The Anthropology of Religion: And the Worlds of the Independent Thinkers 9781032303161, 9781032303154, 9781003304432

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Introducing the Independent Thinkers
1 “Such Turbulent Human Material”
PART I: Nineteenth-Century Beginnings
2 The Mirror of Modernity
3 The Phenomenon of The Golden Bough
4 If I Was a Horse
PART II: Definitions
5 The Essence of Religion
6 On The Uselessness of Ritual
PART III: Religion and Science
7 Einstein in the Outback
8 Real Knowledge of Real Worlds
9 Integrity of Science and Religion
PART IV: Dismissing Diversity
10 Laying Tylor’s Ghost
11 Exorcising Freud
PART V: Looking for Meanings
12 What’s Only Natural
13 Beginnings, Middles, and Ends
PART VI: Ritual and Rationality
14 No One Believes in Things That Aren’t There
15 Being Reasonable
PART VII: Powers
16 Invitations You Can’t Refuse
17 Nature Does Not Work Independently of Man
Findings
Postscript: Religion and Evolution
Endnotes
Glossary of Ethnic Groups
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Anthropology of Religion

This book describes how anthropologists in the twentieth century went about documenting the religions of those independent peoples who still lived beyond the frontiers of the global economy and the world religions. It begins by examining the enormous popularity of the newly invented field of anthropology in the nineteenth century as a site of multiple intellectual developments. Its climax was Frazer’s Golden Bough, which is a pillar of modernity second only to Darwin’s Origin of Species. But its notion of religion was entirely speculative. When anthropologists went to see for themselves, they encountered formidable obstacles. How to access a people’s most profound understandings of the world and everything in it? Holding fast to the premise that ethnographers have no special powers of seeing inside other people’s brains, this book teaches students to proceed slowly, a step at a time, watching how people perform rituals great and small, asking questions that seem stupid to their hosts, and struggling to translate abstract terms in unrecorded languages. Using a handful of examples from different continents, the book shows the potential of an anthropological approach to religion. Peter Metcalf is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Virginia, USA. He has conducted fieldwork in central Borneo over many years and written extensively about its peoples and cultures. He has also written about issues in comparative religion, especially as concerns death rituals worldwide and throughout history.

The Anthropology of Religion

And the Worlds of the Independent Thinkers

Peter Metcalf

First published 2023 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Peter Metcalf The right of Peter Metcalf to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978 -1- 032-30316 -1 (hbk) ISBN: 978 -1- 032-30315- 4 (pbk) ISBN: 978 -1- 003-30443-2 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/b22988 Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra

Contents

Introducing the Independent Thinkers 1 “Such Turbulent Human Material” Firth in Tikopia – the archive – not theology – the priority of ritual – the Ariki Kafika

1 3

PART I

Nineteenth-Century Beginnings

11

2 The Mirror of Modernity The child of travelogue – Cook in Tahiti – the fit with Thomsen, geology, Darwin, and capitalism – the Comparative Method – Aborigines most ancient – the temporal illusion

13

3 The Phenomenon of The Golden Bough ‘Primitive’– the invention of anthropology – Greek ethnography – Frazer at Nemi – Tylor’s idea of survivals – sacred kings – the definitive third edition – relevance to Christianity – influence in modern literature

22

4 If I Was a Horse From dreams to ancestors – Tylor’s brand of empathy and intellectualism – Berawan ancestors – the world of spirits – from soul to spirit – ‘losing breath’ – doing the bones – Terry Schiavo and the medically undead

30

vi

Contents

PART II

Definitions

41

5 The Essence of Religion The Comparative Method and religion – animism – religion is our concept – promiscuous fossicking – characteristics of Judeo-Christian-Islamic Complex – Bororo: aroe and bope – do the Bororo have a religion? – non-human agencies

43

6 On The Uselessness of Ritual ‘Slaves of custom’ – most definitions self-defeating – weddings and funerals – hygiene – ritualization

55

PART III

Religion and Science

63

7 Einstein in the Outback Gillen and Spencer – correspondence with Frazer – nature and society – lizard man – alcheringa geography – timescapes – Durkheim seizes on the sacred – the Great Project goes looking for it

65

8 Real Knowledge of Real Worlds The myth of starving Australians – knowledge of their econiches – ethno-science – Hunanoo words for pepper – Langba takes a walk – the science of the concrete – drug testing

77

9 Integrity of Science and Religion The engwuru festival – Spencer and Gillen’s 194 totems – magic, science, or religion? – the hakea flower rite – the Arunta understanding of the world – integrity of the land – vs. mobility of longhouses – knowing the jungle – summoning the eagles – awareness

88

PART IV

Dismissing Diversity

101

10 Laying Tylor’s Ghost The context of High Modernism – particle physics – Dawkins swallows Tylor’s evolutionism – waving culture

103

Contents

vii

away – genetics can never replace linguistics – the limitations of materialism – haute couture – matriarchy Must-Have-Been – anthropology and false science 11 Exorcising Freud Connotations of the word symbol – Jung: myths and dreams – heroes – reductionism – ritual and emotion – exorcising Freud – the flag of the Ndembu – Turner’s methods – things unsaid – Geertz’ blunder

113

PART V

Looking for Meanings

125

12 What’s Only Natural Right and left – rights and being right – dualism – the Bororo village circle – opposition and complementarity – the solution to Tylor’s riddle

127

13 Beginnings, Middles, and Ends Natural philosophy – death and rebirth – refugees and pilgrims – Ndembu mukanda – a rite within a rite – the (in)accessibility of ethnography – secrets and mysteries

134

PART VI

Ritual and Rationality

143

14 No One Believes in Things That Aren’t There Evans-Pritchard’s dilemma – Azande witchcraft is not supernatural – first and second spears – Columbine – rejecting chance – the Problem of Evil – radical egalitarianism – divination – the poison oracle – the Great Witch Craze – misinformation

145

15 Being Reasonable Rationality and coherence – relativism, radical and otherwise – pastiche – Boas and diffusion – culture as emergent – Schneider redefines culture

159

viii

Contents

PART VII

Powers

169

16 Invitations You Can’t Refuse Mutual definition – Bororo names – aroe orthography – shaman is a Tungus word – shamans of the bope – becoming a shaman – the shaman as kosher butcher

171

17 Nature Does Not Work Independently of Man Mana in actual usage – atua – “nature does not work independently of man” – chiefly genealogies – the Dance to Quell the Wind – the Proclamation of Rarokoka – Robertson-Smith vindicated

178

Findings

186

Postscript: Religion and Evolution

198

Endnotes Glossary of Ethnic Groups Bibliography Index

205 209 210 215

Introducing the Independent Thinkers

In the nineteenth century, something was invented called ‘primitive religion.’ The crucial thing about it was its uniformity – a fog of superstition that preceded science and civilisation. When anthropologists in the twentieth century went looking for it, what they found was the exact reverse: an amazing diversity of subtle and unique understandings of the world based on close observations of nature. This book tells the story of that adventure and shows just how far a genuinely comparative study of religion has to go beyond the handful of world religions. What exactly it was about a religion that made it ‘primitive’ was never made plain. Each armchair theorist made up his own version. The easiest way to come at the category is to say that the primitive religions were the religions of the primitives – that is to say, those few remaining people who lived beyond the frontiers of an ever more voracious world economy and all the ideological baggage that goes along with it. They lived without money, controlling their own food supplies. Consequently, they retained independence of thought and action. In contrast to the majority of humanity, they were the independent thinkers. The religions of the independent thinkers had no theologians; instead, they were woven into the fabric of everyday life. What anthropologists reported of them was not dogma, but entire understandings of the world. That first-hand reporting on the independent thinkers should have only begun so very late in the day was absurd. How much more satisfactory it would have been if a team of observers had arrived with Columbus in 1492, but that was not the way colonialism worked. When research did finally begin it was already almost too late – but not quite. As, with increasing urgency, anthropologists headed off to every remote corner of the world, and the number of case studies multiplied, our knowledge of the independent peoples grew by leaps and bounds. By the end of the twentieth century, this project of documentation had run its course. This is not of course to suggest that humanity is turning into some grey uniform mass. On the contrary, processes of cultural diversification grow ever more complex and demanding of attention. There is no danger

DOI: 10.4324/b22988 -1

2  Introducing the Independent Thinkers

of anthropology running out of work to do; rather it will have constantly to re-invent itself. Meanwhile, the archive that was assembled higgledy-piggledy in the twentieth century is still available, and its value is in no way reduced by the disappearance of the erstwhile ‘primitives.’ On the contrary, its importance can only grow in years and centuries to come because it records the full stretch of the human imagination. There can be no discussion of human nature that does not take into account the worlds of the independent thinkers.

Chapter 1

“Such Turbulent Human Material”

In a remote corner of the western Pacific, there is an island about two miles in diameter, with a single mountain. Ocean swells break constantly along its rocky northern shore, and there is no safe anchorage for large vessels. The nearest neighbours are 200 miles away. The island is called Tikopia, and it is inhabited by people of Polynesian descent. When the New Zealander Raymond Firth went to study their way of life in 1928 there were about 1,200 Tikopians, the majority still following their indigenous religion. That was remarkable because by that date all the other Polynesians across the entire Pacific were Christian, and most had been for generations. Many were converted by the London Missionary Society (LMS), an interdenominational alliance of Anglicans, Methodists, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians. The LMS was active in Tahiti and Tonga by 1797. Samoa received its first missionaries in 1830, and Samoans were soon so devout that they became missionaries in their turn, carrying the faith to other islands in Polynesia and Melanesia. Just why Christianity took hold so rapidly and profoundly in Polynesia is an interesting question, but for the moment the point is that the indigenous religions had all but disappeared before anyone thought to document them. In some islands or island groups, missionaries encouraged newly literate youngsters to write down whatever their grandparents remembered of the old religions. Where they are found, such sources are a mine of information. They are, however, partial, both in the sense of being frustratingly incomplete and also of being biased against the old ways. In other islands, there was no such encouragement, and by the twentieth century, all that remained was a vague memory of major deities, and nothing more. What could not be recovered from these snippets was a sense of Polynesian religions as a part of everyday life. There was no way to access the understanding that they created for their participants of the world around them. Meanwhile, on his remote island to the west, Firth was able to participate in rituals great and small that framed a distinctively Tikopian way of life. All that he observed, he documented. By the time he was done, he had produced

DOI: 10.4324/b22988 -2

4  “Such Turbulent Human Material”

six books on Tikopia, and together they comprise a unique and irreplaceable account of a still-functioning Polynesian religion. Firth’s results were unique, but his methods were not. During the twentieth century, research in the same mould was carried out in every corner of the globe. Each study was a part of the Great Project of anthropology, which was nothing less than the discovery of the full range of human possibility, as demonstrated by societies that retained some measure of independence of thought and action from the economic, political, or religious domination of the empires and civilisations of the Old World. Since those societies were rapidly succumbing to the advance of modernity, the project had from the outset a sense of urgency about it. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the project was effectively over – not completed, but winding down for lack of new material. People with the sort of cultural independence that the Tikopia had in the 1920s are now rare, perhaps non-existent. In place of the Great Project, a whole new program has emerged. The central issue now in anthropology is how cultural difference appears in a world of global economies, cell phones, and television. The ingenuity of people worldwide in bending modernity to their own ends is truly amazing. Far from being absorbed into some grey global uniformity, new cultural cohesions have emerged and old ones have taken on new meanings. In short, there is no danger of anthropology running out of work to do. On the contrary, its relevance to everything from social policy to the impact of technology has never been greater. Anthropologists have an important critical function to play, because they see first-hand the results of the global economy and the actions or inaction of governments, in countries both rich and poor. Meanwhile the achievements of the Great Project have not been lost. They comprise hundreds of book-length studies, thousands of articles, and trunks full of fieldnotes in libraries around the world. The record they provide is in no way comprehensive. On the contrary, it is full of holes. Many valuable opportunities were lost, and a distressing number of anthropologists failed ever to write up their findings. Moreover, no individual account could possibly provide all the information that anyone might want. Nevertheless, and despite these caveats, the accumulated literature is impressive. It would fill a substantial library, with detailed material from every continent. It also represents an enormous investment of time and effort. To qualify for inclusion a piece of research had to meet demanding requirements. First, control of the relevant local languages. Frequently that involved languages that were unwritten and unstudied – no dictionaries, no grammars, not even an orthography. Everything had to be built from scratch, but it was essential to be able to talk to people directly and to follow casual conversation. That requirement alone stretched fieldwork into months and years, but that was necessary anyway to allow an observer to actively participate in his or her hosts’ way of life – as far as that was feasible for a naïve and incompetent

“Such Turbulent Human Material”  5

outsider. What was not acceptable was living in a hotel and conducting interviews through an interpreter. In fact, for many anthropologists their choice of places to work was a lifetime commitment, involving multiple visits and a steadily deepening understanding. The result is an archive whose value can only increase in decades and centuries to come. Unless our global civilisation collapses – which seems entirely possible given its environmental destructiveness – there will never again be people who live with anything like the cultural independence of the Tikopia, as Firth knew them in the 1920s. What is true of his work is true also of the entire archive: it is invaluable and irreplaceable. It is the great achievement of twentieth-century anthropology. The most compelling material in the archive is that related to religion, taking that word in its broadest sense. It concerns the most subtle and fundamental understandings of the cosmos and everything in it, of what it is to live and die, what it is worth striving for in this life, and what in the end is the nature of nature. Such abstractions are not easy to translate, because they do not match our own. If they did, the project would be pointless. Meanwhile, it would be sheer hubris for anyone to claim to know how other people experience their world. There is no mysterious anthropological technique that enables us to see inside other peoples’ minds. Instead, we must proceed cautiously, trying by degrees to approximate indigenous concepts, while avoiding the imposition of our own ideas. This turns out to be a delicate business, which is why ethnographers wince when they hear some clumsy stereotype of ‘the primitives’ being bandied about, such as their assumed inability for rational thought. At first glance, this gradual refinement of interpretation looks like that most long-established of all academic traditions, theology. Medieval universities were largely founded on theological debates that sought to reconcile Church doctrine with Aristotelian logic. Exponents of scholasticism in Oxford and Paris argued endlessly about the true meanings of such notions as grace and redemption. When Martin Luther put the cat among the pigeons, he did so in a properly academic fashion, by posting his ninety-five theses. He claimed that his goal in doing so had been nothing more than provoking debate among his colleagues at the University of Wittenberg. As it turns out, however, the anthropology of religion looks nothing like theology. There are two main reasons for this: a difference in subject matter, and a difference of approach. First, theologians are primarily concerned with what have come to be called the World Religions. Those are, generally speaking, the religions that are nowadays found worldwide, but there is nothing self-evident about grouping them together. The category is of recent invention, having gained currency only in the 1930s.1 It is not at all clear what is their defining feature, but that need not delay us. Since they are so few in number anyway, the simplest way to define the World Religions is to just list them: Buddhism,

6  “Such Turbulent Human Material”

Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism. Others are sometimes sneaked in, such as Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, or Taoism, but there is no disagreement about the five that would have to appear on any list. So, as a first approximation, we might say that anthropology pays particular attention to the non-World religions, and a moment’s thought is enough to see that they must vastly outnumber the handful of World Religions. To convince yourself of this consider only the indigenous religions of the New World. It would be impossible, not to say pointless, to count exactly how many of them there were, but even without any such tally it is obvious that they were very numerous. Since there were no theologians, and nothing resembling evangelism, it is a safe bet that there must have been at least one for every language. That is because the key concepts in one language seldom translate neatly into those of another. Consequently, we may gain at least a first approximation from linguistics: it is estimated that there are or were about 300 indigenous languages spoken in the Americas, grouped into fifteen language families.2 Languages and religions are not the same thing – far from it – but the diversity of languages is enough to hint at the range of cultural variation. Taking that figure as a minimum, then, would mean that the indigenous religions of the Americas alone outnumbered the World Religions by sixty to one, and that is without taking into account those of the Pacific, sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and so on. Consequently, the tendency of theologians to favour the World Religions to the virtual exclusion of everything else vastly distorts the richness and diversity of human religious experience. There is a second and more profound contrast between theology and anthropology, one that concerns methods. Theologians characteristically work in libraries. Their primary interest is in texts, both those considered sacred and all the voluminous exegesis that has accumulated around them over centuries. There can be no doubting the depth of scholarship involved. It would take a lifetime to become enough of an expert on, say, the Vedas, or the Old Testament, to be able to add anything new to the existing literature. The result, however, is inevitably to give primacy to dogma. After all what is a religion if not a set of beliefs? The answer to that question is that religions are more than a matter of thinking. They are also a matter of doing, and it is ritual that typically provides the point of entry for anthropologists. There is a practical reason for this: for someone struggling to learn a language, perhaps unwritten, rituals are immediately observable; questions can come later. Beyond practicalities, however, there is an important finding to report. In the great majority of religions everywhere, it is not beliefs that are prescribed, but rituals. There are proper ways of doing things, and everyone needs to know them, or have an elder at hand to give instructions. Beyond that, people may please themselves with what meaning – if any – they place on their acts.

“Such Turbulent Human Material”  7

The first person to point this out was W. Robertson Smith, and for his pains, he was expelled from his chair of Hebrew and Old Testament Exegesis at the seminary of the Free Church in Aberdeen. Smith was a pioneer of the new methods of historical and literary criticism that were being applied to Biblical studies in the late nineteenth century, and his special interest was the pre-Islamic religions of the Arabs. His Religion of the Semites (1889) argues that the most sacred acts involved food. For people to eat together made clear that there was a relationship between them, which he called commensality. When the gods were included in the invitation, the result was an act of communion. This made its way into Christianity in the form of the eucharist, the climactic moment of a mass, powerfully charged with symbolism of sacrifice and redemption. What struck Smith was that the rite – the sacred meal – persisted over many centuries in a variety of religions, regardless of the deities so honoured. He concluded that, both historically and logically, ritual precedes belief. This proposition did not commend itself to his colleagues in the seminary, and that is hardly surprising given that it inverted the basic premise on which they worked. It did, however, point to an alternative approach to religion that in the twentieth century opened new vistas, admitting the non-World and non-theological religions equally to consideration. The crucial point is that anthropologists are interested in religion as lived, not mentalised. In fact, they usually have no choice in this, since most of the people they meet have things to get on with, and no time for idle speculation. Meanwhile the lives of these same people are filled with rituals great and small, everything from perfunctory gestures to elaborate festivals, that manifest their basic assumptions about the world. This is true whether those assumptions are or are not expressed by the participants, or even whether the participants would be capable of expressing them. For the great majority of people, the most fundamental aspects of life are taken for granted. There are truths that are simply self-evident, and it does not occur to them that there is any other way of seeing things. Language competence provides a useful analogy here. A native speaker of English effortlessly puts together sentences that are grammatically correct, by the lights of his or her own speech community, even when he or she couldn’t begin to explain the rules of English grammar. For example, it is remarkably hard to explain to someone whose native tongue lacks definite articles why the sentence “money is the root of all evil” is correct and “the money is root of all evil” and “money is root of all the evil” are not. The point I am making is not that religion is a kind of language – it is not – but simply that there are things unspoken in them that are inherent in the actions of people who have never made them explicit, or felt the need to do so. This is not to suggest that anthropologists avoid people who, for whatever reasons, are inclined to put things into words. On the contrary, such people are assiduously cultivated and may become key informants. An older person

8  “Such Turbulent Human Material”

who is content to while away the time by indulging the anthropologist’s curiosity is a treasure, but he or she is still not a theologian. The common experience of anthropologists is that the answers they get to their questions are often enigmatic. That is because the outsider does not yet have the cultural competence necessary to understand why they are answers. Imagine for example a Tikopian ethnographer asking a Londoner why all the men streaming across London Bridge at 8.30 in the morning are wearing bowler hats. Since the ethnographer had been directed to someone knowledgeable about the city, he or she might be given a lengthy account of class formation in the nineteenth century. Notice however that this would not be an answer to the question posed. Struggling to follow his East End dialect, the confused ethnographer can only say: Yes, but, why are those men wearing bowler hats? Are they perhaps better for dealing with the English weather, a topic that evidently begins all well-mannered conversation? Such communicative tangles are the origin of the old saw that anthropologists ask smart people dumb questions. In the meantime, there is nothing to be done but tag along in various activities, and frame more questions, productive or otherwise. Occasionally, there are flashes of insight, but the regular work consists of comparing bits and pieces collected in different contexts to see whether any particular interpretation unlocks other mysteries, or leads to a dead end. The quality that is required is not so much intellectual brilliance as stubborn persistence. In Tikopia, Firth participated in a complex round of annual rites called the Work of the Gods. The word for ‘work’ in this context was the same as applied to such mundane activities as gardening or fishing. Most adults contributed in some way, but the principal burden was carried by a cadre of senior men who held noble titles. The most important of them was the Ariki I Kafika, a frail but dignified old man with white hair and beard. Needless to say, Firth spent a lot of time with him. The old man was content to discuss everything, and there were evidently no esoteric secrets. In fact, everyone on the island knew the rites well, and the myths associated with them, even if they did not have the authority and command of detail that the Ariki I Kafika had. Firth learnt Tikopian rapidly, having had the advantage of already speaking Maori, the Polynesian language of New Zealand, so there was no obstacle to his discussions with the Ariki. The word ariki, or some slight variant, is found in virtually all Polynesian languages, and the obvious gloss is ‘chief.’ Kafika is a proper noun, the name of one of the four clans of Tikopia. In this context, a clan is a group of people who trace their descent in the male line from a founding ancestor. Daughters as well as sons belong to their father’s clan, but when they marry they go live with their husbands. They remain, however, members of their father’s clan. One of the annual events that Firth attended was a rite of restoring one of the sacred houses ( fare tapu), which looked pretty much like regular houses. One informant told Firth: “ fare tapu are houses which were dwelt in of old. Things went on thus, went on, but coming down to later times they were not

“Such Turbulent Human Material”  9

dwelt in. They stand uninhabited, and people go merely to make the kava in them and then disperse.” (Kava is a mildly intoxicating drink made throughout Polynesia and associated with special occasions.) The occasion that Firth describes was in a house called Resiake that belonged to the Taumako clan. However, it had a special association with an entity called Atua I Kafika. The word atua, also found throughout the islands, is usually translated as ‘god.’ So we have a Taumako house presided over by the god of the Kafika clan. There is a story to explain this anomaly. It seems that the house was built originally by a former chief of Taumako, but after he had moved in he heard a voice at night calling down to him from the sky, saying “Friend! I desire your house.” The chief recognised the voice as that of the Atua I Kafika. So the house was given over to him as his spiritual residence, and its central post was said to be the material token of his presence.3 As a consequence of this, the house restoration that Firth describes was presided over by the Ariki I Kafika, whose principal work was to supervise the laying of new mats inside the sacred house. Mats have a special significance in Tikopia, in ordinary houses as well as sacred ones. There were often mats placed on the ‘face’ side of a house, covering the place where a previous head of house was buried. The sentiment was that the roof that shielded him in life should continue to do so afterwards. No one ever stood or sat on the mats, but the residents slept with their heads towards them as a sign of respect. This detail is alone enough to show that all houses are in their own ways sacred. Old house sites are named, and everyone remembers who owns them. Title to houses belong to lineages – that is subgroups of the clan tracing descent from a common male ancestor more recent than the founding ancestor of the clan. The word for these subgroups is paito, meaning simply ‘house.’ The ideas surrounding the Tikopian notion of a house were an intimate mix of the divine and the everyday. No one needed to be reminded not to step on the ancestors’ mats; avoiding them was so ingrained as to be automatic, even for Firth. However, replacing the mats at the house called Resiake immediately called to mind the odd encounter long ago between the chief of Taumako and the god of Kafika. Having participated in the re-carpeting of Resiake, Firth had lots of questions to ask. In particular, he needed to know about the Atua I Kafika, the god of Kafika, but to his surprise the Ariki I Kafika, the chief of Kafika, flatly denied that his ancestor had been a god. “But what, a god? A man the chief of Kafika,” he told Firth emphatically, and indeed there are stories of him building a house and making a garden just like anybody else, although he was a giant of a man. In the manner of heroes, his encounters with his fellow men were not always harmonious, and indeed he was in the end clubbed to death by an angry neighbour, who waited on a steep and winding path so as to have the advantage of height. Those stories fit with the Ariki’s insistence that his ancestor – and that is who he was referring to when spoke of “chief of Kafika” – was just a man. At the carpeting of Resiake, however, Firth had

10  “Such Turbulent Human Material”

had heard his friend the chief invoke his list of deities, starting with the Atua I Kafika. Moreover, the ancestor was said to have performed super-human feats. Here is an example: Thus in early times all things were said to have voices which they used unsparingly – trees, rocks and all things that moved in the earth spoke with lips, though not in articulate speech, so that the land was filled with a terrible murmur of confusing sounds. The Atua i Kafika, living as a man, went to each object separately, asked it what it spoke about, and ordered it to be silent. He went to a stone and said: “You who speak, of what do you speak?” The stone replied “It is the speech from my growing.” He then said: “O stand there! Do not speak, abide there, say nothing.” So it stood there and spoke no more. He went then and told a tree that it should not speak, but it too answered that such was its habit from the time it first sprouted. But all trees and stones obeyed him, and have been silent ever since.4 All this left Firth with some knotty problems. How is it that someone can be both man and god? Or was it foolish to expect that Tikopian beliefs would be consistent? Was this perhaps a sacred mystery, like the virgin birth? Or was there a problem in translation? Had Firth perhaps created a problem by translating atua as god, a problem that simply wasn’t there for Tikopians? What then was the connection between ariki and atua, and what significance was there in silencing overly talkative trees? The solutions that Firth framed to these questions I will explain later, so shamelessly making them into a cliff hanger. The point for now is that these are the kinds of questions that researchers like Firth wrestled with in the Great Project.

Part I

Nineteenth-Century Beginnings

Chapter 2

The Mirror of Modernity

The way that Firth went about studying the Tikopia became characteristic of anthropology in the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, however, when the discipline first established itself, it had different goals and different methods. The Great Project was not yet what anthropology was about, and the first generation of scholars saw no good reason to go chasing off to remote corners of the globe. Instead, as they saw it, there was already a wealth of material ready to hand on library shelves. Before the sixteenth century, Europe had been a peripheral region on the great Eurasian land mass. The Moslem world that surrounded Europe was more central to world trade and far more sophisticated. Then, suddenly, Europeans were travelling everywhere. Whole continents were discovered, and ancient rumours of distant civilisations turned out to be true. Just what the Renaissance had to do with this is a contested issue that I am happy to leave to historians. What is beyond doubt, however, is that the expansion of Europe created an insatiable appetite among the reading public for accounts of far off places. The demand was met by all kinds of authors; explorers, traders, colonial officers, missionaries, marooned sailors, and downright imposters. Even the sober-sided accounts were full of wonders, and so much was new that it was hard to distinguish genuine marvels from tall stories or pure fantasy. It was to this literature that the founding generation of anthropologists turned, and there was indeed a great deal of information to be mined from it. In this way, anthropology was the child of travelogue. This is more than a detail of intellectual history because the conclusions that the founders of anthropology drew from their armchair research caused a great stir. They produced an appealing account of human diversity, of how it came about that the ways of life reported from around the globe were so diverse. Moreover, that account became lodged in the Western imagination. Even in the twenty-first century, it is implicit in all kinds of discourses, everything from movies to politics. Indeed it is so much embedded in our thinking that it is often taken as simple common sense, even by – indeed, especially by – people who have never heard of any of the scholars who framed it. Consequently, the research of twentieth-century anthropologists

DOI: 10.4324/b22988 - 4

14  Nineteenth-Century Beginnings

stands against a backdrop of preconceived ideas. Without knowing what those ideas are we cannot see how the results of the Great Project put everything in a new light. When Captain James Cook dropped anchor in Matavai Bay in April 1769, he had literally sailed into the Stone Age. Before Europeans arrived, the Tahitians had no knowledge of the use of metals. All tools for gardening and fishing were made out of stone, sea shell, and wood. The great double-hulled canoes that their ancestors had built for their amazing voyages of discovery were shaped with stone adzes and stitched together with sennet. Tahitians had all they needed to be self-sufficient, but that did not make them slow to see the superiority of metal tools. On the contrary, Tahitians were desperate to get their hands on anything made of iron. As Cook tells it in his journals, when canoes came alongside the Endeavour with every show of friendliness it was a hard matter to keep them out of the out of the Ship as they clime like Munkeys, but it was still harder to keep them from Stealing everything that came within their reach, in this they are prodiges expert. When Cook and his officers spent a night ashore, several had their pockets picked. “For my part,” Cook writes, “I had my stockings taken from under my head and yet I was certain I was not a Sleep the whole time.”1 Cook was anxious to remain on good terms, but he was obliged to do something when a quadrant in a wooden crate was stolen from under the noses of the men set to guard it. This instrument was needed in order to make the astronomical observations that were a major goal of the expedition, and he had no choice but to make a show of force. There are several curious aspects to this encounter. Where did Tahitians learn to pick pockets? Their own simple clothes had no pockets. Did Tahitians steal things from each other or did they have different notions of private ownership? Did they understand their strange visitors as somehow not covered by the usual social norms? Most islanders evidently felt no guilt about stealing. One man who helped himself to the contents of a longboat alongside the Endeavour said “but I only put it in my canoe.” There were obviously important class distinctions in play: on a couple of occasions people of high status who were entertaining Cook’s party did seem embarrassed by the depredations of their commoners and tried to make recompense. Cook’s efforts were also subverted by his own men. Before making landfall, Cook had announced a strict set of rules. Seamen were to cultivate friendship with the natives and treat them with “all imaginable humanity.” Trade for provisions was to be supervised by officers and nothing made of iron could be traded by individuals. The first rule the seamen mostly observed – there were no ugly incidents. But the second was undone by the most striking feature of Tahitian culture, and certainly the most widely reported. Tahitians evidently felt no shame or guilt about sexual activity. Copulation in public

The Mirror of Modernity  15

caused no comment, and there were even ritual occasions that required it. Girls as young as ten were not only allowed to have sex, but coached by older women on how to do it. For a European, then as now, it was almost inconceivable that sex should be anything but socially and morally explosive. Amazed, the seamen hurried ashore carrying everything they could offer the Tahitian women, including iron spikes and barrel hoops. Some went so far as to pull nails out of the ship itself. When Cook arrived back in England what he had discovered created a sensation. Broadsheets based on the accounts of ordinary seamen were rushed into press, and whetted the public appetite for the official version, which followed a year or so later. Cook himself was not considered up to the job, and he modestly handed over his journals to John Hawkesworth, a literary friend of Dr. Johnson. Hawkesworth had not been on the Endeavour, but he knew exactly how to play the material to a popular audience. It resonated with a common theme in European folklore that spoke of a Golden Age before the Fall. It came just as French philosophes were speculating about a Society of Nature made up of Noble Savages unpolluted by the vices of modernity. To make his point, Hawkesworth allowed himself considerable poetic license, and the final product – three large volumes illustrated with maps and engravings – was an immediate success. An edition came out in America, and there were translations into French, German, and Italian. When Cook got back from his second voyage, he was furious at what had been made of his sober diaries. The damage was done, however. The stereotype was established, and to speak of the South Seas still brings a dreamy look to the faces of Englishmen. Hawkesworth never offered Cook a penny of the royalties.2 For the Victorian founders of anthropology, Hawkesworth’s account was no doubt titillating, but what most excited them was the neat fit between the Tahitian case and recent developments in European archaeology. In the late eighteenth century, it had become a fad for the land-owning elite to excavate ancient sites on their estates. To say ‘excavate’ may be putting too fine a point on it. Workmen simply drove a ditch through the site, pulling out whatever they found for their employer and his guests to puzzle over. There was a particularly rich haul in Denmark, where a single royal palace had over a hundred tumuli scattered across its grounds – small turf-covered mounds clearly not of natural origin. These produced a rich haul of objects: urns, bronze swords, stone axes, and ornaments, as well as human remains. All of this was understood to relate to the Danes of the sagas, and so was of intense national interest. In other sites, the finds were less spectacular, comprising mostly chipped stone tools of various kinds. Insofar as anyone wondered about this contrast, it was assumed that the stone tools were made by the peasants, as opposed to the elite weapons of the chiefly class. The volume of artefacts in the royal collection rapidly grew, until finally a young man from a merchant family, Christian Jurgenson Thomsen, was asked to put them in some kind of order. Being familiar with the storage of

16  Nineteenth-Century Beginnings

commodities in his father’s warehouses, he made a preliminary sorting by materials: stone objects in one corner, bronze in another, and iron in a third. It was only slowly that Thomsen came to realise that the stone artefacts were older, some much older, than the bronze ones, which in turn were older than the iron ones. In this straightforward way the Three Age system was invented: Stone, Bronze, and Iron. Similar historical sequences had been proposed many times before, beginning of course with the Greeks. Hesiod knew very well that iron armour had replaced bronze in living memory, but he saw this, not as technological progress, but as spiritual decline. So his sequence envisaged Ages of Gold, Silver, Bronze, and Iron. Thomsen’s sequence, however, had the great advantage of providing a hypothesis that could be tested locally, and it was not long before another Dane, Jens Asmussen Worsaae, showed by more careful excavations that stone tools were consistently found in lower levels than bronze, which in turn underlay iron. In this way, he invented the archaeological technique of stratigraphy. Put together the discoveries of Cook and Thomsen and nineteenthcentury anthropology invents itself. Simply put, primitive peoples were living testimony to previous stages of human development. The Endeavour, like the Santa Maria before her, was a time machine. It was a very striking idea, but it was not new. In particular, it had been discussed at some length in the mid-eighteenth century by the philosophers of the Scots Enlightenment, such as Adam Ferguson and John Millar. A century later, however, the intellectual climate had changed so that the reading public in general was ready to embrace the idea of social evolution. Indeed, for many converts, it came as a flash of insight. Of course! Everything fits! The pieces that fit so neatly together were three. First, it had become inescapable that the world was infinitely older than any literal reading of Genesis could accommodate. The Anglican Church fought a rearguard action against this conclusion, but many priests – a well-educated band – were already accepting that the truth of Genesis was figurative, not factual. What persuaded them, and others, was the development of the science of geology, which was of wide interest because an urban population had begun to see the countryside as a spiritual resource, “nature” rather than just land. Working men’s clubs were founded in many cities to promote, among other things, access to education for adults, and trips into the country were popular family events. Standing on a hilltop with a view of a river valley, it was immediately convincing to be shown that the landscape had been carved out by exactly the same processes of erosion as could be seen on a small scale in any tiny riverlet, or by a trickle of water across a sandy beach.3 Having grasped some notion of geological time, another amazing vista opened up. The prehistory of humankind – that is, before the rise of literate civilisations – stretched away indefinitely. This stood in striking contrast to the date for the Creation arrived at by that diligent Irish scholar, Bishop James Ussher. By stringing together the genealogies found in the Old Testament

The Mirror of Modernity  17

he arrived at the date 4,004 BC. Given that the rule of the pharaohs was established by 3,000 BC that reduced prehistory to a mere 1,000 years, barely enough time for people to distribute themselves over the earth. Once geology breached this time constraint, the stone tools that were being excavated all over Europe began to look more interesting, and it was not long before they were arranged in sequences displaying ever more sophisticated techniques, from lumpy chopping tools to delicate long blades expertly shaped from selected flint cores. The Stone Age stretched ever further back and was soon divided into three: Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic or Old, Middle, and New. The New Stone Age was the briefest, but it was the period when plants and animals were domesticated. After that followed the Ages of metal, first Bronze, then Iron. By comparison, the Old Stone Age was much longer, and so it was further divided into Lower, Middle, and Upper. The second piece that fits so neatly was the triumph of biological evolutionism in the late nineteenth century. Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) caused a revolution in how we understand the variety of life on earth, and consequently of humankind’s place in nature.4 Darwinian evolutionism is nothing less than the keystone of the whole structure of modern rationalism, and that is as much the case now as it was a century ago. Having embraced the evolutionary paradigm as the explanation of the diversity of forms of life, it was but a small step to extend it to the diversity of societies, as discovered by European travellers in the previous three centuries.5 It must be emphasised, however, that the mechanisms of biological and social evolution are entirely different. This was not obvious in the nineteenth century because the importance of Gregor Mendel’s research on how traits pass between the generations through genes had not yet been recognised. When it was, it provided the other half of the modern Syncretic Theory of Evolution. Meanwhile, social change has nothing to do with gene pools. It proceeds infinitely faster than genetic adaptation, and the reason for that is simple: technical and cultural innovations can be borrowed by one population from another at the drop of a hat. As a matter of intellectual history, it is ironic that ideas of social evolution long predated Darwin’s account of biological evolution. Naturally, the Greeks had proposed it, and the Scots Moralists had elaborated the idea a century before The Origin of Species. With the wisdom of hindsight, this seems a curious reversal of logic.6 Third, the precepts of social evolutionism appealed to the mood of the times. The late nineteenth century was the epoch of High Imperialism, and evolutionary ideas rationalised imperialism nicely. Progress was inevitable – it was evident in all creation. Clearly, it was a positive duty for the advanced nations to bring the benefits of civilisation to those less fortunate, including all the stunning technological innovations of the Industrial Revolution. True, industrialisation had created an underclass whose living conditions were appalling, but there was no point wringing one’s hands about that. All practical men understood that nature was red in tooth and claw, and

18  Nineteenth-Century Beginnings

there was nothing to be done about that. Bleeding heart liberals could only obstruct the inevitable march of progress. Unfortunately, Social Darwinist dogmas like these are as prevalent today as they were in 1900, and it would be a mistake to underestimate their power, then and now. The error is the conflation of genetic and social evolution that results from not understanding how genes work. In 1900 that was inevitable; nowadays it’s just wilful ignorance. In less ideological terms, the triumph of Darwin’s evolutionary theories was to reconcile two contradictory legacies of the Enlightenment. On one hand was the optimistic premise of the perfectibility of human nature. The application of mankind’s God-given ability to reason offered the promise of escape from the bonds of tradition and superstition, and opened the door to the fulfilment of humanity’s limitless potential. Meanwhile, pessimists such as Thomas Malthus drew the opposite conclusion; it was the natural order of things that all species reproduced fast enough to exhaust their food supply, and what followed was starvation for the excess population. Human history was one of war and famine, and always would be. Darwin’s genius was to unite the two: perfectibility proceeded through struggle. The process of selection had produced all the wonderful complexity and diversity of the higher animals. Within this framework, all that was left for anthropologists to do was to line up all the various societies in order of primitiveness. This was a job to keep a generation of scholars busy arguing about who fitted in where, how many stages of social evolution should be distinguished and in what order, and explaining away the inevitable anomalies that each schema produced. This process was called the Comparative Method, and that needs to be distinguished with capitals because much more was implied than simple comparison. What emerged was another three-part series: Savagery, Barbarism, and Civilisation. Savages were peoples who made a living from hunting and gathering, and Barbarians were those who practiced agriculture but had not achieved Civilisation. In addition, both Savagery and Barbarism were subdivided into three parts, Lower, Middle, and Upper and hey presto! there was the whole of human prehistory laid out to view. In terms of religion, what was revealed by the Comparative Method was the Primitive Mind groping fitfully towards rationality. The end point of that process was self-evident, and what made that obvious was the triumph of the natural sciences. By 1900, so much had been achieved that some observers thought that the work of science was nearly done. Newton’s laws of motion predicted even the paths of stars in the heavens. Electricity, optics, X-rays, thermodynamics – all had been discovered and harnessed. Primitive Man fitted this self-congratulatory mood perfectly; he provided the mirror in which Modernity could admire its own reflection. Where Modernity was liberating, forward-looking, progressive, innovative, and rational, everything primitive was entrapment in the old, defunct, crude, and

The Mirror of Modernity  19

irrational. Modernity consisted of turning your back on ‘tradition.’ Religion was the blind, unthinking acceptance of it. Time for another disclaimer: in criticising the hubris of late nineteenth rationalism I am not suggesting we abandon reason in favour of some post-modern indifference. Given that the world is everywhere awash with ignorance and stupidity, I cannot see how abandoning rationality will help. The point instead is that pride goeth before a fall; in the twenty-first century to hope for rationality even in oneself is to bet against the odds. Triumphalism has no place. The people invariably nominated to be the most primitive of all were the Australian aborigines. They wandered about grubby and naked, gathering whatever scraps of food their bleak environment afforded. They had no houses and no possessions other than those few they could carry. For Cook, arriving on the east coast in 1770, they could not have made a more stark contrast to the Tahitians and other Polynesians he had just left. No canoes set out from the shore to greet him. Only a handful of people were seen at any one time, and they ran away when a landing party went ashore. The sailors tried tempting the Aborigines with “Cloth, Looking glasses, Combs, Beeds, nails etc.,” but “all they seem’d to want was for us to be gone.” Cook looked at one of their canoes and found it “the worst I think I ever saw,” and there was nothing at their campsites but bark windbreaks. At another anchorage, they were finally approached by a group of five men whose skin, “the Colour of wood soot,” was painted in stripes of red and white. A women and a boy hung back and having inspected them through his telescope, Cook reports “the woman was as naked as ever she was born, even those parts which I had always before thought nature would have taught a woman to conceal were uncovered.” For once, Cook sounds prudish. Nevertheless, his last comments on the Aborigines before his departure to the Torres Straits and Indonesia were surprisingly generous: From what I have said of the Natives of New Holland they may appear to some to be the most wretched people upon Earth, but in reality they are far more happier than we Europeans; being wholly unaquainted not only with the superfluous but the necessary Conveniences so much sought after in Europe, they are happy in not knowing the use of them. They live in a Tranquillity which is not disturbed by the Inequality of Condition: The Earth and sea of their own accord furnishes them with all things necessary for life, they Covet not Magnificent Houses, Household-stuff etc., they live in a warm and fine Climate and enjoy a very wholesome air, so that they have very little need of Clothing and this they seem to be fully sensible of, for many to whome we gave Cloth etc to, left it carelessly upon the Sea beach and in the woods as a thing they had no manner of use for.7

20  Nineteenth-Century Beginnings

These sentiments have a very eighteenth-century ring to them. That was after all the epoch of the philosophes, many of whom found something to admire in simpler societies. It is worth noting that the word sauvage in French does not mean brutal so much as shy, and the Aborigines were certainly that. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, attitudes had become more brittle, ‘scientific racism’ had established its grip, and such romanticism had no place in the hard-nosed social evolutionism of the practical man. At the other end of the scale from the Aborigines were of course the industrialised nations of Europe and North America. It was conceded that there had been civilisations elsewhere; the Chinese, for example, had made encouraging progress until the fifteenth century, when their potential somehow ran out. What exactly should be the criterion for civilisation was much debated, and the most popular was writing. There were those, however, who found even that too inclusive. For some, what was required for a fully certified civilisation was a phonetic alphabet, not mere pictograms – stylised drawings of things. This nice distinction excluded China as well as ancient Egypt, not to mention all the states of the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa. In between the aborigines and modernity, there were hundreds of primitive peoples to be compared – a scholarly project of wide scope, full of surprises, and of compelling interest to the layman. There were most obviously all the peoples of the New World, ranging from the Eskimos in the far north, who survived in an environment even more forbidding to Westerners than the arid deserts of Australia, all the way to the Aztecs and Maya of central America, whose architectural and artistic glories were still to be found in the deep jungles of the region. Then out across the Pacific from Easter Island to New Guinea, in many parts of Southeast Asia, and even in remote corners of South Asia. Meanwhile, the interior of the Dark Continent maintained its mystery, being still largely unexplored even as it was carved up between the European colonial powers. As for central Asia, it was still inhabited by those warlike pastoralists who had so often erupted into European and Chinese history. Finally, to the north lay the wastes of Siberia, a region little known in the west, but rapidly being incorporated into Greater Russia. To embrace, all that within one theoretical paradigm was indeed a bold enterprise. The travelogues that had fascinated Europeans for generations revealed worlds that were not only exotic but astonishingly varied. That the wonders of the Orient should have coexisted for so many centuries with the primitiveness of Australia seemed almost incredible. Meanwhile, it was certainly true that complex societies must have been preceded by simpler ones. Civilisations did not drop from the sky, despite the sensationalist theories of Arnold von Danniken, who argued in the 1970s that the pyramids of Egypt – always a focus for cranks – were built by intergalactic voyagers. Consequently, there is a solid commonsense basis for notions of social evolution. From there it was easy to be drawn along by the arguments of social evolutionists, but their conclusions were less transparent than they seemed.

The Mirror of Modernity  21

This is not the place to explore all the implications and critiques of social evolutionism – all in good time – but it is worth noting at the outset that the Comparative Method is based on an illusion and a false analogy. Primitive peoples were not living relics of anything. Instead, each had its own path of development and adaptation. When Cook arrived in Tahiti in 1769 it was still 1769 when he went ashore, even if the Tahitians were blissfully unaware of that. He had sailed into a Stone Age alright, but it was the Tahitian Stone Age not the one that Worsaae had excavated in Denmark. As regards the false analogy, we must remind ourselves that biologists do not reconstruct the evolutionary paths of living species by juggling around the Linnaean classification of existing species, sorting them into degrees of primitiveness according to some criterion devised by the biologist. Linnaeus himself was after all an uncritical creationist. Instead, the crucial data of evolutionary biology came from fossils, the remains of species that became extinct millions of years ago. There is a story, no doubt apocryphal, that Queen Victoria once asked a courtier what was all this talk about Mr. Darwin. “Darwin says, Madam,” came the reply, “that we are descended from apes.” Huffed the Queen “Mr. Darwin must speak for himself.” The courtier was, of course, wrong; humans are not descended from apes. Instead, both have a common ancestor who didn’t look much like man or ape. We now know vastly more than the Victorians about the evolution of Homo sapiens, and those discoveries were made by carefully searching out and excavating ancient remains. The same techniques are needed to discover human prehistory. There are no shortcuts.

Chapter 3

The Phenomenon of The Golden Bough

The word primitive has a broad range of meanings, all derived from Latin primus, ‘first.’ The Oxford English Dictionary (1991) gives this list: (i) of or belonging to the first age; (ii) mental processes that apparently originate in unconscious needs and desires and have not been affected by objective logical thinking; (iii) conformed to the pattern of the early church; (iv) simple, rude or rough; (v) relating to groups whose culture, through isolation, has remained at a simple level of social and economic organisation. Of the five meanings, all are negative, except perhaps (iii). There are Christians who describe themselves as ‘primitive’ Baptists, meaning that they reject all the elaboration of priesthoods and churches in favour of the simple congregation of fellow believers. Excluding (iii) then, the others comprise three elements: antiquity, crudeness, and irrationality. So closely are these elements fused in Western thinking that it is hard to prise them apart, so that when the word is used in one sense, the other two are always implied. There is, however, nothing ‘natural’ or inevitable about this combination of meanings. On the contrary, it was the product of a particular time and place. In the late nineteenth century, anthropology took shape around the notion of the primitive. Antiquity was the most accessible element, since all educated people, by definition, knew something about the Greek and Roman classics. Sensational discoveries in Egypt and Mesopotamia pushed antiquity further back and planted archaeology firmly in the public imagination. The prehistory of Europe aroused hobbyist interest and was everywhere woven into myths of national origin. With this beginning, it is astonishing to think of all that archaeology has revealed about the evolution of our species, its spread around the globe, the gradual refinement of technologies in making tools, pottery, fabrics, houses, and clothing, the domestication of plants and animals, and the elaboration of urban civilisation in different parts of the world. It is also astonishing to think of how little of this was known when anthropology was founded – a very solid achievement. You can’t, however, excavate a religion. The shoe is on the other foot; for clues about the significance of the remains they find archaeologists turn to accounts of contemporary or historically recorded peoples. These accounts

DOI: 10.4324/b22988 -5

The Phenomenon of The Golden Bough 23

constitute the data of anthropology. To be more precise, I should speak of social, or cultural, or even socio-cultural anthropology, but the nice distinctions between these approaches need not concern us here, and they have little impact on the broad contrast between the activities of archaeologist and anthropologist. The word anthropology was coined in the nineteenth century. Its Greek roots translate literally as ‘people study,’ but this in itself is not very useful, since virtually every academic discipline old or new, excluding only the natural sciences, is in some way or another about people. History is a large part of people-study, and it is as old as writing. All literature, accumulated for centuries in a vast range of languages and styles, surely has something to teach us about the human condition. Psychology and sociology have their own turf to defend. What the neologism anthropology was meant to convey was a new and more encompassing view of humanity, drawing together everything from biological universals to the meanings of myths. Despite changing intellectual fashions and often violent disagreements, that is still what anthropology is about. Paradoxically, however, the technical term for what anthropologists actually do, for their mode of research, long predates anthropology itself. In the fifth century BC, Greek writers already spoke of a genre called ‘ethnography,’ meaning, broadly, writing about different nations or ethnicities. Herodotus is the best-remembered exponent. He travelled widely over the world as he knew it, and his Histories are full of ethnographic sketches. He devotes a whole book to Egypt, describing the pyramids – already ancient in his time – the remarkable geography of the Nile valley, and the modes of livelihood of its inhabitants. What interests him most, however, is the customs and religion of the people, and he reports without condescension what he was told by priests about the Egyptian pantheon. Having heard them out, he remarks with admirable cultural relativism “I do not think that any one nation knows much more about such things than any other.”1 At other times he reports what he heard about the lands even further off beyond Egypt. These he relates with a properly Greek scepticism. In India, so he was told, there were poisonous ants as big as dogs that could outrun a horse. Needless to say, accounts of these fearsome creatures were never first hand. Herodotus is relevant to the founding of anthropology, two and a half millenia later, because the first generation of self-declared anthropologists was for the most part classicists. They knew their Herodotus, and what the Greeks had to say about their Asian neighbours in their accounts of the Persian wars. For information about the peoples on the fringes of the Roman Empire, there were equally familiar sources, such as Caesar’s Gallic Wars, a text assigned to generations of suffering pupils studying Latin. Digging a little deeper, there were discussions by Sallust and Strabo, and an account by Tacitus of the early history of the German tribes, entitled Germania.2 That volume made Tacitus

24  Nineteenth-Century Beginnings

an ethnographer in the Greek sense, and so a pioneer of an anthropology that had yet to be invented. As to how to classify the Germans, that was simple: they were barbarians. It was in this intellectual milieu that The Golden Bough was written. It was an instant success. It has never subsequently been out of print. In terms of sales, it is the most successful book ever published in anthropology, and that includes not only the nineteenth century but the twentieth as well. Its influence has been enormous. The critic Lionel Trilling remarked that “perhaps no book has had so decisive effect upon modern literature.”3 Echoes of it have been found in modernists writers as diverse as James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, and T.S. Eliot. Igor Stravinski’s The Rites of Spring, which caused a virtual riot at its debut in Paris, takes it grisly plot line on human sacrifice directly from The Golden Bough. At a conference to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the debut, one Stravinski scholar argued “the ballet seemed to satisfy a local hunger for exotic primitivism, although in the end it proved too brutal for the opening night audience to handle.”4 The book had an influence, however, that went well beyond literature and music. To a large extent, it created the modern understanding of what it meant to be ‘primitive,’ and what the existence of the primitives had to teach us about human progress. As such, it had an impact on late colonial policy and is still routinely cited – if less frequently read. In intellectual circles, it is often taken to represent ‘the’ anthropological approach. Even though anthropology in the twentieth century turned its back on the sensationalism of The Golden Bough, much of its agenda was shaped in reaction to it. Meanwhile in the West, its arguments ossified into everyday common sense, and it echoes in all kinds of contexts among people who have never heard of the book or its author. The author of the Golden Bough, James Frazer, later Sir James Frazer, was a Scot from a severely Calvinist background. He began his career as a classicist in a mould that would have been familiar in the great universities of the middle ages, and his contributions to that tradition were considerable. In particular, he made a translation of the travels of Pausanius, whose descriptions of the ancient sites of Greece, written in Greek, were as fascinating to an audience of sophisticated Romans in the second century as they were to Hellenophiles in the nineteenth. It took Frazer fifteen years to complete his translation – in six volumes, he was never one to do things by halves – because he was distracted by a detail that led him ever further away from Greece. It all began with an inscription recorded by Pausanius, telling how Hippolytus was killed by Theseus but revived by Aesculapius, god of medicine. After his recovery, Hippolytus turned his back on Greece and settled in Italy. At Aricia, he established a temple to Artemis where, as Pausanius says, “down to my time the priesthood of the goddess is the prize of victory in single combat. The competition is not open to free men, but only to slaves who have run

The Phenomenon of The Golden Bough 25

away from their masters.”5 The slave was liberated by murdering his predecessor, and then he had no protection but his own vigilance, day and night, against a new attacker. This reference troubled Frazer because its barbarity did not fit with his notion, shared with many of his peers, that the Rome of the second century represented the apogee of civilisation and refinement. This was especially so since Aricia is only about ten miles from Rome itself and was a popular resort for Romans rich and poor. It was an attractive spot, especially in the pleasantly wooded hills surrounding the lake of Nemi. Caesar built a villa there, and wealthy Romans soon followed suit. Caligula had two pleasure barges moored on the lake. This rural seclusion was disturbed, however, by the crowds of pilgrims and the touts who preyed on them, coming to the temple of Diana, the Roman Artemis. Diana was associated with woodlands, but she was also credited with healing powers, especially for women with gynaecological problems. The precinct at Nemi was extensive and maintained by an order of priestesses. Frazer could not reconcile this peaceful scene with the haunting figure of the murderous, and doomed, priest of Nemi. Strabo had attributed the practice to the Scythians, a nomadic people living to the north of the Black Sea who had a particularly ugly reputation. There was even a circuitous myth connecting Nemi with the Scythian capital of Tauropolis in the Crimea. More credible sources portrayed Nemi as a sort of national shrine of the Latin League, which preceded not only the Empire but the Republic before it. That would make sense of the sacred precinct and the priestesses, but not of the lonely priest skulking in the trees, the Rex Nemorensis, King of the Woods. Surely, Frazer reasoned, he dated back into some hazy past; he was the original inhabitant of Nemi, and everything else was added on later. This conclusion gained immediate support when Frazer began to explore the burgeoning field of anthropology. He was particularly impressed by Edward Burnett Tylor’s Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilisation, first published in 1865 and several times revised. Tylor had elaborated the notion of survivals, odd practices, and superstitions that persisted long after their original functions and meanings were gone. Consequently, they provided evidence of past times, forgotten by later generations who nevertheless went on observing the customs of their ancestors. This fits neatly with other things that had puzzled classicists. Ovid asked why the high priest of Jupiter, who lived on the Capitoline hill, wore a peaked cap, and why his wife was forbidden to comb her hair on certain days of the year. He found no answers; it was the priest’s job to abide by rules laid down long before, and that was that. In this account ritual is a kind of attic, where useless junk is stored. Belief is irrelevant: the pagans were ritual automatons, sleep walking through their rites.

