Category Archives: Friendship

Remembering My Friend, Véronique Amenan Akpoueh (d., Aug. 3, 2023)

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Ours was not an ordinary friendship.

Race, class, religion, citizenship, educational background, and (for 14 years) parental status divided us. Language brought us together. Curiosity and intellectual companionship kept us going.

Véronique and me in the village (1993) (photo by Philip Graham)


Initially, Véronique (given that personal name in the French colonial-style school she attended) grabbed the chance to practice her grade-school-era French with me, an uninvited visitor in her village bordering the rain forest. As for me, while I struggled to learn the tonal West African language surrounding me, I immediately felt grateful to find a woman who spoke a language I knew. Later, as my grasp of Beng developed, Véronique turned out to be a naturally gifted language teacher. She happily shared her love of her native language, finding ways to explain the nuances of proverbs, metaphors, and secret speech. From there, our friendship blossomed.

During my first month in her village in east-central Côte d’Ivoire, Véronique and I met daily as she oriented me to the new worlds confronting me. “Why do babies wear so much jewelry and make-up?” was the first question I had asked our new village father. “That’s secret women’s business,” he answered. “Ask my cousin, Véronique.” I did, and Véronique immediately explained the medical goal of this symbolically resonant bead and face paint, distinguishing it from that purely decorative bead and face paint.

Amenan readily distinguished the linear and circular medicinal treatments from the decorative eyeliner and eyebrow pencil adorning this baby boy (1993) (photo by Alma Gottlieb)

Here was a villager who operated far from her neighbors’ proclivity to conceal knowledge from a stranger—understandably wary (from decades of colonial and post-colonial oppression) of what I might do with it. Instead, Véronique delighted in sharing her knowledge of her world. Quickly, she moved from informant to instructor, and from there, to friend.

Back in 1979, both my academic mentors had firmly instructed me to choose a village with a population of fewer than 500 people for the year-plus of doctoral research I would conduct in rural West Africa, so I could get to know everyone in a face-to-face community. Véronique tried to convince me to remain in her village of 1,500 for the next 14 months. But my advisors’ instructions remained firmly in my head. So, after a month of browsing among the 20 or so Beng villages, my husband and I left Véronique’s welcoming space and moved to a village of 250 notoriously suspicious people some 2.5 miles up the road.

The tiny village I chose to live in during our first stay in Bengland (1979) (photo by Philip Graham)

Véronique warned me repeatedly that the residents of the village I selected—the seat of the local, secretive, traditional religion—had strong reasons to reject me. Attentive to these warnings, my husband encouraged me to remain with my new friend in her village. Stubbornly, I ignored both their urgings and promptly experienced firsthand all that Véronique had predicted.

But Véronique forgave me my arrogance; by the time I confessed my decision, our friendship had been sealed. As Philip and I packed up our suitcases, Véronique made me promise that I would return once a week to spend the day with her. And, so I did. Moreover, over the following 14 years, when we returned twice to Bengland (the second time, with our son, then six years old), we lodged in her compound.

Amused, Véronique watches our six-year-old son observing two girls pounding corn (1993) (photo by Alma Gottlieb)

*

My writer-husband has written that “anthropology is gossip with footnotes.” Véronique had never heard of anthropology when we met, but by Philip’s definition, Véronique turned out to be a consummate anthropologist par excellence.

Every week of our first year’s stay, I drove or biked 2.5 miles to chat with Véronique in her village. No sooner had we completed the long, formulaic greetings required of a hostess-and-guest than Véronique launched into a monologue consisting of all the village goings-on I had missed over the past six days. Véronique was literate—one of two women in her village who had gone to elementary school—but she didn’t need to jot down notes about any of the week’s events to keep them in her mind. Out poured a list of the week’s highlights, from quotidian to momentous.

From these sessions, I soon learned the meaning of fɛn plã na. Literally, the expression means two days. But its reach is more than that, with two standing in metonymically for several. A better translation would be, in the past few days or, even more vaguely, recently. And so, within an hour of my weekly arrival, I heard about everything that, according to Véronique’s all-seeing ethnographic eye, had happened fɛn plã na. As Philip once described Véronique (referring to her by her Beng name, Amenan) as she eagerly approached us with village news, “Amenan was already making a beeline to us, her juicy-gossip face firmly in place—at times like this, Amenan was most Amenan.”

