A Iguana set, Surf journal - Encantadas
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The excursion
One Sunday a local family invited me on an excursion to a remote beach. We
journeyed on a small, open boat operated by a local man that had more or less given
up fishing in favor of being a tourist guide in the local surroundings of his island.
The family I accompanied was familiar with the man – not close friends, but acquaintances. He told us that he had been a fisherman for all his life – as his father
and grandfather. Obviously, he held an impressing amount of local knowledge,
which enabled him to tell us “everything there is to know about flora and fauna on
Galapagos”. When we asked him about his fishing these days he said that he
occasionally went out, but that he only caught a few grown-up lobsters so that he did
not interfere with the lobster population. He mentioned people fishing everything
they could find, categorized them as ignorant people and finished the statement with
the wanted explanation:
Es que no hay como hacer eso (pescar sin pensar) porque Galápagos no es solo
para nosotros que vivimos aquí. Galápagos es único en el mundo, es un
patrimonio de la HUMANIDAD y tenemos que ser conscientes y responsables
de nuestras acciones.
“We just can’t do that (fish without reflecting) because Galapagos is not only
here for us who live here. Galapagos is unique in the world, it is a world-
human-heritage and we have to be conscious and responsible for our actions”
As we found our beach and settled our camp we continued to talk about the
archipelago and related subjects. Our guide (the fisherman) found some shadow
under a bush tree and leaped into a one-hour siesta while, I, the woman, her father,
brother, two young sons and a peer went for a stroll in the spectacular surroundings.
The context of untouched nature, white-sandy beaches and the eternal blue sea made
us reflect upon the beauty of the island and inevitably created a feeling about the
importance of keeping it this way. We talked about the horrible exploitation of the
mangroves on mainland Ecuador where the nature have suffered intolerable pain in
favor of numerous shrimp-farms. This gave further basis for a discussion and critic of
the capitalist society los pelucones, social-cristianos – and we would all agree that the
world is run by the wrong people (men!).
Back on the beach our guide slowly woke up. The father of the woman that had
invited me was around 80 years old and began to tell the story of how he came to
Galapagos from a city in the southern highlands of the Republic some 40 years ago.
He told us about the hard work and harsh conditions, about his small farm and problems with landownership related to the powerful landlords and so on and so
forth. When we switched into contemporary issues in Galapagos it was notable that
the old man had problems of understanding, especially when it touched the themes
of politics and regulation. At this stage our guide had joined us in the conversation
and made comments, answered questions and explained. It was all done in a very
laid back atmosphere, there was no rush and the conversation could move slowly
without anyone feeling eager to speed it up. We sat in the shadows of the bushes -
close to where our guide had slept - and talked while the woman and her brother
prepared the meal. The old man made some remarks that implicitly revealed his lack
of understanding in some matters and it was the most admirable observation to see
how the guide explained to him the “matter-of-facts” in such a subtle and respectful
manner that the old man would come to understand without being insulted in any
way. As our guide had been a fisherman all his life he seemed to have the kind of
patience that can only be achieved after many years of contemplating in silence on
the open sea. The dialogue between the two men was, I must say, a remarkable
experience as it showed humanity in a nutshell in one of the most stunning contexts
nature could offer. In this atmosphere it was as if the interaction mirrored the nature
surrounding us and created a form of communication that contrasted very much
with the hazards and practical issues of everyday talk. When we discussed the
controversy in the local fishery, the truth was uttered by our guide:
Bueno, yo tengo que trabajar para mi familia y cuando hay turistas voy con los
turistas. Cuando no hay (turistas) tengo que ir al mar y pescar. A mí no me interesa
que la langosta esta en veda si yo igual no cojo los grandes. Lo que a mí me interesa es
cuidar a mis hijos y contribuir en una u otra manera para que tengan comida. Hay que
aprovechar lo que el mar nos puede dar. No somos nosotros, como yo, quienes dañamos
el medio ambiente, ni nosotros que ganamos la plata. Los que hacen ambas esas cosas
son los barcos grandes de pesca y de turismo. Nosotros simplemente hacemos lo que
hacemos para vivir y así siempre ha sido el destino del pescador – soltero y pobre.
“Well, I have to work for my family and when there are tourists I work with
them. When there is none I have to go out on the sea and fish. It doesn’t
interest me if or not the fishing of lobster is in close season because I never
pick the big ones. What interests me is taking care of my children in one way
or another so that they have food to eat. It is not us, people like me, who
destroy the environment or earn the big money. The ones who do both those things are the big fishing and cruise boats. What we do is simply to stay alive
and that’s how the destiny of the fisherman always has been – lonesome and
poor.”
I had already asked the man about illegal fishing and as we had built confidence
between each other he told me a lot of things about it relating it to times that has
passed.
As far as manhood is concerned the men’s dialogue indicated something about the
respect for seniors. Although our guide was somewhere in his 40s and had lived a
relatively long life himself, he acted with very much respect towards the old man. He
subsumed and listened to what the old man said without interfering, much like a
young boy does in front of an adult. When he disagreed he was as pedagogic as any
psychologist or teacher. He expressed understanding at first and then confronted the
topic with his own insight in a manner that would not hurt the old man, but rather
introduce him to the same insight. The guide knew that the old man had worked
hard and gone through a lot and appreciated the wisdom the old man held. It was as
if he regarded his own “updated insight” or information as small details in the big
picture.