26  Nineteenth-Century Beginnings

Armed with the concept of survivals, Frazer went looking for the barbaric prototypes of the priest of Nemi. He announces his program clearly at the outset: The strange rule of the priesthood has no parallel in classical antiquity, and cannot be explained from it. To find an explanation we must go further afield. No one will probably deny that such a custom savours of a barbarous age, and, surviving into imperial times, stands out in striking isolation from the polished Italian society of the day, like a primaeval rock rising from a smooth shaven lawn. It is the very rudeness and barbarity of the custom which allows us hope of explaining it.6 This is of course the same Rome that kept its citizenry docile by means of “bread and circuses” in Juvenal’s satirical phrase. When Trajan returned triumphant from the Dacian wars, for example, he organised an extravagant series of public games in which 10,000 gladiators competed.7 It is not recorded how many survived. By comparison, a mere affray in some remote corner of a forest seems like small beer. But Frazer could not see it that way, and his reaction was evidently sincere since he never seemed satisfied with his arguments, which he revised through several editions. He sets out his reasoning with a remarkable list of conditionals: if we can show that a barbarous custom … has existed elsewhere; if we can detect the motives that led to its institution; if we can prove that these motives have operated widely, perhaps universally, in human society, producing in varied circumstances a variety of institutions specifically different but generally alike; if we can show, lastly, that these very motives, with some of their derivative institutions, were actually at work in classical antiquity; then we fairly infer that at a remoter age the same motives gave birth to the priest of Nemi. It sounds as if he is trying to convince himself, but he must be given credit for frankly laying out the series of premises his argument required. He was ever the scholar. Nevertheless, Frazer’s material was sensational, and he did not shrink from exploiting it. In the opening pages of the Golden Bough, he conjures an image of “the dreamy blue of Italian skies, the dappled shade of summer woods, and the sparkle of waves in the sun,” only to switch dramatically to a somber picture, set to melancholy music – the background of forest showing black and jagged against a lowering and stormy sky, the sighing of wind in the branches and in the foreground, pacing to and fro, now in twilight, now in gloom, a dark figure with a glitter of steel at the

The Phenomenon of The Golden Bough 27

shoulder whenever the pale moon, riding clear of the cloud-rack, peers down at him through the matted boughs. This Gothic prelude made it plain that the book was addressed to a popular audience, and readers who were drawn in by it were not disappointed by what followed. Frazer’s strategy is to dismantle the complex of ideas revolving around the priesthood, and then pursue each element wherever it led him. In the process, he manages to maintain an air of suspense. Frazer is a detective searching out secrets shrouded in the mists of time – secrets that can only be revealed by paying attention to every possible clue. It is no accident that Frazer was writing at the time when Arthur Conan Doyle was creating Sherlock Holmes. The first question Frazer takes up is why the priest of Nemi was called a king. With that impetus, the global hunt for survivals is on, and the format of the entire enterprise is established. In the space of a single paragraph, he cites half a dozen cases of priest-kings. In Sparta, there were dual kings, each the priest of a major deity. The city states of Zela and Pessinus in Asia Minor were “priest-ridden,” and Teutonic kings “in the old heathen days” seemed to be high priests as well. The Emperors of China and the kings of Madagascar made sacrifices in annual public rites that were vital to the welfare of the entire nation, and the kings of the Galle in East Africa added humans to the list of animal sacrifices. In Central America, “the dim light of tradition” reveals something similar at Palenque. Sacred kings, Frazer discovered, were often credited with a wide variety of powers over natural phenomena such as the weather. These powers cause Frazer to turn his attention to the workings of magic, and again examples come spilling out, from Malays, Ojibwa Indians, the Dayaks of Borneo, and the peasants of Perche in France. Frazer did not lack for examples of magic in rural parts of Europe. Folklorists had been busy for a century, among whom the peasantry was often seen as preserving the true genius of the nation, in contrast to the over-sophisticated urbanites. Frazer’s voracious reading included their writings, and evidently no one was bothered by the implication that peasants were primitive. The peasants themselves, along with all the other primitives, had of course no say in the matter. These topics provided enough material for the first two-volume edition of The Golden Bough, published in 1890. In the first flush of enthusiasm, Frazer completed the manuscript in less than a year, and it was this volume that made him famous. When it was incorporated in later editions it was subtitled The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings. Near its end, Frazer plays a trump card. Early European visitors to India had reported practices that resonated with the priesthood of Nemi. In the seventeenth century, an English traveller to Calicut reported that a jubilee for the king was held every twelve years, but previously the king had been killed at this festival, and a new king

28  Nineteenth-Century Beginnings

appointed. The only survival of this was a custom whereby a handful of guests went through the motions of trying to kill the king, who was meanwhile surrounded by his entire army. To seal the argument, a Portuguese adventurer visiting the region two centuries earlier had reported that at the end of his twelve years the rajah was obliged to mount a scaffold and dismember himself limb by limb, while his successor watched the entire procedure. Neither European actually witnessed the events, but that hardly undermined the drama of their reports. Frazer was not finished, however – far from it. Over the next two decades, he added volumes that were first issued as addenda and then drawn together in new editions. The second edition of 1900 was kept to three volumes only by using a smaller type. In this version, he broadened his theory to include the subject of taboo (properly tapu), a word of Polynesian origin that Frazer borrowed from Cook’s Journals. Things taboo had the strange quality of combining both the unclean and sacred, a puzzle that has kept generations of anthropologists busy theorising. The third, and definitive, edition reached twelve volumes. It appeared in 1914, and Frazer was knighted the same year. It was obviously the summit of his career, and an amazing effort of scholarship. The interesting question is why his audience kept reading along with him. Part of the answer has to do with Frazer’s own restlessness. He was never satisfied with his account of the priesthood of Nemi, so the suspense was genuine, not an artifice: where was Frazer going next? In addition, it provided any number of topics to keep the conversation going at a dinner party, much as discussing movies do nowadays. There was in addition a frisson of horror to be shared with the ladies, even in polite society, since it was the result of research by a respected scholar. The third edition even legitimised delicate sexual innuendo, since Frazer devotes two volumes to the magical promotion of fertility, particularly in the ancient myth of the Corn Maiden. Survivals of her cult were to be found everywhere among the European peasantry, and Frazer took them as evidence of ancient rites to promote fertility that included human sacrifice, specifically of virgins. Sensational stuff, providing the plot line that lay behind, was Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Similar themes run through the remaining volumes of the third edition. Book four begins with legends from antiquity, two relating to the deities Adonis, Attis, and Osiris, and two more tracing the echoes of the Germanic myth of Baldar the Beautiful. The remaining two volumes of the third edition made Frazer uneasy in his mind because he had inadvertently provided ammunition for those who scoffed at religion, Christianity included. Like many Victorians, Frazer had left behind the faith he was raised in, but that did not make him a dogmatic atheist. Rather, he felt a sense of loss. Perhaps this was part of his motivation for the worldwide pursuit of the sacred. He is drawn into the mysteries of the ancients, rather than dismissive of them. When he climbed up the rocky gorge of the river Styx to its source, it was not only the exercise that made

The Phenomenon of The Golden Bough 29

him breathless. As he described it in a diary entry, he felt close to something profound and meaningful.8 Nevertheless, where his research led him he had to follow. In The Dying God, he recounts ancient Semitic practices of killing people seen as somehow embodying divinity. The similarities to the crucifixion of Christ were plain enough, even if he did not spell them out. In The Scapegoat, he shows how animals – and sometimes people – were loaded with the sins of the community, and then caste out. Had Jesus been a scapegoat? In this way, and despite himself, Frazer became a pillar of nineteenthcentury rationalism. His books were hailed as a blow to the religious establishment second only to Darwin’s Origin of the Species. After all, what price faith when it was obvious that almost everything imaginable, however absurd, had been believed by someone, somewhere? In 1922, Frazer published an abridged one-volume version of Golden Bough, a mere shadow of itself at 864 pages. It is the edition that is most widely known, and in its paperback form easy to find in second-hand bookshops. Frazer was certainly happy to reach an even wider audience, but he was also wary that if he did not make an abridgement someone else would. That has indeed happened, and there are now several versions floating around. They are confusing to use because they tinker with Frazer’s headings and order of presentation. Meanwhile, the mysteries that Frazer evoked fascinated the literati of the early twentieth century. Most famously, in his footnotes to The Wasteland – that icon of modernist angst – T.S. Eliot draws attention to a book which has influenced our generation profoundly; I mean The Golden Bough; I have used especially the two volumes on Adonis, Attis, Osiris. Anyone who is acquainted with these works will immediately recognise in the poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies.9 Notice that Eliot takes it for granted that anyone reading his poetry would know about The Golden Bough. Eliot was not alone; all the great authors of the modernist era were drawn to the book, not to mention any number of lesser figures. It is an amazing legacy of literary inspiration. The most important legacy of The Golden Bough, however, is not to be found in literature. The broad popular interest that the book attracted in the 1890s meant that its ideas made their way into the mainstream of European thinking, and they endure there long after the author’s name has, for most people, faded into obscurity.

Chapter 4

If I Was a Horse

As the Great Project gathered momentum in the twentieth century, the whole raison d’etre of anthropology changed. This was clear to its practitioners, but not to the wide audience that Frazer had reached. By comparison to the eclat of The Golden Bough, the Great Project began quietly. The immediate task was the accumulation of case studies like that of Firth in Tikopia. That seems only reasonable, but the irony is that anthropology achieved its greatest public impact before anything much had been done in the way of research. Instead, Frazer’s generation was content to follow the advice of the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland: Verdict first! Evidence after! Considering its breath-taking scope – all the primitives and all of prehistory – evolutionary theory was surprisingly parsimonious with its data. Previous stages of mental development were deduced from small residues of what Tylor called “unpractical conservatism and dogged superstition,” and then demonstrated by a judicious choice of similar survivals elsewhere. On this basis, Tylor balanced an entire theory of primitive religion on an item of belief reported from Borneo. He begins: Mr. St. John says that the Dayaks regard dreams as actual occurrences. They think that in sleep the soul sometimes remains in the body, and sometimes leaves it and travels far away, and that both when in and out of the body it sees and hears and talks, and altogether has a prescience given to it, which, when the body is in its natural state, it does not enjoy. Fainting fits, or a state of coma, are thought to be caused by the departure or absence of the soul on some distant expedition of its own. When a European dreams of his distant country, the Dayaks think his souls has annihilated space, and paid a flying visit to Europe during the night.1 Spencer St. John was British Consul General to the Sultan of Brunei in 1856 and took the opportunity to make a couple of expeditions upriver, into regions beyond the control of the Sultan. Tylor continues: How like the dream is to the popular notion of a soul, a shade, a spirit, or a ghost need not be said. But there are facts that bring the dream and DOI: 10.4324/b22988 -6

If I Was a Horse  31

the ghost into yet closer connection than follows from mere resemblance. Thus the belief is found among the Finnish races that the spirits of the dead can plague the living in their sleep, and bring sickness and harm upon them. Herodotus relates that the Nassamones practice divination in the following manner: – they resort to the tombs of the ancestors, and after offering prayers, go to sleep by them, and whatever dream appears to them they take for their answers. From Tylor’s point of view, the important thing to notice about the beliefs of the Dayaks, Finns, and Nassamones is that they were all wrong. In contrast to Frazer, Tylor felt no nostalgia for the Christian faith and no guilt about undermining it. On the contrary, he took it as his mission to epater les Cretiens, and he enjoyed pointing out the endless folly of humankind. “We have continual reason to be thankful to fools,” says Tylor, because their unwitting assistance meant that “ethnographers, not without a certain grim satisfaction, may at times find means to make stupid and evil superstitions bear witness against themselves.” This they did by revealing their origins in barbaric and savage customs. Tylor, not Frazer, was the true nineteenth-century rationalist, in the manner of such contemporary scoffers as Richard Dawkins. From the survivals that he had identified, Tylor set about reconstructing the original errors of logic that underlay them. His argument requires a series of steps: First, primitives had the experience of dreaming. Presumably, it is an experience shared by all human beings, primitive and otherwise, and consequently, Tylor himself knew the disorienting effect of waking from a particularly vivid dream. This was the empathetic move. Second, he asks himself: what would I have made of this experience if I knew as little about the real world as the average savage? Perhaps on awaking, I would say to my fellow cave-dwellers: I just saw something weird down at the river. They would reply: impossible, you’ve been lying there all the time. I would then deduce that I was composed of two parts, body and soul. This was the intellectualist move. Third, when I, and the tribe, were confronted by a corpse, we would have a ready-made concept of death as the abandonment of the body by the soul. Fourth, this would raise the issue of where the soul of the deceased had gone. If I now dreamt of a dead family member, it would mean that there was some spirit world from which souls of the dead visited the living. Fifth, if we had already been puzzled by why our magic sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t, we now had an explanation: it depended not on the efficacy of our spells, but the goodwill of the dead. In this way, religion emerges from magic and takes the form of ancestor worship. There is a tiny element of Enlightenment humanism left in Taylor’s historical reconstruction. At least he credits his primitives with powers of deduction similar to his own, even if they did get it all wrong. That is why he is confident that he can detect their errors.

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Tylor’s brand of empathy is a strange beast. In effect, he claims the ability to step inside other peoples’ heads. This bold proposition has been satirised as arguing “if I was a horse.” It would be a very weak argument that you could understand how the world looks to a horse by imagining that you are a horse. That would be what psychologists describe as projection. Moreover, we all know it is not safe to assume you know what is going on in the mind even of your most intimate companion, let alone cavemen and horses. I assume that there is a pan-human, perhaps a pan-mammalian, phenomenon of phases of mental activity during sleep. The brain is most active during phases that can be identified by rapid eye movements (REM). Several functions have been suggested for REM sleep, including the erasure of unnecessary memories. The only dreaming that we are capable of remembering happens in the moments before waking, when the body is still in a hypnogogic state. If this is correct, then the physiological nature of REM sleep and dreaming is a human universal, but that does not mean that everyone experiences it in the same way. Beyond perception there is also cognition, and in understanding what a dream is culture plays a key role. Meanwhile, his account of ancestor worship has the ambiguous quality of all foundational myths, such as Sigmund Freud’s eternally re-enacted drama of the son murdering the father. In some deep past, Freud thought, it had occurred in earnest. Now, thoroughly repressed under a veneer of civilisation, it lurks only in the depths of the unconscious. Since Tylor had no knowledge of Freud and no notion of the unconscious, the primitive errors of logic he identified were at the conscious level. So, is Tylor arguing that the confusion of dreams with “actual occurrences” was made by some underqualified indigenous philosopher in the remote past, and then preserved unthinkingly in tradition? Or was it made anew by each successive generation making the same old mistakes? For Tylor, observing primitive beliefs is like listening to a novice taking music lessons, except that instead of wincing he takes a “grim satisfaction” in hearing the inept student break down at exactly the same place in the score time after time. There is also a logical non sequitur. Tylor argues that a particular understanding of the nature of dreams led to ancestor worship, but how do we know it wasn’t the other way round? The experience of ancestors seems to me no less elemental than the experience of dreams. Anyone who has lost a grandparent or parent has known at least one ancestor personally, and may very well continue to have warm feelings towards her or him. Meanwhile, those who have sustained such losses may have heard stories viva voce from those ancestors before they became ancestors, who may have passed on details of their ancestors, and so on, in a chain reaching back indefinitely. This possibility is surely as old as story-telling, and consequently, it constitutes a profoundly human experience. I personally find it comforting to think of my ancestors, whoever they were, getting on with their lives as best they could – even if they were a pack of fools.

If I Was a Horse  33

This need not be construed as a human universal, however. Cultures, even at similar levels of technological advancement, vary widely in the number of generations they remember. Some peoples barely bother to remember past the grandparental generation, while others maintain genealogies going back to founding ancestors or even deities. The Tikopia are an example of the latter. Firth’s informant the Ariki I Kafika – the chief of Kafika – knew very well his descent from the Atua I Kafika – the god of Kafika. Most of us would envy his secure sense of who he was and where he belonged. If Tylor’s theorising was set in motion by an ethnographic detail that caught his eye, at least that detail was accurate. This I can confirm from fieldwork conducted in the mid-1970s in the hinterland of Brunei. The people there identified themselves as Orang Ulu, or Upriver People, but there are many ethnicities subsumed under the label, one of which is Berawan. The Berawan numbered about 2,000 people living in four main villages in the middle reaches of the Tinjar and Tutoh rivers. Like all Upriver People, they occupied massive communal houses, with floors raised about ten feet off the ground on sturdy pilings, and heavy shingled roofs soaring another thirty feet above that. The space under the roof was divided longitudinally, with an open veranda running the full length of the house on the side facing the river, and a row of family apartments on the other. They made a living from rice farms cut anew each year in the secondary forest, supplemented by fish from the rivers and game from the forest.2 The Berawan language, like Tikopian, has no word for religion. Instead, things that we might think of as religious are included within aded, which may be simply translated as “the way,” or less literally as the way of doing things, or perhaps the way to get things done. Aded covers much more than ritual; it prescribes everything from legal codes to aesthetics. Who owns fruit trees is aded, and so is their disgust at anything lopsided, such as an off-centre ridge pole on a roof. There was another parallel with Firth’s Tikopia: the community where I lived during fieldwork was an island of traditionalism in an ocean of converts. Christianity spread rapidly after the Second World War, and most upriver communities had converted by the mid-1970s. The Berawan case fits neatly into Tylors’s model. Dreams were indeed attributed to souls journeying far away, and the ancestors were key to their religion. It is not clear, however, that these findings confirm his hypothesis. So let us take a closer look. Dreams were occasionally taken as omens. For instance, if a man dreamt of a net bursting with fish, he rushed out to prepare a site for making prayers. In this way, he was said to “own” the dream. If on the other hand, he dreamt he had broken teeth, he did the same thing to avoid the evil omen. I was puzzled by these formulaic accounts, but I was never offered anything more elaborate. Apparently, no one had the kind of dreams I had, or at least no one wanted to talk about them. There is, however, a certain common sense in that. After all, we all find it hard to remember dreams even a few minutes

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after waking. Retaining dream content is a cultivated skill. Instead, longhouse people retained only a presentiment of good fortune, or of menace, and only after particularly vivid dreams. Meanwhile, great attention was given to the ancestors. They were the spirits most frequently invoked in prayer, as in a phrase familiar to everyone: a kaam bili vi, bili sadi bili ukun, bili dupun

where are you spirits of the ancestors, spirits of the ancestors spirits of the ancestors, spirits of the ancestors

Bili is reasonably accurately translated as “spirit,” while vi, sadi, ukun, and dupun all mean grandparents, and by extension ancestors in general. Sadi is the everyday term in Berawan, while vi and ukun are borrowed from other Upriver languages, and dupun is a word used only in this context, so as to create alliteration. This kind of poetic parallelism is typical of the style of speech called piat or prayer, and the verbal form, niat, is the usual way to describe ritual activities.3 The ancestors were invoked in a more direct and awful way at key moments in the most important of Berawan rites, which were funerals. They were literally summoned to come, en masse, to the longhouse. Such a mixing of the living and the dead was regarded as powerfully revivifying for the community, but dangerous in the same degree. It could only be maintained for the limited duration of the rite if the liminal confusion was not to become permanent, that is, the entire community to literally die out. At the end of the rites, a divination had to be performed for every man, woman, and child in the longhouse to make sure that their souls had not gone off with the departing ancestors. I was present at several occasions when the ancestors were summoned, and each time the temperature inside the longhouse suddenly dropped. These moments occurred an hour or so after sundown, but no such relief from the steamy heat was usually available in the early evenings. I did not have a thermometer handy at these times, so a skeptic is justified in dismissing this as a case of auto-suggestion. The first time I experienced it, however, I could not follow what was going on and I was not warned. Somehow I, a naïve outsider, picked up on the chill running through the crowd, and that gives some indication of the solemnity of the moment. When I mentioned this later to Berawan high school students at a town downriver, they knew very well what I was talking about. It was, they joked, “upriver air conditioning.” In the longhouse, the presence of the ancestors is palpable. The ancestors are bili, spirit. But the world of spirits is vast, and, as the Berawan freely confess, largely unknown to them. Animals and birds may on occasion be spirit, or somehow manifest spirit, but inanimate things like trees and rocks generally have no spirit existence. If, however, they do something un-rocklike or un-treelike, people will immediately speak of “the spirit of the tree/rock,” or “the spirit in the tree/rock.” For example, there was at

If I Was a Horse  35

the community where I lived a jar that moved around at night. It was of an ordinary utilitarian type called sitong, used for storing water. It was about eighteen inches high and twenty in diameter, and too heavy to pick up easily. It had, however, the idiosyncratic tendency to be in a different place in the morning to where it had been when everyone went to sleep the night before. So, people spoke of bili sitong, the jar spirit or spirit in the jar. It evidently had no malicious intentions, however, so the only reaction was, out of respect, to move the jar into a corner of the family living space where it joined valuable heirloom property such as large brass gongs and beautifully glazed Chinese jars. Evidently satisfied, the jar settled down. These events caused intense interest, but no great surprise. The Berawan view of it was that the plane of spirit existence intersected here and there with the plane of human existence, but it was beyond human perception to know in advance where or why. Living human beings are, however, not spirit. Instead, they have telanak, which I gloss as “soul.” There were no elaborated ideas of how people acquired souls. There were practices that implied that newborns did not yet have souls. For instance, old men would sometimes hold babies above their heads in the hope that their souls would pass into the child. There was something sentimental in this – a display of affection – and it was no use pestering the old men with questions about exactly what they thought was going on. There were also hints of reincarnation when personal names, or “body names,” were found for children. This did not occur until children were several months old and appeared to be healthy. Infant mortality was high, and it was considered unwise to draw attention to new-borns by giving them names. Even after naming, small children were often addressed, without malice, as “shithouse” or “little snot,” especially if they had frequently been ill. At the gathering to find an infant’s name, tests were applied to see if the soul of a deceased family member had come back. If so, the child was given the same name and expected to show similar character traits, such as skill at dancing, or a weakness for drink. If no such connection was traced the infant was offered names until he or she was deemed to have accepted one, by a nod of the head or a sudden smile. It was a technique clearly open to manipulation, but the mood of the gathering was anyway light-hearted. What mattered was that children meant a thriving community. By contrast, there was a well-defined and crucial understanding of how it was that people lost their souls. The process was important for two reasons. On the one hand, it was in that way that the deceased became ancestors, and for the Berawan the ancestors were the only non-human agency that could be relied on. Other spirit entities were remote, or of uncertain temper, but the ancestors had an immediate interest in their descendants, and their influence was wholly beneficial. They were neither judgmental nor punitive. Instead, they were an integral part of community, not necessarily any smarter or less argumentative that the living, but invested in their descendants’ welfare and powerfully placed to intervene on their behalf.

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On the other hand, there was a darker and more immediate reason for concern. The transition from soul to a spirit was not instantaneous, and it was not easy. On the contrary, it was an ordeal for both the mourners and the deceased. As the corpse sank into disgusting corruption, so did the soul, because it was literally unable to escape the bonds of the flesh. So burdened, the soul was unable to join the ancestors, but it was already excluded from the society of the living. No matter how amiable the deceased had been in life, he or she was liable to become jealous and spiteful, and even to kill. The result was that death tended to follow death, like undoing a zip. This tension between hope and fear gave funerals a distinctly ambivalent quality. What was said outwardly was that the rites were a kind of retirement party to send off the departing colleague in style. It acknowledged his or her contribution, a sort of spiritual gold watch. So there were gatherings every night around the deceased on the longhouse veranda, with much drinking of an alcoholic beverage made from rice. (I follow the convention of calling this drink “rice wine” though there are no grapes in sight. There is also a more formidable distilled version called arak.) As with all other Berawan rituals, the proper thing was boisterous conviviality, aided by rice wine. There was precious little solemnity at funerals, other than that chilly moment when the ancestors arrived en masse. Even so, there were restrictions on the kinds of things done at other parties: no playful songs or silly games, and no music or dancing. There was also an element of compulsion. All able-bodied men were expected to be there night after night, all night long, for eight nights in a row. (When children died or people of no social standing the wake could be four or even two nights.) These same men were working during the day, hunting for the communal pot, cutting down ironwood trees, and constructing the mausoleum. Women who were pregnant were excused the nightly vigils and indeed encouraged to stay away, as were the sick and elderly. On the last night of the funeral, there was an especially large turnout of residents and visitors, and the hustle and bustle was continuous. But on the fourth, fifth, or sixth nights, there might be only a hard core of middle-aged men and women, and nothing happening. At two or three in the morning, with several hours to go before dawn, the semblance of a cheerful send-off party was often wearing pretty thin. When men did drop off to sleep, they were victims of cruel pranks. The favourite was to try to lower into the mouth of the snoring man some foul, rotting thing, such as half a mouse put aside earlier for the purpose. This was called “fishing,” and it was often enough to revive the failing conviviality of the event, as everyone guffawed and recounted practical jokes of yesteryear. During the first few days, the corpse presided over these events, seated on its death throne, and surrounded by valuables. People newly arrived in the longhouse would be seated in the place of honour directly in front of it. After two or at most three days, when the corpse became melarak (drippy),

If I Was a Horse  37

it was installed in a massive coffin carved from a single hardwood log, or alternatively in a large jar that was cut at the shoulder to allow the body to be inserted. Whichever was used, it was sealed with damar gum and firmly tied together. There is a type of spirit called telasak that tries to get inside coffins and reanimate the corpse. This is the most horrific thing that Berawan can imagine. Being dead already, the decaying corpse can’t be killed; it can only be hacked into quivering pieces by the bravest of men. What this underlines is that there is nothing ghoulish in these rites. No one cares to think about the corpse. On the contrary, they are simply doing what must be done to free the soul of the dead person and to protect the living from the insidious infiltration of death. I should in fact not speak of the person as being dead at all. All that had happened in the Berawan view is that he or she had “lost breath;” the process of dying was barely begun. Only the ancestors were truly dead (leta), and their realm was lia de lo leta, the community of the dead. As usual, it was not much use pestering people with questions about things they did not claim to know. No one had much to offer on what things were like in the land of the dead, or what went on there, except to say simply that it was mas, “golden.” I took this to mean beautiful, but also incorruptible, without suffering or disease. This trajectory was made dramatically evident in the moments after loss of breath. On one occasion that I witnessed, a middle-aged woman had been ill for a long time with a wasting disease, probably tuberculosis. Seeing that the end was near, people gathered in the apartment the woman shared with her husband and children. The mood was not solemn. People laughed and joked and played cards to while away the time, except when the woman had a violent spasm of coughing. Then everyone paid attention, and clucked sympathetically for a few minutes, before resuming their conversations. Visitors arrived and departed constantly, day and night, including me. I wanted to see the rites that occurred immediately after death. I was deeply ashamed of these callous motives, but my presence excited no negative comment. On the contrary, people were pleased that I was acting like a true member of the community. In the longhouse, no one dies alone. During this time, the woman’s husband sat by her wiping her face, and propping her up when she coughed. When she finally lay unmoving, the standard test was applied. A feather was balanced on her pale lips, and when it stayed put, the woman was declared to have “lost breath.” Immediately women began to wail, setting up a dirge that was addressed directly to the corpse. Why are you leaving us now? How can you desert us like this? Your husband needs you… and so on, each woman repeating the same accusations, with their long hair dramatically thrown forward over their faces. The men, grim faced, organised themselves into work parties to begin carving a massive coffin made from a single log, and to construct the seat on which the woman’s body would be displayed on the veranda for several days and nights.

38  Nineteenth-Century Beginnings

Before that, however, there were the rites that I had come to see. The corpse was given a sponge bath by the older women there and then dressed in her finest clothes, a new sarong and blouse. Then it was propped against the wall, and the close relatives in turn sat next to it, lit a cigarette, took a puff or two, and then put the cigarette between the lips of the dead woman. That done, the corpse was marched puppet-like into the kitchen at the back of the family apartment, all the time being urged to look out for the welfare of everyone there. Then the corpse was force fed with rice from the family pot. Finally, it was passed through a hole knocked in the front wall of the apartment, and installed on the death throne. As mourners arrived back from their farms, summoned by a deep-voiced gong used only for this purpose, women renewed the wailing, still phrased in accusatory terms. As everyone knew, decomposition proceeded rapidly in the tropical heat and reached its full flow in only a few days. Thereafter, the intensity slowly decreased, and the threat along with it. The longhouse community as a whole was released from the restrictions of mourning after ten or twelve days, but close kin continued for a full year. By the end of that time, the bones were deemed to be dry, and the soul transformed into spirit. This was a matter of biology; it was not in any way brought about by the death rites. There was however the option, for sufficiently prestigious people, of a whole second round of funeral rituals after the year was up. These were called nulang, a verbal inflection of tulang, bones, so the name might be translated as “doing the bones.” This involved bringing back the mortal remains of the individual who was now genuinely dead, and holding an entire second funeral, for ten days and nights. But there was nothing ambivalent about nulang: it was wholly celebratory, and preparations took months. Stores of rice had to be accumulated, both for food and rice wine, and messengers sent to invite guests from far and wide. Meanwhile, the most skilled woodcarvers were busy building a splendid mausoleum, raised like the longhouse on massive pilings. Nulang was the grandest of Berawan festivals and a source of pride for the entire community. It was also formidably charged by the presence of that other community, into which the new ancestor was at last formally inducted.4 The Berawan understanding of death could hardly be more different to that held in the West and now made worldwide by the extension of Western medicine. For modern medicine, death is the failure of the body as machine. What is necessary to avoid death is to locate the part that is not working properly and repair it or replace it. People regularly survive heart attacks that would have killed them a century ago, and it is no surprise to meet someone with a replacement hip joint. Failing kidneys call for dialysis, and hearts can be stimulated by pacers, or transplanted from victims of road accidents. So effective have emergency rooms and surgeons become at averting death that it is now a matter of nice distinctions to tell who is dead and who is not.

If I Was a Horse  39

On this point, religion and science routinely clash. In 2005, the case of Terri Schiavo was a front page story throughout America. At the age of 26, Schiavo went into cardiac arrest, as a result of a potassium imbalance caused by an eating disorder. She was rushed to hospital, but the temporary deprivation of oxygen caused damage to the brain. She slipped into a coma that was prolonged for fifteen years. Various teams of doctors concluded that she was in a persistent vegetative state (PVS). Eventually, her husband petitioned the Florida supreme court for the removal of her feeding tube. This was necessary because Schiavo was not technically dead, which is to say that there was still some slight electrical activity in the brain. A judge ruled in favour of the husband, but the ruling was contested by Schiavo’s parents, who were Catholic. The dispute was picked up by right-to-life activists, whose usual cause is the banning of abortion, and they organised demonstrations. What followed was a macabre political circus. The governor of Florida intervened to have the feeding tube re-inserted, and then the Republican leader of the House of Representatives took the extraordinary step of issuing a subpoena ordering Schiavo to appear in person before Congress. The judiciary stood firm, however, and when nature was finally allowed to take its course, Schiavo’s brain was found to have shrunk to half its normal size. The striking thing is that complicated electrical devices with video screens are now required to distinguish the living and the dead. But cultural features are also in play. A fascinating study conducted by David Sudnow found that whether or not people were found to be dead on arrival (DOA) at major hospitals in Los Angeles depended in part on how they were dressed.5 If, for instance, a man in a business suit was brought in, all possible techniques of resuscitation would invariably be attempted, including electric shock. Meanwhile, a man brought in a similar condition but wearing shabby or dirty clothes stood a good chance of being declared DOA. There is of course a cultural logic to this: the relatives of men in business suits are more likely to sue the hospital than those of street bums. The fact remains, however, that whether or not you are dead in Los Angeles may depend on what clothes you are wearing. The message for Los Angelinos is not to have a heart attack while digging the garden. The Berawan account of death is just as precise as the medical one, but it mixes biology and culture in a different way. As Tylor learned from St. John, in some parts of Borneo a person’s soul is believed to wander about in dreams. From that ethnographic detail, Tylor proceeded via a series of deductions to the cult of the ancestors. There was a significant intermediate step that he left out, however, one that constitutes an indigenous theory of medicine. Asleep or not, the prolonged absence of the soul poses a threat to the health of the body. There is no specific result that follows. Instead, the body becomes vulnerable to a wide variety of afflictions. Soul loss is a kind of immune deficiency. Like an AIDS patient, the victim may show any number of symptoms. People were happy to make use of whatever Western medicine was available,

40  Nineteenth-Century Beginnings

but they knew that it could only treat symptoms. In the end it was the underlying spiritual condition that had determined the outcome. Finally, if an errant soul somehow wandered into the land of the dead, it instantly lost its ability to give life to its own body. Decomposition began at once. This proposition is medically accurate: the lining of the stomach loses its immunity to the acids it itself produces which is why corpses rapidly bloat. Unable to re-animate its own body, but equally unable to shrug it off, the soul lingers around the longhouse, miserable and menacing. Surely, nothing could be more humanly universal than our mortality, and yet death does not appear in the same way to everybody. As we shall see, the same applies to matters of sex and reproduction. The biology is the same everywhere, but the understanding of that biology is surprisingly varied. This is one important finding of the Great Project, and it could not have been reached if the focus of anthropology in the twentieth century had continued to be the pre-history of human folly, as illustrated by those religions labelled primitive.

Part II

Definitions

Chapter 5

The Essence of Religion

The Comparative Method set out to reconstruct human prehistory, and there were two variables used to sort higher and lower. The most obvious was technological evolution. In the scale developed by the American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, Middle Savagery was defined by knowledge of the use of fire. Since no human population was ever discovered that lacked the knowledge of fire, the preceding category of Lower Savagery was an empty box. Perhaps Homo sapiens had always used fire; perhaps fire was tamed by pre-human hominids. Moving on to Upper Savagery, that was demonstrated by the invention of the bow and arrow. Barbarism began with the use of pottery. Middle Barbarity was achieved by the domestication of plants or animals, and Upper Barbarity was heralded by the use of iron. Civilisation was the seventh and final stage. The sequence seems plain enough, but it unleashed endless debate among scholars. Were dogs to be counted as domestic animals? – even the Aborigines had hunting dogs. Again, there were people in central Borneo who had evidently had iron tools for centuries, but did not have the bow and arrow. Had they somehow jumped a couple of stages? As I can report, bows and arrows are not much used in deep jungle because it is hard to lean far enough back to shoot up into the trees. Pigs require quick work with a spear, and birds and monkeys are best shot with blow guns and poison darts. In this way, the Method produced intellectual problems that would not have been there if it wasn’t for the Method. The second variable was scale of organisation, that is, the number of people who could be brought together for some purpose, such as making up armies or building great monuments. On the face of it, this provided a readily quantifiable variable and produced a satisfyingly commonsensical scale: hunters and gatherers lived in small “bands;” agriculturists started out with chiefdoms, which gradually grew in size until they became kingdoms, so leading by degrees to whole civilisations and the modern nation state. Even here, however, dilemmas arose. On certain occasions, Australian Aborigines came together in gatherings numbering in the hundreds or even thousands. Could this be dismissed on the grounds that these events were ritual, or that no one actually organised them? ( Just how such large events could happen

DOI: 10.4324/b22988 - 8

44 Definitions

without organisation was a question not asked.) In addition, there were figures whose indigenous titles had been translated as ‘king’ but who had no evident organisational function at all – as Frazer had noticed. Meanwhile, how to apply the Comparative Method to religion? The whole evolutionary logic was that things start out simple and gradually became complex. Following this model required that there was some simple and undifferentiated thing out there called ‘primitive religion,’ and in the nineteenth century no one hesitated to speak of it in the singular. If there is one thing that the Great Project established beyond a doubt, it is that no such thing exists, nor is there any evidence that it ever did. Primitive religion was a Victorian fantasy just like Lower Savagery. But even if there were multiple primitive religions, what would be the criterion of primitiveness? It could hardly be something quantifiable such as number of gods. No one tried to argue that the more gods, the more evolved. Could the proposition be turned on its head, then: the fewer gods, the more evolved? That would make Christianity more civilised than Roman religion, with its pantheon of named gods, and Hinduism would take us back another step. So far so good, but it was difficult for any scholar to deny that Hinduism had been at the heart of an ancient and sophisticated civilisation, especially as the riches of Sanskrit literature had only recently been revealed and the common origin of Indo-European languages established. Meanwhile, it would be difficult even for the Aborigines to out-compete Hinduism in number and variety of deities. The solution to this glaring contradiction was something called ‘animism.’ The idea was that the primitive mind constantly confused inanimate things with living things, so that some kind of ‘soul’ (Latin: animus) was attributed to rocks and trees and thunder, and everything else in the environment. Instead of gods, all natural things – limitless in number – were given souls. The term made its way into English usage and is still used dismissively by missionaries.1 For Tylor, mental evolution comprised a slow progress towards a properly scientific understanding of nature. This proceeded through stages making up yet another three-part evolutionary sequence: magic, religion, and science. Magic was false science, that is, science that didn’t work. When humans, after innumerable experiments, tumbled to the fact that their magic was sometimes followed by the desired outcome and sometimes not, they concluded that there must be spirits meddling with the process. Consequently, the important thing was to conciliate the spirits in the first place. In this way, religion emerged from magic, to await a time when humans could take the final step, and practice science. Tylor and his followers supported their theories with instances collected from the abundant travel literature and consequently claimed for them the status of scientific findings. In this guise, they became a key element in nineteenth-century rationalism, and the notion of modernity that it supported.

The Essence of Religion  45

For all their scientific claims, however, these theories were not inductive, but deductive. The underlying logic was that primitive religion was the way it was because that was the way it had to have been. In passing, we should note that Tylor’s application of the logic of must-have-been was modest compared to other nineteenth-century exponents. One example will make the point. John Lubbock (1870) proposed no less than seven stages: atheism, when the primitives were too stupid to have any religious ideas at all; fetishism, through which they compel deities to do their bidding; nature worship or totemism, about which more in Chapter 7; shamanism, in which inspired individuals enter into spirit realms; idolatry or anthropomorphism, in which human qualities are projected onto deities; deism, in which deities are regarded as the authors of nature; and a final stage, in which religions finally convey morality – which evidently hadn’t existed before. I need hardly labour the point that all such fantasies are now of no interest to anyone but an antiquarian. Meanwhile in Tylor’s schema, religion begins as the conciliation of spirits and in essence it remains the same. On the face of it, this looks like a definition of religion, but it is really a whole theory of religion. The theory was then proven by citing a selection of cases that fitted it. The problem is that any defining feature we settle on will produce the same result: whatever we decide on as the necessary feature that must be present in order to have a religion, we are asserting that the given feature is the essence of all religion everywhere. Since cases that fail to fit the criterion are then excluded, the only possible result of research will be to confirm our claim. The problem is made worse by the fact that many languages – indeed the majority – lack any word that could reasonably be translated as religion. We have already encountered examples. When Tikopians had things that needed to be done in temples, they referred to those things as ‘work,’ as in the phrase that provided the title of one of Firth’s books, The Work of the Gods. There was no categorical difference between work in temples and work in gardens. Locating ‘religion’ in such places is not a matter of translation. For Berawan, all such things activities are just part of ‘the way of doing things.’ The term ‘religion’ can only be analytic; it is our concept imposed on their understanding of things, not an indigenous category. Under these circumstances, the finding of anthropology is that our data have an inconvenient way of outrunning our definitions. Whatever we settle on as the defining feature, we sooner or later find ourselves confronting a case that looks like it ought to fit, but lacks that one crucial defining feature. We then have the choice of pushing aside the new case as beyond consideration, or alternatively fiddling with the wording of our definition so as to squeeze it in. The theological tendency is to do the former, so that it is then possible to speak of people ‘without religion.’ The anthropological reflex is just the reverse. We are not dismayed to find that the range of religion-like things that we discover constantly escapes whatever definition we started with. On the contrary, we are delighted.

46 Definitions

Discovering diversity was the whole point of the Great Project. A large part of the purpose of this book is to show where such promiscuous fossicking leads us. Inevitably essentialist definitions of religion seize on some feature that is present in the World Religions. This seems reasonable enough – after all, they could hardly be left out. The danger is, however, that something is being smuggled in. Perhaps some of the non-World religions – that is to say the vast majority of religions – have features that are not shared with the World Religions. We would then be arbitrarily segregating the non-World religions into two categories, those that resemble the World Religions in some feature or other, relevant or not, and those that don’t. When people in Europe or America discuss religion, it is usually not long before it becomes evident that what they are really talking about is Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or some combination of the three. The reasons for this are not far to seek. By the time of Charlemagne, Europe had already become Christendom. In later centuries, it found itself hedged about by an expansive Islam. The threat from outside was matched by an alien element within, the dispersed Jewish communities. Suspicion and hostility were pervasive; it is worth remembering that the first anti-Jewish pogroms in Europe were carried out by ragtag armies called into being by the Pope’s declaration of a crusade to recover the Holy Land from its Moslem conquerors. Now, in the twenty-first century, and to the profound disgust of secularists, these ancient antagonisms are once again at the centre of world politics. The result of this long history of strife is that Jews, Christians, and Moslems see themselves as having radically different faiths. From a comparative perspective, however, what stands out is just the opposite: their common origins and basic assumptions.2 Any list of their shared features would have to include at least the following: Monotheism is the most obvious feature. Even so, there are nuances of meaning that make the concept less easy to apply than might appear at first sight. Since most Christians have from earliest times insisted on the divinity of Jesus, Christian theology has had to deal with the thorny and divisive issue of the precise relation between Father and Son. Islam firmly rejects any such ambiguity, but that does not mean that there are no other spiritual agencies, such as Shaytan (the devil), jinn (spirits of uncertain temper) and various ranks of angels. From the comparative viewpoint, these entities are also part of the Islamic pantheon. Meanwhile in the long history of Judaism there have been subtle shifts in the nature of the divinity. When Yahweh commands the Israelites: “thou shalt have no other gods before me” it is not clear whether the writers of the Old Testament meant that were no other gods, or only that Jews were forbidden to have anything to do with them. Worship is so familiar a feature of religion that it seems inescapable. How could any religion not involve worship? There are ambiguities, however. The Lord Mayor of London is addressed as Your Worship. “Worship” in

The Essence of Religion  47

this context implies respect, perhaps even reverence, but surely not divinity. Clearly, when Jews, Christians, or Moslems say that they worship God, they mean something more than respect, but it is not clear exactly what that is. Meanwhile, in the nineteenth century, it was reported that there were people in India and elsewhere who worshipped trees, so confirming their primitive level of intellectual development. On closer inspection, however, whatever it was that went on underneath those trees bore very little resemblance to what happens in churches on Sundays, or mosques or synagogues on Fridays. There is no doubt that a deep reverence for God is essential to the practice of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. What is in doubt is what observers meant by describing the activities of followers of other religions as ‘worship.’ The very familiarity of the word makes it a trap. Credos, or specific statements of faith, are conspicuous in Islam and Christianity, and adherents routinely recite them. In many Christian churches, the credo is recited at every service. The closest equivalent in Judaism is a phrase repeated at morning and evening prayers: listen, Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One. Elsewhere credos are rare. For instance, when Moslem scholars encountered Hinduism they were perplexed to say what Hindus had to believe or do in order to be Hindus. In comparative terms, Hinduism is more typical in this respect than Islam, Christianity, or Judaism. Conversion to Hinduism is equally problematic. There is nothing to stop a Westerner from adopting Hindu practices, but there is no process by which he or she can ‘convert’ to Hinduism, nor is there anyone to receive or confirm the new adherent. By contrast, the dynamic proselytism of Christianity and Islam has shaped the modern world. In Roman times, Judaism also was spread widely across the empire. Whole populations converted, as in the case of the Khazars of southern Russia. Only in the Middle Ages, when it became punishable by death, did Jewish proselytism cease. Buddhism also has evangelical goals, but among non-world religions there is seldom anything comparable. Prayer is commonly asserted in theology textbooks to be universal, but this is not so. There are rites that are performed in silence. Even where rituals are accompanied by some formalised mode of speech, it may take many forms. If we take as a minimal definition of prayer the summoning of spirit agencies followed by appeals for their help, prayer as such turns out to be is far from universal. Among Indonesian peoples, for example, major festivals were often accompanied by the recitation of genealogies reflecting the status of the sponsors, rather than any form of invocation or supplication. Sin is again so fundamental a concept in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that it is often assumed to be a universal feature of religions. It is not. In some branches of Christianity, the doctrine of “original sin” means that even newborns are burdened with it. The emotional counterpart of sin is guilt, which is also wrongly assumed to be universal. A whole family of concepts in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam follow from the notion of sin.

48 Definitions

Heaven and hell are portrayed in graphic terms in both the Qur’an and the New Testament. They hardly occur in the Old Testament, and rabbinical scholars have varied in their teachings on the topic. Some have seen heaven as a return to the Garden of Eden, others as an abstract state of union with God. This diversity reflects different eschatologies, or doctrines about the end of time. A theory of history is central to all three religious traditions. In Judaism, it is phrased in terms of the restoration of the kingdom of Israel, as promised in God’s covenant. Christianity and Islam foresee a final struggle against the forces of evil, followed by the establishment of a permanent divine order. Judgment, the final separation of the righteous from the damned, precedes the end of time. There is, however, an inconsistency about whether judgment occurs for everyone together at the end of time, or individually after a person’s death. In Judaism, there is more emphasis on a continuous or unfolding judgment because God’s covenant with His chosen people is delayed while they continue to infringe on the rules laid down for them. The messiah, in Christian doctrine, has already arrived. Without Him, there is no possibility of salvation or the redemption of sins. For Jews, he is yet to appear. In Islam, there is the notion of a leader (mahdi) who will usher in the end of time, though it is more prominent in some branches of Islam than others. Sometimes the term is applied as an honorific for Mohammed and the first four caliphs. In addition, there have been self-proclaimed Mahdis, just as there have been false messiahs in Jewish history. Sacred books are so fundamental to all three religious traditions that their adherents are often called “the people of the book,” an acknowledgement of their shared literary heritage. Needless to say, there are other traditions that have extensive ancient literatures, notably Hinduism and Buddhism, but their followers are not included in the category of people of the book. This list is not exhaustive, but without much hunting around it is possible to find a dozen important features that are common to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. From a comparative perspective, the three religions constitute variations on a theme. Consequently, I speak of a Judeo-ChristianIslamic Complex ( JCIC). The phrase implies no disrespect; it is not my business to ridicule anyone’s religion. On the contrary, it is impossible for any educated person not to admire the great cultural achievements of all three traditions. My point is simply to emphasise their common origins and underlying similarities. In much the same way, the linguist Benjamin Whorf spoke of a language he called simply ‘European.’ What he meant by that usage was that the differences between Spanish and French, or even French and German, were trivial when any of them was compared to the American Indian languages he studied. Those languages, he argued, are fundamentally different to ‘European.’ Following Whorf ’s comparative strategy, I also turn to an Amerindian example to contrast with the religions most familiar in the West.

The Essence of Religion  49

The Bororo live on the central plateau of Brazil, a vast area of savannah cut across by rivers. They make a comfortable living from fishing, supplemented by hunting and gardening. When they were first encountered by Europeans at the end of the seventeenth century they were spread across the watersheds of rivers flowing south towards Paraguay and north towards Amazonia, so that the Portuguese spoke of a Bororo ‘empire.’ When Christopher Crocker went to live among them in 1964–6, they were reduced to some 500 people in a handful of villages along the banks of the Rio Sao Lourenco, but they remained fiercely protective of their way of life. His ethnography (1985) is the most comprehensive study of Bororo religion. According to Crocker, the Bororo conceive of the world in terms of two countervailing entities or forces called aroe and bope. Neither term is easy to translate, which is to say that English has no equivalent concept, or indeed anything vaguely similar. The only way to grasp their meaning, in so far as that is possible, is to talk around them, to see what Bororo themselves say about aroe and bope, and in what contexts the two concepts are mentioned or implied. This form of translation is a large part of how anthropologists operate. Lacking appropriate translations, all we can do is show how concepts are mobilised in everyday life and discourse. The aroe, Bororo say, are not much interested in people. Their existence is serene, beautiful, and submarine. They are associated with rivers; their realm is full of shifting patterns of sunlight diffused from above. When Crocker asked his Bororo teachers to give examples of particular aroe, they produced very diverse lists. If he pushed them for more, in the irritating manner characteristic of anthropologists, they finally allowed that ultimately everything that had a name had an aroe. This proposition brings to mind Plato’s theory of ideas. In logical terms, Plato makes a distinction between particular objects and the words we call them by. The metaphysical consequence he draws from this is that what we experience with our senses are mere shadows of reality. Behind these appearances lie the “forms” of true reality. For example, beyond the diversity of flesh and blood horses, there is an ideal horse, and true beauty lies with the latter. It is the philosopher’s task to awaken people to the ideal. This parallel between Plato’s forms and Bororo aroe is intriguing, but it will not do to turn the Bororo into a tribe of classical philosophers somehow lost in the wilds of the Mato Grosso. It might make a plot for a Hollywood movie, but it cuts short any attempt to find out what the Bororo themselves understand by aroe. Looking at the lists collected by Crocker, the Platonic echoes are there, but soon disperse. The parabara, for example, are two thin unimaginably long ‘things’ stretching up to the stars. They are said to make a dry, clacking sound. In ritual, they appear as a length of bamboo, perhaps five meters long, split along its top third. When the bamboo is held with its butt rested on the ground and then shaken, the upper parts clack together. The parabara are as striking a representation as one could imagine of the abstract quality ‘length.’ Other aroe are however far from abstract. Fish are said to

50 Definitions

be “in themselves” aroe, as are herons, whose white plumage and elongated bodies the Bororo find particularly elegant. Also, herons are aquatic in their way; they wade about sedately in the shallows, eating small fish. Otters are said to be “almost aroe” because of their shiny pelts, their grace and speed on land and in water, their invulnerability to predators, and their human-like curiosity. In addition, the dead are aroe, not because they have some special sort of ‘soul’ that other creatures lack, but because they had names. Usages concerning personal names are strict. A child receives his or her name from the stock belonging to his mother’s family, who alone have the right to use them. When the child dies, they take it back again. Having got this far, there are many questions that spring to mind. Is every fish an aroe, or is there just one for all the fish? Or is there perhaps one for each species of fish? If herons eat fish, doesn’t that make them anti-aroe? Do dead people have no names, or do they somehow become absorbed into the aroe that goes with their names? When Crocker asked such questions, the Bororo repeated them to each other, enjoyed a good laugh, and walked away. He had wandered into the domain of the absurd. This is a common experience of anthropologists and an important one. For everyone, there are questions that make no sense. Imagine asking a Christian whether God wears underpants. Such a question, from anyone over ten, could only be facetious. In any event, it does not have an answer. Meanwhile, Crocker’s Bororo informants earnestly asked him questions that did not seem so very different. He found it difficult to brush off their questions or to provide answers that satisfied them at all. They taxed him, for instance, with the deeply puzzling phenomenon that when macaw eggs hatch, the chicks invariably turn out to be macaws. To westerners, the question is absurd and would have been so even before the scientific discovery of genes and DNA, because we take it for granted that like produces like. For Buddhist philosophers, however, the question makes perfectly good sense, because they deny that there is anything like a soul or an ego to be reborn. What persists through reincarnation is karma, and karma is not something that a man inherits from his ancestors, but something he inherits from himself in some previous state of existence. In his famous annotated translation of basic texts in Buddhism, first published in 1896, Henry Clarke Warren phrases the problem in exactly the same terms as the Bororo: “Why can not a swallow’s egg hatch out a lark? Is there any difference between two eggs in respect of composition or structure, adequate to account for the difference in the result? If not, how is it that the egg of a lark will never hatch out into any other kind of a bird than a lark, and that a swallow’s egg must always yield a swallow?”3 Evidently, one man’s absurdity is another’s profundity. The other aspect of Bororo existence is the bope. Without the bope, there could be no life. They cause all animals to reproduce and grow. A handsome young couple with their first baby is fairly bursting with the energy of

The Essence of Religion  51

the bope. However, the bope also cause people to age and die. All types of change, good or bad, manifest the bope, starting with night and day, sun and moon, and extreme weather of all kinds. The bope change shape constantly, almost at random, so that they might be met anywhere. In their own shapes, however, they are said to be about three feet tall, ugly, foul smelling, and very hairy. Even their eyeballs are hairy, the Bororo say, with a shiver of disgust. The creatures that are “in themselves” bope are vultures and alligators. Unfortunately, in contrast to the aroe, the bope are intimately involved in human life. To hold them at arm’s length, to push birth and death apart for the span of a lifetime, humans must observe an elaborate code of dietary rules. Any infraction brings illness and eventually, death. The Bororo concepts of aroe and bope form an interlocked pair, and that might bring to mind the well-known Chinese duality of yin and yang. This is not an invalid comparison. It hints at a widespread human tendency to think in terms of dyads, such as left and right, male and female, sun and moon, and so on. If the parallel is pushed too far, however, it has the danger of obscuring what is uniquely Bororo. For instance, the principles of yin and yang are complimentary, and harmony results from keeping them in balance. But bope and aroe are deeply antagonistic. There is precious little harmony to be had in the Bororo world, and every balancing act is precarious. We can now see why it is that the aroe generally avoid people. The problem with people is that their lives are so filled with repulsive things. Humans are noisy, quarrelsome, and messy. At the best of times, when they are up to nothing worse, they sweat and defecate. They increase their numbers by the particularly sweaty and pungent process of copulation, followed by a birth that is dangerous and gory. Babies, as the Bororo say succinctly, are shit. Hunting involves bloodshed both in killing and butchering. Cooking meat produces strong odours and animal appetites. And before long, people grow old, ugly, and infirm, and finally sink into stinking corruption. As the Bororo put it, the aroe are outside us, but the bope are inside. Who can deny that all of this is true? Far from being esoteric and impenetrable, I find the concepts of aroe and bope almost self-evident. Having started to think in these terms, I see the evidence of them everywhere. For me, they catch something of the ambivalence of the whole business of living, in which the glorious and the squalid are so intimately mixed. This thumb nail sketch, to be expanded later, is enough to pose the question of definition in a different way: do the Bororo have a ‘religion’? Christian missionaries might very well say that they do not, since there is very little they could sympathise with in the Bororo view of things. For Catholic missionaries, this is made less distressing by the doctrine originating with Saint Thomas Aquinas that all men have an inborn, if hazy, premonition that there is a God, and that their deeds will be judged. Even a belief in multiple gods, like the Greek and Roman pantheons, provide a basis on which to build true faith. Following Aquinas’ teaching, Catholic missionaries have often been less

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severe than Protestant ones in their condemnation of indigenous religions, and this flexibility has allowed scholars to amass impressive archives on the religions they aimed to displace. A striking example is provided by the Salesian brothers Cesar Albisetti and A.J. Venturelli who over many years compiled the collection of rituals recorded in the magnificent Enciclopedia Bororo (1962–76). Meanwhile, many fundamentalists dismiss indigenous religions as nothing more than a bundle of superstitions. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, superstition is “a belief or practice founded on fear or ignorance.” The constant repetition of the term has produced the curious illusion that people lacking God live in a permanent state of dread, daily tormented by the Devil. This is odd, given that the same people speak respectfully of those who are ‘God-fearing.’ Moreover, the claim does not square with the facts. For example, the Bororo are evidently lively and fun loving, and distinctly less terrorised by the bope than a Calvinist is by Judgment Day. Nevertheless, there is nothing wrong in deciding that the Bororo lack religion. It is simply a matter of definition, and there exists no authority whose word on this is final. An anthropologist has no more right to rule on the matter than does a missionary; it is a matter of one’s goals. What the Bororo case does demonstrate, however, is that there are Amerindian religions, or worldviews, or whatever one wants to call them, that are radically different from the JCIC, just as Amerindian languages differ sharply from what Whorf described as ‘European.’ Another tack might be to classify the aroe as gods, so re-admitting Bororo religion into consideration. This in general was the approach of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. Not everything believed by those who have not yet heard the Good News is necessarily the work of the Devil, but may contain a partial perception of God, just as Aquinas argued. Whether this approach is any help in understanding Bororo religion is another question, however. Meanwhile, to classify the bope as demons would be downright misleading. They may cause harm to people, but without them there would be no life at all, no activity, no laughter, no children. The problem with the bope is not that they are inherently evil, but that their explosive energy rushes on from creation to destruction without pause. Moreover, there is no way to use the terms ‘god’ or ‘devil’ without introducing all kinds of images that have nothing to do with Bororo ideas. Having spoken of god, let alone God, it is hard not to think of Moses descending from the mountain. The Devil meanwhile is known to have a barbed tail and cloven hoofs. (As it happens, and just to confuse matters, the bope also have cloven hoofs.) Other words are equally loaded. ‘Idols’ calls to mind misshapen, semi-human figures, lurking in the dark recesses of some pagan temple. Magicians wear top hats, wizards pointed ones, and wild spaces are liable to be inhabited by ghouls, vampires, fiends, harpies, ogres, kobolds, imps, fauns, golem, nymphs, dryads, fetishes, elves, trolls, sprites, leprechauns, shades, hobgoblins, wraiths, banshees, satyrs, kelpies, or pixies.

