Musings In a Bamboo Grove

The bamboo grove in question is located in the garden of the small private guesthouse where I stay here in Kathmandu. Actually, it is a large villa set in a garden with lots of trees and other vegetation, including a bamboo grove, all of which is run by my employer. There are 5 rooms, and we expats who work on projects in Nepal stay here, which is much better than staying in a hotel. Two staff takes care of our every needs. The guesthouse is in Baluwatar, an area on the outskirt of town, quiet and peaceful. The garden is full of birds, insects, butterflies, as well as a couple of smaller mammals (in addition to two dogs that have adopted the house and us, and do not care much for guarding the property).

I walk around in the garden, observing how things grow and then wither, the fantastic flowers that suddenly show up, the birds and butterflies. And then there is the bamboo grove. The vernacular name is "golden bamboo", likely corresponding to a species with the Latin name bambusa vulgaris. Both vernacular and Latin names are used for a number of spies I sit and look at it over lunch with my colleagues (we drive – or rather, are driven – back to the guesthouse for lunch). There are any number of different species of bamboo, and I do not know what species this is (see photo). Each stem is 10+ cm thick, maybe 20 m high, and yellowish in colour. The stems grow very close together, a mass of leaves towering high above. Bamboo is of course a grass. It is perennial and evergreen, and for this reason is rather alien to vegetation in the northern hemisphere where I grew up. It is also unique in that the internodal region of the stems usually are hollow. Finally, the absence of secondary growth (read: branches), causes stems of bamboo to be columnar rather than tapering (the same applies to palms).

Bamboo is a most versatile plant. Throughout South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia, and Madagascar bamboo is of substantial economic and cultural importance. It is used for a variety of purposes, as raw material, as food, and as a building material. Bamboo is a crucial raw material for an endless variety of tools, utensils, and what not – it is a key raw material for many objects of material culture (to invoke a term from anthropology). When I lived in Sunamgonj in Northeast Bangladesh most of the furniture in my house was made of bamboo.

Right now, my bamboo grove produces new shoots, at least 10 of them. The one that is highest grows at a speed of 1 1/2 m per week! The smaller ones grow slower at first. I have selected one shoot and photograph it once per day, sort of to document the speed of growth.

In spite of this for me extreme growth I do sense very strongly the permanence of it all. Bamboo grows fast, certainly compared with the growth of trees in Norway. Nonetheless, or in spite of this, I feel that this bamboo has been here forever, not my bamboo grove, that is, but bamboo as a grass plant, and that it has been an intrinsic part of culture, and of cultural evolution, in these parts of the world since man first came here. A classic anthropology monograph on society and culture in India has two subtitles: "Continuity and Change," and "Change and Continuity" (Mandelbaum 1970; Note 2). This is a very apt and to-the-point title. And it applies not just to India, but to cultures – or rather civilizations – throughout Asia.

Traveling means different things to different people. Two general types of travellers are engaged in tourism and in business. In the following they are admittedly somewhat caricatured. First, you may travel as a tourist, where what matters most is getting to the nearest beach, bar, nightclub or national park, and where you interact with those in your own travel group and other foreigners on the same mission. Second, you may travel on business, which means you mostly see offices, and while you interact with locals they will to likely be closer to you in culture than to the average person in that country, and you will likely communicate in English. As for me, I travel with a different set of rationales and goals. I will interact only with local people, often in English, and often in the vernacular language (using an interpreter). The whole raison d'etre of my work hinges on understanding what lies behind whatever they say and argue, upon reading between the lines, so to speak. As a complete outsider understanding a new and unknown culture is exceedingly complicated and difficult.

Shifting from one cultural context to another is complex and involves adaptations on several levels. There are necessary adaptations to be made on physical and physiological levels, maybe specifically after crossing several time zones and adjusting to a new one. These are common ones that all travellers experience to some extent, the further away one travels the longer time it takes. Also, people commonly experience more physical and physiological issues of adjustment traveling east than west. On this mission I flew from Norway to Nepal, via Thailand. After a long and sleepless night, I found myself in a location so radically different that it is difficult to describe, let alone comprehend. I would like to say that I am not getting used to it, after years of traveling across many time zones and cultures. Yet I am, sort of. To some extent at least this is a psychological reality as well as necessity.

For me there are additional adjustments and adaptations to be made on a deeper cultural level. I travel from one culture, which happens to be the one I was born and raised into, and land in a culture that is fundamentally different in so many ways. It is actually less a question of adjusting as it is one of getting it under my skin, of living it. While that certainly is a very tall number, the anthropological idea is one of so-called "participant observation." As students we took it for a fundamental truth. Now, when practising it, it is clear that it is less said (and read) than done. Actually, to participate AND to observe is something akin to a contradiction in terms. If you participate in something you are, at least in theory, part and parcel of it. If you observe something, you are doing so from the outside. If you do both –  participate (as a member of a group) and observe (as an outsider) – you quickly realize that you have engaged in a difficult balancing act. Participate colours your observation of what is going on. And when you participate you influence the behaviour of the other members in the group whose behaviour you observe. A tricky issue, to be sure, one that there is no obvious solution to. All we ever achieve when engaging in participant observation is approximations towards an ideal. And the fundamental problem is that we will never know exactly how our participation influences and channels the behaviour of those we observe.

Since a couple of weeks, I have worked out of the project office in Kathmandu together with other expats and with the project staff. All are educated and urban-based persons. We speak English together. Tomorrow morning (Sunday), I will fly to the extreme Western part of Nepal to work in the future project area of this proposed hydro-power project. This is where the local people live, those that I have to try and understand, whose livelihoods I have to assess, whose thoughts about how this proposed project will affect their lives in myriad ways I have to learn and understand, whose losses (specifically economically) I have to determine, and all of this in order to be able to suggest correct levels of economic compensation while at the same time contributing to making their future lives hopefully better than before. To get at answers to all there questions, this time around I bring a team of 20+ persons who will administer a large socio-economic and asset survey. We will visit close to 2,000 households and ask a very large number of questions, mostly quantitative ones, so many in fact that chances are it will take too long time as it cuts into their daily round of chores (the people who live in this valley are mostly farmers).

And all the while my bamboo grove is sitting there, saying nothing, doing nothing (except growing new stems at a breakneck speed, being totally and only concerned with that, not caring at all about what goes on in the rest of the world. The world keeps spinning, and I spin with it. We are all in the same boat, figuratively speaking. There is some solace in that. It hopefully makes for a better understanding of these peoples' living conditions.

Lars T Soeftestad

Notes
(1) This book, by David G. Mandelbaum, and the area of social science work in India that addresses the terms "change" and "continuity", mostly focus on the caste system and mobility. The caste system does indeed change, meaning there is upward mobility of individuals between the various layers of castes- Also, whole castes can over generations move up in the hierarchy (so-called "sanscritization"). As I write this I am thinking of another anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, who coined the term "agricultural involution" (Geertz 1963). With reference to wet rice agriculture in Indonesia he observed how changes continually took place on a micro-level, but without changing the macro-level agricultural system. The system was already so well developed and adapted that change was not necessary. In a way it became ever more like itself, hence "involution" instead of "evolution".
(2) Image credit: Lars Soeftestad, Supras Ltd.
(3) Permalink. URL: https://devblog.no/en/article/musings-bamboo-grove
(4) This article was published 29 September 2018. It was revised 7 October 2018.

Sources
Geertz, Clifford. 1963. Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Mandelbaum, David G. 1970. Society in India. Vol. 1: Continuity and Change. Vol. 2: Change and Continuity. Berkeley, California: University of California Press.