Safe Conduct, by Brian Deevey, 1993. in Anthropology and the Peace Corps: Case Studies in Career Preparation, pp. 150-158, edited by Brian E. Schwimmer and D. Michael Warren, Iowa State University Press / Ames.
When I first heard about the Peace Corps, it sounded like a good idea, but I didn't think I had time for it. It sounded like a suitable pastime for activists and drifters with nothing better to do. I, on the other hand, was a hardworking undergraduate planning to do graduate work in anthropology and archaeology.
In college, I was interested in everything and couldn't decide what to major in. After a while, I saw that if I could major in anthropology the problem would be solved, because anthropology subsumes everything else. Because at that time Bates, my little college, had no program in anthropology, I decided to get a solid liberal arts background and pick up the anthropology in graduate school. Since I was especially interested in the human past, I majored in history. I thought it would be helpful to learn about the periods for which we have written records and then move on to prehistory later. In those days, I was very quiet and bookish, and I wanted to learn everything. Archaeology appealed to me as something sheltered and remote, in which I could learn masses of trivia and not be bothered by the real world, which seemed both scary and boring.
I was raised by two Ph.D. biologists, and I have always been inclined toward academia. We lived in Europe for a year when I was ten, and on our way over and back, we stopped to see a lot of anthropological landmarks. When I was in high school, we spent a couple months in Mexico and Guatemala, and we also stopped at various sites on that trip. Looking back, it seems that some of the things that inclined me toward anthropology also got me into the Peace Corps, because the Peace Corps looked for evidence of cross cultural interest in selecting volunteers.
I spent four years in college trying to learn everything, but one thing I never learned was how to study effectively for exams. I always got lost in the trivia. My grades were embarrassingly average and never reflected the amount of time I put in. Mentally I was pretty immature, and I realized it would be self-defeating to take those traits with me into graduate school. I needed to spend a year or two after college doing something nonacademic. But there was a serious problem for people who were not in school: the draft.
As graduation approached and I realized I needed a break from school, I wondered what to do. I wanted, ideally, to learn a strange language, go somewhere exotic like Polynesia, and practice the sorts of skills I would need later as an anthropologist. But I would need a draft deferment, a sort of safe-conduct pass, to keep me out of the clutches of the government and get me through to anthropology in one piece.
Of course, I could have gone to Canada or Europe; tens of thousands of Americans did precisely that, and many are still there. But I understood that scientific anthropology, especially archaeology, was taught only in the United States, so unless I changed the whole course of my life I would have to stay on the right side of the law. I needed to come back here to go to graduate school. When I put my requirements all together, there was only one thing that had everything I needed: the Peace Corps.
The next concern was getting in. I was concerned that the Peace Corps would not have any use for another history major. A liberal arts background didn't seem like very effective preparation for applied work. I forget what I put on the application under "skills," but it must have been enough. Early in 1966, 1 found myself at California State University-Los Angeles as a trainee for community development and rural public health in the Thailand 14 project. Life hasn't been quite the same since.
My Peace Corps Experience: Apart from a mechanic and a nurse, most of the fifty or so of us were what the Peace Corps called BA generalists, or BAGs for short. Training was intense and diversified, because no one knew quite what we would be doing when we got to Thailand. Classes ran from about 8 AM to 8 PM, five and a half days a week. The anthropologist in our training sessions presented us with Thai cultural material and quickly impressed us with its antiquity and sophistication. He stressed that we should avoid cultural imperialism and should carefully consider any changes we might want to introduce, because changes might have unintended negative effects on other areas of Thai culture.
Back in those days, there was a lot of camaraderie among volunteers. At Cal State, we spent all of our time together. Even in Thailand, we were reassembled and given conferences every few months. We were clannish, avoiding outsiders. It was said that we would later feel a bond with all RPCVS, because non-PCVs would never understand what we had gone through.
I'm not sure what we all had in common as volunteers; we were a pretty diverse group. Most of us were typical college liberals, I suppose. Adaptation to a low economic level might have characterized many of us. In those days we were not allowed to bring in money from the outside, so we bad to get by on what the Peace Corps gave us for a living allowance. That didn't bother us. We didn't have any money to bring in anyway.
