Leaving Belize

We did what we came for- complete data on plant diversity and abundance from 10 Mopan Maya, 10 K´ekchi Maya, and 10 Garifuna home gardens. Most of these gardens were the size of a ¨normal¨ suburban front and back yard. We insinuated ourselves temporarily, and respectfully, into these cultures by bringing along Maya plant experts Polo Romero and Señor Cocom, by first approaching the local government, and, of course, by compensating each gardener for the (non-consumptive) use of their garden ($12.5-25 US). The local government was an interesting matter- an ostensibly democratic (the election process is unclear) combination of the old-school alcalde system and a newer village council system. The alcalde is in charge of legal matters and unrest. The ones we met had less than law abiding pasts, shall we say, but they seemed good people committed to doing well for their community, which they probably would define as letting illegal activity (marijuana growing primarily) go on as long as the village stays civil and harmonious in other matters. Many of the happiest, most prosperous, and most proud of the Maya we met seemed to be involved at one time or another in the drug trade. The village council consists of a chairman, a secretary, and 6 other elected positions. These folks are all volunteers, and via their hard work the organization and limited administration of the town is achieved. On of the most important of the chairman’s roles is as the organizer of quarterly fahinas- communal workdays to ¨clean up¨ the village.

We really liked these little villages. San Pedro de Columbia, a K´ekchi Maya community, in particular was a clean community of nice, open, and proud people who readily shared their gardens, plant knowledge, and language with us. One family was so nice we stayed all day and played with the children, Jerry, Jabril, Gloria, and Valentino Ack. These kids were exceptional in the premium they put on education, books, inane facts, and many of the things I grew up valuing. Jerry, who just graduated from primary school, clutched a book of fairy tales the entire time we were there. When I asked he enthusiastically said he needed new, more advanced book. This was a defining moment for me. It was both something I highly value (intellectual growth and reading) and something I only then fully realized was rarely as valued in these communities. For Jerry, education could mean upward mobility and success. But will cultural knowledge (linguistic, botanical, etc.) be associated and maintained with this growth? A touchy subject that I’m ill equipped to understand fully. The constant becoming of our values requires much attention and labor.

Incidentally, I took the opportunity to test with these children the results of a dissertation conducted in a neighboring village. With mixed skepticism, confusion, and amazement (it was very poorly written), I read this dissertation and its remarkable conclusion that by age 9 children in San Miguel know, on average, 80% of the names of plants in their garden and 50% of the names of plants in the surrounding area. I can say that the Ack kids (ages 6-12) seemed to know more plant names than other children I casually talked to, but still knew less than half of the plant species in their yard. This may be a problem of how we each define a garden, but it doesn’t seem to be. It seems to me that Zarger half-assed her research and came up with erroneous results. It is no wonder I haven’t been able to find any publications by her in the literature- her methods are flawed.

The second Maya village we visited, San Antonio, is the largest Mopan Maya community in the Toledo district (about 2,000) and very homogenous, which we later found out is culturally enforced. This community was generous and nice but conspicuously troubled. All the young men I saw seemed unhappy, tattooed, and wary of us. When we first showed up, the community was celebrating the day of its patron saint and we joined in, drinking a wonderful cacao-based drink, eating food, and listening to live marimba music. I was feeling welcomed and innocently approached some young men with the intention of chatting. I soon told them we were here studying the plants people grow in their yards, which they reflexively took to mean I was a threat to their (obvious) involvement in the drug trade. They concocted a bogus story about being traveling marimba musicians and then stopped talking to me and refused eye contact. Later, they joined a group of other half drunken young men and in a very obvious and drunken way eavesdropped on our conversations with more reasonable adults. This threat may have been neglible but it was rendered so anyway by our association with the alcalde. I realized now how smart it was to get the alcalde´s approval first and how the functioning of the community was best achieved by an alcalde that is connected to the drug trade and, in this case, is deferred to by these young men.

In all of Belize, there seems to be a high tolerance for filth. This was especially so in San Antonio. I would go so far as to characterize it as laziness and irresponsibility. Litter in a developing country and in a culture fairly new to non-biodegradable packaging is fairly understandable. But stagnant rivulets of pig and human wastes and piles of rusty metal are another matter. Not all yards displayed such love of amoebas, dysentery, and tetanus, suggesting that it wasn’t inevitable in these situations. I guess I can understand, but not accept these conditions. I did, however, have to accept all but the worst conditions in the process of the research. I predict I am gestating amoebas as we speak.

If the dark underbelly in San Antonio could be characterized as new and festering (if livable) in San Antonio, the social problems in Hopkins (the Garifuna community we sampled) were chronic and ingrained in the culture. This village is in a very different part of Belize - an ecologically more simple and saline coastal area. The Garifuna are a mix of African slaves and Carib Indians, which have not survived independently as far as I know. Their culture is very syncretic and interesting. It, at least superficially, shares similar magico-religious traditions with voodoo-probably a result of similar African origins and is very closely linked to the sea. For me, the most powerful and obvious expression of their culture was through drumming and fishing. One morning I awoke at 6 to read and ended up watching some young men in a dugout canoe pull in a net for a half an hour. They jumped in and out of the small canoe, even from neck deep water, with remarkable aplomb and love of getting wet. That they didn’t catch anything is, I understand, unusual. Later that day, Sarah and I charted a boat to go snorkeling and ran into a fleet of these canoes 40 miles off shore (they were based out of a large fishing boat). Their owners would pop up every now and again near the scattered canoes as they dove for lobster, which they used a hook to bring up to the surface.

