Anthropology and its Discontents

After completing the reading assignment, the students avoided looking up at their teacher.

Instead, they opted to make as many disgusted, eye-rolling, or otherwise disapproving glances that they knew of to each other. One student however, chose instead to stare at a point roughly eight to ten inches through the teacher's head.

Increasingly uncomfortable, Mr. Keisher decided to turn the tables, but in then end it failed spectacularly.

"And what do you think of the Halu-hawthi people?" he asked her.

"Buncha savages." She shrugged and continued staring for no better reason than that making Mr. Keisher uncomfortable was a more interesting thing to do than acknowledge that around her existed smelly, sex-obsessed classmates who kept snickering about the naked photo of some Hello-whatever women grinding food with rocks.

"That's an extremely offensive thing to say," snapped Mr. Keisher. 

"Doesn't make it less true." The girl smirked, and Mr. Keisher could feel the air shift or at the very least his control of the conversation. She added, "They burned some stupid Pac-Man symbol into the left breast of every woman to prevent their evil devil beast thing from possessing her heart and making her want to marry someone other than who her parents arranged for her."

"The symbol, is the sacred sun god, Allu-ti, being visited by the everlasting bird, Fhanu-fhan. Key figures in their mythology. This practice is part of their religion. It's core to their belief system and a fundamental part of their culture. It's no less savage than circumcision."

Mr. Keisher would not lose control of the conversation. He had heard horror stories of how this girl destroyed other classrooms, but he had made it through the first marking period without incident, surely he could survive the next twenty-eight minutes.

"That's my point. They're a buncha savages just like the rest of humanity," the girl retorted. "Some people believed in Manifest Destiny and used it to justify wiping out entire species because their fur made nice hats. And other people believed in Lebensraum and used it to justify gas-chambering millions of humans to death. And I haven't touched slavery, witch trials, deforestation, the giant plastic isl--" 

"The purpose of this reading," Mr. Keisher interrupted, "was to help you, to help all of you," he said hoping to engage the rest of the class in the conversation, "to understand that the Halu-hawthi are very much like all of us, more similar than we might want to admit, and certainly we share more sameness than difference."

"Yes," the girl said, "that point was made abundantly clear. Like the rest of mankind, they use savage practices to control female sexuality. In their case, they cut off the thumb of a girl who -- by way of magic chicken bones -- was determined to no longer be a virgin. In our case, we blame girls who dress too sluttily if they get raped. You did a great job, you made your point, they are a waste of carbon just like the rest of humanity."

The other students were now shifting uncomfortably in their chairs. Sex was not a topic spoken openly about in front of a teacher, especially a teacher old enough to be their dad. And absolutely not a topic talked about in terms of violence or criminal implications. They glanced at their teacher, not because they were hopeful that he could resolve the situation -- no they had, each in their turn, witnessed the girl destroy other teachers -- the class looked at Mr. Keisher like he was a wounded, baby antelope in the shadow of a lion preparing to pounce.

"Cultural beliefs, religions, are a very different thing than governmental practices. A people's religion can't be bad. It can be different. It might seem cruel or harsh to someone not of the faith, but it cannot be bad. Governments may be dysfunctional and through hindsight's lens prove to have been harmful, but we must tread cautiously through history and across the globe. Just because something does not meet our present ideal of perfection, does not mean it is not still good, we cannot simply condemn humanity to evil."

"But we can conveniently invent religions to justify being jerks? I'm a viking. My warrior religion says it's my right to pillage. I'm an ancient Egyptian. My religion says I can kill my entire serving staff so that they'll be with me in the afterlife to keep on serving me because they don't deserve to ever catch a break. I'm an ancient Greek, and my religion says I need to slaughter eleven oxen to please Zeus, but since he's a god up on Olympus and can't actually eat the food only smell it, I guess me and my buddies will have to eat what we can and let the rest rot, all so that my wife will give birth to a son since daughters are little better than cat--."

"To the guidance counselor, this minute!" Mr. Keisher thrust his hand towards the door.

"Pretty sure they're called 'School Counselors' now because some humans believe that makes a difference." The girl stood up, slowly pushed her chair in, took her time collecting her belongings and shuffled, as if suddenly arthritic, towards the front of the room.

"I said NOW!"

"You said, 'this minute,' and I believe I still have a few more sec--"

"GO! OUT!" Mr. Keisher roared, and his fist slammed onto his desk. 

KERRRACKKK! 

A long split broke across the corrugated wood.

The girl shrugged her shoulders and walked out the door without even giving the poor man the decency of a victory smirk. She was completely apathetic towards her win -- from Mr. Keisher's perspective it had been a battle, and he had -- in front of all of his students -- lost, unquestionably.

The girl relayed the event to the school counselor.

"I thought you did not like activism?" the counselor asked when the recounting finished. She had known the girl since before coming to work as a school counselor, even before coming Earth. 

"I don't."

"Then what do you call what you were doing? That was some feminist, bra-burning, patriarchy-smashing words you had there."

"I was just stating factual information about human stupidity."

"Killing Mr. Keisher would have been kinder," the counselor said 

"I hurt his feelings." The girl shrugged. "No big whoop. He wanted me to like some dumb tribe of people I'm never gonna meet on the merits of them being able to make huts out of dung and get by with the equivalent of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics for their writing system. Humans have literally been there and done that, it's not all that impressive just because they're still doing it in 2010."

