Monster Anthropology: Ethnographic Explorations of Transforming Social Worlds through Monsters 9781350096257, 9781350096288, 9781350096264

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Contributor Biographies
Introduction: Monsters and Change Yasmine Musharbash and Geir Henning Presterudstuen
1 Monsters and Fear of Highway Travel in Ancient Greece and Rome Debbie Felton
2 Gods as Monsters: Insatiable Appetites, Exceeding Interpretations, and a Surfeit of Life Indira Arumugam
3 Pangkarlangu, Wonder, Extinction Yasmine Musharbash
4 Decline and Resilience of Eastern Penan Monsters Mikael Rothstein
5 Monster Mash: What Happens When Aboriginal Monsters Are Co-opted into the Mainstream? Christine Judith Nicholls
6 Margt býr í þokunni—What Dwells in the Mist? Helena Onnudottir and Mary Hawkins
7 Bird/Monsters and Contemporary Social Fears in the Central Desert of Australia Georgia Curran
8 The Nine-night Siege: Kurdaitcha at the Interface of Warlpiri/Non-Indigenous Relations Joanne Thurman
9 Monsters, Place, and Murderous Winds in Fiji Geir Henning Presterudstuen
10 Terror and the Territory Cults: Pregnancy and Power in Monsoon Asia Holly High
11 Drawing in the Margins: My Son’s Arsenal of Monsters—(Autistic) Imagination and the Cultural Capital of Childhood Rozanna Lilley
Afterword: Scenes from the Monsterbiome Michael Dylan Foster
Index

Citation preview

Monster Anthropology

Also available from Bloomsbury: Art and Masculinity in Post-War Britain, Gregory Salter Crowds, edited by Megan Steffen Electrifying Anthropology, edited by Simone Abram, Brit Ross Winthereik and Thomas Yarrow Performing Masculinity, Geir Henning Presterudstuen

Monster Anthropology Ethnographic Explorations of Transforming Social Worlds through Monsters Edited by Yasmine Musharbash and Geir Henning Presterudstuen

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Yasmine Musharbash, Geir Henning Presterudstuen and Contributors, 2020 Yasmine Musharbash and Geir Henning Presterudstuen have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: © Tjaša Krivec Cover Image: Claw, 2015 (© Rebecca Dagnall) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Control Number: 2019949541 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-9625-7 ePDF: 978-1-3500-9626-4 ePub: 978-1-3500-9627-1 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Figures Acknowledgments Contributor Biographies Introduction: Monsters and Change  Yasmine Musharbash and Geir Henning Presterudstuen Monsters and Fear of Highway Travel in Ancient Greece and Rome  Debbie Felton 2 Gods as Monsters: Insatiable Appetites, Exceeding Interpretations, and a Surfeit of Life  Indira Arumugam 3 Pangkarlangu, Wonder, Extinction  Yasmine Musharbash 4 Decline and Resilience of Eastern Penan Monsters  Mikael Rothstein 5 Monster Mash: What Happens When Aboriginal Monsters Are Co-opted into the Mainstream?  Christine Judith Nicholls 6 Margt býr í þokunni—What Dwells in the Mist?  Helena Onnudottir and Mary Hawkins 7 Bird/Monsters and Contemporary Social Fears in the Central Desert of Australia  Georgia Curran 8 The Nine-night Siege: Kurdaitcha at the Interface of Warlpiri/NonIndigenous Relations  Joanne Thurman 9 Monsters, Place, and Murderous Winds in Fiji  Geir Henning Presterudstuen 10 Terror and the Territory Cults: Pregnancy and Power in Monsoon Asia  Holly High 11 Drawing in the Margins: My Son’s Arsenal of Monsters—(Autistic) Imagination and the Cultural Capital of Childhood  Rozanna Lilley

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1

Afterword: Scenes from the Monsterbiome  Michael Dylan Foster Index

29 45 59 75 89 113 127 143 159 173 191 213 229

List of Figures 1.1 1.2 1.3

1.4 3.1 3.2 5.1

5.2

5.3

5.4

5.5

Remains of the Via Appia Antica in Rome, near Quarto Miglio. Reprinted with permission of Kleuske at Dutch Wikimedia 31 Map showing Theseus’s route from Troezen to Athens. Illustration by Michele Angel, with permission 35 The Old Woman siccing the Crommyonian Sow on Theseus. Attic red-figured vase, c. 440–430 BCE. Photo credit: ©Marie-Lan Nguyen/ Wikimedia Commons 36 Oedipus encounters the Theban Sphinx. Attic red-figure vase, c. 450 BCE. Public Domain 37 Pangkarlangu foot track at Yuendumu Big Dam, August 2013. Photograph courtesy of Rachel O’Connell 66 Pangkarlangu story from Willowra School. Photo courtesy of Rachel O’Connell. 70 Charlie Tjaruru (also known as “Watama”; c. 1921–1999, Tjungurrayi, Pintupi language/cultural group, Papunya NT), Untitled painting of a Pangkarlangu. Flinders University Art Museum Collection, Adelaide. Image © the Artist’s estate, licensed by Aboriginal Artists Agency Ltd 90 “Mother—What country is that across the river?” From Henry Kingsley’s The Lost Child, Macmillan and Co., page 15. Illustration by L. Fröhlich. Image scan courtesy of Olivia Lang 95 “The Story of the Bunyip” by Francis Thomas Dean Carrington; July 29, 1889. Image courtesy of Troedel and Co. and Wikimedia Commons for better readability 96 “Aboriginal Myths—the Bunyip,” photomechanical reproduction: halftone. State Library of Victoria Accession Number: IAN01/10/90/12 Image Number: mp006089 Notes: Print published in the Illustrated Australian news. Title printed below image l.c. Publication: Melbourne: David Syme & Co., Engraved in image l.l.: J. Macfarlane (1890) 98 Ron Brooks (Designer), July 14, 1994, “The Bunyip of Berkeley’s Creek,” Photolithography, 35 mm × 35 mm, Printer Leigh Marden Pty. Ltd., National postmark, Bunyip Vic 3185. Set of 4. Image courtesy of Australia Post Philately, Melbourne, Australia 100

List of Figures 5.6

5.7

5.8

8.1 8.2 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4

10.5 10.6

10.7 10.8 10.9 11.1 11.2 11.3

Jerry Morrison (designer), July 14, 1994, “A Bunyip of Aboriginal Legend,” Photolithography, 35 mm × 35 mm, Printer Leigh Marden Pty. Ltd., National postmark, Bunyip Vic 3185. Set of 4. Image courtesy of Australia Post Philately, Melbourne Australia Marg Towt (Designer), July 14, 1994, “The Bunyip of Natural History,” Photolithography, 35 mm × 35 mm, Printer Leigh Marden Pty. Ltd., National postmark, Bunyip Vic 3185. Set of 4. Image courtesy of Australia Post Philately, Melbourne Australia Trent Jansen, Pankalangu Wardrobe, 2016, Queensland walnut, copper, brass, and molded plywood, 210 × 120 × 57 cm. Courtesy of the Artist. Photograph: Dan Hocking. Pankalangu Wardrobe was designed for Broached Commissions, as part of the Broached Monsters exhibition; on display in the exhibition of finalists’ work in Ramsay Art Prize for Young Australian Artists under 40, Art Gallery of South Australia, March 27– August 27, 2017 Kardiya by day Significant locations during Kurdaitcha attacks at night The “palace” of one of the Don Khiaw puutaa in its protected patch of forest Inside the “palace” of the puutaa A woman holding a bouquet of bamboo skewers that represent the human and animal members of her household to the puutaa The protected groves of the puutaa in relation to the Buddhist temple on Don Khiaw. Photo credit: Google Earth, accessed June 6, 2017. The captions are my own The stone in the Kandon village plaza, in front of the ceremonial hall. The stones of Kandon. The crosses give a rough indication of the four points where the Buddhist monk tossed out sand and stones to purify the village space. Photo credit: Google Earth, accessed June 6, 2017 The Kandon ahak grove Old Kandon Kinuh of Old Kandon “This is a monster,” 2006 (aged 5) Drawing 7, August 6, 2012. “Freaky cat” (artist’s description). Example of a static monster portrait Drawing 12, August 9, 2012. Scary jester. Example of a mirrored monster portrait

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102

108 147 150 178 179 179

180 181

182 183 184 184 195 196 197

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List of Figures

11.4 Drawing 13, August 13, 2012. “A person transforming into a demon” (artist’s description). Example of transformation portrait 11.5 Drawing 14, August 13, 2012. The normal world and the underworld. Example of a mirrored narrative scene 11.6 Drawing 21, August 27, 2012. Zombie apocalypse. Example of a narrative scene 11.7 Drawing 11, August 9, 2012. Monster Clown 11.8 Drawing 4, August 6, 2012. Mutant scarecrow (artist’s description)

197 198 199 200 201

Acknowledgments What started in 2012 as a lark—The Monster Panel at the Australian Anthropological Society’s annual conference—has become a full-time passion, and we must thank Tanya King, again, for starting us off on this road. More monster meetings have happened since, and most pertinent for this volume were these two symposia: Theorising Belief through Monsters and the Supernatural (2015) and Living with Monsters (2017), organized with much-appreciated financial and administrative assistance by Religion and Society Research at Western Sydney University and the University of Sydney’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and the Department of Anthropology, as well as the Australian Research Council. We thank the keynote speakers, presenters, discussants, and audiences for wonderfully stimulating debates around monsters and anthropology and for the fruitful ideas that emerged during the symposia, which have flown into the current volume. We would like to thank the contributors to this volume (most but not all of whom attended the symposia) for their fantastic chapters, their good grace in responding to our many queries and requests, and their excellent contributions to extend our interest in monster anthropology. It has been an absolute pleasure working with you all. We are eternally grateful to Chris Marcatili for everything! He has been absolutely essential to this volume, and we could not have done it without his superpowers of organizing and keeping everything on track, let alone his editing skills and expert research assistance. Our deep gratitude also goes to Miriam Cantwell and Lucy Carroll at Bloomsbury for being the most delightful editorial team. It’s been such a delight to work with a publishing team that coupled efficiency and professionalism with genuine enthusiasm for our project. Artist Rebecca Dagnall has (again!) made available to us one of her monstrously fabulous images for the cover and we thank her from the bottom of our hearts. Last but not least, Yasmine would like to thank the ARC for granting her a Future Fellowship FT130100415, which allowed her to explore monsters, and the Australian National University for granting her time to work on this volume, while Geir Henning wants to acknowledge the ongoing support from the School of Social Sciences at Western Sydney and Professor Adam Possamai in particular.

Contributor Biographies Indira Arumugam is an anthropologist who works in Tamil Nadu, South India and among the Tamil diaspora in Singapore and Southeast Asia. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the National University of Singapore. Her research interests include vernacular political imaginaries, theories of power, rituals, sacrality and popular Hinduism. Her writings on ritual sacrifice, the gift, Hindu festivals and kinship have appeared in journals of anthropology, religion and Asian Studies. She is currently revising her manuscript Visceral Politics: Intimate Imaginaries of Power in South India for publication. Georgia Curran is an anthropologist with interests in Indigenous music and languages, performance ethnography and cultural continuity and change. She has undertaken collaborative research with Warlpiri people in Yuendumu and other Central Australian communities since 2005. She is the author of Sustaining Indigenous Songs: Contemporary Warlpiri ceremonial life in Central Australia (2020, Berghahn Books) and has collaborated with Warlpiri women to produce two song books, ‘Jardiwanpa yawulyu’ (2014) and ‘Yurntumu-wardingki-juju-ngaliya-kurlangu yawulyu: Warlpiri women’s songs from Yuendumu’ (2017), both published by Batchelor Press. Georgia is currently a research associate at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Debbie Felton, Professor of Classics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, United States, does research on classical mythology and folklore, with particular attention to the supernatural and the monstrous. Professor Felton’s work has appeared in Classics and folklore journals and her books include Haunted Greece and Rome: Ghost Stories from Classical Antiquity (1999) and the edited collection Landscapes of Dread in Classical Antiquity: Negative Emotion in Natural and Constructed Spaces (2018). Her current project is on serial killers in the ancient world. She is Editor of the journal Preternature (Penn State Press) and Associate Review Editor for the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. She has also been the content consultant for several series of children’s ghost-story books. Michael Dylan Foster is Professor and Department Chair of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of The Book of Yōkai: Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore (2015), Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yōkai (2009), and numerous articles on Japanese folklore, literature, and media. He also co-edited The Folkloresque: Reframing Folklore in a Popular Culture World (2016) and UNESCO on the Ground: Local Perspectives on Intangible Cultural Heritage (2015). His current project explores discourses of tourism and heritage as they relate to local festivals in Japan.

Contributor Biographies

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Mary Hawkins is an anthropologist whose fields of ethnographic research include Indonesia and Iceland. She has published widely on aspects of national and ethnic identity, social change and social conflict. Her books include Global Structures, Local Cultures (2006; 2nd Edition 2014); Race and Ethnicity (with F Fozdar and R Wilding, 2009) and Identity and Belonging (with Kate Huppatz and Amie Matthews, (2016). Mary is a Professor and Director of Anthropology and Sociology in the School of Social Sciences and Psychology at Western Sydney University. Holly High is an anthropologist. She was trained at the Australian National University, does her fieldwork in Laos, and has held postdoctoral positions at Yale, Cambridge and Sydney. She is now Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology, The University of Sydney. She is the author of Fields of Desire: Poverty and policy in Laos (2014). She has also written about anthropological approaches to debt, power and psychoanalytic theory; cultural, health and agricultural policies in relation to lived experience in Laos; emerging infectious disease as an intercultural zone; and religion in Laos. Currently, she is investigating transformations in pregnancy, birth and early childhood in Laos. Rozanna Lilley, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Department of Educational Studies, Macquarie University, is an anthropologist and an autism researcher. She has published extensively in academic journals and books on diverse topics. Rozanna is the author of Staging Hong Kong: Gender and Performance in Transition (1998) and, most recently, Do Oysters Get Bored? A Curious Life (2018), which was shortlisted for the 2019 National Biography Award of Australia. Yasmine Musharbash is Senior Lecturer in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University. Since the 1990s, she has been conducting participant observation-based research with Warlpiri people in Central Australia. Her main interest is in social relations: among Warlpiri people on the one hand and between them and non-Indigenous people, fauna, flora, the elements, and monsters, on the other. Related themes she has explored include fear, the night, sleep, boredom, laughter, and grief as well as resistance, transformation, and intergenerational transition. She is the author of Yuendumu Everyday (2008) and of a number of coedited volumes, including Monster Anthropology in Australasia and Beyond (with G Presterudstuen, 2014) and Knowing Monsters (forthcoming, with Ilana Gershon). Are we? Christine Judith Nicholls is an Honorary Senior Lecturer in the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics at the Australian National University. From the early 1980s, she lived at Lajamanu, a Warlpiri settlement in the Tanami Desert, working first as a linguist, then as the school principal. Well published in the fields of sociolinguistics, literature, visual arts and education, Christine has been tracing developments in these fields for several decades now. Helena Onnudottir received her BA from the University of Iceland and her MA and PhD in social anthropology from Macquarie University. Helena has conducted

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fieldwork among settled Aboriginal communities in western NSW, and more recently has focused on social and cultural transformations in Iceland following the GFC of 2008. She is the author of Religious Change and Indigenous Peoples: Global Discourses and Aboriginal Religions, (with A. Possamai and B. Turner, 2013), as well as numerous articles and book chapters. Her most recent publication is ‘From Resurrection and New Dawn to the Pirate Party: Political Party Names as Symbolizing Recent Transformations in the Political Field in Iceland’ (with Mary Hawkins) Politics, Religion and Ideology 19 (4) 2018. Helena is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences and Psychology at Western Sydney University. Geir Henning Presterudstuen is Senior Lecturer in anthropology at Western Sydney University. He has conducted ethnographic research in Fiji since 2009. Apart from ghosts and other monsters, his main research interests include the intersections between social categories such as gender, ethnicity, class and sexuality in context of the modern market economy, anthropology of the body, and social theory. His key publications include Performing Masculinity: Body, Self and Identity in Modern Fiji (2019), two edited volumes: Monster Anthropology in Australasia and Beyond (with Y Musharbash, 2014) and Anthropologies of Value: Cultures of accumulation across the Global North and South (with Luis Angosto Ferrandez, 2016) as well as a number of articles in international journals. Mikael Rothstein, mag.art. and Ph.D. in Comparative Religion, Associate Professor, University of Southern Denmark (SDU), Research Professor at the Lolland-Falser Museum, Guest Professor, Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania, originally specialized in the study of new and emergent religions, but since 2005 increasingly focused on religion among indigenous peoples, particularly nomadic, small scale hunter-gatherers. Fieldwork has been among the Penan of Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo (2005–present), but also in Hawai’i and Brazil. Rothstein is a prolific author. His monograph Regnskovens religion (The Religion of the Rainforest) about the Penan, was the first analysis of the subject (2016). Currently he is involved in an archaeological project where “the ethnographic analogy” will be critically tested. Mikael Rothstein lives in Albertslund, Denmark. Joanne Thurman is a PhD candidate at the Australian National University. She spent her fieldwork at Nyirrpi, Central Australia, researching the meaning and significance of material things in Warlpiri peoples’ lives. She is now writing her thesis with the working title, Things that meet the eye: The materiality of Warlpiri dwelling.

Introduction: Monsters and Change Yasmine Musharbash and Geir Henning Presterudstuen

Monsters, says Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (1996: 4), are born at “metaphoric crossroads, as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment—of a time, a feeling, a place.” As a medievalist, a scholar of English, and author of foundational texts of the ever-evolving interdisciplinary but mostly humanities-based field of monster studies, Cohen’s reference to both the monsters themselves and the crossroads are, of course, metaphors.1 The monster anthropology we are developing attempts to marry monster studies— specifically, its premise of the monster as meaning generating and the dazzling array of insights that can derive from this—with ethnographic fieldwork. The latter tends to present anthropologists with contexts, situations, and encounters where monsters are anything but metaphors (see also Musharbash and Presterudstuen 2014), even if they still very much are “meaning machines.”2 As anthropologists, naturally, we want to adopt, employ, and experiment with such multi-perspectival analytical approaches toward monsters, which simultaneously means that we need to fully embrace that: anthropologists are often caught—determined to respect their fieldwork interlocutors who live in a world populated with different beings, or unable to admit to their colleagues that they have joined this world too. To be respectful and act with integrity to those whose lives they study, they have to live as-if monsters interfere with people’s daily lives. Or they have to live as-if these monsters don’t exist when among their colleagues. Monsters make the relationship work at the heart of anthropology into the work of living in the as-if. (Musharbash and Gershon, under review)

This volume demonstrates how taking the as-if seriously means seeing monsters as beings with the ability to act in the world and as beings who respond to social change and transformation in interesting ways, in ways that tell us important things about the world and us in it. This introductory chapter contours key aspects of the difference between monsters as metaphors and monsters as agents who nonetheless are “meaning machines.” We begin this work by (1) detailing more exactly the possibilities and pitfalls of employing the

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term “monster” in the context of anthropology and (2) tying the monster more closely to “time.” In tandem, these sections provide the springboard for the main contribution we make, presenting an analytical overview of different ways in which monsters relate to change. Specifically, we detail change through the following processes: emergence, adaptation, appropriation, amalgamation, extinction, and succession. Throughout, we sketch the different monsters to be encountered in this volume as well as the various approaches that contributors take to analyzing their meanings. We conclude with a brief overview of how the analytical roads in this introduction crisscross the ensuing chapters in different directions.

Monsters and anthropology “Monster” is a term rarely employed in anthropology: curious, considering just how many anthropologists work in field sites where other-than-humans—from emplaced spirit guardians, via vengeance demons to cannibalistic witches (to name just a very few)—dwell and cause havoc. We posit that there are at least three reasons why anthropologists shy away from using the term monster: 1. There is considerable resistance in anthropology toward an overarching term such as “monster” for beings that are considered uniquely embedded in particular times, places, and sociocultural contexts. 2. Anthropology has a tendency toward producing geographically confined paradigms, which set themselves apart from others by allegiance to certain terms and correlated theoretical frameworks (in regard to beings we would label monster such potent terms include “malicious spirit,” “sorcery,” and “witchcraft,” for example). 3. We suspect that some anthropology colleagues quite simply consider the term “monster” too outré due to its pop culture associations and perhaps also because it destabilizes the all too porous but hotly contested boundary between anthropology and cultural studies. Against these qualms, we propose that “monster” is a useful umbrella term indeed. First, it allows us to gather, contrast, and compare (ethnographies of) a great variety of different beings that otherwise would not be considered in the same conceptual space. Take this volume, for example. Under the banner of monster it brings together a humanoid witch, partly invisible killers with superhuman powers, a mutant scarecrow, giant hairy cannibals, locally specific ghosts and spirits, a number of hybrid creatures including a half-woman, half-serpent, and shape-shifting bird/monsters (men and birds simultaneously), a horrific red-eyed “flying head” which appears at night and signals misfortune and catastrophe, river-dwelling Bunyips, a feline-like beast who, among other things, avenges the violation of taboos, a winged zombie demon, a people-devouring snake, a Sphinx, a three-headed giant, a man-eating pig, vindictive guardian spirits, mutants and cyborgs, and even some gods. Or, to put this differently, focusing on monsters gives us an avenue to investigate specific aspects of processes of

Introduction

3

social change and transformation in different scenarios, from the Icelandic Census of Hidden Creatures, via shrines in Laos and Tamil Nadu, or settler–colonial relations in Central Australia, to infrastructure in ancient Greece and Rome, and shifting notions about autism in psychology. Second, gathering all these beings under the banner of monsters allows us to draw upon the extensive theorizations about monsters from interdisciplinary monster studies and apply them to ethnographic analyses. There is much that anthropology can learn from monster studies. And third, by building a bridge between monster studies and anthropology, we can bring to the table not “just” ethnography—that is, a distinct social science approach toward monsters that differs from the humanities in its focus on different lived and embodied experiences of monsters—but also engagement with the most enduring discussions of anthropology. This includes questions of taboo, kinship, belief, social structure, and personhood and identity, to mention a few that become apparent in the chapters in this volume. Clearly, what counts as “monstrous” does not mean the same for everyone; what is monstrous differs over time and across cultures. And yet, monstrous creatures share a distinct family resemblance. At the most basic level, we can look at the etymology of the Latin words at the root, monstrare and monere, “to show” and “to warn.” In this original sense, all monsters are embodied omens or portents. In previous work, we proposed that drawing all kinds of beings together under the label “monster” produces four new analytical possibilities that smaller compartmentalized paradigms do not allow (Musharbash 2014a): 1. The indeterminacy of monster realities. By this we mean, specifically, that as anthropologists we must look at monsters within the “as-if ” as our monsters are not (only) found on pages of books and the screens of televisions. Far from being fictional, the monsters we encounter in the field demand acknowledgment of their being. As a result, “the anthropological approaches to the question of the reality of monsters are vast and varied, but most see monsters as something more than pure fiction, not least because they are intimately familiar with their interlocutors’ responses to the presence of monsters” (Musharbash 2014a: 6). 2. The particularities of the monstrous body. What monsters have in common, we propose (and in this follow a long tradition from Pliny the Elder via Cohen to Asma and others), is that all their bodies are “fantastic” bodies, if we understand the term in its original sense. Hailing from Greek phantastikós, it means being able to present or show (to the mind), in short, being imaginable, as opposed to imaginary. (Musharbash 2014a: 6)



Monstrous bodies, as Asma (2009: 125) put it, “always disrupt neat categories of taxonomy.” They are, to give some examples from this book, neither bird nor man but both; or they have the abilities to be either old man or snake. They may look like humans but with claws, or translucent, or bigger, or hairier. They may be dead but also alive. In a further extension of this point, Clasen (2012) links the body of monsters not just to the classificatory schema of the people they haunt

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but also to the environment both monsters and hauntees find themselves in. Building on Asma’s (2009) statement that local predators ideally lend themselves to be incorporated into the bodily manifestation of monsters, he outlines how “we find different shape-shifters in different ecologies: a were-tiger in India and other Asian regions, a were-bear in North America, a were-leopard in Africa, a wereboar in Greece and Turkey, a were-crocodile in Indonesia and Africa, and so on” (Clasen 2012: 225). Monster bodies are, in short, always impossible; they always cross un-crossable categories. 3. Monsters are contingent on the humans they haunt. As we put it in our first volume: “Their actions (as much as their bodies) are culturally specific, and they target and make sense only in particular societies” (Musharbash 2014a: 11). In the same volume we speculated that monsters out of their own sociocultural context more likely than not would fail to “make sense”; an Anito spirit from Indigenous Taiwan would be utterly meaningless if encountered in Madrid, much as the Jersey Devil would be incomprehensible in Morocco. As Weinstock (2014: 3) most appositely put it: “We are intimately familiar with monsters … because they are our own.” In this volume we add a caveat to this observation, namely that in this globalized world monsters may find it easier than in the past to haunt people who are not originally “their own.” As we discuss below, some monsters adapt while others are appropriated and so their contingency on hauntees becomes more flexible. This leads immediately to the key point of this volume, namely Monsters and change. 4. Monsters and change. Much as Cohen argues, anthropologists would agree that monsters are embodiments of cultural moments (Cohen 1996: 4). We proposed earlier that anthropology, through cross-cultural comparison, is ideally situated to examine exactly how monsters relate to change, how they gain in significance or fade into insignificance, how they change themselves as the world around them changes, or how they become transcended by new monsters. Those were sketches of territory new to anthropology. The task we set ourselves for this volume is to explore this conceptual terrain of monsters and change further.

Monsters as embodiments of cultural moments “Our contemporary moment is a haunted one,” states Jeffrey Weinstock (2004: 3) in summing up his insights about the rise of ghosts in popular culture and academic writing during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Others corroborate; for example, Bader et al. (2017) qualitatively and quantitatively document the recent and ever-increasing permeation of the paranormal in American culture (see also Picart and Browning 2012). Indeed, Bader et al. found that these days, in “a strictly numerical sense, people who do not believe in anything paranormal are now the ‘odd people out’ in American society” (2017: 163).3 In this context of increasing US fascination with ghosts, UFOs, Bigfoot, and other paranormal beings, consider also Clasen’s pronouncement that

Introduction

5

from about 1925, the representation of zombies in English-language books increased by more than 500%, and by 2000 it had increased by 3,250% … [and further that the zombie] could never have achieved this level of cultural success if it had not connected squarely with adaptive dispositions to fear lethal attack and infectious agents. (Clasen 2012: 225)4

Over 3,000 percent! These numbers are as staggering as they are irrefutable. They are commonly linked to a paralleling rise in anxieties—about attacks and infectious agents, as Clasen proposes, or, more sweepingly, about a whole cluster of interrelated causes, as detailed by Levina and Bui: In the past decade, our rapidly changing world faced terrorism, global epidemics, economic and social strife, new communication technologies, migration, and climate change, to name a few … while monsters always tapped into anxieties over a changing world, they have never been as popular, or as needed, as in the past decade. (Levina and Bui 2013: 2)

What we have, then, is overwhelming evidence that monsters are becoming more and more prominent and increasingly central to defining contemporary experience— in the United States, in particular, and perhaps the Global North more generally.5 From a comparative monster anthropological perspective, two issues should be taken into account: 1. It is important to remember this steady permeation is a process that does not occur everywhere in equal strength and speed. 2. Nor does the same process occur everywhere in the same direction. Put differently, the eminently plausible, reasonable, and insightful portraits of the rise of monsters in the United States (specifically) should not be read as (nor do we think are they written as) hegemonic truth. However, because of the weight they bear they take on an air of generalizability. If looked at comparatively, it comes to light that they provide a skewed impression of monsters and change that does not take into account how monsters are part of similar processes (locally) and also produce their own changes or, indeed, as Michael Dylan Foster reflects on in the afterward to this volume, how monsters themselves are change as is the case with Japanese bake-mono. In other words, their very existence veils other possibilities, other processes of change, and the various roles monsters play in them. Weinstock put his finger on it when he says: That our monsters keep changing—or that the same monsters look, act, and function differently in different historical contexts—demonstrates the extent to which our understanding of them is always dependent upon time, place, and worldview. (Weinstock 2014: 1)

With a similar view of monsters and change across time but in a different cultural context (Japan), Foster asserts exactly the same. He says, “Yōkai [a Japanese term,

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Monster Anthropology

roughly translatable as ‘monster’] always exist outside of the purview of history and, at the same time, reside at its very center” (Foster 2009: 25). And recall Cohen’s description of the monster as embodying cultural moments with which we started this chapter. What we want to do in this volume is use monster anthropology analytically in order to interrogate what these irrefutable truths (that monsters are embodiments of certain cultural moments) mean in practical terms for people in ethnographically specific contexts and situations. As a consequence, we not only provide novel forms of monster manifestations, including monsters that appear as soil or stones (High, this volume) or remain heard but unseen (see also Curran, Musharbash, Nicholls, and Thurman, all this volume), but also keep our analytical focus on the changes they reflect, affect or cause and, most importantly, how these follow local cultural scripts. This issue crystallized as central during a 2017 symposium, “Living with Monsters,” from which more than half of the chapters in this volume hail. During the symposium, change emerged as a common theme, crisscrossing in different manifestations across the panels, presentations, and discussions. As our discussant, Debbie Felton, summed up6: In several papers, the advent of various technologies, whether a road system, electric lighting, or deforestation, causes environmental change and consequent change among human and animal populations, in turn causing migrations and extinctions. In ancient Greece and Rome, such movements caused an increase in the presence of monsters, due to trepidation about the unknown outside local communities. Alternatively, sightings of Pangkarlangu among the Warlpiri became scarce, and their absence caused distress; people were relieved and kind of excited when an entire Pangkarlangu family was spotted, fostering a sense of community. In Borneo, the supernatural appears to have retreated in the face of the modern, with a decline in Indalau–human contact. Encroachment on the habitat of the Minis in Tamil Nadu provoked a tension between the spirits of the land and sociopolitical attempts to govern them, and a similar tension and fear has been evoked in Laos as the modern state encroaches upon and usurps the function of territorial guardian spirits. In Ghana, technology is perhaps misappropriated in the form of Sakawa boys, who ostensibly use “evil occult powers” to commit internet fraud, “possessing the mind of the foreign cyber target” and thus turning them into effectual zombies.

The symposium offered the perfect opportunity to hone in on the issue of monsters and change. In some ways, this is an extension and development of something we sketched in our previous monster anthropology volume. There, we already delineated two different ways of understanding monsters and change, stating that as human society changes, so do its monsters (see among others Asma 2009; Campbell [1948] 1968; Carroll 1990; Poole 2011). [We aim to] approach these matters, specifically, by exploring … two different paths of monstrous adaptation suggested in the literature: one that sees one type of monster supplanted by another as the world and, with it, understandings of the self and knowledge changes; and the other, which sees the monster changing with the world. (Musharbash 2014b: 40)

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In this volume, we aim for more. Below, we present the results of our analysis of the literature—a differentiation of the primary ways in which monsters and change are commonly understood. In the ensuing chapters we follow up this discourse on monsters and change by providing ethnographic explorations of such (and new) instances of meaning generated by monsters in different sociocultural contexts of social change and transformation.

Monsters and change Our analysis of the literature has led us to conclude that there are a number of different ways in which monsters “behave” in situations of (human) social change and transformation. We believe that distinguishing these different avenues is of benefit analytically and conceptually. More, we propose that analyzing processes of social change and transformation by focusing on the path a particular monster takes through that change generates novel insights. In this vein, the aim of this section is to sketch the ways that monsters conduct themselves in the situations of change we have identified (and in the ensuing chapters, our authors explore these in ethnographic detail). First, however, a small caveat. At some point, our distinctions become artificial as none of the paths we will outline are entirely isolatable from the others. Indeed, it is possible for the one monster to be involved in all of them (something we demonstrate by drawing on the zombie as a case in point in every instance). Moreover, it is possible for different monsters caught up in the one situation of change to pursue different avenues (see Rothstein, Chapter 4, this volume, for an excellent investigation of such a scenario). Interrelated as these monstrous ways of experiencing and reacting to change are, we nonetheless propose that distinguishing them conceptually is analytically rewarding—something the individual chapters in this volume will also demonstrate. Two of these avenues are elaborations of those we sketched earlier (“one that sees one type of monster supplanted by another as the world and, with it, understandings of the self and knowledge changes; and the other, which sees the monster changing with the world”; Musharbash 2014b: 40), or as we call them here “succession” and “adaptation.” The other avenues we outline are “new”—not new in terms of them never having described before. Quite to the contrary, as we will show there are many examples of each to be found in the literature. But to the best of our knowledge they have not hitherto been distinguished and analyzed as specific conceptual paths monsters may take in contexts of social change and transformation. These latter ones include “emergence,” “appropriation,” “amalgamation,” and “extinction.” In the following, we will discuss each of these avenues in turn. We do so by providing examples both from the more humanities-leaning engagements in monster studies and from anthropology.

Emergence Probably the best-known and most elaborated-upon example of emergence is Frankenstein’s monster. Previously, in a discussion on the monstrous body, we have

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Monster Anthropology

situated Frankensteinian creations—human–machine assemblages—as contingent on the industrial revolution and as an example of the axiom that “as new categories appear in the taxonomic schema, so do new monsters” (Musharbash 2014a: 9). Before there were mechanical machines, a monster such as Frankenstein’s quite simply was not possible (see also Graham [2002] and Hunter [2008], among many others). Similarly, the emergence of new monsters as a result of medieval explorations collated for example by Pliny the Elder ([1601] 1949) was dependent on new “discoveries” and the stories told by travelers. The emergence of (new) monsters, then, stands in direct correlation to the emergence of something else “new” that is characteristic of the zeitgeist. Felton (this volume) provides a brilliant retrospective “ethnography” of exactly this happening in the ancient Greek and Roman countryside: she shows that monsters emerge as novel infrastructure in the form of interconnecting and vast road networks is built, and how they embody the new perils of road travel. Another example of monster emergence from this volume can be found in Lilley’s chapter, which illustrates a similar dynamic in a vastly different historical and cultural context. The monsters drawn and experienced by her son Oscar change dramatically in dialog with the popular culture he consumes and his own intellectual and creative development, effectively emerging as mash-ups based on a rich set of cultural influences. A prominent example of monster emergence from anthropology is the Andean Pishtaco—a monstrous version of the white man emerging out of (and representing) conquest, colonization, and neocolonialism (see, among others, Oliver-Smith 1969; Weismantel 1997, 2001). Mary Weismantel (2000: 408) describes the Pishtaco as “a terrifying bogeyman who waylays Indian travelers in order to drain the fat from their bodies. He then sells the human fat to other whites; the latter use it to manufacture industrial goods ranging from pharmaceuticals and processed foods to rocket fuel, skin creams, and scented soaps.” Another contemporary example of monster emergence that has received significant attention is Slender Man, the 2009 Creepypasta Internet meme that took on a life of its own (see contributions in Blank and McNeill 2018; Boyer 2013; Tolbert 2013; and for a beautiful narrative exposition of this process of emergence, see Tolbert under review). Zombie examples of emergence include their first manifestation in the New World after arriving in the Caribbean on the slave boats from Africa. Then called zombi (without an “e”) they became integral to Voudou, the creolized religion of slaves, and an exceedingly potent expression of the traumas caused by slavery (among countless others, see Ackermann and Gauthier 1991; Cannon 1942; Degoul 2011; Lauro 2015; Mars 1945; Métraux 1946; Simpson 1945). Other zombie examples of emergence include the splash that Romero’s zombies caused in Night of the Living Dead (not mindless laborers now but the shuffling undead expressive of the mindless slaughter of the Vietnam War) or the shockingly fast swarming undead hordes of World War Z.

Adaptation A second avenue, and one we discussed previously (see Musharbash 2014a), is for specific monsters to adapt to “the times” and to change with them. This was first outlined most sharply by Nina Auerbach (1995) in her path-breaking book

Introduction

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Our Vampires, Ourselves. As so much has happened since this was published, it is important to remember that, as Auerbach (1995: 1) herself outlines, the “book took shape between 1989 and 1992—the span of George Bush’s presidency.” Starting with Lord Byron and making her way from the days of Romanticism to the then present, she painstakingly documents how the figure of the vampire across this time span has displayed an uncanny ability to change in tandem with the times and places in which it exists, thus coming to ideally reflect and embody contemporary anxieties. Through the way vampires “blend into the cultures they inhabit,” she says, they stand out in contrast to “ghosts, werewolves, and manufactured monsters [who] are relatively changeless, more aligned with eternity than with time” (Auerbach 1995: 6). According to her, this is caused by the vampires’ closeness to “the mortals they prey on. I can think of no other monsters who are so receptive” (Auerbach 1995: 6). Time has shown that she was certainly right about the vampire’s aptitude for adaptation (more so than she was about the time and changelessness of ghosts, a point we reflect upon below; see also Presterudstuen, this volume), and with the benefit of hindsight one wonders if even Auerbach could have foreseen the ways in which vampires continued to transform since her publication, which preceded not only Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the first episode of which aired in March 1997) but the new wave of vampire films and TV series that characterizes the early twenty-first century—think True Blood, Being Human, The Vampire Diaries, Twilight Saga, Underworld, Blade, and many others. It appears, though, that the vampire is by no means the only monster with a talent to adapt and the zombie appears to be making a dash for being the most adaptable monster (McIntosh 2008). Late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century popular culture has experienced a veritable torrent of new and different zombies, so much so that both primary and secondary works are far too numerous to recount in full.7 Considering the zombie’s history, this knack at adaptability should not really come as a surprise. Their very first (documented) adaptation happened when they traveled on slave boats from Africa to the Caribbean and their subsequent integration into one of the most exoticized religions of the New World: Voudou (among numerous others, see Ackermann and Gauthier 1991; Cannon 1942; Degoul 2011; Lauro 2015; Mars 1945; Simpson 1945). Undoubtedly, the mystique of Voudou must have abetted their entry into the West, culminating at first in White Zombie (1932), a movie that followed in the wake of the success of the first wave of Hollywood horror movies such as Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, and so forth (among many others, see Bishop 2008; and for a contemporary twist on the Haitian zombie and occupation, see Fay 2008). After White Zombie, they “laid low” until Romero gave them a new opening with Night of the Living Dead (1968). From thence they colonized the West, multiplying across TV shows, movies, books, comics, and zines, inhabiting popular culture with ever-increasing force, all the while adapting, taking over new domains of meaning, new ways of being in the world. As if all that expansion was not enough, the zombie also returned to Africa. Back in their continent of origin, they adapted again, now haunting in late capitalist fashion as famously described by Jean and John (Comaroff 1999, 2002) and, among others, Niehaus (2005).

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The key point about zombie adaptation is that, not unlike the vampires described by Auerbach, the zombie body transforms as the zombie adapts: its gait adjusts from a slow shuffle to high speed depending on context (e.g., whether embodying dead labor, mindless consumption, or voracious infection); the ways to kill it as much as how it sustains its own “life” and infects others vary according to circumstance; even the extent to which it can think or feel is attuned to the situation it is adapting to. In the zombie case, too, we see that monstrous adaptability, or the potential to keep up with social change and transformation, peaks when the monstrous body is human-like (see Musharbash 2014a). The anthropological literature is rich in monsters with adaptive potential. Consider, for example, “Burnt Woman,” a ghost with possible precontact or early contact origins haunting a contemporary Aboriginal Australian ex-mission. Through meticulous analysis of hauntings and vernacular interpretations, Mahnaz Alimardanian reveals how this ghost’s ambiguity, particularly to the extent that it is gendered, appears to have arisen out of a transformation of … local classical themes in relation to social changes brought about by European colonization and enforced settlement on missions. (Alimardanian 2014: 94)

Burnt Woman fits into a broad category of ghosts that is recognizable in the historical moment they emerge, either as specters of persons that have recently passed or as stock characters from a specific event, known as revenants. Stemming from the old French verbal form revenir, meaning “to come back,” revenants are prime examples of ghosts’ ability to adapt to change (see also Onnudottir and Hawkins, this volume, on Afturgöngur and Uppvakningar). Not only are they by definition ghostly embodiments of identifiable historical and cultural phenomena, their cultural meanings have been specifically contingent on religious change. Revenants rose to prominence in the Middle Ages where histories abounded about creatures that emerged from their graves to haunt the living. In most early cases, revenants were individuals that had suffered “bad deaths”—they died as a result of violence, had died unrepentant after having lived what was deemed “sinful lives,” or had simply not been given a proper burial. As a consequence, they returned to their communities to haunt their families shortly after their demise. Given it was largely their moral failings that “separated them from their communities, leaving a door open through which they could embark on a violent post-mortem career” (Owens 2017: 23), these early Medieval revenants were considered intrinsically evil and they needed to be dealt with accordingly—their bodies were exhumed and stakes driven through their hearts or their entire bodies cremated. With the concept of purgatory established in most Christian teachings by the 1400s, the conceptualizations of revenants subtly changed. No longer seen as unambiguously evil characters whose souls were forever lost, revenants came to signify and embody a state of spiritual limbo and moral ambiguity that took on increasing significance in Christian thought and ritual. Moving into modernity ghosts seem to follow a

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similar pattern, becoming more complex social beings and “adopting a more soberly professional demeanor” reflecting the rational age (Owens 2017: 108). Ghosts recorded today appear to have a similar knack for reflecting the concerns and mentalities of the people they haunt. This is true in Iceland, where ghosts display a concern about social and environmental change in context of modernity (Onnudottir and Hawkins, this volume), in Indonesia where they reflect on personal and collective trauma (Bubandt 2008, 2009, 2012), in Fiji where they worry about social protocol and morality in context of racial division (Presterudstuen 2014 and also this volume), and elsewhere. While vampires, zombies, and ghosts might be particularly skilled at changing with the times, adaptability seems to be a feature so common among monsters that it emerges as a key classificatory characteristic. In fact, the anthropological record bursts with records of monsters adapting. Consider among many, many others: ●●

●● ●● ●● ●●

●●

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Native American ghosts driving automobiles and shopping at stores (Boyd 2011; Elmendorf 1993); Torres Strait Markay with spirit cars (Davis under review); The spirits of Korowai dead from Papua moving to Singapore (Stasch 2016); Central Australian Kurdaitcha using Facebook (Musharbash 2014b); White vampires that captured locals, extracted their blood, and drove it away in fire trucks in colonial East Africa (White 1993) and later “electric vampires” that secured wealth by selling the blood of their kin during the AIDS epidemic in Haya communities in Tanzania (Weiss 1998); Andean Pishtaco taking the appearance first of Spanish soldiers, then of priests, and later all manner of white men, including doctors and anthropologists (Weissmantel 2000, 2001); and In this volume: Laotian guardian spirits of the land that not only made their way from local folk beliefs into Indic religions but also relocated from the natural landscape to occupy airports and cities in order to remain relevant for the people they protect (High); Minis in Tamil Naidu protesting their habitat destruction by refusing to engage in ritual (Arumugam); Central Australian bird/monsters responding to changes in gender relations (Curran); witches and other monsters who, along with the eastern Penan people they coexist with, respond to extensive deforestation and cultural disasters by adopting new modes of being (Rothstein); or Icelandic Huldufólk that reinvent their ways as their haunts are modernized by urbanization and the extension of the power grid (Onnudottir and Hawkins).

Another striking example of monstrous adaptation being facilitated through nearness to humans (and humanness) is the tommyknocker—the New World version of the Cornish knacker. Mining spirits from Cornwall traveled to America with Cornish miners. Their adaptations are widely discussed and analyzed (among others, see Baker 1971; James 1992; Manning 2005; Stern 1977). Above and beyond adaptive changes in body shape, haunting practices, and so on, the starkest and most pertinent adaptation was the tommyknocker’s attitudinal change in the new capitalist environment. As James puts it:

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12

The Cornish type of legend telling of miners rewarded for following sounds without question and then taking only a portion of the wealth did not survive in America. American folklore cannot condemn a miner’s desire to take everything. (James 1992: 168)

The most detailed description and multifaceted analysis of a monster adapting we have is Foster’s (e.g., 1998, 2009, 2012, 2015, under review) work on the trials and tribulations of the Japanese Kappa across time. The Kappa is a fine example, too, for both undermining and substantiating our previous postulation (following Auerbach) that “the possession of human-like traits is essential for monsters to be able to transform and keep up with the massive transformations the people they haunt are experiencing” (Musharbash 2014a: 14). The water-dwelling, green, turtle-like Kappa is distinctly not human and yet has cleverly adapted across centuries. However, it seems when Kappa are at their most human-like, as suggested in Foster’s (under review) tongue-in-cheek Kappa graduation speech, that their potential to adapt peaks. With the Kappa as a caveat, we propose that human-like monsters are not the only ones adapting (nor, of course, do all human-like monsters adapt). The analytical point thus goes beyond merely observing that many monsters are as adaptable as the humans with which they coexist. We contend that by looking at which monsters adapt, how they adapt, and why they choose to do so, (analyses of) monsters can reveal some profound truths about the nature of change itself and the circumstances in which it happens.

Appropriation Above we spoke of the zombie colonizing first the United States then the broader “West,” but another view would be to analyze the zombie itself as being appropriated. Considering the zombie’s African roots, its connections to the slave trade, and its resurgence in the sociocultural context of Haitian religion, one can make an equally convincing argument that the zombie is a modern appropriation of the zombi. This change of perspective opens up entirely different vistas on the meanings accredited to and the experiences of zombies by different peoples—distinctively highlighting unequal power relations. It is crucial to consider the limits of agency in such contexts where different readings have a potential to compete or where one is overridden by the other. Considering the possibilities, once acknowledged, it then becomes imperative to investigate whether a particular monster—in this instance, the zombi/ie—is conquering or being conquered and, crucially, which readings are veiled by preferencing one view over the other. Such an approach is particularly prudent in (but should not be limited to) colonial contexts. The significance of this has been illustrated, for example, in North America, where, as Boyd and Thrush put it, “Ghosts—and in particular, the ghosts of Indians— have been an important element of colonial fantasy ever since Europeans … first arrived in North America” (Boyd and Thrush 2011: vii).8 Further, they (and the contributors to their volume) highlight how

Introduction

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the history of North America is shaded by the spirits of settlers and Indians who reenact conflict in stories told to justify and explain certain outcomes; regardless of location, settler society depends upon the acquisition of Indian ghosts. (Boyd and Thrush 2011: xv)

The same process is evocatively illustrated in Christine Nicholls’s chapter (this volume) in which she describes distinct historical steps the Bunyip, a river-dwelling monster from Aboriginal South Australia, underwent. First, the colonizers of the people it used to haunt since time immemorial took it out of the river and then progressively relegated it to books, then children’s books, and cuddly toys. Her second example is perhaps even starker: she details how the Pangkarlangu, a monster still alive and well in Central Australia where it continues to be encountered and feared by local Warlpiri people (see also Musharbash, this volume), has been turned into consumable fine art in a set of “Pangkarlangu-themed furnishings [which] extend beyond [a] wardrobe to include multiple accessories—a chair, side-table and bowl, with the latest addition being a Pangkarlangu credenza.” The conclusion Boyd and Thrush (2011: xviii) draw is that vernacular “ghosts [which we would extend to all monsters] are very much like Indigenous peoples: neither was expected to survive modernity’s ascent.” A brilliant cautionary tale in exactly this vein about confusing the Native American Sasquatch with its appropriated (and much less dangerous) version can be found in Cailín E. Murray’s (under review) piece Don’t Say His Name. We would like to emphasize that analyzing the different ways in which appropriation of the monsters that haunt colonized peoples is undertaken, the directions these appropriations take, and the effects they have on all involved (the monsters, the colonized, the colonizers) is terribly important, as they afford us more nuanced ways of understanding what is happening. And, naturally, we would also like to emphasize that these analyses need to extend past the colonial into neo- and postcolonial contexts.

Amalgamation A road less often traveled by monsters but no less significant in producing meaning is that of amalgamation. In regard to the zombie, two points about amalgamation have been made: (1) that the “original” Haitian zombi already was an amalgamation in its own right (see, for example, Lauro 2015, Lauro and Christie 2011) and (2) that the zombie of popular culture has been amalgamated many times with other monsters (think Nazi zombies, iZombies, redneck zombies, zombie monkeys, cybernetic zombies, and so forth). Anthropologically speaking, the classic case of amalgamation is to be found in the twists of fate of the Algonquian Windigo. Squarely rooted in Native American and First Nation traditions of the boreal forests of North America, the Winidgo is a supernatural being whose gaunt figure, insatiable hunger, tattered lips, and superhuman strength in the most prevalent readings embody deep-seated fears about isolation, hunger,

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starvation, and, sometimes, survival cannibalism.9 Starting with the intermingling between French Canadian voyageurs and local indigenous peoples, a process was set in train that Margaret Atwood described: White people and Native people have been interacting in the North, and crosspollinating one another’s inner landscapes, for hundreds of years now, and the concepts of getting “bushed” and “going Wendigo” can overlap in interesting ways. (Atwood 1995: 81)

What this entailed for the monster itself is poignantly described by Carolyn Podruchny: On first glance it seems that the French-Canadian voyageurs who chose to spend their lives in the pays d’en haut (which literally translates as “the upper country”) adopted the cultural ways of their Aboriginal wives and kin, which included a fear of windigos. Yet the stories also reflect more complex cultural movement, a mingling of cosmologies, and oral technologies, distinct to French-Canadian voyageurs … the French-Canadian belief in werewolves provided voyageurs with a framework to understand windigos in French-Canadian terms, and in the narratives about cannibal monsters, the motifs of windigo and werewolf mingled. (Podruchny 2004: 678)

Over time, this led to the Windigo, especially in the non-Native imagination, to take on more werewolf-like characteristics, such as a bulkier figure, hirsuteness, and, in some instances, hunting only at the full moon. While ever more syncretic in this regard, its Native origins remain strong, so much so that there is in fact a growing literature analyzing the diversification of Winidgo representations (see, among others, DeSanti 2015; Saunders 2012; Smallman 2014). Within Native communities, its voracious appetite has been further amalgamated with the figure of a virus, so that Scholars and artists from Ojibwe and other Native American and First Nations backgrounds have compared the horrendous consequences of colonialism to the insatiable and gluttonous attributes of the winidgo … Forbes (2008), who was of Powhatan and Delaware heritage, argued that the windigo operates like a virus, infecting anyone in its path. Societies characterized by unchecked capitalism, boundless industrialism at the expense of the environment, and constant military interventionism to maintain their wealth at the expense of the colonized spread the spirit of the windigo. Even the colonized can become windigos by adopting the worst aspects of colonialism and becoming oppressors. (DeSanti 2015:195–6)

Within the turbulent context of post-sedentization in Australia, the Jarnpa, which exclusively haunted Warlpiri people, amalgamated with the pan-regional Kurdaitcha (see Musharbash 2014b), and in this volume, Curran provides further amalgamation examples from the same region. Other examples of amalgamation in this volume include the discussion by Nicholls of different river-dwelling monsters becoming merged into the Bunyip, Presterudstuen’s discussion about how the category of ghost

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merges with traditional spirit beings in Fiji (see also Presterudstuen 2014), while Lilley demonstrates how popular culture influences from the Batman franchise, video game fan sites, comic books, and mythology are amalgamated in her son’s representations of new forms of monsters. Finally, the process through which a variety of different creatures come to be defined by, and change based on, their similarities to a hegemonic monster form—a process which Foster (this volume) labels “semantic staining”—can effectively be seen as a form of amalgamation.

Extinction Some monsters simply fade away, others “die,” get killed or banished, others again disappear, and some may even, later, reappear echoing refaunation (e.g., the Pangkarlangu at Yuendumu; see Musharbash, this volume). The reason why we assert that it is crucial to pay close attention to such movements—slow or fast deaths, disappearances, and losses—lies in their implications. Consider, for example, Katie Glaskin’s (2018) point about the departures of beings she calls spirits and we would include under the label “monster” in the world of Bardi and Jawi people in northwestern Australia: They are becoming increasingly less differentiated; knowledge of some has contracted, and others are considered to have disappeared completely from formerly inhabited locations. Like Ashforth (2011), I take relations with these beings to be real relations that have social effects. As these beings are associated with particular places, the social effects produced in relation to them also have a geospatial dimension. (Glaskin 2018: 313)

In fine ethnographic detail, she demonstrates how “contractions in the kinds of spirits inhabiting country are likely to have implications for the spatial and temporal extension of the person, consequential for relations between persons and country” (Glaskin 2018: 315). That is to say, when examining the disappearances of monsters, including the mode of disappearance, we are sure to gain valuable insights about the state of things, or to use Cohen’s words, of the metaphoric crossroads at the cultural moment. Issues, processes, and developments that contribute to the extinction of monsters are the same that contribute to the changing of lifeworlds of the humans they haunt. One such primary process, of particular concern to anthropology, is settler colonialism. Here the threat of eliminating native life is echoed in the disappearance/ fading/death of monsters, something which many chapters in this volume consider (see Curran, Musharbash, Nicholls, Thurman). Other such processes include all aspects of what we might broadly call “modernization,”10 which includes, but is by no means limited to11: ●●

Missionization, especially Christianization. If there was a patron saint for the extinction of monsters in the name of Christianity, it would have to be St George, the dragon slayer. Not only does his killing of the dragon (serpent) free the people (Christianize them), but the story itself is of pre-Christian origin and was Christianized by transferring the identity of the hero to St George.12 Depending

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Monster Anthropology on the creed of missionaries (see also Rothstein, this volume), the extinction of local monsters could take the form of an all-out substitution. More often it stems from the complex interplay between vernacular creatures, concepts, and beliefs on the one hand and Christian doctrine on the other. One prominent example is Charles Stewart’s (1991) Demons and the Devil, which carefully details how on the Greek Orthodox island Naxos, discourses of evil interweave pagan notions and church dogma. The anthropological record is replete, with examples of vernacular monsters being turned into stock characters of Christian theology or being banished from reality as superstition (for just a few examples specifically formulated within a monster anthropology framework, see Eickelkamp 2014; Presterudstuen 2014). Presterudstuen (this volume) demonstrates similar dynamics in Fiji, where ancestral deities, spirits, and demons disappeared from official religious discourses after Christianization but remain active players in many people’s everyday lives. The introduction of electricity. Iceland is an early example where the withdrawal of Huldufólk was linked to the introduction of electricity (see Hastrup 1990; Heijnen 2005; and Onnudottir and Hawkins, this volume). Another is the disappearance of Tommyknockers from the mines; as James (1992: 170) puts it: “As electric lights made mines less gloomy, the environment no longer lent itself to the tradition. The Tommyknockers fled into dark corners until even these last refuges succumbed.” It is safe to assume that similar processes are still happening in parts of Africa, South America, the Pacific, and Asia today (see Rothstein on Malaysia, this volume). Logging, the introduction of monocultures, pastoralism, deforestation, and other kinds of destruction of habitat seem to produce parallel pathways of extinction for flora, fauna, and monsters (see Rothstein, this volume, Bond [2017] on Borneo, and contributors to Tsing et al. [2017]).

When analyzing the extinction (whether this be a sudden death or a slow fading away) of monsters, we propose it is imperative to take into account the following points. First, a focus on a particular monster (or, for that matter, the emphasis on something like the upsurge of monsters as can be witnessed in the United States at this contemporary moment; see, for example, Baden et al. 2017) veils the disappearance of other monsters. Put differently, it seems prudent to look for (and not overlook) disappearance when studying emergence. Second, it is imperative to distinguish different forms of extinctions. The disappearances of monsters can happen in a multitude of different ways—which, ultimately, are similar to how natural species are experiencing extinction (see also Musharbash, this volume): some capture the public imagination and become a matter of concern while others slip away without receiving any attention; some are deemed worthy of being saved or revived while the fading away of others goes unnoticed. How, exactly, an extinction of a monster unfolds, we propose, is of significance. Third, much like the discourses about other forms of extinction, the causes underlying monsters’ deaths are complex and multiple and do not necessarily follow unilineal paths (see Rothstein as well as Onnudottir and Hawkins, this volume).

Introduction

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Lastly, it is imperative to note that monsters can also become extinct by slipping between narrative genres (see Nicholls, this volume). For example, monsters can slide from an experienceable event of legend or the truth of myth to the story used just to scare children—a tragic end indeed!13 Monster extinction, naturally, does not exclude any of the other ways of change we outline here. Take the zombi for example—did it get superseded by its own development? Who now even remembers the Haitian zombi (or its historically and locally specific entanglements) in light of the overwhelming might of the twenty-firstcentury zombie? Also consider the disappearance of the Japanese gamishiro described by Foster (this volume). Having previously lurked in the ocean in southwest Japan, threatening to pull swimmers underwater, this monster had now faded from living memory and merely being talked about as a variation of the famous kappa. Depending on the perspective the dynamics at play here might be examples of amalgamation, extinction, or, the final category of change we will identify, succession. In other words, the approach (angle and focus) determines what is seen, how it is seen, and, importantly, what is concealed.

Succession While the paths of monster/change engagements sketched so far are primarily synchronic, the last one we want to discuss is the diachronic counterpart. Succession is characterized by a combination of temporal movements: first, the crystalizing of particular fears and anxieties defining the zeitgeist; second, a monster emerging/ growing in significance which embodies these fears; and, third, this monster taking the position of the monster(s) which previously held that position. The succession of one (or more) monsters with history, circumstances, and the times changing, through the parallel refocusing of people’s fears and anxieties on something new, is the most usual way in which change and monsters have been described.14 To name just a few of the many examples from monster studies that demonstrate this, consider: ●●

●●

Stephen T. Asma’s (2009) foundational volume On Monsters, which presents a comprehensive genealogy of (Western) monsters starting with those that haunted the ancient Greeks and Romans, and the monsters of the Old Testament, on to Medieval monsters, and then to monsters in the age of science, concluding by contemplating, first, terrorism and zombies and, second, the future of posthuman cyborgs. W. Scott Poole’s (2011) elegant elaboration of the specifics of US monster succession starting from early colonization and Gothic America on to the monsters of weird science of the early twentieth century and those of outer space mid-century, followed by the horror of deviant bodies epitomized by the undercurrents of antiabortion and serial killer discourse, and then ghosts and hauntings with the fragmentation of the “American family,” and ending with the Undead expressing the apocalyptic atmosphere of the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries.

18 ●●

Monster Anthropology Noël Carroll’s (1990) perceptive overview of the horror genre in which he makes visible the associations between the traumas of different historical periods and their artistic emergence and expression in different horror styles, for example, the crisis of the Weimar Republic with German Expressionist horror movies, the Great Depression with Universal Studio’s horror classics, and the Cold War with the 1950s sci-fi/horror resurgence.

In regard to zombies, look no further than the titles of Tyll Zybura’s (2016) Zombie Studies Bibliography. The works analyzing the figure of the zombie listed in that book contain a profusion of topics that have been represented by other means before the zombie “shuffled in” to succeed them. These include, but are by no means limited to, race, class, and gender via war, viruses, and post-humanism to capitalism, globalization, and geopolitics.15 Additionally, Cohen perceptively identifies a very recent reading of the zombie, that of de-humanized Other: Zombies offer a permissible groupthinking of the other. We feel no shame in declaring their bodies repulsive. They eat disgusting food. They possess no coherent language; it all sounds like grunts and moans. They desire everything we possess. They are a danger from without that is already within. We need to erect walls, secure borders, build fortresses, and amass guns against their surging tide. Applied to any other group, such homogenizing reduction and obsession with physicality, communal menace, and fantastic consumption would constitute racism. But the zombie is a body from which the person has departed, so we can talk about them without worrying about nuance or bigotry. (Cohen 2012: 403–4)

Foster’s oeuvre (see, among others, 1998, 2009, 2012, 2015), which is dedicated to exactly the question of monster succession, focuses on the specific ways in which discourses about Yōkai change as sociocultural contexts change. In fact, he specifically links his investigation to works that do similar work in the West: The yōkai, as has been said of the “monster” in the West, “is an embodiment of a certain cultural moment—of a time, a feeling, and a place” (Cohen 1996, p. 2) … I consider a long chronological swath, from the late seventeenth century to the late twentieth century, in order to explore discourses that imbue yōkai with specific meanings during different cultural moments. (Foster 2009: 3)

In turn, he proceeds to investigate how Japanese monsters fare in four different periods: he examines their presence in encyclopedic taxonomies during the Edo period; explores the re-evaluation they underwent in the Meiji period in light of scientific knowledge; moves to the refiguration of Yōkai in the early twentieth century in the interplay between nostalgia and the emergent modernizing of Japan; and concludes by deliberating on the roles Yōkai played in the 1970s and 1980s in Japan’s new identity formation after recovering from the Second World War (Foster 2009: 4).

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Conclusion It is a truism that anthropology has long been obsessed with studying social change and transformation. What we bring to the table is a new angle. Rather than focusing on local or global processes or on historical comparison, we propose a perspective which is comparative while converging on the one phenomenon: monsters. Ethnographically examining monsters in contexts of social change and transformation brings forward not only new locally and socioculturally specific insights, but through the focus on monsters a point of convergence from which more encompassing discernments about social change and transformation can be achieved. In other words, everybody has monsters— as the contributions to this volume show, they haunt in remote communities as much as in prominent psychological conceptualizations; their genesis can be engendered with the building of new roads in antiquity or on the internet; and they are on the prowl at socialist monuments, at shrines, and at exclusive fine art exhibitions. And, in this day and age, everybody and their lifeworld experience upheaval, change, and transformation—some of these processes included in this volume are: Christianization, colonialism, commercialization, development including deforestation, the introduction of electricity, rationalization, and so forth. The ways in which the monsters discussed in this volume respond include emergence, adaptation, appropriation, amalgamation, extinction, and succession—sometimes singly, sometimes in various combinations. Together, then, the chapters of this book, we hope, provide a first glance at what a comparative monster anthropology focused on social change and transformation can afford us: novel comprehensions toward the world we live in. We have ordered the chapters in a way that we hope will afford a cumulative understanding of what we strive toward. In this vein, we open with a chapter looking at the emergence of monsters. In Chapter 1, Debbie Felton takes us back to antiquity and explores some of the monsters that began haunting the new—and highly unsafe— highways as they expanded connecting far distant points of empire. Indira Arumugam, in Chapter 2, examines monstrous adaptation in Tamil Nadu by exploring two interconnected questions: first, can deities be monsters and, second, what happens to them when the land they are supposedly protecting changes? Chapter 3 is the first to transport the reader to Australia.16 Here, Yasmine Musharbash ponders some links between monster and natural species extinction by considering the recent reappearance of a family of Pangkarlangu (hairy, cannibalistic giants) outside of a remote Aboriginal desert community. From there we move to Chapter 4 and Malaysia, where Mikael Rothstein is concerned with the potential death of monsters. He analyzes the combined consequences of Christianization and the logging industries on the eastern Penan, formerly nomadic hunter-gatherers of Sarawak, and on their monsters. Chapter 5 considers appropriation and amalgamation. Here, Christine Nicholls compares the fates of two Aboriginal Australian monsters from different regions with a specific view to how they have been successively compromised and enfeebled post-colonization. In Chapter 6, Helena Onnudottir and Mary Hawkins take us on an excursion back to the other side of the world and discuss extinction and adaptation of monsters in Iceland, with a specific focus on Icelandic ghosts across time. Chapters 7 and 8 are located

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back in Central Australia. In the former, Georgia Curran discusses the adaptation and amalgamation of bird/monsters. She details how symbolism focused on the intimacy of bird–human relationships reinforces idealized ways to exist in the world, and in tandem, how the paradoxes evident within these monstrous categories reveal much about the shifting understanding of the Warlpiri self in a rapidly changing world. Joanne Thurman, in Chapter 8, discusses adaptation from a different angle and by providing us with the possibly scariest piece in this collection. She analyzes the nine-night siege of a remote community by murderous Kurdaitcha and reveals how, today, they also sustain, mark, and enforce the boundaries of Aboriginality vis-à-vis the neocolonial nonindigenous Other. In Chapter 9, Geir Henning Presterudstuen provides a novel variation on the theme of adaptation by investigating the link between Fijian ghosts and climate change, in particular, the ever more destructive force of cyclones. And in Chapter 10, Holly High investigates how guardian spirits in Laos today are as much about vengeance as they are about protection. She argues that this is a result of the appropriation of ephemeral generative powers—paradigmatically parental nurturing—into political (including post-socialist) projects of asserting enduring authority. In Chapter11, Rozanna Lilley provides a concluding twist on monsters and change by looking at amalgamation and succession of monsters in two contexts: that of the medical profession’s conceptualizations of autism and those drawn by her son Oscar. Through the images of the monsters, she concludes, Oscar unintentionally talks (or draws) back to the poverty of theorizing around autistic imagination, subverting representations of individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder as monstrous by creating his own ebullient cast of quirky monsters. But the book is not just about monsters for monsters’ sake. Although all chapters share this dual focus on specific monsters and their relationship to change, they are at the same time contributions to debates about broader anthropological themes. Felton’s chapter speaks to, among other things, how structural change facilitates new forms of mobility that in turn creates new fault lines and cultural anxieties. Similar themes are taken up by Rothstein and Arumugam, who both provide vivid descriptions of communities in duress as a consequence of loss of habitat and modes of livelihood. Other chapters, particularly those by High, and Onnudottir and Hawkins, are framed by reflections on how people’s relationship to land has a spiritual dimension tied up to socialities, including with a variety of nonhuman entities. Managing the relationship between community and land is also a core aspect of Presterudstuen’s chapter. The themes of how other-than-human beings and experiences are intrinsic to the processes through which communities and individuals create a sense of themselves in the world are central in the widely different chapters provided by Nicholls and Lilley. Three of the chapters are set in Aboriginal Australia, by Musharbash, Curran, and Thurman, and all use the monster trope to illuminate the complexity of ethnic politics and the enduring consequences of colonialism. And throughout the collection, familiar anthropological concepts such as kinship, ritual, morality, and liminality recur, speaking to the diverse cultural work monsters engage in across time and space. Monsters, says Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (1996: 4), are born at “metaphoric crossroads, as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment.” Anthropological analyses of monsters in contexts of social transformation and change, we hope to show across

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this volume, provide marvelous insights into the current cultural moment—of this time, its feeling, and its reception in different places. Perhaps the biggest contribution monster anthropology can make is alerting ourselves and others to just how extensive the depths and breadths are when it comes to insights about social transformation and change that can be gained from the vast range of ethnographic examples of monsters embodying different emplaced cultural moments.