Nothing was out of bounds for Véronique’s skilled storytelling. I learned about breastfeeding woes suffered by a new mother, and a strange condition afflicting the rectum of an old man. I heard how a young girl had been sent to Abidjan as a companion for a childless aunt, and about the latest rants of the village madman. I learned who had broken the weekly sacred day by cursing a relative, and whose domestic dispute ended up in the village chief’s court. After this rich news catch-up, we would settle down under the shade of her coffee trees for a more systematic conversation about a topic of interest to us both, whether wily hyena folktales or witchcraft. But Véronique’s expansive mind was such that one recounting led to five more. I soon learned to restrain my impulse to return to the original story and let Véronique’s prodigious memory, knowledge fund, and chain of associations take her where they would.

Véronique and me in our signature spot under her coffee trees (1980) (photo by Philip Graham)

*

The balance of power between the two ends of this financially unequal relationship tilted constantly. Véronique gave me intellectual gifts that became symbolic capital fueling my career. I brought material gifts that Véronique and her family valued (first, soaps, baby clothes, and dried fish; then, furniture; finally, we funded the construction of a new house and, more recently, an adult daughter’s business venture, and treatment for a serious sinus infection that threatened my friend’s eyesight). Véronique also readily offered advice whenever I solicited it (how should I respond to learning that the chief of our tiny village had blacklisted me, or to my husband who was angry with me for not fully translating something he needed to say?); I timidly returned the favor on the rare occasions that Véronique solicited advice (two of her daughters were fighting, or her Ghanaian husband had disappeared yet again). In these ways, across the darkness created by drastically divergent social histories, the sunlight of common humanity shone through.

Véronique and me walking to interview her uncle, the king of the Savanna region (1980) (photo by Philip Graham)

It was obvious enough what I gained from our relationship. But beyond the day-to-day gifts I could bring her (and the larger investments I was able to make later), what did Véronique have to gain?

I believe Véronique longed for a conversation partner of a different type from what her beloved family and neighbors offered. After all, she had attended school through the fifth grade. That modest level of education gave her expanded life experiences, compared to those of her peers. Following her five years at a Catholic elementary school, the nuns coordinating her education must have seen the bright spark of deep intelligence that drew her to me, for they soon offered Véronique a year’s job as an assistant, accompanying them as they conducted a regional program to promote rural health.

Based in the nation’s second-largest city of Bouaké some 80-miles-and-a-world away from her home territory, the program brought young Véronique from village to village—mostly, inhabited by Baulé people, not Beng. Her cultural horizons expanded as she gauged similarities to, and differences from, her homeland. She learned how to help women birth and breastfeed, how to diagnose diseases from Guinea worm to tetanus. She came to juggle two distinct religious systems—the spirit- and ancestor-based cosmology of the Beng world view, and the monotheistic cosmology of Christianity. And she gained knowledge of a new biomedical pharmacopeia that complemented the healing forest herbs she already knew. Beyond these technical funds of knowledge, making the rounds of villages beyond her own made Véronique a new sort of cosmopolitan. Returning to the somewhat insular bounds of her own village must have felt confining. By the time Philip and I showed up unannounced one hot September day in 1979 that surely started out like any other hot September day, I must have offered food for a hunger that had long but quietly gnawed in her belly.

*

Véronique was born to political and religious privilege on both sides: her father’s older brother was king of the Savanna region, while her mother’s brother was the most senior Master of the Earth of her village.

L: Véronique’s paternal uncle, King Bonde Como, of the Savanna region (1980); R: Véronique’s maternal uncle, Kokla Kouassi, senior Master of the Earth (1980) (photos by Alma Gottlieb)

Dire poverty underlay all these rich cultural inheritances. More comfortable walking barefoot than wearing the rubber flipflops I once bought her, Véronique did, and did not, exude royalty.


From a lifetime of work—rising by 6 am to walk deep into the forest to chop down trees for firewood, carry a log on her head back to the village, use it to light a fire, then bathe babies, cook breakfast, and wash the dishes, all before returning to the forest for a full day of hard farming in her rice and vegetable fields, followed by cooking dinner, washes the dishes, and bathing the babies again—Véronique’s clothes were as threadbare as her neighbors’. Nor, at something like 4’ 9”, did her height visually mark her status. Her tall husband sometimes teased her in his lilting Ghanaian English: “She’s just a Pygmy, a regular Pygmy.”