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On the other hand, there is no way to avoid translation. In the Bororo case, I simply import the indigenous terms bope and aroe, but this can’t go on indefinitely. The goal is not to learn Bororo. However many things there are that are special to the Bororo, most of them will have to be described with an approximate gloss. The choice of which terms to leave in Bororo depends on the focus of attention. If I was talking about social organisation rather than religion, I would have to be careful with such terms as ‘family’ and ‘house.’ The Bororo do not live in family groups the way Westerners do, nor do they inhabit structures that resemble suburban houses. For present purposes, however, there is no need to learn Bororo vocabulary related to families and houses. It is a great temptation for anthropologists to litter their accounts with indigenous terms – if only to show they know them – but that soon makes them unreadable. The general rule of thumb is that two or three terms can be introduced when they are the ones that the anthropologist is struggling to grasp and convey, and so to ‘translate’ – but not dozens. Consequently, there is a tricky balance between importing misleading connotations from English words and not talking English at all. My solution is to substitute a purposely dull and academic phrase for all the wonderfully evocative English words. The bope and aroe are, in this usage, non-human agencies. The formula is dry, but not vacuous. The word ‘agency’ means that there is something that somehow has the ability both to decide and to act. Is there perhaps another feature of the JCIC that might define religion broadly enough to include the Bororo? Worship looks promising. The Bororo have frequent ceremonies related to the aroe, and the consumption of food requires dealing with the bope on a daily basis. In neither case, however, is there much piety or solemnity. There is also the problem that the English term includes reverence to other human beings, not to mention solemnities and passions directed at national flags. In either case, we are stuck with a circular definition: religion is worship, and worship is activity in a religious context. As for credos, Bororo religion does not need them since the Bororo understanding of the world is implicit in everything they do and has been since childhood. Nor is conversion applicable. When Crocker participated in Bororo events he certainly distinguished himself from the settlers who often showed their contempt for Bororo ways, but he did not become Bororo. No one thought that when he went back to the USA he could go on living a Bororo life all on his own, however much he had absorbed the Bororo view of things. Meanwhile, if a Bororo married a non-Bororo from another Amerindian group, the in-marrying spouse would simply follow the ways of his or her adopted community without fuss. A Bororo marrying into settler society was simply lost. Prayer, understood as the invocation and supplication of non-human agencies, is not much in evidence in Bororo rites. At the most important community festivals, the aroe are somehow present, if only in the form of dancers

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wearing the elaborate feather headdresses that represent them. The first Portuguese explorers were so impressed by these colourful diadems that they called the Bororo coronodos, the “crowned ones.” The aroe, however, are not begged for favours; all that really matters about them is that they exist. As for the lurking bope, there is no need to invoke them. Regarding the concept of sin, Bororo certainly see themselves as vulnerable to their own failings. So many rules have to be observed in order to control the hyperactive bope that it is practically impossible not to make a slip sooner or later, but these errors are not sins. They do not result from evil intentions, and they do not indicate moral failings. They are at worst sins of omission, like forgetting to pay a bill on time. The gently illuminated realm of the aroe might perhaps be seen as a kind of heaven, and one that I find more convincing than those described in Christian or Islamic sources. It is in fact difficult to conjure any satisfying image of heaven, and there is an obvious reason for that. Everyone is familiar with pain, and however bad it is, it is not hard to imagine even worse or more prolonged pains. Hell is easy to picture. By contrast, humans have no experience of extended bliss; delight, almost by definition, appears only in brief flashes. Meanwhile Bororo old people, tired of the struggles of everyday life, often express a readiness to join the aroe. They are not, however, haunted by the fear of hell. There is in the Bororo understanding of things no theory of the end of time, and consequently no judgment and no messiah. Obviously, there are no canonical texts, and Crocker, however, incomplete his understanding, is the closest the Bororo have to a theologian. Regrettably, there are no Bororo to do the job because the process of getting an education inevitably takes young people away from the life of the village, to the point that they become outsiders almost as much as the foreign anthropologist. One final point: there is in Bororo ideas no notion that anybody outside Bororo society will see the world as they do. In-marrying spouses will certainly be drawn into Bororo rites, but there is no sense in which they need to be ‘converted.’ In fact, I cannot think of a single example of an independent religion that has the least trace of evangelism. Contrast that with the religions of the JCIC, each of which claims to embody truths that apply to all mankind. The result is that if I am right, you must be wrong. It is a formula for constant oppression, strife, and warfare, as much now as in the Middle Ages. Looked at from a genuinely comparative viewpoint this fratricidal ideology is not only unique but deeply perverse. The conclusion of this comparison is simply that there is no major feature of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions that is also important in the Bororo worldview, and consequently no one thing that usefully defines religion in a way that covers both. That is not all there is to be said about defining religion – far from it – but it does show the problems we are up against.

Chapter 6

On the Uselessness of Ritual

If Americans are asked why they play baseball the usual response is: it’s our national game! In the nineteenth century, travellers to remote places often received much the same response. Grilling a native about some strange practice – through an interpreter of course – the standard response was no response. All they could elicit was: it is the custom of our ancestors. From this, anthropologists of Tylor’s era concluded that such people were the ‘slaves of custom.’ For them, this state of affairs was anyway evident from their primitiveness, which in itself was enough to prove that their customs had stayed the same for thousands of years. This proposition was a mirror image of the vision they had of their own Modernity. For them, the rapid advances being made in science and technology had come about because Modern Man had liberated himself from the suffocating superstitions of the past. The peasants of Europe remained backward because they clung to outmoded ways of thinking, and the poor primitives were irrevocably sunk in antiquity, irrationality, and barbarity. From the point of view of an ethnographer, there are several dubious features of this account. First, the formulaic response attributing everything to the ancestors cannot be taken at face value. A free translation might go as follows: look, I have things to do. I can’t be sitting around here all day answering stupid questions from someone who doesn’t seem to understand the simplest things. Second, even during fieldwork spread out over a few years, or at most decades, ethnographers are well aware of changes going on around them. At the most obvious level, young people have families and valued old informants die. Oral histories tell of leaders who rose and fell, only to be replaced by others much the same. Such events are news in the communities where they occur, but they are not in themselves evidence of change. Instead, they comprise, in anthropological jargon, social processes. They do not represent change at all, but continuity. At a subtler level, people’s ideas and practices develop over time according to internal logics. Australian aborigine societies are famous for the complexity of their rules about which categories of kin are marriageable, so much so that

DOI: 10.4324/b22988 -9

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how those rules function has absorbed more attention from ethnographers than anything else. With great relief, I side step the tangled debates about the social consequences of different rules, some of which are theoretically unworkable. For present purposes, the point is that even during the century or so that ethnographers were keeping track, new variants were spreading from one part of the outback to another. It is hard to resist the conclusion that complexity itself was aesthetically pleasing to Aborigine peoples. Moreover, few of those classified in the nineteenth century as primitives were quite so isolated from the currents of world history as the Australian Aborigines. All the peoples of Southeast Asia existed for millenia on the margins of empires that were themselves linked by trade to India and China. In sub-Saharan Africa there were great migrations across the entire continent, complex polities arose, and there was contact with the Moslem world. As for the Americas, they may have been isolated from the empires of the old world, but they produced many of their own. The more we learn about prehistory, the more absurd it becomes to imagine that anyone remained somehow frozen in time. The third and most important point about the claim that the primitives were the slaves of custom is that it is everywhere the case that people seldom question their own ways of doing things. This might suggest chauvinism, the attitude that my culture is right, and everybody else’s is misguided, irrational, or downright evil, but this is not necessarily the case. As with my impatient indigene, most of us, most of the time, just get on with things without constantly asking ourselves why we do what we do. Plato thought the unexamined life not worth leading, but he was a philosopher. For non-philosophers (and non-ethnographers), there is nothing unreasonable or uncharitable about following the manners and mores that we grew up with. In particular, people do not generally sort their everyday activities into those that are ritual and those that are not. In many of the languages that ethnographers deal with, there is no word that could be glossed as ritual. In Tikopia, ritual was simply another kind of ‘work’. For the Berawan it was a part of ‘the way of doing things.’ Even in English, the word ritual has a self-conscious ring. It is seldom used in everyday English, except perhaps in an ironic way. If someone says “I went through the ritual of asking my colleagues about their weekend” it means that his or her apparent concern was not sincere. Meanwhile, Christians are not usually described as performing Christian rituals. That makes the speaker sound like an alien from outer space. Instead, Christians are said simply to go to church, just as at other times they go to work. This makes it obvious that, even more so than religion, ritual is an analytic category, not an indigenous concept. So what is gained by speaking of ritual as if it was something separate from the rest of life? To answer that question, we might begin by consulting a dictionary to see what ritual is in common usage. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that

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the term is derived from Latin ritualis and gives this definition: pertaining or relating to, connected with; of the nature of, forming, a rite or rites; a book containing the order, forms, or ceremonies to be observed in the celebration of religious or other solemn service; ritual observance, ceremonial acts. Webster’s Unabridged offers: a set form of rites; the observance of a set form of rites; a book containing rites; a ritual service or procedure; ritual acts or procedures collectively. In sum, from these two respected sources we learn that a ritual is a ritual. The New Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary does a little better, offering: any formal or customarily repeated act. If we now look up “formal” we find customarily repeated. Meanwhile, custom is given as: things done repeatedly to a traditional pattern. So all this gives us just one defining feature: repetition, and that is important because it excludes things that are unique or idiosyncratic. But surely not all repeated acts are rituals. Is a farmer ploughing a field performing a ritual? How about Henry Ford’s mass production line for the Model T? In fact, any technical skill at all must involve repetition. If we call all those things ritual, we have simply made ‘ritual’ the same as what Tikopians call ‘work’ or Berawan call ‘the way of getting things done.’ As an analytic category it evaporates. Consequently, we need another criterion to separate ritual from work, and there is one that has been repeated for a century. This version comes from a standard textbook aimed at undergraduate students: ritual is any noninstinctive predictable action or series of actions that cannot be justified by a rational, means-to-ends type of explanation. The italics are mine; in this formulation uselessness is the defining feature of ritual. How would this strike the father of the bride who was about to spend thousands of dollars – or really any amount of money, the sky’s the limit – for a wedding with all the trappings? If you asked him why he was doing it his response might be: “it’s my darling daughter’s special day; I want it to be as special as I can possibly make it.” A cynical onlooker might suggest we look at the guest list to see just who the host managed to turn out for this particular special day. In between the extremes of affection and status competition, there is room for a whole range of motives, some generous, others less so. Whatever they may be, they are powerful enough to support a large wedding industry, with multiple ritual specialists such as caterers and photographers, in addition to priests or ministers. Next time you are browsing through a magazine rack, notice just how many there are that are devoted solely to wedding dresses and wedding arrangements. Given that a wedding of this kind is supposed to be traditional, it is hard to imagine what novelties each issue contains. Evidently no one feels any sense of contradiction in the idea of the latest fashions in ‘traditional’ weddings. In fact in a wedding with all the bells and whistles the vows themselves may be the only thing that has remained recognisably the same over any length of time – and perhaps not even them. If rituals accomplish nothing, then logically there could be no possibility of failure. Try telling that to the mother of the bride, who is probably close

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to nervous collapse by the time the big day finally arrives. Merely sending out the invitations is a minefield of social gaffes. What to do about unwanted guests who will carry a grudge for years if they are not invited? What to do about couples that are now divorced? If both attend can they be relied on to be civil? If only one is to be invited, which one? In addition, there may be issues of taste contested between mother and daughter. Or perhaps there is some breakdown in communication with the caterer concerning the wedding cake. For those most responsible for the success of the event, disaster looms on every hand. Such tensions are familiar even to those of us who have never been through the ordeal because it is a stock plot line in comedy movies. Moving from farce to tragedy, or potential tragedy, consider the possibilities for failure in a Berawan funeral. If the rites do not do their job, what follows is more death. What looms is not embarrassment, but annihilation. The problem with separating “pragmatic, means-to-ends” behaviour from vacuous ritual is that what is pragmatic is in the eye of the beholder. Tylor was perfectly happy to decide for others what was irrational in their behaviour, but that will not do for the Great Project. The goal is, as far as possible, to see things from the point of view of the participants, and for that purpose the textbook definition of ritual is immediately self-defeating. Notice that I speak of ‘participants’ in the plural. Individual motivation is not the point and cannot be the point because ethnographers have no magical ability to see inside other peoples’ heads. While marriage vows are being exchanged, some of those present may be totally caught up in the event – including for best results the bride and groom – but others will no doubt be trying to disguise boredom or worse. Unless there is some major hitch in the rite, like bride and groom falling out at the altar rail, none of that will make any difference. When I once debriefed a friend of mine about his wedding, he described turning round to walk back down the aisle and being confronted by a sea of faces turned towards him, some with tears running down them, many with huge smiles, and then, as he describes it, he knew, he finally knew, that he really was married. He still is; it worked. Not all marriages do work of course, and then there is the little matter of what counts as ‘working’ in the first places. Rising divorce rates cause conservatives to announce the collapse of family values, but underlying that reaction is the premise that marriage is a sacrament, a promise made before God. Outside the JCIC, few people see it that way. Marriage for people in a Berawan longhouse is a remarkably low-ritual event. When a man moves into the apartment of his wife – seldom the reverse – the neighbours are called in for a drink. The only ritual per se is that the mother of the groom sits with her hand on the bride’s back, and other women behind her in a wavy line – a tangible network of women. There is nothing casual about the social consequences, however, because the in-marrying man becomes part of the productive unit of his wife, working on their farm and

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sharing in their harvest. Divorce is common enough, and then the man moves out and loses all rights to the food he helped grow, but if a marriage ngutok in this fashion lasts and produces children then there is the option of a second marriage, a grand party called mano aded, which might be glossed as ‘doing it up right.’ The point is that the couple has then become a nucleus of expanding social relationships. Nothing could be more respectable. Registry office marriages in the west might be compared to ngutok, but we are sadly lacking any equivalent to mano aded. Perhaps church marriages should be held back and reserved as an honour for those who manage to make a go of it. Moreover, when it comes to issues of whether rituals are or are not ‘working,’ there is always the possibility of spurious utilitarian rationales. For example, funeral rites in the USA often include embalming the corpse, and if you ask members of the Funeral Directors’ Association (FDA) why this is, they will mumble discreetly about hygiene. Surely, we can’t have rotting corpses lying about the place, how primitive. But American practices of embalming do not in fact turn corpses into slate-grey effigies like Lenin in his tomb in Red Square. Only weak formalin solutions are used, so that once underground fingers and facial features soon rot away, leaving behind a shapeless blob. When graveyards in New Orleans were washed out during hurricane Katrina gloopy, decades-old corpses floated through the streets. I once made the mistake of telling Berawan people about embalming. The technical details were tricky, but I was in no hurry because we were only willing away one of the long nights of a funeral, when all stories are welcome. I’d launched into my description because, as usual, someone asked me how we orang puteh (white men) handled all this. So I told about how the blood was pumped out by a suction machine and liquids pumped in that preserve the flesh, and then all the big organs that don’t preserve well like the liver get sucked out and replaced with gum like the stuff used to stop leaks in canoes. I was quite pleased with how well I was getting this across until I realised that everyone had drawn away from me. I was looking at a row of faces, dimly lit by a wick lantern, staring back at me in shocked disbelief. Did I mean to tell them that we deliberately trapped our nearest and dearest permanently in that most disgusting and dangerous of conditions, neither alive nor dead? Did our ancestors not curse us – if indeed we had any ancestors? Were our cities really surrounded by armies of partially rotted corpses ready to be horrifically reanimated by spirits the Berawan call telasak, like a scene out of The Night of the Living Dead? So what is embalming for exactly? If you ask Americans – and then wave away the fatuous hygiene rationale – you get no direct answers at all. Apparently, it is simply the custom of the ancestors. If you are lucky enough to find a thoughtful informant ready to put up with your questions, you get a surprisingly rambling account. The first recourse is usually a conspiracy theory: it’s all just a rip-off by the FDA designed to exploit people at a vulnerable

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moment. There is a lot to be said in support of this. The FDA certainly has lobbied for laws that increase their profits and encourage the illusion that embalming is everywhere required for, ahem, hygienic reasons. They will also try to sell you some absurd silk lined coffin about the size of a 1950s sedan. It is a rare person who has the stamina to hold his or her ground and insist on a plain pine box. Moreover, there is no need of embalming even if there is a delay while close kin assemble; the corpse can go in the freezer, just as it would at the morgue. That cannot be the end of the story, however. The FDA did not invent embalming even if it profits from it. The key to its origin in modern-day America is appropriately technological: arterial replacement. Moreover that technique predated refrigeration, which is much more difficult. So during the civil war freelance embalmers roamed the battlefields preserving corpses that they then sold back to grieving parents arriving from upstate New York or the midwest. This grim pilgrimage was fixed in the national consciousness when Abraham Lincoln made his final journey home from Washington, D.C. to Springfield, Illinois, pausing at every whistle stop to allow people to pay their respects. The economic and historical contexts are important, but still leave us with the question of why people buy into it now, or to put that in more abstract terms what is the place of the practice in contemporary American culture. Obviously, most Americans never give it a thought – and why should they? Nevertheless, they will in all probability sooner or later be present at an event at which an embalmed corpse is the centre of attention. Other things will be going on as well – quiet exchanges of sympathy, promises to stay in touch – but the formal purpose of the ‘viewing’ is for the mourners to take a last look at the deceased. The appropriate reaction is: “he/she looks so peaceful.” That effect is of course the result of the funeral director’s art, with its postmortem cosmetic surgery and paint. It is rationalised by the FDA as supplying a ‘positive memory image’ for the bereaved, so emphasising the psychological role of the ‘grief counsellor’ to match the surgical one. If mourners, especially children, produce the wrong response – ‘granny looks so dead’ – they are coached by the multiple director’s assistants. In this modern ritual sequence, the viewing has replaced the death-bed scenes that were formerly so important in the west. In nineteenth-century America, there were popular manuals on how people should prepare for death, and the crucial lesson was to invert the helplessness of the newborn: at your birth you howled as everyone about you was smiling; now you should be smiling as everyone else cries. This drama was so powerful in medieval Europe that anyone in the street – including total strangers – was supposed to follow a priest on his way to administer the last rites. Nowadays most people die in hospital and alone, and consequently, the dying themselves have lost all agency. The scene will instead be directed by professionals who know how to play it right.

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These creepy echoes between funeral directors and doctors hint at much broader issues of medicine in western, and specifically American, understandings of what it is to live and die. The embalming of corpses has, as far as I can tell, nothing to do with taking one’s body along into the afterlife. If it did, we could surely do at least as good a job at embalming as the ancient Egyptians. Instead, even for people who believe in Judgement Day, the corpse in the funeral ‘parlor’ faces back the other way, towards life. The ‘peaceful’ corpse is an icon of the faith we have in medicine: we all know we’re going to die sometime, but we expect to have the opportunity to live a full life, unburdened by constant pain or brought to an untimely end. We know that children still die of leukaemia, and we all fear the Big C, but a large number of us do in fact live lives longer and healthier than anything imaginable even a century ago. In other words, our faith is justified. The National Health Service (NHS), put in place by the post-war Labour governments, is as close as the British have to a national religion, and even the austerity-promoting Tories dare not announce their plans to abolish it. In the USA, attempts to reform the massive inefficiency of health care delivery are smothered by special interests who know very well that Americans will soon become anxious that their currently existing services may be somehow threatened. In matters this sacred, it is surely best to stick with tried and true ways of the ancestors. The first important advances in modern medicine, however, had less to deal with healing than with hygiene. The key breakthrough was in understanding how epidemic diseases spread, and how to quarantine those already infected. It is still the front-line response; when Ebola broke out in West Africa there was no cure, and everything depended on isolating the sources of infection. The disease was so contagious that the task required a massive international effort. Drugs were rapidly developed, but without the medical teams going from village to village, sheathed from head to foot in protective clothing while disposing of corpses, they would have been too late to be of any use. In the era of covid, it is hardly necessary to emphasise this point. It is a far cry from Ebola to the sign in a restaurant bathroom saying ‘Employees must wash their hands before returning to work’ but we all know that the principle is the same. Moreover, hygiene is so profoundly established in the public consciousness that it lends itself to abuse by those who would sell us things we don’t really need. In the 1950s, Madison Avenue marketed mouthwash as ‘dental hygiene,’ without which, it was implied, you were liable to sexual rejection. What wife would kiss a husband with ‘morning breath’? Later on it invented something called ‘feminine hygiene,’ which was designed to prey on the pre-feminist fears of women concerning their own uncleanness during menses. At one time Lysol was marketed as a douch; it is carcinogenic, and nowadays used only to disinfect drains. As a final absurdity, in the 1960s a product was marketed that contained a chemical, rapidly absorbed through the delicate wall of the vagina, that in some women caused

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Toxic Shock Syndrome, a sort of heart attack. We are left with the absurd prospect of a variety of hygiene that’ll kill you. This slide from pragmatic issues of hygiene towards fears of pollution is an example of what we might call ritualisation. Adequate facilities for keeping clean are essential to health, as is very obvious in parts of the world where water supplies are inadequate. But where plumbing is standardly available bathrooms lend themselves to fetishisation. The range of architectural elaboration is virtually endless; wall to ceiling mirrors, queen-sized tubs with taps of the latest design, and showers that jet everything from a mist to a skintingling cloud burst. There also needs to be enough cabinets for all the necessary beauty products, skin bracers, and so on. They accumulate there because, despite all the advertising, any one product is about as useless as the next. America clearly led the way in this process. In the immediate post-war tourist boom in Europe, hoteliers grumbled that Americans were irrationally demanding on the subject. Surely one bath and one toilet on each floor was enough; were they planning to spend the whole day in there? But Americans found the prospect of sharing a loo with utter strangers downright disgusting, and they were the ones with dollars to spend. Soon enough we were all made converts, but the gain in strictly hygienic terms is less clear. Despite the myths, sexual diseases are not contracted from toilet seats, and you are just as vulnerable to athlete’s foot in your own shower as in the communal one. The products sprayed around by the cleaning staff are really only designed to give an air of freshness, a sort of hygienic benediction. Savvy travellers carry plastic flip flops to wear in showers everywhere, regardless of how many stars their hotel has. Meanwhile, Europe had of course its own history of pollution and hygiene. Roman bathhouses required amazing feats of water reticulation and provided a public forum for politicking and doing business. In some circum-Mediterranean countries, the tradition persisted into modern times, but in northern Europe standards declined until only aristocrats could afford the luxury, with servants hurrying up from the kitchens carrying buckets of hot water. Moreover, the church took a dim view of bathing because it was often associated with sexual licentiousness. Cleanliness was not next to Godliness – quite the reverse. Body lice became so prevalent that doctors assumed they were essential to life, just as we now believe stomach flora to be. When European sailors arrived in Asia during the Age of Discovery, the refined people they met there were disgusted by how filthy and foul-smelling they were. What these examples indicate is the subtle and shifting relationship between the rational and the ritual. If we are interested in exploring other people’s worlds, we had better step carefully.

Part III

Religion and Science

Chapter 7

Einstein in the Outback

Starting with an ethnographic detail from Borneo, Tylor re-constructed to his own satisfaction an entire stage in the evolution of religion. The implication was that ancestor worship had been practiced everywhere at some time or other, and only later had concepts arisen of an abstract god, or gods. These later beliefs were also irrational, but they were at least not ‘primitive.’ Having deduced this chronology, primitive religions could then be sorted through to see how many were still passing through the ancestor worship stage. The Berawan case fit nicely, which is not surprising given that his original data came from the region. Beyond that, a fair amount of stretching of definitions and squashing of material was necessary. Nevertheless, it is still routinely asserted in some corners of academe that ancestor worship is characteristic of primitive religions. The Australian Aborigines, for example, were not very difficult to shoe-horn in. Their religions do indeed place a central emphasis on past inhabitants of their territories, who could in a pinch be described as ancestors. The question for anthropologists of the Great Project was: why bother? Surely sorting things into preconceived boxes hides more than it reveals. The indigenous religions of Australia were important to the development of anthropology for two distinct reasons. First, the Aborigines had already been nominated as the most primitive peoples on earth, as we saw in Chapter 1. Second, there was already at the beginning of the twentieth century an impressive ethnographic record. This was the result of the efforts of two remarkable men, F.J. Gillen and Baldwin Spencer. Gillen had little formal education, but long experience in the outback. He joined the telegraph service as a young man and was rapidly promoted because he was willing to be posted to remote places. Finally, he became Post and Telegraph Master at Alice Springs, in the centre of Australia. Alice Springs is now a thriving town, but in Gillen’s day it was a lonely outpost. Since government personnel were scarce, he was also made a Special Magistrate and Subprotector of Aborigines. In the latter role, he provided simple medical services and solved minor disputes. For example, the Aborigines had found that the glass insulators on the telegraph lines produced, when smashed, wonderfully sharp

DOI: 10.4324/b22988 -11

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edges. Having figured out what was going on, Gillen solved the problem neatly by supplying them with empty beer bottles, of which, despite the small population, there was an ample supply in Alice Springs. Spencer, by contrast, was a scholar, Oxford educated before being appointed as Professor of Biology at Melbourne University. Nevertheless the two got on well and spent summers together travelling in the outback. Their carefully recorded findings attracted attention both in Australia and in Europe, and in 1900 they were given funding and a year’s leave of absence to make an expedition across Central Australia. Gillen kept a diary that he sent back in instalments to his wife. Published in 1968 they provide wonderful vignettes of life with the Aborigines. They also make it clear that travelling was slow and sometimes arduous. In addition to the extremes of temperature, there were sometimes dense clouds of flies whose torments included eyelids so swollen as to render the victim temporarily blind. Both men were stoical; Gillen says about Spencer “nothing ruffles him. I swear sweat and fume he only smiles.” It is clear however that both enjoyed camp life, and the freedom to roam as they pleased. The mission was not one of exploration. All along their route there were settlers trying to make a go of it in the outback, and the two needed supplies. In particular, they needed to change horses, since the poor beasts lost condition while constantly moving, and could not protect themselves from “bung eye.” The horses were needed for the cart that carried their tents and provisions, all supervised by Mounted Constable Chance, an experienced bushman. Various Aborigines also tagged along from time to time. The cart also allowed them to carry photographic and recording equipment. The pictures of ceremonial occasions are remarkable: men with abstract designs marked across their bodies with emu down stuck on with blood and wearing elaborate head dresses, some almost the height of the wearer. The photographs are clearly posed, and the Aborigines stare stiffly into the camera, but they are irreplaceable. The sound gear also produced novel results: About 3 o’clock a friend of my youth Jacky Brown called upon us and greeted me most effusively he reeked of filth and flies but I was delighted to see him. Later on some more men turned up: we gave them a good feed and after tea rigged the phonograph and got them to sing into it a number of corroberee songs. As each song was finished we reproduced it much to the amazement of our smellful friends who left at 10 p.m. delighted with their unique entertainment. Spencer and I delighted to have these recordings which are the first ever taken amongst the Australian aborigines. The fact that we are the first to get such records consoles one for all the discomforts we are suffering from this plague of flies. If only Job lived in modern times and travelled up the Stevenson just now I’m afraid his reputation would not be so spotless.1

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Stops were made at outstations to develop pictures, bring their fieldnotes up to date, and to write home. Spencer and Gillen also maintained another correspondence. A decade earlier, Spencer had read The Golden Bough and it was this that sparked his interest in the Aborigines, and his association with Gillen. Spencer contacted Frazer, who was of course delighted to have a source so well placed to gather new information. Tylor reacted in the same way, and both suggested lines of enquiry and asked for clarification on obscure points. It was a productive relationship, whose most valuable aspect was perhaps to re-assure Spencer and Gillen that they were not indulging some eccentric hobby, but making discoveries of interest to an international audience. The help of Frazer and Tylor is acknowledged in the Preface to Spencer and Gillen’s most important book The Native Tribes of Central Australia, but the evolutionary paradigm is not much in evidence. Their main concern was to get their facts straight, and that is why their work is timeless – a sobering thought for those pursuing passing theoretical fads. What is most striking about the book is the extraordinary access that Gillen was given to things that were normally shrouded in secrecy. By 1900, he had lived in Alice Springs for twenty-five years, and he had got to know many Aborigines. Moreover, he had learned the language most widely spoken in the surrounding area, Arunta. (I retain the spelling that Gillen and Spencer used. Nowadays the name is usually written Aranda.) So great was the trust that he had earned with Arunta people that he was treated as a kind of honorary member of all of the ceremonial groups and was told all the associated myths. It is plain from the diaries that both he and Spencer took genuine pleasure in the company of Aborigine people. Gillen frequently gives sketches of the personalities he met, both pen and ink drawings in the margins of his notes and descriptions of their idiosyncrasies. He did the same for the whites he met in lonely places in the outback, and there is the same ironic tolerance in both. Next to a sketch of a dignified Aborigine man ­Gillen writes: The benevolent savage here depicted is one of our prime favourites a grand old chap whose cranium is a storehouse of Warramunga lore. Could I get inside his head for one brief hour many things that are now troubling us would be solved and the weary ethnologists would be happy. His knowledge of English is confined to two words “thank you” and “Bacca,” of the first he has but a hazy notion of its meaning of the second he has a comprehensive grasp. His appetite for the soothing weed is insatiable.2 Gillen presents an encouraging example of what can be achieved by people who are oblivious of grand social theory. Unlike his more academic partner,

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Gillen took it as his ultimate goal to see the world as Arunta people saw it. He was under no delusions that he could achieve that by deduction or some leap of empathy. He knew that he could only proceed by slow increments, based on what he saw and heard. In effect, Gillen invented the Great Project for himself, a generation before the professionals got there. Like all the ethnographers who followed him, Gillen confronted the simple truth that he had no way of getting inside anyone else’s head. It follows that the ethnographer’s task is never completed. Always, there are key ideas that resist simple translation. The sort of neat closure that nineteenth-century proto-anthropologists promoted is what betrays their falsehood. To avoid that is to keep alive the puzzlement, the sense of wonder, that is the whole point of the enterprise in the first place. Secrecy is a pervading feature of Aborigine religions, but beyond that there are few generalisations that hold true across the entire continent. It is estimated that at the beginning of European settlement in 1788 the Aboriginal population was about 750,000 divided into some 500 named groups speaking over 200 languages. It is only to be expected across that range there was great cultural variation. Consequently, I discuss only the Arunta, and some immediate neighbours, as described by Spencer and Gillen. They were, however, themselves trapped by terminology they had not made up. The most obvious was ‘totemism.’ It is a term that I would rather avoid, since the controversies surrounding it are so tangled as to make it meaningless as a general concept. But Spencer and Gillen give it a specifically Arunta meaning, so I simply follow their definition: Every individual of the tribes with which we are dealing is born into some totem – that is he or she belongs to a group of persons each of whom bears the name of, and is especially associated with, some natural object. The latter is usually an animal or plant; but in addition to those of living things, there are also such totems names as wind, sun, water or cloud – in fact there is scarcely an object, animate or inanimate, to be found in the country occupied by the natives which does not give its name to some totemic group of individuals.3 The knotty problem is to understand the nature of this ‘association.’ Spencer and Gillen state it in terms of social allegiances, as if totemic groups were teams in some sport. They constantly refer to the emu people, or the honey ant people, or the fire people, and so on ad infinitum. Moreover, it does sometimes sound as if a game of some kind was going on, even if the teams did not compete on the same field. At one camp near Alice Springs, Gillen and Spencer were invited almost every day, and sometimes twice a day, to come to one ceremony or another. They grew weary of hurrying between them carrying their heavy photographic equipment. Perhaps the presence of Gillen and Spencer and their camera spurred competition among totemic

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groups about who had the most splendid finery, but there was certainly nothing new about the festival. There was, however, much more to the “association” than simply team colours. Membership was conferred by birth, but had nothing to do with parentage. The criterion was instead where the mother happened to be when she became pregnant. This must in practice have meant when the mother-to-be became aware of being pregnant, although Gillen’s diary records a case where the mother heard a child’s voice call out to her. Then she knew that a spirit child (erathipi) had entered her. Not wanting to be pregnant, she ran away, but it was too late: she was young and plump and the spirit children are known to prefer such women. This encounter took place near a sacred site of the witchetty grub, and so that was the totem of the child, regardless of the totemic connections of the mother or father. Let us pause here to note that this is another example of culture creating biology, rather than the other way around. The Arunta evidently did not know “the facts of life.” Just as the Berawan did not see death as mere bodily malfunction, so the Arunta did not think that copulation had anything to do with conception. Instead, as Gillen says, “the old men of the tribe have a thousand and one ways of reserving all the best things for themselves.”4 All the tastiest foods they prohibited to the young men, and in the same way, they married the young women. This was simply a matter of appetites; it had nothing to do with perpetuating a line of descent. Issues of continuity had to do with totems, not genetics, and there were ways in which individuals merged with their totems. For instance, Gillen records this story about a lizard man: When he first came to life he was stiff and could only move with difficulty but after lying in the sun for some time he was able to straighten himself. He then examined himself all over and filled out as he did so then looking around he saw some lizards and said “these are the same as me” “these are me”, in every direction he looked he saw lizards and said “these are me” “there I am again”. He journeyed away to a place called Unqurtunga where he met a great Oknirabata of the nail tailed wallaby (Onychogale lunta) totem whose name was Arilkirra and to whom he said you are a big man look at yourself well and keep on looking at yourself and by and by you will have many sons picanninnies. I had no mother I sprung up. Keep looking at yourself as I did until I saw a mob of lizards around. If you look at yourself well you will see a lot of wallabys which will be you. Arilkirra “looked at himself ” and had many Sons.5 The lizard man just “sprung up,” but he was not part of any original creation in the manner of Genesis, since there were already lizards about. Instead, he somehow recognised himself in the lizards, having warmed himself in

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the sun, as any lizard would, and then examined himself all over. Then he journeys away and falls into conversation with a man who is versed in tribal lore, an oknirabata. Consequently, this man already knew that he belonged to the wallaby totem, but the lizard man still advised him to “look at himself.” The wallaby man, however, did not “spring up.” Even the reward of having many sons is ambiguous. Does it mean there will be lots of wallabys, or that the man will be frequently re-incarnated, or just that his wives will produce lots of boys, whatever totem they happen to be? That Gillen puts the phrase “looked at himself ” in inverted commas indicates that he was making a literal translation, but just what negotiation of man and nature is involved remains mysterious. In addition to the lizard/man ambiguity, there is also a temporal displacement. The lizard man belonged to the alcheringa, which Spencer and Gillen define in their glossary as “the far past times in which the mythical ancestors of the tribe are supposed to have lived.” In the story, however, the alcheringa being on his travels meets a human not from the alcheringa since he already has an alcheringa ancestor of his own, who was presumably a wallaby man who “just sprung up.” Had the lizard-man just then re-enacted his original springing up? Or was the elder somehow transported to the alcheringa? The crucial point is that this was not a detail that bothered either Gillen or the story teller. It would be useful to know more about how Arunta expresses tense, if indeed it does, but again and again Arunta stories imply that the alcheringa is somehow still happening or unfolding. Gillen tried to catch this quality by translating alcheringa as “the dreaming.” It is a suggestive phrase, and it caught on. He is now castigated for later uses of the term in all kinds of misleading contexts, but that is hardly his fault.6 In Arunta, specifically, his gloss is justified by contexts in which dreaming – that universal human activity – is indeed associated with The Dreaming. At this point, Tylor would have heard enough. What further proof could there be of the murky confusions of primitive thought? Not only could the Arunta not distinguish between humans and animals – or even vegetables – but they could not keep clear in their heads the difference between past and present. As it happens, we now know that damage to the hippocampus can produce a condition in which people can’t create new memories. Someone in this condition has difficulty comprehending the passing of time and can’t distinguish between things that happened five minutes or five years ago. Had Tylor known this, he might have concluded that the less-evolved aboriginal brain lacked the necessary development in the hippocampus. He might even have argued that nothing had changed in the Aboriginal lifestyle in thousands of years, so they had nothing to remember anyway. On the other hand, there are ways that the notion of the dreaming neatly matches twentieth-century developments in physics. Albert Einstein famously wrote “the past, present and future are only illusions, even if stubborn ones.”

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What made him say this was that in his calculations the variable t, time, cancelled itself out and so disappeared from his equations. Time, he concluded, is not a fundamental aspect of the universe.7 My point here is not that the Aborigines in some mystical way knew about the theory of relativity, but only that Tylor certainly did not know about it. Tylor’s brand of nineteenthcentury rationalism existed in a world governed by the certainties of Newtonian physics. In the twenty-first century, it is Tylor’s views that look, perhaps not primitive, but at least old-fashioned. Another feature of the dreaming is that it is anchored to very specific places. To quote Gillen’s diary again: Each man woman and child of this tribe is associated with some natural feature such as a tree or rock this feature marks the spot where their Alcheringa ancestor died – every person now living is reincarnation of an Alcheringa individual.8 It is telling that within the same sentence Gillen refers to Arunta people as both descendants of the alcheringa beings and also as reincarnations of them, and the evident interchangeability of these terms is noticeable throughout Spencer and Gillen’s book. What this suggests is that both words convey something of the Arunta concept, but neither quite captured it to their satisfaction. What we can say is that living people somehow embody the alcheringa beings, but not in any simple genealogical way. After all, a child’s totem may be different to both parents. So much for ancestor worship. Arunta people explain totemic relationships in terms of journeys made by the alcheringa beings. Spencer and Gillen record dozens of these narratives, and collecting them was clearly a major part of their research. An edited version of one of the shorter ones will give some idea of their format: Two women of the Unjiamba (Hakea flower) totem, named Abmoara and Kuperta, sprang up at Ungwuranunga, about twenty five miles north of Alice Springs. Leaving this place they entered the ground, and came out again at Arapera, where they saw a wild cat woman named Arilthamarariltha, who originated here and whose descendant is now alive. The two women did not join her but camped close by, and ate Unjiamba, on which they always fed. Thence travelling above ground, they went to Okillalatunga and walked about looking for Unjiamba women, but did not see another. Thence they went to Unthipita where they played about, and looked for Unjiamba. They travelled on to the Ooraminna rockhole, where they went into the earth, and two large stones mark the spot. The descendent of Abmoara is now living, and one of these stones is her Nanja. The descendant of Kuperta died recently, and it will be some time before she will again undergo reincarnation.9

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The term nanja is described in Spencer and Gillen’s glossary as follows: The term applied to some natural object which arose to mark the spot where an ancestor of the mythical past went into the ground, leaving behind his spirit part. The tree or stone is the nanja of that spirit, and also of the human being in the form of whom it undergoes reincarnation.10 The story of the two Hakea flower women has several characteristic features. First, the route is carefully specified: Ungwaranunga, Arapera, Okillalatunga, Unithipita, and Ooraminaa are real places that could have been pointed out to Spencer and Gillen, and perhaps were. Second, from an outsider’s point of view the route is unmotivated, that is, there is no obvious reason why these sites are linked together in the story rather than others. Third, the alcheringa beings have superhuman powers. In addition to their ‘springing up,’ they can travel aboveground or underground. Fourth, the story always finishes with the alcheringa beings going into the earth, and that place is marked by rocks or trees that are familiar features for everyone living nearby, and sometimes even to people from considerable distances away. At that place, something of the alcheringa being persists and gives rise to the spirit children that make women pregnant. Finally, Abmoara and Kuperta not only ate Hakea flowers, but also looked for other Hakea women. Evidently they were not the primordial origin of all Hakea people, but just one instance of Hakea beings “springing up.” Major features of the landscape such as mountains and rivers are not attributed to alcheringa beings. Consequently, the nanja are best thought of as monuments. Each evokes its own story from a distant past, so that to travel between places is also to travel between times, like a nineteenth-century gentleman making the Grand Tour: a Roman Temple here, a Renaissance palace there. The philosopher Edward Casey argues that this is a general phenomenon because where we live is not a neutral space, but marked with our own experiences. For many urban people, the daily round is remarkably limited in geographical terms: back and forth to the office, with an occasional side trip to the supermarket. There are to be sure other familiar locations, an old school perhaps, or the houses of friends. But in an unfamiliar city, the suburbs seem to go on forever, drab and featureless, unmarked by any recognition or memory. We are not so much earthlings, says Casey, as placelings. Places do not so much exist as happen. This captures neatly something about the Arunta experience of the landscape. For the Arunta, these happening places are spread over miles of red desert sparsely covered with spinifex and mulga.11 Here again, there is an echo of modern science. Einstein’s relativity means that there is no moment, now, that exists throughout the cosmos. Consequently, time is best thought of as a fourth dimension. For instance, if we try to say where the moon is in three dimensions the coordinates will constantly change, and, worse, will vary according to the observer’s location. It is more

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satisfactory to think of the moon in four dimensions, as a spiral in space, its shape governed by the fact that it is circling both earth and sun. It is true that the fourth dimension has some odd properties: if I move something from A to B I can always move it back to A again, but I can’t repair a broken window by throwing the stone back through it. This is deeply puzzling to physicists, but for present purposes what concerns us is the concept of a time-space continuum. A striking example of this is provided by how we view the night sky. For all normal purposes, the stars are simply there, grouped into constellations and galaxies passing regularly overhead. But this illusion disappears as soon as an astronomer points out that some dots of light come from stars so far away that the light has been travelling for millions of years to get to our eyes. There is no way of knowing if they still exist. By comparison, the moon is close enough that for all intents and purposes we are seeing it as it is. In between there is variation, each star representing a different moment in time. Lying on your back and staring into the void, you can experience a kind of vertigo, as if you might drop into outer space, like the opening sequence in Star Trek. What you see does not exist. This mind-stretching experience is an example of what physicists call a timescape. The night sky is a timescape, and the Arunta notion of the dreamtime is another. Given the subtlety of this understanding of geography, it is not surprising that disputes about aboriginal land rights tie themselves up in legal knots. A mining company wanting to exploit a particular area is frustrated to hear that there are sacred sites everywhere. Their lawyers may even imply that the Aborigines are just making them up to be obstructive. For the claimants, however, it is impossible to imagine how the land could not be full of sacred places, each one located by its own narrative. In the story of the Hakea women, I edited out phrases referring to the objects they took along on their trip. They were of two kinds, nurtunja and churinga. Both types existed in the dreamtime and continued to be used in the ceremonies Spencer and Gillen witnessed. A nurtunja was a pole decorated in various ways and emblematic of a totem creature or plant. Churinga were pieces of wood or stone, ground or carved into a flat elliptical shape. They varied in size from a few inches to four or five feet, and they had abstract patterns of lines and circles incised on their surfaces. These designs constituted a kind of aide-memoire for the journeys of the alcheringa beings, but they could only be read by older men who had passed through all the stages of initiation, and so learned their secrets. The most important were kept hidden away near the places where the alcheringa beings went into the earth. Women were strictly prohibited from going near these sites, let alone seeing the churinga themselves. Some older men succeeded in accumulating a hoard of churinga, inherited when other members of their totem group died. As Spencer and Gillen remark, such collections constituted wealth for the Arunta. A man rich in churinga was described as oknirabatta, or great teacher, and commanded considerable respect.

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In addition, there was an abstract meaning to the word churinga that Spencer and Gillen translate as “sacred or secret.” The influential French sociologist Emile Durkheim, having read Spencer and Gillen, seized onto the notion of the sacred, and built around it a theory of religion, which he sets out in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1917). The book was written late in his career, and of all Durkheim’s works it is the most influential in anthropology. The adjective ‘elementary’ in his title is somewhat slippery. To begin with, Durkheim seems only to reiterate the standard evolutionist claims about the primitiveness of all things Aborigine, but his emphasis shifts as he proceeds. It is not so much that Aborigine religions are the most ancient, but that they are most different. He also took it that they were simple and consequently reveal what is most fundamental in religion. Given the complexity that Spencer and Gillen reveal, it seems a naïve proposition. Nevertheless, it allowed him to frame a crucial definition: religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things.12 It is, of course, an essentialist definition of the type reviewed in Chapter 5. His next move, however, is more interesting. Having merely passed on the problem of definition from ‘religion’ to ‘the sacred,’ Durkheim declines to tell us what constitutes the sacred, on the grounds that it may take innumerable forms. This response is regularly dismissed as simply dodging the question, but that misses the point. Durkheim’s position was a liberation because he effectively abandons the whole question of definition. In this way, Durkheim opened the door for the Great Project. Instead of a definition what he offered was a test for finding the sacred, so that the obvious next step was to apply the test worldwide, and discover empirically what constituted the sacred in different cultural traditions. The test involved dividing rituals into two classes, positive and negative. Positive rituals were celebratory in nature – special occasions marked off from the everyday mundane world. What marked them off were negative rites, that is, prohibitions, or tabus of some kind. This analysis, naturally, fits nicely with the Arunta material. There were sacred sites from which women and children were rigorously excluded, and there were things hidden there, the churinga, that could be displayed only in carefully prepared ritual contexts. The model worked just as well, however, in any small country church in France. Typically, steps lead up to a door framed by an arch that is the most elaborately carved feature, full of Christian iconography. On entering men take off their hats, and once inside only the most boorish of visitors talk loudly, even if the premises are deserted. Most people turn to one side or the other, conscious of the powerful symbolic associations of walking down the aisle. Along the walls are plaques illustrating the stations of the cross. The altar is at the far end and commands the most respect. It is hardly imaginable that anyone, Christian or not, could be so barbarously insensitive as to sit on it. Even so, the most sacred thing of all still remains hidden, namely, the host used in the eucharist. Only a priest can produce it for the congregation, and only after careful ritual preparations.

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From this basic plan, any number of elaborations are possible. Typically, a cathedral has foyers, multiple aisles, and walls covered with memorials. A rood screen hides the high altar from the view of ordinary congregants seated in the nave, and elaborately carved wooden partitions surround it on all sides. During services, only priests and the choir are allowed inside, but laymen can peek through holes in the partition and glimpse what is going on. Behind the elevated and secluded high altar, there is an ambulatory that passes multiple smaller side chapels, each with its own altar, for smaller family rituals. The most important of these is the Mary chapel, which is at the far eastern end of the complex. The model of nesting boxes, each more intensely sacred than the last, works remarkably well in all kinds of sacred architecture worldwide, in churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples of all kinds. For example, the temple of Karnak in Upper Egypt was approached from the bank of the Nile by way of an arcade of statues. Then the worshiper passed between two massive stone pylons and entered the first courtyard beyond which lay the extraordinary hypostyle hall, so densely packed with rows of huge columns, dimly lit from above, that it was easy to become disoriented. Wherever one stood there were views along two axes, left and right, forward and backward, but the rest of the view was crowded out by a forest of columns that were originally brightly painted with sacred scenes. The effect must have been dazzling for laymen, assuming they were allowed in this far. Beyond that were multiple doorways and corridors with ever lower ceilings, until at the very centre lay the holy of holies, a tiny room, lightless and airless, about as big as a broom closet. That, of course, is where the sacred statue of the god Amun-Re was kept – but not all the time. The great festivals of ancient Egyptian religion involved visits that one god paid to another in their temples along the Nile. There were magnificent processions that wound through all the courtyards and down to the river, onto the barge, and then into the temple of the host deity, always accompanied by priests of various ranks, and crowds of awed commoners. These processions were not all there was to Egyptian religion, but imagining them gives some feel for it as lived experience rather than a static pantheon of bizarre deities. The Forbidden city in Beijing has an even more complex floor plan, but at its centre there was a living person rather than a statuette, and he was not hidden in a box. On the contrary, seated on his grand throne, the Emperor looked down flight after flight of broad staircases, though one gate after another, and down an avenue that went straight as an arrow across the horizon. The drama of the sacred geography is well captured in the opening scenes of The Last Emperor for which thousands of extras were dressed as mandarins, eunuchs, and soldiers each in its own courtyard and all bowing together on cue – an amazing spectacle. I am told that tourists are nowadays invited to sit on the throne, but few ever do. Even after the various revolutions, cultural and otherwise, it remains charged with power, and it is noticeable that the most

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sacred place in the People’s Republic is still the square directly in front of the palace. Stores of sacred power evidently do not dissipate easily; the conquistadors built their cathedrals on top of Aztec temple mounds, and there is a disused mosque on one of the pylons at Karnak. When it was built sand evidently covered the whole site, but people knew where it had been, and the power lingered. All this is well and good, but some religions lack sacred architecture of any kind. There were no temples attached to Berawan longhouses. Prayers were made outside the house in front of an apparatus built for the occasion, with a row of eight sticks each holding an egg in a cleft on the top end. They were hardly sacred, however. After use they were left to fall to pieces, and I once saw an elderly man, already well into his cups, make a sweeping gesture midprayer, lose his balance, and tumble right through his line of sticks. No one was shocked, however; on the contrary, they were delighted – a festival that does not border on chaos was judged a failure. Liveliness is the whole point. There were however things that were formidably sacred and they were the songs that invited the ancestors to the longhouse. Out of the proper ritual context, they were lethal. If they were sung when there was no corpse in the house, there soon would be one. On one occasion, I was humming in a way that reminded people of the songs, and I was immediately hushed into silence. At one funeral, I was allowed to record the key songs, but the recordings were useless. During the funeral, the old people that knew the songs were preoccupied, even if sober. At any other time, no one would dream of letting me play the tapes back, let alone sitting with me while I worked them through verse by verse. One old lady volunteered to go down to the coast with me, on the grounds that she didn’t care if it killed people down there. She had it in mind to see the big city, but her family vetoed the idea. What if she herself died? A corpse can never be brought into the longhouse, although the rule was sometimes bent if it could be sneaked in quietly before the death was announced. The old lady however would be several days travel away – no proper funeral for her – and I was intimidated by the idea of her dying in the hotel room next to mine. What would I tell the police? So the project was abandoned. I have the recordings still, but they will remain useless; all the old people who might once have translated them for me are long since gone.

