[Besire], the Ngöbe village in the heart [brukwä] of the Ngöbe reservation, wakes [nüke ngwäte] up early [deka].The Ngöbe woman [merire] gets up first [känekri].She drinks some water [ñö] or homemade juice [tomana] and goes to the river [ñö] to have a quick [jötrö] morning swim and shower [jükete]. Her husband [brare] and her children [monso] are asleep [kibien]. So are the chickens [kwi], the dog [nukro] and the couple of pigs [mütü] underneath the hut [ju]. Her rooster [antlan] is the only one awake [ngwäte] as is the rooster of the neighbor’s house [ju] . And so is the woman of that house, who has already gone to swim and shower, and so is her husband, who has just awoken and is ready to go to the river [nö] him-self [ti-kwe]. At these times, between four and six, there is a collective movement from the Ngöbe households to the river. The women bathe with their clothes on and the men with their trousers. Its a local etiquette that nobody violates.
The water of the river is always cool and fresh and depending on the amount of rain it showered on the mountains in the distance, sometimes its clear and sometimes it is brown. Tonight it was muddy..A half [ötare] moon [sö] is reflected on its ripples and reveals in shadows of brown the thick vegetation of the jungle [kätäkwä] enveloping the environment [kä]. The frogs [grwe] sing Grwe-geegee, Grwe-ee, Grwe-eëe, Grwe-geegee, Grwe-ee, Grwe-eëe, ‘They must fall from the sky when it rains because there are so many of them and they always appear in greater numbers right after’ Donysius said a month [sö] ago in a night very similar to this. Bathing is rather quick process at four am. The woman walks [didekä] with her dress on from her house in a slow pace which she steadily maintains as she enters waist high inside the river; whereby she makes a small jump [nibrenkä]. With a bar of soap in her hand she calmly rubs her body, shampoos her hair and washes her dress. She makes another gentler jump in the water and then slowly heads home. In the peace and quiet [kwekebe] of these hours, the discussions in the river between two people that might encounter each other are minimal and liminal. A man may say a ‘niantore’ to another man, exchange a couple of words and return back to the house. This scenario would be similar if two girlfriends encountered each other but it is more likely that they would even be more laconic. “Niantore” roughly means ‘nothing’ and is used quite frequently when two people meet or pass by each other throughout the day... ‘nada’ says one Ngöbe and ‘nada’ says the other. It is a cut short response from the question which sometimes proceeds it and which asks “Köbö ni nio?” which literally means “How did you dream?” The answer 'niantore' is a good sign as nothing was dreamed that indicated that something should be taken into consideration during the day. Dreams were dreamed but not dreams with public and social significations.
A woman and a man, unless they are close kins and live in the same hamlet, will not exchange a single word; the woman in fact will not give a man even the slightest bit of recognition that he is present. Nor a look nor a moment’s stare or a nod will escape her eyes and her face. An exchange of stares is a door that may lead to numerous scenarios: chastising by a husband to the wife and vice-versa -sometimes verbal sometimes physical-, enmity between men, enmity between women, semi-scheduled fist fights during yearly fiestas and if divorce, re-arrangement of households and of lands.Generally all the consequences ‘that promiscuity gone public’ unveils and unfolds in the local world. But the way that an interactions in the river is performed does not carry the weight of all these promiscuous consequences on its back. It would be very difficult to detect if the interaction is due to chance or whether it was pre-arranged. If it is pre-arranged by two secret young lovers or two adulta having an extramarital affair then it is implied that they did not meet to talk or to have sex. Four am is a late hour from the sense that its the hour that women begin walking up in their huts and an early hour in the sense that men are basically still asleep. In any case the illicit meeting would not be at the river which runs along the village defining at least one of its boundaries. So if it is pre-arranged it probably preceded a lover's meeting and the performance is performed naturally, as if it was by chance. They slip a glance or two here and there at the each other’s eyes.... and they bathe for a moment longer. All movements, of the hands, the head, the whole body are within the boundaries of normality. A stare is just a stare, but like it was written above, the Ngöbe woman will ‘not give the man even the slightest bit of recognition that he is present’. And if their hearts are beating faster and louder the observer would never know and should be joyous that s/he doesn’t.
