Durkheimian anthropology and religion This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Maurice Bloch. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau5.3.019 REPRINT Durkheimian anthropology and religion Going in and out of each other’s bodies Maurice BLOCH, London School of Economics and Political Science   In memory of Skip Rappaport Emile Durkheim’s work has always been criticized for reifying the social and situating it in an indeterminate zone between actors’ consciousness and positive facts.1 In this chapter, however, I am not concerned with exploring whether this criticism of the founder of French sociology’s work is justified. My purpose instead is to show that it is possible to retain some aspects of Durkheim’s conclusions about the nature of religion and of the social with types of argument quite different from those he employed. My framework here is that of modern evolutionary natural science and recent understandings of the specificities of the human mind/brain. Such an evolutionist perspective tends to make social/cultural anthropologists uncomfortable. I hope that as they read on, they discover that an evolutionist perspective does not necessarily lead to the dangers they envision; and that it can even be reconciled with some of their most cherished ideas that will emerge all the stronger as a result.[286] But because one might as well hang for a sheep as for a lamb, I begin my argument much further back than is usual in evolutionary anthropology with a consideration of the very earliest stages of life on earth, when unicellular organisms associated together to form multicellular units in the Cambrian era. During this crucial transition, and for millions of years, it was far from clear whether those early multicellular organisms were one or many because they were in an in-between stage. This biological conundrum still exists, in varying ways and to varying degrees, for many subsequent and more complex forms of life. An extreme example is coral, about which one can argue equally plausibly either that the minute units of which it consists are separate organisms or that whole coral branches (or even whole reefs) are one single animal. The difficulty of isolating the “individual” does not only apply for such exceptional life forms. The issue of identifying the specific unit on which natural selection acts arises in respect of all living things and has become particularly acute in modern biology. Does natural selection occur at the gene level or on combinations of associated genes? Or is it at the level of the individual? Or on a larger group that shares genes to differing degrees (Stotz and Griffiths 2004)? This sort of question is particularly problematic when we are dealing with social species. Is it the bee or the hive that is the animal? After all, the bees in a hive are as genetically identical as are the different bits of the human body, and a hive possesses only one set of working reproductive organs. The biological problems do not end there. When does an embryo become separate from its mother? Is a live spermatozoid a unit? More generally, how far are parents one with their children, and are descendants of individuals their continuation or new units? Are descent groups one body? Do members of one caste have unique distinctive types of blood? Are nations one people? Are we all the children of God in the brotherhood of Christ? Is society, as Durkheim claimed, more than the sum of the constituent individuals? Here, those readers who have already given me up as some sort of biological reductionist, indifferent to the higher purpose of cultural anthropology, might summon a ?icker of interest with these more familiar disciplinary questions. They may even begin to hope that I might have something to say about religion and ritual, which, after all, is what this book is about. I shall get there . . . eventually. And indeed, my prime purpose in this chapter is to consider the theoretical implications of the way I have just managed to slither from a discussion of the structure of coral to hoary classical subjects in anthropology and even to central tenets of some interpretations of the Christian religion. If the reader is totally unsympathetic to the approach, however, I propose they will already have revelled in identifying a familiar sleight of hand: representing facts about the world as if they were just that, without having ?rst recited the anthropologists’ exorcism prayer. I humbly acknowledge that everything I say is nothing but an epiphenomenon of my present cultural position and time and that this inevitably leads me to essentialize a particular cultural position and then mercilessly impose it on defenseless people.[287] In other words, I have been guilty of suggesting that my scientific knowledge, a mere elitist manifestation of my own culture, is somehow the basis of the propositions made by those people around the world who say things like this: “The members of our group, which has existed since the beginning of time, share a distinctive type of bone”; or “Our lineage consists of one body”; or “Initiation reunites us with our ancestors”; or “Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” I would have thus committed all the category mistakes in the book. Especially in having forgotten the fact that the cultural creates an impenetrable screen between what is and our cultural representations. Familiar arguments of this kind might be partly justified as ?rst steps when we teach an introduction to anthropology,2 but in this chapter I argue that when left in categorical form, they are as misleading as the ethnocentricism that anthropologists love to denounce. We can start with a classic and familiar polemic as a way of introducing the theoretical position I shall adopt here. In the bad-old days, so the story goes, anthropologists used to think that kinship was based on the fact that people go in and out of each other’s bodies. Indeed, they might have stressed that the physical separation of a child from its mother takes quite a while, with intermediate phases such as breast feeding and child care. Some of these earlier vulgar anthropologists went as far as to suggest that the care given by fathers to infants was somehow the consequence of having gone into the mother during sexual intercourse. They argued that these “natural” foundations were the common base of all different kinship systems (Yanagisako and Collier 1987: 30–35). Such naïveté, however, was soon to be severely disciplined by developments in our subject. First, anthropologists stressed the old platonic point that humans do not live in the world as God or the scientists see it, but via their own understanding of it (I don’t see why this does not apply to other animals, too). From this they argued that the foundation (i.e., going in and out of each other’s bodies) cannot be the direct foundation of social knowledge. This correction was, however, soon deemed not to have been severe enough. It was not simply that people saw the world “through a glass darkly”; it was that they did not see it at all. There was no such fact as that people went in and out of each other’s bodies; they were just accidental cultural representations of which my particular formulation is only one among many. Thus, to talk of different, culturally constructed kinship systems as if they were cultural interpretations of a single reality was a fallacy. In a wonderful metaphor, David Schneider explained that if you went out into the world armed with a kinship-shaped cutting tool, you inevitably got kinship-shaped pieces. By this he implied that if the tool had had any other shape than the western-shaped kinship tool, which would be the case with the tools used by the “others,” you would have gotten a quite different shape (Schneider 1984, 198). I have always liked this metaphor of Schneider’s because, as a child, I used to spend much time watching my grandmother making biscuits. She would roll out a large flat pancake of dough on the marble of the kitchen table, and with a few ancient tin tools she would cut out various shapes. This is exactly what Schneider [288]has in mind. But the other reason why I like his metaphor is that what is wrong with it is also obvious. The world in which people go in and out of each other, the denounced foundation, is not (as Schneider’s analogy suggests) inert, undifferentiated, and flat like biscuit dough. It has a shape, and this shape, while it does not determine the way the world will be represented, severely restricts the parameters of what is likely. Plato also used a culinary metaphor to talk about the world. For him, however, the world was more like a roast chicken than pastry, and unless you really wanted to make things difficult for yourself, you would “carve it at the joints,” wherever they occurred on the animal you were serving up. Indeed, it is the dialectic between the facts of sex and birth and the cultural representations of these phenomena that most promises to advance our understanding of the nature of human beings, which, of course also involves the cultural (and hence historical) aspect. But examination of this dialectic is what the Schneiderian rhetoric makes impossible by refusing to allow us to ask what the representations “are about” and what the world is like. A trivial objection to the effect that not all languages have a word for what anthropologists call “kinship” puts a stop to any consideration of the really important questions about our species. And there is yet something else that is obscured by Schneider’s figure of speech. The cutting tools, which represent concepts in the metaphor, also have to be explained. There is no doubt that these tools are the products of specific histories but they nevertheless have had to be usable by the minds of the human beings who employ them. Here again, the world interacts in a challenging way with the representations that cultural anthropologists study. It is banal to stress merely that the world we live in is culturally constructed; what is of interest is the indirect relation of the construction to what is constructed and how the construction is used. This chapter, however, will not pursue the implications of the link between the fact that we go in and out of each other’s bodies in birth and sex and the cultural representations of this fact in kinship systems. Many (I do not include myself among them) might feel that this topic has grown tiresome. I merely evoke the controversy to stress that because all cultures interpret, and have to interpret, the fact that we go in and out of each other in sex and birth, they also have to interpret the consequent fact that for us (as with coral) there is indeterminacy concerning the physical boundaries of individuals. For instance, the so-called “descent theorists” of my anthropological youth were fascinated with groups of people who declare themselves to be “one body”; in other words, corporate groups. These statements are interesting not because they are flights of fancy proving yet again that the world we live in is culturally constructed but because they are in part motivated by the very real fact of the indeterminacy and arbitrariness of the boundaries of biological units. My focus in this chapter concerns another real fact about human beings that, although it concerns a matter different from kinship, is not altogether unrelated to it. Indeterminacy and arbitrariness of boundaries are not simply the result of the sexual character of our species and the way it reproduces itself. They are also due to another feature of Homo sapiens. Individuals go in and out of each other because of certain characteristics of the human nervous system. This form of interpenetration is as material as sex and birth; but unlike sex and birth it is more or less unique to our species (Povinelli et al. 2000; Decety and Somerville 2003).[289] I have already mentioned that, although the boundaries of individual units are arbitrary among all living forms, this ambiguity takes on a special, perhaps more extreme form in social animals because the social—of itself and by definition— continually reconnects the individuals whom time and genealogical distance are separating. Such a process occurs in a variety of ways in different life forms because of the mechanisms that make the social differ according to the species concerned. So it is not surprising that the specific basis of human sociability is a product of those capacities of our species that make it distinctive (Humphrey 2002). One thing that normal human babies do at about 1 year old, but our nearest relatives, the chimpanzees, never do, is point at things, not because they want what they designate—they do this, but so do chimps—but because they want the people around them to pay attention to the same things. In other words, they want the people they are with to adjust their minds in harmony with theirs—in short, to share intentionality (Gopnik 1993; Tomasello and Rakoczy 2003; Tomasello 1999). This demonstrative pointing is one of the first stages of the development of that unique and probably most important of human capacities: the ability to “read” the mind of others, a capacity that is somewhat oddly referred to as “theory of mind” (TOM for short). This ability continues to develop from the age of 12 months on until the child reaches the age when it can be shown that the child “knows” that other people act in terms of the beliefs or concepts they hold, rather than in terms of how the world is (Wimmer and Perner 1983). By “know,” I simply mean that the child and, of course, the adult, acts in terms of their reading of the beliefs of alter and continually adjusts her behavior accordingly. I do not mean that the person who does this is necessarily conscious of the process (a point to which I shall return in a moment). The whole process is far too complex and too rapid for that to be possible. Nonetheless, the importance of TOM can hardly be overestimated. Those familiar with Gricean theories of linguistic pragmatics will realize that it can be argued, convincingly in my opinion, that this continual mind reading is what makes linguistic communication, and indeed all complex human communication, possible (Sperber and Wilson 1986). It is legitimate to think that to talk of the mutual mind reading on which our social life is based is, at best, simply a metaphor; at worst, a mystification. However, I want to stress that the metaphor refers to an empirical phenomenon of interpenetration, even though admittedly we don’t stick our finger into each other’s brains in some kind of mental intercourse. Just how material the process of mind reading may be has become clearer in the light of recent neurological findings. For instance, many researchers now argue that the unique human ability to read the mind of those with whom we interact is ultimately based on a much more general feature of the brain that is not confined to humans: the so-called “mirror neurones” (Gallese and Goldman 1998). Perhaps the term is misleading. What is being referred to is an observation that has been made possible by modern neural imagery. The term mirror neurones means that exactly the same neurones are activated in our brains when, for example, we see someone raising their arm to point at the ceiling as when we perform the action ourselves. In other words, the action of alter requires from us a part of the same physiological process: the neural part as the action of ego. Indeed, a moment’s reflection makes us realize that, even without the arcane and somewhat [290]contested biology of mirror neurones, the very nature of human communication must involve something like this (Decety and Somerville 2003).3 Let us consider a simple act of linguistic communication. Here I follow Sperber and Wilson’s theory of relevance fairly closely (Sperber and Wilson 1986). For my message to come across when I say, for example: “Today we honor the memory of Roy Rappaport” a mechanism must occur that enables you to penetrate my brain and align yours so that its neuronal organization resembles mine. In order to do this, we both had to use a tool, sound waves in this case, but it cannot possibly be the sound waves, as such, that carried my meaning to you. Sound waves, poor things, are just sound waves. The reality is that sound waves enable me to modify your brain, or mind, so that its neuronal organization in part resembles mine, admittedly in a very limited way. And, of course, the ability to communicate in this way—to connect our neurones—is what makes culture possible because culture must ultimately be based on the exchange of information. This can then be combined with other information and then transformed or reproduced through time and across space in a uniquely human way. The parallel neuronal modification implied by communication has further important implications. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that it is possible for an individual to create ex nihilo a representation. Such a representation could then be said to be under that individual’s control because the process that produced it would be hers alone. However, when the representation comes from someone else’s brain (i.e., when it comes via the process of communication, which is in fact always the case, though to varying extents), the representation of one brain colonizes another. This process, whether it is conscious or subconscious, is the basis of all communication. In such a case, the created neuronal activity of one brain is the material existing in another. By this means, the brains of different individuals interpenetrate materially so that the boundaries that we believe to be obvious become problematic. What I am saying is very similar to what some writers, especially Ed Hutchins, call “distributed cognition” (Hutchins 1995). However, I would distance my argument from them on one minor point. Hutchins, in talking about this phenomenon, likes to refer to minds “not bounded by the skin” as if some sort of extra-biological process existed. I am too literal-minded to feel comfortable with such phraseology, which makes the process in question appear surreal. The process of interpenetration I am discussing is straightforward and biological. My other difference from the distributed cognition folks is not a disagreement; I simply would like to push their insights further. Hutchins is famous for his demonstration of the way the knowledge necessary to navigate a big ship is not held in the head of any one crew member; it is distributed in a group. In an action such as coping with an emergency, each individual does his job as best he can in the light of his own knowledge, but in doing so he relies on other individuals who have other bits of knowledge necessary to navigate the ship that he does not and does not need to have. This is what Hutchins calls distributed cognition. For this type of reliance [291]on the knowledge of others to be possible, the different individuals need to trust that the others know what they are doing and are well intentioned. This means that people can then act on what they know is incomplete knowledge, but which they trust is completed by the knowledge others have, to the extent of acting on that which they do not need fully to understand. It is not that they rely wholly on others; they rely on others at the very moment they rely on their own knowledge. By using this particular formulation, I deliberately align what I am saying with the point made by a group of philosophers who, following Hilary Putnam and the “deference” theorists, stress that social life is based on trust of others; basically on the default assumption that these others with whom we are in contact are normally competent and cooperative. In other words, because of our theory of mind adaptation, we continually interpenetrate as we communicate and hold as true information that makes sense only because it is also contained or continuous with that in other minds (Putnam 1975; Burge 1993; Orrigi 2000). This is the nature of human cognition, which is essentially social. Such a state of affairs makes it possible that the content of knowledge stored in an individual is not to be understood nor consciously sought to be understood, but this individual is likely to be aware of the solidarity on which the whole system of social cognition is based, and this may be greatly valued. This is a point to which I shall return. * * * I started this chapter by arguing that for all living things, humans included, the distinctness of the units of life is far from clear. Furthermore, I argued that for people this fact is commonly represented in the kinship systems that are about this reality in culturally varied and specific ways. For social animals the problem of the blurring of individual boundaries is compounded by the very nature of their sociality. Individuals in social species are, to varying degrees, materially continuous with each other. Because humans are social animals, this problem applies to them. In their case, this state of affairs is brought about by the tool that makes human sociability possible: the hard-wired human capacity referred to as theory of mind. Such an assertion, however, raises the same question that I touched on in the discussion of sex and birth: What are the cultural implications, if any, of this fact? The necessity to ask this difficult question is precisely what is missing from much of the work of evolutionists such as Tooby and Cosmides (Cosmides and Tooby 1992) and even Rappaport. The parallel with kinship may help to advance the argument, but at the same time it highlights an obvious difficulty. When anthropologists study kinship systems, they are studying representations of phenomena having to do with obvious empirical processes, of which no one can be unaware: going in and out of each other’s bodies. When we examine the interpenetrations of minds, however, we are dealing with phenomena not so easily consciously perceived. The continual mutual reading of minds on which communication depends is like grammar: it is and has to be subconscious, if only to operate at the necessary speed. But, if that is so, how is it possible that an awareness of this process could occur, a necessary step for it to take explicit form in cultural representations? To approach this question, I ask the reader to accompany me on a detour, away from purely theoretical considerations and toward a brief description of an empirical case.[292] About a year ago, I decided to do a new (for me) type of field research in the remote Malagasy forest village in which I have been working on and off for nearly 40 years. I carried out what is probably the most typical experiment used to demonstrate the development of children’s understanding of TOM in front of any villagers who were available at the time; I then asked the adults watching to make sense of what they had just seen. By inviting them to give me their interpretation of what was going on, I placed my informants in the same situation as that in which professional psychologists normally find themselves in the lab. The experiment in question is usually called the “false belief task.” In the version I used, I showed a child two hats, and I placed sweets under one of them in the front of the child and everyone else present. I then asked a member of the audience to leave the house and, showing the child what I was doing, I switched the treasure to the other hat. I then asked the child—this is the key question—under which hat the person who had just gone out of the house would look for the sweets when they returned. The results in the Malagasy village were, as expected, much the same as those reported from all over the world. Younger children say that the person who left the house will look under the hat where the sweets actually are, while older children say that the person will look under the hat where he or she saw them put, but where, of course, they no longer are. This difference is usually interpreted by psychologists to mean that the younger child has not yet subconsciously understood that other people do not necessarily know what they know. To put it more theoretically and somewhat differently, the younger child has not yet subconsciously understood that people act in terms of their possibly false beliefs, not in terms of what the world is actually like. The adult Malagasy villagers’ interpretation of the experiment was not all that different from that of professional cognitive psychologists. After a bit of prodding and reflection, the commonest explanation was that younger children have not yet learned to lie, so they do not understand that other people can also lie. For reasons that I cannot go into here, I take this to mean that the younger children are represented by them as naive empiricists, while they believe the older children and adults know that people can deceive and therefore look for the communicative intention of the speaker because they do not simply trust appearances that could be manipulated by people. I then used the discussion of the results of this experiment, which had been conducted in front of villagers, as a springboard for a more general discussion about the nature of thought. During these continuing discussions, the villagers explained that thought was an activity through which one matched one’s action to one’s purpose. Thought, they reasoned, is thus a feature of all animals. Fleas, for example, also think because they hide in the seams of garments in order not to get caught. Humans, however, are superior to other animals in that they have an extra tool— language— that enables them to achieve the purpose of their thought more efficiently especially through indirectness and deceit. When I consider the very detailed information on mind, thought, and cognitive development that I obtained through this work from the largely unschooled Malagasy in this remote village, I am, above all, struck by the familiarity of the ideas they expressed and their similarity with our own folk view. I am also impressed by the correspondence between their views and those of the psychologists. And, [293]indeed, when I look at the few other ethnographic studies of folk theories of mind and thought we possess, I find this general family likeness again and again (Gubser 1965; Rosaldo 1980).4 These similarities inevitably raise the question of what causes such recurrences. The obvious answer is that they are triggered by an awareness of the same actual universal human cognitive process. This explanation, however, runs into the difficulty discussed previously, that mental processes such as the workings of the mind operate below the level of consciousness while what I was told in the discussions that followed the experiments was clearly explicit and conscious. But is this difficulty as serious as it seems? Or, to put it another way, following the arguments of a number of cognitive scientists (Jackendoff 1987; Block 1993; Humphrey 2002), is the barrier between the conscious and the subconscious as impenetrable as the objection assumes? The comparison with grammar, alluded to previously, suggests otherwise. When we speak to or comprehend others, we do not consciously obey grammatical rules; nevertheless, we can become aware of the existence of such rules when, for example, somebody makes a “grammatical” mistake. Indeed, it is probably as a result of such “mistakes” that folk grammarians the world over can build their theories. Although these folk grammatical theories vary probably because of a great variety of historical and cultural factors, it would surely be perverse not to accept that their obvious similarities are caused by the way grammar actually works and that this can be accessed to a degree. The situation with theory of mind is probably similar, perhaps also based on reflection prompted by instances of faulty or difficult communication. For example, much of the general speculation about the nature of mind and thought in the data I collected In the Malagasy village was linked to explicit reflection on the abilities and limitations of a co-resident deaf and dumb man. It seems that this sort of more familiar and recurrent event causes the same kind of continual attempt to understand the psychology of thought and communication as was artificially stimulated by my experiment. This is probably why villagers were so willing, enthusiastic even, to engage in the discussion of the experiment I had conducted once their initial resistance was overcome. The intellectual challenge it presented was not as unusual or bizarre as it might at first seem from the outside. Of course, this more ordinary speculation was not done in the jargon of modern psychology, but with the cultural tools available. But even these unsophisticated tools and vocabulary must have been developed in relation to psychological processes that actually occur and are known to occur. It is not surprising, therefore, that similar ideas and representations should crop up, again and again, in different cultural and historical contexts. In making this claim, I am not arguing for any direct determinism between the actual working of the mind and people’s theories about it. Many other factors are clearly involved in each case. The working of the mind is difficult for the Malagasy to understand and represent, as indeed it is for any psychologist. It involves peeping past barriers of many kinds by means of thought or practical experiments, but both parties do this and for neither party is this completely impossible.[294] To illustrate such complexity and to begin to approach the subject of religion and ritual, I return to my case study. When the Malagasy villagers so emphatically insisted that thought always, directly or indirectly, was a matter of matching ends and means, I was naturally led to ask them about dreams. Were these not a case of thought without a practical end in view? The commonest answer I was given to such a question was negative. Dreams, I was assured, occurred when other people entered you and thought through you in order to achieve their ends. In this way, local cognitive theory was made coherent with a theory of interpenetration with which I had become familiar when I studied Malagasy ancestor worship. This is because it is through dreams that ancestors manifest themselves most typically, and make their desires known. This local theory of dreams is radically different from what is found in many other cultures, including that of professional psychologists. This, however, does not mean that as soon as we touch on phenomena that are usually labelled religious, we inevitably move away from concerns cognate with those of professional cognitive science. The idea that dreams are really other people, especially ancestors, thinking through you for their own ends is part of that much more general idea that previous generations, dead forebears, living elders, or absent members of the family are speaking through you as you consciously or subconsciously “quote” them. Not only are you expected to utter the words of other wise people because you trust and rely on them. But a person’s forebears are thought to be continually acting through him or her. Indeed, to allow that to happen willingly is to show respect and to act morally. Morality is thus experienced, less as a matter of individual choice and more as a matter of submission and recognition of the presence of others who penetrate you. As soon as we rephrase the Malagasy concept of ancestors in this (to my mind) ethnographically more accurate way, we find that we have returned to the familiar territory of scientific theories of distributed cognition and deference mentioned previously. In the very area in which my Malagasy co-villagers could be represented as most exotic—notably their beliefs in the power of ancestors—we find them very close to Hutchins and Putnam. Even their belief in the penetration of the young by elders and ancestors turns out to be built on an implicit recognition of the effect of interpenetration made possible by TOM—on the real fact that knowledge is distributed. The point I want to stress is that the operation of theory of mind and the nature of the distribution of knowledge in society are neither unknown nor fully known by the Malagasy villagers I studied. Furthermore, they are aware of the unsatisfactory partial nature of their knowledge, often commenting on this during the discussions that followed the experiments. And, as a result of their realization of the incompleteness of their knowledge, when the chance arises, as when I showed them the false belief task or when they observed the deaf and dumb man, they eagerly seize the opportunity to find out more about their own and others’ mental processes. In that inquisitiveness they are no different from professional scientists. Like them, their knowledge is incomplete, but also like them they strain to know more about a reality that, in the case of psychological processes, is common to all human beings and partly accessible. Of course, as in the case of the scientists, but probably to a greater extent, there are many other factors that interact with the villagers’ theoretical speculation and representations, and this multiplicity of factors produces systems that are only partly scientifically motivated. However, it is the [295]commonality of the enterprises and the reality of the world they engage with that explains the continuity between scientific discussion of such things as theory of mind and the cultural representations of largely unschooled Malagasy villagers and Western scientists. The bodily interpenetration of TOM is thus, to a certain degree, known by Malagasy villagers, and this knowledge combines in varying ways and in varying contexts with other types of knowledge. This leads to partial continuities between scientific and folk understandings of the interpenetration of individuals and of the consequent provisionality of levels of individuation. It is to these that I now turn. A central implication of TOM is that all social relation implies interpenetration, so the arbitrariness of boundaries within the social fabric applies not just to people who are related but also between all human beings who are in contact. Awareness of this ensures that ideologies of individualism are always, to varying degrees, negated by ideologies based on the realisation of interconnection, as Mauss stressed in his seminal essay on the gift (Mauss 1923-1924). Knowledge of interpenetration and of the lack of clear boundaries, as well as the emotions that are an integral element of the way these phenomena are experienced, is what is meant by that most Durkheimian of words: solidarity. The presence of this sentiment, at its most general, is one that is difficult to put one’s finger on, because it seems rarely made explicit or the subject of reflexive discourse. However, from my reading of ethnography and from my own experience, it would seem that a default assumption in most cultures is that there is a potential moral obligation to any stranger with whom one might come into contact or, to put it in a different way, that the very fact of entering into a relationship implies being consubstantial and therefore morally obligated. Perhaps the most familiar manifestation of this phenomenon is the obligation of hospitality toward strangers, a moral imperative that recurs, admittedly in different forms, in so many unrelated cultures but that, as far as I know, has been little theorized at a comparative level by modern anthropologists. This general unspecific morality is probably an epiphenomenon of the very nature of human communication. There are, however, many instances of much more specific and elaborate awareness of the lack of boundary between individuals. Many of them seem to fall in the domain that is usually labelled as religion, though some are of a less amiable and more threatening form. I have already mentioned the Malagasy interpretation of dreams and its link with ancestor worship. Ancestor worship is found all over the world in a variety of forms and is often linked to the lack of bodily differentiation within descent groups. Other examples are witchcraft-like ideas that often take the form of a belief in the secret and evil penetration of one’s body by a consuming other made possible by the existence of communication. More obvious still are beliefs in spirit possession that seem to crop up all over the world. These beliefs are an extreme representation of the colonizing nature of social relations because they involve the total invasion and replacement of one individual’s intentional mind by that of another. In a somewhat different way, the realization of the interpenetration of individuals and of the context dependence of boundaries also seems present in many political movements and religions. The idea of a corporal unity beyond the individual is well documented for certain forms of Christianity, Islam, and devotional Hinduism. They [296]emphasize an alternative “brotherhood” to that based on interpenetration of sex and birth, thereby highlighting the comparability of the two types of interpenetration at the same time as using the one to challenge the other. These ideas become most explicit in the mystical forms of these religions, for example in Sufism or devotional Hinduism, in which the theme of the interpenetration of the bodies of the devotees and the lack of boundaries of their bodies takes an extreme and dramatic form. Perhaps, however, it is in ritual that the conscious and culturally encoded awareness of lack of boundedness is clearest. This, of course, was one of Durkheim’s key points, but what he stressed was the effervescence of highly dramatic rituals. There is no doubt that feelings of transcendence of individuality and even of dissolution of self into a greater whole occur in many of the manifestations that we would label as ritual. Furthermore, these may well be part of the realization of the empirical lack of boundary of human individuals. However, many rituals are simply not like that. One universal feature of ritual, however, is deference, if only because it is at the very core of the meaning of the English term. Deference is, as noted previously, the acceptance of the content of other minds without necessarily knowing the whys and wherefores of the propositions and actions one performs. As argued in different ways by Putnam, Burge, and Hutchins, this is characteristic of knowledge in society and implies cognitive interpenetration. Ritual is an extreme case of this. In ritual one accepts that the motivation for meaning is to be found in others one trusts (Bloch 2004). In other words, it is not only that one surrenders one’s intentionality to others but also that one is aware of this happening. Recourse to ritual is therefore to be understood not only as awareness of neural interpenetration, a submission to other minds, but also as a celebration of such awareness. Of course, religious and ritual representations are not simply realizations of the fact that we interpenetrate each other as we interact and that the boundaries separating individuals are provisional and alterable. In each and every case, much more is involved that might indeed be more important in the particular case. I am simply saying that the social, sexual, and reproductive characteristics of the human species means that we go in and out of each other’s bodies in at least three different ways, and that this implies an indeterminacy of the level of relevant differentiation. In the case of birth and sex, the interpenetration is inevitably, though variously, cognized. In the case of TOM, the matter is more complicated, however. The working of TOM is normally below consciousness as is also the interpenetration it involves. However, because the boundary between the conscious and the subconscious is not sharp and because we have tools to traverse it (such as experiments or the existence of deaf and dumb relatives), we can use our hazy awareness of the process to interpret and speculate about such phenomena as dreams, the relation with ancestors, and many other central aspects of human life. This knowledge—the raw material of interpenetration—becomes a resource and an idiom that can become central in many representations that we would label as moral, religious, or ritual. It is this line of causation from the fact of interpenetration to its conscious representations by different people in different ways that makes it possible to slither from the biological to the cultural, including the religious. In so far as this causal chain involves a direct connection between the social, the moral, the religious, and ritual, such an argument is inevitably reminiscent of Durkheim’s theories. After all, the central argument of The Elementary Forms of [297]the Religious Life is that religion, by means of ritual, is a projection of the intuition of the dependence of the individual on society, and of the individual’s incompleteness—an intuition that gives rise to the impression of the presence of a superior transcendental element: the religious (Durkheim 1912). My admiration for this great anthropologist cannot but be heightened by the similarity of our arguments. Much of what I have said is what he said long ago, though from a totally different epistemological base. For this reason, it is also essential to stress the profound difference between his argument and my own, if only to clarify the status of what I have been arguing. Unlike Durkheim, I am not proposing a general theory of “religion.” Like most modern anthropologists, I do not believe that the term religion has any general analytical value. To seek the essence of religion would, therefore, inevitably run into the circularity for which The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life has been criticized. In any case, awareness of the provisional nature of individual boundaries occurs in many kinds of cultural representations that could never reasonably be termed religious. For the same reason, I am not arguing that the interpenetrations of kinship and TOM are the origin of the religious; any such claim would be meaningless because for me what anthropologists call religion is merely a ragbag of loosely connected elements without a common core. Most importantly, however, I differ from Durkheim in his understanding of causation. For Durkheim the social, which comes from we know not where, mysteriously causes the cultural, which then gives us the tools to invent what is, irrespective of what the world is like. This idealist fantasy would be worth elaborating only as a quaint example of an archaic conceit if it did not in my opinion still resemble much contemporary anthropological theorizing. What I am proposing is more straightforward, more modest, more materialist, and anchored in evolutionary theory. The source of the social is to be found in the cognitive capacities of humans, though, of course, the evolutionary line of causation between the social and the cognitive is not unidirectional but rather, as argued by Humphrey and Tomasello, a single process. This socio/cognitive means that, even more than is the case for nonsocial animals and differently from the case for other social animals, the boundaries between human individuals are partial at best. This fact and our consequent bodily connectedness, which supplements and sometimes competes with the connectedness of kinship, are fuzzily available to our consciousness. It is this awareness that becomes a recurrent element in a great variety of representations in different cultures, representations that we must not forget are different kinds of phenomena from the simply psychological. It is these kinds of awareness that Durkheim examined under the label “solidarity.” And, furthermore, the types of solidarity he identified are often, though not always (as he also stressed) manifest in what we call religion and ritual. References Bloch, M. 2004. “Ritual and deference.” In Ritual and memory: Toward a comparative anthropology of religion (eds) H. Whitehouse, and J. Laldlaw, 65–78. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press.[298] Block, N. 1993. “The computer model of the mind.” In Readings in philosophy and cognitive science (ed) A. Goldman, 819–832. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Burge, T. 1993. “Content preservation.” The Philosophical Review 102, 457–488. Cosmides, L., and J. Tooby. 1992. “Cognitive adaptation for social exchange.” In The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture (eds) J. H. Barkow, and L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby, 163–228. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Decety, J., and J. A. Somerville. 2003. “Shared representations between self and other: A social cognitive neuroscience view.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7, 527–533. de Waal, F. B. M.. 1996. Good natured: The origins of right and wrong in humans and other animals. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Durkheim, E. 1912. Les formes elementaires de la vie religieuse. Paris: Alcan. (Translated 1915. The elementary forms of the religious life. London: Allen Unwin). Gallese, V., and A. Goldman. 1998. “Mirror neurones and the simulation theory of mind.” Trends in Cognitive Science 12, 493–501. Gopnik, A. 1993. “How we know our minds: The illusion of first person knowledge of intentionality.” Behavioural and Brain Science 1, 90–101. Gubser, N. 1965. The Nunamiut Eskimos: Hunters of caribou. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Humphrey, N. 2002. The mind made flesh: Essays from the frontiers of psychology and evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hutchins, E. 1995. Cognition in the wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jackendoff, R. 1987. Consciousness and the computational mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mauss, M.. 1923–1924. “Essai sur le don: Forme et raison de l’echange dans les societes archaiques.” L’Annee Sociologique, seconde serie, 30–186. Origgi, G. 2000. “Croire sans comprendre.” Cahiers de philosophie de VUniversite de Caen, 34, 191–201. Povinelli, D. J.,, J. M. Bering, and S. Giambrone. 2000. “Towards a science of other minds: Escaping the arguments by analogy.” Cognitive Science 24, 509–554. Putnam, H. 1975. “The meaning of ’meaning.’.” Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 7: 131–193. Rosaldo, M. 1980. Knowledge and passion: Ilongot notions of self and social life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schneider, D. 1984. A critique of the study of kinship. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Sperber, D., and D. Wilson. 1986. Relevance: Communication and cognition. Oxford: Blackwell. Stotz, K., and P. Griffiths. 2004. “Genes: Philosophical analyses put to the test.” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 26, 5–28. Tomasello, M. 1999. The cultural origins of human cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.[299] Tomasello, M., and H. Rakoczy. 2003. “What makes human cognition unique? From individual to shared to collective intentionality.” Mind and Language 18 (2), 121–147. Wimmer, H., and J. Perner. 1983. “Beliefs about beliefs: Representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children’s understanding of deception.” Cognition 13, 103–128. Yanagisako, S. J., and J. F. Collier. 1987. “Toward a unified analysis of gender and kinship.” In Gender and kinship: Essays toward a unified analysis (eds) J. F. Collier and S. J. Yanagisako, 14–50. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.   Maurice BLOCH is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the author of hundreds of articles and many books. He has carried out fieldwork among irrigated rice cultivators and shifting agriculturalists in Madagascar, and in other parts of the world including Japan. Partly because of his French background he has combined British and French approaches and was instrumental in introducing the revival in French Marxist theory to British anthropologists. His interests have focused on the notion of ideology and he has written on ritual and language. He is now working on how to relate the findings of cognitive psychology with anthropology. ___________________ Editors’ Note: This is a reprint of Bloch, Maurice. 2007. “Durkheimian anthropology and religion: Going in and out of each other’s bodies.” In Religion, anthropology, and cognitive science, edited by Harvey Whitehouse and James Laidlaw, 63–88. Ritual studies monograph series. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press. We thank the author for granting permission to reprint this essay and we remind the reader that we retain the style of the original. 1. An earlier version of this was given to the American Association for the Anthropology of Religion as a Rappaport lecture. I would like to thank R. Astuti, E. Keller, G. Orrigi, A. Yengoyan, and D. Sperber for comments on an earlier version. 2. They are what would be used to dismiss as irrelevant studies such as those of Cosmides and Tooby (1992) about cheater detection. 3. It is also important to remember the importance of sharing of emotions, which is highly relevant to the argument of this chapter and goes in the same direction as the evidence on TOM. It is not considered here, but I hope to do so in another publication. See de Waal 1996. 4. Rosaldo’s book, in fact, emphasizes the exotic character of Ilongot psychology, but I am struck that, in matters of cognition at least, Ilongot conceptualization is very familiar.  