Chapter 8

Real Knowledge of Real Worlds

The anthropologists of Sir James Frazer’s generation were preoccupied by magic. That was because it represented for them the very earliest stage of human mental evolution, back before religion had been invented. Religion constituted an advance because humans finally noticed that magic didn’t always work. After thinking that over for a millennium or two, they decided that there was something out there that interfered with their magic, so that it worked sometimes and not others. The most obvious of those non-human agencies was the ancestors, whose existence had already been deduced (incorrectly) from the mysterious but universal experience of dreaming. After that, human creativity produced gods and demons in vast profusion. In its latest stage of evolution, the higher religions had converged towards an abstract notion of a single God. This refinement was to be applauded, but it remained an illusion. The true liberation from error awaited the advent of the natural sciences. In this narrative, magic is simply dud science. People tried to bring about useful ends by practical means – that is without invoking devils or deities – but they failed because they could not rationally relate cause and effect. In the words of Lucien Levy-Bruhl, primitive thought was ‘mystical’ and ‘prelogical.’ Given how lost in error the primitives were, it was amazing that they survived at all. It could only have happened because, being closer to nature, the lives of the primitives were mostly governed by instinct. After all, a lion knows how to stalk game, and a sparrow can find crumbs. Moreover, it was obvious that they only just managed to survive. Before agriculture made secure food supplies possible, people spent all their waking hours scratching around for edible roots and berries and lived permanently on the edge of starvation. This myth is one of the most persistent legacies of nineteenth-century anthropology. It crops up with dreary regularity in introductory textbooks in economics, but it had been debunked even before Tylor’s theories were

DOI: 10.4324/b22988 -12

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popularised. Travelling in some of the harshest terrain in Western Australia in the 1830s, Sir George Grey found that: Generally speaking, the natives live well; in some districts there may be at particular seasons a deficiency of food, but if such is the case, these tracts are at those times deserted. It is, however, utterly impossible for a traveler or even for a strange native to judge whether a district affords an abundance of food, on the contrary …But in his own district a native is very differently situated; he knows exactly what it produces, the proper time at which the several articles are in season, and the readiest means of procuring them. According to these circumstances he regulates his visits to different portions of his hunting ground, and I can only say that I have always found the greatest abundance in their huts.1 He describes as “ludicrous” the reports that Aborigines “have small means of subsistence, or are at times greatly pressed for want of food.” He cites the case of a traveller in the outback appalled to find a group of Aborigines reduced, as he thought, to collecting gum from mimosa trees. What he didn’t know was that the apparently unappetizing gum was considered a great treat and that the people he met had come there for the specific purpose of harvesting it while it was abundant. Moreover, the gum makes an easily stored source of nutriment, allowing people to camp together for weeks at a time, as in the engwuru festival described in Chapter 7. Just how sophisticated and effective were subsistence economies of indigenous Australians has recently been documented in detail by Bill Gammage.2 He shows that the Australia that Europeans discovered in 1788 was anything but the wilderness they thought it was. On the contrary, its mix of grasslands and woods had been created and maintained by generations of land management, for which the most important tool was the discriminating use of fire. Gammage distinguishes between “hot” and “cool” fires. Hot fires occur where brush and leaves have accumulated over some time. They move slowly and leave a blackened landscape, charred to the tree tops. For a settler, such fires were a disaster, but if the timing is right the vegetation recovers quickly. Moreover, what grows back is entirely predictable. Bluegums are particularly fire resistant, and they produce an open canopy with dappled light below it, allowing many useful plants and animals to flourish. Meanwhile, a rapidly moving grass fire hardly damages the trees at all and was often “cool” enough that Australians (by which Gammage means indigenous Australians) could step through it. New grass soon sprang up, attracting large game animals such as kangaroo. The result was that the Australia that Europeans found was a park as carefully managed as that of any English duke. The first geographers to take an interest in the landscape were hard put to explain why stretches of pleasantly wooded country lay side by side, on the same soil and terrain, with swathes of

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lush grasslands. Needless to say, under European management things rapidly degenerated. A thick scrub, almost impassable in places, invaded the pastures that had attracted the settlers in the first place, but few drew the obvious conclusion that they would do well to consult the Australians who had previously managed things better. Gammage’s book is a protest against this mindless vandalism. The only Australians allowed to continue their lives in peace were those in the inhospitable central desert, where, beyond the reach of European settlement, they still found ample supplies of everything they needed, just as Grey reported in 1841. As it turns out, what we have discovered about the economies of Australians is born out in other places where hunting and gathering lifeways persisted into the twentieth century. The most detailed research has been done among the San people of Botswana who live in a state of what Marshall Sahlins called “primitive affluence” in the Kalahari Desert. Their staple food is the energy-rich mangetti nut, which Richard Lee found was “so abundant that millions of the nuts rotted on the ground each year for want of picking.”3 Lee estimated that adult San people on average spent not much more than two hours a day in finding food and that included intermittent hunting trips. The estimates for Australians are only slightly higher. Moreover, there were occasions when there was amazing abundance. In the 1840s, John Edward Eyre found as many as 600 people camped together along the Murray river, where the number of fish obtained in a few hours was “incredible.” This finding, it must be emphasised, is the result of sober-sided research. It is not romanticism, and there is not a Noble Savage in sight. It does however flatly contradict Thomas Hobbes’ characterisation of life in a State of Nature: “No arts, no letters, no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”4 The lack of letters we may concede, the rest is pure hogwash. In particular, travellers often remarked on how tall, well built, and healthy the Australians were. So much is this the case that it turns the question on its head: why in heaven’s name did people abandon their former freedom and tie themselves to the endless drudgery of the peasant? Archaeologists have struggled mightily with this question and their answers are usually framed in terms of a challenge/ response model. The challenge is often a change in local climactic conditions such that foraging becomes less productive. The technical response is domestication of some range of plants and animals so as to feed the excess population. If that tips off further demographic growth, then the move becomes irreversible and serfdom in some form or another awaits. What now to make of the image of the indigenous peoples of Australia lost in a fog of magic and prelogical thought? Instead, Gammage shows inhabitants paying close attention to the details of their own particular econiches, in all their variety, across a vast continent. As Grey pointed out, the astounding – one might almost say magical – way that his guides found food and water

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in the most unpromising places was the result of specific local knowledge. Instinct had nothing to do with it. On the contrary, it bore witness to a wealth of practical experience passed on from generation to generation. One of Gammage’s informants gave the example of a child being shown a tree, and then taught: everything there is to know about the existence of that tree. When it blooms, the insects that live in its branches and bark, the birds and animals that use that type of tree only for food and shelter, what certain parts of the tree can be used (food or healing). Then he or she is taught about the surrounding vegetation, landscape, geology and climate.5 The genius of the Australians was to preserve and refine this science over generations beyond counting. I use the term science deliberately, and for two reasons. First, it refutes the fanciful nineteenth idea that an epoch of pure magic somehow preceded the advent of real knowledge of real worlds. Second, the study of indigenous bodies of knowledge has been a major focus of anthropological research since the 1950s. It constitutes the field known as ethnoscience, the idea being that the natural sciences taught in universities have counterparts in folklore elsewhere. In any particular place, the science of botany is matched locally by an ethnobotany, and the same for ethnobiology, ethnoastronomy, and so on. There is as yet no field of ethno-particle physics, but for all I know it may lie unexplored, at least by westerners, in the Rig Veda. There are Hindu scholars who claim that western nations learned the secrets of nuclear fission from the Vedas. One of the pioneers of ethnoscience was Harold Conklin, who worked for many years with Hanunoo people of Mindoro, one of the islands of the Philippines. He paid particularly close attention to what they knew about the flora and fauna of their forest environment, which was impressive. His goal was to find out how Hanunoo people divided up the world of living things into categories and sub-categories, in a manner analogous to the Linnaean classification. In describing his method, he gives the example of a farmer drawing someone’s attention to a particular pepper plant. He might say something like “look at this big plant here.” Or – and this is more interesting – he might use a classificatory term. Conklin used the following eliciting frame: maluq, qinda pag _____, “Hey, take a look at this ______.” At different levels of contrast, the term in the empty space might be:

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As it turns out, Hanunoo people distinguish over twenty varieties of house yard pepper plants, divided, as his example indicates, into three levels of classification.6 The research necessary to establish Hanunoo botanical classifications was arduous because all possible combinations had to be checked: is X a kind of Y? Is Y a kind of X? As Conklin himself notes, in theory this includes questions such as: is a poodle a type of snail? It was so boring for informants that they had to be paid to undergo the ordeal. However, since all that was needed was a native speaker of Hanunoo, it was easier to bring the informant to the ethnographer rather than the other way around – a far cry from Firth in Tikopia or Crocker among the Bororo – but this is no surprise if one thinks of ethnoscience as an extension of the standard methods of linguistic elicitation. Nevertheless, the methodology was sometimes referred to sceptically as “little white room” ethnography, and what exactly its results signified was hotly debated.7 Ethnoscientists thought of themselves as engaging in practical semantics, in cornering just how meaning was in practice conveyed. They did this by revealing the criteria – or in the technical jargon, components – that distinguished one taxon from another. For instance, the difference in everyday English between “tree” and “bush” is – and I speak here as a native informant – mostly a matter of height, and perhaps whether there is a noticeable trunk. This is hardly a useful distinction for a botanist; instead the taxa tree and bush are features of Anglophone ethnoscience. What ethnoscientists established beyond doubt is that people who live or lived in pre-industrial societies often had a remarkably extensive factual knowledge about their natural environment. The findings of American ethnoscientists fascinated the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, but he took them in another direction. He quotes at length from Conklin’s field notes: At 0600 and in a light rain. Langba and I left Parina for Binli …At Aresaas, Langba told me to cut off several 10 X 50 cm. strips of bark from an anapla killa tree (Albizzia procera (Roxb.) Benth.) for protection against the leeches. By periodically rubbing the cambium side of the sapanceous (and poisonous: Quisumbling 1947:148) bark over our ankles and legs – already wet from the rain-soaked vegetation – we produced a most effective leech-repellant lather of pink suds. At one spot along the trail near Aypud, Langba stopped suddenly, jabbed his walking stick sharply into the side of the trail and pulled up a small weed, tawag kugum buladlad

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(Buchnera urticifolia R.Br.) which he told me he will use as a lure … for a spring-spear boar trap. A few minutes later, and we were going at a good pace, he stopped in a similar manner to dig up a small terrestrial orchid (hardly noticeable beneath the other foliage) known as liyamliyam (Epipogum roseum (D.Don.) Lindl.). This herb is useful in the magical control of insect pests which destroy cultivated plants. At Binli, Langba was careful not to damage those herbs when searching through the contents of his palm leaf shoulder bag for apug ‘slaked lime’ and tabaku (Nicotiana tabacum L.) to offer in exchange for other betel ingredients with the Binli folk. After an evaluative discussion about the local forms of betel pepper (Piper betle L.) Langba got permission to cut sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas L. Poir.) vines of two vegetatively distinguishable types kamuti inaswang and kamuti lupaw … In the camote patch, we cut twenty-five vine-tip sections (about about 75 cm. long) and carefully wrapped them in the broad fresh leaves of the cultivated saging saba (Musa sapientum compressa Blco. Teoforo) so that they would remain moist until we reached Langba’s place. Along the way we munched on a few stems of tubu minuma, a type of sugar cane (Sacharum officinarum L.), stopped once to gather fallen areca nuts (Areca catechu L.) and another time to pick and eat the wild cherrylike fruits from some bugnay shrubs (Antidesma brunius L. Spreng). We arrived at the Mararim by mid-afternoon having spent much of our time on the trail discussing changes in the surrounding vegetation in the last few decades.8 What struck Levi-Strauss was that Langba’s primary motivation in his botanizing was simply wanting to know, that is, curiosity – the wellspring of all western science. Just like the natural philosophers of the Enlightenment, he set about observing, sorting, and naming. Conklin’s role as ethnologist was to match the two systems, and his success is shown by Latin species names inserted after each Hanunoo name. Effectively, he had to study botany in two languages at the same time – a formidable research agenda! Meanwhile, there was nothing unique about Langba’s activities. The Indians of the north-eastern United States had an elaborate herpetology, even though reptiles had for them no economic use whatever. Siberians knew a great deal about beatles, which were equally useless, and so on, example after example, worldwide. In the face of this evidence, it is impossible to maintain that primitive people only knew the bare minimum they needed to survive, or that populations failing to reach even this minimum simply died out – evolution at work. In place of this dreary materialism, what comes into view is a something far more creative. Langba’s pure science, however, immediately spilled over into the applied variety, and not without success. Anyone who has ever travelled through a rainforest infested with leeches knows what a trial they are. They look like nothing more than threads of cotton hanging below the branches, and

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they can hang there inert for decades, but when they detect the odour of sweat, which is the only thing their sensory apparatus can detect, they launch themselves blindly into space. If they land on skin, they drill a hole and ingest blood, causing their bodies to swell into a sack perhaps an inch or so in diameter. Clothing provides some defence, but they nevertheless find their way inside. Every once in a while, it is necessary to stop, strip off, and remove the swollen leeches, but it is a mistake to just pull them off because the jaws remain lodged in the skin. Blood continues to flow, and sepsis can easily follow, causing painful and dangerous tropical ulcers. Instead, the leech must be encouraged to withdraw its jaws and continue its reproductive cycle elsewhere. This can be done by putting salt on them, but salt is rarely available. In Borneo, the favourite technique was to stop for a cigarette and then touch the lit end to the leech’s sack. This was effective, but there were often sacks that had already been burst in the act of walking. So bloody armpits and underwear were a familiar part of forest expeditions. All this could apparently be avoided when travelling with Langba. I do not know whether Albizzia procera grows in Borneo, but I am sure its active element would by now have been isolated if leeches were more common on suburban back lawns. Perhaps global warming will bring that about, and some pharmaceutical company already has a product ready to market. Meanwhile, big pharma is by no means too proud to pay attention to folk remedies in such places as the Amazon rainforest. Clearly, they appreciate that indigenous peoples do indeed have worthwhile information about the amazing biodiversity of the region, regardless of whether that data is to be called science or ethnoscience. Langba’s next stop was to collect Buchnera urticifolia as bait for wild pigs. As far as I know, no research has been done to establish scientifically whether pigs are or are not attracted by the smell of these weeds. It seems credible, but it would take a lot of testing to establish it as a fact. Identical spring spear boar traps would have to be set up, some with B. urticifolia and others with an odourless bait of similar colour. In the jargon of drug testing, this needed to be a “double blind” test. To avoid any unconscious skewing of results, which traps contained the bait and which the placebo had to be kept a secret from both the researchers and the recipients, in this case the pigs. Then the test should be repeated, with the baited and baitless traps reversed, and in other seasons and so on. Lacking such controlled testing, we only have Langba’s word for it. The effectiveness of Langba’s next discovery looks distinctly more dubious. Conklin himself says that Epipogum roseum is used in the “magical” control of pests, by which he presumably means that it did not work. Conklin does not tell us how the orchid was used. Perhaps if it were ground up and made into a solution to be sprayed onto the crops we might suspend judgment, but not if it was buried in a corner with spells muttered over it.

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For the rest of it, Langba collected varieties of cultigens to experiment with at home, and finding fruit and sugar cane to eat along the way. No magic there. In its applied stage, Langba’s science was solidly built on the experimental method, which is to say he would try anything. Just what it was that suggested to him that orchids might be good for controlling pests is where the magic comes in. In The Golden Bough, Frazer offers this famous classification of “the branches of magic according to the laws which underlie them” 9:

|

Sympathetic Magic (Law of Empathy) |

Homeopathic Magic (Law of Similarity)

|

Contagious Magic (Law of Contact)

In his usual thorough fashion, he piles up examples from every corner of the world and every age to illustrate the working of his Laws. For instance, it is indeed the case that a common mode of magical attack involves getting hold of something from the victim’s body: hair, nail parings, spittle. In Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, the Australian authorities in the 1960s were frustrated to find that the pit latrines they installed in shanty towns were hardly used. What they did not know was that the residents were scared to use them. An enemy, seeing them going in and out, might put a stick down the pit, and recover enough of their leavings to cause havoc. Nervous immigrants surrounded by strangers preferred to use more anonymous spaces, such as the road outside someone else’s house, getting up before dawn to do so as inconspicuously as possible. The beaches around the city were also convenient because they were swept regularly by the tides, but this was an outrage to the sun-worshipping Australian residents, for whom the beaches were sacrosanct. As regards orchids, might it have been that something about them – their small size, their tiny leaves – suggested insects to Langba (Similarity)? Or was it that orchids always remained fresh and green, and he hoped that this would somehow rub off on his cultigens (Contact)? In the jargon of symbolic anthropology, the Laws are a way of pointing out the many tropes that might connect two different things, by metaphor, simile, metonymy, or synecdoche. Having connected the two in his head, in any which way imaginable, why not try out the hunch in practice? Great scientific discoveries have been made on no more sophisticated basis and all that Langba lacked was proper laboratory facilities. Moreover, trial and error was surely behind every great technological advance before the Enlightenment gave us science as we know it. As proof

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of that, Levi-Strauss holds up the example of the Neolithic Revolution, that last brief era of the Stone Age when ground-edged tools appear, suitable for cutting down trees rather than cutting up meat, and grindstones, and sickles made of chips of sharp flint mounted in a curved wooden handle, all indicating agriculture. There was also a proliferation of earthenware pots, large ones for storing grain and smaller ones for cooking. Even knowing little about the craft of the potter it is easy to imagine the piles of cracked jars that piled before the techniques for reliably producing sturdy examples were mastered, techniques of mixing and moulding clays of various consistencies, and firing them at just the right temperature that they were hardened rather than exploding. For those who actually know the business, including archaeologists, the delicate shapes and magnificently coloured glazes, including some that cannot now be reproduced, are a continuing source of wonder. Similar things might be said about weaving, and all its useful, diverse, and beautiful products. Moreover, the history of trial and error does not end in the Neolithic. During the Industrial Revolution, steam engines were invented by tinkerers, not theorists of thermodynamics. These considerations drive a wedge between technological success and scientific sophistication. Nineteenth-century theories of progress always smuggled in the assumption that the one implied the other. In fact, the relationship between, say, the expansion of the railroads and advances in science is far from direct. What distinguished Langba’s magic from true science, Levi-Strauss argues, was not an inability to make causal connections but an inability not to make them. Langba took it for granted that there was something that would fix any particular problem, if only he could find it. If he had used the orchid before – in whatever way he had in mind – and then got a good crop, he concluded that it worked. Or, at least, he concluded that it maybe worked. The thing about the leech repellant is that it could be tested every time anyone went into the rainforest. Conklin was convinced of its effectiveness after just one trial. Testing the orchid hypothesis is much more difficult. Entire growth cycles would be involved, and a host of variables that controlled for weather conditions, animal pests, uniformity of seed, and all kinds of features of the adjacent vegetation. Moreover, the tests would have to be repeated many times before anything could be said one way or another, and this would be a challenge for a well-funded agronomist, let alone Langba. We might note in passing that all the resources of modern science have not made infallible the testing of new drugs. There is always the suspicion – not unjustified – that corporations with billions at stake will manipulate the results, especially if they happen to be paying for the testing procedures. Even with the best will in the world, however, it is very hard to make the results statistically watertight. Spotting unwanted side effects is also full of hazards. It is usually done by asking the participants in the testing procedure whether they had any trouble with anticipated possible side effects A, B, or C, but

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what about D, a possibility no one had considered? As for long-term side effects, only time will tell. If the grandchildren of everyone in my generation who took Prozac will be sterile, it will be too late to do anything by the time we find out. Meanwhile, Like Langba, we assume that there is a cure for everything, which is why pill popping has an eerie sense of magic about it. Levi-Strauss characterises Langba’s mode of operation as bricolage. In France, a bricoleur is someone you phone if there is a problem in the house, leaky plumbing, crumbling plaster, defective light switches – anything. The bricoleur fixes things, using whatever tools and materials he has in the back of his truck. He is not a plumber, plasterer, or electrician, but simply a handyman – and a godsend. Langba was a generalist in the same fashion, but not a generaliser. He had in his head an indigenous version of the Linnaean classification, but he was never going to discover evolution. That is what Levi-Strauss meant by describing Langba’s mix of the pragmatism and magic as the “science of the concrete.”10 Frazer had been wrong in describing magic as a “timid and stuttering science.” On the contrary, Langba was downright daring. Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, both students of Durkheim, caught it better when they described magic as “a gigantic variation on the theme of causality.” The goal of true science was the second-order formulations necessary for the framing of abstract laws, and Levi-Strauss had grand ambitions of this kind himself. The theory of culture he developed was an extension of a familiar principle of linguistics framed by Ferdinand de Saussure.11 In order to specify the sounds that the mouth and vocal chords need to make in order to speak any given language, what is needed is to show what sounds must be differentiated from what other sounds. So, in English, “pint” and “paint” have different meanings, so /i/ and /ai/ must be kept phonemically distinct. That doesn’t mean that every English speaker pronounces the words in the same way, far from it. It does mean, however, that accents that confuse the noises, such as Cockney, will also confuse the words. Then hearers must rely on context to work out what is meant. As another example, people who have no experience of tonal languages find it hard to learn Mandarin, and native speakers have to do a lot of guessing to follow them. Levi-Strauss’ idea was that this technique might be extended to cultural things other than language, such as ideas of kinship, totemism treated as kind of classification, and, later in his career, mythology. His four-volume Mythologiques (1969–82) follows mythic themes across the entire Americas, noting how their structures are transformed from one ethnic group to another. Levi-Strauss’ structuralist approach was widely influential, being applied in disciplines as various as literary criticism and neurology. In anthropology, he inspired a whole generation to look for structural regularities wherever they went, providing a new impetus to the Great Project. Given these goals, it is clear that Levi-Strauss’ arguments are not designed to collapse the nineteenth-century distinction between magic and science.

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What he wants to show is that the two are more intimately connected – in every age – than Frazer or Tylor had imagined. The book in which he makes this argument is called La Pensee Sauvage (1962), which his translators glossed as The Savage Mind (1966). Something, however, got lost in translation. For starters, the title contains a pun. It could also be translated as The Wild Pansy, a play on Langba’s botanizing. More significantly, the word sauvage has different connotations to savage; it emphasises naïvety more than brutality. In nineteenth-century terminology, the savages were those who had not yet reached the cultural level of barbarians. What Levi-Strauss argues is that, except for scientists in moments of deep concentration, all of us are awash in naïve thinking.

Chapter 9

Integrity of Science and Religion

Aborigine religions were often dismissed in the nineteenth century as mere “nature cults,” as contrasted to proper religions, which had gods. The ancient Greeks and Romans had their pantheons, and the religions of the JudeoChristian-Islamic complex were monotheistic, but Aborigine religions were about nothing more than animals and plants. In that sense, of course, biology and botany might also have been classified as nature cults. At the same time, it was argued, Aborigines had so little grasp of reality that they were blatantly lost in the supernatural, the alcheringa and its heroes, who travelled underground and had no origin except that they “sprang up.” All religions, of course, revolved around supernatural things, angels and ghosts and saviours and such, but the Aborigines presented a particularly egregious example. Webster’s New Universal Dictionary gives this definition of supernatural: “Existing or occurring outside the normal experience or knowledge of man; caused by other than the known forces of nature.” The two characterisations, often employed by the same author in the same paragraph, are contradictory. Was it that Australian religions were exclusively about nature, or that they had no concept of nature? The problem is that “normal experience and knowledge” and the “known forces of nature” were precisely what Aborigine ritual was about. Consequently, what is and what is not supernatural is in the eye of the beholder, and the term is useless for the purposes of the Great Project. The situation is similar to the common textbook definition of ritual as repeated action “not justified by a rational, means-to-ends” explanation. Whose means? Whose ends? Clearly, the magic/religion/science ordering that seemed so straightforward in the nineteenth century is in practice not so simple. So let’s take a closer look at Arunta religion, as sketched out in Chapter 7, to see exactly where magic and science part company, and how non-human agencies appear. Specifically, what was it that went on during the grand festival of engwuru, lasting months and attracting hundreds of participants? Its basic format was simply a series of rites – dozens of them – each relating to a particular totem. So, could the festival in toto be characterised as an exercise in collective magic? Viewed

DOI: 10.4324/b22988 -13

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in that way, each totemic group performed the acts necessary to propagate their own totem creatures, and everyone benefited. The rites were magical because they supposedly had a direct effect on the natural world – more kangaroo rituals, more kangaroos. Following a logic of this kind, Australian festivals like engwura were often labelled “increase ceremonies.” Bronislaw Malinowski, a pioneer of fieldwork methods in the 1910s, stated matters baldly: The road from the wilderness to the savage’s belly and consequently to his mind is very short, and for him the world is an indiscriminate background against which there stands out the useful, primarily the edible, species of animals and plants.1 Levi-Strauss was scathing about what he saw as Malinowski’s crass materialism. What he asks are we to make of such totems as laughing, illnesses of various kinds, vomiting, and corpses?: A search for utility at any price runs up against those innumerable cases in which the totemic animals and plants have no discernible use from the point of view of the native culture. To adhere strictly to the principle, it is necessary to manipulate the notion of interest on each occasion, in such a way that the empirical exigency postulated in the beginning is progressively changed into verbal juggling, petitio principii, or tautology.2 Spencer and Gillen offer a nice example of these contortions in justifying the existence of a fly totem. Their efforts are ironic given the horrors that Gillen had reported in his diary from the plague of flies. “If only Job lived in modern times,” he wrote, “and travelled up the Stevenson just now I’m afraid his reputation would not be so spotless.” Nevertheless, in the formal presentation of their results he, or perhaps Spencer, evidently felt the need to put a more positive face on it. Flies, they argue, “are very intimately associated with what the native above all want to see at certain times of the year, and that is heavy rainfall.”3 At the end of their 1904 volume, Spencer and Gillen provide a handy inventory of totems found among the northern tribes, particularly the Arunta. They are, however, modest about their effort: “The following does not pretend to be anything more than a very incomplete list,” they say. Moreover, other lists “in so far as they make any claim to be being complete are liable to be very misleading.”4 This was because alcheringa stories were so intimately connected with local geography, but the Arunta-speaking people are spread out over an area that measures some 600 miles from north to south. Even for one of the frequently found totems, such as emu or wallaby, the stories and rites for them varied from place to place. There were no master narratives. Meanwhile “almost every material object gives its name to some totemic

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group” so there was ample room for local variation, not to say eccentricity. This fits with what Sir George Grey had remarked in the 1830s, that the uncanny ability of Australians to find food applied only “in their own district.” Spencer and Gillen travelled widely in central Australia, but they could hardly visit every corner of such as vast region, hence their modesty. Even with these caveats in mind, however, Spencer and Gillen’s list is impressive, totalling 194 items. As regards “utility,” there is a heavy preponderance of items that were not only edible but also eaten. In this regard, Australians were eminently practical and virtually omnivorous. There were no dietary restrictions, except that for the most part people did not eat their own totem, but there were exceptions even to that rule. Of thirty species of mammals, all were eaten, except for the wildcat (Dasyurus geoffroyi). Of forty-six species of birds, all were eaten, apart from a tiny wren. Of thirty kinds of snakes, eighteen of lizards, and eight of fish, all were eaten. All of twenty-four species of insect totems were eaten, except for flies – blow flies and March flies, in addition to the ones that plagued Spencer and Gillen. All of the totemic plants were used, mostly for food, but the wood of the bean trees was valued for making tools, and hakea flowers, steeped in water, made a refreshing drink. So far, Malinowskian materialism seems to be winning out, but Spencer and Gillen’s last category throws a spanner in that works. Its twelve items are: boomerang, cold weather, darkness, fire, hailstones, lightening, moon, red ochre, porcupine-grass resin, salt water, the evening star, stone, sun, water, whirlwinds, wind, and finally the wonderfully anomalous totem, laughing boy. At this point then, it is clear that the biological and botanical sciences, plus a little meteorology, are fundamental to the engwura. Attempts to directly manipulate the environment by magic are also apparent, but where does religion enter the picture? Applying Durkheim’s definition, there was certainly no lack of sacred things; in the opening phase of the festival senior men brought churinga from far and near – mostly pieces of wood incised with esoteric designs. They were housed on a platform some distance from the campsite, carefully wrapped, and covered with leaves. One specific purpose of the engwura was to show the churinga – eventually – to the uninitiated young men, of whom about forty were assembled, but this was not done all at one go. Instead, they were produced a few at a time, in separate rites for each totem. These rites were held in no particular order, and depended simply on who showed up, and what totems they happened to “own.” In Spencer and Gillen’s account of it, every Arunta person had a totem by the circumstances of birth – location, not heredity – and consequently was a reincarnation of the alcheringa figure whose spirit children (erathipi) had entered that person’s mother. Apparently, this did not mean that young men knew the stories and rites of their own totems; reincarnation evidently did not imply memory of previous lives. Instead, they had to learn them at engwura, so the festival

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was also an initiation. Consequently, the young men were segregated, bossed around, and put through a number of ordeals in the familiar manner of boot camps everywhere. Women were excluded, but later research revealed that there is a parallel series of rites that are nowadays referred to in English as “women’s business.” Not surprisingly, Spencer and Gillen saw nothing of the women’s business; they had their hands full keeping up with the men’s side, and the oknirabata or teachers did not deem it worth mentioning. In addition, totemic rites, and the churinga that went with them, could be given away. Old men who had participated in many rites, including but not limited to the grand engwura festivals, had considerable collections of both. The significance of this is that the number of totemic rites that could be performed at engwura was not limited to the number of totems that those attending had acquired at birth. The available repertoire was larger than that, so that a generous helping of Spencer and Gillen’s 194 totems might be represented at any particular event. Moreover, the rites of, say, the etjunpa lizard (Varanus sp.) at one location need not be the same as those at another, and at both locations there would be an alcheringa story about the adventures of lizard in that specific neighbourhood, referring to named trees and rocks. The room for diversity and specialised knowledge was virtually infinite. Finally, there was room for dream inspiration, and rites that originated in this way might be completely novel. In their two major books, Spencer and Gillen narrate dozens of totemic rites, including ones performed at engwura, and also in smaller gatherings. As an example, the quabara unjiamba rite of the Ooraminna area was associated with the story of the hakea flower women Abmoara and Kuperta who sprang up at Ungwurananga, had various adventures, and went into the earth at Ooraminna, as recounted in Chapter 7. At the engwura, Spencer and Gillen describe, the hakea rite began about ten in the morning, when the owner took a half dozen helpers to the bed of a small creek near the engwura ground and found a shady spot under a gum tree. Everyone else stayed a discrete distance away. Under the tree, the elders whispered among themselves and instructed the dancers on what they had to do. Then each man opened the skin bag he had brought to the festival, containing pieces of red and yellow ochre, white pipe clay, balls of string made out of human hair and possum fur, some porcupine grass resin, small flints, various feathers, and the dried crop of the eagle hawk filled with down, which served as a paint brush. These materials were necessary for preparing the ritual apparatus called nurtunja and decorating the dancers who were to perform the rite. In this case, there were two dancers, though there were on some occasions as many as eleven. The owner chose his younger brother, also of the hakea totem, as one, and another man who was of the achilpa or wild cat totem, a relative by marriage. It was considered a great compliment to be invited to officiate in this way. The nurtunja was in this case made from a spear wrapped around with grass tied on with human hair string so as to make a cylinder about six inches in

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diameter, with eagle-hawk and emu feathers tied to the top. One assistant cut a vein in his arm and allowed about a half pint of blood to spill into the hollow side of a shield, which provided an effective adhesive for alternate rings of red and white down glued onto the cylinder. All this was accompanied by what Spencer and Gillen call “a monotonous chant” repeating some simple refrain such as “paint it around with rings and rings.” Half a dozen wooden churinga were produced by the owner and tied to what would be the top of the nurtunja when it was stood up. Next, it was the turn of the dancers to be decorated with designs in ochre and bird’s down, and all was ready for the rite to commence. The two dancers knelt down, the one behind holding the nurtunja upright behind his back. They then walked to the ceremonial ground in a special way: It is curious to watch the way in which every man who is engaged in performing one of these ceremonies walks; the moment he is painted up he adopts a kind of stage walk with remarkable high knee action, the foot being lifted at least twelve inches above the ground, and the knee bent as to approach, and, indeed, touch the stomach, as the body is bent forward at each step.5 This was the signal for the assistants to call up the other men, using a strange ululating cry. They came running in great excitement and pranced around the dancers shouting wh’a! wha! Wh’r-rr! Then the nurtunja was bent down a couple of times over the heads of the crowd, who kneeled in front of the dancers. Then it was laid aside, to be dismantled later. The dancers took a piece of down and touched it to the stomachs of the older men present to relieve the agitation that the sight of the nurtunja had caused in them. They described it as feeling as if their guts were tying themselves up in knots. That done, the rite was over. At other totemic rites, the details were different, notably the nature of the nurtunja and the designs on the dancers, but the format was roughly similar. At the end of the main events of the festival, the initiates underwent a series of ordeals, literally, by fire. The old men made them lie on the ashes of a large bonfire, protected only by a few branches. Spencer and Gillen found it uncomfortable to even get close. Then they were made to lie still on the ground for hours on end in the midday heat without moving a muscle. After dark, they were roused and sent to charge into the women’s camp hurling firebrands, so making a spectacular show of fireworks. The final phase was dances involving men and women, and as these wound down people drifted away to their home territories. The totems were not in any direct way ‘represented’ in the rites associated with them. At the hakea event, as in others at the engwura, there was no invocation; no summoning of alcheringa characters. Nor was there any

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suggestion that the dancers were in an altered state of consciousness, or somehow inspired shaman-like by hakea-ness. The nurtunja, though formidably sacred, was not made of hakea flowers. Indeed there were no hakea anywhere in the rite, and nothing in the dancers’ actions hinted at the totem. It is not clear if any non-human agencies were involved at all. There were few rites in which anything was mimed out. Once, at the totem ceremony for a fish plentiful in the Finke River there was a single performer, a snake man who had inherited the fish totem from his father: Squatting on the ground, he moved his body and extended his arms from his sides, opening and closing them as he leaned forward, so as to imitate a fish swelling itself out and opening and closing his gills. Then he moved along, imitating by means of twigs in his hands the action of a man driving before him, with boughs, the fish in a small water-hole, just as the natives do.6 Whether Spencer and Gillen would have noticed the significance of these moves had they not been pointed out to them is a good question, but by comparison with most of the rites they saw it was positively theatrical. Now let me offer a proposition: instead of parcelling out Arunta activities between magic, science, and religion, wouldn’t it fit better with the ethnographic data simply to say that the Arunta had an understanding of the world, one that was distinctly their own. There is no need to taboo the terms magic, science, and religion. They are familiar words in English, and that is the language I am writing in. For the purposes of the Great Project, however, they tend to split into pieces what is essentially a whole. Ethnographers begin with details, snippets of ritual, and so on because they must. The goal, however, in so far as it is possible, is to see the whole. What is most obvious about the Arunta understanding of the world is how firmly it was anchored in the landscape. This was evidently true everywhere in Australia. It seems odd to talk about Aborigine land tenure, since we imagine them wandering about more or less at random, but Gammage makes it plain that this was not so. On the contrary, Australians could point out rocks and trees marking their territory and knew who owned what land in the surrounding region. In general terms, this knowledge reached out for hundreds of miles. As James Dawson wrote in 1881, “no individual of any neighbouring tribe or family can hunt or walk over the property of another without permission of the head of the family owning the land. A stranger found trespassing can legally be put to death.” 7 Note here that there are territories belonging to groups ranging from whole “tribes” to particular “families,” so that every person evidently had a cognitive map in his or her brain about as complicated as the city planning office. What Dawson means by “legally” is that everyone would assert the same right themselves, and concede it to others. It was part of their shared understanding.

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Gammage emphasises, however, that it was less a matter of people owning the land than the land owning the people; they were its custodians for future generations. If a local group died out, it was the obligation of their neighbours to maintain their land, which is to say, repeat their alcheringa stories and perform their totemic rites. In the first phase of colonisation, when European diseases such as smallpox outran settlement, this produced a crisis even before the land was alienated because survivors were forced to take on more and more ritual duties. To say that the attachment of Australians to their land was spiritual is a platitude so often repeated that it has lost all impact; it has become as bland as the liberalism it echoes. No amount of goodwill on the part of the European settlers would have averted the disaster that Gammage describes. How could it, when the settlers were living in a different world, even as they were occupying the same terrain? As Bill Stanner put it: No English words are good enough to give a sense of the links between an aboriginal group and its homeland. Our word ‘home’, warm and suggestive though it be, does not match the aboriginal word that may mean ‘camp’, ‘hearth’, ‘country’, ‘everlasting home’, ‘totem place’’, life source’, ‘spirit centre’, and much else all in one. Our word ‘land’ is too spare and meagre.8 When Australians were displaced from their lands, he says, they experienced a kind of vertigo which persists to this day. No welfare policy is going to undo that. It is misleading to describe the attachment that Australians felt to their land as spiritual because the term implies other-worldliness – which is exactly what Australian religions were not. I need a word, however, that expresses something broader than Durkheim’s notion of the sacred, which is by definition restricted to some places or contexts, and is fenced about with prohibitions that keep it at arm’s length from the mundane. The adjective I substitute for ‘spiritual’ is ‘integral,’ meaning, by dictionary definition, “whole, entire, lacking nothing, complete as an entity.” When I say that the Arunta understanding of the world had integrity I mean that it framed a particular experience of the physical world, closely observed and carefully considered, that was axiomatic for the people that shared it and pervasive in their lives. At the other extreme, post-modern New Agers dabbling in shamanism and Zen have zero integrity. It might at this point seem perverse to go introducing another technical term, given how much trouble we have had with ‘religion’ and ‘ritual.’ My excuse for doing so is to express a quality of wonderment, even reverence, that I find in the natural sciences. It is evident, for example, in those doughty nineteenth-century botanists and biologists who found their ways into every corner of the globe – at a time when anthropologists barely stirred from the

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library. Iain McCalman describes the travels of four of them who jointly laid the foundations of biological evolutionism: Joseph Hooker, Thomas Huxley, Alfred Wallace, and, of course, Darwin himself.9 Whatever career goals they may have had, it is clear that what kept them going was the delight they took in the diversity of life forms they were discovering. To vicariously feel something of that delight it is only necessary to pay attention to what they learned, and that is surely what creates the insatiable demand for nature programs on television. It is also evident in devotees of bird watching, who seem to get from it an almost mystical tranquility. More prosaically, I find it in the evening weather forecast. Most people take the weather maps that invariably stand behind the reporters as just props, if not wallpaper. If you decide, however, to take a close look at one of those maps – more than the glance you get during the weather news – and learn their conventional symbols, it is amazing how much information is packed into them. What most people want to say about weather forecasters is how often they are wrong; what impresses me is how often they are right. You begin to realise how intricately weather conditions are interconnected across whole regions, and indeed around the whole globe, and how delicately balanced it all is. It makes our atmosphere seem precious and vulnerable. Having had your eyes opened, global heating deniers turn into agents of the devil; they should be burned at the stake. These things are on an earthly scale; when we try to grasp what astronomers have learned in recent decades of the incomprehensible vastness of space and its profound mysteries, we can only be humbled. I also find it calming; there is nothing any human could possibly do that would have the slightest impact on that vastness. All we can do is bear witness, and that thought fills me with an awe greater than any talk of Yahweh, God, or Allah. Coming back to earth, the integrity of Australian understandings of the world was bound up with their rootedness in the land, but I must immediately head off any tendency to assume that such attachments are a common feature of ‘natives’ everywhere – some admirable simplicity now regrettably lost in the fog of ‘civilisation.’ One contrasting case should be enough to do that, and for that I return to the Berawan of Borneo, who we met in Chapter 4. As Gammage shows, it is misleading to describe Australians as nomadic even though they had no houses and precious few possessions. By comparison, the indigenous peoples of central Borneo, despite their massive longhouses, were the merest transients. They moved their communities every generation or so, often only a few miles upriver or down, but sometimes across mountain chains into whole new river systems. Outside observers constantly jump to the conclusion that they moved because they had to, because they had worn out their old localities using slash-and-burn agriculture that involved clearing new farms every year. Rain forest activists see the issue in simple terms: trees or people. They overlook some elementary facts: ‘extensive’ agriculture – as

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the term is – coexisted with the rainforests for hundreds of years without environmental degradation. That was in part because population densities were low, but also because cutting primary forest is horrendously hard work with nothing more than hand axes. Some kind of platform is needed to get above the wide spreading buttresses of the huge trees, and then it takes days to chip away enough to get one to fall over. True, that creates a rent in the jungle canopy, but all the clutter would have to be cleared before planting could begin. Consequently, farms were almost invariably made in secondary forest. These niches had been used before because they weren’t too steep to wash off all the thin topsoil after the first tropical cloudburst, nor so flat as to be flooded out every time the river rose. They belonged to particular families and were plentiful enough to allow at least a decade of lying fallow. The conclusion is unambiguous: the largest rainforest outside Brazil was systematically destroyed by Asian mega-corporations in league with corrupt local politicians. All Indigenous opposition was crushed, and profits that might have funded steady economic growth for generations were smuggled out to Swiss bank accounts and London real estate. The real reason why longhouse communities moved long distances – as opposed to localised re-sitings along the same segment of river – was for access to trade with the outside world via small Islamic states on the coast. That may come as a surprise given Borneo’s reputation as the most primitive place on earth, an honour it held in the late nineteenth century but ceded to New Guinea in the 1920s. Unlike New Guinea, however, central Borneo had maintained trading links – if tenuous ones – with India and China for a millennium or more. Glass beads provide the most obvious evidence of that. The ownership of valuable old beads, worn on high days and holidays, was the proof of elite social standing. They are ideal for the purpose being impervious to rot or decay. The most valuable of all are simple blue globes of Indian manufacture old enough that they are dulled by wear. In addition, there are ones manufactured by coiling or rolling strands of differently coloured glass, round, oval, or cylindrical in a hundred varieties, each named and evaluated. The experts were invariably matriarchs, and when they sat choosing a new arrangement for a necklace they had their ancestors graphically spread out on a cloth in front of them. Beads made their way into the remotest parts of Borneo; what went the other way was jungle produce, items that were rare and as convenient to transport as the beads they paid for. For example, some species of hornbill have large hollow chambers called casques on top of their beaks, which were carved into elaborate ornaments. Other rarities related to Chinese medicine, such as the stones occasionally found in the gallbladders of macaques. They were one of many types of bezoar stones greatly prized as sovereign remedies against poisons – emperors always liked to have a stock on hand. Longhouse people themselves had no use the stones. They understood their value as commodities, but no one set out to make a fortune in beads by massacring

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macaques wholesale. Instead, when monkeys were shot for meat (using blow guns and poison darts, bows and arrows are no use in the jungle) a quick inspection of the gallbladders during butchering might occasionally turn up a stone. These accumulated in caches in longhouse communities all across the interior, until there was enough to make it worthwhile mounting a trading expedition downriver. These enterprises were organised by the same elite that hogged the majority of the profits – a neat and thoroughly modern-looking trading system, with manufactures going from centre to periphery and raw resources the other way. Ironically, the ‘primitive’ social organisation of central Borneo would not have existed without the Asian world economy.10 These opportunities for profit might well have made longhouse people pay close attention to their environment, but there were far more pressing day-to-day concerns. ‘Dry’ rice agriculture, as it is called – that is, without irrigation – is a risky business. After the secondary forest has been ‘slashed’ there needs to be at least a week without heavy rain, so that the fallen debris can be burned. Then after the planting there needs to be enough rain to make the seeds germinate and grow, and then there needs to be fine weather so that the seed will ripen ready for harvest. All this takes nice judgement, and then there is the risk of blights of various kinds for which they have no cure other than to have at least two farm plots so as to spread the risk. Finally, there is the destruction caused by wild pigs, and worse, by troops of macaques which can flatten a crop near harvest time just by moving through the clearing. The response that might be expected from primitives to such uncertainty is magic – that is certainly what nineteenth-century anthropologists would have predicted – but the longhouse people I knew had almost no magic at all, and none for growing rice. Instead, they paid attention to the signs; they watched the night sky for the appearance of the constellations associated with the dry season. They watched the clouds over the central mountains far off upriver to see if there was storm activity brewing, beyond the usual evening showers. And they watched the movements of animals and birds, to see what they had to say. When choosing a site for his farm, a man might go and sit there quietly on his own for a while, getting the ‘vibes’ as we say. Deer can be remarkably inquisitive, and if one came to investigate him, whether the barking deer tela’o (Cervulus muntjac) or the sambhur deer payau (Cervus unicolor), that was a good sign. Birds were often seen and evenly more frequently heard. One with a croaky voice, especially off to the left, were generally bad news. There was no implication that the bird itself was bad; on the contrary, it was a friend because it gave warning of lurking dangers. Birds with liquid melodious voices were more encouraging. What was striking was that people had very different interpretations of what they saw and heard. One man found the tek-tek-tek of the oriental pygmy pied woodpecker pengape (Dendrocopus canicapillus aurantiventris) threatening, because it suggested to him the sound of nails being banged into a coffin lid. His neighbour, however, heard the floor of his rice barn creaking

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under the load of rice he would harvest. No one’s estimation of augury was undermined by this contradiction; the point was that both men were getting the information they needed. This personal, even private, relationship with the omen creatures points up a major contrast with astrology, as practiced in ancient Mesopotamia and regularly featured in local newspapers. Infamously, astrologers see different messages in the night sky even though they are all looking at the same stars. Berawan augury went further – it involved a twoway communication with the natural world. There was one omen creature that outranked all the others: plake, the Malaysian black eagle Ictinaetus malayensis. There are several hawks, kites, and eagles in the region that are classified as plake but only Malaysian eagles have the necessary presence. First, they are rare; omens of such weight are not ten-a-penny. Second, they circle high over the forest canopy so that when first seen they are the merest dots in the sky. Third, they cruise in pairs, male and female, and that matters because making out what the eagles have to tell requires two readings, one after the other. On these occasions eagles, unlike any other omen creatures, are called, which is to say summoned: Oooooooooooooooo …………. Spirit of eagle, just answer for a moment, spirit of eagle, whatever you’re doing, whatever you’re up to up there, spirit of eagle, just one of you answer my call, spirit of eagle. However small the window of sky, of bright sky in front of me, spirit of eagle, there is where you show your feathers, you spirit of eagle.11 The usual result of such a summons was, not surprisingly, nothing. Having called for a few minutes, the augur sat back and chatted with whoever was there, perhaps smoked a cigarette of home-grown tobacco, and stared lazily out across the river. A spot on the riverbank was necessary because only there was any open view of the sky available. After twenty minutes or so he might try again, and so on all day if necessary. If however something appeared, the tiny dots soaring far away over the forest, excitement mounted rapidly. The augur renewed his summons with urgency, and people can down from the longhouse to watch. First, the eagle was asked to ‘dance,’ or fly in circles to show that communication was established. Then it was asked, if things were favourable, to glide away off to the left – a good

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omen. But then a second eagle was needed, always spoken of as the first eagle’s wife, and told to fly off to the right. If, after appropriate urging, she did so, a huge cheer went up, and everyone reverted to the longhouse to celebrate. The feeling of having been honoured by an extraordinary visitor was irresistible. I once saw an augur pull off this trick, the entire sequence, in ten minutes start to finish. He was naturally delighted, and a little amazed, but looked down modestly as everyone came to pat him on the back. He had been calling for a serious reason – plake is not called for trivial reasons – at the end of a funeral that had lasted for ten days. The vital question was: had the rites worked, because if they hadn’t more deaths would soon follow. On another occasion, plake was called because people became alarmed at the behaviour of a child who repeatedly went into convulsive fits. He looked as if he was possessed, but what could it mean for that to happen to an infant? As the augur described it: Because we human beings, have a big problem; look at this human illness, an illness that appears, sick and not sick, spirit of eagle. Because he that is sick, rolls up his eyes, as if suddenly startled, suddenly rolling, his body stiff, and sort of shivering, his eyes going up into his head. That is why we humans, don’t know how to care for him. You alone spirit of eagle know how. What was needed was a diagnosis, so the augur set up three sticks in front of himself, one pointing half left, one straight ahead, and one-half right. Then the eagles were asked to come and circle over the appropriate stick, according to whether the child was indeed possessed, or the parents had been guilty of some breach of tabu during the pregnancy or something else again. It turned out to be the first, and appropriate measures were taken with the assistance of a well-respected shaman. Needless to say, not all consultations were successful. Even the most determined augur gave up after a couple of days if his calls went unanswered, and eagles often did something other than requested, yielding omens that were ambiguous or downright threatening. The worst possible outcome was for

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the eagle to swoop down over the longhouse, and the only thing to do then was for everyone to clear out, abandon the place ASAP. When I pushed for specifics on this agency called ‘spirit of eagle’ I got nowhere. Since nouns in Berawan do not inflect for number, the phrase bili plake could as easily be spirits as spirit. Augurs often told eagles to “show their feathers, show their pinions”; did that mean a feathered spirit? Or was the agency human-like, since elsewhere it was told to “get out of bed right away”? These questions only made people laugh. Indeed, I was teased about it; an eagle was once pointed out to me and I was asked what I saw. I answered naively that it was bili plake, but no one had summoned it; it was just a bird getting on with bird business. I was missing the point: it is not for humans to know about the nature of spirit realms. There was nothing vague about this agnosticism, as Tylor might have assumed. On the contrary, it was part of the power of augury that when eagle was called and then appeared, those spirit realms briefly intersected with the human world. It was impossible not to be awed. What in the end I found most impressive about Berawan augury was that people were constantly aware of what was going on around them, in the skies and in the forests. The world was semiotic: there were messages everywhere, attached to trees and animals, for anyone who paid attention. I would often find that the people I was with had fallen silent and were all staring at something I not only hadn’t noticed, but couldn’t see when it was pointed out to me. Or walking through woodland everyone would freeze, listening to some faint sound, near or far. By comparison, I seemed to be walking around in a haze, oblivious to the natural world around me. I have noticed the same awareness in farmers, who always have one eye out for the weather, or with sailors, conscious of wind patterns moving on the surface of the sea, or squall lines in the offing.