Acknowledgments We would like to thank all the reviewers from the bottoms of our hearts, and especially Manuscript Reviewer 1, for most excellent suggestions that have strengthened our introduction. As always, heartfelt thanks to Chris Marcatili for excellent research assistance and eagle-eyed editing. Mark at Le Petit Tart has been the most wonderful host at our favorite writing café in Sydney, where much of this introduction was drafted; thank you for the music, the tea, the personalized lunch sandwiches, and the super comfy chair at the table with a view. Lastly, thank you to the Australian Research Council for Future Fellowship FT130100415 which made this project possible.

Notes 1 2

3

4

5

Cohen gives a paradigmatic example of such a crossroads-born monstrous embodiment of a time, a feeling, and a place: zeitgeist. While the term zeitgeist needs no explanation, it is significant that “Geist” is German for ghost or spirit. Here, we are following Halberstam’s pronouncement in Skin Shows that “monsters are meaning machines” (1995: 21). While this book was published under the name Judith Halberstam, the author is now known as Jack Halberstam. As they demonstrate, monsters “can represent gender, race, nationality, class, and sexuality in one body. And even within these divisions of identity, the monster can still be broken down. Dracula, for example, can be read as an aristocrat, a symbol of the masses; he is predator and yet feminine, he is consumer and producer, he is parasite and host, he is homosexual and heterosexual, he is even lesbian” (Halberstam 1995: 21–2). Specifically, this number refers to “only” 48 percent of the US population being dismissive of the seven subjects they investigate under the label of the paranormal: alien visitations, UFOs, Bigfoot, mediumship, astrology, telekinesis, and hauntings (Bader et al. 2017: 163). There is just something about statistics and monsters. Consider just two further case studies: A Japanese database collating more than 13,000 entries about Yōkai (broadly: monsters) that opened to the public in 2002 and “received 180,000 hits in its first month of operation” (Foster 2009: 2) and see Onnudottir and Hawkins (this volume) on the Icelandic Census of Hidden Creatures. The same point can be made by looking at how “monsters” generally and “ghosts” and “hauntings” in particular are being embraced in contemporary critical theory. See for example the use of ghosts and monsters in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (Tsing et al. 2017), as spelled out on the back matter:

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6 7 8

We thank Debbie Felton for making her discussant’s notes available to us. More information about the symposium can be found here: https:// anthropologylivingwithmonsters.wordpress.com/. For a taste, see Bishop 2010; Dendle 2007, 2011, 2012a, 2012b; Harper 2002; Lauro and Embry 2008; McNally 2011, 2012; Miller and Van Riper 2012, 2013; Moreman and Rushton 2011; Zybura 2016. This contrasts interestingly with the situation in Japan, as described by Foster (2009: 207):

9 10 11

12 13

14 15 16

On a Damaged Planet monsters and ghosts are figures hiding in plain sight. They point us to forms of noticing that crosscut forms of knowledge, official and vernacular, science and storytelling. They show us co-species practices of living. If monsters are excess, ghosts are absence and invisibility. Monsters are entangled—and contaminated—bodies. Ghosts suffuse landscapes with many kinds of time. Following ghosts and following monsters are different ways to know the terrors of the Anthropocene.

Yōkai are all the more desirable as representatives of a lost Japanese nation because, as denizens of an otherworldly past, they can be invoked without also calling up distasteful this-worldly memories of, for example, colonialist and militarist ventures … the very otherworldliness of yōkai ensures that they remain untainted, uncontroversial, and remarkably safe for fetishistic consumption. Perhaps this is the reason for the ongoing yōkai boom: yōkai are spooky, but they are fun-spooky and, ultimately, much less threatening that the serious ghosts of the human past still haunting the present.

See Smallman (2014) for an example of a more nuanced reading which adds gender and relatedness as pertinent axes of Windigo interpretations. For a brilliant analysis of the impact of modernization on monsters during a defined period, see Figal (1999). There really are many other aspects; consider, for example, the rise of science and its impact on monsters, which is well discussed in the interdisciplinary historical monster studies literature, as well as more specific examples, such as Foster’s (2009: 75) point that the change from the lunar to the solar calendar on January 1, 1873 can be seen to constitute “first systematic and rigorous attempt to exorcize the spirits from the Japanese landscape.” For more on the meanings of slaying serpents, worms, and dragons, we highly recommend Tom Murray’s (2018) two-episode radio program on the Lambton Worm. We are deeply grateful to one of our reviewers for adding this point, as well as putting their finger on the fact that this, exactly, is what irks folklorists, at least, since Bascom (1965) when it comes to the term “fairytale” because after all fairies are creatures of factual narratives, legends, and not fictional narratives (for the story of the fairy writ small, see Manning 2016 on the fate of the pixie). For a gripping history of the succession of fears—without the attendant monsters— over the past 200 years in the United States and Britain, see Bourke (2005). In fact, zombies lumber, surge, or swarm so frequently that zombies’ typifications are becoming progressively more complex (see, among many others, Dendle 2007). Australia is disproportionately prominent in this and our previous book (Musharbash and Presterudstuen 2014) not purely because there are so many

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monsters (t)here and neocolonialism is in full swing, but also because the idea for monster anthropology was conceived and has been explored in panels and symposia here. Our hope is—and seems to be gradually coming true—to build more bridges not only between anthropology and monster studies, but also between anthropologists working on monsters across the world.

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Saunders, R. A. (2012), “Hungry Lands: Conquest, Cannibalism, and the Wendigo Spirit,” in C. J. Miller and A. B. Van Riper (eds.), Undead in the West. Vampires, Zombies, and Ghosts on the Cinematic Frontier, 182–202, Lanham: Scarecrow Press. Simpson, G. E. (1945), “The Belief System of Haitian Vodun,” American Anthropologist, 47 (1): 35–59. Smallman, S. (2014), Dangerous Spirits. The Windigo in Myth and History, Victoria, Vancouver, Calgary: Heritage House. Stasch, R. (2016), “Singapore, Big Village of the Dead: Cities as Figures of Desire, Domination, and Rupture among Korowai of Indonesian Papua,” American Anthropologist, 118 (2): 258–69. Stern, S. (1977), “Ethnic Folklore and the Folklore of Ethnicity,” Western Folklore, 36 (1): 7–32. Stewart, C. (1991), Demons and the Devil: Moral Imagination in Modern Greek Culture, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tolbert, J. A. (2013), “‘The Sort of Story That Has You Covering Your Mirrors’: The Case of Slender Man,” Semiotic Review, 2. Available online: https://www.semioticreview.com/ ojs/index.php/sr/article/view/19. Tolbert, J. A. (under review), “How to Make (and Possibly Un-Make) a Digital Monster,” in Y. Musharbash and I. Gershon (eds.), Living with Monsters, manuscript. Tsing, A. L., E. Gan, H. A. Swanson, and N. Bubandt (eds.) (2017), Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Weinstock, J. A. (2004), “The Spectral Turn,” in J. A. Weinstock (ed.), Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination, 3–16, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Weinstock, J. A. (2014), “Introduction: Monsters Are the Most Interesting People,” in J. A. Weinstock (ed.), The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters, 1–7, Burlington and Farnham: Ashgate. Weismantel, M. (1997), “White Cannibals: Fantasies of Racial Violence in the Andes,” Identities Global Studies in Culture and Power, 4 (1): 9–43. Weismantel, M. (2000), “Race Rape: White Masculinity in Andean Pishtaco Tales,” Identities Global Studies in Culture and Power, 7 (3): 407–40. Weismantel, M. (2001), Cholas and Pishtacos: Stories of Race and Sex in the Andes, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Weiss, B. (1998), “Electric Vampires: Haya Rumors of the Commodified Body,” in M. Lambek and A. Strathern (eds.), Bodies and Persons: Comparative Perspectives from Africa and Melanesia, 172–94, Aldershot: Ashgate. White, L. (1993), “Cars Out of Place: Vampires, Technology, and Labor in East and Central Africa,” Representations, 43: 27–50. Zybura, T. (2016), Zombie Studies Bibliography. Available online: https://www.academia. edu/25343787/Zombie_Studies_Bibliography (accessed January 28, 2019).

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Monsters and Fear of Highway Travel in Ancient Greece and Rome Debbie Felton

Why monsters and roads? In his Latin novel Metamorphoses, the second-century CE writer Apuleius tells the adventures of a man named Lucius who, through a botched magical spell, turns himself into a donkey. At one point in the narrative, Lucius, still in the form of an ass, travels with a group of runaway slaves along a road somewhere just north of central Greece. Eventually, they stop to rest in a grove of trees, the only shaded place in an otherwise open and deserted area. They spot a lone shepherd hurrying by, but when asked he refuses to pause to give them anything to eat or drink, saying, “Don’t any of you understand where you are?”1 The shepherd’s tone of voice and his haste to pass through the area frighten the travelers, who try to get more information but cannot find anyone else to ask. Then an old man approaches them. Weeping, he begs the group for help. He tells them that his grandson has fallen into a deep pit by the roadside. The boy is still alive but seriously injured, and the feeble old man beseeches the travelers to come to the boy’s aid. One of them, a strapping young man, volunteers and follows the old fellow. After a while, when the young man has not yet returned, his companions call out to him—but he doesn’t answer. Growing increasingly uneasy over his absence, the unexpected delay, and the need to proceed with their journey, the group sends another man to search for the first. But this second man returns quickly, highly agitated, bringing astounding news about his fellow slave: “I saw him stretched out on the ground—most of him already devoured—a huge serpent was slithering all over him, chewing on his flesh! And that old man was nowhere to be seen!” (Met. 8.21). The travelers realize belatedly that this is what the shepherd had been warning them about. They immediately flee the area, not stopping until they reach the safety of the next village for the night. The story leaves no doubt that the old man and the serpent are one and the same. But what does such a story intend to convey? Apuleius’s description includes details that also appear in other ancient stories of roadside encounters with monsters, and the patterns that emerge suggest the Greeks and Romans felt considerable anxiety about

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traveling on roads between towns. For example, Apuleius specifies the road as open and deserted, signaling a high degree of vulnerability for anyone passing through. Roads are also, in a sense, liminal: neither one place nor another, but a passage between (Doroszewska 2018: 186). Liminal imagery, with its stress on supernatural encounters, appears throughout the large number of Greek and Roman stories about such encounters on the roads. The ubiquity of these stories seems to reflect a cultural concern about increasingly rapid changes in society connected with new technology— in the case of ancient Greece and Rome, the expansion of a road network not only between proximate towns but between previously isolated city-states and eventually across the entire Roman Empire. As Musharbash suggests, urbanization is one cause “for monstrous displacement or transformation” (2014: 13), and a look at stories reflecting the development of road networks and their social consequences around the ancient Mediterranean indicates that even in classical antiquity monstrous displacement and transformation constituted a major expression of cultural anxiety related to urbanization (see also Introduction, this volume). By the sixth century BCE, previously insular Greek city-states were communicating with each other via clearly defined routes as Greece entered a period of urban and mercantile expansion. As Quilici explains, “Already in the Bronze Age paved roads connected cities, sanctuaries, and necropoleis … An extensive road network united the Mycenean citadels and territories of the Greek mainland” during the Late Bronze Age (c. 1600–1100 BCE).2 But a series of socioeconomic and political changes at the end of this period resulted in a lack of road maintenance, with stories of dangers on the road then becoming increasingly widespread, as for hundreds of years these roads were not safe for travel. Many Greek roads during this period were mere paths, often along streams or rivers, designed for those traveling on horseback or by foot rather than by wheeled vehicles such as horse-drawn wagons (Quilici 2008: 553). The Roman road network underwent constant construction and expansion from its beginning in the late fourth century BCE to the end of the Empire in the fifth century CE, and was considerably vaster and better organized than the Greek network, ultimately totaling over 120,000 kilometers (Quilici 2008: 551). The Romans perceived their roads as a symbol “of public order and utility,” a crucial part of the Empire’s infrastructure, and besides major thoroughfares such as the Via Appia (see Figure 1.1) and Via Flaminia they even paved smaller roads in the countryside (Quilici 2008: 551–2). However well planned the roads were, travelers in both Greece and Rome had to pass through long stretches of sparsely settled countryside where lone bandits or entire gangs of highway robbers could easily ambush them. No organized force kept order on the roads between towns in ancient Greece; the open country was “to all intents and purposes a no-man’s land. The travellers’ only recourse was to move in groups” (Casson 1974: 73). The rich could afford bodyguards; the poor were often spared because they had nothing worth taking. All travelers, though, men and women, rich and poor alike, remained vulnerable to attack by robbers often intent not just on stealing wealth but on kidnapping, with plans to sell their victims as slaves or into prostitution for a keen profit. Some bandits killed their victims. While highwaymen remained a concern for the Greeks, they nearly constituted an epidemic for the Romans, whose extended empire and strained military resources were

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Figure 1.1  Remains of the Via Appia Antica in Rome, near Quarto Miglio. Reprinted with permission of Kleuske at Dutch Wikimedia.

sorely tested by the many criminals roaming the vast road network through Italy and across the provinces (see Fuhrmann 2012; Grünewald 2004; Van Hoof 1988). Apuleius’s story above illustrates this concern: shortly before the runaway slaves meet the old man, the narrator remarks that “the workers on an estate we happened to be passing mistook our group for brigands, and being both anxious about their possessions and excessively frightened, they set their dogs upon us” (Met. 8.17). This anxiety arising from the dangerous reality of highway crime informed Greek and Roman myths about monsters attacking travelers on the road.

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But how can we study ancient emotions such as anxiety and fear? Recent years have seen an “emotive” turn in the field of Classics—an increased interest in the study of emotion in literature from classical antiquity (Felton and Gilhuly 2018: 1). But how do we collect and interpret evidence about feelings such as “fear” and “anxiety” from a long-gone society, one to which we cannot apply modern anthropological methods of fieldwork? Whereas archeologists can study the structure and use of ancient roadways, the only remaining evidence about people’s attitudes toward roads in antiquity comes from their literature, which consists both of stories passed down via oral tradition before being recorded and of literary texts intentionally composed by individual authors.3 Literature influenced by oral tradition often contains stock phrases (such as “people say that … ”) as well as other characteristic indicators such as the occasionally repetitive nature of the stories, the lack of any authoritative version of a given myth and/or in the existence of multiple variants of a story, and the story’s anonymity (i.e., lack of a specific author/creator).4 Whether a story derives from oral tradition or an individual, identifiable author’s mind, however, once dealing with a written text we can look not only to specific vocabulary for “fear” and related emotions, but, more importantly, to the settings, events, and characters’ reactions in the stories, and even to the number of such stories that have come down to us. One or two stories about monsters on ancient roadways would not prove statistically significant, but many dozens would seem to indicate a major cultural concern. In the case of Apuleius’s story, a literary text, we saw concern expressed about bandits on the road—“they mistook our group for brigands”—as well as vocabulary for the emotion of fear: eximieque trepidi (“excessively frightened/fearful”). Similarly, after the group meets the shepherd who refuses to stop, the narrator comments that the shepherd’s tone of voice and great haste cause them to feel “considerable dread” (non mediocrem pavorem, Met. 8.19). That is, the shepherd’s words, tone of voice, and behavior were cause for fear even when the original reason for the shepherd’s own fear remained unspecified and nameless. The narrator adds that the group was “utterly terrified” (perterriti). The many fear-related words in this Latin text provide us with the emotion accompanying travel along unknown roads, and similar indicators—both behavioral and verbal—appear in Greek stories about monsters on the roadways. The emotional details in classical stories about monsters vary greatly depending on the types of character involved as well as on the types of source. For example, while the Odyssey, a detailed epic poem, presents Odysseus as a hero with relatable emotions, including extreme fear, our Greek sources for Heracles and Perseus tend to be mere summaries rather than elaborated literary versions and as such give little information about these heroes’ state of mind. The extent of emotional elaboration in our case studies from classical literature, therefore, does not allow decisive conclusions regarding fear about monsters in roadways as compared to monster encounters in other venues, such as at sea or in their lairs. Rather, the ubiquity of monster-on-the-road stories—the sheer number of such stories when compared with other sites of monster encounters in classical literature—suggests an emphasis on the realistic cultural concern about the safety of roads.

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Case studies from literature of ancient Greece and early Rome Many of our earliest stories about monstrous encounters on the roads consist of written versions based on orally transmitted tales from the Greek Bronze Age. Transmission of these stories coincided with the expansion of trade among Greek city-states and Greek colonization of areas such as the Black Sea coast, Ionia (now western Turkey), and southern Italy from the ninth through to the sixth centuries BCE. Extension of primitive road networks and the subsequent contact with unknown peoples—the “Other”—on the peripheries of the known world signaled substantial changes in store for previously isolated Greek towns and cities, giving rise to a natural uncertainty and fear regarding the wisdom of such expansion and the necessity of travel.5 In mainland Greece, reluctance to face a changing world resulted in stories about the dangers of road travel—stories that flourished and found expression in the myths of heroes such as Heracles, Theseus, and Oedipus.

Heracles makes early roads around the Mediterranean safe for travel The Greek hero Heracles (Hercules, to the Romans), renowned for his super-human strength, gained fame not just for his Twelve Labors but for making the roads of the early Mediterranean safe for travel. As he traveled to and from each Labor, he found his journey constantly impeded by one monstrous encounter after another. The Labors themselves involved some spectacular monsters, such as the Hydra and Cerberus, but those relate less to the development of road technology and more to larger themes involving the “Hero Pattern” such as “saving society” and “facing mortality,” as when Heracles travels to the Underworld itself to capture Cerberus. In the so-called parerga, the lesser-known “side adventures” of Heracles, reflections of cultural anxiety about the roads begin to appear in ancient Greek and early Roman literature. One monster Heracles encountered between Labors was Antaeus (Greek for “Opposed” or “Hostile”). Our sources describe Antaeus as a giant nearly as broad as he was tall. He ruled over Libya, which at the time comprised nearly all of North Africa other than Egypt. Like Heracles, Antaeus had immense, nearly invincible strength. Unlike Heracles, Antaeus did not use this asset for the good of society. Instead, he was infamous for his custom of challenging to a wrestling match every traveler who passed through his kingdom. Inevitably, because of his superior strength, Antaeus won; not content with merely winning, he killed the travelers, cut off their heads, and used their skulls to build a shrine to his father, the god Poseidon (Pindar, Isthmian 4.3). Heracles met Antaeus when passing through Libya on his way to the far west of North Africa to accomplish his Eleventh Labor. Like all strangers passing along the road through this territory, Heracles was forced to take up Antaeus’s challenge and wrestle with him. At first, the match went poorly for the Greek hero: Heracles was immensely strong, but Antaeus was even stronger. And, oddly, every time Heracles wrestled him to the ground, Antaeus gained new energy. Finally, Heracles realized Antaeus’s trick: contact with the earth restored his strength. Heracles solved this problem by lifting Antaeus into the air, thus depriving him of contact with the earth, and then defeated

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the weakened giant by squeezing the life out of him. Heracles had cleared a dangerous stretch of road, allowing travelers to pass through unharmed. Another monster Heracles met on the road was the homicidal, cannibalistic, halfhuman, fire-breathing, three-headed giant named “Cacus” (Greek for “Wicked One”), who lived in a vast, labyrinthine cavern in the area that later became Rome. He preyed upon travelers passing along the road through the area, decorating the entryway to his cave with the rotting faces and limbs of his victims. The floor of his dwelling “was always warm with fresh blood” and “the gory ground was white with human bones” stripped of their flesh (Vergil, Aeneid 8.195–6; Ovid, Fasti 1.558). Heracles came across Cacus while crossing through Italy on the way back from his Tenth Labor, far across the western Mediterranean, and bested the giant by beating him to death. After Heracles’s victory, the local people began a ritual honoring the hero for saving them from this danger. Later versions rationalize the myth by downgrading Cacus to an ordinary, if highly dangerous, robber with no mythical or cannibalistic associations. Both parts of the tradition—the ritual and the rationalization—reflect the connection with anxiety over road travel. Such stories about Heracles remained popular in antiquity not simply because they made the hero look good; the myths of his Twelve Labors alone were more than sufficient to establish his strength, bravery, and tireless work to make the world safer. Rather, to a great extent these stories reflected the reality that the roads of the ancient Mediterranean, rudimentary and unpatrolled as they were, were extremely dangerous and that travelers were prey to bandits, some of whom were not concerned simply with robbery but who were violent enough to kill their victims.6

Theseus clears the road from Troezen to Athens The adventures of Heracles’s younger cousin Theseus relate even more clearly to the growing urban expansion in late Archaic Greece. Main roads between cities were just starting to become important to ancient Greek society: in the sixth century BCE, the same period in which most of the Theseus myths developed, contact between the city-states increased rapidly. As a result, trade and exploration became progressively important. Before the sixth century, the isolationist tendencies of Greek settlements, caused in part by the mountainous geography of Greece, did not lend themselves well to the development of major road networks. Consequently, “most roads were single tracks following stream beds or some other path of least resistance”7 and tended to be muddy and narrow. With few exceptions, these early roads were not paved; a widespread road system at that time would have been “expensive to build and hard to maintain.”8 But in the sixth century, travel between Greek city-states became more frequent and encounters with highway bandits more of a serious concern. Perhaps best known for his victory over the Minotaur in the Cretan Labyrinth, Theseus, like Heracles, had a number of less famous side adventures. Long before his voyage to Crete, he wished to travel from his hometown of Troezen to meet his father, King Aegeus, in Athens. His adventures on the road from Troezen in the south to Athens in central Greece reflect the political, economic, and technological changes during this period and the societal concerns surrounding them. The myths note that

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Theseus had the option of taking a ship from Troezen to Athens, but specifically chose to take the more dangerous land route in order to test his courage and make a reputation for himself. The route between Troezen and Athens (Figure 1.2) provides an example of an early Greek roadway considered highly dangerous but also necessary, both as a connection between major cities and as a less expensive option than travel by ship. That is, though Theseus was a mythological character, the cities and the road described in these myths were real and clearly identifiable. Unless travelers could afford to take a boat across the Saronic Gulf, they had to traverse the same path as Theseus. On his journey, Theseus encountered six dangerous characters who targeted vulnerable travelers. Descriptions of these characters indicate their liminal nature, somewhere between humans and monstrous creatures: most of them had human shapes but nonhuman parents and exhibited highly antisocial, inhuman behavior. Though often referred to as brigands, these creatures delighted in torturing, mutilating, and killing their victims rather than robbing them.9 Among these antagonists was a giant, man-eating pig known as the Crommyonian Sow (after Crommyon, the nearby town). This alarmingly huge and ferocious swine killed people indiscriminately, earning itself the epithet “man-slaughtering.”10 Theseus killed the pig along with its trainer, an old woman (Figure 1.3).11 After ridding Crommyon of its menace, Theseus continued across the Isthmus of Corinth. In the vicinity of Megara he encountered Sciron, who had a unique method of killing passers-by and disposing of their bodies: he shoved them to the ground and forced them to wash his feet, using water from a little basin he kept nearby expressly for this purpose. While his victims were bent over, he kicked them over the cliff into the sea. They were dashed to pieces on the rocks, their bodies devoured by a monstrous sea turtle waiting below. Theseus eliminated Sciron the same way—by throwing him over the cliff into the jaws of the monstrous turtle. Ultimately, Theseus rid the road of all six menaces before finally arriving in Athens.

Figure 1.2  Map showing Theseus’s route from Troezen to Athens. Illustration by Michele Angel, with permission.

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Figure 1.3  The Old Woman siccing the Crommyonian Sow on Theseus. Attic red-figured vase, c. 440–430 BCE. Photo credit: ©Marie-Lan Nguyen/Wikimedia Commons.

The story of Theseus’s crossing the Isthmus and his dangerous adventures during this journey mirrors the ancient landscape itself: before a modern roadway was cut along the cliffs and in a narrow strip along what is now the Corinth Canal, there was an old road and rocky terrain with many places for criminals to lie hidden in wait for unwary travelers. For most of the way, the old road ran precariously along sheer cliffs. In clearing the road of dangers awaiting travelers, Theseus, like Heracles, gained a reputation for making the roads safer. Both Heracles and Theseus are mythological characters, but their stories, like the others here, reflect a significant concern in classical antiquity about the expansion of Greek society past its small-town boundaries and into the territory of the monstrous “Other.”

The Sphinx disrupts travel to and from the city of Thebes At around the same time the stories about Theseus’s travels in southern Greece were circulating, a famous monster blocked the road to the city of Thebes in central Greece. Many people know the Theban Sphinx from the riddle she posed about the nature of man, solved by Oedipus (Figure 1.4)—who was, ironically, less adept at solving the riddle of who killed his father and married his mother. Less well known is that the Sphinx appeared as a very late addition to the Oedipus saga: although Oedipus was infamous for parricide and incest by the eighth century BCE, the Theban Sphinx had no role in the story until Thebes became connected to other cities via a major highway in the fifth century BCE. The Sphinx—a hybrid creature with the head of a

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Figure 1.4 Oedipus encounters the Theban Sphinx. Attic red-figure vase, c. 450 BCE. Public Domain.

woman, body of a lion, and wings of a bird—blocked the main road to Thebes, killing anyone who could not solve her riddle. Among other things, this disrupted trade; increasingly fewer people were inclined to travel to and from Thebes while the Sphinx lurked on the roadside. The story of the Sphinx and her riddle involves more than mere commentary on trade and travel, of course, but in short, there exists a significant connection between the timing of the Sphinx’s appearance in the story, the need for Thebes to be less isolated, and the anxiety as to how interaction with other Greek city-states would be accomplished—by means of the ancient equivalent of interstate highways.

Case studies from literature of Imperial Rome Encounters with lamiae Until the Empire, Greek and Roman monster-on-the-road stories reflected basic cultural concerns about travel over long distances on open roadways fraught with danger, as in the stories about Heracles, Theseus, and Oedipus. But the intricate connection of monsters with roadways increased drastically during the Roman Imperial period (from the first through the fourth centuries CE). Stories by both Greek and Roman authors during this period work on various levels. They continue to reflect the real-life difficulties of patrolling the roads of a vast empire with strained

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resources. But the stories during this also work metaphorically to teach specific lessons, like the story from Apuleius about the escaped slaves, which expresses not only the danger of travel on the open road but the fact that runaway slaves had reason to dread anyone they encountered for fear of being caught. They might meet someone who seems innocuous, such as the decrepit old man, but who could pose a real threat if he reported them to local authorities: runaway slaves would be returned to their masters or resold elsewhere, and in either case branded, tortured, and even executed. Another good example of a story combining concern over growing urbanization with a metaphorical lesson comes from the third-century CE author Philostratus, a Greek philosopher living under the Roman Empire. Writing an effusive biography of the first-century CE Greek sage Apollonius of Tyana, Philostratus tells the following story about a lamia. A young man named Menippus, who is studying philosophy with Apollonius, travels alone on the road from Corinth to its port. On his way, he meets a beautiful young woman who claims to be in love with him. He abandons the philosophical school and moves into her mansion, which is merely an illusion of luxury created by her magic. Menippus sees silver and gold everywhere, eats the best foods, drinks the finest wines, and has his every need met by a vast number of servants. But the esteemed miracle worker Apollonius discerns the creature’s true nature and tells Menippus that the “woman” poses a grave danger because she is not really a woman at all, but a lamia—a half-woman, half-serpent shape-shifting monster who only wants to fatten him up before devouring him; lamiae feed on babies and on the flesh and blood of young men (see Scobie 1977: 246–7). When Apollonius confronts the creature, the entire mansion and all its contents disappear, having been mere illusions (Philostratus, Vita Apollonii 4.25; henceforth VA). On one level, Philostratus’s story expresses anxiety about the dangers of traveling the roads in various parts of the Empire. But the story also provides a metaphorical lesson, presenting lamiae as creatures intended to help define negatively what a female’s role in society should be: a female should mate with young men, not kill them, and should produce babies, not devour them (Johnston 1999: 366–9). On still another level, we can read the story of Menippus allegorically, with the moral that only philosophical discipline can conquer the allure of worldly pleasure: the philosopher Apollonius rebukes a backsliding pupil who has deluded himself into thinking that he can have a lasting relationship with a prostitute on the lookout for gullible clients (Anderson 1986: 141).12 In a related story about danger on a remote, deserted road, Philostratus tells of Apollonius’s encounter with a similar shape-shifting creature. Passing through the Caucasus Mountains on their way to the river Indus, Apollonius and his followers were traveling by moonlight when “an empousa fell in with them”—that is, a creature like a lamia appeared on the road with them (VA 2.4). The empousa, a type of shapeshifting female creature, is not as clearly described in classical literature as the lamia, but the Greeks and Romans considered empousae similar: dangerous, supernatural beings intent on seducing young men to feed on their flesh and blood. Apollonius understood the danger the empousa posed to his group so he denounced it, hurling

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curses at the creature until it fled (VA 2.4). Like other monster-on-the-road stories, this one contains liminal imagery that relates to the “between” nature of the cultural transition from isolated towns to urbanized areas. Apollonius and his friends travel in a remote area, through mountains near a river, by moonlight—which in classical literature often signals the liminal hour of midnight—and meet a creature that has neither one definite form nor another. As a well-traveled, well-educated character, Apollonius brings the trappings of civilization to the wilderness, acting an agent of change during a time of cultural transitions.

Niceros and the werewolf One final story illustrates just how nerve-wracking road travel in ancient Greece and Rome could be. In his novel Satyrica, the first-century CE Roman author Petronius tells the following tale about a man named Niceros who wants to travel from the city to visit his girlfriend at her country house. Knowing it was foolish to travel alone, Niceros asks an acquaintance, a soldier, to accompany him for at least a few miles out of town. The soldier agrees, but the trip does not go as Niceros planned (Sat. 62): We left around cock-crow, and the moon was shining as brightly as if it were noon. We arrived at the cemetery, which was outside the city boundary, and my companion headed for the tombstones.13 I hummed and counted the tombs while he went about his business. But when I looked around at my friend, he had taken off all his clothes and placed them next to the road. This made me extremely uneasy: my heart was in my mouth, and I went numb with fear. He urinated in a circle around his clothes,14 then suddenly turned into a wolf! I’m not joking; if I’m lying, may lighting strike me! After he turned into a wolf, he began to howl and then fled into the forest. At first, I was so stunned that I didn’t know where I was. Then I approached his clothes and tried to pick them up, but they had turned to stone. I was terrified; I drew my sword and hacked at every shadow until I arrived at my girlfriend’s villa. I walked in pale as a ghost, having nearly died of fright. Sweat was streaming down my face, my eyes were wide with fear, and they were scarcely able to revive me. My girlfriend was amazed that I had arrived so late, saying, “If you had come just a bit earlier, you would at least have been able to help us! A wolf got onto the grounds and attacked the whole herd—it was like a slaughterhouse out there! But it didn’t get the last laugh. As the wolf was fleeing, one of our servants pierced it through the neck with a spear.” When I heard this, I couldn’t have opened my eyes any wider. As soon as daylight came I ran home as fast as I could. When I got to the spot where the clothes had been turned to stone, I found nothing but blood. When at last I arrived home, my soldier companion was lying in bed sick as a dog, with a doctor tending to his neck. Then it dawned on me that the man was a shape-shifter. After that I could no longer eat at the same table with him—not even if you had held a knife to my throat.

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This narrative reflects the fear related to road travel in several ways. First, both the soldier and Niceros are armed; one does not expect to travel the roads safely. The irony in this story, also illustrative of the tension surrounding traveling by road, is that the soldier whom Niceros has enlisted as protection turns out to be a werewolf and, in Niceros’s mind, a monster who could attack him at any moment but who, if Niceros had stopped to think about it, clearly preferred livestock over humans. The liminal imagery, as in other monster-on-the-road stories, signals the supernaturally dangerous nature of the encounter: the moon shining as if it were noon, the cemetery just outside the city boundary, the deserted road providing transitional space between city and country villa, the werewolf itself (neither man nor wolf, but something in between).15 This narrative, more elaborate on a literary level than most of the stories presented here, contains many expressions of fear from the narrator: 1. “My heart was in my mouth, and I went numb with fear” (mihi anima in naso esse, stabam tamquam mortuus; literally “My spirit was in my nose, I was standing just like a dead man”). 2. “I didn’t know where I was” (ego primitus nesciebam ubi essem), indicating the disorientation that can accompany intense fear. 3. “I was terrified” (qui mori timore nisi ego; more literally “who if not I died from fear?”) again connecting fear with death. 4. “I walked in pale as a ghost, having nearly died of fright” (ut larva intravi, paene anima ebullivi; literally “I went in like a ghost, I had nearly breathed out my spirit”). 5. “My eyes were wide with fear and they were scarcely able to revive me” (oculi mortui, vix umquam refectus sum; literally “my eyes were dead, I was barely revived at all”). As in Apuleius’s story about the runaway slaves, the language of fear in Petronius’s werewolf story highlights both the expectation of supernatural encounters on the road and the emotional reaction when such encounters occur.

Conclusion Stories about monstrous encounters on the roads started appearing in ancient Greece and Rome as soon as the roads themselves. Although these stories reflect various cultural concerns and remain open to different metaphorical and allegorical interpretations, they have in common an intense sense of disquiet about the increased necessity for travel in societies that were changing rapidly over the centuries because of increased trade, urbanization, and globalization (echoed across many chapters in this volume). The earliest stories present brutal monstrous creatures that pose unusual physical threats to travelers: Antaeus, Cacus, the Crommyonian Sow, and Sciron, for example, are all monstrous beings intent on torture and mutilation. Such intent may reflect the savage nature of life outside the safety of early Greek and Roman settlements, with roadways dangerous not only because of natural obstacles such as rocks and fast-flowing rivers

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but because of the threat of highway robbers, which increased as trade-based travel increased. Stories from more technologically advanced, more urbanized Imperial Rome refine the dangerous roadside encounters by admitting subtler metaphorical interpretations such as Apuleius’s commentary on slavery—an institution crucial to the Roman economy. Philostratus’s stories suggest the importance of spiritual rather than material satisfaction during a period when afterlife beliefs (such as early Christianity) offered a salve for the stresses of an increasingly urban, ordered, and busy Empire. Just as sailors believed in sea monsters that reflected the dangers of seafaring, the ancient Greeks and Romans, stricken by a real and justifiable fear of going beyond the safety of their familiar town boundaries to risk communication with other settlements, used monstrosity as an expression of anxiety about the dangers of highway travel during a period of urban and Imperial growth and transition. Eventually, after hundreds of years, Europe became more accustomed to its roads. The monsters of story and belief, rather than continuing to multiply at the advent of technology, began to retreat from it, withdrawing to the dark forests where travelers would encounter them only when foolishly deviating from set paths. In various arenas, technological advancement and change coincided with fewer interactions between people and monsters. For example, in his anthropological study of the Tidung (an ethnic group spread across Indonesia and Malaysia), Bond (2017) observes that monsters in this culture have nearly disappeared because advances in technology, such as logging and electrical lights, have caused monsters to retreat to what few dark places remain (see also Arumugam, High, Onnudottir and Hawkins, and Rothstein, this volume).16 Yet monsters on the roads continue to plague us in new and different ways. In the mid-1950s, the US Congress approved “the planet’s largest public work,” the national interstate system stretching across America. In contrast to the Greek and Roman attitude toward roadways, reaction to the promise of these highways was highly positive: the dream of the open road offered freedom, escape, and improvement for many people. And in many cases this dream was met. But the innovation allowed by the interstate system also quickly brought with it a new kind of monster: the highway serial killer (Strand 2012: 1 and 11). Human though it may be, this monster lurks in the imagination and evokes dread and fear just as much as the monsters stalking the ancient Mediterranean—so much so that in 2001 the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began its (regrettably named) “Highway Serial Killings Initiative” to raise awareness of the problem among both law enforcement and the general public. The Greeks and Romans didn’t need a formal initiative. They had their stories.

Acknowledgments I wish to thank Yasmine Musharbash and Geir Henning Presterudstuen, first, for convening the wonderful “Living with Monsters” symposium at the University of Sydney in December 2017; second, for putting this volume together; and third, for their expert editorial advice on this individual chapter. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewer for suggesting a number of improvements.

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Notes 1 Apuleius, Metamorphoses 8.19 (henceforth Met.). All translations from Latin and Greek are my own. 2 Quilici 2008: 552–3. Examples of major Bronze Age roadways include the “King’s Highway” from Damascus to Aquaba and the “Royal Road” that extended across the Persian Empire, though the latter was not paved. 3 Ingemark and Ingemark (forthcoming) explain the methodology used here. I am extremely grateful to the Ingemarks for allowing me a preview of their manuscript. 4 The Iliad and Odyssey are notable ancient examples of literature derived from oral tradition. 5 For an extended discussion of time and space relating to random encounters on the road in the ancient novel, see (Bakhtin 1981: 84–258); cf. Hirschon (1993, esp. 64–5). The road as a dangerous place was a concept certainly not confined to the ancient Mediterranean; e.g., see Hill (1995, esp. 112–13). 6 Casson stresses that “Overland travel in this age was both hard and dangerous … Even worse than the [environmental] hardships were the dangers, above all brigandage” (1974: 38). 7 Bernard Alkire, Michigan Technical University (personal correspondence, October 9, 2013). 8 Ibid. 9 Some were probably based on real-life enemies of the Athenians; see Walker (1995). On these characters as resembling serial killers, see Felton (forthcoming). 10 In reality, large pigs can easily knock over a grown man, stomp or gore him to death, and eat him. 11 Compare Betty White’s character, the elderly Mrs. Bickerman, in the 1999 horror film Lake Placid (directed by Steve Miner): she raises a giant, man-eating crocodile. 12 See also Doroszewska (2018: 187–90); cf. Celoria (1992: 128–30) and Ogden (2013: 104–9). 13 To “head for the tombstones” (ad stelas facere) is here a euphemistic way to say that his companion needed to urinate. On cemeteries and ghostly encounters, see Doroszewska (2018), passim; cf. Plato, Phaedo 81c-d and Ogden (2009: 146–65). Cf. the urban legend known as “The Vanishing Hitchhiker,” on which see, e.g., Hankey (1942), Beardsley and Hankey (1942), Brunvand (1981), and Bennett (1998). 14 Likely a magic spell that turned the clothes to stone. The implication is that the soldier could not regain human form without his clothes—clothing being representative of civilization. Cf. Adam and Eve (Genesis 3.7); Enkidu (Gilgamesh Tablet II). 15 On the importance of liminal imagery here, see Doroszewska (2018: 194–7). 16 This is not to say that monsters disappear entirely from urban areas. Some of them adapt. For example, see Felton (2018) and Stewart (1991: 164, 166).

References Anderson, G. (1986), Philostratus: Biography and Belles Lettres in the Third Century AD, London: Croom Helm. Bakhtin, M. (1981), The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, M. Holquist (ed.), C. Emerson and M. Holquist (trans.), Austin: University of Texas Press.

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Bennett, G. (1998), “The Vanishing Hitchhiker at Fifty-Five,” Western Folklore, 57 (1): 1–17. Beardsley, R. K. and R. Hankey (1942), “The Vanishing Hitchhiker,” California Folklore Quarterly, 1 (4): 303–35. Bond, N. (2017), “Monstrous Frontiers,” Paper presented at the Living with Monsters: The University of Sydney Anthropology Symposium, Sydney, December 2017. Brunvand, J. H. (1981), The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings, New York: W. W. Norton. Casson, L. (1974), Travel in the Ancient World, London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd. Celoria, F. (1992), The Metamorphoses of Antoninus Liberalis: A Translation with Commentary, London: Routledge. Doroszewska, J. (2018), “The Liminal Space: Suburbs as a Demonic Domain in Classical Literature,” in D. Felton (ed.), Landscapes of Dread in Classical Antiquity: Negative Emotion in Natural and Constructed Spaces, 185–208, London: Routledge. Felton, D. (2018), “Dread of Daimones in (ancient) Urban Spaces,” in D. Felton (ed.), Landscapes of Dread in Classical Antiquity: Negative Emotion in Natural and Constructed Spaces, 209–25, London: Routledge. Felton, D. (Forthcoming), Monsters and Monarchs: Serial Killers of Classical Myth and History, Austin: University of Texas Press. Felton, D. and K. Gilhuly (2018), “Introduction: Dread and the Landscape,” in D. Felton (ed.), Landscapes of Dread in Classical Antiquity: Negative Emotion in Natural and Constructed Spaces, 1–11, London: Routledge. Fuhrmann, C. J. (2012), Policing the Roman Empire: Soldiers, Administration, and Public Order, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grünewald, T. (2004), Bandits in the Roman Empire: Myth and Reality, J. Drinkwater (trans.), London: Routledge. Hankey, R. (1942), “California Ghosts,” California Folklore Quarterly, 1 (2): 155–77. Hill, J. H. (1995), “The Voices of Don Gabriel: Responsibility and Self in a Modern Mexicano Narrative,” in D. Tedlock and B. Mannheim (eds.), The Dialogic Emergence of Culture, 97–147, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Hirschon, R. (1993), “Open Body/Closed Space: The Transformation of Female Sexuality,” in S. Ardener (ed.), Defining Females: The Nature of Women in Society, 51–72, Oxford: Berg Publishers. Ingemark, C. A. and D. Ingemark (in progress), Therapies of Fear: Verbalising Emotion in Ancient Roman Folk Narrative. Johnston, S. I. (1999), Restless Dead: Encounters between the Living and the Dead in Ancient Greece, Berkeley: University of California Press. Musharbash, Y. (2014), “Introduction: Monsters, Anthropology, and Monster Studies,” in Y. Musharbash and G. H. Presterudstuen (eds.), Monster Anthropology in Australasia and Beyond, 1–24, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ogden, D. (2009), Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ogden, D. (2013), Dragons, Serpents, & Slayers in the Classical and Early Christian Worlds: A Sourcebook, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Quilici, L. (2008), “Land Transport, Part 1: Roads and Bridges,” in J. P. Oleson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Engineering and Technology in the Classical World, 551-79, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scobie, A. (1977), “An Ancient Greek Drakos-Tale in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses VIII.19–21,” Journal of American Folklore, 90: 339–43.

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Stewart, C. (1991), Demons and the Devil: Moral Imagination in Modern Greek Culture, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Strand, G. (2012), Killer on the Road: Violence and the American Interstate, Austin: University of Texas Press. Van Hoof, A. J. L. (1988), “Ancient Robbers: Reflections behind the Facts,” Ancient Society, 19: 105–24. Walker, H. J. (1995), Theseus and Athens, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

2

Gods as Monsters: Insatiable Appetites, Exceeding Interpretations, and a Surfeit of Life Indira Arumugam

How can gods be monsters and vice versa? This chapter explores the interpenetrations between sacrality and monstrosity in a village in Tamil Nadu, India. Minis are amoral fertility spirits which must be appeased to secure agricultural productivity. Muniswarar is a tutelary deity who guards against chaos and evil. Minis and Muniswarar are not absolutely distinct entities but part of a spectrum of sacredness premised upon ritual attempts to govern the land’s volatile potency and channel it to instrumentalist purposes. Based on how the Minis’ and Muniswarar’s shared ritual cult disrupts stable categories—deities and demons and good and evil—I offer two premises to demonstrate how the sacred is also inherently monstrous. First, the sacred possesses an insatiable appetite which cannot be satisfied through mere human rituals and has an excessive wrath when defied. The sacred will always want more than the devotees can give. Second, the sacred inevitably eschews cultural conceptions and social expectations. It has a life that always exceeds the human grasp. Finally, I take up this volume’s brief to consider monsters in contexts of change and detail how amid gathering socioeconomic transformations and habitat destruction, the sacred is becoming even scarcer. It refuses, unlike good monsters, to demonstrate and to forewarn. It resists being probed for meaning. It just wants to be. This meta-sociality is what makes the sacred truly monstrous. On a Tuesday in 2007, at noon, Pushpa was cycling home after her computer class. As she passed the Velankuli pond adjoining the Muniswarar Temple, she heard someone hail her. She looked around. There was no one. She heard her name again. But the surrounding rice fields were deserted. Thoroughly alarmed, she hurried past the pond. When she reached home, she began shaking with fever and writhing with abdominal pains. Her parents brought Pushpa to the local doctor but he could find nothing amiss physiologically. With no discernible improvement in her condition after three days, her parents rushed her to the government hospital in the city. As their taxi passed Velankuli pond, a frantically writhing Pushpa emitted a single scream. Then, she fell silent and lay still. Pushpa had died.

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This tragedy preoccupied Vaduvur, a large village of about 13,500 people in central Tamil Nadu, South India, for weeks. The agricultural laborers working near this pond stayed away for several days. They were much too afraid—boycotting until they could no longer afford it. Other villagers avoided the pond, taking the long way around. A miasma of rumors emanated. Several signs surrounding Pushpa’s eerie demise were interpreted to account for its cause. Noon—the sun at its zenith—was when Pushpa had been startled. Midday is also when the Minis hunt. The Velankuli pond, near which she had been struck, was a known Minis’ haunt. This pond was also by the temple where, just five days before, a spectacular sacrifice had been enacted for Muniswarar, the deity inextricably bound up with the Minis. The villagers concluded that Pushpa had been the Minis’ prey. In this chapter, I take Pushpa’s death (and the possessions, diseases, and near-death experiences of others) as an opening to interrogate the intricate natures of the deity Muniswarar and the Mini spirits. I am concerned, in particular, with the ways in which they—and more abstractly the sacred and the monstrous—intertwine with and feed into each other. Within a local cosmology, I flesh out a monstrous sacred that escapes an orthodox Hindu cosmology’s attempts to impose an ontological clarity and a certain moral order. I do this against a background of rapid socioeconomic change where sacred groves are being cleared, and peoples, houses, and agriculture are encroaching upon the once-desolate habitat of the sacred once desolate habitats and light and noise are intruding into their preference for darkness and silence (see also Introduction, and Felton, High, Onnudottir and Hawkins, and Rothstein, this volume). Amid this onslaught, sacrifices are being rejected and the sacred is retreating ever further. Unlike in other related disciplines, the monsters that anthropologists grapple with are not simply art or artifacts. They not only haunt imaginations but also prowl the land (Musharbash 2014). They are not just metaphors but are embodied ontological realities that are experienced viscerally, shape human behavior, and leave tangible traces. Several anthropologists have highlighted that gods and monsters are in some sense ontologically continuous (Presterudstuen 2014a, b; Roheim 1934). So much so that they can and often do transform into each other (Morton 2014). Like monsters, gods too inhabit the frontiers where reason falters and fantasies flourish. Their liminality and existential ambivalence unites them. Richard Kearney (2003) locates the intimacy between gods and monsters in their common estrangement from humans. Strangers, gods, and monsters, he argues, represent different facets of the self grappling with the other. Otherness and other-worldliness unite all three enigmatic entities. As the unknown and the equivocal, they disrupt human attempts at establishing the known and securing its categories. To preserve the self and its coherence, these others are set apart with trepidation and loathing, exiled into the borderlands and ostracized from human community. A radical alterity that is feared and also fascinating makes gods and monsters mutual kin. Drawing from these theoretical interventions positing the monster as a category that allows for complicating the distinctions between gods, spirits, and demons, I sketch the affinity between the sacred and the monstrous. I begin by scrutinizing the nature of the Mini spirits and the deity Muniswarar and outlining how they are not discrete entities but bleed into each other to form a spectrum of sacredness. I move on to the questions

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of why and how gods can also be monsters. The notion of excess is at the heart of my definition of the monstrous. Excess takes on two forms. First, the sacred will always want more than what the devotees can give. Minis possess an insatiable appetite which cannot be satisfied through mere human rituals. Muniswarar, on the other hand, is not hungry as much as he is angry, inordinately so. His punishments of his congregants’ slightest infractions exceed a sense of proportion. Second, the sacred has an inevitable tendency to exceed and even eschew human purposes, institutions, and practices. Overwhelming attempts to even depict it, the sacred has a life that always exceeds the human grasp. Monstrous beings exceed human intentions and eschew social, ritual, and ethical conventions to assert their own autonomy. In a final twist, I conclude by problematizing my own premise that the sacred is monstrous. The sacred refuses to do as good monsters should, to demonstrate and to forewarn. It refuses to be probed for meaning. In outlining a culture of monsters, Cohen (1996) and Musharbash (2014) offer several key “breakable” postulates to try to analytically pin down what are inherently amorphous, instable, and elusive creatures. Given that they are contingent on the cultures that create them and which they subsequently haunt, monsters are often read as exclusively and purely cultural products. I propose, however, that monsters are monstrous precisely because they evade their creators’ control and ultimately culture itself. They stop being metaphors of and for something else and take on a life of their own. The Minis’ and Muniswarar’s sheer surfeit of life, beyond human conception and containment, makes them meta-social. Defying interpretation in order to just be—and be free—makes them real monsters.

Muniswarar and the Minis: A spectrum of sacredness Minis are spirits that reside in the branches of large trees and stalk waterbodies such as ponds and lakes. No one really knows what Minis actually look like. When they do appear, they tend to possess humans or assume human guise. They lure hapless victims by mimicking their prey’s close kin. A priest provided a partial description: My grandfather has seen one. He said it was immensely tall. It was all white. But he could not really make out its face. As tall as a palm tree … stretching between the sky and the earth.

Minis are essentially fertility spirits. They are responsible for the yield of the land and the fruitfulness of water bodies such as ponds, lakes, and rivers. Minis must be regularly appeased with sacrifices in order to secure continued agricultural productivity. A sacrificed animal represents the Minis’ share—an acknowledgment that the ultimate responsibility for generativity lies outside of human intentionality and agency in the life-giving and death-dispensing powers of the otherworldly Minis. The unruly Mini spirits are supposed to be kept in check by the tutelary deity Muniswarar. Muniswarar appears fierce. He is massive, muscled, and sports a luxuriant moustache. His eyes are red and bulging. His brow is furrowed. His teeth are bared in a grimace, canines protruding from his mouth. He bears a massive array

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of weaponry. One foot rests upon the head of a decapitated demon. And yet for all this, Muniswarar is a vegetarian deity. Animal sacrifice may be integral to his tutelary cult, but Muniswarar himself does not partake of the sacrifice. The live animals are not ritually killed within his sight. Nor are any of the cooked meat offerings presented to him. It is his personal guard, a lesser deity called Munnadiyan, who technically receives the sacrifice. Muniswarar’s fierce countenance is part of his protective function. Muniswarar is a guardian deity. Every night, astride his horse and accompanied by his guard, Muniswarar patrols his jurisdiction. Frightening away evil spirts and fighting against the forces of chaos, he defends his territory’s integrity and secures its order. It is tempting to understand Muniswarar just as a virtuous divine protector and the Minis simply as demonic spirits that must be pacified so that they do not harm human prospects. In the literature, it is this ethical imperative that fundamentally undergirds how deities are differentiated from monsters (Fuller 1992; Masilamani-Meyer 2004; Mines 2005). Gods are moral. Even when they are cruel or capricious toward their devotees, their actions are rationalized. Their violence is punitive and therefore justified, ethical, and meaningful. Demons or monsters, in contrast, are evil or at best amoral. Their violence is graphic and gratuitous—wholly wrong and without reason. Within the shared sacrificial cult of Muniswarar and the Minis, however, such neat ethical distinctions collapse into each other. Strict and stable norms of identification and differentiation between gods and demons become untenable especially in the villagers’ lived experience. What this dialectic alludes to is the comingling of preHindu sacralities and an orthodox Hindu divine pantheon to form a manifold and layered cosmology (cf. Stewart 1992 on Exotika and their dialectical relationship with the tenets of the Greek orthodox church). The villagers often refer to the Minis and Muniswarar interchangeably. This conflation is also reflected in their shared ritual cult. Muniswarar is the tutelary deity of the Mannaiyar lineage. The Mannaiyars are Kallars, who form the dominant caste monopolizing land-ownership and political offices in Vaduvur. For Kallars, animal sacrifice to one’s lineage deity is a ritual obligation. Every five years or so, the Mannaiyar lineage enacts a worship which culminates in them sacrificing roosters and goats to their deity. Even here, the Minis are inextricable from Muniswarar. The Minis live around the lands owned by the Mannaiyar lineage and policed by their deity, Muniswarar. They are also an intrinsic part of the ritual protocols for the lineage’s tutelary worship. Ostensibly, the goat is decapitated in Muniswarar’s name and its life offered to him. However, the sacrifice is not exclusively his but also shared with the Minis. Right after its decapitation, these hungry spirits are offered the animal’s blood. This is mixed with rice, rolled into balls, and flung into the trees where they live. The bloody rice balls do not fall back down. The Minis would have caught and consumed them. The only blood sacrifice offered to the Minis is an essential part of Muniswarar’s sacrificial worship. No sacrifice to Muniswarar is complete unless the Minis are also simultaneously appeased. The precise nature of the relationship between Muniswarar and the Minis is difficult to untangle. In the villagers’ everyday discourses, the Minis appear to be part of the deity and undifferentiated from his divinity. When they haunt, possess, hunt, and kill, however, the Minis seem distinct from him. They appear more like the evil and chaos that Muniswarar is supposed to be defending his congregants against. And

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yet, they share a ritual cult and a blood sacrifice. This is a paradox only if we attempt to impose categorical purity on what is an indeterminate and pliable cosmology. For the villagers themselves, however, the Minis and Muniswarar coexist harmoniously as part of a spectrum of sacredness that defines a people, delineates their territory, and produces fertility. Additionally, the Mini and Muniswarar dynamic articulates the obdurate tensions between the vital forces of the land and human attempts to harness its fertility through ritual technologies. The land—as embodied in the spirits of soil and water, the Minis— is voracious. It hungers for life. To create yet more life—crops, animals, and human children—the land requires the violent destruction of a former creation, that is, the death of an already-existing life. David Shulman (1980: 90–1) explains: One kills and in killing produces a vacuum that must attract more life … [For] the Hindu universe is a closed circuit, nothing new can be produced except by destroying or transforming something else.

The land’s ravenousness, in the form of the Minis, must be appeased so that it will yield. Sacrifice is the means through which the land’s hunger is satiated. The tutelary deity, the lineage cult, and its sacrificial ethic form the ritual pragmatics through which the villagers attempt to harness the force of the land for their own ends. Muniswarar is at the apex of a socio-ritual calculus premised upon lineage citizenship, vernacular self-government, and caste-based discipline that are part of attempts to govern the potency of the land and channel it to politico-economic purposes (Arumugam 2015). Villagers recognize that despite owning the land, working on it, and deploying the latest techniques and technologies, the productive process itself is ultimately an enigmatic one. Wealth, productivity, and life itself are not contingent on human skills alone. Sacred beings such as the Minis and Muniswarar ultimately arbitrate the success or failure of human efforts. Human production and reproduction depend on forces beyond human agency and society (Sahlins 2017). The agricultural economy (and the human family) is thus a relation between producers and the sacred. Sacrificial worship is an attempt to make a relationship with the sacred—from the radical alterity of the land spirits to the guarded affinity offered by the lineage deity—to cajole and coerce them into beneficence or at least non-maleficence. And yet, all this frenetic ritual activity and frantic ritual offerings are never enough. Its appetites exceeding ritual appeasement, the land defies comprehensive politico-economic control. The Minis remain hungry; monstrously so.

Insatiable appetites: Spirits and sacrality Muniswarar’s lineage had sacrificed fifty-four goats to their deity. But the fifty-four lives that they had voluntarily given had not been enough. One more life, a human one, Pushpa, had been taken. Mysterious deaths days after a Muniswarar worship are not unusual. They are inherent to the ritual, part of its sacred reverberations. As a villager said:

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Customarily, it is “deities that are denied sacrifices they want that will wreck terrible revenge” through the seizure of unwilling victims (Fuller 1992: 102). Such killings are what are owed to the deity for failing to fulfill one’s ritual obligations—a “sublimated sacrifice” with little or no ritual syntax (Parry 2005: 241). But in this case, divine claims had been acknowledged. Ritual obligations had been fulfilled. The deity was not angry. And yet, Pushpa had died a week after the sacrifice from no discernible cause. Her death was also not seen as divine punishment for the incompetence of ritual specialists or imperfections in the ritual performance. This is a common occurrence, as we will see. But this was not the case here. How then to explain Pushpa’s mysterious death? Within Muniswarar sacrificial worship itself is an acknowledgment of the inherent insufficiency of rituals. The Minis’ appetites can never be quenched by mere human tendered offerings. Their insatiability is part of the very sacrifice intended to satiate their hunger. Some of sacrificed animal’s blood is also given to a member from Muniswarar’s lineage. This designated blood drinker was Muniswarar’s goddancer. Possessed by the deity, the god-dancer literally dances the god into effect in the material world. When the god-dancer had sipped a few drops, he began to run. He raced across the scorching soil and leapt over irrigation ditches. Other men ran after him to ensure his safety. But no matter how fast they ran, they could not catch up with him. Three times the god-dancer ran and every time he easily outpaced them. As a Mannaiyar headmen explained: After drinking the sacrificial blood, the god-dancer runs and nobody can catch him. He runs straight to and into the pond, where the Minis await him. The Minis will pull him under and try to drown him. He will thrash and flail in the water. We have men on standby around the pond. They hide behind the bushes and wait for the god-dancer. But they cannot intervene before he plunges in. If they try to stop him before that, then they themselves will be seized by the Minis and potentially killed. Once the god-dancer is in the water, they plunge in and drag him out. They give him a salty tart broth to rouse him. It cleanses his palate of the intense blood. He awakens, unsure of how he came to be there. They help him to the shore.

Even as they prepared to sacrifice multitudes of animals, the sacrificers knew that their efforts were not and indeed would never be enough. Even the god-dancer—the embodiment of the divine in this world who receives the sacrifice intended for them— is not exempt. Ultimately, he too is a potential sacrifice or simply prey. The Minis want more lives than the devotees can give. They will always want more. Insatiability is part of the Minis’ uncanniness. An excess of hunger, covetousness, and violence—above and beyond ritual protocols, social mores, and human imagining—makes these spirits also monsters. Such excess also applies to Muniswarar—not so much as a voracious hunger but more of a prodigious anger.

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Excessive fury: Demanding deity A tutelary deity’s primary responsibility is toward their lineage’s biological production— through the granting of sons—and social reproduction—through promoting their economic and interests (Arumugam 2015; Nabokov 2000). Yet the Mannaiyar lineage cannot assume an uncomplicated intimacy with their own deity. The affinity is a tense one overshadowed by their trepidation. Muniswarar demands absolute obedience and is hypercritical of his lineage’s adherence to his injunctions. He has a particularly fearsome reputation and is known to quickly take offense at infractions, specifically those compromising caste purity. Another Mannaiyar headman recounts: Work over, a lower caste agricultural labourer took a bath and sat on an embankment near Muniswarar’s temple. He soon developed terrible stomach pains. Doctors diagnosed him with dysentery. Despite treatment, his stomach pains did not stop. Until, that is, he was taken to Muniswarar’s priest and given some holy ash to smear on his forehead.

Muniswarar’s wrath at congregants who do not marry within their caste is even more terrible. Lineage reproduction is premised upon caste endogamy. This requires the policing of the lineage members’ sexual proprieties and specifically women’s reproductive properties. As a Mannaiyar lineage member attests: A lower caste man from the neighbouring village came to Vaduvur to work in the harvest. He developed a relationship with an upper caste woman, from Muniswarar’s lineage. The lovers eloped to the man’s village. The man soon developed crippling stomach pains and died. His Kallar lover committed suicide thereafter.

Since lineage viability and vitality is dependent on their tutelary deity’s protection, lineage rituals must be taken seriously. Ritual specialists should approach the deity reverentially. Ritual procedures should be followed assiduously. According to another headman: You must fear the deity. You cannot fake being possessed by him or manifesting him or relating his will. You must observe the taboos. You must be clean and pure to approach Muniswarar.

Their fear ensures that tutelary sacrifices are enacted regularly and as perfectly as possible. Muniswarar’s one and only function may be to promote his lineage’s interests. But he does not willingly overlook or readily forgive even his own lineage’s ethical violations or ritual infelicities. Another Mannaiyar lineage member explained: Muniswarar punished his own god-dancer. When he drank the blood at the last sacrifice, he became severely sick. He drank too much of the rich blood. He had a heart attack and died.

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Monster Anthropology A headman had been responsible for Muniswarar’s statue being built improperly. It was a brand new statue. But the statute fell, backwards. When Muniswarar’s statue fell, so did the headman. Also backwards, with severe fits. Motionless since then, he is bedridden and must be looked after.

Even ritual specialists who perform the sacrifices are not immune. Several of the priests who had done the worship got sick within a year … and died. You have to be scrupulously clean … not drunk … Otherwise Muniswarar will punish them.

The local priest, who had presided over the last sacrifice, refused to perform any more Muniswarar sacrifices. He is still alive. But he was too afraid. He did not want to come this time. We had to get a foreign priest—from a distant village. We did not tell this one too much about our Muniswarar’ reputation … But he is also a brave man.

Unlike the depredations of the Minis, which are met with bewilderment, Muniswarar’s violent punishments are undergirded with meaning and considered ethically warranted. Though seemingly justified, the punishments are anything but commensurate with the original violations. God-dancers faking possessions and flouting ritual protocols have suffered debilitating illnesses. Headmen who allowed Muniswarar’s icons to be improperly built have become paralyzed. Lineage members who flouted caste endogamy have suddenly died. Through these punishments, Muniswarar reinforces the community’s social codes, ritual imperatives, and sexual boundaries (Blackburn 2003; Hiltebeitel 1989; Masilamani-Meyer 2004). Through disciplining the sacrilegious rupturing of caste classifications and ritual proscriptions, he reinscribes them. Monsters function as “vehicles of prohibition” enforcing patriarchal laws of exogamy and “decrees against interracial sexual mingling” in the “service of some notion of group purity” (Cohen 1996: 15–17). Muniswarar, decreed a deity, also does this. He polices women’s sexuality and punishes caste miscegenation seeking to preserve a caste-based (specifically Kallar-dominant) patriarchal society. Spectacular beyond measure, Muniswarar’s retributions punish sacrilege but more importantly serve as a warning against future transgressions. Simultaneously, his violent reprisals are in themselves violations against congregants whom he should be protecting. In their severity, they also violate a sense of proportionality. Punishments exceed the original crimes—monstrously so.

Exceeding relations, eschewing society To expand on excess as a fundamental premise of monstrosity, I turn to how the Minis and Muniswarar always exceed human institutions and transactions. They

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evade attempts to fix them through cosmology, architecture, iconography, and rituals. Overwhelming human intentions, the sacred forcefully asserts its own will. The monster, as Cohen (1996) concludes, always escapes. Not only do Minis want more lives, but they also want different lives than those offered by the devotees. Sacrifices are the means to dissolve the normally prevailing boundaries between the human and the divine (Fuller 1992: 87). While the animal serves as an “intermediary between the deity and the human sacrificer,” it is merely a substitute (see also Hubert and Mauss 1964; Girard 1977; Tambiah 1970 on sacrifice in Thai Buddhism and spirit cults; Hoskins 1993 on the substitution and sacrifice among the Kodi in Indonesia; Eberhart 2011 on sacrifice in Christianity). What should actually be sacrificed is the human sacrificer himself (Fuller 1992: 84–5). As Laura Bear (2015) clarifies, the animal in Hindu sacrifice is merely the interest owed to the deities. The principal—the human sacrifice—still has to be paid. Hindu funerals are where the principal is finally settled. The corpse surrendered to the crematory fire is the final sacrificial oblation (Parry 1994). The animals sacrificed to Muniswarar are a surrogate for the Mannaiyar lineage-mates themselves. A mother from another neighboring lineage said: In 1986, my son Mani accompanied his grandfather to deliver food to the workers the Velankuli pond. When he stepped onto the Muniswarar temple lands, Mani fell to the ground. His eyes would not open. His hands and feet started convulsing. We brought Mani to the doctor in Vaduvur but to no avail. So we went to the city hospital. The doctors performed a body scan but they could find nothing wrong. We brought Mani home. On a suspicion, we went to Muniswarar’s medium to get some holy ash, hoping it would revive my child. When the god-dancer saw Mani, he started dancing. He shouted, “I am the one who seized your kid. I have him. I want a life!” We immediately bought a rooster and released it near the Muniswarar temple. My son made a full recovery.

The customary logic—an animal life for a human one—animating sacrifice in general also applies to Hindu sacrificial worship (Fuller 1992). However, the post-sacrificial human deaths and the blood drinker’s near-death experiences inherent to Muniswarar’s rituals allude to the Minis eschewing these logics of proxy. They deny the investment of the human sacrificer in his animal substitute. They refuse to treat the proffered goats “as if ” they are the human sacrificers themselves. In refusing animal surrogates, the Minis dispel the expedient metonymy through which a sacrificial covenant is made between the sacrificer and his tutelary deity. Despite knowing of their insufficiency, people do still offer sacrifices. Ultimately, sacrifice is a demonstration of submission to an acknowledged higher power. To withhold it invites even more dire retaliation—the futility of future prospects, sterility of productive, and reproductive efforts and even more mortality (Arumugam 2015; Nabokov 2000) Nevertheless, the Minis disdain the artifice of sacrifice and its anthropocentric orchestration and mediation. Despite a successful sacrifice, the Minis still seize and kill unwilling human victims. Even during the ritual intended to appease

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them, they tried to drown their own god- dancer. Not appeased by the intended and the willingly tendered, the Minis prefer to seize their prey for themselves. This encapsulates the Minis’ capacity to activate their own desires and act in this world independent of their devotees’ volition. The sacred is sacred precisely because it exceeds human attempts to author and authorize it. The Minis hunger not just for physical life. They also have erotic appetites. As several villagers related: Devi [a fair-skinned and voluptuous woman] used to leave her house door open as she slept. On Tuesday and Friday nights, the Mini would often “seize” her. In the guise of her husband, the Mini would cajole, sweet-talk and laugh with her. Behaving like a married couple, they would walk to the pond and then into it. Devi would be plunged into the water. She would wake up scared and come home crying. Even when locked within her house, on these nights, she would scream “I will come! I am coming! Let me go! I am coming!” Devi’s family consulted many ritual specialists to bind the Mini and prevent it from possessing her … to no avail … They said that if the Mini captured a mother or a sister, then it will abandon them midway. But Devi had been seized as a wife. The Mini liked her too much. It will never let her go. Unless there is a flaw … in her mind or body.

