Butterfly's Shadow by Lee Langley

Author:Lee Langley
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781407084589
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2011-04-30T23:14:56+00:00

PART FOUR

28

‘Anthropology? Where will that take you? Louis asked. ‘Will anthropology give you a foot on the corporation ladder?’

Joey shrugged. ‘Probably not. But I don’t want to work for a corporation.’

‘Young people today, they think college is a game. Jobs don’t grow on trees, Joey.’

‘Well they do if it’s a mulberry tree and you’re into silk.’

‘Don’t get cute with me, kid!’

‘Okay. You’re asking why anthropology. Well, Margaret Mead said—’

‘And don’t give me what the smart-asses say. That’s how they earn their bucks and their Pulitzers.’

Joey found it difficult to explain to Louis why the study of difference and similarity, social systems, alien cultures and faraway countries held a certain appeal. And in any case that was not the whole of it

‘Gramps, anthropology tries to show us what makes us human; the world’s full of people killing each other . . . Maybe that would be just a bit more difficult if we didn’t think of it as Us and Them all the time. If there could be another word, a word for the whole mix. What we have in common.’

He stopped. Inside his head, there was nuance and complexity. He was aware that what emerged was too simple, naïve.

Long ago, when he was a kid, Nancy had read aloud to him a story about a girl who fell down a rabbit hole and had adventures. But she fell very slowly, so that she could take a look at what she was passing. Anthropology was a bit like that: falling into the past, but slowly, so that you could reach out and pluck things off the shelf of time and study them as you progressed. You immersed yourself in a strange world; you couldn’t change what you saw, but you could learn from it.

He shrugged helplessly.

‘You know: if you prick us do we not bleed? If you poison us do we not die—’

‘Oh, right,’ Louis said. ‘If we’re getting into that, I’ll tell you what I think of anthropology: Much Ado About Nothing!’

He punched his grandson affectionately on the shoulder. ‘Just kidding.’

From her rocker by the window, engaged on a seemingly endless piece of patchwork, Mary said mildly to Joey, ‘I remember, at the beginning, you didn’t know what it meant to squeeze a lemon. What a baseball mitt was. What I find fascinating is the way people can change.’ She glanced at Joey over her glasses. ‘But I’m not an anthropologist.’

Despite the growls and cartoon harrumphing, Louis was enormously proud of the boy, secretly supposing him the brightest kid at Oregon State – even if he was studying a load of hooey.

‘What I’m thinking about,’ he remarked when Joey had left the room, ‘is the war. I know the action’s a long way off, and there’s an ocean between us, but FDR’s cosying up to Winston Churchill like a long-lost cousin, which I personally find worrying.’

‘Nancy’s working for the Democrats and she thinks he’s the greatest thing since sliced bread—’

‘And that may yet turn out to be a flash in the pan.

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