Philip Graham
“Your head will get turned around a bit if your unusual bicycle accident gets labeled by village neighbors as an attack by hill spirits, or if you wake in the middle of the night in your mud-brick house to the rustlings of a nearby poisonous snake, or if you feel the need to consult a diviner for writer’s block, but those events are the mere particulars of a larger cultural universe. The main lesson I learned, living in small villages among the Beng people in Ivory Coast, is how much of culture is invisible. People often behaved, to my lights, in unusual ways, but it wasn’t always obvious why. Alma’s job, as an anthropologist, was to try to uncover the why, and slowly she began to figure out the cosmology, the belief system and cultural assumptions vividly alive within all of our village neighbors, the local common sense that wasn’t immediately obvious to an outsider. Returning to the United States, that lesson learned got trained on the culture I grew up with, and then the invisible of home began to coalesce, which I eventually realized was a great potential gift to my writing.”
@2 years ago