Devi was finally released by the Minis when she developed breast cancer and had a mastectomy. Her perfect beauty was marred. The Minis lost interest. Minis thrust themselves into human lives to temporarily subsume and ultimately consume them. Even their erotic impulses are sublimated to their hunger for life. They will attempt to drown even those whom they “lovingly” possess as wives. Regulating these vital life forces and channeling them toward utilitarian purposes remains a struggle. The Minis’ appetites often escape even Muniswarar’s vigilance. Refusing to subject itself to mediation through human relations and rituals, the sacred hunts and seizes for itself. Even supposedly ethical tutelary deities refuse to accommodate themselves to human expectations. In Tamil spatial grammar, villages are organized and orderly centers of civilization. Wildernesses are chaotic and threatening places of mixture (Mines 1997: 175). Haunted by ghosts, demons, and spirits, these margins are also where tutelary deities’ shrines are sited, that is, when they deign to be housed. Despite their lineage’s urgings, such deities often refuse to be housed in temples. Another tutelary deity, Viranar, has repeatedly refused, through his god-dancer, to be enshrined in a temple. According to the headmen, “Viranar refers to bask in the sun and soak in the rain. He likes roaming all over the place.” To be rooted in, represented, and related to is to be subject to human intentionality. Such circumscriptions of their own agency are anathema. Except, at other times, these very same deities order their lineages to house them. Ravuthar, another tutelary deity, appeared in his lineage headman’s dream: Get up! Here I am withering in the sun and sodden with rain. And you are sleeping comfortably in your house.

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Startled awake, the headman looked around, saw nothing amiss, and went back to sleep. He was awakened by another reverie in which Ravuthar was angrier and more forceful. “I’m telling you to get up. And you are still sleeping so deeply. GET UP!” These admonitory dreams impelled Ravuthar’s lineage to immediately build a temple for their disgruntled deity. Such contradictions are part of how the sacred endlessly transforms its modes of existence, constantly undermining attempts to moor it to human classifications and systemic structuring. Thus, the sacred asserts its own will in this world.

Elusive monsters, evading meaning Through his wrath, Muniswarar reinscribes the cosmic, social, and ritual codes that underpin a Hindu caste order. In asserting their excess of appetites, the Minis often escape Muniswarar’s vigilance. Minis cannot be fully subsumed by and therefore are liminal to a Hindu moral order (cf. Stewart 1992). In exceeding the human grasp, both deity and spirits elude cosmology to become a monstrous sacred. In a final twist, I suggest that they even resist being pinned down as monsters. In keeping with their classical etymology—monere (to warn or admonish) and demonstrare (to reveal, show, or indicate)—monsters are probed for meaning as revelatory signs or embodied portents (Cohen 1996; Musharbash 2014). This does resonate here. Muniswarar’s visitations—through possessing god-dancers or via admonitory dreams—can reveal unmet sacrificial obligations or improper ritual enactments. Severe and spectacular punishments have been read as signs of Muniswarar’s disapproval of ethical failures and moral turpitude, especially that compromising caste purity. The Minis themselves increasingly do not even appear at their own sacrifices. After Muniswarar’s 2007 sacrifice, the bloody rice balls had been thrown up into the trees as usual. But this time, they fell back down and smashed to the ground. The Minis had not seized them. Since the large trees they shelter in have been cleared, the Minis have become even scarcer (Arumugam 2015; Parry 1979, 2005: 279). Nevertheless, Minis and Muniswarar more often than not refuse to demonstrate or forewarn as monsters should. They resist being dissected for meaning. According to a devotee: In the past, Goddess Pidari’s temple had been surrounded by deep forest. There had been a massive Banyan tree. The headmen gathered under it for their assembly. The gods would also gather there. They would sing and dance. You could hear the sound of the bells on their anklets. They would bathe and wash their clothes there because all temples have ponds. You could hear the sounds of splashing water and the pounding of wet cloth on a wash-stone. They would play and then go to sleep. They liked it there. It was a secluded place. They would not be disturbed by the sounds of mortar and pestle [human habitation].

Shunning human society, the monstrous sacred prefers to keep to itself—trying to escape being read. Disdaining being installed in the center of the village, at the heart

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of a temple complex, their preference to occupy wildernesses and prowl peripheries can be read as them evading interpretation. They may be “cultural products,” “both constructs and projections,” and therefore contingent on human society. But not purely so. They do not “exist only to be read” (Cohen 1996: 4). They also resist being read in order to just exist. Vaduvur’s accelerating socioeconomic development and changing topography in the past thirty years has only exacerbated the monstrous sacred’s recoil from society. As more houses and people encroach, the sacred groves where these beings lived have been cleared. So that more land can be brought under cultivation, the massive trees in which they roosted have been cut down. As the electricity supply became regularized, the shadows enshrouding them have been dispersed. Exposing what had always been unfathomably eerie to human traffic and electric luminescence has transformed the ambience. The enigmatic has become quotidian. Responding to these ecological and social transformations which threaten their power, agency, and very nature, the monstrous sacred has retreated even further from human imagination and engagement. Ritual specialists and the older lineage members agreed that the old gods’ intercessions in human affairs have waned. Villagers no longer see the deities riding their horses accompanied by their guardians on their nightly patrols around their territories. They no longer appear in dreams as often as they had in the past. They do not possess as many people as they had previously. They no longer even attend their own sacrificial worship. They do not let their approval or disapproval of their ritual—and therein their judgment of their congregation—be known. The Minis themselves may have seized an unsuspecting young girl in 2007. However, they did not turn up at the worship to which they had been expressly invited and where they had been expected. From having been intrinsic to experienceable events, the Minis have become relegated to hushed stories. With fixed temples, built icons, and regular rituals, Muniswarar may have been drawn deeper into orthodox Hindu worship. His own vital wanderings over his land, however, have become circumscribed so that Muniswarar too is now rarely encountered outside of cautionary tales. Minis and Muniswarar are not transcendent. They fully inhabit this world—dwelling and delighting in their landscape in quotidian ways. As the landscape they roam over and relish irrevocably changes, so does the nature of these sacred monsters—not so much in quality but in degree. They become even more themselves—reclusive, taciturn, and elusive. These monsters just want to be. Even as they expect submission from their devotees, they themselves want to be unmediated by social norms. They want to roam unattached to a site, icon, or specific devotees. They want to wander unmoored from human ontologies. Eschewing ritual proprieties, transactional reciprocities, and ethical conventions renders these monsters meta-social and sacred. Defying efforts to plumb them for significance makes them free and truly monstrous. Pushpa’s uncanny death offers a tragic aperture through which to consider the sacred’s inherent monstrosity. Since they are real for our interlocutors, in our ethnographies, monsters have also become muscular and kinetic. This chapter has gone even further to insist on the monsters’ agency, which remains always outside human constitutions and institutions. This autonomy also lies at the heart of their sacredness.

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The monstrous sacred has hinged on the notion of excess: first, as an insatiable appetite that exceeds ritual satiation and a profuse fury when defied and, second, as a sovereignty that exceeds attempts to conceive of let alone neatly categorize them. The monstrous sacred has a will that cannot be subsumed by human intentionality. One that, as it seizes, possesses, judges, punishes, and even kills them, undermines human attempts to establish and defend their own sovereignty. It has a capacity to act that is untethered to human persuasion or coercion. It possesses a life so overwhelming that it unsettles purely anthropocentric readings. A vitality so intense that it cannot be incorporated within the spheres of the social and the cultural, which are anthropologically more valorized but epistemologically reduced domains (Uchimayada 2008). A life that is so vigorous as to demand to be understood on its own terms.. Hence, I end by querying my own premise. Are the gods actually monsters? They are not, at least not in the way we are used to understanding monsters. Despite their etymology, monsters are not simply omens of impurity and apparitions of a numinous otherness—vehicles of meaning for humans to decipher. Perhaps monsters ought not to be defined purely as “a message that breaks into this world from the realm of the sacred” (Kearney 2003: 34). The Minis and Muniswarar decline to caution or reveal as ideal monsters should. They resist being objectified, signified, and therefore subjected. They refuse to be rationalized or ethicized. They refuse to be of utility. As their habitats get destroyed and people encroach even more, they fight even harder to retain their unfathomable profundity. Their transcending of the social—not into the ethereal, but deeper into a vital and anarchic impetus and, consequently, their very saturation with life—is what makes them truly monstrous.

References Arumugam, I. (2015), “‘The Old Gods Are Losing Power!’: Theologies of Power and Rituals of Productivity in a Tamil Nadu Village,” Modern Asian Studies, 49 (3): 753–86. Bear, L. (2015), Navigating Austerity: Currents of Debt along a South Asian River, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Blackburn, S. (2003), “Moral Fictions: Tamil Folktales from Oral Tradition,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 66 (1): 116–17. Cohen, J. J. (1996), “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” in J. J. Cohen (ed.), Monster Theory: Reading Culture, 3–25, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Eberhart, C. A. (ed.) (2011), Ritual and Metaphor: Sacrifice in the Bible, Atlanta, GA: The Society of Biblical Literature. Fuller, C. J. (1992), The Camphor Flame: Popular Hinduism and Society in India, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Girard, R. (1977), Violence and the Sacred, Baltimore, WA: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hiltebeitel, A. (ed.) (1989), Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism, Albany: State University of New York Press. Hoskins, J. (1993), “Violence, Sacrifice and Divination: Giving and Taking Life in Eastern Indonesia,” American Ethnologist, 20 (1): 159–78. Hubert, H. and M. Mauss ([1898] 1964), Sacrifice: Its Nature and Functions, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Kearney, R. (2003), Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness, London: Routledge. Masilamani-Meyer, E. (2004), “Guardians of Tamil Nadu: Folk Deities, Folk Religion, Hindu Themes,” Neue Hallesche Berichte 5, Halle: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen zu Halle. Mines, D. P. (1997), ‘Making the Past Past: Objects and the Spatialization of Time in Tamilnadu’, Anthropological Quarterly, 70 (4): 173–86. Mines, D. P. (2005), Fierce Gods: Inequality, Ritual, and the Politics of Dignity in a South Indian Village, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Morton, J. (2014), “A Murder of Monsters: Terror and Morality in an Aboriginal Religion,” in Y. Musharbash and G. H. Presterudstuen (eds.), Monster Anthropology in Australasia and Beyond, 75–92, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Musharbash, Y. (2014), “Introduction: Monsters, Anthropology, and Monster Studies,” in Y. Musharbash and G. H. Presterudstuen (eds.), Monster Anthropology in Australasia and Beyond, 1–24, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Nabokov, I. (2000), Religion against the Self: An Ethnography of Tamil Rituals, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Parry, J. P. (1979), Caste and Kinship in Kangra, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Parry, J. P. (1994), Death in Banares, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parry, J. P. (2005), “Changing Childhoods in Industrial Chhattisgarh,” in R. Chopra and P. Jeffery (eds.), Educational Regimes in Contemporary India, 276–99, London: Sage Publications. Presterudstuen, G. H. (2014a), “Ghosts and the Everyday Politics of Race in Fiji,” in Y. Musharbash and G. H. Presterudstuen (eds.), Monster Anthropology in Australasia and Beyond, 127–42, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Presterudstuen, G. H. (2014b), “Ghost, Spirits and Christian Denominational Politics: A Case from Fiji,” in A. S. Dabve (ed.), Monsters in Society: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, 87–96, London: Inter-Disciplinary Press. Roheim, G. (1934), The Riddle of the Sphinx: Or Human Origins, London: Hogarth Press. Sahlins, M. (2017), “The Original Political Society,” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 7 (2): 91–128. Shulman, D. (1980), Tamil Temple Myths: Sacrifice and Divine Marriage in the South Indian Saiva Tradition, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Stewart, C. (1992), Demons and the Devil: Moral Imagination in Modern Greek Culture, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tambiah, S. J. (1970), Buddhism and the Spirit Cults in North-East Thailand, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Uchimayada, Y. (2008), “Kurati and Kali: The Dead-End of Hierarchical Finality and the Moving Body That Assembles Unthinkable Series,” Paper presented at The Unthinkable-Thinking Beyond the Limits of Culture Conference, Institute of Ethnology, Academica Sinica, Taiwan, December 2008.

3

Pangkarlangu, Wonder, Extinction Yasmine Musharbash

I have been visiting the remote Central Australian Aboriginal community of Yuendumu for participant observation-based research since the mid-1990s. It was there, through living with local Warlpiri people, that I learned about monsters in the Tanami Desert, or kuuku, as Warlpiri people at Yuendumu call them. Conversations like the following were (and continue to be, this one is from January 2018) par for the course: YM: They really should find you a house! ON: They did. But I did not want that one, it’s kuuku house. You know the one behind the old store, next to M’s house, that little one where A used to live? That one! I don’t want that one! B lived there [after A] and he was always sick, and when he went to town for tests, x-rays and everything, they’d say there was nothing wrong with him; and when he is back in that house he is sick again. It’s from that kuuku woman! She was living there when crazy A lived there, they had two kuuku kids together. People used to hear those kuuku kids cry. She fell in love with him and slept with him. The witch doctor told her to go back to her own country and A moved to the other side of Yuendumu, but that house is still kuuku house, I am not moving there!

It often seemed that kuuku were everywhere: they were invoked to frighten children from strolling too far from camp, they lived in houses, behind that big tree in West Camp and definitely next to the airstrip! They threatened camps at night, lay in wait along lonely desert tracks, and followed all kinds of clues that were telling them where to find people to haunt. And haunt they did (and do!): some can ensorcell you, others can kill you or rape you, others again will trick you, or tease you, confuse you, or make you laugh. Over time, I learned to distinguish different kinds of kuuku: I learned first hand about the terrifying human-like murderous Kurdaitcha and Jarnpa when they threatened and killed friends of mine (Meggitt 1955; Musharbash 2014a, b, under review; Thurman, this volume). I learned about the ways in which different kuuku and certain birds cooperate (Musharbash 2016b, and for the related case of bird/monsters see Curran, this volume). I learned about Milarlpa, localized spirits who need to be

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greeted when you first arrive at a new place in the Tanami Desert, especially if you plan to camp there overnight as the Milarlpa may play tricks on you. I learned about rainbow serpents, about the lonely and always hungry giantess just down the road from Yuendumu, and about Mingalpinji, the flat and hairless inhabitants of the salt lakes to the south. More than this detailed taxonomic knowledge, I learned what it is like to live in a world that is populated not just by people and animals and plants but also by monsters. In tandem with this, I learned to understand that one dust devil might just be that, a dust devil, but that another one, the one traveling along an erratic path, might be a monster that made itself otherwise invisible. In the same vein, I learned that Warlpiri people distinguish between storm clouds coming in and an angry rainbow serpent tracking somebody from the sky, and between different sounds in the bush always aware which bird songs or types of whistling signal supernatural danger and which ones signal safety. Against this background, then, it originally struck me as incongruous when, in August 2013, Warlpiri people got terribly excited about a group of giant-like hairy cannibals called Pangkarlangu traveling past Yuendumu. I was in Sydney at the time (it was during the semester and I was teaching), and my phone ran hot with calls from Yuendumu. Everyone was ringing to tell me the news: the Pangkarlangu (it turned out to be a husband, a wife, and a child) had first been sighted as they appeared a little distance east of Yuendumu. Over the next few days, people continued ringing with updates of the slow westward journey of the Pangkarlangu family. The calls ceased once the Pangkarlangu disappeared further west into the depths of the Tanami. One person rang me more often than the others, with minute updates on every new piece of information, rumor, or gossip during the Pangkarlangu’s progress from east to west as it made the rounds. This was Mary-Lou, a Warlpiri friend of mine in her mid-thirties, mother of three grown children and one toddler, grandmother of two further toddlers. She’d ring me as soon as she heard reports that the remains of a Pangkarlangu camp were found, or when what were assumed to be their fires toward the horizon were spotted. She called as soon as she heard that someone had photographed giant footsteps in the vicinity of Yuendumu (see Figure 3.1) and when one person managed a blurry “close-up” shot with a telephoto lens. Many of these phone calls ended up becoming deep conversations about the implications she saw unfolding from the events. In this chapter, I take my cue from Mary-Lou and frame my discussion of the 2013 Pangkarlangu sightings through the key notions that kept coming up in our discussions: the question of truth, the feeling of wonder, and the issue of extinction. To recognize where Mary-Lou’s thoughts were coming from in our phone discussions requires an understanding that the world filled with kuuku, which I described at the beginning, used to include Pangkarlangu but had not done so in Mary-Lou’s living memory. In fact, during her lifetime, and in sharp contrast to other kuuku, they had become relegated to little more than just so characters in just so stories. I can only take Mary-Lou’s word that this was true (reinforced by my own experience of never having heard about Pangkarlangu in any other context than fireside stories about Pangkarlangu from a long time ago) until 2013. It is interesting to note that Nicholls

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(this volume) describes a very different situation for Lajamanu, another Warlpiri community some 350 miles to the northwest on the other side of the Tanami Desert. I have no issues accepting both stories as true, especially considering how different Yuendumu and Lajamanu are, being located not only in different ecological zones (one arid, one tropical, with attendant different foods, vistas, and phenomenologies) but each also on different tribal lands skirting the Warlpiri homeland of the Tanami Desert (Yuendumu is located on traditional Anmatyerr land and Lajamanu on traditional Gurindji land). Yuendumu is oriented to the south with Alice Springs to its southwest as the main service center, Lajamanu to the north, toward Katherine and Darwin (emplaced examples of the common division of the Northern Territory into “the Center” and “the Top End,” respectively). That a particular monster—in this case the Pangkarlangu—has a different history and presence in two different places is, after all, underscoring a key point we are making in this volume. It was only through the reappearance of the Pangkarlangu family near Yuendumu in 2013 that Mary-Lou became aware that this monster, conceptually, had deviated from the others she knew, which triggered her wonder and our conversations. Before I get to analyzing them below, I first want to provide an overview of MaryLou’s and my knowledge of Pangkarlangu up until 2013. From there, I proceed to deliberate on the questions the Pangkarlangu raised for Mary-Lou. I start by examining the monster in relation to The Dreaming and Mary-Lou’s feelings of wonder, then move to contrast her understanding of the Pangkarlangu vis-à-vis her understanding of non-Indigenous people’s reading of a similar monster, Big Foot, and finally move to contrast Mary-Lou’s contemplations about monsters’ and other species’ extinction, before closing with an example of emplaced and embodied experience relating to the Pangkarlangu. These deliberations approach questions of truth and belief, experience, and ontological difference from a range of different vantage points. In my conclusion, I ponder the implications of the Pangkarlangu visit in relation to the issue of change and social transformation that frames this volume.

Pangkarlangu The deeds of Pangkarlangu are recited in Warlpiri stories, myths and songs, are retold around the fires in the evenings, and these days are also depicted in Warlpiri schoolbooks. In one of these schoolbooks, produced by the Literacy Centre of the bilingual Yuendumu School, the late Neville Japangardi Poulson, artist and gifted storyteller, provides a brilliant illustration of a large, hairy Pangkarlangu wielding a spiked club. It is accompanied by a description of a Pangkarlangu as “like a person but very large with huge feet, long claws, very big eyes and a big head. The belly, back, arms and legs are covered with hair” (Poulson et al. 1990: 9–10, 18). Pangkarlangu are said to live in caves, hunt at night, and to sleep during the day (see also Nicholls, this volume). They kill and devour not only other monsters, but also humans and other Pangkarlangu. Many stories elaborate especially on the Pangkarlangu penchant for killing, cooking, and eating human children (see, for example, Larry 1987). Christine Nicholls describes this vividly:

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Furthermore, and very much in tune with Warlpiri people’s own interpretations, Nicholls (2014: unpaginated) emphasizes two key points: 1. That Pangkarlangu serve a warning function for children not to lose their carers out of sight (“because Pangkarlangu will get you!,” see also Musharbash 2016a). 2. That the Pangkarlangu way of killing, cooking, and consuming children is eerily reminiscent of the way in which Warlpiri people kill, cook, and consume goannas. Just like Warlpiri people (albeit after chasing or digging it out) grab the goanna and bash its head against their digging stick, the Pangkarlangu kills the child either by beating its head with a club or by smashing its head against rocks or a tree trunk. Just as Warlpiri people cook goanna in the hot coals of the fire, so do Pangkarlangu with children. And just as Warlpiri people rip off a goanna’s legs or tail to eat, so do Pangkarlangu rip off the cooked child’s appendages to munch on when they feel peckish. There are a few Pangkarlangu myths which invert the usual plot (see Morton et al. 1987). In one such myth, the Pangkarlangu captures a boy who, despite warnings to stay in camp, tried to follow his parents hunting but couldn’t keep up. Instead of eating the child, however, the Pangkarlangu takes the boy home and over the next few years hunts other monsters for itself and goanna and kangaroo for its adopted son. This continues until the Pangkarlangu falls sick and the boy, now a grown man according to the Pangkarlangu, returns to his human family, bringing them meat and then undergoing initiation. This appositely articulates another aspect of the Pangkarlangu’s monstrousness, also underscored by Neville Poulson’s description of the Pangkarlangu as “like a person, but … ”1 Their appearance is human like, but they are much bigger, hairier, over-sexed, and wilder. Their monstrosity expresses itself also through their failure to understand and perform social rules. For example, while their hunting techniques mirror those of humans, they fail to distinguish between consuming socially sanctioned edible meat and cannibalism through devouring humans and other Pangkarlangu. Correspondingly, while they exhibit a desire for a sociality like that of humans, their performance lacks key attributes: Pangkarlangu raising children fail to initiate them (i.e., they fail to socialize them into full personhood through ritual instruction). This theme is further developed in yet another myth, which retells the theft of a woman by a Pangkarlangu who desires a wife (Egan 1984). This Pangkarlangu is killed by two men who come looking for the woman. In this and all other stories, upon his death the Pangkarlangu is left to rot lying where it died.2 That is to say, Pangkarlangu steal women and know nothing of who is in the right kin relation to be marriageable or indeed about the bonds created through marriage promises (see also Curran, this volume). Upon death Pangkarlangu bodies are not cared for and buried by their peers

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but are left to rot on the ground.3 In all these regards, Pangkarlangu strongly adhere to a common trope in stories about monsters, who strive to be(come) humans and be accepted in human society but end up doing horrible things in trying to achieve it.

Pangkarlangu and The Dreaming The Warlpiri myths and songs that tell about the Pangkarlangu I referred to above, the ones on which the school books are based, are part of jukurrpa, or The Dreaming as it is called in English. In one sense, jukurrpa refers to the time of ancestral creation, during which the land, its hills, rivers and plains, the animals, plants, people, clouds, winds, stars, fire, water, and, indeed, the monsters were created. In this sense, as is true for all monsters of the Tanami, Pangkarlangu have been on the prowl in Warlpiri country haunting Warlpiri people since the beginning. However, jukurrpa is not understood as a fixed time period but, as so appositely coined by Stanner (1979), as “everywhen.” In the Warlpiri context, Nancy Munn (1970) has elaborated on this by considering the transformation from subject into object and back into subject (from ancestral being into features of the landscape, and from the spiritual forces in these features into the beings animated by them: humans, flora, fauna, monsters, and so forth). Specifying that jukurrpa (which Munn spells djugurba) refers to the period of ancestral creation, to ancestral beings themselves, as well as to the act of dreaming and dreams, she interlaces this with the Warlpiri term yijardu (jidjaru in Munn). Yijardu, it is vital to understand, refers both to the temporal order of the here and now and to truth. As Munn puts it, Warlpiri people contrast between the ancestral past (djugurba) and the ongoing present (jidjaru) which includes the more or less immediate past as well as contemporary existence  … In addition to its temporal meaning, the term jidjaru also denotes “truth” and conveys the idea of concrete actuality. One may use it to assure a listener that one is telling the truth, and that what one is talking about is thoroughly real … [further she says, and this is the crux:] Warlbiri emphasize that djugurba is also jidjaru. Djugurba was and is an actuality. (Munn 1970: 95–6)

Munn’s point is that Warlpiri people understand jukurrpa (The Dreaming) to be yijardu in both senses: it is true, and it is now (“everywhen” according to Stanner). It is in this sense that The Dreaming always was and always will be; and the same is true for the creations of The Dreaming. Pangkarlangu, in exactly the same way as features of the landscape, Warlpiri people, flora, fauna, and other monsters, are part of jukurrpa, and as such and just like features of the landscape, Warlpiri people, flora, fauna, and other monsters, they are yijardu: they exist in the everywhen and are true. But herein, exactly, lay the rub for Mary-Lou. She realized that due to their lengthy absence from Yuendumu during her lifetime, they had become just-so stories to her, with no experiential knowledge of the actual monsters and little thought devoted to them. When the Pangkarlangu came to Yuendumu in 2013, their appearance filled her with wonder because in the

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most personally meaningful way possible, their presence signaled the yijardu-ness of jukurrpa to her. That is to say, it at once reaffirmed her trust in the strength of jukurrpa and simultaneously signaled that she had lost something vital before.

Mary-Lou and the Pangkarlangu During the phone calls in 2013, Mary-Lou would often pause and say, “But, Yasmine, they are here, they are really here!”—conveying a jubilant delight suffused by wonder, very much in the sense as Michael Scott defines it. “Wonder,” he says (Scott 2016: 476–7), “is inextricably linked not only to alterity but also to people’s ontological premises, and, indeed demonstrates the existence of such premises, however we theorize them.” The presence of the Pangkarlangu made them yijardu in both senses: present in the here and now and real. Mary-Lou’s wonder (something she certainly does not feel, or at least exhibit, when we encounter Milarlpa out bush or when Jarnpa are said to prowl around Yuendumu) then indeed spoke to the second part of Scott’s definition: it was not the alterity of the monster that caused her wonder but the way in which the Pangkarlangu’s appearance highlighted her “ontological premises” in the very instance that also showcased that they had become “loosened,” were less solid and all-encompassing than she had hitherto assumed. Only the loss of “belief in” the yijardu-ness (even if unreflected about until that moment) could cause such delight. And yet, every time she came to speak about it, her joy immediately became tinged by fear in a logical progression of following that thought line: if they are yijardu (here and real) then: why are they here? One thing Mary-Lou knew for sure about Pangkarlangu was that they steal, kill, and eat children. She had three toddlers in her care and during our conversations she oscillated between excitement and terror: What if they were here because they were looking for children to eat, how could she best protect her young daughter and her two grandsons? As her emotions swung, so did the ways in which we discussed the Pangkarlangu, and our conversations became knotted around the themes of fear, protection, questions about belief, which led to comparative deliberations about Pangkarlangu-like monsters elsewhere and—memorably—deliberations about extinction and how to reflect back on the world as she knew it through that new frame. In my discussion of our conversations below, I have disentangled these themes in such a way that each reflects about a particular aspect of Pangkarlangu and change. However, it is important to remember that the potency of our conversations came from the ways they were entwined and the multiple ways in which each theme refracted the next.

Pangkarlangu and Bigfoot During one phone conversation, Mary-Lou reported that she had overheard a sarcastic conversation between two non-Indigenous people earlier that day (for a similar scenario at another Warlpiri community, see Thurman, this volume). They had mocked the Warlpiri population for being swept up in a panic about the Pangkarlangu and had

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expressed their astonishment that even two highly educated Warlpiri persons “believed that the Pangkarlangu were real.” They had laughed and mentioned Bigfoot. This got Mary-Lou thinking about the similarities and differences between the Pangkarlangu, on the one hand, and Bigfoot, on the other hand. Via television, the internet, and yarns with non-Indigenous people, Mary-Lou, like most Warlpiri people, is familiar with Bigfoot and its associates: Himalayan Yetis, the American Sasquatch, Australian Yahoos and Yowies, and others of their ilk. In some regards, they all shared much in common: their conduct of being menacing yet distant, much as their semblance to humans, physically only distinguished by their hirsuteness and claws as well as the size of their “large, ungainly hands, feet and head” (Nicholls 1999: 85). Yet, to consider them all the same, as the two non-Indigenous people she overheard did, was almost shocking to Mary-Lou. Most Warlpiri people are aware that in the media, on many internet sites as well as in the mainstream consciousness, Bigfoot reports are often collated in tandem with UFO sightings, alien abductions, and other fringe beliefs. In fact, the Australian media has regularly reported on Australian Yowie sightings since the eighteenth century, and the Yowie continues to grace the covers of the NT News (incidentally, its fourth most “talked about” front-page headline is “Dog killed by Yowie,” April 21, 2009).4 In tandem, Warlpiri people understand that most non-Indigenous people in Australia consider belief in Bigfoot laughable, in exactly the same vein as described by Bader et al. (2017: 2) who delineate “how Americans relate to the paranormal: they are simultaneously fascinated and repulsed, intrigued and dismissive.”5 Further, Warlpiri awareness that these beings are considered as figments of the imagination of the gullible, the cracked, and the balmy goes hand in hand with their understanding that what is commonly provided as Bigfoot evidence—foot tracks, blurry images, rumors of sightings—is not universally accepted as “proof ” of their existence. However, the same kind of evidence derided by the mainstream in the case of Bigfoot has a different kind of traction in the Warlpiri context. In the Tanami Desert, human, animal, and monster presence has always been unequivocally established by exactly these means: seeing smoke in the distance, finding the remains of camps, and spotting and following tracks and footprints (among others, see Bird et al. 2005; Musharbash 2018). After all, the verb for going hunting in Warlpiri is wirlinyi, literally “to follow the feet, or footprints,” and Warlpiri people read footprints like I read books: they can tell who or what walked past where and when by simply observing the ground. The photograph of the Pangkarlangu footprint, in fact, spread like wildfire through Aboriginal Central Australia (see Figure 3.1). A teacher from Yuendumu recalls arriving at the neighboring Warlpiri community of Willowra, 150 kilometers to the north, and “being mobbed at the opening of the Willowra Learning Centre with people calling over their entire families to check out the evidence on my phone” (Rachel O’Connell, pers com). What to make of this, then? Mary-Lou played through the different options: Were Pangkarlangu real, were they made up? Was Bigfoot real, or was it made up? Were some beings real for Yapa (Aboriginal people) but not for Kardiya (non-Aboriginal people)? Inevitably, in these musings she circled back to the original wonder-causing experience, namely that until recently, she had not worried about Pangkarlangu

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Figure 3.1 Pangkarlangu foot track at Yuendumu Big Dam, August 2013. Photograph courtesy of Rachel O’Connell.

and that way had allowed them to slip into the possible realm of just-so-stories. The conundrum this posed at times seemed weightier than her worries for the toddlers: What did it say about her world? In this instance, the Pangkarlangu most truly were, to follow Cohen (1996: 4), “embodiment[s] of a certain cultural moment—of a time, a feeling, a place.” The presence of the Pangkarlangu made discernible to her the fact that her world contained multiple ontologies, that jukurrpa and non-Indigenous philosophies about (not only!) monsters coexisted not just in the world, but in her understanding of the world. This increased the danger of the Pangkarlangu beyond the threat they posed to the toddlers: once relegated to the realm of just-so-stories they had potential to take other creations of The Dreaming or, indeed, the entire Dreaming with them into the realm of the fictitious.

Pangkarlangu and extinction “What, though,” asked Mary-Lou, “if Pangkarlangu weren’t made up?” She was sure most of the time that they were not. “What if they had ‘just’ been extinct?” The notion of something just having been extinct took me by surprise, especially now that we all live in the “Anthropocene,” integral to which, as Debbie Bird Rose (2008: 81) so succinctly put it, “is the sixth great extinction event on Earth, the first to be caused by a single species, namely our own. Central Australia offers an excellent example. The

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rate of mammalian extinctions in Central Australia is the highest in the contemporary world” (Rose 2008: 82). However, the notion of something just having been extinct begins to make sense when considering the implications of Rose’s next sentence: “At the same time, much of the region is Aboriginal land, and much of the effort toward preservation of endangered species is collaborative” (Rose 2008: 82). Extinction is brought to the fore of Warlpiri consciousness through the recent proliferation of “rescue” programs in and around Warlpiri country. For example, Newhaven Wildlife Sanctuary (on Warlpiri Native Title Land), with the help of Warlpiri rangers, runs the world’s largest feral cat eradication program to create a refuge for threatened mammals, including the Mala (rufus hare wallaby)6: The Mala were released in the feral-free area named “Mala-Kurlangu” which means “home of the Mala” in the local Warlpiri language. The translocation involved transporting the Mala from AWC’s Scotia Wildlife Sanctuary, in western New South Wales, to Newhaven, supplementing the 27 released there from Watarrka National Park in November 2017. (Aus. Wildlife Conservancy 2018)

Warlpiri rangers are also engaged in trying to combat the encroachment of weeds onto the Tanami, which replace native grasses and alter the entire ecosystem. But even before the advent of the more recent “extinction management industry,” Warlpiri people were familiar with extinction. Colonization hit the Tanami hard and in its ongoing aftermath, in conjunction with the fact that climate change now reaches into all corners of the planet, including Central Australia, extinction has been part and parcel of Warlpiri people’s experiences since first contact. Take, for example, the common brushtail possum Trichosurus vulpecula, or the janganpa in Warlpiri. Yuendumu, after all, is built right next to a possum Dreaming track (Janganpa Jukurrpa) and only the most senior Warlpiri people remember seeing (and eating) possum in Central Australia.7 In the southern cities of Australia, however, possums flourish and are there encountered by Warlpiri people. The crux of Mary-Lou’s understanding of extinction, however, was based on her experiences: while there are no possums left at Yuendumu, she has seen them in abundance in the cities down south. The Mala, being cared for and protected at Newhaven, are doing well. While her experiences may invoke the concepts of and debates around refaunation and rewilding (think of the return of wolves in Europe and the United States, the Elwha River Restoration, or the introduction of beavers to Wales), this is not how she understood the issue. She again invoked jukurrpa and its potential to grant absences: dreamings disappear underground only to reemerge elsewhere (Myers 1991), and this spatial metaphor works temporally as well; they can disappear at one point in time only to reappear at another. And finally, if plants, animals, humans, weather patterns, and all sorts of other things can be threatened by or experience extinction, then why not monsters, too? This, Mary-Lou triumphantly said, is what had happened to the Pangkarlangu: they were gone for a while (during which they had faded from her consciousness as beings that were part of the world), and now they were back!8

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Pangkarlangu are back! Mary-Lou rang me to tell me that her brother Anton and his son, like other men the day before, had just set out to look if they could find the Pangkarlangu. She said that she was tempted to go too, to see for herself. Being at home, watching over the toddlers, and worrying about their safety was driving her nuts; she wanted to know why they had come. She knew that the men wouldn’t take her, and sighed, “Oh, Yasmine, I wish you were here. You and I could go for a drive, too, like the men, and look for the Pangkarlangu. You would do it, right? And you wouldn’t be frightened, and I would feel safe.” Alas, all we could do was talk, and talk brought us to discuss why she wanted to see them. In part, she said, she wanted to “just know”—this bit does not translate well from the Warlpiri. Really what she meant was that she wanted to see how they were yijardu (true) now that she had wrapped her head around that. In addition, her desire to go and look for the Pangkarlangu was driven by her ongoing concerns about the children in her care: she wanted to see the Pangkarlangu to assess whether the kids were safe from them. The more she thought about it, the more she realized that they might be “safe” because “Yasmine, you know, they have their own child!” Could it be that with their return (from wherever they had been and after their absence, during which whatever had happened to them) the Pangkarlangu had changed? Except in the myth of the woman-stealing Pangkarlangu, the gender of the Pangkarlangu is not usually explicitly stated (and Warlpiri does not linguistically distinguish between “he” and “she”). However, and as Nicholls (2014) reports, Pangkarlangu are one of the rare phenomena that Warlpiri people at Lajamanu paint figuratively in fine art and always with an oversized penis. She describes the Pangkarlangu as “equipped with a standard third leg, long, hanging genitalia that act as code for sexual excess and generally malevolent intentions, which include the stealing and even eating of children” (Nicholls 1999: 85). This is to say the usual perception of Pangkarlangu is that they are male. Mary-Lou speculated that they had been deep in the desert for decades, a long way away from people. And maybe that explained the biggest difference between Pangkarlangu as she knew them from stories and the ones present. These Pangkarlangu were a family: a husband, a wife, and a child. A big change indeed! (And a transformation in tune with Nicholls’s observation vis-à-vis the Pangkarlangu picnic scene that had been described to her by people from Lajamanu, that Pangkarlangu “seem to be becoming increasingly domesticated, acting a little more like ‘whitefellas’, this volume.)”9 To understand what it meant, though, Mary-Lou felt, she really needed to “meet” them to experience their presence. While her desire for this experience had to remain unfulfilled (had I not been in Sydney we would have set out immediately, to be sure), another person did acquire an entirely different kind of experience of the Pangkarlangu visit to Yuendumu. Consider this ethnographic snippet from a year later. There is a place on Yuendumu Hill, roughly a mile distant from the town, that I call “my office” as I often drive there to write my notes. It’s become a bit of a tradition that each time I return to Yuendumu, Mary-Lou and some of my other friends say “you’re back, let’s go to your office” and we pack a whole heap of children into the car and drive up for a group selfie. On my first return to Yuendumu after the Pangkarlangu sightings,

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when we planned to drive up to “my office,” Mary-Lou’s daughter Raqeisha, who at the time of the Pangkarlangu sightings was three and a half years old, screamed and refused to come along. “She is still frightened,” said Mary-Lou, “because this is where the Pangkarlangu went past.” At the time of the sightings, stories about Pangkarlangu would have made up much of the conversation during the day and especially in the evenings when people sit around the ambers of the cooking fires after eating dinner. As Mary-Lou and others were frightened about the Pangkarlangu killing and eating their young children and grandchildren, I can just imagine how people focused in their stories on graphic descriptions of how exactly Pangkarlangu kill, cook, and eat children. As I have described elsewhere, scaring children into staying close to adults and the fires is a stock in trade of Warlpiri childhood socialization (Musharbash 2016a). It is also very effective, as Raqeisha’s example shows. She would have been terrified by the danger posed by the Pangkarlangu and clung to her mother during the time the Pangkarlangu were said to be present. As the Pangkarlangu moved further west and then disappeared, Raqeisha’s fear would have lessened, but it is still emplaced at Yuendumu Hill, which she associates most closely with the monsters. This fear is embodied as well, causing her to tremble, cry, and scream at the mere thought of going to the hill. Raqeisha’s experience of the Pangkarlangu coming to Yuendumu translates directly into embodied and emplaced fear. To her, the Pangkarlangu are as true as her fear of them, and so they have fully reintegrated themselves into the consciousness of Warlpiri people at Yuendumu—even as they slowly moved further west and disappeared into the desert. Lastly, from a Yuendumu-centric view, the course of the Pangkarlangu’s journey is potent of meaning: that they are heading west metaphorically underwrites their reintegration into Yuendumu Warlpiri consciousness. West, after all, is where the Warlpiri heartland lies, and their path leads in the opposite direction (and away from) the road that takes people from Yuendumu east toward “town,” to Alice Springs, the Australian mainstream, non-Indigenous people, and the Global North more broadly.

Conclusion Through the case study of the Pangkarlangu coming to Yuendumu, I hope to have shown that and how monsters can assist in reflecting about social change and transformation. The monster in this chapter is both subject to discourses about its own extinction and the launchpad for discussion about transformation and change in other domains. The Pangkarlangu suffers as well as heralds change, and in this behaves very much like a classical monster in Cohen’s sense: “The monster polices the borders of the possible … From its position at the limits of knowing, the monster stands as a warning against exploration of its uncertain demesnes” (Cohen 1996: 12). Its reappearance raises pressing questions relating to the meanings of its former absence about the potential extinction of the monster itself: with its disappearance during Mary-Lou’s lifetime, the Pangkarlangu underwent the ultimate transformation from existing to not existing. However, it is unclear to Mary-Lou whether the Pangkarlangu went the way of the dodo or the possum, whether it disappeared through crossing into

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another genre (from myth to just-so-story), or whether its disappearance constitutes as a warning about potential ontological decay. In fact, the ambiguity surrounding monster extinction serves well to reflect about (1) Warlpiri and (2) Western understandings of potential extinctions per se, and of flora and fauna more specifically. These ambiguities become further illuminated with the reappearance of the Pangkarlangu. The Pangkarlangu family that walked past Yuendumu in 2013 stands for both the old and the new: this was not a lone male Pangkarlangu hunting for human children as they used to, but a nuclear family; a kin formation new to both Pangkarlangu and Warlpiri people. Further, they came from the east and moved west in a potent metaphor of refaunation: just as first colonialism and then climate change—both processes steered by the Global North—caused the disappearances of possums and Mala and all the other extinct and endangered species across Central Australia, including potentially Pangkarlangu so now, Pangkarlangu return west. They are coming “back home,” even if changed.

Figure 3.2  Pangkarlangu story from Willowra School. Photo courtesy of Rachel O’Connell.

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And while this return is ontologically soothing to Mary-Lou, it is terrifying to Raqeisha, who will grow up with an understanding of Pangkarlangu that is significantly different as well as remarkably similar to that of her mother. This seems to be true for Raqeisha’s generation, as Figure 3.2 illustrates. It shows one of the drawings of the children at Willowra School, a hundred miles north of Yuendumu, made in response to the report of the 2013 Pangkarlangu sightings. The monster heralds change as much as it changes itself, and change itself can be grasped through the monster.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Samantha Disbray, David Nash, and Rachel O’Connel for many helpful and fun conversations about Pangkarlangu. As always, heartfelt thanks to Yapapatu yurntumu-wardingki and especially to Kumunjayi Napangardi. Many thanks to Chris Marcatili for excellent editing and to Geir Presterudstuen for pointing me in the right direction. Writing, presenting, and rewriting this chapter would not have been possible without the ARC Future Fellowship FT130100415, for which I will be eternally grateful.

Notes 1

Interesting echoes of this ambiguous monster–human assemblage can be found in discussions about the North American Windigo (see, for example, Brightman 1988; DeSanti 2015; Podruchny 2004; Smallman 2014). 2 This reverberates with the fate of the bodies of deceased giants in Middle Ages Britain (see Cohen 1999). 3 Warlpiri burial practices have changed with Christianization. Today, the dead are buried in graves; in the past Warlpiri people practiced tree burial and secondary interment at a later stage—never, though, would people just be left; this is unthinkable (Meggitt 1962; Musharbash 2008). 4 See http://www.yowiehunters.com.au/index.php/media-clips for a listing of Australian newspaper articles about Yowie sighting since 1789, and for NT News see https://www.ntnews.com.au/news/northern-territory/the-nt-news-most-talkedabout-front-pages/image-gallery/14c34390b2dd6b44f3998a7ccd289f03 (both accessed August 18, 2018). 5 They provide vivid evidence of the same awareness of Bigfoot aficionados:

6

We found [Bigfoot hunters] to be well aware of the way they are perceived by outsiders. David … is careful who he tells at work, concerned that people will not trust a Bigfoot hunter to manage their banking. Keith would not dream of telling his fellow surgeons about his quest for the beast. (Bader et al. 2017: 161)

Domestic cats were introduced to Australia (for an overview, see Doherty et al. 2017) and are highly implicated in extinctions.

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8

Across most parts of Central Australia, the possum is said to have become extinct as a result of colonization and changed rainfall (see Foulkes 2001; Kerle et al. 1992). Its status has been changed to “endangered” more recently, as two small colonies of possums still exist south of the Tanami (see https://nt.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_ file/0007/200014/possums.pdf, accessed January 7, 2019). For other ways in which extinction has been linked to monsters on the one hand, and to cultural productivity on the other, see Sodikoff ’s (2012b) edited volume on the anthropology of extinction. As she spells out in her introduction:

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Just as the death of biotic species clears space for emergent creatures, extinction events propel the evolution of cultural productions, including science and technology, politics, history, and art. The prospect of human extinction has animated a doomsday genre of film and fiction, for example. This genre depicts alien invasions and zombie epidemics that annihilate the human species. The life-sucking creatures that fascinate us on the screen and page dramatize and invert the human–nonhuman relationship. (Sodikoff 2012a: 2–3)

Pangkarlangu-like creatures have recently entered the mainstream in the Australian TV series Cleverman, which combines different Aboriginal traditions with the genre of dystopian superhero fiction. Importantly, Cleverman includes the “Hairypeople,” a species distinct from but related to humans: stronger, hairier, with longer lifespans and altogether quite similar to Pangkarlangu and related beings from across the continent.

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Scott, M. W. (2016), “To be Makiran is to See Like Mr Parrot: The Anthropology of Wonder in Solomon Islands,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 22 (3): 474–95. Smallman, S. (2014), Dangerous Spirits. The Windigo in Myth and History, Victoria, Vancouver, Calgary: Heritage House. Sodikoff, G. M. (2012a), “Introduction. Accumulating Absence: Cultural Productions of the Sixth Extinction,” in G. M. Sodikoff (ed.), The Anthropology of Extinction: Essays on Culture and Species Death, 1–16, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sodikoff, G. M. (ed.) (2012b), The Anthropology of Extinction: Essays on Culture and Species Death, 1–16, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Stanner, W. E. H. (1979), White Man Got No Dreaming. Essays 1938–1973, Canberra: ANU Press.

4

Decline and Resilience of Eastern Penan Monsters Mikael Rothstein

My first experience with the Penan (Needham 2007; Nicolaisen 1976; Rothstein 2016a; Sellato 1994) was in the village of Long Iman in 2005, and it had everything to do with monsters. Two men had been found dead in the forest, and both corpses, so we were told, had been drained of blood from cuts to their ankles. People were alarmed and bewildered, but the strange deaths were given structure and meaning by introducing a monster as the perpetrator; sanén, a kind of vampire, had been around. Or was it ungap tilo, the monster that also devours men’s testicles (tilo meaning penis)? Nobody knew exactly, but everybody agreed that a monster was to be blamed. Today, thirteen years later, the Penans’ monsters are as important as ever. However, today, the Eastern Penan, a traditionally nomadic hunter-gatherer people of the Malaysian state of Sarawak in Borneo’s interior, find themselves within a context of unprecedented transformation. Due to severe logging, relentless Christian missionary efforts, and a general influx of modern media and technology, everything is in rapid flux—and the monsters of old do not remain unaffected. The minds that create and maintain them are under siege, and the physical environment to which they belong is being destroyed. The Penan, however, are reluctant to give up on their monsters. In fact, as I discuss in this chapter, monsters seem to be more resilient than most other aspects of the Penans’ traditional belief system. Monsters live on, partly in their traditional form, partly adapted to the new conditions. The explanation for this can be found by analyzing the event described in my introductory vignette: monsters seem to work well as explanatory devices, also in the face of cultural changes, if not cultural disasters. They have, as we shall see, a strange ability to uphold the world when it seems to fall apart. Below, after a few words of introduction, I discuss three monsters in the context of the above-mentioned changes (deforestation, Christian missionary work, and the impact of modern media and technology): Jenuing, a kind of anti-structural humanoid witch who causes harm to people; Tepun, a feline-like beast who, among other things, avenges the violation of certain taboos; and the horrific red-eyed “flying head” which appears at night and signals misfortune and catastrophe. Other monsters (there are lots of them: iguk, ungap, ket, rutei, etc.) could have been chosen as examples (Rothstein 2016a: 221– 43), but these three reveal issues central to my chapter in particularly clear-cut ways.

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A brief ethnographic note Traditionally, the Penan lived in nomadic clusters of fifteen to thirty individuals and primarily hunted and foraged in a certain area, their pengurip. The word urip means “life” or “lifespan” and thus pengurip designates the place where your life unfolds. The word refers specifically to the social life of humans, but the pengurip also encompasses other beings: animals, the dead, and different kinds of spirits and monsters. All depend, one way or another, on the forest—tana—which, incidentally, also translates as “world.” A typical pengurip covers approximately 300 square kilometers, and within its confinements people have precise knowledge of where to locate resources and where to expect danger. A camp is maintained for a few weeks, perhaps a little more, before the group continues on its nomadic path. When a new place is reached, a number of lamin—basically elevated platform shelters with a roof and no walls—are built, and people tend to carry out their daily business, preparing darts, mending blowpipes, producing dart poison, weaving baskets and blankets, cooking, or setting out to hunt and collect. The egalitarian group consists of people of all ages. Those who are experienced or particularly good at something will take the lead when relevant, but traditionally the group has no formal leadership. Prior to logging, the forest provided everything needed to stay alive and be well, and in most aspects the Penan have been self-sufficient. They have always traded with other indigenous peoples of the area, but do so more extensively now as the boundaries previously created by the rainforest have been weakened. In terms of religion, the Penan live in a world inhabited by a host of different beings. There are no major gods, but a variety of balei—spirits, some big, some small, some very powerful, others less so. These and other beings affect the lives of humans, and people’s social and cultural capabilities include moral as well as ritual knowledge of how to deal with the spirits. Monsters—like the spirits—are integrated into people’s everyday lives and could, at least to some extent, be described as a condition, as something unavoidable you have to be aware of and respond to. Nothing happens at random. Spirits and monsters are to be blamed, or appreciated, as they may sometimes come to people’s assistance. The ordinary events of the day simply imply spirits and monsters. Much of the Penans’ knowledge about these creatures comes not only from everyday experiences, but also from myth and legend, which provide a standard reference and a framework for what to expect. Consequently, I use reports from people’s personal experiences as well as mythological narratives as references. One particular kind of narrative, sukét, falls somewhere between myth and folktale. Such stories may be amazing and sensational, hair-raising and spine-chilling, or moral and instructive, but they are never considered fibs. Whatever a sukét is about is in some sense real, it exists as a part of the Penans’ world, and monsters are very often central figures. The way time is structured in a sukét sets the scene for the way monsters are experienced. In many other cultural contexts, the mythical past constitutes another kind of world compared to the one people live in, but not among the Penan: their world lies in a qualitatively unchanged continuum from ancient, mythical times, and monsters of mythical narrative therefore may also be encountered today. In traditional terms there is no beginning and there is no end to the Penans’ world, and so an element

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of changelessness prevails. However, what happened a very long time ago happens with less frequency and with waning intensity today, which is why I suggest that the present is best understood as a diluted version of the reality related in sukét narratives. When monsters show themselves, the Penan are reminded of, or even transported back to, a time of “thicker” relationships with spirits and other strange creatures.

Monsters and monster perception I tentatively differentiate between spirits and monsters for one particular reason: the spirits, balei, have no definite form but tend to assume shapes needed for specific purposes, while monsters are identified by specific outwardly features. In a sense, monsters are more concrete. Boundaries, however, are blurred also to the Penan themselves. Some would consider monsters such as those discussed here as types of balei, others would not. The question is unresolved, but my emphasis shall be on the beings feared by everybody as, what we would deem, monsters. In 2010, I asked a man if the monstrous creatures he knew also lived in my country. His answer was telling: “I really have no idea? I’ve never been to your place. You should know yourself.” I told him that I had never seen or heard of such creatures back home and that I had never met anyone who had. If that was the case, the man said, the spirits and monsters he knew of were surely not there. He continued: “You would at least have dreamed of them, or heard them.” The implications were clear; the monsters of the Penan belong to the rainforest, and in tong tana they will be encountered, at the very least in dreams or as auditory phenomena. Knowing of their presence in his world through experience, the man could not tell if his monsters also roam elsewhere—as that, also, would need to be established through experience. But what, precisely, is a monster to the Penan? What we are dealing with are ideas, notions, and conceptions, and thus narratives, descriptions, and things painted in words. I suggest drawing on Einar Thomassen’s (2016) characterization of gods is productive (see also Arumugam, this volume): First, gods have agency. They do things and act on their own initiative. They appear directly to humans. They cause things to happen. They communicate with humans by means of signs and oracles. Gods are thus characterized by a set of actions that are typically oriented toward the world of humans (Thomassen 2016: 368). I put forward that almost the same can be said about (in this case, Penan) monsters. I tentatively define the Penans’ monsters as ontologically accepted, locally bound (and thus contingent on the humans they relate to), anti-structural beings with foul intent. But in fact there is nothing to handle, and nothing to see. An investigation into the Penans’ monsters is primarily an exploration of semantics. Monsters are, just as their benign counterparts in mythology, troupers in sacred fiction, and a narrative stage for them to perform on is constantly created as the Penan tell their stories and recall mythological events. Monsters are designed to break down the normal systems of classification. They are by definition reversed creatures, anti-structural beings, paradoxical organisms impossible to place in ordinary taxonomies. Hence monsters are dangerous, a constant threat to humans and society, but for the very same reason cultures may also be

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understood through the monsters they bear (Cohen 1996: 4). Precisely because they avoid all normal categorizations and disregard societal standards, monsters also defy limitations. They are not bound by the same restrictions, physical or moral, as other beings. They are liminal characters outside the normal order of things, and when they manifest, it happens as an intervention into the normal order. Their form mirrors their behavior—always on the verge, always ambiguous and paradoxical and quite often intangible. Strangely, however, they also have a say in the maintenance of cosmic order. If we, following Cohen, consider monsters to be reflections of the culture to which they belong, the Penan’s monsters may be seen as expressions of the perils of the rainforest and symbols of the natural environment’s unpredictability. Until recently, when logging was intensified, the forest provided everything the Penan needed, and they continue to praise it as their beloved and generous home—but it is also a dangerous and treacherous place. Monsters, then, can be interpreted as embodiments of the hazards and uncertainties of the Penans’ physical environment and, I propose, as the impact of modernization and Christianity intensifies, monsters serve as mythological reflections of the new social threats. To be sure, people fear the monsters and do whatever they can to keep them at bay. This, however, does not change the fact that monsters are considered entities with the same right to roam the forest—to be in the world—as other spirits, humans, and animals. Monsters can be beaten, but not permanently slain; they are supposed to play their part in the social–ecological system. In some cases, as we shall see, monsters (some constitute a taxon while others are single individuals) even have a role to play with regard to human morality.

Birds and auditory monster presence Auditory monster presence supersedes visual monster presence. This, I suspect, has to do with the Penans’ concrete experiences of any kind of being that moves through the forest. They know, of course, a multitude of sounds from the forest, but sometimes they are unable to tell what the creature that emits the sound looks like. Indeed, visual identification is not necessarily the primary way of recognizing an animal. In some cases, as among the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea, birds are primarily sounds, their physical form being of secondary or no relevance at all (Feld 1982: 45). Similarly, monsters among the Penan are often perceptual sounds rather than shapes. One such example—although the bird is also well known by sight—derives from the call of the ouat, the  Rajah Scops-owl (Otus brookii). Ouat’s call at dusk, using a series of brief uuuw … uuuw … uuuw (c. thirteen times per minute), is interpreted as the monster Tepun’s sound. At the same time, however, people—thinking of it as a bird—know the owl to produce the same tone. So how do they distinguish between the sound of the monster and the bird? The answer is that they do not. Rather, the sound is potentially both, and depending on the social situation, it will be interpreted—and reacted upon— as either Tepun or ouat. This cognitive priority of the auditory admits a balanced encounter with the monster.1 It is never allowed to dominate or take over, but neither will it be ignored or forgotten. Tepun (more about which follows below) occupies a position where he affects people enough to be of lasting relevance, but too little to

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become a real everyday problem. The monster creates a balanced tension, which ensures that people are always sufficiently alert and ready to respond. We may even use Tepun as a template for all the challenges and dangers of the forest, and suggest that being mindful of him stimulates a general preparedness to respond to various threats.

Monster presence in dreams Monsters are also encountered in dreams, nyupin. People may be haunted by nightmares featuring eerie beings and simply be afraid, but sometimes dreams of the monstrous carry specific meanings and become part of a divinatory system, amén nyupin (amén meaning “sign” and njupin “dream”). Monsters showing themselves in dreams may be heralds of imminent disaster. In one case a woman told me that the occurrence of Ket—a demonological rendering of the diminutive primate known as Horsfield’s tarsier (Cephalopachus bancanus borneanus)—in a dream had been an omen of falling trees, which is deeply feared by the Penan (Rothstein 2016a: 224–8). Either way, monsters are once again mediated, in this case by the sleeping mind rather than experienced in stories or by means of sound. This kind of presence does not render the monsters less real or less present. Indeed in dreams they are pu’un, a verb denoting the reality or validity of something, they “are” in a very real way. In fact, what transpires when a person is dreaming is considered as real as events while he or she is awake.2 In the following I shall briefly present three monster examples and show how each of them has evolved in the face of cultural change.

Tepun The word Tepun designates a certain type of monster, but it also means “grandfather” (see also High, this volume). The only connection I have found between the name of the monster and the genealogical label is the superficial mentioning of Tepun as predecessor to a human in some myths. The word also carries a third meaning: “tiger.” Tepun is indeed described as a tiger-like creature—sometimes young, fierce, and agile, at other times old and worn. When weak, Tepun is always bald-headed, with teeth and claws falling out. His voice becomes feeble, his fur becomes patchy, and he loses his grip on things. Tepun may simply grow old and weak, but his miserable condition can also be the result of a fight against determined, strong, and cunning humans. Not least, Tepun may fall victim to humans with strong magical facilities or resources. A good amulet, sihap, and the knowledge of certain magical songs, tivai, which are sung in a special “spirit language,” lita for instance, will sap Tepun’s strength and eventually kill him. However, in general Tepun is in full command and very difficult to beat. Tepun’s presence is first and foremost detected by sound. You know him to be around when you hear a noise similar to that of da’un, the so-called umbrella palm (Licuala orbicularis; possibly L. valida) being dragged across the forest floor. You may also hear a slow, heavy breathing, and a kind of snoring. Tepun never appears at random. People may not be aware of the exact reason why he arrives, but usually his presence is related to a taboo violation. However, Tepun does not simply await the violation to occur; he often instigates it by deceiving people or luring them into traps. The basic motif is the

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“thing out of place” problem, which is a repeated theme in Penan lore: Typically, a fruit or another edible item is discovered by a person who eats it. If the food belongs to the place where it was found (for instance, under the tree where it grows), all is well, but if there is no congruence between object and place, it leads to disaster. The breakdown of the normal system of classification triggers Tepun to strike. Similarly, if the rules of social conduct between humans have been ignored, he may intervene (Rothstein 2016b). He may kidnap a person, drag him or her to his den, or rip off someone’s head and take it as a trophy. Sometimes he simply kills people. In one myth, for instance, two brothers swapped blow pipes, but forgot to exchange darts, thus rendering both weapons useless. Tepun lures the younger brother and kills him, but is himself killed by the older. It is difficult to explain exactly why Tepun responds the way he does, but it has to do with the anomaly of the situation. Systems of classification are there to keep things in place or mechanisms working, and when they are disrupted a minor or local cosmological breakdown takes place. Tepun, thus, is a chaotic element in the Penans’ worldview, a challenge to cosmic coherence and order, but also a creature that thrives on people’s violations of that order. Tepun is dangerous in himself, but he may also choose to cast a spell on people and thus be a more indirect threat. When something bad happens, people are inclined to consider how they may have caused Tepun to respond. The assumption is that something has been done wrong, or has been neglected, and that Tepun has sent a curse. Tepun is also known to occasionally mate with women, and when this happens their offspring will be semi-monstrous. One myth tells of Viat, the offspring of Tepun and a woman. The child (quite hairy) is antisocial and unable to do anything but imitate what others do. As he displays an exceptionally bad manner by eating uncooked food alone, his (human, social) father expresses fear that Viat may soon devour one of his own family. Eating uncooked food is in itself monstrous, and eating alone is one of the most objectionable things to the Penan. A woman from the village of Batu Bungan told me that she, when she was a child, “knew a man whose father was Tepun. He was always angry, and he was very strong. But he was easily fooled, because he was also quite stupid.” Physical strength and stupidity often coincide in the nature of the Penans’ monsters. Tepun usually appears alone, but a number of narratives tell of the creature’s habitat (always a den or cave, usually on a cliff which is difficult to ascend) where he lives with others of his own kin. Some are old, some are young. They appear to live together, but not as a familial unit, more like soldiers in a camp. Some Penan tell of an occasional female Tepun, while others deny that possibility.

Jenuing Jenuing is a female character about whom many stories are told, including proverbs. She is an individual, a person, not a type or category. Jenuing is messy, shabby, and bad smelling. Her hair is full of maggots, she dresses in tree bark, her nails are clawlike, and she is unable to carry out even simple tasks without inverting or capsizing things. Jenuing is malicious and evil for no apparent reason. It seems to be her nature to do humans harm, and she does it by interfering in human affairs in cunning and

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deceptive—and often quite bloody—ways. Sometimes her wicked intentions are exposed, but every so often she leaves her human victims dead, mutilated, or distraught. In some legends she ends up dead, but that does not prevent her from being present again elsewhere. Jenuing is perfectly antisocial and thus incompatible with everything human, even when she tries to lure people into thinking she is one of them. This, however, allows her to cast light on what is normal and desirable. It is the oldest trick in the book used by social groups to build their identity; by identifying the opposite, the wrong, the alien, and the dangerous, the normal is simultaneously emphasized. When the monstrous unfolds, it always happens against the normal as backdrop. Monstrosity is, simply put, impossible if there is no normality to deviate from. It is difficult not to interpret Jenuing as a monster in the service of the normal. One very good example is the story of how she manipulates a man, Abing, to think that she is his wife, Bungan. Jenuing kills Bungan, takes her place, and even as she turns the cooking pots around, puts out the fire when she needs it, collects rotten food, and serves her own nasal mucus as a soup for Abing, he only sees through her at the very end. Those listening to the story, however, know exactly what kind of monster Jenuing is. Her aim is always to destroy what is nice and orderly, what is normal and attractive. Stories featuring Jenuing, therefore, are emphasizing the orderly and normal by showing all the problems entailed by the opposite. Jenuing also enjoys reversing or perverting human rituals, like in the following story where she takes advantage of divinatory techniques, just as people would, but in her own peculiar way: Every time Tamen Lebui [a male character] went off hunting, Jenuing would take a stone, and she would strike her clitoris with it. Whenever the blow produced a spark, like the spark produced by a flint and steel, the direction the spark flew would show which way her husband had gone. (Mackenzie 2006: 193; tekék)

It appears Jenuing has lured Tamen Lebui to be her partner. It also appears that she wants to keep him under constant control, and—apart from that—her body has its extraordinary properties. She may appear quite human, but it is all deception.

The flying head The Penan have warned me against this dangerous and sinister manifestation many times. Apparently, it has no name apart from the flying head (at least I know of no other  designation), but it certainly resembles the Penanggalan of Southeast Asian indigenous lore and the Balan-balan of the indigenous communities in Sabah, the northernmost Malaysian state in Borneo. The flying head is, as the name would suggest, a human, often female head, which flies through the air silently and sometimes, but not always, with most of the body’s intestines hanging from its bloody neck. It will appear in front of you at night, wake you from your sleep, and just hang there, suspended in midair with red glowing eyes, staring at you with a death-like, open-mouthed face surrounded by wild, ungroomed hair. Typically, the head has been sent out by a sinister sorcerer from a village not too far away, but sometimes it appears on its own behalf.

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The flying head generally carries a curse, but on a few occasions people have told me that it came to them as a warning. In one particular case, a flying head appeared to two or three people in the village of Long Iman. They were scared and wondered what misfortune to expect. The head itself had caused no direct harm, but its nightly presence indicated impending trouble. Those involved were convinced that the head was that of a renget, a sorcerer, that lived upstream. This sorcerer had the ability to release his head from his body and send it out to cause calamities or augur bad things to come. The head had appeared silently at night, but once it was there the witnesses felt a great noise inside their heads. I was told not to look directly into the eyes of the flying head, should it come my way, as the fiery gaze is extremely dangerous. The flying head emits a strong, rotten odor, which spreads rapidly wherever it goes. Noticing the stench allows you to flee before it arrives, but only the very lucky will in fact escape. Also, in this case, the abomination points to its own opposition: the head will come when something is wrong, or things fall apart when it arrives. Its presence, therefore, triggers people’s attention to the orderly and the normal. Referring to an instance where a flying head had been seen in his village, a man told me: “We all did our best to behave well when it left,” thereby implying that order is the best defense against the monster. Indeed, the Penan, as all peoples in Borneo, will refer to their adat, their customs, their traditions, the right way of doing things. Perhaps monsters could be seen as reflections of what is not appropriate, what is not according to adat.

Old monsters in a new world In the face of current cultural changes some monsters seem to survive, some are transforming into something new, and some disappear altogether. Three examples follow.

Christianization (and the flying head) According to Christian mythology, the creator god transformed into a man, Jesus, claimed omnipotent sovereignty and total control, and demanded that his followers make his will come true. After returning from the realm of the dead, Jesus, according to Christian lore, says: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations […] and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you” (Matthew 28: 18–19). This clear-cut assignment (however mythological) has always provided the basis for Christian missionary efforts and ideology. The god of the Christians is far from local. He claims universal authority, and all other gods—and monsters—must vanish. The missionaries could, of course, deny the existence of the creatures entertained in Penan mythology, but they do not. On the contrary, they constantly confirm the reality of spirits and monsters, but at the same time they insist forcefully on a new interpretation.3 The spirits and monsters are all manifestations of Satan. In effect the missionaries import the Penan monsters into their own mythological habitat, a

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recontextualization that effectively transforms Tepun, Jenuing, the flying head, and all the others into New Testament demons in the service of Satan. It is not enough to believe in a new god.4 The Penan are also told to fear a new set of demons led by the worst of them all, Satan. Fearing their traditional monsters on traditional conditions is not an option. As Christians they are required to fear the monsters of the Church. These theological transactions never include negotiations or deliberations of any kind. The new reality is put to the Penan as a fait accompli. The old paradigm for understanding the monsters of the forest must be abandoned in exchange for a Christian demonology, spurred by an entirely alien concept, “sin.” The new god is generally not understood in the way the missionaries would prefer, but the new demonology is spawning. The Penan fear Satan and his demons, and unfold a religion of dread and anguish. Luten, the big, eternal fire, awaits all sinners, and nobody is in doubt that he or she is just that. Incidentally, a similar—but reversed— mechanism has been described with regard to the Korowai of Papua. Perceiving missionaries as radical strangers, Korowai speakers have deemed them “demons” and their Indonesian language “demon speech.” To the Korowai, language is intimately linked with ethnicity and land, and so, by designating the language of the Christian newcomers “demonic,” they effectively place themselves in opposition to the missionaries (Stasch 2007). The Penan, who also operate with a connection between language, ethnicity, and land, on the contrary, turn the linguistic demonization strategy against themselves. They have succumbed to the demands of the missionaries and accepted their own mythological categories to be best understood within the missionaries’ system of classification. In effect the missionaries have once again emptied a prevailing mythological matrix from its traditional meaning and replaced it with their own, in this case by transforming various imagined Penan creatures into a new breed of monsters (Shapiro 1987). The functioning of the monsters has thus moved from people’s everyday lives to an  abstract, Christian-theological realm. Monsters no longer pose a threat when someone is crossing a river or climbing a tree to fetch fruits. They have entered a new cosmology ruled by notions of “sin” and “salvation,” a dualistic paradigm which separates the monsters from the world of humans. Monsters are no longer reflections of the dangers of the forest, but agents in a sinister angel’s scheme to destroy the good god’s creation. The monstrous lives on, albeit in reformulated ways. The flying head, for instance, was recently (in 2017) described to me as a manifestation of Satan “who wants all of us to be burned in the big fire.” It was explained to me that when you see it, you know that Satan is observing you “because you are a sinner.” The flying head is still an omen of bad things, but of a Christian kind with extra-worldly connotations.

