Day Twelve: A Marma 'Mae' (24 June)
on From Banglatown to Bangladesh (Bangladesh), 14/Jul/2010 03:23, 34 days ago
The Chittagong Hill Tracts, with its diversity of peoples, languages and religions, is the type of place that anthropologists and‘cultural’ tourists dream of. With somewhere between eleven and thirteen different ethnic groups (depending on your definition), each with their own language and cultures, you could spend years trying to understand the mesh of peoples and practices here.For me, this diversity of peoples is fascinating, and has been, at times, overwhelming, especially in early days. While Chakma, the language of the largest indigenous group, dominates my office, words and phrases may come in as many as five different languages, including English. It took me a while to learn some of the symbols of the groups, to recognise differences in dress and food, and to hear some of the stories about their origins and ways of being.Indeed, even the idea of‘group’ characteristics felt strange to me. As a social science student, I spent hours discussing the social construction of cultural signs and practices, and questioning many portrayals of indigenous peoples, which so often describe groups as simple folk, with lives unchanging for centuries.Perhaps unsurprisingly, the discussions of indigenousness I have here are very different from those I encountered in the academic world. Here, talk focuses less on the construction, and more on the definition. Not only is one’s ethnic group talked about as a vital part of one’s identity, but the label ‘indigenous’ itself is loaded with political debates and consequences.This diversity also allows me brief encounters with the variety of peoples. Depending on what I am wearing or the language I attempt to speak, I have days where I am called‘Megan Tripura’, and others where I am ‘Megan Marma’. More often than not, I am ‘Megan Chakma’, as this is the only indigenous language I have any knowledge of.Today, I wore my new Marma dress. I have, on a previous occasion, been told‘thank you’ by a Marma family behind a bamboo fence, as I sat in a tea-stall in my Marma dress. There were no thank yous today, but I was told that I was a ‘Marmamae’, or Marma girl, when I arrived in the office. When I walked home, through the small, busy market by my house, I was greeted by smiles and laughs by the women sitting cross-legged selling their vegetables, themselves wearing similarly-patterned skirts and blouses.Despite being limited to the outer layers, and only the briefest of understandings of what it means to be‘indigenous‘ or a member of a such a defined cultural group, it is a privilege to live somewhere which allows me this range of encounters, far away from the dry, theoretical debates of ‘culture’ I had in university. On a lighter note, my attempts at learning languages and the right ways towear the different kinds of dress never cease to amuse my friends, colleagues and neighbours.I prefer to take their laughter as a compliment.