Part IV

Dismissing Diversity

Chapter 10

Laying Tylor’s Ghost

The great technique of nineteenth-century anthropology – the Comparative Method – was designed to conjure evidence where there was none. Since little or no archaeology had been done anywhere outside Europe, prehistory everywhere else was a complete blank. The premise of the Method was that existing primitive societies provided all the evidence needed to reconstruct previous stages of social evolution. Religion was particularly interesting because it showed the gradual evolution of rationality through various stages of irrationality. The response of twentieth-century anthropology was to deny that there is any such thing as fossil religions or societies. Each and every one of them has a history reaching from the first population of Homo sapiens through to the present day. When Cook landed in Hawai’i he hadn’t really travelled back in time. To think that he had was an illusion – a piece of irrationality that can now be seen to fit neatly with the over-confident rationalism of High Modernism. That is the brand of rationality that is nowadays ridiculed by post-modernists, who point out bitterly what it produced: Hitler, Stalin, two world wars, atom bombs and so on. My viewpoint is different; given that there is so much human stupidity on display everywhere in the world, I can’t see that ditching rationality is going to help matters. I have a different reason for drawing attention to the Rationalism of that epoch, and that is to put it in context – that reflex of the ethnographer. The historical context was: European imperialism, the triumph of the industrial revolution, and capitalism in full bloom. The intellectual context was that Newtonian physics had explained just about everything that needed explaining, the motion of the planets, electricity, optics, X-rays, thermodynamics, and so on. To many it seemed that the project of science was all but complete, and there was nothing for rationalists to do but sit back and admire it all. How wrong they were. Physics was instead poised on the edge of a dramatic leap into the unknown. In the closing years of the nineteenth century, Albert Michelson, using a machine called an interferometer, produced the counter-intuitive result that light travelled at the same speed relative to an

DOI: 10.4324/b22988 -15

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observer regardless of how fast the observer was going. Not long after, Albert Einstein showed why, and we have been dealing with the consequences of that ever since. Gravity, it turned out, was simply a distortion of space-time. Regarding quantum physics, Niels Bohr reportedly remarked that “a person who wasn’t outraged on first hearing about it didn’t understand what had been said.”1 Using the Large Hadron Collider, physicists found all kinds of unimagined particles inside the nucleus of atoms, bosons (Higgs and otherwise), muons, pions, hyperons… at last count over 150 of them. When a student asked Werner Heisenberg how one could envision an atom, he replied “don’t try.” For laymen, today’s physics borders on the mystical, but the point is that even for scientists it goes beyond anything we can possibly imagine. Knowledge has outrun understanding. In the face of such radical departures from the certainties of the Newtonian understanding of the world, it is hardly surprising that the flimsy stuff of Tylor’s theorising would take on a moth-eaten Victorian air. That applies, however, only to those who have had some reason to pay attention to it. For the great majority of people, it has simply been absorbed into everyday commonsense – but ethnographers are careful about common sense anyway. What is ‘only’ common sense is exactly what differentiates one understanding of the world from another. Just how deeply Tylorian evolutionism is embedded in contemporary western culture is an interesting question, but it is evidently deep enough to cause even scientists to drop into it unthinkingly and by default. Here is Richard Dawkins, distinguished biologist and successful author, introducing his attack on The God Delusion: Not surprisingly, since it is founded on local traditions of private revelation rather than evidence, the God Hypothesis comes in many versions. Historians of religion recognize a progression from primitive tribal animisms, through polytheisms such as those of the Greeks, Romans and Norsemen, to monotheisms such as Judaism and its derivatives, Christianity and Islam.2 The word ‘animism’ gives the game away; it is of course the term that Tylor invented to characterise all ‘primitive’ religions. It implied that primitives, wandering around in their prehistoric fog, could not tell what was alive and what was not. The word was used, I noticed, by fundamentalist missionaries in both Borneo and New Guinea in the same rag-bag way; everything that wasn’t Christian was animism. Dawkins has swallowed the whole nineteenth-century claptrap, hook, line, and sinker. This is odd; the only explanation I can come up with is that he has learned to curl his lip at the very mention of the word ‘relativism.’ Towards the end of The God Delusion, he offers a strange little parable about a defendant, pressed on where he

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was on the night of the murder, who evades the question with a “relativist” plea: It depends on what you mean by ‘in’. It is only in your Western scientific sense of ‘in’ that I was in. The Bongolese have a completely different concept of ‘in,’ according to which you are only truly ‘in’ a place if you are an anointed elder entitled to take snuff from the dried scrotum of a goat.3 For ethnographers, the Bongo Bongo are any imaginary tribe made up by journalists and philosophers to justify some claim about the ‘primitives.’ I can only hope that my accounts of the Arunta, Berawan and Bororo do not sound like that. The brand of relativism that I aspire to is simpler; it just means that for the purposes of the Great Project I pay attention to other people’s understandings of the world without prejudging them. It is simply keeping an open mind; it implies nothing about what I personally think is the nature of reality. It certainly does not imply any hostility to science; on the contrary, I admire science and scientists and am more than content to make use of what they can tell me. Dawkins, like others of his persuasion, seem to think that all anthropologists are wobbly minded idealists and intellectual reactionaries who will run and hide at the very mention of Darwin’s name. What I object to is having Darwin used as a cudgel to beat me about the ears. It is happening in the twenty-first century just as it did in the nineteenth. Invoking the holy name does not give them sole title; Darwin belongs to all of us. Another problem I see with Dawkins’ concise summary of what historians of religion ‘recognise’ is that it is vacuous. All it really says is that there were the religions of the Greeks, etc., and before that, all bundled together, those of the primitives. I doubt I can pass muster as a historian of religion, since the whole point of the Great Project was to abandon fanciful notions about social and mental evolution conjured from thin air, and instead to pay attention to what the ‘primitives’ were actually doing and saying. But who are these historians that Dawkins is referring to anyway? Since history requires records of some kind, historians of religion are by definition not students of prehistory. Students of early Judaism or Hinduism, or any other of the World Religions, work with documents of various kinds and have little to say about epochs from which no history survives. No, the historian that Dawkins is thinking of is Frazer, and so we come full circle, back to The Golden Bough. The real issue underlying Dawkins’ rhetoric is the relation between genetic and cultural factors in human behaviour: in any particular instance, where does one stop and the other begin, or perhaps it would be better to say how do the two aspects intersect? Obviously, there is some kind of biological basis to everything humans do, since they do it with their bodies, but that

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is hardly all there is to say. The Olympic Games could not exist if humans were not bipedal, but what does that prove? The technique of self-proclaimed Darwinists is just to pretend the issue isn’t there – all that matters is ‘human nature’ and that is by definition the result of evolution. This is what I think of as the Wave-it-Away Technique: yes, yes, there are some superficial variations between populations, but they tell us nothing about humanity in general. Language provides an example of the Technique at work. It begins by asserting that the universally human facility for language is a phylogenetic trait unique to Homo sapiens sapiens. Agreed; to argue otherwise would be cultural relativism gone mad. What makes the assertion unmistakably plain is the extraordinary rapidity of language acquisition in children, which is now well documented. Not only do children learn grammatical skills in the same order, they even produce the same errors at the same stage. For example, kids learning English all invent for themselves first the word ‘sheeps’ and then ‘sheepses’ while trying to figure out the plural for sheep. Since they had not heard either of those words used by adults, they must have generalised a rule for creating plurals, first by comparison with such pairs as toy/toys, and then house/houses. Such abstract thinking is truly impressive, and it was the starting point of Noam Chomsky’s brand of structural linguistics, which set out to discover what was fundamental to all grammars. Moreover, this research confirms what we have all observed, that toddlers who are gurgling away contentedly at their mother’s knee one weekend are busy telling you long stories the next – or so it seems. No human population has ever been found that lacked language, and any child can learn any language to which he or she is exposed. Moreover all natural languages – that is ones not devised de novo, like Esperanto – are complex, each with its own grammatical structures and ways of assembling words and sentences. Putting that another way, there is no such thing as a primitive language, and that striking fact is all by itself a repudiation of the premises of nineteenth-century evolutionary anthropology. Presumably there once were primitive languages, but there are precious few clues about what form they might have taken, and they were certainly gone by the time our most distant ancestors appeared. So much for biology. At the same time, however, people do not all speak the same language, and if linguistic diversity is what we want to study then biological universals are not the point. To understand just how diverse languages really are would require a course in linguistics, and for present purposes, I must rely on mere illustration. In the 1930s, Benjamin Whorf spoke of a language he called ‘European’ because, he argued, the differences between French and Italian, or even French and German, were trivial compared to how different they all were from Amerindian languages. To take just one example, in Nootka, a language of British Columbia, the phrase “he invites people to a feast” translates as one word that you will not be able to pronounce without coaching: tl’imshya’isita’itlma. The apostrophes indicate

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glottal stops, which are found in only a few dialects of English, for example in Cockney wa’er instead of water. The Nootka word is a compound of elements: a verb stem tl’imsh- “boil,” ya indicating past tense, -is means “eat,” ita is what would be “–ers” in English, -‘itl means “go for,” and – ma is “he does.” The whole word in all its glory might be translated literally as “he does something involving going for eaters of something already boiled.”4 It is an example of word formation in an agglutinative language. This example makes clear another feature of language diversity that strikes at the heart of social evolutionism: there is no correlation whatsoever between the complexity of languages and the complexity of their speakers’ technology. For an Anglophone, Russian is infamously difficult to learn because it has such complicated inflections, including ones unknown in English. The Industrial Revolution, however, occurred in England, not Russia. Navaho is even worse than Russian. As is widely known, during the Second World War the American Pacific fleet dispensed with codes and simply had Navaho people on board all major warships who spoke to each other in clear. The Japanese never succeeded in cracking this non-code. By contrast, Berawan is easy. As in many Austronesian languages, verbs do not inflect for person, number, or tense. Remarkably for anyone who has laboured over French irregular verbs, the Berawan verb form in “she had gone” is the same as that in “they are going.” This does not mean, however, that Berawan is somehow inferior to Apache any more than English is inferior to Russian. It simply means that the complexity of Berawan appears elsewhere. Berawan is, in the technical jargon, a word order language, as opposed to an inflectional one. That is, extra words can be inserted as required to indicate when something is/was/etc. going on and who is/was/etc. involved. Inexpertly used this can make for confusion, but more subtly it allows for creative ambiguity in such art forms as insult and teasing. Again in technical jargon, Berawan is a language with low redundancy as compared to Navaho or Nootka, in which words and phrases may contain the same information multiple times. The crucial point here is that genetics can never replace linguistics. At this historical moment, the brilliant research done in genetics has given the field enormous prestige. Everyone has heard of the Human Genome Project, and about techniques of gene replacement that may in future allow all kinds of maladies to be switched off at source. It is an exciting prospect, and it provides a ready audience for all kinds of speculation about what genes can tell us, not only about human metabolism, but also about human nature. This field was originally called sociobiology and is now more often referred to as evolutionary psychology. Just as with Jung’s archetypes, these arguments make a direct connection between ourselves and our most remote ancestors. Our evolution as a species, it is argued, occurred when humans were all hunters and gatherers spread thin over the landscape. That is the environment that made us what we are, and it is no surprise that we as a species are not doing well in the overcrowded conditions of modernity. It is a persuasive

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proposition, and it has wide appeal. It claims the force of science, while also echoing the romanticism of Pierre Rousseau, who glorified the primitives as true children of nature as opposed to the effete specimens produced by civilisation. In that way, you can have your cake and eat it too. It also has the charm of being anti-intellectual – who cares about those pointy heads rattling on about culture and interpretation! Just give us the facts man! The problem is that evolutionary psychology does not produce facts, but only assertions. In his book Evolutionary Psychology as Maladapted Psychology (2007), Robert Richardson takes these assertions apart in minute detail, as befits a philosopher of science, and finds that their standards of proof would not pass muster among serious biologists, who are very cautious about attributing physical changes in a fossil species to specific environmental features. As Darwin was well aware, the process of natural selection was more complex than that. The principle fallacy is that any feature found in an animal, in this case Homo sapiens sapiens, must be there because it provided some advantage in natural selection. It does not follow. The neatest example I have come across showing how misleading this can be concerns a Russian geneticist who set about breeding tame foxes. For a couple of generations, he selected the foxes that seemed least alarmed by the approach of humans. He succeeded in his goal, but his breed of foxes had floppy ears instead of pointed ones, and piebald black and white coats instead of grey ones. They looked more like dogs than foxes. This was, of course, a result of non-natural selection, but the principle remains the same: the process of selection can produce changes in a gene pool that have no relationship at all to the feature selected for in the first place.5 The reason why this debate became so heated was that very aggressive claims were made by sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists. In an interview for Time magazine, Robert Trivers, a founder of sociobiology, said that “sooner or later, political science, law, economics, psychiatry, and anthropology will all be branches of sociobiology.”6 Not surprisingly, practitioners in those fields were not pleased at being declared obsolete. Trivers’ brash claims also irritated Phillip Kitcher, a philosopher of science, whose Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature demonstrates in detail just how far the reach of sociobiology exceeded its grasp of evidence. He describes the whole program as “pop” science. Before Dawkins has a chance to denounce Kitcher as the deluded tool of relativist Frenchphilosophy-spouting anti-positivists, his next book was Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism. Kitcher is defending science, not attacking it. There is a technical term for the logical error being made here: reductionism. In abstract terms, if a trait in culture A is attributed to something innate or genetically determined, we then have to explain why that trait is absent in culture B. The result is zero net gain in understanding cultural diversity. A single cause cannot explain simultaneously both X and non-X. The error consists in reducing a more complex phenomenon – presence and

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absence – to a simpler one – presence only. The error is not committed when biologists are describing biological phenomena – there is no sneak attack on science here – but when faux biologists claim to ‘explain’ cultural traits. It is noticeable that biological reductionists who argue aggressively in this fashion never take on linguistics. That is because linguistics is a science in its own right, and its achievements are not to be dismissed. Linguists have methods of reliably writing down any sound the human voice can produce. Having collected enough data in that form, they can design an orthography for any given language, such that anyone familiar with the script can pronounce it correctly, even if they have never heard it spoken. This is no small achievement. Proceeding to the level of grammar and syntax, linguists can analyse how each language works in its own terms, without importing preconceived categories from other grammars, such as those of Latin or English. Again, they can make comparative studies of whole families of languages and show in what order they split away from one another. This is the field of historical linguistics. Another branch, called sociolinguistics, studies how speech patterns vary according to class, education, and region. This is a very paltry summary, but it may give some idea of the theoretical and methodological resources at the command of modern linguistics. For a proper survey, I recommend the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Linguistics.7 The utility of the language analogy is that it pushes apart culture and biology. Everyone knows how rapidly toddlers learn to talk – that’s the biology bit – and everyone knows that there are many different languages in the world – that’s the cultural part. The same logic applies to things cultural in general: the human aptitude for culture is clearly universal and innate, but cultures themselves are strikingly diverse. Anthropology is no more a subfield of sociobiology than is linguistics. The singular achievement of evolutionary psychology is to be reductionist in both biological and psychological ways at the same time. To show just how much is being left out let’s think about another distinctively human trait: wearing clothes. The materialist argument goes as follows: humans are not very impressive predators compared to, say, lions. They don’t have big teeth or powerful jaws, and they don’t run very fast. What they have instead is tools, and skills in making and using tools are taught by each succeeding generation to the next. Culture is what humans have instead of big teeth; it is the human form of adaptation. Humans also don’t have fur, so they need clothes to adapt to seriously cold places. As it happens, a current theory argues that humans would not have made good hunters on the African savannah even with spears if they had been furry, because they were too slow to make a kill in one charge like a lion. They needed to run game down, and they would have rapidly overheated with too much in the way of fur. In any event, once off the savannah and into colder climes, they could furnish themselves with fur by sewing together the skins of the animals they hunted. Elsewhere, where sunlight

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was intense they could shield themselves from damaging solar radiation with lighter clothing. No doubt this account is broadly accurate, and it has the satisfying feature of putting us humans back where we belong, among the animals, rather than separating us off because God gave us souls. There are, however, limitations to the argument. First, the correlation between climate and clothing is not in fact very close. The first Europeans to visit the freezing southern tip of the Americas were astonished to find the indigenous people wearing no clothes at all, and the seamen who reported this were no sissies themselves – how they tolerated the icy conditions south of the Horn with their flimsy, less-than-waterproof clothing is a wonder to any modern sailor. Meanwhile, the pastoralist peoples on the western edge of the Kalahari Desert adopted the heavy Victorian-era clothing that German missionaries taught them to wear, including large bustles for the women. This certainly distinguished them from their neighbours the San Bushmen, whose clothing was as informal as the Tierra del Fuegans, but it is hard to see how it provided any adaptive advantage. The obvious problem with a strictly materialist account of clothing, however, is that it leaves so much out. Coming at it from the other direction, the variety of clothing across cultures and within cultures is striking, and surely worth attention in its own right. One thinks immediately of haute couture, and why indeed should the fashion scene in Paris or New York not be approached from an ethnographic standpoint? Even those of us who’ve never been anywhere near it know that it is swirling with competition and sexual fantasy, and we thoroughly enjoy tut-tutting over its decadence, but I could easily be drawn into an account based on substantive research and free of sensationalism. Moreover, we all know that the expensive rituals of fashion are not going on for no reason. They support a massive, international clothing industry and what clothes are available even in cheap clothing stores will be some faint echo of what the fashion world has decided is ‘the look’ for this year. In that sense, we are all supporters – or victims – of the fashion world, even if we don’t know it. Behind all of this is a clothing manufacturing industry that will go anywhere in the world to find the cheapest possible labour, and hide the appalling working conditions there behind a chain of subcontractors. There are more PhD dissertations in here than you could shake a stick at, and interesting ones too. Haute couture is, however, only the tip of the iceberg. How is that when you see on TV the head of state of a poor country wearing a meticulously ironed uniform and a chestful of medals, you know immediately that he is a dictator? And before camouflage became de riguer even for generals who would never be out of their offices except in a limo, why did British cavalry ride around in the summer heat of India wearing fur hats? During campaigns, it was not uncommon for them to die of heat stroke before they ever saw the enemy. Even if we restrict ourselves to the everyday wear of ordinary

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people, convoluted cultural dynamics are everywhere apparent. When teenagers adopted the style for low slung baggy pants, their elders were disgusted, so what ‘fashion statement’ were the youngsters making? In France, it is a matter of national debate whether Moslem girls are allowed to wear headscarves at school. Americans tend to see this as simple discrimination, but that overlooks the struggle between Church (i.e. Christianity, not Islam) and State (the Republic) that has been going on in France ever since the Revolution. Is all this to be Waved Away? Biological reductionism has a second technique that goes: Must Have Been. Ever since the late nineteenth century, it has constantly been argued that the evolution of human mental abilities or social organisation was the way the theorist says it was because it must have been that way. To take a classic example, it was once asserted that Matriarchy preceded Patriarchy, on the grounds that it was impossible for there to be any doubt about which woman had given birth to a child while it was only too easy to be uncertain of which man had impregnated the woman. It was, as they say, a wise child who knew his father. What set this theorising in motion in the 1850s was the report that among the Iroquois people of upstate New York wealth and titles passed down through the female line, rather than the male. Being unfamiliar to westerners, this naturally indicated primitiveness. It was well known that the Romans had firm rules of inheritance through the male line, which were indeed still evident in European law, even where in practice both sons and daughters shared in it. The survival of a more ancient system among the Iroquois was clearly evidence of a former epoch, now lost in the mists of time, when women held power. What must have happened then was an uprising by the men, who seized power for themselves. It is a dramatic fantasy that still surfaces from time to time in films and fiction, and on the more remote shores of feminism. The Great Project soon revealed the fundamental flaw in this argument: it does not follow that inheritance in the female line means empowerment of women. Political roles in matrilineal societies still for the most part pass between men, but from mother’s brother to sister’s son rather than father to son. Nor does the Comparative Method lend any support to the Matriarchy theory. On the contrary, patrilineal and matrilineal versions of very similar cultures often exist side by side. In the 1960s, Jack Goody found adjacent populations in Ghana whose only real difference was that one was patrilineal, the other matrilineal. Goody’s colleague Edmund Leach made fun of him for giving them different ethnic labels, so perpetuating a nineteenth conviction that they constituted radically different types of polities. Instead, he suggested, they were just structural alternatives on a similar notion of descent.8 Anthropology is haunted by faux science. In addition to social evolutionism, there was in the nineteenth century something called ‘scientific racism,’ whose applied arm was the kind of eugenics practiced in parts of the southern US in the 1920s, including sterilisation of those judged mentally or morally

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defective. Another project embodying the notion of immutable racial descent was the painstaking measurement of the anatomy of ‘primitives,’ so as to reconstruct their ancient origins. Particular attention was paid to measuring heads, and a whole classification system was devised. Easy-going Southern Europeans were brachycephalic (round headed) while their more energetic northern neighbours were doliocephalic, or long headed. It all sounded wonderfully scientific, and the same terminology could be applied to skulls excavated from ancient sites, with further exciting possibilities. Unwieldy piles of data were collected, but the results were confusing. Computers wouldn’t have helped because, as we now know, head shapes do not descend identically the same generation to generation down the centuries. On the contrary, they are relatively labile in response to environmental factors such as diet. The whole project was a complete bust – an object lesson for intellectual historians. What anthropologists have learned the hard way is that to claim to practice science is one thing, to actually do it is something else again.

Chapter 11

Exorcising Freud

With few exceptions, religions prescribe what their adherents must do, not what they must think. It follows that an ethnographer cannot expect to simply be told the meanings of rituals. For the participants, the question does not arise. It would be like asking a motorist with a flat tire what was the ‘meaning’ of car jacks. Rituals, like car jacks, have uses, not meanings. Consequently, it is up to ethnographers to work out as best they can what understanding of the world underlies the rituals, if indeed there is such an understanding. From the 1970s onward, this project was often discussed in terms of symbols, which is to say the multiple meanings attached to things mentioned or manipulated in rituals. For many people, however, the word ‘symbol’ has a spooky quality about it, immediately bringing to mind such murky things as Oedipal complexes and anal stages. In modern thinking, it is impossible to avoid the impact of Sigmund Freud and his concept of the unconscious. All of us know perfectly well that deep in our minds there are all manner of irrational fears and fantasies seething away, and if you are not convinced of this just try keeping a dream diary for a few months. Since memories of dreams evaporate so rapidly, you must put a pad and pencil right next to the bed. At first, you will forget about it until you’ve put on the coffee and then it’s too late, but slowly the habit gets established and then you find yourself remembering longer and longer dream segments. Often they are very vivid, sometimes frightening, sometimes libidinous, but mostly just weird. Why was I dreaming about so and so? I haven’t thought (consciously) about him/her in years. What was that strange building I was in, it seemed oddly familiar? Repetitive dreams are particularly compelling; surely your unconscious is trying to tell you something. If you are interested enough to consult a professional, you stand to gain insights. Freudian or otherwise, psychiatrists bring to bear an objective attitude and a wealth of experience. They may detect in your dreams some trauma that your conscious mind has been unhealthily repressing for years. Freud’s student Karl Jung saw something else in dreams. What struck him was their resemblance to the myths of primitive peoples. Myths, he noticed, unfolded through the same irrational leaps in which heroes did impossible

DOI: 10.4324/b22988 -16

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things, and humans morphed into animals and back again. He concluded that myths had in them the same kind of hidden meanings as dreams, leading directly to the unconscious. For psychiatry, they were particularly valuable because the primitives lived closer to the unconscious than modern man, who had hidden it from himself under a veneer of civilisation. By comparison, the primitives acted out their irrational impulses in ritual and narrated them in myth. Like children, they lacked the inhibitions that modern man had imposed on himself. In Jungian terms, the unconscious is the repository of archetypes, and experience in spotting them is the special skill of an analyst: The psychologist must have a sufficient experience not only of dreams and other products of unconscious activity, but also of mythology in its widest sense. Without this equipment, nobody can spot the important analogies; it is not possible, for instance, to see the analogy between a case of compulsion neurosis and that of a classical demonic possession.1 It’s not clear what exactly he means by “classical;” surely it has nothing to do with Greece or Rome. Evidently, he takes it for granted that all the primitives are prone to “demonic possession” in much the same way. What they share with his patients are “archetypes,” defined as a tendency to form representations of a motif – representations that can vary a great deal in detail without losing their basic pattern. Analysts needed to be alert to spot them, but they soon built up a handy checklist. As an example, Joseph Henderson works through a particularly common one. “The myth of the hero” he says, “is the most common and best-known myth in the world:” These hero myths vary enormously in detail, but the more closely one examines them the more one sees that structurally they are very similar. They have, that is to say, a universal pattern, even though they were developed by groups or individuals without any direct cultural contact with each other – by for instance, tribes of Africans or North American Indians, or the Greeks, or the Incas of Peru. Over and over again one hears a tale describing a hero’s miraculous but humble birth, his early proof of superhuman strength, his rapid rise to prominence, his triumphant struggle against the forces of evil, his fallibility to the sin of pride (hybris) and his fall through betrayal or a “heroic” sacrifice that ends in his death.2 Henderson cites a wide range of examples, including Davy Crockett, Hercules, Superman, Buddha, and King Arthur. He then analyses a lengthy dream sequence reported by a patient, and matches it up scene by scene with a cycle of myths from the Winnebago Indians, revealing the same structure in both. The diagnosis is that the patient, though apparently successful in life, remained immature. It seems a bland diagnosis for so much analysis.

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Jung’s ideas had considerable public impact, not perhaps as much as The Golden Bough a generation before, but enough to keep them in circulation. Indeed, they seem to enjoy a revival every decade or so. Their best known proponent in recent times has been Joseph Campbell whose books have reached a wide audience. They are frequently cited by journalists and television commentators whenever questions arise about the nature of myths, symbols, or the primitives. What is most compelling about Jung’s ideas is that they suggest a direct link between ourselves and our most ancient ancestors, countless ages ago. By looking deep inside our own minds, we simultaneously see deep back in time. We feel in ourselves the passions that kept our ancestors alive, that swirled through Greek drama, and that are the subject of all serious literature. In this visceral appeal, Jung easily upstages nineteenth-century evolutionism, whose time-depth served only to push the primitives away. Tylor’s version of ‘empathy,’ however satisfying it was to the self-confident rationalists of the nineteenth century, now seems in our post-Freudian world only cold, distant, and unconvincing. For those sceptical of all things Freudian, the critique of Jung is obvious. Archetypes exist only in the over-heated imaginations of analytic psychiatrists. They have no scientific basis; they are just as irrational as the myths they repeat and the neuroses they claim to treat. This is not, however, the anthropological critique. To start with, ethnographers have for decades been leery of making any claims to practicing a science. For anyone with any familiarity with the natural sciences, that would be immodest to say the least. We have nothing to offer that looks anything like Newton’s laws of motion, let alone Einstein’s relativity. There is nothing definitive about my account of Berawan death rites. The best I can hope for is that I have marshalled my data so as to make it convincing, while not twisting it to suit my goals nor leaving out things that don’t fit. The Berawan ‘culture’ that I describe is in the last analysis as insubstantial as Jung’s archetypes. This is not an epistemological abdication; I have any number of facts to report: I can say with confidence that Berawan longhouses had no plumbing; that no one liked to sleep without a little wick lantern nearby; that pregnant women were forbidden to throw sticks at fruit bats, and so on, indefinitely. As regards reportage, I believe I am better qualified than any journalist, and I’m not expecting to be interrogated about any of that. If however I gave a talk about previous practices of headhunting, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to be contradicted. I can imagine being told that headhunting was a myth made up to justify colonialism. (It wasn’t.) As for the understanding of life and death that underlay Berawan death rites, that is open to challenge by anyone, including other anthropologists reworking the data I myself provide. The problem with the argument from archetypes is not that it is unscientific, but that it commits the logical error of reductionism, of explaining the particular from the general. It seems reasonable enough that people everywhere

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tell stories in which the ups and downs of a particular individual provide the connecting thread. That claim is surely innocuous enough. Perhaps the protagonist is foolish, like Don Quixote; or warlike, like El Cid, but at what point exactly do they become heroes? Is there something more needed, something deeply buried in the human mind that makes the true hero? Must they be semi-divine, like the Greek originals? That would require some universal idea of the divine. Do all heroes do heroic things? Not exactly; mostly they get themselves into trouble for no good reason. Are heroes role models for ordinary mortals? Rarely, folk heroes have a strong tendency to steal from the gods, commit incest, and do other downright anti-social things. Most heroes would not make good dinner party guests. The goals of the Great Project lie in exactly the opposite direction. Jung found myths irrational and dreamlike because he paid no attention to what they might have meant to the narrators or their audiences. The stories surrounding Robin Hood, for example, often stretch credulity but they have a perfectly comprehensible plot line, the struggles of an outlaw – a generous, good-hearted fellow – against an oppressive regime. Bonny and Clyde are in the same genre, as is that “wild colonial boy” Ned Kelly, but that does not make Robin Hood just another generic hero. On the contrary, the main interest of his myth is what it says about medieval England or our imagination of medieval England. Out of context, for example, the role of religious institutions makes no sense. Since the Norman conquest, political power had been in the hands of a foreign elite. Anglo-Saxon influence persisted most strongly in the Church. Robin Hood was at war with the former, not the latter. Friar Tuck is portly and affable, your true Englishman, and Maid Marion becomes abottess of a nunnery in order to avoid a forced marriage to a nasty pushy Norman. Meanwhile, England is misruled because the king himself is away on a crusade, summoned by the Pope himself. He is offstage but imminent, like king Arthur, the once and future king, that most British of heroes. It is in the social and historical context of its telling that Robin Hood starts getting ethnographically interesting. The familiar genre conventions of such stories are the least interesting thing about them; they can be pretty much taken for granted. Psycho-reductionism appeals to the universality of emotion. When I lay out the details of Berawan mortuary rites, I am sometimes accused of callousness. Surely what matters is the devastation that people everywhere experience when they lose a loved one. It would be strange indeed to deny that all people everywhere are capable of feeling the full range of emotions, love and anger, grief and hope, and so on. Indeed, for the last century anthropologists have embraced what is called the ‘principle of the psychic unity of humankind.’ This principle cannot be described as a finding, since there is no imaginable way of proving it. Instead, it is a premise, prompted by a broad form of humanism, without which it would be hard to claim any kind of understanding of how other people experience their world. In other words, it

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makes room for empathy – real empathy, not the Tylorian version. Instead of showing erroneous logic, there is a simple assumption of common humanity. The principle cannot be abused in any reductionist way because it is, intentionally, too vague. Empathy of the emotional kind is familiar enough. If you attend a funeral simply out of respect for someone you did not know well, it’s a common experience to find yourself at some point fighting back tears. The sight of a grieving widow or widower, or confused-looking children, often produces a pang of empathy – how will she or he hold up in the next few months? Who will take care of the kids? Your heart, as we say, goes out to them, but there is also something else going on. If you yourself have suffered a similar loss – and as we grow older that becomes virtually inevitable – then the grief you see reminds you of your own, and summons it back with full force. Then your tears are for yourself as well as the bereaved, and – who knows? – perhaps for the entire human condition. An inability to feel empathy in this way is a serious matter, a diagnostic feature of character disorders such as narcissism. Note, however, the order of events: first you go to a funeral dry-eyed, and then when you get there you feel moved to cry. Consequently, it was the ritual that caused the emotion, not the other way around. This is important because it inverts the logic of psycho-reductionism: for reductionists the flood of emotions that are universally felt at such times propel death rituals – any death rituals, as long as there is some outlet for grief. But is that what death rituals, in all their amazing variety, actually do? American funeral directors, in their role as ‘grief-counselors,’ will tell their customers that the ‘viewing’ of the resurrected corpse in the funeral ‘parlour’ will help them have pleasant memories of the deceased, and so ease the pain of mourning. But who is to say that it doesn’t make it worse? For the grieved to be forced to play their assigned parts during a whole series of quasi-public rituals is for many people more of an ordeal than a comfort – a sort of grim inversion of a society wedding. Nor is it unknown for children to step back in horror and blurt out: he/ she looks so dead! The trauma of seeing the lifeless corpse of someone they loved and relied on to be always there may then be repressed, calling for psychiatric help at a later date. What Freud called the grief work has to be done around, behind, or after the rites, not by means of them. What I conclude from this is that there is in fact no direct relationship at all between emotion and ritual. On the one hand, emotions are far too evanescent, too shifting, to be the basis of behaviour that is by definition preplanned. On the other hand, emotions cannot be scripted; we all know that our moods can switch between extremes of elation and depression in a matter of minutes, even without any outside stimulus whatsoever. What rituals can do, however, is to prescribe the emotions that should be felt, whether or not they in fact are. For example, after the tubercular Berawan woman was pronounced to have ‘lost breath’ as described in

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Chapter 4, dozens of women immediately set up such a great wailing that I felt disoriented. Even though I’d known what to expect, I did not realise how overwhelming this outpouring of grief would be, and how I would be swept up in it. I was soon blinking back tears, and reliving a grievous loss of my own not so long before. It was some time before I remembered that I was supposed to be doing ethnography, and began to pay attention to who was doing what. One senior woman was already taking charge of washing the corpse, carefully respecting its modesty. The husband looked simply exhausted, and his daughter confused. In front of me, a middle-aged woman was on her knees, swaying back and forth, her long black hair thrown forward so as to conceal her face. I could not catch what it was she was saying, because her voice came out in bursts starting on a high note and descending as she ran out of breath. I got the drift, however: why are you leaving us? What shall we do without you? The woman seemed lost in the intensity of her grief, but she was not alone. There were at least a dozen women keening in the same fashion, but while I was watching, one sat up abruptly and asked her neighbour a question in a perfectly ordinary conversational tone. Having noticed that detail, I started looking closer, and there was a young girl, maybe twelve years old, watching her mother and copying her actions. I talked to people after the event and they agreed immediately that wailing in this fashion was an art form. There were women in the longhouse who were known to be adepts, and had they not been there someone would have gone to get them. I felt disillusioned, even cheated, but thinking about it later I concluded that this did not prove wholesale insincerity. Some women clearly were moved and cried bitterly. Were they grieving for the woman that had lost breath, or for some other loss that had touched them closely? How could anyone know, even the crying woman herself? Moreover, even the celebrated exponents of the art form may very well have called forth in their own breasts the emotions that they were enacting; perhaps that was how they had become exponents. One for instance had lost a dearly beloved brother, and when some time later she became pregnant it was found that it was her brother come back again. Then the adored child grew sick of some wasting disease, and the mother had to watch as the child died. That woman knew a thing or two about grieving, and I had no business being condescending. This emotional experience of watching the display of grief was intense, but that was not why I was sitting in the room of the sick woman What I was there to see was the rites that occurred right after ‘loss of breath’ was pronounced, and they were striking. The corpse was talked to constantly, given cigarettes, force fed with a spoon, and marched around the family apartment amid scenes of apparent chaos, and all this was done at a brisk pace so as to get it finished before rigor mortis set in. But what did it signify? Surely, it made unmistakably clear that no one in that room thought the person who had lost breath was simply gone, as western medicine would have it, but was still somehow present and aware. The important point for present purposes is that

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I did not reach this interpretation by invoking theories of a universal Oedipal complex or some murky submerged archetype. For ethnographic use, the spooky Freudian associations of the word ‘symbol’ must be exorcised. The goal is to find out what symbols connote in their own cultural contexts, and that may include meanings that are unique to that culture. Consequently, there is no knowing what they are in advance. In addition, participants in a ritual cannot be expected to list all the connotations of a symbol, and almost certainly could not do so if they tried. In that sense, we might describe them as unconscious, but not in the Freudian way: they are part of a shared understanding of the world, not the result of either personal trauma or universal emotions. Since I am contrasting cultural and psychological things, I should say plainly what is meant by the saying that something is cultural. Cultural things are those that are learned rather than innate. So, for instance, smiling is not a cultural feature; everybody worldwide does it in exactly the same way, and it appears in babies everywhere at the same stage of maturation as they acquire the necessary muscle co-ordination. There is still a cultural dimension to this, since we are taught when it is appropriate to smile – soldiers must not smile at their sergeant – but the act itself is innate. By contrast, shaking hands is not universal. In a remarkable film clip showing New Guinea highlanders encountering white men for the first time, they clearly have no idea why the Australians are chasing them around holding out their right hands. They soon acquired the custom, however, to the extent that by the 1970s it was impossible to enter a village in the region without shaking hands with everyone there. Kids ducked back to the end of the line so as to go round twice. Shaking hands is the great cultural legacy of Australia in modern-day New Guinea. In philosophy, there is a whole literature concerning the nature of the symbol, but for present purposes the admirably simple definition offered by Victor Turner will serve: symbols, he says, are things that stand for other things. One of their important characteristics is that they are multivocalic, which is to say they have multiple meanings. There is no ambiguity about a road sign that says STOP, but symbols appear in all kinds of contexts, and call forth different associations for different people. Turner’s pioneer studies were carried out in the 1950s among Ndembu people in north-western Zambia, who are farmers living in villages scattered through woodlands. In many rites that Turner saw, special use was made of wood from a tree they called mudyi, and when Turner asked about it he was told that the mudyi tree was their ‘flag.’ They had seen the British colonial officers standing at attention and saluting as the union jack was raised, and they had understood readily enough that the flag symbolised something important to the white men. (No Ndembu, we might notice, were fooled into thinking that the British worshipped flag poles, as Frazer might have expected.) Obviously, they knew nothing about the importance that Roman legions attached to their brass eagles, or the

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bloody struggle to plant the stars and stripes atop Iwo Jima, but they knew enough to grasp that the Union Jack was a symbol. So when they wanted to convey what the mudyi tree was to them they made an analogy they knew Turner would understand, which was really very ingenious of them. Of the multivocalic nature of flags I need say no more, but the mudyi tree takes a lot of unpacking. As it happens, the tree exudes a white milky substance when the bark is cut, so it takes no great penetration to guess that it was associated with mothers’ milk, and hence mothers, and with women generally. That, however, had a special resonance for the Ndembu because they were matrilineal, that is to say property and titles passed through the female line instead of the male line. Matrilineal societies are not, however, simply mirror images of patrilineal ones such as Tikopia because women did not become chiefs. That did not mean that there were not powerful women, and powers that women especially possessed, but chiefly status passed from man to man. Consequently, a boy did not inherit from his father, but from his mother’s brother. Paradoxically, however, the rule of residence after marriage was that husbands move to their wives’ villages, so that a man’s heir was born and raised in another village. This made for all manner of scheming and manoeuvering by men who were trying to gain political clout. To assure a larger following it was necessary both to keep the husbands of their daughters in their own villages, as custom required, and also to break up the marriages of their sisters and daughters in order to bring home their sister’s sons. Like politicians everywhere, they invoked shared social values – mother and apple pie – and subverted them at the same time.3 The result was constant strife and high rates of divorce. This did not signify any kind of historical crisis because Ndembu society had been muddling along in this way for generations – this turmoil was Ndembu society. It did however mean that the Ndembu spent a lot of time patching up quarrels, in a constant succession of what Turner called ‘social dramas’ – effectively, Ndembu soap operas. As he pursued his research it became clear to Turner that the principle mode of resolution was through rituals, often cast as a process of healing. Consequently, Turner turned his attention from social organisation to ritual, which he argued was the stable element in Ndembu life, underlying all the social mayhem. So he sought out all manner of rites, some near where he was based, others far, some familial and intimate, others grand festivals that attracted hundreds of participants. The mudyi tree made an appearance in many of these rites. Later in his fieldwork, Turner had the great luck to find an invaluable informant, a man who was not only a recognised expert in ritual matters but also willing to sit with Turner for hours at a time explaining what it all meant. To help with tricky translations, Turner also recruited a young Ndembu school teacher, a man who had spent his formative years at boarding schools in the city and was keen to learn about his own culture. The three of them together, seated round a table in one of his tents, comprised what

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Turner described as a ‘running seminar’ on Ndembu ritual. It is an appealing image, one that many ethnographers have tried to reproduce elsewhere, with varying degrees of success.4 Turner also worked out a methodology.5 There were, he said, three sources of information concerning the meanings of symbols: observation of rituals, commentary by ritual experts, and comparisons made by the ethnographer between symbols as they appeared in one context versus another. The first of these is obvious, but not always so easy to put into practice. If an elaborate ritual is in progress with lots of participants, it is very easy to be in the wrong place watching something only marginally relevant while the crucial action is occurring elsewhere. It is very noticeable that in ethnographic movies – especially those made by film professionals – the cameras are invariably trained on a group of young women dancing, when they should be following a raggedly dressed old man off to the side. Especially at the beginning of fieldwork, it is very helpful to have a local guide who taps your elbow when you are looking the wrong way. The second source of information was what Turner’s seminar provided, and he spoke of it as ‘indigenous exegesis.’ For anthropologists, the term exegesis is now short hand for commentary by a participant in ritual, preferably a locally acknowledge expert, and it is not always in good supply. There are places – the highlands of New Guinea, I am told, is one of them – where it is hard to elicit any exegesis at all, and that provides a serious challenge. Finally, there is the work the ethnographer must do alone: careful poring over field notes. If an interpretation suggests itself in one ritual, does it shed any light on another? Was there an echo somewhere in a myth? If so, it might be worth following up with more questions. If not, nothing to do but try another angle. The method is hardly infallible, and there is no doubt an intuitive quality about it, but it is fundamentally an inductive technique. The eureka moment for the ethnographer comes when a disparate collection of puzzling items all fall into place at once. Such moments are rare. As Turner rapidly discovered, in tracking down the multiple meanings of symbols there is no way of knowing when the job is finished. Concerning the mudyi tree, for example, there were things that everyone mentioned. The tree, their ‘flag,’ stood for everything that Ndembu shared by virtue of being Ndembu. Children, they said, ‘drink’ Ndembu custom as they drink their mother’s milk, and so grow into responsible adults. Consequently, the tree stands for harmony, especially between all those, men and women, who share descent through a line of mothers – that is, a matrilineage. Such groups can include dozens of people, and typically villages are associated with a particular lineage. It also stands for harmony among women, who provide the whole framework of Ndembu society. So far, so good. When watching the performance of rites, however, and discussing them with his colleagues in the ‘seminar,’ Turner began to uncover less rosy subplots. The mudyi tree, not surprisingly, is conspicuous in the rites

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that a girl goes through when she reaches womanhood, specifically when she has developed breasts. The basic format is simple: the girl is confined under a milk tree, and adult women dance around her. Turner’s informant explained that the tree represented the founding ancestress, who slept under the very same tree when she was initiated, and each subsequent matriarch after her. It is a touching moment between mother and daughter, a high point in both their lives, but it is also the moment when the daughter establishes herself as an independent agent. The most obvious struggles between them are, of course, about marriage. Ndembu girls are not always compliant with their parents’ choice of husbands. If they chose a husband from far away, there is the risk that the line of succession will be broken because daughters will be born far away. Moreover, if, by some miracle, she happens to get on well with her husband and his people, she may not take kindly to her mother’s brother constantly trying to break up her marriage after she has a son. But then she will be guilty of keeping her son in a village where he cannot inherit, so that he will remain a poor relation of his father’s family. These inescapable tensions for and between women have ritual expression. For example, the girl’s mother herself is not allowed to participate in the dancing around the milk tree. Moreover, the girl must remain motionless underneath a blanket throughout the day of the rite, and if she were to lift the blanket and see her mother or her mother’s village, then the mother would die. Interestingly, none of Turner’s informants had any explanation to offer for this tabu, but it seemed plain enough to Turner that the girl did indeed have both the motive and the means to ‘kill’ her mother, that is terminate her line of descent. Other tensions emerged in the girl’s initiation rite. Men were excluded, and chased off if they appeared, as befits an occasion when women in general have reason to resent the way they are manipulated by men. Again, there is an occasion when the mother of the girl must cook up masses of vegetable foods, and deliver them to the women who do the dancing from which she is excluded. A struggle promptly ensues between women from different matrilineages to grab hold of the serving spoon, so making manifest the competition between them. Most of the food is spilled in the struggle and wasted. So much for universal harmony, for women as much as men. What Turner found out about the mudyi tree was important because it showed that symbols and rituals may have implications or connotations that the participants do not put into words, or even could not put into words. Potentially that gives ethnographers a powerful tool; it allows them to discover the most basic premises on which other people’s understandings of the world are based. The simplest things are often the most profound, and the hardest for the poor stumbling ethnographer to grasp, busy as always asking smart people dumb questions. For the Ndembu, it would be literally unremarkable that there were always conflicts simmering away just below the surface, and who could doubt that, wherever they lived? Turner’s achievement

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is to show us how Ndembu think about this aspect of the human condition, and what could be done about it. We might take some tips from them about conflict resolution. The same point was made in Chapter 4 in connection with Berawan understandings of what it was to die. Right from the beginning of fieldwork, I participated in funerals – that was a minimal requirement of residents. When people went off to a funeral in another community, they routinely took me along, or rather I took them along because I had an outboard motor. Funerals were occasions for drinking and renewing old friendships. The teenage boys were particularly enthusiastic because it was a great opportunity to flirt with the girls in the host community. This much was evident, but even early on in fieldwork, I noticed a kind of edgy nervousness in all the partying. There were strict tabus against music and dancing, and nothing optional about sitting up all night. Pregnant women and the sick stayed away, but no one there could simply go off to bed, however, tired. Men who nodded off had nasty pranks played on them, and all the silly games that the teenagers played hardly alleviated the boredom for many adults. At about 3.00 am, the weightiness of the death rites was sometimes very apparent. Yet no one ever said to me: you do realise don’t you that the recently dead are dangerous, spiteful, and unpredictable, however amiable they were in life? In fact, they could not have said that because the person laid out on the longhouse veranda was not in their view dead at all, and would not be for months to come. They did not tell me their understanding of all this because it had never occurred to them that there was any other way of understanding it. After all, death is universal: how could it not be the same for everyone? One young man told me that he had become a Catholic when he had learned about purgatory. It was the responsible thing to do, he thought, because that way his soul would not hang around the longhouse threatening everyone there, but would be securely under the watchful eye of God until he was ready to become an ancestor. I started out this chapter with a caveat: for the participant rituals no more have ‘meanings’ that do car jacks. Turner’s methodology – watch, ask, compare – had the potential to discover, with luck and persistence, peoples’ most fundamental, taken-for-granted, understandings of the world, and achieving that was the culminating triumph of the Great Project. There is a pitfall, however, that we must be careful to step around. The temptation is to think of ritual as a kind of language, a non-vocal code for communicating shared values. Indeed in the 1970s Clifford Geertz, from his influential position as the first anthropologist at the Centre for Advanced Study in Princeton, made this idea explicit with a formula that was repeated ad nauseam: ‘treat culture as text.’ This was attractive to historians and literary critics because they too dealt with texts, and what came into view was a grand synthesis in the humanities. By that time, most anthropologists already found meaningless that hoary old academic category ‘social sciences,’ and a re-orientation towards interpretation was well underway. For their part,

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anthropologists were only too ready to borrow the theoretical resources of their neighbours in the humanities, and having launched themselves into symbolism, were soon talking in terms of tropes, metaphor, metonymy, simile, synecdoche, and so on. This light-fingered attitude to other peoples’ theories was indeed a feature of twentieth-century anthropology; there was an economic anthropology that lifted ideas from Marx, a legal anthropology full of English jurisprudence, and a political anthropology that confronted – and refuted – Thomas Hobbes’s assumption that anarchy was chaos, a war of all against all. Geertz’s maxim, however, was a dead end. As a result of it, a great deal of ink was spilled arguing about theoretical issues that evaporate if it the analogic relation between things cultural and things linguistic is kept firmly in mind. Cultures may, for a particular purpose, be treated as like texts, but they are not texts. Texts have authors, rituals do not. Even if a written text cannot be attributed, we can be sure there was an author or authors back there somewhere. To say the same thing about ritual would be utterly misleading. Rituals are not simply made up someday, like Tylor’s caveman having a bad dream and promptly inventing ancestor worship. It would be better to say that symbols accrete meanings, the way ships get barnacles. Rituals do not have audiences either. Pepys’s diaries may not have been intended for an audience, but they got one willy-nilly. By contrast, for whose benefit are participants ‘performing’ a ritual? Is it a kind of pep rally, allowing people an opportunity to publicly re-affirm their shared values? Are they staged so as to ‘express’ those values to some other audience, such as perhaps the visiting ethnographer? Geertz’s blunder was another example of the fatal tendency of analogies to freeze into dogmas. In the 1950s, British theorists argued that societies were like machines because the parts of which they were made – their various institutions – fitted together into functioning wholes. This metaphor neatly overturned the nineteenth-century view of cultures as nothing more than ‘survivals,’ the detritus of previous millennia. Soon however it had ossified into a premise: if an institution was there clearly it had a function. Claude Levi-Strauss put paid to all this with a quip: “To say that a society functions is a platitude; to say everything in a society functions is absurd.” A variant of functionalism compared societies to bodies, capturing a pleasing notion of culture that was not only living but also growing. The body politic, however, doesn’t eat or defecate. Again, evolutionists argue that human tools upstaged lions’ teeth, so that cultures are a kind of false teeth. The analogy has an important truth in it, but it remains an analogy, not a truth or a finding.

Part V

Looking for Meanings

Chapter 12

What’s Only Natural

As an item invested with multiple symbolic associations, the mudyi tree has a restricted geographical range. One can hardly expect it to be found outside the region where mudyi trees grow. Before Turner arrived in Zambia, he had never seen a specimen of Diplorrhyncus condylocarpon, so he could have had no pre-conceived idea about its meaning. When he was shown one, it took no great powers of observation to notice that its sap was a milky white. Indeed, in English, it is called the milk tree. Beyond that, however, Turner had to piece together the associations that the mudyi tree had for Ndembu people by carefully noting its use in ritual, quizzing his informants, and then sifting repeatedly through his accumulated data. By contrast, there are things that are part of everyone’s experience, wherever they live. It does not follow that these things are universally assigned symbolic importance in any particular place, but it would be surprising to find people who attached no meaning beyond the literal to, say, sun and moon, or male and female. The trap is then set for assuming some universal unconscious significance, or Jungian archetype. To avoid that, ethnographers have to work just as hard at understanding sun and moon and male and female as Turner did with the mudyi tree, with the added difficulty that they must scrupulously avoid imposing meanings that they themselves see as selfevident. This is seldom effort wasted, however. As Robert Hertz put it, writing in 1909: Every social hierarchy claims to be founded on the nature of things, physei, ou nomo. It thus accords itself eternity, it escapes change and the attacks of innovators. Aristotle justified slavery by the ethnic superiority of the Greeks over barbarians; and today the man who is annoyed by feminist claims alleges that woman is naturally inferior.1 His observation is as incisive today as it was a century ago. Consequently, alert ethnographers seize on any claim that some state of affairs is “only natural,” and then they are off like hounds after the hare. Such claims are bound to conceal those culturally specific understandings of the world that it is our job to hunt out. DOI: 10.4324/b22988 -18

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In this way, we arrive at the counter-intuitive proposition that a culture is first and foremost an account of nature. Putting that the other way round, there is no ‘nature’ without a culture with which to know of it. This is not a philosophical observation; I have no intention of rousing the ghost of Bishop Berkeley, nor am I making a sneak attack on the epistemology of science. It is instead a finding of ethnography, no more, no less, but it is sufficient to sideline all brands of psychological or biological reductionism. The quote above comes from an essay called “The Pre-eminence of the Right Hand: A Study in Polarity.” This is the same Hertz that was mentioned in Chapter 4 in connection with Berawan death rites. He was by all accounts a brilliant young man, but his life was cut short by some futile charge into machine gun fire during the First World War. The essays on death and handedness are virtually all that he left and consequently he does not in terms of intellectual history cut the figure of his mentor Emile Durkheim, let alone Sir James Frazer. Nevertheless, his arguments provided a way of taking up Durkheim’s challenge to go looking for the sacred, one that was widely used by twentieth-century ethnographers. Hertz begins incisively: What resemblance more perfect than between our two hands! And yet what a striking inequality there is! To the right hand go honors, flattering designations, prerogatives; it acts, orders, and takes. The left hand, on the contrary, is despised and reduced to the role of a humble auxiliary: by itself it can do nothing; it helps, it supports, it holds. The right hand is the symbol and model of all aristocracies; the left hand of all plebians. What are the titles of the nobility of the right hand? And whence comes the servitude of the left? The first question that Hertz takes up is whether there is a biological basis to this. At first glance, this seemed obvious, simply from the findings of human anatomy. Predominantly the left lobe of the brain, which controls the right side of the body, is larger than the right lobe. Ergo, we are right handed because we are left brained. Hertz’s approach requires, however, that any claim that something is ‘natural’ must be carefully inspected. Is it possible, he asks, that we are left brained because we have chosen to be right handed? Chimpanzees, our nearest relatives among the apes, are ambidextrous. Moreover, people who take the trouble to develop the skills of their left hand increase the size of the right lobe of their brains. A striking example is the amazing speed and precision with which accomplished violinists move the fingers of their left hands up and down the neck of the violin to create the chords. Meanwhile, the right hand simply holds the bow – an important role in musical expression no doubt, but hardly as demanding of digital agility. This is intriguing, but nevertheless Hertz ends up by conceding that there must be a physical predisposition for the superiority of the right. What convinced him of this was that he

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never found a culture where the relationship was reversed. There were cases, certainly, when the attributes of the left temporarily came to the fore, but nowhere did it acquire an overall pre-eminence over the right. If it were a matter only of convention there would be no such uniformity, and we would expect to find the right preferred in some places and the left in others. At this point, one might consider the matter closed, but Hertz has only just begun. Given that for the majority of people the right hand is more dexterous, what point could there be in preventing the left from acquiring skills? Yet in Java, children who showed a tendency to be left handed – also universal, but everywhere in the minority – had their left arms tied to their waists so that they could not make use of them. Meanwhile, as a matter of good breeding, regular right-handers were discouraged from using their left. Presumably, there were no Javanese concert violinists. Meanwhile in Europe children who wrote with their left hand had the pen firmly removed and put in their right. For this there was a spurious utilitarian rationale: since one must write from left to right, a left-hander was liable to smudge what he or she had just written. In practice, every left-hander knows to simply turn the paper sideways. Moreover, Arabic is written right to left, apparently without problems. It is evident that left-handers are a persecuted minority. (I speak as one of the oppressed.) In Java, it is insulting to hand someone money with the left hand. A lefthander travelling there must concentrate on keeping his favoured hand buried in his trouser pocket. In India, it is disgusting to eat with the fingers of the left hand, because that is the hand used in defecation – so neatly confirming Hetz’s point. Meanwhile, the right side has associations with the divine. In pictures of the Last Supper, Jesus points inspiringly upward to heaven with his right hand, and menacingly down to hell with his left. Saints were said to be so immediately drawn to the good and away from evil that as nursing infants they refused the left breast. In consecrating a church, the priest leads his congregation in procession three times around the building with their right sides inwards. To go the other way around is to summon the devil. In England to go widdyshins in this fashion, even without intending to, is seen as dangerously perverse. Needless to say, all of this goes far beyond anything that can be attributed to ‘nature.’ In addition, right and left are frequently entangled with male and female. For the Maori of New Zealand, all kinds of unpleasant things are associated with tama wahine, the female side. “All evils, misery, and death,” says a Maori proverb, “come from the female side.”2 This is made evident in a rite that occurs in many contexts, called tira. A tohunga, or priest, builds two small mounds of earth, one to his left and one to his right, with a stick planted in each. The one dedicated to life and the deity of the sky is, of course, the one on the right. Meanwhile, all misfortune and impurity is ordered into the other, which is associated with the earth. Finally, the priest simply kicks over the stick and the mound on the left-hand side. It is the most economical

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ritual imaginable, and it must be very satisfying to perform. One does not need to be a feminist, however, to question its premises. There is no greater frequency of left-handers among women than men, and no biological reason for making the left the female side. Moreover, the words right and left have strangely shifting connotations. If someone says “I know my rights,” they are not talking about laterality. If a teacher says “that’s right” to a student, he or she is saying something else again. Why should these three very different senses of the word be linked together? There is nothing self-evident or ‘natural’ about connecting correctness and legal privileges with the right hand, but neither is it an accident of English etymology. French droit encompasses the same three meanings, as does adj in Armenian, and tu’o in Berawan. ‘Dextrous’ itself comes from Latin dexter, right. Meanwhile, words for the left have an oddly shifting, or shifty, quality. When French sinistre was borrowed into English it acquired sinister connotations. Meanwhile gauche became merely clumsy, equivalent to French maladroit. The dialect term cack-handed is derived from Middle English cakken, meaning excrement. A left-handed compliment is not flattering. In many European legislatures, the opposition sat to the left of the aisle, but that very soon took on other connotations. Left-wing politics is concerned to defend the interests of the less privileged against exploitation by the rich and powerful. “If organic asymmetry had not existed,” says Hertz, “it would have had to be invented.”3 That is, according to him, because humans have a strong tendency to think in terms of dual categories, such as good/bad, left/right, male/female, and these dyads tend to be mapped onto one another in various combinations. “How could a man’s body,” asks Hertz, “escape the law of polarity which governs everything?” Durkheim and his students at the beginning of the twentieth century placed great emphasis on the pervasiveness of dualism in ‘primitive thought.’ As the Great Project gathered more data, it turned out that they had somewhat overstated their case, but even so, there are some remarkably thorough examples of it. For example, the social organisation of the Bororo of Brazil, who we met in Chapter 5, is intensely dualistic. As we have seen, the circle of houses that make up the village is divided into two halves or moieties. Everybody belongs to the moiety of their mother, and no one can marry into their own moiety. Men cross the village to their wives’ houses, but they are never at home there. They have precious few rights, and none at all in the stock of personal names of their affines, or in the all-important ritual resource of the insignia of the aroe. The opposition between moieties – and that is the technical term – is made manifest when the women gossip about the low moral standing of those ‘other’ people across the way, but this is less so for the men, who are constantly moving to and fro. Even more conspicuous, however, is the complimentarity between the two: the village unity exists not in spite of the division but because of it. Each half is dependent on the other; a man cannot even be buried without the help of people from the opposing moiety.

