THE YAKHA: CULTURE, ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT IN ...

Notes: Chapter One
1. I should explain that the loss of Weidert's field notes and his
subsequent death in Bangkok had no direct connection with his Yakha
studies. According to Professor Winter at the University of Kiel (pers.
comm,), Weidert was renowned for not making duplicates of his field
nates, hence the catastrophic nature of their loss (on an Indian train).
His death, according to people who had known him in Kathmandu, was due
to his having taken over the running of a bar, and then presumably
failing to pay off the right people in the shady underworld of Bangkok,
2. CASS awards have since been discontinued, apparently because of a
belief on the part of the ESRC that too many firms were taking advantage
of them to obtain cheap research labour without contributing much
themselves,
3, Gri 1 lo talks about those who "are struck by what Sandra Wellman has
called 'a chronic desjre to be usefulu' (1985:28). While this epfthet
could be applied to me, there were other factors involved in my interest
in the CASS scheme, CASS offered a double chance of gaining an ESRC
award, since putting in a CASS application on behalf of an academic
department did not preclude one still applying for an individual
competition award.
4. My first contact was with the organisation 'Survival International',
However, I had spent the previous two-and-a-half years on Coll working
for a small-scale organisation and, when I visited the 'Survival
International' off ices, I felt I risked ' jumping out of the frying pan
into the fire' by leaving one such organisation and its problems for
another. Furthermore the research suggested, in areas such as the war
zones of Indonesia which the director said would be too politically
sensitive for a member of their own staff to conduct, did not appeal.
5. Predominantly flat Bangladesh, by contrast, was a country I had
never visited, and, truth be told, had no great desire to do so.
However, this was not the only reason for rejecting the possibility of
doing research in Bangladesh, I had written a thesis on the controversy
surrounding the injectable contraceptive ' Depo-Provera' for my master' s
degree in biomedical anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania,
and, from what I had learnt about family planning and its more dubious
partner, population control, in the process, I thought 'action research'
on social forestry would involve fewer political and ethical problems.
This view was actually misguided (cf, Hobley 19871,
Another factor was that Sean Conlin thought that medical
anthropology, which in terms of its methods and achievements could
justifiably claim majesty over the other applied anthropological
discipl ines, was perhaps now start i ng to become somewhat
institutionalised and oversubscribsd~ 'Envfronmental anthropology', he
predicted, was a growth area in the field, Finally the project with
which Sean envisaged my collaboration in Bangladesh had been operating
longer than the project in Nepal, and we both felt it would be better if
I could become involved in a development project at its earlier stages,