When the sinha-le ("lions blood") bumper sticker emerged with its racially motivated message, writers for the Mirror dismissed it or worse, praised it as a symbol that included "all true" Sri Lankans. The paper has celebrated D. S. Senanayake, the first prime minister after independence who stripped upcountry Tamils of their citizenship. In another instance the paper wrote about the 30 years' war as a war against "Tamil terrorism." The fount of hatred and misinformation doesn't stop. And here, the scars are being gone over, scabs picked at, hatreds moldering. 

I don't know where this society is headed. I don't feel the hatred coming from the Tamil side. I've heard perfectly well-meaning Sinhalese people tell me "there are two sides to every story" and that "no one was unaffected by the conflict." But where conflict is being kept alive and where conflict is being put to sleep seems to follow a boundary between Sinhalese-dominated culture and the sliver of this country that still holds pockets of Tamil language and culture. It's a pretty scary thing. And it makes me think the conflict is far from over. 

The power of cultural landscape ecology in a conflict zone

Conflict went on for more than thirty years. For all we know it's going on now and may stretch far into the future. Make that a Hundred Years' War, why not? Why stop just when the vanquished stop kicking? Conflict stretched back decades and decades and decades. Conflict was a side show and the main thing. Conflict hit every corner and every house and not just once. Conflict emptied neighborhoods and towns. Conflict assumed the legitimacy of a lime juice, the hardness of a whisky soda, the gentleness or sourness of milk. Landscape bore the scars of conflict. But landscape wore and wears and develops a cloak of healing, a disguise of normalcy, a cover of relaxed or frenetic rebuilding. Cultural landscape ecology, "landscape analysis" for short, finds itself in a place where reading isn't easy, comprehension more difficult still. 

The scientist is shown things. Things that shine. The scientist is like a crow or some kind of bird that likes to see blue shiny things, things that impress, things that stand out, things that sing with zing and by their reflective nature must have meaning. The scientist looks for low hanging fruit because that's human nature and here in Sri Lanka, owner of the world's longest and evilest conflict or sets of conflicts, the landscape lends itself to quick analysis. The sweet fruit seems to hang everywhere. Low and waiting. Hint. These things are not the things they seem to be. They may say something about cultural landscape ecology but not the the things the scientist thinks she's looking for. The scientist will have to learn to look under the surface of these things or better, she will have to discern the reason they are being shown to her. And the reasons she finds them interesting or thinks they have value for her or for her pursuit of understanding. These baubles and bling and rotting fruit covered with honey-seeking wasps are hard to resist because they seem to tell such a cogent story. They do not.   

The observer immerses himself and struggles to discern one space from another. To delineate boundaries. To form concepts of properties. These are hard tasks when "properties" could mean space or the characteristics of space. The properties of properties. Enough immersion over enough time and the observer may start to discern properties. But maybe not. And if he stays immersed and adsorbed into the process he may "lose track" or fail to find or be able to retell the story. Is it so bad not to have the "story" ready for an elevator talk? It may be far far better not to have this story and its properties than to have a story clothed in trite misconceptions bought for cheap. 

Property. A focus of landscape analysis. Property in either sense is a construct. Your property or its properties. Wanting concrete, the bones of the construct are imagined, reconstructed, bordered. But the constructs that underly the realities here are too resistant for this simple analysis. The learning curve is steep and fraught with misconceptions, misapprehensions, the lies of others, missteps, heat, fog, timidity. Only time and doubt give the outsider some kind of inside look. 

I heard a sociologist in the shade say, "if I'd been an anthropologist I would have had to stay longer and know the language." He would have had to learn something, to confront the elastic borders of his ignorance, to puncture his certainties, to question the constructs he built or the constructs others fed to him. He would have had to do something! Am I too harsh? Sorry if I seem that way. He made hisdecision to do small short visits when he returned home after his first six months. He sat in a restaurant. He ordered a spaghetti dish. Here in Sri Lanka it would have cost Rs 500 maximum. There in His state it was $14. He reports that he cried and cried and cried over that plate of carbonara, "absolutely lost it!"

