Ghosts of Manila Read Free Page A

documentary rather than ‘imaginative’; that it aspired to be journalism decked out with a few subjective ruffs and bows. Prideaux maintained that much journalism was vitiated by a pretence of objectivity. The average TV documentary, for example, had come to feel like pure fiction. Its language and conventions and formulae were all stock, by now so familiar that it dropped unremarked down the general well ofentertainment, at par with the news and re-runs of The Flintstones. Famine victims tottered and wept just as predictably as prime ministers emerged from shiny limousines smirking or careworn. C’était leur métier. (His views on the subject of newzak were all too familiar to members of the university’s Faculty of Media Studies.)
    He knew that an unconventional thesis ought as far as possible to be dressed up to resemble the regular article. Yet he soon found even this minimal disguise hard to achieve. It was usual at the outset to state the subject, after which the preferred method was to append the standard authorities and explain how one had managed to uncover, by sheer cleverness and originality, a loophole in their research or a weak point in the argument that fatally dated their work. Prideaux’s problem was that, faced with the eventual pile of his own typescript, he no longer knew what the subject was. It was therefore impossible to follow with the customary abstract: the pithy couple of sentences in bold print which summarised the whole thing. ‘Displaced Oklahoma dirt farmers enter the non-lucrative mid-1930s California citrus industry’, he had once seen somebody précis The Grapes of Wrath. How could even the laziest academic think this was a useful exercise? Proper fieldwork could hardly be boiled down without gross distortion or banality any more than literature could.
    He had also to confront the issue of his own middle-age, since he discovered it had a bearing on such matters Maybe the typical anthropology student in their early twenties might have picked the sort of subject that could easily be summarised, which lacked resonance. But a mature student in his forties looked at a different world through different eyes. Who with daughters and sons of their own at university would think ‘Kinship Systems Among the Nambikwara’ a nice, neutral little topic when the very word family had become synonymous with private anxiety, bafflement and guilt? The years went by and interests become more compromised and intricate even as tastes grew simpler. That went for theses, too. Such considerations were ignored by the academic establishment, whose judgements and expectations were based on the energetic callowness of comparative babies.
    Initially, while still casting about for a suitable subject, Prideaux had been tempted by the wholly fictitious, as anyone would be who had once admired Carlos Castaneda. He had toyed with many titles,half prepared to reasearch and write a thesis to match any which took his fancy. ‘The Tribe That Dare Not Speak Its Name’ had had real possibilities and would have been a great pleasure to write. Only the difficulty of trying to invent a plausible location for this intensely superstitious and shy people had finally dissuaded him. Given the fictive nature of even the most scientific undertaking (its inventiveness, its arbitrariness as a human endeavour carried out according to human rules), he saw how the driest doctoral essay could become a roman à thèse. He had not considered this when he began his research and had given little thought to how his choice of topic was bound to be related to private preoccupations and public anxieties: the high whistling noise and cracking sounds as chips flew off interior façades. Was he not like the worried scientist in a disaster movie, taking an evening stroll along the top of the dam and suddenly noticing that the white lines in the middle of the road no longer quite match up? Eventually, though, his chosen area had seemed to settle