Véronique carrying her baby grandson on her back and a log on her head


Yet, as Véronique walked through the village, her tiny frame commanded attention far beyond its dimensions. Everyone greeted her, and, as she returned the greeting, more often than not, she was asked for advice. A baby wasn’t eating, a child had developed a mysterious rash, a fever wasn’t disappearing, and what did Véronique advise?

Véronique helping a young relative learn to walk (1993) (photo by Alma Gottlieb)

Sometimes, she sold home-grown medical treatments for a shotglass of grain alcohol she made; more often than not, she dispensed herbal remedies at no charge. If her preparations healed, she was thanked; if they didn’t have the desired effect, I never saw her blamed—confidence in her knowledge, unshaken.

Whether working or relaxing, Véronique was widely appreciated by relatives and neighbors as an impromptu babysitter.

This set of photos of Véronique taking care of multiple infants (including “dry-nursing” one from her milk-less breast) was taken on a single day in 1993 (photos by Alma Gottlieb)

Her skill in massaging infants’ heads widely was especially sought out by new mothers.

Véronique massaging an infant’s head (1993) (photo by Alma Gottlieb)

Our own bonds spilled over beyond fictive kinship. I was present at the home birth of one of her daughters who, as coincidence would have it, bore the same Beng day name as mine. Véronique made sure to instruct baby Amwé that I was an important person in her life.

Véronique points to me and asks her baby Amwé, whose birth I observed, “Who’s that?” (photo by Alma Gottlieb)

Nor did her skills remain confined to the gender-stereotyped world of women. Men paid attention when Véronique directed animal sacrifices. On several occasions, she asked me to buy trapping line in the Bouaké market so she could set traps and hunt small animals.


Véronique overseeing the apportioning of meat from a sheep that was slaughtered in honor of Philip’s recently deceased father (1993) (photo by Alma Gottlieb)

*

This week, I learned that Véronique had finally succumbed to an illness that had caused her much suffering over the past month. Medical care being what it is across much of the continent that Europe underdeveloped, her illness will forever remain unidentified. Two doctors to whom her daughter Lucie took her for consultations claimed they couldn’t do anything for her, and the emergency money I wired to Lucie didn’t make a difference.


Maybe it was pulmonary complications caused by chickenpox—which my American dermatologist, on hearing about the symptoms, named as a likely cause. Maybe it was something else. Maybe Western biomedicine could have effectively treated it, and Véronique would be alive today. My dermatologist said that had Véronique been in an ICU, round-the-clock nursing care would at least have alleviated the symptoms, and perhaps held death at bay. Or maybe Western biomedicine could not have identified or treated the disease, and no medicines yet exist that would have kept her alive.


Being a continent away, my imagination and guilt are both running riot. What if? I keep asking myself. But, no What if can rewrite history. The global North and the global South cohabit the same planet yet continue to produce human experiences worlds apart. As I contemplate how I can honor the ordinary-yet-extraordinary life that my friend Véronique lived, she continues to peer over at me through her framed photo.

Véronique’s signature look (1980) (photo by Alma Gottlieb)

Those wry, wise eyes remind me daily that we humans must constantly endeavor to bridge all that separates us. Our distinctive subjectivities may conspire with the institutional structures that divide us to keep us from ever fully knowing each other. But, as Véronique implied when I once expressed surprise that she—then, a 30-something woman—was good friends with an elderly woman well into her 70s—trying to see each other across our multiple divides is all we’ve got.

Véronique continues to watch over me in my home office as I work at my desk (2021); (photo by Philip Graham)

Update, Dec. 2023: If you’d like to support education in Bengland via the Beng Community Fund (a non-profit organization we established to provide sustainable assistance to the Beng community), we have created a GoFundMe campaign — you can make a tax-deductible contribution via the link here.