A plate of pasta is part of the landscape and it may be the landscape itself. The call to learning is to learn this landscape and its ramifications. But the ramifications go beyond you, the research person. The ramifications, the meaning of that plate of spaghetti begin when you get beyond yourself. When you get beyond yourself you begin to understand. And that is only the earliest beginning. The bud of a beginning. Cultural landscape ecology demands an escape from self, not the closing in on yourself that you demonstrated and subsequently value. Like putting your legs up on a chair. We do it where we live. It's not done here. I know because I've seen the stares. I took them in and did something with them like not putting my legs up on a chair in front of me. I may not be valued more than you or lied to less but I suspect otherwise. Your behavior is trashy even if you mean no disrespect. 

Conflict scars and you must partake in that scar material. You must grow a third eye and not just focus on your stomach or your emotions. Maybe it's not just cultural landscape ecology that makes these demands. Maybe it is any pursuit. And that may be why so many of our scholars fall short. If you can't get out of yourself how can you encounter, filter, absorb that world? How do you discern the local and hyper local? How do you see past the ugly or the dirty? How do you find the patterns that weave a story or stories of your community? If you are crying over a carbonara you may not see construct from construct, place from space, scar from scab. 

When someone says they're from Ampara you should know at least some of the dozens of meanings "Ampara" carries. If you don't, learn them. You don't have to speak Amparish any more than you have to know how to make useable wood planks from a fresh coconut trunk. But if you are a geographer get crackin'.

Struggling to know properties and their properties you may begin to exchange information, analyze, perceive conflict where it is no more or where it exists only in the distant echoes of conflict you perceive where they reverberate on walls, verges, waterworks, fences, parking lots, bus stops, beaches, boardwalks, sidewalks, storefronts, temples, the crease on a face, the face that smiles, the face that doesn't smile, the sweet face, the darkened face, the potted plant, the drape of a sarong, the dog's trot or the cow's trot or the way the radio plays laughter and ribald humor on the Sooriya morning program when you sit in the barber's chair and the barbers and the other customers look at your eyes to see if you're laughing, if you understand you're supposed to laugh, or the fold of a newspaper or the gulp of arrack from a small bottle on the side of the road, desperately thirsty. 

It occurs to me

It occurs to me. There were so many questions I wanted to ask you. I've brewed up answers to so many questions from the quagmire of my own observations. But these so-called answers lead to so many more questions. It's all muddy, orangy place, like the swampy parts of northern Canada where Indians dug up iron oxide for their body paint and most of the forest was there, burnt away by the chemicals in the soil. 

It's the same here. Questions burn and scrape your skin. They hurt behind your eyes. They disguise themselves as headache. They disguise themselves as good vision. They disguise themselves as curiosity, disgust, wonderment, dissociation. The questions that lead to more questions lead to an apathy of questions. How can you ask so many questions and who can you ask them of?

I got in the seat of car and started driving. The questions were hot on the plastic. The questions sent waves off the dashboard. The questions created wavy lines under the windshield. The questions were a kind of torture that drove the car and drove the driver. The questions forced themselves into quietude, under a thickly baked crust of finished dough. The questions became impossible. Questioning became impossible. Questions pulled the air out of conversation. Questions had to be quietened. Questions punished from the inside. Do you see why, even though I had plenty of questions for you, I couldn't ask them?

One day I gained perspective on the questions and the questioning. Questions had become a an enormous brick stupa on a rock like Kudimbigala, overlooking jungle and the Indian Ocean. They became an outcrop. Inappropriate in the landscape. They became an impossibility, something to be scaled or climbed up. Bricks deposited upon. Bricks of devotion. Bricks carried up in your tired arms by your hot feet step by step on that hit rock in the hot sun. The people I could have asked the questions, people like you, people with good or excellent English, were so busy thinking about other things. They were thinking about: cars and boats and school and crows and crocodiles and leaves and clothing and television shows and money and children and child raising and tourism and health problems and pressed bricks and markets and traffic and fruit from the stalls in Kattankudy. There were no memories or the memories were kept under a crust like the questions. The occasional bit of steam rising or churning but temporary, contemporary. Not, never, no-how all-consuming the way my questions were. 

