Over the weekend I stumbled upon two passages that reminded me of one another.

1) From Clifford Geertz’z “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight”:

Early in April of 1958, my wife and I arrived, malarial and diffident, in a Balinese village we intended, as anthropologists, to study. A small place, about five hundred people, and relatively remote, it was its own world. We were intruders, professional ones, and the villagers dealt with us as Balinese seem always to deal with people not part of their life who yet press themselves upon them: as though we were not there. For them, and to a degree for ourselves, we were nonpersons, specters, invisible men.

We moved into an extended family compound (that had been arranged before through the provincial government) belonging to one of the four major factions in village life. But except for our landlord and the village chief, whose cousin and brother-in-law he was, everyone ignored us in a way only a Balinese can do. As we wandered around, uncertain, wistful, eager to please, people seemed to look right through us with a gaze focused several yards behind us on some more actual stone or tree. Almost nobody greeted us; but nobody scowled or said anything unpleasant to us either, which would have been almost as satisfactory.

 If we ventured to approach someone (something one is powerfully inhibited from doing in such an atmosphere), he moved, negligently but definitely, away. If, seated or leaning against a wall, we had him trapped, he said nothing at all, or mumbled what for the Balinese is the ultimate nonword – “yes.” The indifference, of course, was studied; the villagers were watching every move we made, and they had an enormous amount of quite accurate information about who we were and what we were going to be doing. But they acted as if we simply did not exist, which, in fact, as this behavior was designed to inform us, we did not, or anyway not yet.

This is, as I say, general in Bali. Everywhere else I have been in Indonesia, and more latterly in Morocco, when I have gone into a new village, people have poured out from all sides to take a very close look at me, and, often an all-too-probing feel as well. In Balinese villages, at least those away from the tourist circuit, nothing happens at all. People go on pounding, chatting, making offerings, staring into space, carrying baskets about while one drifts around feeling vaguely disembodied. And the same thing is true on the individual level. When you first meet a Balinese, he seems virtually not to relate to you at all; he is, in the term Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead made famous, “away.” Then-in a day, a week, a month (with some people the magic moment never comes) – he decides, for reasons I have never quite been able to fathom, that you are real, and then he becomes a warm, gay, sensitive, sympathetic, though, being Balinese, always precisely controlled, person. You have crossed, somehow, some moral or metaphysical shadow line. Though you are not exactly taken as a Balinese (one has to be born to that), you are at least regarded as a human being rather than a cloud or a gust of wind. The whole complexion of your relationship dramatically changes to, in the majority of cases, a gentle, almost affectionate one – a low-keyed, rather playful, rather mannered, rather bemused geniality.

My wife and I were still very much in the gust-of-wind stage, a most frustrating, and even, as you soon begin to doubt whether you are really real after all, unnerving one, when, ten days or so after our arrival, a large cockfight was held in the public square to raise money for a new school.

2) From Yirmiyahu Yovel’s “Converso Dualities in the First Generation: the Cancioneros”:

Often, when we are disposed to read them that way, the novels and poems of another era can serve as cogent historical documents. Whether realistic or ironic, equivocal or crudely direct, complexly symbolic or outright vulgar, or a mix of the above, works of fiction will reward the curious intruder with knowledge, illustration, and insights of a kind that “factual” records and the no-less-tendentious chronicles often lack.

A particularly telling genre is the fifteenth-century Spanish Cancioneros: collections of vivid, popular poems that flourished parallel to the first converso generation (Spanish Jews who converted to Christianity, mostly by force or harsh pressure). The Cancioneros were often coarse and satirical but also on occasion speculative and intimately personal. Using unadorned language and simple rhyme, the poems dealt, sometimes irreverently, with current events, people, social habits, and institutions, and they also served their authors to quarrel, flatter, defame, and supplicate.

To the willing reader,4 the Cancioneros offer illuminating glances into the converso situation and its early dualities. Surprisingly, many authors of these poems were conversos of the first generation, as was the first compiler of their work, Juan Alfonso de Baena; a former Jew who had been converted to Catholicism during the riots of 1391. Several poems abound in Jewish concepts and Hispanized Hebrew idioms, which readers were presumed to understand. A good many poems attack and defend conversos, voice feuds among conversos, and otherwise articulate their mental and social complexities.

In one poem, the count of Paredes attacks an aspiring converso author, Juan Poeta (Juan of Valladolid), and in so doing offers a vignette of the converso poet, his many faces and unsettled identity:

Each of the following is his name – Juan, Simuel [Shemuel] and Reduan [Arabic name]. A moor, so he won’t be dead, A Christian, so he’ll have more worth, But a Jew he is for certain, As far as I can know.

This hostile image is not altogether incredible. The ending is quite revealing. The writer does not claim that Juan is a genuine Jew who merely puts on false masks but that all of his faces constitute his identity; although his Jewish persona appears to be dominant (or at least the most “certain”), this claim is immediately qualified (“as far as I can know”), for the converso’s most distinctive characteristic is that no one can know exactly who he is – perhaps not even himself.