Both young and old generations of course benefit from having a smooth relation. At
the general level the young generations arguably depend on the knowledge of elders,
but as time can be conceived as moving faster now than before, the contrary is also
true. Older people will to a certain degrees depend on learning about modernity, or
whatever we want to call it, from the young generations that participate more
actively and even constitute the “new time”. This may be true, but Nestroy reminds
us that “advance” is not always what it seems to be;; “it is in the nature of every
advance that it appears much greater than it actually is” (opening quote:
Wittgenstein 1997). We certainly cannot juxtapose ”new time” with progress or
advance, but it suffices for the sake of the argument I try to sketch out. Younger
generations depend on the elders from childhood to adulthood and respect them
although the respect does not exclude a challenge towards old traditions. What is central here is that a man reaches a peak at some stage in his life. At one point he
becomes the humble one and regards himself as less competent to lead the way.
When this happens he has nevertheless contributed so much that he can take a rest
without feeling guilty about it. In fact, in the context of Galapagos and Ecuador, he is
expected to do so. Older generations are respected because they carry a large
backpack of life-experience and although the luggage of the younger ones may
contain more colors than the former, it is the size that matters here. Ecuadorians have
a proverb for this: El Diablo sabe más por viejo que por Diablo (“The Devil knows
because he is old and not because he is the Devil”)
Old people hold a kind of wisdom that simply cannot be held by young people40.
This is especially significant in times of crisis. It is very much similar to the service
and significance of the priest. People may regard him as useless and never attend
church, but in the moment of death (especially the death of a close relative) the priest
is a great supporter in the grief. He holds a heavy experience and is a specialist in
mourning;; he is called upon and appreciated for his “solidness”, empathy and ability
to listen. In this way he manifests his position and gain a deep value from the ones
who mourn, a value that is beyond economic and rational calculation. It is precisely
this deep assessment that is paralleled in the fisherman’s respect towards the old
man. Furthermore, this trait has a highly implicit life since it is not normal to speak
about, but merely grows with a man’s life-experience and understanding. Any man
on San Cristobal would have reacted with disapproval if an old person had been
offended or scrutinized in the public sphere and although it might seem romantic
isn’t it also a good thing to know? Like pregnant women, old people have immunity
from the splashing during the carnival, but the respect at play here is ultimately
representative for a notion of common sense that transcends the local setting: in an
ideal world it approximates a universal value or understanding.
The episode above is ultimately about the encounter of empathy and about a
reciprocal feeling that often occur in sociality between humans. It is what Wikan
(1992) talks about through her notion of resonance and what originally led to Bastian’s
concept of “psychic unity of mankind” (Koepping 1983). There was an
intersubjective understanding grounded in human empathy that orchestrated the
whole game of interaction, especially between the fisherman and the old man. It was
as Wikan points out, the power of this understanding that guided the dialogue and
dominated over any potential, superficial disagreement or ruptures of personal
egoism. In folk-knowledge this is very much about “playing along” and I think it is
possible to elaborate quite far on this thought. The point here was to exemplify the
dimension of age and respect, which sheds a light on the empathic dimension of
manhood.
There are many strong reasons towards an assumption in which this intersubjective
understanding – i.e. resonance and reciprocity with all related associations ultimately
and deeply has something to do with the concept of love. Human love, love in
humanity, love towards fellow human beings, love as a cultural system? Although
this is a worn out cliché there must be a reason for Bourdieu’s escape to love when
treating masculine domination. Was he just trying to anticipate his critics by offering
a softer side of himself? Bourdieu asks:
Is love an exception, the only one, but of the first order of magnitude, to the
law of masculine domination, a suspension of symbolic violence, or is it the
supreme – because the most subtle, the most invisible – form of that violence?
(Bourdieu 2001:109)
At first he answers by pointing to the potential reversal of the relation of male
domination, when a man loses himself in the love of a woman, but that this is still a
context of struggle that only reinforces the androcentric mythology. He follows by
referring to momentarily love as mere breaks in the ordinary, but then he shifts
towards the miraculous part and finally albeit a bit hard to follow from what he calls
“a strictly anthropological point of view” – he reveals the possibility of true love:
…based on the suspension of the struggle for symbolic power that springs
from the quest for recognition and the associated temptation to dominate, the
mutual recognition by which each recognizes himself or herself in another
whom he or she recognizes as another self and who also recognizes him or her
as such, can lead, in its perfect reflexitivity, beyond the alternatives of egoism
and altruism and even beyond the distinction between subject and object, to
the state of fusion and communion, often evoked in metaphors close to those
of mysticism, in which two beings can “lose themselves in each other” without
being lost. (Bourdieu 2001:111)
He even go as far as to say that the phenomenon of giving secret names lovers in
between can have the power to mark a new birth, which is ultimately a change in
ontological status (op.cit. 112). To put an end to this romantic dream – which I take to
have an essential importance in the masculine script – a real and true man as Neil
Young has obviously been through this movie before when he sang;; …only love can
break your heart, try to be sure right from the start…41 As with gender it is impossible to
define love since the concept could potentially contain all sorts of harmonic feelings.
Nevertheless, its impact has a social reality in time and it is expressed in a number of
social representations, sometimes explicitly and sometimes beneath the surface of the
dialogue and interaction.
Source: duo.uio.no
Text full-link:
https://www.duo.uio.no/handle/10852/16145?show=full
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