3 - People without wisdom

Summary

I realized very soon after settling in Betania that there was little point in attempting to plan my days ahead, as I had initially tried to do to keep anxieties under control. I found it difficult at first to grasp how villagers managed their time, for they seemed to move erratically from days of hectic activity at sea and at the market, to long spells of time spent playing bingo in small groups dotted around the village. A few weeks after I arrived, I wrote in my diary that the only sensible thing to do was to take each day as it came, and forsake any desire for long-term planning.

As I later discovered, by learning how to cope with the short-termism of my daily life in Betania, I was actually learning about a fundamental trait of Vezo identity, about a type of ‘doing’ that renders people Vezo. Wholly unawares, I was making myself Vezo. I argued in the previous chapter that what people do, hence what they ‘are’, is not determined by the past, and remains at all times contingent on people's activities in the present. We have seen how a person's past is shed when he moves from place to place and learns new ‘ways of doing things’; and how a person who ‘is’ Vezo at one moment can become temporarily Masikoro by making a blunder in sailing – he replaces his past Vezo-ness with a new identity created in the present.