Petra Rethmannoverwhelming that it submerged everything that I truly enjoyed and
liked. There were many difficult moments, and I associated most of
them with failure. But the difficulties lay within me. Not simply in the
form of partiality and bias but also in what I had brought to the sit-
uation. Anxiety and fear, not ease. And I realized a few things. I had
a hard time being the kind of anthropologist that I thought I needed
to be: Shouldn’t I be busy running around with pencil and paper, ask-
ing important questions that would secure my anthropological fame?
Shouldn’t I come up with some marvelous descriptions of some rit-
ual, tragedy, or important event? Ethnographies were full of myr-
iad descriptions of interesting rituals, incidents, and myths. Most of
the time, however, fear, alarm, and panic set in. Panic at not asking
enough questions, not being inquisitive enough, not getting enough
data, not being sociable enough, being an ethnographic fiasco. Until,
at some point, it dawned on me that this was simply not what I liked
to do. I loved listening to people’s stories, but I did not like to be in-
quisitive about them, in particular when I did not know people well
enough. I loved being in northern Kamchatka, but at that time, I saw
little sense in statistical, numerical, and other kinds of positivistically
driven research when everything seemed so chockfull with experience.
I just really liked “being there.” And when I could reach that stage,
things went more smoothly.
But somehow I thought this was not what my discipline asked me
to do. This is perhaps one of the most important things I learned: to
stay with myself. Connectedness. Perhaps it is this that easily creates
a certain kind of romantic image. Who knows? But this connected-
ness is also part of the silence that can and does translate into open-
ness and awareness.
In a way, I felt out of my mind during the entire time I spent in north-
ern Kamchatka. Halfway through my first stay, somebody gave me a
sticker, one of those badges that were ubiquitous in the Soviet Union
and usually displayed Lenin, Stalin, or some other functionary or hero
of labor in some aggrandizing pose. The one given to me was slightly
different. It did not flaunt somebody’s stature but outlined the phys-
ical shape of the Kamchatka Peninsula. There was, too, an inscrip-
tion: Kamchatka, eto strannoe mesto, “Kamchatka is a strange place.”