On Value This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Louis Dumont. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported. ISSN 2049-1115 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau3.1.028 Reprint On Value The Radcliffe-Brown Lecture in Social Anthropology, 1980 Louis DUMONT1   I saw Radcliffe-Brown only once, in this very room. In my memory I can still see him today, though somewhat hazily, delivering the Huxley Memorial Lecture for 1951.2 I must have made it to London for the occasion, from Oxford where I was a new, if not that young, lecturer. As I listened to him, he seemed to have made one step in the direction of Lévi-Strauss, and I felt comforted in my recent structural allegiance. In fact it was only a limited, passing convergence.3 In those days I was busy learning a good deal from him, and from British anthropology at large, which had reached unprecedented heights partly under his influence. Yet I must confess that, for one whose imagination had been initially fired by Mauss’s genial humanism, Radcliffe-Brown’s constricted version of Durkheimian sociology was not very attractive. [208] Today, one feels the need to insist, beyond all divergences, on continuity on one basic point. Reading his Natural Science of Society, one is struck by Radcliffe-Brown’s decided holism.4 Whatever the shortcomings of his concept of ‘system’, the point—should I say the importation?—was probably decisive in the development of anthropology in this country, and it made possible the dialogue with the predominant sociological tradition of the French. There is relatively little about values in Radcliffe-Brown’s writings.5 Yet the expression was very much in the air in British departments of anthropology in the last years of his life. My impression was that it figured largely as a substitute for ‘ideas’, which stressed the relation to action and was therefore less unpalatable to the empiricist temper. No doubt the situation is quite different today. But to state plainly the reason for my use of the term, preferably in the singular, and for my choice of topic: I have been trying in recent years to sell the profession the idea of hierarchy, with little success, I may add. I thought of making another bid, this time by using the professionally received vocable, which I had instinctively shunned heretofore, I suppose because of the forbidding difficulties the term seems to present. May the attempt be taken as an effort to come closer to the Radcliffe-Brownian heritage. In fact, my intention is solely to offer an observation bearing on the relation between ideas and values, or rather to comment on [209] that observation and draw some consequences from it. The modern type of culture in which anthropology is rooted and the non-modern type differ markedly with regard to value, and I hold that the anthropological problems relating to value require that the two be confronted. We shall start from the modern configuration, which represents an innovation, then introduce in contrast some fundamental features of the more common non-modern configuration, and finally return to the modern predicament with a view to setting it ‘in perspective’ and to thus, it is hoped, throwing some light on the position and task of anthropology as a mediating agency. The modern scene is familiar. In the first place, modern consciousness attaches value predominantly to the individual, and philosophy deals, at any rate predominantly, with individual values while anthropology takes values as essentially social. Then, in common parlance, the word, which meant in Latin healthy vigour and strength and in medieval times the warrior’s bravery, symbolizes most of the time the power of money to measure everything. This important aspect will be present here only by implication. (Cf. Dumont (1977)). As to the absolute sense of the term, the modern configuration is sui generis and value has become a major preoccupation. In a note in Lalande’s Philosophical Dictionary, Maurice Blondel said that the predominance of a philosophy of value characterizes the contemporary period, following a modern philosophy of knowledge and an antique and medieval philosophy of being.6 For Plato the supreme Being was the Good. There was no discord between the Good, the True and the Beautiful, yet the Good was supreme, perhaps because it is impossible to conceive the highest perfection as inactive and heartless, because the Good adds the dimension of action to that of contemplation. In contrast we moderns separate science aesthetics and morals. And the nature of our science is such that its existence by itself explains or rather implies the separation between the true on the one hand, the beautiful and the good on the other and in particular between being and moral value, what is and what ought to be. For the scientific discovery of the world was premised on the banning as secondary of all qualities to which physical measurement was not applicable. Thus for a hierarchical cosmos was substituted our physical, homogeneous universe (Koyré (1958)). The value dimension which had been spontaneously projected on to it was relegated to what is to us its proper locus, that is, man’s mind, emotions, and volition. [210] In the course of centuries, the (social) Good was also relativized. There were as many Goods as there were peoples or cultures, not to speak of religions, sects or social classes. ‘Truth this side of the Pyrenees, error beyond’ noted Pascal; we cannot speak of the Good when what is held as good on this side of the Channel is evil on the other, but we can speak of the value or values that people acknowledge respectively on one and the other side. Thus, value designates something different from being, and something which, while the scientifically true is universal, is eminently variable with the social environment, and even within a given society, according not only to social classes but to the diverse departments of activity or experience. I have listed only a few salient features, but they are enough to evoke the complex nexus of meanings and preoccupations to which our word is attached, a tangle to which all kinds of thoughtful efforts have contributed, from the romantic complaint about a world that has fallen asunder to the various attempts at reuniting it, and to a philosophy of despair, Nietzsche’s, contributing to spreading the term. I do not think that anthropology can disregard this situation. Yet it is no wonder that there is something unpleasant about the term. Being comparative in essence, it seems doomed to emptiness: a matter of values is not a matter of fact. It advertises relativism, as it were, or rather both the centrality of the concept and its elusive quality, to which a considerable literature testifies. It smacks of euphemism or uneasiness, like ‘underdevelopment’, ‘methodological individualism’ and so many other items in the present-day vocabulary. Yet there is a positive counterpart, modest but not insignificant, for the anthropologist: we have at our disposal a word that allows us to consider all sorts of cultures and the most diverse estimations of the good without imposing on them our own: we can speak of our values and their values while we could not speak of our good and their good. Thus the little word, used far beyond the confines of anthropology, implies an anthropological perspective and invests us, I think, with a responsibility. But of this more later. We begin with a few introductory remarks about the study of values in anthropology. The prevailing use of the word in the plural—values—is indicative not only of the diversity of societies and of the modern compartmentalization of activities but also of a tendency to atomize each configuration that is in keeping with our culture in general. This is certainly the first point that requires attention. In a paper published in 1961,7 Francis Hsu criticized [211] some studies of the American character for their presenting a bare catalogue of traits or values without bothering about the relations prevailing between those items. He saw conflicts and inconsistencies between the different values listed, wondered at the lack of serious attempts to explain them, and proposed to remedy the situation by identifying one fundamental value and by showing that it implied precisely the contradictions to be explained. The ‘American core value’, Hsu suggested, is self-reliance, itself a modification or intensification of European, or English, individualism. Now self-reliance implies contradiction in its application, for men are social beings and depend heavily on each other in actual fact. Thus is produced a series of contradictions between the level of conception and the level of operation of the main value and of the secondary values derived from it or allied with it. I for one cannot but applaud both the search for a cardinal value and its identification in this case as some form of individualism. One also notes that Hsu implies, if he does not state it explicitly, a hierarchy between conception and operation. Yet in the end Hsu’s distinction between the two levels is still insufficient. He uses a classification of Charles Morris, who had listed three uses of value or sorts of value, among them conceived and operative value, and he goes some way toward ranking these two levels. Finally however, he speaks of ‘values’ for both, and thus lumps them together again in the8 same way as the atomizing authors he had begun by criticizing. In fact the two levels should be firmly distinguished. For we have here a universal phenomenon. Surely all of us have encountered this characteristic complementarity or reversal between levels of experience where what is true on the more conceptual level is reversed on the more empirical level, a reversal which bedevils our attempts at unifying, for the sake of simplicity, the representation and its counterpart in action. Whatever the peculiarities of the American case, the end cannot be its own means: either what is called ‘operative values’ are not values at all, or they are second-order values that should be clearly distinguished from first-order values or values proper. In general, there is perhaps a surfeit of contradictions in contemporary literature in general. An author belonging to a different era or milieu will frequently be taxed of contradicting himself simply because a distinction of levels obvious to him and therefore implicit in his writings, but unfamiliar to the critic, is missed.9 It will be seen later on that where non-moderns [212] distinguish levels within a global view, the moderns know only of substituting one special plane of consideration for another and find on all planes the same forms of neat disjunction, contradiction, etc. Perhaps there is a confusion here between individual experience which, while crossing different levels, may be felt as contradictory, and sociological analysis, where the distinction of levels is imperative in order to avoid the short-circuit that results in tautology or incomprehension. Apart from Clyde Kluckhohn, the late Gregory Bateson is one of the rare anthropologists who clearly saw the necessity of recognizing a hierarchy of levels.10 There has been in the history of anthropology at least one sustained attempt at advancing the study of values. In the late forties, Clyde Kluckhohn chose to focus attention on values and to concentrate efforts and resources on a vast co-operative long-term project devoted to their study, the Harvard ‘Comparative Study of Values in Five Cultures’. There seems to have been in the United States, at the end of World War II, a wide renewal of interest in social philosophy and in the understanding of foreign cultures and values.11 Kluckhohn may have found in the circumstances of the time the occasion to develop what was undoubtedly a deep personal concern. In the late forties, he launched his project, which assembled a number of scholars and issued in an imposing array of publications over the next decade. Today this considerable effort seems largely forgotten. Unless I am deeply [213] mistaken, it has not left a deep mark in American cultural anthropology. Is this one more example of those fashions that disconcertingly displace one another in our discipline, particularly in the US; or are there internal reasons to the discredit, and, in the worst case, are values a mistaken focus or a ‘non-subject’, something I could hardly believe? I am not able to answer this complex question. I shall only try to draw from Kluckhohn’s endeavour a lesson for our benefit. There must be such a lesson if we believe with him that values are a central problem. For Kluckhohn was not naïve: he was obviously a man of wide culture (with a German component, I suppose, as is the case with several of the early American anthropologists), and, moreover, he anticipated much of what I shall have to say here. Yet, whatever contributions the project may have brought to the knowledge of each of the particular groups or societies studied, the results seem disappointing as regards Kluckhohn’s main aim, namely the advancement of comparative theory. How can we account for the fact? Clyde Kluckhohn was closely associated with Parsons and Shils in the symposium that was published as Towards a General Theory of Action and to which he contributed an important theoretical essay which can be taken as the chart of the Harvard Project.12 It is clear that Kluckhohn developed his own position while agreeing on the broad ‘conceptual scheme’ of the symposium. He dissented only from the rigid separation between social and cultural systems.13 To be brief I shall mention only three main points in Kluckhohn and two of his main associates. First, that (social) values are essential for the integration and permanence of the social body and also of the personality (p. 319)—we might say with Hans Mol for their identity14—is perhaps obvious, but it is in practice too easily forgotten, either by anthropologists insisting unilaterally on change, or by philosophers abstracting individual values from their social background. Saint Augustine said somewhere that a people is made up of men united in the love of something. Second, the close link between ideas and values—here ‘cognitive’ and ‘normative’, or ‘existential’ and ‘normative’, aspects—is clearly acknowledged, as it was by Parsons and Shils (1951, pp. 159–89), under the central concept of ‘value-orientation’ [214] as defined by Kluckhohn (1951, pp. 410–11). (The concept is open to criticism on another score, as was shrewdly noticed by an anthropologist.)15 Thus the scheme for the classification of values used by Florence Kluckhohn includes by the side of values proper a minimum of ideas and beliefs. One may prefer the more ample treatment of the Navaho case by Ethel Albert, which includes not only the normally unverbalized ‘value-premises’, but also a complete picture of the worldview as the ‘philosophical context’ of the value system strictly defined.16 The third point is the clear recognition of the fact that values are ‘hierarchically organized’. Clyde Kluckhohn’s programmatic article had a very lucid and sensitive page on the question (p. 420), but it is perhaps Florence Kluckhohn that most developed this aspect. Early in the research, she proposed a grid for the comparison of ‘value-orientations’. It is a scheme of priorities distinguishing, in each instance under three terms, different stresses relative to relations between man and nature, to the conception of man, to relations between men, to time, and to action.17 The author underlines the importance of hierarchy and of nuances in hierarchy. Each value system is seen as a hierarchical combination sui generis of elements which are universal in the sense of being found everywhere. This was a solution to a problem that much concerned Clyde Kluckhohn himself. He was reacting against an excessive stress on relativity in anthropological literature. He wanted to avoid falling into (absolute) relativism, and he tried to salvage a modicum of universal values.18 Florence Kluckhohn found this universal basis in the very material which was elaborated into different value systems, in each case, by an original combination of particular value emphases. Let me briefly articulate a double criticism. The scheme does [215] not yet apply broadly enough the recognition of hierarchy, and therefore gets stuck in a measure of atomism: no relation is posited between the five subdivisions. What for instance about the relative stress between relations to nature and relations between men (items 1 and 3)? A universal basis seems here to be unduly assumed. The scheme remains thus inevitably sociocentric. Indeed, it is actually centered on a White American and even a Puritan model. Other cultures may make different choices, but only in terms derived from the American choices. A later text by Clyde Kluckhohn adds a new scheme of classification of his own to a presentation of those of Ethel Albert and Florence Kluckhohn. The paper,19 apparently Kluckhohn’s last word on the question, would deserve longer consideration than can be given to it here, less for the scheme itself than for the preoccupations that lead up to it. The general, universal bearing of the project is stressed, while the provisional character of the particular scheme is granted. The effort is to make the scheme purely relational: it consists of a series of qualitative, binary oppositions. What is more, it is supplemented by an effort to bring out, by tabulation, the associations between features and thus to reconstitute to some extent the systems analysed. How is it, then, that a considerable effort containing so many correct perceptions leaves one finally unsatisfied? We are left, on the abstract side, with grids into the pigeon-holes of which we should be able to distribute the elements of any value system. It is clear that, notwithstanding Clyde Kluckhohn’s last and pathetic effort to affirm a structural, or structuralist, approach and to recapture the living unity given at the start, the whole has vanished into its parts. Atomization has won the day. Why? Because, I submit, the attempt has been unwarily to unite fire and water, structure, hierarchical structure, and classification, that is, classification through individual features. The need for classification was certainly reinforced by the attempt to compare five cultures in one compass, and the most valuable products of the project are probably the monographic pictures in the manner of Albert that it produced. A somewhat unpalatable conclusion follows, namely that a solid and thorough comparison of values is possible only between two systems taken as wholes. If classification is to be introduced further on, it will have to start from wholes and not from itemized features. For the time being we are closer to [216] Evans-Pritchard’s ‘historiography’ than to Radcliffe-Brown’s ‘natural science of society’. Kluckhohn noticed that the term ‘value’, chiefly used in the plural, had come recent into the social sciences from philosophy. He saw in it a kind of interdisciplinary concept20 and, probably largely for this reason, mingled occasionally individual and group values. The term ‘value-orientation’ itself is indicative of a commanding concern with the individual actor (see p. 214 n.1 above). Of course, all this tallies with a behavioural approach, but it is above all an index of the philosophical background of our anthropological problems. The philosophical debate is of intimidating dimension and complexity. Yet we cannot possibly leave it out entirely in an attempt to clarify the anthropological question. Fortunately, I believe that, conversely, an anthropological perspective can throw some light on the philosophical debate and that it is thus possible to take a summary and yet not ineffectual view of it. There are two kinds of philosophers, or rather two kinds of philosophizing in the matter. One locates itself within modern culture and is careful to work in accordance with its constraints, its basic inspiration, its inner logic and its incompatibilities. From that point of view the conclusion follows that it is impossible to deduce what ought to be from what is. No transition is possible from facts to values. Judgements of fact and judgements of value are different in kind. It is enough to recall two or three major aspects of modern culture to show that the conclusion is inescapable. First, science is paramount in our world, and, as we recalled at the start, to make scientific knowledge possible the definition of being has been altered by excluding from it precisely the value dimension. Second, the stress on the individual has led to internalizing morality, to finding it exclusively within the individual’s conscience while it is severed from the other ends of action and distinguished from religion. Individualism and the concomitant separation between man and nature have thus split the good, the true and the beautiful, and have produced a theoretically unbridgeable chasm between is and ought to be. This situation is our lot in the sense that it lies at the core of modern culture or civilization. Now, whether this situation is comfortable or reasonable is quite another question. The history of thought seems to show that it is not, for no sooner had Kant proclaimed this fundamental split that his gifted successors, and the German intelligentsia as a [217] whole, hastened in various attempts to re-establish unity. It is true that the social milieu was historically backward and that German intellectuals, while inspired by individualism, were still imbued with holism in the depth of their being. But the protest has continued down to the present day. It must be admitted that, for one who turns away from the environment and attempts to reason from first principles, the idea that what man ought to do is, let us say, unrelated to the nature of things, to the universe and to his place in it, will appear queer, aberrant, incomprehensible. The same holds true of someone who would take into account what we know of other civilizations or cultures. I have said elsewhere that most societies have believed themselves to be based in the order of things, natural as well as social; they have thought they were copying or designing their very conventions after the principles of life and the world. Modern society wants to be ‘rational’, to break away from nature and set up an autonomous human order.21 We may thus be inclined at first flush to sympathize with those philosophers who have tried to restore unity between facts and values. Their attempts testify to the fact that we have not entirely broken away from the more common mould of mankind, that it is still in some manner present with us, underlying and perhaps modifying the yet compelling modern framework. But we should be on our guard… The attempt can take different forms. One consists in annihilating values entirely. Either value judgements are declared meaningless, or the expression of mere whims or emotional states. Or, with some pragmatists, ends are reduced to means: having construed a category of ‘instrumental values’, they proceed to deny the distinct existence of ‘intrinsic values’ that is, of values proper.22 Such attempts seem to be an index of the inability of some philosophical tendencies to take into account real human life, to mark a dead end of individualism. Another type can be taken as a desperate attempt at transcending individualism by resorting to a modern ersatz of religion. In its Marxist form, and through it and somewhat similarly in totalitarian ideologies in general, this doctrine has proved fateful; it is sometimes regarded as sinister, at least in continental Europe, and rightly so. Here we must firmly side with Kolakowski in his impassioned [218] condemnation of the trend, as against certain rambling intellectuals.23 We follow Kolakowski especially on one point; the danger does not arise only from the violent attempt to implement such doctrines, but is contained in the doctrine itself under the form of value incompatibilities that call for violence on the level of action. To confirm this point: in an article of 1922, which in retrospect appears prophetic of later developments in Germany, Karl Pribram has noted the parallel incongruity and structural similarity of Prussian nationalism and Marxist socialism. Both, Pribram pointed out, jumped from an individualistic basis to an illegitimate, holistic (‘universalistic’) construct, the State in the one case, the proletarian class in the other, which they endowed with qualities incompatible with their presuppositions.24 Totalitarianism is present in germ in such encounters. Philosophers themselves are not always sensitive to such incompatibilities, but their constructions are seldom applied to society.25 Here a question arises: it is convenient to link totalitarianism with such incompatibilities—yet there exist incompatibilities in societies without their developing into that scourge. Tönnies insisted that both Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft are present as principles in modern society. My provisional answer is that they are found on different levels of social life, while it is characteristic of modern artificialism to disregard such levels altogether and thus to make for collision between what it consciously introduces and the substratum which it does not really know. There may well be, indeed there actually is, a need for reintroducing some measure of holism into our individualistic societies, but it can be done only on clearly articulated subordinate levels, so that major clashes with the predominant or primary value are prevented. It can be done, that is, at the price of introducing a highly complex hierarchical articulation, which can be imagined, mutatis mutandis, as a parallel to the highly elaborate Chinese etiquette.26 This point will become clearer in what follows. At any rate, we should in the first place, as citizens of the world and of a particular state within it, abide with Kolakowski by the Kantian distinction as an integral part of the modern make-up. [219] Now what are the consequences of the distinction for social science? Let us take as vanished the times when a behavioural science banned the study of social values together with that of conscious representations at large. We do study social representations as social facts of a particular kind. Here two remarks are called for. First, it is clear that we maintain this ‘value-free’ attitude on the basis of the Kantian distinction, for otherwise our own native view of ‘facts’ would command value judgements and we should remain locked up in our own system, sociocentric as all societies are except, in principle, our own. The point simply confirms the link between science in general and the is/ought separation. But then our approach is philosophically questionable. It may be argued that we should distinguish tyranny from legitimate rule. Leo Strauss maintained against Max Weber that social science could not escape evaluation,27 and it is true that Weber was led by this ‘value-free’ stand to undesirable admissions, such as his ‘ethic of conviction’. More radically, one may contend that values cannot really be understood without our adhering to them (note the proximity to the Marxist plea), and that to relativize values is to kill them. In a discussion, A. K. Saran maintained the thesis in its full consequence.28 According to this view, cultures cannot communicate, which means cultural solipsism, a return to sociocentrism. And yet, there is point in it in the sense that comparison implies a universal basis: it must appear in the end that cultures are not as independent from each other as they would claim to be and as their internal consistency seems to warrant. Stated otherwise, our problem is: how can we build a bridge between our modern ideology that separates values and ‘facts’ and other ideologies that embed values in their worldview?29 Lest our quest should appear futile, let us not forget that the problem is in a way present in the world as it is. Cultures are in fact interacting, thus communicating in some mediocre manner. It behoves anthropology to give a conscious form to that groping and thus to answer a contemporary need. We are committed to reducing the distance between our two cases, to reintegrating the modern case within the general one. For the moment, we shall try to formulate more precisely and thoroughly the relation between them. [220] Values are in general intimately combined with other, non-normative representations. A ‘system of values’ is thus an abstraction from a wider system of ideas-and-values.30 This is true not only of non-modern societies, but also of modern societies, with one cardinal exception, namely that of (individual) moral values in their relation to scientific, ‘objective’ knowledge. For all that we said previously about ought bears exclusively on individual, ‘subjective’ morality. That this morality is, together with science, paramount in our modern consciousness does not hinder its cohabiting with other norms, or values of the common sort, namely traditional social ethics, even if some transition, some substitution of the former for the latter is taking place under our eyes. Thus the modern value of equality has spread in the last decades in European countries to domains where traditional ethics were still in force; from the French Revolution, in whose values it was implied, up to our days, the equality of women had not imposed itself against subordination as entailed by a whole nexus of institutions and representations. Now the struggle between the two ‘systems of values’ has intensified, and the outcome has still to be seen: our individualist values are at loggerheads with the considerable inertia of a battered social system that is gradually losing its own justification in consciousness. A convenient example of the inseparability of ideas and values is found in the distinction between right and left. It is widespread, if not universal, and is still found with us in some manner, although our attitude to it is highly consonant with modern ideology. We are in the habit of analysing it into two components. We see it essentially as a symmetrical opposition, where the two poles have equal status. The fact that the two poles are unequally valued, that the right hand is felt to be superior to the left hand, appears to us an arbitrary, superadded feature, which we are at pains to explain. Such was the frame of mind of Robert Hertz when he wrote his classical essay, and it has prevailed ever since. It is wholly mistaken. As I argued elsewhere, the reference to the body as to a whole to which right and left hands belong is constitutive of the right, the left and their distinction.31 The contention should be obvious: take a polar opposition at random, add to it a difference [221] in value, and you will not get right and left. Right and left, having a different relation to the body (a right relation and a left relation, so to speak) are different in themselves. (They are not two identical entities situated in different places, as we know pretty well from sensuous experience). Being different parts of a whole, right and left differ in value as well as in nature, for the relation between part and whole is hierarchical, and a different relation means here a different place in the hierarchy. Thus the hands and their tasks or functions are at one and the same time different and ranked.32 There is something exemplary about this right-left relation. It is perhaps the best example of a concrete relation indissolubly linked to human life through the senses, which physical sciences have neglected and which anthropology may presumably retrieve or rehabilitate. I believe it teaches us in the first place that to say ‘concrete’ is to say ‘imbued with value’. That is not all, for such a difference in value is at the same time situational, and the point will require attention. The fact is that, if certain functions are allotted to the left hand, then, in relation to their performance, the right hand will come second notwithstanding its being on the whole superior. The right-and-left pair is indissolubly both an idea and a value, it is a value-idea or an idea-value. Thus at least some of the values of any given people are enmeshed in that people’s conceptions. To discover them, it is not necessary to go about eliciting people’s choices. These values have nothing to do with the preferable or the desirable—except in that they suppose that the naïve perception of the relation between whole and parts, that is, of order as given in experience, has not been obliterated. The moderns tend to define value in relation to arbitrary will, Tönnies’s Kürwille, while we are here in the realm of Naturwille or natural, spontaneous will. The whole is not, strictly speaking, preferable to its parts, it is simply superior to them. Is the right ‘preferable’ to the left? It is only apposite in some circumstances. What is ‘desirable’, if one insists, is to act in accordance with the nature of things. As to the modern tendency to confuse hierarchy with power, who will pretend that the right hand has power over the left? Even its pre-eminence is, on the level of action, limited to the accomplishment of its proper functions. [222] The case also gives us a clue as to how we moderns manage to avoid the ranked nature of things, for we have not ceased to possess a right and a left hand and to deal with our body and with wholes in general. Not only have we developed permissivity in the matter in accordance with our de-valuation of the hands and with our individualism. We also tend to decompose the original relation by separating value from idea, and in general from fact, which means separating ideas and facts from the whole(s) in which they are actually to be found. Rather than relating the level under consideration—right and left—to the upper level, that of the body, we restrict our attention to one level at a time, we suppress subordination by pulling apart its elements. This shunning of subordination, or, to call it by its true name, of transcendence, substitutes a flat view for a view in depth, and at the same time it is the root of the ‘atomization’ so often complained of by romantic or nostalgic critics of modernity. The point holds in general: in modern ideology, the previous hierarchical universe has fanned out into a collection of flat views of this kind. But I am anticipating.33 [223] In the non-modern view that I here tried to retrieve, the value of the right or the left hand is rooted in their relation to the body, i.e. to a higher level of being: the value of an entity is dependent upon or intimately related to a hierarchy of levels of experience in which that entity is situated. Here is perhaps that main perception that the moderns miss, or ignore, or suppress without being fully conscious of so doing.34 The point has a bearing on the problem of evil. Two different conceptions are currently contrasted: for some, evil is only the absence or insufficiency of good, vice the limit or zero degree of virtue; for others evil is an independent principle pitched against its opposite as the will of Satan defying that of God.35 Yet, if Leibniz’s Theodicy is compared with Voltaire’s discussion of the Lisbon earthquake, one senses a contrast of a perhaps different nature. Let me interpret freely. For Leibniz, the fact that there is evil locally, here and there, in the world does not prevent the world from being, globally considered, the best of all possible worlds. Voltaire concentrates on a massive example of evil and refuses to look elsewhere or beyond; or rather he simply cannot. Voltaire will not ask himself what are the conditions for a real world to exist. [224] He might well say that it is a question beyond the reach of human reason. For Leibniz36 good and evil are interdependent to begin with, the one inconceivable without the other. But that is not enough, for surely they are no more equal than are right and left. If I may make use of the definition I proposed of the hierarchical opposition, good must contain evil while still being its contrary. In other words, real perfection is not the absence of evil but its perfect subordination. A world without evil could not possibly be good. Of course we are free to call this a universe of faith as against a universe of common sense, of modern common sense. But it is also a universe of rich concreteness as against one of desiccated principle. More precisely, a universe thick with the different dimensions of concrete life, where they have not yet come apart. The different dimensions of life do of course exist for Voltaire, but his thought sorts them out, it cannot embrace them all at once. And no doubt we live in Voltaire’s world, and not in Leibniz’s. It is just a matter of advancing in the perception of the relation between them. Now let us suppose that, enlightened by the right-and-left example, we agree not to separate an idea and its value but to consider instead as our object the configuration formed by idea-values or value-ideas. It may be objected that such complex entities will be difficult to handle. Can we really come to grips with such multidimensional objects in their interrelations? Certainly the task is not easy, as it goes against our most ingrained habits. Yet, we are not entirely deprived of clues to make a beginning. We start with three remarks. First the configuration is sui generis, idea-values are ranked in a particular fashion. Second, this ranking includes reversal as one of its properties. Third, the configuration is thus normally segmented. I shall comment in turn on these three characteristics. First about ranking. ‘High’ ideas will both contradict and include ‘low’ ideas. I called this peculiar relation ‘encompass-[225]ment’. An idea that grows in importance and status acquires the property of encompassing its contrary. Thus I found that in India purity encompasses power. Or, to take an example closer to us, from those that came up in the course of studying economic ideas: economists speak of ‘goods and services’ as one overarching category comprising, on the one hand, commodities and on the other, something quite different from commodities but assimilated to them, namely services.37 This is incidentally an example of relations between men (services) being subordinated to relations to things (goods), and if we were to study, say, a Melanesian system of exchanges, it would come nearer to the mark to reverse the priority and speak of prestations and goods, I mean prestations (relations between men) including things or encompassing their contrary, things. We have already alluded to the second characteristic, reversal. The logical relationship between priest and king, as found in India or, nearer to us, in