Published: 24 September 2019
Last updated: 4 March 2024
She was delighted, if surprised, to discover I could read her picture books and regularly prevailed upon me to do so. It made it all the more fun that, when I didn’t understand their meaning, she could improvise charades and enhance my vocabulary.
I remembered this long-ago experience recently, as I was sorting beans on a hillside in Luquina Chico, an isolated village on a peninsula in Lake Titicaca, Peru, as part of a fascinating trip in the footsteps of the Incas. We spent a day and night in the home of a family of subsistence farmers, eating with them, breathing their thin but pristine air, and sharing their daily tasks.
Their 12-year-old daughter was detailed to shepherd us and I watched her barely suppressed amusement as we deferred to her about where to pasture sheep and whether deformed beans were too damaged to germinate. At 3,800 metres above sea level, we couldn’t even walk up a hill without panting, and I felt the same need as I had with my kibbutz sister to explain. I’m not stupid. I’m not (that) unfit. I just come from a different world.
A great privilege of travel is that it enables one to recalibrate what one considers important, successful or even “normal”. Growing up in my particular cultural corner of Eastern European Jewish thinking, everything was mediated in words and ideas. We come from a culture that values abstractions, elevates academic success and all but idolizes books.
I’m famous in my family for once asking a builder “Aren’t you well-read?” because he had never heard of The Wind in the Willows. I was about seven years old, but the value of deep literacy had already been so well inculcated that it did not occur to me that being “well-read” might not be a priority for him.
At this distance, I can take apart that myopia at a number of levels. The fact my Polish-born father had me thinking such an Anglophile children’s classic defined “well-read” is a megillah in itself.
The combination of a Jewish elevation of book-learning with a British colonial education in New Zealand was so strong that it wasn’t until university that I started reading even the American classics, let alone the post-colonial literature which had by then challenged the existence of the literary canon.
Deep in this upbringing was an assumption that empires – whether the Jewish intellectual tradition or the more literal politico-geographic hegemony of the British – are built with words. I’m a book lover and a word-worker who is a natural heir to this tradition.
You’d think people who could do all of that, could develop a written language,” a man on our tour commented. My instinct was to agree, but then I glanced around..
But travelling in Peru has allowed me to question that very Jewish prejudice which respects book-learning but considers physical knowledge a synonym for ignorance.
The Incas ruled a vast empire, stretching the equivalent of from Spain to half-way through Russia, with no written language. Their only form of record-keeping and distance communication was a kind of accounting system made by knotting a series of strings called quipu.
They were a highly sophisticated society with a huge bureaucracy, a complex cosmology and laboratories for agriculture that enabled them to feed 12 million people across a range of altitudes. Their engineering and architecture are still being studied by contemporary experts, who use it in particular for guidance on how to build stable structures in earthquake-prone zones.
“You’d think people who could do all of that, could develop a written language,” a man on our tour commented. My instinct was to agree, but then I glanced around. We were standing in a museum surrounded by magnificent examples of complex ceramic art from various pre-Columbian cultures.
I come from a culture that can do anything with words but – for various structural and ideological reasons – barely made so much as a pot, unless it was to store chicken soup. I might look askance at bookless peoples, but perhaps to them my lack of visual or kinesthetic literacy is every bit as wanting. Certainly, my capacity to wield a pen – let alone a computer keyboard –seemed a strangely pointless skill during my day as an Andean peasant.
Tourism is an artificial experience, of course, and 24 hours later I am back in a hotel room with an internet connection (and a hot shower!) blogging my experiences and skimming my photos. But the arrogance of ethnocentrism has been punctured just a little.
When I return to Melbourne, I am asked if the family with whom we have stayed is “very primitive”. I baulk as I imagined our 12-year-old hostess returning to school where, on top of her various practical skills, she learns in two languages and harbours academic ambitions.
She is greeted by a schoolmate, another sturdy girl, whom we met while serving slops to the pigs. “How were your tourists?” asks the other and our girl shakes her head and grins. “They couldn’t even separate beans. So ignorant.”
Illustration: John Kron
