Word: barker
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Indians who then inhabited the Caribbean islands, they found only three tiny scraps of gold. It looked to them as if the "Admiral of the Ocean Sea" had sweetened the record to increase the attractiveness of the lands that he discovered. But last week Anthropologist Paul W. Barker of Maine's Gorham State Teachers College vindicated Columbus. In northern Haiti, he reported, he dug up two golden pendants just like those described by Columbus. Barker may even have found them in the village where dwelt the lass with the nose plug...
Tense Moments. An anthropologist's job is especially tough in northern Haiti. Many grown Haitians there have never seen a white man. Afro-Haitian (voodoo) gods sometimes command their worshipers to remove strangers, like Barker, posthaste from the premises. But mustachioed Paul Barker, a former merchant seaman, chemist and Baptist minister, somehow managed to get along. On the northern seacoast near Port Paix, a local landowner and amateur ethnologist-who is also a voodoo potentate-helped Barker excavate the townsite where the gold pendants were found. Tense moments came when it was reported that the god Dambala had ordered...
...Barkers' surprise, patients were at first embarrassingly scarce. The Zulus aloofly decided to see what the doctor could do before entrusting him with their bodily ills. Community status came in time; with it came Barker's discovery that the Zulu's ritual way of thinking made medicine an exercise in etiquette as well as a practical science. No visit to a tribal chief, healthy or not, was complete without an injection or, at the least, the prescription of a placebo. On house calls, a patient remained untended, no matter how ill, until the end of a lengthy...
...Mysterious Brew. Despite all his efforts, Barker found that serious ailments were often still taken first to a diviner, on the theory that no white doctor could solve the "illnesses of the people." Barker has considerable respect for the sincerity of the witch doctors, who regard their vocation as divinely inspired-but very little for their knowledge. One of them tried to cure Barker's hay fever with a mysterious, gagging brew that "tasted like a Scottish peat bog." It didn't work, Barker adds...
...Barker writes of his African education, and of the shy, proud, solemn Zulus who taught him, with compassion, humor and a certain sense of shame. He is no revolutionary, but nonetheless shares, with Novelist Alan Paton and the crusading Anglican priest Trevor Huddleston, a searing hatred of apartheid and its works. Barker's own hospital community was, and still is, racially integrated-not to satisfy any liberal belief, he says, but simply because it is natural: in so small a social organism, survival depends upon each man's becoming a good neighbor to the man next...