The Anthropologists
“Ayşegül Savaş wades into the thorny challenge of deciphering the other.”
Diversity is at the core of the anthropological paradigm. To get a grasp of it, its complexity, its dynamism, and its hidden revelations anthropologists deploy ethnographic methods (in-depth participant observation) that piece together a people’s rich stories. Renowned anthropologist Clifford Geertz famously termed this “thick description”: a deep and nuanced understanding of what makes people and places tick in a specific milieu, at a specific time.
In her latest novel, Turkish-born Ayşegül Savaş wades into the thorny challenge of deciphering the other—in this case, through the eyes and understanding of a young couple, Asya and Manu. They have taken the plunge and seek to carve out a life in an unnamed foreign city virtually on a whim. Asya is an anthropologically trained documentary filmmaker with a new grant, and Manu works for a nonprofit organization.
Strangers in a strange land. Yet the strange land has superficial familiarities: bookstores, record shops, restaurants, bars, and the like. Yet just beneath the surface there are no standard cultural formats, narratives, actions, or forms of organization. To her credit, rather than clutching desperately to familiar cultural assumptions and understandings, Asya sets out to comprehend this foreign place and its people by documenting the rhythms and contours of everyday life.
Keywords crop up early and often, like breadcrumbs leading down a path: rituals, rules, faith, history, and sturdy. These extend and deepen as the book moves on: field/fieldwork, mythology, symbols, kinship and family, sacred and profane, gift exchange, division of labor, and the list goes on.
In a nod to Geertz, Asya decides that her research will take a tight focus on a nearby park—at once utterly mundane but with its own rules, rituals, practices, and idiosyncrasies.
As she goes deeper into the park and its denizens, she becomes aware of their well-worn grooves of everyday life. She also notes that they also have interesting quirks. Thus, Savaş introduces the notion of culture as normative mimesis in contrast to idiosyncratic instances of alterity that are all too human. Asya, the anthropologist, has some decent chops.
Interwoven through the book we find chapters that center on Asya, Manu, and their friends Ravi and Lena. These narrative changes masterfully shift the gaze away from the “other as other” to the “self as other.” Savaş, thus, turns the tables on her protagonists. The gazer becomes the gazed upon, the observer becomes the object.
This is a slick power move, for it brings a certain equity to the intellectual and emotional playing field. Savaş shifts her authorial role and becomes the documentarian’s camera (giving us “the facts,” if in incomplete form) while the reader takes on the researcher’s gaze onto the protagonists’ world. With the narrative inversions, again, the anthropological role and subject are fluid, hence the plural nature of the title.
Not surprisingly, we learn far more about the protagonists than we do about the worldview of the people in the park. Along the way, we are given glimpses into their thoughts and practices around marriage, relationships, friendships, gift exchange, food, faith, work/leisure—all encased in a variety of rituals and traditions.
These might have gone on with little comment or awareness had the protagonists been snugly situated in the comfortable confines of their home country, region, or city. It is axiomatic in anthropology that engaging “the other” requires engagement with one’s own culture through a reflexive dialectic that is comparative. The deeper you dive into another culture, the more you compare their grooves with your grooves.
The throughline to the story of Asya, Manu, and their friends is the inevitability of change, transformation, and impermanence. Asya and Manu search (endlessly) for an apartment to buy and leave their old, cramped one behind; friends (seemingly permanent) drift away; people (who seem ageless) age and grow infirm; a documentary is started and finished.
As Asya notes at the book’s close: “All this time, we were waiting. For the news of some momentous change; that we were being summoned to serve in real life; that the time of playing games was over.” Rather than change coming in some gobsmacking bolt, Savaş suggests that more often it is iterative, an accretion. Here the gulf between life and art disappears.