GOD’s ways are astonishing, inscrutable and mysterious. GOD has made ample provision for all man’s needs. He has also given to man

much more in the form of luxuries. In addition, He has conferred on man the power to control all these things. GOD has told man:

You are free to use as you like all the things given to you, subject to one condition. You will have to face the consequences of your actions. This means that you cannot abuse the freedom gixxn to you to misuse the things that are provided for you. When you misuse anything, you have to bear the resulting misery. When you make good use of anything, you will enjoy the benefits therefrom. You have to take note of the purpose for which you use your senses or the objects given to you. Any misuse of them will bring misery in its wake. You came with nothing into the world and leave it with nothing. Wfmt happens to your wealth or to yourself? Of what use is all other wealth unless a man realizes the bliss of oneness with the Divine. —SSSB

This is a story you may have read or heard a dozen times before; if that is so, my account will reinforce all those other stories. Regardless of whether the concept is new to you, this Is my story—a true story I am sharing with you.

I mentioned that this is my point of power because I am doing something about it—now! I am writing to explain it to those who wish to read it for themselves and, if there is one person who benefits from this story, then this book will have been worthwhile.

There is as much variety in size and kernel color in popcorn as in any other kind of com. You can buy black, blue, red, burgundy, baby yellow, baby white all of which have their devotees. 1 prefer regular old yellow popcorn, but who caresr The important thing to remember is that according to the journal of the American Dietetic Association in its May 2008 issue, popcorn eaters get a 22 percent higher intake of liber than those who don’t eat popcorn.

Popcorn is the easiest type of corn to grow. It germinates and comes up faster. We grow an old open-pollinated kind that friends gave us. It doesn’t have a name that I know of. It grows as well as hybrid varieties. Popcorns typically require from 95 to 120 days to mature, but I suppose there are exceptions to that. Plant popcorn at the same time you’d plant your field com or right after youi early sweet com.

Orna M enta I . Cc>rns

All seed houses sell ornamental or “Indian” corn seed. The variet-ies are usually non-hybricls, so you can save the seed. One excep-tion is ‘Purple Husk Hybrid*, an Indian corn with purple rather than white husks. New hybrids and new introductions of old open- pollinated varieties are always coming and going. Study your cata-logs. Ornamental com needn’t be “wasted” on decoration alone. When you no longer want it for the centerpiece on the table, you can feed it to chickens or livestock.An accepted principle of agricultural economics states that the more corn (or any grain) produced with a given amount of time and labor, the lower the per-unit cost of production. The more acres farmed, the more acres to spread the cost of fanning over. The larger the operation, therefore, the more “efficient” it can be. The soundness of this principle is no longer taken for granted.

That act appears repeatedly in the accounts here. Further, rather than being static categories, these same places became transformed in later accounts, and these changes reflected the observers’ increased knowledge of what they saw on their travels—knowledge that was quite possibly gleaned from earlier travelers. When travel turned to settlement, observers’ views be-came more detailed, though comparisons still appeared in their texts, some-times quite explicitly.31 The Jesuit Luis Frois, for example, produced a lengthy work comparing Europeans to the Japanese after he had lived in Japan for more than two decades, perhaps as a guide to the missionaries who would arrive later.Yet for all the problems modern readers have navigating these travel ac-counts, the texts that survive should not be dismissed as revealing more about the observer than the observed. Many of the travelers whose accounts can be found in this anthology strove to find ways to describe precisely what they saw.

Though it is possible that these accounts helped Europeans in particu-lar create an “other” seemingly awaiting the arrival of Christian colonizers, the travelers themselves did not necessarily write their accounts to promote such ventures. As the historian Joan-Pau Rubies aptly put it, there “is much more to European accounts of non-Europeans than a justification of Empire.” Read carefully, these accounts can be used to reveal foreigners struggling to understand new worlds. This is not to suggest that travelers left their political agendas behind. Rather, the ablest of these writers provided posterity with ac-counts that have proven to be fundamental for scholars trying to understand what particular societies were like. Since the arrival of visitors often trans-formed the places they landed, reading these early texts becomes one way, however flawed, to grasp what parts of the world looked like centuries ago.The early modern writers whose travel accounts appear in this collection did not invent the genre of writing about places thev visited (or pretended to visit). The earliest account of an East Asian excursion to Europe, for example, dates from the thirteenth century.33 Nor were the sixteenth-century travelers the first to feel the sensation of wonder about what seemed exotic to them.

 Taking don Juan’s behavior as an example, at first glance it may have seemed that his dramatic exertion was only his own idiosyncratic preference for his-trionics. Yet his dramatic exertion was always much more than acting; it was rather a profound state of belief. He imparted through dramatic exertion the peculiar quality of finality to all the acts he performed. As a consequence, then, his acts were set on a stage in which death was one of the main protagonists. It was implicit that death was a real possibility in the course of learning because of the inherently dangerous nature of the items with which a man of knowledge dealt; then, it was logical that the dramatic exertion created by the conviction that death was an ubiquitous player was more than histrionics.

