Euphoria

“She wanted to touch the one closer to her, push up her sleeve and see how far up the white went, the way all her tribes wherever she went needed to touch her when she first arrived. She saw pity in the women’s gazes as she and Fen boarded with their dirty duffels and their malarial eyes.”

This passage illustrates how Nell begins to identify more with the tribal people she studies rather than other white people, who have become curious objects to her. Similarly, white people see Nell as an “other”—less privileged than her race and education would make her—because she has succumbed to the native diseases.

“I heard a word I knew, taiku, the Kiona word for stones. One said it then the other said it, louder. Then loud belly-shaking guffaws of laughter […] They laughed like people in England used to laugh before the war, when I was a boy.”

This passage illustrates how the tribespeople are capable of laughing at the anthropologists and their strange ways. They misinterpret Andrew’s attempt at suicide as an attempt to swim with stones in his pockets. He in turn admires their laughter, which seems to belong to a more ancient and happier civilization—one that England might have been before the First World War’s mass destruction.

“From the nature of their questions—Fen’s about religion and religious totems, ceremonies, warfare and genealogy; Nell’s about economics, food, government, social structure and child-rearing—I could tell they’d divided their areas neatly […] everyone wanted to stake out his own territory.”

Andrew’s observation of the different themes that interest Fen and Nell, which allow them to research alongside one another without invading each other’s territory, reminds him of the competitive, colonizing bias in anthropology as a whole. Like colonizers, anthropologists in the domain of knowledge have a tendency to claim their own distinct territory rather than collaborate.