BENEDICT: Listen, Chaney, what do you plan on doing after I drop you all by your lonesome into the Wild? You aren’t thinking of using the standard anthropological ploy, are you? You know, marching right into the Asadi hamlet and exclaiming, ‘I am the Great White God of whom your legends foretell’?
CHANEY: Not exactly. As a matter of fact, I’m not going into the Asadi clearing until morning.
BENEDICT: Then why the hell do I have to copter you into the Wild in the middle of the goddamn night?
CHANEY: To humor a lovable eccentric. No, no, Ben. Don’t revile me. The matter is fairly simple. Frasier said that the Asadi community clearing is absolutely vacant during the night; not a soul remains there between dusk and sunrise. The community members return to the clearing only when Denebola has grown fat and coppery on the eastern horizon.
BENEDICT: And you want to be dropped at night?
CHANEY: Yes, to give the noise of the Dragonfly a chance to fade and be forgotten, and to afford me the opportunity of walking into the Asadi clearing with the first morning arrivals. Just as if I belonged there.
BENEDICT: Oh, indeed yes. You’ll be very inconspicuous, Chaney. You’ll be accepted immediately – even though the Asadi are naked, have eyes that look like the murky glass in the bottoms of old bottles, and boast great natural collars of silver or tawny fur. Oh, indeed yes.
CHANEY: No, Ben, not immediately accepted.
BENEDICT: But almost?
CHANEY: Yes, I think so.
BENEDICT: How do you plan on accomplishing this miracle?
CHANEY: Well, Frasier called the stratagem I hope to employ ‘acceptance through social invisibility.’ The principle is again a simple one. I must feign the role of an Asadi pariah. This tactic gains me a kind of acceptance because Asadi mores demand that the pariah’s presence be totally ignored; he’s outcast not in a physical sense, but in a psychological one. Consequently, my presence in the clearing will be a negative one, an admission I’ll readily make – but in some ways this negative existence will permit me more latitude of movement and observation than if I were an Asadi in good standing.
BENEDICT: Complicated, Chaney, very complicated. It leaves me with two burning questions. How does one go about achieving pariahhood, and what happens to the anthropologist’s crucial role as a gatherer of folk material: songs, cosmologies, ritual incantations? I mean, won’t your ‘invisibility’ deprive you of your cherished one-to-one relationships with those Asadi members who might be most informative?
CHANEY: I’ll take your last question first. Frasier told us that the Asadi don’t communicate through speech. That in itself pretty much limits me to observation. No need to worry about songs or incantations. Their cosmologies I’ll have to infer from what I see. As for their methods of interpersonal communication, even should I discover what there are, I may not be physically equipped to use them. The Asadi aren’t human; Ben.
BENEDICT: I’m aware. Frequently, listening to you, I begin to think speechlessness might be a genetically desirable condition. All right. Enough. What about attaining to pariahhood?
CHANEY: We still don’t know very much about which offenses warrant this extreme punishment. However, we do know how the Asadi distinguish the outcast from the other members of the community.
BENEDICT: How?
CHANEY: They shave the offender’s collar of fur. Since all adult Asadi have these manes, regardless of sex, this method of distinguishing the pariah is universal and certain.
BENEDICT: Then you’re already a pariah?
CHANEY: I hope so. I just have to remember to shave every day. Frasier believed that his hairlessness – he was nearly bald – was what allowed him to make those few discoveries about the Asadi we now possess. But he arrived among them during a period of strange inactivity and had to content himself with studying the artifacts of an older Asadi culture, the remains of a temple or a pagoda between the jungle and the sea. I’ve also heard that Frasier didn’t really have the kind of patience that’s essential for field work.
BENEDICT: Just a minute. Back up a little. Couldn’t one of the Asadi be shorn of his mane accidentally? He’d be an outcast through no fault of his own, wouldn’t he? An artificial pariah?
CHANEY: It’s not very likely. Frasier reported that the Asadi have no natural enemies; that, in fact, the Synesthesia Wild seems to be almost completely devoid of any life beyond the Asadi themselves, discounting plants and insects and various microscopic forms. In any case, the loss of one’s collar through whatever means is considered grounds for punishment. That’s the only offense that Frasier pretty well confirmed. What the others are, as I said, we don’t really know.
BENEDICT: If the jungles are devoid of living prey, what do the poor Asadi live on?
CHANEY: We don’t really know that, either.
BENEDICT: Well, listen, Chaney, what do you plan to live on? I mean, even Malinowski condescended to eat now and again.
CHANEY: That’s where you come in, Ben. I’m going to carry in sufficient rations to see me through a week. But each week for several months you’ll have to make a food-and-supply drop in the place you first set me down. I’ve already picked the spot. I know its distance and direction from the Asadi clearing. It’ll be expensive, but the people in base camp – Eisen, in particular – have agreed that my work is necessary. You won’t be forced to defend the drops.
BENEDICT: But why so often? Why once