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The complementarity of moieties creates other oppositions. For example, a man is in the opposite moiety to both his father and his son, but in the same one as his grandfather and grandson. This pattern of alternating generations does not apply to women, since they define membership in the first place. It does, however, have consequences in ritual because no one can wear the regalia of his own moiety. Instead, it is the sons in one moiety of the fathers in the other that must wear them, and that creates a bifurcation even in the individual, setting in opposition a man’s role regarding his kin through his mother’s line, versus the one he plays as an aroe of his father’s people. This too has ritual expression, because the latter cannot die, only the social person gets a funeral. So every man has a double – from his own moiety, of course – who can assume his roles. This is no mere matter of finding a stand-in, but is an important relationship throughout a man’s life. Women do not have doubles because they do not wear the elaborate feather crowns of the aroe. Women are also excluded from the men’s house at the centre of the village, setting up the related dualities male/female, inside/out.4 This is the merest sketch, enough perhaps to hint at the depth of dualism in Bororo thinking. Compare this with the Berawan of Borneo – no moieties, no men’s houses, no bifurcated persons. In the twentieth century, the theories that Durkheim and his students had proposed about the centrality of dualism in ‘primitive thought’ were developed by Claude Levi-Strauss. His writings became influential in the 1960s, just as universities in Britain and America were expanding to accommodate the baby boom generation. The greater availability of funding provided the opportunity to test Levi-Strauss’ ideas, and they stimulated a great deal of ethnographic research. The results showed that dualistic thinking is indeed found worldwide, but with varying degrees of elaboration. Speaking in very general terms, it is prominent in many parts of the Americas and Southeast Asia, but less so in Africa and Melanesia. Aside from assessing the prevalence and distribution of dualism, there is a more fundamental point here, having to do with the recurrence of particular symbols. In the nineteenth century, it was a great puzzle to armchair anthropologists that they constantly found similarities of custom or ritual in cultures far away from each other, even on different continents. They had two theories to account for this. The first was that people at different stages of mental evolution thought the same thoughts – the familiar stages of Edward Burnett Tylor, as described in Chapter 3. The second explanation was that the similarities were proof of the diffusion of prehistoric peoples over vast distances. These notions of ancient origins and forgotten migrations still captivate the public imagination, as is evident in the pages of National Geographic and on TV programs specialising in the mysterious and the occult. There can be no doubt that diffusionist theorising has a basis in fact. To begin with, humans are found in every corner of the globe, and they must have got there somehow. In the nineteenth century, there were some who

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argued that the different races each had a separate origin, but that is impossible in phylogenetic terms; it can’t be a random coincidence that all human populations are cross fertile. In addition, it is obvious that technological innovations have spread from one place to another. To convince yourself of that you need only think of the spread of agriculture, or of domesticated animals, or the techniques of metalworking. We now know vastly more about these processes than was known in the nineteenth century as a result of research spanning archaeology, linguistics, biology, botany, and chemistry, but even then it was evident that they must have occurred. If we pause for a moment to compare evolutionist and diffusionist theories, we can see that the obvious process of diffusion drives a solid wedge between theories of biological and social evolution. In evolutionary terms, diffusion means that human populations can change their whole mode of ecological adaptation – their place in the food chain – virtually at the drop of a hat. There is no parallel process in biological evolution; Darwin could hardly have written The Origin of Species if horses could turn into hares. Meanwhile, diffusionist theorising lost respectability because it attracted all kinds of cranks. When the pyramids hidden deep in the jungles of Yucatan were rediscovered in the 1840s, the imaginations of diffusionists immediately flew to Egypt. The great pyramids of Giza were by then already the focus of all manner of crackpot theories: their dimensions contained a secret code that could foretell the future – a code incorporated by the Jewish slaves at God’s instructions. (The Egyptian pyramids were not built by slaves, and certainly not by Jewish slaves.) So, with a flash of insight, the pyramid enthusiasts concluded that the Mayans must have been the descendants of ancient Egyptian colonists, who got there via the Lost Continent of Atlantis. Or perhaps they were the thirteenth lost tribe of Israel, who had learned their trade building the Egyptian pyramids. This is all very daffy because in fact the pyramids of Egypt and Yucatan have virtually nothing in common except the label ‘pyramid.’ Their proportions and mode of construction are entirely different. Mayan pyramids have flights of steps and temples on top, whereas Egyptian priests did not go scrambling up their smooth-finished pyramids, and the only spaces in them were buried deep inside. As an innovation in building technique, they comprise piles of stone blocks with fewer the further you go up, like something a kid might make with play blocks. Were the Mayans not capable of inventing this architectural form for themselves? Ironically, Tylor had the solution to the problem immediately at hand, but he allowed it to be obscured by his evolutionary premises. In the introduction to his Evolution of Prehistoric Society (1878), he writes: When similar arts, customs, beliefs, or legends are found in several different regions, among people not known to be of the same stock, how is similarity to be accounted for? Sometime it is the like action of men’s

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minds under like circumstances, and sometimes it is proof of blood relationship or of intercourse, direct or indirect, between the races among whom it is found.5 The second “sometimes” acknowledges the possibility of diffusion, but the first requires only the “like action of men’s minds under like circumstances.” Hertz argues the same thing, except that the circumstances he has in mind have nothing to do with the ancient past, but instead with the immediate physical environment – the worlds people live in. Those worlds have things in common, of which the most obvious have to do with the biology of the human body, such as right and left. Apart from that, everything else is variable: physical terrain, animals and plants, food sources, climate – everything. Which of those things people will fix on as symbolically significant, and what about those things, it is impossible to know in advance. For the ethnographer, the only safe assumption, Freud notwithstanding, is that anything may stand for anything. In this area, human creativity knows no bounds.

Chapter 13

Beginnings, Middles, and Ends

When Victor Turner set out to study the religion of Ndembu of Zambia, his first lessons were in botany. When he was shown a mudyi tree, he took note of what Ndembu people thought significant about it, so he was not surprised to find that in English it was called the milk tree. He was not finished, however, with the milk tree. On the contrary, he had his work cut out for months to come learning the full range of associations of the tree for Ndembu people. Moreover, as a responsible ethnographer, he also needed to identify the tree by genus and species. After all, it might also be important among other peoples across that region where milk trees are found, and it would then be interesting to know whether or not it had the same ritual uses elsewhere. What we would expect prima facie is that it probably would make an appearance, but not perhaps with the same importance as among the Ndembu, or not with the same connotations. Its meaning might even be inverted; perhaps among neighbouring people the sap of the mudyi tree represents semen, and so becomes a symbol of patrilineal descent. Or perhaps it is not the whiteness of the sap that is remarked on at all, but something else; its stickiness for example, and then it might represent the virtues of stable marriage. These are of course nothing but guesses, but ethnographers who have prepared themselves by reading up on the region can often make some pretty shrewd guesses. If they turn out to be wide of the mark, so much the better – that will be more interesting – but they needed to know enough in advance to be surprised. Meanwhile, nothing could be worse than imposing pre-conceived meanings, as for instance from the more wooden kinds of Freudian interpretation. There is no alternative but to keep an open mind and go find out. What is remarkable here is that ethnographers trying to grasp all manner of abstract philosophical issues must begin with the material environment. As necessity requires, they have to become students of one or another branch of what was referred to in the nineteenth century as ‘natural philosophy.’ For the Ndembu, tree symbolism is pervasive, and Turner soon found himself busy identifying other trees.1 The initiation of boys is more elaborate than for girls, but it begins in the same place – under a mudyi tree. After that, as Turner succinctly describes it, boy initiates must be carried over a transplanted

DOI: 10.4324/b22988 -19

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muyombu tree (Kirkia acuminata) and then seated in a row on a freshly cut mukula log (Pterocarpus angolensis). The use of the mudyi tree is no surprise; boys also belong to matrilineages. Meanwhile, muyombu, Turner was told, is used because of its whiteness. A stick newly stripped of its bark is “dazzlingly white,” and whiteness brings with it everything good: it is health and strength, children, authority, successful hunting, it is to eat well, it is to laugh – but not be laughed at. According to Turner, Ndembu people are essentialists; they think of whiteness as an aspect of creation, made manifest in various things, such as beer, tobacco smoke, and, most of all, white clay. Muyombu trees are planted at ancestral shrines in every village, and men performing rites there cover themselves with white clay. It is somewhat confusing that both the mudyi and the muyombu trees are needed at boys’ initiations, since they both connote whiteness and so the ancestors. Surely, one or the other is redundant, but that is not how Ndembu people see it. Perhaps it is impossible to have too much whiteness, or perhaps the connotations of mudyi and muyombu are sufficiently divergent as to require mobilising both. Or perhaps this is just another example of the tendency of symbolism everywhere to have high levels of redundancy – to repeat the same message endlessly – a feature that makes ethnographic analysis that much easier. There is, however, another possibility that has to do with the tripartite structure of the ritual – of which more below. The third tree that features in the initiation rites has neither white sap nor white wood. Instead, the gum it secretes is red. Its connotations have to do, not surprisingly, with blood, which seems reasonable at a rite involving circumcision. Blood, however, has good and bad aspects. The blood of healthy people is said to be ‘white.’ Disease is a result of black blood, and it brings with it all the afflictions that whiteness protects against. Circumcision strengthens the boys’ white blood, and the blood they shed is positively associated with the blood of game killed by huntsmen, and by brave leaders in warfare. It is a kind of down payment on a life of vigorous activity. The initiates are daubed with red clay, like hunters and warriors. At the same time, the gum of mukula trees sticks to the trunk rather than dripping down like the sap of mudyi, and so connotes the scabbing over and healing of the boy’s wounds. In a similar way, the conception of children is described as coagulation of the mother’s blood, rather than its discharge in menstruation. The exegesis that informants had to offer Turner was never exhausted. One ritual led to another, one botanical observation to another. All rites involved preparing ‘medicine’ – that being the term adopted in English to cover a wide range of concoctions, including, but not restricted to, those involved in healing. It was a colonial usage, hence the equally familiar ‘medicine man’ – a phrase so vague and dismissive that it was avoided by ethnographers, even in colonial times. There were, however, details and implications that led away from botanical symbolism. Why, for instance, was the place under the mudyi tree, that symbol of matrilineal continuity, where both boys

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and girls sat during initiation, referred to as ‘the place of dying.’ In what sense were they dead? The answer to this question is, as it turns out, very simple. Death symbolism is characteristic of the first phase of what Arnold van Gennep called Rites de Passage (1909). Rites of passage are those that mark out the major phases of the life cycle: birth, adulthood, marriage, and death. They occur virtually everywhere, in some form or another. In some places, marriages are the most elaborate of rites, elsewhere it’s funerals. For the Ndembu, the biggest rites were for the initiation of boys, a whole generation of boys, gathered from many villages. Van Gennep’s argument was that rites of passage typically fell into three phases: rites of separation, of transition, and of re-incorporation. The man who arranged for the translation of van Gennep’s essay into English, Edward Evans-Pritchard, was not impressed with its theoretical depth. So, he sniffed, rituals have beginnings, middles, and ends. Evans-Pritchard missed the point. There is obviously something universal here: people get born, breed, and die. That much is biology, but so is the fact that the majority of people everywhere are right-handed. Van Gennep’s insight was that life is full of small deaths and rebirths, as people change their relationship with others. In romantic novels, it is a platitude that “to part is to die a little.” When a bride’s father is overcome with emotion, he is comforted with the promise that he has not lost a daughter but gained a son. Whether this is at all comforting is debatable, but what is sure is that when an Ndembu woman’s child is seated under a mudyi, then she parts for ever with the little person who used to grasp her knees, and look up lovingly at her. No wonder that at the opening of initiation, mothers wail “as at the announcement of a death.” The person she gets back some months later is someone else, a certified adult. The roles each play in the others’ life – their rights and responsibilities towards each other – are forever changed. Elsewhere, adulthood comes in multiple stages – going to secondary school, perhaps to university or getting a job, and eventually moving away from home, leaving the parents in their empty nest. For an Ndembu boy, all this happens at one go, during the rites of mukanda. It is very distinctly what van Gennep called a ‘life crisis.’ Rights of re-incorporation are equally striking. At a climactic moment in the closing phase of mukanda, initiates crawl through a tunnel made of senior men standing with their legs spread apart. What could possibly be a clearer image of rebirth? In terms of symbolism, it is about as transparent – as not requiring subtle analysis – as Berawan people in Borneo stuffing food into the mouths of corpses. But this time the “lads” – in Turner’s phrase – are born into a world of men. The closing phases of mukanda are a “scene of complete, uninhibited jubilation.” As the boys – healed of their circumcision scars – parade into the village the wailing of the mothers “turned to songs of rejoicing as each realised that her son was safe and well.” As it happens, mukanda falls neatly into three phases. The Ndembu describe them as ‘causing to enter,’ ‘seclusion,’ and ‘the rites of return.’2 The

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first takes two days and involves setting up the camp for the initiates from which women are excluded, followed by the circumcision. The third phase also lasts two days, climaxing in the “uninhibited jubilation” as the boys re-enter the sponsoring village. The second phase is by far the longest, lasting two to four months, during which the boys are restricted to their lodge and constantly supervised and harassed by their ‘guardians.’ It was this ‘liminal’ (threshold) condition that came to fascinate Turner, and he found analogous circumstances worldwide. Like Ndembu initiates – no longer boys, but not yet men – liminal people have no place in society. They are kept apart, like the boys in their lodge. They are uniform in their formlessness, just as the “lads” are naked, and subject to the same intimidation and abuse, regardless of who their parents are. When the boys finally return to the village they are painted in random designs of dots and lines designed, supposedly, to make them unrecognisable to their mothers. Anyone who has ever undergone ‘basic training’ in the military will immediately understand what the Ndembu boys are going through, and it is not designed to be fun. But there are liminal non-persons who suffer conditions that are far worse; think only of the newsreel footage of refugees in Europe during the two world wars. They all looked the same regardless of where they were fleeing from or to. Everyone was wearing a raincoat, and under that often their best clothes, suits, and dresses, but damp and filthy after days or weeks on the road, carrying their pathetic belongings in cheap suitcases or piled on handcarts, preyed on by ruffians, and rejected by everyone – an inchoate mass of shuffling human misery. The most hopeless of all get stuck between boundaries as ‘displaced persons.’ In one case that attracted international attention a group of Palestinians were expelled from Israel but refused entry by the Palestinian Authority. They were stuck, without food or shelter. Even when the Palestinian Authority relented, all the homeless people had to look forward to was life in a refugee camp, a liminal condition that they passed on to their children. Not all liminality is so grim, however. In contrast to van Gennep, Turner emphasised the positive aspects of a liminality that was willingly assumed, and his prime example was pilgrimage.3 Even in the early middle ages, Europe was criss-crossed by pilgrim routes, some a matter of hours or days to the shrine of some local saint, and others reaching halfway across the continent. The pilgrimage to Campostella in the northwest corner of Spain, resting place of the sacred relics of St. John, collected pilgrims from all over France and Germany and even further afield, who travelled along welltrodden routes between churches and cathedrals, staying in hostelries provided for their benefit. It still does. A man setting out on the pilgrimage left behind whatever fine robes he may have had, and put on the plain clothes of the pilgrim, complete with staff and broad-brimmed hat bearing the seashell emblem of St. John. (I say a man because it was not easy for a woman to travel alone.) He carried only as much money as was strictly necessary, and

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for people of the middling sort the further he got from home the less anyone cared who he was. For the duration of the pilgrimage, he could lay down the burdens of his everyday roles, and lose himself in the present venture. He could, blessedly, stop cross-questioning himself about whether he’d been a failure in life, why his parents favoured his brother, and so on. As parties of pilgrim converged, gathering together for protection and fellowship, he became one amongst many sharing a great spiritual enterprise. He returned home a new man. This positive view of liminality reflects back on other liminal situations. One of the reasons why a sergeant is so mean to new recruits is that he wants them to bond with each other. Where you went to school, what your family connections are, and so on have to be made irrelevant. When his recruits face an enemy – a real enemy, not the artificial enemy the sergeant makes himself – they must work as a team, and place absolute trust in the man next to them. For men who have experienced life in the military, and especially those who have seen combat, this fellowship is often the most profound bond they ever made in their entire lives. In Durkheimian terms, there is plainly something sacred about basic training: hedged about by rules (many pointless), uncomfortable, threatening – and awe-inspiring. Turner’s ethnography of the Ndembu comprises several books and many articles, two of which are focused on mukanda. The earlier is relatively brief, and deals with the symbolism of the three trees mudyi, muyombu, and mukula, as described above. The second is longer, and at 130 pages takes up a third of Turner’s best-known book The Forest of Symbols (1967). Mukanda was one among many Ndembu rituals, the most common of which were aimed at healing – both for medical problems and social ones, which were anyway indistinguishable for the Ndembu. People who underwent treatment became adepts themselves, that is, they were initiated into a healing cult. In one rite, a woman suffering from infertility was made to crawl through a narrow tunnel excavated between two pits about five feet deep. A neater expression of the stages of a rite of passage could hardly be imagined: the patient descends into the grave, passes through a gloomy underworld, and emerges into the light, re-born from a symbolic womb, and ready to herself become a mother.4 Mukanda was however the grandest of Ndembu rites, assembling people from a large distance and requiring elaborate planning and preparation. It obviously required extended description, and in the process of doing so Turner had to deal with a problem that tests the metal of all ethnographers: how to relate a mass of details without losing sight of the big picture – whatever big picture it is that the author is trying to frame. This balancing act is particularly tricky with elaborate rituals. Just about the only defining feature of ritual that is offered in mainstream dictionaries is its repetitiveness. Consequently, a straight-forward narrative of any ritual, large or small, resembles nothing so much as cookbook recipe: first collect the ingredients, then mix two of them while warming up a frying pan, not forgetting to allow

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time to cut the onions, and so on. Recipes make boring reading if you are not planning a special dinner, but at least they are seldom longer than a couple of paragraphs, never 130 pages. Turner uses two techniques to evade the recipe format. First, he narrates a specific mukanda that he witnessed himself, indeed the only one, since years go by without one. The opening section – about thirty pages – is given over to introducing the dramatis personae, the leading men from different villages jostling to take on the major roles. As the events unroll, Turner notes occasions when there were arguments about what should happen next, and when things got left out by mistake. He makes clear the impossibility of being everywhere at once when the action was fast and furious. He missed a rite that occurred directly after the circumcision, for example, because he was busy dabbing antiseptic on the boys’ wounds. His second technique is to intersperse the narrative with exegesis, provided by his major informant at a later date. The informant’s commentaries are quoted at length, in Ndembu with a running English translation. Some go on for several pages. It must be confessed, however, that these techniques are not entirely successful. In order to grasp what is happening in the rites, it is in practice not relevant to know much about inter-village politics; that is simply a different issue. Meanwhile, the comments of the informant bring the narrative to a halt, making the text that much bulkier, and are often hard to follow. In my experience, most readers just skim over them. Finally, there are everywhere odd bits of ritual details that never get explained in either the informants’ exegesis or the ethnographer’s analysis. For example, here is an episode that constitutes a rite of passage in itself, nested within the main event. It was for men who wanted to qualify for major roles in future mukanda, and it is narrated out of sequence because it involved the preparation of ‘medicines’ used early in the sequence, before the seclusion of the initiates. It took place, however, in the smoking ruins of their lodge, burnt down only in the final days of the festival. The leading ritual officiant, Sampasa, had already mixed together ashes from the lodge and from grasses used to soak up blood during the circumcision, together with the dregs of the ‘white’ beer drunk by the lodge officials, and the blood of a red cock sacrificed to the ancestors just before. The two men who wished to qualify as future circumcisers were then told to strip completely: The men sat upright in the ashes of the lodge facing one another and worked their way into a favourite Ndembu position for copulation, the legs of one over the other’s thighs. Sampasa now squeezed from the complete intestines of the beheaded chicken all the excrement into a clay pot. This pot, already containing the chicken’s blood, he then placed under the entwined legs of the men. Next he laid the intestines on the genitals of the apprentice playing the male role and led them along the legs and around the other’s genitals. This apprentice’s penis had been tied

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up against his stomach. Sampasa warned the men not to do anything to break the intestines, otherwise their own legs would break and they would become impotent. Sampasa then told the first apprentice to urinate into the clay pot. This he did having previously drunk some of the sacred beer for the purpose. The mixture in the pot was stirred several times by Sampasa, who afterwards put some of it in one half of the kadiwu container. In the other half of the kadiwu he placed the soggy mixture of ashes. The he suddenly drew his circumcising knife lightly along the genitals of both men. This was the signal for them to get up and hop on one legs right across the smoldering ashes of the lodge. Senior men, aged about forty to fifty, rushed around to meet them with small sticks and lashed at them, driving them back to the ifwili side. As they entered the ifwili they were beaten quite hard. They hopped across the ifwili side to a dry (probably lightening-struck) tree. This belonged to the musesi wezenzela species, but my informants told me it was its dryness and hardness that were important, not what kind it was. Each man stamped his leg on the tree, simultaneously slapping his hand on his calf. Then Sampasa made two small incisions with his circumcising knife, one in the small of the back, and one under the navel. After this they returned to their clothes, swearing good-naturedly at those who had beaten them.5 A rapid reading leaves only an impression of bizarreness – I find the image of the men hopping about on one leg going ouch! ouch! particularly ludicrous. This was exactly how nineteenth-century anthropologists saw all ritual, everywhere, a meaningless repetition of meaningless things. Faced with this example, one can only sympathise. Meanwhile, any deeper reading requires hunting back and forth in the text for clues. A kadiwu is a gourd container; the ifwili side of the lodge is the one facing away from the circumcision site. There are familiar items of liminal symbolism: the initiates are naked, they are bossed around, and they are beaten. The small wounds they receive are reminiscent of circumcision, but produce scars that can be seen, indeed displayed. Alert to tree symbolism, Turner asks about the musesi wezenzela tree, but it turns out to be false lead, so he does not bother tracking down its Latin name. The hopping business turns out to be pervasive. When initiates in the main ritual move about they must hop. Even if only needing to leave the lodge to pee a boy had to be led by his personal guardian, both of them holding up their right foot and hopping on the left. Hopping, it appears, connotes copulation, a reasonable leitmotif for boys about to become men. An alternative, when the boys are stationary, is to lie on their backs holding one leg up in the air – phallic symbolism unsubtle to say the least. There are two themes that run deeper, however, and would presumably require extended analysis: the use of the chicken’s guts, and the nature of

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‘medicines.’ Clearly, the killing of the chicken in the first place was an act of sacrifice, a phenomenon found in many religions, and the subject of its own considerable literature. For the moment, however, the issue is more specific. The guts serve to connect male and female – it being understood that no actual woman could possibly be present. The alimentary canal has a processing function: without it, food can’t provide nourishment, and the result is starvation and death – an extreme kind of sterility. Unappealing as it may seem to westerners, Ndembu make an analogic connection between the process of digestion and that of producing sperm. Accordingly, it is the apprentice playing the male role who is told to urinate into the clay pot – a reasonable facsimile of ejaculation given the circumstances. Note that to make any progress at all with understanding the rite it is necessary to firmly put aside western ideas of hygiene, let alone any Freudian fantasy of suppressed homosexuality. As for the medicines used at mukanda, their most obvious connotation is of continuity. Sampasa brought with him to the event a store of medicine prepared at previous ones, and what was left of that was mixed with the new stock. In that way, the medicine becomes a sort of archive: however often diluted, there is always a trace of mukanda rites reaching back for generations, and even of the initiates themselves, since the ashes of their foreskins are included in the brew. If Turner’s account of mukanda is heavy going, one might well ask why it should be anything else. No one would expect a dissertation in economics or linguistics to be light reading. An ethnography is not a novel; and ethnographers are seldom brilliant writers. The most that can be expected of them is straightforward prose, and self-conscious attempts at literary style usually spell disaster. Only a handful of ethnographers have ever been successful at writing to a general audience, of whom Margaret Mead is the best known, but Mead was a propagandist. As is now generally acknowledged, her first book Coming of Age in Samoa was based on flimsy fieldwork, and the picture it painted is romanticised. A British anthropologist – whose own fieldwork had been distinctly more demanding – described it as “wind-in-the-palmtrees” ethnography. Mead argued that the sex lives of Samoan girls were not burdened by Calvinist guilt, nor did they have to deal with the infamous double standard that oppressed American teenagers, by which girls had to look simultaneously seductive and virginal. Mead was a figure in what is now called ‘first wave’ feminism. The ambiguity of anthropology’s peculiar genre remains, however. There is no reason why an intelligent ethnography could not be interesting for an ordinary reader, without needing to summon the ghost of Rousseau’s Noble Savage. Our data – whether from tropical rainforests or urban jungles – still potentially holds the fascination that Frazer so successfully exploited in The Golden Bough. The main factors militating against this have to do with the insular and cut-throat worlds of academe. In order to get published, a young

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scholar is obliged to make immodest claims about the novelty and significance of his or her writing, and to dress it up in all the latest trendy jargon, the more esoteric the better. Many are uncomfortable with this situation, but they have little choice. In this environment, it is the most uninhibited narcissists who prosper. So much for the restful groves of academe. Meanwhile, publishers are keen to pick up only the most cutting-edge books, so as to guarantee at least the limited sales that the academic market offers. In this way, they become accessories to the crime, and ethnographies routinely appear with introductions so dense as to guarantee that no ordinary reader will get past them. As a result, commercial presses shy away from any author with a PhD and publish books by hacks. A fine trap we have created for ourselves!

Part VI

Ritual and Rationality

Chapter 14

No One Believes in Things That Aren’t There

In the twentieth century, the Great Project in anthropology turned away from Tylor’s program of deducing the mental prehistory of humankind. Instead, the goal was to see, as far as possible, how the world appeared to other peoples. In that context other peoples’ beliefs could not be pronounced wrong – that would simply stop the game before it had begun. They might prove incomprehensible, but that would only indicate our failure to get the job done. Following that principle, when Edward Evans-Pritchard lived among the Azande of the southern Sudan between 1926 and 1929 he did not contradict his hosts’ ideas about witchcraft: You cannot have a remunerative, even intelligent, conversation with people about something they take as self-evident if you give them the impression that you regard their belief as an illusion or a delusion. Mutual understanding, and with it sympathy, would soon be ended, if it ever got started. Anyhow, I had to act as if I trusted the Zande oracles and therefore to give assent to their dogma of witchcraft, whatever reservations I might have. If I wanted to go hunting or on a journey, for instance, no one would willingly accompany me unless I was able to produce a verdict of the poison oracle that all would be well, that witchcraft did not threaten our project; and if one goes on arranging one’s affairs, organising one’s life in harmony with the lives of one’s hosts whose companionship one seeks and without which one would sink into disoriented craziness, one must eventually give way, or at any rate partially give way. If one must act as though one believed, one ends up believing, or half-believing as one acts.1 As an image of the ethnographer’s situation, always half in and half out, it could not be bettered. In this case, however, there is a special dilemma. One side of EvansPritchard would have very much liked to say that his hosts’ beliefs were wrong, but that would have derailed the entire ethnographic project. During fieldwork, he could not say it to his hosts because he would have alienated friends

DOI: 10.4324/b22988 -21

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he valued in human terms, and because it would have closed off his sources of information. Later, when writing Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande, which first appeared in 1937, he thought it proper to exclude his own reactions; it was after all a book about the Azande, not about him. It is only in an appendix written many years later that he reveals something of his personal experiences, including the quote above. On this issue, thinking has changed in the last few decades. The problem with taking the author out of the picture is that it gives a misleading appearance of objectivity, as if the research had been carried out by a visitor from Mars. Ethnographies nowadays are expected to offer some account of how the author was, in the technical jargon, “situated” during fieldwork; such things as living arrangements, relationship with local leaders, choice of research topics, and relevant personal factors. For example, it was never irrelevant to Evans-Pritchard’s work that he was Catholic. In the appendix to the Witchcraft book, he makes it plain that he admired – and learnt from – the subtle and abstract notion of Spirit that he found among the Nuer, a pastoral people living to the north of the Azande who were the subject of another of his research projects. The Nuer have no witchcraft. The change in ethnographic conventions does not, however, mean that Evans-Pritchard’s dilemma has gone away. Imagine, for instance, how a woman anthropologist would have been situated in fieldwork among the Azande. To say that Azande society was patriarchal would be an understatement. In the same appendix, Evans-Pritchard says that Azande women were “almost an inferior caste, and unless elderly matrons, shy and tongue tied.” Segregation of the sexes was “rigidly enforced,” and women had no access to the all-important poison oracle, of which more below. A woman ethnographer might well have major reservations about Evans-Pritchard maleoriented assessment. It might be argued that he missed dimensions of politics in the domestic realm where women held authority, and so refute his view of their lives as confined to “the boredom of family life and the drudgery of household labour.” Even so, even if Evans-Pritchard’s account of gender relations was skewed, it seems unlikely that he was mistaken about the general state of affairs. A woman ethnographer would then be hard pressed to describe dispassionately what she saw – just another cultural system – when she was provoked on a daily basis to denounce it. Feminist anthropologists, including male ones, have struggled to find a balance between reportage and activism, but their situation is not unique. How should an ethnographer respond for example to discovering that, despite national laws against it, his or her hosts still have slaves? Meanwhile, witchcraft beliefs also presented the colonial regime with a conundrum. The legal codes adopted in the Sudan took no account of it, on the grounds that there was no such thing. This seems reasonable enough, but it left district officers with no basis on which to decide a large part of the cases brought before their courts. So they were left to apply ad hoc rules each

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time, and the accumulation of contradictory precedent left everyone totally confused. In other parts of East Africa, colonial regimes made laws protecting accused witches from violence, and it was certainly true that innocent people accused of witchcraft were occasionally murdered. From the point of view of villagers, however, it put the administrators in the curious position of being protectors of witches. One moral to draw from this is that colonialism was a bad idea anyway, and during the period of de-colonisation it was generally assumed that the problem would disappear once Africans were running things for themselves. Moreover, in that optimistic era, it was taken for granted that as economic progress took hold and people moved into cities, the old superstitions of the village would be left behind. What happened was just the reverse; impoverished people in shanty towns found themselves living cheek by jowl with complete strangers, and witchcraft fears only grew worse. In the countryside, anti-witchcraft movements appeared, and then there were gangs of armed men roving about with lethal intent. Following the inexorable logic of commodification, there were soon hit men available for hire. Meanwhile, governments vacillated between denying that witchcraft existed and trying to eradicate what they said did not exist. Many administrators were anyway, like Evans-Pritchard, half-believers themselves. What can’t be escaped is the central premise that misfortune of all kinds is the result of witchcraft. To talk people out of this is like denying that apples grow on trees. True, they don’t grow on all trees, but if you have an apple in your hand you can be sure there was an apple tree back there somewhere. People do not believe in witchcraft, they simply know what they know. Look about you, they say – do you not see the evidence of witchcraft everywhere? Evans-Pritchard describes the reactions of an Azande man in this way: When misfortune occurs he does not become awestruck at the play of supernatural forces. He is not terrified at the presence of an occult enemy. He is, on the other hand, extremely annoyed. Someone, out of spite, has ruined his ground-nuts or spoilt his hunting or given his wife a chill, and surely this is cause for anger! He has done no one harm, so what right has anyone to interfere in his affairs! It is an impertinence, an insult, a dirty, offensive trick! It is the agressiveness and not the eerieness of these action which Azande emphasise when speaking of them, and it is anger and not awe which we observe in their responses to them.2 As this quote shows, almost anything unpleasant can be attributed to witchcraft. When a lad scraped his foot against a small stump on a bush path and the scratch became septic, he diagnosed witchcraft. When cross-questioned by Evans-Pritchard he agreed that the presence of the stump had nothing to do with witchcraft, but why had he failed to notice it, and why did the wound become infected? When the bowls made by a skilled wood carver split as the wood dried out, he grumbled about the jealousy of his neighbours. When

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Evans-Pritchard tried to convince him that he was well thought of in the community, he simply held up the split bowl. The most memorable of EvansPritchard’s examples, however, concerns the occasional collapse of a granary. Granaries are elevated on sturdy pilings surmounted by large wooden discs, so as to keep rats out. The loads they contain can be heavy, but they provide dense shade in the midday heat, so people routinely sit under them to rest and gossip. Finally, everyone knows that termites eat away the underground ends of the pilings. If, however, someone is injured when an old granary finally collapses, witchcraft is immediately blamed. Agreed, the granary collapsed because of termites, but why did it collapse at that particular moment, just when so-and-so was sheltering underneath it? This double causality is made explicit in the Azande notion of the first and second spears. When hunters killed game, there was a division of meat between the man who first speared the animal and the man who finished it off with a final thrust. Similarly, if a man was trampled by an elephant, Azande said that the elephant was the first spear and witchcraft the second, and the two acting together killed the man. Evans-Pritchard insists that Azande are not confused about the physical world, which is just as real to them as it is to us, but in discussing causality they emphasise the death as a social fact, rather than a natural one. They might say simply that someone was killed by witchcraft, and only later report that he was trampled by an elephant. This seems bizarre, but is it so different from how westerners deal with causality? As an example consider the acrimonious debate that took place in the press and on television after the shootings at Columbine High School in 1999. Two boys in their final year opened fire in the school cafeteria, killing one teacher and twelve students and wounding twenty-one more, before killing themselves. So why did those people die? The answer is that the boys loaded bullets into guns, aimed them, and pulled the triggers. That was what happened, but after the first televised police statements, no one much bothered mentioning it. The actual shooting was only the first spear. Immediately, and not for the first time, the cry went up that something must finally be done about gun control in America. However, the National Rifle Association, a powerful lobby group that opposes any gun controls whatsoever, was ready with its response, and it is a slogan often seen on bumper stickers: guns don’t kill people, people kill people. An Azande would agree whole heartedly: elephants don’t kill people, witches kill people. Having made the standard parry, gun-friendly conservatives next pointed to what they saw as the collapse of family values in the face of such decadence as legal abortion and gay marriage. Social historians asked wearily during what previous epoch exactly these American family values had existed and produced a society free of murder? Was it during the time of the pioneers on the famous six gun-toting Wild West? Others again pointed to the appalling violence to be seen every evening on television, and the competition among channels to produce the most shocking sadism. Those concerned with

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mental health wondered how it was that such disturbed youngsters could have escaped noticed by school authorities, and what might be done in future to save such youngsters before they destroyed themselves and others. Meanwhile, the press picked over the bones: were drugs involved? Was the family dysfunctional? Were there racial overtones? All the traumatised parents could say was: they were such nice boys. The scenario was repeated at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 when a teenager walked in off the street and killed twenty children at random, and six teachers who tried to stop him. This time the NRA’s solution was to arm school teachers. The only way to stop the bad guys with guns, they said, was to make sure the good guys had guns. They did not explain who was going to sort the good from the bad, or how. The problem was underlined by a shooting shortly before at the University of Alabama-Huntsville when a teacher who had been denied tenure produced a handgun at a faculty meeting and shot dead five of her colleagues. Shortly after the Sandy Hook massacre, a rogue Los Angeles policeman killed two people, and during a shoot-out at his hiding place he killed a fellow policeman and seriously wounded another. The obvious question is who shall guard the guards themselves? These cases are only examples of a general phenomenon. Controversy about the ‘real’ causes of what’s currently in the news is largely what the ‘news’ is about. Journalists report the first spears, pundits set to work explaining to us the second. Another peculiarity of the doctrine of two spears is that mere chance is not an acceptable explanation of anything. In the west, by contrast, we have a whole science of chance. When an insurance company insures your car, the price they quote is based on careful analysis of all the available statistics on car crashes. How old you are, whether you have had tickets for speeding, where you live, and many other factors are taken into account when working out your chances of denting the bodywork, or rear-ending someone at a traffic light. But when rescue crews pull people out of wrecked cars after a serious accident, the injured are not thinking of themselves as a statistic. Something of such life-threatening importance surely can’t be just random. Very frequently, and often out loud, they ask themselves: why did this happen? Why me? Why now? Surprisingly, the answers they come up with, even when they bear no responsibility for the accident, often accept some kind of culpability – if I had not rushed out of the house angry with my spouse, this would never have happened. Such a response would be unthinkable to an Azande – even, as it turns out, Christian converts. In moments of shock, however, westerners revert to Judeo–Christian–Islamic notions of sin and guilt. Looked at from this point of view, witchcraft could be seen as the Azande answer to the longstanding theological issue of The Problem of Evil. Christians assert that God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and present everywhere in His creation, so how did evil get into the world? The familiar rationale has to do with free choice: He gives us the power to choose between good and evil.

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But that doesn’t solve the problem: how did evil get into the picture to begin with? Lucifer, the Devil himself, began as an angel, but because of his wicked pride was cast down into Hell. The problem is that if God created everything, then He must have created Lucifer, including his wicked pride. Did God create a dud angel? There is simply no way around this contradiction. The Manichaean solution to the Problem is to posit that creation is permanently contested between the forces of good and evil and that humans are caught up in the struggle. Manichaeism, however, was condemned as deeply heretical by the Church. The Albigensians, or Cathars, of southern France took the position that the sensory world was inherently evil and that only by seeking out a world of the spirit could people improve themselves. Some respected adepts were honoured with the title ‘parfait,’ literally perfect, or perfected, people. This so scandalised the Pope that he called into being a brutal crusade against the Albigensians, who were massacred wholesale. Religions that lack supreme deities are not caught in this particular dilemma, but even so it is hard to imagine a religion or worldview that offers no account of the origin or cause of all the disasters and tragedies that afflict us. In that sense, they all provide some answer to the Problem of Evil, and what is surprising is how diverse those answers can be. The Berawan of Borneo, for example, as described in Chapter 4, do not pretend to know who or what are the malicious spirits that attack them, or why they do it. The one important issue is who will defend them, and it is really only the ancestors that can be relied on. They too are part of the longhouse community, but they are spirit, and so can act in the world of spirits. The situation for the Bororo of Brazil, as discussed in Chapter 5, is entirely different again. For them there is no thought of devils or malicious spirits; their frailties and afflictions are inherent in being human, in being poised between bope and aroe. What is most difficult for westerners to accept about the Azande solution to the Problem of Evil is that misfortune is attributed to other human beings, indeed neighbours and in-laws. Witchcraft cannot act at a distance and must be ‘aimed’ by someone at someone. This sounds so paranoid as to make any kind of ordinary social life impossible, yet Evans-Pritchard insists that the Azande were “a cheerful people who are always laughing and joking.” Evidently, they did not spend all their time glowering at their neighbours, and moreover, they were confident that they had the resources to deal with whatever happened. Looked at from a broad perspective this might even be thought of as a kind of radical humanism. For humanists also, people are the source of everything both good and evil. The physical world is neither good nor bad in itself, and we have only ourselves to blame for what goes wrong. Consistent with that view of things, the Azande have nothing resembling worship. There is a hazy notion of a creator, Mbori, but he is seldom mentioned and people differ in what they say about him.3 There is also in this a kind of radical egalitarianism. To avoid being the target of witchcraft, people need to behave considerately towards everyone

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around them. If they give themselves airs and graces, they are looking for trouble. If their gardening goes well, and they have plenty of food, then the thing to do is sponsor a feast. As an excuse, some suitable social occasion is easily found. Compare this with the west. The motto of the French Republic is liberté, égalité, fraternité, but this does not inhibit wealthy Frenchmen from buying themselves sports cars and chateaux. American notions of the equality of human rights co-exist with the most extraordinary accumulations of personal wealth by some and poverty for others. This point was made forcibly in Ira Bashkow’s (2006) account of the Orokaiva of New Guinea, where people mean it literally when they say that everyone should be equal. If a young man goes to the coast and makes some money, he will be promptly relieved of it when he gets home again. If he stays in town, his relatives will come and find him there and expect to be housed and fed indefinitely. Nor do they then think of themselves as spongers; one of them has money, the others don’t, there is nothing more to say. A song popular in Port Moresby catches this nicely. A young man with a steady job complains that every day when he comes home there are relatives, including individuals he doesn’t even recognise, watching his television and eating his food. “There goes my pay,” he laments.4 The man is frustrated that he can never save up a bit of money for himself, but at heart he also knows what a decent person must do. By contrast, Europeans, from the Orokaiva point of view, have no attachments at all; they go wherever they please, they buy whatever they want, and they enter into only the most transitory human relations. One of the questions Bashkow was repeatedly asked was whether, when your brother comes to visit you, do you make him pay, as in a hotel. The Orokaiva people, I need hardly say, have witchcraft. All forms of witchcraft, by definition, share the central premise of the human origin of evil, but beyond that there is a great range of variation. Azande beliefs are unusual in many ways. For those thinking of the witches in Macbeth, it is surprising to learn that for the Azande the action of witchcraft is unconscious. Some people, the Azande say, are born with witchcraft substance inside them, which they inherit from their parents, boys from their fathers, girls from their mothers. Consequently, both men and women can be witches or the victims of witches. Given that gender-neutral language had not been invented in his era, however, it is not always clear whether Evans-Pritchard’s use of ‘he’ does or does not mean ‘he or she.’ In any event, witchcraft is said to consist of a black oval sac attached to the liver, and when people who have this substance become jealous or offended by someone, the action of witchcraft is automatic. It must, however, be directed in the sense that the witch needs to be thinking about someone in particular. It is, as Evans-Pritchard remarks, a psychic act. Given this unconscious activation, the entire framework of Azande notions of witchcraft would remain in place even if there was not one single person in all of Azandeland actually trying to do witchcraft.

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There is no way for anyone to know if he or she has the potential to be a witch. Most people are confident that they do not, because they come from respectable families that have never had any witches. If, despite this, a witch is discovered among a man’s close male relatives, he will be shocked, but he will defend himself by saying that the witch’s mother obviously became pregnant on that occasion as a result of some extra-marital affair. A women embarrassed by a female relative makes the same argument. In fact, Evans-Pritchard remarks, people do not at all follow out the logical implications of their statements about how witchcraft passes between generations. If one person in a family is proved to be a witch, it follows that everyone else in the family of the same sex is also a witch, but Azande do not reason in that way. What concerns them is the particular case at hand, not theorising about witchcraft in general. The only definitive proof that someone was a witch is the presence of the black sac on the liver, but that can only be revealed post-mortem. For someone to be convicted by public opinion of witchcraft is a lengthy process. Most minor misfortunes are simply ignored, apart from grumbling, but for serious matters such as crop failure or long-term illness the search begins for a culprit, and that means consulting the oracles. There are a variety of them, in ascending order of importance using three sticks, a device called a rubbing board, termite hills, and poison administered to chickens. The simplest, which anyone can use including children, consists of stacking three short sticks, with one balanced on the other two. A question is addressed to them at sundown in the form: is X the person bewitching me? Next morning the sticks are inspected and if the stick balanced on top has fallen off, or turned sideways, that constitutes a yes answer. As with all types of Azande oracle, the question must then be asked again, but reversed: am I wrong in thinking X is the witch? If on the second morning the sticks remain undisturbed, that indicates a no answer, and the original finding is confirmed. If the order is reversed, the suspect is cleared, and another must be nominated. If the result is mixed, that is two positives or two negatives, the result is unclear, which might mean that the test wasn’t done correctly, or that the oracle isn’t working properly, perhaps because witchcraft has interfered with it. The victim, or supposed victim, must then turn to more powerful oracles. The second technique is common enough, but can only be carried out by qualified men. They take a block of wood and split it along the grain, smooth its outer surfaces and address the appropriate magical words to it. To use the board, the adept moistens it and rubs on the juices of various plants. Then he puts the two sides together and pushes the top half back and forward over the bottom, while addressing questions to it. If it slides back and forth easily, the juices acting a lubricant, the board is not giving any answers, but occasionally the juices form a perfect seal and surface tension clamps the two halves together. Then, quite suddenly, the blocks will not move even when force is applied, and that indicates a positive answer. The adept’s search is getting warm. Then the question has to be reversed for confirmation. Some

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rubbing boards are large and kept for use at home, but many men have laptop versions that they carry round in a little sack tied to their waistbands, ready for use at a moment’s notice. For instance, if a man visits a friend or kinsman, he may wonder as he is about to leave whether it is a good idea to head off straight away or wait until after sundown. The problem is that a witch may have seen him arrive. So the man consults his rubbing board, and if there is danger because a witch knows where he is and may direct witchcraft at him, he may think it safest to sneak out of the house after dark, without saying a word. His host will not take offense because he knew perfectly well why his guest was consulting his rubbing board the previous evening. Rubbing boards are known to play tricks, however, so for more weighty issues the next step is to use the termite oracle. The petitioner makes a hole in the hill with a spear, explains the question and which stick means yes and which no, then puts them in the hole side by side. The next morning he or she looks to see which of the sticks, if either, has been eaten by the termites. Only if they eat one and not the other is there a coherent answer. Then as usual the question must be asked the other way round. From a rationalist point of view, what is striking about these modes of divination is that the answers they provide are random. Evans-Pritchard insists that the results are not manipulated, and for the most part can’t be, and that it would anyway be pointless. The supplicant wants to identify the witch and accusing the wrong person only leaves the true culprit free to continue. Nor are there any cynics among the Azande, slyly duping their gullible neighbours. Meanwhile, the possibility of misfortunes being merely accidental has already been eliminated by the theory of the first and second spears. The paradoxical result is that the Azande abolished chance in favour of a determinism that is itself established by a process of pure chance. One oracle outweighs all the other, however, and that is the poison oracle, which is also the most expensive and time consuming. The poison is administered to fowls, and Azande keep them almost exclusively for this purpose. Chickens are rarely eaten and eggs are left to hatch, but any fowl will serve for the oracle, including tiny chicks and skinny old cockerels. The other requirement is a stock of poison, which is expensive because it has to be traded from people to the west in Congo, so not everyone has access to the oracle: It is particularly the province of married men with households of their own to consult the poison oracle and no occupation gives them more pleasure. It is not merely that they are able to solve their personal problems; but also they are dealing with matters of public importance, witchcraft, sorcery, and adultery, in which their names will be associated as witnesses of the oracle’s decisions. A middle-aged Zande is happy when he has some poison and a few fowls and the company of one or two trusted friends of his own age, and he can sit down to a long séance to discover all about the infidelities of his wives, his health and the health of

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his children, his marriage plans, his hunting and agricultural prospects, the advisability of changing his homestead, and so forth.5 Evans-Pritchard makes it sound like watching a Saturday-afternoon football game on television, and once again it is the lack of eerieness that is striking. Nevertheless, the process is hedged about with tabus against certain foods, but most emphatically against contact with women. A man must refrain from sex, especially the man asking the questions, or the oracle’s ability to answer correctly will be damaged. Youths are not invited because they can’t be relied on in this respect. A young boy is useful, however, to administer the poison to the fowl, and in that way he learns the operation of the oracle. Needless to say, women are strictly excluded, and men say that women hate the oracle because it exposes their infidelities and that if women find their husbands’ hidden supplies of poison they will urinate on them to destroy their power. Meanwhile, the exclusion of women from the oracle makes them second-class citizens, unable to bring any serious matter to a conclusion. To avoid prying eyes, the men arrange a secret rendezvous in spot well away from homesteads. Considerable experience is necessary to conduct the event correctly, to frame the questions clearly and in the appropriate language, and to interpret the meaning of the fowl’s reactions. The man seeking answers often hands matters over to someone not involved in the matter at hand, someone who can remain cool and detached. The first order of business is to decide on the agenda, since there are often several men with questions, each of whom has brought his own fowls. The day’s supply of poison is dampened to make a paste, and several doses forced down the fowl’s throat, and then the questioning begins. The active ingredient in the poison is strychnine, which causes muscular spasms. The fowl’s reaction is closely watched: some die at once, others after a few minutes, and some survive. Occasionally one shows no reaction at all, but if that happens repeatedly the suspicion is that the poison is too old or has perhaps been deliberately sabotaged. As always, the question is asked twice. If X is the witch, poison oracle kills the fowl. Then, if X is not the witch, poison oracle kills the fowl. If the fowl dies in both cases or lives in both cases, the result is ambiguous. The only answer that is definitive for or against is one yes and one no, but when the right sequence occurs the verdict is considered proven, and everyone there is witness to it. Having established guilt, the next step is to counteract the witchcraft, and there are several ways to do that. The simplest is to confront the witch. This is done with every show of courtesy, since what the victim wants is not justice but to have the witchcraft removed. The most common reaction of the accused is surprise when he is presented with the evidence, that is, the wings of the chickens that the oracle poisoned. (Evans-Pritchard does not make clear how a female witch would be treated.) He is confident that there is no witchcraft in his family, and he knows that he does not in fact harbour any malice towards his afflicted neighbour. Nevertheless, in order to demonstrate

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his good will, he takes a mouthful of water and blows it over the wings saying “if I possess witchcraft in my belly I am unaware of it; may it cool. It is thus that I blow out water.”6 He does this with every show of earnestness; it is the gentlemanly thing to do. At this point, as Evans-Pritchard is at pains to show, the accused is often applying a double standard. Although he knows that witchcraft acts unconsciously, he believes that there are those who know they have witchcraft substance and consciously utilise it to inflict harm on people. There are rumours of covens that meet at night to cannibalistically eat the substance of their victims. The accused, however, has nothing to do with anything of that kind, and he concludes that some kind of mistake was made in using the oracle. Occasionally, someone who has been repeatedly accused reacts with resignation. Whether he likes it or not, he has to conclude that he does indeed have witchcraft in him. Even so, he knows that he did not intentionally bewitch anybody, and does not consort with other witches. The worst possible reaction for the accused is to grow angry. That only proves his anti-social tendencies, and he is driven by degrees to the margins of the community. He may well have been there already, and that is why his name was put before the poison oracle in the first place. Later research in East Africa showed that younger brothers who had not inherited enough land to live on often became targets. However amiable the poor man was, it was assumed that he harboured jealousies and resentments and he was bit by bit forced out of the village and into urban slums – where witchcraft fears and accusations are even more rife. As we noticed at the outset, Azande notions of witchcraft remain intact even if there is not a single witch in the whole of Zandeland. This state of affairs is not unique to the Azande, however. During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Europe was convulsed by a mass panic about witchcraft, and there was persecution and execution of suspected witches on a massive scale. As with the Azande, it was marginal people who were accused – often poor widows, who had no means of support after their husbands died. However, European authorities reacted to witchcraft fears in a very different way to the Azande. The only thing that concerned EvansPritchard’s informants was to evade witchcraft. He never met anyone who confessed to cultivating witchcraft, and no one was interested in theorising about how exactly witchcraft worked or what witches of the deliberate and malevolent kind got up to among themselves. On the contrary, everyone conceded that the action of witchcraft was mostly unconscious. In fact, it is misleading to talk about witch ‘craft’ at all, since there was no craft involved. In Europe, by contrast, witchcraft was the subject of serious and extensive research. An accused witch was subject to interrogation by civil and church authorities, and since witches were often reluctant to divulge their secrets, they were subjected to torture; the wrack, tearing off the skin with hot tongs, and so on – the sheer ingenuity of torturers is always amazing. As

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the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper describes it, the inquisitors, using these methods, were able to gather a great deal of information about their diabolical enemy, and what they found amazed them: By their own confession, thousands of old women – and not only old women – had made secret pacts with the Devil … Every night these ill-advised ladies were anointing themselves with ‘devil’s grease’ made out of the fat of murdered children, and thus lubricated, were slipping through cracks and keyholes and up chimneys, mounting on broomsticks or spindles, or airborne goats, and flying off… to a diabolical rendezvous, the witches’ sabbat. In every country there were hundreds of such sabbats, more numerous and more crowded than race-meetings or fairs. There were no less than 800 known meeting places in Lorraine alone. Some countries had national, some international centres. It was all very alarming, and proved the need of ever greater vigilance by the spiritual police. And what happened when the witch had reached the sabbat? The unedifying details, alas, were only too well authenticated. First, she was surprised to find nearly all her friends and neighbours, whom she had not previously suspected to be witches. With them were scores of demons, their paramours, to whom they had bound themselves by the infernal pact; and above all the Devil himself, who appeared sometimes as a big, black, bearded man, more often as a stinking goat, occasionally as a great toad. Those present recognized their master. They all joined to worship the Devil and danced around him to the sound of macabre music made with curious instruments – horses’ skulls, oak logs, human bones etc. Then they kissed him in homage, under the tail if he were a goat, on the lips if he were a toad. After which, at the word of command from him, they threw themselves into promiscuous sexual orgies or settled down to such viands as tempted the national imagination. In Germany these were sliced turnips, parodies of the Host; In Savoy, roast or boiled children; in Spain, exhumed corpses, preferably of kinsfolk; In Alsace fricasses of bats; in England, more sensibly, roast beef and beer. In the intervals between these acts of devotion, the old ladies had, of course, good works to do in the home. They occupied themselves by suckling familiar spirits in the form of weasels, moles, bats, toads, or other convenient creatures; by compassing the deaths of their neighbours or their neighbours’ pigs; by raising tempests; causing blights or procuring impotence in bridegrooms.7 By means of these confessions, an ever-expanding corpus of material was built up – a detailed ethnography of the witches’ world. Trevor-Roper shows that this material can’t be interpreted as the remnants of a medieval folklore that had existed alongside Christianity throughout the Middle Ages. On the

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contrary, it was something entirely new, a whole new branch of learning. The Roman Church, always concerned about heresy, did much of the basic research and disseminated their results through parish priests for whom manuals were prepared so that they could adequately warn their congregations. That meant that accused witches at least knew what they were supposed to confess to, and if they had another detail to add, so much the better. Before long, they were producing elaborate confessions even without the application of torture. This phenomenon of voluntary confession was mysterious, but not unknown elsewhere. In the 1980s, there was a rash of stories about disturbed women who had totally repressed sexual abuse suffered in childhood, and who had, with therapy, managed to retrieve the memory as adults, and so come to terms with the trauma. The process was called ‘recovered memory,’ but doubts soon surfaced about whether the memories were being recovered or invented. The situation became more confusing when it appeared that in a few cases fathers had confessed to acts they had not in fact committed. A climactic moment came when a former police chief in a small Texas town confessed that he had been running a devil-worshipping cult in his basement for years, including the wholesale abuse of children. He implicated several members of the town council, and a major furor ensued. One can only guess at the murky unconscious sources of his lurid fantasies, but they plainly echo the horrors of the sixteenth-century witch craze in Europe, still persisting in some corners of American evangelism. One might have guessed that the leaders of the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century would have turned their backs on Catholic teachings about witchcraft, as they did about heresy. They did just the opposite. During his lifetime, Martin Luther became ever more severe in his judgment of witches. They must be burned, he said, even if they did not harm, because they had made pacts with the Devil. Lutheran and Calvinist preachers competed to bring the witch craze to every corner of northern Europe, where the death toll was higher than in the Catholic south. Indeed the Inquisition put limits on the violence by reserving its use to itself. There were no sceptics to be found on either side of the religious conflict. Francis Bacon – that pioneer of the scientific method – believed in witchcraft as implicitly as the cultivated popes of the Renaissance. One lesson ethnographers might take from this is that torture is not a useful fieldwork technique. Even without it, however, it is risky to place too much dependence on one informant. There is only a subtle difference between the valuable exegesis of an expert and the idiosyncratic projections of a blowhard. For example, in the 1940s Hans Schärer wrote an account of the religion of the Ngaju people of southern Borneo based on his long residence there as a Protestant missionary. In the post-colonial era, Ngaju people struggled to have their traditions acknowledged by the government in far-off Jakarta, and especially to have their religion recognised as legitimate,

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and classified as a branch of Hinduism. This was no random choice; Hindu influence runs deep in Southeast Asia and Dutch scholars had made much of this. Not surprisingly then, Schärer found echoes of Hinduism everywhere. The problem with all this was that Schärer’s account had been largely based on information from just one informant who also knew a bit about Hinduism, and just how much he built in for Schärer’s benefit is debatable. Much was not confirmed by later research, and the Hindu echoes he provides are sometimes too neat to be true. How are ethnographer supposed to defend themselves against such misinformation? As usual, the answer is that there is no sure defence, no special methodology available to certified anthropologists, other than perhaps an extra dose of scepticism. Of course ethnographers are told lies, all the time, and on every side. In many parts of the world, it is a form of verbal play, of ‘having you on,’ as the expression goes, and novice ethnographers are fair game.8 With more experience, the victim learns soon enough when he or she is being made sport of, if only by watching it happen to others. As regards misinformants, during the lengthy encounters that fieldwork involves, it becomes increasingly hard for them to cover their tracks. In a relatively small community, everyone knows who is braggart. Who ever heard of a village being wrong about something like that? In the end though, there are no shortcuts for the ethnographer. The only way to sort the wheat from the chaff is by constant winnowing of the data.