Exertion entailed not only drama, but also the need of efficacy. Exertion had lo be cUcctivc; it had to possess the quality of being properly channeled, of being suitable. The idea of impending death created not only the drama needed for overall emphasis, but also the conviction that every action involved a struggle for survival, the convic-tion that annihilation would result if one’s exertion did not meet the requirement of being efficacious.

Exertion also entailed the idea of challenge, that is, the act of testing whether, and proving that, one was capable of performing a proper act within the rigorous boundaries of the knowledge being taught.

A Man of Knowledge Was a Warrior

The existence of a man of knowledge was an unceasing struggle, and the idea that he was a warrior, leading a warrior’s life, provided one with the means for achieving emotional stability. The idea of a man at war encompassed four concepts: (1) a man of knowledge had to have respect; (2) he had to have fear; (3) he had to be wide-awake; (4) he had to be self-confident. Hence, to be a warrior was a form of self- discipline which emphasized individual accomplishment; yet it was a stand in which personal interests were reduced to a minimum, as in most instances personal interest was incompatible with the rigor needed to perform any predetermined, obligatory act.

A man of knowledge in his role of warrior was obligated to have an attitude of deferential regard for the items with which he dealt; he had to  imbue everything related to his knowledge with profound respect in order to place everything in a meaningful perspective. Having respect was equivalent to having assessed one’s insignificant resources when facing the Unknown.

As the new Aquarian Age, so long foretold, dawns for humanity, the outbreaking of the Holy Ghost, the Com-forter, again speaks, and in no uncertain tones, to all child-ren who recognize Her, and proclaims to them: “Behold, it is I. Be not afraid!” At the ushering in of this Aquarian Age She comes under the name of Aquaria. And. true to the promise of Jesus, She brings to our remembrance all that He has told us concerning the New Dispensation when there “Shall appear the sign of the Son of Man (the sign Aquarius) in heaven.”

The instant the word was given, ihe two apparitions sprang forward and began to rain blows down upon each other wilh such lightning rapidity that I could not quite tell whether I saw ihe swords or only Hashes they made in Ihc air: the rattling Jin of these blows as they struck steel or paddings was something wonderfully stirring, and they were struck with such terrific force that I could not understand why the opposing sword was not beaten down under the assault. Presently, in the midst of the sword-dashes. I saw a handtul of tiair skip into the air as if it had lain loose on (he victim’s head and a breath of w ind had puffed it suddenly away.

The seconds cried “Halt!” and knocked up the combatants’ swords with their own. The duelists sat down: a student official stepped forward, examined Ihc wounded head and touchcd the place with a sponge once or twice; the surgeon came ;uid turned back the hair from tike wound— and revealed a crimson gash two or three inches long, and proceeded to bind an oval piece of leather and a bunch of lint over il: the tally-keeper stepped up and tallied one for the opposition in his book.Then the duelists look position again: a small stream of bloixl was How ing dow n the side of the injured man’s head, and over his xhoulder and down his body to the floor, but he did not seem to mind this. The word was given, and iliey plunged at each other as fiercely as before: once more the blows rained and rattled and flashed: every few moments the quick-eyed seconds would notice that a sword was bent—then they called “Halt!” struck up the contending weapons, and an assisting student straightened the bent one.

The wonderful turmoil went on—presently a bright spark sprung from a Made, and that blade broken in several pieces, sent one of its fragments flying to the ceiling. A new sw ord was provided and the light proceeded. The exercise was tremendous, of course, and in lime the fighters began lo show great fatigue. They were allowed to rest a moment, every little w hile: they got other tests by wounding each other, for then they could sit down while the doctor applied the lint and bandagcv The laws is that the battle must continue fifteen minutes if the men can hold out: und as the pauses do MM count, this duel was protracted to twenty or thirty minutes. 1 judged. At last it was decided thai the men were loo much wearied lo do battle longer. They were led away drenched w ith crimson from liead to fool. That was a good fight, but it could imii count, partly because it did not last the lawful fifteen minutes (of actual fighting), and partly because neither man was disabled bv his wound. It was a drawn bailie, and corps law requires that drawn Kittles shall be refought as soon as the adversaries are well of their hurts.

 In the one place I speak of, one could look below him upon a world of diminishing crags anil canyons leading down, down, and away to a vague plain with a threail in it which was a road, and bunches of feathers in it which were trees,—a pretty picture sleeping in the sunlight—but with a darkness stealing over it and gl«x>ming its features deeper anil deeper under the frmvn of a coming storm; and then, while no lilm or shadow marred the nix>n brightness of his high perch, he could watch the tempest break forth down there and see the lightnings leap from crag to crag anil the sheeted rain drive along the canyon-sides, and hear the thunders peal and crash and roar. Wc had this spectacle; a familiar one to many, but to us a novelty.