Africa, Africanist scholarship, Anthropology, Beng, Cultural Anthropology, Culture, Friendship, Humanistic anthropology, Intercultural communication Read more

Ed Bruner: In memoriam

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August 8, 2020

Ed Bruner at his home in Illinois (2005)

Ed Bruner passed away yesterday, at 95–peacefully, at home. I wish my daughter and I could have been with him, but–Covid.

Ed started out as my senior colleague in the anthropology department at the University of Illinois. He soon became a mentor, then writing/editing buddy, then dear friend, then adoptive grandfather of my daughter. With 37 years of a richly multi-layered relationship, how do I begin to mourn?

I will post some memories soon. For now, I just wanted to inform my anthropology colleagues that our discipline has lost a great scholar.

Meanwhile, if you’re not familiar with Ed’s wonderful writings, a few of his many brilliant articles are available for download on his ResearchGate page here–catch them while you can.

August 8, 2020

Some especially strong memories of Ed Bruner will always remain. Here’s one.

In my early years as a professor, he and Ann Anagnost and I co-created a graduate course (on Symbolic and Interpretive Anthropology) and co-taught it twice. I learned so much about how to teach from that semester, watching Ed masterfully lead discussions like an orchestra conductor. He always knew when to lecture, when to call on the quiet student, when to apologize for having been unclear or unfair, and how to lighten the moment when two students risked having their theoretical disagreement turn nasty. In that classroom, Ed taught me to be an anthropologist of our students, to pay attention to their realities and meet them where they were. He also modeled the righteousness of democracy.

Although Ann and I were un-tenured assistant professors, and Ed was already a full professor and had been head of the department many years earlier, he treated the two of us as fully his equals. We co-created the syllabus, each of us meticulously responsible for one-third of the readings and leading one-third of the class sessions; we divided up all other responsibilities equally, even the grading–Ed never shirked on his share of work. In that classroom, Ed modeled egalitarian values that I still try to live out.

There’s also this: When Ann and I both became visibly pregnant toward the end of our second round of co-teaching, Ed never made us feel out of place, as many male colleagues might have, for our bulging bellies. In fact, he joked about his disadvantaged position as the only non-pregnant instructor. Although he came of age well before the second wave of feminism changed America, Ed’s basic humanity led him to feminist stances, even if he didn’t know to call them such. So, when I started schooling him in the basic tenets of feminism, he was a quick study. I was just giving him a vocabulary for something he already knew–that women are human.

In my next post, I’ll address that hunger to learn.

August 9, 2020

Ed Bruner celebrating his 91st birthday in our Illinois home (2015)
Photo by Alma Gottlieb

August 9, 2020

Soon after I arrived as a new professor at the University of Illinois, a graduate student in my department offered me his version of a rundown on all my new colleagues, complete with some juicy nicknames he’d concocted. His moniker for Ed Bruner: “What’s-New Ed?” This grad student gently mocked Ed for having switched intellectual paradigms more than once. I was intrigued and resolved to understand what lay behind such multiple shifts.

What I discovered was a voracious appetite for knowledge. Ed frequently asked me what I was reading and told me excitedly about what he’d just read. For years, he was a member of an interdisciplinary reading group that exposed him to new trends in the humanities. In mid-career, reading interpretive theory led him to migrate away from the positivist orientation of his graduate school training and help forge what became known as interpretive anthropology. Ed edited two influential collections of essays (one, with Victor Turner, one of my own mentors in grad school) that marked the interpretive turn in anthropology. To further cement this major shift and legitimize humanistic perspectives in anthropology, Ed helped found the Society for Humanistic Anthropology, and (ever generous) he (anonymously) funded its Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing.

For all his humanism, Ed also loved science. His first major in college was engineering; his son became an engineer; and he never relinquished his fascination with the latest STEM discoveries. Into his 90s, Ed was always the first person I knew to buy (and master!) the latest cell phone model; I learned about GPS technologies installed in cars from Ed, who once proudly gave me a detailed tour of his new car that had one of the first GPS technologies available. Once my son started working as a software engineer for Apple, Ed enjoyed geeking out with Nathaniel about the most minute of tech niceties. When the field of anthropology was being torn apart by bitter and rivalrous claims between the humanistic and scientific ends of the discipline, Ed wrote a piece for the major anthropology newsletter gently taking us all to task for seeing the two perspectives as mutually exclusive. When that disciplinary rupture started tearing apart our own department, Ed’s was always the calm voice of reason at faculty meetings at which reason was in short supply.