The people I could have questioned were thinking about fish and singing fish and bridges and fans and water and gardens and discipline and music. The people I could have asked questions of were thinking about the future. Even more, they were thinking about the present. The present, the present, the everlasting present. The present that stretches and warps  and wraps itself around the sky and the waterways. The present that declares itself each and every morning and each and every morning when the sun gets hot and each and every impossible afternoon. And each and every late afternoon as shadows clarify and the air goes from thick to breathable, and every evening as stars begin to start and breezes die or quicken and sounds of music sound from the shed. The present, always present, roars "I am present!" This presence provokes a drunken lassitude of and inside of the present. It prevails. It paints its own pretty picture or pungent picture or partial picture. It coats the consciousness, your consciousness and the "collective consciousness" with its own bright paint, oily, smelling of turpentine or linseed. The present. It presents a facies of days, of activities, of wheels, of sand, of tracks in the sand, of crows in the casuarina trees, of casuarina needles thick on the sand, of dried basidiocarps scrawny and smelling of mushroom. Of sand dunes and sand deposits. Of kovil music. Of church music. Of Tamil music. Of movie music. Of the cursed ponsala chant rant quip quelch quench stench. The present claims all ground and covers all surface. The present pushes out the past, dims the future, narrows the playing field. And so. No questions. No time for questions. Only time for what you say, what you tell me, what you joke, what you laugh about, what you declare, what you ponder, what you ask me because my asking you is not on the menu not in the scrip not in the flow not in the breeze or on the breeze or in the reflection or in the growing glare of shine that comes here so close to the equator on photons abundant pouring filling the spaces of darkness and creating new eddies of darkness where they chase away the non-photon-enriched crannies behind walls or gates or village fences or under the repand bodies of dogs panting lightly in the partial shade under a wall under a shrub under a tree under the sky. 

How could I have asked you the questions that formulated themselves, that insinuated themselves, that bubbled up through the troubled surface into the splash of photons that rambled and rustled and rampaged through the present? How could any one question to survive in this hyper oxygenated troubled trembling tremendous terrifying tipsy environment? This environment hot. Acidic. Burning. Burning with the present. With its presence. This is not an environment for questions. Not mine. Not for you, on your way to Dacca. Not for you on your way to Colombo. Not for you on your way to your next meal. Not for you on your way through the today's present into tomorrow's present. Not questions of hydraulics or irrigation anyway. Not questions of politics or culture anyway. Not questions of curiosity or wonderment or troubled anticipation of doubt and more doubt. Of tremendous doubt. Of deep doubt. Of doubt and of doubts so deeply etched and so thoroughly scraped out of reality like a coconut is scraped and grated and sounded and hollowed that it became so that there was no uttering these questions. Not just an issue of "polite company." A question, if you will, of vocabulary. Of diction. Of echo. Of willpower and of will. No words for these questions! They sprung too deep in the deepest crevasses of lightless highly pressurized water. As they bubbled to the surface, molecules of their origin, their original matrix clinging to them, they depressurized and burst. They decompressed. They atomized. They became formless, senseless, dematerialized, vaporized, invisible in a landscape of discourse. They popped. Not the way you pop a question. The way a soap bubble pops. Pop. Pop. No more. No more bubble no more question no more trouble no more intention. No more wondering no more wonderment no more covering no more coverlet no more manners no more nicely folded hands no more tea time no more gentle smiles because no more questions. 

Time to say a few words about our neighborhood cinema

The Shanthi Cinema is just about 200 meters from our front door. The closest we've ever lived to the movies. It took us a couple of months to start going but since then we've been regulars. At least once a week, sometimes more. The place looks like a big barn with a folding metal gate in front. Yesterday when we got there the gate was almost closed tight, just enough room for a person to get inside. 

Why? Well it was the second day of "Theri" (the spark) starring the baby faced Indian actor, Vijay. Did I tell you the Shanthi carries Tamil-language movies exclusively? The movies are imports from southern India (Tamil Nadu) and they are full of action, fighting, loving, rituals, mothers and sons, fathers and daughters, references to FaceTime, What's App, Instagram, weddings, violence, zombies, and of course dance numbers. Some of the movies are great. Some not so much. They carry excellent English subtitles. 

The Shanthi is one of four cinemas in Sri Lanka from the "STR" group, one in Vavunia, one in Jaffna, one here in Batticaloa (Kallady to be exact), and one of unknown place. I know this because the four theaters are advertised before each film (pronounced fill'em here). It's great that there are these Tamil-language movie houses, even if they deliver low-ish culture, because cultural genocide has been such a prominent feature of the Sri Lankan landscape since the 1950s. SRT is not the only chain here. I think the Sellam movie houses, some (at least the one in Eravur up the coast) being more upscale with AC, 3-D, and other features you don't really need to enjoy a movie. 

