Galileo's Middle Finger (N) by Alice Dreger

Author:Alice Dreger [Dreger, Alice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-02-04T22:00:00+00:00

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ON THE PLANE to Philadelphia to present my findings at the AAA in December 2009, it suddenly became clear I was coming down with a serious respiratory virus. As we taxied from runway to gate, I kept doing the math hoping that if it was the H1N1 flu (which was going around that year), there was no way I could have exposed Nap to it a few weeks before. With the significant respiratory problems he had developed from years spent sitting around cooking fires and smoking unfiltered Pall Malls, the flu might do him in.

By the time of my AAA session the next day, I had started to lose my voice, and I felt increasingly feverish. The adrenaline that came with the session helped a bit. Although I almost never read a paper for a presentation, here I had no choice but to read, to make sure that the work I presented was exactly what I had provided to Turner and Gregor ten days in advance, so that there was no chance they would feel ambushed. Because of what I’d found, the AAA audience had no trouble staying interested. When I finished, Gregor and Turner each got the fifteen minutes at the podium I’d arranged. (Turner spent much of his allotted time complaining that I’d given him only fifteen minutes.) Then the moderator, a well-respected anthropologist peacemaker whom I’d chosen knowing he’d be fair, did exactly what I’d asked of him: During the discussion period, he called first on anyone I had criticized who now wanted to speak. Although by the end I wanted nothing more than to go to bed, I stuck around to talk to the reporters from Science, the Chronicle of Higher Ed, and Inside Higher Ed, who were looking to get copies of my paper.

By the time I got home the next day, I had a full-blown fever and a terrible cough, a cough that got worse and worse over the next several days. (It turned out to be pertussis. My doctor had forgotten to vaccinate me.) As I fell in and out of sleep, I kept thinking back to the one hostile question I’d gotten at HBES, from a man who accused Bailey of being offensive in his work. He had asked me, near the end of our session, whether I thought that perhaps the Galilean personality I was describing also applied to me. I had answered promptly: yes.

And now I knew, better than ever. Yes. Pugnacious, articulate, politically incorrect, and firmly centered in the belief that truth will save me, will have to save us all. Right in the fight but never infallible. Yes, I thought: In Chagnon, I have met the ghost of Galileo. And he is me. He must be all of us.

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