Christianity itself, five centuries after Christ, under the pen of Pope Gelasius, is exemplary in this regard. In matters of religion, and hence absolutely, the priest is superior to the king or emperor to whom public order is entrusted. But ipso facto the priest will obey the king in matters of public order, that is, in subordinate matters.38 This chiasmus is characteristic of hierarchy of the articulate type. It is obscured only when the superior pole of the hierarchical opposition is coterminous with the whole and the inferior pole is determined solely in relation to the former, as in the instance of Adam and Eve, Eve being created from a part of Adam’s body. What happens here is that it is only on the empirical level—and thus not within the ideology proper—that a reversal can be detected, as when the mother comes to dominate in fact the family in which she is in principle subordinate to her husband. The reversal is built-in: the moment the second function is defined, it entails the reversal for the situations belonging to it. That is to say, hierarchy is bidimensional, it bears not only on the entities considered but also on the corresponding situations, and this bidimensionality entails the reversal. As a consequence, it is not enough here to speak of different ‘contexts’ as distinguished by us, for they are foreseen, inscribed or implied in the ideology itself. We must speak of different ‘levels’ hierarchized together with the corresponding entities. In the third place, values are often segmented or rather, I [226] should say, value is normally segmented in its application, except in specifically modern representations. I shall give a few examples of a striking contrast between non-modern and modern cultures, which bears on the way distinctions are organized or configurated. Impressionistically, on one side, as I said of India, distinctions are numerous, fluid, flexible, running independently of each other, overlapping or intersecting; they are also variably stressed according to the situation at hand, now coming to the fore and now receding. On the other side, we think mostly in black and white, extending over a wide range clear either/or disjunctions and using a small number of rigid, thick boundaries defining solid entities.39 It is noteworthy that the same contrast was recently found between early Christianity and the late Middle Ages in political theology. According to Gerard Caspary, the ‘slow growth of scholastic and legal modes of thinking’, emphasizing ‘clarity and distinctions rather than interrelationships’ has disembedded the political dimension while the ‘multifaceted and transparent symbols … have become one-dimensional and opaque emblems’.40 A similar contrast has been pointed out in modern psychology by Erik Erikson. Discussing the adolescent’s identity formation he contrasts two possible outcomes of the process, which he calls ‘wholeness’ and ‘totality’, as two different forms or patterns of ‘entireness’: As a Gestalt, then, wholeness emphasizes a sound, organic, progressive mutuality between diversified functions and parts within an entirety, the boundaries of which are open and fluent. [Note the plural!] Totality, on the contrary, evokes a Gestalt in which an absolute boundary is emphasized; given a certain arbitrary delineation, nothing that belongs inside must be left outside, nothing that must be outside can be tolerated inside. A totality is as absolutely inclusive as it is utterly exclusive: whether or not the category-to-be-made-absolute is a logical one, or whether the parts really have, so to speak, a yearning for one another.41 We cannot at this point follow any further Erikson’s fine discussion. We retain essentially the perception of two conceptions or definitions of a whole, one through a rigid boundary, the other through internal interdependence and consistency. From our [227] point of view, the former is modern and arbitrary or somewhat mechanical, the second traditional and structural.42 It should be clear that such contrasts between segmented and unsegmented representations have not taken us away from values. In the first approximation the opposition is between holistic values in the former and individualistic values in the latter. I owe to Robert Bellah a superb reference to hierarchy in Shakespeare. In the third scene of Troilus and Cressida Ulysses pronounces a long eulogy of order as degree: The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre Observe degree, priority, and place Insisture, course, proportion, season, form, Office and custom, in all line of order… There is one egregious example of the segmentation of value. It is the representation of the universe as a linear hierarchy of beings that is called the Great Chain of Being. It was influential all through our history from neoplatonism to the nineteenth century, as was shown in the well-known book which Arthur Lovejoy devoted to it.43 It pictures the world as a continuous series of beings, from the greatest to the least. It combines, Lovejoy tells us, plenitude, continuity, and gradation. It is a kind of ladder with a secret. The rungs of the ladder are so multiplied that the distance between two successive rungs shades into insignificance and leaves no void; the discontinuity between different sorts of beings is thus seen as a continuity of Being as a whole. The hierarchical aspect is evident, yet it appears on reflection that Lovejoy did not do it full justice. As most moderns, he was unable to see the function of hierarchy in the scheme. He gave scant attention to the only treatise we have on hierarchy, that of the Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagitus, in fact a double treatise on celestial and on terrestrial hierarchy. Let us have a look at Dionysius’s definition:44 I mean by hierarchy a holy ordering, a knowledge, and an activity, which assimilates itself as closely as possible to the divine form, and [228] which raises itself to the imitation of God in proportion to the lights which God has granted to it; the beauty which is worthy of God, being simple and good and the principle of initiation, is on the one hand absolutely pure of any dissimilarity, and on the other grants to each one, according to his desert, a share of its own light, while it initiates each one in the most divine initiation, forming them to an harmonious and indistinguishable likeness of itself. The aim of hierarchy is therefore the attainment, as far as possible, of likeness and of union with God. It is worth stressing that in Dionysius the emphasis throughout is on communication if not on mobility (at least not in our sense of the term). The angels and other creatures situated between men and God are there to transmit or relay the word of God which men could not otherwise perceive, as well as to pave the way, as it were, for the ascent of the soul.45 It is not enough, then, to speak of a transformation of discontinuity into continuity. More widely and deeply, the Great Chain of Being appears as a form for acknowledging differences while at the same time subordinating them to and encompassing them in unity. Nothing can be more remote from this grand scheme than the American ‘color-bar’. Of course there is no homology, for the latter representation is limited to men (in accordance with the modern split between man and nature). Yet it is as characteristic of the modern as the Great Chain is of the traditional mode of thought. All men, instead of being divided into a number of estates, conditions or statuses as previously, in harmony with a hierarchical cosmos, are now equal, but for one discrimination. It is as if a number of distinctions had coalesced into one absolute, impassable boundary. Characteristic is the absence of the shades still found elsewhere or previously: no half-breeds, mulattoes or mestizos are recognized here: what is not pure white is black. Clearly we reach here the perfect opposite of segmentation. The contrast is so decisive that one might as well speak of antisegmentation, and the similarity with the other examples adduced tends to show that this form is characteristic of modern ideology. With ranking, reversal, and segmentation, we have gained [229] some insight in the common, non-modern, I am tempted to say ‘normal’, configuration of value. Such a configuration is part and parcel of the system of representations (ideas-and-values) which I call, for the sake of brevity, ideology. This type of configuration appears very different from the modern type: more precisely, granted that it is not completely absent from modern society, but survives in it in parts and in some degree, it is a fact that modern ideology itself is of quite different type, is indeed as exceptional as Polanyi said of an aspect of it. Now, as we have seen, science has a predominant place and role in modern ideology. It follows that modern scientific, and to a large extent philosophic, ideas, linked as they are with the modern system of values, are often ill-fitted for anthropological study and sociological comparison. Actually it follows from the connection between ideas and values that, just as we must be ‘value-free’ in our ‘laboratory’, we should in principle at the same time be wary of applying our own ideas, especially our most habitual and fundamental ideas to our subject-matter. To do this is of course difficult, and at the limit impossible, for we cannot work ‘idea-free’. Actually we are caught between the Scylla of sociocentrism and the Charybdis of obscurity and incommunicability. All our basic intellectual tools cannot be replaced or modified at one stroke. We have to work piecemeal, and that is what anthropology has done, as its history shows. The reluctance one feels against putting oneself in question— for in the end this is precisely what the effort amounts to—inclines us to do too little, while self-aggrandizement to the neglect of the scientific community counsels to do too much. Regarding our use of a given concept, it might be of some help to get a clearer view of its place among modern values. I shall take an example. Clearly the absolute distinction between subject and object is fundamental for us and we tend to apply it everywhere, even unknowingly. Its link with some of the ideas already mentioned is obvious, and it clearly bears a value stress.46 At the same time, it has a bearing on a contemporary problem. We badly need a theory of exchanges, for they enshrine a good deal of the essence of certain societies, as in Melanesia. Now, judging from recent literature, we seem condemned either to subordinate exchanges to the social morphology, or the reverse. The two [230] domains or aspects collide and we have no means of subsuming them under a unified framework. Have we not here a case where our absolute subject/object distinction obtrudes? When Lévy-Bruhl spoke of ‘participation’ between men and objects, was he not trying to circumvent the distinction? Mauss’s Essay on Gift [sic], so celebrated nowadays, is largely busy acknowledging two facts, first that exchanges cannot be sliced up into economic, juridical, religious, and other aspects, but are all that at one and the same time (a point not irrelevant here, but one that is now widely admitted); and second that men do not exchange things as we would think but, inextricably and fluctuatingly mixed up with those ‘things’, something of themselves. I am not pleading for cancelling all distinction between subject and object; but only for releasing the value stress that bears on the matter, thus suspending its absolute character and allowing the boundary to fluctuate as the case may be, and/or other distinctions to come into play in keeping with native values.47 But is such an approach practicable? It has been attempted. A young scholar, André Itéanu, has taken such a course in his reanalysis of the Orokaiva, a Papuan society, from Williams’ and Schwimmer’s writings. In my reading of his thesis,48 he has found an alternative principle for ordering the data in an assumption that again contradicts our received conceptions, although it should not seem so surprising after all, namely that the society has to be thought of as including the dead, the relations with them being constitutive of it and offering the global framework within which not only all the detail of ritual and festive exchanges, but also what there is of social organization proper make sense. The Orokaiva do not have moneys in the classical Melanesian sense. Yet, as Melanesian money has generally to do with life and the ancestors, the paramount place that the Orokaiva give to the dead reminds us of the cases where ceremonial exchanges do make use of institutional money. Here I am inclined to bring together two problems that can hardly be entirely left out of a discussion bearing on value. Those ‘primitive’ moneys have to do with absolute value. Therefore their relation to money in the modern, restricted sense of the term is somehow homologous to the relation, [231] among us, between value in the general, moral or metaphysical sense and value in the restricted economic sense. In the background of both lies the contrast between cultural forms that are essentially global and those in which the field is separated out or decomposed into particular domains or planes, that is, roughly speaking, between non-modern and modern forms. Perhaps two features of the contrast may prove significant. Is it a fact in tribal societies that, where we have elaborate systems of exchange making use of one or more traditional moneys—mostly shell-moneys—to express and seal a wide range of ceremonial transitions and important rituals, we do not have permanent elaborate chiefship or rulership, and conversely that where the latter is found the former are absent? Melanesia and Polynesia seem clearly contrasted in that regard. If this were so, we might suppose that one thing can replace the other, that there is a certain equivalence of function between them. Now, in modern Europe the predominance of economic representations has resulted from the emancipation of economics from politics and has demanded, at some stage, the curtailment of political prerogatives.49 Is there here, despite the vast difference in the backgrounds, more than a chance parallelism, an index to a more general relation between two aspects of society? Another feature drew the attention of Karl Polanyi. He contrasted the fixed ‘equivalencies’ between objects of exchange in primitive or archaic societies with the fluctuating price of goods in market economies. Mainly in the former case, the sphere of equivalence and possibly of exchange may be restricted to a few types of objects, while in the second, money tends to be a universal equivalent. But the question I want to raise is about the contrast between fixed and fluctuating rates of exchange. Polanyi attributed the fixity encountered in Dahomey to royal regulation.50 But the phenomenon was probably widespread. In the Solomon Islands, where regulation by political authority was out of the question, the rate of exchange between native money and the Australian dollar remained unaltered over a long period even though the devaluation of the dollar entailed very unpleasant consequences.51 At the other end of the spectrum, in the case of a high civilization and a complex society, Byzantium offers a spectacular case of fixity. The purchasing power of gold money [232] remained practically unchanged from the fifth to the eleventh century.52 The fact seems unbelievable if one thinks of the vicissitudes of the Empire during that period, where it was repeatedly, in every century, threatened in its very existence. Given the circumstances, the admitted excellence of imperial revenue administration is perhaps not a sufficient explanation of this remarkable phenomenon. I propose a different hypothesis which may or may not be tested but which I see other reasons for putting forth. When the rate of exchange is seen as linked to the basic value(s) of the society it is stable, and it is allowed to fluctuate only when and where the link with the basic value and identity of the society is broken or is no longer perceived, when money ceases to be a ‘total social fact’ and becomes a merely economic fact.53 It remains to recapitulate the foregoing and set in perspective the modern ideological framework and the anthropological predicament. The picture will be perforce incomplete and provisional, the language very approximate. The aim is to assemble a number of features, most of which have found stray recognition here or there, in order to perceive, or merely to sense, some of the relations between them. I insisted elsewhere on man as an individual as being probably the cardinal modern value, and on the concomitant emphasis on relations between men and things as against relations between men.54 These two features have notable concomitants regarding value. First, the conception of man as an individual entails the recognition of a wide freedom of choice. Some of the values, instead of emanating from the society, will be determined by the individual for his own use. In other words, the individual as [233] (social) value demands that society should delegate to him a part of its value-setting capacity. Freedom of conscience is the standard example.55 The absence of prescription which makes choice possible is actually commanded by a superior prescription. Let me say in passing that it is therefore idle to suppose that men must have in all societies a similar range of choices open to them. Contrariwise, and very generally, value is embedded in the configuration of ideas itself. As we saw with right and left, this condition prevails as long as the relation between part and whole is effectively present, as long as experience is spontaneously referred to degrees of totality; and there is no place here for freedom of choice. We are faced, once again, with two alternative configurations; either value attaches to the whole in relation to its parts,56 and value is embedded, prescribed, as it were, by the very system of representation, or value attaches to the individual, which results, as we have seen, in the separation between idea and value. The antithesis is economically seen in terms of Tönnies’s Naturwille and Kürwille, the crux of the matter being that freedom of choice or Kürwille is exercised in a world without wholes, or rather in a world where the assemblages, sets or empirical wholes that are still encountered are deprived of their orientating function or value function. Let us turn to the complex link between the modern value configuration and the relation between man and nature. Relations between men have to be subordinated for the individual subject to be autonomous and ‘equal’; the relation of man to nature acquires primacy, but this relation is sui generis, for, whether or not the independence of the individual demands it, man is indeed separated from nature: the free agent is opposed to nature as determined,57 subject and object are absolutely distinguished. Here we encounter science and its predominance in the culture as a whole. To cut the story short, let us say that the dualism in question is artificialist in essence: man has distanced himself from nature and the universe of which he was a part, and has asserted his capacity to remodel things according to his will. Again it makes full sense to say that Naturwille had been superseded by Kürwille, the latter being taken here less as arbitrary will than as detached, [234] disembedded, independent will. Given the close link between the will and values, it is worthwhile asking whence came this unprecedented type of will. I surmise that it was forged in the otherworldliness, or rather outworldliness of early Christianity, from which issues finally the figure of Calvin, a prototype of modern man, with his iron will rooted in predestination. Only this Christian gestation seems to me to make understandable the unique and strange ‘prometheism’ of modern man.58 At any rate, with Kürwille as human will detached from nature and applied to its subjugation, we are in a position to appreciate the deep anchorage of the dichotomy between is and ought in modern ideology and life. Finally, our two configurations embody two different relations between knowledge and action. In the one case, the agreement between the two is guaranteed on the level of the society:59 ideas are in conformity with the nature and order of the world, and the subject can do no better than consciously insert himself in this order. In the other case, there is no humanly significant world order, and it is left to the individual subject to establish the relation between representations and action, that is to say broadly speaking, between social representations and his own action. In the latter case, this world devoid of values, to which values are superadded by human choice, is a subhuman world, a world of objects, of things. One can know it exactly and act on it on condition of abstaining from any value imputation. It is a world without man, a world from which man has deliberately removed himself and on which he is thus able to impose his will. This transformation has been made possible only by the devaluation of relations between men, relations which generally commanded the relation to things. They have lost, in the predominant ideology, their concrete character; they are especially seen from the viewpoint of relations to things (remember the Parsonian variables) except for one residue, namely moral action. Hence the abstract universality of the Kantian imperative. So much for the subject side of the matter. Despite our absolute distinction between subject and object, there is some homology between the ways we look at both sides. I wish to add a few notes on the object side to complete the picture and to draw attention to a few features of the modern configuration of knowledge. It is a [235] commonplace to say that modern knowledge is distributed into a number of separate compartments, to speak of a high degree of division of labour, of scientific specialization. I shall try and characterize the modern model more precisely in contrast to the traditional one, of which we recalled some major aspects in the foregoing. The modern configuration can be taken as resulting from the break-up of the value relation between element and whole. The whole has become a heap. It is as if a bag containing balls had volatilized: the balls have rolled away in all directions. This again is commonplace. The fact is that the objective world is made up of separate entities or substances in the image of the individual subject, whose empirically ascertained relations are taken as external to them.60 Yet the image is poor. In the first place, it suggests that the final distribution of the elements is random. Actually a complex, multidimensional world of ordered and fluctuating relations has been analysed, decomposed by the effort of (philosophical and) scientific reason into simpler components whose inner constitution and relations are quite peculiar. A somewhat better image is that of a multidimensional solid bursting out into a number of discrete, straight surfaces or planes that can accommodate only level linear figures and relations. Those planes have, I think, three characteristics: they are absolutely separate and independent, they are homologous to each other, and each of them is homogeneous throughout its extension. The bursting out in general is relatively familiar: the history of modern painting from Impressionism onwards provides an example. The means that were until then subordinated to the descriptive reference were emancipated and each of them could in turn occupy the foreground. Nor is there any doubt as to the perfect separation of the ‘planes’ of knowledge: do we speak of physics or chemistry, psychology or physiology, psychology or sociology? But what is it that determined the identity of each of the disciplines among which the constituents of the world have been distributed? The answer seems to be that the instrumental point of view is decisive.61 Correlatively, we had occasion to point out the [236] extreme and striking weakness of the notion of a ‘whole’ in philosophical thought. Secondly, the ‘planes’ on which knowledge and progress are concentrated remain ‘homogeneous’ throughout their extent. All the phenomena considered are of the same nature, have equal status, and are essentially simple. The paradigm here would be Galilei’s model of rectilinear uniform motion: a single material point moving through empty space. As a consequence, the planes have a tendency to split when the development of science reveals an (instrumental) heterogeneity. Yet all planes are homologous, at least in principle, in the sense that the methods applied to diverse kinds of phenomena are identical. There is only one model of the natural sciences. It is true that with time and experience the model may be altered, but only with difficulty (witness biology and psychology). The model is mechanistic, quantitative, it rests on cause and effect (one individual agent, one individual result).62 It is essential to note that scientific rationality is present and at work only on each of these distinct planes, and that its exercise supposes that the whole has been put to pieces. It cannot reach beyond the relation of means to ends. Successful as they have been in ensuring the mastery of man over the natural world, the sciences have had other results, one of which is to confront us with what Alexandre Koyré called ‘the enigma of man’. If anthropology is dealing, in its own manner, with this ‘enigma’, then it is both an integral part of the modern world, and in charge of transcending it, or rather of reintegrating it within the more common human world. I hope that our observations on value have pointed in that direction. There remains to face squarely the question of our relation to value: anthropology is poised between a ‘value-free’ science and the necessity to restore value to its proper and universal place. The philosophical critic of social science demands that it should be evaluative. He may grant us the ability to go beyond mere neutrality in the matter and yet maintain that we are unable to get rid of it completely and to evaluate or prescribe. That is true in practice. It is not quite so, I suggest, in principle, and the point is worth making. What happens in the anthropol-[237]ogical view is that every ideology is relativized in relation to others. It is not a matter of absolute relativism. The unity of mankind, postulated and also verified (slowly and painfully) by anthropology, sets limits to the variation. Each particular configuration of ideas and values is contained with all others in a universal figure of which it is a partial expression.63 Yet this universal figure is so complex that it cannot be described, but only vaguely imagined as a kind of sum integral of all concrete configurations. It is thus impossible for us to grasp directly the universal matrix in which the coherence of each particular value system is rooted, but it is perceptible in another way: each society or culture carries the trace of the inscription of its ideology within the human predicament. It is a negative mark, carved below the surface in intaglio. Just as an action has unforeseen consequences or ‘perverse effects’, or as each individual choice in our societies is immersed in a milieu of greater complexity and thus brings forth involuntary effects, so each ideo-normative configuration has its specific obscure yet compelling concomitants, which accompany it as its shadow and which manifest the human condition in relation to it. These concomitants are what I called in a somewhat different context the ‘non-ideological features’ that we find by comparison and which we see as non-conscious aspects, unsuspected by the people themselves.64 There is thus in each concrete society the imprint of this universal model, which becomes perceptible to some degree as soon as comparison begins. It is a negative imprint, which authenticates, so to speak, the society as human, and whose precision increases when comparison proceeds. It is true that we cannot derive a prescription from this imprint, but it represents the reverse side of the prescription, or its limit. In principle, anthropology is thus fraught with progress in the knowledge of value, and hence of prescription itself, and this should lead in the end to a reformulation of the philosopher’s problem. But what about here and now? Granted that the meaning of ‘prescription’ is made more complex in our perspective, to the extent that we should prefer to speak of counsel rather than injunction, can we not offer something of the sort on the basis of our factual conclusions? We found that the modern configuration, however opposed to the traditional, is still located within it: the modern model is an exceptional variant of the general model and remains encased, or encompassed, within it. Hierarchy is [238] universal, at the same time it is here partially but effectively contradicted. What is it, then, that is necessary in it? A first and approximate answer is that there are things that equality can and things that it cannot do. A contemporary trend in public opinion, in France and elsewhere, suggests an example. There is much talk round about of ‘difference’, the rehabilitation of those that are in one way or an other ‘different’, the recognition of alter. This may mean two things. In so far as it is a matter of enfranchisement in general, equal rights and opportunities, equal treatment of women, or of homosexuals, etc.,—and such seems to be the main import of the claims put forward on behalf of such categories —there is no theoretical problem. It should only be pointed out that in such equalitarian treatment difference is disregarded, neglected or subordinated, and not ‘recognized’. Given the easy transition from equality to identity, the long-range outcome is likely to be in the direction of the erasing of distinctive characteristics in the sense of a loss of the meaning or value previously attributed to the corresponding distinctions. But there may be more in these claims. The impression is that another meaning is also subtly present in them, namely the recognition of alter qua alter. I submit that such recognition can only be hierarchical—as was keenly perceived by Burke in his Reflections on the French Revolution. Here, to recognize is the same as to value or to integrate (remember the Great Chain of Being). This statement flies in the face of our stereotypes or prejudices, for nothing is more remote from our common sense than Thomas Aquinas’s dictum that ‘order is seen to consist mainly in inequality (or difference: disparitate)’.65 Yet it is only by a perversion or impoverishment of the notion of order that we may believe contrariwise that equality can by itself constitute an order. To be explicit: alter will then be thought of as superior or inferior to Ego, with the important qualification of reversal (which is not present in the Great Chain as such). That is to say that, if alter was taken as globally inferior, he would turn out as superior on secondary levels of consideration.66 [239] What I maintain is that, if the advocates of difference claim for it both equality and recognition, they claim the impossible. Here we are reminded of the American slogan ‘separate but equal’ which marked the transition from slavery to racism. To be more accurate, however, I should say that the above is true on the level of pure representation—equality or hierarchy—and thus make room for an alternative of a different kind. As to the practical forms of integration, most of those we can think of either assemble equal, principially identical agents, as in co-operation, or refer to a whole and are implicitly hierarchical, as the division of labour. Only conflict qualifies, as Max Gluckman has shown, as integrator. We should then say, speaking roughly, that there are two ways of somehow recognizing alter: hierarchy and conflict. Now, that conflict is inevitable and perhaps necessary is one thing, and to posit it as an ideal, or as an ‘operative value’, is quite another67 —although it is in keeping with the modern trend. Did not Max Weber himself grant more credibility to war than to peace? Conflict has the merit of simplicity while hierarchy entails a complication similar to that of Chinese etiquette. The more so, as it would here have to be encompassed within the paramount value of individualism and equality. Yet I must confess my irenic preference for the latter. Bibliography Albert, Ethel M. (1956). ‘The Classification of Values: A Method and Illustration’, American Anthropologist, 58. Bateson, Gregory (1972). Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Ballantine Books. Buber, Martin (1938). Je et tu. Paris. Caspary, Gerard E. (1979). Politics and Exegesis: Origen and the Two Swords. Berkeley, University of California Press. Dumont, Louis (1953a). ‘The Dravidian Kinship Terminology as an Expression of Marriage’, Man, March 1953, no. 54. ——— (1953b). ‘Dravidian Kinship Terminology’, Man, Sept. 1953, no. 224. ——— (1966). ‘A fundamental problem in the Sociology of Caste’, Contributions to Indian Sociology. ix. Dec. 1966; pp. 17–32. ——— (1975). La civilisation indienne et nous. Paris, Colin. ——— (1977). From Mandeville to Marx, University of Chicago Press. ——— (1979). ‘The Anthropological Community and Ideology’, Social Science Information, 18, 6. 1979. ——— (1980a). Homo Hierarchicus. Complete and revised edition. University of Chicago Press. (In French: Gallimard, coll. Tel, 1979). ——— (1980b). ‘A Modified View of Our Origins. The Christian beginnings of modern individualism’. Deneke Lecture 1980. (To appear.) Erikson, Erik H. (1964). Insight and Responsibility. New York, Norton, Gauchet, Marcel (1980). ‘Tocqueville, l'amérique et nous’, Libre, 7. (Paris, Payot); pp. 43–120. Gierke, Otto (1958). Political Theories of the Middle Age. Trans. by Maitland (1900), Beacon Press. Hsu, Francis L. (1961). ‘American Core Value and National Character’. In Hsu, ed. Psychological Anthropology, Homewood, Ill. 1961; pp. 209–30. Itéanu, André (1980). Échanges, circulation et valeurs chez les Orokaiva. Thèse de 3e cycle, Univ. de Paris VII (unpublished). Jacob, Francois (1970). La logique du vivant. Une histoire de l'hérédité. Paris, Gallimard. Kluckhohn, Clyde, et al. (1951). ‘Values and Value-orientation in the Theory of Action. An exploration in definition and classification’, in Talcott Parsons and Edward A. Shils, eds., Toward a General Theory of Action. Cambridge, Mass. 1951. ———. (1952). ‘Categories of Universal Culture’. Draft, Wenner-Gren symposium, June 1952. Tozzer Library, Harvard University. ———. (1959). ‘The Scientific Study of Values’. Offprint in the Tozzer Library. (Kluckhohn file). Kluckhohn, Florence (1961). ‘Dominant and Variant Value Orientations’, in F. Kluckhohn and F. L. Strodtbeck, eds. Variations in Value Orientations, Evanston, Ill. 1961. Koestler, Arthur (1967). The Ghost in the Machine. London, Hutchinson. Kolakowski, Leszek (1977). ‘The Persistence of the Sein-Sollen Dilemma’, Men and World, vol. 10, no. 2. Koyré, Alexandre (1958). From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe. Harper Torchbooks. Lalande, André (1968). Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie. 2e ed., Paris, PUF. Leach, Edmund (1961). Rethinking Anthropology. London, Athlone Press. ———. (1976). Social Anthropology: A Natural Science of Society? Radcliffe-Brown Lecture 1976. (From the Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. lxii, 1976). Oxford University Press. Lepley, Ray. ed. (1949). Value: a Co-operative Inquiry. New York, Columbia University Press. Lovejoy, Arthur (1973). The Great Chain of Being (1933). Oxford University Press, 1973. Mol, Hans (1976). Identity and the Sacred. A Sketch for a New Social Scientific Theory of Religion. Agincourt, The Book Society of Canada. Morris, Charles (1956). Varieties of Human Value. University of Chicago Press. Northrop, F. S. C. (1946). The Meeting of East and West. New York, Macmillan. Ostrogorsky, Georges (1969). Histoire de l’état byzantin. Paris, Pavor. Parsons, Talcott and Shils, Edward A., eds. (1951). Toward a General Theory of Action. Harvard University Press, quoted in Harper Torchbooks edn. 1962. Phillips, D. C. (1976). Holistic Thought in Social Science. Stanford University Press. Plenge, Johann (1930). Zur Ontologie der Beziehung (Allgemeine Relationstheorie). Münster i.W. (Forschungsinstitut für Organisationslehre). Polanyi, Karl and Rotstein, Abraham (1966). Dahomey and the Slave Trade: an Analysis of an Archaic Economy, Seattle and London, University of Washington Press. Pribram, Karl (1922). ‘Deutscher Nationalismus und deutscher Sozialismus’. Archiv für Socialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 49: pp. 248–376. Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. (1953). ‘Dravidian Kinship Terminology’. Man, July 1953, no. 169. ———. (1957). A Natural Science of Society. Glencoe, Ill., The Falcon’s Wing Press. ———. (1958). Method in Social Anthropology. Edited by M. N. Srinivas, Chicago. Ritter, Joachim (1977). ‘Hegel und die französische Revolution’ [1957] in Metaphysik und Politik. Frankfurt, Suhrkamp. Sahlins, Marshall (1972). Stone Age Economics. Chicago, Aldine-Atherton. Serres, Michel (1968). Le système de Leibniz et ses modèles mathématiques. 2 vols. Paris, PUF. Sheldon, Richard C. (1951). ‘Some Observations on Theory in Social Science’, in Talcott Parsons and Edward A. Shils, eds. Toward a General Theory of Action. Cambridge, Mass., 1951. Strauss, Leo (1954). Droit naturel et Histoire. Paris, Plon. (Original: Natural Right and History. Chicago, 1953). Williams, Raymond (1976). Keywords. New York, Oxford University Press.     Louis DUMONT (1911–1998) was a prominent French anthropologist and Director of Research at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris. A specialist in the study of cultures and societies in India, western philosophy, and the anthropology of kinship, his works include From Mandeville to Marx: The genesis and triumph of economic ideology (University of Chicago Press, 1977), Homo Hierarchicus: The caste system and its implications (University of Chicago Press, 1980), Affinity as a value: Marriage alliance in South India, with comparative essays on Australia (University of Chicago Press, 1983), and Essays on individualism: Modern ideology in anthropological perspective (University of Chicago Press, 1987). ___________________ Publisher’s note: This is a reprint of Louis Dumont, 1980. “On Value.” Proceedings of the British Academy 66: 207–41. We are very grateful to the British Academy for granting us the permission to reprint the lecture. We remind the reader that we retain the style of the original, and indicate in the text the original page numbers in square brackets. 