Visual media (and Tepun) In 2007, I was visiting the village Long Win with a group of hunter-gatherers. Electricity was already installed in a number of houses, and in one place a TV set was on. People crowded around it to watch what appeared to be an Indonesian showwrestling video (Indonesia being quite close to the area in Sarawak, where the Penan live). Show wrestling, of course, is not a sport but a staged fantasy where a rehearsed

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act is carried out. One participant plays the role of a heroic figure, another takes the part of a sinister and bad character. A simple narrative always accompanies the “fight,” so that spectators know why the opponents so fiercely go against one another. To emphasize things, the competitors often wear colorful outfits, including masks signifying their personas. The people I was with had probably watched a video before, but not of this kind. What they saw really scared them: it was the monsters they had always feared! They understood quite well that it was a film, but they did not understand that it was an act, and that the monsters were in fact show wrestlers dramatically styled for the occasion. One wrestler wore a ghastly tiger half mask and had tigerish patterns painted on his lower face, neck, and upper chest. Moving around in the ring, beating his chest, screaming, and displaying the powers of his character, the Penan immediately associated him with Tepun, and for good reasons. Tepun is not a tiger precisely, but a twisted, grotesque kind of being with the basic features of a tiger. My impression was that they saw the image of their imaginations, not in the context in which the monster traditionally belongs, but indeed in a situation where conditions were blurred or rather unclear as always when monsters are believed to strike. There were probably never tigers in Borneo (cf. Meijaard 1999; Sellato 1995). The monstrous in this case seems to be inspired by features from Chinese religion where the tiger-motif is prominent. The TV screen was mediating Tepun as a parallel to the cryptic narratives that would otherwise render him present, but with a significant twist: until the presence of TV and video, Tepun was a creature of stories told and sounds heard. Now, however, his presence—his reality—could also be confirmed visually. The people I was with (this is my assumption) saw the monster for the first time when they watched the wrestling video, a fact that may render Tepun even more real and powerful. In that sense modern technology has underpinned the Penans’ knowledge of Tepun and contributes to the ongoing construction of this particular monster, even in the context of Christian mythology taking over the specific interpretation. I later realized that Indonesian horror movies, a pop-cultural parallel to the wrestling shows, are extremely popular and, importantly, they often feature monsters inspired by local lore and legend.

Logging (and Jenuing) During the past four decades, and with an increasing intensity, logging has destroyed vast areas of Borneo’s rainforest and thus the home of the nomadic, foraging Penan. Clearly evil forces are in motion, and it is easy to identify them: they are the loggers. The Penan are wholly aware that the loggers are employees of greedy companies, but as one man said: “They hire evil people and evil spirits” adding a demonological dimension to his analysis of the situation. The simple fact that the loggers destroy the forest, including the very large, highly cherished, or tabooed trees, testifies to their monstrosity, but there is more. Loggers dwell in temporary camps in the forest, well out of the limits of local law enforcement and in some of these places all sorts of brutal and hard ways abound: drugs, violence, shootings, and prostitution. There are even rumors of slavery, kidnappings, murder, and more. The Penan know where it is dangerous to go and avoid areas where loggers stay.

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Talking to the forest people about the problem, it becomes clear that they interpret the situation according to old traditions. The behavior of the loggers is in principle comparable to that of monsters, and in order to protect themselves against the loggers the Penan employ the same apotropaic rituals believed to keep the old monsters at bay. It is, for instance, quite normal to see sign poles made of little branches, which would traditionally avert monsters from approaching, being raised to keep loggers out. I have also seen people place garlic-smelling leaves at strategic spots or burn certain kinds of smelly bark in the forest to scare loggers off. The traditional monsters dislike such smells and avoid them, and it is hoped that the much-despised loggers will do the same. I have also witnessed the ritual empowerment of sihap—amulets that would support people in their struggle to keep the intruders away. In short, the ritual measures taken against loggers are those traditionally used against monsters. But the cultural clash also takes on other forms. People in Ba Puak, one of the last nomadic groups to settle in a longhouse village, told me (in 2013) of a rumor they had heard: Jenuing had been seen driving a truck or a tractor not far from where we were. Unfortunately, I received no further details, but the basic outline is enough. The monster that traditionally inverts everything and causes destruction has (symbolically) teamed up with the loggers, who are doing exactly the same. By merging two symbols of ill fate, the traditional monster, Jenuing, and the new nuisance, the loggers and their machinery, an updated and deeply meaningful epitome of the Penans’ severe problems is produced. As we have seen in the story of Abing and Bungan, Jenuing is known to interfere in people’s lives by infiltrating and destroying their communities. Now, driving a truck, she is doing the same. Her specific behavior is different, but her monstrous intentions have not changed. In essence, symbols of traditional Penan culture are employed to comprehend what is taking place on the verge of the destruction of the Penan world.5

Conclusion Penan monsters are born out of storytelling, soundscapes, olfaction, and conversation. They are born in people’s imaginations, passed on from individual to individual, reflected in moral and ritual action, and are intrinsic to what it means to be human. But monsters are also products of the forest environment. They are reinterpretations of forest biology and forest sociality, reshaped variations of things that exist in concrete ways. Relating to monsters, therefore, means relating to the world. In essence monsters help people to be human by constantly reminding them of right and wrong, what to be aware of, and how to go about things. When the world changes, monsters change as well, and as I have shown they do so in a variety of ways. But the functioning of the monstrous in the world of the Penan remains unchanged: the world is constituted by order, but chaotic forces—monsters—are always trying to throw it into confusion or destroy it. For that reason monsters are greatly feared, but at the end of the day a reverse mechanism is at work. When people are being mindful of the monsters and take precautions against them, order is in fact reinforced, which is why the monstrous and the human, in strange ways, go hand in hand. As mentioned, monsters have a strange ability to keep the world together when it seems to fall apart.

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Notes 1

2

3

4

5

Georgia Curran (at the Living With Monsters Symposium, University of Sydney, December 2017) has shown how the Warlpiri of the Tanami desert incorporate birds in their religious songs and narratives, and how birds alert people of evil presence, thus pursuing what Yasmine Musharbash has pointed to that “in Central Australia, bird voices are indexical auditory signs of monstrous presence” (Musharbash 2016). In many cases the same can be said regarding the Penan (Rothstein 2018). Other indigenous groups through Borneo and neighboring islands display a similar pattern of perception, including a system of divination also very significant to the Penan (cf. Kershaw and Kershaw 2007). According to the so-called problem or threat simulation theory, dreams have evolved in the cause of human evolution in order to prepare us for the challenges we face in real life (Valli and Revonsuo 2009). By imagining unreal dangers and fears, monsters for instance, humans prepare for problems of more prosaic kinds. The modern ideal of a clear-cut theology with no strange beings apart from God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, Mary, and perhaps a few saints is in fact an illusion. In most cases, Christians will encompass a host of other creatures into their mythology. As an example, see Stewart 1991. Similar dynamics are parallels elsewhere. In Fiji the dominant Methodist and Catholic narrative is that the Christian god merely is the main god while all other spirits are relegated to minor positions underneath him. Pentecostals, on the other hand, utilize the Satan narrative for all spirits (cf. Presterudstuen 2014a, b). A parallel conversion happens when the presence of loggers is compared to the much-feared headhunters of bygone days. Today, pejamun [“evil people” or “assassins”] is a designation not only for headhunters, but also for loggers. Some Penan believe that headhunters still lurk in the forest, but for the majority the menace of headhunting and the fear associated with it have transmuted into a fear of the loggers.

References Cohen, J. J. (1996), “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” in J. J. Cohen (ed.), Monster Theory: Reading Culture, 3–25, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Feld, S. (1982), Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kershaw, M. E. and R. Kershaw (2007), “Messengers or Tipsters? Some Cautious though Concluding Thoughts on Brunei-Dusun Augury,” Borneo Research Bulletin, 38 (January). s.p. Mackenzie, Ian 2006. Dictionary of Eastern Penan. Incorporating the Principles of a Lexicographic Model Known as Explanatory-Combinational Dictionary (Including a Grammar and an English-Penan Index). Preliminary Version. Not published. Private print with permission. Meijaard, E. (1999), “The Bornean Tiger; Speculation on Its Existence,” Cat News, 30 (Spring): 12–15. Available online: http://www.researchgate.net/publication/236898561.

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Musharbash, Y. (2016), “A Short Essay on Monsters, Birds, and Sounds of the Uncanny,” Semiotic Review, 2 (September). Available online: https://semioticreview.com/ojs/ index.php/sr/article/view/14. Needham, R. (2007), “Penan,” in P. Sercombe and B. Sellato (eds.), Beyond the Green Myth: Borneo’s Hunter-Gatherers in the 21st Century, 50–60, NIAS Studies in Asian topics vol. 37, Copenhagen: NIAS Press. Nicolaisen, J. (1976), “The Penan of the Seventh Division of Sarawak: Past, Present and Future,” Sarawak Museum Journal, 24 (45): 35–62. Presterudstuen, G. H. (2014a), “Ghosts and the Everyday Politics of Race in Fiji,” in Y. Musharbash and G. H. Presterudstuen (eds.), Monsters and Anthropology in Australasia and Beyond, 127–42, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Presterudstuen, G. H. (2014b), “Ghost, Spirits and Christian Denominational Politics: A Case from Fiji,” in A. S. Dauber (ed.), Monsters in Society: An Inter-Disciplinary Perspective, 87–96, Oxford: Interdisciplinary Press. Rothstein, M. (2016a), Regnskovens Religion. Forestillinger og ritualer blandt Borneos sidste jæger-samlere, København: University Press. Rothstein, M. (2016b), “The Alimentary Construction of Social and Supernatural Identities. Religious Commensality Codes of the Eastern Penan of Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo,” in P. Antes, W. G. Armin, and M. Rothstein (eds.), Contemporary Views on Comparative Religion, 389–400, Sheffield: Equinox. Rothstein, M. (2018), “Interspecies Phylogenesis in Borneo’s Rainforest. Avian Divination among the Eastern Penan. On the Insertion of Animal Realities into Human Conditions,” in A. K. Petersen, I. S. Gilhus, L. H. Martin, J. S. Jensen, and J. Sørensen (eds.), Evolution, Cognition, and the History of Religion: A New Synthesis, 621–36, Leiden: Brill. Sellato, B. (1994), Nomads of the Borneo Rainforest. The Economics, Politics, and Ideology of Settling Down, Honolulu: The University of Hawaii Press. Sellato, B. (1995), “Zoolinguistics II. New Species in Kalimantan?,” Conservation Indonesia, 11 (1): 34–5. Shapiro, R. (1987), “From Tupa to the Land without Evil: The Christianization of TupiGuarani Cosmology,” American Ethnologist, 14: 126–39. Stasch, R. (2007), “Demon Language: The Otherness of Indonesian in a Papuan Community,” in M. Makihara and B. B. Schieffelin (eds.), Consequences of Contact: Language Ideologies and Sociocultural Transformations in Pacific Societies, 96–124, New York: Oxford University Press. Stewart, C. (1991), Demons and the Devil, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Thomassen, E. (2016), “What Is a ‘God’ Actually? Some Comparative Reflections,” in P. Antes, W. G. Armin, and M. Rothstein (eds.), 365–74, Contemporary Views on Comparative Religion, Sheffield: Equinox. Valli, K. and A. Revonsuo (2009), “The Threat Simulation Theory in Light of Recent Empirical Evidence: A Review,” American Journal of Psychology, 122: 17–38.

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Monster Mash: What Happens When Aboriginal Monsters Are Co-opted into the Mainstream? Christine Judith Nicholls

Growing up in the 1950s at Mannum on the Lower Murray in South Australia, where our family home overlooked the river, I knew of the Mulyewongk, an amphibious monster inhabiting the southeastern sector of the River Murray, including its tributaries, lakes, swamps, and caves. Mulyewongk is the local Ngarrindjeri name for a close relative of the Bunyip, which, for the most part, are underwater dwellers camouflaged by mud, algae, or other subterranean fluviatile detritus and slimy plant life. Further downstream the creature was also said to emerge as a terrifying terrestrial monster at times—still swathed in aquatic slime (see Bell 1998; Karloan cited in Berndt et al. 1993: 423). This monster—best known today as the Bunyip—is a primary focus of this chapter. My main concern is to examine its status loss as a direct result of the British colonization of Australia. This discussion is contextualized by my consideration of another monster that I learned about in adult life: the Pangkarlangu from Central Australia (see also Musharbash, this volume). In the 1980s, I moved to Warlpiri country in the Northern Territory to take up a position at Lajamanu, working first as a linguist and then as the principal of the bilingual Warlpiri and English school. During that time, I was regaled with narratives about Warlpiri Kinki (a generic term meaning “monsters” in the hominid classification), especially the desert-dwelling Pangkarlangu. A giant cannibalistic hominid, characterized by the absence of a neck, grossly enlarged genitals, a hirsute body, and dangerous talons (as demonstrated in Figure 5.1), the Pangkarlangu preys upon, steals, and executes human infants. Toward the end of a successful “kidnapping” day, the Pangkarlangu builds an open fire on which he barbecues his kill. After feasting on chargrilled babies’ delicious, tender flesh, come nightfall he sleeps off his tasty repast.  Pangkarlangu also roam in groups, wielding enormous wooden clubs and fighting one another in bloody battles. Warlpiri woman Molly (Jinjilngali) Napurrurla Tasman explained to me that from a Pangkarlangu perspective this is a form of recreation.

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Figure 5.1  Charlie Tjaruru (also known as “Watama”; c. 1921–1999, Tjungurrayi, Pintupi language/cultural group, Papunya NT), Untitled painting of a Pangkarlangu. Flinders University Art Museum Collection, Adelaide. Image © the Artist’s estate, licensed by Aboriginal Artists Agency Ltd.

Years later, in 2017, I had an uncanny encounter with an inorganic Pangkarlangu. It took place in an entirely different context: at a visual art exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia. There, I came across furniture designer and academic Trent Jansen’s Pankalangu [sic] Wardrobe—one piece among Jansen’s repertoire of aesthetically pleasing Pangkarlangu furniture (see Figure 5.8). To see the Pangkarlangu in such an entirely foreign mise-en-scène—represented as bespoke fine art and designer furniture destined to inhabit the domestic sphere— was for me an other-worldly experience, given its absolute disconnectedness from its epistemological and ontological places in the world. The Pangkarlangu’s realm is its vast desert homeland, where it roams unbridled. To encounter it in this hautebourgeois, sandstone institution typical of colonial architecture was unheimlich and rendered me virtually speechless.1

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These experiences in my early and later life have indirectly led to my exploration of the differing sociocultural and historical trajectories of the Bunyip and the Pangkarlangu. Both will then be discussed in relation to the Windigo, which inhabits the terrain of Algonquian-speaking North Americans, to compare the ways  in which these different monsters are faring in the contemporary colonial context. Each of these three anthropophagous monsters occupies an extensive demesne, encompassing a range of different language and cultural groups. Differences in language use and how these monsters are represented as they traverse their vast terrain are important matters for the traditional owners of the narratives pertaining to each respective being. Furthermore, their terrains differ ecologically: the Mulyewongk/ Bunyip exists along a considerable stretch of Australia’s largest river system, the Murray–Darling, the Pangkarlangu cuts a swathe through the vast Australian Central and Western Desert regions, while the Windigo traverses the freezing North American tundra and boreal forests. As I will show, the Bunyip, a behemoth with a considerably lengthier postcolonial history than that of the Pangkarlangu, has been all but entirely divested of its original standing as a respected ancestral being, to the extent that it is now regarded by mainstream Australia as an imaginary, child-friendly fabrication. The fate of the Bunyip is discussed first in this chapter and then compared with that of the Pangkarlangu. The aim is to use these case studies to identify the reasons why and to what extent these Aboriginal monsters have lost traction over time and to explain their differing trajectories. The Windigo is then deployed as a Northern Hemisphere analogue for the Bunyip and the Pangkarlangu, in order to illuminate the processes that have led to their social transformation and perceived status changes in the wake of colonization. This chapter needs to be read against the background of brutal colonial practices ranging from massacres, enforced diaspora, and harsh assimilatory measures, leading many Aboriginal people to give up or modify the beliefs and practices that for eons they had held dear. As Patrick Wolfe (1994: 93) described settler colonialism, it is predicated upon displacing Indigenes from (or replacing them on) the land—as Deborah Bird Rose (1991: 46) points out, to get in the way, all the native has to do is stay at home. Since it cuts through Indigenous society to connect directly to its territorial basis, it is awkward to speak of settler-colonisation as an articulation between coloniser and colonised. As a social relationship, it is best conceived of as a negative articulation. The cultural logic that is organic to a negative articulation is one of elimination.

Without exception, classical Aboriginal monsters are inextricably connected to specific locations, territorial bases, or “country,” as it is known in Aboriginal English. The specific nature of that “country” determines not only the form a monster takes, but also its modus operandi, including its choice of prey and its unique way of killing or transforming its victims.

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The Bunyip’s entry into the Australian lexicon For millennia Aboriginal people living along the Murray feared the Bunyip on account of its propensity to grab unsuspecting people, especially the young, then drown them or transform them into other dangerous underwater creatures.2 The Bunyip first began to grip the colonial imagination during the nineteenth century’s frontier era as British colonization made its way across the country. Over decades the Bunyip has been adopted, appropriated, and has undergone transformation into the broader context of popular cultural Australiana, eventually becoming an emblem of pan-Australian identity. Today, the “Bunyip” is the most celebrated and well-established lexical and conceptual co-option of an Aboriginal monster into anglophone Australia. According to Dixon et al., “Bunyip,” now largely considered as an English word, is derived from “banib,” a Wemba Wemba word from western Victoria. The authors cite an unnamed 1845 source describing the creature as “a fabulous, large, black amphibious monster supposed to inhabit waterways. It was thought to be the cause of loud noises in the night and said to devour women and children” (1990: 109). While there are somewhat variant versions of the word’s linguistic origins, these do not undermine one another, given the Bunyip’s embeddedness in specific proximate areas of the River Murray system. According to Blake, “banyip” (alternatively “panhip” or “panip”) appears to be the root of the now-ubiquitous word concept. On balance, the word’s source seems to be an interrelated dialectical cluster of the western Kulin Australian languages Wergaia, Wathawurung (now spelled Wathaurung), Tjapwurrung, and the nearby Yorta Yorta language (Blake 1997: 98). The closely related Wemba Wemba language also has another word for the same creature, “tanggel” or “danggel” (Blake 1997: 98; Hercus, cited in Thieberger and McGregor 1994: 107). Luise Hercus described the “banbib” and “banib-ba-gunubar” as a “bunyip-cum-swan; a black bunyip with a long, thin neck” (1986: 256) Blake (1997, 2011) referred to the semantic extension of the term “panyip” in the figurative sense to the “coal-sack in Milky Way.” There are also expressions for different subspecies of the Bunyip, including the long-necked bunyip (Hercus 1969 n.p. and 1986: 256); see Figure 5.4 for an illustration of the long-necked variety holding a naked woman in his powerful jaws. While the nomenclature for this fearsome water-dwelling monster differs in other Australian Aboriginal languages, synonyms for Bunyip remain largely unknown outside of their specific locales. Not long after the cultural body of the Bunyip entered the Anglo-European mindscape its speedy uptake resulted in its eventual morphing into the generic term used today in pan-Australian popular culture. The general principles of borrowing from any of the original Australian languages apply to the British colonists’ early adoption of Bunyip.3 Borrowings from Australian languages were mostly nouns, with the majority relating to flora and fauna that the British had never before encountered. If an English word concept for a thing, idea, or being already existed, then only rarely was an Aboriginal word used in its place. Furthermore, once a word that had been borrowed from one Australian language was co-opted into English, it largely overrode variants in other Australian languages. As a

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result, the Ngarrindjeri Mulyewongk, a near-synonym for a Bunyip, is all but unknown outside of one part of South Australia. Another factor that has continuing ramifications is monolingual English speakers’ requirement for words that are easy to pronounce. Mainstream Australia’s inability and/or unwillingness to master the pronunciation of Aboriginal words that do not conform to English phonology or morphology have been continuing issues since first-phase colonization. This is one reason why certain Aboriginal monsters, although equally impressive as the Bunyip, are unlikely to go mainstream—the Pangkarlangu being one example.

The Bunyip in the early colonial period While today the Bunyip is portrayed as an imaginary, anthropomorphized, panAustralian being with overtones of the ridiculous, in frontier days the Bunyip was no joke. Early British colonizers’ were predisposed to believe in outlandish monsters inhabiting Australia—and elsewhere in the Southern Hemisphere—was to some extent foreordained. The notion of “the Antipodes” (literally “with feet opposite”), specific to the Southern Hemisphere, is traceable back into antiquity (see, inter alia, Flint 1984). Fausset (1995) writes that during the eighteenth century, coterminous with first-wave British colonization of Australia, Anglo-European notions of an unknown “upsidedown” Great South Land abounded. It was deemed to be a place of “hybrid species, black swans and so on” (1995: 189). Europeans imagined people walking upside down and believed in the existence of “humanoid animals, fish-like or bird-like mutations.” Belief in “antipodean monsters” was in many cases treated as accepted fact (Fausset 1995: 1). Both Flint and Fausset suggest that, by extension, claims of Antipodean monstrosity included the region’s Indigenous human inhabitants. These Anglo-European attitudes were projected onto Australian flora and fauna but, most destructively, onto Australian Aboriginal people themselves—enduing them with a kind of monstrosity by proxy. Perhaps more surprisingly, Fausset attests that “even as the austral regions became known and legend gave way to reported fact, the discovery of unknown peoples with bizarre customs, and of strange flora and fauna, seemed again to suggest an ‘upside down world.’ It seemed to offer, along with Europe’s traditional stock of myths, a rich source of literary images” (Fausset 1995: 5). Early colonial fiction and visual artworks reveal colonizers’ very real fears of the Bunyip, undoubtedly underpinned by their encounters with Antipodean creatures the like of which they had never seen. Strange animals, including kangaroos, emus, koalas, black swans, echidnas, and platypodes, existed—why shouldn’t the Bunyip be real? William Buckley (1780–1856), an escaped convict who lived with the Wauthaurang people in southern Victoria from 1803 to 1835, reported a partial viewing of a Bunyiptype aquatic creature (Buckley, cited in Morgan 1852 n.p.). There are numerous other putative early “sightings” by convicts and early colonists attesting to the Bunyip’s reality (Barrett 1946; Clarke 2007; Mulvaney 1994; Taplin 1879). Colonizers began using the word “Bunyip” very early in the piece. After reviewing academic literature and early newspaper reports, Philip Clarke writes that “from the

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1840s, newspapers in southeastern Australia contained many references to ‘Bunyip’ spirits as living animals” (Clarke 2007: 145; also see Ramson 1988: 109). At Mt. Gambier, in the southeast of South Australia, it was reported by a colonist in 1852 that “when the monster of the bulrushes made his appearance, the blacks on the bank … set up a fearful yell … The animal was [about 3.7–4.3 meters long] and I suppose must be a bunyip, so long supposed to the native’s imagination” (South Australian Register, December 30, 1852: 3; also cited in Clarke 2007: 145). Two years later, it was claimed by another European that, after an alleged sighting at Melrose in the southern Flinders Ranges of South Australia, “respectable people” had seen Bunyips in large waterholes of the colony and that “intelligent blacks” had confirmed their existence (South Australian Register, January 25, 1854: 3; also cited in Clarke 2007: 145). Other historical evidence indicates that during the frontier period in Victoria the Bunyip was feared and respected as “real” by a broad range of missionaries, anthropologists, and eminent members of the colonizing group, although from the beginning there were those who questioned the being’s existence. Newspapers often reported on sightings (Port Phillip Herald, February 11, 1847; Bell’s Life in Sydney; cited in Dixon et al. 1990). One believer was the missionary-cum-ethnographer, Reverend George Taplin, whose claim to real-life knowledge of the creature’s physical existence arrived via the auditory channel—he claimed to have heard the booming sound made by the creature emanating from the depths of the River Murray (Clarke 2007: 145; Taplin 1879). Taplin worked with the Ngarrindjeri people of the Lower Murray, whose word for the Bunyiptype monster he spelled as “Moolgewanke” or alternately “mulyawongk.” Reports of strange or seemingly inexplicable water turbulence elsewhere in the Murray system led to similar statements of belief. Henry Kingsley (1830–1876), a British-born novelist, migrated to the Victorian goldfields in late 1853 (Phillips 1974). Bunyip dread is at the heart of his novel The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn, which became an instant success. An excerpt follows, with accompanying image (Figure 5.2): “Mother, what country is that across the river?” “The forest, child.” “There’s plenty of quantongs over there, eh, mother, and raspberries? Why mayn’t I get across and play there?” “The river is too deep, child, and the Bunyip lives in the water under the stones.” “Who are the children that play across there?” “Black children, likely.” “No white children?” (Kingsley 1859, n.p., original punctuation retained)

The same passage is repeated almost verbatim in a novella Kingsley wrote in 1871 following his return to England. Titled The Lost Child, this story has the same little white boy defying his mother’s edict by deliberately crossing to the other side of the river, where “he stood, naked and free, on the forbidden ground” (1871: 19). Eventually, a search party finds the lost child’s body under a tree where it “lay, dead and stiff ” (1871: 38). The figure of the white child, or sometimes children, lost in the vast Australian landscape (or waterscape), is ubiquitous in colonial Australian literature.4

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Figure 5.2  “Mother—What country is that across the river?” From Henry Kingsley’s The Lost Child, Macmillan and Co., page 15. Illustration by L. Fröhlich. Image scan courtesy of Olivia Lang.

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Figure 5.3  “The Story of the Bunyip” by Francis Thomas Dean Carrington; July 29, 1889. Image courtesy of Troedel and Co. and Wikimedia Commons for better readability.

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Visual imagery of the Bunyip also bespeaks early migrant Australians’ anxiety about their children’s safety in such “foreign” terrain. More than two decades after Kingsley’s first novel, journalist and illustrator Tom Carrington (1843–1918) drew The Story of the Bunyip (1882). In Figure 5.3, two small white children huddle together while a very tall, strong Aboriginal man of senior years and stately appearance points backwards to a flowing river. The children appear to be engrossed, although concerned, as the man warns them of the Bunyip in those waters. While the Bunyip is not manifest, as an invisible, submerged being its significance is magnified, becoming more, rather than less, terrifying. The Story of the Bunyip is an ambiguous image. Of course, visual imagery is always open to interpretation. From this colonial artist’s perspective, it is perhaps the Bunyip’s conspicuous absence and insubstantiality that fuels that viewer’s imagination, thus underpinning its ambivalence. On one level, it is possible to interpret this image as a sympathetic portrayal of its Aboriginal protagonist.5 A tall black man of dignified bearing is positioned as the knowledge holder, generously passing on his wisdom to young children who are listening respectfully and intently. While he may be frightening the children, the man is imparting to them “healthy fear” (Nicholls 2014) of their aquatic environment, as no doubt he has done with young kin in his own extended family. The man’s gravitas imbues him with a presence both plausible and venerable. Another possible reading, also taking into account the three figures’ physical representations and bodily postures, could lead viewers to interpret this image as being tinged with and tarnished by the everyday racism of that era. The Aboriginal narrator towers over the seated brother and sister who, leaning against one another, are nursing a pet cat, symbolic of Anglo-European domesticity. The children, particularly the girl, are dwarfed by the looming figure of the muscular and exceedingly tall, dark-skinned man whose penetrating gaze addresses them directly, emphasizing his height and powerful presence. The man’s height is such that the top of his head is actually above the eaves of the children’s wooden shack. Compared with the white children he is giant-like, and giants have figured adversely in stories and beliefs the world over. But the reason the children in this image are unable to disregard the storyteller is less about the man’s height than their own relative smallness, amplified by their fearful demeanor and obvious bodily weakness. This opens up a significant question of what or of whom are the children actually afraid: the unseen Bunyip, the giant Aboriginal man, or both? Little more than a decade later, an image titled Aboriginal Myths: The Bunyip (see Figure 5.4) evinces a significant change in how the Bunyip is portrayed. Rather than leaving the Bunyip’s form and mode of dispatching its victims to the viewer’s imagination, the artist, Macfarlane, has created a hyper-realistic image in which any distinction between the real, the fake, and the Anglo-Australians’ dominant cultural predilections about Aboriginal “myths” has been blurred. Macfarlane’s image prefigures certain early-twentieth-century American films, for example, the Perils of Pauline or King Kong movies, both of which feature beautiful maidens in distress. Macfarlane’s portrayal of the monster gripping a struggling young woman between his giant fangs and powerful jaws is one designed to generate populist

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Figure 5.4 “Aboriginal Myths—the Bunyip,” photomechanical reproduction: halftone. State Library of Victoria Accession Number: IAN01/10/90/12 Image Number: mp006089 Notes: Print published in the Illustrated Australian news. Title printed below image l.c. Publication: Melbourne: David Syme & Co., Engraved in image l.l.: J. Macfarlane (1890).

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appeal. This image presages the beginning of the Bunyip’s journey into the realm of Australian popular culture, while providing justification for the artist’s sexist portrayal of an attractive, naked, presumably Aboriginal, woman.6 Macfarlane’s image was published in a popular newspaper, the Illustrated Australian News, where there was already an established unofficial policy that visual and textual subtlety be sacrificed for populism and profitability. This entrepreneurial trend continued as the Bunyip wended its way through the twentieth century and into the present.

The Bunyip in the twentieth century: Its passage from monster to appealing, wholesome kid-lit icon For many years now, the Bunyip’s Aboriginal genealogical origins, linguistic variations, and locational specificity have been largely forgotten and/or disregarded. The National Library of Australia’s Trove database lists an astonishing 146, 402 Australian publications with the word “Bunyip” in their title. Many of these publications represent the Bunyip as benign, if not a figure of fun. Since the middle of last century, a high proportion of these are children’s books in which the intimidating appearance and traits of the Bunyip have been eliminated or sanitized, purging the creature of its most salient early contact characteristics. How and why has this Aboriginal monster become so compromised and enfeebled? Its social function in alerting people to the dangers of specific riparian parts of Australia, writ large in precolonial days, is equally relevant today as it was almost 200 years ago. One important exception to such saccharine representations is Dot and the Kangaroo, now regarded as a classic Australian children’s book. Written by the English migrant Ethel Pedley (1859–1898), and first published posthumously in 1899, Dot and the Kangaroo has remained continuously in print. It’s chock-full of Australiana, with Australia’s “weird” fauna deployed strategically. While Pedley’s Bunyip is utterly terrifying, the action is set in the Outback, the dry, remote, and supposedly unpopulated inland Australia. The Bunyip could not have been more thoroughly displaced from its natural habitat. Filmmaker Yoram Gross adapted the book in 1977 and set it in the Warragamba Dam area of New South Wales (Gross 1977). The Bunyip scene combined live action with animation, and friends who were young children when they first viewed the film confessed that this scene gave them nightmares.7 For the most part, however, this once-feared monster has been successively purged of any attributes that could potentially evoke terror. This change of direction is premised on the dominant conception in the Western world that young children need shielding from even mildly alarming subject matter. In contradistinction to at least some early colonizers who believed in and feared Bunyips, particularly because of their well-founded concern about their children, when children’s picture books and other popular culture media began “colonizing” the Bunyip, this once highly respected monster began a rapid descent into the imaginary zone, where to this day it remains. Over time this transition has been reductive. In less than two centuries the Bunyip has spiraled into an anodyne version of its former

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fear-inspiring self, reflecting its transformation from beast to simple but likeable rogue, sometimes featuring in the repertoire of “tall stories” told by roughhouse Aussie blokes (e.g., see Jenkin 1992). Alternatively, the Bunyip has morphed into an endearing teddy bear–like figure, or hybrid of both types. In the late twentieth century the Bunyip became the subject of more than ten Australia Post stamps, most of which depict the creature as “legendary,” either overtly or implicitly. A 1994 stamp (see Figure 5.5) depicts the “Bunyip of Berkeley’s Creek” as an older, overweight but congenial Aussie chap. With braces hitching up his trousers, and holding a mirror to his face between arthritic toes, the Bunyip asks himself, “What am I?” The anthropocentrism of this image leaves no trace of a relationship to the original Bunyip. An inglorious transformation from monster into an elderly version of Winnie the Pooh seems to have been wrought. Inadvertently, no doubt, the stamp’s designer,

Figure 5.5 Ron Brooks (Designer), July 14, 1994, “The Bunyip of Berkeley’s Creek,” Photolithography, 35 mm × 35 mm, Printer Leigh Marden Pty. Ltd., National postmark, Bunyip Vic 3185. Set of 4. Image courtesy of Australia Post Philately, Melbourne, Australia.

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Ron Brooks, hit upon an essential trait of the mid- to late-twentieth-century Bunyip: this once-fearsome amphibious being was in the grip of an identity crisis of monstrous proportions. It is possible for artists or designers to override an author’s intentions, which may or may not have reflected the book’s author, Jenny Wagner’s original point. (Wagner 1988) The only stamp in the series to have been designed by an Aboriginal artist is Jerry Morrison’s 45-cent stamp (see Figure 5.6). It is the least sentimental and therefore most convincing visual iteration of the original Bunyip’s qualities. Unlike the other stamps, Morrison uses bold primary colors in his artwork, investing his figure with a convincingly robust stance, teeth bared. This visual representation obviously references aspects of its earliest monstrous traits. While there is a cartoonish quality to Morrison’s work, this does not undermine the power of the image, which is set against

Figure 5.6  Jerry Morrison (designer), July 14, 1994, “A Bunyip of Aboriginal Legend,” Photolithography, 35 mm × 35 mm, Printer Leigh Marden Pty. Ltd., National postmark, Bunyip Vic 3185. Set of 4. Image courtesy of Australia Post Philately, Melbourne Australia.

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Figure 5.7 Marg Towt (Designer), July 14, 1994, “The Bunyip of Natural History,” Photolithography, 35 mm × 35 mm, Printer Leigh Marden Pty. Ltd., National postmark, Bunyip Vic 3185. Set of 4. Image courtesy of Australia Post Philately, Melbourne Australia.

a background of “country.” Consonant with classical Aboriginal art, Morrison does not deploy linear perspective. By contrast, while the creature in Marg Towt’s stamp “The Bunyip of Natural History” in Figure 5.7 has sharp claws, her Bunyip’s stance, its nonthreatening facial expression, and its location on grassy slopes bring to mind Badger in The Wind in the Willows rather than a creature “at home” in the harsher Australian riverine setting and landscape.

The Bunyip and the Pangkarlangu in the contemporary colonial context Unlike the Bunyip, the Pangkarlangu began being appropriated into the Australian “mythoscape” only during this present century, meaning that this Central and Western

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Desert monster still remains relatively unknown in the Australian mainstream. The reasons underlying this difference are to be found in the respective monsters’ divergent colonial histories. In contrast to the Ngarrindjeri, most Warlpiri still live on their country in the Australian Central Desert. There are still many fluent speakers of Warlpiri. Although the Warlpiri have been subject to strenuous efforts to convert them to Christianity, and many have done so, at least superficially, this has not meant discarding their longer-term convictions, apropos of their belief in spirits and monsters, including the Pangkarlangu. The Pangkarlangu remains part of Warlpiri religious structuration. Kinship ties to Dreaming ancestors, including beings like the Pangkarlangu, exist to this day. Warlpiri friends from Lajamanu ring me every now and again to relate recent sightings of Pangkarlangu. I was told recently about a group of Warlpiri people almost stumbling upon (then rapidly taking off in another direction) an entire family of Pangkarlangu sitting in a circle on the ground having a picnic. This small colony of Pangkarlangu was described as a nuclear family, comprising two parents and several children, unlike the considerably more extended Warlpiri kinship affiliations, which constitute the norm. While Pangkarlangu seem to be becoming increasingly domesticated, acting a little more like “whitefellas,” Warlpiri belief in the actual existence of these giant cannibals has not eroded, although nowadays the behavior of these beings does reflect certain elements of the brave new world that has been imposed upon the Warlpiri (see also Musharbash, this volume). Insofar as Warlpiri people from Lajamanu are concerned, monsters always have been and continue to be an integral part of the natural order of things and of everyday life (see also Curran, Musharbash, and Thurman, all this volume). They are not regarded as “Other” as is so often the case with monsters in contemporary Western cultures (see, for example, Cohen 1996). The fact that Pangkarlangu have retained their original features while taking on certain behavioral traits of non-Warlpiri people reflects present-day Warlpiri systematic structuration, via which means they demonstrate their ability to accommodate and absorb difference when necessary. It is evident, for the most part, in how the Warlpiri have managed to adapt to the presence of the predominantly white interlopers who have intruded on their country. One example of this is the Warlpiri success in drawing many “outsiders,” particularly those who stay on Warlpiri country for lengthy periods of time (including the writer of this chapter), into their kinship system, which involves a complex web of non-negotiable interconnections, rights, and obligations. In other words, Warlpiri have the collective capacity to make many of “us” fit in with “them,” a trade-off that reflects the principle of reciprocity that is a hallmark of Warlpiri social practice. Hence, the Pangkarlangu have remained the monsters of old, while now also incorporating certain behavioral elements of the colonizers (e.g., having picnics, traveling in nuclear family groups, or, for that matter, “hanging out” solo). By contrast, the Mulyewongk’s diasporic journeying across the entirety of Australia (under the generic name “Bunyip”) reflects the fact that Ngarrindjeri country was colonized and Christianized a good deal earlier than that of the Warlpiri. First contact with the desert Warlpiri people came considerably later, in some cases as late as the

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early 1950s. In addition, their desert homeland is regarded by non-Warlpiri as less desirable for permanent residency. It is also true that a critical core of Warlpiri people is determined to hang on to their beliefs against the greatest of odds. While those Ngarrindjeri still living on “country” do hold dear certain beliefs, their country made for good fishing and farmland, meaning that it was quickly usurped— and the traditional owners were soon outnumbered—by the colonizers. This meant that Ngarrindjeri land as well as the river and its attendant islands and tributaries have never been returned to them other than in tokenistic ways. Many Ngarrindjeri now live in Adelaide (on traditional Kaurna country) and have intermarried with Kaurna people, with other diasporic Aboriginal people, and with non-Aboriginal people. Some of the younger Ngarrindjeri people I have met tend to regard stories of the Mulyewongk as folk tales rather than as real and ontologically significant, despite this being hotly contested by some older people.

Comparing the mutant monsters down under—The Bunyip and Pangkarlangu—with the North American Windigo When considering monstrous adaptation and appropriation, comparative case studies prove instructive. I now turn to comparing and contrasting the Mulyewongk/Bunyip and the Pangkarlangu’s sociocultural and historical trajectories with those of the Windigo. Prior to colonization, the Windigo was feared and revered by Algonquian-speaking groups, whose territories traverse what are now known as the United States of America and Canada. Akin to the Pangkarlangu, the Windigo’s monstrosity is closely associated with the extreme climatic conditions in which it lives. While the insatiable hunger of the Pangkarlangu is in part related to the extreme heat of Australia’s desert region, the freezing subzero temperatures affect the Windigo’s ability to find enough to eat. In both cases, scarcity of food, especially meat, is the common factor that partially accounts for their cannibalism (Johnston [1995] 2001; Podruchny 2004). According to the Ojibwe scholar Johnston, The Wendigo was gaunt to the point of emaciation, its desiccated skin pulled tightly over its bones. With its bones pushing out against its skin, its complexion the ash-gray of death, and its eyes pushed back deep into their sockets, the Wendigo looked like a gaunt skeleton recently disinterred from the grave. What lips it had were tattered and bloody … Unclean and suffering from suppurations of the flesh, the Wendigo gave off a strange and eerie odor of decay and decomposition, of death and corruption. (Johnston 2001: 222)

Podruchny (2004), inter alia, cites “starvation cannibalism” as one explanation for Windigo behavior. There are obvious differences between the Windigo and the two Australian monsters under discussion. The first is that the Windigo is a shape-shifter, unlike either Pangkarlangu or the Bunyip.8 The idea of the Antipodes as a zone that gave

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rise to bizarre creations, human and nonhuman, was not applied to North America. A different preexisting historical phenomenon influenced the French voyageurs, early seventeenth- and eighteenth-century migrants to Canada and the United States, to accept the plausibility of the Windigo’s existence, which has led to a mash-up of preand postcolonial belief systems. Podruchny writes that “the French-Canadian belief in werewolves provided voyageurs a framework to understand windigos in French-Canadian terms, and in the narratives about cannibal monsters, the motifs of windigo and werewolf mingled” (Podruchny 2004: 678). As a result, depictions of its body could vary from emaciated to hairy and gigantic (see also Chapter 1, this volume). When the Windigo first entered the world of the colonizers, much as in the case of the Bunyip, more accurate pronunciations, synonyms, and local variants of its name became pretty much the exclusive purview of Indigenous peoples and linguists while the colonizing “mainstream” referred to it exclusively as Windigo or Wendigo.9 As the eminent linguist of Algonquian languages, Ives Goddard writes, apropos of the Windigo, Contemporary language names and spellings: Meskwaki wîtekôwa ‘owl’ (= Fox) Cannibal monster: Cree wītekōw Ojibwe wiindigoo Munsee máaleew Menominee

The OED was considering using “wendigo” as the lemma, and I sent the following to my contact there: The spelling “wendigo” is a very bad choice. It seems to have been popularized by the British ghost-story writer Algernon Blackwood (writing in fake folksy North American dialect, no less) and picked up by the comic poet Ogden Nash and lesser lights, and more recently by the highly-regarded Canadian writer Margaret Atwood (1995). The choice of this in the DCHP … is shamefully contrarian and ignorant. I had never encountered this spelling as the English standard before I saw the OED entry, and I have heard a lot about windigos. “Windigo” is used as the English gloss in current dictionaries of Ojibwe (online), Plains Cree (beside “Wihtiko”; 2001), and Swampy Cree (C.D. Ellis 1995). Hbk. No. Am. Inds. (1910) has weendigo, I suppose an attempt at promoting the Ojibwe pronunciation, but now everyone I know says windigo, with “win” like “win.” This is *our* [North American] word, and I don’t think the horror-story literature should be determinative. (Ives Goddard, pers. comm., 2019) In keeping with the previous point, Brady DeSanti, an academic of Ojibwe heritage, writes that the Windigo has become a popular figure in the entertainment industry, which is “mostly used by entertainment outlets as just another stock monster comparable

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to many other notable fiendish creatures, such as werewolves, vampires, zombies and demons” despite the fact that “it remains a viable component of the religious beliefs of many North American tribal nations” (2015: 186, emphasis added). As is the case of the Bunyip, which has also largely become “just another stock monster,” many publications and websites referring to the Windigo are to be found on the Library of Congress website and its Canadian equivalent. Other than in academic publications, today the Windigo is largely annotated as “Fictitious Character.” The fact that colonization in North America began considerably earlier than in Australia is demonstrable in the now-dominant view of the Windigo. The almost total acculturation of the Windigo into the broader American mediascape is evident when DeSanti attests to multiple appearances of the Windigo in Marvel comics, in which the anthropophagous creature periodically serves as an adversary for the Incredible Hulk, Spiderman, Wolverine, Alpha Flight, and the X-Men … Authors spell the name as wendigo and limit the monster’s vocabulary to growling his own name. With few exceptions, Marvel’s windigo physically resembles a cross between a yeti (Abominable Snowman) and a werewolf, which differs from Ojibwe traditions of the entity as a tall, rail-thin being with a heart of ice. Here, the windigo is covered in white fur and possesses a tail and razor-sharp teeth and claws. In the Marvel Universe, however, the windigo is massive and formidable as the formidable Hulk. (DeSanti 2015: 189)

A further commonality exists between the Bunyip and the Windigo in how they have been subjected to mass popular cultural desacralization. Like the Bunyip, the Windigo has been treated as a figure of fun. For example, Ogden Nash’s satirical poem The Wendigo (1952) is filled with inaccuracies that trivialize the being. This is magnified by the fact that Quentin Blake, Nash’s illustrator, depicts the Windigo with tentacles. The Pangkarlangu and the Windigo share another significant similarity in that they continue to be valued on their own homelands, regardless of the extent to which the dominant colonizing cultures have stripped these monsters of their former gravitas.

Conclusion It is clear that successive waves of colonizing migrants to Australia and North America have wrought massive changes upon classical Aboriginal monsterdom. One consequence is that non-Indigenous Australians and Americans have frequently conflated and projected their substrate belief systems into Aboriginal monsters, erasing Aboriginal epistemological and ontological understandings. Thus, a superstrate hybrid emerges, primarily based on the dominant group’s substrate ideation, which in turn becomes assimilated into the colonizers’ episteme. This process of acculturation goes well beyond the creation of sanitized versions of monsters that combine cultural appropriation with anthropomorphism. By stripping the original monsters of their use-value as exemplars giving material form to the specific dangers of localized environments, they are transformed into commodities.

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The advent of late capitalism has accelerated this process. The result vis-à-vis the Bunyip and the Windigo has been their acculturation into the dominant culture’s mindscape. With respect to the previously little-known figure of the Pangkarlangu, it has been thrust into the arena of international fine art, appropriated into the privileged bubble of virtually unchecked global capital. And yet, their fate is neither predetermined nor sealed. The Windigo has been almost totally appropriated into transnationally constructed American (read “global”) popular culture as a superhero, albeit a “baddie,” while remaining significant to Algonquian groups—on its own territories. As is the case with the Windigo, the Pangkarlangu remains respected in his own vast homelands. While both of these monsters remain locally indigenized, the Pangkarlangu, unlike the Bunyip and the Windigo, has never been appropriated into the popular cultural or the digital mediascape, but has leapfrogged directly into the rarified world of international fine art, thus far avoiding debased popular culture renditions. Mainstream Australia’s difficulty of pronouncing the word “Pangkarlangu” may yet save it from becoming a debased common currency like the word “Bunyip,”10 along with the fact that it is still firmly lodged in its own vast estate. So, ironically, Australia’s largely monocultural and monolingual mindset may well “save” the Pangkarlangu. But because the Pangkarlangu has been untimely ripped from Warlpiri country (or in the case of Jansen’s Pankalangu (sic) suite, from his Western Arrernte homeland), and transposed and immobilized in urban living rooms as inanimate, functional objets d’art to be admired aesthetically and little understood regarding connections with specific Aboriginal “country,” questions need asking. One such question to pose concerns the value of bringing Aboriginal monsters into the purview of an international audience that for the most part would never have known of their existence. This has a potentially positive dimension: Jansen does acknowledge his sources. Having said this, the original monsters are fundamentally de- and recontextualized by their reification into furniture. In addition, Jansen’s Pankarlangu is equipped with a tough protective sheath composed of an armature of scutes (see Figure 5.8). In the course of almost four decades of discussion on this subject, I have never heard any Warlpiri description of this monster having scales or plates as a bodily shield. Ultimately, the representations of Australian Aboriginal monsters seem to provide a mirror image of how Aboriginal people themselves have been and continue to be subject to continuous assimilatory pressure. In closing, I would like to take some liberties with Karl Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte in which he wrote that “men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” Long may these monsters weigh like nightmares on the brains of the living in those specific environments where for eons they have signposted very real dangers— which continue to pose genuine threats to human life. Finally, to elaborate upon Ives Goddard’s perspicacious observation, I don’t think that populist, colonially defined, commercially driven representations of Aboriginal monsters, whether in the form of print, film, or digital technology, should be determinative in this matter.

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Figure 5.8  Trent Jansen, Pankalangu Wardrobe, 2016, Queensland walnut, copper, brass, and molded plywood, 210 × 120 × 57 cm. Courtesy of the Artist. Photograph: Dan Hocking. Pankalangu Wardrobe was designed for Broached Commissions, as part of the Broached Monsters exhibition; on display in the exhibition of finalists’ work in Ramsay Art Prize for Young Australian Artists under 40, Art Gallery of South Australia, March 27–August 27, 2017.

Notes 1

2 3 4 5

Today, Jansen’s Pangkalangu-themed furnishings extend beyond the wardrobe to include multiple accessories—a chair, side table and bowl, with the latest addition being a Pangkalangu credenza, on show recently (2018) in Basel, Switzerland (see also Jansen 2014). Personal communication from the late Ngarrindjeri artist Ian Abdulla (1947–2011). Bell (1998) has postulated that such transformation possibly symbolizes male initiation. The principles outlined here derive from my lectures in the topics “Australian Languages: Issues and Debates” (AUST2611, 1998–2018) and “Language and Languages” (LANG1002, 2012–2019), at Flinders University Australia. This is also true of twentieth-century film. Eminent examples include Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971) and Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975). While at that time and in that place, the Aboriginal man almost certainly would have been wearing a possum-skin cloak, second-hand clothing, or rags provided

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by the white interlopers, here he is attired in what appears to be a toga. At first sight this seems jarringly inaccurate, but it could also be interpreted as a respectful representation of the Aboriginal protagonist. 6 Coined by the colonial Australian writer Henry Lawson, the term “Black Velvet” referred to Aboriginal women with whom non-Aboriginal men consorted—the white men were known as “gin jockeys.” 7 The YouTube clip provided in the reference list includes commentary from adults who viewed this film in childhood. 8 Although there are in fact shape-shifting monsters in Aboriginal Australia (e.g., the Mamu of the Western Desert regions, see Eickelkamp 2014 among others), not all Aboriginal Monstrous Beings are shape-shifters. 9 For examples of other terms and spellings, see, among others, Brightman (1988) and Goddard (1969). 10 Or, for that matter, “Windigo,” the relatively simple pronunciation of which has meant that most North American colonists remain untroubled about sequestrating it, is analogous to “Bunyip.”

References Atwood, M. (1995), Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature, Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York : Oxford University. Barrett, C. (1946), The Bunyip and Other Mythical Monsters and Legends, Melbourne: Reed & Harris. Bell, D. (1998), Ngarrindjeri Wurruwarrin: A World That Is, Was, and Will Be, North Melbourne: Spinifex Press. Berndt, R. M., C. H. Berndt, and J. E. Stanton (1993), A World That Was: The Yaraldi of the Murray River and the Lakes South Australia, Carlton: Melbourne University Press and Miegunyah Press. Blake, B. (1997), Wathawurrung and the Colac Language of Southern Victoria, Pacific Linguistics, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Canberra: Australian National University. Blake, B. J. (2011), Dialects of Western Kulin, Western Victoria Yartwatjali, Tjapwurrung, Djadjawurrung, Melbourne: La Trobe University. Brightman, R. (1988), “The Windigo in the Material World,” Ethnohistory, 35 (4): 337–79. Clarke, P. A. (2007), “Indigenous Spirit and Ghost Folklore of ‘Settled’ Australia,” Folklore, 118 (2): 141–61. Cohen, J. J. (1996), “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” in J. J. Cohen (ed.), Monster Theory: Reading Culture, 4–25, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. DeSanti, B. (2015), “The Cannibal Talking Head: The Portrayal of the Windigo ‘Monster’ in Popular Culture and Ojibwe Traditions,” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, 27 (3): 187–201. Dixon, R. M. W., W. S. Ramson, and M. Thomas (1990), Australian Aboriginal Words in English: Their Origin and Meaning, Oxford and Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Dot and the Kangaroo, [Film] Dir. Yoram Gross, Australia: Yoram Gross Films. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtrYO-Mog60 (accessed January 16, 2019). Eickelkamp, U. (2014), “Specters of Reality: Mamu in the Eastern Western Desert of Australia,” in Y. Musharbash and G. H. Presterudstuen (eds.), Monster Anthropology in Australasia and Beyond, 57–74, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Fausset, D. (1995), Images of the Antipodes in the Eighteenth Century: A Study in Stereotyping, Cross Cultures 18, The Netherlands: Rodopi. Flint, V. I. J. (1984), “Monsters and the Antipodes in the Early Middle Ages and Enlightenment,” Viator, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 15: 65–80. Goddard, R. H. I. (1969), “Owls and Cannibals: Two Algonquian Etymologies,” Paper presented at the Second Algonquian Conference, St. John’s, Newfoundland (unpublished). Gross, Y. (n.d.), “‘Biography’ and ‘Film Credits’,” Yoram Gross Films. Available online: http://www.yoramgrossfilms.com.au (accessed February 6, 2019). Hercus, L. A. (1969), The Languages of Victoria: A Late Survey, Part II, Canberra: Australian Aboriginal Studies, No. 17. Hercus, L. A. (1986), Victorian Languages: A Late Survey, Research School of Pacific Studies, Canberra: Australian National University. Jansen, T. (2014), “I Merge Indigenous Stories with My Design—Maybe Others Should Too,” The Conversation, Melbourne. Available online: http://theconversation. com/i-merge-indigenous-stories-with-my-design-maybe-others-should-too-34132 (accessed January 11, 2018). Jenkin, G. and J. Draper (1982), The Ballad of the Blue Lake Bunyip, Adelaide: Omnibus Books. Johnston, B. ([1995] 2001), The Manitous: The Spiritual World of the Ojibway, St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press. Kingsley, H. and illustrated by L. Fröhlich (1859), The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn, Adelaide: eBooks@Adelaide. Kingsley, H. and L. Fröhlich (1871–1872), The Lost Child, London and New York: Macmillan. Marx, K. ([1852] 2010), The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, USA, New York: Feather Trail Press. Morgan, J. ([1852] 1980), The Life and Adventures of William Buckley: Thirty-Two Years a Wanderer amongst the Aborigines of the Then Unexplored Country Round Port Phillip, Now the Province of Victoria, Hobart: Tasmania Text Classics. Mulvaney, J. (1994), “The Namoi Bunyip,” Australian Aboriginal Studies, 1: 36–8. Nash, O. (1952), “The Wendigo,” in Verses from 1929 On, unpaginated, New York: Curtis Brown Limited. Nicholls, C. (2014), “Dreamings and Place: Aboriginal Monsters and Their Meanings,” The Conversation, April 30. Available online: https://theconversation.com/dreamingsand-place-aboriginal-monsters-and-their-meanings-25606 (accessed April 30, 2014). Pedley, E. C. (first published 1899; Pedley, E. C. and illustrated by Frank P. Mahony, 1920), Dot and the Kangaroo, Marcie Miur Collection of Australian books, Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Phillips, A. A. (1974), “Kingsley, Henry (1830–1876),” in Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 5, Canberra: National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/kingsley-henry-3961/text6247, published first in hardcopy 1974 (accessed July 29, 2019). Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), [Film] Dir. Peter Weir, Australia and the U.K: Australian Film Commission, British Empire Films, McElroy and McElroy Productions. Podruchny, C. (2004), “Werewolves and Windigos: Narratives of Cannibal Monsters in French-Canadian Voyageur Oral Tradition,” Ethnohistory, 51 (4): 677–700.

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Ramson, W. S. (ed.) (1988), Australian National Dictionary: A Dictionary of Australianisms on Historical Principles, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rose D.B. (1991), Hidden Histories. Black Stories from Victoria River Downs, Humbert River and Wave Hill Stations, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Taplin, G. (1879), The Folklore, Manners, Customs, and Languages of the South Australian Aborigines (also titled South Australian Aboriginal Folklore), Adelaide: E. Spiller, Acting Govt. Printer. Thieberger, N. and W. McGregor (1994), Macquarie Aboriginal Words: A Dictionary of Words from Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Languages, Sydney: Macquarie University. Walkabout (1971), [Film] Dir. Nicolas Roeg, United States: 20th Century Fox. Wagner, J. illustrated by R. Brooks (1988), The Bunyip of Berkeley’s Creek, Victoria: Viking Kestrel. Wolfe, P. (1994), “Nation and Miscegenation: Discursive Continuity in the Post-Mabo Era,” Social Analysis, 36: 93–152.

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6

Margt býr í þokunni—What Dwells in the Mist? Helena Onnudottir and Mary Hawkins

Introduction “Margt býr í þokunni,” a fairly common saying in Icelandic, may be translated as: “Many strange things dwell in the mist.” These strange things are ófreskjur, a term that glosses as monster, and refers to dangerous trolls, to horse-like creatures that drown their human riders (nykur), and to a vast company of ghosts (draugar). Not all ghosts are ófreskjur—some, waif-like, haunt a place and are more pitiful than frightening— but malevolent and dangerous draugar,1 who are capable of driving a person mad, are considered to be ófreskjur. Indeed, the origin of “Margt býr í þokunni” is a tale about a young farm girl who wakes up one night (as others in the room sleep) to a voice—by some accounts a ghost, by other accounts a huldumaður (one of the “hidden people”)—at the window reciting: Margt býr í þokunni, þokaðu úr lokunni, lindin mín ljúf og trú. [Much dwells in the mist, move aside the (door) latch, my truly, dearest.]

The Icelandic reader of this tale knows that the girl will fall under the power of the ghost unless she can quickly respond with a verse of her own, and she does so, reciting: Fólkið mín saknar, og faðir minn vaknar; hann vakir svo vel, sem þú. [(My) Folk will miss me, Father will awake; He is as alert as you.]

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Defeated by the verse, the “ghost” returns into the mist, never to visit the girl again.2 This short tale is one of hundreds of tales in Icelandic myth and folklore of human encounters with creatures of the dark. These stories frequently set such interactions within a narrative framework that contrasts sleep to wakefulness, and the hidden to the visible. Ghosts may move back and forth between these dimensions, appearing to humans in their sleep, manifesting when the human wakes, and then retreating to the dark. The particular significance of darkness in Iceland is well documented in Adrienne Heijnen’s (2005) ethnographic account of the relationship between dreaming and darkness. Heijnen claims that “darkness [in Iceland] is conceptually associated with parts of the world that are hidden from the waking mind, while light is linked to the living human world” (2005: 193).3 In this chapter, we examine beliefs, stories, and sightings of and about ghosts, both historical and contemporary, in order to argue that while many of the ghosts of Iceland’s past—the walking dead, those who have been summoned from death, as well as ghosts of nonhuman form—live on in the present, not all have survived and the cultural meaning of many has been transformed. In some cases, such transformation can be conceptualized as a form of adaptation to “the times.” Such transformation as a means of adaptation is conventionally associated with vampires, as Nina Auerbach (1995) has suggested. Ghosts, however, are in her view relatively changeless and dwell in an eternal realm (see discussion in Chapter 1). However, as we will demonstrate, Icelandic ghosts are not timeless but rather exhibit a fair degree of adaptability. We begin the chapter with a brief account of ghosts in other cultures, so that we may demonstrate by way of contrast what draugar are (and are not) and then outline why some draugar are resolutely Icelandic, inseparable from the mists and the land, and connected to all who do or have lived on the island. Having established the historical nature and categories of draugar, based on Icelandic myth and folklore, we move to a consideration of contemporary stories, beliefs, personal communication material, even websites, devoted to twenty-first-century draugar. We conclude that while modernity has brought Icelanders out of the dark, to connect today with draugar dwelling in the mist is, for an Icelander, to connect with her history and her land. In this sense, draugar are, and were, mirrors of the images that Icelanders have of themselves, and of their land: awesome, threatening, beautiful, and sometimes deadly dark.

Societies get the ghosts they deserve Of course, ghosts do not exist in all cultures, as countless anthropology undergraduates have discovered through reading Laura Bohannan’s account of her attempt, largely unsuccessful, to relate the tale of Hamlet to the Tiv (Bohannan 1966). In many cultures, however, ghosts are something of an obsession. In a paper on ghosts in Indonesia, Nils Bubandt claims, “Societies get the ghosts they deserve” (2012: 3) and proceeds to substantiate his claim through an analysis of the haunting, by a cannibal witch, or suanggi, of a small town in North Maluku in 2004.4 The suanggi, known throughout eastern Indonesia, is a human being who has been possessed by a malevolent spirit, in most cases a spirit who has failed, after bodily death, to make a complete transformation from the human realm into that of the ancestors. This terrifying entity, quiescent in the

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host body during the day, at night pulls off the head of its host and, entrails dangling from the disembodied head, flies about the neighborhood, looking for victims to strike down and their livers to devour. This is standard suanggi behavior, but this particular suanggi dispensed with the flying entrails and instead took on the guise of a beautiful young woman who seduced her male victims, bit them on the neck, drank their blood, and ate their genitals. Local accounts described the suanggi as the victim of a traumatic rape and her actions as motivated by a desire for revenge. Leaving aside the penis attack, this modern suanggi clearly resembles the vampire of Hollywood movies—a further example, perhaps, of vampiric adaptability—and of countless Indonesian-made ghost and vampire movies. Since the late 1990s, when North Maluku became the center of a mining boom and many households purchased televisions and satellite dishes, vampire movies have become the most popular local movie genre (Bubandt 2012: 12). Invariably, they feature a beautiful female ghost who has been raped and killed and is now bent on revenge. This may be one way of thinking about the suanggi’s representational transformation. Bubandt, however, makes a rather different argument, linking the 2004 suanggi to the bloody 1999–2001 conflict in north Maluku between Christians and Muslims, and the efforts, national and international, made to rehabilitate “traumatized communities” that followed in the wake of the conflict. These efforts introduced the people of north Maluku to a new concept— trauma—as well as a new social process. Trauma, they were told, begets violence, which begets further trauma. This provided a new way of talking about the unresolved events of the conflict (Bubandt 2012: 15). From this, then, emerged both a thoroughly trendy suanggi, whose existence acknowledged the horrors of the conflict and who acted out the link between trauma and violence, and a new way of understanding why certain spirits act the way they do: they are traumatized. Cannibal ghosts do not feature among Iceland’s draugar, but Bubandt’s emphasis on the cultural construction of ghosts, or, as he puts it, on ghosts as mirrors of the images that humans have of themselves (2012: 3), is useful in reminding us that such images are neither static nor singular, and thus we would expect that ghosts change shape and meaning in history and between cultures. This is an argument similar to that proposed by Shane McCorristine (2010) in his account of ghost sightings in nineteenth-century England, where he contends that the pre-Victorian ghost, then seen as a manifestation of an existing external supernatural order, had by the end of the century become an hallucination, a pathology of the psyche. Influential in this transformation of ghost nature was of course the rise of science, in particular the psychological sciences, and the spread of a secular and rational, in Weberian terms, approach to the living and the dead. Even so, Victorians persisted in seeing ghosts and far from all of these people were considered insane. Did ghosts, then, inhabit a particular sort of reality and could their existence be captured scientifically? The idea of the paranormal emerged and with it an elaborate technology for measuring paranormal activities and the places, such as haunted houses, in which these activities or energies manifested (Hanks 2016). Furthermore, death, be it of the psyche, the soul, or the body, remained a problem. If not heaven, then what? Could souls be contacted after death? It was these sorts of questions that gave rise to the nineteenth-century spiritualism movement which began in the United States and spread to the United Kingdom and as far as Australia. This was a truly popular movement, which attracted individuals from all social classes, from

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Arthur Conan Doyle in England, to Helena Blavatsky, founder of Theosophy, in New York (McGarry 2008) and to William Guthrie Spence, the leader of the organized labor movement, in Australia, who regularly attended séances at the Sydney home of his daughter Gwynetha and son-in-law Hector Lamond, himself a Labor Party MP and editor of The Worker (Bellanta 2008: 66). Spiritualism may be strongly associated with the English-speaking world, but it became popular in Iceland too from the late 1800s, reaching a height in the earlyto mid-twentieth century, a time when Iceland was experiencing significant social change. Even today, the ability to communicate with the dead is still recognized—or, perhaps more correctly, not much questioned—in Iceland. Some even claim that spiritualism is in fact an extension of “traditional beliefs in ghosts, elves, and other supernatural phenomena” (Gissurarson 1997: n.p.), and not in any way a rejection of the existence of other dimensions when it comes to dead humans or other creatures. We might conclude, then, that the ghastly Maluku ghost provided a way to represent and think through conflict, and the nineteenth-century spiritualist urge to contact ghostly dead souls was an attempt to grapple with the uncertainties of a secular soulless modernity. Societies do indeed get the ghosts they deserve, or perhaps need. But, while we have used the term “ghost” in the context of Maluku, within the spiritualist movement and in Iceland it is clear that “ghost” has a very loose meaning and its use may serve to imply similarities that are not simply erroneous, but hinder understanding. For example, the Maluku ghost needs to be located within a broader company of dangerous local spirits, not all of whom were once human. Bubandt makes reference to the moro, invisible forest beings who tempt people into marrying them only to draw them so far into the jungle that they cannot return (2012: 10). The total conceived cosmic order in Maluku, then, includes both human and nonhuman entities. In contrast, the spiritualist ghosts are situated squarely within a Christian moral framework, as souls of once-living people that have separated from the earthly realm and now dwell in the spirit world, from where they may provide guidance to the living. The Icelandic ghostly realm appears to incorporate elements of both the Maluku and the Christian cosmic order. Some Icelandic draugar are in their appearance as well as due to the fear they invoke truly monstrous, but they are not the only monsters in Iceland and not all draugar are monsters. Some draugur, like Glámur, who we discuss later in this chapter, and the Deacon of Myrká (Hallmundsson 1987: 50), are corporeal and have ill and murderous intents. Other, noncorporeal draugar are conceived of as well meaning, even helpful to the humans who contact them. In the following section, we discuss the diverse creatures or entities that may be referred to as draugar.

Categorizing draugar Icelandic myths and folktales vary when it comes to “types of ghosts.” The first volume of the biggest collection of Icelandic myths and folklore, Íslenzkar Þjóðsögur og Æfintýri (1862) by Jón Árnason, contains almost 200 pages of “ghost stories,”5 within which ghosts are divided into three broad categories. These categories were established to

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encapsulate the richness and diversity of Icelandic draugar, but they are not necessarily the categories that individual Icelanders use when discussing their understanding of draugar. We return to this point later. Here, we are concerned to outline Árnason’s categories, which are as follows: ●●

●●

●●

Afturgöngur (direct translation is “those who have returned to walking in life”), referring to people who come back from Death, including newborns who have been left outside to die. Uppvakningar (those who have been brought back from Death), usually these ghosts have been brought back by sorcerers who use them for various ill intents. Fylgjur (direct translation is “accompanying ghosts/entities,” which can include Afturgöngur or Uppvakningar)6 are classified into two kinds: There are those associated with a particular person—the “owner” of the fylgja—these fylgjur can appear in the form of dead people, animals, or other visual phenomena (e.g., most commonly a moving light) and tend to appear at particular locations shortly before the “owner” of the fylgja arrives. These kinds of fylgjur are benevolent. Then there are fylgjur who are attached to a kin group, to farms, or to particular areas— the males are referred to as Mórar, drawing their name from the color of their coats (the color of peat), and the female are referred to as Skottur, drawing their name from their headwear which has a dangling tail (skott).