In the context of ‘doing fieldwork’ if it is indeed a pre-arranged meeting then the performance is immediately perceived as something extremely interesting to observe and analyze. The anthropologist now wants to set in motion an entire fieldwork agenda of locating and uncovering all the social layers that the affair is entangled in. In conversations to cunningly bring up the subject of ‘affairs’ and then drive it towards its pre-determined subjective source. Like a main actor in a telenovela the anthropologist creates a fantasy of social webs by connecting synecdochic events and stories heard from others who heard it from others. But lets say, for the sake of argument, that the affair is one hundred percent verified. The first question that comes to my mind, is what constitutes an affair in Ngöbe society. wihere polygamy has been part of the culture for hundreds of years. The second is a realization that basically says from one end, that "Yes...its incredibly difficult to explore and located amidst multiple discourses one distinct discourse and actively dissect it without damaging it and without always relocating your own subjective center" and at the other end, a voice that says that exploring is better than not to explore so ‘try to find out as much as you can without compromising your authenticity and henceforth your sincerity. Be sincere, ask what you want to ask, but do not have a clumsy and insidious approach. In reality though you cannot avoid not stepping on people’s toes and that is the magical truth.
So from this entire perspective which brings so many anthropological dilemmas it may also appear that if it was a pre-arranged meeting then it is more difficult to analyze because it is indeed so much more interesting; apart from the illicit nature of it that drive the senses biologically it is the amount of information that it will bring to the surface regarding "Ngöbe culture and society." But in 'space' [kä] this is not necessarily true. If the encounter in the river was by chance, one could argue that it is more difficult to analyze because it is more intricate and much simpler, more indicative and much more concealed, more meaningful and much more bewildering. It is a performance but of a different sorts. Because if it is by chance, then, the two individuals are not engaging each other mentally, and are left to their own to think what they want to think or don’t want to think; Or not think at all. Again the anthropologist, can never know. And because the anthropologist assumes that he can never know, he or she turns the attention to what at least can be found out; motives, intentions, in-tensions, and constructed-enacted and reenacted performances that were pre-arranged. A search of a holy grail of a sort. But the two performances of love and apathy are a synecdoche of one another and part of the same local theatre that this anthropologist has called his fieldwork site and which it is based on the real lives of real people, called the Ngöbe, who call this site their village Besire. In Nietzsche’s first book the Birth of Tragedy he exclaims that when the Dionysian and Apollonian currents fuse “Man is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art.” Underlying this we can see the Ngöbe as the artists of their culture and the embodied work of art itself. They move through the local social networks which like strings on a musical instrument play the culture tune that the Ngöbe, the Art itself, produces. I am not talking about a sacred mystical self which lurks in the depths of the self’s subconscious...no. I am talking about considering the Ngöbe as creative agents with choices and the Ngöbe culture as a symbolic medium which is almost always social, or public in orientation.Even the spirits [chelas or chokoli] which are so often seen at night in locations which mark boundaries such as the clearing in the forest and the river, and which from the western perspective are considered part of a metaphysical or even delusionak world, are active members of the local societal culture. And what attracts them to attact an individual is persistent thoughts: especially illicit ones. Which is another, if not the main, reason why the woman will not give a man an inch of recognition that he is present and will bathe and head right home to light a fire, prepare caccao or coffee and then make breakfast out of plantains for her husband who is to wake up shortly before the food is ready. By six am the sun will brake the darkness of the night, the chelas will retreat, and the two will be on their way in attending the requirements of their six to ten people household; working [sribiri] in turn in the agriculture field and looking for wood to light fire complementing each other in creating the hearth of the home.
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A woman walking in the village from point A to point B along a row of houses will not do so with her head up high observing and looking at the people sitting in their homes. First off all she is not remotely curious as an 'Anthropologist' might be regarding what they are doing and as a matter of fact she probably has a million things to attend to.In a slightly lesser degree the same applies for a Ngöbe man. He walks steadily through the homes with his face without any tension looking straight and his eyes focused ahead, while maintaining a full mental map of the immediate periphery. The Tuesdays and Wednesday’s of the one thousand Ngöbe who actually live within the forest clearing are not the same Tuesdays and Wednesdays of the thirty five latino teachers who came to teach the locals a latin education. Nor is five o’clock in the afternoon of any other day the same, nor four am or midnight. There is no definite time schedule to be followed and the wrist watch is for the few who wear it an ornament; its in practicality unnecessary. When Philipio tells me to be at his house at six am to begin early our two hour walk to for two hours to the rice field he basically means ‘come ‘some’ good amount of time before sunrise so we can sit and have a quick coffee by the fire and head off at twilight’. He will often even say “Six punto” to make his point that I should be there while it is still dark.
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