1. The author is grateful to Joseph Erhardy who has helped, here as so often in the past, to give his English a more acceptable shape than it would otherwise have had. Thanks are also due to Alan Montefiore, who has kindly suggested some improvements in that regard. 2. Radcliffe-Brown (1958). 3. Actually, Sir Raymond Firth tells me that such developments were habitual in Radcliffe-Brown’s teaching, from early days onwards (in Australia in the thirties). Radcliffe-Brown said in the lecture ‘the kind of structure with which we are concerned is one of the union of opposites’ (Radcliffe-Brown (1958), p. 123, my emphasis). It was thus a particular case, not the application of a general principle, which required speaking of ‘oppositions’. Cf. Leach (1976), p. 9. Accordingly, my first and limited attempt at structuralist analysis (Dumont (1953a)) drew shortly afterwards a magisterial rebuke from the aging Radcliffe-Brown (Radcliffe-Brown (1953), my reply Dumont (1953b)). My paper was a piece of that ‘Parisian heresy’ which, as Sir Edmund Leach said (ibid.), was mostly ignored in this country for ten years or more. Yet, let it be said for the record that Radcliffe-Brown’s strictures did not alter the friendly protection and non-committal encouragement of Evans-Pritchard who, of all colleagues, showed most understanding for the effort at a systematic retrieval of affinity. 4. Sir Edmund Leach has discussed at length (Leach (1976)) this posthumous presentation of Radcliffe-Brown’s widest views (Radcliffe-Brown (1957)). In it the positive aspects of Radcliffe-Brown’s teaching appear clearly, together with what appears to us now (or to me) as its shortcomings. In retrospect, he is seen to have gone in the right direction, but not quite far enough. Yet his articulate holism (pp. 22, 110, etc.) coupled with the consequent stress on ‘relational analysis’ and on synchrony (pp. 14, 63), and, remarkably enough, with the downgrading of causality (p. 41, cf. below, n. 62), appears as very meritorious if one looks at it against the background of the nominalism which permeates his own thought and the predominant orientation in British ideology. In this perspective, it is not surprising that Radcliffe-Brown’s holism remains narrowly functional, that the distinction between ‘culture’ (somewhat reluctantly ushered in, p. 92) and ‘social structure’, sound in principle, in fact reduces the former to a mere means of the latter (p. 121). Also Radcliffe-Brown did not– probably could not–perceive that relational analysis demands that the boundaries of the ‘system’ be rigorously defined and not left to arbitrary choice or expediency (p. 60), and that such analysis is incompatible with the primary emphasis he put on classification or taxonomy (pp. 16, 71) (See Leach’s early dismissal of ‘butterfly collecting’, Leach (1961)). I shall refer to a few other points in the following (‘natural kinds of systems’, n. 61 below; fixed equivalencies in exchange, n. 53 below). 5. See Radcliffe-Brown (1957), pp. 10–1, 119, 136–40 (economic value). 6. Lalande (1968), p. 1183. 7. Hsu (1961), pp. 209–30. 8. Morris (1956). 9. Arthur Lovejoy sees in some passages of Plato a contradiction between the Good (or God) being self-sufficient in its perfection and its being the ground and source of this world: the same entity cannot be both complete in itself and in any degree dependent on something else. (Lovejoy (1973), pp. 43–50). But Lovejoy comes to this contradiction by erasing the philosopher’s progress and flattening its result. In a first step one must turn away from the world to come to grasp the Idea of the Good (and True and Beautiful). In a second step, once the Good is correctly understood–as limitless generosity or irrepressible fecundity–one finds that it explains and justifies the world as it is. These two conclusions are not at the same level: on an inferior level God is absolutely distinct from the world, on a superior level the world itself is contained in God; the Good transcends the world and yet the world has no being but through it. The world depends on God, God does not depend on the world. The crux of the matter is that Lovejoy stops at the inferior level. He does not and probably cannot accept hierarchy, or transcendence. He looks at Plato with egalitarian eyes. 10. Gregory Bateson (1972), pp.271–8 (double bind), 336, and passim; cf. Kluckhohn (1951) ‘what appear superficially as incompatibilities are seen on closer examination to be functions of different frames of reference’, (p. 399 n. 19); the difference is between seeing things-in-themselves and seeing things in relation, i.e. within a ‘frame of reference’. 11. Cf. F. S. C. Northrop (1946) and see p. 257; Ray Lepley, ed. (1949); Clyde Kluckhohn himself alludes to the circumstances (ibid., pp. 388–9). 12. Kluckhohn (1951), p. 388–433. Kluckhohn reiterated his basic position in a number of papers. 13. See the note in Parsons and Shils (1951), p. 26–7. 14. Mol (1976). 15. ‘In the working out of the theory by far the major attention is paid to value-orientations (as against ideas and beliefs) because much of the theory is concerned with the selection by actors of objects and gratifications’ writes Richard Sheldon in what is actually a minute of dissent (Sheldon (1951), p. 40). Sheldon went on to say that this stress on personality and on the ‘social system’ resulted in cutting culture in two. 16. Albert (1956), pp. 221–48. 17. The reference is to a later version of Florence Kluckhohn (1961). 18. Cf. especially Clyde Kluckhohn (1952). It must be added that Florence Kluckhohn was particularly keen on nuances in the hierarchical make-up, which enabled her to grasp variations not only between cultures but also within a given value system, thus securing an opening toward the question of changes in values. 19. Kluckhohn (1959). The text is apparently a part of a volume of Installation Lectures, which I have not been able to identify (pp. 25–54). It would not have been earlier than 1959. 20. See Kluckhohn (1959) section II, and (1951), p 389. 21. See Homo Hierarchicus (Dumont (1980a)), App. A. 22. It is the fulcrum of the discussion in the symposium edited by Lepley (Lepley, 1949). The pragmatists’ attempt goes against the means/ends distinction, which is akin to the others we referred to and is as fundamental as they are to modern culture. 23. Kolakowski (1977). I alluded to the problem in Dumont (1977). 24. Pribram (1922). 25. See Dumont (1979), p. 795. A caricatural example: according to Ritter, Hegel succeeded in building up an Aristotelian philosophy of the French Revolution (Ritter (1977). 26. Dumont (1979), p. 796. It goes without saying that, to be successful, such a distinction of levels should be present in the consciousness of the citizens. 27. Leo Strauss (1954) ch. 2 and p. 85. 28. Discussion and references in Dumont (1966), pp. 25–7. 29. As the reference to ‘embeddedness’ may remind the reader, we have been following in the footsteps of Karl Polanyi and simply widening his thesis on the exceptional character of modern civilization. 30. We found the point stressed by Parsons and Shils (1951) as well as by Kluckhohn (above). The latter analysed the interplay between normative and ‘existential’ statements (1951, pp. 392–4); he quoted (p. 422). Herskovits on ‘cultural focus’ as linking the distribution of values and the configuration of ideas (also Dumont (1977), pp. 19–20 and (1979), p. 814). 31. For details and references, see Dumont (1979), pp. 806–15. 32. Therelation between whole and part was previously defined as the hierarchical opposition, or the encompassing of the contrary (ibid. and 1980). For Thomas Aquinas, difference by itself suggested hierarchy. So that ‘order is seen to consist mainly in inequality (or difference: disparitate)’, cf. Otto Gierke (1958), (= DGR III) n. 88. 33. To assert that the modern mode of thought is destructive of the wholes with which man had until then seen himself surrounded may seem excessive or incomprehensible. Yet I think it is true in the sense that each whole has ceased to be value-providing in the above sense. If one turns to our philosophies with the simple question: What is the difference between a whole and a collection, most of them are silent, and when they give an answer, it is likely to be superficial or mystical as in Lukàcs, cf. Kolakowski (1977). I take it as exemplary that the constitution of Hegel’s system results from a shift in the location of the Absolute, or of infinite value, from the Whole of Being (in the writings of his youth) to the Becoming of the individual entity–a point I intend to argue elsewhere. There is a small current of holistic thought, but it also bears the mark of the difficulty that modern minds experience in the matter, see D. C. Phillips (1976)–the discussion is sometimes tendentious. A book of Alfred Koestler’s (1967) represents an exception. To quote from a summary (p. 58): ‘Organisms and societies are multi-levelled hierarchies of semi-autonomous sub-wholes branching into sub-wholes of a lower order, and so on. The term “holon” has been introduced [by the author] to refer to these intermediary entities which, relative to their subordinates in the hierarchy, function as self contained wholes; relative to their superordinates as dependent parts.’ Koestler is seen to stress hierarchy as a chain of levels, while I have insisted on the elementary relation between two successive levels. The definition of ‘holon’ is valuable. I would only rank the two faces of this ‘Janus’ in relation to each other: the integration of each sub-whole as a unit in the next higher one is primary, its self-integration or ‘self-assertion’ is secondary (Dumont (1980a), p. 403)· We have already noted Gregory Bateson’s recognition of the hierarchy of levels (n. 10 above). A biologist, Francois Jacob, introduced the ‘integron’ in a sense somewhat similar to Koestler’s ‘holon’ (Jacob (1971) p. 323). 34. Is it possible that what is true of particular entities or wholes (sub-holes or ‘holons’ in Koestler’s terms) is true also of the great Whole, the universe or whole of wholes? Is it possible that the Whole in its turn needs a superior entity from which to derive its own value? That it can be self-integrative only by its subordination to something beyond itself? Clearly religions have a place here, and one could even try to deduce what the Beyond should be like in order to be final. Then we could say not only that men feel a need for a complement to the ‘empirically’ given, as Durkheim supposed, but that the need bears on an apex of valuation. This speculation arises from an exactly opposite view put forward by Lovejoy. He begins his classical book The Great Chain of Being (1973, see below) by positing ‘otherworldliness’ as a general attitude found in different forms in some of the world religions and consisting in taking refuge outside the world from its incoherence and wretchedness. Lovejoy states an absolute separation between this attitude and the world: it is only a place to get away from and about which otherworldliness has nothing to say (ibid., pp. 28–30). Here we may wonder. Let us take, as Lovejoy tends to do, an extreme form of ‘otherworldliness’ such as Buddhism. No doubt Buddha was not busy justifying the world. Yet he offers a kind of explanation of it, if a negative one. In general, the beyond is more than a refuge, It is a distant place from which, so to speak, one looks back with detachment upon human experience in the world; it is finally a transcendence that is posited and in relation to which the world is situated. Has not this transcendent glance been historically necessary to the understanding of the world as a whole? At any rate history shows abundantly, in India and perhaps in the West as well, that otherworldliness has powerfully acted on life in the world, and this process would be incomprehensible if an absolute heterogeneity was presupposed. 35. Lovejoy (1973), ch. 7. 36. Cf. Michel Serres. (1968). Leibniz’s world should not be simply identified with the traditional world. Perhaps theodicies are an index of individualist questioning and an effort, more or less successful, to reassert the holistic view. On the other hand, the Voltairian mood has had to stomach certain lessons, to learn, for instance that one pole of a magnet could not be separated from the other as some would have wished. ‘Jadis, en brisant les aimants, on cherchait à isoler le magnétisme nord et le magnétisme sud. On espérait avoir deux principes différents d'attraction. Mais à chaque brisure, si subit, si hypocrite que fût le choc, on retrouvait, dans chacun des morceaux brisés, les deux pôles inséparables’ (Bachelard in his preface to Buber (1938), p. 9). 37. Cf. Dumont (1977), index, s.v. Hierarchy, instances. 38. Cf. Dumont (1980b). 39. Cf. Dumont (1975), p. 30. 40. Gerard Caspary (1979), pp. 113–14, 189–91. The whole conclusion should be read. 41. Erikson (1964), p. 92. 42. Eriksontakes both forms as normal, although one is obviously inferior (‘more primitive’), to the other. At the same time he points out acutely the possible transition from the mechanical form to the totalitarian disease. In that regard the weakness or the very absence of the structural form in philosophical discourse is remarkable. 43. Lovejoy (1973). 44. Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagitus, Celestial Hierarchy, ch. 3, §§ 1–2, 164d–165a. The translation is by Jasper Griffin, Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, to whom I am grateful, and who also provided the following translation (n. 45). 45. Very similar is the function of Love (Eros) as defined in Plato’s Symposium by Diotima: he is a daemon, that is, a being intermediary between gods and men: ‘He interprets and makes a communication between divine and human things, conveying the prayers and sacrifices of men to the Gods, and communicating the commands and directions concerning the mode of worship most pleasing to them, from Gods to men. He fills up that intermediate space between these two classes of beings, so as to bind together, by his own power, the whole universe of things.’ (202e, Shelley’s translation.) 46. The distinction accompanies in particular the priority of the relation between man and nature, and on that account is already eccentric for a system stressing relations between men. The value stress is seen even in the contradictory valuations of subject and object in positivism and in idealism, of which Raymond Williams reminds us (1976, pp. 259–60). 47. There is a precedent in German philosophy, in Schelling’s philosophy of nature, where he wanted to transcend the Kantian duality, and downgraded this distinction to one of mere degree or complementarity within a class. I am not advocating Schelling’s perhaps primitive and inefficient device. For us each particular context should be decisive. 48. Itéanu (1980). 49. Dumont (1977), p. 6. 50. Polanyi (1966). 51. Oral communication from Daniel de Coppet (about the 'are’ Are on Malaita). 52. Ostrogorsky (1969), pp. 68, 219n., 317, 371. 53. Radcliffe-Brown had already attracted attention to fixed equivalences as against the action of supply and demand ((1957) pp. 112, 114, 138).–The hypothesis may seem unwarranted, coming after the careful and thoughtful study of Marshall Sahlins (1972, ch. 6). As formulated here, however, it is not straightforwardly contradicted by Sahlins’ conclusion. We may read him as stating only that contact with a market economy and/or radical economic changes have directly or indirectly an action on fixed equivalences in the long run. Also there may be, between the two conditions that the hypothesis contrasts, intermediary transitional stages with a complex interaction between norm and fact. 54. Startingfrom these two kinds of relations and tracing their application and combinations, the German sociologist Johann Plenge developed a complete– ahierarchical–and impeccable classification of relations in a brochure published in 1930: Plenge (1930). 55. The individual’s capacity is obviously limited. Analytically, either he exerts his choice between existing virtual values, or existing ideas, or he constructs a new idea-value (which must be rare). 56. Koestler allows for more precision: ‘the whole’ is mostly a sub-whole or holon, itself part of a higher sub-whole. 57. Descartes’s penseé et étendue, etc. 58. See Dumont (1980b). 59. The relation is intrinsically problematic. To ensure it is the essential and distinctive function of religion (cf. the note in Dumont (1977), p. 214). 60. Predominantly at any rate. About ‘internal relations’, see Phillips (1976), cf. n. 33 above. 61. Radcliffe-Brownwrote of ‘natural kinds of system’ (1957, p. 23); thus implicitly admitting that the separation between scientific disciplines is grounded in nature. The relation with the predominance of nominalism in science is obvious. The Cartesian difficulty of conceiving the relations between soul and body is perhaps the archetype of such fission. Hence the surfeit of contradictions and of simple oppositions badly subsumed. 62. It is noteworthy that Radcliffe-Brown saw the incompatibility between a holistic or systemic approach and causal explanation and rejected causality from his ‘theoretical social science’ (1957, p. 41). 63. Dumont (1979), p. 793. 64. Dumont (1980a), § 118. 65. Cf. n. 32, above. 66. For the application to societies, see Dumont (1979), p. 795. If we suppose the levels to be numerous, and the reversal multiplied, then we have a fluctuating dyadic relationship which may statistically give the impression of equality. In a quite different context, Sahlins’ analysis of exchange in the Huon Gulf is pregnant with meaning (Sahlins (1976), pp. 322 f.). [Editor’s note: the reference to the English edition should be Sahlins (1972), pp. 285 ff.] Briefly: (1) between two commercial partners, each of the exchanges in a series is unbalanced, alternatively in one and the other direction, in approximation to a balance reached in the end, i.e. for the series as a whole; equality is thus reached through a succession of somewhat unequal exchanges; (2) each particular exchange is thus not closed but remains open and calls for the next one: the stress is on the continuing relationship more than on instantaneous equivalence between goods. All aspects of our problem are here contained in a nutshell: the difference between hierarchy and equality is not at all what we are wont to suppose. 67. Thisis what, in my view, Marcel Gauchet does in a thoughtful reappraisal of Tocqueville; Gauchet (1980, see esp. pp. 90–116).  

Witchcraft, morality, and doubt This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Malcolm Ruel, Odu: Journal of Yoruba and Related Studies. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau7.1.045 REPRINT Witchcraft, morality, and doubt Malcolm RUEL   Among the Banyang witchcraft forms one element of their wider supernatural beliefs. Besides witchcraft, these include a cult of the dead, beliefs concerning a series of protective supernatural agencies or njɔ, and the concept of a generalized and ultimate deity, Mandɛm. These other elements are related to witchcraft beliefs in ways that will be later described and they are also important in their own right; yet if any complex of belief were to be singled out as preoccupying Banyang to a greater extent than others this certainly would be that which is here described as “witchcraft” and which Banyang speak of as dɛbu, that is, the actions of, and events which can be ascribed to, were-persons, bo babu. In an important respect also, these beliefs differ in their reference from other aspects of Banyang supernatural belief since they relate less to group behavior or the values inherent in group solidarity but are rather concerned with the supernatural or “non-apparent” element of individual behavior. Banyang witchcraft is concerned with the attributes or potential abilities of individual persons in their relationships with other individuals. In a number of respects this complex of belief has common features with the witchcraft beliefs which have been described for other African societies. In a way similar to that Professor Evans-Pritchard has shown for Zande witchcraft, it provides Banyang with a “philosophy of misfortune”—a way of accounting for events, especially those of personal misfortune such as death, disease, or accidents. As in Zande witchcraft, the emphasis here is on the particularity of the events explained [580]by the beliefs and their coherence or logical consistency rests to a large extent upon the fact that the beliefs are employed situationally where it is not the belief itself which is challenged but the event or sequence of events which is apprehended in terms of the belief (Evans-Pritchard 1937). There is also, as Evans-Pritchard and other writers have shown elsewhere, an important moral element in Banyang witchcraft—albeit an “inverted” morality which presents stereotypes of evil or anti-social actions and where the “witch” is seen as a person who stands outside and opposed to society (Middleton 1963; Buxton 1963). Finally, to take up a point which R.G. Lienhardt (1951) makes in his account of Dinka witchcraft, these beliefs are very closely involved in questions of personal identity and individuality: despite the fact that in contexts of formal description clear general or type attributes can be named concerning a “witch” or witchcraft activities, in the actual situations where witchcraft is suspected, the suspicion is focused not upon type-agents but upon people: even although one may be unable to name who the witch is, there is no doubt that it is some one, a living person. In other respects Banyang witchcraft has some unusual features. Firstly, the beliefs have an unusual degree of detailed elaboration: basically they concern the possession of animal counterparts which can be used to harm others, but there is a very wide range of possible “were-animals” that people can possess and the actions attributed to them are equally diverse. Secondly, and leading on from the first feature, not all were-animals are believed to do harm and even those that are most closely associated with harmful actions may in particular instances be owned without harming others. Although, as it were, all witchcraft—the possession of any were-attribute—is tainted by the nefariousness of some, the essential moral question is not “Does a person possess were-animals?” (to which the answer is likely to be “yes,” since all people are to a greater or lesser extent assumed to have them) but “Which were-animals does he possess?” and “How have they been used?” Witchcraft dɛbu, is not of itself evil: it provides the potentiality for evil which depends upon the way in which were-attributes have in fact been used. A third characteristic feature of the beliefs is their strongly “introspective” or self-identifying element. Although one may fear or harbor suspicions of other’s witchcraft activities, explicit accusation of other persons is rare: the identification of were-persons and their activities is made not through others’ accusations but through the events which befall or the spoken testimony of the were-person, mu dɛbu, himself. It is impossible then in the case of Banyang to undertake the kind of analyses that Marwick (1952) has suggested for Cewa witchcraft or sorcery, where the accusations made between persons are related to situations of tension in certain social relations and enable some adjustment to be effected in them. This does not mean that tensions are absent in Banyang society but suggests that they are of a more general nature, common to a wider range of persons. Finally, Banyang witchcraft beliefs are totally unallied with any belief in or practice of “sorcery” (i.e. the use of medicines or material agents in the belief that this may directly cause harm to others): the harm which people may do to others is expressed exclusively in terms of the inherent powers possessed through witchcraft or were-attributes. From their contact with people of other cultures Banyang recognize the possibility of sorcery but they deny its presence within their own traditional society. This exclusive emphasis on witchcraft beliefs as such makes the present study highly [581]relevant to the hypothesis recently advanced by Middleton and Winter (1963), who in distinguishing between witchcraft and sorcery suggest that witchcraft beliefs are more likely to be used to express actions of maleficence in societies whose local groups, wider than the domestic kin-group, are recruited on the principle of unilineal kinship, whereas sorcery beliefs are more likely to appear where local groups are not so recruited (i.e. where a man can choose his own neighbors). Banyang beliefs lend support to this hypothesis, but in a way I shall attempt to elaborate further. The argument that I present in this paper is that Banyang witchcraft beliefs pose a central problem concerning individual behavior. This problem concerns the use of personal abilities or personal qualities of character in a society where in the immediate sphere of social life a person’s position in relation to others is ascribed or “given” to him by the fact of his birth, his membership of a particular kin-group being basic to his identity in society. In these circumstances (where his personal identity and ideally his interests are merged in a wider group) what role should he play as an individual: in what ways should he direct the attributes or abilities that he finds himself individually endowed with? This problem is intensified by the fact that whereas in the localized kin- or lineage-group, a person’s status is ascribed outside this—in the sphere of community or political activities there is a strong emphasis upon the values of individual ability and personal achievement. I shall suggest that this tension in the structure of the society underlies the nature of Banyang witchcraft belief. Ultimately, however, and in the face of the problem here outlined, the beliefs provide little assurance, but show an underlying doubt or uncertainty. The paper will try to show that a central feature of the beliefs is precisely this element of uncertainty, of ambivalence, both concerning the nature of the were-animals and the moral implications of their possession. Used to explain events after they have occurred, the beliefs do not establish a line of conduct whose moral consequences are clear in advance of its being made. A moral problem is posed then through the beliefs but the morality which they offer is negative and retrospective in its judgments. The paper describes firstly the general background of Banyang society and in particular the tension between kinship and community values before considering in greater detail the nature of the beliefs themselves. The social background Banyang are one of a series of small ethnic groups living in the present Western State of the Federal Cameroon Republic. According to the. 1953 census they numbered little more than 18,000 persons in their home country. Their territory, which lies in the central area of the basin of the upper Cross River, is hilly and forested, traversed by many rivers and streams; it is also very populated, with a density of approximately 23 persons per square mile. Banyang are traditionally farmers, growing plantains and coco-yams as their two most important crops. A feature of their country and of the larger region of which it is part is the variety and number of wild animals found there.1[582] The pre-colonial political structure of Banyang society was essentially a small-scale one based upon a system of autonomous or semi-autonomous residential groups. As a people they lacked any overall political unity. The largest political groups accepting a common authority and recognizing a corporate unity were the village groups or “clans” numbering rarely more than 2,000 persons. These were further divided into villages, politically the most important units, each village recognizing a pre-eminent chief, and smaller hamlets, separate residential groups within the village whose own chiefs were junior to the village chief. In fact all these orders of grouping—village group, village hamlet—are known by a single undifferentiated εtɔk, “community” or “town,” and may be represented as different extensions of one overall community (ultimately the village group) whose members combine for political action on different occasions at different levels. Such political action is concerned especially with the government of affairs within the community itself and is essentially collective or corporate in character: authority is a function of the community and its exertion is dependent upon the unity of its associated members. While chiefs serve to define the formal status and interrelationships of particular residential groups, they act as leaders or representatives rather than rulers, and it is the “community” itself, represented (at any level of grouping) by chiefs and elders acting in council, who decide political issues, judge cases, discuss events of common concern, and so forth. Cutting across the principle of residential association which is at the basis of community grouping is the further principle of descent or kinship unity. The largest corporate political group, usually a village group, is normally associated with and in most cases takes its name from the descendants of one ancestor. Within a village group, however, its integral residential groups (villages and hamlets) are characteristically composed of a series of separate descent or lineage groups (banɛrɛkɛt), each a corporate group with its own internal structure of authority. Villages are thus composed of a number of “major” lineage groups (commonly five to eight), hamlets of a number of “minor” lineage groups (commonly three or four). While all lineage groups are linked to the common genealogy of the village group or “clan” as a whole, it is the position of a lineage group within the wider residential group of which it is part which is the most important factor determining its form rather than the genealogical status of their common ancestor. The unity of interest and corporate structure of a lineage group are based upon the continuing common kinship which its members share and which distinguishes them from other members of the same residential community. This dual system of grouping gives to each Manyang a dual identity. In the first place he is “a person of such-and-such a community” (mu εtɔk N-): for example, if a person is asked in Banyang country at large where he comes from he is likely to give the name of his village, “I am a Tali person,” “a Bara person,” and so on. Within the community itself, however, a man’s identity is derived from the lineage group of which he is a member: here he will be described as a “child” (mɔ) of one of the known lineage group ancestors. Moreover a person’s position within a community (village or hamlet) is very closely associated with the power or prestige of his [583]lineage group, for it is these, his fellow kinsmen, who will be expected to support him in any matter which involves him directly with the community. As Banyang say, “A person’s respect comes from his lineage group.” Status within the community and status within the lineage group, while linked in the structure of Banyang society, are based upon very different qualities and attributes. Status within a lineage group is primarily ascribed: it implies a moral unity with one’s fellow kinsfolk which no Manyang would explicitly deny. Although in practice there may be disagreements or dissatisfaction between lineage group kinsfolk, ideally their unity of interest is always strongly emphasized. There is a saying, which may be sung as a lament by a person who has lost his closest lineage relatives, “A person alone (i.e. without kin) is an animal.” This saying, whose terms bear upon our later description, suggests how it is through one’s kin that one is brought into society, made as it were a true person. A man’s status in the community, on the other hand, is very largely achieved and depends to a great extent upon his personal abilities, his access to wealth, and ultimately upon his personal good fortune. In the past, when residential patterns were somewhat different, any man could found his own settlement and could attempt to attract followers to himself there. There are no strictly hereditary community positions: through the help of a man’s father or kinsfolk he may be placed in a better position for the competitive acquisition of community status, but this must still be done individually—by entry into the associations or closed groups of a community, by building up followers, by expanding his domestic family. The element of achievement which underlies community status is expressed in the term mu εtɔk, “person of the community,” itself: in its literal sense, as when combined with a place-name, the phrase refers to any residential member of the (specified) community, but the same phrase is more commonly used, without qualification, to refer to someone who has achieved positive status in the community by being actively involved in its affairs. A man who does not join associations, who stays away from the corporate meetings of a community and has no voice in its running is often described as being “outside the community,” “lost in the bush”: the bo Etŋk, “the people of the community,” are those people of standing who collectively represent the community in its corporate actions. These two types of demand upon a person need not necessarily conflict. A man may become a leader of his own age-group, may join associations, and so forth, without in any sense denying his obligations to his kin: indeed, his lineage group would be pleased by its representation through him in community activities. If, however, he is to achieve any significant status in the community—to become at some level a “chief” this is likely to bring him into competition with others of his own lineage group who are similarly seeking status, and may ultimately give rise to a split within the group and residential secession from it in the case of such a split the emergent leader is likely to carry certain of his kinsmen as supporters with him. A man who presses his own potential leadership or abilities too hard, on the other hand, is likely to alienate his kinsmen as a group and to acquire the reputation of being “arrogant” or “proud,” thus losing their support. The two sets of values imply then a certain tension in the choice of behavior for the individual person: a harmonization of them is required at each stage of a man’s life, the need to achieve status through his own efforts being related to the support or security which is derived from his merged identity with his own kin.