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Dutchitude

The paper on which Domenica had been working, and to which she would return after she and Angus had consumed their dinner of tomato soup and scrambled eggs on toast, represented the first fruits of a significant piece of research. Unlike the fieldwork she had previously done in her anthropological career, which involved travelling to distant and exotic places, Domenica’s latest project was one that took her no further than the slopes of the Pentland Hills on Edinburgh’s southern boundary. That is not to say that it was without risk: there had been several difficult moments in Fairmilehead and even in Morningside itself, the epicentre of Edinburgh respectability, but by and large there were none of the dangers that she had faced on her earlier forays into Papua New Guinea and the Malacca Straits.

Domenica’s career had closely followed the cursus honorum of the academic anthropologist. An undergraduate degree had been followed by research for a PhD and that, in due course, led to a postdoctoral fellowship. The PhD was completed under the supervision of the distinguished social anthropologist, Professor Lance Studebaker, an authority on the use of linguistic evidence in support of anthropological conclusions. Studebaker came from a cosmopolitan background. His father had been an American air force colonel who spent some years as air attaché in the American Embassy in Sri Lanka. It was while he was in Colombo that he met Anna-Marie van Vonk, the daughter of a prominent member of the Burgher community. The Burghers were people mostly of Dutch or Portuguese origin who had lived in Ceylon, as it once was, and Sri Lanka, as it became, for generations. Most of them had intermarried with the Sinhalese and become very much part of the patchwork of peoples who made up Sri Lankan society. The van Vonks were tea merchants and had their own small tea garden not far from Galle. Anna-Marie, the eldest of three daughters, was a bird painter whose works had attracted an international following; her delicate watercolours of the island’s birds were displayed in museums all over the world and had been published, too, in a handsome, privately printed book. Lance was born in Colombo, but was taken back to the United States at the age of four. He was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy and then at Princeton, where his interest in anthropology was first aroused. Because of his family connection with the country, it is perhaps not surprising that he should have chosen to do postgraduate research into an aspect of his mother’s country, concentrating on the sense of Dutch identity experienced by the Burgher community. To this concept he gave a name – Dutchitude – a nod in the direction of Léopold Sédar Senghor’s influential work on identity.

The notion of Dutchitude attracted considerable attention, and rapidly became widely used in several cognate disciplines, including sociology and social philosophy. Asked what exactly it meant, Studebaker explained: “Dutchitide is what the Dutch feel in their essence. It is not a state of being that will exclude those who are not of Dutch extraction, but it is admittedly difficult to feel Dutch if you are something else – Belgian, for example. Belgitude is a different thing altogether. True Dutchitude is a matter of identification with a totally positioned personal provenance.”

Although he did not make much of his own Burgher antecedents, it was clear to those who knew him that Lance’s sense of identity was influenced by his Dutch heritage, even though the family had long since detached itself from the country and become absorbed into the Colonel’s wider family in the American Midwest. That was where Lance first took employment as an associate professor of anthropology – at Oberlin College – but by the time he was thirty-five he had moved to Britain, and to a post at King’s College London, to be followed, after a few years there by his first chair in the subject, which was in Glasgow. Studebaker was an inspiration to Domenica in her postgraduate years and continued to be so throughout his career.

Her postdoctoral fellowship had allowed Domenica to travel to that promised land of anthropology – a remote region of New Guinea where, on the Sepik River, the Great Crocodile Spirit is worshipped by local people. Domenica’s paper, Two months with the crocodile people of the Sepik River, had attracted widespread attention and had brought anthropologists to the area from scores of major European and North American universities. Such was this influx that the tribe in question, hospitable by instinct, had created a special lodge to accommodate their academic visitors. This building, described in Melanesian pidgin as haus bilong anthropology-fella, had such creature comforts as were available that far up the Sepik, including an ingenious river-cooled fridge for the storage of beer. The lodge itself was later to be the subject of anthropological study by a team from the University of Frankfurt in that classic of anthropological self-reference, Reinforcement of otherness in the self-view of anthropologists amongst the Crocodile People of the Sepik by Professor Dr Wolfgang Zimmermann.

A subsequent project had taken Domenica to the Malacca Straits, where she undertook ground-breaking research on the domestic lives of contemporary pirates. That had involved living for several months in a pirate village, tucked away in a mangrove swamp from which the male pirates issued each day in high-speed motorboats. While they were out, their wives remained at home, home-schooling the pirate children and preparing meals of nasi lemak for their menfolk on their return from their day’s labours. Domenica found that the pirate wives were bored; their men were absorbed in their own concerns, spent a great deal of time discussing the Singaporean football league, and gave them little intellectual stimulation. Against this background, it did not take her long to set up a thriving book group and a nasi lemak recipe circle. The pirates’ wives responded enthusiastically, and when Domenica returned to Scotland they remained in touch for several years. “We miss you so much,” they wrote. “Each day we think of you and remember how it was when you were among us.”

“Anthropology,” Domenica once said to a friend, “may be all about the study of human bonds, but its practice nonetheless requires one to break them regularly. Friendships are made, but must then be broken. We say goodbye to those amongst whom we have lived. They say goodbye to us. That is our condition. That is the source of our private and individual grief; that is the source of la tristesse eternelle de l’anthropologiste.” And added, “So to speak.”