#4
I pursued the Ph.D. out of momentum, not ambition, although the presumption is that one then teaches at the college level. I was accepted at Chicago, Brown and McGill. The advice I got was to “beg, borrow or steal, but go to Chicago,” one of the outstanding anthropology departments. But McGill, which is half-jokingly called the Harvard of Canada, offered me money and a teaching assistantship, so actually while abjuring ambition I nonetheless found a way to be venal, and chose McGill.
Now, the entire weight of the doctoral program in perhaps every discipline is the dissertation, the written work that must in some way “contribute to knowledge,” which is to say it should say something new, and do it in a manner that satisfies a committee of three experts in your field, plus an examining committee composed of more experts from other fields. What I did then, and what I tell anyone who asks today, is to arrive at the program with as precise an idea of what you want to do as you possibly can, because the politics of dealing with three professors each with interests on many levels can result in ruin. Enough said.
But I arrived already armed with where I wanted to go and whom I wanted to study, and I had a fair idea of what I wanted to say. It had all come together for me even while I was in Nevada. My displaced interest in psychology had transmuted into cognitive anthropology, the study of people’s beliefs, which, recall, was an extension of my interest in drugs. In the 1970s the intersection of these two interests was popular after such works as Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan, with his use of peyote. And there was much else. It was my understanding at the time, and still is, that just about all traditional societies use some form of substance or practice in order to alter the consciousness of at least certain individuals within it, and this is integrated within its system of what, in the tradition of anthropology, is called “religion”—an observation that formed part of my dissertation idea.
There was a rather large theoretical move going on in anthropology at this time, which questioned the concept of religion, the point being that it’s impossible to say what is supernatural. Theorists had been struggling with this for over a century, and the move at that time was to abandon the concept of religion in favor of cognition, simply meaning a person’s beliefs. Whether or not they were “religious” beliefs could be set aside. This however struck many people as counter-intuitive, as well as counter to all the work that had been amassed under the rubric of religion.
What I wanted to do was define religion differently—not on the content of beliefs but on their function in the mind: I was saying that those beliefs at the base of a person’s reality, the beliefs that are the foundation of all other ideas in his mind, can be regarded as his religion. The question then was how to reach those basic beliefs.
The answer was a series of “why” questions posed to an individual, starting with anything the individual says and then asking the why of each answer. At some point, if this is done with sincerity, a person will necessarily come to a belief for which he has no answer to the why: The answer is some form of “That’s just the way it is.” At which point a basic or “religious” belief has been reached. These beliefs, reached through that person’s own logic, could literally be said to be held on faith, that is, accepted without reason. The questioning process can be repeated to reveal other beliefs, and there is no natural limit to how many basic beliefs a person can hold.
I began by studying two undergraduate students, a young woman and man (who were lovers) who were both practitioners of Transcendental Meditation, an essentially Hindu technique taught in the West at that time by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (who had been the guru of the Beatles in the 1960s) and around whom a following had formed which had some cultic qualities. The programmatic elicitations of their beliefs and a few other individuals helped me develop an ability to convert a statement or utterance into the why question that most accurately reflected the sense of the original statement. (Apart from grammar and syntax, an important part of the technique which can move a person to think further into a belief that seems all too familiar is to play with the intonation of different words in the question—as I’ve heard people do as a form of play—so that the person hears the question posed in an unfamiliar way: Consider “Why is the earth round?” changing the emphasis between “earth” and “round.”) (One observation that occurred very quickly was that the answer “I don’t know,” which ends many inquiries in common conversation, becomes “Why don’t you know?” which leads the person into choices made in life.)
So I had a method, and it seemed from the nature of the method that it could not fail to produce basic beliefs if the fundamental principle was followed (variations in the way the principle can be applied resulting in greater or lesser efficiency at worst).