[584] The nature of witchcraft The term dɛbu (in its singular form) refers in a general sense to any were-animal or were-attribute that a person may possess and it can also be used to describe the actions or events believed to derive from them. Although the term does not belong to the abstract noun class in Kenyang, it is frequently used in an abstract or generalized way to refer to the fact of a person having were-ability or as a general explanation of events caused by it. The plural form, on the other hand, babu, refers more specifically to “were-animals” as creatures or “beings with their own separate identities.” Banyang are not alone in their beliefs in “animal souls” which would appear to be common in the Cross River area. It is notable, however, that whereas amongst the Ejagham, who neighbor Banyang to the west, a distinction is made between “witchcraft” (ɔjε) as a malevolent activity and the possession of “animal souls” (Efamɛ),2 no such distinction is made by Banyang. For Banyang there is no separate attribute or power distinguished from dɛbu which can be used mystically to harm others: were-animals are not necessarily evil, but it is pre-eminently they who potentially provide the means to injure others. The beliefs in were-animals take their cosmology from the settlement communities in which Banyang live. The mbaŋ, the “world around,” “general area” or “place,” includes on the one hand the area where people live, the εtɔk, the settlement or residential community, and on the other the “bush,” ebɔ, which surrounds the settlements, an area of farms, bush and forest, inhabited by animals. Witchcraft, dɛbu, is the possession by a person in the community of another identity which has the form of an animal living in the bush. One person may have one or a number of such “were-animals,” babu. Characteristically, a “witch” or “were-person” (mu dɛbu) is thought to be able to move in his (or her) were-identity in the “bush of the were-animals” (ɛba babu) at night whilst his body lies inert or “sleeping” in his house in the settlement. Although witchcraft belief takes its primary orientation from this division of the Banyang world into “settlement” and “bush,” there is nevertheless some ambivalence about the exact sphere in which “were-animals” operate. Associated in the first place with the “real” bush (where they can be met by hunters, fall into traps, be attacked by others, etc.) were-animals are also thought to move about in invisible form within the residential community itself. Only those who can dεgɔ mbaŋ, “see the place”—those who have second sight—can witness their actions there. Children who cry or dogs that growl for no apparent reason may be said to have seen were-animals moving invisibly in the settlement. Were-animals are divided into two broad classes, “were-animals of destruction” (babu nsɔ) and “were-animals of ability” (babu betaŋ: betaŋ is the general word for “power,” “strength,” or “ability”). The “were-animals of destruction” are those whose possession may be used to cause injury to others (either directly, or to farms or property); they are also associated with certain internal organs or conditions of the body which can be examined at a post mortem operation to establish which animals a person owned and used harmfully. The “were-animals of ability” are associated with certain physical, temperamental or sometimes supernatural attributes [585]and are said to lie not “in the belly” but “in the skin” (that is, in the surface of the body, perhaps “in the muscles”); they are not subject to examination by autopsy. The most notorious of the were-animals of destruction is the bird of night, the owl, the “chief of the were-animals,” which is believed to consume children; at an autopsy possession of an owl is signified by large clots of blood formed in the heart. Closely second to the owl is the python, which is thought typically to work in league with the owl: the owl takes the “shadow” or “spirit” of a child and gives it to the python who then “sits with it,” whilst the child at home sickens and may eventually die. At an autopsy the evidence for possession of a python is swollen intestines which slither out of the belly when this is open. What Banyang describe as a “male owl” or “penis owl” (ɛpɛmndɛm) is believed to go at night to cohabit with women, thus causing miscarriages, difficulties in child-birth or barrenness; the sign of a male owl (which can be owned by either men or women) is a swollen or turgid appendix. Possession of a bush-pig is especially linked with women: moving in herds they may cause damage to farms, and ownership may also be suspected in cases of frequent miscarriages or infertility, when the woman is said to be “bearing her children in the bush” and not at home. The sign of a bush-pig is said to resemble a gecko, lying in the lower part of the pelvis (probably the fallopian tubes), which when “rotten” or in an abnormal condition indicates possession and harmful use of the were-animal. A further series of animals, although generally classed as were-animals of destruction, are less positively condemned and are in part associated with “abilities” which may be used for acceptable purposes: the important point here is whether the were-animal, potentially destructive, has in fact been used harmfully. These animals include: the leopard, which can chase or attack other animals in the bush or may carry off goats from a settlement and is associated with physical strength or litheness in fighting, running or dancing, and whose sign is spotted or mottled lungs; the elephant, which sometimes causes damage to farms but more especially is said to “hear things” (-gok mbaŋ in the witchcraft world) and in real life to give its owner the ability to learn quickly what is going on in the community, and whose sign is a pitted liver (said to be marks of the grape-shot of the hunter who has killed the animal); the hippopotamus (“the elephant of the river”) whose attributes in the river are similar to the elephant’s in the bush, but whose physiological sign I did not ascertain; the crocodile, which can attack others in the river or those coming to the river and whose sign is the “rotten” or abnormal condition of what is probably the pancreas (with a form not unlike that of a crocodile); the bush-cow, associated with wily strength in fighting and sometimes said to carry off children, its sign small holes in the smaller part of the liver (mɔ bεcεn). Mention should also be made of a certain species of owl (εkpɔnεn), distinct from the common owl (ɛpɛm), which owl is believed to be possessed by members of a witchcraft detection society, Basinjom, and is properly used to fly at night to observe witchcraft happenings but which may also be used for evil purposes, “to eat the heart of others”; its sign is the “rotting” of the surface of the heart. Finally, “lightning” is also believed to be a were-attribute which can be used to cause damage by striking trees or more rarely houses, and is especially associated with a fierce or commanding temperament; its sign is an enlarged gall-bladder. The “were-animals of ability” are even more numerous than those of “destruction.” I have collected some thirty different creatures and no doubt there are many [586]others. The following may serve as examples: possession of a wasp (which frequently builds its hanging nest in a doorway or under the eaves of a house) helps to protect its owner from the incursions of other were-animals and is often associated with sharpness of temper; possession of a mud-fish is said to enable its owner to sweat profusely in fighting and so to slip out of his opponent’s grasp; possession of a bat enables its owner to have control over the waters of a river, damming the river by stretching itself across it and then suddenly releasing the waters and so causing a flood; a hunter may be helped by possession of an apparently mythical animal, (εssɔnatɔ), who invisibly rounds up animals for him to shoot; possession of a drill (ɛkurikak) is believed to confer strength of body, including the ability to carry heavy loads; possession of a lemur [sic] is associated with a strong grasp; of a hawk, the supernatural ability to fly up out of an awkward situation; of a type of rat or burrowing animal (ngumbok), the ability to burrow out of or otherwise extricate oneself from an enclosed space; of a lion; the ability to lead or command others—and also to protect the settlement from other animals; of a certain bird (ncɔkɔrɔk), skill and liveliness in dancing. The division of were-animals into two classes implies a moral distinction between those animals which are, or can be, used harmfully and those which are merely of benefit to their owners. The difference however is not entirely clear-cut since, as has been noted in describing them, not all the “were-animals of destruction” are thought of as necessarily harmful and a number of them are associated with acceptable attributes: the most open in this respect are probably the elephant, the bush-cow, the εkpɔnɔn owl, and “lightning.” Such animals merge into the second class, the “were-animals of ability,” and in some situations can be aligned with them. For the most part, however, less emphasis is given to the were animals of ability, which have a greater diversity and are more sporadically owned. Possession of them is generally regarded as being morally neutral and they may be claimed or ascribed with few overtones: nor can positive evidence—internal, physiological signs—be adduced to prove ownership. Nevertheless, even a were-animal of ability may become a potential danger to its owner, since, as we shall later see, anything which affects or occurs to a person’s were-animal in the bush is thought to have its repercussions upon the person “in the house.” Someone who is noted as having a particular were-animal of ability—a lion, hawk, or drill, say—and who falls ill, may have his illness explained in terms of things that have occurred to his were-animal. Such explanations are made far more commonly with regard to the were-animals of destruction but no person with a witchcraft attribute is entirely free from the danger of involvement in “the bush of the were-animals.” Banyang believe that were-animals are acquired, usually in childhood, by instruction and the use of medicines. It is commonly the parents who are thought to instruct the child but sometimes it may be a more distant relative who has been close to the child in its upbringing. Instruction in witchcraft is closely associated with the general process of a child’s education, which for Banyang is a recognized and deliberate activity by which a man or woman’s knowledge is passed on to the child. (Teaching of “affairs of the community” is especially important in the relationship of father to son.) Potentially any person can have acquired were-animals in this way, although he may later deny conscious knowledge of them. When, for example, I have denied that I possessed were-animals, I have been asked: “Did your [587]mother (or father) not love (or care for) you?” A number of people have told me how in their childhood their fathers had given them medicines to drink (leaves or woods, usually infused in water) either telling them or implying that this was a form of were-animal, although in these cases the were-animal claimed was always one of “ability,” not of “destruction.” Other more fanciful accounts are given of procedures used to teach possession of were-animals, sometimes coupled with stories of how medicines actually change into the animal concerned. In general, however, there is assumed to be a definite stage of instruction when the candidate’s “eyes are opened,” i.e. when full, conscious knowledge of the were-animal is imparted, together with the ability to activate it. People will often admit, somewhat generally, that they may have been taught were-animals by their parents but will deny that “their eyes were opened.” Evidence for the direction from which witchcraft has been taught is given in the autopsy by whether the signs appear on the right-hand side of the body (which indicates the father or father’s side) or the left-hand side of the body (indicating the mother or maternal kin). The use of witchcraft for evil purposes is identified for Banyang with actions of duplicity or deceit. A were-person (who does harm) is closely akin to “a person of two voices” (mu bɛyŋbɛ pai) or double-dealer; to “do evil things,” “to move at night,” or “do things of the night” is to use witchcraft for wrong-doing. Such possibilities of deceitful action are believed to be an ever-present factor in human relations: whatever a person says one is never sure of what he is contemplating “in his heart.” This uncertainty in human relations may be contrasted with the quality of certainty or truth which is ascribed to God, Mandɛm. Although Upper Banyang often refer in ordinary speech to “Mandɛm” (usually in the sense of an ultimate cause, often as a beneficent guiding providence) and sometimes address prayers to him, Mandɛm or Mandɛm mfai, “God above,” is nevertheless seen as a distant, inaccessible figure beyond man’s direct comprehension. More immediately involved in human affairs and representing the principle of truth or certainty there are the cult-agencies, njɔ, which are believed ultimately to owe their efficacy to God and may be described as Mandɛm mɛk, “God below.” These cult-agencies, of which the most important is Mfam, are thought to operate against actions of wrong-doing or deceit within the community: they are used in the swearing of oaths in legal cases; they may be invoked against unknown thieves; but their most important role is the detection and punishment of evil actions through were-animals. Single cult-agencies are normally owned by the members of a lineage group or a section of one. Their impersonal power is thought constantly to be operating in the settlement: when it “sees” any evil action of witchcraft it will “take” or “catch” the witch, who will then fall sick and, if nothing further is done, may die. After an act of witchcraft has been suspected a cult-agency may be especially invoked; not all cult-agencies are thought to be equally effective; but ultimately the punishment through the cult-agencies of harm by witchcraft is automatic and certain. “A were-person will not remain in the community” (mu dεbu apu tat εtɔk).3[588] Witchcraft as an explanation of death, illness, and abnormal events The illness or death of children, the barrenness of women, accidents causing injury, a house catching fire, drowning or the loss of goods in a river, damage to farms, the loss of a goat or dog, the unusual flooding of a river or the sudden storms which come in the dry season may all be accounted for through the action of witchcraft or were-animals. Witchcraft is an ever-present element in Banyang thought and speech about events in the world around them and is likely to be imputed in any unusual happening, especially one of misfortune. Many such explanations remain circumstantial, to be confirmed or altered by the later process of events. In the most serious cases—for example, the illness or death of children—a diviner may be consulted and his advice sought. If he confirms that witchcraft is the cause of the misfortune (illness may also be caused by the dead) he will indicate what actions should be taken to guard against it. It is unlikely however that responsibility for a particular case of misfortune will be expressed as an explicit accusation against another, known person. An accumulation of incidents and suspicions may center over a period of time on one person and in the past, it is said, such suspected witches were required to undergo trial by the esere bean or other means. The use of these ordeals was however stopped in early colonial times and their only modern equivalents are the accusations which can be made at a dance of the Basinjom society. The identification of a witch depends less however upon the accusations of others than upon the events which demonstrate the person’s own complicity in were-actions. One of the commonest songs sung in a witchcraft context emphasizes this element of personal responsibility or self-searching: “If something disappears in the house, you yourself should look for it.” In Banyang belief a were-person faces two potential dangers. In the first place the mere fact of possessing a were-animal and moving with it in the bush or having it in the river, renders its owner liable to any accident or misfortune which can occur to the were-animal there: one’s leopard may be trapped, one’s elephant shot, sand from the river may be thrown into the eyes of one’s hippopotamus, and so on. Such events are believed to cause parallel disease or injury to the person’s body at home: sores appear on the legs; a person is suddenly sick and vomits black bile; someone goes blind. These are only some of the commonest and most stereotyped explanations, but there are many others which relate circumstantially to the particular features of a disease and to the were-animals that a person may be assumed to have: breathlessness to the running away of a leopard (who has been challenged by or wishes to escape from others); an attack of virulent boils to the biting of ants; festering sores on the nose and face to a crab which has seized the muzzle of a were-leopard coming to the pool to drink, and so on. The second potential danger concerns a were-person who “removes his were-animal” to cause harm to others and who is “caught” by the protective cult-agency njɔ. In either case recovery from the disease and avoidance of its possible fatal consequences is possible only after the person has “confessed” (-ka, affirm, agree to) [589]his (or her) were-animals. In the first case such a confession may be made simply as an open statement in front of other people, in daylight, facing the sun, in the settlement. (It would seem usually to be made outside or just behind the house in which the sick person is living.) In the second case, when njɔ has caught a culpable witch, confession must be combined with the ritual removal of the cult-agency’s influence, which is carried out at the appropriate shrine of the cult-agency in the presence of those who own it. Confession must be full: if anything is held back the disease may still continue, it is believed, leading ultimately to the person’s death. Such confessions are in fact made and provide Banyang with the clearest verbal evidence for the existence of were-animals and the malefactions of their owners. The possibility of false or incomplete confession is however also recognized, with its consequences in failure to recover and ultimate death. It is at this point that witchcraft beliefs are used almost exclusively to explain events, and here too that most certain knowledge is gained regarding a person’s were-animals. In the vast majority of cases—the major exceptions are the deaths of small children and obviously old and senile people—deaths are accounted for by witchcraft, where the witchcraft concerned is that owned by the dead person himself. The evidence for this is obtained at an autopsy performed immediately before burial. (In 1953–4 such operations were illegal but were still very widely performed; for one reason or another they might be omitted but whenever there was doubt about the cause of death the pressure was always to perform them.) The skin and flesh covering the stomach and chest of the corpse is cut and folded backwards over the face and the internal organs are examined for the signs which have already been listed. The person who performs this operation is not a specialist but is any person not directly related to the deceased (often a friend or in-law to the lineage group) who has knowledge of the signs and who is willing to undertake the task. It is usually he who first interprets the signs but they should also be witnessed and agreed to by observers from the lineage group of the deceased, and in the case of a younger person from his matrilateral kin. The signs are interpreted for were-animals that the person has owned but has not activated or “removed from his belly” and for those that the person has “removed” and used for harmful purposes—and which now account for his death. The uncertain actuality of were-animals A number of features of Banyang witchcraft belief are immediately striking: the very generality of these beliefs which ascribe to all persons a greater or lesser complicity in the “other” world of were-identities; the elaborate diversity of were-animals which people are thought to possess and “use” in various ways; the developed circumstantiality of the beliefs which associate witchcraft with a wide range of material circumstances—types of disease, physical abilities, possible events, organs and conditions of the body (some of which may indeed be interrelated in fact). A further feature of this belief system which would seem to be of critical importance to it is the quality of uncertainty or ambivalence which it shows concerning both the nature of the were-animals and the moral consequences of their use. In this section I discuss the ambivalence which surrounds the way Banyang speak of [590]were-animals—at once “actual” and “psychic.” In the following section I discuss their moral ambivalence—sometimes neutral or morally acceptable, sometimes harmful and “evil,” but with the effective distinction between the two by no means certain. It is important to understand that these beliefs are not seen as a formally arranged, “logical” system of ideas, in the way that they have been presented here, but are associated very much more closely with the ongoing pattern of events taking place in a community. This pattern, as interpreted by the beliefs, is an emergent, ever-continuing one. A child is sick; farms are ravaged by bush-pigs; a goat is lost; a young man falls ill; his illness continues and he confesses to moving with a leopard and bush-cow; the child dies but before its death the cult-agency, Mfam, is carried, its power being invoked against the (unknown) were-person harming the child; a woman falls ill and before the cult-agency she confesses to a python and bush-pig; she recovers, but later the young man dies; there is an autopsy after his death and he is discovered to have had an owl, lightning, and a leopard, but did not “remove” his leopard to do harm with it. Witchcraft interpretations emerge from such a complex and intertwined skein of events: so much can be directly explained by the beliefs (the death of the child; the inefficacy of the young man’s confession and his subsequent death); more can be inferred from the events (the complicity of the woman in the child’s illness and in the ravaging of the farms); what remains unexplained (the subsidiary were-signs at the autopsy of the young man, the loss of the goat) can be left simply unresolved, or becomes the potential reference for future events. Within this ongoing, ever emergent pattern of interpretation and events there are three relatively fixed or “certain” points around which all knowledge of witchcraft activity coheres. The first of these is the assumed power and ultimate efficacy of the cult-agencies to detect and “catch” were-persons engaged in harm.4 The second is the visible signs of witchcraft examined at an autopsy. The third is the confessions made by persons willing to admit to were-activities. The first of these points is a projected certainty only: the axiomatic power of njɔ which forms part of Banyang religious belief. The second is knowledge gained of another person’s were-animals when he himself is dead, no longer part of events and unable to reply. The third point is more crucial, for by confession individuals implicate themselves in were-activities and thus give the strongest evidence that witchcraft “exists.” Yet assuming, as we must, that were-animals do not have the ostensible reality claimed for them, how then can we explain that confessions are made and what meaning should be given to them? Individual confessions are likely to be prompted by a mixture of influences. Fear of the consequences of failure to confess, the pressure of relatives who on the occasions of illness are ready to emphasize that the matter lies with the person himself, suggestions by others (including a diviner who may indicate that an illness may [591]come from the person’s own “belly”), the memory of past events or a person’s own subjective experiences: all or any of these may form factors. The most important general fact underlying the credibility of witchcraft confessions would however seem to concern the nature of the were-animals themselves as they are conceived by Banyang. As already briefly mentioned, Banyang speak of were-animals as having a different form in different contexts. In some contexts they appear as the actual animals which inhabit the bush, rivers and forest around their settlements: the bush-pigs which do in fact ravage farms, the leopards which are known to carry off goats and can occasionally attack an isolated person, the owls which are heard at night hooting from a housetop or nearby tree. In other contexts were-animals are ascribed less actually and are said to be present or to move in invisible form: they are “shadows” (barikndi) or “spirits” (bεfoɔo) moving about in the community. Again, while most of the were-animals correspond to actual species, a number of them shade off into animals which are known only by hearsay (e.g the lion, which is not a forest animal, or the nyakɛfiɛt the animal of the grassland) and finally into those which can only be described as mythical (e.g. the hunter’s aid, the εsɔŋatɔ, and another animal which was described to me as living in the depths of the forest and having huge, luminous eyes which lit up the area around it). This same ambivalence applies also to the mode of operation of the were-animals: sometimes actual (the striking of lightning, the carrying off of domestic animals, damage to farms, attacking other animals), sometimes supernatural (the owl which “eats” children, the python which “sits with” the child’s “spirit”), sometimes a mixture of the two modes (the elephant which “hears things” in the witchcraft world, those animals of ability which enable their owners to fly up or burrow out of difficult situations). Throughout much or all of these beliefs there is an element of extended metaphor which in its extension hovers uncertainly between literal and symbolic statement. For example, the phrase dεgɔmbaŋŋ means literally “to see the place” (or world around); someone who does not do this is blind. The phrase is also used metaphorically in the sense “to see (or know) things that go on”; during the hearing of a dispute and in the face of an unlikely account of events a chief or leading man can challenge the disputant by asking “Do you think I do not see what goes on?” (literally, that: “I do not see the place”). Finally, as already mentioned, the phrase means “to see things in the witchcraft world,” but in this sense (while the metaphorical meaning is still there) the literal elements are stronger and are supported by an extended verbal and ritual usage concerning sight and the eyes; medicine is indeed put in the eyes of Basinjom candidates so that they may “see the place”; similarly instruction in possession of were-animals involves at some stage “opening” the initiant’s “eye,” while others who “see the witchcraft world” are thought to do so through the means of their were-animals which inhabit it. Clearly there is an element of symbolism here, but it is a symbolism which is systematically elaborated to provide the basis for behavior and explanation which treat the “symbolic” statements as though they had “literal” meaning: the dividing line between metaphor and literal truth is blurred and at any one point it is difficult to distinguish between them or to say which element is the more important. A part of the coherence of Banyang witchcraft belief depends upon such an extended system of analogy which can be referred at different points and in different ways to actual events or personal experience.[592] An important area of this range of reference concerns mental or psychological experience. Whilst the “objective” evidence for witchcraft activities is usually cited in the consistency of the events they purport to explain (for example, recovery from illness after confession), when I have pressed informants to state more exactly what witchcraft is they have generally pointed to people’s “thought” or “evil ideas” about others. It is often said that “witchcraft is people’s thoughts”; “Witchcraft is when someone is annoyed and has the idea of harming another.” It is worth noting at this point the parallel which exists between Western psychological concepts and the concepts of Banyang witchcraft. The divided areas of “bush” and “community” resemble in a number of respects the divisions of the “sub-conscious” and “conscious” mind. The “bush,” like the “sub-conscious” mind, is a place of no apparent order, of rampant individualism, a place in which the normal principles of space and time are in abeyance. From this area come the influences which break in upon and disturb the ordered, public life of the community. “Confession” to were-activities is a process of harmonizing the two areas, of making explicit and public within the one actions or influences deriving from the other, a process of “re-integrating” or “re-socializing” the person in the community who was earlier part of this divided world. I would not argue that the “reality” of Banyang witchcraft beliefs lies in the realm of psychological experience. This certainly would be denied by Banyang, who find plenty of external evidence for witchcraft in the events of the world around them. Yet the fact that the nature and operation of were-animals is left uncertain by the beliefs enables these beliefs to be extended into the field of psychological experience and to be used there as a kind of psychology, a set of interrelated concepts which enable people to express and deal with this experience. Witchcraft and the problem of individual behavior As has been emphasized throughout in this paper, the possession of were-animals is not itself condemned. It is how a person acts with his were-animals that determines his guilt or innocence. Throughout the whole range of the beliefs this moral issue is left open: in the two main categories of were-animals (those of “destruction” and those of “ability”); in the fact that even some were-animals classed with those of “destruction” may be used merely for personal benefit and without causing harm; in the denial of conscious knowledge of whatever were-animals a person possesses (that he may have been instructed in were-animals by his parents but “his eyes were not opened”): and finally in the plea that even although a person owns and has knowledge of the most heinous of the were-animals (especially the python) this has been “kept in the house” and has not been sent out on nefarious errands. So also when were-abilities are spoken of in more general terms, the point implicitly made concerns how they are used and not their possession as such. Thus it is commonly said that in the distant past the only were-animals that people had were those of “ability” and that they used them for good; nowadays, it is added, “people’s hearts have changed and they use their were-animals for evil things.” Again, it is generally believed that Europeans have were-animals (“lightning” in particular is commonly ascribed to Europeans) and it is sometimes said that it is with their were-animals [593]that Europeans have created all the things that they have—airplanes in the sky, ships that travel on the water, ships that travel under the water, and so on. But, it is added (or was, in 1953–4), whereas Europeans have used their were-abilities to good purposes, “black people” have used them only to harm others. (On the other hand, when I spoke of the atom bomb the immediate response of my informants was that this was witchcraft, dɛbu, and that it showed that Europeans too, could use this ability for evil.) The central issue of Banyang were-beliefs concerns not the existence of were-attributes but in what ways such attributes are directed. Although were-animals are thought to be able to range over relatively far distances and to form compacts with others there, the use of were-animals to cause harm to others is commonly associated with the immediate field of social relations, including especially lineage kinsfolk and co-residents. A were-person may wish to injure these, it is thought, out of malice or a secret jealousy. A further, stereotyped reason for a kinsman (or kinswoman) attacking his (or her) own kin comes from the complicity of the were-person in witchcraft activities which then obliges him to sacrifice a relative (or occasionally part of himself); were-animals are said thus to join in “groups” (ncɛmɛ) in order to share in the food each member provides in turn; someone who has been brought into the association will at first share in the food of others but will then be obliged to make his own contribution under pain of his own life, and so will be forced to give someone close to him. Occasionally witchcraft is said to operate within a lineage group in preservation of its own norms or solidarity. There is a belief that each lineage group owns its own part of a river, or “deep” (Eka), where its members’ were-animals live. A person who flouts the norms of kinship by offending or failing to respect his lineage elders may, it is believed, be disciplined by them “in the river.” This belief in the sanctioning power of lineage were-animals is similar in form to belief in the sanctioning power of the dead of the lineage group, who on perceiving the annoyance of its living elders are thought to cause illness to a miscreant member: whereas, however, the sanction of the dead is associated with an external, moral force (which is merely activated by the elders), the sanction of the were-animals is essentially an individual trial of strength (in which the more experienced elders may be thought to have a greater robustness). Thus if a person is proud and does not respect others, he may be told: “We shall meet with our were-animals: then we shall see who is the strongest.” As these examples show, the possession of witchcraft is essentially an attribute of persons as individuals; the qualities associated with the were-animals are the individual qualities distinguishing one person from another, and the various actions ascribed to were-animal may be said to figure the ways in which such particular qualities may be directed. The morality implicit in witchcraft beliefs is not then a statement of “good” or “bad” qualities as such but of the harmony or discordance of individual behavior within the framework of generally accepted social relationships. The range of this discordance is illustrated by the range of the were-animals themselves. The most heinous of them—the owl and python, together in a slightly lesser place with the male owl and bush-pig—may be said to represent individual actions which run directly counter to the central values of the society: the bearing and rearing of children in the community and the rightful use of sexuality in procreation. These were-animals have the characteristic quality of “inversion” noted [594]for the witchcraft beliefs of other societies. At the other extremes, the “were-animals of ability” represent individual attributes which are morally neutral, not running counter to social norms or relationships. Nevertheless, as we have seen, the fact of wrongful action—action discordant with given social norms—is not determined solely by the nature of the were-animal itself. While this is true to some extent of all were-animals it is most notably so of those were-animals which stand between the two extremes cited above. Here there is an important series of animals (the leopard, elephant, crocodile, hippopotamus, bush-cow, Ekpɔnɔn owl, “lightning”) whose moral attributes are open, uncertain or ambivalent. They may be used to do harm—and as such are classified with the “were-animals of destruction”—but their possession is also believed to confer abilities which are not condemned, but are of advantage to the person who owns them. It is these animals, moreover, which figure to a large extent in stories about witchcraft, in confessions, in accounts of a person’s self-caused death, and so on. Some indication of the kind of issue which is posed by the possession of them is given by the personal abilities associated with them. Most of these are of direct relevance to the individual struggle for status in the community: personal power, command and initiative in action, knowledge of affairs. Such qualities are very much those expected of a man who is to rise to the status of chief or leading elder in a community; but they are also qualities which by their very individualism are potentially disruptive of other norms and relationships. The problem which is posed by, and through, Banyang were-beliefs and which is focused centrally in this intermediate series of were-animals can now be stated more precisely. Briefly it can be described as the problem of uncertain individualism. While all behavior to some extent implies such a problem it would seem to be one which is especially emphasized by the conditions of Banyang society. Here, as we have already described, two sets of values operate which while not in direct conflict (being each concerned with a separate sphere of social life) are nevertheless radically dissimilar and imply some tension in the choice of individual behavior. On the one hand, in community activities individual qualities are at a premium; on the other hand these qualities are required to accord with a person’s “given” identity as a kinsman and member of a lineage group, a group of persons whose solidarity is based upon their common, ascribed status. The problem for Banyang may be described as that of using personal attributes or abilities, but of using them in such a way as not to jeopardize other values, or oneself in relation to them. In terms of the were-beliefs themselves and stated perhaps rather crudely, the problem is of having the strength and power of a leopard (or a bush-cow or a crocodile) but of not over-aggrandizing oneself to the detriment of others, of having the initiative and command associated with “lightning” but of not overreaching oneself in one’s claims to influence over others, of having the indirect knowledge of affairs ascribed to an elephant but of not so implicating oneself in such knowledge that one’s public identity is obscured by it. Yet ultimately, while the beliefs express this problem, they do not themselves provide an answer to it. In the final analysis Banyang were-beliefs present an uncertainty and not an assurance. It is left to events to decide how a person’s were-animals have been used: these events are the external circumstances of illness and finally death, and the beliefs can have no control over them. The moral issue concerning [595]the use of a person’s were-animals is decided only after the event—by what happens to the person himself—and the judgement is circumstantial and retrospective. The incidence of confessions is perhaps itself an indication of people’s willingness to accord by the event (presented externally to them) and other’s judgment of it—and even the test of confessions in later events: proved right if further illness does not follow; wrong if illness does follow—when ultimately death and the subsequent autopsy become the final arbiters. References Buxton, Jean. 1963. “Mandari witchcraft.” In Witchcraft and sorcery in east Africa, edited by John Middleton and E.H. Winter, 99–122. London: Routledge. Durrell, Gerald. 1953. The overloaded ark. New York: Viking Press. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1937. Witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lienhardt, Godfrey. 1951. “Some notions of witchcraft among the Dinka.” Africa 21 (4): 303–18. Marwick, M. G. 1952. “The social context of Cewa witchcraft beliefs.” Africa 22 (2): 120–35. Middleton, John. 1963. “Witchcraft and Sorcery in Lugbara.” In Witchcraft and sorcery in east Africa, edited by John Middleton and E.H. Winter, 257–76. London: Routledge. Middleton, John and E. H. Winter. 1963. “Introduction.” In Witchcraft and sorcery in east Africa, edited by John Middleton and E.H. Winter, 1–26. London: Routledge. Sanderson, Ivan T. 1937. Animal treasure. New York: Viking Press. Talbot, P. Amaury. 1912. In the shadow of the bush. New York: George H. Doran Company.   Malcolm RUEL (1927–2010) was a British social anthropologist who taught at the University of Edinburgh and at Cambridge University. A student at Cambridge and Oxford, he studied with Meyer Fortes, Paul Bohannan, and E. E. Evans-Pritchard. He published two books: Leopards and leaders: Constitutional politics among a Cross River people, based on his doctoral research among the Banyang people, and Belief, ritual, and the securing of life: Reflective essays on a Bantu religion, based on research among the Kuria of East Africa. ___________________ Editors’ Note: This article is a reprint of Ruel, Malcom. 1965. “Witchcraft, morality, and doubt.” In Odu: Journal of Yoruba and Related Studies vol. 2: 3-26. We would like to thank Ann Ruel for permission to reprint the work. We remind the reader that we retain the style of the original with some minor formatting changes. 1. A number of zoological expeditions have been carried out in this general area. Two which were largely based in Banyang country have been popularly described in I.T. Sanderson’s Animal treasure (1937), and Gerald Durrell’s The overloaded ark (1953), both of which gave vivid pictures of the variety of animal life. 2. For information on this point I am grateful to Mr. S. T. Tataw of Ossing. See also Talbot 1912, Chapters 7 and 17. 3. It may be noted that it is not explicitly stated here that the “were-person” has in fact committed evil, although by its context this would be understood. On the other hand, it is sometimes said that many more people have died since the introduction of Mfam, which suggests some reservation of judgment about people’s guilt or an acknowledgement of the fact that all are in some way guilty. 4. In a more extensive description I would include in this first category the witchcraft detection society, Basinjom, whose name in Ejagham means “cult-agency (njɔm) of God (Obasi)” and which Banyang often refer to simply as “cult-agency,” njɔ. I have not attempted to give an account of this society since it would overburden the present paper and since, whilst it plays an important role in the divination of witchcraft it is not integral to the system of belief itself. The society is also of relatively recent introduction.  