It should be pointed out that the apparel of ghosts in Iceland is not uniform. Ghosts appear in different colored garbs, in shrouds (particularly those recently dead, hence “fresh” from the grave), and some are stark naked. Most of the time, the ghost’s appearance is not described in detail, as it is frequently assumed that they are not visible to most people. When ghosts are clearly visible to people, their appearance tends to relate closely to the manner of their death. Drowned seamen appear with dripping skin and wool garments. Those who died a violent death appear with their wounds still open, as in the case of the Deacon of Myrká—who walked around with his skull cracked open so blood and brain were visible—some are in the habit of taking their heads off, and in many cases ghosts are reported to smell like rancid butter. Many of these ghosts inspire dread, while others are physically violent to people and other living creatures and must be sent back to the mist. In a later section we recount the tale of the killing of the monstrous ghost Glámur; here we may note that the Deacon of Myrká had to be reburied by a sorcerer, who then imprisoned the Deacon by rolling a huge stone over his grave. In his preface to Íslenzkar Þjóðsögur og Æfintýri (1862), Guðbrandur Vigfússon claims that while the appearances and types of ghosts in Iceland do vary, they are inevitably defined according to the imagination, as well as the social and geographic locations, of those who record and/or transmit their stories and are hence constructed and “animated” according to the dominant ideas and ideological forces of their time and place, an argument that resonates with that of Bubandt (2012). Vigfússon states that the impacts of ideological and intellectual forces are clear as you read the different accounts of human contact with ghosts and the relationship between the living and ghosts in Iceland, and that there is a categorical difference between the ghosts of medieval times, which were clearly associated with Christianity and the Devil, and

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ghosts of later times.7 Vigfússon claims that the ghostly “richness” does not diminish; one simply finds that stories of sorcery and witchcraft become less common from about the late 1700s onwards. These changes can be related to the growing influences of the Enlightenment across Europe, the advancement of scientific explanations for “otherworldly phenomena,” and the introduction of spiritualism; in a sense, one can argue that monsters and ghosts are adapting to “changing times.” Following Vigfússon’s claims, we wish to explore further some of the colorful assembly of Icelandic ghosts of the past and grasp their contemporary incarnations. One way of doing so is to look at some of the records which Icelanders have produced about the existence of monsters in general and ghosts specifically throughout the centuries. We have already drawn on one of the monumental works on monsters and myth in Icelandic, Íslenzkar Þjóðsögur og Æfintýri. In the introduction to volume 1— which Árnason dedicates to Jakob Grim of the Brothers Grim—he reflects on the richness of stories about ghosts, trolls, elves, and other monsters since the beginning of time in Iceland. Vigfússon further claims that myths and tales reflect the cultural characteristics of each society and epitomize what he calls the “temperament and sensibility (intelligence) of the people” (1862: V). In order to explore both the “cultural characteristics” and the “temperament and sensibility” of Icelandic people and society, we would like to step briefly into one of the Icelandic Sagas, Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar (1936) (also known as Grettla, the Saga of Grettir the Strong) and introduce the reader to one of the most famous ghosts of the Icelandic Sagas, Glámur.

The battle between Grettir and Glámur The central figure of the Saga of Grettir the Strong, written around 1320, is Grettir Ásmundarson, described as a bad-tempered, rebellious, antisocial man of phenomenal bodily strength. In common with many of the heroes of Icelandic Sagas, his volatile nature frequently gets him into trouble. Grettir commits his first manslaughter at the age of sixteen, is later sentenced into exile in Norway before he returns and ends his days in isolation on Drangey, a small island off the coast of Iceland. As an outlaw in Iceland, Grettir leads a hard life, surviving mostly by theft and robbery, but his superior physical strength means that people still call on him to solve various problems associated with monster attacks on humans. Some of Grettir’s major achievements are the annihilation of a haugbui (an undead sprite), the killing of an entire band of marauding berserkers in Norway, and the slaying of two murderous trolls in Iceland. No creature, dead or alive, is a match for Grettir until his encounter with Glámur. Glámur is a Swedish man who was hired as a shepherd for a farm holding which was notoriously haunted. Glámur is a very unattractive character, described as a “big strong man of strange facial features, with huge grey eyes, ‘wolf-grey’ hair … [Glámur] abstained from mass, had no religion, and was stubborn and surly. Everyone hated him” (Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar 1936: 110). One Christmas Eve, Glámur leaves the farm in foul mood to tend to the sheep and soon a blizzard sets in. After the blizzard finally dies down, Glámur does

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not return and men set out to look for him. The search for Glámur is described as follows: [The search party] came upon some well-marked tracks up above in the valley. The stones and earth were torn up all about as if there had been a violent tussle. On searching further they came upon Glámur lying on the ground a short distance off. He was dead; his body was as black as Hel and swollen to the size of an ox. They were overcome with horror and their hearts shuddered within them. Nevertheless they tried to carry him to the church, but could not get him any further than the edge of a gully a short way off. So they left him there and went home to report to the farmer what had happened. He asked what could have caused Glámur’s death. They said they had tracked him to a big place like a hole made by the bottom of a cask thrown down and dragged along up the mountains which were at the top of the valley, and all along the track were great drops of blood. They concluded that the evil spirit which had been about before must have killed Glámur, but that he had inflicted wounds upon it which were enough, for that spook was never heard of again. On the second day of the [Christmas] festival they went out again to bring in Glámur’s body to the church. They yoked oxen to him, but directly the downward incline ceased and they came to level ground, they could not move him; so they went home again and left him. On the third day they took a priest with them, but after searching the whole day they failed to find him. The priest refused to go again, and when he was not with them they found Glámur. So they gave up the attempt to bring him to the church and buried him where he was under a cairn of stones. (Hight 1914: n.p.)

Glámur did not rest in his grave. People started seeing him around their farms and soon Glámur started riding on house-tops by night, terrifying people. Glámur had been ugly during his life, but as a ghost (afturganga) he is described as “unlike any human … with a gross distorted head … with huge, hard, and piercing eyes” (Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar 1936: 119–21). Glámur’s violent activities soon led to the depletion of people and animals in the valley, and the last surviving farmer sought the help of Grettir. Grettir accepted the challenge and arrived to battle Glámur. The battle between Grettir and Glámur is one of the best-known battles of the Sagas and is described in gory detail. The battle starts inside a farm house, gradually moving outside—as the walls and the roof of the farm cave in due to the forces at play—where Grettir seems to gain the upper hand. As Grettir manages to drive Glámur to the ground, the cloudy sky opens up, letting through the light of a full moon. The light shines onto the face of Glámur, revealing his eyes to Grettir with such startling effect that Grettir almost loses his grip. Eventually, Grettir manages to kill Glámur—to kill the ghost—but not before the ghost casts a curse on Grettir: You have expended much energy, Grettir, in your search for me. Nor is that to be wondered at, if you should have little joy thereof. And now I tell you that you shall possess only half the strength and firmness of heart that were decreed to you if

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you had not striven with me. The might which was yours till now I am not able to take away, but it is in my power to ordain that never shall you grow stronger than you are now. Nevertheless, your might is sufficient, as many shall find to their cost. Hitherto you have earned fame through your deeds, but henceforward there shall fall upon you exile and battle; your deeds shall turn to evil and your guardianspirit shall forsake you. You will be outlawed and your lot shall be to dwell ever alone. And this I lay upon you, that these eyes of mine shall be ever before your vision. You will find it hard to live alone, and at last it shall drag you to death. (Hight 1914: n.p.)

The eyes of Glámur followed Grettir through the rest of his life. The hero who previously feared no creatures of the dark, dead or alive, became afraid of the dark, and this fear stayed with him till the end of his days. The story of Grettir and Glámur contains some of the key elements of what can be described as the “temperament and sensibility” of Iceland in the early centuries of the second millennium. In the first place, for much of each year Iceland is shrouded in darkness: to be afraid of the dark is a terrible affliction in an environment that for months sees just a few hours of light per day. Second, the exaltation of the physical body, which overrides social contracts—Grettir had been lawfully exiled but his exile was broken in order to allow him to take on Glámur—aligns with the selfimage of Icelanders as from exceptionally strong Viking stock, an image which still has currency today (Hawkins and Onnudottir 2017). Physical strength allows the exceptional Icelander to overcome a monster even as terrifying as Glámur, a rather reassuring notion given that Icelanders had little in the way of weaponry at their disposal. Men will triumph over monsters but, and here is the rub, in their triumph they may be cursed, as was Grettir. We can read this as a warning to people: you may establish your small holding and grub out your existence under the shadow of the mountain, but in the high places, away from human habitation, you are in danger— from blizzards, from avalanches, from monsters and devils. You must keep to your path, imagined both as a moral path and as a literal one—the Icelandic landscape is dotted with small cairns that mark a safe passage for people on foot or horseback. To stray from the path is to find yourself in mortal, and moral, danger. Gunnell has made a similar point in reference to Icelandic coastlines where, he says, “the solid earth came to an end and the wholly untrustworthy water began” (2013: 2). Despite electric light, satellite navigation, state-of-the-art fishing fleets, and a good road network, venturing out to sea and straying off the path are a risky business. The awful company of ghosts and other monsters, who may appear from the sea or out of the upland mists, serves to mark the boundary between the safe home world and places of danger. While contemporary Icelanders are unlikely to encounter a modern Glámur, many do acknowledge the presence of ghosts in their midst. In order to understand just what Icelanders of today mean when they refer to draugar, we made use of networks of friends to pose questions to their families testing “belief in ghosts.” In the next section we discuss the replies we received, followed by an outline of the recording and mapping mechanisms contemporary Icelanders use when “locating ghosts.”

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Locating ghosts: In place and in contemporary beliefs As we prepared for the writing of this chapter, we had received replies from seventeen people who had been asked two short questions: 1) Do you believe in ghosts (draugar)? a. If no, why not? b. If yes, how would you explain your belief in ghosts? Where do ghosts dwell? 2) Have you heard the saying: “What dwells in the mist?” a. If yes, what does this saying mean to you? b. If no, what comes to your mind? The number of replies was of course not sufficient as a basis from which one can generalize about Icelanders’ beliefs in ghosts. Rather, the main purpose of this exercise was to gain a snapshot insight into the reality of ghosts in Iceland today from the point of view of a handful of Icelanders, which could then be analyzed and contextualized through the experiences and knowledge which both researchers can draw on. The comments we received ranged from “I find it difficult to use the term draugar … I find the term [personally] negative” to stating: “I see draugar as something paranormal/metaphysical … something which is here and is not here” to claiming that “when people die they do not become draugar … I believe we go somewhere when we die … and someone watches [over] us … but I would not personally call these draugar.” These accounts by three of the participants demonstrate the fact that in a small, homogenous culture where people share a considerable knowledge of monsters (devils, ghosts, and other creatures of the dark), personal beliefs do still vary and the conceptualization and engagement with such creatures differ, depending on spiritual and ideological orientations. Some of the accounts described “personal encounters” with other dimensions, for example, they claimed to know people who “see” and communicate with people who have passed away— spiritualism remains popular in Iceland—as well as with hidden people (huldufolk).8 Still, nine out of the seventeen participants stated “no” when asked about “belief in ghosts,” while seven stated “yes” (one stated “yes” and “no”). Generally, the explanation for a “no” was that the respondent had never seen or encountered a ghost. The yes/no answer was one of interest, perhaps an indication that “strange things” still live with people in Iceland. Fifteen out the seventeen participants had heard the saying “Many strange things dwell in the mist” and provided the following explanations for its meanings: What you cannot see with naked eyes are the things which live in the mist … that what is hidden from us … the first thing that came to my mind was this was a saying which the grown-ups used to use when we were children. Mist/mystical … you cannot see through the mist, which is useful for ghosts you can and cannot see. We do know or see all that exists. The dead live in the mist … even if I have not experienced it myself. The mist hides what is in it. There are ghosts in the darkness.

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One of the most interesting findings was that most of those who stated disbelief in ghost provided us with the accounts above. The oldest participant, an 81-year-old male, simply answered “nonsense” when asked if he believed in ghosts. However, the person who spoke with him (his daughter) added her comments: “This man has in the past told me all kinds of stories about his early years, living on a small farm (with no electricity), where Skottur and Mórar followed certain people and ghosts lived in all the dark corners.” The fact that this participant now declared the stories he had told his daughter 30–40 years ago “nonsense” might simply be indicative of the extent of changes many Icelanders have experienced over the span of a couple of generations. This might seem an argument for the “extinction of ghosts in twentyfirst century Iceland” (see Chapter 1 in this book), but more compellingly, it points toward the adaptability of the ghost: the old man may have abandoned ghosts, but these ghost stories still live on in the mind of the daughter. Dark corners might be fewer in twenty-first-century Iceland—so electricity might be one of means to ward off ghosts—but ghosts are not all of the past. Subsequently, drawing on feelings, beliefs, and stories provided to us, we might assume that Icelanders today are more skeptical than their ancestors about the existence of ghosts and other creatures hidden to our sights, as if the bright lights of modernity (electricity), popular culture, and digital devices have banished the ghosts of centuries past from the realm of everyday lives of most Icelanders. However, while some of the monstrous ghosts are no longer sighted, many Icelanders remain preoccupied with ghosts, sprites, hidden people, trolls, and so on, and employ modern technology and websites to track and locate such beings. The University of Iceland runs an interactive science website9 where scholars in different science departments reply to and discuss various questions to do with science, ranging from astrophysics to ancient manuscripts, and micro-biology to psychology. There are numerous questions posted on this site about the nature and existence of ghosts. The answers to these questions are detailed and informative, and many result in final comments along the lines of “the conclusion is that there is no scientific proof for the existence of ghosts.” Pointedly, while the scholars responsible for the site stress the lack of empirical evidence for the existence of ghosts, they nevertheless refer you to statistical information about haunted places in Iceland. The site provides a link to Íslenskt vættatal (Björnsson Á. 2010 [1990])—best translated as the Icelandic Census of Hidden Creatures—which provides statistical (as well as qualitative) information on all the kinds of monsters and creatures of the dark in Iceland, ghosts among them. According to the Census, there are 320 ghosts who are known by a personal name—that is, whose stories are linked directly to a named person and/or location. The presence of ghosts and haunted places can be found across Iceland, a number of these in the less or uninhabited (by people) parts of the island. These are not included on the map or in the Census as their genealogy is not always clearly established, but their presences are easily detected in popular songs and myth. The twenty-first century has seen further advances in such mapping of folktale and myth, the most recent addition being Sagnagrunnur, a geographically mapped database of the main published collections of Icelandic folk legends.10

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One can argue that the Census could be taken as indication of the “normalness of ghosts.” Or, referring to observations made earlier by Jón Árnason, “our senses and imagination have not faltered yet,” indicating that while science and technology have impacted on the relationship between Icelanders and their ghosts, the knowledge of their location is still important, speaking to the “relationship between people and ghosts.” Such claims can be supported by the fact that various state and social media routinely address the subject of ghosts. To name but one example, in early 2017, the Icelandic National Radio station broadcast a six-episode series called Reimleikar (Ghost Manifestation)11 (2016), focusing on beliefs in and encounters with ghosts. The series includes interviews with specialists on ghosts, elves, and hidden people, as well as several accounts by people who have had personal encounters with ghosts. These encounters are not considered particularly odd by many Icelanders. Apart from official institutions which concentrate on the collection and preservation of Icelandic myths and folklore, one can find numerous Icelandic websites catering to those interested in ghosts and other nonhuman creatures. One such site is Draugasidan (the “ghost-site”) (Guðjónsdóttir 2007), which contains links to valuable information on ghosts, as well as 132 ghost stories. This site was created by Þórdís Edda Guðjónsdóttir in 2007 as a final project toward her degree in Library and Information Studies and remains a source for those interested in Icelandic ghosts (https://notendur.hi.is/thg44/). Ghosts are present in radio broadcasts (on radio waves); their nature and general existence are discussed and debated on scholarly websites and in social media; even Netflix provides new avenues for the dissemination of ghost stories. Hence, ghosts are very much present in the lives of many Icelanders, one such example being the tragic story of Þórdís Þorgeirsdóttir.

“There is a person behind every ghost”—The story of Þórdís Þorgeirsdóttir The story of Þórdís is a prime example of the complex entanglement of the lives of humans and ghosts. It may also signal a new shift in the ghost–human relationship in Iceland, whereby humans seek to resurrect the reputation of a ghost in the context of contemporary ideas, in this case of gender and class. Þórdís Þorgeirsdóttir lived in Eskifjordur, in the east of Iceland. In November 1797, she decided to travel across the Fjarðarheiði heath with her brother Bjarni, walking from Þrándarstaðir to Seyðisfjörður. They were caught in a terrible snowstorm and became lost. They then decided to bury themselves in snow to keep warm, a method of survival in these cases, and then her brother Bjarni decided to attempt to reach the next farm. Bjarni managed to find his way to a farm in Seyðisfjörður, but due to the weather a search party could not be sent out until five days later. The search party included Þórdís’s brother Bjarni and they found her at the bottom of the valley (Stafdal). Disa [nickname for Þórdís] looked like she was dead, but when she started showing signs of life the men became frightened as they thought she was coming back as a ghost, and killed her.

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Þórdís was buried at Dvergasteinn in Seyðifjörður and is said to have haunted the fjord and its people and is considered to be quite a wicked ghost. Þórdís’s brother Bjarni had thirteen children who all died, and people claimed that he had been cursed by his sister. (Kristin Steinsdottir 2017: n.p.)

Kristin Steinsdottir is an Icelandic author who recently came up with the idea of a memorial for Þórdís Þorgeirsdóttir. Kristin feels that Þórdís has been misrepresented in Icelandic folklore and claims that she is angry on her behalf. Kristin wrote a novel, Bjarna Disa, in 2012 about the story and told the Municipality of Seyðisfjörður that she would buy a memorial statue if the book sold well, which it did. Kristin claims that Þórdís’s story is a tragic one, stating that Þórdís was a maid at a farm. She was poor, she was pretty, and she liked to dress up. But because she was just a maid she wasn’t allowed to be pretty or to dress nicely … she’s described in folklore with such arrogance … It really annoyed me. I was asked, why would I want to raise a memorial for a ghost? So, I replied, well if she was a ghost, she was a person before becoming a ghost. There’s a person behind every ghost. (2017: n.p.)

Þórdís Þorgeirsdóttir was killed because she was thought to be a ghost and then she became a ghost. Þórdís is now being brought back to humanity—in a sense from behind the mist—by Kristin’s writing of her story and the erection of a memorial.

Conclusion For centuries the long darkness that is Iceland’s autumn and winter, and the thick mists that accompany the cold and dark months, have provided cover for a host of creatures. When Icelandic dwellings were lit only by small fish oil lamps and people gathered in one room, eating, sleeping, and working together in order to stay warm, stories of the creatures of the mist would be shared. Some of these stories, such as the clash between Grettir and the hideous Glámur, doubtless terrified generations of Icelanders, but other tales served to part the mists, to reveal the hidden creatures, to make them knowable. Furthermore, and because almost all Icelandic folktales are located in a specific and described place, the stories taught listeners about the land, named its mountains, and exposed both its bounty and its danger. Revealing that which is hidden in the mist is a recurrent leitmotif of these tales, as is the association of the dark with danger and light, even if only a guttering lamp, with safety and warmth. Icelandic winters are still cold and dark, but contemporary Icelandic settlements are brightly lit, and due to the harnessing of geothermal power, they are also always warm. Now, the mist and the dark may be pierced with electric lighting, rather than stories, and there is little that remains hidden. This has not meant, however, that ghosts and other creatures of the mist have retreated to the past. Rather, as the number of websites devoted to ghosts, ghost sighting, and ghost locations demonstrates, ghosts have not left Iceland; they have adapted. The company of ghosts may now include more of the

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benevolent variety and fewer akin to Glámur but, for many Icelanders, ghosts, trolls, hidden people, and other such creatures are not simply part of the Icelandic world, they are constitutive of it. Iceland’s ghosts are not universal or ahistorical beings; they are bound to places and times that are resolutely Icelandic. To believe in the company of ghosts is thus, at least in some sense, to believe in an Iceland which is special, unique, out of the ordinary. Contemporary Icelanders are as invested in that idea as were their ancestors, and hence ghosts have a continuing—albeit to some extent transformed— presence in Icelandic lives.

Notes 1 2

Draugur is singular; draugar is plural. The tale is recorded in Íslenskar þjóðsögur og æfintýri (Icelandic Myths and Adventures) (1862) by the greatest collector of Icelandic myths and folk tales, Jón Árnason, who provides the following information in footnotes:

The source of the tale was found in a manuscript owned by reverend Jón Norðmann from Barði í Fljótum (a farm and church location in the north of Iceland). Some people (those in the west of Iceland) commenting on the tale say that it was a huldumadur who cited the first verse; however, other people (those living in the south of Iceland), say that it was cited by an outlaw (útilegumadur), both men harbouring amourous intentions towards the girl. (Árnason 1862: 52)



It is evident by the footnote that the time and location of this particular tale cannot be fully established. 3 See also Heijnen (2010) on how dreams can be experienced as conduits between the living and the dead, further revealing the fascinating relationships conducted across dreams, mists, and darkness. 4 See Auerbach (1995) for monsters, time, and culture. See also Musharbash (2014) on particular monsters of particular field sites. 5 Jón Árnason (1819–1888) was an Icelandic writer, librarian, and museum director who published the first collection of Icelandic folktales and myths. 6 Not all fylgjur are considered to be draugar. 7 Iceland became formally Christian in the year 1000 CE. However, for a few generations the old Norse Gods were still worshipped by some, albeit in private. 8 See author’s connections to Trolls in Onnudottir (2014). 9 Available at http://Visindavefur.is. 10 Accessed at http://sagnagrunnur.com/en/. 11 Available at http://www.ruv.is/sarpurinn/ruv/reimleikar/20161103.

References Árnason, J. (ed.) (1862), Íslenskar þjóðsögur og æfintýri, Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs. Auerbach, N. (1995), Our Vampires, Ourselves, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bellanta, M. (2008), “A Man of Civic Sentiment: The Case of William Guthrie Spence,” Journal of Australian Studies, 32 (1): 63–76.

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Björnsson, Á. ([1990] 2010), Íslenskt vættatal, Reykjavik: Mál og Menning. Bohannan, L. (1966), “Shakespeare in the Bush,” Natural History, 75 (7): 28–33. Bubandt, N. (2012), “A Psychology of Ghosts: The Regime of the Self and the Reinvention of Spirits in Indonesia and Beyond,” Anthropological Forum, 22 (1): 1–23. Gissurarson, Þ. (1997), “Andatrú á Íslandi, Morgunblaðið,” Morgunbladid, May 30. Available online: https://www.mbl.is/greinasafn/grein/334236/ (accessed February 24, 2018). Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar (1936), Islenzkd forrit VII. Guðni Jónsson, Reykjavik: Hið Íslenzka Fornritafélag. Guðjónsdóttir, Þ. (2007), Draugasidan. Available online: https://notendur.hi.is/thg44 (accessed February 5, 2018). Gunnell, T. (2013), “On the Border: The Liminality of the Sea Shore in Icelandic Folk Legends of the Past,” in A. Jennings, S. Reeploeg, and A. Watt (eds.), North Atlantic Islands and the Sea: Seascapes and the Dreamscapes, 10–31, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Hallmundsson, M. and H. Hallmundsson (eds.) (1987), Icelandic Folk and Fairytales, Reykjavik: Iceland Review. Hanks, M. (2016), “Between Electricity and Spirit: Paranormal Investigation and the Creation of Doubt in England,” American Anthropologist, 118 (4): 811–23. Hawkins, M. and H. Onnudottir (2017), “Land, Nation and Tourist: Moral Reckoning in Post—GFC Iceland,” Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, 26 (2): 110–26. Heijnen, A. (2005), “Dreams, Darkness and Hidden Spheres: Exploring the Anthropology of the Night in Icelandic Society,” Paideuma, 51: 193–207. Heijnen, A. (2010), “Relating through Dreams: Names, Genes and Shared Substance,” History and Anthropology, 21 (3): 307–19. Hight, G. H. (trans.) (1914), “Grettis Saga,” Icelandic Saga Database. Available online: www.sagadb.org/files/pdf/grettis_saga.en2.pdf (accessed November 16,2017). McCorristine, S. (2010), Spectres of the Self: Thinking about Ghosts and Ghost-Seeing in England 1750–1920, New York: Cambridge University Press. McGarry, M. (2008), Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America, California: University of California Press. Musharbash, Y. (2014), “Introduction: Monsters, Anthropology, and Monster Studies,” in Y. Musharbash and G. H. Presterudstuen (eds.), Monster Anthropology in Australasia and Beyond, 1–24, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Onnudottir, H. (2014), “The Workings of Monsters: Of Monsters and Humans in Icelandic,” in Y. Musharbash and G. H. Presterudstuen (eds.), Monster Anthropology in Australasia and Beyond, 179–93, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Reimleikar (2016), RUV, August 23, https://www.ruv.is/sarpurinn/ruv/reimleikar/20161103 (accessed November 17, 2017). Steinsdóttir, K. (2012), Bjarna Disa, Reykjavik: Forlagið. Steinsdottir, K. (2017), “Það er manneskja á bakvið hvern draug,” Morgunblaðið, August 23. Available online: https://www.mbl.is/frettir/innlent/2017/08/23/thad_er_ manneskja_a_bakvid_hvern_draug/ (accessed November 17, 2017). Vigfússon, G. (1862), “Formáli,” in J. Árnason (ed.), Íslenskar þjóðsögur og æfintýri, I–XXXIII, Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs.

7

Bird/Monsters and Contemporary Social Fears in the Central Desert of Australia Georgia Curran

Many societies across the world see birds as providers of information—be it environmental, cultural, or symbolic. Augury, the ancient Roman practice of reading the flights of particular birds as omens, is one such example; interpretations of bird calls, bird pecking, and bird entrails are others.1 In Central Australia, birds are seen by Aboriginal people as referents, signifying: 1. ecological phenomena (e.g., swarms of budgerigars indicate the presence of surface water in the desert); 2. social phenomena (e.g., various bird species can forecast or herald a death); and 3. danger. In regard to the last, Turpin et al. affirm that the “great number of bird species that signal danger in the form of a nearby stranger reflects a fear that is still a controlling factor in Aboriginal people’s mobility today” (2015: n.p.). The scholarly literature of Central Australia abounds with throwaway references to birds that appear as or indicate the presence of monsters (see, for example, Eickelkamp 2004; Green and Turpin 2013; Morton 2014; Musharbash 2016; Nicholls 2014; Ryder 2017; Strehlow 1971; Turpin et al. 2013). One way in which Central Australian Aboriginal people “know” of monsters is through the visual, acoustic, and sensory presence of birds: distinctive calls, fleeting movements, camouflaged sightings, scratched tracks, and the sensation of being “watched” are qualities displayed in uncannily similar ways by various species of birds and their monstrous counterparts. While some birds warn of monsters and some accompany them, here I focus on a type of monster I call bird/monsters. They appear as ancestral beings in the songs and associated Dreaming narratives of Warlpiri people, who traditionally lived in the Tanami Desert and today live in towns fringing the Tanami as well as further afar.2 Bird/monsters are figures that, at once, are both men and birds and exist among other ancestral beings which take on the form described by Rose (2011: 122) as “shape-shifters, sometimes walking as humans,

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sometimes travelling in the form of the being they would become.” Being birds and men simultaneously also distinguishes them from classical hybrid figures such as centaurs (part man, part horse) and werewolves (sometime person, sometimes wolf). What is clear is that like all monsters, bird/monsters defy easy categorization (Cohen 1996). The two-part terminology I apply when describing them as bird/monsters reflects both this and their ability to move between different realms. The spiritual associations that birds have with Warlpiri people and their ever presence in their environment link them closely to the human realm; yet, the immoral and culturally inappropriate acts of the monsters they embody continue to make this categorization uneasy. Despite potentially becoming more human like, these bird/monsters do not play by the rules of the human world, a factor which enhances their power to control and frighten. I begin by presenting portraits of four bird/monsters and explain how I understand them to be “monsters.” My main focus is on showing how these immoral, socially inept, violent, and culturally defiant monsters highlight deep-seated social fears. The stories of these bird/monsters are passed on and made known to Warlpiri people through Dreaming narratives and songs, intimately linking them to fundamental and highly valued components of Warlpiri cultural heritage. I demonstrate how bird/monsters continue to have monstrous signification even when what is feared has changed. These bird/monsters continue to invoke fear in contemporary contexts marked by the widescale social changes associated with neocolonialism and increased connections to a broader and more globalized world. Contemporary fears are concerned with loss of connections to country, of traditional social organization, of control over women’s sexuality, and of the gendered forms of sociality which have until recently typified Warlpiri life. To analyze this, I explore the following manifestations of the focal bird/ monsters: 1) They defy cultural expectations around the gendered use of social space. 2) They are incorporated as kin despite their incapability for proper social relations. 3) They confront and control despite being rarely seen. 4) They display extremes of male (notably sexual) violence. Through these analyses I demonstrate my core point, namely, that bird/monsters are intimately linked to contemporary social fears associated with shifting understandings of the Warlpiri self.

On monsters in Aboriginal Australia Christine Nicholls (2014) describes the monsters of Central and Western Deserts as: roaming Ogres, Bogeymen and Bogey women, Cannibal Babies, Giant BabyGuzzlers, Sorcerers, and spinifex and feather-slippered Spirit Beings able to dispatch victims with a single fatal garrote. There are lustful old men who, wishing to satiate their unbridled sexual appetites, relentlessly pursue beautiful nubile young girls through the night sky and on land. (2014: n.p.)

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In Nicholls’ words, these monsters “attest to some of the least palatable aspects of human behavior, to the nastiest and most vicious of our human capabilities” (2014: n.p.). Eickelkamp (2004, 2014) and Morton (2014) have illustrated this in their psychoanalytic analyses of monsters in Pintjantjatjara country and the soul-afflicting Arrentye that haunt Arrernte groups, respectively. All these monsters attack, in Morton’s words, a kind of culturally constructed ego or ideal self to which is attached a moral and emotional field associated with kin relatedness, generosity, and the growth of children into responsible adulthood. (2014: 76)

Monstrous beings have presumably always lurked in the alcoves of the unseen Warlpiri world—among them Kurdaitcha,3 “seductive killers” that regularly terrify the population, and Jarnpa, “ancestral monsters” that exist in the landscapes which are home to Warlpiri people and the animals, sites and phenomena with which they share their spiritual and cultural identities (Meggitt 1955; Musharbash 2014a, b, and this volume). Glaskin (2018) has illustrated how changing understandings of personhood among Bardi people of the Kimberley can be seen through analyses of “other-than-humans,” including creator or ancestral beings, malevolent beings, and the spirits of the recently deceased. Bird/monsters have close behavioral associations to “persons” having intent, albeit malicious, and social relationships, albethey defined by immorality. Bird/monsters are both animals and ancestral beings with anthropomorphized qualities. In Brightman’s consideration of Cree worlds in this vein, he suggests that “the animal as other is probably everywhere significant as refraction, reflection, distortion and counterpoint of the socially constructed categories of human self and person” (1993: 178). The relational epistemologies of people from many nonWestern cultures encompassing ecological and spiritual environments are specific to context but make it clear that traditional Nature/Culture dichotomies are of little analytic value (Bird-David 1999; Glaskin 2012; Vivieros de Castro 1998). It is the closeness and frequent overlapping with the human world which makes extremes of improperness and inappropriateness associated with Warlpiri bird/monsters so highly feared—poignant as they are also connected to The Dreamings, country and kinship networks of Warlpiri people.

Four bird/monsters Warlpiri songs and Dreaming narratives contain numerous examples of these bird/ monster figures—all combining bird-like and human-like features—who evoke fear in other ancestral beings central to the stories and songs. Here, I introduce four of these figures: Wirdangula (an undefined species) is a lone, male ancestral being who comes into being at the same moment as a group of ancestral women who emerge from the salt lakes around Lake Mackay near the Northern Territory and Western Australian border. These women here begin an eastwards journey across Warlpiri

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country creating the features of the landscape and singing and dancing the songs which are central to Warlpiri ceremonies today. As Wirdangula follows the women throughout their journey, he tries to seduce them with elaborately over-performed dance moves. He is of Jungarrayi subsection, an improper marriage partner for this group of Napaljarri and Nungarrayi women and therefore it is forbidden for them to have sexual relations with him. Wirdangula is not defined clearly as human or animal, though he is withouta-doubt male. Many of his features, however, are bird-like. He makes scratching claw-like marks in the salt lakes and has the ability to sneakily hide in the scrub behind the travelling women so that he is not always visible despite his overbearing presence throughout their journey. Whilst Wirdangula disappears at a point in the journey, fooling the ancestral women into thinking they have lost him, as they reach the country to the north of Yuendumu he sends his enormous penis underground for over a hundred kilometers and rapes them as they urinate. Humiliated, the women jab their digging sticks repeatedly into the ground, severing his penis and killing him once and for all. Whilst he dies at this place Wirdangula lingers in the landscape in rock form.4 [Based on fieldnotes made with Thomas Jangala Rice and Jeannie Nungarrayi Egan, July 2006.] Yinkardakurdaku, the Spotted Nightjar (Eurostopodus argus), similarly pursues a group of travelling ancestral women who come from Minamina, a place in the northwest of Warlpiri country. Warlpiri women today sing both about Yinkardakurdaku and in his voice when they sing the Minamina yawulyu.5 These songs and Dreamings belong to women of Napangardi/Napanangka subsections. Yinkardakurdaku, of Jungarrayi subsection is of inappropriate kin relationship for marriage to them and therefore forbidden as a sexual partner. In the bird’s true reserved but assertive manner, he follows behind this group of travelers, camouflaging in the scrub behind them. He calls out to the women and then hides when they turn around to see who it is. Rather than being an overt threat, the women treat Yinkardakurdaku as an annoying presence and they laugh at him as they travel along. Yinkardakurdaku moves around the women in a circular manner, swooping in on them aggressively from different angles, forcing them into a huddled group. Yinkardakurdaku is audibly present through his call but is rarely seen as his movements are fleeting and fast. [Description developed from fieldnotes and recordings with Judy Napangardi Watson and Judy Nampijinpa Granites, 2006.] Wangala, the crow (Corvus orru), sits high on a hill peering down over a group of visiting women as they sing in preparation for a ceremony. He is of the Japanangka skin group, an owner for this country and as such the party of travellers bring him lots of food as payment for having the ceremony at this place. One of the Napaljarri women who is part of the group is embarrassed to be watched like this by a man of inappropriate marriage group (he is her classificatory son-in-law). He continues to gaze down at her, plotting his seduction. He stretches out like crows do, showing off so that she will notice him but Napaljarri is getting increasingly shamed throughout his performance. Wangala is sitting up at the ceremony facing

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the women like Anmatyerr people do (acting in an inappropriate way for Warlpiri people whose men sit with their backs to the women). He does this so that he can look at the women and watch Napaljarri. He places one hand over his eyes, so no one can see that he is watching her. When they finish the ceremony, everyone walks off but Japanangka holds on to Napaljarri’s dog and pretends to tell it to go to her even though he knows he is holding it too tightly. When Napaljarri comes back to get her dog he grabs her and rapes her. Some men from Warnapiyi had joined up with the Kunajarrayi women in their eastward journey and they came and blindfolded Wangala and took him to the creek where they burn him as punishment for this monstrous act. When they burned this Japanangka, all these crows came out of the fire like ashes. That’s where all the crows come from today. [Taken from fieldnotes with Thomas Jangala Rice and Jeannie Nungarrayi Egan, 2006.] Jujurrayi: “That’s where they were,” Nampijinpa nodded to the south as I pulled my car up on a rise on the side of the road. She peered towards Warnipi hill through which there was a clearly visible gap—created by a group of ancestral Nampijinpa/ Nangala women as they travelled eastwards. At the base of the hill was another clearing where this group of women had sat gathering wayipi, commonly translated into English as “tar vine”—a creeper with a small edible root. She nodded her head back subtly to the hill on the other side of the road behind us. I glanced behind me, following Nampijinpa’s nod, to see the small black rock about two-thirds up the hill. This was Jujurrayi, the Australian Owlet nightjar (Aegotheles cristatus)—a small bird with big eyes that comes out at night. “He just sits there, he doesn’t go anywhere,” Nampijinpa explained. The ancestral women, on the other hand, were frantically running back and forth as they collected the wayipi vine. Running out to get more and then retreating quickly in to the nearby cave. They were frightened because he was watching them. “He is wrong-skin for them and he kept watching them from the hill.” Nampijinpa demonstrated how Jujurrayi lay as he watched the women, getting down on her side with her elbow crooked so she could rest her head on her hand—forever haunting these ancestral women from this position just outside their hunting ground. Milirni (the Warlpiri verb that Nampijinpa used)—specifically denoting a way of unobtrusively peering from a distance of around 100 metres or so—the same kind of distance from which a hunter might stalk a kangaroo. [Taken from fieldnotes with Lynette Nampijinpa Granites and Judy Nampijinpa Granites in October 2006.]

Understanding bird/monsters as “monsters” Bird/monsters are referred to by Warlpiri people as “monsters” and “Kurdaitcha birds” in English, and—importantly—as Jarnpa or Kurdaitcha in Warlpiri, that is to say, they formally share their names with those monsters. Meggitt (1955) provided rich, ethnographic descriptions of Jarnpa [djanba] encountered during the 1950s by residents of the then newly formed settlement of Lajamanu, describing them as:

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malicious, indeed malevolent beings, who on occasions seem to be wholly immaterial and to possess powers yet have many human qualities and frailties. Although they are often the subjects of amused conversation by day in the camp, after nightfall the Walbiri fear of them is quite apparent. Djanba are in no way venerated as culture heroes, nor are they regarded as innovators or validators of custom. Rather, they are dangerous nuisances. They first appeared on earth in the dreamtime and still inhabit it today. (Meggitt 1955: 378)

These Jarnpa have qualities similar to the bird/monsters, also being associated with particular sites and referred to as fornicators with large, semi-erect penises (1955: 378). However, Meggitt also describes that Jarnpa wear “feathered boots” to cover their foot tracks (1955: 378)—an important difference given that when associated with bird/ monsters, bird tracks, specifically, are often an identifying indicator of their presence. In Warlpiri stories, songs, and art, a specific kind of monstrous association is based on the visual evidence of bird tracks. A further difference can be found between the monster/birds and the Jarnpa and Kurdaitcha described by Musharbash (2014b) half a century after Meggitt. She compared Meggitt’s descriptions with her own observations at Yuendumu and argues for the amalgamation of not just the terminology Jarnpa and the today more commonly used term Kurdaitcha, but that these figures are gradually becoming more human like.6 In contrast, bird/monsters are referred to by Warlpiri people as “Kurdaitcha birds,” while also being symbiotically linked to the Warlpiri owners of particular Dreamings. These amalgamated monstrous beings differ from the Jarnpa that Meggitt describes, though Wirdangula certainly has more similarities than the other three bird/monsters. While many of the stories and songs about Wirdangula, Yinkardakurdaku, Wangala, and Jujurrayi are not known by younger generations, these “indexes of evil” (Musharbash 2016) seep into the Warlpiri collective conscious with bird sightings, birdcalls, and other interrelated phenomena frightening and controlling Warlpiri people across generations. These stories highlight the human qualities of these bird/ monsters while demonstrating their refusal to play by the rules of the human world.

Bird/monsters defy the cultural expectations of the gendered use of social space Bird/monsters emerge in ways that address tensions surrounding contemporary regressions to the traditionally gender-segregated Warlpiri lifeworlds with adult Warlpiri men largely socializing among themselves and adult women and children spending the majority of their time together. Warlpiri people laugh when they tell the story of Wirdangula, who dances like a woman in an effort to seduce the party of traveling women. Wirdangula, however, dances like a woman overtly and confrontationally, and most poignantly, he does so in an attempt at seduction—a shared and intimate male/female act. Similarly, Wangala threatens by sitting in a Warlpiri Kurdiji ceremony facing the women. Contrary to accepted ways, Wangala’s acts are

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immediately confrontational and highlight core anxieties which Warlpiri people face around the gendered use of social space. In ritual contexts, the blurring of otherwise strict categories of gender, where men dance like women and vice versa, only occurs in gender-restricted zones (see Curran 2017).7 With the rise in many of the features of modernity, a teenager category (which never previously existed) has emerged as a new social group. Within this group, children, who have not yet been formally initiated through ceremony and therefore have not formed the subsequent matriline interconnections, are having sexual relationships and bearing children. Significant changes to traditional patterns must necessarily occur to adapt to these circumstances. On top of this, husband and wife pairs are often best friends (though this is not always the case and mostly relates to older remarried couples), choosing to spend their days together rather than with their gendered groups. These newly formed ways of socializing have deep effects on the day-to-day structures of Warlpiri life and the ways in which Dreamings, country, and associated components previously core to Warlpiri identity are being passed on. The stories of Wirdangula and Wangala highlight contemporary concerns over the ways in which these changing social structures may threaten aspects of the more traditionalized (and hence morally acceptable) ways of life.

Bird/monsters are incorporated as kin but incapable of social relationships In the four stories, the central characters have subsection terms, associating them with particular owned country and classifying them in to relationships with others. Wangala “the crow,” for example, as a Japanangka owner for the locational site of the story, accepts payments of food from the travelers who arrive to hold their ceremony in his country. He is thus embedded in the social world of these visitors at once, placed into the pan-Central Australia socio-centric system of social organization. Most notably in three of the bird/monster examples, the bird/monsters lust in unrequited ways after women in their mother-in-law category—the most culturally unacceptable sexual liaison marked by complete avoidance in more traditionalist contexts. The bird/monsters do not adhere to the rules of kinship categorization. They seduce and sometimes violently sexually assault women who are in mother-in-law relationships to them. Core to the system of social organization, which supports the patrilineally passed on ownership of country by patri-couples (F–S for men and FZ– BD for women), is reliance on marriage between people of particular social categories. Meggitt (1962) has described the ideal marriage arrangements as being “that in which a man promises his daughter (as yet unborn) to the M.B.S.S. or the mother’s brother whom he has circumcised” (1962: 266). This basis for marriage, while conservatively adhered to in the 1950s when Meggitt undertook his fieldwork, nowadays is rarely actualized, though is still upheld as ideal in Warlpiri minds. Following an idealized marriage, a man enters into a relationship of avoidance to his mother-in-law, who promises her (much younger than him) daughter to him through the symbolic act

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of passing a burning firestick during his initiation ceremony. Musharbash notes that although many of these promised marriages never eventuate, at Yuendumu today, initiation rituals take place almost every year and generally all boys get initiated, meaning among other things, that all initiated men have at least one promised wife. Promises are made public by the announcement of the identity of the circumciser during initiation rituals. (2010: 274)

Ultimately, this has little to do with the actual sexual or romantic relationships between younger Warlpiri people today. The ritualized promises of marriage, most of which will never eventuate, seem to be more about passing on patrilineal ownership of country and forming alliances between matrilines. In their violent rapes and other lewd acts of sexual violence, bird/monsters echo concerns about the cultural consequences of nonideal marriages and the effects this has on the ways in which ownership of Dreamings and country is passed on. These are deeply held cultural fears which today are particularly disconcerting with wrong-way marriages being common and knowledge of inherited country declining.

Bird/monsters confront and control but are rarely seen Bird/monsters fall into two categories: those traveling long distances through country and those localized in one place.8 The bird species typify these habitual tendencies, though importantly do not entirely predict the ways in which the bird/monsters haunt and invoke fear. Wirdangula and Yinkardakurdaku follow groups of women in long journeys across country, whereas Wangala and Jujurrayi remain in one place, lurking on the edges, in both cases on nearby hills which provide an overview. There is no predictability in the ways these bird/monsters emerge from these boundaries: some are overtly confronting, some sexually violent, and others less proactive, but just as powerful due to their known sinister intent. Yinkardakurdaku, the “Spotted Nightjar,” appears mostly at dawn and dusk, when he can easily camouflage against the scrub. This bird also hunts in areas close to the ground; he hops around insistently after his prey, which are mostly insects. This ornithological knowledge is transmitted in the story of Yinkardakurdaku’s pursuits of the traveling ancestral women. He flits around the group of women throughout their journey, yet is always hidden in the surrounding scrub when they turn to spot him. Despite never being sighted his presence is persistent. Jujurrayi is even less proactive but equally as powerful in the way he haunts and controls the behavior of the group of ancestral women collecting wayipi vine from the base of Warnipi hill. Typically for the behavior of the Australian Owlet Nightjar, and as Nampijinpa emphasized, “he just sits there, he doesn’t go anywhere.” From the distance and through his sinister presence, however, he controls the movements and activities of the women, who continually race to hide in a nearby cave during their hunting expedition. Wangala too begins with this kind of haunting from a nearby hill. In this

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story though, the bird/monster is more confronting, particularly in his cunningness to deceive and his unfettered desire for inappropriate and violent sexual liaisons. Wirdangurla is the most overtly confronting of the examples. His persistent sexual advances on the group of traveling women throughout their journey are mostly displayed through his exaggerated dance movements. Despite this show, Wirdangula disappears for a part of the women’s journey but, like any proper monster, reappears dramatically and in full fear-invoking force when he violently sexually assaults the group of women by sending his enormously enlarged penis under the ground to rape them when they least expect to encounter him. The interdisciplinary literature on monsters abound with examples of monsters lurking at boundaries: the boundaries of certainty in liminal periods and on the outskirts of focal activity. These zones are dark, on the edges, and the monsters that haunt them are often invisible. Similarly, Central Australian birds are rarely obtrusive and often reserved—commonly inhabiting these kinds of boundary zones. Many are camouflaged or night active—thus, not seen but encountered through their calls and tracks. In other words, many actual Central Australian birds share behavioral characteristics with monsters and, crucially, with another controlling but barely visible presence in remote communities in Central Australia: policies made by governments from far-off and culturally different urban Australian centers. Occasionally, these powerful forces emerge closer and reveal their existence on the boundaries of the Warlpiri world: white Toyotas arriving and leaving settlements, unknown people who arrive to do government jobs and the incomprehensible forms that need to be filled in for access to basic services. But for the most part, like birds, like monsters, they operate from afar while having a kind of menacing control over many aspects of desert lives. This is the reality of the neocolonial Warlpiri world where fears of the outside submerge into personal fears and monstrous forms emerge in response to social shifts.

Bird/monsters are the perpetrators of extremes of male sexual violence Whether through overt physical assault or threatening gaze, bird/monsters demonstrate ways in which male figures confront and control female victims. While Yinkardakurdaku and Jujurrayi do not ever sexually assault or even, in Jujurrayi’s case, move, their lingering male gaze impacts on the women’s activities and movements. The bird/monsters in their violation of normative sexual relations and enlarged genitalia are similar to the feared Japanese tanuki “racoon dog” whose haunting representation features the use of “magical equipment” in the form of a gigantic scrotum, a powerful symbol of fertility as well as their main mechanism for shape shifting (Foster 2012). Cohen describes monstrous practices in general, summarizing: The monster embodies those sexual practices that must not be committed, or that may be committed only through the body of the monster … the monster enforces the cultural codes that regulate sexual desire. (Cohen 1996: 14)

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While the bird/monsters’ incapacity to engage in correct social relations is a key feature of their monstrousness, the violent acts they commit also frame a core tension that exists between idealized promised marriages and romantic love, which is more connected to female sexual desire. I put forward that these monsters in their aggression are addressing male-centric cultural fears concerning control over women’s sexuality and the maintenance of traditionally gender-segregated social worlds. They all commit sexually violent acts; Wirdangula rapes a group of women, Yinkardarkurdaku harasses and stalks, Wangala tricks a woman into having sex with him, shaming her in the process, and Jujurrayi through his gaze controls the behaviors and movements of women. The sexual violence central to these stories reflects an effort to maintain male dominance in a world where patriarchal systems are losing their centrality. Over the generations of female-centered ethnography of Warlpiri people, Bell (1980), Dussart (1992), and Musharbash (2010) describe the active and central role of women in promised marriage arrangements, including matriline negotiations (see also Peterson 1969) and remarriage choices (see Dussart 1992). Musharbash notes that “today, at Yuendumu, there are not many avenues open to Warlpiri men to enforce the marriage with their ‘promised one’—should they so wish” (2010: 275). Relatively recent historical developments have provided Warlpiri women with increasing economic independence and, consequently, new avenues for exercising their choice in broader social issues. Settlement in the 1940s leads to much larger groups living together; the ration era and then direct welfare payments of the selfdetermination era of the 1970s resulted in less economic reliance on traditional modes of hunting and gathering; access to motor vehicles has seen the broadening of social networks and subsequent increase of travel across the desert regions and beyond. Notably, with the contemporary rise in use of social media in remote desert regions the intensity of engagement with people from often-distant places has been dramatically enhanced. The possibilities open to Warlpiri women today for romantic relationships have moved far beyond those defined by traditional systems of social organization, opening up conservative fears concerning the future cohesiveness of Warlpiri society.9

Discussion: Bird/monsters represent feared aspects of changes to Warlpiri sociality Deeply held cultural ideals are passed on through Warlpiri generations in Dreaming stories and songs, and significantly relay the culturally accepted moral order held by previous generations. My analyses of the bird/monsters reveal fears of loss of a number of valued areas of Warlpiri cultural heritage: connections to country, maintenance of kinship and social organization, and the culturally accepted use of gendered social space. Future reproduction of these cherished aspects of cultural heritage is considered by Warlpiri people to be under threat—often framed as “loss of culture.” Peterson has problematized these understandings of the maintenance of a “Culture” in noting that it is

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now associated with a completely objectified and thing-like understanding that bears little resemblance to any nuanced anthropological view in which much culture is implicit, taken for granted, and embedded in sedimented dispositions. (2017: 237)

Nonetheless, these simplified understandings of Aboriginal worlds receive significant attention. Australian governments emphasize through policy and funding avenues the importance of the maintenance of Aboriginal culture (also, supported by Aboriginal people and their organizations nationwide). For Warlpiri people, whose lived everyday experience is within these cultural worlds, confusion arises as views of wellbeing are increasingly framed by connections to these more “traditionalized” aspects of Aboriginal culture which are ever more difficult to maintain in to the neocolonial present (and future). Literature from elsewhere in Aboriginal Australia points to significant shifts in the ways that Aboriginal people relate to country. Merlan (1998) points out the generational differences of Jawoyn people’s connections to country in the Katherine region, noting that younger people’s connections have been “shaped at least as much within a framework of developing Western institutional influences as in some sociospatial experience of the elders” (1998: 2). Burbidge too has noted that parts of the country which previously were considered to have agency have become “less a relational part of the Wiradjuri self ” (2015: 422). For contemporary generations of Warlpiri people, all of whom have lived in settlements for the majority of their lives, country is still at the core of their identity despite a decline in opportunities to live in and visit places distant from settlements. It is largely the oldest generation of Warlpiri people who pass on knowledge of songs and stories through oral traditions, including much of the site-specific knowledge. It is through their efforts that knowledge of the referential associations of birds to monsters is being passed on as part of the collective conscious. In Yuendumu, visiting sites on country is identified as crucial to maintaining the wellbeing of young Warlpiri people. The Yuendumu School’s country visits are seen as essential for the proper education of Warlpiri children, and bush trips run by the youth program are identified as a key mode to engage youths who may otherwise be involved in antisocial behaviors. Visiting country and camping out are also a favorite pastime among Warlpiri people of all generations. Glaskin examines how Bardi imagination and experience of country have successively been shaped, as colonisation and missionisation have precipitated economic, political, ecological, technological, and linguistic transformations in people’s everyday lives. (2018:3)

She also suggests elsewhere that there has been a recent ontological shift toward “possessive individualism” (2010). Austin-Broos has noted a similar kind of shift toward a reinterpretation of Arrernte country as “private landed property” (2009: 226), noting that this has ontological consequences, turning kin into “market individuals” (2009: 226). These kinds of ontological transformations have widescale impacts on the ways in which Aboriginal people connect to and engage with country. Among

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Warlpiri people living in desert settlements emotional connections associating family with place continue, even if there has been a shift toward focusing on settlement sites (e.g., many younger Warlpiri people today speak of connections to Yurrampi “honey ant” Dreaming at the site of Yuendumu where they have lived their entire lives). These continue to be associated with good feelings, family, and belonging, whereas in previous generations this connection would have been intimately linked to patrilineally inherited sites. Against a background of these kinds of shifting ontologies, bird/monsters such as Wirdangula, Yinkardakurdaku, Wangala, and Jujurrayi appear as indications of the kinds of fears that Warlpiri people have around the rapidity and effects of broader and often tense, social changes.

Conclusion: bird/monsters haunt forevermore Cohen reminds us that “the monster always escapes … No monster tastes death once” (1996: 5). Wirdangula and Wangala, despite dramatic corporeal deaths, reemerge and continue to lurk in Warlpiri country forevermore—Wirdangula in rock form and Wangala as the crows that fly through the sky overseeing all that occurs in the world below. Yinkardakurdaku remains as a bird that is rarely seen as it lurks in the boundaries of human activity, its call initiating fear. Jujurrayi remains as the ultimate Foucauldian panopticon, forevermore overseeing the acts of both ancestral and individual Warlpiri people. As the birds that inhabit Warlpiri country continue to soar the skies, fleet in surrounding scrub, and call out during the night, they also act as a witness to all human activity and change: These monsters ask us how we perceive the world, and how we have misrepresented what we have attempted to place. They ask us to re-evaluate our cultural assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, our perception of difference, our tolerance toward its expression. This is why we have created them. (Cohen 1996: 20)

From a Warlpiri perspective, monsters have and always will exist in country and their presence will be passed on through songs and stories. Monsters linger in oral tradition and have specific interpretations which highlight pertinent human fears at particular historical periods. The bird/monsters of this chapter gain new life to address the contemporary world and associated anxieties. The calls of birds are more than distant sounds in the environment—they bring to mind interpretations of the acts of the ancestral beings and the associated moral understandings of the world that arise from these stories.

Notes 1

Among others, see Evans-Pritchard (1940) for an early description of the symbolic role of birds among the Nuer and Agnihotri & Si’s (2012) account of the role of

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2 3

4

5 6

7 8 9

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birds among the Solega of southern India for a recent one. Similar to ancient Greek, Roman, and Etruscan systems of augury (Aristophanes 1924; Fowler 1933; James 1950; Rose 1911), cultures across Southeast Asia place importance on “interpretation of divine revelation as it is believed to be manifested in the behaviour of certain sacred birds” (Freedman 1961: 142). For further Southeast Asian examples, see Delacour (1947), Smythies (1957), and Waterbury (1952). Like many Aboriginal groups across Australia, Warlpiri people’s cosmological understandings of their world derive from a timeless moment known as jukurrpa, often translated in to English as The Dreaming. The English word Kurdaitcha is used across Australia by Aboriginal people with reference to revenge killers. While Warlpiri people explain suspicious deaths and regularly experience Kurdaitcha—a term used in both Aboriginal English and as a borrowing in Warlpiri—they take a different form to the feather-footed beings which haunt other parts of Aboriginal Australia (see Musharbash 2014b for further details). Wirdangula has similar characteristics as the much-celebrated Pitjantjatjara hero, Wati Nyiru, who chases the Seven Sisters star constellation across the sky in a similar seductive pursuit. In the exhibition “Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters” (National Museum of Australia 2018), Wati Nyiru appears in narratives described in various ways: an old man, a sexual deviant, or simply as a penis, and is consistently represented by bird tracks in paintings of the story. Yawulyu are a broad genre of Warlpiri women’s songs that are sung to nurture the identity of particular women associated with the country and Dreamings central to the songs. Musharbash emphasizes that “it is of crucial importance to note that the beings that Warlpiri people call Kurdaitcha are—most of the time—quite different from the human Kurdaitcha revenge killers known elsewhere in Aboriginal Australia” (2014b: 41). The Warlpiri ritualized practice of jiliwirri, or “joking around,” draws precisely on this fear by emphasizing extremes of inappropriateness in gendered behavior (see Curran 2017 and Musharbash 2008 for further discussion of this practice). Warlpiri songs generally follow the actions of ancestors that are either traveling or localized (see Curran 2013). Likely particularly pertinent fear for people who have lived in communities such as Yuendumu, which—unlike other desert regions where there has been significant mixing of different Aboriginal groups—is predominantly Warlpiri and has maintained Warlpiri systems through much of its history.

References Agnihotri, S. and S. Aung (2012), “Solega ethno-Ornithology,” Journal of Ethnobiology, 32 (2): 185–211. Aristophanes (1924), The Birds, B. B. Rogers (trans.), London: G.Bell & Sons Ltd. Austin-Broos, D. (2009), Arrernte Present, Arrernte Past: Invasion, Violence and Imagination in Indigenous Central Australia, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Bell, D. (1980), Daughters of the Dreaming, Sydney: McPhee Gribble and George Allen Unwin.

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Bird-David, N. (1999), “‘Animism’ Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology,” Current Anthropology, 40 (S1): S67–S91. Brightman, R. (1993), Grateful Prey: Rock Cree Human–Animal Relationships, Berkeley: University of California Press. Burbidge, B. (2015), “‘We Are Kangaroo, We Have the Owl’: Linguistic and Emotional Clues of the Meanings of the Bush in Changing Wiradjuri Being and Relatedness,” Australian Journal of Anthropology, 26 (3): 414–27. Cohen, J. J. (1996), “Monster Theory (Seven Theses),” in J. J. Cohen (ed.), Monster Theory, 3–25, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Curran, G. (2013), “The Dynamics of Collaborative Research Relationships: Examples from the Warlpiri Songlines Project,” Collaborative Anthropologies, 6 (1): 353–72. Curran, G. (2017), “Warlpiri Ritual Contexts as Imaginative Spaces for Exploring Traditional Gender Roles,” in K. Gillespie, S. Treloyn, and D. Niles (eds.), A Distinctive Voice in the Antipodes: Essays in Honour of Stephen A. Wild, 73–88, Canberra: ANU Press. Delacour, J. (1947), Birds of Malaysia, New York: Macmillan. Dussart, F. (1992), “The Politics of Female Identity: Warlpiri Widows at Yuendumu,” Ethnology, 31 (4): 337–50. Eickelkamp, U. (2004), “Egos and Ogres: Aspects of Psychosexual Development and Cannibalistic Demons in Central Australia,” Oceania, 74 (3): 161–89. Eickelkamp, U. (2014), “Specters of Reality: Mamu in the Eastern Western Desert of Australia,” in Y. Musharbash and G. H. Presterudstuen (eds.), Monster Anthropology in Australasia and Beyond, 57–73, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1940), The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People, London: Clarendon Press. Foster, M. D. (2012), “Haunting Modernity: Tanuki, Trains, and Transformation in Japan,” Asian Ethnology, 71 (1): 3–29. Fowler, W. W. (1933), The Religious Experience of the Roman People, London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd. Freedman, J. D. (1961), “Iban Augurt,” History and Archaeology Dijdragen tot de Taal, Land- en Volkenkunde, 117(1): 141–67. Glaskin, K. (2010), “On Dreams, Innovation and the Emerging Genre of the Individual Artist,” Anthropological Forum, 20 (3): 251–67. Glaskin, K. (2012), “Anatomies of Relatedness: Considering Personhood in Aboriginal Australia,” American Anthropologist, 114 (2): 297–308. Glaskin, K. (2018), “Other-than-humans and the Remaking of the Social,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 24 (2): 1–17. Green, J. and M. Turpin (2013), “If You Go Down to the Soak Today: Symbolism and Structure in an Arandic Children’s Story,” Anthropological Linguistics, 55 (4): 358–94. James, E. O. (1950), “Augury,” Chambers Encyclopedia, London: George Newnes Ltd. Meggitt, M. (1955), “Djanba among the Walbiri, Central Australia,” Anthropos, 50 (3): 275–403. Meggitt, M. (1962), Desert People: A Study of the Walbiri Aborigines of Central Australia, Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Merlan, F. (1998), Caging the Rainbow, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Morton, J. (2014), “A Murder of Monsters: Terror and Morality in an Aboriginal Religion,” in Y. Musharbash and G. H. Presterudstuen (eds.), Monster Anthropology in Australasia and Beyond, 75–92, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Musharbash, Y. (2008), “Perilous Laughter: Examples from Yuendumu, Central Australia,” Anthropological Forum, 8 (3): 271–7. Musharbash, Y. (2010), “Marriage, Love Magic, and Adultery: Warlpiri Relationships as Seen by Three Generations of Anthropologists,” Oceania, 80 (3): 272–88. Musharbash, Y. (2014a), “Introduction: Monsters, Anthropology, and Monster Studies,” in Y. Musharbash and G. H. Presterudstuen (eds.), Monster Anthropology in Australasia and Beyond, 1–24, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Musharbash, Y. (2014b), “Monstrous Transformations: A Case Study from Central Australia,” in Y. Musharbash and G. H. Presterudstuen (eds.), Monster Anthropology in Australasia and Beyond, 39–55, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Musharbash, Y. (2016), “A Short Essay on Monsters, Birds, and Sounds of the Uncanny,” Semiotic Review, 2: 1–11. National Museum of Australia (2017), Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters, September 15, 2017—February 28, 2018, Canberra: ACT. Nicholls, C. (2014), “Dreamings’ and Place—Aboriginal Monsters and Their Meanings,” The Conversation. Available online: https://theconversation.com/dreamings-and-placeaboriginal-monsters-and-their-meanings-25606 (accessed April 30, 2014). Peterson, N. (1969), “Secular and Ritual Links: Two Basic and Opposed Principles of Australian Social Organisation as Illustrated by Walbiri Ethnography,” Mankind, 7 (1): 27–35. Peterson, N. (2017), “Is There a Role for Anthropology in Cultural Reproduction? Maps, Mining, and the ‘Cultural Future’ in Central Australia,” in F. Dussart and S. Poirier (eds.), Entangled Territorialities: Negotiating Indigenous Lands in Australia and Canada, 235–52, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Rose, H. J. (1911), “Divination (Greek),” Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, J. Hastins (ed.), Edinburgh: T.& T. Clark. Rose, D. B. (2011), “Flying Fox: Kin, Keystone, Kontaminant,” Australian Humanities Review, 50: 119–36. Ryder, T. (2017), Ayeye thipe-akerte: Arrernte Stories about Birds, Batchelor: Batchelor Institute Press. Smythies, B. E. (1957), “An Annotated Checklist of Birds of Borneo,” Sarawak Museum Journal, VII (9) (New Series), Kuching, 1–15. Strehlow, T. G. H. (1971), Songs of Central Australia, Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Turpin, M., R. Gosford, and F. Meakins (2015), “Human–Bird Relationships in Some Aboriginal Cultures of Inland Australia,” Eleventh Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies (CHAGS11), Paper presented to the 11th Conference for Hunter and Gatherer Societies, Vienna, 7–11 September. Turpin, M., A. Ross, V. Dobson, and M. K. Turner (2013), “The Spotted Nightjar Calls When Dingo Pups Are Born: Ecological and Social Indicators in Central Australia,” Journal of Ethnobiology, 33 (1): 7–32. Vivieros de Castro, E. (1998), “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism,” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 4 (3): 469–88. Waterbury, F. (1952), Bird-Deities in China, Ascona: Artibus Asiae Publishers.

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The Nine-night Siege: Kurdaitcha at the Interface of Warlpiri/Non-Indigenous Relations Joanne Thurman

On a Saturday in November 2015, after a fatiguing week in Alice Springs supporting a Warlpiri woman’s case against welfare (child protection), I drove the 450 kilometers northwest to return to my fieldwork location, the Warlpiri community of Nyirrpi in Central Australia. Arriving in the late afternoon, I found that a large proportion of its Warlpiri members, including most of the men, had gone to another community for a sports weekend. To my surprise, the remaining community members, women and children for the most, had formed a collective camp in the middle of Nyirrpi. During my nineteen months of fieldwork, this was the only time I experienced such large-scale, collective camping.1 More commonly, people at Nyirrpi sleep in smaller family groups in and around their own houses. On this evening, however, bed frames and mattresses were arranged in rows in a central open area between houses, the Art Centre, and the work-for-the-dole office—and as far away as possible from the community periphery where monsters were known to be lurking. A cluster of women sat gathered around a young woman, Abigail, dealing with what turned out to be the first of a nine-night Kurdaitcha attack. As one of the women said to me, “This is what kuuku [monsters] do: when all the men leave, they come looking for a wife.”

Introduction Among the monsters that haunt and hunt Warlpiri people, the most ubiquitous and also the most feared are the Kurdaitcha. During my fieldwork at Nyirrpi, the existence of Kurdaitcha “out there” and their potential to strike anytime was a quotidian reality: people were always on alert for signs suggesting that they may be lurking nearby. Kurdaitcha are extremely malevolent beings, with more-than-human powers of flight, sorcery, and the ability to make themselves invisible to most Warlpiri people. While in physical appearance they look like human (Warlpiri) men, albeit more “wild” looking, with darker skin, red eyes, and matted hair, they are classified by Warlpiri people as kuuku, meaning monster (Meggitt 1955; Musharbash 2014a, b). During the precontact

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past, the proclivity of Kurdaitcha to hunt, kill, and ensorcell Warlpiri people as they lived and moved across their Tanami Desert homelands provided a logical explanation for otherwise inexplicable human deaths. Over more recent decades, Warlpiri people have been sedentized in towns and communities across Central Australia, a process that has not only reshaped social relations between Warlpiri people, but also altered their interactions with others. In these new socio-spatial arrangements, contemporary Warlpiri find themselves sharing their communities not only with resident populations of non-Indigenous service providers but also with Kurdaitcha. In a frightening example of monstrous adaptability (Musharbash and Presterudstuen, this volume), Kurdaitcha have learned to navigate the infrastructure, technologies, and languages of these human settlements, from the edges of which they continue to haunt and hunt their Warlpiri prey (Musharbash 2014b). In this chapter, I focus on one case study of a Kurdaitcha attack at the remote community of Nyirrpi: the nine nights in November 2015, over which a growing number of Kurdaitcha men unsuccessfully tried to steal Abigail for a wife and then, frustrated and angered, became intent on killing her instead. In what follows, I present the ethnography of the Kurdaitcha attack as it unfolded over the nine nights, and the Warlpiri praxis involved in the whole-of-community’s effort at repelling their sorcery. My overall aim is to show how Kurdaitcha may be understood as markers of a distinctly Warlpiri lifeworld. I begin by introducing Nyirrpi community as the ethnographic context of this chapter. Here I emphasize how a key feature of contemporary life is the similar, if inverted, role that both Kurdaitcha and non-Indigenous service providers play as structuring presences in Warlpiri peoples’ lives. Against this background, I juxtapose the sociality of the nighttime monster attacks, which only Warlpiri people can recognize, avoid, and defend against, with the daytime structuring of a governmentserviced remote community. As such, I use the lens of the siege to pull into analytical focus the neocolonial dynamics of government service provision and to illustrate that Kurdaitcha are entangled in the dynamics of Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations in the contemporary context of Nyirrpi. In the conclusion, I engage with literature from the interdisciplinary field of monster studies, specifically with the common understanding of monsters as the Other (Cohen 1996). I use the Nyirrpi siege to argue that Kurdaitcha, although terrifying and threatening, also belong—insofar as their existence sustains and marks the boundaries of a specifically Warlpiri ontology.

