“Chess gets ahold of some people, like a virus or a drug,” says Robert Desjarlais in Counterplay: An Anthropologist at the Chessboard (University of California Press). “Just as the chemical properties of heroin directly and immediately affect the central nervous system, so chess can lock into certain pathways of the mind, and it doesn’t easily let go.”
Desjarlais, a professor of anthropology at Sarah Lawrence College, writes from personal experience. He spent his youth studying chess masterworks and hunched over a chessboard with other “cognitive junkies.” But he wasn’t good enough to play professionally, he says, and after college he gave up chess in favor of another abiding interest—anthropology. Over the following years, he did ethnographic fieldwork at a homeless shelter in Boston and studied the death and funeral rites of Nepal’s Yolmo people.
Then one day he stepped into a Manhattan chess shop, where locals played for a dollar an hour. Although his play was rusty, he was surprised to find how much he still enjoyed the game. Just like that, the addiction was back.
Already disillusioned with the politics and empty rituals of academe, Desjarlais was soon absorbed by his boyhood passion. It became irksome to attend meetings and keep up with research in his field. When he told a former student that he had been spending a lot of time playing chess, the puzzled young man asked, “Why?”
Desjarlais wondered, too: “Why play chess at all? Why take up a game—if game is the best word for it—that can be so exhausting, so demanding, so maddeningly frustrating? ... Why devote one’s energies to a time-intensive pursuit that is little valued or understood in one’s own society?”
“The anthropologist in me got to thinking,” writes the author. “Why not conduct fieldwork at the chessboard?” He did—mostly among amateurs, at tournaments and chess clubs, in church basements and city parks.
Part of the appeal of chess, the scholar found, lies in its aesthetic. To many people, the arcane rules, patterns, and vocabulary of chess seem dull and forebodingly mathematical. But chess lovers describe the game’s cathedral-like complexity in reverent terms. For seasoned players, Desjarlais says, “chess is like some enchanted palace they have stumbled across, its beauty and astonishing intricacy known only to a few.” Many artists are drawn to the game. For example, in the 1920s, the French painter Marcel Duchamp largely gave up painting, “for he found chess to be a purer medium.”
Unlike other art forms, chess is inherently adversarial, the author notes: “Imagine a master painter whose every brush stroke is countered, stroke by stroke, by the hand of another.” Emotions run high. That element of drama, writes Desjarlais, is what makes the game so addictive.
Yet, he explains, the rituals of chess can also provide a sense of belonging—socially, to the community of players, but also spiritually, to the world.
Writes the anthropologist: “A board with pieces on it reminds me of Hindu mandalas that I’ve seen in Nepal, or the altars of indigenous healers in Peru. Religious designs like these at once represent and summon the forces and energies of the world. Chess does the same, or so it seems at times. While playing I sometimes feel I’m tapping into the forces of the universe and thus sensing its primal matter and physics.”
A Dancer’s Spirit
In 1952, Pearl Primus’s passport was confiscated by the FBI. Like other artists with an affinity for radical politics, the internationally renowned black dancer was accused of being a Communist.
She admitted it. Although her involvement was limited—and her passport was eventually restored—there was a time when she had believed the Communist Party would improve the situation of blacks in America.
The dancer had never been one to back away from a risk, write Peggy and Murray Schwartz in The Dance Claimed Me: A Biography of Pearl Primus (Yale University Press). The authors, who are married, knew Primus well in the final years of her life, when all three taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo. After her death in 1994, they interviewed hundreds of her family members, friends, and fellow artists.
Although born in Trinidad, Primus was raised in New York. While working toward a graduate degree in psychology in the 1940s, she found work as a modern dancer. Primus quickly gained a reputation for her talent as well as her activism. She performed at civil-rights rallies and joined a radical troupe of dancers, the New Dance Group, whose motto was “Dance Is a Weapon.”
Primus traveled to Africa on a fellowship in 1948, write the authors. In a letter from Liberia, which was published in the New York Observer, she wrote, “This life is new to me. The dancer is still very important in the lives of the people. The dancing is basic—not primitive. (I shall never again use that term when speaking of African dance forms.) It seems to hug the earth, leaving it fleetingly only to plunge into its guts again—the feet move faster than any other form I’ve seen. ... I dance as I have never danced on the stages of America.”
Primus’s dancing would never be the same, according to the Schwartzes, and neither would her sense of self: For example, after her trip to Africa, she never again wore Western clothes in public. Her travels continued throughout her career as an international dancer, and the scholars write that she was truly “as satisfied eating taro root and peanut soup with villagers in West Africa as she was having a corned-beef sandwich and a cream soda at the Carnegie Deli in New York.”
Upon her return from her first trip to Africa, Primus defied expectations again by marrying Yael Woll, a white Jewish man, whom the authors describe as patient, gentle, and tolerant of her moods. Although the dancer was prone to flashes of anger and emotional flare-ups, her charisma was irresistible. Described by many as “queenly,” the authors write that she “gave gifts freely and with purpose. There were always people in her life who would serve her. She had a great need to be supported in this way, and an uncanny ability to have her needs met.” Later she divorced Woll and married Percival Borde, a Trinidadian dancer and choreographer, with whom she would eventually start a cross-cultural school of dance.
For Murray and Peggy Schwartz—a professor of literature at Emerson College and the former director of the dance program at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, respectively—Primus’s past illuminates their personal relationship with her: “Pearl believed in the spirit world and in the power of ‘the Ancestors.’ Part of her connection to us was her trust in Murray to deal with the complexity and institutional politics of the actual world, and her reliance on Peggy to share her trust in the spirit realm. Perhaps the many worlds she inhabited finally came down to these two.”