Moral crises This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Max Gluckman. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau4.2.025 REPRINT Moral crises Magical and secular solutions The Marett lectures, 1964 and 1965 Max GLUCKMAN   Introduction It is a double honour for me to be invited to deliver lectures in honour of Richard Ranulph Marett in this Hall.1 Such an invitation must honour any anthropologist; and in addition I think I am correct in asserting that I was the last of his pupils to become a professional social anthropologist. In this Hall, too, I partook of that commensality which, even over meals we grumbled at, made me feel so deeply I was a member of your Society. I have selected for the theme of my lectures two subjects on which Marett wrote at length: morals and magical activity. Indeed, he first moved from the study of classics into social anthropology when he was awarded the Oxford University Green Moral Philosophy Prize for an essay on the ethics of tribal peoples (1893). His later, best-known work, The Threshold of Religion (1900), examined those forms of activity, such as magic and sorcery, which he held to precede religion. Marett, like most of his contemporaries, considered that one of the main functions of social anthropology was to set out the evolutionary series through which the institutions of human society have developed. I too am an evolutionist in that I consider that when we assess and try to understand the significance of institutions it is essential to examine them against the background of what has undoubtedly been a major trend in the history of human society as a whole—the increasing complexity of technology, and with it of economic organization. I believe that when we work out the forms of social organization and of social beliefs and ideas associated with different ranges of technology, we illuminate them all. This is now an unpopular line among social anthropologists, and has been for a long time, save for the school under Professor Leslie White at the University of Michigan. Of recent years the stress has been on what is common in the institutions of all human societies; and indeed there is much that is common to them all. Yet within this marked common area, it is possible to trace differences which acquire significance from their common matrix in social life. A further theme that I shall discuss is that of the effect of customs, the standardized practices of a particular population of people, on behaviour; and the relation of various forms of custom to the general techno-economic background. This again is a theme which Marett used frequently to stress; hence the volume of essays presented to him by his pupils and admirers on his seventieth birthday was entitled Custom is King (1936: edited Buxton). And here too I take a line that is, at least among most younger British social anthropologists, a relatively unpopular one: for many of them have moved from the emphasis laid by their elders on social relationships to study human action apart from the constraining effect of custom, which Marett considered so to dominate in controlling human behaviour. My problem may be briefly posed. Individuals in all societies run into moral crises. The crises with which I am concerned in these lectures are the crises that arise in situations where a person is moved by different social rules and values to opposed courses of action so that no clear solution is available. I shall argue that in such situations tribal custom provides resolutions which are in some form or other magico-religious, or ritual, depending on beliefs in occult forces, and I shall demonstrate this through an examination of a number of African societies.2 Durkheim and many other scholars have asked why there should be such customs, and this is the problem to which I shall address myself. I shall then report and analyse one similar crisis in an industrial society, and show how it is handled in terms of secular beliefs. From this comparison I shall suggest that there may be certain consistent contrasting approaches in the sets of beliefs of tribal societies and those of at least many members of a modern industrial society. I must emphasize here initially one point to which I shall have to refer on other occasions. Recent work on the incidence of accusations of witchcraft and sorcery, or divinations of ancestral wrath, to explain the one cause of misfortune has related these to areas of tension in social life. For example, the set of beliefs I shall particularly examine are those in witchcraft, sorcery and divination. I have selected these because they enable me, in delivering a lecture to honour Marett, at the same time to honour his successor, Professor E. E. Evans-Pritchard, at present Professor of Social Anthropology in the University of Oxford and, like myself, a member of this College by origin, though he holds his Chair in All Souls. His study, which initiated the line of research I shall follow, largely through my own work and the work of other of his pupils, is well known to social anthropologists and has influenced other disciplines. Furthermore, I shall in presenting the work that flowed from Evans-Pritchard’s be setting out some analyses I have published before, though I hope that I succeed in emphasizing their major points more adequately and in developing further their implications. I fear it is inevitable in the Marett lectures, delivered to an audience composed largely of people who are not professional anthropologists, that I must go over some grounds known to my colleagues. But the function of tributary lectures of this sort is to acquaint ‘outsiders’ with developments in one’s own subject. Moreover, because of my stress, following Marett, on the constraining effect of custom, as I have said I shall again draw attention to points of analysis which I consider have been overlooked by my colleagues in their recent concentration on human behaviour itself and in the dropping of evolutionary approaches. I shall be talking about beliefs in witchcraft and sorcery and divination, and I must insist that they constitute only part of the set of beliefs and ideas of the peoples concerned. All of them have technologies which are highly developed relatively to an absence of tools, though they appear simple in comparison with modern industrial technology. Without an efficient technology they could not have survived. All of them also have codes of law: and I for one have presented in detail records of trials in one African society, the Barotse, in which I have demonstrated that their modes of judicial reasoning are in many respects akin to those of our own judges.3 Africans insist in trials that man is distinguished from animals by his possession of ‘reason’ and ‘sense,’ and this includes ‘respect’ for custom.4 We shall see that they equally exhibit ‘reason’ in their beliefs in occult forces; and it is to a consideration of these that I now proceed. It appears to me that one of the essential elements in a set of beliefs that ascribe a person’s misfortunes to the witchcraft or sorcery of another is that individuals are made responsible, or at least can be held liable, for the welfare of their fellows in situations where, in other societies lacking such beliefs, there is no such responsible interdependence. Societies holding such beliefs have relatively under-developed technologies. Hence they have much less knowledge of the empirical causes of misfortune and good fortune, present and past. They also have less surety about the future. When they resort to divination to obtain further knowledge it may be, as Forde stressed in his Frazer lecture, because of the limits of their technical knowledge.5 But we have still to explain why this uncertainty and ignorance are interpreted so strongly in moral terms. That accusations of witchcraft or sorcery, allegations of ancestral wrath, and rituals occur in situations of social tension and areas of social strain in itself is an inadequate explanation. Our own society is full of social strain and tension, but anyone who related his misfortunes to them through accusations of witchcraft or the like would be regarded as mentally ill.6 We have to try and explain why some societies have such beliefs and others do not. The beliefs argue by implication that if the moral situation of the individual in relationship with his fellows were satisfactory, all would go well. If he suffers misfortune, it is because he himself has committed some wrong; or because he has been wronged, possibly by occult means, by one of his fellows; or because—in major, widespread disasters—there is something wrong in the moral state of the society as a whole. As Durkheim showed for early society, there is less differentiation between the natural, the social and the moral orders. The same situation is inherent in divination about the future course of events. Evans-Pritchard showed for the Azande that there is involved in divination into the future a particular conception of time, where the future is there in the present. The divination foretells the future by bringing into the open the present alignment of occult forces—which depend on moral alignments—that will influence the course of events. Thereafter one must either wait for that alignment of occult (moral) forces to alter, or else strive to protect oneself, or alter the alignment, by magic. These ideas are implicit in customary beliefs. One thing which they do, therefore, from our point of view as outside observers, is to exaggerate the dependence of people on one another. As we shall see, it is believed that if a man feels anger or envy against a fellow the latter may suffer some external misfortune: the effects of feelings are thus exaggerated. Direct moral interdependence is made greater by these beliefs than it would be without them. They thus reflect a characteristic of tribal societies, which is well expressed in a Barotse song: He who kills me, who will it be but my kinsman? He who succours me, who will it be but my kinsman?7 This song describes pithily the extent to which close relatives cooperate with and depend on one another, and the extent to which they yet compete with one another. The competition goes on within a highly valued solidarity which stresses mutuality and sharing, and which is very different from that organic solidarity which Durkheim ascribed to the increasing division of labour that finally results in modern industrial situations; here, he argued, the individual is more dependent on the specialized organs of society, yet he is more isolated and alone. Durkheim argued incorrectly that this was accompanied by a shift from repressive law to restitutive law;8 I shall try to show that it is accompanied by a varying emphasis, in occult beliefs, in the placing of responsibility towards one’s fellows, though there are common ideas about responsibility in all societies in judicial or proto-judicial situations. Examination of this varying emphasis leads to an attempt to determine in what situations occult and legal responsibility respectively will be fixed. I consider that it should be possible to bring out a comparison of shifting emphasis if we looked at units of production in traditional African societies in contrast with units of production in an industrial society. An African village can be regarded as a family firm, with resources and jobs, a number of possible workers who are at the same time shareholders, and a limited number of executive positions. What happens when the number of worker-shareholders and of competitors for executive positions increases beyond the capacity of the firm? Set in this way, we can compare events in an African village with what happens when a similar situation arises in a family firm in industrial England; and we are fortunate in that Dr C. Sofer has provided us with an excellent study of such a situation.9 In Africa the response is to call in a witch-detective, or a diviner; and I shall argue that what he does, in terms of his occult beliefs, is to exaggerate the wickedness of individuals and, as we see it, to hold them responsible for crises arising from struggles rooted in the conflicts in social structure itself. In Sofer’s study an industrial consultant is called in, and he seems to do the opposite to the diviner: he seeks to diminish resort to explanations in terms of individual wickedness or weakness, and to relate difficulties objectively to the exposure of the conflicts within the social system (conflicts of role, etc). Similar procedures are used in investigations of non-family firms. Thus the tendency is to diminish, rather than to exaggerate, the responsibility of persons for group and individual misfortunes, and not to exaggerate it. Finally I ask whether one can relate this difference to changing views on criminal responsibility. Evans-Pritchard’s study of witchcraft beliefs From 1926 onwards Evans-Pritchard published a series of essays on beliefs in witchcraft and mystical beings, on divination and on magical practices which completely altered our understanding of these phenomena. In 1937 he pulled his analyses together in a book which is still studied by both students and research workers: Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. First, he examined beliefs in witchcraft as a theory of causation. Briefly, the Azande ask about every unfortunate happening, How did it happen? and Why did it happen? For example, if an elephant tramples on and crushes a hunter, the Azande see how he was killed in terms of the might and weight of the elephant which crushes a man. But they also ask, Why did this elephant, and not another elephant, kill this hunter, and not another hunter, on this occasion, and not another occasion? Again, men seek shade in the heat of a tropical day by sitting under their granaries, which are built above the ground on poles. Termites eat these supports, and the weight of the granary brings it down, perhaps to crush the people sitting in its shade. Azande see that it is the termites that destroy the supports and cause the fall of the granary, whose weight crushes a man as the weight of an elephant does. But they ask again, Why did the granary fall at the particular moment when these particular people were sitting under it? Azande answer these ‘whys’ by saying that a witch caused that elephant to kill that hunter on that occasion, or that granary to fall just at the moment when those people were sitting in its shade. I have stated that in many technical and social situations Africans—including the Azande—argue in the same terms as we do about events and responsibility. An Azande cannot, for example, plead that witchcraft made him commit adultery, theft or treason. Azande also observe clearly and generalize certain aspects of the empirical ‘hows’ of misfortunes: a heavy weight crushes a man; wild beasts attack hunters. But they also try to explain what can be called the ‘particularity’ of misfortunes—why particular persons suffer them. Here beliefs in witchcraft enter. Similarly, beliefs in witchcraft explain why one man’s crops fail and not another’s, why a man falls ill when he has previously been well and his fellows are still well, why a small wound festers instead of healing, and so forth. Among the Azande the belief is also used to explain why particular warriors, and not others, are killed by particular enemies in battle. Clearly those slain were killed by enemy spears: but an internal enemy, the witch, has caused this particular death. And this witch is held responsible, and may be liable to pay compensation or suffer punishment in internal tribal relationships. Thus when an Azande suffers a misfortune his society’s beliefs offer him an agent, in the form of a witch, who can be held liable. He seeks the particular witch responsible for his immediate misfortunes by consulting oracles or a diviner or witch-detective (a better term than witch-doctor). These modes of seeking for the witch bring out that beliefs in witchcraft are a theory of morality as well as a theory of particular causation. When the sufferer consults an oracle he thinks of people who have cause to wish him harm and puts their names to one of the oracles. The most important oracle consists in giving a vegetable substance, collected and prepared with many taboos, to chickens while asking questions, such as whether a particular person is the witch you are seeking. The chicken dies or vomits the substance to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the question. The substance, used widely in Africa, is probably a strychnine which is ‘haphazard’ in its effect, since the operator cannot determine what quantity of the substance will be lethal or will be vomited. Since the consultant puts the name of several personal enemies to the oracle, in the end a man he believes wishes him ill will be indicated as the witch. Early observers had noted that a man almost always accused a personal enemy of bewitching him. They therefore concluded that the whole business was fraudulent. Evans-Pritchard demonstrated that this alleged fraudulence was essential to the reasonableness and credibility of the system of beliefs. And it is essential to note that the misfortune is suffered first, and this crystallizes belief in witchcraft: accusation of witchcraft follows on misfortune. An Azande witch is a person with a certain black substance in his intestines, which can be seen after an autopsy. (It is probably a passing state of digestion.) A man may not be aware that he possesses this substance, which is the power of witchcraft. Even if he has this power it will remain ‘cool’ inside him unless he entertains vicious feelings against a fellow. But if he hates another, feels anger against him, or is envious of him, grudging him good fortune and resenting his success, the witchcraft becomes ‘hot.’ Its ‘soul’ will leave the witch’s body to consume the ‘soul’ of the internal organs of the other to make him ill, or it will cause him some other misfortune. The power of witchcraft is believed by Azande to be inherited in the patrilineal line, so a man is not himself responsible for possessing this power. But if he is a good man it will harm no one. Vicious feelings set witchcraft to work. This is why a sufferer seeks among his personal enemies for the witch who has caused his misfortune. Zande beliefs in witchcraft are a theory of morality, and they condemn the same vicious feelings that we regard as sinful. Witchcraft beliefs condemn these vicious feelings even more severely than we do. For in witchcraft beliefs these vicious feelings are endowed with an occult power, by virtue of which they can, without the knowledge or will of their bearer, cause misfortune to others. Hence they embody a belief that persons bear high responsibility to their fellows. The morality which is implicit in witchcraft beliefs is shown even more clearly if we look at Azande beliefs in ‘sorcery,’ which Evans-Pritchard distinguishes from ‘witchcraft.’ A witch’s ill feelings are endowed with power to harm others by the substance in his stomach. But a man may wish another harm without possessing this substance. Then he can only harm his enemy either directly and openly, or by resorting to sorcery, which involves the deliberate decision to use noxious magic. Sorcery is used by Azande to account for sudden illnesses and deaths. Witchcraft takes longer to achieve its object. Evans-Pritchard further made a full analysis of how beliefs in witchcraft, oracles and magic accommodate and absorb experiences that appear to show them to be invalid. He shows, for example, how experiences of this kind are explained as due to breach of taboo in preparing the oracle-substance which makes a false detection. Each apparent failure is thus rationalized in terms of other mystical beliefs. Thus the whole system is bolstered by apparently contradicting evidence. Among the Azande, if a sufferer’s oracles say that a particular man, X, is causing him harm, he sends an intermediary to X with the wing of the chicken that died to X’s name. X is then constrained by good manners to blow water over the wing while he states that he was ignorant of causing harm and, if he has been doing so, he hereby ‘cools’ his witchcraft. The accused acts thus even if he does not accept the charge as valid. In the past, if a death was in question, the verdict of the dead person’s kin’s oracles had to be confirmed by the chief ’s oracles: the accused used to pay damages. After the Anglo-Egyptian government forbade accusations the deceased’s kin made vengeance-magic to punish the witch, and as people died in the neighbourhood the oracle was asked if each was the guilty witch, till an affirmative answer was obtained. This set of beliefs, therefore, in certain situations obviously condemns vicious feelings which are condemned throughout human society. Furthermore, men and women are constrained to control the exhibition of these feelings, for those who show anger, envy or hatred towards others in their social relationships are likely to have their names put to the oracles. But witchcraft beliefs do not operate in all social relationships. Among the Azande accusations are excluded from among the patrilineally related kinsmen who have to avenge one another’s deaths. Nor does a commoner accuse a prince, not only because he is afraid to but also because their behaviour to one another is determined by notions of status. Men do not accuse women. Witchcraft is believed to operate only over short distances, and men accuse their neighbours. Evans-Pritchard sums up thus: Azande ‘are most likely to quarrel with those with whom they come into closest contact, when this contact is not softened by sentiments of kinship or is not buffered by distinctions of age, sex and class.’ Sub-sequent research in Africa has confirmed Evans-Pritchard’s analysis of the logic of witchcraft, oracles and magic, and this research has developed his preliminary analysis of the social relationships within which accusations are made or from which they are excluded by cultural norms. It is clear that accusations of witchcraft are not only a straightforward reflection of animosities—otherwise Azande would accuse their patrilineal kin, with whom they must surely at times quarrel. Indeed, it is with these kin that quarrels may be most frequent. Later research on other tribes shows that it is not sufficient to say, as Evans-Pritchard does, that the softening of contact by sentiments of kinship excludes accusations. We know that quarrels often become most bitter where relationships are closest. We can see that the belief in patrilineal inheritance of witchcraft is consistent with the exclusion of accusations against patrilineal kinsmen. By contrast, in the patrilineal societies of southern Africa it is believed that the unrelated women who marry into the group of patrilineally related kinsmen bring witchcraft into their midst. And witchcraft in one of these tribes is believed to be inherited, as in fact haemophilia is among us: women pass it to their children but, while their sons suffer from the taint, they cannot pass it on. Daughters marry out of the group and transmit the taint to their husbands’ children. We shall not be able to explain this difference in beliefs, or in the levying of accusations, until we have a full analysis of the structure and development of patrilineal groups among the Azande. For, in sharp contrast, in most other African societies, both patrilineal and matrilineal, accusations of witchcraft are often made against closely related kin, within the effective corporate group whose members hold property together and should support one another. These accusations are the outcome of profound moral crises in relationships within the group. According to Evans-Pritchard’s analysis, a Zande accuses another of witchcraft against him in a social relationship which is confined to their mutual dealings with each other, and which is not set in a wider context of interaction in a group. Such accusations, among the Azande and other peoples, arise out of patent causes of hostility, which may well arise in turn from relatively chance encounters: jealousy over a woman, or skill at dancing, a quarrel over land, and so forth. Other accusations may be made in standardized situations of competition, between seekers after political office or, nowadays, between the employees within a single industrial enterprise. One such standardized situation is that of the fellow wives of a common husband: on the surface this appears to be straightforward jealousy arising from competition for the husband’s favours. Indeed, in many African languages one word for ‘jealousy’ also describes ‘polygyny.’ I shall argue that the jealousy of fellow wives, in so far as it appears in accusations of witchcraft, is not due simply to sexual rivalry but reflects, in some tribes at least, conflicts deep within the social structure. An analysis of this situation will lead us to examine the context within which people of most African tribes often accuse their nearest kin of attacking them with sorcery or witchcraft—that is, they accuse those persons whose equivalents among the Azande are immune from such charges. Conflicts of value in the South-eastern Bantu agnatic systems10 The tribes of south-eastern Africa (such as the Zulu, Swazi, Mpondo and Xhosa) are organized in patrilineal lineages. In this system, men who are related to one another by common descent through males from a single ancestor some four to five generations back live together in a group of neighbouring homesteads. They are what the Romans called ‘agnates.’ Each homestead contains a number of males closely related in this way; and it is linked to its neighbours by more distant patrilineal ties. The homestead is not a mere centre of residence, from which men and women go out to diverse ways of earning their living, and to which they return to consume goods as separate families. The members of a homestead assist one another in various productive activities: it is a family firm. Nowadays they even try to operate a rota under which men take turns to stay at home to care for gardens, cattle, women and children, and then to go out to work in European enterprises for money for the whole group.11 Because when individuals acquire goods they share them with their fellows, and all the men tend to eat together, separately from the women and small children. The men in each homestead have claims on one another’s property in land, in cattle and in marriage payments for women of their families, as well as claims to succeed to one another’s social positions. These claims extend in an elaborate pattern into the other homesteads of the patrilineal group, should all the men of the first homestead die. The claims of men within this system are fixed in orders of priority, partly by the nearness of their relationship through male progenitors, and partly by the respective status of their mothers—the wives of these progenitors. These wives must be married from outside the group. Indeed, they must be virtually unrelated to the group. For a number of these patrilineal groups are held to have common descent, through males, from a long-dead ancestor. This constitutes the Zulu clan. A man may not marry a woman of his clan. Nor may he marry a woman who is a member of his mother’s clan. Ideally, a Zulu marries several wives. Each wife has an established position and is ranked in relation to her fellow-wives. The ranking of wives is determined partly by the order in which they are married, partly by their husband’s dispositions and affections, and partly by the status of each wife’s father.12 Though the idea of ranking should eliminate uncertainty about the status of each wife and the claims of her sons, these varied rules produce uncertainty and potentially breed disputes between the women. Straightforward competition between fellow wives for their husband’s favours is aggravated by competition in the interests of their respective sons begotten by him. It is even held that a good wife and mother should look to the interests of her husband and children, though this may set her against the interests of other wives and their children and against the interests of the group of male agnates as a whole. Polygyny thus produces quarrels inside the patrilineal group, and these quarrels centre on the strangers—the wives who have married into the group. These quarrels, centred on the wives of the group, penetrate even more deeply. Most men in fact marry only one wife. She remains liable to be accused of witchcraft by her mother-in-law or her sister-in-law or her brother-in-law. Ideally, the group of males linked by patrilineal descent should remain united and bound together in shared loyalty to one another. With this unity, a premium is placed on each male having many sons both to perpetuate and to strengthen the group. A man can achieve this goal only if his wife bears sons for him. This is therefore regarded as the highest duty of a wife: she suffers severely if she is barren or bears only daughters. But in the very process of fulfilling her duty by producing sons to strengthen the group the wife weakens the group: for her sons will have to compete with their cousins—their father’s brothers’ sons—for the positions and the patrimony of the group. Moreover, though every man is by one set of values closely identified with his brothers, with half-brothers by his father’s other wives, and beyond them with his patrilineal cousins, by another set of values he fulfils himself as an individual through marriage and the begetting of his own sons. He is entitled to look to the welfare of his own wife and her children, and to see in them the nucleus of a following which will establish him independently of his patrilineal kinsmen. The wife, in the very process of fulfilling her creative duty to bear children to strengthen her husband’s lineage, sows the seeds of dissension and break-up in the group. Zulu themselves see the woman who marries into the patrilineal group as a mischief-maker who starts quarrels between her husband and his brothers or patrilineal cousins. And the Zulu are not the only patriarchal people who hold this stereotype about the wickedness of daughters-in-law and sisters-in-law. It is a stereotype which is held strongly in the Chinese and Indian joint families. The daughter-in-law is soon at odds with her husband’s mother, because she is under the older woman’s domination. Explanations in these terms explain the cause of tension; they do not explain why the tension should be reflected in occult beliefs. For example, Freedman, in a fine study of the South-eastern Chinese lineage, refers to my work on the Zulu without drawing attention to the attempted explanation of the occult beliefs.13 This very real source of quarrelling between them is, I have suggested, underlain by a deeper conflict of values: the mother-in-law represents the unity of all her sons, while in contrast each of her sons’ wives represents the independence of her particular husband from the other sons. It is this deeper conflict which, I suggest, is represented in this type of society in a whole series of beliefs about the inherent evil of femininity—an evil which is endowed with occult power that can harm others. Since the conflict arises out of the reproductive powers of the woman, logically it is associated with her intense sexual desires. Many agnatic societies have analogous ideas. Chinese believe that contact with women who are yin—like the moon and cold and winter—compromise male vigour—yang, which is like the sun and heat and summer. Hindus believe that in sexual intercourse the male yields part of his life and virtue. The South-eastern Bantu—and many others—believe in the mystically polluting and harmful effects of the blood of birth and menstrual blood, which they may yet consider is built up into the flesh of the strongly desired children.14 Additionally, the Zulu fear that a woman’s desires will attract to her sexual familiars—both sprites and animals— who will then demand from her the lives of her husband’s kin. Wives are thus believed by the Zulu to be full of inherent evil power—a power they carry into the heavens, where dangerous forked lightning is female, while harmless sheet lightning is male. Only female ancestral spirits afflict their former husband’s living kin capriciously with misfortune: male ancestral spirits are believed to remedy misfortunes they have sent when proper sacrifice is made to them; female spirits may not respond thus reasonably. And among the living a man’s illwishes or nature do not of themselves inflict misfortune. A man must deliberately make the choice to attack another, either openly by force or secretly by practising the evil magic of a sorcerer. Women are witches, with inherent evil power. But women’s powers are ambivalent: in addition to threatening evil power, women also contain ritual power for good, power which can be directed to fertility or to the detection of occult evils. Because of the strong suspicion with which the Zulu viewed all whites, I found it difficult when I was studying them to collect detailed records of divining sessions where the causes of misfortunes were sought—an activity which was illegal under South African law. The cases I did collect bear out what Zulu say, and what was recorded by earlier students of the Zulu—namely, that most witches detected were women. Detection followed the line of customary belief because the principal form of Zulu divining is controlled by the consultants, and not by the witch-detective. The consulting party come to the witch-detective, who, after preparing himself, asks a series of questions, such as ‘Something is lost?’ ‘Cattle are ill?’ ‘A person is ill?’ while the afflicted clap their hands steadily and chant, ‘We agree, we agree, we agree. . . .’ When the diviner hits on the misfortune concerned, they clap and chant more rapidly and loudly. Then, if someone is ill, the diviner seeks similarly for the occult cause of that illness: someone has broken a taboo, an ancestral spirit has sent the illness, a witch is responsible. Louder and faster clapping and chanting indicate when he has stated the present fears of his clients. He then specifies, say, ancestral spirit or witch or sorcerer by sex, age and kinship or other relationship to the victim. The clients are clearly in control of this method of detecting which occult agent is held responsible for a misfortune. In the 1860’s Bishop Callaway recorded a text from some young men in Natal who said that, realizing this, they decided to maintain a steady tempo and tone in their responses. The diviner told them to go away and send to consult him some elders who knew how to divine. Other Zulu diviners work by methods which are less under the control of those who have come to consult. Least under control is the diviner who goes into a trance, during which his (or, more commonly, her) ancestral spirits speak in whistling whispers from the rafters of the hut. Presumably such a diviner works on the basis of local knowledge. Other diviners cast collections of bones and other objects, representing various persons and elements in Zulu life; and these are read according to the patterns in which they fall—patterns which are known to the public. These bones are, as one early ethnographer described them, ‘a résumé of their whole social order,’15 so they cover all possible social contingencies. Immediately I must confess that when I was studying the Zulu I was not alert to the importance of trying to investigate in detail whether afflicted Zulu consult various types of diviners according to the internal situation within their social relationships. I suspect now that when relationships within a patrilineal group have developed to a point where break-up is imminent, and misfortune befalls those who wish to assert independence, they are likely to consult by the clapping of hands so that they will get the answer they desire. Their reasoning would not, of course, take this form: they will reason that the case is, in an American phrase, more or less open and shut, so an ordinary diviner will suffice. But at more peaceable phases of a group’s development it is likely that open-ended methods of divination are used, with the diviner or his apparatus selecting from several possibilities.16 After all, the clients above all want to know accurately what occult power has caused their troubles in order to end it: it is not in their interests, as they see these, to ‘cheat.’ These guesses I am making now, all too many years after I finished my research in Zululand, are guesses inspired by the recent work of younger anthropologists,17 who have concentrated on the details of developments within particular homesteads or villages as their members mature, marry and produce children, who in turn mature and marry. These recent analyses emphasize that a struggle to control the divinatory decision may proceed between different contestants for superior positions in a village, or between the head of a village and the leader of a section within it who is attempting to establish independence. The struggle to control the divinatory decision is hidden from the protagonists themselves, since—I repeat— they are all motivated by the wish to discover what occult agent is responsible for the misfortune at issue in order that remedial measures may be taken. They are, of course, aware of the issues that lie between them; but they believe that the divination gives an unbiased answer—and indeed some methods of divination operate more or less mechanically. But if the decision does not favour one protagonist he may go to another diviner, and yet another, or seek some practitioner who uses different methods, to get the answer he wishes. This kind of jockeying for position at the divinatory séance appears to occur when the course of the group’s cycle of development has reached a crisis. I shall later return to these analyses, after I have emphasized some points which have already emerged. The first is that since such high value is placed by the society on kin remaining united and continuing to reside together, a threat to the well-being of some members of the group, a threat which is ascribed to witchcraft or sorcery on the part of another, often seems to be required to justify separation. Either the evil-doer and his close dependants are driven out, or the sufferer and his dependants move away. In South-east Africa, Monica Wilson has reported this process from the Mpondo and Xhosa, and I have noted it among the Zulu. Several anthropologists have described the process in other parts of Africa. I emphasize that this ‘excuse’ is not always necessary: Professor I. Schapera tells me that sorcery was the ostensible cause of Tswana wards splitting in well under half of such divisions on which he has adequate information. Elsewhere the proportion of divisions related to witchcraft is higher. We can say that, in many African cultures, before a man can act against the high value set on maintaining unity he himself often has to feel, and demonstrate publicly, that though he desires unity he and his have suffered or are threatened by disaster caused by maleficent occult agents, and they must separate. This statement immediately raises the question: why should this rationalization to justify separation be required? Why cannot those who wish to do so simply move away? We know that in some cases—as Schapera again tells me about the Tswana—where there is palpable shortage of land for cultivation or congestion in living quarters people agree amicably to move off: but sometimes even in this kind of situation a misfortune attributed to occult causes is held to justify the separation. Our problem is, then, why in some societies the total process of development in a group of kinsfolk is conceived to be permeated by occult forces operating either advantageously or maleficently—forces which must be specified through divination. I suggest that one reason may be that the people cannot know the full implications of their own social rules. The Zulu and Mpondo, for instance, see women as mischief-makers, but they cannot recognize that the duty they impose on their women to be fruitful of children, especially sons, must ultimately, if fulfilled, produce effects opposite from those they desire. Were they to do so, they could no longer set such high value at the same time both on the persistence of agnatic unity and on the female fecundity which must destroy that unity. The ideology and values of the Zulu, the Mpondo and similarly organized tribes are those of stationary societies. They do not accept the idea of radical changes in social pattern—which have indeed occurred. Furthermore, even changes that are within the established cultural pattern (i.e., changes in the personnel of actual groups and in the incumbents of particular established social positions) tend to be handled with ritual precautions. These ritual precautions render safe an implicit interference with the occult forces that are believed to preserve the well-being of a society. For every change in life—whether it be the birth of a child, a boy’s or maiden’s growing to maturity, or a transfer of land—tends to be treated as a disturbance and becomes the focus of a ritual in which related persons participate by performing actions which symbolize their interest in the central parties or object. These rituals have a strong moral element in them: they state the moral character of the relationships between the persons concerned.18 This moral element is highly emphasized in the approach to misfortune. For a misfortune is regarded as a break in the orderly course of events, a break which results from a disturbance in the moral relationships between the sufferer and his fellows. The breach may be by either the victim; or someone connected with him, or by an alleged wrongdoer.19 The moral disturbance either prompts a fellow to harm with witchcraft or sorcery, or provokes ancestral spirits or other occult beings to send ill fortune. Looked at from outside, we see that in these ostensibly stationary societies the natural order, the social order with its moral code, and the occult order permeate one another. Hence there is continual resort to divination, either to detect the occult cause which is connected with present misfortune, or to measure the pressures of occult forces which will influence good and ill fortune in the future. But these beliefs in the moral aspect of occult causes and forces do not apply most strongly to patent breaches of morality. Patent breaches of morality can be dealt with in a straightforward, rational, secular manner, for example by discussion or by arbitration or by judicial consideration. It seems that occult beliefs are most significant when some major ambiguity is present in social life. My suggestion is that Zulu belief in the inherent evil of femininity can be referred to the major conflict resulting from the effects of female fecundity on the structure of Zulu agnatic groups. In short, a belief of this kind has to be referred to a deep-seated conflict of social rules, or principles of organization, or processes of development, and not to superficial quarrels arising out of divergent interests between men and women. The essence of these situations is that the people concerned are not aware of these conflicts. As I have said of the Zulu, were they aware of the conflict they could no longer operate the system. The occult belief, which is phrased to stress what are apparently common, realizable norms and values, and which indeed stresses the observance of morality, conceals the conflict and the disharmony it in fact produces. Divination selects some alleged slip from morality—be it in feeling only, or an allegation that a woman has a highly sexed sprite as a familiar—as the alleged cause of misfortune which is related to observed social difficulties, even though these arise from the structure of society itself. We may note that these beliefs predicate that in some situations an illness or death is due to the evil motives of some related person who competes with one for land or cattle. In a sense, therefore, there is an element of psychological truth in them. For at the level of subsistence, when resources become scarce, possession of cattle or land may make the difference between hunger and satisfaction, between illness and good health, between life and death. He who covets the cattle and land to which I aspire, by implication wishes me to be hungry, to be ill, even to die. Yet nevertheless, viewed objectively, the beliefs ‘exaggerate,’ so to speak, the responsibility of a pre-selected individual for the harm suffered by another.20 Conflicts of moral principle We owe our insight into the relation between conflict of social principles and the occurrence of occult beliefs and rituals to Professor M. Fortes (now of Cambridge, but formerly a member of this College) and Evans-Pritchard in a joint Introduction to a series of essays on African Political Systems (1940). Most of these essays emphasized the occult attributes of political offices, and the ritual responsibilities of chiefs and other leaders. Fortes and Evans-Pritchard pointed out that political rituals aim to achieve prosperity for a political unit as a whole: rain and sunshine at appropriate seasons to produce good crops and pasture, fertility of both people and cattle, success in hunting and war, freedom from disease, and so forth. These are communal goods, and they derive from weather, land, people and beasts. But individual men (taking the men’s point of view) get their good crops from weather which may benefit a small area, affecting only individual plots of land, and they get their calves from individual cows and their children from individual women. Men may compete and struggle with others over these plots of land, these cows and these women. Communal good—the general prosperity of the country as a whole and the fertility of all women and beasts—thus arises out of individual prosperity based on individual plots of land, individual women and individual beasts, over all of which