Creativity/Anthropology

Smadar Lavie, Kirin Narayan, Renato Rosaldo, Smadar Lavie, Kirin Narayan, Renato Rosaldo

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781501728020
• eBook ISBN: 9781501726040
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Creativity and play erupt in the most solemn of everyday worlds as individuals reshape traditional forms in the light of changing historical circumstances. In this lively volume, fourteen distinguished anthropologists explore the life of creativity in social life across the globe and within the study of ethnography itself. Contributors include Barbara A. Babcock, Edward M. Bruner, James W. Fernandez, Don Handelman, Smadar Lavie, José E. Limon, Barbara Myerhoff, Kirin Narayan, Renato Rosaldo, Richard Schechner, Edward L. Schieffelin, Marjorie Shostak, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, and Edith Turner.

PART I

Creative Individuals in Cultural Context

[1]

Ceferino Suárez:
A Village Versifier

James W. Fernandez

Muttering his wayward fancies he would rove.

—Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

At a time when anthropologists seek to capture some of the more subtle and emotional aspects of fieldwork in verse of their own, it may be illuminating to evoke the “creative persona” of Ceferino Suárez, a country versifier of the Cantabrian Mountains of Northern Spain. Ceferino was a man of various talents, a sculptor in stone and wood, and something of a musician as well as a poet. His poetry, I discovered, was largely confined to a thick handwritten notebook—a notebook that was misplaced or thrown away at the time of his death. Though I was able to copy out most of Ceferino’s verse, I often wondered how many other notebooks were lost in those mountains, for Ceferino was not the only versifier my wife and I heard of, though he may have been one of the most prolific and talented. Thomas Gray in his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard set for us in respect to such unknown talents the pensive thought: “Full many a Gem of purest Ray serene, / The dark unfathom’d Caves of Ocean bear: / Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, / And waste its sweetness on the desert Air.” But this elegiac mood is quite different from the ironic playfulness of Ceferino Suárez himself. And though romantic sentiments animate our anthropology, to be sure, yet our method moves us beyond them to the actual voices of countrymen and women such as Ceferino.

In this essay, then, consulting only several of his more notable poems from a much larger corpus, I will try to evoke the spirit of Ceferino—this village versifier now passed on—such as I came to understand it first in the many hours I spent with him in the early 1970s, taking down his life history on the bench—the mentidero or “yarning bench” as it is called—that stood beside his portal. By “evoking the spirit” I mean to indicate trying to recapture Ceferino’s particular voice and trying to place it among the village voices and the voices from beyond the village that he heard and to which he had to relate in his time. I use the term “spirit” to denote some essential play of mind of the man that transcends the materials out of which it arises and from which it is made. Probably what we mean by spirit is the lively search for identity—his own identity preoccupied him—but, as pursued in his own work, an identity more adequate to his persona than what can be discovered in the usual categories applied to a man of Ceferino’s place and position in life: peasant, countryman, villager. In the several poems out of a larger corpus selected for comment here we see our poet animated by the problem of what we would call individual and generic identity. For Ceferino this was one of the central problems of his life in community, and he addressed it with verve, insight, and poetic resource.

What His Life History Tells Us: “El Habanero”

The life history, it ought to be said, was not Ceferino’s particular genre—at least at the time he was asked to recount it—for his telling of it was not a virtuoso performance, an unburdening or release of long withheld memories and treasured experiences. He told it with hesitation and some reiteration, too much influenced by two hectoring elderly women—distant relatives living with him—who loomed over his words in many sessions. As at the time he was plagued by the infirmities of old age, his life history was rather more reminiscent of his misfortunes and frustrations than might have been the case in earlier years. Nevertheless, from it we can learn several important things having to do with his sense of the contrast between the limited possibilities of village life and the “world” opened up by his fifteen years in Cuba in the teens and twenties and by the books he read. For Ceferino was surely one of the villagers who had mundo (“world” or “worldliness”) as the Spanish say. It was one among other reasons that the villagers called him el habanero, the man from Havana.

The phases in Ceferino’s life are three. His first thirty years, 1883–1913, were spent in the village, where he was mostly involved in herding and agriculture on family lands. The next fifteen years, 1913–1928, he spent in Cuba. There his mundo and its possibilities opened up to him. In the final phase of his life, 1928–1975, he returned to his mountain village, where he took up once again the care of family lands, either those passed directly on to him or those he administered for collateral relatives and particularly nephews, sons of his older siblings, who had gone into the professions. These lands barely provided enough for a modest living.

It is the Cuban period that he remembered most vividly and talked about most animatedly—even though he had been obliged to return to the Asturian Mountains because of a persistent tropical infection of the throat and lungs, even though his attempts like many emigrants’ to make his fortune had come to nothing, and even though while in Cuba he confessed that he had thought every day about Asturias and had dreamed frequently about his mother. (His determined bachelorhood, his attachment to his mother, and his timid, symbolic, mostly poetic courtship of women are aspects of his identity I will not comment upon.)

No doubt the frequency with which Ceferino talked about Cuba to his fellow villagers was partly what caused them to nickname him the habanero, although other villagers had spent years in Cuba and could have claimed the title as well. Perhaps there was something insouciant, breezy, “tropical” in Ceferino as well—something resistant to the severities and sobrieties of village life. When he returned, Ceferino, like many indianos (the Spanish word for the emigrant returned from the New World), took a judgmental, usually amused if not ironic, view of that life; it was a view loquacious, even voluble, in expression. Because the vehicle of that judgment was rhyme, verse, and other expressive media, Ceferino became something of a rare bird by village standards. In his life history he recognizes that his mannerisms were a “little strange” (extraños) by those standards, and he ascribes this to two facets of his character: a desire to know (deseo de saber) as much as possible about things of the world and a complete disregard for the long-standing enmities between village families and village factions. Though Ceferino was very adept, even formidable, at andando cantares, inventing verses to put up or put down himself or his fellows in the jocularly competitive give-and-take of village life, upon his return he came to regard himself as above all that. Ceferino thus saw in his own character a curious mix of restlessness with respect to knowing the world, inquietudes, as the Spanish call it, and tranquility about the challenges of social life. These aspects of his character were reinforced by his years in Cuba, which animated his desire to know and offered him some of the tools to fulfill that desire as they removed him from the day in and day out experience of familial enmities. Ceferino recognized very clearly that his emigration had enabled him to transcend many of the limitations of village life though not, in the end, the nostalgic hold of the village upon him.

Of the first thirty years of his life Ceferino remembered little more than a bad school, a series of nondescript uninterested teachers disgruntled at their rural assignment, and no books except an abecedario, a counting book, and a book on Christian doctrine. He learned rapidly, but there was no encouragement. He left the school at the age of twelve to take up the usual tasks of herding, haying, and subsistence agriculture, and in carrying out these tasks, he became like any other villager. He also began gradually, as the youngest child, to take on more and more responsibilities for the care of his parents as his older brothers and sisters married. (I will not comment on the influence on his character of his role as the last an...

Table of contents

• Introduction: Creativity in Anthropology
• PART I Creative Individuals in Cultural Context
• PART II The Creation of Ethnography from Experience
• PART III Collective Creativity
• Epilogue: Creative Persona and the Problem of Authenticity
• Contributors
• Index