Ed’s intellectual adventurousness didn’t only lay in theory–he also lived it. He conducted his earliest research with Native Americans, then switched to study Indonesia (and learned the Indonesian language). Late in life, he started a major new fieldwork project of studying tourist behaviors around the world. Observing American tourists in Asia, Africa, and the U.S., Ed helped forge Tourism Studies as a serious discipline.

Ed and Cookie Bruner (left) interviewing Maasai performers for tourists in Kenya (1984)

Ed’s book, Cultures on Tour, a compilation of his best articles on the topic, is must-reading on every Tourism course syllabus.

Back in 2014, a session at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association addressed Ed’s impactful work on tourism. That session was so strong that the participants decided to publish their talks. Such projects always take more years than anyone predicts. As Ed’s health declined, awaiting the publication of that book became one of the things that kept him going.

Ed Bruner at a session on tourism organized by Naomi Leite and Queetzil Castañeda in his honor at the American Anthropological Association (2014)
Photo by Alma Gottlieb

When The Ethnography of Tourism: Edward Bruner and Beyond appeared last October, Ed felt gratified that much of his life’s work had firmly found its place in the scholarly world.

For my part, Ed’s scholarly globe-trotting gave me courage to contemplate my own major fieldwork switch (from Côte d’Ivoire to Cabo Verde). I was thrilled when Ed agreed to write what turned into a magisterial chapter for a book I edited (The Restless Anthropologist), thoughtfully and honestly looking back on his (then) 60 years of global field research.

Ed didn’t only read scholarly work; he also devoured fiction. Once, my writer-husband, Philip Graham, mentioned a list-in-progress he kept of his favorite works of contemporary world fiction, to share with his students. Ed begged for the list and soon started reporting his impressions of the books he was reading. After plowing through the initial list of hundreds of novels and short story collections, he kept requesting Philip’s periodic updates.

In short, Ed was a model for his students, and for me, of how to be a scholar–not the kind of scholar who revels in the trivial, or who defends a single idea to the grave, but the kind of scholar who remains perpetually intellectually alive and open to the world of ideas.

August 11, 2020

Today’s more personal memories of Edward M Bruner . . .

When she was three years old, our daughter Hannah declared that she needed us to find her a grandfather. Both of her biological grandfathers had died before she was born, and she felt that lack early. I asked her if she had anyone in mind. She asked me to list all the older men in our lives who she knew. When I got to Ed’s name, she stopped and said, “That’s my grandpa.”

At that point, our daughter had only met Ed a few times. Until they were old enough to balk, my husband and I regularly dragged our children to conferences, dinner parties, lectures, classes, and even some faculty meetings (poor things), to keep them an active part of our lives. That meant, they got to know a lot of adults. At the cocktail parties that Ed and his wife Elaine (“Cookie”) hosted, Hannah was usually the only child present. Ed had always taken kind notice of Hannah: asked her what she’d like to eat, found her a cozy spot to sit, asked if she was afraid of his large dog (she was, and Ed removed the animal to another room). Clearly, Hannah (always emotionally wise beyond her years) intuited that Ed was someone who was sensitive to other people’s realities, even those of a far different age category. Hannah picked well.

Over the next 23 years, Ed indeed became our daughter’s grandfather. (He already had grandchildren from his son, but they lived a couple of states away.) Year after year, Ed and Cookie bought our growing daughter the perfect, age-appropriate presents for her birthday and for Chanukah. When she was young, there was a stuffed panda bear about three times Hannah’s size, which occupied a very large corner of her bed for many years.

In middle school and high school, there was an increasingly sophisticated set of jewelry gifts. In college, there was a designer purse. When Ed was heartbroken that he couldn’t travel to Rhode Island to attend Hannah’s college graduation in 2017, he sent the largest flower bouquet he could.