Here, I must say, is a tragedy of over fishing in the making. Creole and Garifuna fisherman alike are harvesting undersized lobster habitually, depriving the species of any chance of reproducing enough to sustain fishable populations long, much less maximize the potential of the reefs in the long term. Lobster season started June 15th and I have enjoyed many of these fine creatures (less rich and succulent than the New England species I’m used but satisfying and wholesome none-the-less). But many of the ones I was served in fairly respectable establishments were undersized. In addition, I understand there is a good, and undiscerning, market for lobster in Guatemala which fishers illegally tap into on a regular basis.

That night, Sarah and I walked around the town in the meager light of the moon. There were a whole lot of people out on the streets, some drunk but most jovial and kind. This was in part normal but also in part caused by an all night wake in the neighborhood. Instead of joined the wake as we had been advised to (we would have been the only non-black non-Garifuna there and we didn’t know the deceased’s family), we sat at a nearby local bar. After a soda and a nice chat, a man pulled out a large sea turtle shell and began to drum on it. More drums surfaced and we witnessed a wonderfully unique jam session. The rhythm was loud, almost frenetic but controlled, and passionate. Singing in Garifuna accompanied it and young and old sang along. Later, I bought some Garifuna drumming music and it has the power to recall the contented and simple appreciation I had for that music that night.

The gardens in Hopkins were fairly simple and uninteresting. The most interesting feature was the use of bitter cassava (aka manioc in South America). Only sweet cassava, if at all, was used throughout the Maya villages we sampled. It was, to us, an unexpected (granted we knew little about this culture before we went) legacy of the Carib part of the Garifuna culture. The Carib´s former use of bitter cassava was the northern extent of the plant, which was domesticated in South America. I am unsure but doubt that the ancient Maya much used the bitter variety. I know the record is largely absent to answer this interesting question but some more research is in order. In addition, the Garifuna had some interesting African ornamental plants not much seen in the rest of Belize, including the pencil tree among others.

So we leave Belize content with our progress. I leave with a toehold from which to begin to try and understand Latin America and contemporary traditional cultures. I am convinced of the value of plants and their uses in assaying these cultures and their futures. However, more work needs to be done to standardize and deepened the rigor of the field of ethnobotany. It needs to be more than purely descriptive, possibly by making ecological tools and better writing more common. We aim for our publications to contribute in these areas. However, first the mountain of data must become intelligible- the task before us as we return home.

I don’t think we will find anything of much value in our data regarding forest creation – the original main interest of our work. These gardens are too globalized and modern to possibly reflect the composition of home gardens in the pre-collapse Maya area. However, these inventories are a good and necessary step in this discussion. More and more, it is becoming obvious that culture, especially the way the landscape and plants are used, is a social construction responding to changing environmental, economic, and political factors. That is, it is silly to say that the Classic Maya did this or that categorically. Their was a mosaic of environments in Classic era Maya Lowlands and a context for their subsistence that changed dramatically over time. What makes sense now doesn’t make sense then and vice-versa. I think I see this transition towards understanding the dynamism and materialism of culture occurring and having occurred over the last decade and presently but I’m not convinced Campbell has dealt with its critiques fully. Gratuitous neologism is one of the most glaring, and superficial, indications of this transition-subsistence strategy matrix, for instance.

So I’m not sure where I would go next with the forest composition question but it would likely not focus as much on contemporary home gardens. Still I look forward to seeing what the data have to say, which will require increasing my statistics capabilities and may not get finished this summer, unfortunately.

Belize update

I think you ought to know that I did an amazing thing three days ago: I swam with a 30 foot long fish. It was a Whale Shark, the largest species of fish in the world. It was congregating as part of a biological orgy cued by the moon that occurs every full moon in March-June in certain spots along the barrier reef aff Belize. This orgy is a matter of mutton and ? snapper sex: millions of them congregate to release their eggs and sperm in places that offer good dispersal (major gaps in the barrier reef). The only successful strategy for these species is to release so many eggs in one place as to overwhelm any possible congregation of predators, such as filter feeding Whale Sharks, dolphins, and small feeder fishes (whales are not common around here for some reason).

Finding these orgies is a crapshoot made only slightly less chancy by knowing the tides and currents (great Creole captains took care of this), going on the full moon (check), and following terns and gulls. We found two of these orgies all day- and we were considered very lucky. At one I got about 2 or 3 minutes of swimming above thousands of snapper and one large whale shark roughly 25 feet away. The sharks here are being chased a bit too much and this one immediately started to descend to distant depths in the species' characteristic slow nonchalant way. It seems they have no natural predators.

At the other orgy I swam with a bottle nose dolphin which was enjoying the buffet. It was a male and he actually approached me to within 20 feet.

That day I also swam with two other species of harmless sharks at a nearby reef- a nurse shark and a reef shark. I must go to dinner but I will finish this later. I'm off to Hopkins tomorrow for three or four days or relaxation and snorkeling.

Belize Photos

New photos here.