We bowled along cheerily, and presently, at the very summit (though it had been all summit to us, and all equally level, tor half an hour or more), we came to a spring which spent its water through two outlets and sent it in opposite directions. The conductor said that one of those streams which wc were ltx>king at, was just starting on a journey westward to the Gulf of California and the Pacific Ocean, through hundreds and even thousands of miles of desert solitudes. I le said that the other was just leaving its home among the snow-peaks on a similar journey eastward— antl wc knew that long after wc should have forgotten the simple rivulet it would still Ik- plodding its patient way tlown the mountain sides, antl canyon-beds, antl between the banks of the Yellowstone; antl by antl by would join the broad Missouri and flow through unknown plains and deserts and unvisited wildernesses; and add a long and troubled pilgrimage among snags and wrecks and sandbars; anil enter the Mississippi, touch the wharves of St. Louts and still drift on, traversing shoals and rocky channels, then endless chains of bottomless and ample bends, walled with unbroken forests, then mysterious byways and secret passages among woody islands, then the chained bends again, bordered with wide levels of shining sugar-cane in place of the sombre forests; then by New ( )rlcans and still other chains of Ixnds—and finally, after two long months of daily anil nightly harassment, excitement, enjoyment, adventure, anil awful peril of parched throats, pumps and evaporation, pass the Gulf and enter into its rest upon the bosom of the tropic sea. never to look upon its snow-peaks again or regret them.

1 freighted a leaf with a mental message for the friends at home, and dropped ir in the stream. But I put no stamp on it anil it was held for postage somewhere.On the summit wc overtook an emigrant train of many wagons, many tired men ami women, anil many a disgusted sheep anil cow.

My reindeer and myself seemed to be the only living things, and we were pursuing the phantoms of other travellers and other deer, who had long ago perished in the wilderness. It was impossible to see more than a hundred yards; some short, stunted birches, in their spec-tral coating of snow, grew along the low ridges of the deep, loose snow, which separated the marshes, but nothing else interrupted the monotony of the endless grey ocean through which we went floundering, apparently at hap-haz- ard. How our guides found the way was beyond my com-prehension, for I could discover no distinguishable land-marks. After two hours or more we struck upon a cluster of huts called Palaj&rvi, seven miles from Lippajftrvi, which proved that we were on the right track.

The fog now became thicker than ever. We were upon the water-shed between the Bothnian Gulf and the North-ern Ocean, about 1400 feet above the sea. The birches be-came mere shrubs, dotting the low mounds which here and there arose out of the ocean of snow. The pulks all ran in the same track and made a single furrow, so that our gunwales were generally below the sea-level. The snow was packed so tight, however, that we rarely shipped any. Two hours passed, and I was at length roused from a half- sleep by the evidence of our having lost the way. Long Isaac and the guide stopped and consulted every few minutes, striking sometimes in one direction and sometimes in another, but without any result. We ran oyer ridges of heavy, hard tussocks, blown bare of snow, which pitched our pulks right and left, just as I have bumped over the coral reefs of Loo-Choo in a ship’s cutter. Then followed deep beds of snow-drifts, which tasked the utmost strength of our deer, low birch thickets and hard ridges again, over which we plunged in the wildest way possible.

After wandering about for a considerable time, we sudden-ly heard the barking of a dog at some distance on our left. Following the welcome sound, we reached a scrubby ridge, where we were saluted with a whole chorus of dogs, and soon saw the dark cone of a Lapp tent. Long Isaac arous-ed the inmates, and the shrill cry of a baby proclaimed that there was life and love, even here. Presently a clumsy form, enveloped in skins, waddled out and entered into con-versation with our men. I proposed at once to engage a Lapp to guide us as far as now, which they informed us was two Norwegian (fourteen English) miles farther. The man agreed, but must first go off to the woods for his deer, which would detain us two hours. He put on his snow- skates and started, and I set about turning the delay to pro-fit by making acquaintance with the inmates of the tents. We had now reached the middle of the village; the lean, wolfish dogs were yelling on all sides, and the people began to bestir themselves. Streams of sparks issued from the open tops of the tents, and very soon we stood as if in the midst of a group of volcanic cones.