What makes the Shanthi so enjoyable, other than the fact that the 2:30 matinees get you out of the sun for several hours during the hottest part of the day? Could it be the sound of glass Coke and Fanta bottles rolling along the floor? The hoots and hollers of the enthusiastic audience? The acrid smell of smoke from the manager's cigarette out in the lobby? What about the giant fans mounted along the walls and under the balcony, where we like to sit? I guess it's all of the above. 

If I were into this kind of thing I could use the Shanthi for an ethnography with a focus on media history. Then I could go to all four seatings, 10:30 AM, 2:30, 6:30, and 10:30 PM. I could go to special seatings too and maybe learn Tamil from the subtitles. Indian Tamil at least. I could sit on the old theater seats salvaged from somewhere else, not attached to the floor or to each other, and like the boys do, turn the seat in front of me backwards and lounge with my bare feet on it. Sometimes the seats list forward if you relax too much. 

A media history project would have to include the fact that the movies are digital. Sometimes after intermission (sometimes spelled ntermission, entermission, or tea break) the projectionist has to fiddle with the computer to get things going. Then you see the same lousy "Windows" show you get when someone does an incompetent job of power point. The cursor wanders all over the screen, click here, click there, expand, sound, etc. You know how it looks. 

If I were doing an ethnography I'd look at the way the Shanthi is a kind of community resource, a community center where social interactions play out. I would consider its resilience after decades of war and the rise of personal computing. Even today the boys at our guesthouse told me they're downloading "Theri" onto their phones. Only 1.5 gb. Why go to the theater? But people go. Part of my ethnographic work would look at the parking (along the sides or for yesterday's huge event out in front) for Rs 20 per vehicle. Most of the vehicles are motorbikes. A few bicycles like ours too. I would consider the role of the theater as a pastime for boys who a decade ago might not have been allowed out of the house, or who two decades ago might have been rounded up by the LTTE for child soldiers or by the armed forces as potential terrorists. Boys who might not have come back home. Today they ride in and park, arms all over each other during the film, group selfies from their seats, snacks carried in or bought during intermission, and of course the yelling. 

But yesterday during the second day of "Theri" it wasn't just boys. It never is. But on a Friday that followed Sinhala-Tamil new year on Wednesday and Thursday, an ad-hoc holiday hastily declared by the government to make it five days off, the Shanthi was crowded with families, young people, old people, girls, grandmothers, and babies in arms. Maybe 600 people pressed in, compared with the twenty or thirty (sometimes less) who show on an afternoon or even for the evening show. 

The noise was prodigious. The crowd had mostly carried in their snacks. Most apparent were two-liter Coke and Sprite bottles. Tickets were the special price of Rs 300 instead of the usual Rs 250. Even a king coconut next door was Rs 60, ten rupees above normal. This was an Event. In fact this was more people in one place than I've ever seen in this part of Sri Lanka. A real assemblage of families. When we poured out of the theater with them the front gate was jammed with tuktuks, motorcycles, and bicycles. Ours were deeply set next to the wall behind the crush. We'd come an hour early to buy our tickets. 

The outside air at 5:30 seemed cool and gentle compared to the hot breath of the inside. While we were watching the film sweat was falling off of every bit of skin. Eyelids? Come on. Fingers? Forearms. It was hot. Maybe hotter than we registered during the movie, which was overheated enough thanks to ample violence, bloodshed, bludgeoning, and mayhem. But what an experience. 

While we've been here we've pretty well avoided religious ceremonies. Partly by chance and partly by choice. Religion plays such a huge role in this society but we don't like snooping into other people's sacred rites. And truthfully there is so much more to see. Hanging out for this special showing yesterday at the Shanthi was like a huge secular ritual that involved so many people. One I hope we'll get to participate in again.   

The truth beneath the truth

So much of our time here in Sri Lanka we are trying to figure out what makes people tick. The impassive faces, the quietened eyes, the hidden hostilities. None of these presents us with very much evidence at all. Neither do the occasional smiles, the warm handshakes, or empty promises of following up on a visit or conversation. As Sri Lankans would say, "what to do?"