Many things have changed in the Peace Corps since those days. At least for Thailand, everyone now is trained in the country itself. Language training is much more effective, or they are screening volunteers more carefully. Outside money is allowed, if one has any. The clannishness seems to have disappeared, and people are more oriented to their host-country coworkers than to other volunteers.
Getting off the plane in Bangkok was an almost eerie experience. We marveled that it really did look like the movies and slides we had been shown. In those days Bangkok was much smaller (only two million), and we passed a lot of countryside on our way from the airport countryside filled with water buffalo and farmers in exotic straw hats.
We were sent to our provinces after a few weeks of in-country training, during which the doctor told us not to drink anything with ice in it and sold all the guys condoms. My province was Nakornsrithammarat, on the Malay Peninsula halfway between Bangkok and Singapore. It took almost a whole day to get there by steam engine from Bangkok.
Getting off the plane me quite a jolt; somehow I never fully realized that I would be spending two years with people who spoke no English at all. Training had provided us with enough Thai to ask simple questions, but not enough to understand the answers.
After a period of settling in, I adjusted almost enough to get a little done. For the first few weeks, I mostly read the Thai-English dictionary (and all of War and Peace). One of the local Chinese merchants offered to help me with my Thai. He spoke English beautifully; for generations his family had sent their boys to high school in Malaysia so they would learn English. In the afternoons I went around with the district health officer, fixing water pumps and surveying local health conditions, which were pretty good, considering. Most Thais are healthy and very well fed by Third World standards.
Nakorn is an old cultural and administrative center-, it might be termed the heart of southern Thailand. In the old days its rajas were related to the royal families of Cambodia and other kingdoms in the region. It almost conquered Ceylon once. The food is hotter than any place else I have heard of. The national dish is orange curry, a thin, villainously seasoned solution of small chunks of fish with the bones still in them. I lost fifteen pounds in the first few weeks, before I found anything I could eat. This was not unusual. After a few months my adaptation to the food was completely successful, but there were a number of volunteers in southern Thailand who lost up to sixty pounds. I was told that some volunteers arrived looking like Russians and left looking like basketball players. I came to love beef curry, when it was available. Hot seasonings keep up the interest in eating if you have to eat four plates a day of indifferent rice to keep your weight up.
After a few months I was transferred to the main office in the town of Nakorn itself. I lived over the office with four young Thai sanitation workers. We drove all over the province (or at least all over the parts that had roads) and fixed pumps and water systems. I spent one year as a boarder in a Buddhist temple in a village and went from house to house with a sanitation student. We tried to persuade people to install sanitary outhouses and put pumps on their wells to close them off to pollution. It seemed that my major role in the Peace Corps was to be a mascot for the public health department.
There were advantages and disadvantages in being a bushnik, as the Peace Corps called those of us who lived out in the villages. Our jobs were more exotic and interesting than those of most volunteers, who taught high school English in the towns. Of course, village life does not have the same comforts, like running water and electricity. It would have been helpful for me to have been working with educated Thais; their vocabulary is quite different from that in the villages. But on the whole, I'm glad I was a bushnik.
We bushniks, with our unstructured jobs, probably got less done than our counterparts in town, and some were upset about it. My group was highly critical of the Peace Corps at our last conference, which was run by staff members from the Philippines to allow us to be frank They agreed (at least to us) that the Peace Corps could have done more to support us. It was my feeling, though, that many PCVs had gone in with unrealistic expectations of their abilities as change agents. Early on, during the "what am I doing here" phase that I suppose most PCVs undergo, I decided that I was there as an individual, in the old American tradition of neighborliness. On my own, I would do whatever I could that there was a demand for, but I didn't expect much help from the Peace Corps. I would not be disappointed if the consequences of my two-year stay were moderate. In my case, a major goal was just to live in the Third World and see what things were like there. For those reasons, I was less frustrated than many in my group. I also succeeded in improving my Thai-speaking ability substantially and learned my way around well enough to be comfortable when I came back.
I left the Peace Corps reasonably satisfied with what I had gotten done. Several of us were pleased that we had been sent to Thailand. We counted ourselves lucky that we had not been sent to some gross part of the world like Latin America, where we heard that all of the PCVs were dissatisfied, and life sounded generally depressing. The sophistication and fun-lovingness of the Thais, even at the village level, had presumably changed us for the better. I'm sure the Thais would agree; they have a saying that 'heaven is to be a Thai in Thailand."
