Tropical melancholia

I get gloomy as I read Levi-Strauss these days. Perhaps I shouldn’t think of his recent death as I read stories of his days in the thick forest of Brazil. But death looms. I am so used to reading dead white men, I am less used to seeing them arrive at death. A posthumous tale.

The pages of Triste Tropiques, stained yellow with time, seem a shade darker now. A spectre of what has come and gone; the passing of time. He died while I was in the fields of Brazil, and now I chase his shadows in the hallowed halls of academia, in a university he lectured in, the dormitories once described by him “as musty cellars and stale wood embers.”

If only I could conjure his spirit, cast new meanings in anthropology about Brazil; perhaps ask him where my dissertation might go. He will tell me: “into the forest.” I will say “there are so many, which one?” He would say “there is only one that will give meaning.”

It is strange, this exercise of talking with the dead, but I have done it for so long. It seems so normal, so natural to speak to the walls of those I read. I speak to my mother when I look up to the moon. The fog becomes my council.

I could not finish an essay, a few years ago, since Clifford Geertz passed as I was in the midst of a trenchant critique. His death hung heavy over my words. Eerily enough, I had begun the piece with a narrative about the Yale Anthropology department’s annual treck to Malinowski’s grave.

The apotheosis of our star academic forefathers, this idolatry, might indeed, be one of our own rituals, and worthy of analysis. But death struck. I did not know how to make the active passive. I said goodbye, and tucked the manuscript into the recesses of an old hard drive, never to be looked at again.

I don’t think I run from death, but maybe I should run to it. There are so many answers when life is in question.