So it came as a bit of a surprise to us yesterday, actually quite a surprise, to hear our hostess reflecting on how hard it is to get people accustomed to work. It's not just work ethic or related cultural attitudes about work, it is, in her opinion, people's "capacity" for work. What a strange but perhaps apt term, one that bears further exploration. When our hostess says, "you actually have to measure people's performance for better or for worse based on their capacity for work," she is making a statement laden with hidden meanings and value judgement. When she describes exactly the kinds of behaviors we see in the United States, absenteeism, slowing down so you're not given more work, letting the "other person" do what you don't want to do, she is putting these behaviors in a different cultural context. 

Not averse to mentioning that the girls may not be able to perform because they are of "low caste," our very hardworking hostess is not above labeling her workers as "lazy," an epithet I think we would be hard pressed to utter in our world. Or maybe not. But questions of caste and capacity seem to have a sort of 19th century ring that is every bit part of the Sri Lanka's social reality too. How to fathom that?

There are many more questions than answers of course, as Janet pointed out in conversation this morning. But the best questions I think, strive to dig below the surface of "truisms" like caste or capacity. How do these states of being, "truisms" as it were, play out in the real world? How to you judge or measure "capacity?" Is there an inevitability about "caste?" If I had a methodology for generating such questions I think it would be an admirable thing but alas, it's hit and miss. But among all people I've met here whatever their station in life, their occupation, their gender, or their favorite color, it seems there are "truisms" stated for the listeners benefit that hide (or obfuscate) an awful lot of good information. 

We are here with the gift of time and patience. Also the Fulbright does not require any formal publication of one's findings. This can be seen as much as a challenge as it is an open-ended invitation for inquiry. But what about our friend Kim who is garnering information for a projected PhD project? How can she delve beneath the pat truisms of her informants? Embedded among them and with increasing fluency in Tamil, Kim has reflected on many subtleties of communication that provide her with sparks of insight. But like all sparks these moments are bright but temporary, hard or impossible to replicate. One is left wondering whether she heard correctly or misunderstood. But isn't that the gist of communication anyway? It's alive, dynamic, open to interpretation. 

It seems to me that these moments of uncertainty are worth more than all the many hours of "truth" that are poured into you as an endless vessel of truth-holding. Instead, I think we have to depend upon our gut reactions and value the unknown places these reactions take us. It's a freewheeling sort of pursuit and it takes time. Moreover it's hard to defend it as a "methodology." But it's preferable to having "scientifically" gathered data that build an edifice of lies. 

So, how do we get beneath the truth? I think a lot of it has to do with keeping our senses open, bring receptive to surprises, and remaining strongly skeptical of testimony anyone gives. In a way I suppose it puts us on a slippery slope of subjectivity. But as I try to teach my science students, even "objective" science is predicated on subjective ways of observing, of decision making, and solving problems. 

I think a good first step is for us to have our ears open. As we discern patterns of speech, specially chosen words, plausible explanations for phenomena, we may mentally catalogue these as clues rather than "truths." We may be able to use these clues later not necessarily as non-truths but as signals for deeper inquiry. 

As luck would have it we may not be able to dig deeper underneath all these items. In a given social setting like where Kim is working in Kattankudy there are social constructs that may not permit digression or dissension. But these airtight places are exactly the kinds of shiny surfaces we want to examine further. 

When I get back to teaching in September, something I have to admit I don't totally relish at this point (TMI?), I am preparing a preliminary exercise for my non-majors who are taking a required science course. I want them to spend time outside examining shadows. I want them to do this in an organized way, a way that I hope will make them mindful of their powers of observation. I also want to make them aware of questions such as subjectivity vs. objectivity and permanent vs. temporary. These have a strong bearing on scientific inquiry! I want my students to observe shadows at various scales. Minute shadows in the crack of a sidewalk or wall. Temporary shadows cast by a plant or a parked vehicle. Larger shadows and their movement, as produced by buildings and bridges. It's not just seeing and photographing the shadows. It's a matter of analyzing what the shadows do. Do they create a breeze, a cool spot, a habitat?

As intangibles go I guess shadows kind of take the cake. Yet shadows are real and they affect the world around them in tangible ways. If we can start by observing shadows I think we may start to value close observation. Observing shadows may also help students see "below" the truth. Where once we perceived a surface or a structure now we perceive a new dimension from which may arise a whole new set of questions. Rather than "how big is this building" we may ask, "how does this shadow move?" Instead of "how is this wall a barrier" we may ask, "what kind of ecosystems are supported here?" Instead of hard and fast truths that we accept without question we see new dimensions of inquiry that may take us closer to the truths beneath the "truth."