Homesickness, Kari Kari Sickness, and the Unique Anthropologist Syndrome

On Thursday evening, after having gotten lost approximately seven times earlier that day—even with a map to consult!—while trying to find the house of the American missionary where my groceries were held hostage, then going through somewhat of an ordeal to find even a distant refrigerator in which to keep said groceries, and finally being dragged endless blocks to buy a wireless internet antennae for my computer that it turned out I couldn’t afford and a prepay cell phone they couldn’t actually sell me, perhaps it was inevitable that I would start to feel that deep, irremediable loneliness unique to strangers in a strange land. When I came home phoneless, internetless, worried about my higher-than-expected living costs, and exhausted from altitude sickness and/or dehydration (which seem to be one in the same problem for me), it suddenly dawned on me that there was absolutely no way I could possibly communicate with anyone who had known me for more than 36 hours. I wanted my mommy. Crying ensued.

But I pulled myself together and went down to the kitchen to cook a meal with the hermana who oversees the hospedaje and her 10-year-old daughter. After all, I had two beef chuletas to cook that would otherwise go to waste, nor am I one to waste an opportunity to invite my new Bolivian hosts to dinner. As we waited for the brown rice to cook (which didn’t, by the way, really cook—but at least my first attempt at brown rice 12,500 feet above sea level proved highly education!), I asked the hermana about how she came to live in the hospedaje and work for the Methodist church. In the story she elaborated for me, I learned that her husband had died of an illness called kari kari, which, if I understood her correctly, results from a malicious individual performing a procedure on you when you are unaware and vulnerable, perhaps sleeping on a bus, for example. This procedure creates an abscess in your stomach or your lung (via the back) or sometimes your thigh. At first, you don’t feel anything and go about your life as normal. But within a week or a month, perhaps, you are bound to eat something fresh such as fish, eggs, or cheese, and this activates the dormant abscess, at which point you begin to feel a screaming, constant pain, as unbearable as being in labor. Finally, you bleed to death out of your nose, mouth and anus. The evil stranger is then able to collect this blood somehow and sell it. The doctors don’t believe in this illness, she explained, thus it is no use going to the hospital, where they will inject you with poison in any case. The only cure is an herbal remedy that her husband did take, but as she found out later, he did not take enough of it, which is why he died. She told me that another hermana, the gatekeeper of the hospedaje, cured herself from the same illness using this remedy.

It would, of course, be natural for most anyone from my cultural context to side with the Bolivian doctors in their disbelief. However, as I listened to her story, I was reminded of a book I just finished reading before I left for Bolivia that gave me some reserve in denouncing the hermana’s understanding of bodies, illnesses and medicine as categorically less enlightened than my own understanding. In this book, The Woman Beneath the Skin, Barbara Dudden examines the case files of a 17th-century German doctor who attended primarily to women. In the world of this doctor and his female patients, not only the medical explanations of illness and the cures prescribed were strange to my medical understanding, but even the physical symptoms themselves were almost completely alien to any types of diseases and conditions of the human body that I am familiar with. In this small town in 17th-century Germany, women would urinate pins and other household objects; bizarre swellings and abscesses on the skin would be encouraged and nurtured as semi-permanent cleansing outlets for the body as they emitted varied substances that I don’t associate with bodily fluids; and men frequently menstruated as well as women, sometimes from the penis but more often from other body parts, such as the fingertips. It was seen as a grave sign when men’s flows stopped, just as such stoppage was grave for women. Unless I am to believe this ordinary but meticulous doctor was inventing every single thing he wrote down, I am forced to allow my own solid notions about what the body is and how it works to be challenged, and to recognize that our understanding of the body shapes our experience of the body, and, perhaps more importantly, our experience shapes our understanding.

Needless to say, my conversation about the kari kari illness, as preliminary and poorly understood as it may have been, made me feel like quite the anthropologist. Here I was learning about folkloric medical notions, without even prompting! I felt the same way on Saturday at the house of a woman who works for the three FEFEME leaders. She told me about her struggle to pursue a college-level degree with three children and an unsupportive husband, whom she had only married to escape the abuse of her older brother. She indicated that her relationship with her husband had improved considerably since he stopped drinking after getting a testicle cut off by muggers while drunk, but she was still saddened by the fact that he was unable to show much tenderness and love to his children. Perhaps even worse, from my perspective, was that he only gave her Bs. 200 (US $28.50) per week to contribute to her own income as the primary breadwinner for the family. On top of providing the lion’s share of the income for household expenses, she also did all the household work, with help from a cleaning lady one day a week. Despite all these classic conditions of “gendered oppression,” however, she positively glowed with pride at having loved herself enough to pursue her own education, and she also explained that working as a leader of women’s causes in the church has given her confidence and a sense of meaning in her life. Later in the afternoon she agreed to let me record her while I asked her to elaborate on various themes she’d brought up while we went to the market and cooked. Our conversation was cut short because her son was ready to drive me back home, but I walked away with fifteen minutes of conversation on my digital voice recorder—to be continued soon—like they were gold star stickers affirming my anthropologist-ness.

With that said, however, I have to admit that at this point in my stay, I feel as if most of the people I talk to had read all the same ethnographies I did, and were dutifully representing their stereotypical cultural customs along with a haphazard unification of the sundry ethnic groups contained in their national boundaries. I am wondering what it is that I’ll have to add as a scholar, and my ego doesn't like the idea of letting go of doing something radically groundbreaking and unique with my research. I am assuming, however, that this is a common sensation for anthropologists of my generation in these beginning moments of research. Besides, there seems to be infinite layers of gleanings we can uncover with finer and finer-toothed combs as we seek the messy truths in the margins between previous social scientists' generalizations. I like the idea of being a gleaner, because it conjures the image of discovering sweet fruits left behind by chance, carelessness or callousness.

Because of course, not every interaction I've had has been a replay of my expectations. I’ve been pleasantly surprised, for example, that so far the stereotype of the guarded, impassive Andean Bolivian does not hold up all the time, as a couple of women have already shared relatively freely with me about their personal lives. And perhaps more importantly than the “uniqueness” of my findings, I genuinely like many of the people I have met, and am looking forward to getting to know them better. In that sense, my findings are bound to be unique, because truly knowing, understanding and sharing with individuals is always a lesson in the cliché snowflake metaphor: No two of us are ever made alike. The uniqueness of each human being has, in fact, always been an axial research interest for me. After all, what most effectively challenges those oppressive, monolithic cultural structures that I so earnestly seek to topple, as every good liberal-liberal arts student should? Particularity. All oppressive structures rely on the illusion of homogeneity in order to survive.