Akenfield

Ronald Blythe spent several months in the summer and fall of 1967 riding around Suffolk on a bicycle and recording the people of the mythical Akenfield. (Akenfield is named for oaks near Blythes's childhood home - "acen" is Old English for "oak" - but was based in fact on two villages and the surrounding area in East Anglia.) There are 50 interviews in the book (including statistical tables and other materials) ranging from an 82-year-old illiterate hermit to a pair of teen-agers, one a forge apprentice, the other a farm worker. Many of these people reminded me strongly of people I met during my childhood as a farm boy in Southern Wisconsin. A shepherd tells how to train a sheep dog. "Once you have taught him stillness, you're getting somewhere". A wheelwright describes building wagons. "For making the hubs we always chose wych-elm." And "The blue rode well in the corn". The veterinarian warns that "Tail biting among pigs is becoming a quite incredibly large problem." The blacksmith's advice: "I always look at the parents before I take an apprentice. If you know the home, you already know the son." We raised pigs in Wisconsin, and this English pig farmer's thoughts rang absolutely true: "Pigs are different. A pig is more of an individual, more human and in many ways a strangely likeable character. Pigs have strong personalities and it is easy to get fond of them. I am always getting fond of pigs and feel a bit conscience-stricken when I have to put them inside for their whole lives. Pigs are very clean animals but, like us, they are all different, some will need cleaning out after half a day and some will be neat and tidy after three days. Some pigs are always in a mess and won't care. Pigs are very interesting people and can leave quite a gap when they go off to the bacon factory." Leonard Thompson remembers World War I: "We set to work to bury people. We pushed them into the sides of the trenches but bits of them kept getting uncovered and sticking out, like people in a badly made bed. Hands were the worst; they would escape from the sand, pointing, begging - even waving! There was one which we all shook when we passed, saying, "Good morning," in a posh voice. Everybody did it. The bottom of the trench was springy like a mattress because of all the bodies underneath..." Thompson was 71 in 1967, a farm laborer from a family of laborers. "Village people in Suffolk in my day were worked to death. It literally happened. It is not a figure of speech." Pride in workmanship was important: "A straight furrow was all a man was left with." John Grout, 88, remembered: "The holy time was the harvest. ... the farmer would call his men together and say `Tell me your harvest bargain.'" [Whitsun-Tuesday was the common day for this negotiation in Suffolk.] Fred Mitchell, 85, remembers old "full of raw fear--of landlords, of weather, of hunger. But I have not forgotten one thing. The singing. There was such a lot of singing ... So I lie. I have had

Anthropology grabbed me early and it has never let go. Why do people behave so differently from one another ? Why are they so similar too ? What would I have been if I had been born in Afghanistan instead of in Boston ? What would my life have looked like if I were an Australian Aborigine ? Why would I think what I think ? These and a myriad other questions intrigue me like no others. Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist, often strikes the theme of "I want to be somebody else, therefore I am." This resonates very well with me. Finally, though, you can only be whatever you are. Travelling, working abroad, making friends among different peoples---these help you answer some of those questions, but only in part. Reading ethnographies, village studies, autobiographies, or novels can also provide some answers. When such books are excellent, you plunge into somebody else's world and emerge changed---you have almost known what it is to be somebody else. When those books are about lives that began many decades before yours, you open a corridor to the past, as well.Ronald Blythe's AKENFIELD is one of the best ethnographies that I have ever read, and I have read a lot. It certainly does not fit the academic mold and perhaps never figured in many anthropology course reading lists. More's the pity. Blythe, from East Anglia in England, wrote this beautiful, penetrating study of an East Anglia village in the 1960s. It is constructed almost entirely as narratives by the inhabitants, ranging from WW I veterans to housewives, young farm laborers to schoolteachers. Bellringers, blacksmiths, and the vet--the list of characters is comprehensive. Blythe gives description when needed and added a short, almost lyrical introduction, but has worked the interviews into a seamless whole. Arguments could be made that AKENFIELD is more social history than anthropology, but this is a barren field to sow. As the years go by, all anthropology turns into social history, as the world changes and leaves memories of what used to be. I would say that this book is one of the handful that inspired me to write anthropology, that encouraged me to avoid the jargon-strewn wastelands of academic strivings. I have never been able to reach the heights of AKENFIELD, but it has stayed with me for thirty years. Who could give this book enough stars ?

Ronald Blythe's Akenfield is a book about the past. And approaching the past always involves both sadness and exhilaration. The latter because, rightly or wrongly, we see ourselves in the past, feel at home there, and know the pleasure of its kinship; the former because we know the past is irretrievably lost, its faces vanished, its words and songs and experiences, its life and laughter, its sharp pain and flashes of joy irredeemably gone. This is the experience of the reader in Akenfield. And this is the book's blessing. Even after thirty years, Blythe's book about the people who live in a small rural village in Suffolk, who told him candidly and completely the history of their lives and their village, restores to us a world we still know, but barely. It reminds us of an England that--along with single-family farms, hedgerows, village pubs, and rural silence--has seen its time pass, and its depth and flavor lost.But neither the book nor the people whose lives are captured in its pages should be romanticized. That would be injustice. Akenfield is peopled by characters from farrier to farm student, from ploughman to pig farmer, from saddler to schoolmaster, who without adornment or pretension tell the stories of their lives, of its bitterness and struggle, along with its victories and unexpected moments of pleasure. We hear the voices of the nurse, the schoolteacher, the poet, the wheelwright. We hear the magistrate, the apple-picker, and the gravedigger. These are the voices--and the lives--of the generations that came before us. Voices of the Great War and after, of the growing middle class between the wars, of the incursion into rural existence of electricity, the telephone, the main road to Ipswich and then London, of the Second World War and the soldiers' return. They are familiar, they are friendly. They are also heartrending, and the lives they tell--particularly of conditions in agrarian English society in the early 20th century--can be appalling. Yet this is also a magical work, a work of art--one invaluable to any ethnographer but transcending ethnography or anthropology because of its simple humanity. The book's preface refers in passing to the Domesday Book of 1086; and, because Blythe insists on remaining a recorder instead of an author--because he transcribes the words of others instead of describing what they say--he has created consciously or not a documentary history of life and society at the end of our last millennium as similarly important as we received from the Normans at its beginning. Akenfield is a remarkable, enduring achievement; it surely stands as one of the finest examples in English history of the living, breathing spirit of late 19th- and early 20th-century culture.