Nyirrpi community: The ethnographic context Traditionally a nomadic, hunter-gatherer people, Warlpiri people were relatively unaffected by colonialism until the early 1900s, when colonists began pushing into the center of Australia. By the 1940s, the establishment of pastoral stations and gold and Wolfram mines in the Tanami Desert, combined with the ravages of frontier violence and a severe drought, was making bush life increasingly untenable (Heppell and Wigley 1981: 4–17; Meggitt 1962: 16–29; Musharbash 2008: 17–18). Over the next decade, Warlpiri people were pushed onto centralized settlements, including what was

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then the government ration station of Yuendumu (Musharbash 2008). A few decades later—in the mid-1970s—some Warlpiri families at Yuendumu decided to establish their own outstation at Nyirrpi.2 From a population of approximately twenty people living in humpies, by the 1980s Nyirrpi had grown to become a small community. Its residents had cut their own road to connect with the Tanami Highway, which runs from just north of Alice Springs to Western Australia, and secured funding for basic infrastructure and facilities (Peterson 2016; see also Morel and Ross 1993). From these early beginnings as a Warlpiri initiative, albeit with the support of a few key non-Indigenous proponents (see Peterson 2016), Nyirrpi has since grown into a well-established, government-run remote community. Today, Nyirrpi has roughly 250 residents, of which over 90 percent are Yapa, meaning Warlpiri or more generally Aboriginal people.3 The remaining, less than 10 percent of the population, are Kardiya, or non-Aboriginal people, whose job is to manage and/or deliver the services of the mostly government (local and Territory) and few independent organizations— including council services (power, water, sewage, roads, rubbish), policing, health care, child care, primary education, adult employment and training, welfare, and housing. For its Warlpiri residents, the fabric of daily life at Nyirrpi is inflected by the current Interventionist era of government policies and coercive approaches toward Aboriginal people: a suite of reforms at the heart of which is a clear intent to produce a “newly oriented, ‘normalised’ Aboriginal population, one whose concerns with custom, kin and land will give way to the individualistic aspirations of private home ownership, career, and self-improvement” (Hinkson 2007: 6; see also Dodson 2007). During the daytime, the delivery of community service provision operates in such a way that Warlpiri peoples’ lives are rarely free from the rules, regulations, surveillance, and scheduling of a neoliberal system of governance. This daytime structuring of community life, when services operate and Kardiya are present, represents a stark difference to the rhythms of the evening/nighttime sociality of Nyirrpi, a difference that became even more pronounced during the Kurdaitcha attack on Abigail.

Kardiya and Kurdaitcha Both Kardiya and Kurdaitcha represent what Musharbash (2014b: 53) has called “historically disastrous and now all-encompassing presence[s]” in the lives of Warlpiri people. Musharbash’s analysis turns on the changes to Warlpiri peoples’ lives since they became enfolded into the Australian nation. Of key concern is the “drastic differential in measurable inequality” between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians’ rates of literacy, incarceration, unemployment, and crucially, mortality (2014b: 39–40). Compellingly, she shows that while Warlpiri people are “experiencing new kinds of deaths, more deaths, and earlier deaths than before” (2014b: 50), like other monsters with human-like bodies (Musharbash and Presterudstuen, this volume), Kurdaitcha have simultaneously flourished and adapted to the changing times: they have learned to drive, to speak English as well as Warlpiri, and have followed the Warlpiri to their communities and towns. As Musharbash and Presterudstuen (this volume) have pointed out, while the fact of monstrous adaptability is interesting in

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itself, a key analytical point about monsters and change lies in looking at what such adaptation reveals about the contemporary circumstances within which it occurs: in this case, what Kurdaitcha adaptation reveals about the neocolonial relations and socio-spatial arrangements of Warlpiri communities. As structuring, pervasive, and potentially harmful presences in Warlpiri peoples’ lives, both Kardiya and Kurdaitcha have come to play similar, albeit inverted, roles: on the one hand, Kardiya are visible and Kurdaitcha are invisible (at least to most Warlpiri people), and on the other, while Kardiya structure “daytime settlement space through their presence and ideas about offices, work, and money,” Kurdaitcha “structure nocturnal sociality through intimidation” (Musharbash 2014b: 53). Whether visible or invisible, Warlpiri people are always on the alert for the signs of Kurdaitcha as well as of certain Kardiya. Kurdaitcha can only be seen by ngankari (traditional healers), mad people, children, and non-Indigenous people (the latter, also, are never attacked). For everyone else, to be on the alert for Kurdaitcha is to be constantly reading the environment—looking, listening—for their foot tracks in the sand, for curiously moving whirlwinds, the whistling a Kurdaitcha or his companion bird makes, or the warning barks of camp dogs (Musharbash 2014a: 120–1; Meggitt 1955: 382–4). As I was told during the Nyirrpi siege, if you think a Kurdaitcha might be close by, other tricks of detection include spreading flour on the ground, which will show their footprints, or spraying water from a hose, which will silhouette their shape and potentially repel them (Kurdaitcha don’t like rain). While it is true that you may encounter Kurdaitcha at any time—they are always “out there”—Kurdaitcha are prone to attacking at nighttime. As an inversion of this, at Nyirrpi at least, it is only during the daytime that you are likely to encounter Kardiya. In fact, it would be fair to say that Kardiya exert a structuring presence over the community during daytime, mostly through diffuse and mundane processes at the interface of service delivery rather than through individual actions. There are, however, certain Kardiya who, as with Kurdaitcha, Warlpiri people are always on the alert for, and with whom interactions carry similar risks and worries (at worst, the removal of a family member).4 During my fieldwork at Nyirrpi I was always impressed with the environmental awareness of Warlpiri people, including what was, to me, an uncanny up-to-date knowledge about who was arriving at the community. Mostly on the lookout for family, such alertness was also trained for the distinctiveness of a police vehicle, or the giveaway white Toyota with “NTG” (NT Government) number plates harking the arrival of an NT Housing representative, or, more worryingly, child protection agents. Upon the arrival of such vehicles into Nyirrpi the warning word would spread; and the telltale rap-rap-rap on the front door (you can always tell a Kardiya knock) would often send children scurrying into locked bedrooms, much like they will hide under blankets at nighttime for fear of Kurdaitcha. That Kardiya are mostly present during daytime hours is explained, in part, by the fact that most positions they hold require daytime working hours.5 At Nyirrpi, the daytime presence and nighttime absence of Kardiya in Yapa lives is also spatially enshrined. Like many remote communities in Central Australia, the houses at Nyirrpi have been organized such that there are distinct Yapa and Kardiya sides (see Trigger 1992)—a spatial segregation that is further enhanced by an east–west running sand

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dune, indicated in Figure 8.1 by the dashed line. To the north of the sand dune are the employer-provided houses for Kardiya, referred to as “Other Side” by Yapa residents; to the south of the sand dune is where Warlpiri people live, in houses owned and managed by the Northern Territory government. On the southern side is also where the majority of Kardiya workplaces are located (marked X on Figure 8.1). A distinctive pattern of daytime Nyirrpi, then, is the entrance of Kardiya service providers, either from their houses on “Other Side” or driving in from other towns and communities, to their places of work on Yapa side, and their departure again at the end of the working day. As part of broader systems of community service provision, informed by neoliberal policies, this Kardiya presence brings a specific fabric to daytime life. The day begins with the early morning school sirens: the first telling you it is time to wake up, the second that it is time to eat breakfast, the third that you should now be walking your children to school, with a sometimes-loud-speaker followup announcement calling for the children who have failed to show up. While some Warlpiri adults make their way to the employment positions available to them, all others are expected to be productive in some way: by attending adult training courses on numeracy and literacy, computing, cooking, sewing, homemaking (hygienic practices), carpentry and building, or work safe practices. Those receiving welfare benefits are expected at the work-for-the-dole office to sign daily paperwork and to do their work hours. Warlpiri community members are also expected to attend regular local council meetings, the monthly police and community meetings, and other, ad hoc events such as meetings with visiting politicians. Daytime hours are also whiled away waiting: on designated social security phones for an operator to answer, at the clinic to see the nurse, at various offices for a Kardiya worker to help negotiate a

Figure 8.1  Kardiya by day.

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bureaucratic phone call with the telecommunications company, the bank, or the tax office. In short, daytime Nyirrpi is punctuated by the kind of scheduling—of it being “time to” begin, engage in, or end certain activities—that Burbank (2006) has identified as characteristic of Western or “impersonal” institutions. As well, each day is full of micro-moments in which Warlpiri people are subject to—or need to negotiate, avoid, or ignore—the rules and expected behaviors that are attached to being employees, students, or trainees, or the recipients of services and benefits such as welfare, housing, health care, policing, and so on. Throughout the period of the Kurdaitcha attack, with the exception of one daytime attack that I return to below, the fabric of daytime life remained remarkably “normal,” following the routines described above. Each day, however, come late afternoon or evening, with the departure of Kardiya from Yapa Side, Abigail’s demeanor would change as the sorcery of the Kurdaitcha men took effect. Compared to the daytime activities, when Warlpiri people were dispersed across the community, the nighttime attacks were characterized by a gathering together, as the Warlpiri residents organized themselves into a cohesive crisis response, closing ranks against the monsters. While those nights were characterized by fear, anxiety, and stress, they also exemplified a particular sociality that arose from the Warlpiri praxis of knowing how to deal with Kurdaitcha sorcery.

Kurdaitcha sorcery On the evening I arrived back from Alice Springs, Abigail was sitting cross-legged on the ground of the communal camp. She was at the center of a protective gathering: an inner circle of women huddled around her on the ground, including her grandmother Mae, around which more women were sitting on surrounding chairs and bedframes. There was a hushed atmosphere: the women wore concerned expressions as they spoke softly to each other and to Abigail, while those closest held her hands and arms. A little further afield patrolled the eight or so Warlpiri men who had remained in Nyirrpi, conversing quietly. Abigail’s eyes had a dazed look and she was, seemingly involuntarily, trying to move away from her protected position. Repeatedly, as her attention was apparently pulled westward, Abigail would raise her head to look up and out past the group. She would lift a hand and lean her body as if compelled to move in that direction, until Mae and others gently but firmly returned her hand to her lap, and Abigail’s head and shoulders would slump down again. Mae and others explained this to me by detailing the Kurdaitcha’s powers of sorcery: “They’ve got wool, like you make hat, beanie, out of, but invisible one, and they trying to pull her away … [It’s] hairstring. That’s why she’s trying to walk away … they’re pulling her, and she can feel it.” Historically, hair-string—literally human hair spun into string—has held symbolic and ceremonial value for Warlpiri people, including in healing rituals where the string was said to “draw out sickness,” simultaneously detaching the sickness while “binding up” the body (Glowczewski 1983: 226). During mourning and initiation ceremonies, the symbolic potency of hair-string, often coated with red ochre for ritual purposes, incarnated the life force of both humans and ancestral beings. As such, the

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circulation and exchange of hair-string among individuals was bound up in social reproduction: in the transmission of kinship relationships not only between people but also between people and their country, via the ancestral life force incarnated in the string (Glowczewski 1983). In my experience of contemporary Warlpiri life, hairstring still plays a central ceremonial role, although these days, as Mae’s explanation above suggests, wool, sometimes coated with red ochre, can serve the same symbolic purpose as string made from human hair. As Mae’s explanation also indicates, Kurdaitcha too use hair-string though not for healing purposes or the productive transmission of life forces. Instead, as recorded by Meggitt (1955: 385–7), Kurdaitcha carry a “cursing bag” woven from hair-string into which they sing curses and from which, across some distance, they are able to “fire” the bag’s power—the curse—into their victim. During the Nyirrpi siege, it was with their hair-string, which like them is invisible, that the Kurdaitcha launched their ruthless attack on Abigail. For the first two nights, the two Kurdaitcha men tried to abduct her by using the hair-string to pull her toward the western periphery of the community where they were lurking.6 As I understood it, this “pulling” was an attempt to isolate Abigail from the protection of Warlpiri community members. When this attempt failed they, frustrated and angry, became intent on killing her instead, using their hairstring to block her throat and mouth to stop her from eating, breathing, and speaking. When under the attack of Kurdaitcha sorcery, compared to her usual lively demeanor and quickness of mannerism and speech, Abigail became increasingly subdued and often appeared dazed and confused, zombie-like. Over the course of the siege these symptoms intensified: many times, I observed her lying prone and frail on a mattress, sometimes crying and teeth chattering, sometimes limp and still, until someone touched her, and she would flinch and twitch and then sit up, looking confusedly around. The Kurdaitcha sorcery as explained to me and the symptoms displayed by Abigail were eerily similar to Meggitt’s (1955: 386–8) description of how Kurdaitcha effect their kill: the curse they have fired into their victim will materialize inside them, as a stick or a stone, and will “split” their body. For a few days, the victim will be able to walk around, albeit in a trance-like, confused state, but they will die if they are not treated by a ngankari (traditional healer). Despite the intensity of these relentless attacks on Abigail, and the anxiety and compounding fatigue it created in the community, all the Yapa present at Nyirrpi pulled together in a cohesive and coordinated effort at repelling the Kurdaitcha sorcery. The activation of this Warlpiri praxis and sociality against the Kurdaitcha attack made Nyirrpi feel like a very different place: during those nights, Nyirrpi became a place with an inner core where Yapa dwell and a periphery where monsters lurk and attack from, and simultaneously, a place that seemed to be fully disconnected from “Other Side.”

Yapa and Kurdaitcha During the Kurdaitcha siege, the communal camp indicated as Y1 in Figure 8.2 was the main gathering and sleeping place for most of the Yapa present at Nyirrpi.7 For a few nights we were also besieged by huge thunderstorms—heavy rain, thunder,

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Figure 8.2  Significant locations during Kurdaitcha attacks at night.

lightning, and winds—adding to the dramatic atmosphere and requiring us to relocate the gathering to the veranda of the house marked at Y2. At both of these locations, we were buffered from the west and southwest periphery of the community—where the Kurdaitcha lurked and launched their attack from—by houses, buildings, streets, and street lights. The initial and immediate response to the attacks was to locate Abigail at one of these safe areas and gather around her. Abigail was always at the center of a collective circle of family, protected not only by the general marlpa (company) of everyone present, but also, importantly, by senior men and women, two Warlpiri pastors, and two local ngankari. Nearly always someone was physically touching her—sometimes a gentle and affirming touch, sometimes a firmer hold to prevent her from moving away— and people talked to her, consoled her, and told her to pray. Senior people—men and women—patrolled or stood sentry, calling out into the night, telling the Kurdaitcha to “Yantarra, yantarra [go away]” and to leave her alone. Late into the nights people sat with Abigail, talking and keeping vigil over her, and when we eventually slept, Abigail was put to bed in the middle of a yunta (bed row), protected by her aunty, cousin, and grandma, with more family nearby in other bed rows (see Musharbash 2013). At the communal camp (Y1), Abigail was repeatedly treated by the two local ngankari, whose efforts were eventually reinforced by ngankari called in from other communities. Much like the process described by Meggitt (1955: 388), this treatment involved both removing the curse from Abigail’s body—a process that made her wince and groan—and then depositing healing properties taken from the ngankari’s own body (see also Dudgeon and Bray 2018; Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Women’s Council Aboriginal Corporation 2013; Saethre 2007). After each treatment

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Abigail seemed somewhat better and would sit up and talk a little, until the next attack came. I was told that the Kurdaitcha men were being unusually persistent, as every time the ngankari removed the curse, the Kurdaitcha would put it back somewhere else, requiring treatment not just on her head but her stomach and feet as well. In conjunction with the traditional healing powers of ngankari, on two significant occasions Abigail was taken to the church (indicated as Y3 on Figure 8.2) so the Warlpiri pastor could conduct prayers for her. Nyirrpi church sessions are rarely held inside the actual church, it being a smallish, shed-style tin structure. As with funerals and sermons more generally, the nighttime prayers for Abigail were conducted from the church veranda that faces a garden area. Everyone was present for these vigils: Abigail was seated in a chair in front of the veranda, closely flanked by her aunty, cousins, sister-in-law, and grandma, while the rest of the community sat on chairs and benches behind her. The Warlpiri pastor began by delivering sermons and singing hymns, joined for the latter by a group of women. In his sermons, which he directed at Abigail, he praised the power of Wapirra [God] and entreated her “to take Him into your heart and sing out His name.” Here, the spiritual power of Wapirra represents protection against all evil: a power to strike down the devil as known through locally specific manifestations of evil, including the Mamu (evil monster, see Eickelkamp 2004, 2014) and Kurdaitcha (see also Hinkson 2014: 106). On one occasion, the sermons and songs segued into a kind of confessional, with members of the congregation standing up to share stories that carried messages not only about the importance of having faith in and living for Wapirra but also of coming together as one family, to look after the community and its people. This had a particular resonance for me as throughout the siege a common refrain was about the dangers of young women—like Abigail—going to Alice Springs. Going to town, walking around the streets, and traveling on the roads make you vulnerable to Kurdaitcha attention and possible attack as they follow you home. While such comments could be analyzed critically through the lens of gender relations, in this context I read their importance in a different way. Young women are vulnerable not because they are away from the protection of their men (and therefore at risk of unwanted attention from strange men, including Kurdaitcha) but because they are away from the collective protection and kinship meshwork of family and community, including, crucially, those with social seniority. On four evenings throughout the siege, it was in a display of this collective strength that the community escorted Abigail to the western periphery of Nyirrpi (indicated as Y4 on Figure 8.2) to confront the Kurdaitcha. From the communal camp at Y1 or the veranda at Y2 we moved en masse, the men in front holding wooden or iron bars, followed by Abigail flanked and held by the women, to the stretch of cleared ground that characterizes the western edge of Nyirrpi (Y4). There, the women guided Abigail to sit again and immediately huddled around her. As we sat facing the shadowy silhouette of scrub and trees to the southwest where the Kurdaitcha were lurking, senior men and the ngankari patrolled further, spreading out and circling around in the dark. Over time, the numbers involved in these en masse movements and confrontations grew. On the night of the first attack Yapa numbers at Nyirrpi were relatively small. At this point, also, there were only two Kurdaitcha men. By the fifth day of the siege,

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Yapa numbers had grown as a ngankari and family members from Western Australia arrived to help, and Nyirrpi community members started arriving back home from the sports weekend at another community. By that night, it was reported that the original two Kurdaitcha men had been joined by three more; however as one of them died (of hunger and thirst it was reported), we were facing two old men Kurdaitcha and two younger ones. By the seventh night, it was whispered, “There’s more of them now, more came, whole lot Kurdaitcha standing out there now.” By that time, too, more Nyirrpi people had returned home, and yet another ngankari and more family had come from another community. These confrontations—described as “taking Abigail karlarra [west] for those men”—didn’t seem to be an attempt to engage the Kurdaitcha in any kind of battle. They were, rather, a display of Warlpiri collective strength, a standing of their ground, but executed in a manner so as not to provoke or exacerbate conflict: weapons were carried in readiness, but they were not brandished provocatively or aggressively, and the verbal engagements were not delivered with tones of incitement. There was an even steadiness in the voices of the senior Warlpiri—both women and men—as they repeatedly called out into the night, telling the Kurdaitcha, “We’ve got family here, go away, we’ve got watiya [stick].” It was during those sit-downs with the women— peering into the shadows further afield, hearing the calm coordination of the senior protectors—that my impression of Nyirrpi as a belonging-to-Warlpiri place, with an inner, Yapa core and a periphery of monstrous potential (and the simultaneous disconnection/irrelevance of “Other Side”) was most heightened. I read these incursions westward as a significant, symbolic display of Warlpiri collective strength, for the very fact that they were enacted at the corridor of cleared red sand—the border area—of that Yapa inner and monstrous outer. In effect, “taking Abigail west” was a calmly coordinated, unflinching demonstration that there would be neither surrender nor retreat. That the attack on Abigail eventually subsided cannot be attributed to any one of these responses alone. Repelling the Kurdaitcha required a coordinated Warlpiri response, at the very foundation of which was the importance of everyone being marlpa [company] for Abigail: an affirmation of the Warlpiri residents of Nyirrpi as being “one family” and of their community as a place in which they look after and care for each other. With this ethos at the heart of the collective, further coordination was possible across and between people with social and ceremonial seniorities, traditional healers, and religious, spiritual leaders—all of whom played particularly important roles in combatting the Kurdaitcha sorcery directly and in leading the demonstrations of collective strength and standing Warlpiri ground. Overall, what became clear was that not only are Yapa well equipped to deal with Kurdaitcha, in fact it is only they who have the knowledge, skills, and powers to respond to and repel their attacks. This fact became starkly apparent one night when Abigail started exhibiting symptoms of Kurdaitcha sorcery at the same time her Kardiya stepfather bent over with chest pain. There was a rapid but differentiated response: while some people gathered around Abigail and called the ngankari to her aid, others rushed to “Other Side” for the oncall nurse. Tellingly, even when the ambulance came, at no point was it suggested the nurse should treat Abigail too. In these contrasting reactions it is clear that the

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Warlpiri response to the Kurdaitcha attack speaks to more than the engendering of a particular sociality, of community cohesiveness. That Kurdaitcha business is clearly Yapa business is also illustrative of the way Kurdaitcha mark the boundary of a distinctly Yapa way of life.

Conclusion: Kurdaitcha mark the boundary What may have been implied but not so far explicitly stated is that my use of Yapa and Kardiya in this chapter does not just refer to different categories of people, Indigenous and non-Indigenous. At a deeper level of meaning what Yapa and Kardiya denote are differences in ways of life or being in the world. Describing something as “Yapa way” is the simplest and most complicated answer a Warlpiri person will give when asked why they do X or Y “that way.” For example, in the opening vignette to this chapter I made reference to having been in Alice Springs supporting a Warlpiri woman prepare for a case against child protection. When asked to explain why she allowed a young (three- or four-year-old) boy to play naked in her yard in the middle of summer, she explained it as “Yapa way.” Similarly, when a death occurred at Nyirrpi I was told by a Warlpiri man that while the nurse explained it as a stroke, “Yapa way” they knew it was Kurdaitcha. In light of this, the spatial organization of Nyirrpi into Yapa and Kardiya sides takes on greater significance than just an understanding about how daytime life at Nyirrpi is structured through Kardiya presence: it speaks also to the fact that while Warlpiri and non-Warlpiri people live alongside each other at Nyirrpi—and may develop good and caring relations at the interface of service provision—in many respects they live in entirely different lifeworlds. At no time did this seem more evident than when the Kurdaitcha launched a daytime attack on Abigail, at the same time that the police and NT Housing representatives were conducting a community meeting. It was the fourth day of the siege, the Tuesday for which the meeting was scheduled, when around midmorning the alarming news spread that Abigail had been alone inside a house when she felt the power of Kurdaitcha sorcery. She was quickly led to a mattress in the shade of a tree near the communal camp (Y1), where family members gathered around her to begin what ended up being a day-long into the night effort at spurning the attack. Meanwhile, less than fifty meters away at the work-for-the-dole office, the meeting, which some family members had tried unsuccessfully to cancel, was getting underway. A few family members vocalized their resistance to attending and opted instead to stay with Abigail, while others ended up joining at least for a while. What stood out most to me was not that they refused to cancel the meeting but what I read as a fundamental difference in the imaginary of community. Meetings like this one tended to deliver repetitive, top-down messages to the Yapa attendees: a reminder to take pride in their community and their houses, the direct effect of such pride being that they will put work into keeping the houses and streets clean. To me, this vision of community and the behavior that pride in it might engender seemed to be missing something crucial, something that could be found fifty meters away on and around a mattress under the tree.

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The argument I am putting forward is not only that there is something specifically “Yapa way” about the fact that Warlpiri people believe in and live with Kurdaitcha, but that living with these monsters sustains a Warlpiri way of being in the world. In the interdisciplinary field of monster studies, a common understanding of monsters is as the Other, that which confronts or disturbs a particular sociocultural order or structure. In their bodies and their behaviors, monsters refuse to participate in the classificatory order of things (Cohen 1996: 6) and this is what makes them dangerous. Monsters do not just threaten lives, they are cognitively threatening: “They challenge the … order of the universe” (Gilmore 2003: 19; also Mittman 2013). For Warlpiri people, however, Kurdaitcha came into being in the jukurrpa or Dreaming (Meggitt 1955: 379). Like Warlpiri people themselves, along with the geographical features, sacred sites, ancestral beings, plants, and animals that are of Warlpiri country, Kurdaitcha have always existed: Warlpiri people have always shared their existence with and inhabited the same country as Kurdaitcha. It is precisely the fact that Kurdaitcha do in fact belong that makes them such an interesting monster in the contemporary context of Warlpiri/non-Indigenous relations, and so distinct from other monsters that have been analyzed as marking an Indigenous/colonial interface elsewhere. Unlike the Latin American Pishtaco, for example, Kurdaitcha straddle a more complicated set of relations than being a clear marker of the racial violence inflicted by colonists or whites (Weismantel 2000). Nor can the Kurdaitcha be likened to the Windigo, a monster which appears to have adapted to the changing times by becoming a point of “cultural conjunction” (Podruchny 2004) between French-Canadian voyageurs and Aboriginal North Americans (discussed as a process of amalgamation by Musharbash and Presterudstuen, this volume). On the one hand, in their adaptation to the neocolonial context of Central Australia, Kurdaitcha represent a mirror, or inversion, of the structuring presence of Kardiya in Warlpiri daily lives and, on a broader level, in terms of mortality rates especially, can be read as a parallel to the devastating effects of colonization (as Musharbash 2014b has shown). On the other hand, Kardiya and Kurdaitcha are not rendered here as a combined or parallel “Other” to the Warlpiri, because from the perspective of a Warlpiri lifeworld, Kurdaitcha are of Warlpiri country in a way that (most) Kardiya could never be. In presenting the case study of the nine-night Kurdaitcha attack, my aim has been to illustrate that the Warlpiri praxis involved in repelling their sorcery also has the effect of sustaining some core principles of Warlpiri life. There is a cohesiveness and collective strength that can be activated through kinship relations, which reaffirms the mutual responsibility Yapa have to care for and look after each other. Crucially, what is also upheld is a cultural system in which social and ceremonial seniorities, and traditional and spiritual knowledge and powers are central to the maintenance and protection of the community and its members. In the activation of this Warlpiri praxis and sociality, Nyirrpi itself is maintained as a Warlpiri place. In short, my point is that while Kurdaitcha presence poses a very real danger to Warlpiri lives, the fact of their existence is simultaneously integral to Warlpiri ways of being in and knowing the world.

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Acknowledgments My forever thanks to the families at Nyirrpi for looking after me and learning me about Yapa way. To the editors, Dr. Yasmine Musharbash and Dr. Geir Henning Presterudstuen, my deepest gratitude for encouraging my participation in this second volume of monster studies, and for the valuable feedback on previous drafts. My thanks also to the anonymous reviewers for some valuable suggestions. This research is supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship.

Notes 1 2

3 4

5 6

7

The only common larger aggregation was for sorry business—mortuary rituals— when family groups used designated camps at the edges of community. This was part of the “outstation movement” of the 1970s when smaller, decentralized communities were established by and for Aboriginal kin groups. This movement emerged in the historical convergence of a shift in government policies toward Aboriginal people (from assimilation to self-determination) and the latter’s desires to move back to their own country and a degree of autonomy (Myers and Peterson 2016). There were 236 people in Nyirrpi for the 2016 Census (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2017). For many Warlpiri people, the child protection agency’s removal of children into State or foster care, the disproportionate rates of Indigenous imprisonment in Australia, and Indigenous deaths in custody are experienced as an echo of government policies that resulted in the Stolen Generations. Even when some, like police or health workers, have on-call shifts, they will wait to be called rather than patrol or drive around. In Warlpiri love magic and jukurrpa (Dreaming) stories it is also common to find reference to hair-string being used to “pull”: in the former to pull the other to the self, in the latter to pull ancestral beings across vast distances, or to manipulate geographic features of the landscape, for example, “pulling” a hill down to a lower height. Even those who chose not to camp with us—who had very young or elderly relatives to care for, or whose houses were on the east side of the community and therefore further away from the Kurdaitcha activity—still joined the gatherings until well into the night.

References ABS (ADDIN EN.REFLIST Australian Bureau of Statistics) (2017), “2016 Census QuickStats: Nyirripi,” ABS, Available online: http://www.censusdata.abs.gov.au/ census_services/getproduct/census/2016/quickstat/SSC702 15?opendocument (accessed June 8, 2018). Burbank, V. (2006), “From Bedtime to On Time: Why Many Aboriginal People Don’t Especially Like Participating in Western Institutions,” Anthropological Forum, 16 (1): 3–20.

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Cohen, J. J. (1996), “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” in J. J. Cohen (ed.), Monster Theory: Reading Culture, 3–25, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dodson, P. (2007), “Whatever Happened to Reconciliation?,” in J. Altman and M. Hinkson (eds.), Coercive Reconciliation: Stablise, Normalise, Exit Aboriginal Australia, 21–9, Australia: Arena Publications Association. Dudgeon, P. and A. Bray (2018), “Indigenous Healing Practices in Australia,” Women & Therapy, 41 (1–2): 97–113. Eickelkamp, U. (2004), “Egos and Ogres: Aspects of Psychosexual Development and Cannibalistic Demons in Central Australia,” Oceania, 74 (3): 161–89. Eickelkamp, U. (2014), “Specters of Reality: Mamu in the Eastern Western Desert of Australia,” in Y. Musharbash and G. H. Presterudstuen (eds.), Monster Anthropology in Australasia and Beyond, 57–73, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gilmore, D. D. (2003), Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Glowczewski, B. (1983), “Death, Women, and ‘Value Production’: The Circulation of Hair Strings among the Walpiri of the Central Australian Desert,” Ethnology, 22 (3): 225–39. Heppell, M. and J. J. Wigley (1981), Black Out in Alice: A History of the Establishment and Development of Town Camps in Alice Springs, Canberra: The Australian National University. Hinkson, M. (2007), “Introduction: In the Name of the Child,” in J. Altman and M. Hinkson (eds.), Coercive Reconciliation: Stablise, Normalise, Exit Aboriginal Australia, 1–12, Australia: Arena Publications Association. Hinkson, M. (2014), Remembering the Future: Warlpiri Life through the Prism of Drawing, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Meggitt, M. (1955), “Djanba among the Walbiri, Central Australia,” Anthropos, 50: 375–403. Meggitt, M. (1962), Desert People: A Study of the Walbiri Aborigines of Central Australia, Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Mittman, A. S. (2013), “Introduction: The Impact of Monsters and Monster Studies,” in A. S. Mittman and P. J. Dendle (eds.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, 1–14, England: Ashgate Publishing Limited. Morel, P. and H. Ross. (1993), Housing Design Assessment for Bush Communities, Alice Springs, NT: Tangentyere Council. Musharbash, Y. (2008), Yuendumu Everyday: Contemporary Life in Remote Aboriginal Australia, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Musharbash, Y. (2013), “Night, Sight, and Feeling Safe: An Exploration of Aspects of Warlpiri and Western Sleep,” Australian Journal of Anthropology, 24 (1): 48–63. Musharbash, Y. (2014a), “Here Be Kurdaitcha: Towards an Ethnography of the Monstrous on the Margins of a Central Australian Aboriginal Town,” in C. Douglas and R. Monacella (eds.), Places and Spaces of Monstrosity, 117–24, Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press. Musharbash, Y. (2014b), “Monstrous Transformations: A Case Study from Central Australia,” in Y. Musharbash and G. H. Presterudstuen (eds.), Monster Anthropology in Australasia and Beyond, 39–55, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Myers, F. and N. Peterson (2016), “The Origins and History of Outstations as Aboriginal Life Projects,” in N. Peterson and F. Myers (eds.), Experiments in Self-Determination: Histories of the Outstation Movement in Australia, 1–24, Canberra, Australia: ANU Press.

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Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Women’s Council Aboriginal Corporation (2013), Traditional Healers of Central Australia: Ngangkari, Broome, WA: Magabala Books. Peterson, N. (2016), “What Was Dr Coombs Thinking? Nyirrpi, Policy and the Future,” in N. Peterson and F. Myers (eds.), Experiments in Self-Determination: Histories of the Outstation Movement in Australia, 161–79, Canberra, Australia: ANU Press. Podruchny, C. (2004), “Werewolves and Windigos: Narratives of Cannibal Monsters in French-Canadian Voyageur Oral Tradition,” Ethnohistory, 54 (1): 677–700. Saethre, E. J. (2007), “Conflicting Traditions, Concurrent Treatment: Medical Pluralism in Remote Aboriginal Australia,” Oceania, 77 (1): 95–110. Trigger, D. (1992), Whitefella comin’: Aboriginal Responses to Colonialism in Northern Australia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weismantel, M. (2000), “Race Rape: White Masculinity in Andean Pishtaco Tales,” Identities, 7 (3): 407–40.

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Monsters, Place, and Murderous Winds in Fiji Geir Henning Presterudstuen

When I visited my field site in western Fiji in June 2016, it was obvious that many were still dealing with the aftermath of the latest tropical storm. Much of the damage from Cyclone Winston, which had hit a few months earlier, was everywhere visible. Fiji islanders are accustomed to severe tropical weather patterns and have well-developed strategies for survival in such circumstances, but not many had been prepared for the sheer ferocity of this particular visitor. The most powerful tropical cyclone ever recorded in the Southern Hemisphere, Winston reached peak intensity shortly before it hit land in eastern Fiji on February 20, 2016 and proceeded to cause unprecedented damage across the islands. The total damage throughout the country was estimated at a material cost of almost 3 billion FJD, with more than 40,000 houses destroyed. Fortyfour people lost their lives and more than 131,000 people, nearly 15 percent of the total population of Fiji, were affected to the extent that they needed emergency relief. The Fijian term for cyclone, cagilaba, literally meaning “murderous wind” or “the wind that kills,” seemed more appropriate than ever and I was struck by the intensity and solemnity with which people evoked this term when discussing their experiences of Winston even months after it occurred. I soon realized that the cyclone had been a significant, traumatic experience for people across Fiji and that the presence of Winston still loomed large in local conversations and imaginations. Besides the extraordinary violence it unleashed there were two other aspects that made this particular cyclone stand out for locals. First, it was a harbinger of new times, tangible evidence for the veracity of what locals to an increasing extent had become accustomed to talk about, understand, and fear in terms of climate change. Fiji had, under the leadership of Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama, spent the last few years positioning itself as a leading voice for those most immediately vulnerable to global warming and rising sea levels, and the unprecedented ferociousness of Winston became a timely reminder about the severe consequences these changes might have locally. Second, throughout Fiji people reported a number of spirit or ghost1 manifestations in the aftermath of the cyclone, indicating that a changing climate also unsettled the delicate balance of the local spirit world.

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In this chapter I focus on two such ghost encounters and analyze the relationship between them and the existential threat Fiji villagers perceive from a changing climate. The first of these took place in the close vicinity of my main field site outside Nadi in the western parts of Fiji’s main island, Viti Levu, and involved the return of a ghostly presence that had its roots in the historical village of Nagaga and a natural disaster that occurred there. The second ghost appeared as a revenant of a young man who lost his life in Cyclone Winston and in the following weeks proceeded to haunt his village, Nayavutoka, in northeastern Viti Levu. Although these ghostly presences appeared in two different parts of Fiji’s main island, they were tied together by the trauma of Cyclone Winston and became narrative focal points for discussions about the lasting damage these murderous winds caused the community. In what follows, I analyze these two encounters in conjunction with each other and in the broader context of cultural understandings about the relationship between people and the environment. I pay particular attention to how ghosts, understood as one type of monsters existing in Fiji, emerge in ways that make them intrinsically linked to place (specifically in terms of the local articulation of the spiritual connection between people and their land) and consequently become effective harbingers of environmental threats and change. My analysis is not concerned with discourse, deconstruction, or metaphors, associated with the “spectral turn” in cultural studies, but rather about the cultural work ghosts do in real-life situations. As I conclude my chapter I use these insights to reflect upon what my case studies from Fiji might teach us about ghosts, and their ability to reflect, augment, and mediate the anxieties of the people they haunt, more generally.

Ghosts and place Despite the ubiquity of ghosts and apparitions across time and space, discussions about them are often framed by a strong sense of these creatures emerging from the very landscapes they haunt. A starting point here is Roger Luckhurst’s (2002) notion of ghosts as always and inextricably shaped by the context in which they emerge, but with ethnographic insights we can move from such general points to the specific. For instance, across Southeast Asia ghosts consistently materialize “where war has ravaged the landscape and claimed the lives of individuals,” linking land and people through shared trauma (Morris 2008: 230). Ghosts elsewhere have narrative and historical links to the violence of the colonial experience (cf. Gordillo 2009; Delaplace 2010; Alimardanian 2014). Even though the temporal often becomes overdetermined in such narratives, as place becomes intrinsic to an event, these accounts are testament to how ghosts, far from being deterritorialized stock characters, are creatures of and from the land more than anything. Susan Owens, in her cultural history of ghosts in Anglo-European literature and art, ponders whether their widespread presence in British narratives and folklore can be explained by the British weather, which might be “particularly conducive to the idea to the ghost” (2017: 10). In this volume, Helena Onnudottir and Mary Hawkins follow a similar line of reasoning as they reflect on Icelandic spirits and come to the conclusion that ghosts in Iceland are among a plethora of monstrous creatures that

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dwell in the misty wilderness of the saga island. Such speculation is perhaps reliant upon a universalization of an Anglo-European pathetic fallacy linking grayness, mist, and darkness to ghosts that ignores evidence from elsewhere. Still, a useful implication in both texts is not only that particular forms of landscapes, weather patterns, and climactic conditions might give rise to particular types of ghosts but also that the creatures themselves are linked to nature and the elements in important ways. Of more obvious cultural relevance to my analysis is Vilsoni Hereniko’s retelling of Rotuman2 legends in the feature film The Land has Eyes (2014). The film follows the story of Viki, a young woman, who fights poverty and local injustice in her quest to further her education. Struggling against local elitism and a conspiracy that involves her father being wrongly convicted of theft by colonial officers, she eventually invokes local legends to gain strength from the legendary Warrior Woman, thought to be the brave first settler of Rotuma. Viki becomes both haunted and inspired by the Warrior Woman as she overcomes difficulties in a fashion that resembles the original legend. Underlying these struggles is her unwavering belief that the Rotuman land itself, reflected by the specter of the Warrior Woman, will avenge any injustice made against it or its people. Although lacking the same clarity of purpose, the ghosts manifesting in the two case studies used in my analysis share the intrinsic connection to land and place that characterized the Rotuman Warrior Woman. In what follows I demonstrate how this interdependence between the spirit world, people, and their land makes ghosts central actors in local anxieties about climate change in Fiji.

Ghosts of Nagaga I first stumbled upon the link between ghosts, Cyclone Winston, and the existential threat of climate change some days after I re-entered my field site in June 2016. Having followed the reports about Winston closely from afar and keeping in touch with friends across Fiji as they organized their rebuilding effort, I was aware of the extent to which local understandings of natural disasters were now framed within a scientific discourse of climate change. More surprising, however, was the realization that some of my local interlocutors were just as moved by another, more spiritual element of recent experiences. Some of my local friends, now residing in freehold settlements in Nadi but with strong kinship connection to the old village of Nagaga that was located some 20 kilometers northeast toward the Nausori highlands, told me that Winston had opened a historical wound of significant magnitude. Their life stories were framed by another murderous wind, personal trauma, and a longstanding experience of ghost manifestations and demonic presence as a result. On February 22, 1931—in other words, almost eighty-five years to the day before Cyclone Winston made landfall—a chunk of Mount Batilamu broke off after weeks of heavy rainfall and strong winds. The resulting rock and mudslide caused significant damage on local roads and gardens and, most severely, buried the entire village of Nagaga and killed the majority of its inhabitants. Three survivors emerged from the mud, one of them became the headman of the village they eventually resettled in, the grandfather of one of the men who relayed the story to me.

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Long before the mudslide happened, Nagaga had been a village of a certain reputation. Its leaders had allegedly been among the most prominent in the western Fijian resistance against Christianization, national unification under eastern chiefly rule and colonial rule in the 1800s, and had maintained a strong sense of independence ever since. Its inhabitants were described as wild, unruly, and frivolous compared to other villages in the district, and they were reputedly steadfast in maintaining local traditions. Based on these characterizations it was perhaps quite typical that villagers had gathered together drinking kava and singing in elaborate defiance of the murderous wind and rain on the night of the 1931 tragedy. As the storm intensified, only an elderly, deaf woman residing in the village showed any concern. According to the myth, she could sense an ominous rumbling in the ground and repeatedly warned her compatriots that danger was imminent. Her work was to no avail and as a consequence almost all villagers were buried when the landslide happened. Ever since the disaster struck, the voice of the old lady as well as the desperate cries of the other victims can be heard from the site of the old village. I was also told that people often experience an eerie feeling when going near the old burial sites. “Your hairs will stand on your arms and you will feel a chill down your spine,” one interlocutor explained, adding that no visitor was ever in doubt that something terrible had happened there. This narrative gained momentum and renewed significance in the aftermath of Cyclone Winston. As the descendants of the victims of the Nagaga landslide grappled with the damage of this more recent murderous wind, they were again reminded of the precariousness of existence in a small village community in Oceania. But stories also circulated that suggested a more immediate relevance of the old tragedy and the ghosts that remained from it. In the weeks before Cyclone Winston, settlers in the new village of Abaca, only kilometers down from the original site, had also started to sense the presence of the ghosts of their past homeland nearby. Some reported getting a heavy feeling in the chest, as if someone was pressing down on them, or experiencing drowsiness, as if they were half asleep. In the wake of Cyclone Winston many started to reflect on these happenings afresh and see them in direct correlation with not only the extreme weather event in isolation but the general existential threat of climate change more broadly. Increasingly, people started to consider that ghosts or spirits of the past came back with a particular mission to warn them of danger and imminent destruction. “Maybe they are trying to tell us something,” one of these villagers suggested, arguing that it was difficult to not see the increase in ghostly activity in connection with natural disasters.

Ghosts and climate change Ghosts, as well as the related trope of haunting, appear quite frequently in discussions about climate change and its associated challenges. In academic writing these ideas are often utilized metaphorically to discuss “ghost towns” that have succumbed to rising sea levels in the past (Pilkey 2016) or to illustrate the extent to which problems of the present are intertwined with practices of the past (Nordhaus 1995 is an early

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example of this). Other times the image of the ghost serves to invoke feelings of mystique, awe, and dread in the face of escalating problems. The cultural theorist Nick Mansfield, for instance, argues that our time is haunted by “a very material ghost, the Absolute Other of climate change” (2008: 3). Here the ghost emerges as a signifier of dramatic change and a zeitgeist3 characterized by unknowable and indeterminate threats. More recently a prominent volume edited by Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt posits as a key premise that the era of the Anthropocene, that is the current geological age in which the human impact on the environment is the most significant and long lasting, is haunted by ghosts that “are the traces of more-than-human histories through which ecologies are made and unmade” (2017: G1). In that volume, ghosts largely appear as symbols of what has become absent or invisible, for instance, extinct animals. One thing all these examples have in common is that ghosts are not afforded ontological claims to existence but remain as mere metaphors. By contrast, in Fiji ghosts emerge in material forms and are tied into real social relations. Although rife with symbolic and spiritual meaning, rooted as they are in ancestral myths and contemporary storytelling practices, their ontological existence is rarely questioned and their appearances cannot be readily dismissed. Instead, they are, albeit reluctantly, spoken about and acknowledged, considered part of a remarkably busy spiritual realm. “Fiji literally swarms with miscellaneous spirits. The top of the hills, the gloom of the forests, the running streams and waterfalls, stones, capes, bays and the ocean are crowded with them.” This observation was made by Reverend W. Deane, an Australian missionary and academic, in his book Psychology and the Sociology of Fijians in 1921. Deane’s assertion echoes what was reported by many early colonial writers and missionaries: namely that the number of gods and spirits in the Fijian pantheon was constantly on the rise because all souls lived on after death and most mortals became deified spirits after death. The striking thing for many observers was that this spiritual richness survived colonization and proved resilient in the face of Christianization. Rather than a consequence of mere religious pragmatism, the continuous existence of Fijian spirit beings into the modern realm might be at least partly associated with the domination of Methodist missionaries in the Christianization of Fiji. Methodism had long been associated with an understanding of Christianity that engaged with rather than opposed folk beliefs and spiritualties. John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Church, actively preached that witchcraft, ghosts, apparitions, and other supernatural phenomena that were popular in working-class Britain in the 1700s were evidence of the spiritual realm and thus complementary to Christianity and that giving up on the belief in any of them “is in effect giving up the bible” (Wesley 1805: 5; see also Owens 2017: 111).4 Methodist missionaries thus arrived in Fiji with a compromising attitude to local spiritual beliefs and preached a doctrine that had room for the existence of local spirit beings. As a consequence, the older gods and ancestral spirits of the Fijian pantheon were never eradicated by the advent of Christianity. Instead, they entered a stage of inactivity as they were no longer subject to Fijians’ attention and sacrifices to them. A crucial point to note in the Fijian context is that deities, as well as chiefs and other

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traditionally perceived authorities, derive their efficacy from devotees’ attendance to them. In other words, for converts “the Christian God is invoked not as ‘the only god,’ but as ‘the only god who is served’” (Toren 1995: 166). Early missionaries also perpetuated the salience of old spirits by presenting Christianity as a way to deal with or combat these on an everyday basis. This was most obviously done by explicitly preaching that recently converted Christians ought to pray to God and Jesus whenever they felt afraid or besieged by ancestral spirits or demons, but it was also implied in the emphasis on attention to God and the practical aspects of devotion that underlies much of Methodist doctrine. For some observers, this made Fijian Christianity little more than a veneer over more deep-seated beliefs in animism. I think this is an over-simplification and one that most Fijians I know would not agree with. It is more accurate to think of Fiji as a context where the Christian separation of God from nature has been, if not entirely, unsuccessful, at least incomplete. I follow Matt Tomlinson (2016: 26), however, who has usefully pointed out the dangers of bifurcating “Fijian spiritual imaginations into ‘traditional’ and ‘Christian’ domains” when the relationship between these is more accurately understood as continuous. Fijian anthropologist Asesela Ravuvu (1987) suggested that the incompleteness of this separation can explain the continued presence of Fijian spirits in the belief structures of many indigenous communities that otherwise would consider themselves deeply and non-negotiably Christian. Focusing on his own kinsfolk and interlocutors, Ravuvu argued that Fijians operated with multiple realms occupied by different spiritual beings. They perceived of the Christian God as the Kalou Vakayalo—that is, as the God of the spiritual realm that is invoked for what Ravuvu labeled spiritual purposes, most importantly gaining access to the afterlife of the Kingdom of God. At the same time, ancestral gods remained important and were referred to as Kalou Vakalago—that is, the spatiotemporal gods, those who are rooted to place and can be appealed to for spatiotemporal advantage, including prosperity, fertility, and safety from the elements.

Ghosts and the Vanua Ravuvu’s study provides an appropriate vantage point for a broader analysis of the relationship between different spiritual beings in the Fijian pantheon. I have previously argued that contemporary Fijian discourses conflate traditional understandings of ancestral spirits with more recently adopted categorizations such as ghosts, spirits, or demons (Presterudstuen 2014: 130). Here I read these two conceptualizations of Fijian spiritual distinctions and change in conjunction with each other in order to further elaborate on the relationship between ghosts/spirits and the spatiotemporal aspects of local identities in Fiji. My key argument is that mapping these relations becomes crucial in understanding the emergence of ghosts in context of natural disasters, and how encounters with ghosts are explained in broader discourses about existential threats and displacement in relation to climate change.

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Places can everywhere be thought of as “emotional embodiments of lifeways that are essential foundations of human culture” (Sakakibara 2008: 462). In Fiji these dynamics are further formalized through the notion of vanua, an indigenous concept that ties together people and their ancestral land in a way that is all-encompassing and sacred. Cultural concepts such as tradition and identity are consequently perceived in terms that are intrinsically spatiotemporal and largely incomprehensible outside the people/land nexus (cf. Presterudstuen 2016). The classic Christian separation of divinity and nature holds little purchase in this social structure, notably giving a clue to not only why spirits, ghosts, and demons remain present in the Fijian vanua but also why these creatures emerge when one’s sense of place is violated by outsiders (Presterudstuen 2014) or threatened by extreme forces like murderous winds or rising sea levels. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that the spirits of those buried by a mudslide in Nagaga nearly a century ago should be stirred into action by the violence of Cyclone Winston. For their descendants, these specters emerged not as ghosts of the past but rather as spirits of the land carrying a portentous forewarning about imminent danger. The point about the spiritual connection between land and people can be exquisitely illustrated through my other case study, a ghost haunting in the aftermath of Cyclone Winston that featured prominently in media and village discourses in Fiji throughout 2016. One of the first places in Fiji Winston hit land was in a small, isolated village named Nayavutoka in the Ra province in the northeast of the main island Viti Levu. Overnight Nayavutoka was almost entirely devastated. As villagers ventured outside from their shelter (most had congregated in the church hall, which was the most robust building in the village) at the break of dawn on February 21 to face the destruction, they found only two houses left standing. Soon after, as they started the onerous task of cleaning through mud and debris in order to assess the damage, they found the deceased body of Pauliasi Naiova, a 32-year-old man born with a deformity in his left foot that made him walk with a heavy limp. Pauliasi had become trapped as the corrugated iron house he was staying in had collapsed and subsequently drowned in the surging tides. Given his physical disability, Pauliasi had only had limited capacity to work in the village, making him reliant upon kinship networks for food and other material needs. As the cyclone was about to hit, Pauliasi’s cousin and occasional carer Osea carried him from his own precarious dwelling to a larger, presumably safer house. Osea had intended to return to the house and stay with Pauliasi after making sure his pregnant wife was safe but had been prevented from doing so by the intensifying storm, leaving Pauliasi alone and helpless when the full ire of the cyclone hit. The fatal consequences of this chain of events only became clear the morning after. With no electric power or facilities to keep a deceased body and no means to contact relevant authorities outside the village, the village headman and local Methodist priest organized for Pauliasi to be buried immediately and for a curtailed funeral ceremony to be conducted. Although these types of provisional arrangements are a necessity of life for many remote communities in Fiji, the inability to give Pauliasi a proper funeral ceremony added to the trauma of his tragic and untimely death.

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Only a few days after the body of Pauliasi had been buried the people of Nayavutoka started noticing strange things happening in their village. One night shortly after the funeral people woke up from the noise of the village dogs, all of whom had congregated around the remnants of Pauliasi’s house—some dogs cowering and whimpering in the vicinity of where the deceased man used to sleep, others barking incessantly at the empty ruins. A few nights later Osea was awoken in the middle of the night, feeling a heavy pressure against his chest and having difficulty both breathing and getting up from bed.5 Osea said: When I opened my eyes, Pauliasi was standing in front of me … At first, I thought I was dreaming because he looked so real and so alive. All of a sudden, he spoke to  me and every time he opened his mouth, just one word came out, kakana (food) … I was never afraid of him. I told him his time here was done, and that he needed to go. But he kept saying kakana.

Osea later explained that he thought that would be the end of the haunting; however, he was suspicious the following night when the dogs started barking again: I came out and realized they were barking where my neighbor’s house used to be … The next day when I went over there, I realized that the exact spot the dogs were barking at was his mattress, the one that he used to use. So just to test it, I picked up the mattress and left it behind where the house used to be … Sure enough, that same night the dogs were barking again, but this time, they were barking behind the house, where the mattress was.

Apparently, the barking kept on recurring in the village for weeks until it culminated in another sighting: a group of young men who were all camping out in a house while other buildings in the village were rebuilt were apparently awoken by a noise. They all scrambled out of their beds, screaming, claiming to have been frightened by the ghost of Pauliasi limping around in the house asking for food. “They all got very frightened and ran out of the house and we had to tell them that everything was OK and that no harm would come to them,” said village headman, Timoci Nabogibogi. “We just told them that they needed to pray and believe in God.” The headman later explained that the visitations from Pauliasi continued for about a week and every time it happened, he would tell him the same thing. “I told him, you’re dead. You don’t belong here anymore and you have to go.” Pauliasi’s death was still heavily discussed both in media and popular discourses when I visited my field site, located on the other side of Viti Levu, in June 2016. The tragedy of a young man’s untimely death holds emotional currency everywhere and was in this case intensified by the backstory of physical disability and dependency that was elaborated on in the newspapers. It also came to symbolize the vulnerability many felt in the aftermath of Cyclone Winston. That Pauliasi returned to haunt the village immediately after his tragic demise was not only a dramatic narrative twist, it also served to tie the isolated event to a broader cultural discourse about the relationship between people and nature, local spiritualties and sense of place in context of climate change.

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Ghosts and local anxieties Although not necessarily unexpected given the complexity of local spiritual life, ghost manifestations are often perceived as deeply problematic by indigenous Fijians. Ghosts serve to highlight an aspect of local cosmology that many prefer not to think about and acknowledge openly—that is the continued presence of ancestral spirits and local, premodern deities in the same pantheon as the Christian God. In fact, it is precisely in the ambiguous borderlands between seemingly competing regimes of beliefs that spirits and ghosts, among other monsters, emerge as social realities for contemporary Fiji citizens. The ontological existence of spirits, even in the shape of ghosts, is taken for granted and accepted but they should ideally remain invisible and unnoticed by humans on an everyday basis, lest they “reveal the wider socioreligious fault lines below the surface” (Delaplace 2018). It is generally when something has gone wrong, or is about to, that spirits become felt or known. For those who see or experience spirits, their presence is also associated with spiritual danger. I once told my compatriots in the village that I had possibly met a Fijian ghost in Levuka town (Presterudstuen 2014) and was accusingly told that “you only see the ghosts you believe in.” Seeing, in this sense, becomes a way of attending to ancestral spirits and thus empowers them in ways that are seen to endanger others and weaken the power of good many associate with the Christian God.6 This local angst took on particular immediacy in context of Pauliasi’s spectral return to the village of Nayavutoka. Located in the Ra province, this village was not an entirely unlikely setting for the return of the undead. This district contains some of the earliest evidence of settlements in the Fijian islands and has long had a central place in Fijian mythology and spiritual history. To the west the region is bordered by the Nakauvadra mountain range. A towering physical presence, these mountains are known as a spiritual center of ancestral religions as well as the birthplace of a number of local cultural heroes, including Degei, the supreme God of the traditional cosmology, both creator of all humans and the guardian of the afterlife who passes judgment on the newly deceased. People throughout Fiji also recognize a number of other physical places in the Ra district as places to be revered and feared because of their spirit population. That includes the northwestern town of Rakiraki, to which many clans and kinship groups throughout the country trace their original ancestors (Parke 2014). And in the Pacific Ocean just outside Rakiraki town lies the island of Nananu-i-Ra, which had a special place in premodern Fijian mythology as the intermediary location where the deceased stopped by on their way to the ancestral afterlife. The direct geographical link to this mythical backdrop undoubtedly contributed greatly to the prominence Pauliasi’s haunting gained in discourses across Fiji. Since reports from Nayavutoka attracted considerable media interest, it also served to open up local discourse for ghost encounters and add credibility to other ghost sightings. For my interlocutors outside Nadi town, it was certainly an impetus to openly discuss their own history and more recent experience of ghostly presences. Although their own specters lacked the same obvious connection to ancestral beliefs and myths as that which characterized Pauliasi and his village, there were enough similarities to see both occurrences as part of the same phenomenon. First, both events

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discussed here could be linked to the trauma of environmental disaster. The ghosts in question were also intrinsically linked to place, both in the geographical and spiritual sense. These spatiotemporal elements were also evident in how in both encounters the ghosts in question were easily recognizable as the revenants of specific persons with a strong connection to the places they emerged. Besides returning to haunt the ruins of the house in which he lived and died, seemingly looking for his mattress, Pauliasi’s ghost walked with the same limp that had characterized him in life. Presumably his physical handicap had precluded him from contributing to food production in the village and thus earning his own food, necessitating him to ask his fellow villagers for meals, a feat he carried on with as a ghost. In Nagaga it was the context of the ghostly apparitions that revealed their identity rather than any overt physical resemblance, but no one was in any doubt about whose revenants haunted the old village site. This social connectedness, not only to time and place but also to kinship—presumably an unusual feature as far as ghosts of Fiji are concerned (Tomlinson 2016: 20)—is what makes their presence compelling for those they haunt. The ghosts belonged to their haunts, and their message, whatever that might be, ought to be heeded. However, speculations about the reason for the ghost appearances and the motivations of the ghosts were still rife in both villages. While it is obvious that the manifestation of these ghosts was not unequivocally negative, the ghosts appeared frustratingly vague as conveyors of cultural messages. The headman in Nayavutoka, for instance, rebuked the ghost’s presence but did not suggest one needed to be afraid of it. It was not perceived as a vengeful or punishing character, but rather one that needed assurance about its new position in the local cosmology. Implied in these discussions was also a notion that the ghosts themselves were as brooding and reflective as the people they haunted. Pauliasi wandered around the village, apparently looking for his old abode and the mattress on which he used to sleep, requesting food, and seemingly failing to understand the circumstances through which these mundane regularities of everyday village life had been snatched away from him. These actions provided an uncanny representation of the most immediate concerns of the survivors of his village in the wake of Cyclone Winston. How were they to provide for each other’s immediate needs after crops and houses had been irreparably damaged? Was the village sustainable in the long run, or was this brutal cyclone a mere preamble to more permanent climate change making its location uninhabitable? This episode can serve as a telling point of difference to Nina Auerbach’s (1995) claim that ghosts and other monster lack the adaptability shown by vampires and therefore remain similar across time and space. Pauliasi’s ghost used his intimate knowledge about the village to embody the most direct concerns of the people he haunted, thus adding immediacy to the horror he represented. Here he followed a pattern of contemporary ghosts that show they have the finger on the pulse of the local zeitgeist as much as Auerbach’s vampires do and embody monstrous adaptability (see Musharbash and Presterudstuen, this volume). The victims of the two events I have described were not just any members of community, however, but people who were set apart from the rest by their physical appearance and (dis)abilities. Pauliasi’s incapacity gives obvious associations to the Greek mythical tragedy of Oedipus, so named after the Greek word for “swollen

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feet.” This was a condition he sustained after having his ankles nailed and tethered together as an infant because his father wanted him dead to thwart the prophecy— that Oedipus would grow up to kill his father and marry his mother—from being fulfilled.7 There are two interrelated points worth noting here. First, the Oedipal myth rose to prominence in anthropology through Claude Levi Strauss’ structural work on myths. Using this framework, Levi Strauss (1963) argued that one of the constitutive events of the Oedipal myth was the recurrence of characters, including Oedipus himself, that had an inability to or difficulty walking. The inclusion of these characters, Levi Strauss argued, ought to be seen as the affirmation of the autochthony of man.8 Following this logic and extending it to Fiji, Pauliasi emerges as a symbol of the indigenous, place-bound subject, affirming at once the continuity between ancestors and the living through the vanua and the veracity of the ghost as the harbinger of the emerging threat to the village. At the same time, some of the specific connotations from the Oedipal myth are also apparent in this context: first, there are hints of sins from the past that come back to haunt the present (a common way ghosts are used to represent climate change). Second, the presence of the ghost itself is an omen of a predicted disaster coming true. Third, the myth speaks to the theme of displacement and exile, something the ghost of Pauliasi itself seems to struggle against and the villagers had to sustain, at least temporarily, after Winston’s destructions. This is also becoming one of the central themes of the threats posed by climate change throughout Oceania. In the narrative from Nagaga, physical disability and bodily difference takes on another meaning. Here the old deaf woman was paradoxically the only person who could sense or forebode disaster and tried to warn her kinsfolk. In that sense she was perhaps always other-than-human, also before disaster struck, although these meanings did not become apparent until after she returned in the shape of a ghost. Both cases, however, point to the interesting fact that ghosts may emerge from a set of circumstances that are, in the most direct sense of the word, extraordinary and represent themselves as human-like but not quite. In other words, it is not the ghost itself that emerges from outside the order of things, but it is created from a situation of radical upheaval and dramatic change. Susan Owens points out that it is exactly this notion “that ghosts are people of sorts, humanity’s shadows, but at the same time utterly remote—that accounts for the enduring fascination they exert” (Owens 2017: 13). From there it is easy to fit them into a broad taxonomy of monster, as that which is monstrous is frequently characterized by how they break familiar systems of classifications, defy easy characterizations, but are still recognizable to us. That is why their presence is so rich in meaning and can lend itself so readily to local anxieties, fears, and premonitions. It is worth noting, however, that Pauliasi’s return was never interpreted in terms explicitly related to the social relations within the village. Although the villagers clearly did not welcome his specter haunting the village after Pauliasi’s demise, there was no indication that his return was seen as a vengeful act in response to wrongs they had committed to him in the past. Instead, the familiarity of Pauliasi merely helped locate his ghost, geographically, temporally, and ideologically, in local discourse and make the situational context of its emergence more immediate.

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Ghosts as analytics Nils Bubandt (2012), in his analysis of a penis-eating vampire spirit haunting locals in Bali, historicizes these forms of reflexivity to contemporary late modernity. It is as if the ghosts of our time have read Anthony Giddens, he surmises, and have developed new forms of self-awareness and a critical appraisal for their own circumstances in much the same way as the people they haunt. The general point here, that ghosts and other monsters adapt in tune with the communities they haunt and people they interact with, is a valuable, if not revolutionary, insight. But looking at the history of ghosts in text, traditions, and folk narratives, one wonders if the development of critical reflexivity in their own emotional repertoire did not happen some time ago. As a matter of fact, it is perhaps this human quality that makes ghosts and their monstrous relatives uncanny and thus analytically compelling. Ghosts are by definition ambiguous and unsettled. Stuck in a space in-between life and death, they are intent on bringing the past into the present. Although difficult to explain or ascertain, they always invite intense existential reflection and demand serious attention. For those haunted they “appear through perceptions that are at the same time similar to past experiences yet absolutely distinct and unique; they look familiar and are yet definitely stranger” (Delaplace 2013: 62). Fit to frighten and perplex, they also facilitate action and make things happen. The specific ghost encounters I have discussed here are insightful examples of this in as much as they add another layer to how people in Fiji experience and understand social and environmental change from their precarious vantage point in the Pacific Ocean. Perceived as manifestations of the danger associated with increased intensity of tropical storms—what is locally referred to as murderous winds or cagilaba—the ghostly presences in Nagaga and Nayavutoka became a timely reminder about the role of human agency in creating these conditions as well as the risk they posed to the community. Being at once of the land and of the people, indeed, both “nature” and “culture,” ghosts helped focus the attention of many Fiji villagers on what the relatively new and foreign concept of climate change might entail in practice. And in helping crystalize people’s fear, they also stimulated practical responses. It was certainly in that capacity they captured the local imagination among my interlocutors, both those who had a personal connection to the ghosts and the wider community.

Notes 1

2

Ghost is an imported concept in Fijian languages but is today used more or less interchangeably with the local term yalo, which can be translated as “soul,” “spirit,” or “shadow” (cf. Tomlinson 2016). For a more comprehensive discussion about the relationships between ancestral spirits and ghosts in Fiji, see Presterudstuen (2014). Rotuma is a Fiji dependency whose inhabitants are part of a distinct ethnic group that is commonly considered linguistically and culturally Polynesian. For a more comprehensive discussion on Rotuman legends and spirit belief, see Howard (1996).

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Zeitgeist, literally translated as “time ghost” or “the bodiless spirit that uncannily incorporates a ‘place’” (Cohen 1996: 21), is a word with obvious spiritual and monstrous connotations. Wesley even went as far as postulating his belief in ghosts explicitly when he was challenged on such matters. Responding to a question of whether he had seen a ghost or apparition himself, he responded: “No, nor did I ever see a murder. Yet I believe here is such a thing; yea, and that in one place or another, murder is committed every day. Therefore I cannot see a reasonable man deny the fact; although I never saw it, and perhaps never may. The testimony of unexceptionable witnesses fully convinces me both of one and the other” (Wesley 1805: 5). This version of events and the quotes included below are from Fiji Times news articles published in May 2016 as well as from second-hand retellings from interlocutors with a connection to Nayavutoka village. Incidentally, this logic also resembles doctrines promoted by Enlightenment clergymen that held that ghosts only appeared to those whose faith in Christ’s ability to save the souls of the deceased was not strong enough. This chain of events is recurring in most prominent versions of the Oedipus myth. Levi-Strauss claims, “It is a universal characteristic of men born from the earth that at the moment they emerge from the depth they either cannot walk or walk clumsily” (1963: 215). For a further discussion of Levi-Strauss’s argument and a critique of his conclusion, see Carroll (1978).

References Alimardanian, M. (2014), “Burnt Woman of the Mission: Gender and Horror in an Aboriginal Settlement in Northern New South Wales,” in Y. Musharbash and G. H. Presterudstuen (eds.), Monster Anthropology in Australasia and Beyond, 93–108, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Auerbach, N. (1995), Our Vampires, Ourselves, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Bubandt, N. (2012), “A Psychology of Ghosts: The Regime of the Self and the Reinvention of Spirits in Indonesia and Beyond,” Anthropological Forum, 22 (1): 1–23. Carroll, M. P. (1978), “Levi-Strauss on the Oedipus Myth: A Reconsideration,” American Anthropologist, 80: 805–14. Cohen, J. J. (1996), “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” in J. J. Cohen (ed.), Monster Theory: Reading Culture, 3–25, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Deane, W. (1921), Fijian Society or, the Sociology and Psychology of the Fijians, London: Macmillan. Delaplace, G. (2010), “Chinese Ghosts in Mongolia,” Inner Asia, 12 (1): 127–41. Delaplace, G. (2013), “What the Invisible Looks Like. Ghosts, Perceptual Faith and Mongolian Regimes of Communication,” in R. Blanes and D. Espírito Santo (eds.), The Social Life of Spirits, 52–68, Chicago, Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press. Delaplace, G. (2018), “Ghosts Happen: Apparitions of the Dead and Spectral Manifestations,” in Terrain, D. Horsefall (trans.), 69. Gardillo, G. (2009), “Places That Frighten: Residues of Wealth and Violence on the Argentine Chaco Frontier,” Anthropologica, 51 (2): 343–51.