Chapter 15

Being Reasonable

Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic has been criticised for forcing Azande thought into Western rationalist models. I find this charge unfair. On the contrary, he is at pains to draw out the contrast between the two: I hope I am not expected to point out that an Azande cannot analyse his doctrines as I have done for him. It is no use saying to a Zande ‘Now tell me what you Azande think about witchcraft’ because the subject is too general and indeterminate, both too vague and too immense, to be described succinctly. But it is possible to extract the principles of their thought from dozens of situations in which witchcraft is called upon to explain happenings and from dozens of other situations in which failure is attributed to some other cause. Their philosophy is explicit, but is not formally stated as a doctrine.1 Throughout the book, there are many places where Evans-Pritchard points out that what he saw as the logical consequences of what he was told were not the conclusions drawn by Azande themselves. We have already noted one example: Azande people did not in practice conclude that entire lineages of men, brothers, uncles, and cousins were witches if one man in the lineage was identified by the poison oracle as a witch, despite the universal assertion that witchcraft substance passed from father to son. Evans-Pritchard accounts for this by saying that people were focused on the problems immediately at hand, rather than generalities. We could just as well say that Azande thought does not proceed by syllogisms, and there is nothing primitive about that. On the contrary, everything indicates that no one’s does. There is another way of putting the charge, however, one that has to do not with rationality per se, but with coherence. Evans-Pritchard says that Azande philosophy regarding witchcraft is not stated as doctrine, and this is consistent with the general proposition argued above that people generally do not, or cannot, put into words their most fundamental understandings of the world. But there is a further implication. What Evans-Pritchard found “explicit” in dozens of everyday situations he describes as a “philosophy” – that is, an

DOI: 10.4324/b22988 -22

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interconnected set of ideas each somehow confirming or consistent with others. Was this really a finding of his research, or was it an assumption that he imposed on his data? This question has frequently sparked scepticism about particular ethnographies, or ethnography in general, and so it should – there is nothing on this score that can be taken for granted. The most recent critiques have come from exponents of the intellectual trend called post-modernism, who take a jaundiced view of the so-called Enlightenment and the Humanism that went along with it. What they see in those movements is hubris. The bright future promised by the philosphes has turned to ashes: warfare of a previously unimaginable destructiveness, repression by police states using all the modern apparatus of the gulag, ‘democracies’ that are an elaborate farce, and so on. One aspect of this pessimism is a doubting of all epistemologies associated with the Renaissance and its progeny. Classically, philosophising is divided into two parts: ontology – what it is that exists; and epistemology – how we know that. Post-modernists attack the epistemology even of the natural sciences; the so-called ‘social sciences’ are, by comparison, easy meat. In the period after the Second World War, there were Grand Theorists, including sociologists, psychologists, economists, and yes, anthropologists, who claimed to be laying the groundwork for a positive science of human behaviour. Their ideas stimulated fascinating research in all fields, but the results were disappointing. Though wrapped up in elaborate jargon, when unwrapped they often turned out to be the merest platitudes. As has been noted several times already, many ethnographers were from the outset uncomfortable with grand scientific claims. Evans-Pritchard was one of them, and he was outspoken in his scepticism. He preferred to compare ethnography to history – the discipline in which he was trained – which also involves sifting through data that is always incomplete, and then making an interpretation. No account was final; it was always open to challenge. This did not mean that Evans-Pritchard was hesitant in what he wrote. He has a fine, round style, and is not afraid of declarative statements: “When misfortune occurs he does not become awestruck at the play of supernatural forces. He is not terrified at the presence of an occult enemy. He is, on the other hand, extremely annoyed.” The “he” in his sentence is your average Azande man, and perhaps also woman, since gender-neutral language was not yet de rigueur. The effect is to assert that there is a specifically Azande way of understanding of the world and that he has taken the trouble to find out what it is. This assertion is satirised in recent critiques as “I was there, you weren’t.” Evans-Pritchard would have looked such an attack straight in the eye: just so, that is what is meant by saying that I did research. He was unwilling to subscribe to the scientific aspirations of mid-century, but he would have had no truck with post-modernist nihilism. He was willing to agree that there were all kinds of things he did not know about the Azande, but very clear that he did know some things. I, obviously, am in the same camp.

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The alternative to thinking that ethnographers know something is to think they know nothing, and there are indeed those who take this a position. They get there by following to what they see as its logical conclusions the scepticism that the Great Project itself brought to bear on the scientistic pretensions of nineteenth-century social evolutionism. Instead of sorting peoples into savages and barbarians according to one cultural trait or another, the Great Project set out to explore the variety of human understandings of the world, seeing each as valid in its own right, and worthy of study. This stance is generally what was meant by cultural relativism, and there is an intellectual modesty built into it: the students did not presume to know in advance what they were going to find. They did assume, however, that research was possible and could reveal what they were looking for, and to that minimal extent they were positivists, and so modernists. By denying that, post-modernism turned modesty into immobility, a relativism so radical as to make everyone their own tribe, alien to every other. A milder version of post-modernism denied that anyone had the ability, or the right, to say anything about a culture that he or she did not belong to. So, for instance, whatever white men had to say about African-Americans was suspect, regardless of whatever ‘research’ they had done. It is not hard to see the point of this suspicion; the ‘scientific racism’ of the 1920s and 1930s, the worst years of the Jim Crow era, was substantiated by any number of ‘scholarly’ treatises, based on cooked evidence of head measurements, and so on. There was a similar trend in gay and lesbian circles towards suspicion of anyone outside those circles, and again, for good reasons. The result however was a premise that only African-Americans could study African-Americans, and gays gays, and so on, ad infinitum. Obviously, this ‘neo-essentialism,’ as it was called, ran directly counter to the goals of the Great Project, for which the displacement of the ethnographer from one culture to another was the whole point. That experience was the very process by which they might, with luck and careful attention, become aware of what was taken for granted in their own culture, by comparing it to someone else’s. There was indeed a barely concealed racism that ran through nineteenth-century social evolutionism, but the Great Project set out specifically to overcome that flaw, as far as humanly possible.2 There is, it seems to me, another aspect of the modesty that is essential to the Great Project, and that is the recognition that it is not possible to see directly into other peoples’ hearts and minds, to know directly what they are thinking and feeling. Such cautiousness is wise with people we have known all our lives, how much more so among people in far-away places that we have only just met? The experience of fieldwork impresses this on all but the most arrogant or dim-witted of ethnographers, especially at the outset, when you can’t interpret even peoples’ body language. If they talk loudly, or wave their arms about, are they angry at you for some reason? Have you breached some rule of etiquette that you didn’t even know existed? If, on the other

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hand, people whisper, are they talking about you? In this direction lies paranoia, and few ethnographers do not notice its effects. The only useful defence is to know in advance that it is likely to happen and that it has happened to fieldworkers before. There is no question here of somehow becoming inhumanly ‘objective’ – the visiting Martian – but only of holding yourself together enough to get on with the job. Some ethnographers, especially those drawn to phenomenology or performance theory, argue that they can participate emotionally in their hosts’ lives by miming out their actions, as for instance in dance or ritual. I find this claim doubtful. It might be happening, but there is no way of knowing when it is and when it isn’t. I sometimes cried in all sincerity alongside Berawan people at funerals, but I could never know for certain about their sincerity. Perhaps they were expressing grief in a conventional way, simply for form’s sake. In response to post-modernist scepticism of what ethnographers could know there were interesting experiments with how ethnographies were written. One was to discuss, not what the ethnographer’s hosts were thinking or feeling, but what the ethnographer him- or herself was thinking and feeling; that at least was something he or she could report on directly. Unfortunately, this was not what most readers were interested in, and it was satirised as ‘navel gazing’ ethnography. Another approach was to publish sections from the author’s fieldnotes, only slightly edited. This provides a sense of immediacy, but the problem is that fieldnotes are not usually that interesting. It is what can be made out of the fieldnotes that is interesting or can be interesting, and the ethnographer can’t simply abandon to the reader the process of winnowing the data. Anyway, the choice of excerpts to publish already puts a filter between the reader and the experience, in just the same way that ethnographic films depend on the whim of the cameraman and the selections made during editing. Seeing is not believing. Another tactic was to stick close to the stories of one main informant whose personal experiences shed light on an entire epoch or way of life. Indeed, collecting life histories has always been a standard technique of fieldwork, one that is in most places virtually inescapable. Old people often make the best informants, if only because they are willing to sit with the ethnographer for a while, rather than rushing off to take care of practical matters. Having lived a lifetime, they have much to reflect on, about the changes they have seen, and what in the end mattered to them. However, to rely on a single life history has obvious limitations. The implication is that this one person’s life was somehow typical, which is on the face of it unlikely – a sample of one. Other authors deliberately chose heroes and heroines who were obviously eccentric, as a kind of distorted reflection of the normalcy they rejected. The results may be intriguing and suggestive, but they back away from things cultural and take refuge in individual psychology. In post-modernism, however, the cultural and the psychological were anyway often fused, or confused. The word that was used to describe this

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confusion was ‘pastiche,’ meaning that everything about human beings was made up of scraps collected from here and there, more or less at random. Our sense of individuality, of being a coherent self, is an illusion. We are constantly bombarded by advertising, insistently telling us what we need to own in order to live better, fuller lives, and buffeted on every hand by mindless political soundbites telling us what our ‘values’ really are. Since the reach of neoliberal capitalism is now worldwide, everyone is drawn into this world of flickering illusions.3 As for anthropologists, they are simply trying to escape this emptiness by imagining that there are pre-modern peoples out there in remote corners who are whole, who really do know who they are. If I think too much about this image of modernity I find it not only convincing but frightening; is life really so empty? Do I even exist? Meanwhile, I can well be accused of escapism; I began the book by describing the inhabitants of a remote island in the western Pacific with a 1,000 or so inhabitants, led by four hierarchically arranged chiefs. The first in status was the Ariki I Kafika, the chief of the clan of Kafika, whose job it was to perform rituals in honour of the Atua I Kafika, the god of Kafika. This man stood at the centre of social arrangements and a ritual cycle that involved everyone on the island. We can but envy, I said there, his secure sense of who he was and where he belonged. The notion that cultures are pastiche long predates post-modernism, however. Already at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was argued that culture was, in the phrase then fashionable, ‘a thing of threads and patches.’ This idea followed directly from observing the effects of cultural diffusion that fascinated Franz Boas, who made a special study of it among Amerindian peoples of American northwest and Canada, including the Kwakiutl. Boas was an intellectual figure of the stature of Frazer or Durkheim. He was the founder of the American school of cultural anthropology, and teacher of an entire generation of its exponents. Moreover, his influence reached beyond academia because he was an active propagandist against the deeply entrenched racism of the early twentieth century. Himself an immigrant, he refuted the spurious statistics of ‘scientific racism’ by making his own studies among the immigrant communities of New York, showing that measurements of head shape, cranial capacity, and so on had more to do with diet than racial origins. The statistics for second-generation Italian Americans, for example, looked more like other Americans than like their parents from Italy. His true interest, however, remained in the northwest, where he spent many summers seeking out knowledgeable elders. Boas thought that the most valuable work he could do was to record as much as he could of rituals and myths that were being forgotten as indigenous people became more and more absorbed into western lifestyles. This choice of priorities meant that he was often dismissed as a ‘particularist’ – someone working on details, rather than propounding grand theories in the manner of Frazer and Durkheim. Boas himself said that it was too early in the development of anthropology for theoretical syntheses and that what was

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urgently needed at that stage was more data, and more reliable data, collected by specialists devoted to that task rather than people who just happened to be around on other business. This was his professionalism, and it paralleled developments elsewhere especially in Britain. In this way, Boas was a crucial pioneer of the Great Project. It was not the case however that Boas’ particularism prevented him from making generalisations. In his meticulous study of myths among neighbouring peoples of the north-west, one of the things he noticed was that the same folk heroes or similar turned up across wide swathes of territory, hopping, so it seemed, from one ethnic group to another. What this demonstrated was diffusion. Clearly, a myth had originated in one group and spread to others, along the way becoming somewhat garbled, as in the party game where each person whispers a message to his neighbour. This fitted neatly with the threads and patches theory of culture: myths from the north, kinship terminology from the south, carving styles from the west, and so on. But Boas did not let it rest there; in addition to diffusion, there was something else going on. When he looked at a version of the myth told in any one place, he noticed that its peculiarities were not random. For example, when a myth referred to kinship relations, it did so according to the local kinship system. Animals that appeared in myths from inland people were replaced in the versions of coastal people by sea creatures, with all manner of implications for the plot.4 Boas concluded that, in the process of spreading, culture traits were in effect re-invented. Instead of simply being adopted whole, they were modified to fit in with existing circumstances, and in this way, creativity and coherence re-appear. If a culture is a garment of threads and patches, it is still a garment, sewn together out of whatever materials were available. Consequently, Boas’ arguments converge with those of Hertz, as described in Chapter 12: cultures are constructed out of whatever is to hand, but they are still constructed for all that. As for pastiche, it is a style of painting: artists put together carefully chosen scraps of newspaper, and then paint over them to produce the effects they want. The artist would be extremely offended if you were so crass as to suggest that they had been made at random. Random pastiche is rubbish. Cultures, post-modernism notwithstanding, are not rubbish – detritus maybe, but not rubbish. Boas and his students described cultures as ‘emergent,’ an adjective that neatly captures its dynamic quality. Long before the explosive forces of modernity came into play people everywhere were already encountering new things, as a result of trade, technological innovations arriving from elsewhere, social developments at home, the spread of ideas from influential cultural centres, or encounters, hostile or harmonious, with migrants from near and far. Consequently, the process of absorbing or re-inventing was also continuous. At any given historical moment the process might be well advanced, perhaps after a period of tranquility perhaps, only to begin anew as a result of some destabilizing new influence.

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In this view, the coherence of cultures is never absolute, but it re-emerges even in the most chaotic of circumstances. Contemporary ethnographic research bears out this conclusion; even in times of war and disaster, the resilience of its victims is remarkable. For example, Robecca Solnit’s study of the aftermath of hurricane Katrina in New Orleans records people struggling to put a life back together, and reaching out to others in the process.5 Government agencies, as usual, anticipated that the ‘breakdown of order’ would produce looting and violence, so their reaction was to send in the army. It didn’t happen. False rumours flew of all kinds of horrors in the places where poor people had collected to escape the rising flood waters. Meanwhile, ordinary folk took the initiative in rescuing elderly people stranded in flooded apartment buildings. Small boats turned up from everywhere, even evading police cordons, to bring in food and water. Blacks and whites often cooperated, though the mostly white police treated blacks abominably. In one case Solnit documents, refugees in an abandoned camp ground organised themselves to build shelters and distribute food that shop owners donated because it would otherwise go to waste. Some people found this experience of genuine community so satisfying that they were unwilling to leave when the waters finally subsided. Perhaps there is after all hope for humanity. In the 1970s, the American tradition of cultural anthropology was re-invigorated by David Schneider, who sought to bring the concept of culture into better focus by radically narrowing its coverage.6 Previously Boas and his students, notably Ruth Benedict, had popularised a notion of ‘culture’ much broader than the old idea of ballet, painting, opera and so on, or what is now called ‘high culture.’ They wanted a culture that was to be found everywhere, including all manner of arts and techniques, customs, and ideas. What that added up to was everything learned as opposed to innate, everything that passed from generation to generation by a process of socialisation. This usage was – and is – enormously productive, and we learned just how deeply cultural factors reached into every aspect of our lives. To take just one example, it would seem absurd to argue that walking is a culture trait, since bipedalism is a defining feature of genus Homo. People do not, however, all walk in the same way. African-Americans have their own characteristic gait different to their Euro-American neighbours. In fact, a lot of knee-jerk racism (no pun intended) has more to do with body language than colour, and upwardly mobile African-Americans have to be bilingual in body language as well as dialect. Nevertheless, Schneider argued that so broad a definition obscured a crucial feature of things cultural, which is their symbolic nature. During the heyday of the intellectual movement called symbolic anthropology, his new definition hardly seemed radical: a culture, he said, was a system of symbols. It took a while to notice just how much of what had previously been part of culture had been set aside. Effectively, what was excluded was everything learned that had to do with rules or performance. That included all forms of

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technology (how to sharpen a knife); law (who inherits what when a person dies): etiquette (table manners); and, crucially, social roles. British anthropology, building on Durkheim, had concentrated its efforts by focusing on roles, seeing society as a web of interactions in which specific roles were assigned to people, regardless of their personal psychodynamics. In simple societies, many such roles were acquired at birth and investigating them defined the study of kinship. So, in whatever society, a son was taught how he should behave towards his father. It was always possible of course that the son might be subject to some appalling Oedipal complex, and act hatefully towards his father. That would mean that he failed to perform his role as a son. Perhaps the father had caused the situation by failing to perform his role, but both father and son knew that they were failing, and in what ways, and if they forgot, their neighbours and kinsmen stood ready to remind them. Their disapproving looks and wagging fingers were what Durkheim called ‘sanctions,’ which might in the end include being dragged off to prison, but mostly, and incessantly, had to do with contemptuous glances. In the majority of cases, wet-nurses aside, the first face that a child looks into for approval is, of course, his or her mother’s. To mothers fall the first steps in ‘socialising’ the child, later to be assisted by other kin, the child’s peers and teachers, formal or informal. Some American critics of British anthropology, asserting their brand of individualism, saw Durkheim’s ‘society’ as a kind of prison house, but the British on the whole are not offended by having it pointed out to them that who they are in large part is a result of the circumstances of their birth and upbringing. Meanwhile, to argue that being socialised is inhibiting is like arguing that learning to speak is inhibiting. A language is, amongst other things, a mode of self-expression. Would being incomprehensible prove some native independence of spirit? And if you don’t like the language you learned at your mother’s knee, you can always learn another one. Better yet, move somewhere else and become bi-cultural as well. Identity is self-created, but it can hardly be nurtured by living alone in a cave. If roles are to be sidelined in the new definition of culture, that would include the roles that individuals are assigned in ritual, and that despite the well-established finding that, in the great majority of religions, participants are taught what to do, not what to think. Consequently, the weight of Schneider’s culture is placed on belief rather than ritual – using the contrast dating back to Robertson Smith – but this still does not make him a theologian, because he is not concerned with dogma. There is nothing here of Geertz’s misleading maxim “treat culture as texts.” Instead, Schneider is concerned with how, in any particular location, symbols, together with all their diverse connotations, constitute a system. Although stated in different terminology, this comes close to what Evans-Pritchard called an informal “philosophy,” made “explicit” in all manner of contexts but not stated in words, or in any way preached.

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Meanwhile, Schneider was very careful not to make his approach dependent on some mere assumption of coherence: This problem assumes that the cultural level of observation can be distinguished from all others; that cultural units and constructs can be described independently of all other levels of observation; and that the culture so isolated can be examined to see what its core symbols are (if there are core symbols); how meaning is systematically elaborated (if it is elaborated) throughout its differentiated parts; and how the parts are differentiated and articulated as cultural units (if they are so articulated).7 Such a formidable sequence of caveats makes it plain that whether a system of symbols – a culture – exists in any particular location is something to be discovered, not assumed. Consequently, he follows in the path of the Great Project. He remains a modernist, or pre-post-modern. For both Schneider and Evans-Pritchard it is not for the ethnographer to test other peoples’ rationality – the term is too presumptuous, too weighty, too freighted with syllogisms and logic-chopping. Their goal is more modest – to see how other people’s ways of understanding things are reasonable. To be reasonable is the great Anglo-Saxon virtue; rationality is for the French. But this runs deeper than national temperament, and it has to do with whatever might pass for explanation in ethnography. For post-modernists, the whole idea of explaining anything, of digging down to some underlying level of order, was an Enlightenment myth. All that could be done was to contemplate the surface of things. For post-modernist ethnographers – if in fact there ever were any – the only thing they could permit themselves was to ‘evoke’ what they saw. Meanwhile, active ethnographers, poring over their dog-eared fieldnotes, are trying to put things into contexts where they make some kind of sense. The best reaction they can expect from their audience is: “oh yes, I see – that’s reasonable.”

Part VII

Powers

Chapter 16

Invitations You Can’t Refuse

From the Azande point of view, the bad things that happened to them were the result of witchcraft. Their first response was to identify the witch, and the final confirmation of that was the poison oracle. The next step was to confront the witch, who was often willing to recall any unintentional witchcraft by blowing water from the mouth. Meanwhile, protection was available through magic, and there was a vast range of it, for everything from curing illness to delaying sunset. To use magic required the preparation of what Evans-Pritchard calls “medicines,” some drunk, others rubbed on or sprinkled about. The medicines were concocted from herbs and needed no spells, although they might be urged to work properly just as was the poison oracle. Recipes for medicines were inherited, or purchased from reputed adepts. People had confidence in their medicines but knew they were not infallible. The result is that, as Evans-Pritchard argues, “witchcraft, oracles, and magic are like three sides of a triangle.”1 This three-way relationship matters because each term effectively defines the others, and that is what allows us to make sense of the “informal philosophy” of the Azande. It allows us to circumvent the familiar European image of the witch, defined in the OED as “a female magician, sorceress; in later use especially a woman supposed to have dealings with the devil or evil spirits and to be able by their co-operation to perform supernatural acts.” Nothing in the OED definition fits with the Azande concept of mangu. The lesson is that a mere convenience of translation must not fool us into believing that there is some natural or universal category of witchcraft, as nineteenth-century arm-chair anthropologists implicitly assumed. For them witchcraft was primitive, ergo it was found among the primitives, but there were primitives who had no witchcraft. The Berawan for instance, despite being mentioned several times in The Golden Bough, had none at all, and precious little magic. Azande notions of soroka (oracles) and ngua (magic) put witchcraft in a cultural framework even though Azande oracles are not at all like the Delphic oracle and Azande magic does not involve sawing ladies in half. It is a case of what we might call successive approximation; without making any claims to seeing inside other peoples’ heads, it is nevertheless possible to edge closer to

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their understanding of the world. This is genuine empathy, unlike the fantasy projections of Tylor. It is not a technique restricted to ethnographers; all that is needed is to slow down and pay attention – the very things that politicians and practical men of action never do. The relationship between witch, diviner, and magician can also be viewed as a kind of ritual division of labour, one that is unique to the Azande. Elsewhere we expect that if there are witches, diviners, or magicians their job descriptions will be different. The same logic applies to other words pressed into service by ethnographers, such as priest, prophet, or shaman. As glosses of indigenous terms, they are a first approximation only. For the Bororo of Brazil, who we met in Chapter 5, there was such a profusion of roles to be played that virtually everyone was a ritual specialist, each with an essential part to play. Indeed, Bororo society seems to have been designed for just this purpose, divided and subdivided until every household had a specific place in the ritual scheme of things. First, the village circle was conceptually split along an east-west axis into two ‘moieties.’2 The relation between these moieties was complementary, which is to say that they constituted a whole because they were divided into two, and everyone had to marry into the opposite moiety. Each moiety was further divided into four named sub-groups and each of those into households of three distinct ranks. Since every component had a part to play in ceremonies, the village was formidably sewn together by relationships of mutual dependence. The Bororo put up a fierce resistance to Brazilian control into the 1880s, but there was no known occasion when Bororo fought with other Bororo. Violence within communities was almost unheard of, even when they had populations numbering a 1,000 or more. For the Portuguese who first met the Bororo, this level of social cohesion without anybody resembling a king was a marvel. That did not make it the land of the lotus eaters, however. As among the Ndembu – although for different reasons – marriages were unstable, and led to all kinds of quarrelling. In fact, to speak of marriage at all is something of an overstatement. Young men were regarded as feckless and dissolute, though admired for their vigour, and not much was expected to come of it when one began visiting a girl during the night and tip-toeing away before dawn. If the relationship prospered, he might take to visiting during the day and his presence would be tolerated by the girl’s brothers. By degrees, he became incorporated as a de facto member of the family and assigned all the heaviest chores, from gardening to house building. Only when there was a child, or better yet children, would the arrangement gain acceptance by the community as an established fact. Meanwhile, there were plenty of opportunities for a breakup. A frequent cause of friction was jealousy between sisters, who all lived together under the same roof. If one sister began to suspect that another was flirting with her husband, then all domestic harmony was at an end.

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A person’s crucial kinship link was to his or her mother’s brother who was i-edaga, or “name giver.”3 However stormy home life might be for the child, that relationship was permanent and close. Names came from a stock owned by a matrilineal group – people of common descent through the female line – and they were considered its most valuable property. That was because names implied the existence of aroe – a world impossible to translate into English. As explained in Chapter 5, they are nothing like deities or spirits, nor are they ancestors – although ancestors partake of aroe since they had had names. Aroe are, in the words of Crocker’s informants, “all that there is,” and that includes a dazzling array of things ranging from fish and birds, through natural phenomena, to abstract qualities such as “length.” The aroe were not only central to the Bororo understanding of the world but also to their rituals. “All public Bororo ceremony,” says Crocker, “has for its end the representation through costumes, dance, and song, of the aroe.”4 A crucial feature of these ceremonies was that the rights to represent particular aroe belonged to matrilineal groups, just like personal names. This was done through various body ornaments, most notably elaborate feather head dresses. These so impressed Portuguese explorers that they called the Bororo los coronodos, the “crowned ones.” The feathers were arranged in a fan shape, and what distinguished one from another was the order in which feathers of different colours and patterns were placed. Given that there were dozens of feathers in one crown, in different shades of red and blue, or plain white, or white banded with black, not to mention ear pendants and necklaces, the possible number of combinations was enormous. An inventory of them was made by two Silesians fathers, Cesar Albisetti and A.J. Venturelli who worked for many years among the Bororo, and, very laudably, set about to record everything that they planned to replace. The result was the magnificent and unique Enciclopédia Bororo, in three volumes. The feathers in these designs acted as a kind of orthography: each combination “spelt,” as it were, the name of a particular aroe, and the representation was strictly formal. The obvious next question is what was the point of “representing” the aroe in the first place, and this turns out to be one of those profound issues that ethnographies identify but cannot resolve, like the “association,” in Spencer and Gillen’s phrase, between an Arunta person and his or her totem, as we saw in Chapter 7. The idea that a dancer on the village plaza was somehow ‘dressed up’ as an aroe was laughable. It was simply absurd to imagine that aroe wore feathers. Moreover, there was no suggestion that dancers were inspired or possessed by the aroe they represented. One can imagine a documentary film producer, grasping for a rationale, suggesting that the Bororo were busy renewing the world or maintaining some cosmic order, but Crocker does no such thing. Even to call these events dances is perhaps misleading; they had more the character of a parade, going round in a circle because the village was circular.

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There was a further twist in the representation of aroe. No one could wear the decorations belonging to his own family. (I say he because women did not perform these roles, although they did join in the dancing.) Instead, someone had to be nominated from the opposite moiety, and there was no greater honour than to be asked to play this role. The obvious candidates were sons of the men of a name-giving group, who belonged to their mothers’ matrilineages, and so were dispersed among the opposite moiety. It was these links that knit villages so closely together, making everyone ritually dependent on everyone else, and making irrelevant all domestic upheavals. The power of these bonds was neatly shown by the case of a young Bororo man who was sent by the missionaries for training at a seminary in Portugal. He was a conscientious lad and did well in his studies, and so his sponsors were surprised when only a few days after his return they found him dancing on the plaza in the regalia of an aroe. When asked why, his response was: “am I not my father’s son?”5 Not being burdened with the Silesian fathers’ concept of religion, there was for him no contradiction. What the seminary had taught him and what his obligations were to his fellow villages were simply things of a different order. The existence of the aroe is peaceful and eternal. They have no gender and no inconvenient appetites. Their calm is disturbed only by humans, who are – as we noted in Chapter 5 – noisy, quarrelsome, malodourous, and transient. This is because humans are altogether too bound up with the bope, those bizarre and repulsive creatures that are the other great element in Bororo cosmology. If the bope appear as themselves, they are short, hairy, and foul-smelling, but they seldom do appear as themselves because they are shape changers, constantly turning into something else, so that at any moment they might be anything and anywhere. The bope bring illness, old age, and death, but – and it is a very big but – they also bring about birth and growth and everything that connotes health and vigour, or raka. The aroe have no raka, and they are repelled by all things that are messy and smelly – jerimaga – shit, blood, especially menstrual blood, semen and afterbirths, puss, decomposing corpses, and even the smell of cooking. Unfortunately, there can be no life without these things, so that humans, along with all other living things, must co-exist with the bope as best they can, just as they must put up with the weather. Indeed, sudden rain, flooding, thunder, and lightning are just other manifestations of bope. In managing their relations with the bope, Bororo people relied on their shamans. The word ‘shaman’ was borrowed into English from Tungus because Russian accounts of Siberian people made an impression comparable to those of Spencer and Gillen from Australia. Tungus people lived in small bands spread out over huge tracts of sub-arctic tundra and relied largely on hunting. At the core of every band was a shaman whose special ability was to communicate with the spirit world. There were three defining features of shamanism: first, shamans went into a trance while possessed by their spirit familiars; second, while in trance they could travel to distant spirit realms and

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recover the souls of people who were ill; and third, shamans did not acquire their abilities by study or practice. Instead, their spirits chose them. Bororo shamanism had all the standard characteristics of Tungus shamanism, but others as well that were distinctively Bororo.6 To begin with there were two varieties of shamans, one for the aroe and one for the bope. While Crocker was doing his fieldwork there was no shaman of the aroe and that was a problem, but not a crisis. By contrast, had there been no shamans of the bope – no bari – the disruption of day-to-day life would have been immediate. That was because a lot of what humans ate – wild pigs, deer, the huge catfish to be found in the Sao Laurenco River, even maize – were also the foods of the bope. The aroe, having no raka, needed no food and disdained anything but the blandest offerings. That left humans to compete with the bope for all the most nourishing and tasty items – a distinctly dangerous situation, since the bope were jealous, unpredictable, and vindictive. The only defence that humans had against their random malice was a formal code of etiquette that kept the bope at arm’s length, but any tiny breach of the rules was likely to call down disproportionate reprisals. Moreover, even strict observance of the rules would not work without the mediation of shamans with established contacts among the bope. No one chose to be a shaman of the bope. The job was dangerous and polluting. No one would touch a shaman’s possessions, or marry his widow, and his hair and nail clippings had to be disposed of carefully. Moreover, he was beset by bope other than those that had picked him out to be their shaman. The bope were jealous not only of humans, but also of each other, and they fought among themselves constantly. Being full of raka, the bope did not sleep, and the shaman’s dreams were often disturbed. No shaman of the bope slept in peace. The only compensation was that people gave him generous contributions of meat and game fish, but even this counted for little, since the bulk of everyone’s diet anyway was made up of gifts. A shaman-to-be’s first inkling of his fate was flying dreams. One described it as soaring like a vulture – a creature that the Bororo say is “in itself ” bope – and looking down on a human world that seemed much smaller. The next step was that odd things started to happen in the man’s waking life, such as tree stumps or ant hills moving about at the edge of his vision. Then he began to hear voices when he was alone in the woods along the river banks or in the open savannah, and the proper reaction was to light a cigar and blow smoke in all four directions, so that the invisible speakers could partake of it. Tobacco smoke was the only thing that both the aroe and the bope enjoyed, and anyone seeking their indulgence did the same. He might also be confronted by talking animals, such as a monkey demanding a cigar. All this time the novice shaman’s hunting went well, as might be expected since hunting was only ever successful if the bope cooperated by driving game towards the men. Finally, the bope showed itself and cross-questioned his chosen victim rudely, before disappearing just as abruptly. On his way home from this

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encounter, the hunter invariably came on some large game animal – a tapir, a wild pig – and killed it easily. Returning to the village, he fell into a disturbed sleep, repeatedly sitting up, babbling incomprehensibly, and throwing himself around so that he has to be held down for his own safety. These fits continued for some months until he underwent his major ordeal: he was carried away to a kind of bope heaven where he was presented with a beautiful naked woman. The shaman-to-be must show no response. If he passes the test, his bope handlers guarantee him long life and the ability to heal. If he fails, he soon dies. It seems odd that the bope should suddenly turn so puritanical, setting before their chosen candidate the kind of temptation that might undo a god-fearing Calvinist. Surely they themselves are hardly in a position to pose such tests; if the aroe have no desires, the bope have no inhibitions. Once again, the conceptions of aroe and bope neatly catch the human condition: we are burdened with desires – and apart from a few determined Buddhists, we have no wish to be separated from them – but we had better keep them under control, or all hell breaks loose. As for the poor shaman, he is always on the front line of this struggle, pushed and pulled at from all sides. The way that bari become bari is typical of shamanism everywhere, or to put that the other way round it is one of the features that cause us to label any particular ritual specialist a shaman. But are they ‘ritual’ specialists at all? One familiar defining feature of ritual is that it is scripted; that the person performing it knows what role he or she is to play and performs it on cue. The reverse is the case for the shaman who is simply swept along by powers over which he or she has no control. This feature makes shamanism appealing to romantics and New Agers, who are attracted to the idea of spiritual power bursting through the dreary round of everyday life. Max Webber’s much-abused term charisma is often invoked in this context; charismatic leaders are those whose gift it is to inspire crowds and motivate mass movements. The unrepressed primitives however live permanently in contact with the spiritual, and consequently, shamanism is a universal feature of primitive religion. This fantasy has been in circulation for more than a century and is sensationally rediscovered every decade or so, but it makes the ‘primitives’ into a rather exclusive club. The Azande, for example, had their team of specialists, but it would be hard to shoe-horn any of their witches, diviners, or magicians into the shaman role. Moreover, their functions are so neatly articulated that there is no room left between them for anyone else. Again, for the Arunta of central Australia, no special gift was required to experience the alcheringa or dream time because it was present for everyone, all the time. An elder gained his knowledge not by inspiration but by working his way through the full series of initiations, and remembering what he was told. Like shamans elsewhere, bari had the power of healing, but the way they went about it was unspectacular.7 Elsewhere shamans dance and sing while

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in trance, and their performances are public events. All there was to see of the Bororo version was the shaman sitting by the recumbent patient, muttering to himself and blowing tobacco smoke over the patient’s body. He had another assignment however unlike anything found elsewhere, as a kind of kosher butcher. Whenever hunters killed large game – deer, pigs, tapir – nothing could be done with the meat until the bari had processed it. Until then, the mass of slathering bope it attracted would lash out at any ordinary human who touched their food, the game they had driven towards the hunters. When game arrived, a child was sent to summon one of the several bari in the village, who cut up the meat and cooked it, using his special skewer and his special fan for stirring up the fire, though his wife usually did the cooking. When the meat was ready, it was laid out on fresh palm leaves. The shaman inhaled great draughts of tobacco smoke while calling on his bope helpers, starting on a high falsetto and running down the scale until he has no breath left. This was a dangerous moment for the shaman because, although already half unconscious, he had to pick out one of his allies from among the crowd of bope attracted by the smells of tobacco and cooking. Shamans described this moment vividly: they saw the alien bope as small alligators, or vultures, or chattering monkeys, or some creature unlike anything they had ever seen, all swarming around, but any mistake would be fatal. Finally, with a great whoop, a bope ally takes over the shaman’s body, which at once relaxes, becoming, heavy and sleepy. All the bari could report of this phase was feverish dreams and a compulsion to scratch. The bope, speaking through the shaman, asks who has killed the animal, and to whom the meat is to be given, all the time smoking heavily. Then the shaman took bites out of every piece of meat, chewing and slobbering in an uncouth manner. Several bope might arrive in succession to share the feast. After half an hour or so they left, and no sooner was the shaman conscious again than he began to call out to his bope helpers to keep their side of the bargain and protect everyone there. The meat was then, finally, ready to be shared out and eaten.

Chapter 17

Nature Does Not Work Independently of Man

In Tikopia – the tiny island in the western Pacific where I started out in Chapter 1 – all notions of power revolve around the concept of mana. The term is found among all Polynesian peoples right across the Pacific, and it has made its way into English in much the same way as tapu, though less commonly used. There is a scent called Taboo, but as far as I know no aftershave called Mana, or not yet anyway. It has of course no connection with the Biblical manna sent down from Heaven to feed the Israelites in the desert. Firth begins his 1940 essay on mana in Tikopia by noting: Despite sixty years of discussion and a bulky literature the controversies that have raged around round the meaning of the Oceanic term mana and its related concepts are still far from settled. Much of the obscurity and confusion has arisen through the fact that elaborate theoretical discussions have been constructed on the basis of inadequate factual data.1 Firth was of course the man for factual data – his ethnographies are exhaustive and sometimes exhausting. Firth’s conscientiousness earned him a knighthood – one of very few anthropologists since Sir James Frazer – but paradoxically counted against him in elite intellectual circles. He was shunted aside as a mere fact grubber, rather than a grand theorist. Such is the fate of honest, hard-working ethnographers. In fact, his writings contain some surprisingly prescient ideas, set out in the simplest prose, ideas that in other hands were later elaborated into entire theoretical frameworks. What Firth was objecting to was the way that mana had been seized on by armchair anthropologists, and hailed as the very essence of “primitive religion” – the basic premise of all magic, all supernatural power. Several authors compared it to electricity, that mystical force; powerful men evidently just reached up into the sky and plugged themselves in. All of this was of course the same essentialism that plagued the definition of religion itself. Not only was the concept – as defined by the writer – exported to places where the word did not occur, it was taken for granted that everywhere it was found mana meant the same thing. It is true that Polynesian languages are closely related,

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to the extent that Captain Cook could speak of a language called ‘South Seas,’ and that was the case because the Polynesia peoples have a common ancestry not so very long ago. But that in itself proves nothing; think only of the divergent uses of the word ‘liberal’ on opposite sides of the Atlantic, despite the passage of only a few centuries and continuous contact all the while. In the US, the term still implies generosity; liberals are those who think that well-heeled citizens should lend a hand to those who are not doing so well. In Europe, liberalism, or more emphatically neo-liberalism, means uninhibited laissez-faire capitalism. The two meanings have directly opposite connotations. Divergence in the meaning of mana is all the more likely given the range in size of Polynesian islands. At the top end, the Hawaiian Islands had dense populations and intensive agriculture making use of irrigation. At the time of Captain Cook’s visit it had a rigid hierarchy of rank that radically separated chiefs from commoners, and a variety of priesthoods attached to different deities. There were large temple compounds where a cycle of rituals were performed in front of images of the gods sanctified by human sacrifice. In Tikopia, there was none of this – just a tiny island so remote as to have been overlooked by missionaries until the twentieth century. In place of generalisations about mana, Firth advocated “studying the actual usage of the word as employed in the course of normal behaviour and activities, and obtaining native linguistic comments on such usages” – which is to say, getting on with the Great Project. This required paying attention to what Firth called the “flexibility” of Polynesian languages. Mana could be applied to persons or things; it could be noun or verb; and it could be modified by prefixes, as for example in the compound form nokofakamana, implying something causative (making mana) and also frequentative (was making mana). On the other hand, there was nothing to indicate whether something or somebody “had” mana or “was” mana. Translating a phrase into English meant choosing one or the other, and both might be misleading. Translating is a delicate business. Firth says that he “hammered away” at his informants to get them to say what mana was in itself, but he was told flatly “no man looks upon it.” He concludes mana “I am sure, has not the connotations of an isolatable principle, a force, a power, or any other metaphysical abstraction.”2 So much for the electricity theory. Instead, he was told that there was no mana of itself, but only mana of the rain or mana of food, and so on. The statements seem to imply that it is mana existed in material things – food and rain – but it soon became clear that this was not what was meant. Instead, the crops and rain are the evidence that someone has mobilised mana, presumably a chief or elder. The action of mana is always positive and for the public good; one chief told Firth that if he tried to use his mana to harm someone then it would stop working when he was trying to heal someone. The next question is where mana comes from, and the answer to that was unambiguous: it comes from atua. So here we have another Tikopian term

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to translate, and like mana it is found with slight variants across the Pacific. Firth is careful to avoid any one-word gloss for mana so as to avoid prejudging the issue of what it means to Tikopians, in much the same way that Crocker borrowed the untranslatable Bororo terms aroe and bope. For atua however he allows himself a gloss: ‘god’ or ‘gods.’ It is the standard translation, but there are times when it evidently strikes him as not quite right so he uses ‘spirit’ instead. This switching of translations signals complications. The category atua turns out to be a mixed bag. There are uncounted numbers of atua vare, meaning wild, foolish, or senseless atua, who are responsible for all kinds of accidents and irritations. There were also atua fakafua, who were downright evil, and had to be driven off by atua fangai, ‘nourishing spirits’ of various kinds. The dead became atua – or were absorbed into atua, whatever is the proper way of putting that – but very little attention was paid to them. Consequently, there was no ancestor cult as Tylor had imagined it, except for one very special category of atua – the former holders of chiefly title. Firth describes it as a “bureaucratic” ancestor cult. Early in his fieldwork Firth had been thoroughly confused by this process of deification. If the anonymous dead were atua why were they ignored? When the Ariki I Kafika, the Chief of Kafika, spoke about the Atua I Kafika, the God of Kafika, how had an atua become Atua? Was there something here resembling the Roman senate voting divine status on an Emperor? Was there some sacred mystery, or some inappropriate imposition of western logic? Was the gloss causing a problem that simply wasn’t there for Tikopians? Things only got more confusing as Firth worked his way down the list of Atua that the Ariki recited reverently at all important rituals, such as laying new mats in the temple at Resiake as described in Chapter 1. At the top of the list, second only to the God of Kafika, came Pu Ma, who were said to be a pair of twins but were always spoken of as one. The official story of Pu Ma was given to Firth by Pa Fenuatara, heir to the Kafika title. Having warned Firth not to pay attention to anyone else’s account, he begins: In the land of olden times there grew from the earth Pu Ma and the God of the Woods (Te Atua i Te Uruao). As Pu Ma dwelt they became chiefs in Kafika. Then they had speech together and decided to go wandering. Pu Ma strolled off to foreign skies while they left their sister Pinimata to dwell as chief. When the two of them had disappeared on their journey to foreign lands they were seen by the Brethren from the eye of the east wind. They saw that Pu Ma was absent so took their own vessel and came down to this land. They were striving to come here to be chiefs in Kafika.3 There ensues a struggle for control between Pinimata and the gang of atua threatening called ‘the Brethren.’ The resolution is complicated, but before continuing to the denouement it is important to note that Pu Ma (and

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presumably Pinimata) were ‘earth sprung,’ or autochthonous. So is the God of the Woods, but he plays no further part in Pa Fenuatara’s story. Returning to the island, Pu Ma rescue their sister and take her off to the skies, but then they sneak back in disguise. One of them then has a liaison with a woman. Just where she came from is not explained; she is evidently a side issue, like the wives of Cain and Abel in Genesis. The point of bringing her into the story is that she is definitely not atua at all, but simply human. Pu Ma leave again, and the woman gives birth to a son. Grown up, the son marries the same woman, who gives birth to another son, who is destined to be the Atua that all Tikopians agree is the most powerful of all, namely, the Atua I Kafika. When Pu Ma returned to the island for the final time, they grasp the situation and leave permanently. The result is that the Atua is the product of a regular marital relationship in the Tikopian manner, even if an incestuous one. The odd business of him marrying his mother seems to have no other purpose than to distance him further from the divinity of Pu Ma; in Greek terms, he is only a semi-hero. Why Pa Fenuatara didn’t simply smuggle in another human female is a mystery, but his account supports his father’s emphatic statement to Firth: “But what, a god? A man the chief of Kafika.” For a westerner, the striking feature of the Kafika story is that a man, the original Ariki Kafika, becomes atua. For the Tikopia, however, that part is routine; the interesting part is the reverse process, an atua making himself human. In some versions of the story, it is made explicit that Pu Ma chose to live as humans; they wanted to experience life as men among men, with wives, gardening, fishing, festivities, and, yes, death. There is here the hint of a profoundly spiritual thought: maybe, for all its trials, it’s better to be human, rather than being atua pure and simple. Maybe existence as atua lacks sometime. The Ariki Kafika was anyway sure that atua who had once been humans were more inclined to listen, having once known hunger and worked for a living. The narrative of Pu Ma explains the principle sources of mana for the chief of Kafika, as it had been for all his chiefly forebears, each generation adding a new Atua. From them collectively he begged with the upmost humility the gift of mana to be used for the common good. If the gift was made the fishing would produce large catches and the gardens large crops. The chiefs of the other three clans had their own avenues to mana via different atua both of human and non-human origin. Sometimes, for reasons unknown, mana was withheld, but this had nothing to do with moral worth. According to Firth, the atua were not concerned with the goodness or badness in the doings of men towards one another. Theft, adultery, evasion of obligation, cursing, physical violence, greed, anger, jealousy between men had as such no interest for them. They would interfere on behalf of the men with whom

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they were affiliated if invoked, but did so without reference to the merits of the case.4 Consequently, a chief whose projects were not successful was not judged as immoral in any way. Moreover, he was not dismissed as incompetent because his atua might change their attitude at any moment. His powers by virtue of descent were delayed, as it were, rather than erased. Commoners might also have mana; for instance the mana of a canoe builder was demonstrated by the excellence of his canoes, but it was a gift that came to him alone and was not passed on to his descendants. Tikopians brought to bear a wide range of technical skills in their gardening and fishing – the everyday work that was not part of the Work of the Gods. Fishing in particular involved knowing all about the different species of fish, where they were to be found at different seasons, and how to catch them with an array of nets and spears and traps. Clearly, there was a very respectable Tikopian ethno-ichthyology, but in their view of it that was not sufficient for success. The extra something required consequently had the character of magic, but was not available equally to everyone, and couldn’t be learned like a spell. Instead, it was geared to a set of relationships between people, having to do with marriages and birth order, so that, in Firth’s striking phrase, “nature does not operate independently of man.”5 Mana constituted the integrity of the Tikopian understanding of the world, the concept within which magic, science, and religion are fused. Since mana depends on genealogical descent it is not surprising that senior men disagreed about the origins of Atua. Inevitably, Pa Fenuatara’s account of the origins of the Atua I Kafika were challenged by others, sometimes in a conspiratorial whisper. The revisionists often claimed that they kept quiet about the true facts in order not to embarrass the worthy but misinformed Ariki Kafika. To illustrate, Firth produces four competing accounts, two of them from within the Kafika clan itself. Pa Vainunu was an elder not close to the chiefly line, who nevertheless claimed chiefly ancestors. According to him, Pu Ma were just immigrants from overseas and not ‘earth-sprung’ at all. When they first arrived they lived in a house belonging to Pa Vainunu’s ancestors, who, we are to understand, were already there. Another elder of Kafika claimed descent from the Atua i Te Aruao – Pa Fenuatara’s God of the Woods. He acknowledged that Pu Ma were earth-sprung, but says that when they came back to Tikopia they had become human. Another version has it that Pinimata was bisexual, being married first to the Atua i Te Aruao and later to a human woman. There were also various versions of a story about a couple, a man and a woman, who were sitting on top of the island when it was first pulled out of the sea, and there was also a “Female God” Atua Fafine, who may or may not have been Pinimata. The point is made. As Firth says, somewhat wearily, “Tikopia myth gives a very confused picture of the original status of the major gods.” Even some

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of his informants seemed reluctant to be drawn in. The Ariki Tafua, second ranking chief in Tikopia, was a plain spoken man. He told Firth: “The person who comes to speak to you, he just speaks stupidly; you are being told lies by him.” He had his own story of course, but it was less convoluted than most. Firth sums up: Tikopia traditional tales then are egocentric and uninquisitive. They are concerned with conditions in their own land, and in their own society, and they show no interest in the origins of other lands and other peoples. Moreover, they are hardly concerned with creation or generation in any ultimate sense of the aggregation or transmutation of simpler elements to make land and people; they are concerned primarily with their emergence or appearance as such, from somewhere else. In this they are also concerned – one might think almost obsessionally – with two themes: priority of appearance; and indigenous origin. In a sense these two themes are related, since indigenous origin implies that one has been here all the time, and therefore assumes priority.6 These private disagreements never caused public contretemps. It was unthinkable that anyone would contest a chief ’s lineage while he was appealing to the mana of his ancestors. In striking contrast to the diversity of beliefs about the Gods, there was complete consensus about the Work that had to be performed for them. Firth’s major book on Tikopian religion, The Work of the Gods, describes a complex annual cycle involving eight-five named rites. The schedule of these events was familiar to all adults, and even to children, and everyone was drawn in as participants, and to prepare food for the accompanying feasts. The chiefs were kept busiest because they had to attend the rites of other chiefs as well as organising their own. The major food sources were under the jurisdiction of particular chiefs: Kafika for yams, Taumako for taro, Tafua for coconuts, and Fangarere for breadfruit. In terms of calories, the most important food was taro, but yams were valued because they could be kept in storage for long periods, as insurance against disasters like hurricanes. Moreover, they were said to be the ‘body’ of the Atua I Kafika, and the Work of the Yams involved the largest number of rites, spread out over the growing season from planting to harvesting. Another major segment of the annual rites had to do with the sacred canoes of each of the four Ariki. At one of these events early in his stay Firth made a presentation of cloth, having been told by an informant that it was the right thing for a visitor of rank to do, and coached on exactly what to say. Since both he and his teacher had kept this a secret, the chief and his people were taken aback at first, but then “a murmur of appreciation went around” and “my gesture of acknowledgement of hospitality and recognition of the gods helped me greatly in my future work.” 7 Not coincidentally, he had simultaneously distanced himself from the missionaries.