I went into the Peace Corps to get as far away from home as I could. It worked. I found the exotic ancient civilization I had wanted and got all the field experience I would need to come back later and do research. I had demonstrated to myself that not only could I live in the field, but I could enjoy it. The road to a career in anthropology was open and still desirable. All I had to do was to get into graduate school and keep out of the way of the draft. But that's not what happened.
My "Other" Experience: Instead I was inducted into the army and given a few months' infantry training. In 1969, 1 was sent to the Mekong Delta as a "grunt." I didn't like the circumstances much, but it was nice to be back in Southeast Asia. I felt more at home there than I did in the army. The Peace Corps had given me a totally different perspective from the people around me. The GIs were all in different levels and types of culture shock, although they didn't know it. This made some of them a little unstable at times. The Vietnamese reminded me a lot of the Thais, although I'm sure both sides would be insulted by the comparison. They share a long cordial enmity and a lot of cultural material, including many of the assumptions of Buddhism. I was sorry that the language barrier prevented me from talking to the Vietnamese at any meaningful level.
After a few days in the field, I was given an opportunity to carry the twenty-five-pound field radio, which I much preferred to being a rifleman. I was able to confine my hostile activities to speaking English, and I stayed with that for the eight months or so that I was on the line. Bizarrely, there were quite a number of parallels between the Peace Corps and the infantry (once I was in a sort of noncombat status in the field): low pay, long hours, physical discomfort, lots of fresh air and exercise, culture shock, strange languages, indifferent food, and unpredictable coworkers, for instance. Both the Peace Corps and the army were twenty-four-hour-a-day jobs that would only stop when I left the country. Both claimed my full attention while they were going on. People in both situations live for the mail, at least in the early stages of adjustment. In both jobs I got to walk and ride around in the countryside in a patchy and unpredictable work situation and see what was happening in the villages. It was like being a different sort of bushnik, in a very similar environment in the same part of the world. Perhaps the biggest environmental difference was that in the very swampy Mekong Delta, we were very close to mud at all times. The only comfortable way to travel was by helicopter and sometimes jeep; otherwise, we had to wade wherever we went.
In those days, people could get out of any assignment by re-enlisting for three or four years; they would be given a bonus and shipped off to practice, for instance, computer maintenance. People who didn't have useful education or job skills usually did that, because they didn't have much to look forward to when they got home. It slowly dawned on me that those of us who remained in the infantry in the field were those who were willing to risk death in order to get out of the army sooner. Those of us who suffered through combat duty were paradoxically doing so because of our commitment to civilian life.
Eventually I was taken off the line and assigned to a different department. I was given four ex-Viet Cong "scouts," and we accompanied a medical team that drove around and held impromptu clinics for the villagers. It was spookily like part of my job in Peace Corps; the Thai public health department does the same thing in areas where there is no regular health center. While the medics passed out malaria medicine and looked at babies, we wandered around the neighborhood and asked if people had seen anything suspicious lately. They always said no and invited us in for tea. It was wonderful to see the countryside in a noncombat setting. I was impressed at what superb and busy farmers the Vietnamese were.
I was processed out of the army as soon as I got back to the United States; I was in only a little over a year and a half. My safe conduct pass into anthropology had been decidedly unsafe at times. I had developed a permanent aversion to mud and sudden loud noises, but was otherwise unharmed and had gotten some professional good out of seeing a quite different side of Southeast Asia. I had spent two years making the world safe for democracy and another year making it safe for capitalism. Now I was ready for a change.
It was too late to apply to graduate schools, so I joined my family, who were living in Canada at the time. This delayed my return to the United States for another year. Altogether, I had been out of the country for most of five years, between 1966 and 1971. I had missed out on most of what people think of as the 1960s: a whole lot of amazing music, drugs, and political activism. I still hadn't gone through the returning culture shock that the Peace Corps had told me to expect, and it was multiplied many times because, as far as I could see, the country I came home to was largely unrelated to the one I had left. It took several years to realize that I was wrong about that and that it was essentially the same. I was pretty confused for a while.