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Howard, M. (1996), “Speak of the Devils: Discourse and Belief in Spirits on Rotuma,” in J. Mageo and A. Howard (eds.), Spirits in Culture, History, and Mind, 121–46, New York: Routledge. The Land Has Eyes (2014), [Film] Dir. V. Hereniko, Honolulu, USA: Te Maka Productions. Levi-Strauss, C. (1963), Structural Anthropology, C. Jacobson and B. G. Schoepf (trans.), New York: Basic Books. Luckhurst, R. (2002), “The Contemporary London Gothic and the Limits of the ‘Spectral Turn’,” Textual Practice, 16 (3): 527–46. Mansfield, N. (2008), “‘There Is a Spectre Haunting …’: Ghosts, Their Bodies, Some Philosophers, a Novel and the Cultural Politics of Climate Change,” Borderlands, 7 (1): 1–9. Morris, R. C. (2008), “Giving Up Ghosts: Notes on Trauma and the Possibility of the Political in Southeast Asia,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, 16 (1): 229–58. Nordhaus, W. D. (1995), “The Ghosts of Climates Past and the Specters of Climate Change Future,” Energy Policy, 23 (4/5): 269–82. Owens, S. (2017), The Ghost: A Cultural History, London: Tate Publishing. Parke, A. (2014), in M. Spriggs and D. Scarr (eds.), Degei’s Descendants: Spirits, Place and People in Pre-Cession Fiji, Canberra: ANU Press. https://press-files.anu.edu.au/ downloads/press/p289571/html/cover.xhtml?referer=&page=0#toc_marker-1. Pilkey, O. H. (2016), Retreat from a Rising Sea: Hard Choices in an Age of Climate Change, New York: Columbia University Press. Presterudstuen, G. H. (2014), “Ghosts and the Everyday Politics of Race in Fiji,” in Y. Musharbash and G. H. Presterudstuen (eds.), Monsters and Anthropology in Australasia and Beyond, 127–42, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Presterudstuen, G. H. (2016), “The Value of the Vanua—the Nexus of People and Land in Fiji’s Market Economy,” in L. F. Angosto-Ferrandez and G. H. Presterudstuen (eds.), Anthropologies of Value: Cultures of Accumulation across the Global North and South, 93–111, London: Pluto Press. Ravuvu, A. D. (1987), The Fijian Ethos, Suva, Fiji: Institute of Pacific Studies. Sakakibara, C. (2008), “‘Our Home Is Drowning’: Inupiat Storytelling and Climate Change in Point Hope, Alaska,” Geographical Review, 90 (4): 456–75. Tomlinson, M. (2016), “Little People, Ghosts and the Anthropology of the Good,” Journal of the Polynesian Society, 125 (1): 11–32. Toren, C. (1995), “Seeing the Ancestral Sites: Transformation in Fijian Notions of the Land,” in E. Hirsch and M. O’Hanlon (eds.), The Anthropology of Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space, 163–83, Oxford: Clarendon. Tsing, A. L., H. A. Swanson, E. Gan, and N. Bubandt (eds.) (2017), Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wesley, J. (1805), An Extract from the Rev. Mr. John Wesley’s Journal, from May 14, 1768, to September 1, 1770, London: Conference Office, North-Green Finsbury Square.

10

Terror and the Territory Cults: Pregnancy and Power in Monsoon Asia Holly High

The cults addressed to the liveliness of the landscape are easily missed. Perhaps there is an unremarkable, unadorned stone in a secluded, unfrequented patch of forest. Perhaps there is an understated shrine housing it, featuring a few spent candles, the remains of incense, and dried-up posies. In some cases, there are annual rites held there. But often not. A potent place might be a mountain that dominates the landscape, or it might be a scene of no obvious distinction. The Buddhist temples with their soaring, gilt rooves and tidy swept yards, daily, monthly, and annual formalities and professional personnel, and the dramatic carvings of a ceremonial hall in an upland village plaza, are much more eye-catching. Compared to these showier elements of religious life in the region, the territory cults of Laos can be near invisible. But the cults dedicated to the “energies of the soil” are just as important, if not more so. Paul Mus, in a 1933 essay, argued that world religions like Buddhism and Hinduism found purchase in Southeast Asia because they resonated with a preexisting veneration of the land that was common to both South and Southeast Asia, and indeed can be detected throughout what he called “Monsoon Asia” (Mus 2011). When Indic influences landed on Southeast Asian shores, they resonated with preexisting beliefs there because they were already in some ways preadapted to them. When the great Hindu polities—like the Cham of Vietnam or the Cambodian Angkor Wat—receded in influence, their echoes remained potent in the form of still-vibrant venerations of earth and rain. For instance, today, ruins of Cham structures are often the sites for Vietnamese veneration of the feminized energies of the soil (Schweyer 2017). John Holt (2009) has argued that Buddhism in Laos today is interpreted through and practiced within the framework of an indigenous understanding of the “spirits of the place.” It is common in the literature to refer to these as “guardian spirits” or “tutelary spirits,” but this is not a direct translation. Local terms in the region I am most familiar with—southern Laos and the northeast of Thailand, and neighboring areas—are numerous. References to “Lords” are frequent. Some Lords are specific, named beings like the caw kho mu lek (Lord of the Iron Wrist) (Lando 1983: 129), and the jaw nai ton chock (Lord of the Lucky Tree) recorded in the north on Thailand (Walker 2012: 103).

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Walker notes that often the modest shrines dedicated to these entities are referred to as ho (palaces) or khum (prince’s house) (2012: 104). Savarnabhumi International Airport in Bangkok is inhabited by a Lord called “bu ming” who is the owner of the area where the airport was constructed (Ferguson 2014: 53). The entire class of beings which are venerated in miniature houses in household plots, irrigation nodes, rice fields, and other notable parts of the landscape are called caw thii (Lord of the Place) in north Thailand (Chotisukharat 1971: 225; Lando 1983: 121; these are also found in Laos). The Shan language refers to the energies of the soil as tsau möng (Lord of the Realm) (Durrenburger 1983: 71). Another generic term is lak muang (polity pillar). This refers to the pillars erected at the center of towns (as in Chiengmai, Chotisukharat 1971: 215). Villages, too, might have a lak baan (village pillar) at the center (Wijeyewardene 1971: 212), sometimes referred to as a buu baan (village navel) (Formoso 1990: 68). Pattana reports of such lak that “every village, town or city in Thailand is required to build and maintain” one (2005: 483). Words for one or another kind of grandparent are also frequent. The territories of Luang Prabang are overseen by “Grandfather and Grandmother No” (Archaimbault 1964: 58). In this case, and some others, the “grandparents” are explicitly thought of as the original settlers of the land. In the northeast of Thailand, a taa heag is honored both as the “first rice field” and as “the first grandfather,” taa being a word for both maternal grandfather and a rectangular plot of land (Smutkupt and Pattana 2003: 66). In Malaysia, modern construction sites often feature a makeshift shrine to the datuk kong, a compound word made from the Malay and Chinese words for grandfather (Goh 2011: 155). My own experience of Laos is that there is some support for translating these various terms as “guardian spirits.” For instance, in one village I lived in, people venerated a puutaa (paternal grandfather–maternal grandfather). They used words like hak saa (care for, protect) and phok kong (govern, look after) to describe how their puutaa cared for them. They spoke of their puutaa as protecting them on journeys and in daily life. Some people described the puutaa not as a singular entity, but as consisting of “battalions” that patrolled the perimeter of the island. The “palaces” dedicated to the two puutaa on the island featured wooden flintlocks and bazookas: weapons for the puutaa’s patrols. One woman commented that, despite the numerous coconut palms on the island, no one had been killed by a falling coconut: this was due to the protection of the puutaa. However, these people vehemently rejected the notion that this entity was a phii (spirit). Instead, they said that the puutaa was simply “of the soil”—the power of the place itself, and not in any way similar to a real ancestor, a ghost, a corpse or witch (the more usual meanings of the word phii). In this chapter, I focus on the other half of that common gloss “guardian spirits”: are the energies of the soil really “guardians”? This chapter accepts the invitation to think of monsters as an umbrella term that can bring together previously disparate areas of anthropological enquiry (Musharbash 2014). Because the territory cults of Southeast Asia have so often been discussed as “guardian spirits,” Durkheimian interpretations that emphasize the affirmation of the community itself in the practice of the cult have dominated (Tanabe 1988: 1).

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For instance, Condominas concluded that “the Liang Phiban [Feasting of the Village Spirit] sacrifice in these cases clearly symbolizes the unity of the village as a collectivity” (1975: 262). When thought of as monsters, another interpretation becomes possible. For instance, a great deal of ritual action in these cults concerns the prevention of violence from the energies of the soil against the people who live in the area, the very people supposed to be under their protection. There is a dimension of grisly gore in these cults. An example from the literature illustrates the point. Niklas Århem tells of a “tutelary spirit” (2014: 206) he learned about in an ethnic Katu village in upland central Vietnam. Kong Dhu was the presence of a hill near the village. When Århem first encountered Kong Dhu, it was because a village woman—possessed by Kong Dhu—was smearing feces on her own face. This was interpreted as Kong Dhu’s punishment for moral lapses in the village. Some people (not the woman) had been watching pornography. Århem furthermore heard about the son of Ating Brol, who found a stone when clearing a swidden field: It was a white stone with a red bright spot in the middle. He took it back home and didn’t tell anybody. One week later, when Ating Brol’s son was sitting in his field sharpening his knife, a tree fell down on him … While he was lying [in the village] mortally injured, one of the village mediums [Ba Bheng] turned up. She had been possessed by the spirit of Kong Dhu’ and came to Ating Brol’s son’s house. When she saw the dying man, Ba Bheng suddenly started to laugh. She said, with the sinister voice of the spirit: “the tree didn’t fall down by itself, it fell down because you did something wrong to me.” (Århem 2014: 208)

The “something wrong” was variously interpreted as taking the stone and taking a turtle. Despite these and other horrifying stories, Århem notes that the villagers chose to live close to the hill because it was their protector. For instance, they said it had repelled raiding parties and the bombs of the American war. The ethnographer concludes: “Like a stern but responsible father, Kong Dhu hill was actually seen as both nurturing and protecting the villagers of Arek—but also punishing them if they faltered in terms of morality” (2014: 214). What kind of father metes out death as punishment for small misdemeanors and ignorant blunders? And punishes one woman for another person’s transgressions? By having her smear feces in her own face? A monstrous one is the answer. The presence of this place seems to be a “Dark Lord”: prudish, capricious, difficult to read, and dangerous. I take the phrase “Dark Lord” from Andrea Acri’s (2017) suggestion that the territory cults of Monsoon Asia are convergent with Tantric gods in India. They are not so much worshipped as appeased, not adored but pacified, and their cults feature blood, skulls, possession, and an obsession with death. He argues that both the South Asian tradition and those found more widely in Monsoon Asia are very deep rooted and share common ancestry. One unifying theme of the cults in and around Laos is that they are preoccupied with violence. Even people living with the most beneficent of territorial “Lord” or “Grandfather” still seem preoccupied with telling stories about how it protected them

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from bombing, raids, or falling coconuts: while these are stories of protection, they are also stories that remind listeners of the ever-present potential of meeting a violent death. It is common for the territory cults to use imagery of horses and elephants. Some city pillars, such as that in Vientiane, feature multiple statues of horses and elephants. Some modest village shrines have “posts” to tie up these (invisible) animals out the front, and some villagers say that the approach of the territorial Lords is heralded by the sound of hooves. While this reinforces the “lordliness” of these territory owners, it is also a reference to warfare: horses and elephants were war animals in past, and political powers sought to monopolize the ownership of these beasts as a way of monopolizing the means of force (Trautman 2015). The favored means of communicating with the presences of territories and appeasing them is sacrifice. “Sacrifice” is an English rendering of phrases that in local languages often simply mean “to kill”: a much more direct reference to the violence of the act, rather than some notion of holiness. In the spirit of this volume, this chapter focuses on such malevolent aspects. This is a deliberately lopsided approach. Actually, the energies of the soil are innately neither good nor evil. Rather, they are simply powerful. As Paul Durrenberger and Nicola Tannenbaum (1989: 86) note, there is a continuity between upland and lowland Thailand in terms of an understanding where power is morally neutral. People need to enter into relations with more powerful beings in order to protect themselves, but these are circumspect, mediated relations. Even when relations are established, there is a need to be cautious because a powerful being is by definition free to act on caprice. A common theme in the territorial cults of the region is that people relate to these powerful entities through “contracts” or “promises” (see for instance: High 2006, 2009; Lando 1983: 144; Walker 2012). These are usually formal and simple: people offer food and adherence to certain rules in return for protection from the powerful entity. The rules of these cults are generally very few. Perhaps the most common is the rule banning defilement in the immediate vicinity of the stone or potent place. This can include restrictions on cutting trees and a ban on defecation. Rules of this nature have been reported for particular cults in Cambodia (Guillou 2017: 428), Thailand (Chotisukharat 1971: 215; Lando 1983: 144), Laos (High 2006, 2009), and Vietnam (Århem 2014). As a result, often these places are the sites of patches of forest that remain undisturbed even when all surrounding land has been cleared. A second common rule is that all long-term comings and goings to and from the place need to be reported to the place, although often this rule is interpreted loosely. A final common rule bans pregnancy out of wedlock (High 2006, 2009; Lando 1983: 143). It is characteristic of these cults that if these rules are broken, anyone and perhaps everyone in the village will be punished—not the perpetrators, but the community. At least, this is my sense of the core of the rules common to the area. Unfortunately, it is difficult to be certain about how common this set of rules is because the literature has tended to assume that the Lords of the land are by definition beneficent and so have attended little, or only in passing, to the specific contracts that people have struck in the process of making them benevolent. I hope that my lopsided approach provokes others familiar with similar cults to respond with clear statements about the rules and punishments operating in this region. One wonders if rules regarding

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illegitimate pregnancies and defecation have been underreported in comparison to rules about tree cutting in the literature to date due to a certain circumspection on these topics. There are suggestive hints at the widespread importance of pregnancies in the cults. The sacrifice or suicide of a pregnant woman is particularly potent (Terwiel 1978; Work 2016: 395). For instance, the lak mueang (city pillar) of Vientiane is inhabited by the ghost of a woman who was five months pregnant when she volunteered to throw herself into the pit where the city pillar was erected (see also Condominas 1975: 255). The principality of Champassak has—“in myth, legend and history” (Archaimbault 1964: 71)—a recurring theme of illegitimate pregnancies that curse the kingdom and necessitate aspects of the territorial cults (see also Archaimbault 1956: 844). For instance, the mythical origins of the kingdom tell of a celestial princess who becomes pregnant to a servant (Archaimbault 1964: 61). The Legend of Nang Malong tells of a noblewoman who drowned herself when she conceived to her lover (Archaimbault 1964: 70–1). And at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Queen Nang Pao was seduced by a foreign prince and at the birth of the child she declared that all unwed mothers would thenceforth need to offer a buffalo to the “guardian spirit” (Archaimbault 1964: 71). Her pregnancy was understood as a sort of enduring curse on the kingdom right up until its dismantlement (Archaimbault 1971). Why should a potent place care if a woman becomes pregnant and the social circumstances under which conception took place? Why should the potency of the realm be linked with stories of women’s sexual misdemeanors? A clue can be found in the rules.

Puutaa, kinuh, and ahak: The rules I have first-hand experience of three cults because of my fieldwork in their associated territories. What was particularly striking to me was how similar the rules of the cults were, despite other differences between the three field sites. The first field site, where I lived for sixteen months (2002–2003), is an island in the Mekong River called Don Khiaw. It is inhabited by ethnic Lao, Buddhist rice farmers. This village is well established and has been continuously inhabited for at least a century (it was not evacuated during the war or resettled afterwards). The second village is New Kandon, an ethnic Kantu village, where I have conducted fieldwork for a total of twelve months (2009–2018). These people practice a mix of ancestor veneration and placation of various other presences. This village was established in 1996 as a resettlement from the remote mountains at the headwaters of the Sekong River to a plains area at the edge of the Bolaven Plateau. In 2001, some settlers returned to their former home and reestablished a village on the old site, and that village is my final example. The Lao and Kantu villages I worked with contrasted in many ways: in political outlook, economic position, livelihoods, religious orientation, domestic arrangements, and marriage patterns. Against this background of contrasts, the similarities I found in the rules of territory cults of all three villages was all the more striking.

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The Don Khiaw Puutaa Don Khiaw is a small island which is home to about 600 people. The island has two territory cults, each with its own stone. One is housed in the north of the village and the other in the south. Both are now housed inside small “palaces” located in two separate patches of forest (see for example Figure 10.1). Figure 10.2 shows one of the stones. As you can see, it is very plain. The wooden carvings around it are guns which are given to the puutaa to help it protect and patrol the village. The rules of this cult are as follows: First: any permanent relocations of people into or out of the village must be reported to the puutaa at the stone. In Figure 10.3, a woman is holding an offering she has prepared for the puutaa at one of the two annual festivals held for at the puutaa’s “palace.” She has made one bamboo skewer each for the people, the poultry, the pigs, and the buffalo of her household. One snap on each skewer indicates one individual. This is an accounting of who is part of the household and thus under the care of the puutaa. Importantly, people who have moved away can still be counted as locals for the purposes of the cult so long as they have not entered the care of another territory cult. Therefore, emigrants to places like Australia and the United States are often included here. Second: Remains of deceased humans must not enter the village domain. For example, a man who had fled Laos after the revolution died in France and his body was sent back to Laos to his home village, Don Khiaw island. This was against the rules of the Don Khiaw cults, which state that no human remains may enter the village. As a

Figure 10.1  The “palace” of one of the Don Khiaw puutaa in its protected patch of forest.

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Figure 10.2  Inside the “palace” of the puutaa.

Figure 10.3  A woman holding a bouquet of bamboo skewers that represent the human and animal members of her household to the puutaa.

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result, every human and domestic animal resident in the village was put at risk of an epidemic or collective misfortune when these remains arrived. To stave this off, a pig was sacrificed to the puutaa by the dead man’s sister, who had received the remains. The key point here is that it was not the party in France who sent the body that were put at risk in breaking the rules of the cult. It was the locals who were at risk. Locals, not the transgressor, are punished by territorial presence. Third: Pregnancies outside of recognized marriages are prohibited. They are not, however, rare. It is common for women in Don Khiaw to become pregnant before they are married, but they must khaa muu (kill a pig) at the stone to kee (repair) the puutaa. Fourth: Entry into or use of the forest surrounding the puutaa pavilions other than for the purposes of communicating with the puutaa is prohibited. As can be seen from the aerial photographs, some of the only patches of forest on the island are those two areas dedicated to the puutaa (Figure 10.4).

Kandon ahak Figure 10.5 is a photograph taken in an ethnic Kantu village. There is no Buddhist temple here. In the center of the village, there is a communal hall dedicated to the village spirit. In front of this hall is a stone. The hall and stone were erected when the village was established in 1996. These people previously lived on a mountain top. When they moved to this foothills area, as a population of about 900, about fifty people died, mostly infants and elderly people. In response, the settlers held a Buddhist exorcism, even though they are not Buddhist. It was during this ceremony that this stone was retrieved from a nearby river. It was planted in the soil, and a gunshot was fired to scare existing presences (ghosts especially) from the village territory. Then, the Buddhist

Figure 10.4  The protected groves of the puutaa in relation to the Buddhist temple on Don Khiaw. Photo credit: Google Earth, accessed June 6, 2017. The captions are my own.

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Figure 10.5  The stone in the Kandon village plaza, in front of the ceremonial hall.

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monk who had been invited to conduct the exorcism tossed sand and small stones over the boundary of the village to the north, south, east, and west, sealing the perimeter of the village against the reentry of these malevolent entities (Figure 10.6). Some years later, in 2001, another spate of deaths occurred. This time it was healthy people in the prime of the lives. It was surmised that the presence venerated in the territory cult of the former owners of the land—a cult that had lapsed when those former owners moved away—was incensed. Previously, in the early 1990s, an ethnic Alak village inhabited this area. Numbering only fifty people, a government consolidation program relocated them to a large settlement by a road. Prior to their relocation, they had venerated a golden stingray that—although made of stone—was animated and swam about in a pond on the center of a sacred grove. They called this creature ahak. Ahak is a Lao word commonly used in these cults and which is normally translated as “guardian spirit.” In 2001, with the second spate of deaths among the new settlers, diviners concluded that ahak was responding to this neglect. Some of the original inhabitants and some of the new settlers gathered at the place at the ahak’s altar. It was fed with the blood and meat of a cow killed on site, and the knowledge of how to venerate it was passed from the former occupants to the new settlers. Since then, the new settlers have venerated the ahak by keeping to a set of rules.

Figure 10.6  The stones of Kandon. The crosses give a rough indication of the four points where the Buddhist monk tossed out sand and stones to purify the village space. Photo credit: Google Earth, accessed June 6, 2017.

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Figure 10.7  The Kandon ahak grove.

These rules are very similar to the ones from the previous example. Like the puutaa, the ahak is fed sacrifice to remediate for illegitimate pregnancies and offered portions of other sacrifices made in the village. It is informed of movements into and out of the territory. Any frivolous activity in its grove is banned. Figure 10.7 is a photograph of the grove. At the time of writing this, I had been unable to enter because that was considered too dangerous for locals (not for me!).

Old Kandon kinuh My third example is the area that the new settlers of Kandon originally came from and to which in 2001, eighty-seven people returned (Figure 10.8). Those returnees now number about 150. In the center of their village is a ceremonial hall. Around it, forming a circle, are the households (a mix of long houses and nuclear households). Around these is a fence. Outside the fence is a stone named kinuh (Figure 10.9).1 The rules imposed by kinuh are very similar to those already described for the other villages: pregnancy out of wedlock requires a sacrifice at this stone. Respectful behavior is required while in vicinity of this stone. In addition, some people felt that both spates of deaths discussed above were not due to the ahak in the new site, but to kirnuh—they thought that kinuh objected to the old village being emptied out. When the returnees repopulated the old site, kinuh was appeased and the deaths stopped. Therefore, they now reported that one of the rules imposed by kinuh was that village residents were not allowed to leave the mountaintop village. However, they also emphasized that the new settlement established in the lowlands was quite prosperous now, and they claimed that this was also due to kinuh extending its protection over both the original

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Figure 10.8  Old Kandon.

Figure 10.9  Kinuh of Old Kandon

village and the new site. What was opposed by kinuh was not mobility of the residents per se, but rather the total emptying out of the original village territory. Mobility that took place while maintaining the original site as well was benevolently supported by the kinuh. Before I move on, it is important to note that in this mountainous area there is another important variety of territorial presences: the presence of mountains. In Old Kandon, people lived under the care of “grandmother mountain.” One settler who moved to the new site in the lowlands, and stayed there, said:

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Before we moved, the spirit of the mountain that we lived with cared for us. Grandmother mountain. But since we moved, I don’t think the mountain looks after us anymore. Now, I don’t know for sure who cares for us.

It was clear that, although he now observed the rules imposed by the ahak in his new place of residence, he did not feel that it was truly a guardian. It was treated more as a dangerous presence, part and parcel of the land the settlers had come to claim.

Discussion As can be seen in these examples, the territory cults are extremely interested in precise accounting of where the boundaries of this place are and who lives within these boundaries. In all three cases, in the course of venerating the territorial Lord the borders of the territory were made very clear. In the case of the puutaa, the boundary of the puutaa’s protectorate corresponded with the perimeter of the island (including waterways around it). This became clear, for instance, when dead human remains crossed this boundary. In New Kandon, the Buddhist exorcism drew a clear perimeter around the village. In the case of the kinuh, the boundaries of the village territory were well known and often indicated by boundary markers such as waterways or words painted on a mounted board. Mus wrote that the stone cults of Monsoon Asia formed a “spiritual land survey, the centre of each district being marked by one of the sacred stones” (Mus 2011: 34). I would add that the cults these days frequently mark not only a center, but also distinct boundaries. These defined territories are associated with an equally well-defined collectivity. In Don Khiaw, for instance, people insisted that it was not possible to be a member of more than one puutaa cult at a time. During the annual festivals, the offerings prepared for the puutaa (Figure 10.3) gave a precise and detailed accounting of who was to be considered a “child of the village” for the purposes of the cult and therefore and due for puutaa protection. People were generally ignorant about the representations made by their co-villagers, but as far their own households went, propitiants were clear about who was inside and who was outside the care of the puutaa. The ahak, likewise, is told of any long-term arrivals or departures from the village. Kinuh, as well, was specific in its attacks: it was the members of Kandon who were at risk and also who benefited from the power of kinuh. A kind of local “citizenship” is suggested by these cults. This is not exactly the same as nation-state reckonings of citizenship but it is also not radically different. I make special mention of this because it is common to hear accounts of power and place in Southeast Asia that stress the fuzziness of territorial boundaries and the inclusiveness of political centers. Condominas famously argued that while in Europe, territory and its borders were the core political units, in Southeast Asia, manpower was really mattered (1980: 306). Wolters (1982) influentially suggested that the precolonial mandala featured an exemplary, radiant center (such as a capital, a palace, or a temple) “without fixed boundaries” (1982: 17).

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Wolters and Condominas were talking about precolonial polities. It is possible that the current-day concern with firm boundaries and strict accounting of membership in the territory cults is a result of recent influences, such as the global spread of the nation-state. It is also possible that this concern is a long-running feature of territory cults that has long been at odds with mandala politics. Tooker (1996) has argued that notions like the “galactic polity” and “mandala politics” need to be balanced with an understanding of the centrifugal pull of local sources of potency. The territory cults I  have described can be understood as emplaced potencies that can, in particular cases, tug against the centripetal allure of the center. So, what is this understanding of power and emplacement, if it is not a typical mandala formation? An answer can be generated by looking again at the rules that repeat in these cults: a ban on defilement of the grove, illegitimate pregnancies, and unsanctioned movements in and out of the territory. One possible interpretation is that these three rules are in fact just a single rule. Illegitimate pregnancies are treated as more or less similar to unreported or unsanctioned movements into and out of the territory. And both of these are treated as more or less the same sort of thing as loitering in or defiling the sacred groves. Each of these is an unlicensed or sullying entry into an area under the Lord’s protection and/or control. The Lord of the Land, then, asserts authority over the entries into terrestrial and human bodies under its control. In this sense, the territory cults can be understood as cults of fertility. Specifically, they are assertions of control over and limitations to the fertility of certain, defined, bodies. Why would a cult of fertility feature a stone as its recurring central point of focus? Why not, say, a blooming flower, an egg, or a seed? Following Maurice Bloch (1992), one answer is that stones represent all that is imagined as unchanging and eternal. He argues that any society that is interested in asserting a sense of its own permanence is faced with the problem of how to maintain this in the face of the all-too-apparent impermanence of life. People age, sicken and die, and the products of their labor, including social arrangements, do too. One solution, remarkably widespread, is representations where instead of birth and other forms of natural fecundity being associated with life, they are portrayed as dangerous and even deadly. They are denigrated. In their place, death is asserted—counterintuitively—as that “which leads to a successful existence” (Bloch 1992: 3). Reverence for death is expressed in ancestor veneration, sacrifice, and unchanging rules. The stones, lifeless and enduring, stand on the side of death and are an assertion of the permanence of social institutions, such as the community, political authority, ownership of land, and marriage. Illegitimate pregnancies and willy-nilly comings and goings of people and in places violate this permanence. In my introduction I described the cults as “addressed to” the “liveliness of the landscape” and the “energies of the soil,” but this is not quite right: the cults are assertions of control over the energies of the soil and fertility more generally. The nomenclature “Lord” expresses this particularly well. The stone cults—preoccupied with condemning spontaneous pregnancy as dangerous to the community—denigrate the power of women’s fertility and fertility more generally. They also appropriate the power of fertility, asserting that it is an inanimate stone, a barely known occult presence and the blood of sacrifice that assures health, fertility, and wellbeing in the community.

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The nomenclature “grandfather” is an apt image of this nurturing, parental care: it is appropriated into an assertion of stone-like authority. That is why these Dark Lords can be said to be guardians: the cults have denigrated and then appropriated the maternal and paternal power of nurture and merged it with the authority over life so that the two become indistinguishable. That is why the presences of places can be described as local guardians and protectors, and even as a kind of father figure, while also being great dangers for the people said to be under their protection. Furthermore, these are never simply stones, but stones in places: a stone in a grove, a stone in a rudimentary “palace,” or a stone found concealed in the soil and illegitimately taken home. The setting is as important as the stone itself. The setting can be thought of as “the frame” in which the stone is able to be a representation of power. The frame is not what is represented by the stone, but rather that which makes the representation of the stone possible. It is the stone’s pedestal and environment (Thompson 2016). The stone is the claim for a limiting authority over life. The setting in which the stone is laid or found is the context of limitless life itself. As Thomson notes, Mus himself observed that one of the outstanding features of the stones is that each stone presents only a “limited surface.” Mus wrote: I think that the choice of the stone as a representative of the god must have been dictated in part by the needs of magical technique: the stone presents a limited surface which can easily be sprinkled with water or anointed, actions which, by sympathy, would ensure rain and fertility for the whole surface of the territory which the stone is considered to represent in microcosm. (Mus 2011: 27)

This enables stones to represent the limits imposed by authority over life, as opposed to the unbounded vibrancy of life itself. These cults turn on the question of how political authority is possible. If life springs forth often spontaneously and even unbidden, on what grounds can anyone presume to act as Lord and master over it? In what ways can any person or group claim to rule land or the plants that grow on it, or claim to own the animals or the people that live there? What is the substance of political authority? The answer given in these cults is that life is not actually the ultimate power. They assert that things that do in fact produce life—like pregnancies or forests—are actually dangerous. Instead, stones, occult presences, ghosts, ancestors, and death in the form of sacrifice hold the ultimate power to foster and protect life. The lesson taught is that the lively, generative forces of people and places are dangerous and best approached within structures that endure, stone like, beyond any one life. Little wonder, then, that the Lao state—far from merely seeking to eradicate territory cults as mere superstition as one might expect from its secular socialist styling—has in addition sought to establish territory cults of its own. In their introductory essay, Musharbash and Presterudstuen (this volume) suggest that monsters can be thought of as emergent, amalgamated, appropriated, and/or extinct. So how are we to think of the presences of places in Laos? One thing is for certain: these species are not extinct. The

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cases I described showed that the presences of the places described had moved with the times, including protecting villagers from the US bombardment, playing a role in the wave of resettlement and village consolidation since the war, and extending themselves to the Lao diaspora in Australia, the USA and France. Without better documentation of these cults in the past, it is difficult to say how much these current manifestations are instances of emergence, amalgamation, or appropriation. What is clear is that across Laos there is an active attempt by government to enliven stone or concrete monuments—such as lak muang (pillars), stupas, statues, and other venerated sites—with supernatural, emplaced presences that are both venerated and feared (see Tappe 2013). For instance, in Sekong a city pillar recently constructed is annually the site of a state-sponsored veneration of all of the past provincial governors of Sekong. As museum staff told me, some people believe, and other don’t, but the venerated deceased governors are now meant to be guardians of the Province. They were known for creating grisly accidents in the increasingly motorized traffic that swirls around the monument. This can be interpreted as a case of appropriation of the long-running lak muang phenomenon into a “supernatural ideology” (Figal 1999: 197). The presences of places are suggestive of the importance of authority, so it is no surprise that some have been enlisted into an essentialist vision of Lao national identity. But this is not the full story. Most of the golden stingrays, rocks worshipped in “palaces,” and grandmother mountains I have come across in Laos so far have been sidelined, ignored, and belittled by the secular state. But they continue to insist on their own stone-like authority.

Note 1

Informants suggested that the best rendering of this word in the Lao script is ກິນຸຮ.

References Acri, A. (2017), “Tantrism ‘Seen from the East’,” in A. Acri, R. Blench and A. Landmann (eds.), Spirits and Ships: Cultural Transfers in Early Monsoon Asia, 71–144, Singapore: ISEAS. Archaimbault, C. (1956), “Le Sacrifice du buffle à Vat Ph’u,” France-Asie, 12 (118, 119, 120): 841–5. Archaimbault, C. (1964), “Religious Structures in Laos,” Journal of the Siam Society, 52 (1): 57–75. Archaimbault, C. (1971), The New Year Ceremony at Basak (South Laos), S. B. Boas (trans.), New York: Cornell University. Århem, N. (2014), Forests, Spirits and High Modernist Development. A Study of Cosmology and Change among the Katuic Peoples in the Uplands of Laos and Vietnam, PhD thesis, Uppsala Studies in Cultural Anthropology, Uppsala University. Bloch, M. (1992), Prey into Hunter, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chotisukharat, S. (1971), “Supernatural Beliefs and Practices in Chiengmai,” Journal of the Siam Society, 59 (1): 211–31.

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Condominas, G. (1975), “Phiban Cults in Rural Laos,” in G. W. Skinner and A. T. Kirsch (eds.), Change and Persistence in Thai Society: Essays in Honor of Lauriston Sharp, 252–77, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Condominas, Georges. 1980. L’espace social a propos de l’asie du sud-est. Paris: Flammarion. Durrenberger, E. P. (1983), “The Shan Rocket Festival: Buddhist and Non-Buddhist Aspects of Shan Religion,” Journal of the Siam Society, 71: 63–74. Durrenberger, E. P. and N. Tannenbaum (1989), “Continuities in Highland and Lowland Religions of Thailand,” Journal of the Siam Society, 77 (1): 83–90. Ferguson, J. (2014), “Terminally Haunted: Aviation Ghosts, Hybrid Buddhist Practices, and Disaster Aversion Strategies amongst Airport Workers in Myanmar and Thailand,” The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 15 (1): 47–64. Figal, G. (1999), Civilization and Monsters: Spirits of Modernity in Meiji Japan, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Formoso, B. (1990), “From the Human Body to the Humanized Space: The System of Reference and Representation of Space in Two Villages of Northeast Thailand,” Journal of the Siam Society, 78: 66–83. Goh, B. (2011), “Spirit Cults and Construction Sites: Trans-Ethnic Popular Religion and Keramat Symbolism in Contemporary Malaysia,” in K. Endres and A. Lauser (eds.), Engaging the Spirit World: Popular Beliefs and Practices in Modern Southeast Asia, New York, 144-162, Oxford: Berghahn Books. Guillou, A. Y. (2017), “Khmer Potent Places: Pāramī and the Localisation of Buddhism and Monarchy in Cambodia,” The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 18 (5): 421–43. High, H. (2006), “Ritualising Residency: Territory Cults and a Sense of Place in Southern Lao PDR,” The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 7 (3): 251–64. High, H. (2009), “The Spirit of Community: Puutaa Belief and Communal Sentiments in Southern Laos,” in A. Walker (ed.), Tai Lands and Thailand: Community and State in Southeast Asia, 89–112, Honolulu: Hawaii University Press. Holt, J. C. (2009), Spirits of the Place: Buddhism and Lao Religious Culture, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Lando, R. P. (1983), “The Spirits Aren’t So Powerful Any More: Spirit Belief and Irrigation Organization in North Thailand,” Journal of the Siam Society, 71: 142–8. Mus, P. ([1933] 2011), India Seen from the East: Indian and Indigenous Cults in Champa, I. W. Mabbett (trans.), Monash Papers in Asia—No. 3, Caulfield: Monash University. Musharbash, Y. (2014), “Introduction: Monsters, Anthropology, and Monster Studies,” in Y. Musharbash and G. H. Presterudstuen (eds.), Monster Anthropology in Australasia and Beyond, 1–24, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Pattana, K. (2005), “Beyond Syncretism: Hybridization of Popular Religion in Contemporary Thailand,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 36 (3): 461–87. Schweyer, A. (2017), “Potent Places in Central Vietnam: ‘Everything That Comes Out of the Earth is Cham,” The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 18 (5): 400–20. Smutkupt, S. and P. Kitiarsa (2003), “Rice Festivals in Northeast Thailand,” in R. W. Hamilton (ed.), The Art of Rice: Spirit and Sustenance in Asia, 66-69, Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History. Tanabe, S. (1988), “Spirits and Ideological Discourse: The Tai Lü Guardian Cults in Yunnan,” Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, 3 (1): 1–25. Tappe, O. (2013), “Faces and Facets of the kantosou kou xat—The Lao ‘National Liberation Struggle’ in State Commemoration and Historiography,” Asian Studies Review, 37 (4): 433–50.

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Terwiel, B. J. (1978), “The Origin and Meaning of the Thai ‘city pillar’,” Journal of the Siam Society, 66 (2): 159–71. Thompson, A. (2016), Engendering the Buddhist State: Territory, Sovereignty and Sexual Difference in the Inventions of Angkor, London: Taylor and Francis. Tooker, D. E. (1996), “Putting the Mandala in Its Place: A Practice-Based Approach to the Spatialization of Power on the Southeast Asian ‘Periphery’—The Case of the Akha,” Journal of Asian Studies, 55 (2): 323–58. Trautmann, T. R. (2015), Elephants and Kings: An Environmental History, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Walker, A. (2012), “Drawing Power into Private Realms,” in Thailand’s Political Peasants: Power in the Modern Rural Economy, 86–110, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Wijeyewardene, G. (1971), “Supernatural Beliefs and Practices in Chiengmai,” Journal of the Siam Society, 59 (1): 211–31. Wolters, O. W. (1982), History, Culture and Region in Southeast Asian Perspective, Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Work, C. (2016), “The Persistent Presence of Cambodian Spirits,” in K. Brickell and S. Springer (eds.), The Handbook of Contemporary Cambodia, London, 389-398, New York: Routledge.

11

Drawing in the Margins: My Son’s Arsenal of Monsters—(Autistic) Imagination and the Cultural Capital of Childhood Rozanna Lilley

Monstrous framings Children born with developmental disabilities have historically been framed as monstrous. Troubling the expected trajectory of ordered childhood development, their appearance and behavior affords a disturbance to “normality.” Representations linking developmental disability with monstrosity circulate in various forms today. Although autism is often described as an “invisible” disability (Broderick and Ne’eman 2008: 473), because its manifestations are primarily behavioral, those diagnosed as being on the spectrum are frequently targets of stigmatization. Sometimes autism itself is portrayed as monstrous, as was the case in a 2009 television advertising campaign in Britain, which used animation to depict a child as trapped inside the rampaging monster of autism (Wilkerson 2009). Clinical psychologist John Richer went so far as to query the membership of children with autism in culture’s ableist club. He wrote: It is pretty clear that if a child does not learn the meanings of his culture’s symbols, including language, then he is not a fully paid-up member of that culture, and if he further fails to acquire many of the skills for communication and cooperation he is further behind with his subscription. Autistic children, perhaps like “feral” children with whom they have often been compared, are, I am suggesting, such “dyscultural” children. (1978: 48)

The notions that autism is a monster or that people with autism are feral outsiders, sniffing ineffectually at the edges of culture, are contested. Autism’s monstrosity and/ or the monstrosity of autism is not a monolithic construct. Facebook groups form protesting autism stereotypes; neurodiversity activists call attention to the disabling logic of currently circulating metaphors and stereotypes; advocates lament the crudity,

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and sometimes the cruelty, of public debate around autism (Waltz 2012). But such ideas draw on a long lineage and are not easily displaced. As Stuart Murray (2008: 49) reminds us, autism continues to be predominantly seen “as tragic, a terrible and cruel absence of so much that makes being human the most familiar wonder we know.” The idea that people with autism are monstrous gains some of its representational tenacity from its intersection with essentializing gender constructs. One of the most striking features of autism spectrum disorder is the globally high male-to-female ratio, with a frequently cited mean of four to one (Jack 2014: 14). Hans Asperger’s seminal essay “Autistic psychopathy” posited that autism is “an extreme variant of male intelligence” (1944: 84); Simon Baron-Cohen’s (2002) riff on this remark led to the “extreme male brain” theory of autistic development. Indeed, in many ways the current diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorder, as codified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition (DSM-5) (ASA 2013), might be interpreted as performing a set of concerns about the perils of contemporary masculinity. The two major criteria of the diagnosis—“persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction” as well as “restrictive, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities”—conjure a taciturn person preoccupied with technology and systems who struggles with social and emotional engagement. For most readers, that person is stereotypically masculine. In this chapter, I reverse the usual representational connection between autism and monstrosity by looking at a set of primary school drawings by my son, Oscar. Oscar was diagnosed with autism at age 3. In the following years, he spent much of his free time at school drawing monsters. These primary school monster drawings are considered within two competing, or perhaps just disparate, theoretical frames. The first treats the art of individuals diagnosed with autism as evidence of their fundamental cognitive differences and impaired condition. The second views children’s monster drawings as indicative of their competent participation in a broader social context, that is as part of normal social development. The idea that drawing is either evidence of impairment or of the successful acquisition of valued cultural capital cannot be easily reconciled. The tension documented here between these frames of interpretation is, of necessity, a sketch. But an effort to follow the contours of the argument allows us to consider what is ethically at stake when we think about how an 11-year-old boy unintentionally talks (or draws) back to the poverty of theorizing around autistic imagination, subverting monstrous representations of individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder by creating his own ebullient cast of quirky monsters rendered in ink.

Autism and art: Diagnostic drawing Historically, autism has been characterized as an impairment of imagination (Quirici 2015) with research on children’s art contributing to this view (Barnes 2012). One wellknown British study by Scott and Baron-Cohen (1996: 376), for example, concluded that children on the autism spectrum have “a deficit in the domain of imagining unreal entities compared to matched controls.”

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Nevertheless, there are quite a number of famous autistic artists. Two examples allow an understanding of how individuals on the autism spectrum can be simultaneously seen as lacking in imaginative capacities and producing original artwork. The public interest in, indeed appetite for, savantism (Murray 2008: 65), which includes disparate abilities from calendrical calculation to perfect pitch, frames the field of reception for these artists, feeding into a stereotype of “the autistic genius without imagination” (Quirici 2015: 71). Nadia Chomyn’s (1967–2015) drawings have been viewed simultaneously as both astonishingly precocious and entirely lacking in interpretive intent or symbolic meaning, that is as the work of an imagination-impoverished savant. Educational psychologist Lorna Selfe first drew attention to Nadia’s drawing with a 1977 case study and then a further monograph published in 1983. Nadia had, from a very young age, demonstrated a prodigious talent for drawing.1 Her preferred subject matter was horses and other animals, often memorized from Ladybird children’s picture books and then reproduced in a distinctive vivid and loose style. Her use of foreshortening, linear perspective and correct use of proportion make her drawings developmental anomalies. She did not progress through the usual stages, from scribbles to schematic and geometric figures and then to “tadpole” figures (Sacks 1995: 185), which are thought to universally characterize children’s art. Nadia’s drawing precocity occurred in the context of marked disability. Selfe (1983: 202) argued that Nadia was unable to conceptualize what she was drawing; that “social, conceptual and symbolic communication is absent” from her images. Nicholas Humphrey (1998: 176), an archeologist, went a step further, interpreting Nadia’s work within an evolutionary framework, hypothesizing that there is a similarity between her drawing and high cave art, springing from shared mental limitations, namely perceptual experience uninfluenced by language or symbolic conventions. We are not so far here from the logic of the dime museum exhibiting human curiosities as steps on the evolutionary ladder (Mitchell 2002: 46). The second example of the way in which artwork by individuals on the spectrum is often treated as lacking in imagination is provided by the reception of the drawings of Stephen Wiltshire. In his famous 1995 essay, titled “Prodigies,” neurologist Oliver Sacks described Wiltshire as a prodigious graphic savant whose drawings were always “unchildlike” (Sacks 1995: 186). Wiltshire is able to draw complex buildings or cityscapes after “a single sidelong glance” (Sacks 1995: 191).2 Like Nadia, this ability, suggesting a photographic or eidetic memory (Sacks 1995: 196), is contrasted with Wiltshire’s disability. Sacks (1995: 193) writes: “He could draw, with the greatest ease, any street he had seen; but he could not, unaided, cross one by himself.” The stark contrast is a cause of narrative wonder as the reader is led to conclude that this pairing (prodigious ability/profound disability) reveals some, as yet not fully understood, cognitive mechanism (Sacks 1995: 215). Wiltshire’s drawing is frequently interpreted as a manifestation of restricted, repetitive, and stereotyped interests that forms part of the formal diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorder (Sacks 1995: 188). Sacks (1995: 231) makes this link explicit, arguing that “the art takes on some of the strengths and weaknesses of autism, its remarkable capacity for minutely detailed reproduction and representation, but

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also its repetitiveness and stereotypy.” After situating the interest of Wiltshire’s artwork in its graphic revelation of diagnostic criteria, Sacks takes on the implications of Wiltshire’s prodigious talent for our understanding of humanity. He questions whether the drawings entail “any depth of inner resonance” (Sacks 1995: 201), concluding that Wiltshire “may never develop, or enter the full estate, the grandeur and misery, of being human, of man” (Sacks 1995: 232).3 The two artists briefly summarized here—Nadia Chomyn and Stephen Wiltshire— exhibit very different styles. What is consistent is that their drawings are interpreted both as a confirmation of their autism diagnosis and, as Roger Cardinal (2009: 1465) has perceptively pointed out, “as direct traces of the autistic condition itself, i.e. they could be read as symptoms.” “Perhaps,” he continues, “we might even envisage them as metaphorical descriptions of autism—attempts at showing, by virtue of a sort of projection from within, what it feels like to be autistic, or again how the world appears when one views it through the autistic window.” The thrust of Cardinal’s criticism has been to query the logic of this receptive field, highlighting the interpretive limitations of treating art as a straightforward object of either psychiatric or cognitive analysis. Marion Quirici (2015: 85), in a sustained analysis of the trope of autistic genius, has contributed a summation of such reductive approaches: In these examples, autistic artists are not defined principally by their ability, agency or imagination, but by traits like literalism, obsession, isolation, conceptual limitation, strangeness, and indifference to social and cultural influences. In these pathologizing discourses, disabled achievers are doubly stigmatized, alienated for both their abilities and their disabilities.

Oscar’s drawings: Marginalia, monsters, and mash-ups From an early age, my son, Oscar, liked drawing monsters. The first example I have of this oeuvre stems from 2006. Oscar was 5 years old. His preschool framed this image for their annual art show. Oscar’s commentary on his drawing is noted on the back. The text reads, “This is a monster” (Figure 11.1). The primary data set used in this analysis consists of twenty-three drawings and five recorded interviews with Oscar, aged 11. The drawings were completed on six school days between August 6, 2012 and August 27, 2012. I interviewed Oscar in his bedroom at home about the drawings during the same time period, explaining: “I’m writing a paper about children’s drawings and I’m interested in these drawings of yours. Do you mind talking to me about them?” At first Oscar was a little hesitant about these post-school interviews. But he soon came to enjoy discussing his artwork. In fact, for some weeks after I had, in my estimation, finished collecting the data set and doing the interviews, Oscar continued to show me his drawings and demanded that I interview him about them. The twenty-three drawings are composed of fourteen monsters and various fantasy—including satanic—scenes. Most of these were completed on Mondays during

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Figure 11.1  “This is a monster,” 2006 (aged 5).

“non-scripture,” which was essentially free time for students from nonreligious families. The vast majority are static portraits; six are complex narratives. The interviews took place while we looked at the drawings completed on that day. Altogether there are fifty minutes of conversation about the drawings, with the longest interview (the first) running for seventeen minutes and the shortest for seven minutes. Also included in this analysis are some additional fieldnotes taken during Oscar’s tenth birthday party in 2011. A brief diagnostic history will help to position this material for readers who have a particular interest in the developmental trajectories of children with autism spectrum conditions. I mentioned earlier that Oscar was first diagnosed aged 3. He was categorized as having “Autistic Disorder.”4 He was also assessed as having an intellectual disability in the mild range. Over time, his IQ scores improved and, in a 2010 assessment, aged 9, he was reassessed as being in the normal IQ range, though with significant peaks and troughs across the various subtests. Like Nadia, Oscar preferred to draw in black biro pen on white paper (see Selfe 2011: 28). Although many art materials were available to him at home, he refused to use color. He explained that “black pen gets the job done.” That is, he represented the medium as an efficient way to convey his ideas.

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Figure 11.2 is an example of a static monster portrait. Oscar described it as “a freaky cat with mandibles” and “two extra eyes.” He also pointed out that the monster has “two tails, and chicken legs.” He added, “I just think of it as some kind of race of mythical creatures.” Figure 11.3 is a mirror image or doubled jester monster. Oscar confirmed that “they’re both the same creature,” excitedly expanding: “They both share the same mind!” He specifically pointed out that the two serrated right arms are actually mouths. Figure 11.4 is an enormous face in the process of transforming from a man (left side) to a demon. The drawing is clearly divided into two distinct halves. To the left is an urban landscape with a tall building and a car, positioned at the top of a steep hill. The face, looming over this everyday landscape, is, as Oscar said, “a normal guy.” To the right, the face has become that of a demon or the devil, complete with a goat horn and large globs of snot and saliva. Flames dance around him. “It’s like two different sets of reality,” Oscar explained. Two narrative scenes provide the final examples of the range of subject matter drawn by Oscar during this time period. Figure 11.5 was completed on the same day as the transformation from a man to a demon portrait. It is also divided into two distinct

Figure 11.2  Drawing 7, August 6, 2012. “Freaky cat” (artist’s description). Example of a static monster portrait.

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Figure 11.3  Drawing 12, August 9, 2012. Scary jester. Example of a mirrored monster portrait.

Figure 11.4  Drawing 13, August 13, 2012. “A person transforming into a demon” (artist’s description). Example of transformation portrait.

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Figure 11.5  Drawing 14, August 13, 2012. The normal world and the underworld. Example of a mirrored narrative scene.

halves, with the left side (a transparent male figure, hands on hips, positioned between two skyscrapers) depicting the quotidian world and the right a satanic landscape. A stick figure is being transported by a winged demon, using his clawed feet, into the underworld. Two demons with tridents (below) are stabbing at stick figures. The chief demon (the devil) occupies center stage at the bottom right of the page. He has a flowing cape and horns. He is positioned on the same level as the transparent male figure to the left, suggesting a duel-like challenge. Oscar made it clear that this is the same devil featured in Figure 11.4 (“That’s the guy from my first drawing”). The minor demons, he elaborated, are punishing people for acts of evil. The central shape represents lava. When I asked Oscar if he believed in the underworld, he replied with a definitive “No.” And then he added, with a tone of rising excitement, “Unless I was proven wrong!” The second narrative scene, Figure 11.6, depicts a zombie apocalypse. Oscar informed me that these zombies are mutations from a virus and are collectively known as “Stalkers” because they are like predatory animals. He explained, “They are powerful

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Figure 11.6  Drawing 21, August 27, 2012. Zombie apocalypse. Example of a narrative scene.

and big, but they are very stealthy too.” The Stalkers are equipped with various melee weapons, including a spitter, who has massive blades for hands, and another Stalker capable of firing acid and poison from his arms. They are chasing a stick-figure man, who is running toward the bottom edge of the frame, exit left. According to Wikipedia (2017a), S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is a series of first-person shooter survival horror video games, developed in the Ukraine, and set in the area surrounding the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant accident site, known colloquially as “The Zone.” Oscar’s iconography is clearly inspired by the many gaming websites and YouTube videos devoted to this game series, which, by 2010, had sold over 4 million copies. These five examples of portraits and narrative scenes draw on an extraordinary range of visual references, derived from popular culture, especially gaming. The sources Oscar uses are diverse, including textual sources, such as comic book encyclopedias, and internet sources, such as gaming blogs and fan sites. This intertextuality is a defining feature of contemporary cultural production. The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game series just referred to, for instance, was loosely based on a Russian science-fiction novel Roadside Picnic (Strugatsky and Strugatsky 2012 [1972]), published in thirty-eight editions in twenty countries, which then spawned a feature film, titled Stalker (1979). Attempting to trace the “genealogy” of any of these drawings invariably leads down an internet rabbit hole into a wonderland populated by monsters and men, zealous devotees of spinoffs and spoofs and other dedicated enthusiasts all making their

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mark or just passing the time in a cavernous clickbait world. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (1996a: vii) succinctly observed, “We live in a time of monsters. Channel-surf for a moment.” To gain a sense of the extent of popular culture knowledge used and exhibited in Oscar’s artwork, let’s briefly consider two more examples, a monster clown and a mutant scarecrow. When I asked Oscar if Figure 11.7 was a monster clown, he looked at me as though I was really stupid. “Look at its head!” he answered, exasperated. The main head is floating, connected by strings to the body. Oscar then pointed out that the clown has two heads, the second looking like a bow tie. Still amazed by my lack of perspicacity, he added, “And he even has those clown pants!” I also asked: “Do you think clowns are friendly or scary?” “I think they can be both, depending on how you portray them,” came the immediate reply. Oscar’s knowledge of monster clowns could have come from a wide variety of sources. Think of the Joker in Batman with his chalk-white skin, green hair, and laughing scarlet lips, or Pennywise the Dancing Clown in Stephen King’s (1986) horror novel It. The source that most immediately springs to mind is the scary clowns in the

Figure 11.7  Drawing 11, August 9, 2012. Monster Clown.

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Yu-Gi-Oh!, Trading Card series, including Clown Zombie and Peten the Dark Clown. These cards were very popular, particularly with boys and young men. Some people suggest it is the top-selling trading card game in history, with more than 25 billion cards sold globally (Wikipedia 2017b). We had a number of sets of these collectible cards at home, which Oscar enjoyed looking through and playing with from a very young age. Oscar knew precisely what his sources were for creating this “mutant scarecrow” (Figure 11.8). “I got the idea for this from some two different things,” he explained. “The scarecrow from Batman, and those giant swords.” I asked if the giant swords were from Batman. Oscar witheringly replied: “They’re practically in every anime, to be precise.” The Scarecrow was an arch-nemesis of Batman in the 1990s television series Batman: The Animated Series. The swords referred to are zanbatō, with fictional interpretations of the weapon used by many characters in anime and video games, consisting of a large wide blade attached to an extended hilt. Two of these swords are fused to Oscar’s mutant scarecrow. It’s important to note that this drawing is not a mechanical reproduction of other images of either the Scarecrow or anime swords. Oscar has combined them in an original way and imbued this monster with personality—with a leering grin and a patchwork body, this mutant scarecrow looks zany, demented, and dangerous.

Figure 11.8  Drawing 4, August 6, 2012. Mutant scarecrow (artist’s description).

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All of the drawings discussed provide clear examples of Oscar’s awareness, and appropriations, of graphic conventions and images derived from a vast pop culture industry, largely directed toward children and young adolescents. He skillfully interweaves the visual images and graphic conventions of others into his own rich representational repertoire. In Cohen’s (1996b: 6) terms, these are the “strings of cultural moments” that monster theory needs to follow. Rebecca Tushnet (2011: 2135) provides insight into this creative process of “mashing” in a discussion of the genre of vidding and the difficulties “remixes” pose for copyright law: “This type of creativity foregrounds its constructedness, its debts to earlier works, with editing (‘cutting’) taking the place of the stitches used to suture the limbs of Frankenstein’s monster.” She concludes: Influence, borrowing, and all the other terms we use to describe how the author mixes what exists with what does not yet exist involve an interpenetration of author and external world. We don’t stand on the shoulders of giants; we stand partly inside them. (Tushnet 2011: 2149)

To remix her metaphor, Oscar stands partly inside his monsters, looking out at a world populated by, among myriad others, freaky cats, mutant scarecrows, and monster clowns. His representational repertoire is dense with allusion and animated by a genuinely imaginative and distinctly contemporary aesthetic sense. Oscar’s oeuvre includes many classic monsters, composite beings that unite, in a single body, disparate categories. Like the mermaid or the sphinx, this ragtag band is loosely bound together by their malevolent hybridity (Huet 1983: 78–9). His focus on mirror imaging and transformations is part of the “intriguing simultaneity or doubleness” (Cohen 1996a: ix) that properly forms part of the ontological liminality that is at the definitional core of the monstrous (Cohen 1996b: 6). Whether the drawings are in static portrait mode or depict multiple-figure narrative action scenes, the viewer has entered classic monster territory. If we consider the set of images, it is clear that Oscar has a generative rather than simply imitative understanding of a range of visual genres. Using this understanding, he creates and refines what Wolf and Perry (1988: 29) call “a personal idiom—a kind of visual signature.” Oscar’s highly symbolic artwork is animated by a strong sense of playfulness, using his own versions of popular culture images to explore thematics of good and evil, beauty and ugliness, aggression and conflict, monstrosity and the marvelous. I should make it clear that Oscar was never especially interested in drawing. He sometimes drew when it was a task demanded of him. Mostly he drew to fill in time, especially when he was bored and there was nothing else to do at school. Oscar never voluntarily sought out art materials at home or decided to draw without prompting. His drawings were not those of a savant. They were developmentally typical, progressing from classic tadpole figures (hommes tetards) to more detailed conventional figures and then to transparency drawings. Both their formal properties and their content were age appropriate. In fact, Oscar had many activities he preferred over drawing, including gaming and watching television. Mostly he liked to make up fantasy stories, often enlisting a partner to listen and make occasional comments or contributions. His father has

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written about the ways in which “Pretend” fills our lives, with Oscar developing and recombining narratives as he uses content from different media to create narrative mash-ups (Maclean 2016). This case study detailing the performative aspects of Oscar’s storytelling was based on recordings from 2011 while the drawings featured here were done in 2012 when Oscar was in grade 5. Together, these parental ethnographies provide a joint testament to our son’s imagination. Drawing, during these primary school years, remained a relatively minor expression of that larger vivid interior life.

Man-made monsters Earlier I discussed the ways in which the art of people with autism tends to be taken as evidence of their diagnosis (see Cardinal 2009). As part of this tradition, both Nadia’s and Stephen Wiltshire’s drawings have been treated within a cognitive frame as demonstrating savant abilities that graphically mark their different brain functioning. As previously mentioned, Oscar’s artwork is not part of a savant tradition; he demonstrates no astonishing drawing abilities. Another way of looking at these drawings is through the lens of gendered processes of socialization. Brooks (2004) argues that when we see children’s drawing as meaningmaking, then the sociocultural context within which that meaning-making takes place demands our attention. Certainly, I attempted to elicit from Oscar some sense of receptive context: Me: And when you do these drawings at school do other kids ever come and look at your drawings? Oscar: Yes. Me: And what do they say? Oscar: They think they’re good. Me: Do they? They enjoy looking at them? Oscar: Yeah. Me: Is it mainly boys or girls who look at your drawings? Oscar: Boys.

As Connell (1996: 212) has noted, schools are a major site for the formation of masculinity. Sexed difference in the subject matter of children’s drawings has been the focus of a number of studies. These studies have shown that boys usually prefer drawing monsters, dinosaurs, vehicles, and spaceships; girls go for royalty, landscapes, domestic scenes, people, and animals (Feinburg 1977; Flannery and Watson 1995). Feinburg (1977: 63) even documents “the monster, dinosaur stage in which boys produce ominous creatures who spit fire, bare menacing mouths of grotesque teeth and protruding limbs.” She goes on to argue that seeing such pictures in a therapeutic mode as representations of anguish and hostility may be misplaced. Instead, she points to drawings as part of a sustained effort by children to perform gender, with boys attempting to identify with societal expectations for them to aggressively accomplish, master, and control (Feinburg 1977: 71).

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In more recent scholarship, Judith Butler’s (1990, 1993, 2004) theorization of gender as actualized through repetitive performances that promote the illusion of “natural” or “fixed” hegemonic (heterosexual) identities has been very influential in considerations of children’s identity work. There is wide recognition of the ways in which children become gendered within an institutional space (primary school) and of the importance of middle childhood in this process (Renold 2004, 2006; Swain 2004). Within this gender performativity vein, my husband has understood Oscar’s imaginative world as drawing from “identifiable ‘boy’ cultural capital.” In the context of episodes of Pretend, he has elaborated on how Oscar “has a detailed knowledge of the highly textualized cartoon, film and game terrain, with its action and fantasy tropes, that acts as a major point of reference for male teen and preteen performances of masculinity” (Maclean 2016: 163). To this point I have stressed Oscar’s commonalities with his peers—the typical developmental trajectory of his drawings as well as his investment in age-appropriate stereotypical boy interests and themes. His interest in, and vast knowledge of, gaming, cartoon characters, and general cine literacy (Cross 2005: 345), gave him an “in” with his male peers. Oscar was, to some extent, “cool” because other boys recognized his considerable stock of age- and gender-appropriate cultural capital. They were also, however, well aware of his many differences. Oscar first went to our local school after attending an autism-specific placement for three years. His drawings assisted in giving him a place in this new social setting. Oscar’s quirky parade of monsters operated within a known cultural universe and helped to make him one of the boys. Oscar never entirely belonged, however. He generally skirted the periphery of the playground and the social life enacted within it. This marginality is often remarked on in the literature about children with autism in mainstream school settings. Atypical behaviors, such as avoiding eye contact and deficits in pragmatic language use, mark students with autism out, frequently leading to neglect and social rejection (Ochs, Kremer-Sadlik, Solomon and Sirota 2001). Oscar, too, avoids eye contact and his speech is both a little difficult to understand and marked by an endearing formality. His tendency to use extremely complex vocabulary combines with difficulties sustaining reciprocal conversation to create a challenging interactional situation for typical peers. Oscar, therefore, presents us with a seeming paradox. In many ways, he performed valued aspects of middle-school masculinity—he was not studious, and he had no sense of hierarchy, continually transgressing accepted teacher/pupil etiquette. This made him the stuff of stories and something of a local hero. At his tenth birthday party, one of his mates came out to the kitchen to talk to me: Oscar’s really funny. Last year Miss was like “If you’ve finished, just read a book and don’t call out to me.” Then Oscar put his hand up and Oscar just said “Finished.” And one time last year, we were looking at machines on the computer and Oscar called out, “Boring!” And in class this year …

Research in Australian secondary classrooms (Dalley-Trim 2007) has examined how adolescent males perform masculinity. Common practices include calling out

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interruptive behaviors and refusing to affirm the teacher’s authority. During Oscar’s birthday party, his male peers discussed their strict teacher, talking about how much they disliked her. “She made me sick; she was always grumpy,” one complained. Another added: “Don’t you think she was mean, Oscar?” My son considered the matter and good-naturedly offered agreement: “Yeah, meaner than a cranky Tyrannosaurus Rex!” The boys all squealed, gleefully, repeating his indictment over and over again.5 Oscar both is, and is not, “one of the boys.” His position as class clown was partly a result of his difficulties with social interaction and his unawareness of social rules. His contributions to conversation were often unexpected and his peers found this genuinely amusing. At the same time, it is clear that during these conversations, Oscar was doing a lot of work both to keep up with the banter and to insert relevant comments that he judged would be accepted by his friends. Oscar’s monster drawings are part of this broader pattern of inclusion/exclusion. On the one hand, they demonstrate his mastery of age-appropriate boy cultural capital. On the other hand, Oscar largely achieved this mastery alone in his bedroom, where he surfs the internet, searching for images, storylines, and even soundtracks that form the backbone of his deep immersion in fantasizing. His drawings, when produced in a public setting such as school, momentarily connected Oscar to his peers and helped to transform, for a time, his largely self-imposed exclusion into a limited social acceptance.

Through thin and thick From a clinical perspective, individuals diagnosed with autism are expected to have limited imaginative capacities. I have a fat stack of A4 display books containing Oscar’s diagnostic assessments and reports. From ages 2–6, they contain the following chronologically listed remarks about his imagination: ●● ●●

●●

●●

2003. Oscar does not have a lot of imaginative play. 2004. Given Oscar’s developmental level, it is difficult to comment on the level of his imaginative play. 2005. While Oscar can make items from his imagination (e.g., will build a robot with playdough), his dramatic play remains limited. 2006. It is pleasing that he is capable of using language as his primary means of communication, that much of his play is functional and that he enjoys engaging particularly with his parents in imaginative and somewhat creative play.