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The pragmatic nature of Tikopian ritual was very plain at the ceremony that Firth translates as The Proclamation at Rarokoka in which the Ariki Tafua – a man of imposing presence – recited to the assembly in a sonorous and formal tone a list of very practical do’s and don’ts. It included basic elements of the social contract: Men, with murderous thoughts towards each other, Meeting in the middle of the path, Let then have speech, have speech, Separate back, Each go on his way.8 In addition to keeping the peace, the Proclamation has a lot to say about environmental conservation. Young men are told repeatedly not to steal coconuts that are not yet ripe from alongside the paths. They are prone to do this because the milk of the green coconut is tasty, but mature ones provide more calories, as well as fibre for making rope. Moreover, coconuts that hang near paths belong properly speaking to the chiefs. A man should take his family’s supply from the centre of his orchards and give the rest to his chief who then redistributes them to the needy – a very Polynesian form of public welfare. The Proclamation ends with the most urgent appeal: The man who slept with his wife And feels thus let him rise One male and one female That is the plucking of the coconut and the carrying of the water bottle The man who will persist in creating himself a family Where is his basis of trees he will create his family for? He will make a family only to go and steal. The reason for this two-child policy is obvious to everyone, and only the most irresponsible flaunt it. Tikopian oral history relates two episodes when over-population caused violence that saw whole segments of the population killed or expelled. What a pity not everyone on earth can see so readily that we occupy a crowded refuge in an emptiness even bigger than the Pacific. For young people, the high point of the Work of the Gods was the Dance to Quell the Wind because it involved all-night dances in the moonlit grove of Uta, the sacred centre of the island. Each dance had its own rhythm beaten out on a slit gong, and many of them were very energetic. Older people retired at midnight and left the teenagers to it, so that it was a great occasion for fun and flirtation. When Firth was there it was such a temptation for the boys of the dozen or so Christian families that they would ignore the reproaches of parents and let their hair grow long for the occasion. The festival’s name refers to the end of the monsoon season, during which fishing was

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often difficult. The timing had to be precise, so as to mark the last days of the monsoon, and to avert, with the help of the Atua, the sudden and destructive storms that sometimes followed. The responsibility for this lay with the Ariki Kafika, and when he finally began the first rites the news flew around the island, and everyone hurried to get themselves ready.9 Viewed as a whole, Tikopian religion provides a striking confirmation of the conclusion that W. Robertson Smith arrived at in the 1880s from his studies of ancient Arab religions and that caused him to be turfed out of his job at the seminary of the Free Church of Scotland. Robertson Smith argued that religions are primarily about ritual rather than belief. What needs to be done comes first, and theology – if there is any – is a distant second. In Tikopia, there was in addition to weddings and funerals and such a ritual cycle in which everyone participated, and everyone knew their role according to their status as chiefs, elders, or commoners, their age and gender, and their membership in different clans and house groups. It was a neatly organised system. Meanwhile, beliefs about how many Gods there were and what was their order of importance were, as Firth found, “confusing.” Chiefs and elders could dispute forever on such theological issues, without ever disturbing the flow of ritual. Firth allows himself a little historical speculation about this: perhaps the man who later became the Atua I Kafika was the one who worked out the ritual consensus that Firth documents. Perhaps that is why he is recognised by all the Tikopia as the most powerful of their gods. Firth does not insist on this, however; such conjectures were characteristic of nineteenth-century evolutionism, and he had a different Project.

Findings

A large part of the Great Project of twentieth-century anthropology was to assemble detailed studies of particular independent religions, but that does not mean that there were no general results. On the contrary, we have a body of findings based on solid data, in contrast to the arm-chair speculations of nineteenth-century anthropologists. For ethnographers what ‘primitive religion’ translated into was the diverse understandings of the world of the peoples who had retained a measure of cultural independence, that is freedom of thought and action beyond the political, economic, or religious domination of any of the Old World empires or civilisations. In many places, ethnographers arrived too late, or at best only in the nick of time. Nevertheless, research spanned an enormous area; all of the New World, Australia, and Oceania, by definition, and also in practice large parts of sub-Saharan Africa, Siberia, and Southeast Asia. There are two key findings:

The Independent Religions Were Very Diverse At the beginning of the Great Project, no one knew how diverse the independent religions were, and what that might show about the breadth of the human imagination. The reader is now in a position to make a judgment about that for him or herself. Think back for a moment to the Azande of Sudan. Apart from the little matter of witchcraft, the Azande understanding of the world was effectively a variety of secular humanism. There were virtually no non-human agencies, and none at all that got any ritual attention. Even their witchcraft had a humanist dimension because people had to consider not only their own personal wealth and welfare, but also how others might feel about that. The only way to avoid jealousy was to live modestly and contribute generously to communal feasts. A healthy dose of witchcraft might do wonders for our current capitalist system – except, I suppose, the super-rich would just put all the best witches on their payrolls, along with their lawyers. It might be worth a try, however; Wiccans take notice.

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Meanwhile in Tikopia, there were a host of non-human agencies, some ignored, some just a nuisance, and others calling for a great deal of ritual work. Without that work all other work – gardening, horticulture, and fishing – was useless. Mere motivation to get ahead in life, realise one’s full potential, etc. counted for nothing. Everything depended on access to mana, which was given or withheld by a wilful bunch of quasi-ancestral deities according to no moral precept whatsoever. The religion of the Bororo of Brazil had neither witchcraft nor deities. Instead, there were bope and aroe, for which terms there are no English translations that are not downright misleading. The aroe were not gods, and the bope were not demons, and there was no point in worshipping either one. All ethical considerations had to do with performing one’s role vis-à-vis other people around the village circle and that involved a great deal more than is usually considered part of the social contract. The ritual life of the Bororo was apparently so engrossing that they could not imagine life without it. One community felt so harassed by impoverished Brazilian immigrants disrupting their rites that they decided to commit collective suicide by having no more children. Enough; the point is made. In all this diversity, to see a unitary ‘primitive religion’ or stages of mental evolution is pure projection. There is no evidence that there ever was any kind of ur-religion. My guess is that when the first and original band of Homo sapiens split into two, there were immediately two religions. Perhaps there are ultimate limits to the human imagination, but I can’t imagine what they are. Instead, what is apparent is a wonderful collective creativity.

People Constructed Their Worlds Out of the Materials Available to Them In the nineteenth-century view of it, the poor befuddled primitives conjured spirits and demons out of thin air, or perhaps from their collective unconscious. What ethnographers found was just the reverse: understandings of the world very much based on the real world. So much was this so that ethnographers had to start by learning about all kinds of natural phenomena; the colours of sap found in different trees, the flight patterns of birds, the Latin names for plants, the habits and habitats of animals, and so on. To study an indigenous religion was to study an environment – geographical, botanical, and zoological, as well as social. Some aspects of peoples’ experience of the natural world were universal, most obviously those having to do with the body itself. So, in all human populations, there are more right-handed people than left-handed. That is a biological fact, but that does not mean that the left/right distinction is everywhere understood in the same way – not at all. Instead, it is put to work to think about any number of other dyads, correct/incorrect, virtuous/evil,

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male/female, east/west, and so on. Moreover, these dyads can be mapped onto one another in any combination. For some people, this logic of matching dyads was fundamental to their religion, as among the Bororo of Brazil. Equally obvious is the body as a model of change; we are born, we live, we die. In innumerable ritual contexts, this logic is neatly reversed: we die as one person, only to be reborn as another; child to adult, single to married, sick to healthy, and so on. While the ritual is underway we are in between; neither one thing nor the other. Consequently, rituals are shot through with hints of death, of journeys or passages, and of birth. For the Berawan of Borneo, even dying was such a process, because death was not the failure of the body as machine. When the full sequence of rites was carried out, the great festival of ‘doing the bones’ was a sort of coming out ball for debutante ancestors. As for death, so with birth: for the Arunta of Australia conception had nothing to do with copulation; instead, it was a matter of location. To establish membership in a totemic group a GPS was more to the point than a genealogy. So much for what one might have imagined was universal in human experience. Beyond those things lay the experiences peculiar to particular environments. Polynesian people paid a great deal of attention to stars. In the open ocean, it is impossible not to be impressed by the vast starry sky, and knowledge of the constellations was the key skill of Polynesian navigators in their extraordinary voyages. By contrast, under the canopy of the rainforest, it is often difficult to see much sky at all. The navigation of Upriver People in the interior of Borneo relied on rivers; movement was upstream, downstream, or inland. Since rivers wind around on themselves, not even east and west were of much concern. Finally, when it comes to diverse flora and fauna, the possibilities are virtually infinite. What things are noticed about plants and animals, and what significance is attached to them knows no bounds, and the ethnographer had better pay close attention if he or she is to find out. This combination of the general and the particular is the answer to what nineteenth-century anthropologists saw as a deep mystery. Why was it, they asked, with significantly arched eyebrows, that bits of ritual and belief recurred in one primitive religion after another? Clearly they were survivals, their meanings long since forgotten, from some proto-religion. Those survivals provided the evidence that allowed the objective observer, carefully turning over every clue, to reconstruct the originals. It was a captivating idea, but over elaborate. The truth was simpler, and it soon became apparent when ethnographers began to study particular religions in depth. The reason for these echoes is that people often noticed the same things about their world, such as their own handedness, or the process of living and dying, and then built those things into their understanding of the world. To imagine that this occurred only once in prehistory and after that everyone just went along with it out of habit was to grossly underestimate the intellectual powers of our fellow human beings. Our other findings are more specific.

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Many Languages Lack Words for Religion or Ritual It was rare in any of the independent religions that there was any term that might reasonably have been translated as ‘religion.’ For the Tikopia, it was just another form of work; for the Berawan it was simply part of the way of doing things. It follows that the concept of religion was something that ethnographers brought with them as an analytical category. I see no harm in this, provided we do not insist on some essentialist definition that decides in advance what does and does not count as religion. To do that is to blinker ourselves; inevitably what we will find is that the religions so defined do indeed have the defining feature, so confirming the original definition. That is a pointless exercise; instead, the usefulness of the category for ethnographers is in what it turns up that is new, unexpected, and provocative. It would in fact be perfectly feasible to operate with nothing more than a vague, everyday idea of what the word means in English. Then the ethnographer, arriving in the field, asks him or herself: what religiony sorts of things do I see going on around here? – and follows where that leads. It is the activity I called promiscuous fossicking. I am told by philosophers that this is a nominalist position, as opposed to an essentialist one. Nevertheless, ‘religion’ is in my title, and the book is about comparative religion, so I need some kind of working definition. What I have, however, is not so much a definition as a spotters’ guide, and I take it from Durkheim. Durkheim is usually thought of as a sociologist and in that role he was earnest about precise definitions – so we all knew exactly what we were talking about. His books in this mode are ponderous, and not much used by anthropologists. Then, towards the end of his career, he became fascinated by what Spencer and Gillen were reporting from central and northern Australia where in 1900 aborigines still led lives filled with communal rituals, and maintained an independent view of the world. As usual he launches into a quest for definition, but the material defeats him. So he makes an uncharacteristic move; he devises instead a test for detecting the presence of the sacred. The obvious next move was to run the test elsewhere and see what it turned up – in other words, to get on with the Great Project. The crucial point is that the goal of the Great Project was to find out, as far as possible, how other people experienced their worlds, and forcing our data to fit pre-conceived categories was counter-productive. This danger was why throughout the book I often used the expression ‘understanding of the world’ rather than religion. An understanding of the world includes religion, but is not limited to it. What was turned up in the process of looking for the sacred was, not surprisingly, as diverse as the independent religions themselves. Consequently, the list of sacred things constantly grew. Sometimes it had to do with architecture, as in the Tikopian temples at Uta, but often not. The most sacred thing for the Berawan was a song, the one that summoned the ancestors.

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The sacred is indeed so elastic that it seems at times that ‘religion’ has effectively gobbled up everything that is ‘cultural.’ This is not so, however; in any particular case the non-sacred – the profane in Durkheim’s jargon – far outweighs it. What Durkheim’s test does in effect is to identify what it is that people take most seriously in life, the things that are ‘heavy’ for them. There is no question here of asserting that anthropologists have finally got the right definition of religion, and everyone else is wrong. It is only that this approach best serves our needs. When fundamentalist missionaries tell me that their target populations ‘have no religion’ I know what they mean and there’s no point arguing about it.

We Have a Long List of Things That Are Claimed to be Universals, But Aren’t This list includes all the items noted in Chapter 5 that are shared by the religions of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic complex. A few are worth underlining. The notion of worship at first seems so obvious that it is hard to imagine a religion lacking it. In the nineteenth century, it was constantly asserted that there were primitives out there worshipping trees and snakes, in addition to the ever-present idols. Yet the Bororo could hardly be said by any definition to worship either aroe or bope. The Arunta did not ‘worship’ kangaroos, let alone flies, or the wonderfully eccentric totem Orphan Boy. What was going on was more subtle and elusive than that. As for notions of sin and guilt, I don’t find them in any of our examples. When Berawan people died, they went to exactly the same land of the dead as everyone else, regardless of their sins in life. Tikopians became atua without any effort on their part – no judgment, no hell. Prayer – meaning invocation and supplication – is not universal. It was found in the religions of the Berawan and Tikopia, but not of Arunta, Azande, or Bororo. In addition to this list of faux universals, there are theorists who see the origin of all religions in some state of mind. Every few years a new book tells us that religion is a weak human response to the certainty of our own deaths; it is the kind of consolation that little old ladies get from going to church. The rationalist message is: be a man, face up to it. But death did not, in fact, haunt the independent religions. Elderly Bororo people told Crocker that they were ready for a bit of peace and quiet in the aroe world. The Azande were alert to witchcraft attacks, but had no notion of an afterlife. The Arunta experience of time meant that past and future were co-present like stars in the night sky. This is not to say that Arunta people were indifferent to preserving their own lives, but only that they did not live in a state of modernist existential despair. Overwhelmingly, what was emphasised in the independent religions was not death at all, but life.

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Another psycho-reductionist theory that resurfaces regularly is that religion is just the projection onto the clouds of the infant’s fear of the immasculating father. You might, at a stretch, manage to argue that for the Tikopia or the Berawan, but for the rest it is simply absurd. Shamanism is often claimed as the charismatic core of primitive religion. I can see the appeal; there is something wild, uncontrolled, and anti-routine about shamans. Their performances could be dramatic, as I can attest, to the point of making your hair stand on end. When I am asked whether I ‘believe’ in it, my answer is the same as Silvio Berlusconi gave when asked if he was faithful to his wife: sometimes. Shamans are also known for cheap tricks used to amaze their audiences, but the shaman I knew best did nothing of that kind. I knew her in her everyday life, and there was no doubting her sincerity. Nevertheless, shamanism, real or faked, is not universal. The Arunta understanding of the world made no room for them, nor did that of the Azande. Finally, many independent religions had no esoteric secrets, and the notion that the primitives were ‘slaves of custom’ was an illusion produced by ignorance.

Religions Overwhelmingly Tell People What to do, Not What to Think This was the argument made in the 1880s by Robertson Smith, and it turns out he was right. For the independent religions, the conclusion is inescapable, and it is so in all the examples I have used. I made a special point of it in connection with the Tikopia, who operated an elaborate ritual cycle in which everyone knew their role, even as the experts were bickering over who had the best atua. There was never going to be any Tikopian equivalent of the Council of Nicaea; doctrinal debates could drag on forever without the least impact on what needed to be done and when. In an effort to save the distinction between primitive and non-primitive religions (advanced? evolved? modern?), it is often argued that the latter depend on faith, which is a matter of belief. I find this dubious, even concerning the Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions, because practicing Jews, Christians, and Moslems take for granted what they think they know, just as people in independent religions do. That includes matters that are not the topics of religious instruction or credos at all. No one bothers to teach Jews, Christians, or Moslems what it means to die, because they all have the same underlying ideas about that. Moreover, they know very well without thinking about it what is going to happen at synagogue, church, or mosque. Worship is mostly habit, and the very familiarity of liturgy is comforting. Even a tent revivalist meeting – that cauldron of charisma – has a perfectly predictable scenario. If it doesn’t work out the way it is supposed to everyone

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knows it’s a flop. A better distinction, it seems to me, is whether or not there are theologians about the place. The Great Project was concerned with the theologian-free religions. The very word ‘belief ’ is misleading. The Azande do not ‘believe’ in witchcraft; they simply know what they know.

Religions Are Social in Nature This was a point on which Durkheim was very insistent. His sociology begins with the proposition that all of us are aware of innumerable rules, serious or trivial, that we have to follow, or at least to be aware of. Breaking a rule has consequences. The sequence goes: murder – prison. That is because we all agree that homicide is a serious crime, and as a society we have institutions to investigate and punish it. At the opposite end of the scale, we all know hundreds of little rules about what to wear and when, even if we couldn’t list them, or ever poked our noses inside a fashion magazine. We also know what will happen if we get caught wearing some ridiculous outfit: people will laugh at us, and that is a tough sanction, especially for teenagers. On the other hand, if your child becomes a Goth, he or she is self-consciously joining a subculture with its own sense of belonging. You should support the experiment; it is a premise of middle-class life that youngsters must ‘find themselves.’ Rituals fit neatly into this account because they consist of rules about what to do and not do, some trivial and some deadly serious. It follows that religions have what Durkheim called a congregation. In this definition, your private musings about the meaning of life are not a religion, and ‘personal ritual’ is the term psychiatrists use for an obsessive compulsion. In the independent religions, this aspect is very obvious. At the Declaration at Rarokoka, for example, the Ariki Tafua reviewed in hieratical tones the responsibilities of a proper Tikopian. His warning to teenagers against stealing coconuts reminds me of drivers’ ed for eighteen year olds. Always the same messages: don’t steal coconuts, don’t drink and drive. Meanwhile, the gods in Tikopia didn’t care what crimes people committed. Tikopian morality was a social morality. Again, Berawan rites were explicitly for the good of the whole community, and that included the ancestors. For the Bororo, all serious moral obligations were towards other members of the community. Meanwhile, the aroe paid no attention and the bope had no morals anyway. Durkheim’s view of religion is still controversial. At times, Durkheim got carried away by his own logic and argued that religions were society worshipping itself. This is an odd kind of sociological reductionism; it makes religions sound totally introverted. Have they nothing to say about life and death, the origin of affliction, the nature of nature? Meanwhile, the suggestion that one’s moral responsibilities are largely social makes many conservatives in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic complex froth at the mouth. Your duty, they insist, is to God and to God’s law. On the other side of the argument

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the socialists have no need of religious props to support their morality, thank you very much.

Ritual Is Not a Separate Domain of Behaviour Ritual is simply doing religion. Since religion is an analytical category imported by the ethnologist, it follows that ritual is too. For the participants, there need be no distinction between doing religion and doing anything else. Even for the ethnographer, it is often impossible to untangle the two. A better way of looking at it is to notice processes of ritualisation, by which even day-to-day activities take on an air of ritual. My example had to do with cleanliness, but could as easily have been about cooking. Those activities are, to put it mildly, eminently pragmatic, so according to the textbook definition I quoted in Chapter 6, this eliminates them from being rituals. Rituals, it says, “cannot be justified by a rational, means-to-end type of explanation.” Nothing could be more misleading; cooking and eating are everywhere heavily ritualised. Think of the part that shamans of the bope play in Bororo cooking. It is mind-boggling what had to be done to get a decent piece of meat. In the west, people engage in what is called ‘entertaining,’ which involves a great deal more than putting dinner on the stove. In a Berawan longhouse, it is appallingly bad manners to eat in front of someone without pressing them to join you. To refuse is even worse; you are liable to be attacked by a crocodile. You must take a spoonful, or at least touch the plate. If you can’t reach it, you must say pupun. Pupun, I was told, doesn’t mean anything. Examples of this kind could be multiplied indefinitely.

For the Participants, Rituals Have Uses, Not Meanings This proposition turns on its head the textbook definition of ritual quoted in the last paragraph. On the contrary, rituals get things done: healing, marrying, taking care of the land, preventing death from running rampant through the longhouse, and so on. So much is this the case that the whole issue of finding ‘meaning’ in rituals is a banana skin. We find ourselves asking: who put the meaning in there? Was it some indigenous lawgiver, now forgotten, who designed the ritual as a teaching aid? That would be a very nineteenth-century hypothesis. Is it that the participants go through the rites in order to ‘express’ something? If so, to whom? Surely not to the ethnographer – that would be too narcissist for words. To each other then, to remind themselves of fundamental truths – a sort of pep rally? If that’s what’s going on, why can’t they just tell us what the rites mean and save us a lot of work? These questions have no answers because ritual is not a language. The same trap is set when the word ‘symbol’ is used. Who is symbolising what to whom? Nevertheless, it proved liberating when ethnographers asked

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themselves what kinds of connotations things used in rituals had. Turner’s method, as described in Chapter 11 was: watch, ask, compare. What informants could often tell the ethnographer was what it was about the thing – animal, vegetable, mineral – that was relevant in the rite, and then it was up to the ethnographer to piece together its significance. In the process of putting these techniques to work, we learned several lessons. First, however good your informants, the list of connotations they provided can never be taken as complete – there might be connotations they don’t see or even ones they won’t see. Again, you could never know in advance what meanings were attached to things; the only safe rule is that anything can stand for anything. There were predictable items: we generally expect ‘right’ to be associated with ‘male,’ but if an exception crops up, so much the better. My own way of avoiding the trap is to re-state the problem. It is not that we must find the meanings of rites, but that we must try to see what understanding of the world underlies them. When, in a Berawan longhouse, food was stuffed into the mouth of a corpse the question was not what people were trying to ‘express’ by that, but what understanding of death was made manifest in this act. The answer needed no knowledge of depth psychology or Jungian archetypes. Instead, as is often the case in fieldwork, it was staring me in the face; it was impossible to miss.

The Relationship between Ritual and Emotion Is Indeterminate On the one hand, it can’t be argued that rituals are the result of some outpouring of overpowering emotion. To begin with, rituals are scripted. More importantly, we all know that the emotions we feel are constantly changing. Mystics in their retreats invariably comment on their mood swings – elation giving way to despair, and then back again, all with no external impetus at all. If someone you care about dies, the intense emotions you feel are so swirling that it is impossible even to name them. Emotions are far too shifting a base to support social institutions. On the other hand, it is not true that rituals produce emotions. What is true is that participants usually know what emotion they are supposed to feel – comraderie at a party, solemnity at a funeral. Whether they are actually feeling the proper emotions it is impossible for an observer to say: they could be privately irritated by mindless laughter at a party, or suppressing giggles at a funeral.

Each Independent Religion Has Its Own Slate of Ritual Specialists When ethnographers describe people as witches or shamans, those labels are only a first approximation. Azande witches are not at all like those in the

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opening scenes of Macbeth, nor are they the same as witches in other parts of Africa or Melanesia. Similarly, the job of Bororo shamans was unlike anything seen in Siberia, which is where the term comes from. The mere existence of these terms does not imply that there is some worldwide phenomenon of witchcraft or shamanism whose essence we have to distil from all the scattered examples. The most effective way of pinning down what ritual specialists are about in particular cases is to see them as part of a team, whose activities make sense as a whole. About the Azande Evans-Pritchard says: “Witchcraft, oracles, and magic are like three sides of a triangle. Oracles and magic are two different ways of combatting witchcraft.” There is no room in the Azande system for any ritual specialist resembling a shaman. Meanwhile, the Bororo had no witchcraft, and what they needed was shamans of two different types; of the bope and of the aroe. The Berawan had shamans, but in addition there were experts in the art of augury. Berawan ritual specialists had complimentary roles: shamans had direct communication with other worlds, but their helpers were always an eccentric collection of minor spirits. The ancestors themselves were addressed by senior men in prayer, but there was no telling whether or not their prayers would be answered. The augur could find definitive answers, but only to yes/no questions.

Belief Systems Vary in Their Degree of Internal Consistency As late as the 1930s, there were people speculating on the nature of ‘primitive thought.’ There is of course no such thing. Levi-Strauss satirised the idea in his book The Savage Mind, his tease being that if the savages think naively, then so do the rest of us. Except for mathematicians, none of us think in syllogisms, and belief systems routinely incorporate contradictions. This is not a matter of imposing western ideas of logic on others but of paying attention to other understandings of the world. For example, Evans-Pritchard points out that Azande all agreed that the potential for witchcraft was passed from father to son and mother to daughter, but they did not draw the obvious conclusion that when a witch was discovered that meant that all of his or her same-sex descent line were also witches. When he reports this, however, his point is not that Azande beliefs are irrational, archaic or crude, but that this failure to follow through logically is evidently necessary for ordinary life to continue. This is nowhere unfamiliar. In Christian teaching, the contradiction between an all-powerful God and the existence of evil is not made a matter of syllogisms; not even Aquinas managed that. Instead, adherents are told they must cultivate faith – even against reason – because God works in mysterious ways. Judaism and Islam are caught in the same way. For ethnographers, such mysteries are part of a more fundamental issue, and that is the internal consistency of belief systems. If there is no consistency

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at all, if a culture is simply a pastiche of random bits and pieces accumulating from here and there, then we have no way of shedding light on anything. Ethnographies would be simply lists, and nothing more – indeed that logical conclusion has been drawn in post-modern circles. Meanwhile, the closest that ethnographers get to explaining anything is to show how things fit together. That is hardly explanation in any scientific sense; all that can be expected is a moment of insight, a glimpse of someone else’s view of the world.

There Were No Little Green Men When I was first taught physics at school I learned that gravity is a natural phenomenon. No doubt there were primitive people somewhere, I was told, who thought that things fell because there were invisible little green men who pulled them down. The scientific theory of gravity was superior because it was more parsimonious – no middlemen. Needless to say, no independent religion was ever discovered that had little green men. In fact, I know of no ethno-theory of gravity; everyone knows that things just fall. Meanwhile, the Azande had a very parsimonious theory of witchcraft: it was a natural phenomenon. No one could explain how it worked, but there again it’s not so easy for physicists to explain exactly how gravity works. The Berawan had similar natural phenomena. If you refused food sooner or later you were going to have a nasty encounter with a crocodile, snake, or bear. For a lack of sociality, what you got was nature in the raw. I pushed my informants hard on this, just as Evans-Pritchard did on witchcraft, and with the same result. There is no spirit that enforces this, and it had nothing to do with the ancestors or any other spirit agencies; it’s simply a fact of nature. As far as they knew it worked worldwide; if Europeans behaved badly like that, perhaps they got run over by cars.

The Supernatural Is in the Eye of the Beholder By now, it is hardly necessary to labour this point. In the nineteenth century, it was sufficient for Tylor to define religion as everything to do with the supernatural, and he took it for granted that he could tell what was and what wasn’t supernatural – not a useful starting point for the Great Project.

Science, Religion, and Magic Everywhere Co-exist One of the most valuable things that twentieth-century ethnography established beyond a doubt was that people everywhere were close observers of the natural world around them. Crocker says that the Bororo were insatiably curious; if there was an argument about whether two birds were different species or male and female of the same species, they would spend hours trying

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to settle it, watching out for sightings and hunting for nests. What they did not do was wander round in some fog of ‘primitive thought.’ Australian aborigines could find food and drink with ease in places that looked to explorers and settlers like barren deserts devoid of life. Australian religions reflected this knowledge, as in a mirror. Such sophistication shows how condescending was the nineteenth-century dismissal of Australian religions as mere ‘nature cults.’ Worse, nineteenth-century theorists had it that there had been a first stage of human mental evolution that knew only of magic, and had not yet conceived of religion or science. Since the Australians were clearly the most primitive people on earth, it followed that everything they did was magic. Their dressing up and dancing around was an exercise in collective magic – more increase ceremonies, more kangaroos to hunt – and of course they didn’t work. How the Australians fed themselves wasn’t explained. Durkheim took a different tack. While conceding that magic and religion both involved the sacred, he distinguished between them by emphasizing that religion always sought the common good, while magic was selfishly employed for individual advantage. Applying this test to the Arunta, it was clear that they did indeed have magic, even lethal magic, but there was more than that going on at festivals such as engwuru. Whichever definition of magic is used, the key point is that science, religion, and magic were all three bound up in the Arunta understanding of the world. The adjective I used to describe such a synthesis was integral, which is an expanded version of spiritual. Arunta integrity was tied up with the land – not some abstract land as in ‘fatherland,’ but particular chunks of real estate. Tikopian integrity revolved around the notion of mana; it was impossible for Tikopians to see the material world without it.

No Ethnographic Account of a Religion Can Ever Be Complete As F.J. Gillen plainly saw when contemplating his Arunta informant, there was no way he could “get inside his brain for one brief hour.” There is, of course, no way of getting inside anybody’s brain, but the dilemma is particularly sharp for ethnographers of religion because the whole aim is to grasp, as far as possible, how other people experience their worlds. This is not a reason, however, for despair. Closure implies an end. By contrast, the openended quality of ethnographic accounts is what makes them intriguing. We will never exactly know the nature of the ‘association’ of an Arunta person with his or her totem, so we must go turning over the evidence, and trying to imagine that other world.

Postscript Religion and Evolution

Religion, it turns out, is a surprisingly slippery concept. The more we know about it the harder it is to pin down. From this I draw two conclusions: first, we’ve evidently got the wrong word. Second, to claim to ‘explain’ religion is childishly simplistic. I take it that we are just talking about humans here; I wouldn’t know what to make of the idea of animal religions. Setting that possibility aside, we’re talking about one species, with its own specific evolutionary path. Somewhere along that path our pre-human ancestors became bipedal, but how? Several possibilities have been mooted; one is called the rapid feeding hypothesis. This was framed as a result of watching primates whose diet relies heavily on seeds. Before humans began monkeying around with the genetic makeup of edible grains by selecting for those whose seed remained firmly attached to the stalks so as to facilitate harvesting, eating seeds meant picking them off the ground one grain at a time. Getting enough calories to sustain life meant moving the hands back and forth from ground to mouth very fast, while simultaneously shuffling forward. The hypothesis is that for our pre-hominid seed-eating ancestors’ efficiency at this was selectively advantageous, and consequently new modes of locomotion evolved. By degree, this allowed more effective use of the forelimbs, so releasing an enormous adaptive potential for the use of tools. I personally don’t find this hypothesis very convincing, but the point is that we need an account that respects the principles of Darwinian selection, so you cannot argue that people became bipedal because they had it in mind to start using tools. Instead, you have to show how each tiny physical modification was selectively advantageous, each in its own way, in every stage before bipedalism was achieved. This will require a richer fossil record that is currently available, plus a great deal of detailed anatomical comparison, and as yet there is no consensus among paleontologists. Finding a convincing argument and marshalling evidence to support it is going to be very demanding; it is not a task for dabblers in evolutionary theory. After hominids became bipedal, their brains began to grow bigger in proportion to their body weight. This order of events is obvious in evolutionary

DOI: 10.4324/b22988 -27

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terms and is confirmed in the fossil record. An elaboration of technology went along with increased brain power, starting with stone tools so crude that it was not clear that they were man-made at all – perhaps they were just bits of rock that had fallen off a cliff. Where that process will end we do not know – perhaps in us all falling off a cliff. Nor do we know exactly what mental abilities evolved along with technological skills, or in what order. The technique of evolutionary psychologists has been to break down human cognitive skills into various subsets and then to reconstruct their order of appearance by a logic of Must-Have-Been. But why would we do that? My proposition is that there is an overwhelmingly obvious human trait, evident in everything we do, and that is to try to make some sense of the world we find ourselves in. The assumption that ‘the primitives’ wandered around in some kind of pre-logical haze was a piece of arrogance typical of High Modernism, and completely debunked by twentieth-century anthropology. So too is Tylor’s notion that the primitives represented earlier stages of mental evolution. Such implicit racism was characteristic of the nineteenth-century social evolutionists, and not just Herbert Spencer and his misnamed ‘social Darwinism.’ That is why anthropologists are hypersensitive to even veiled hints of racism. They know very well that the first generation of anthropologists played a large part in creating that most faux of all faux sciences, ‘scientific racism,’ and they narrow their eyes whenever anyone goes anywhere near those ideas. I regret to say that sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists, in their casual use of nineteenth-century ideas – often it seems for no other purpose than to tease wooly headed ‘relativists’– skirt dangerously close to the abyss. Get thee behind me, Satan. Taking that as read, the Arunta people that Gillen and Spencer met in central Australia in 1901 brought to bear exactly the same powers of reasoning as all human beings everywhere. We know a fair amount about those powers because of the work of experimental psychologists – not evolutionary psychologists, notice; there is no reference here to anything that happened thousands or millions of years ago. Beyond that we are on thin ice; what specifically Arunta things were going on in Arunta minds is another of those things we can never know. As Gillen said about his knowledgeable Warramunga informant “could I get inside his brain for one brief hour many things that are now troubling us would be solved and the weary ethnologists would be made happy.” Instead, all we have to work on is what Arunta people said and did. In this, Gillen had a decisive advantage: he had never been taught anything about anthropological theory. That meant that he had no preconceived illusions about the primitives as the Mirror of Modernity, so he had a better chance of seeing Arunta people as themselves, rather than a bunch of walking stereotypes. He still had to deal with the endless problems of translation, however. When he took the Arunta word alcheringa and translated it as ‘dreamtime,’ he had obviously given it some thought. Since he had spoken at least some

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Arunta for years, he had no doubt heard the word used hundreds of times and arrived at its meaning in just the way that children do when learning new words, by comparing its use in different contexts. An interesting question – to which again there is no answer – is whether Gillen had in this way arrived at an accurate grasp of the term, but whether he did or not he still had to find a way to convey it to his reader. Alcheringa is the sort of word you could build an entire ethnography around. It certainly looks like one of those religiony sorts of things that might provide a starting point for an ethnographer because it was impossible for an Arunta person to look at the natural world without it. Seeing a lizard, he or she might think of the story about the lizard man who ‘just sprung up’ and then recognised himself: ‘these are me,’ he said, and ‘there I am again.’ Meanwhile, lizards are edible – like just about everything else, except for wildcats and flies – and Arunta people knew all about the different varieties, where to find them at different seasons, and so on. A herpetologist would certainly want an Arunta guide when starting work in Arunta country. This quality of being at the same moment both religion and science is what I described as being integral, as opposed to merely spiritual. To split up Arunta religion and Arunta science would be to miss the wholeness, the integrity, of the Arunta understanding of the world. The integrity of the Bororo world lay elsewhere of course, depending on those magnificently untranslatable words aroe and bope, and to lump Bororo and Arunta together as ‘primitive’ only displays the ignorance behind the slur. There is a second feature of the species Homo sapiens that is immediately obvious: we are a social species, we hang around in groups. Nothing unusual about that in the Linnaean classification. Macaques are even more sociable; if you watch a troop at a zoo you will notice the incessant social activity, amiable grooming over here, and noisy squabbling over there. One wonders how they find time to eat; as pets they are exhausting. By contrast, orangutans are mostly solitary and slow-moving. Solitary does not mean anti-social; I once made the acquaintance of a young female who, if I stood for a while underneath her tree looking up, would slowly climb down onto my shoulders to say hullo. A very endearing creature, and no trouble to take care of. The sociality of our species is of course the result of evolutionary processes – to argue otherwise would be absurd. From that acknowledged truth, evolutionary psychologists go on to make deductions that strike me as over-elaborate in exactly the same manner as Tylor’s deep, mysterious – and misguided – deductions about prehistoric societies. What Tylor correctly noticed was that similar symbolic items or themes recur everywhere, but the reason for that has nothing to do with the ancient past. Since there is a simpler explanation, all those hypothetical proto-societies are unnecessary, and so unscientific by the criterion of Occam’s razor. The result is mystification, and the same tendency is noticeable in contemporary genetic determinism. It constantly re-iterates the platitude that Stone Age ‘religion’ – whatever that

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might have been, how could anybody possibly know? – conferred an adaptive advantage on our human ancestors because it integrated them into cohesive groups. Those who pray together stay together apparently. Religion is imprinted in our genes, which explains why it lives on in the twenty-first century when it is thoroughly maladaptive and against all rationality. My objection is that we simply don’t need this extra profundity. We stick together because we are social creatures. That’s unmistakably phylogenetic, but it says nothing about religion. Macaques are intensely social, but they don’t need religion to manage that. All the genetic theories do is repeat what we started out with: we are a social species. Our sociality has a flip side: if there is, in psychology jargon, an ‘in-group,’ then there has to be an ‘out-group’ or groups, and that is where our violent nature takes over. In the 1970s, the appropriately named authors Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox caused a stir with their book The Imperial Animal, which argued that aggression was built into us because we are territorial, that is, we defend our own space. This set off a debate about whether we are doomed to violence because it is part of our nature. Not surprisingly, the verdict was: yes and no. Making genes the subject of the debate made that result inevitable. Meanwhile, there have been places and times when people have lived out their lives largely without bloodshed. On the other hand, there have been times when humans have lapsed into pointless bloodbaths, Hobbes’ ‘war of all against all.’ Note that Dawkins and I are in complete agreement that this is irrational, horrifyingly irrational, it’s just that I don’t see how that undermines the goals of anthropology. Cultural difference is not superficial, nor is it merely picturesque, and that is one of the hard facts of our dangerously irrational world. The ‘gene-for-religion’ argument is a variant of the infamous glue theory of religion, which is often attributed to Durkheim, and enjoyed great popularity among anthropologists in the 1950s. In this view, all social institutions perform a function, or they wouldn’t be there. There were institutions to perform economic functions (production and distribution of goods), and others that were political (controlling the legitimate use of force), and then there were rituals, which by definition accomplished nothing practical. They were there to serve ‘integrative’ needs; a sort of ongoing pep rally. Since its function was so vague, ethnographers of the era pretty much ignored religion and stuck to social organisation. It was Turner who revived the topic with his talk of symbols and meanings – things that functionalists simply had no way of talking about. It hardly needs emphasising how much of what is intriguing about religions is jettisoned in materialist accounts. Why bother with the details of anybody’s religion when you know in advance that it’s just the locally preferred brand of glue? The effect of reductionism, whether by means of genetics or functionalism, is to hollow out religion to an empty shell. According to Dawkins, that is inevitable anyway. In the Middle Ages, thunder and lightning caused simple peasants to tremble before the wrath of God,

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but now we know it’s just a matter of electric charges building up in clouds, a result of well-understood meteorological processes. As science advances God retreats, until in the end He will be left with nowhere to go. Such uncompromising materialism makes many people uncomfortable, including a colleague in biology with whom Dawkins has often crossed swords over issues related to group selection: Stephen Jay Gould. Himself Jewish and agnostic, Gould once found himself in the anomalous position of reassuring a group of Jesuit priests – in the Vatican no less – that he saw no conflict between evolution and the Catholic faith. That is the official position of the Church, as made explicit by Pope John Paul II in a statement entitled ‘Truth Cannot Contradict Truth.’ Since the Church refers to its teachings using the Latin term magisteria, Gould calls this the doctrine of non-overlapping magisteria, or NOMA for short, and embraces it himself. Dawkins’ response was vitriolic: “A cowardly flabbiness of the intellect afflicts otherwise rational people confronted by long-established religions” (Dawkins 2003: 205). All these intellectual fireworks, it seems to me, are really about the conflicting meanings of the word materialism, or as Turner would say, its multivocalic quality. According to Webster’s Dictionary, ‘materialism’ in philosophical terms is “the doctrine that matter is the only reality and that everything in the world, including thought, will, and feeling, can be explained only in terms of matter: opposed to idealism.” Presumably, science and materialism are identical for Dawkins, which makes Gould a dabbler in necromancy. He is as uncompromising as the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ernest Rutherford who said flatly that “there is physics and there is stamp collecting.” This book is obviously a piece of stamp collecting, although on a very modest scale compared to The Golden Bough, but one wonders what Rutherford would have made of evolutionary psychology. Rutherford won his prize in 1906 for developing the notion of an atom as a nucleus surrounded by orbiting electrons, but his model looks positively naïve now. He talks as if the nucleus was in some simple sense there, while physicists now speak in double talk about particles that are here or there without ever being in between, or indeterminately there and not there, as in the parable of Schrodinger’s cat. Has physics gone beyond materialism? Has Dawkins lost track of where science is going? Come to that, is biology physics or stamp collecting? Once reductionism begins, there is only one place where it can end, and that is physics, for the simple reason that all matter is made of atoms. Recently, the achievements in genetic research, including the Human Genome Project, have pushed biology to the forefront of popular attention. Meanwhile, particle physics has the disadvantage of being incomprehensible to the public – perhaps even its practitioners – but physics remains the sovereign science for all that. Webster offers another definition of materialism: “the doctrine that comfort, pleasure, and wealth are the only or highest goals or values.” Obviously that doctrine has nothing to do with science, and we have crossed over into the realm of values. When it comes to materialism type II, I am morally

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opposed. It does seem at present that there is no viable economic alternative to capitalism – I haven’t heard anyone recently advocating Stalinist centralised production – but that does not make greed a moral system. It is also not an argument for laissez-faire capitalism, as promoted by Herbert Spencer. It seems to me only rational that capitalism needs oversight to stop it going off the rails. Who had more blood on his hands Andrew Carnegie or Al Capone? The armed violence against striking coal miners in the 1930s left far more people dead than the Saturday Night Massacre. Was that free enterprise at work? To argue that capitalists have no social responsibility beyond their shareholders – as Robert Greenspan famously did – plus of course their own bank accounts is just plain irrational. Adam Smith, who thought of himself as a moral philosopher, would agree. Those who think otherwise have not read him, and instead hide behind that one phrase of his about the ‘hidden hand of the market,’ which he later regretted having ever used. Integrity, like materialism, has a double meaning. When I described the Arunta understanding of the world as ‘integral’ I meant whole, or complete, but the shift to the nominal form ‘integrity’ smuggled in another meaning: “the quality or state of being of sound moral principle.” That was intentional; my proposition is that moralities or value systems belong to whole understandings of the world, not just whatever bits of it get classified as religion. Christianity teaches that animals have no souls, but why would that be religion rather than biology? When wildlife conservation activists are confronted by fundamentalists asserting that the Earth was created for man, is one party arguing religion and the other science? Environmentalism fits perfectly well with Durkheim’s definition of the sacred – the diversity of life is sacred. What gives integrity to a scientific understanding of the world – that is, the stuff in the understanding that isn’t the science – is humanism. The first move of Humanism was to embrace the liberating and creative value of human reason, in contrast to dependence on the authority of the Bible. At the end of the nineteenth century, the all-embracing optimism of Voltaire had turned into the exclusionary arrogance of Spencer. After the self-inflicted horrors of the twentieth century, humanism arrives in the twenty-first century in a very battered condition indeed: look what all your precious rationalism did for us! Things are grim; the credo stands that we have nothing to rely on other than our own reason, but it has lost its triumphal ring. To espouse humanism nowadays requires modesty about what reason can accomplish, but there has never been a better moment for modesty. Astronomers can now put numbers to the universe: the furthest galaxy we can see is 13 billion light years away. A light year is 6 trillion miles, give or take. Our galaxy is one of maybe 140 billion others. To reel off the numbers is one thing, but to try to grasp, however inadequately, what they mean is to know for sure that nothing that you or I, or all of us together, could ever do or have done can have the slightest impact on that immensity. Personal vanities

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evaporate, and our bonds of self-consciousness are loosened. That is a blessed condition. The eleventh-century Islamic scholar Qushayri taught that when people prayed they should not think of the heaven they hoped to achieve or the hell they hoped to avoid. Instead what they should feel was awe, in which hopes and fears were left behind, and the future collapses into the present. Would that perhaps provide an escape from what Einstein called the last great illusion: time? Is there a clue here to how Arunta people experience the dreamtime? Intriguing, that such diverse understandings of the world should converge on the two great imponderables: time and consciousness. To contemplate them is surely religion, philosophy, and science, all together.

Endnotes

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

r

Chapter 4

206 Endnotes



Chapter 5

Chapter 7



Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Endnotes 207



Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

208 Endnotes



Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Glossary of Ethnic Groups

Arunta Location: central Australia, along the Finke River and in the Macdonnell Ranges. Population: no figures given by Spencer and Gillen but evidently multiple thousands scattered over a large area in small local groups. Livelihood: hunting and gathering in a sparse desert environment. Azande Location: East Africa, along the border of Southern Sudan and Zaire. Population: no figures given by Evans-Pritchard, but evidently many thousands distributed in isolated homesteads over a large area of open, sparsely wooded country. Livelihood: gardening, with maize, manioc, ground nuts, and bananas, augmented by hunting and gathering. No cattle. Berawan Location: central Borneo, along the Tinjar and Tutoh Rivers, in Sarawak. Population: about 2,000 in four longhouses communities. Livelihood: dry rice cultivation in fields cleared annually from secondary forest, augmented with fishing and hunting. Pigs and chickens are kept domestically. Bororo Location: south America, along the Sao Laurenco River in Brazil. Population: about 500 in three villages – a remnant of a previously much larger population. Livelihood: gardening of maize and sweet potatoes, plus heavy reliance on fishing and hunting. Ndembu Location: East Africa, in the north-east corner of Zambia. Population: 18,000 at the time of Turners’ fieldwork, in many small hamlets scattered through woodlands. Livelihood: shifting hoe cultivation of cassava, plus a wide variety of subsidiary crops. Game is nowadays rare. Tikopia Location: western Oceania, a Polynesian outlier in Melanesia. Population: a little over 1,200 at the time of Firth’s visit, in multiple small hamlets. Livelihood: the main crops are taro and breadfruit, plus bananas and coconut palms, foreshore gathering, lagoon, and deep-sea fishing.

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——— 2008 The God Delusion Boston: Houghton Mifflin Durkheim, Emile 1965 [1915] The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life New York: Free Press Eliot, TS 1930 Selected Poems Orlando: Harcourt and Brace Evans-Pritchard, Edward Evan 1937 Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande Oxford: Clarendon Press ——— 1962 “Zande Theology” In Essays in Social Anthropology Pp. 162–203 London: Faber and Faber ——— 1976 Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande Abridged edition Oxford: Oxford University Press Firth, Raymond 1983 [1936] We the Tikopia: A Sociological Study of Kinship in Primitive Polynesia Stanford: Stanford University Press ——— 1961 History and Traditions of Tikopia Wellington: The Polynesian Society ——— 1967a Tikopia Ritual and Belief Boston: Beacon Press ——— 1967b The Work of the Gods in Tikopia London: Athlone Press ——— 1970 Rank and Religion in Tikopia London: Allen and Unwin Fraser, Robert 1990 The Making of The Golden Bough: The Origins and Growth of an Argument New York: St. Martin’s Press Frazer, James 1935 [1906–1914] The Golden Bough Twelve volumes New York: Macmillan ——— 1922 The Golden Bough Abridged edition New York: Macmillan Gammage, Bill 2011 The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia Sydney: Allen & Unwin Gennep, Arnold Van 1960 [1909] The Rites of Passage Chicago: Chicago University Press Gillen, FJ 1968 Gillen’s Diary: The Camp Jottings of F.J. Gillen Adelaide: Libraries Board of South Australia Gillispie, Charles 1959 Genesis and Geology New York, Harper and Row Gottleib, Anthony 2012 “It Ain’t Necessarily So” New Yorker September 17:84–89 Gould, Stephen Jay 2003 “Nonoverlapping Magisteria” In Paul Kurtz (ed.) Science and Religion: Are They Compatible? Pp. 191–204 New York: Prometheus Hall, Daniel George Edward 1981 A History of Southeast Asia 4th edition New York: St. Martin’s Press Harris, Marvin 1968 The Rise of Anthropological Theory New York: Columbia University Press Herodotus 1972 Herodotus: The Histories London: Penguin Hertz, Robert 1973 [1909] “The Pre-Eminence of the Right Hand: A Study in Religious Polarity” In Rodney Needham (ed.) Right and Left Pp. 1–31 Chicago: Chicago University Press Jung, Karl 1964 Man and His Symbols New York: Doubleday Kitcher, Phillip 1985 Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature Boston: M.I.T. Press Krebs, Christopher 2011 A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’ ‘Germania’ from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich London: W. W. Norton Leach, Edmund Ronald 1961 Rethinking Anthropology London: Athlone Levi-Strauss, Claude 1962 Totemism London: Merlin ——— 1966 The Savage Mind Chicago: University of Chicago Press

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Index

animism 44, 104 Aquinas, St. Thomas 51–2 Aranda see Arunta archaeology 15–17, 79, 85 Archetypes 114 aroe 49–51 Arunta 67–73, 88–93, 105, 176; churinga 74, 90–2; engwuru festival 88–93 Australian aborigines 19–20, 43, 56, 65–74, 88; see also Arunta Azande 145–55, 159, 171–7 Bashkow, Ira 151 Benedict, Ruth 165 Berawan 58, 76, 95–6, 105, 107, 115, 123, 130, 150, 162; bird augury 97–100; death rites 33–9 Boas, Franz 163–5 Bope 50–1 Bororo 49–54, 58, 105, 130, 150, 172–7 Buddhism 50, 176 Campbell, Joseph 115 Casey, Edward 72 Chomsky, Noam 106 clothing styles 109–11 Columbine shooting 148–9 Comparative Method 18, 21, 43–4, 103, 111 Conklin, Harold 80–3, 86 Cook, Captain James 14, 19–21, 28, 103, 179 Crocker, Christopher 49, 81, 173, 175, 196 Danniken, Arnold von 20 Darwin, Charles 17, 21, 95, 105, 108, 132 Dawkins, Richard 31, 104–5 diffusion 131–2, 164

divination 152–4 Doyle, Arthur Conan 27 dreams 30–2, 70, 77, 113 Durkheim, Emile 74, 86, 91, 94, 128, 131, 138, 163, 166 Einstein, Albert 70, 72, 104, 115 Eliot, Thomas Stearns 29 ethnography, defined 23 ethnoscience 80–3 Evans-Pritchard, Edward 136, 145–54, 159–60, 165, 196, 171 evolutionary psychology 107 Firth, Raymond 3–11, 33, 179–85 Forbidden city, Beijing 75 Frazer, Sir James 24–7, 67, 77, 84, 86, 105, 119, 128, 141, 163 Freud, Sigmund 33, 113, 117, 119 funerals 34–8, 76, 117–8, 123; American funerals 59–61 Gammage, Bill 78–9, 80, 93–4 Geertz, Clifford 123–4, 166 Gennep, Arnold van 136 geology 15–6 Gillen, Frances James 65–74, 89–94, 173 Golden Bough,The 22–8, 31, 67, 105, 115, 141 Goody, Jack 111 Great Project, the 4, 10, 13–4, 40, 44, 58, 68, 74, 88, 93, 105, 145, 161, 164, 167 Hawkesworth, John 15 Hanunoo 80–1 Herodotus 23 Hertz, Robert 128–30, 164 Hinduism 158 Hobbes, Thomas 79

216 Index

integrity, defined 94 Iroquois 111 Judeo-Christian-Islamic complex 46–8, 52–4, 58, 88 Jung, Carl 107, 113–5, 128 Karnak 75 Leach, Sir Edmund 111 Lee, Richard 79 Levi-Strauss, Claude 81–2, 85–7, 89, 124, 131, 196 Levy-Bruhl, Lucien 77 linguistics 106–7, 109 Linnaeus 21, 80, 86 Lubbock, John 45 Luther, Martin 157 magic 74, 77, 79, 83–6, 88–9, 97 Mana 178–83 Maori 129–30 Mead, Margaret 141 Malinowski, Bronislaw 89–90 Malthus, Thomas 18 Matriarchy 111 matrilineal 120, 173 Mendel, Gregor 17 Missionaries 3, 52, 104, 110, 174 Morgan, Lewis Henry 44 Navaho 107 Ndembu 119–23, 134–41 Newton, Sir Isaac 18, 103, 115 Nootka 106–7 patriarchy 146 patrilineal 8, 111 pilgrimage 138 Plato 56 post-modernism 103, 160–2 prayer 34, 53, 76, 98–9 primitive, defined 22 ‘primitive religion’ 1, 44, 65, 104, 186 Problem of Evil 149–50 psychic unity of mankind 116

reductionism 108–9, 111, 115–16 religion 5, 33, 77, 88, 94, passim; definition 45–6, 51–4, 74 relativism 104–5, 161 ritual 6, 25, 94, 114, 123, 165, 176, passim; definition 56–9, 74; and emotion 116–8; ritualization 62 Rousseau, Pierre 108 Sacred, defined 74–6 Sahlins, Marshall 79 St. John, Spencer 30 Saussure, Ferdinand de 86 Scharer, Hans 157–8 Schiavo, Terry 39 Schneider, David 165–7 shamans 99, 174–7 Smith, W Robertson 7, 165, 183, 185, 191 social Darwinism 18 sociobiology see evolutionary psychology Solnit, Rebecca 165 Spencer, Baldwin 65–74, 89–94, 173 Sudnow, David 39 superstition, defined 52 symbols 84, 113, 119, 124, 165, 167 Thomsen, Christian Jurgenson 15 Tikopia 3–4, 8–10, 30, 33, 163, 179–85 timescape 73 totemism 68–70, 72, 88–94 Trevor-Roper, Hugh 156 Trivers, Robert 108 Turner,Victor 119–23, 128, 134–5, 137–41; mukanda 136–41; Turner’s methods 120–23 Tylor, Edward Burnett 30–3, 58, 70–1, 77, 100, 104; brand of empathy 31–2, 115, 117, 172; idea of survivals 25; mental evolution 44–5, 65, 131, 145 Webber, Max 176 Whorf, Benjamin 48, 106 witchcraft 145–58 World religions 5, 46–9 Worsaae, Jens Aamussen 16, 21