Nor did Ed’s involvement end at charming and extravagant gifts. In elementary school, Ed-as-Grandpa came to Hannah’s school performances; in high school, he watched her cheerleading gymnastics. When the first serious boyfriend entered Hannah’s life, Ed insisted on meeting him and giving him The Grandfather Talk (complete with You’d-Better-Treat-My-Darling-Granddaughter-Right sort of warnings). When Hannah had an offer of an internship at a very prestigious art gallery in NYC the summer after her junior year in college, Ed helped subsidize her overpriced NYC studio sublet (which happened to be close to the old site of Stuyvesant High School, the competitive high school that Ed had attended decades earlier). When it came time (a few years back) to donate his professional papers to the Wenner-Gren Foundation and figure out what to do with his extensive library, Ed had Hannah sort through his books and papers and organize and pack them up.


Elaine (“Cookie”) Bruner, Hannah Gottlieb-Graham, and Ed Bruner in our Illinois home (2015)
Photo by Alma Gottlieb

Last week, Ed learned from his doctors that the end of his days on this earth was approaching, and he wrote me a farewell note. After tearing up, I shared the terrible news with Hannah. Immediately, she called Ed on FaceTime and they had their final conversation. By now, Hannah had a new partner. She’d hoped to introduce Andrew to Ed on a trip back to Champaign-Urbana (for a dear friend’s wedding) this past May, but, to everyone’s deep dismay, Covid postponed that trip (and wedding) until next May. Hannah fretted greatly about the delay in seeing her rapidly aging grandfather; last week, her worst fears were confirmed.

It meant the world to her that she was able to introduce Andrew to Ed over FaceTime. I don’t know what Ed said in that final conversation, but it must have been just the right thing. Ever an anthropologist, Ed must have managed to intuit Hannah’s mood and speak to it because, although Hannah emerged crying, she also emerged in peace.

Thank you, Ed, for that final gift to your beloved, adopted granddaughter–and for living out your scholar’s understanding of the bonds of kinship. Anthropologists have long known that what we used to call “fictive kinship” can feel as real, as deep, and as meaningful as any bonds forged by biology. Ed demonstrated that theoretical insight as lovingly as anyone might.

August 12, 2020

Last installment of my thoughts about Edward M Bruner (at least for now).

Ed and I were 30 years apart. When we met, he was twice my age. That age difference might appear to offer an unpromising basis for a friendship. In choosing friends, most of us tend to find a path to people who are like us in some obvious ways. Age and gender often rank high on the list of shared criteria. For Ed and me, somehow, neither of those differences interfered with our friendship.

My inspiration was my long-ago Beng friend, Amenan Véronique. One late afternoon, while we were chatting in her compound in the rain forest of Côte d’Ivoire, Amenan excused herself from a conversation, to take dinner over to someone across the village. When I asked about the recipient, Amenan said she was bringing the dish to a very elderly woman who couldn’t easily cook for herself any more. I asked if she was an aunt–in those villages, most people are related to each other in some way or another. Amenan surprised me by telling me that they weren’t related at all–they were friends. At the time, Amenan was in her early 30s, and the age gap further surprised me. “Age doesn’t matter for friendship,” Amenan quietly declared. Ed re-taught me that lesson.

Over the years, Ed and I indeed became friends, of the sort that, in most places, women typically reserve for each other. Ed told me about changing dietary decisions and showed off a new suit or cashmere sweater he’d bought himself. We regularly confided in each other about family issues. As he aged, he asked my opinion about whether he should get this or that medical treatment for this or that condition. That sort of vulnerability that is the hallmark of a good friendship is harder to establish across age and gender divides; to Ed, it came easily.

None of those intimacies prevented Ed from critiquing my work when he thought I needed to rethink a point in a manuscript-in-progress. But it did mean that his critiques were delivered especially kindly, and that I took them especially seriously.

Four years ago, telling Ed that Philip and I would be retiring and moving to Rhode Island was the hardest Goodbye I had to say when we left east-central Illinois after 33 years. Ed was already 91, and increasingly feeble. Nevertheless, he managed to give a beautiful speech at the retirement party my department hosted.

Ed Bruner speaking at my retirement party from the. University of Illinois (May 2016)
Photo by Philip Graham

We left unspoken our worries that we might not see each other again. I am grateful that I did see Ed during a trip back to Champaign-Urbana a year later.

Thank you, Ed, for our 37 years of friendship.

Academia, Academic Career, Cultural Anthropology, Edward Bruner, Ethnographic writing, Friendship, Grandchildren, Grandparents, Humanistic anthropology Read more