Reporter Volume 26, No.23 April 6, 1995

When Jeff Bethony arrived to teach English in Sangklaburi, a remote
Thai village, he could not have predicted how this would lead to a
future role as principal investigator in a five-year public health
project.
	The project, which is being funded by Health In Housing, a
World Health Organization Collaborating Center located at the UB
School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, will seek to establish a
Health In Housing facility in the village.
	Bethony, who is enrolled in a program in medical anthropology
with the departments of Anthropology and Social and Preventive
Medicine at UB, is working toward a Ph.D. in Anthropology and a
master's degree in epidemiological research in Social and Preventive
Medicine.
	In 1988, the young Bostonian who had graduated in 1985 from
SUNY Binghamton with a B.A. in English, volunteered for WorldTeach,
through the Harvard International Institute for Development. It
offered a chance to travel and get out into the world as more than a
mere tourist.
	But Bethony soon found out how difficult and alienating this
sort of travel can be. He knew hardly a word of Thai, and the village,
buried deep in the jungles of Kanchanaburi province near the Burmese
border, was four hours from the nearest city, centuries from the world
he had just left.
	"I was so cut off from everyone; I can't even remember saying
a single word for the first three months," Bethony recalls, "But the
villagers, a mixture of Thai and Mon peoples, were very gracious hosts
and they took the time to teach me about the language and the
culture." Bethony eventually learned not only Thai, but also a Burmese
language called Mon and became familiar with two other languages used
in Sangklaburi.
	As Bethony learned Thai, he became fascinated by elements of
the language known as "numeral classifiers." When he was later exposed
to the concept in a course in cognitive anthropology with UB
Anthropology Professor Charles Frake, these classifiers would become
the centerpiece of his linguistic investigation into the lives of
rural Thai people. While Frake's work primarily concerned the Subanun
peoples of the western Philippines, his theories about the connections
between cognition and culture had a universality that appealed to
Bethony.

To understand numeral classifiers, Bethony says, we should look at an
example of a similar system in English. When we say, "Two sheets of
paper," the word "sheet" is what would, in Thai, be a numeral
classifier, the "extra" word used to count that applies to all nouns.
While similarly functioning words exist in English, they are not the
rule. In Thai, a classifier is used for every noun. 
	Because the Thais have only about 40 of these classifiers,
Bethony became fascinated with the way in which classifiers tended to
group nouns together. Anthropologists have long suspected that
understanding this organizational quality of numeral classifiers would
offer a window into the way Thais convert their environment into
language.
	An example of this process can be found with the numeral
classifier "kan." It is used to count umbrellas, rice paddy dikes,
cars, and bicycles (among other things). This seems at first glance to
be a fairly random assortment of nouns, in that while cars and
bicycles are both modes of transportation, they share very little in
common with rice paddy dikes and umbrellas.
	"It's like using the word sheet to count chairs. It's very
strange," says Bethony. He goes on to explain the most prominent
theory of this arrangement wherein the word "kan" was traditionally
used to describe things that are long and thin: "Rice paddy dikes are
mounds of earth that are very long and thin, and an umbrella is also
long and thin." But how does this system eventually come to
incorporate a car? The theory continues that the bicycle was the
technological advance which began the transformation of the
classifier: "Because the handlebars are long and thin, and are the
most salient feature of the bicycle, it was categorized with the
classifier 'kan.'
	"As people began to see more and more bicycles, they began to
use the numeral classifier more and more, and slowly, over time, they
began to associate it with modes of transportation, so when the car
arrived, it received the classifier that the bicycle had established."
	But while this theory works well for this set of nouns,
Bethony points out that it is not an immutable rule. For most new
technologies in Thailand, a "default classifier," is employed, and it
is uncertain whether or not these modern nouns are ever absorbed by
another, specific classifier.

When Bethony interviewed a surgeon during the project, he found that
to count most of his tools, the surgeon used this default classifier.
But when interviewing people of more "traditional" professions, there
were highly developed sets of classifiers. For instance, Bethony found
that cooks used up to 20 numeral classifiers to count rice, while most
other people used very few.
	In the instance of the rice, the classifier is changed as the
rice is handled in different forms: it has one classifier when it is
used to count grains of rice, another  for bowls of rice.
	In his paper, "From the Raw To the Cooked: Numeral Classifier
Use Among Specialists," Bethony was advised by UB Associate Professor
of Linguistics David Zubin, who first taught him about numeral
classifiers. The title is borrowed from renowned anthropologist Claude
Levi-Strauss.
	As Bethony's grasp of the Thai language continued to develop,
he began to work as a translator for visiting public health
intervention teams. Both western and Thai physicians required
Bethony's knowledge of Mons' ethnophysiological concepts and his
knowledge of classifier usage among the Mons.
	As he worked with these teams, Bethony became interested in
tailoring the linguistic research he had done toward work in public
health. "Epidemiological data is often quantitative, and, of course,
with quantitative data, you run right smack into the problem of how to
count things," explains Bethony. "So I began to switch my interest
into writing medical histories for the area."
	After finishing his first two-year term as a teacher, Bethony
returned briefly to the States to apply to UB. After making his
connection with UB, he returned to Sangklaburi that summer, and has
continued to return each summer for the past five years. 
	When the abbott of the local Buddhist temple asked Bethony to
help the villagers assess their medical status , Bethony went to
Donald Pollock, UB assistant professor of anthropology and an HIH
fellow, for help and advice. This led to the HIH project for which
Bethony is principal investigator.
	"All the linguistic data we'd collected would usually stay in
some database, but I think this program will put it to good use,"
explains Bethony. "Luckily Thailand has a very good public health
service, and the people are very open to this sort of aid, and to
incorporating new ideas into their lives."
	Because the rural Mons' basic concept of illness is so
different from ours, this task of accumulating epidemiological data
posed a new series of linguistic problems for Bethony.
	"Our notion of health is directly related to pathology, and
that was a difficult concept to translate for the village," says
Bethony. "For instance, the Mons have a concept of winds entering and
leaving the body, regulating a balance of humors." 
	A classic example of this, Bethony says, is the Mon practice
of placing a warm stone on the belly of a woman after she has had a
baby. This is supposed to replace the heat that was lost when the body
expelled the child. In addition to this, suckling the newborn is
prohibited until this balance of temperature is restored, which takes
roughly four days. During that time the baby is fed by the father, who
masticates rice and honey, then puts it into the baby's mouth.
	Bethony will return to Sangklaburi this summer to continue the
public health project. One specific problem they will try to combat,
is the endemic malaria in Sangklaburi. 
	Bethony says that the village is "among the worst places on
the face of the earth" for malaria, due to multi-drug resistance. By
tracking the infiltration of the disease into the village, they hope
to discover how to prevent it in the future.