Back to Academia: When I finally got to graduate school, I was older than most of the other incoming students, and that improved my credibility with the faculty. I had a vast amount of anthropology to catch up on, and I spent several years reading. I soon found that archaeology takes a fabulous amount of time and money and is much less cost-effective than ethnography. After several years of working in the field with essentially no budget at all and being concerned that grant money seemed to be drying up, I was leery of committing myself to a subdiscipline in which I might not be able to plan on funding for steady fieldwork. I began to consider cultural anthropology as a specialty.
There were two other factors in my move away from archaeology. I was in such a state of culture shock that I was spending a lot of time trying to figure Americans out. There were all sorts of new patterns of living and coupling, and even comparatively traditional couples seemed more political than in the early 1960s. The women's movement was something I was surprised and puzzled by. It seemed wiser to switch to a discipline that would allow me to get credit, in effect, for the thinking I was already doing about modern cultural changes.
The third factor involved habits of thought. As an undergraduate I was fact-centered; it turned out that archaeologists in general are that way. My attempt to get away from that approach, to become more abstract, had been so successful that in graduate school I found I could generalize much better than I could retain details. I noticed that the cultural students thought the way I did, and the archaeologists had trouble getting away from trivia. It seemed that I had in effect, through the Peace Corps and after, inoculated myself against archaeological thinking and lost the ability to do it. I had overshot.
It seems to me that people are susceptible to a sort of imprinting at certain times in their lives, especially when they are very young or have just finished school. I know that the Peace Corps was instrumental in making me the kind of anthropologist I have become, and it probably influenced many of us in the same ways. ( I'm surprised it didn't influence more of us to go into anthropology.)
My Peace Corps "fieldwork" helped me in a number of ways. For one thing, method and theory made more sense after I had more to hang them on than domestic American experience. Also, it opened more opportunities for fieldwork in graduate school. My advisor took me to the Caribbean for my MA., and I was able to get a Fulbright for the Ph.D. I was a little surprised that many of the faculty hadn't done much fieldwork, although I realize that there are many other ways people can make a contribution to the discipline.
For my Ph.D. fieldwork, I went back to southern Thailand and lived part of the year in a provincial town. (I selected this town partly on the basis of appropriateness, partly on the basis of its magnificent seafood, and partly because it had a first-rate hospital in case of emergencies. My one brush with amoebas was cleared up almost overnight I spent most of the year in a Buddhist temple, as before, and got by with practically no money. This would have been completely impossible without my Peace Corps experience; I would never have even been able to get the grant.
One more advantage of my prior fieldwork was that it let me develop a realistic awareness of how little I could get done. I knew better than to schedule too many things or to take on some elaborate and demanding research design that would be unlikely to work. I pity people who head out with no preparation but graduate school and whose only field experience is when they are under the gun to bring back an infinite amount of data immediately.
Some Final Thoughts: For the last couple of years since finishing my Ph.D., I've been an underemployed anthropologist teaching part-time. My Peace Corps experience helped me adjust to that, as it did in adjusting to life in graduate school; as a result, I can get by with less money than most people. In fact, Peace Corps opportunism made me a model starving graduate student. I, more than the other students, caught on instantly to the point of faculty parties: arrive early, stay late, and eat all of the food. RPCVs know a lot about thrift.
To summarize, the Peace Corps has had a major effect on my life, to such an extent that it dwarfs even my experience as a grunt in Vietnam. It took me from being a kid who couldn't generalize to being an older kid who can't remember facts. It moved me from archaeology to cultural anthropology. It has taught me how to survive happily in times of economic scarcity and to feel comfortable around all sorts of cheap living conditions and odd people. It has made me see teaching and research as an extension of itself: a lifetime of low pay, long hours, and public service. I think it makes me work better with students and other downtrodden minorities like teachers. It has made me more human, in some ways.
As for Thailand, I hope to keep going back every few years. My specialty is culture change, and Thailand is experiencing a lot of it. In a way, I'm sure my experience in the Peace Corps (and anthropology) has been shaped by the Thais, including priests in the temples I've lived in. I have trouble sorting out the influences of Thailand and the Peace Corps--they are not separable for me. But I know that the Thais have shaped the way I see teaching and research--as a peaceful, idealistic service and a safe form of conduct in a sadly troubled world.
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