"His double-majored in anthropology and history education. He took three service-learning trips to live with, learn about and help the Halu-hawthi and their struggling community. In graduate school, in wrote his dissertation on these people and their fight for survival against industrialization. He married a Halu-hawthi woman, and in his desire to respect and honor their cultural customs and beliefs, he had the 'Pac-Man ritual' as you call it performed on his daughter. What you did to him, what you said, will eat away at him. A slow, painful death."

"Stupid should hurt." The girl flicked her hand, as if swatting away a fly. "He's now learned a valuable lesson about what happens when you forgo engaging in critical-thinking just because you're trying to be respectful. It's like if someone gets an ugly haircut, you tell them -- if you like them -- so they can either fix it or wait for it to grow out and never do it again. Respectful silence is actually a form of exercising your power against someone ironically making it like they're lesser than you are instead of equal."

"You have a knack for twisting anything against itself, haven't you?"

The girl shrugged. 

The school counselor, before seeking asylum on Earth, had been the queen of a hell Realm. She had been responsible for torturing other demons and even the occasional human that made it out her way -- which was so rare, she had almost felt like it entitled them to a free pass, almost. But this girl was different. Half human, half vampire. She had been raised by a cabal of vampires who believed she was destined to fulfill an ancient prophecy and destroy either the Earth, completely and entirely, or human beings' dominion over the Earth -- details had gotten a bit garbled in the generations of translations as new languages rose and fell throughout the millennia.

"Just understand," the counselor said, "that what you've done. It can't be undone. You planted a seed in this man. And it will unwind him. I know. I have dealt blows like this since the time when Egyptian hieroglyphics were considering new and edgy."

"Why do you even know all this stuff about Mr. --- Mr. Teacher-that-dated-his-school-project?"

"Some of it is my empath blood, and some of it is because Mr. Keisher has a bulletin board of his multicultural family in the front of his classroom that has been up since the first day of school."

"News. to. me."

If humans were savages, then the prophecy-girl was a lightning strike. A plasma bolt shot out and struck without warning and without target simply because that was its purpose, to strike.

Mr. Keisher stared at his bulletin board. At his family. At his twelve-year-old daughter who had blossomed sooner than expected. Who had cried and begged him not to burn the hot mark of Fhanu-fhan's visit to Allu-ti onto her soft, tender skin -- but that was the role of the father in the ritual. It was the custom, to refuse would be dishonorable and would bring sickness to the tribe's elders. He had asked his wife her thoughts, but she had said simply, "My hand will not be holding a hot knife."

He had wanted to prove himself to the tribe. That he could and would uphold all their values and beliefs. He would not despoil them. He would not erase their existence like so many other Europeans had or try to change them, to convert them to some other system and fit in some special neat and tidy box.

He had told himself that it was normal for teenage girls not to speak much with their fathers. It could feel awkward, changing bodies and all that. But his daughter had grown up in New Jersey. She visited the island home of her maternal lineage only a few times a year. Whatever beliefs they honored and celebrated in their home, she did not exist in a bubble -- separated like her mother's tribe from the beliefs and customs, norms and mores of middle class, suburban life in South Jersey. 

His daughter's classmates were mainly Christian. A few Jews who kept quite about their beliefs lest they be teased like their more visible counterparts the Muslims. There were gendered norms in these religions. A few students at her school wore head coverings, but none of them had been branded by their father.

Sean Keisher stared at a picture of his daughter, a smiling child, back from when she was just a girl of eight-years-old. He had tried to prepare her for the ritual all her life. Normalizing it. Saying things like, "See Mommy has god's mark too, protecting her, and one day so will you. Won't that be nice?" 

But had his wife really followed her parents' arrangement? No, not exactly. On the eve of the wedding, her husband-to-be had been bitten by a poisonous spider. The first time Dahi-le had ever laid eyes on the man she was to marry was during the last few minutes of his life when his face had swollen to twice its size, his lips bursting with blood, the hand that had been bitten, dissolved into a lifeless sac. 

Technically, the marriage still should have been performed. Technically, Dahi-le should have been married to Ore-na, according to tribal law, even if it meant that he would die before their first full moon together. And technically, as was the custom, Dahi-le would be forever labeled a gnek -- a widow without a child -- forbidden to remarry, forced to live out her days as a slave in the hut of the eldest male relative of her deceased husband.

But Dahi-le's parents could not bear the thought of condemning their young daughter to such a fate. Without the power to call off the wedding, they instead demanded Ore-na's parents to pay a higher, impossibly higher, dowry. Ore-na's parents could not afford the sum, so they -- the only one's with the power to do so -- called off the wedding. On the face of things, Ore-na's parents did it because they had to -- they simply could not give up four goats -- but in their hearts they would have done it without the performance. They would not want such a fate for one of their own daughters.

Months later, when a young, comparatively wealthy, white man came and was the first person to bring a smile to Dahi-le's face by telling a simple joke about an impossible animal called an elephant, of course her parents were eager to do anything, take any risk at all, to bring happiness back to their child -- even if it meant knowing she might leave the island. Seeing your child in pain is worse than experiencing any possible physical pain to your own body when you're a parent.

Sean Keisher touched his daughter's smiling face in the photo on his bulletin board. He could not bring himself to look at a more recent photo, taken when she was fourteen. 

As the years went by Mr. Keisher's lectures took a less celebratory of humanity tone, and a more antagonist tone. The girl had long since left the high school. But her mark had been burned in to Mr. Keisher's soul, and its heat still lingered, singeing the edges of new students' brains, shaping their thoughts. Making them ask questions about beliefs and rights. And whether or not humans really had been granted divine domain over the Earth to defile the oceans, smog up the air and lay waste to the soil, starving and choking everyone -- including themselves -- to imminent death.