'Humbug' is a term that means something like 'cadge' or 'ask for stuff' directly or indirectly. Strangers can be humbugged, maybe for a cigarette or a couple bucks (in which case it's more like begging), but people are more likely to humbug people they know, and the more connected they are, the harder it is to refuse the request. I think a lot of whitefellas feel aggrieved to be humbugged by Aboriginal people, but it happens even more within the Aboriginal community than across the black-white line.
Some of you know that I've been pretty interested in the culture of poverty, especially since I read A Framework for Understanding Poverty. Without commenting much upon it, let me offer a little window into the life of a particular local woman with whom Justin works so you can see how 'humbug' fits into the cycle and culture of poverty.
—an anecdote from a day in the life of a linguist—
9:00 am. Justin picks up Pearl (some names have been changed), one of the last full speakers of her language. She is 70 years old and not in good physical health, being very overweight with heart trouble that requires a pharmacopoeia of drugs every day, a recent knee operation that left her using a cane, etc. She is mentally sharp with keen eyesight, especially when observing the countryside. This morning she has Dean, her youngest grandson, with her. He’s about 3 years old, pretty scabby and wearing clothes that have not been washed in awhile. Pearl wants to go to the bank with the paycheck Justin has for her. Two days before, Pearl had called J (a softhearted linguist with whom she worked all last year) complaining that she (Pearl) was out of food because all her relatives had spent all of their money on grog (alcohol) and then come to her house and eaten all her food.
9:15. Bank is closed for another 15 minutes. They sit for awhile deciding whether to wait or not. Justin finally decided to get cash from the ATM and then have her write her check over to him.
Next, they drive about 50 meters across the street to the market. Because of the median strip, this involves a u-turn around the traffic island. Pearl asks Justin to go into the store and buy nappies, telling him the size. She waits in the car with Dean.
Justin drives to the Language Centre, which is quite nearby. Pearl tells J (the linguist) to put a fresh nappy on Dean. J protests that she doesn’t know how. M (another linguist) was once an au pair, so she does the nappy honors. She says that the nappy is far too small.
Justin and Pearl work together on language for about an hour and a half. Dean plays on the floor with toys that the Language Centre has.
Justin drives Pearl and Dean around the corner to Betty's Trash and Treasures (a pawn shop). Pearl spends $20 on cheap plastic toys for the baby including a toy plastic motorcycle and an $8 fake video game (it makes noises, has buttons and a screen, but that’s all).
They drive back to the bank which is now open. Pearl gets out her $300 pension. Outside the bank she runs into the wife of the taxi driver that Pearl’s daughter has been using on “book down” (credit). Pearl has to pay $40 for her daughter’s debt.
Justin drives across the street (u-turn around island) to the market again. As Pearl is trying to get out of the vehicle, relatives (both close and distant) descend on her and start asking her for things. In the market, she buys a 24 pack of name-brand soda, a bucket of white flour (she explains to Justin that if she buys bread, her relatives will eat it all up too quickly), cigarettes, chewing tobacco, and a large bag of small bags of potato chips.
Justin drives Pearl back home, where relatives come out of her house to get money from her before she has a chance to get inside. She shouts at her daughter that she can’t be taking taxis on book-down anymore.
Justin takes two of Pearl’s daughters, one of their husbands and three kids downtown on his way back to the Language Centre.
Bittersweet
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Eyal and I always knew that it would be difficult building a family from
two different countries. It is just now, however, that we have to really
put that ...
13 years ago
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7 comments:
Hilarious... I think. Remonds me of being in the Arctic.
-- David
I wonder if this isn't characteristic of the 'third' world... In Malawi, long, long ago, Native Malawians were hard pressed toopen a shop because realtives of many levels of remove would appear and ask for goods that were for sale. It was culturally verboten to ever refuse a realtive a request for something that youhad 'excess' of. Shop opens; relativees appear; goods 'given' to relatives; inventory depleted and no money to replenish them; shop closes. Often in a very short time span.
Bill
That sounds right... pesky familial bonds, always getting in the way of individual property rights and rational self-interest! How can we teach the poor bastards they just have to look out for number 1? ;)
Good point forest. I think the analysis of 'humbugging' ignores the fact that Pearl (and her family) comes from a culture that has a much more collective worldview than do Western cultures.
It's good to acknowledge the differences that arise from different worldviews (more collectivist vs. more individualist) in relation to this story, and I would point out that many aspects of this story could be repeated right in the US within the networks of families in generational poverty.
In this particular Australian example, something I maybe didn't emphasize enough is the role that alcohol plays. Alcohol, which was introduced by European colonists, has had a devastating effect. Rather than mutual obligations being formed by humbugging, often a few sober people work really hard to hold families together while grog-wrecked relatives just take and take without giving anything back to the relationship.
I think don't think there is a direct link between 'humbug'and poverty. 'Humbug' existed prior to white invasion. In fact the word is an old English one, which may have been introduced to describe it as a problem (as perceived by whitefellas probably because it is not reciprocated) rather than as a cultural practice. I don't know of any languages in the area which have a word for it.
Having said that, poverty may have exacerbated the practice of 'humbug'.
Thanks for the comment. The term 'humbug' is clearly problematic. The fact that there is no equivalent word in local languages points, I think, toward a change in the practice as cultures have changed with contact.
I hope it didn't sound like I was suggesting that humbug creates poverty. Humbug, in the sense of 'network of family obligations' exists within all social classes, I would guess, even if it's substantiated in different ways (the acceptance into exclusive universities of the offspring of major donors is surely 'humbug' too).
The relation of humbug to poverty is that in poverty the slackers weigh down the network and create more burden than the net can withstand. The mutuality is gone or at least diminished, and the weight of the slackers (generally drinkers) holds everyone in poverty. When there are more resources available, there's more room for some people to be free-loaders (hence, the profligate slacker kid who still doesn't manage to bankrupt rich parents).
To rise from poverty (within an industrially developed country, at least) one has to cut oneself free from the net or parts of it, to become free of relationships that weigh one down. However, within poverty, more than in working-class or middle class, relationships are everything.
So. The networks of familial and social obligations that serve small egalitarian cultures well become a liability within a more stratified society. The question is, "Why?"
Is self-destructive behavior, like the dangerous alcoholism we see here among indigenous people or the drug abuse associated with urban poverty in the US, more common within communities of poverty, or does it just have a more devastating effect because people are living so close to the edge of survival that the holes torn in the social network by destructive behavior have more of an effect? Or both?
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