Looked at globally, “academic” knowl-edge of development cannot be seen as singular, yet the institutional re-sources behind different approaches can hardly be seen as equal.Three papers in this volume allow us to examine how different aca-demic disciplines in the West conomics, anthropology, and demogra-phy onfronted their own quests for generalizable knowledge with the specificity of situations in developing societies. Dudley Seers (in Martin and Knapp 1967) called development the problem of the “special case.”Within economics, this created ambiguous reactions: here was a new set of problems for economic analysis, yet the profession valued universalistic theories and powerful models above all else, and was not well equipped to deal with the messy particulars of markets that did not dear or of nonoptimizing institutions. Bardhan (1993) believes that development economists contributed to the mainstream of the discipline in ways not fully recognized. Michael Carter (this volume) argues that it is precisely through engagement with the complexities of “real markets,” information asymmetries, and the nonoptimal outcomes of rational economic behavior that the cutting edge of economic theory emerged, both drawing upon and contributing to analysis of inequality, exploitation, and poverty, as much as growth.

Anthropology, as James Ferguson shows here, has been skeptical of the idea of development and deeply caught up in it Its place in the division of labor among mid-twentieth century social sciences was based both on a theoretical stance that stressed the integrity of individual societies and a methodological one that stressed fieldwork and hence the complexity of particular instances. Yet anthropology had never quite got over its older evolutionist perspective on societies, and by the 1930s many of its prac-titioners were drawn to models of progressive change that could liberate Africans from the racial oppression they observed around them. Hence anthropology’s deep ambivalence about development welcoming yet dis-trusting social and economic progress, worrying about the damage change might inflict on diverse cultures yet acknowledging the misery of the pres-ent When development institutions asked anthropologists to contribute their culturally specific knowledge to projects, anthropologists found at the same time job opportunities, a chance to insert their sensitivities into projects and to validate the usefulness of their discipline, and a danger of becoming immersed in a system of deploying knowledge within which they would have a secondary role (see also Escobar 1995 for a biting critique of anthropology’s encounter with development). Anthropology as sev-eral contributions to the workshops made clear as at least complicated the social sciences’ picture of development, showing its unpredictable ef-fects, raising fundamental questions about the clash of cultures, and point-ing to the possibility of ethnographic analysis of the development appa-ratus itself.”

Demography, John Sharpless points out, is a postwar discipline. Sharp- less shows that its breakthrough into public policy required a conjuncture of intellectual and political processes: a fear among policymakers of a population crisis that would undermine economic growth and lead to political subversion, academic work that seemingly pinpointed where the problem lay and where intervention could take place, the new availability of technical solutions (birth control pills) to the problem, well-endowed foundations seeking their own role in the process, and a government will-ing to treat population as a policy problem. Yet there is a major ambiguity in the relationship of this discipline and policy: demographic transition theory implied that fertility changed with complex transformations in so-ciety, yet intervention implied change at a single point.

All these histories become part of another version of K’tut Tantri’s past, my history of K’tut Tantri and her romance. What then is to be nude of these various accounts including mine? Should the reader accept any as more or less ‘true’? Because complete truth must be beyond the reach of any history, none of them can be the ‘truth* about K’tut Tantri, so the reader can only form his or her own specu-lative history. But this need not mean rejection of all other accounts. If truth is unattainable, then other standards may be useful in judging the worth of a history, even one as seemingly ‘untrue’ as K’tut Tantri’s. Speaking of the process of autobiography, Mary McCarthy says: ‘Oh, I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for self, but what you feel when you’re older … is that… you really must make the self. It’s absolutely useless to look for it, you won’t find it, but it’s possible in some sense to make it.’5 To which Paul John Eakin concludes:

After such knowledge, an autobiographer can only say of the truth of her story, ‘ask me no questions,’ for the telling of lies is inextricably implicated in the writing of her memories. The lesson of McCarthy’s experience of the autobiographical act is that the process of sdf-discovcry is finally insepar-able from the art of self-invention.’Lies’ are, however, more than simply an unavoidable part of auto-biography and, indeed, any history of a life. The fabric of ‘untruth’ may well be the focus of interest of the whole history itself. It may even be the case that the validity of a particular history is, at least in part, located precisely in its ‘untruths’, its qualities of fantasy and creativity, of invention and lyricism an short its ‘art’, even where it amounts to artfulness. Indeed, if wc can tum our attention to the nature of the history, rather than the unknowable truth of the events it depicts, wc can gain different insights into the past, such as the nature of romance, the role it plays for its creator and its audience, the imagery it uses, and the artifice and structure it employs; all these may provide glimpses of a past, the past of the romance itself.7

Whatever its significances and meanings for us, however, there can be little doubt as to the profound significance for K’tut Tantri of her own romantic history. The woman who was to take the name K’tut Tantri allows her tumultuous and unhappy youth less than four pages of superficial text in Revolt in Paradise. Her first three decades were, apparendy, so unhappy that the possibility of escape?anywhere and anyhow as probably overwhelmingly attractive. She found her escape route where so many Westerners of her time did: at the movies. In her case, the cinematic romance of Bali, ori-ental island-paradise of an and freedom, became would-bc Utopia.