I find it difficult to recognize these as descriptions of Oscar, who has always had a vivid and powerful imaginative life. My efforts to describe this inner life to clinicians have been largely met with skepticism, construed (I imagine) either as a compensatory maternal fantasy or as inconveniently muddying the diagnostic waters. Yet if we look through the literature, there are examples linking autism and a genuinely creative imagination. The literary output of Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay (e.g., 2000, 2003), whose work includes prose, poetry, and philosophical texts, comes immediately

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to mind (Hacking 2009: 1470; Murray 2008: 149). In the field of art, Gilles Trehin’s drawings (2006) of his fantasy of an island metropolis called Urville provide an accomplished picture of an entirely invented, chimerical utopia, complete with pseudohistorical notes (Cardinal 2009: 1462). Pondering the issue of autism and imagination, philosopher Ian Hacking (2009: 1472) has noted that stereotypical conceptions “often blind theory to experience.” The problem is not one of not being seen—Oscar was assessed by numerous skilled professionals on many occasions—but, as Quayson (2007: 2) has aptly remarked, “of being framed within a discourse of stereotypes and expectations that serve to efface a person’s identity.”6 Oscar’s monsters fight back against this effacement. Oscar is actively part of the social, both because he draws on other popular culture texts and images as fodder for his creative output and because he creates his own texts (narratives and/or drawings that are shared by his family and peers), contributing to the social imaginary as he mines it. His mash-ups are not simply derivative. They are an imaginative intervention into other stories and other fandoms. The densely woven intertextual references that structure his remix come together to create something new and original (Tushnet 2011; see Mattingly 2017: 265). In insisting on Oscar’s creativity, I follow a trail of recent commentary that works to trouble a clear divide between “autism” and “non-autism.” This chapter functions, in some respects, as a maternal echo to the calls of autistic self-advocates and autobiographers to recognize and respect the complexity of their subjectivity. I do this, however, from a particular standpoint—that of someone who for thirty years has been looking at the world and writing as a social anthropologist. Mattingly (2017) has recently argued that anthropology’s characteristic immersion in local situations—our thick descriptions—offer empirical cases that resist universals, prompting rethinking and amendment. This, she eloquently asserts, is anthropology’s gift to philosophical phenomenology in general and to the study of autism, in particular. I have endeavored to persuade the reader that Oscar is not, in Hacking’s (2009: 1467) terms, the “autistic thin man of yore, or rather the thin child” who “when not having a tantrum, was a silent self-absorbed creature, alone with bizarre habits.” My thick description of my son’s monster drawings leads us to a rich imaginative life, simultaneously animated by the wider world and participating in it. Savantism is not the defining issue here. Oscar’s imagination is both bold and active. The extent of his fantasizing and his ongoing commitment to it are unusual. But his interests and his perceptions, concretized in his drawings, belong to an instantly recognizable childhood world, battling it out between monsters and soon-to-be men. Oscar made it clear to me that he knew monsters were fantastical; that they belong to the realm of the imaginary. When I asked him if he had ever seen a monster, he replied “No.” When I questioned him about whether he thought he might ever see a monster, he answered with a definitive, “No; monsters aren’t real.” Then he added, “But I do believe in aliens!” As Oscar grew older, he became increasingly critical of his own drawing skills. He complained that his drawings were not realistic enough. Eventually, in his early teens, he refused to draw altogether, his interest in monsters initially replaced by extraterrestrials and, later, science fiction narratives. Recently, he’s been talking with

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me about androids. They have, Oscar tells me, “a retro-futuristic vibe” and a “rather utilitarian philosophic view.”7 In the years between Oscar’s monster drawings and his sci-fi fantasy narratives, my son’s social world constricted. Oscar continues to attend a mainstream school, with support. At almost 18, he has never had a telephone conversation with another teenager, been out with friends, or used social media. He appears to have no interest in such matters. The monsters that used to animate his imagination are confined, as they are for most children, to a remembrance of middle childhood. Oscar now inhabits a world brimming over with dissident rogue Machines and, as described by him, nihilistic thoughts. It’s like listening to a remix of Forbidden Planet and Blade Runner. Oscar has become adept at combining fragments of other texts and images, mainly picking up material from the internet to create his own stories, original montages of what has come before. The sheer intensity of his commitment to the inventive remains a source of daily wonder. The value of Oscar’s monster drawings lies partly in the enjoyment they provide for the viewer. They remind us all of a moment in childhood when monsters ruled, their disruption of the boundary between the human and nonhuman a source of tantalizing pleasure. During that preadolescent developmental period, monsters haunted Oscar’s imagination. They skulked around corners at primary school, ran riot around our home, and insisted on coming along for each and every family road trip. Their presence in the crowded inner city, dwelling among a middle-class white family, reminds us that monsters are inherently adaptable, found in remote desert regions, fjords and glaciers, rice fields, and urban landscapes. Sometimes the changes they give form to are interior, marking a transitional moment between childhood and adolescence. In their introduction to this volume, Musharbash and Presterudstuen discuss the different ways in which monsters “behave” in situations of (human) social change and transformation. In Western contexts, monsters are often associated with the cultural capital of childhood. They are not only commodified but also creatively appropriated; children may be entertained and scared by tales of the monstrous but equally may enjoy creating or being monsters themselves. Rachel Brophy (2016: 183) underlines the theoretical value of “creating space for the monster in childhood and giving value to the experience of children.” In adolescence, monsters may become harder to find. Some face extinction; others, as the editors artfully remind us, take different forms, succeeding their more infantile or otherwise discarded counterparts. The cyborg and the alien, too, are hybrid creatures who may help us to navigate or to story changing contexts and developmental periods. But the significance of monsters extends beyond providing a compass by which to guide developmental directions. In drawing monsters, Oscar reframes some of our taken-for-granted ideas about autism and imagination. His monster drawings are not mechanical reproductions of reality. They do not indicate savant capacities of either perception or draftsmanship. To treat them as evidence of trauma seems strained, requiring a pathologization of vast numbers of children who daydream and doodle. Oscar’s monster drawings subvert representations of autism as monstrous, as not fully human, by showing us that autistic children can engage in the same creative processes as other children, participating in the social by drawing on the world as they draw it.

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Acknowledgments I thank Yasmine Musharbash and Geir Henning Presterudstuen for academic encouragement and editing suggestions. My husband, Neil Maclean, has provided both support and thoughtful input. Most importantly, I thank my son, “Oscar,” for giving me permission to show his drawings and to write about them.

Notes 1

2 3

4

5 6

7

Over 200 of Nadia Chomyn’s drawings are held in the Bethlem Archives, Bethlem Museum of the Mind, opened in 2015 in Britain. Commentary and an example can be viewed at http://museumofthemind.org.uk/blog/post/in-the-frame-forjanuary-2013. Many of Wiltshire’s panoramas and other artworks can be viewed on the artist’s website, http://www.stephenwiltshire.co.uk/index.aspx. Sacks was writing more than twenty years ago. The politics of disability rights was in its infancy. Nevertheless, the idea that an individual is excluded from humanity by virtue of his disability, and that his drawing can be used as evidence of his unfitness for membership in the “full estate,” seems remarkably chauvinist (see Shakespeare 1996). At the time this research was conducted, diagnoses of autism in Australia were made according to criteria specified by the American Psychiatric Association’s (2000) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual- IV, Text Revision. Autistic disorder applied to children who met the core criteria for autism (qualitative impairment in social interaction; qualitative impairments in communication; restricted, repetitive, and stereotyped patterns of behavior, interests, and activities). I more fully describe this birthday party conversation in an essay titled “Crocodile Tears” in Lilley 2018. I have written about how mothers respond to the diagnosis of their child with autism and the way this process summons into existence “a certain sort of child; a child with multiple deficits, a necessary recipient of early intervention services, a child with possibly lifelong dependencies” (Lilley 2011: 216). These quotations come from a story Oscar dictated that I recorded in 2017. He was 16 years old.

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Baron-Cohen, S. (2002), “The Extreme Male Brain Theory of Autism,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6 (6): 248–54. Broderick, A. and A. Ne’eman (2008), “Autism as Metaphor: Narrative and CounterNarrative,” International Journal of Inclusive Education, 12 (5–6): 459–76. Brooks, M. (2004), “Drawing: The Social Construction of Knowledge,” Australian Journal of Early Childhood, 29 (2): 41–9. Brophy, R. (2016), “Beautiful Monsters, Strange Children and the Problem of Making Distinctions,” Global Studies of Childhood, 6 (2): 177–89. Butler, J. (1990), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London: Routledge. Butler, J. (1993), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, London: Routledge. Butler, J. (2004), Undoing Gender, London: Routledge. Cardinal, R. (2009), “Outsider Art and the Autistic Creator,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 364 (1522): 1459–66. Cohen, J. J. (1996a), “Preface: In a Time of Monsters,” in J. J. Cohen (ed.), Monster Theory, vii–xii, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Cohen, J. J. (1996b), “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” in J. J. Cohen (ed.), Monster Theory, 3–25, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Connell, R. (1996), “Teaching the Boys: New Research on Masculinity, and Gender Strategies for Schools,” Teachers College Record, 98 (2): 206–35. Cross, B. (2005), “Split Frame Thinking and Multiple Scenario Awareness: How Boys’ Game Expertise Reshapes Possible Structures of Sense in a Digital World,” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 26 (3): 333–53. Dalley-Trim, L. (2007), “The Boys’ Present … Hegemonic Masculinity: A Performance of Multiple Acts,” Gender and Education, 19 (2): 199–217. Feinburg, S. (1977), “Conceptual Content and Spatial Characteristics in Boys’ and Girls’ Drawings of Fighting and Helping,” Studies in Art Education, 18 (2): 63–72. Flannery, K. and M. Watson (1995), “Sex Differences and Gender-Role Differences in Children’s Drawings,” Studies in Art Education, 36 (2), 114–22. Hacking, I. (2009), “Autistic Autobiography,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 364 (1522): 1467–73. Huet, M. (1983), “Living Images: Monstrosity and Representation,” Representations, 4: 73–87. Humphrey, N. (1998), “Cave Art, Autism, and the Evolution of the Human Mind,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 8 (2): 165–91. Jack, J. (2014), Autism and Gender: From Refrigerator Mothers to Computer Geeks, Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press. King, S. (1986), It, London: Hodder & Stoughton. Lilley, R. (2011), “Maternal Intimacies: Talking about Autism Diagnosis,” Australian Feminist Studies, 26 (68): 207–24. Lilley, R. (2018), Do Oysters Get Bored? A Curious Life, Perth: UWA Publishing. Maclean, N. (2016), “Dad! You Have to Be …: Autism, Narrative and Family,” in S. Douglas and L. Stirling (eds.), Children’s Play, Pretense, and Story: Studies in Culture, Context, and Autism Spectrum Disorder, 149–72, Oxford: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group. Mattingly, C. (2017), “Autism and the Ethics of Care: A Phenomenological Investigation into the Contagion of Nothing,” Ethos, 45 (2): 250–70. Mitchell, M. (2002), Monsters: Human Freaks in America’s Gilded Age: The Photographs of Chas Eisenmann, Toronto: ECW Press.

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Mukhopadhyay, T. (2000), Beyond the Silence: My Life, the World and Autism, London: National Autistic Society. Mukhopadhyay, T. (2003), The Mind Tree: A Miraculous Child Breaks the Silence of Autism, New York: Arcade Publishing. Murray, S. (2008), Representing Autism: Culture, Narrative, Fascination, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Ochs, E., T. Kremer-Sadlik, O. Solomon, and K. Sirota (2001), “Inclusion as Social Practice: Views of Children with Autism,” Social Development, 10 (3): 399–419. Quayson, A. (2007), Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation, New York: Columbia University Press. Quirici, M. (2015), “Geniuses without Imagination: Discourses of Autism, Ability, and Achievement,” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, 9 (1): 71–88. Renold, E. (2004), “‘Other’ Boys: Negotiating Non-Hegemonic Masculinities in the Primary School,” Gender and Education, 16 (2): 247–67. Renold, E. (2006), “‘They Won’t Let Us Play … Unless You’re Going Out with One of Them’: Girls, Boys and Butler’s ‘Heterosexual Matrix’ in the Primary Years,” British Journal of Sociology of Education, 27 (4): 489–509. Richer, J. (1978), “The Partial Noncommunication of Culture to Autistic Children—An Application of Human Ethology,” in M. Rutter and E. Schopler (eds.), Autism: A Reappraisal of Concepts and Treatment, 47–61, New York and London: Plenum Press. Sacks, O. (1995), An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales, London: Picador. Scott, F. and S. Baron-Cohen (1996), “Imagining Real and Unreal Things: Evidence of a Dissociation in Autism,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 8 (4): 371–82. Selfe, L. (1977), Nadia: A Case of Extraordinary Drawing Ability in an Autistic Child, London: Academic Press. Selfe, L. (1983), Normal and Anomalous Representational Drawing Ability in Children, London and New York: Academic Press. Selfe, L. (2011), Nadia Revisited: A Longitudinal Study of an Autistic Savant, Hove, UK and New York: Psychology Press. Shakespeare, T. (1996), “Book Review of an Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks,” Disability & Society, 11 (1): 137–42. Stalker (1979), [Film] Dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, Soviet Union: Mosfilm. Strugatsky, A. and B. Strugatsky ([1972] 2012), Roadside Picnic, O. Bormashenko (trans.), Chicago: Chicago Review Press. Swain, J. (2004), “The Resources and Strategies That 10–11-Year-Old Boys Use to Construct Masculinities in the School Setting,” British Educational Research Journal, 30 (1): 167–85. Trehin, G. (2006), Urville, London, UK; Philadelphia, PA: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Tushnet, R. (2011), “Scary Monsters: Hybrids, Mashups, and Other Illegitimate Children,” Notre Dame Law Review, 86 (5): 2133–56. Waltz, M. (2012), “Images and Narratives of Autism within Charity Discourses,” Disability & Society, 27 (2): 219–33. Wikipedia (2017a), “S.T.A.L.K.E.R.,” Wikipedia. Available online: https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/S.T.A.L.K.E.R (accessed November 10, 2017). Wikipedia (2017b), “Yu-Gi-Oh!,” Wikipedia. Available online: https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Yu-Gi-Oh (accessed November 10, 2017).

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Wilkerson, B. (2009), “Disability Activists Call on Action for Children to Withdraw Autism ad,” Campaign, February 10. Available online: https://www.campaignlive. co.uk/article/disability-activists-call-action-children-withdraw-autism-ad/879752?src_ site=marketingmagazine (accessed October 29, 2017). Wolf, D. and M. Perry (1988), “From Endpoints to Repertoires: Some New Conclusions about Drawing Development,” Journal of Aesthetic Education, 22 (1): 17–34.

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Afterword: Scenes from the Monsterbiome Michael Dylan Foster

If monsters notably and notoriously disrupt categories of understanding, then a monster anthropology must compel us to rethink the parameters, methods, and objectives of anthropological inquiry.1 The chapters collected here begin this monstrously productive work by working with monsters productively not (only) as metaphors or reflections of human imaginings but as real actors capable of changing society and culture, and capable also of being changed. Reading these chapters together impels us to expand our thinking about the anthropological project and also to question assumptions within the emerging interdisciplinary field of monster studies. By thinking ethnographically, working on the ground with monsters and their people, we can differently ask what monsters are and what they do. Taken together, these essays do not reach a simple (or single) conclusion, but rather open up avenues for further exploration, discovery, and theorization. With their particular focus on change, they remind us that monsters—just like people—never sit still. They are always shape-shifting across space and time and consciousness. In their provocative introduction to the volume, Musharbash and Presterudstuen suggest a number of different ways to think about these changes: emergence, adaptation, appropriation, amalgamation, and extinction. All of these are relevant and appropriate to the wide variation found among cultures and individuals as to what constitutes a monster (or any of the other words associated with such presences) and are illustrated in the chapters here. In my own geographical research area, Japan, monstrous things are generally called yōkai, but they are also prominently known as bake-mono, which might be translated literally as “changing-thing.” In addition to referencing the status of some (but not all) Japanese monsters as shape-shifters, such language highlights the importance of transformation: like an insect, a plant, a human, or an idea, monsters are informed by change. This afterword is neither a summary nor a culmination of the chapters leading up to it; rather, I want to try to add to the conversation. After reading these brilliant and diverse chapters one after another, I found myself inspired to break from conventional thinking about the monster, to challenge myself to explore fresh approaches to its elusiveness (and illusiveness and allusiveness). I offer no conclusions nor even a sustained argument.

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In the spirit of Cohen’s seminal “Seven Theses” essay, my comments are meant to be suggestive rather than conclusive. Drawing on my own research in Japan and informed by the essays in this volume, what follows is a somewhat random collection of thought experiments that do not necessarily link together or create a whole. They may even contradict each other. But I hope they will stimulate further rumination.

Thought Experiment 1: Semantic staining One metaphor for considering the spread and change of certain monsters (and other things) is “semantic staining,” by which I mean a contagious magic whereby one thing is colored, or stained, through contact with another, changing its meaning forever. Just as when we stain a piece of wood, the contours and grain may still be visible, but the original object is permanently altered. The concept cleaves most closely to what Musharbash and Presterudstuen call “amalgamation,” in which the traits of different monsters merge, but it also correlates to adaptation, appropriation, and extinction. While these are “ways in which monsters conduct themselves in situations of change,” we can think of semantic staining as one of the mechanisms informing this conduct— or at least as a heuristic through which to view it. In contemporary Japan, one of the most commonly known yōkai is a river sprite called the kappa.2 Today it is often portrayed as a child-sized anthropomorphic creature; it is generally green, with webbed hands and feet, a beaked mouth, shell on its back, and a bald, indented head. It thrives in the realm of popular culture, where it is featured in children’s shows, used for advertising, and as a mascot for village revitalization (mura okoshi). But at least through the nineteenth century, the kappa was a monster of folklore, the protagonist of numerous local legends, where it was known for lurking in pools of water, drowning horses, cows and small children, molesting women in the outhouse, challenging passersby to sumo, and stealing vegetables, especially cucumbers—hence the now ubiquitous cucumber sushi called the “kappa roll.” In some folklore, the kappa is also worshipped as a water deity, simultaneously fearful and protective, embodying in a single creature the “spectrum of sacredness” Arumugam insightfully unpacks in this volume with regard to the Muniswarar and the Minis in Tamil Nadu. Clearly the kappa has gone through many changes during the twentieth (and twenty-first) century. But the kappa has not always (just) been the kappa: what we call the “kappa” is a genericized incarnation, an amalgamation (a watering down, as it were) of river sprites from throughout the Japanese archipelago. Indeed, historically speaking, “kappa” is only one of literally hundreds of local dialectal terms used to indicate mischievous water creatures—diverse names include garappa, enkō, mintsuchi, and komahiki. The situation was exceedingly complex but, to simplify greatly, “kappa” was a variant found in the Kantō region (around current-day Tokyo) as well as in the northeast of the country. Another major variant was kawatarō, which was prominent in the area around Osaka and further to the west. Until around the middle of the Edo period (c. 1603–1868), the kappa and the kawatarō may have been relatives but were distinct, with the kawatarō described more like a hairy, upright-walking monkey than the frog-turtle-like figure of the kappa.

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At some point, however, the kawatarō got semantically stained by the kappa. This was not a sudden occurrence, and many factors were involved, but prominent among them was the advent of a popular culture industry in the Kantō region that produced inexpensive books and pictures for wide distribution. An artist named Toriyama Sekien (1712–1788) published a series of often tongue-in-cheek illustrated monster catalogs, in which he included an image of a kappa, web-footed and looking like a turtle-frog, with the simple label: “Kappa, also called kawatarō.” The description, I would argue, represents a moment of change—or at least a confirmation of this change—whereby the western kawatarō is stained by the image of the eastern kappa. By the late nineteenth century, the slimy eastern kappa had become the generic version of the river sprite in Japan, and the name “kappa” was becoming the hegemonic label for the species (Kagawa 2012: 6–7). I would guess that in Japan today, most residents have heard of a kappa, but very few have heard of a kawatarō. The kappa becomes a “prototype” at the center of a “natural category”; such categories “are defined upon prototypes that are definitive of the focal area and that more or less cover objects at a distance from the focal area—that is, fuzz-off toward the edges of the semantic field” (Laughlin 1993: 20).3 In contemporary Japan, kawatarō are part of the same category as kappa, demonstrating a “family resemblance” (Rosch and Mervis 1981), but are not central to it. The kappa, on the other hand, has become the default water demon, a go-to character called on for all sorts of folkloric and popular culture purposes. Such genericization is not limited to Japan—Nicholls (this volume) brilliantly demonstrates how the Bunyip undergoes a very similar process, in which it becomes a “stock monster” (DeSanti 2015: 186).4 My illustration here of the mechanism of semantic staining is derived primarily from archival and library sources, but only comes into focus through ethnographic work. On and off for almost two decades, I have been carrying out fieldwork on a small island off the coast of southwest Japan. There, in the hamlet of Teuchi (pop. approx. 730), I asked about local yōkai and learned of one called a gamishiro. The children on the island had not heard of this monster; the youngest person who had was a friend in his late fifties who explained that as a child he was warned never to swim in the ocean after eating cucumbers because he would be attacked by a gamishiro. One older islander explained she was warned never to swim alone because the gamishiro would grab her leg and yank her down. Another, in his late eighties, told me that as a child he was told to avoid two deep areas in the bay because the gamishiro lurked there—and it would pull you under. The descriptions here overlap to a certain extent with the generic kappa—the association with water, with cucumbers, with the danger of drowning—but they are also somewhat distinct, particularly because the kappa is usually associated with freshwater rivers and ponds while the gamishiro lives in the ocean. What was most striking was that everybody immediately described the gamishiro as being like a kappa, or in the words of one man in his late eighties, “what we would now call a kappa” (ima de iu kappa). While confessing that he himself had never seen a gamishiro (and didn’t know anybody who had), by comparing it to the generic image of a kappa—which many people have seen, in illustrations, film, television, etc.—this man demonstrates the way in which the kappa image stains the local water demon, indelibly coloring

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specific native understandings. There is no way to know when the kappa image came to the island or how much it altered the gamishiro image historically, but the fact that the residents all invoked the kappa as an explanatory analogy demonstrates its dominance, not only in terms of language, but in terms of meaning. The gamishiro is all but extinct now, but the kappa has adapted and, in its amalgamated form, it thrives.

Thought Experiment 2: Loose monsters But even as certain monsters cease to exist, others emerge. Since the early twentyfirst century, cities, small towns, universities, and businesses throughout Japan have been inhabited by what are called yuru-kyara, roughly translated as “loose characters” or “wobbly characters.” These mascot figures are “cute anthropomorphized cartoon characters” (Occhi 2012: 110) created to be symbolically identified with a place, community, or organization. They may take the form of an icon or logo, but most famously they are performed by humans dressed in kigurumi (character costumes), much like mascots for a sports team. In contemporary Japan, yuru-kyara are ubiquitous. Although they often share characteristics, such as oversized bodies and small limbs, there are endless varieties; they are very often constructed of an assemblage of symbolic features that represent the place/entity with which they are associated. Bariisan, for example, is a famous yuru-kyara from the town of Imabari. It looks like a gigantic yellow chick (Imabari is known for its grilled chicken), wearing a belt made of towel cloth (Imabari has a large towel industry) with a ship tucked into it (Imabari is on the coast). Another example, notorious for its (presumably unintentional) creepiness, is Sento-kun from the ancient capital of Nara: a large-headed Buddhist monk (there are many temples in Nara) with antlers (Nara is famous for its deer). While most Japanese would probably not consider yuru-kyara to be “yōkai” per se, there is certainly something monstrous about them with their hybrid construction, their physical size, and their eerie lumbering silence (it is all but impossible for the humans inside these costumes to project their voice); moreover, they reflect a similar aesthetic of nonhuman figures who have an effect on the human world. So even as a wave of genericization threatens local monsters such as the gamishiro, the same mediadriven forces also inversely give birth to new localized monsters, a perfect example of the “emergence” process highlighted by the editors.

Thought Experiment 3: Monster as Anthropologist What if we flip the script and imagine “monster anthropology” to mean monsters doing anthropology, undertaking ethnographic fieldwork among the humans that haunt them? Would an anthropology of humans from the perspective of the monster interpret human agency in the same way that humans might? For that matter, can we even suppose monsters would possess a concept of agency? Can we imagine a situation in which the monster is normative and the humans they believe in reflect the culture

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of the monsters doing the believing? All of this is playful questioning, but it also sheds light on our (human) anthropologic practices. Trying to understand monsters as possessing a distinctly different worldview and different categories of understanding from their closest humans profoundly challenges so many of our taken-for-granteds.5 Indeed, how would the monster construct the human? Felton (this volume) demonstrates how in antiquity the building of roads through otherwise uncharted land inspired human anxiety about travel, which in turn inspired tales of monsters met on the road. But what of the anxiety and fear experienced by the monsters, whose territory is suddenly invaded by rarely seen creatures, humans and horses, speaking a strange tongue? The “expansion of a road network not only between proximate towns but between previously isolated city-states” must have thrown the monsters’ understanding of the world, and their own place within it, into turmoil—how could they possibly imagine why these humans were suddenly leaving their own lairs to cross into theirs? Even in more recent times, such dynamics play out—as in Thurman’s discussion (this volume) of the way Kurdaitcha have “learned to navigate the infrastructure, technologies, and languages” of the new towns of the Warlpiri people in Central Australia (for more on monsters responding to changing environments, see Arumugam, Rothstein and Presterudstuen, this volume). From monsters’ perspectives, perhaps the human (and animal) community would seem nothing like a community at all, but more like a chaotic jumble of disparate beings needing to be forced into a classificatory system. What form would such a taxonomy take? Would a monster categorize people by gender, age, skin color, or physical size (as humans often do with monsters)? Or by odor, or sound? Or by social status or economic class (and how would such distinctions manifest themselves to a monster)? Or perhaps by their ability to see monsters, or believe in them, or communicate with them? Or, more likely, by something we cannot begin to imagine—because it is easy, as I am doing here, to anthropomorphize the monster. The monster’s-eye view, or what we might call “sympathy for the monster,” has of course been experimented with in literature, most famously perhaps in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and even to a certain extent in Beowulf, where we see Grendel’s torment as an outsider. More recently, the monster’s point of view is ingeniously taken up in Pixar’s Monsters Inc. (2001), in which children’s fear is the raw material needed to power the monster world. As the monster creeps into a child’s dark bedroom, we share with it the apprehension of entering a forbidden, foreign space.6 These examples are textual or filmic, but how would this work ethnographically? I don’t know the answer to this, but I do think it is worth thinking about.7 By considering—or at least trying to imagine—a monster’s view of humans, we get not only a different perspective on human culture and society, but also a chance to push the boundaries of anthropology as a discipline. Emerging fields of multispecies ethnography, and related efforts, locate humans in a broader ethnographic context and are “concerned with the effects of our ‘entanglements’ with other kinds of living selves” (Kohn 2007: 4). These “living selves” tend to be animals or plant life, things “previously appearing on the margins of anthropology—as part of the landscape, as food for humans, as symbols” (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010: 545), but humans are also deeply entangled with monsters. This sort of research would fit into what Eduardo Kohn has

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called an “anthropology of life,” which he describes as “a kind of anthropology that situates all-too human worlds within a larger series of processes and relationships that exceed the human” (2007: 6). If mushrooms (Tsing 2015), dogs (Kohn 2007), gingko trees (Crane 2013). and even nonliving objects can be understood ethnographically, why not monsters, whose relationships with certain humans are arguably similar to “companion species” (Haraway 2003) or material artifacts (Henare et al. 2007)? Related to the emergence of multispecies ethnography, the so-called ontological turn in anthropology may also suggest approaches for a monster anthropology. Proponents of the ontological turn push beyond traditional forms of cultural relativism because, they argue, cultural relativism “claims that epistemologies (forms of knowing or understanding) vary, but that there is only one ontology (form of being or existing). Many worldviews, only one world. The ontological turn, instead, proposes that worlds, as well as worldviews, may vary” (Heyward 2017: 2). This means that the monsters spoken of by the groups or individuals discussed in the preceding chapters are not social or cultural constructs, nor even interpretations of phenomena; they simply are.8 Even with such attempts to transcend traditional anthropological thinking, however, humans remain at the center of things—there may be different ontologies, but it is only (so far) human ontologies that other humans seem to have (some) access to. Can we imagine an anthropology of monsters where there are no humans, or where humans are not the center of attention? This may just seem like an impish question, but I pose it with serious hope that “the possibility that one has thus far regarded as obvious—as so obvious that one could not possibly be aware of it—suddenly appears as problematic” (Rees 2018: 32). Is such a possibility not, after all, the possibility of monsters?

Thought Experiment 4: The challenge of the Momo Challenge The notion of ontologies—particularly in the plural—points also to thorny issues of belief and, ultimately, questions of what is real or, simply, what is. Recently, in countries around the world, a “new” monster emerged to cause a ruckus and pose a challenge to belief and questions of what is real—and also, pertinent to the focus of this volume, make us think about how monsters change. The so-called Momo Challenge refers to an internet phenomenon in which a “disturbingly ghoulish avatar” appears through Facebook or WhatsApp and asks “children to play game [sic], then encourages them to post pictures or videos of them committing violent acts. If they refuse, Momo resorts to blackmail and threats.” The quotations here come from one of hundreds of similarly vague reports that can be found online; this one concludes simply: “The Monmouth County Prosecutor’s Office is warning parents to monitor their children’s online activity.”9 As the rumor spread, there were warnings that a frightening image of Momo had been spliced into YouTube videos and would pop up to frighten children, sometimes challenging them to commit suicide. The history of the Challenge is murky but seems to have started around the summer of 2018 before exploding into mainstream media and social networks in February 2019, where it became a “moral panic” (Herrman 2019).

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By early March 2019, coverage of the Challenge was of the debunking sort, pointing out that the whole thing is “bogus” (Sakuma 2019), nothing more than “a viral hoax” or “urban legend” (Lorenz 2019). Currently there is no Wikipedia entry dedicated to “Momo,” nor even to the “Momo Challenge,” but rather to the “Momo Challenge Hoax.” That is to say, the discourse surrounding Momo—at least the adult discourse— almost immediately came to focus on the conundrum of whether or not it was “real.” The New York Times: There are no credible reports of children who have been meaningfully influenced by anyone convincing them to engage with a “Momo Challenge,” or driven to suicide by her likeness appearing in the middle of a Peppa Pig video. This hasn’t stopped police departments and school administrators and local and national media around the world from reporting on the phenomenon as a verified and imminent threat, relying heavily on second- and thirdhand accounts, via parents, of upset children. It’s also not obvious that any of her imagined targets believe her to be “real,” either. (Herrman 2019)

Indeed, the media obsession with the ontological veracity of the Challenge, if not the monster itself, is almost pathological. The Atlantic: The Momo challenge wasn’t real then, and it isn’t real now. YouTube confirmed that, contrary to press reports, it hasn’t seen any evidence of videos showing or promoting the “Momo challenge” on its platform … Additionally, there have been zero corroborated reports of any child ever taking his or her own life after participating in this phony challenge. (Lorenz 2019; emphasis added)

I could continue quoting like this from magazines, blogposts, and social media sites where the discourse is driven by discussions of the “reality” of the Challenge. But as anthropologists and folklorists are well aware, and the contributors to this volume make absolutely clear, when it comes to monsters the question of what is “real” is never easily “confirmed” or denied—and for many people, not even very important. The New York Times article cited above goes on to elaborate that among adults there was a very real fear about “what their kids are doing on the internet, and what the internet is doing to their kids” (Herrman 2019). There is a critical slippage here between the Challenge and the monster itself. But ultimately if a monster is the concretization of fears, then the frightening face of Momo strangely embodies the amorphous (but real) fears of parents worried about the dangerous no-man’s land— the uncharted territory—of the globally connected internet that, just like the new highways of antiquity, can suddenly bring humans face to face with monsters. Whether Momo is “real” or not, Momo is. And yet, for all its metaphoric potency in the contemporary moment, the face of this monster has a long history. By tracing it we can see how a “single” monster radically changes through time and space, all the while remaining—as Musharbash and Presterudstuen, citing Halberstam in the Introduction, aptly suggest—a “meaning machine” (Halberstam 1995: 21). The frightening image associated with the Momo

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Challenge has been described as a “devilish bird-lady,” a “possessed-looking chicken lady” (Sakuma 2019) or “the face of a mom who hasn’t slept or showered” (Herrman 2019). This last comment, apparently uttered half tongue in cheek, ironically points in the direction of a much earlier incarnation: a several-hundred-year-old Japanese yōkai of a woman who has died in childbirth. The Momo image, it turns out, is a photograph of the face of a sculpture created by a Japanese artist named Aiso Keisuke, the founder of a special effects company called Link Factory.10 The full sculpture features a decidedly creepy, scraggly haired, and bug-eyed female head with a long neck, prominent breasts, and arms that morph into chicken-like bird feet. The sculpture was made in 2016 to be displayed at the Vanilla Gallery, an art space in Tokyo that was having a special exhibition dedicated to “ghosts” (yūrei) and similar otherworldly beings.11 At some point in the summer of 2018, a picture of this sculpture was apparently posted on a subreddit page, and from there the virality began (see Sakuma 2019; Lorenz 2019). But what was this sculpture? According to English-language reports, the statue was called “Mother Bird.” I am not sure where this translation came from (nor where the name “Momo” came from), but in Japanese the sculpture is titled Ubume, which alludes to a well-documented yōkai of old. In fact, the ubume has been part of Japanese folk belief since at least the twelfth century, when she can be found in a collection of anecdotes and legends called Konjaku monogatari shū (Tales of Times Now Past).12 Like all folk beliefs and legends, the ubume varies from place to place, but one standard story tells of a woman who appears at a crossroads or on a bridge; her lower body is drenched in blood and she is cradling a baby in her arms. She asks a passerby to hold her baby, and when he does, the child grows heavier and heavier until he is about to drop it. He then recites a Buddhist prayer, and the woman thanks him for allowing her baby to “return to this world” and promptly disappears (Murakami 2000: 56–7; Miyata 1990: 22–4). During the Edo period, the image of the ubume featured in a number of yōkai picture scrolls. She also became a character in fiction and even a trope in kabuki drama. We can infer that during that time the ubume reflected a complex set of concerns, the most obvious of which was the very real fear of death in childbirth. She is also clearly imbricated within popular Buddhist ideas about salvation, and as a deeply loving mother—so devoted as to return from death to save her child—she became associated with self-sacrifice and care for children. Even today there are Buddhist temples associated with her and dedicated to motherhood and safe childbirth.13 Not surprisingly, the kanji characters usually used to write “ubume” are those for “birth” and “woman,” so that her name might read something like “birthing woman” (Nihon kokugo daijiten dainihan henshū iinkai 2000: 402). Where does the “bird” come in? If we look back to a 1776 image in one of Toriyama Sekien’s compendia of yōkai (the same one featuring a kappa), we find a picture of a distraught and bedraggled woman standing in a river with a baby clinging to her breast. Behind her, at the edge of the page, is what looks like a wooden sotoba or stupa, indicating a grave. Significantly, though phonetically glossed as “ubume,” the image is not labeled with the kanji characters that signify “birthing woman”; rather the label contains three different characters which we might translate—very roughly—as “mother-in-law hunting bird.”14

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These same characters can be found in an earlier text, the Wakan-sansaizue, a massive illustrated encyclopedia written around 1712. There an entry contains a line drawing of a small innocent looking bird, labeled ubume-dori (ubume-bird). The author, Terajima Ryōan, refers to an earlier Chinese text that explains “When it wears its feathers this is a flying bird, but when it removes them it becomes a woman. Because it is the incarnation of a woman who has died in childbirth, she has breasts and likes to steal other people’s children, raising them as her own.” Terajima further explains that fear of the ubume has led to various taboos against leaving a baby’s clothes outside at night, the violation of which may lead to the death or illness of the child (1994: 342). (In the context of the present volume, the shape-shifting bird/woman that is the ubume, with her deadly desire for others’ children, provides a fascinating parallel and contrast to the Warlpiri bird/monsters discussed in Curran’s chapter, who are characterized as males lusting dangerously for women.) I rehearse this history of the ubume because we can see how one monster, in its various incarnations, assumes different meanings, each reflecting the distinct concerns of the given cultural moment and the particular society in which it circulates. It expresses a procession of fears: childhood illnesses in China; the dangers of childbirth in pre-modern Japan; and even Buddhist-inflected concerns about salvation. I am being somewhat simplistic—the nuances are too complex to do justice to here—but my point is that change is not a straight line; it has multiple influences and multiple effects. Whether intentional or not, the contemporary Momo Challenge version harkens back to the older description from the Wakan-sansaizue, creatively combining the bird with the distraught mother for a strikingly uncanny hybrid image. In titling his sculpture “ubume,” Aiso uses the bird-related kanji—a direct reference to the complex development of this monster.15 We can see in his creation an example of, among other things, the processes of “amalgamation,” “adaptation,” and an intricate history of semantic staining, as beliefs about a demonic bird morph with the pathos of a woman who has died giving birth to emerge as a spooky face that pops up (or so it is said) to terrify kids in an otherwise innocent video. There is a through-line here, a motif concerning motherhood (“the face of a mom who hasn’t slept or showered”) that plays out again in 2019, but this time as a deepseated anxiety about frightening strangers haunting the playground of the internet. Moreover, Momo is not confined to a single nation, language group, or geographically defined community; rather she is a monster of a digitally connected globalized society. At first glance, such a society seems quite distinct from the “defined territories”—to invoke High’s language of locality (this volume)—in which monsters are frequently found. Or perhaps, rather, monsters of the internet may be just as territorially defined but remind us that not all territories are geographical. It is hard to imagine that this monster, with its ability to change shape and name and cross (or redefine) cultural and national boundaries, is not somehow operating with an agency of its own, a persistent will to keep being relevant, and an uncanny ability to leap from one medium to another. Does it matter that today’s frightened kids and anxious parents have no idea of the lineage of the image? And how do we as anthropologists grapple with a monster like Momo/Ubume and whatever form it may (or may not) take in the future? That is one challenge of the Momo Challenge.

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Thought Experiment 5: Fuzzy ontologies In many of the chapters in this volume, and in my own ruminations in this afterword, there is a lurking, insistent problem of belief—how to define it, quantify it, qualify it, relativize it, and ultimately, whether binaries such as belief and disbelief are of any relevance at all. In Musharbash’s chapter, we see the author’s friend, Mary-Lou, struggle with these questions as she tries to understand the presence of the Pangkarlangu that have been seen in her Warlpiri community. As Musharbash reminds us, these are existential questions: “The conundrum this posed at times seemed weightier even then her worries for the toddlers: What did it say about her world?” In another chapter, Hawkins and Onnudottir demonstrate a range of understandings of ghosts—including that of the 81-year-old man who declares they are nonsense while his daughter asserts that he himself had recounted numerous ghost stories in the past. And in a completely different context, when Lilley asks her son Oscar whether “he believed in the underworld, he replied with a definitive ‘no’. And then he added, with a tone of rising excitement, ‘Unless I was proven wrong!’” These encounters remind us that monsters do not just change over time; even on the individual level people reside with uncertainty, ambiguity, and shifting understandings. In many cases, I would argue, it is not difficult for us to live seamlessly with multiple simultaneous ontologies: people are able “to exercise a ‘double consciousness’ and to embrace complementarities, to be capable of living in multiple worlds without experiencing cognitive dissonance” (Saler 2012: 19).16 In fact, rather than cancel each other out, often different worlds and different ontologies produce instead a kind of cognitive resonance that can be productive and meaningful.17 All this to say that belief in monsters is only a problem when we want it to be. Even in modern Western societies, “rational adults” (Saler 2012: 12) spend a great deal of time inhabiting imaginary worlds of fiction or “residing in virtual worlds populated by characters drawn from the media” (Saler 2012: 11). In contrast to the monsters traced by the anthropologists writing in this volume, the characters Michael Saler is referring to are decidedly fictional—such as Sherlock Holmes or the creations of J. R. R. Tolkien—but many fans treat them as if they exist outside the pages of a book. And they do—they affect human lives and emotions, moving people to tears of sorrow and joy and everything in between. This drive toward “belief,” or toward interacting with something as “real,” is all the more powerful with the “characters” of myth and legend, religion and ritual. Again, monsters are more than mere metaphors. To return once more to my own research in Japan, I want to suggest that some—if not most—ontologies are fuzzy, especially when dealing with something like monsters that generally (at least in Japan) fall outside established religious practice. I think very few people today would claim that yōkai like the kappa mentioned above really exist. At the same time, however, most people can describe a kappa, tell you a kappa story, or at least enumerate its particular proclivities (such as its love of cucumbers). So how can they not exist? My example here is from modern Japan, which no doubt differs from other cultures, such as that of the Penan in which, as Rothstein puts it, “monsters— like the spirits—are integrated into peoples’ everyday lives and could, at least to some extent, be described as a condition, as something unavoidable you have to be aware of

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and respond to.” (Similarly, see also in this volume Musharbash, Curran, and Thurman on Warlpiri people and Presterudstuen on Fijian islanders.) To be sure, yōkai probably do not play a critical role in the lives of most people in contemporary Japan, but they have certainly become a sort of play thing, a virtual world of strange creatures and monstrous beings available to anybody with knowledge of local traditions, or interest in popular media such as manga, anime, or video games. Perhaps there is a continuum between the spookiness of a ghost or poltergeist experience and a plush toy kappa or tanuki given away as a promotional item by a bank? And how do such traditional creatures and their popular culture avatars differ from the wobbly characters discussed above? All of them occupy, I would suggest, a sort of fuzzy ontology—or various fuzzy ontologies—in which, regardless of belief (however we quantify it), they are treated as real entities, as characters in the performance of everyday life. That is to say, whether we admit it or not, most of us are living with monsters.

Thought Experiment 6: The monsterbiome Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes). —Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself ”

I recognize that my comments above are too sketchy, broad, and lacking in appropriate nuance for effectively talking about monsters. But perhaps that is inevitable. As we read the chapters in this volume, it becomes clear that the category contains multitudes that in any culture and any society those things we call monsters (or whatever word, if any, approximates it) are diverse and slippery and (appropriate to the theme of this book) constantly changing. But just as important as culture and society is the individual. Each one of us carries with us into our everyday lives an entire ever-changing stock of monsters (or spirits, or ghosts, or gods, or demons). Some of these are shared culturally, and others are completely distinct to the individual, based on experience and exposure and imagination. Some of them are awesome or frightening, to be worshipped or feared, and others are silly or cute, to be played with and joked about. Some emerge from long-remembered traditions, and others climb out of our smartphone screens. How can we think about this personal panoply of monsters, this fuzzy monster ontology that each person carries throughout the day? In recent years, scientists have made major advances in the study of the microbiome, the collectivity of microorganisms borne by all animals, including humans. While the existence of such microorganisms has long been known, they “were generally treated as either pathogens or as insignificant: the absence of microbes was equated with health” (Rees et al. 2018: 1). That is to say, just like monsters in many societies, they were understood as something to be eliminated, avoided, destroyed: a healthy body was not infested with microbes. So too a healthy individual is not haunted; a healthy society has no monsters.

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But new gene-sequencing technology is challenging this traditional understanding of the microbiome: There is now overwhelming evidence that normal development as well as the maintenance of the organism depend on the microorganisms (collectively the microbiome) that we harbor. The human is not a unitary entity but a dynamic and interactive community of human cells and microbial cells. By current estimates, approximately half of the cells in our body are microbial. (Rees et al. 2018: 2)

From a scientific perspective, of course, this breakthrough revolutionizes biological conceptions of the animal body, which now must be understood as consisting of multitudes of symbiotic life forms and their interactions: So, what is an animal? It is a multi-organismal entity, comprising animal cells and microbial cells. The phenotype of an animal is not the product of animal genes, proteins, cells, tissues, and organs alone, but the product of the interactions between all of these animal functions with communities of microorganisms, whose composition and function vary with the age, physiological condition, and genotype of their animal host. (Douglas 2018: 2)

Transcending the biological boundaries that have defined the individual organism also allows us to reassess the social and cultural understanding of human selfhood and individuality. Microorganisms are invisible lives that vary from person to person and environment to environment. But they are part of us: we are all multitudes. Just as the microbiome may inspire “the breakdown of the anachronistic barriers between the natural and the human sciences” (Rees et al. 2018: 8), so too I would like to propose the monsterbiome as a way for anthropologists to approach the study of monsters. Each individual is constructed of their own bespoke and always shifting set of beliefs, imaginings, images, knowledge, desires, and traditions with regard to monsters. These monsters surround us, inhabit us, and determine who we are. In many cultures, monsters are seen as the ultimate Other, the antihuman. As Cohen so concisely puts it, “Any kind of alterity can be inscribed across (constructed through) the monstrous body” (Cohen 1996: 7). The monsterbiome allows us to subvert the conventional wisdom that humans and monsters are antithetical by suggesting that they are not only symbiotic but mutually constitutive.18 The monsterbiome also provides a heuristic for thinking through the ways in which monsters are simultaneously cultural and personal. And just as the microbiome opens up an avenue for thinking about biological selfhood through the invisible agents that define it, so too the monsterbiome allows us to take into account invisible forces that affect and define who we are. We are all part of families or communities or some form of network; we also belong to groups in which some members, the monsters, may not always be visible. But they are here with us, part of us: our monsters, ourselves. Whitman’s “(I am large, I contain multitudes)” is no longer parenthetical.

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Notes 1 2 3 4

5 6

7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15

On monsters breaking established categories, see Cohen (1996: 6–7), Asma (2009: 125), and Mittman (2012: 7), who explains concisely that the monster “defies the human desire to subjugate through categorization.” For more on semantic staining and the kappa, see Foster 2015. “Monster” might also be considered a prototype, with a constellation of words and images (e.g., demons, goblins, spirits) fuzzily surrounding it. (My gratitude to Geir Henning Presterudstuen for suggesting this connection.) One effect of this genericization of the kappa (or the Bunyip, or any number of other monsters) is that it becomes a representative of a much broader, more generic entity—such as an entire country—on the global stage. The kappa, for example, appears as the representative Japanese monster in the Harry Potter series (Rowling 1999, 2001). In flipping the script, I am partly influenced by Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire (2001), which very casually and in an accessible idiom presents the reader with a view of human culture from the perspective of the plants that have manipulated it. The film and its prequel, Monsters University (2013), are also instructive in that the hybridity and diversity of monsters is accepted in a way most humans, with our modern impulse for categorizing, refuse to do. Because they all possess something that makes them “monstrous,” physical appearance or attributes (e.g., number of limbs or eyes, color of skin/fur, size of mouth, sharpness of teeth) do not become defining categories or rankings for these creatures; rather everything hinges on their ability to cause fear in children. This acceptance of different forms of difference raises the question of what makes them monsters in the first place. Ghosts already inspire us to perform this sort of introspection, as their haunting compels us to seek explanations and probe our relationships, morals, and actions. I am grateful to Geir Henning Presterudstuen for suggesting this connection. I only touch on these issues here. For an excellent summary of the ontological turn, see Henare et al. 2007; Heywood 2017; Holbraad 2012; Holbraad and Pedersen 2017; Paleček and Risjord 2012. For a discussion of anthropology that goes beyond human society and culture, see Rees 2018. “NJ Officials Warn Parents of Online ‘Momo Challenge’”; CBS New York; December 13, 2018; available online: https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2018/12/13/momochallenge-facebook-whats-app/. Available online: http://linkfactory.jp/ For the original exhibition poster, see https://www.vanilla-gallery.com/ archives/2016/20160815ab.html; for an interview with Aiso himself, see Kamba 2019. Konjaku monogatari shū, in Nihon koten bungaku taikei 25 (Iwanami shoten 1965): 539–41. For a discussion of the ubume and similar legends within a religious context, see Glassman 2009. For the image, see Inada and Tanaka 1992: 57. For more discussion, see Shimazaki 2011; Shibuya 2000: 24–30. The popular novelist Kyōgoku Natsuhiko’s 1994 debut mystery novel, Ubume no natsu (The Summer of the Ubume), uses the bird characters in the title and certainly inspired a revival of the ubume in the popular imagination. See Kyōgoku 1998, 2009.

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16 Saler is writing here particularly about a condition of modernity, but I would argue that the cognitive ability to simultaneously experience a multiplicity is not confined to the modern subject—although perhaps conceiving them as a “multiplicity” as opposed to a continuum may be. 17 For more on cognitive resonance, see Foster 2009: 14. 18 In a later essay, Cohen (2012: 463) says “the monster and its dreamer are not two entities inhabiting a divided world, but two participants in an open process, two components of a circuit that intermixes and disperses within an open, vibrant, unstable expanse.” It is precisely this process/circuit/expanse that I am calling the monsterbiome.

References Asma, S. T. (2009), On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cohen, J. J. (1996), “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” in J. J. Cohen (ed.), Monster Theory, 3–25, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cohen, J. J. (2012), “The Promise of Monsters,” in A. S. Mittman and P. Dendle (eds.), Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, 449–64, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing. Crane, P. (2013), Ginkgo: The Tree That Time Forgot, New Haven: Yale University Press. DeSanti, B. (2015), “The Cannibal Talking Head: The Portrayal of the Windigo ‘Monster’ in Popular Culture and Ojibwe Traditions,” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, 27 (3): 186–201. Douglas, A. E. (2018), Fundamentals of Microbiome Science: How Microbes Shape Animal Biology, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Foster, M. D. (2009), Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yōkai, Berkeley: University of California Press. Foster, M. D. (2015), “Licking the Ceiling: Semantic Staining and Monstrous Diversity,” Semiotic Review 2 (June). Available online: https://semioticreview.com/ojs/index.php/ sr/article/view/24. Glassman, H. (2009), “At the Crossroads of Birth and Death: The Blood-Pool Hell and Postmortem Fetal Extraction,” in J. I. Stone and M. N. Walter (eds.), Death and the Afterlife in Japanese Buddhism, 175–206, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Halberstam, J. (1995), Skin Shows. Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, Durham: Duke University Press. Haraway, D. (2003), The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Henare, A., M. Holbraad, and S. Wastell (eds.) (2007), Thinking through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically, London: Routledge. Herrman, J. (2019), “Momo Is as Real as We’ve Made Her,” New York Times, March 2. Available online: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/02/style/momo-mania-hoax.html (accessed September 29, 2019). Heywood, P. (2017), “Ontological Turn, The,” in F. Stein, S. Lazar, M. Candea, H. Diemberger, J. Robbins, A. Sanchez, and R. Stasch (eds.), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology. http://doi.org/10.29164/17ontology. Holbraad, M. (2012), Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination, Chicago: Chicago University Press.

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Holbraad, M. and M. A. Pedersen (2017), The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Inada Atsunobu and Tanaka Naohi (eds.) (1992), Toriyama Sekien gazu hyakkiyagyō, Tokyo: Kokusho kankōkai. Kagawa Masanobu (2012), “Kappa imeeji no hensen,” in Kokuritsu Rekishi Minzoku Hakubutsukan (ed.), Kappa to wa nanika: Dai 84-kai rekihaku fōramu, 6–9, Sakura-shi, Chiba: Kokuritsu rekishi minzoku hakubutsukan. Kamba Ryōsuke (2019), “‘Momo jisatsu charenji’ sōdō de kōgi sattō katte ni gazō o tsukawareta nihonjin zōkei-shi no konwaku,” BuzzFeed, March 4. Available online: https://www.buzzfeed.com/jp/ryosukekamba/momo (accessed September 29, 2019). Kirksey, S. E. and S. Helmreich (2010), “Multispecies Ethnography,” Cultural Anthropology, 25 (4): 545–76. Kohn, E. (2007), “How Dogs Dream: Amazonian Natures and the Politics of Transspecies Engagement,” American Ethnologist, 34 (1): 2–24. Konjaku monogatari shū (1965), in Nihon koten bungaku taikei, 25, Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. Kyōgoku Natsuhiko (1998), Ubume no natsu, Tokyo: Kōdansha bunko. Kyōgoku Natsuhiko (2009), The Summer of the Ubume, A. O. Smith and E. J. Alexander (trans.), New York: Vertical. Laughlin, C. D. (1993), “Fuzziness and Phenomenology in Ethnological Research: Insights from Fuzzy Set Theory,” Journal of Anthropological Research, 49 (1): 17–37. Lorenz, T. (2019), “Momo Is Not Trying to Kill Children: Like Eating Tide Pods and Snorting Condoms, the Momo Challenge Is a Viral Hoax,” The Atlantic, February 28. Available online: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/02/momochallenge-hoax/583825/ (accessed September 29, 2019). Mittman, A. S. (2012), “Introduction: The Impact of Monsters and Monster Studies,” in A. S. Mittman and P. Dendle (eds.), Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, 1–14, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing. Miyata Noboru (1990), Yōkai no minzokugaku: Nihon no mienai kūkan, Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. Murakami Kenji (2000), Yōkai jiten, Tokyo: Mainichi shinbunsha. Nihon kokugo daijiten dainihan henshū iinkai (eds.) (2000), Nihon kokugo daijiten, 2nd ed., vol. 2, Tokyo: Shōgakukan. Occhi, D. J. (2012), “Wobbly Aesthetics, Performance, and Message: Comparing Japanese Kyara with Their Anthropomorphic Forebears,” Asian Ethnology, 71 (1): 109–32. Paleček, M. and M. Risjord (2012), “Relativism and the Ontological Turn within Anthropology,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 43 (1): 3–23. Pollan, M. (2001), The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World, New York: Random House. Rees, T. (2018), After Ethnos, Durham: Duke University Press. Rees, T., T. Bosch, and A. E. Douglas (2018), “How the Microbiome Challenges Our Concept of Self,” PLOS Biology, 16 (2): 1–7. Available online: https://doi.org/10.1371/ journal.pbio.2005358. Rosch, E. and C. B. Mervis (1981), “Categorization of Natural Objects,” Annual Review of Psychology, 32: 89–113. Rowling, J. K. (1999), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, New York: Scholastic Press. Rowling, J. K. (as Newt Scamander) (2001), Fantastic Beasts & Where to Find Them, New York: Scholastic Press, Arthur A. Levine Books.

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Sakuma, A. (2019), “The Bogus ‘Momo Challenge’ Internet Hoax, Explained: How a Viral Urban Legend Swept the Globe,” Vox, March 3. Available online: https://www.vox. com/2019/3/3/18248783/momo-challenge-hoax-explained (accessed September 29, 2019). Saler, M. (2012), As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shibuya Yōichi (2000), Bakemono zōshi no kenkyū: Yōkai kenkyū e no shikiron. Undergraduate Thesis, Chiba University. Shimazaki, Satoko (2011), “‘The End of the ‘World’: Tsuruya Nanboku IV’s Female Ghosts and Late-Tokugawa Kabuki,” Monumenta Nipponica, 66 (2): 209–46. Terajima Ryōan (1994), Wakan-sansaizue, vol. 6, Tokyo: Heibonsha. Tsing, A. T. (2015), The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Index agency 12, 47, 49, 54, 56, 77, 137, 155 n.4, 170, 194, 216, 221. See also autonomy American war 175. See also war amoral 45, 48. See also immorality; morality angst 5, 9, 17, 20, 133, 138, 160, 161, 167, 169. See also fear Anthropocene 22, 66, 163 apparitions 160, 163, 168. See also ghost appropriation 12–13, 92, 102, 104, 106–7, 188, 202, 207, 214. See also popular culture Asma, Stephen 3–4, 17 Atwood, Margaret 14, 107 Auerbach, Nina 8–10, 168 authority 82, 186–8. See also control autism 191–5, 203–4, 205–8 autonomy 56. See also agency Batman 200–1 belief 4, 14, 41, 64–5, 86 n.5, 91, 93, 95, 97, 103–4, 105–6, 121–3, 125, 154, 163–4, 167, 170–1, 216–17, 218–19, 220, 222–3. See also Buddhism; Methodism; folklore; Hinduism; Indigenous belief; Methodism Beowulf 217 Bible 17, 83 Bigfoot 64–5. See also Sasquatch birds 37, 60, 78, 128–30, 131–8, 220–1 Bohannan, Laura 114 Bubandt, Nils 114–16, 170 Buddhism 173, 180, 182, 185, 220 Bunyip 13, 89, 91, 92–4, 96–103, 104–7 burial 10, 123–4, 161–2, 165–6. See also grave cannibalism 14, 34, 60, 62, 104–5. See also Pangkarlangu capitalism 11, 14, 18, 107 carnal. See sex Carroll, Noël 18

caves 34, 62, 80, 119, 131, 134 chanting. See singing Christianization 10, 15–16, 75, 82–3, 103, 115–16, 117, 162–4, 165, 167. See also Methodism class 18, 124 climate change 5, 67, 70, 159–63, 164, 166, 168–9, 170. See also environmental change clothes 9, 39, 42, 108, 221 cloudy 60, 119. See also mist, storm clowns 200–3 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome 1, 3–4, 6, 15, 18, 20, 47, 52–3, 55–6, 66, 69, 78, 103, 128, 135, 138, 144, 154, 200, 202, 224 cold 124 colonialism 8, 13, 14, 15, 70, 91, 92, 93–5, 99, 102–3, 105, 137, 144, 146, 154, 160–1, 162. See also colonization; settler-colonisation colonization 10, 12–13, 14, 15, 17, 33, 67, 70, 91, 92–4, 99, 103–7, 154, 163. See also colonialism; settlercolonisation commodified 207 commodities 106 communalism 18, 151, 153, 176 comportment 35, 65, 78, 80, 85, 115, 204–5 consanguinity 103, 149, 154, 168 control 82, 128, 132, 134–6, 186, 203. See also authority corporeality 116, 138 cosmic order 78, 80, 116. See also cosmology; stars cosmology 14, 46, 48–9, 53, 55, 80, 167–8. See also cosmic order; stars custom 33, 82, 93, 145. See also tradition cyborgs 17, 207 cyclone 159–60, 161–2, 165–6, 168, 170. See also Cyclone Winston; murderous winds

230

Index

Cyclone Winston 159–60, 161–2, 165–6, 168, 169 dance 50, 51–2, 53–4, 55, 130, 132–3, 135 dark 16, 41, 46, 114, 120, 121–2, 124, 125, 135, 151, 161, 217. See also night darkness 46, 114, 120, 121, 124, 161 dawn 134 deforestation 6, 11. See also logging dehumanize 18 demeanor 11, 97, 148, 149 demons 16, 48, 83, 84, 161, 164–5, 196–8, 215 desert 59–61, 65, 89–91, 103–4, 127, 128–9, 136, 138 devil 117, 196, 198 devour 2, 29, 35, 38, 61, 62, 75, 80, 92, 115 disaster 11, 75, 79, 80, 160, 161–2, 164, 168–9 discipline 49, 52 disembodied 115 Doyle, Arthur Conan 116 dragons 15 drawing 116, 148, 192–208, 221 dreaming 79, 114, 166 Dreaming, The 61, 63, 66, 67, 103, 127–30, 132, 133, 134, 136, 138, 154. See also folklore; narratives dusk 78, 134 earth 33. See also soil; stones electric lighting 6, 16, 41, 57, 124 electricity 16, 57, 83, 122 embodied 3, 46, 49, 55, 61, 69 embodiment 1, 4–6, 10, 18, 20, 50, 66, 78, 165 embody 8, 9, 10, 128, 135, 168, 214, 219 emergence 7–8, 16, 164, 188, 214, 216 enlightenment 118 environmental change 6, 11, 16, 75, 217. See also climate change excitement 6, 60, 64, 222 exclusion 205, 208 n.3 exotica 48 extinction 15–17, 19, 60–1, 64, 66–7, 69–70, 122, 187, 207, 213, 214, 216 eye 2, 21, 39–40, 47, 53, 61, 75, 81, 82, 104, 118–21, 131

farming 118–19, 123–4. See also labor; work fear 6, 13–14, 17, 32, 33, 40–1, 51, 64, 69, 83, 86 n.2, 86 n.5, 93–4, 128, 133–6, 138, 169, 217, 219, 220–1. See also angst fertility 45, 47, 49, 135, 164, 186–7. See also pregnancy fighting 48, 57, 79, 84, 89, 161 flying 2, 75, 81–3, 115, 138, 221 folklore 11–12, 76, 214–15, 219; Icelandic 114, 116–18, 122–4; British 160; Fijian 163; Japanese 220. See also Dreaming, The; myth; narratives forest 41, 55, 75, 76, 77, 78–9, 83, 85, 116, 176, 180, 187. See also deforestation, logging, tree Frankenstein 7–8, 9, 202, 217 Gamishiro 17, 215, 216. See also Yōkai gender 10, 11, 68, 136, 138, 153, 192, 203–4. See also gender ideology; gender norms; masculinity gender ideology 128, 132–3, 151. See also gender; gender norms gender norms 192, 203–4. See also gender; gender ideology; masculinity ghost 4, 10–11, 113–18, 121–5, 160–3, 164–5, 167–70. See also apparition; revenants; spirit; Zeitgeist giant 2, 19, 33–4, 35, 60, 89, 97, 103, 128 globalization 4, 18, 40, 128, 221 gods 46–50, 51–7, 77, 82–3, 151, 163–4, 167 gossip 60 gothic 17 grave 10, 117, 220. See also burial hair 3, 19, 62, 81, 118, 143, 148–55 hair-string. See also hairy hairy 60, 61, 80, 105. See also hair Heracles 32–5, 37 hidden (people) 22, 36, 50, 113–14, 121–5, 130, 134, 146 hierarchy 48–9, 51–2, 55. See also class; control hills 68–9, 130, 134, 163, 175. See also mountains Hinduism 46, 48–9, 55–6, 173

Index horror 9, 17–18, 84, 105, 199, 200 humanlike 12, 59, 129, 145 hunger 13, 47–9, 50, 54, 60, 104 hunter-gatherer 75, 83, 144 hybrid 2, 36, 93, 100, 106, 128, 202, 207, 216, 221 immorality 128–9. See also amoral; morality indigeneity 13–14, 144, 145–6, 165, 169. See also indigenous belief indigenous belief 64–6, 154, 164. See also custom; indigenous religion indigenous religion 76, 173. See also indigeneity; indigenous belief invisibility 22, 60, 116, 135, 143, 146, 148–9, 153, 167, 176, 224. See also apparitions; ghosts joking 139, 223 Kappa 12, 17, 214–16, 222–3, 225. See also Yōkai Kurdaitcha 59, 129, 131–2, 143–6, 148–54 labor 8, 10. See also work lake 47, 129–30. See also river, water Lévi-Strauss, Claude 169 limbs 34, 202, 203, 216, 225. See also monstrous bodies liminality 30, 35, 39, 40, 46, 55, 78, 135, 202. See also moon; night logging 16, 41, 75, 76, 78, 84–5. See also deforestation Lord Byron 9 magic 29, 38, 42 n.14, 79, 135, 155 n.6, 187, 214. See also spell margins 54, 204–5 Marx, Karl 107 masculinity 192, 204–5. See also gender; gender norms Methodism 163–4, 165. See also beliefs midnight 39 militarization 14 Minis 6, 45–50, 52–7 mission 10 missionization 15, 137 mist 113–14, 117, 120, 121, 124, 161

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modernity 10 –1, 13, 114, 116, 122, 133, 170, 226 modernization 11, 15, 18, 78 Momo Challenge 218–21, 225 monstrous bodies 3–4, 7–8, 10, 35, 62, 201, 203, 216, 224; and autism, 191. See also limbs moon 14, 38–40, 119 moral order 46, 136. See also morality morality 10–11, 48, 55, 76, 78, 86, 116, 120, 133, 138, 175–6, 218, 225. See also amoral; immorality; moral order morning. See dawn mountains 38–9, 120, 167, 173, 177, 184–5, 188. See also hills mouth 39, 40, 47, 149, 166, 196, 203, 214, 225 n.6 open-mouthed 81. See also teeth muscles 47, 56, 97 myth 17, 31, 32, 34–6, 62, 76–8, 80, 82–3, 97, 116, 118, 122–3, 163, 167–9. See also folklore; narratives narratives 14, 17, 31–3, 40, 76–7, 80, 84, 89, 91, 97, 105, 114, 127–9, 160, 162, 169, 170, 195–9, 203, 206–7. See also folklore; Dreaming, The Native (people) 11, 13–14. See also custom; indigeneity; traditions night 39, 48, 56, 59–60, 81–2, 132, 135, 143–4, 146, 148, 166. See also dark; dawn; dusk; liminality; moon Oedipus 33, 36–7, 168–9, 171 n.7 Old Testament 17. See also Bible othering 6–7, 18, 47, 144, 154 Owens, Susan 10–11, 160–1, 163, 169 pain 45, 51, 152 palm 79, 174. See also tree Pangkarlangu 6, 13, 60–71, 89–91, 102–3, 104, 107. See also cannibalism pastoralism. See deforestation; farming; logging patriarchal 52, 136 performance 50, 130, 204. See also masculinity; performativity performativity 50, 52, 62, 77, 130, 203–5. See also masculinity; performance

232 periphery 33, 56, 143, 149–52, 204 pillar 174, 176–7, 188 Pishtaco 8, 11, 154 Pliny the Elder 3, 8 Poole, Scott W. 6, 17 popular culture 4, 9, 13, 92, 99, 106–7, 122, 199–202, 214–15. See also appropriation post-colonialism 14, 91, 105, 128, 137, 146. See also colonialism; colonization posture 97 praying 150–1, 164, 166, 220 pregnancy 176–7, 180, 183. See also fertility protection 48, 51, 64, 85, 150–2, 174–6, 178, 183–4, 186. See also rituals; sacrifice psychoanalysis 129 race 11, 18, 138, 154 Ravuvu, Asesela 164 reflexivity 170 relief 159 revenants 10, 160, 168. See also ghosts rituals 34, 45, 47–57, 81, 85, 134, 148, 175, 180, 182. See also protection; sacrifice river 13, 39, 83, 94, 214. See also lake, water roads 6, 8, 29–41, 151, 217 sacred 46–9, 53–7, 154, 165, 182, 185–6, 214 sacrifice 46–53, 55–6, 163, 175–7, 180, 183, 186–7. See also protection, rituals Sasquatch 13, 65. See also Bigfoot Second World War (WWII) 18. See also war semantic staining 15, 214–15, 221, 225 seniority 151, 152, 154 Serial killer(s) 17, 41, 42 n.9 serpents 2, 15, 29, 38, 60 settler-colonisation 13, 15, 91. See also colonialism; colonization sex 51–2, 128, 130, 133–6 shapeshifters 2, 4, 38–9, 104, 128, 135, 213, 221

Index singing 130, 151, 162 Slender man 8 sociality 20, 45, 62, 85, 128, 136, 144–6, 148–9, 153, 154, 192 soil 173, 175–6. See also earth spell 29, 42 n.14, 80. See also magic spirits 4, 6, 11, 15, 47–50, 76–9, 82, 114–16, 159, 162, 163–5, 167, 173–5. See also apparitions; ghosts; Minis; Zeitgeist spiritualism 115–16, 118, 121 St George 15 stars 63. See also cosmic order; cosmology Stewart, Charles 16, 48, 55 stones 36, 40, 62, 130–1, 138, 162, 188. See also earth storm 60. See also cyclone strength 5, 13, 33–4, 64, 79–80, 118–20, 152, 154, 161. See also strong strong 33, 80–2, 97, 116, 118, 120. See also strength succession 7, 17–18, 19, 20 teeth 47, 79, 101, 106, 149, 203, 225 n.6. See also mouth terror 22, 64, 99 theosophy 116 Tomlinson, Matt 164, 168, 170 Tommyknocker 11, 16 trade 12, 33, 34, 37, 40–1, 69, 76 traditions 13, 32, 34, 75, 83, 85, 133, 136–7, 152, 162–5, 223. See also custom; folklore; rituals transgression 52, 175, 180, 204 trauma 8, 11, 18, 115, 159–61, 165, 168, 207 tree 29, 47–8, 55–6, 59, 62, 79–81, 83–4, 94, 151, 153, 173, 175–7, 218. See also palm Tsing, Anna 16, 163, 218 UFO 65 unruliness 47, 162 vampire 9–11, 75, 106, 114–15, 168, 170 violence 10, 48–9, 84, 115, 128, 134, 135–6, 144, 154, 159, 160, 165, 175–6 Voudou (voodoo) 8–9

Index war 160, 176. See also American War; Second World War warm 123, 124 warrior 161 water 12, 17, 47, 49, 50, 89, 92, 94, 120, 146, 185, 214–15. See also lake, river Weinstock, Jeffrey 4–5 Weismantel, Mary 8, 11, 154 Wesley, John 163, 171 n.4 whistling 60, 146 Windigo 13–14, 91, 104–7, 154 witch 2, 11, 75, 114, 174

233

witch doctor 59 witchcraft 118, 163 wonder 60–1, 63, 64, 65, 193, 207 woods. See forest; tree work 46, 49, 51, 146–7. See also farming; labor Yōkai 5–6, 18, 22 n.8, 213, 214, 220, 222–3. See also gamishiro; kappa Zeitgeist 8, 17, 21 n.1, 163, 168. See also ghost; spirit zombie 5–6, 8–9, 12–13, 17, 18, 198–9

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