And I knew where I wanted to apply the method. An aspiring anthropologist must choose a cultural region of the world in which to focus his—or more often today her—research. I chose the Caribbean, which often elicited a cynical smile from friends, which then broadened into a grin when I told them that the specific people I chose were the Rastafarians, or Rastas, who were then thought to be a cult in Jamaica known mainly for smoking ganja, an especially potent form of marijuana. (This was also around the time Bob Marley, perhaps the most famous Rasta, was popularizing reggae music.)
Did I make this choice with fun in mind? Yes, but I also found sound ethnographic and ethnological grounds for the study. (Ras TafarI is also spelled with a capital I at the end because it is always pronounced with an emphasis on the I; Rastafarians avoid the use of second- and third-person pronouns as well as the plural “we,” saying “I and I” instead). From the theoretical perspective, the “Rastas” were known to be acephalous: The movement or “cult” had no leader, which is rather rare in such situations. It was generally understood that they believed that Haile Selassie, then emperor of Ethiopia, was the Messiah and would return all black peoples to Africa—free them from the Americas, the white man’s Babylon, in which, like the ancient Jews, they remained enslaved. Yet this understanding must have been derived from individuals not generally recognized within the movement as having the authority to speak. So the whys, it seemed, could provide new information on more than one level.
Moreover, the Rastas had been studied in their native Jamaica but not in New York City, where they were known to have migrated, so doing it there could provide even more new knowledge (while at least one trip to Jamaica, to gain background information, would be in order).
My actual experiences with Rastas in New York varied in a range from the deeply devout in Harlem who preached peace and love, to smugglers and armed robbers in Brooklyn (the police had assigned twenty officers exclusively to Rasta activities, which had reportedly displaced the “Mafia” in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood.) And likewise, individuals responded to me in different ways, but almost necessarily with some curiosity (mixed with some trepidation in Brooklyn) about me and why I, a white man, wanted to ask them questions.
I had known that the Nyabingi sect of Rastas in Jamaica used interrogation as a defense against outsiders; in New York it happened in what seemed to be a totally unstructured way, individuals more or less aggressively pressing questions as to what I was doing, or trying to do. And they asked my why: Why do I want to ask them questions? Why did I study them? Why was I writing a dissertation? Why did I want a Ph.D.? Etc., etc. And whereas in a normal social interaction one might well have departed, I was committed as an (aspiring) anthropologist to remaining with them, so I had to answer the questions, and they had nothing to lose by being candid with me about my answers.
I did not see the irony in what was evolving during my entire eighteen months in the “field.” Not only was I unable to apply my whys on them, but the information I did get could not in good conscience be reported since it might have had strategic value to the police in Brooklyn. (While it might seem to be a citizen’s obligation to help the police, I was first the scientist here, so I had to be impartial, and it was certain that the Rastas would have gained no corresponding advantage from my work, so I felt compelled to withhold it. So, in the absence of any usable information, my project had failed utterly. I tried to quit but my professors advised me not to “burn bridges” and just take some time to think.
That time turned out to be two years, during which I did something that would be relevant later, but immediately after which I was able to justify presenting my own beliefs as the appropriate product of my research with the Rastas. The type of research most characteristic of anthropology is participant observation, according to which the researcher becomes part of the society he is studying. In effect, my true “participation” as a white anthropologist in Rasta society was to respond to their questions by justifying myself.
After the Rastas started me out, I continued the process of asking the whys programmatically, with myself as the subject, partly in preparation for my next meeting with the Rastas. And after quitting the field I continued to ply the whys, with a final product of 91 basic beliefs. I titled the dissertation “Ras TafarI and the Religion of Anthropology,” in which the “religion” was mine, and the work passed a review by three anthropologists (one a devoted communist, another a doctrinaire capitalist) plus a sociologist, a historian and a philosopher. (There is, by the way, an established sub-field, the anthropology of anthropology, in which the research is about the culture of anthropologists, as there is about the cultures of other professions.)
No Guru 