there may be dispute. There is in one sense a deep conflict between general prosperity and individual prosperity. The political system as a whole provides the moral order in which men may hope to hold and work their land, herd their cattle, and marry wives and raise children: so it becomes invested with occult values which hide the potential conflict between communal well-being and well-being for all individuals. These values are expressed in beliefs and rituals. Since this idea was advanced, several anthropologists have followed its lead. Nadel found among the Nupe of northern Nigeria beliefs similar to those of the Zulu. In Nupe the evil witches who kill are women, while male witches defend their fellows against the female witches. Only female witches are believed to kill, but since this evil deed requires that male defenders default from duty, in effect the female requires the assistance of a male. Nevertheless, the evil again resides in femininity. Women are considered to be sexually insatiable. Nadel seeks to answer why. He finds a striking conflict between the roles which, ideally, women ought to play and what many women in fact do. Ideally, a Nupe woman should be a good wife, subservient to her husband, bearing him many children and staying at home to care for them and their father. In reality a great deal of trade is in the hands of the women. They absent themselves to trade, and some become richer than their husbands. Instead of the husband supporting his wife, she may help him; and she, and not her husband, may help their sons find the marriage payments for their brides. On top of this, those women who prosper at trading often travel to distant markets, where they add to their earnings by prostituting themselves. Some of them are alleged to practise abortion to avoid having children who would interfere with their trading activities. Yet women who work hard at trading to acquire wealth, and then help their menfolk, are also approved. Out of this insoluble conflict between two ideals and hard reality, says Nadel, emerges the ascription by men of witchcraft power to women. A Nupe woman aiming at independent trading faces problems similar to those of a modern Englishwoman pursuing a career; the latter escapes being suspected of witchcraft. I would add that the Nupe have the same sort of patrilineal lineage structure as the Zulu; and, with all respect, I suggest that the position of the relatively few women traders exacerbates a conflict over female fertility, a conflict which is represented in Nupe beliefs about women’s sexual voracity.21 M. Wilson22 stresses in the same way conflicts between social principles in an attempt to explain why, in two tribes which she studied, witches are believed to be motivated in one by sexual lust, and in the other by greed for meat and milk. The first tribe, the Mpondo of South Africa, are organized in the main on the same lines as the Zulu. Men of agnatic lineages reside close together, and have claims on one another’s land, cattle and social positions. They eat together. They are forbidden to have sexual relationships with any woman of their agnatic clan and with a large number of women related to them in other ways. Hence many women in a district are sexually taboo to a man. On top of this, they are now part of South African society, with its strict colour bar and its strong, legally punishable condemnation of sexual relationships between persons of different colour. Wilson suggests that this situation leads to the belief that both male and female witches are moved by extreme sexual desires and acquire familiars which then demand the lives of their kin or relatives-in-law. The other tribe that Wilson studied was the Nyakyusa of Tanganyika. Their organization also contains agnatic lineages whose men have rights in one another’s cattle. But the men of these lineages do not reside together. It is forbidden here for a man to be near his daughter-in-law. Hence, as boys of a neighbourhood mature they move out of their fathers’ villages and build a separate new village. Each village is inhabited, therefore, by men of the same age. Here they bring their wives, but they eat as a group of men, not each man with his wife and children. Great value is placed in these Nyakyusa villages of age-mates on hospitality and good companionship: yet the prized foods, meat and milk, are derived from cattle which are ‘owned’ jointly not by fellow villagers but by agnatic lineages some of whose men are dispersed over several age-villages which own the land of the village. Cattle are sacrificed to lineage spirits, and consumed at gatherings of lineage mates. There is a conflict between obligations of hospitality to fellow age-mates in one’s village, and the obligations to one’s lineage fellows with whom one holds cattle. Wilson argues that therefore, although the Nyakusa are better off as regards food supplies than the Mpondo, they believe that witches are moved by greed for food. The belief arises from conflict between membership of agnatic lineage and membership of age-village. All these societies have in many respects their own well developed technologies. Yet in comparison with us their control over the hazards of life is relatively slight. Drought, floods, crop pests and cattle epidemics threaten their communal wellbeing; if famine comes they have no way to obtain food. Their medical lore is inefficient. Infantile and maternal mortality rates are extremely high, and diseases kill many of those who have survived beyond infancy. It is not surprising that in this situation they believe that they are subject to the influences of occult powers, which affect their good and ill fortune. Furthermore, since these powers work outside sensory observations, it is also not surprising that these peoples should seek, through divination, operating also by occult means, to assess what these powers have done in the immediate past or portend in the future. But what we have to examine is the fact that divination is not concerned merely to unravel a technical problem; beyond this, the problem set for the diviner is a moral problem. And what the studies I have cited suggest is that often it is an insoluble moral problem, since it arises from discrepancies and conflicts in the structure of society itself. The Nyakyusa cannot abolish either his cattle-owning agnatic lineage or his residential age-village. He is caught permanently between the two. My analysis and Wilson’s theory that the Mpondo believe witches are motivated by sexual lust because so many persons around them are sexually taboo to them supplement each other. Between them they explain a further point. Wilson is inclined to think that Mpondo beliefs in witchcraft are less concerned with morality than are Nyakyusa beliefs. Yet sex is a subject on which moral codes have at least as much to say as they have about food. Certainly this is so among the Mpondo and their cognate tribes. I suggest that Nyakyusa beliefs deal patently with individual moral lapses because the conflict between membership of age-village and membership of agnatic lineage, though inescapable, is clear even to the people themselves. On the other hand, if I am right the Mpondo conflict is beyond their view, since it resides in the ambivalent effects of women’s fertility. Hence the belief in witchcraft does not appear to be so directly connected with individual morality: it deals with inescapable, but unseen, conflicts in social morality. Clearly, if it is disturbances due to inescapable conflicts in social structure itself that produce the strains and pose insoluble choices for people, no rational assessment of them is possible. The human mind, enmeshed in the culture of a particular society of this type, cannot withdraw to consider, so to speak, judicially what is at fault. Divination provides, in various degrees, an external, seemingly unbiased, means of deciding where the moral fault lies. But why must there be a moral fault to explain a misfortune? To answer this question we may pursue the beliefs of the Nyakyusa. They believe that the power of witchcraft comes from several black pythons in the stomach—pythons which can be seen on autopsy. These pythons lust for meat, and witches fly on them at night and throttle the hated victim or eat his flesh so that he dies. The pythons of witchcraft are fought by defenders of the village—senior men who possess power to destroy witchcraft and witches. This defending power comes from possession of a single python in the stomach (which is not visible on autopsy). If a man is ill, various people may interpret the cause of his illness differently: he may think he is being attacked by the pythons of witches, others may say he is a witch who is being punished by the python of a defender. This belief (and below I shall quote similar beliefs from other tribes) indicates that there is in a sense a similarity between the powers of witchcraft and the powers of anti-witchcraft. I have already cited how Nupe female witches attack, while male witches defend. In many religions, similarly, the line between the powers of good and evil spiritual beings is a fine one. Here, I think, we are looking at the possible opposite effects of a man’s use of his talents, or a woman’s use of her talents. These talents are potentially of value to society: equally, they may harm the possessor’s fellows. In a stationary society, and one in which men cannot easily separate from those with whom they compete or quarrel, this ambivalence of use of talent is most marked. It is excess that is condemned. Many tribes believe that a man succeeds to political office by killing his rivals with sorcery or witchcraft. Yet a man, to be a man, should not be spiritless. What is the golden mean of legitimate striving between spiritlessness and overweening ambition? What is the golden mean which makes a woman a good wife and mother, between the vice of barrenness23 and the vice of overbreeding?—the latter especially if other women are barren. Richards records of the Bemba of Zambia that to find one beehive in the woods is luck, to find two is very good luck, to find three is witchcraft. There is a mean of industriousness, somewhere between under-working and over-working, since it is believed that if a man’s crops are too fruitful he has used sorcery to steal the crops of his neighbours.24 In Britain, among university students there is a mean between slacking and swotting, and among industrial workers between being a rate-buster and a chiseller; but he who exceeds the mean, or does not attain it, is not accused of witchcraft. Under these African beliefs those who are lucky or unduly productive both fear that they will be the target of sorcery or witchcraft from their envious neighbours and in practice are likely to be accused of sorcery or witchcraft by the less lucky or productive. The beliefs are appropriate to societies which are basically egalitarian, which have simple tools and no great variation in productiveness of their members, and which produce simple consumers’ goods so that there is little variation in standards of living. Given, too, that they have few types of occupation and categories of elites in which related men may fulfil their ambitions without competing with one another, the universal ethical problem of achieving balance, a golden mean, takes an acute form. A man rises in status at the expense of those closely related to him: a woman breeds many children at the expense of other women closely linked to her but who are barren. Prosperity is achieved possibly at the cost of one’s near kin. So that every talent and achievement is highly ambivalent. Beliefs in witchcraft and ancestral wrath I have so far described (in what was my first lecture) how in some tribal societies misfortunes are seen as resulting from breakdowns in the moral relations between members of groups of kinsfolk. The occurrence of misfortune is referred to the evil activity of a witch or sorcerer. In tribal belief it is predicated that the evil-doer is likely to stand in a particular kind of social relationship to the sufferer. Accusations of witchcraft or sorcery fall in certain patterns in different tribes and occult evildoers are believed to be animated by motives inappropriate to their social relationships. An accusation that a particular person is guilty has to be levied or validated by some divinatory or oracular apparatus. Ostensibly, this apparatus works out of the control of the accusers: it is external and appears to be unbiased, although those accused may allege that it has not been properly used. I described further how in some agnatically organized societies—that is, societies where property and position pass in the male line—people believe that it is women who possess the inherent evil propensity of witchcraft, and indeed other forms of occult evil. I tried to relate this belief to the ambivalent effects of women’s fertility. A duty is laid on women married from outside into a group of agnates that they bear sons to perpetuate and strengthen their husbands’ groups. But the effect of the birth of sons is to produce competitors for the limited land, cattle, important positions and privileges of each group. Their competition produces dissension because of the very increase which first strengthens the numbers of the group’s membership. This dissension, and the breaking off of relationships to which it may lead, enable a man to achieve the independence to which he is entitled. But he achieves this goal only in conflict with the highly valued goal that he should remain united with his agnates. The goals aimed at are thus mutually exclusive; and it seems that in order to separate into independence a man must frequently get a divinatory declaration that he and his dependants have suffered a misfortune which shows that they are being attacked by occult evil. Misfortune comes first; divination of occult causes follows after. This alone legitimates his flouting the value of unity. I argued further that since the conflict in pursuit of goals arises from the birth of sons, it means that wives both strengthen and weaken the group when they discharge their duty to be fertile. This conflict arising from the duty laid on women is concealed by the belief that they are witches moved by insatiable sexual desires. Many problems can be extracted both from these beliefs and from their social setting. I have concentrated my analysis on the moral crisis created for a group which sets a high value on unity as its own development leads to a proliferation of conflicting interests within it. The interests of members of the group may conflict because of increasing pressure on land, or difficulties in sharing out cattle, or desires for independence and positions of prestige. A situation is created in which persons are moved by different but equally highly regarded social rules and values to opposed courses of action: this I have called a ‘moral crisis.’ The situation is well illustrated in Middleton’s study of the Lugbara of Uganda, but here it is the wrath of ancestral spirits against junior kinsmen who do not respect their seniors that threatens to bring illness—rather more than witchcraft and sorcery. As long ago as 1934 Schapera25 analysed a Bechuana belief under which if a senior relative was indignant against a junior relative, the pair’s ancestral spirits would cause misfortune to the junior. The senior did nothing: his indignation set the spirits to work. The wronged senior was not in these circumstances guilty of sorcery; and he had to take a lead in the ritual treatment necessary for the sufferer to be cured. A similar Lugbara belief has been set by Middleton in the full context of an agnatic group’s development.26 The Lugbara are organized in small, agnatic lineages, with ritual seniority passing down the generations through the eldest sons of senior wives of successive progenitors within each lineage. Seniority is marked by control over certain shrines, at which offerings must be made to cure those who have fallen ill. Illness is commonly believed to result from the legitimate indignation of a senior kinsman against his junior. The ghosts of dead ancestors become aware of this indignation and, without being explicitly invoked, send illness to the wrong-doing junior. The senior is not aware of what is happening until illness strikes. The cause of illness is determined through divination. Therefore if a junior falls ill, it is a validation of the senior’s authority if the divination indicates that it is his indignation which has moved the ghosts to punish the junior who has failed to conform to the norms of morality. When a group has grown in numbers, and becomes differentiated internally in several different lines of descent, a senior man in a junior line may try to assert that it is he whose indignation is causing the ghosts to send illness to his own subordinates. He attempts thus to argue that the sick person’s illness no longer arises from the indignation of the elder who had previously been divined as unconsciously moving the ghosts to punish the patient. If this is confirmed by the oracles and by recovery of the patient after offering has been made, the leader of the junior line is becoming successful in asserting his independence. When the junior elder is invited to go as representative of his own following to sacrifices by other segments of the lineage and is allowed to make ritual addresses, he is recognized as independent. During the crisis which leads to this phase, and after it is reached, the new leader will essay to amend the genealogy of the lineage so that his line appears to be equal, if not superior, to that of the erstwhile common leader. I have had to summarize and over-simplify very complex processes; but I hope I have made clear that here again a misfortune—illness—is referred to a moral crisis in a group, and occult forces are believed to be working through that crisis. To obtain independence the aspiring leader has to claim that dead ancestors are acting on his behalf. The former leader will resist this declaration of independent status and its validation by the divination which detects on whose behalf the ghosts have acted. Each competitor strains to get accepted the divination of the oracle-operator to whom he went; and each man frames the questions answered in his consultation. In these tense situations of competition men have to go for confirmatory divinations to diviners not related to the group, rather than to the several oracular apparatuses they themselves own, in order to determine who is responsible for the illness of a junior. When the client puts questions to the diviner he frames them in terms of the current crises in the group. Lugbara are aware that social ‘considerations enter into the consultation of the oracles’ but since they believe that sickness is due to occult causes, they concentrate attention on these causes (p. 187). Even an elder aspiring to independence accepted the oracles’ verdict that the leader of the group with whom he was competing had brought sickness on him: ‘he was very worried by [his] sickness, and thought that perhaps [the leader’s] mystical powers of eldership were behind it’ (p. 175). The situation is very complicated, because several occult agencies are at work. Only God is responsible for deaths, and at times the extant leader may have God divined as the cause of a misfortune. This supports his position, because God is outside and above lineage sectional interests, though concerned in readjustments of authority and status. God’s support through the oracle is very weighty. Here, then, with similar processes at work to those described for the Zulu, we have elders competing for the right to be named as responsible for sickness. It may seem strange that people should wish to be declared responsible for the ills of those in their care, but they should do this only to maintain lineage authority and its moral code. And the anthropologist was told by one Lugbara, who was divined to have been afflicted by his mother’s people, ‘Yes, it is right that sickness has come from [them]. . . . Do they not love me as their child? They watch over me. They are my people there. . . .’ (p. 191). Sickness of this sort should punish only breaches against the moral code. Here a difficult dilemma arises for elders. As a lineage approaches the point where it will divide, competing elders try to be declared responsible as often as possible to validate their authority. Yet if an elder is held to be responsible too often, he becomes unpopular, and his juniors may allege that he is practising witchcraft. Witches are believed to attack only their agnates, and if one is acting illegitimately one uses witchcraft instead of invoking the ghosts. Middleton writes that ‘there is a very slight difference only between . . . being regarded as an ideal elder, exercising his authority for the well-being of his lineage, and . . . being accused of being a witch, abusing his mystical powers for his own selfish ends’ (pp. 200–1). A man should claim to be responsible for illness sent by ghosts only if he is insulted in his position as elder; it is witchcraft if he reacts to an insult against him as an individual. Even the same word describes moving the ghosts to action and using witchcraft. Again, the line between rightful and wrongful use of one’s talent and authority is difficult to draw, and it may be drawn differently by various parties involved in the situation. The setting of this dilemma is the same conflict of values. It is proper for men to be ambitious and to want authority. Not to be ambitious is to be ‘immature.’ And on the other hand, ‘some men try to acquire authority which they should not possess and . . . others abuse it when they have acquired it.’ As the Lugbara (in Middleton’s words) ‘usually . . . see the total structure of their society . . . as something static’ (p. 216), competition for authority involving breach of the highly valued duty of unity is immoral, even though a man is entitled also to independence. And since division in the lineage often happens after the funerals of key elders, it is significant that men at dances staged at these funerals may have ‘incestuous’ relationships with their clanswomen and are liable to fight with their agnates (pp. 203–4), thus breaking the two most stringent rules in the moral code of the agnatic lineage—those rules that mark its unity. One may well ask why, if the Lugbara have agnatic lineages like the south-eastern African tribes, they do not similarly relate the occult causes of their misfortune to the witchcraft of their wives married into these lineages. And the Azande also have groups of patrilineally related kinsmen, who are indeed required to avenge all deaths: they too do not blame their wives for witchcraft, but unrelated neighbours. This may have been a new pattern of accusations, since when Evans-Pritchard studied the Azande their old pattern of settlement had been disrupted. The Sudan government, in trying to move the Azande out of sleeping-sickness areas, had settled them in lines of homesteads along the roads running on the watersheds. We do not yet know how to explain fully these varied patterns of belief. But the explanation may lie in patterns of inheritance of property and position. As I have described, in south-eastern African tribes, including the Zulu, each wife becomes the centre of a separate estate within the total of her husband’s estate. She is allotted cattle and land to which her own sons are heirs as against their half-brothers by their father’s other wives. Among the Lugbara and the Azande, and other tribes dwelling in the same cultural region, instead of each wife being the focus of a separate estate, it seems that the whole of a man’s estate passes first to his brothers and even cousins before dropping a generation. The heir then administers the property for all the agnates. In a comparative analysis of Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa (1963, at pp. 15–16) Middleton and Winter conclude that, in tribes who ascribe misfortunes to witchcraft, it is where each wife is the centre of a separate estate within her husband’s property that women are accused of this inherent evil. It seems indeed plausible that, where one man is responsible for administering a whole estate in his and all his kinsmen’s interests, occult fears are more likely to focus directly on relationships between the males rather than indirectly via wives and mothers onto those relationships between men. Occult fears focus on women where property interests centre on women. Middleton’s study of the Lugbara culminates in an analysis of the thirty-three occasions of divination during a period of fifteen months in the history of a single lineage nearing segmentation. At the end of this period, which was full of struggle between leaders competing to be divined as responsible for illness, the accredited senior leader died and the lineage split into segments. Earlier studies of these types of situation had set out general principles, and illustrated those principles by examples which were apt at any point in the analysis. This method tended to focus attention only upon the relationship between two apparently isolated persons, the pair of accuser and alleged witch/sorcerer, or between the pair of offended senior, who was supported by the ghosts, and the offending junior. A new generation of anthropologists has analysed divinations and accusations in their full context of social relationships, as Middleton did. They have seen that the divination of a particular occult agent as the cause of misfortune cannot always be handled in isolation. Each divination may have to be related to earlier divinations; and all have to be set in the total context of a group’s development. This method enabled them to penetrate more deeply both into divinations and into the complexity of social relationships. The new method was first applied by Mitchell to the Yao of Malawi.27 Conflicts of value in matrilineal systems Among the Yao social position and authority are obtained and inherited in the matrilineal, and not the agnatic, line. In agnatic systems, growth of the group leads to difficulties which focus on wives, who are the source of increase in numbers and the points at which divisions occur. In matrilineally organized societies, women are also the points of growth and of incipient division, but here it is women in their role as sisters, and not in their role as wives. For under matriliny a woman’s children are attached for purposes of group organization to her brothers and her mother’s brothers, and not to her husband who is their father. Uterine brothers and sisters by one mother form a closely mutually identified group, with the eldest brother entitled to be in charge of all. But the brothers also compete with one another to secure the support of their sisters, for it is largely through this support that each brother can obtain the following which will enable him to win prestige. The elder brother prevents his younger brother from doing this, unless the younger brother can persuade his sisters that the elder is incapable of looking after them, including protecting them and their children from sorcery, or is himself a sorcerer attacking the sisters and their children. ‘Hence,’ says Mitchell, ‘ . . . accusations of sorcery are frequent among brothers: it is a rationalization of a hostility arising from the structural position of uterine brothers, which, in view of the commonly accepted strong sentiments uniting brothers, may not be otherwise expressed.’ In short, here again there is a conflict between the legitimate aspiration for authority, which drives men to independence, and the high value set on unity of kinsfolk and the unity of a big village. The competition is even more acute between a man and his sister’s sons as the latter strive to win their sisters from their common uncle’s care. And accusations of sorcery are frequently made by nephews against uncles, though not by uncles against nephews (see below). Mitchell states that ‘conflicts between sister’s sons and mother’s brothers are frequent’ as ‘a facet of the general political process in which groups are for ever [sic] trying at once to demonstrate their autonomy by setting up new villages, and their unity by remaining in large integrated villages’ (p. 179). The nephew aims to demonstrate that the mother’s brother is himself a sorcerer or neglects to protect the younger man’s sisters and their children against sorcery. And the sisters may in this process accuse one another, or a brother, or mother’s brother, of sorcery. Accusations of sorcery are also made between the men of segments within a larger matrilineage, residing in a single village. Mitchell traced the variety of accusations that arose from seemingly chance quarrels and illnesses in a single village through seven years (the earlier ones were told him by informants and he observed the later processes). People aligned themselves in varied ways, but constant throughout was the opposition of two younger men, each of whom represented the interests of two segments descended from women who shared a common grandmother. Mitchell summarized the history of quarrelling thus: Consistently in the accounts of the divinations each reject[ed] the diviner’s finding if it accuse[d] a member of his lineage segment . . . the divination seance itself [became] a field in which the opposition of the segments [was] expressed. [One man] continued consulting diviners until finally he got the answer he wanted. His opponents rejected these findings and eventually even discounted [the most important,] the chicken ordeal. The diviners’ findings, and the results of the poison ordeals, therefore, [were] bandied about between the opposed groups, and though the whole procedure of divination and accusations of sorcery [was] directed towards the extirpation of discordant elements in the community, in fact, it [was] only a facet of the underlying cause of the tension-the opposition of segments in an ever-segmenting lineage. [p. 174] In a study of the nearby Chewa, who have an organization similar to that of the Yao, Marwick28 analysed how all the quarrels and misfortunes he recorded in his field work were handled. He found that accusations of sorcery are most frequent within matrilineal groups: [T]he issue, either between sorcerer and victim or between accuser and sorcerer, seems to be an outcome of their competing for a strongly desired object in a situation in which there is an irreconcilable conflict in the rights, principles and claims that apply. [Further,] there is some form of impediment—usually because of the irreconcilable nature of the conflict—to the settlement of the dispute by judicial or other rational forms of arbitration. Hatred continues to smoulder. Finally, either sorcerer or victim has committed a recent breach of moral rules (p. 151; see also p. 212). Chewa themselves point out that the matrilineal lineage is ‘the natural arena for quarrels about succession to office and the ownership of property.’ Here are present, says Marwick, the strong motives [that are] often found as ingredients in tensions expressed in terms of sorcery. . . . [T]hese motives are given relatively free play . . . [because] of conflict between the principles governing competitive interaction. In the matrilineal lineage, relationships are highly personal and charged with emotion, and cannot ‘be quietly dismantled’ (as conjugal relationships can be, in a society with easy divorce and a high rate of divorce) (p. 294). Though the people said co-wives and spouses frequently bewitched each other, Marwick collected no cases between co-wives and only two between spouses. Between different matrilineages judicial proceedings can operate. Marwick states, therefore, that while there is a chance of a lineage remaining united, the struggle in terms of accusations of sorcery is to control it: but when its break-up is apparent, accusations of sorcery accelerate and justify the incipient division (p. 147; also p. 220). In a review of Marwick’s book Douglas29 criticized Marwick for following too closely, in his study of the Chewa, Mitchell’s analysis of the role of accusations of witchcraft in the processes of lineage segmentation among the Yao. In a most stimulating, if compressed, analysis she argues that when Mitchell observed the Yao they had an unstable system of lineages in small villages, as the fruits of their long contact with the Arabs and commerce, and later of the imposition of British rule, which cut their trade at the source and liberated their slaves. She points out that among the Yao accusations are in fact made by junior men against their seniors and that this is compatible with a rapidly segmenting system. On the other hand, in practice most accusations within Chewa matrilineages are made by seniors against juniors. This seems to be compatible with the fact that Chewa villages are larger than Yao villages, and this in turn suggests that lineages do not segment so rapidly; charges of witchcraft thus buttress and protect the positions of seniors among the Chewa. She suggests that they have been less influenced by forces which have affected the Yao. Douglas’s essay was published well after I had worked out my argument, which it does not touch in itself. One must note, however, that Mitchell described two types of Yao village—large, persisting villages, hiving off sections, and smaller, segmenting villages. But since Douglas proceeds to argue in a wider comparative study that accusations of this kind occur in ‘the range of small-scale, ambiguously defined, strictly local relations,’ and not within major large-scale political relationships, I feel that the tenor of her comparative analysis stresses the main point from which I start. The analysis of divinations through a series of moral crises and ruptures in the history of single groups thus enables us to compare the kinds of situation where different types of solution, magical and secular, can be applied. Turner (who followed Mitchell and influenced Middleton), in a study of the Ndembu of Zambia,30 traced the course of a whole series of disputes in one village for a period of twenty years, partly as described to him, partly as he observed them. He found that where the parties are disputing about their rights in terms of a single legal rule, or under rules that can be arranged in a hierarchy, judicial arbitration can be applied. But judicial action cannot be employed when disputes arise as a result of appeals by the parties to different social rules which are discrepant or even in conflict. The rules cannot be affirmed clearly to constrain both parties. In such a situation one party, suffering a misfortune, will accuse the other of sorcery or witchcraft, or allege that ancestral spirits have been offended by the other. Divination—an ostensibly external, unbiased mechanism—selects the occult cause, and appropriate steps can be taken. Often ritual is performed. Ritual may even be employed after a judicial decision appears to have settled rights and wrongs, when in fact the cause of dispute is beyond settlement. And finally, when all attempts to preserve existing relationships have failed, final breaches, often provoked by witchcraft charges, are confirmed by rituals which restate the norms as consistent and enduring, even though new relationships have been established. ‘Those who disputed bitterly for headmanship within a village may become helpful relatives when they reside in two different villages when each appears to conform to the Ndembu ideal’ (pp. 1231). In addition, judicial remedies can apply when the living quarrel. But if it is natural misfortune, such as death or sickness, that is the breach of regularity to be redressed, and misfortune is ascribed to occult agents, only detection through divination of the one responsible can clarify issues for adjustment (p. 127). And there is dispute and struggle to control the divinatory apparatus, within the limits set by its mechanism. All these studies stress that a natural misfortune, like a quarrel, inside one of these intimately involved groups, where men and women seek to satisfy manifold interests, provokes a severe moral crisis. The crisis is not always created by individuals or sections nakedly pursuing their selfish interests. It arises from the very process of development of the group, a development which results in conflict between values as well as quarrels between people. The conflict of values seems to give rise to occult fears, and divination focuses these fears onto a specific occult agent. Redress is sought either in ritual or by the breaking of highly valued ties. The golden mean of morality I stressed earlier that (in these relatively stationary societies) a man or woman has to conform to a golden mean in behaviour. Failure to attain the mean is a moral fault and is despised; it inspires envy, which leads to witchcraft or sorcery. Excess, in performance or ambition or exercise of authority, is believed also to be a moral fault, and it may be ascribed to evil occult power. I must now return to this point in order to make a further step in my analysis. The situation is manifest in the beliefs of the Tiv of Nigeria, as reported on by Professor and Mrs. Bohannan.31 A Tiv elder, skilled in handling social affairs and in settling disputes, ‘must have’ what the Tiv call ‘tsav, that is talent, ability, and a certain witchcraft potential. The possession of tsav,’ say the Bohannans, ‘grants power to bewitch and to prevent bewitching; in both aspects it is the most powerful means of discipline in the hands of the elders and, in practice, the force by which their decisions are upheld.’ There could not, surely, be a belief which states more clearly the ambivalent potential of men’s talents in society. I quote further from the Bohannans: ‘Tsav can be either good or bad.’ ‘Tsav . . . gives power over other people, and, in a furiously egalitarian society . . . such power sets a man apart; it is distrusted, for Tiv believe firmly that no one can rise above his fellows except at their expense.’ But a man must will to use his tsav against others, and these victims can only be members of his agnatic lineage. On the other hand, elders with tsav need human lives to obtain prosperity for their social group—the fertility of farms, crops, and women, success in hunting, good health. These human lives, sacrificed so to speak in the group’s interests, the elders without their own knowledge take from among their agnatic kin. It is very significant that kin who may compete can be killed for good or for evil. Tsav grows on the hearts of human beings and varies in shape and colour as it is good or bad. This can be seen on autopsy. And tsav develops slowly, as a ‘man’s personality develops,’ though its growth may be accelerated by a diet of human flesh— consumed in occult form. The Bohannans read this belief at one level as referring ‘to people of small talent who get ahead by misuse of the substance of others. . . . ’ During certain crises the Tiv agnatic group holds divinatory seances. Bohannan, in his book Justice and Judgment among the Tiv (1957), gives a number of graphic accounts of the solemn and ritually controlled jockeying which occurs at these Tiv seances. They are always concerned with disturbances among relatively closely related persons. In a severe crisis each party, including the dead, is represented by either his local age-mates or his maternal kin, who are related to him as an individual but who are not members of the disturbed agnatic group. And each party or his representatives consults a diviner in advance and brings to the seance the diviner’s selection of possible causes of occult disturbance, as possibly associated with misfortunes and quarrels in the group. Death and illnesses provoke seances; or brothers may be quarrelling over their rights to control the marriages of women, or to inherit wives of dead members. As the elders investigate these problems they may light on the omission of a ritual to a fetish, or witchcraft, as the cause of difficulty, or perhaps as the future outcome of some dispute among the close kin. In the course of the proceedings they endeavour to set aright secular disorder, but the proceedings always end with a ritual. The characteristic of these proceedings, says Bohannan, is that they settle disputes between persons in relationships that can never be broken or ignored. The function of a [seance] is only incidentally the settlement of particular grievances; its main function is to make it possible for people who must live together to do so harmoniously. Marriage ties can be broken; marriage disputes can be heard in court. But ties of agnationare unchangeable, and are the basis of all citizenship rights of adult males. One must either get along with one’s agnates or become an expatriate. . . . Tiv recognize that [seances] do settle disputes. But they also insist that the real purpose of the [seance] is not to settle the dispute itself but to allay the mystical factors which are behind it, which caused it, or which it caused. Hence every seance ends with a ritual, either to allay or to be prophylactic against these occult factors. The elders who control the discussion are themselves interested in the internal politics of the group. They have also been involved in quarrels and alliances with the protagonists and with dead men and women who belonged to the group. They may have claims on the property and women discussed. Hence there is struggle for position, and not only ‘judicial’ assessment of facts in the light of law though this is present. In an impasse nothing may be done; and in the end, divination decides the issue. The decisive role of occult factors emerges clearly in a seance which followed on a certain man’s death. The deceased’s full sister had died three or four months earlier, and the divination said she had been killed by tsav (either witchcraft or the elders’ power used for community ends). Nobody asked the divining apparatus whose ‘witchcraft power’ it was. When an autopsy was performed on her she had no tsav (black substance) on her heart. It was clear that she did not die because she had tsav of witchcraft and had been punished, and therefore she must have died either because an evil witch in the group had killed her or because the elders needed a life for the community’s fertility and prosperity. Loud and bitter accusations were made by her close male kinsmen, and a special pot ‘of ashes and [magical substances], which is the symbol of right and justice’ was used to seek out the unnamed wrongdoer. He or she was ‘cursed’ upon the pot. When the woman’s death was followed by her brother’s illness and death, it was necessary to determine whether he was killed by the righteous medicine punishing his own evil witchcraft, or as a sacrifice by his agnatic kin, or by the witchcraft of one of them. Only autopsy on his corpse could settle the matter. His kinsmen opposed the autopsy. They protested that they knew he was innocent, and it was unnecessary. His age-set, composed of age-mates from outside the village, insisted on the autopsy. They protested that they knew he was innocent and demanded that his innocence be proved. The autopsy was performed by the leader of the dead man’s age-set. It disclosed two ‘sacks’ of blood on the heart, one dull blue, the other bright red. The leader of the age-set pointed these out to the anthropologist as bewitching tsav, and added, ‘But tsav need not be evil. But this tsav is evil. It is large and of two colours.’ Slowly it was agreed that the man had been killed by the righteous medicines of justice which punished his witchcraft. The deceased’s age-set, after argument with the agnates, took under its protection his younger brother and widows. The ‘justiceseeking’ medicine was then again invoked against anyone who had ‘done evil deeds in this matter.’ Bohannan brings out the process of dispute arising from self-interest and from assertion of various rights in terms of complex relationships between the parties reaching back into the past. These are seen in terms of moral rules. He discusses the full duality of tsav, whose potential power for good and evil is itself symbolic of the ambivalence inherent in social life—in which it may kill kinsfolk for the good or the ill of the group. But he does not, in my opinion, sufficiently stress the profound moral crisis which faces an agnatic group with these beliefs whenever misfortune occurs. Nor does he draw attention to the manner in which those most deeply involved insist that confidence in the innocence of their brother makes an autopsy unnecessary. In a way they may have feared that he would be found innocent, for that would have left the rankling problem that another of them was guilty. The related outsiders,32 starting from the same premise that the dead man was innocent, force action and temporary resolution of the moral crisis. The outsiders seem to act to clarify moral relationships within the group. Where the divination is observation of an organic condition, it is not the apparatus which is external, unbiased and compelling, but compulsion comes from persons not involved in the crisis. Something complex may lie behind Evans-Pritchard’s statement that among the Zande in the past a blood brother used to carry out the autopsy on an alleged witch.33 In the first part of this essay I tried to relate the forms of a belief in occult causes of evil to conflicts of social values in some African tribes; in the latter part I have examined how divinations of ancestral indignation or of witchcraft, as against judicial arbitration, are set in struggles within proliferating groups, both agnatic and matrilineal. There are African societies where the relation of ritual practice to this kind of process is not so evident, particularly those where the beliefs focus on spiritual beings which can be better described as gods or, to use Lienhardt’s term, divinities.34 In his essay in this book Baxter considers these cultural situations. Situations of moral crisis in Britain Moral decisions arising from conflicting principles are clearly involved in dealing with events and developments within the smaller groups of our society. In discussing Bohannan’s account of a Tiv seance to determine the occult causes of deaths within an agnatic lineage I stressed the incapacity of the lineage itself to tackle its moral crisis, and how related outsiders forced the autopsy which decided whether the most recently deceased member was or was not the killing witch in its ranks. In most societies, even when occult fears are not aroused, persons who are outside the group involved but related to at least some of its members are called in to deal with certain moral disturbances. This process may be operated consciously or unconsciously. The witch-detective, or witch-doctor, is a professional outsider. In Britain we have many professional outsiders whom we can consult in moral crises: priests, lawyers and other consultants or conciliators, or arbitrators, doctors, marriage guidance counsellors and other social welfare workers, and the like. I can look only at the role of one kind of such person, the industrial consultant, who advises on problems of reorganizing a social subsystem. I have selected this in order to make my comparison with the situation in Africa of the extended family unit running a productive enterprise. When a family owning a firm expands in numbers, unless the firm’s business increases very rapidly a situation is likely to arise when it becomes difficult to fit in the members of new generations, and competition between the members of the family for the limited number of leading positions in the organization may become acute. Here, as in Africa, a group’s sentiments of kinship emphasizing unity and the rights of all members of the family come into conflict with the limitations of resources and the principles of efficient running of the business. We have practically no scientific accounts of how a crisis of this sort is handled, though there are plenty of novels on the theme. Fortunately Dr Cyril Sofer, then a sociological consultant with the Tavistock Institute, has published a study of one family firm.35 His organization was called in to advise the firm on how to deal with a crisis which had arisen over the accountant, who had married a great-granddaughter of the firm’s founder. The firm was proposing to introduce mechanized accounting, which this relative-in-law of the rest of the senior managers could not operate. They offered to give him training but still felt that, since 6o per cent of the firm’s shares were held by the general public, they should really look for an unrelated man already skilled. The accountant had asked as an alternative that he be sent as assistant manager to the firm’s branch in Australia, but had been turned down for this job; later it turned out that one of his brothers-in-law was interested in the position. The accountant was bitter because he said his father-in-law had promised he would eventually become a member of the board of directors, while his present relatives-in-law said the board was not committed to this—these relatives-in-law being, as far as I can work out, an uncle, two cousins and two brothers of his wife. The consultant discussed these problems with the directors and contestants separately and in a group, and brought out fears that had long been suppressed, such as the fear of younger members of the family that they were getting on in the firm because they were of the family, and not on merit—and for some decades now our civilization has laid stress on merit. Eventually he got the matter temporarily adjusted: the accountant was interviewed in open competition for the job of mechanical accounting and for the Australian post, and given the latter. A new post was created for his wife’s brother. And the firm agreed that the consulting organization provide a vocational counselling service for the fourth generation of the family, to see if there were not professions and posts outside the firm for which they were better suited, training for which would be financed by the whole family. In short, the consultant made clear to the family that they lived in modern times where opportunities are relatively unrestricted as compared with the more limited opportunities of even Victorian society. All this advice was eminently sensible; but the consultant’s account does not seem to me to weigh sufficiently that the firm’s crisis was a crisis of moral choices. He does not give a genealogy; but the pseudonyms he has given to the directors indicate that in the first or second generation from the founder, sons of daughters as well as sons of sons were well provided for. Maybe daughters’ husbands had previously been taken into the firm. In the next generation the critical problem was a choice between the men related by blood into the family and the men related by marriage. It is not easy to sack your kinswoman’s husband, even when he is competing with you, the blood kinsmen, and it seems to me that the introduction of mechanical accounting may have been used unconsciously, to force the relativein-law out of the firm. We are not told whether it was an economic necessity. And looming over all was the problem of the next generation. In these circumstances only an outsider—and here it was a highly skilled outsider—was able to clarify the issues, and to disentangle technical from sentimental problems, so that at least the technical problems could be dealt with. The firm became less dominated by family interests. The rationale of a scientific civilization was brought into a moral crisis, for an apparently objective secular solution; and this was possible because there are opportunities in our society for achievement which is not at the cost of one’s near kin. I believe that some of the same issues arise even in firms which do not belong to one family. Someone has said that ‘a critical survey has now established that the clients who approach a business consultant do so with one of two motives. On the one hand they may want scapegoats for the reorganization upon which they have already decided. On the other they may want to prevent reorganization taking place.’ I consider this statement to be too cynical. In practice the problem may be to put over a solution which seems objectively sensible but which if proposed by an insider would be judged by others as an attempt to advance his own interests. And even where the proposal seems against his interests the others may suspect some deeply concealed plot. But (as it is put in the north of England) ‘there’s nowt so queer as folk,’ and the queerest thing about folk is that they are not moved entirely by self-interest but are influenced also by moral considerations. Every firm is a closely linked network of personal and sectional interests, but these are affected by the moral principles of our whole civilization and of the overall purposes of the firm itself. They are also influenced by loyalties to other individuals as well as by personal animosities. Not all men easily engage in naked power politics with those who have worked with them in the moral comity of common purpose. Hence even apparently straightforward technical adjustments in a firm may cause a moral crisis, insoluble perhaps because of the conflict between the value of loyalty to colleagues and the value of efficiency. Those involved cannot solve the crisis. They call in, if they are wise, a trained outsider; besides using technical skills, he can act as a moral catalyst to help produce an at least temporarily satisfactory solution. The industrial consultant is not a witch-detective: he achieves a secular solution which, in the opposite manner to the occult solution, focuses attention onto structural difficulties. He studies jobs and roles, brings conflicts centred on a role into the open, tries to get the firm to reorganize itself so that one person does not fill conflicting roles. He points out that it is the firm’s arrangements, not the shortcomings of individuals, that are causing difficulties. He can do this, I argue, not only because of developments in social science but also because there are other opportunities in our society available to those adversely affected by reorganization in the firm. In short, the industrial consultant tries to distract the attention of people away from the alleged shortcomings, weaknesses and wrongdoing of their associates. We may well say that our increasing understanding of the working of the natural world, with the development of the sciences investigating it, has expanded the area within which we can use theories of empirical causation to explain the occurrence of good and ill fortune. But Evans-Pritchard’s analysis of beliefs in witchcraft brought out that Africans have similar insight into empirical causation; what the belief in witchcraft explains is why a particular individual suffers a misfortune or enjoys good fortune. Increase in technical knowledge alone does not deal with this problem. This is graphically brought out in a story reported by Wilson from Mpondoland. A Mpondo teacher told her that his child, who had died of typhus, had been bewitched. When Wilson protested that the child died of typhus because an infected louse had bitten it, the teacher replied that he knew that that was why his child got typhus, but why had the louse gone to his child, and not to one of the other children with whom he was playing? We too suffer ill-fortune which cannot be accounted for wholly by theories of empirical causation: the standard scientific explanation why some people suffer car accidents is to say that it is to some extent statistical chance—which does not really explain the particularity of the misfortune. And there are major disasters, such as economic recessions, whose causes are little understood, or which result from the concatenation of variables that are too complex for us to measure (as, for example, is shown in my citation from Devons in the Introduction to this book). Yet we do not ascribe these individual or community disasters to witchcraft, or to some other occult agent. Even a so-called ‘witch hunt’ for Communists, or capitalists, or the like, in some society or the other, as responsible for social ills, is phrased in secular terms. Hence I believe that it is not sufficient to explain changes in attitudes about the responsibility we bear for what happens to our fellow citizens, or the responsibility of individuals for breakdowns or wrongdoing in the tenor of life, only by ascribing these changes to the expanding growth of our technical knowledge, including that in the social and behavioural sciences. I suggest that we may at least partly ascribe these attitudes which reduce mutual responsibility to the steadily increasing extent to which we no longer depend, in order to make our living, on those with whom we are intimately and sentimentally connected by kinship or in-lawship. This removes an intensifying element in the ambivalence in key relationships, since we do not have to compete as well as collaborate in those relationships. Instead, our dealings, including competition, are increasingly with unrelated persons in differentiated social ties, even when we also cooperate with some of those with whom we compete. The ambivalence in the close personal relationships which dominate in a tribal society leads to an exaggerated emphasis on the importance of others, as part of their responsibility to their fellows, feeling towards these fellows the correct sentiments. Since any defection in duty between close relatives may affect not only their personal relationships but also the working of productive and political units, and so forth, a premium is set on all such people feeling correctly, as well as acting correctly, towards one another. Conversely, feelings of anger and envy and hatred are believed to set in train by occult means disasters which may strike the object of the animus. In practice, when there is a disaster, some misfortune, it is interpreted to be the result of such animus. As I have repeatedly stressed, in fact these alleged harmful feelings are often ascribed to struggles which arise out of conflicts between highly approved social principles whose clash precipitates moral crises. It is here, far more than in simple clashes of interest under single principles, that occult beliefs operate. Hence, I argue, as the individual becomes increasingly less dependent on his close relatives, so it is possible to envisage his taking advantage of the opportunities to move freely in the greater society, away from his relatives. He becomes isolable as a moral person from his relatives.36 This line or argument fits in with Durkheim’s (and others’) general thesis that there is a reduction in ritualization as the division of labour increases, but it fills in details in a sphere with which he did not deal. I would argue further that it is this general situation, and not only developments in biology, psychology and social science, that has led some members of our own society to focus more and more on the criminal as an individual whose capacity for responsibility for his wrongdoing is severely restricted by the organic, emotional and social circumstances that have shaped him. In an essay in this book Professor S. F. Moore states that it is incorrect to contrast too sharply, as I tended to do in an earlier publication,37 the ideas of strict liability which I took to be implicit in the law of feuding societies, and generally in the occult beliefs of tribal societies, with the ideas on liability and responsibility which I took to be characteristic of the law of a modern Western industrial society. Her comments and those of other colleagues convince me that I then went too far. I perhaps understated the extent to which, in many tribal situations (including some I reported from Barotse trials), enquiry is made into the alleged actual state of mind of a party before the court, where motives are inferred as the only reasonable interpretation of the evidence. I should too have taken account of what I have cited above from Evans-Pritchard: viz. that a Zande cannot plead that witchcraft made him commit adultery, theft or treason. Let me say that, in my argument about a movement from strict liability to increasing enquiry into individual motivation, I did not assert that either system of law had the one without the other. I stated that there was a movement, not a complete achievement. And for that statement I quoted authorities in jurisprudence who had seen a general movement away from strict liability as marking the development of law. I have not space, even were I competent, to set out here all the complications involved. Yet I venture to assert that those authorities’ opinions still stand, though there are a number of offences in modern Anglo-American law where strict liability, even without culpability, prevails. And H. L. A. Hart in his recent collection of essays on Punishment and Responsibility (1968) still emphasizes such a development. He says that strict liability has ‘ . . . acquired such odium among Anglo-American lawyers’ (p. 136), and that it ‘ . . . appears as a sacrifice of a valued principle. . . .’ (p. 152; see also passim). The principle was little questioned in early European, or in tribal, law. Hence I consider I am justified in continuing to regard concentration on the circumstances of the individual criminal as a strengthening trend in legal philosophy, and criminology, and perhaps even in the law. This trend has culminated in a paradoxical form, propagated by some of the most liberal of criminologists, such as Professor Lady Wootton. They argue that strict liability should be determined for all offences as a first stage in trial, where a man may be found to have committed some wrongful action, but that the fixing of responsibility or culpability should be eliminated at this stage. If it be found that the accused has committed the action complained of, then there should follow an enquiry into him as an individual and into the specific circumstances of his case, to lead to a determination of whether and how he should be punished or treated. This doctrine seems to me to present an extreme view, a view in which the social concomitants of a crime are radically separated from the individual found to have committed the crime (here one cannot speak of him as being found ‘guilty’ of the crime). But I am here dealing with trends in disputation about the nature of criminal responsibility, and about the form and function of retributive and deterrent punishment as against remedial treatment. As Hart says, ours ‘is morally a plural society’ (p. 171): different people hold different views on these problems. I can only suggest, as a problem for research, that it might be fruitful to try to work out how far the holders of the so-called more liberal views are the most socially mobile members of society and hence those least enmeshed in networks of close relationships with a limited number of others (the opposite situation from that of members of tribal society). I have not been able to trace work on this point, though we know that where people are involved in close-knit networks they tend to have similar views on offences, as against those whose networks are less closely knit. At least I may say, in raising this problem, that theories which argue towards a ‘diminished responsibility’ for the criminal, and regard him as a sick product of society and of his own personal and social circumstances, stand sharply distinct from the kind of beliefs about the responsibility of people towards their fellows which are implicit in beliefs of witchcraft and ancestral indignation. Under these beliefs, ill-feeling alone is endowed with power to do harm. These new theories may be one potential logical end—which will never be attained—of a separation of the individual from complete dependence on his kin, a dependence which produces high moral evaluation of all his actions and all his feelings. The modern tendency contrasts sharply with the situation in Africa from which I started. In Africa you break with your own kin only with difficulty and at high cost. There restriction of opportunities keeps you in competition as well as co-operation with your kin; and hence, I suggest, a high ambivalence in all social relationships invests these relationships with occult fears as well as hopes. I suggest too that the Greek concept of moira, a man’s fate, may be understood in this light. In his Frazer lecture on Oedipus and Job in West African Religion (1959), Professor Fortes considered West African beliefs in the Prenatal Destiny which an individual is held to select before birth and which determines his fate. Among the Tallensi of Ghana this Prenatal Destiny may be evil, preventing a woman from having children and a man from becoming a true man. Fortes says the belief is used to explain why an individual fails ‘to fulfil the roles and achieve the performance regarded as normal for his status in the social structure.’ The failure is irremediable if ritual redressive action has failed to alter his or her circumstances, and hence destiny. Fortes argues that a Prenatal Destiny ‘could best be described as an innate disposition that can be realized for good or ill.’ The victim of an evil Destiny is held to have rejected society itself: ‘this is not a conscious or deliberate rejection, since the sufferer is not aware of his predisposition until he learns it through divination. . . . The fault lies in his inescapable, inborn wishes’ (pp. 68–9), expressed when he selected his Destiny before he was born. Fortes compares this belief with the fate or lot of Oedipus, a moral man condemned from birth to two heinous crimes. Under such beliefs an individual is morally responsible for the occult determination of his own fate, and its moral crisis, even if he does his best to evade that fate. 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Firth, B. Malinowski, and I. Schapera, 293–305. London: Routledge. Sofer, C. 1961. The organization from within: A comparative study of social institutions based on a socio-therapeutic approach. London: Tavistock. Turner, V. W. 1957. Schism and continuity in an African society. Manchester: Manchester University Press for the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute. Van Velsen, J. 1964. The politics of kinship: A study in social manipulation among the lakeside Tonga of Nyasaland. Manchester: Manchester University Press for the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute. Wilson, G. and M. Wilson. 1954. The analysis of social change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilson, M. 1951. “Witch beliefs and social structure.” In American Journal of Sociology 56: 307–13. ———. 1963. Good company. Boston: Beacon Press. Wilson, M., S. Kaplan, T. Maki, and E. M. Walton. 1952. Social structure. Keiskammahoek rural survey, vol. 3. Pietermaritzburg: Shuter & Shooter.     Max GLUCKMAN (1911–1975) was a British social anthropologist and founder of the Manchester Department of Anthropology where he held the position of Professor of Social Anthropology. Between 1941 and 1947, Gluckman directed the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, the first anthropological research institute in Africa. A political activist and resolute anti-colonialist, Gluckman’s work inspired a tradition of anthropologists—sometimes referred to as the “Manchester School”—who moved away from the structural-functionalism of Radcliffe-Brown and Evans-Pritchard and toward Marxist and conflict-centric theories of social change. He is author of Order and rebellion in tribal Africa (Cohen and West, 1963) and Politics, law and ritual in tribal society (Basil Blackwell, 1965), and the editor of The allocation of responsibility (Manchester University Press, 1975). ___________________ Publisher’s note: This is a reprint of Gluckman, Max. 1972. “Moral crises: Magical and secular solutions. The Marett lectures, 1964 and 1965.” In The allocation of responsibility, edited by Max Gluckman, 1–50. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hau is grateful to Peter and Timothy Gluckman for permission to reprint this article. We remind the reader that we retain the style of the original publication. 1. Delivered at Exeter College, Oxford, on 18 and 25 February, 1965. The text has been left in lecture form. 2. I use ‘occult’ following Turner and Fortes, rather than ‘mystical’ as I did in earlier work, following Evans-Pritchard, because ‘mystical’ has other meanings. ‘Occult’ emphasizes that hidden forces are at work. 3. The judicial process among the Barotse (1955, 1967). 4. Epstein, ‘Injury and liability in African customary law in Zambia’ (1969), and Introduction to [the] book in which that essay was published. 5. The context of belief (1957). 6. It seems to me that this point is overlooked by Horton (‘Ritual man in Africa,’ 1964) in his approach to theories which take this into account, but taken up in his later ‘African traditional thought and Western science’ (1967). 7. In his general study of Kinship and the social order (1969), at p. 238n, Fortes cites, from my Judicial process among the Barotse (1955, p. 154), this song in reference to the deep conflicts within kinship amity, and their connections with suspicions and accusations of witchcraft and sorcery. 8. Durkheim’s contention in De la division du travail social (1893) is examined in Moore’s essay in this book. 9. The organization from within (1961), pp. 3–40. 10. For material on the Zulu I depend partly on my own field research in 1936–8, partly on a working through of a mass of literary records in my doctoral thesis on ‘The realm of the supernatural among the Southeastern Bantu’(Oxford, 1936). There I also covered literature on Mpondo, Xhosa and Tsonga (Thonga): see especially Junod, The life of a South African tribe (1927), on Tsonga; for later work on Mpondo, Hunter, Reaction to conquest (1936), and on the Xhosa, Wilson et al., Keiskammahoek rural survey (1952). On Swazi, Kuper has written a most illuminating play, A witch in my heart (1970), with the background of her An African aristocracy (1947). 11. I have written this account of the Zulu in the analytic present; but by ‘nowadays’ in the above sentence I referred to the period when I worked in Zululand (1936–8). This kind of reaction by the extended family to the conditions of labour migration was widely reported from many tribes of South and Central, and indeed other parts of, Africa. Sansom discusses the situation in a South African tribe where the extended family has lost this role (see his essay in this book). I continue my analysis of the indigenous system in the analytic present. 12. In 1950 I named this well known system ‘the house-property complex’ in my ‘Kinship and marriage among the Zulu of Natal and the Lozi of Northern Rhodesia.’ There is a fine account in Kuper, An African aristocracy (1947). 13. Lineage organization in South-eastern China (1958), pp. 134–35. 14. Cf. Leach, Rethinking anthropology (1961), chapter I, on the complex variations in beliefs about maternal and paternal contributions to the child. 15. Junod, Life of a South African tribe (1927), ii, pp. 541f. 16. See Peters’ essay in this book, and his ‘No time for the supernatural’ (1963). 17. See discussion of the work of Mitchell, Turner and Middleton below, and also Van Velsen, The politics of kinship (1964). 18. See Gluckman, ‘Les rites de passage’ (1962) and, for other elaborations and background, Custom and conflict in Africa (1955) and Law, politics and ritual in tribal society (1965). 19. The situation of the members of this triad is well discussed in Marwick, Sorcery in its social setting (1965), passim. Any one of them may have broken a rule. 20. I have discussed the way in which customs ‘exaggerate’ biological and other differences among men and women, and between them, in the works cited in note 18. 21. Nadel, Nupe religion (1954), pp. 180–1. Nadel also refers the beliefs to psycho-sexual processes, in a manner discussed by Devons and Gluckman in the Conclusion to Closed systems and open minds (1964), pp. 251f. 22. ‘Witch beliefs and social structure’ (1951). For background see her Reaction to conquest (1936) and Good company (1951). 23. Kuper’s play A witch in my heart (1970) deals with the plight of a barren woman among the Swazi. 24. Well described in Richards, Land, labour and diet in Northern Rhodesia (1940). 25. ‘Oral sorcery among the natives of Bechuanaland’ (1934). 26. Lugbara religion (1960); page references in parentheses in the text are to this work. For a more general account see his The Lugbara of Uganda (1965). 27. The Yao village (1956); subsequent page references in parentheses in the text are to this work. The development of the new mode of analysis is discussed in my ‘Ethnographic data in British social anthropology’ (1961) and in Epstein (ed.), The craft of social anthropology (1967). 28. Sorcery in its social setting (1965): subsequent page references in parentheses in the text are to this work. 29. ‘Witch beliefs in Central Africa’ (1967). 30. Schism and continuity in an African society (1957). 31. The case material below is cited from P. J. Bohannan, Justice and judgment among the Tiv (1951), and most of the accounts of tsav from P. J. and L. Bohannan, The Tiv of Central Nigeria (1953), pp. 34, 82, 84–6. 32. On this general point see Frankenberg’s essay in this book and his Village on the border (1957). 33. Witchcraft, oracles and magic . . . (1937), at p. 43: Dr Elaine Baldwin drew my attention to this point, which I had overlooked, like most commentators on the book. 34. Divinity and experience (1961). 35. The organization from within (1961). The other studies of non-family organizations in the book also illustrate the argument I make. 36. Bott, Family and social network (1957), discusses the coincidence of moral norms held by, and normal judgments made by, persons with what she termed a ‘close-knit’ network,’ i.e. with kin closely resident together. I have considered the illumination which her analysis throws on to the beliefs of tribal society in my Preface to the second edition of her book (1967). 37. The ideas in Barotse jurisprudence (1967), chapter VII.  

Pitt-Rivers: The law of hospitality This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Julian Pitt-Rivers. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online) The law of hospitality* Julian Pitt-Rivers   Prologue In an essay entitled The Odyssean suitors and the host-guest relationship1 Professor Harry L. Levy discussed the final scene of the Odyssey and took issue with those authors who find it out of character with the spirit of the work as a whole. The apparent anomaly introduced by the unmerciful slaughter of the suitors whose faults went hardly beyond a certain absence of decorum he explained by the hypothesis of an earlier folk-tale in the peasant tradition which is evident elsewhere in the poem, he says. This is intertwined with the courtly tradition of the warrior princes which dominates the greater part. The ideal of courtly largesse is contrasted with the more material concerns of frugal farmers whose customs of hospitality contain a provision forbidding the guest to overstay his welcome and impoverish his host. Leaving to classical scholars the task of unravelling the origin of its elements, the anthropologist is entitled to take the story as it stands and attempt to relate it to what he can discover of the law of hospitality in general and of the code of hospitality of ancient Greece in particular. It appears to me that, regardless of any historical disparities in the sources from which it originated, the tale of the home-coming of Odysseus may take its place among those exemplary epics which provide us with a key to the principles of social conduct. Indeed the whole work may be viewed as a study in the law of hospitality, in other words, the problem of how to deal with strangers. I In one of the earliest professional monographs we have, Boas describes the custom whereby the Central Eskimo tribes receive a stranger and the curious combat to which he is then challenged: If a stranger unknown to the inhabitants of a settlement arrives on a visit he is welcomed by the celebration of a great feast. Among the south-eastern tribes the natives arrange themselves in a row, one man standing in front of it. The stranger approaches slowly, his arms folded and his head inclined toward the right side. Then the native strikes him with all his strength [94] on the right cheek [sic] and in his turn inclines his head awaiting the stranger’s blow (tigluiqdjung . While this is going on the other men are playing at ball and singing (igdlukitaqtung . Thus they continue until one of the combatants is vanquished. The ceremonies of greeting among the western tribes are similar to those of the eastern, but in addition ‘boxing, wrestling and knife testing’ are mentioned by travellers who have visited them. In Davis Strait and probably in all the other countries the game of ‘hook and crook’ is always played on the arrival of a stranger (pakijumijartung). Two men sit down on a large skin, after haying stripped the upper part of their bodies, and each tries to stretch out the bent arm of the other. These games are sometimes dangerous, as the victor has the right to kill his adversary; but generally the feast ends peaceably. The ceremonies of the western tribes in greeting a stranger are much feared by their eastern neighbours and therefore intercourse is somewhat restricted. The meaning of the duel, according to the natives themselves, is ‘that the two men in meeting wish to know which of them is the better man’.2 We can hardly suggest that such a desire to measure oneself against the stranger is peculiar to people of simple social organisation and dispersed settlements, as one might at first be tempted to imagine, for the custom in spirit if not in form, is reminiscent of the age of chivalry when knights on meeting found it necessary to test the ‘valour’ or ‘value’ of their new acquaintance, and we may therefore surmise that it springs from something fundamental in the nature of relations with strangers, such as a necessity to evaluate them in some way or other against the standards of the community. Take the elements of the custom: The feast offered to celebrate the stranger’s arrival; The challenge, issued to determine the stranger’s worth; The forms of the combat which estimate it in terms of the strength in his right arm; His possible execution if he is proved inferior; and The peaceful conclusion which is generally achieved, and which we may suspect to have been the intended outcome. We are not told how often the right to execute the defeated stranger was, in fact, exerted. It is not essential that it should ever have been, for the belief that the right existed must surely have been enough to terrify the potential visitor from the East,particularly since duels inspired by vengeance also led to the execution of the loser. The existence of the right rather than the determination to exert it is all we require in order to understand the literal significance of the institution. [96] At the risk of appearing to throw my comparative net too wide, I would point out that the entry of an outsider into any group is commonly the occasion for an ‘ordeal’ of some sort, whether among British public schoolboys, freemasons or the initiates of the secret societies of Africa, but in these instances the character of the ordeal as a test of worthiness is less important than its character as an initiation rite. They might all be considered as ‘rites of incorporation’,3 a variety of the rites of passage through which an old status is abandoned and a new one acquired. In this case it is the status of stranger which is lost and that of community member which is gained. The social structure of Eskimo communities is notoriously flexible, yet it can hardly be supposed that a single occasion can admit a newcomer to full membership while he is still unacquainted with the other members of the settlement — the ‘ordeal’ of the British schoolboy lasts a whole year. The ordeal of the Eskimo would decide rather his right to remain, assuming he was either victorious or spared. Yet during the time he remained, what exactly would his status be? The combat enables the standing of the new member to be established within the hierarchy of prestige. From then on he is known to be a better man or not than his challenger. Unfortunately Boas tells us nothing more about the relationship which may have existed thereafter between the two men and it would be normal to assume, therefore, that it was in no way peculiar. Nevertheless, braving the bad name which speculation has rightly acquired in anthropology and on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, I should like to speculate on the relationship which subsisted between the stranger and his challenger, for such a guess would enable me to link up the Eskimo custom in this regard with that, so different in every way, of classical antiquity. The guess however does not claim to establish, but only at best to illustrate, the association between the two forms of custom which will be shown to derive from a common sociological root at a more abstract level. Fustel de Coulanges explains that in the city of antiquity a stranger possessed no status in law nor in religion and that it was necessary for him to have a patron in order to gain the protection of the local laws and Gods. To offend the newcomer was to offend his patron since by the code of hospitality the two were allied in this way. ‘L’étranger se rattachait par cet intermédiaire à la cité’.4 The provisions of Arab hospitality are not dissimilar in this respect; indeed, in many countries similar customs are found. In contrast to a member of the community whose status is identifiable by reference to its norms and is recognised by everyone, the stranger is incorporated only through a personal bond with an established member; [97] he has, as it were, no direct jural relationship with anyone else, no place within the system, no status save that of stranger (which is a kind of self-contradiction: the status of being statusless). On the other hand, in relation to his patron he possesses, however little may be known about him,5 a clearly defined status, that of guest or client, which makes any further evaluation of him unnecessary. The status of guest therefore stands midway between that of hostile stranger and that of community member. He is incorporated practically rather than morally. The essence of the stranger is, tautologically enough, that he is unknown. He remains potentially anything: valiant or worthless, well born, well connected, wealthy or the contrary, and since his assertions regarding himself cannot be checked, he is above all not to be trusted. For this reason the charlatan is always, must be, a stranger. In any case his social standing in his community of origin is not necessarily accepted by the people of another. For it is a matter of local pride that each community would set up its standards for itself rather than accept those which are dictated by foreigners. In this sense, every community aspires to autonomy. Therefore the status achieved in one is not directly transferable to another, nor is the status ascribed by one society necessarily recognised in another; indeed the possibility of finding an equivalent at all may very well be missing — you cannot be a Brahmin in the English countryside.6 The stranger therefore starts afresh as an individual insofar as he may be incorporated into the community. It must make its own evaluation of him in order to accept him. The simple logic of the Eskimo custom is apparent: lacking a wider society and a hierarchy of social status, the value of a man is no more than the literal strength in his right arm. The problem of the treatment of the stranger includes another aspect. Does he possess the necessary knowledge of the culture of the people among whom he comes to behave correctly and make evaluations of conduct by their standards? Can he, in a word, subscribe to the rules of their culture? As a newcomer he will never know from the outset how to behave towards individual personalities, but if he knows the rules he will quickly distinguish who is who. No knowledge of persons is required of the guest who has a patron to protect him, but to fulfil the role of guest he must at least understand the conventions which relate to hospitality and which define the behaviour expected of him. Hence the distinction which the Greeks made between Xenoi, strangers who were nevertheless Greeks, and Barbaroi, outlandish foreigners who spoke another language. Franz Boas does not tell us, stranger as he was to the Eskimo, that he was obliged to wrestle with his right arm for his life and we may assume that the ceremony to which he referred was limited to other Eskimos [98] who were practised in the art of such a combat and sensitive to the honour conveyed by a feast of walrus blubber, that is, to strangers capable of becoming incorporated, not ‘barbarians’. Let us suppose that the stranger’s appearance in the community where he had neither kin nor friends constituted in itself a challenge to which the local challenger was doing in reality no more than respond in the name of his group, its self-appointed champion. He is likely therefore to be the chief or the strongest man within it, or at least one who claims to be so. It would follow that if the stranger defeats him, he is proved superior to all and this fact would entitle him to be honoured by the whole community. The precedence accorded to a guest may here be paid by everyone to recognised worth. Honour is gained by all through the visit of a superior person, since in accordance with its paradoxical nature it is gained by being paid (and lost by being denied) where it is due. Moreover, it seems most improbable that the theoretical right to execute the defeated champion could be exerted where he was surrounded by his kin and the stranger was alone. On the other hand, in the instance where the stranger was defeated it seems unlikely that the right to execute him would be exerted unless he was suspected of coming with sinister covert intentions such as to avenge a blood-feud or commit a felony. Eskimos are known to change the affiliation of their community not infrequently, as Boas points out, and it hardly appears likely that this could be done only at grave mortal risk. Moreover they do not have the reputation of a bloodthirsty people who slaughter one another for glory. On the contrary their distaste for exhibitions of anger and violence has earned them the title of ‘The Gentle People’. Is it not likely that this right to execute the defeated stranger existed normally only to be waived, establishing the fact that subsequent to his defeat, he ‘owed his life’ to his conqueror? The fact would surely find some social recognition in a kind of bond; when one has fought for one’s life against someone, lost and been spared, one can hardly resume the relationship of mere acquaintances, especially in a society, like the Eskimo among so many others, where lives may be owed, avenged or commuted into payment. May I not infer that the defeated stranger became some kind of client to the man who had conquered him who became in this way responsible for him in the eyes of the community? Under such conditions his vanquisher would, in fact, have been literally responsible for his presence there, having preferred not to exert his theoretical right to kill him. The struggle, condemnation and pardon at the hands of his victor follow a well-known sequence of social death and rebirth into a changed status. My guess — or is it mere phantasy? — amounts to this: the stranger who was recognised as the better man was accorded universal respect [99] which posed no problem of his precedence within the community, whatever his subsequent relationship to his antagonist, while he who was defeated was thereafter ‘attached to the community by the intermediary’ of his victor. Those who know the Eskimo may have views about the the [sic] possible or probable existence of such a relationship which might conceivably, among a people so addicted to the notion of artificial kinship, have taken this form in the same way as war-captives are sometimes integrated into the lineage of their captors or as Dr Birket-Smith was adopted by his Eskimo host,7 but my aim is not to make any contribution to their studies. The purpose of this imaginary ethnography, embroidering the solid work of Boas, is only to offer an exercise in the logic of social relations, the scales which one may practise before attempting to interpret the infinitely complex score of reality.8 II We have dealt so far only with the social aspect of the problem posed by the stranger, unknown and perhaps unversed in the culture of the local community. The simplest solution of all — and one which was followed by many peoples while they were permitted to do so — was to refuse recognition to any person unable to claim an attachment of kinship with the tribe, that is, to treat the stranger simply as an outlaw who could be spoiled or destroyed with impunity. Such hostility towards him hardly requires an explanation since the threat which he represents to established norms and to the sanctioned order of society is patent, apart from any imagined dangers, natural or supernatural, which, in the absence of any knowledge of him, he may incarnate. Even when not suspect as a vampire or a child-stealer, the stranger is always potentially hostile. How then are we to explain that particular relationship, discussed by Professor Levy, between the stranger and Zeus? The idea that the chief of the Gods should choose to adopt such a disguise, that the most sacred of all should be allied to the outsider, must surely appear as something of an anomaly, especially to those who, following Malinowski, would expect to find in mythology a ‘charter’ for the social system. Taken at its face value the myth appears to contradict the first principle of social organisation: that every community must possess its own particular standards which are held sacred, ordained by the Gods and opposed to the customs of foreigners. Let us examine the possible interpretations of this belief. To begin with, the stranger is also the beggar, since they both belong to the category of persons to whom hospitality is due. The fact that the God took the form of the stranger or beggar ensured the enforcement of the moral [100] duty of hospitality upon which the free circulation of persons between Greek communities depended.9 It may be viewed, then, as a sanction supporting a system of undifferentiated exchange: do as you would be done by; receive the stranger well so that when you travel you may be well received. Taken in this sense the myth furnishes a charter for the code of hospitality, but such a teleological explanation can hardly be held sufficient to explain the existence of the belief since, quite apart from any methodological strictures, a similar code of hospitality towards the stranger exists in the Arab world unsupported by any such charter and is regarded there as a sacred duty none the less. The notion of hospitality derives in this instance from the sacredness of the womenfolk of the household.10 Moreover, in both the Arab11 and the Greek world, by dispensing hospitality honour was acquired within the community and allies outside it and considerations of personal advantage are thereby added to the general utility of the association between the stranger and the sacred. Yet they do not explain it. Granted the function of the association, the anomaly remains. For however convenient it may be in terms of the consequences to identify God with the stranger, whether as potentially the same person (Levy’s little tradition) or as patron and client (Levy’s great tradition), we can hardly suppose that a system of religious thought can be made to submit to anomalies uniquely for the sake of facilitating political and economic relations. Even the argument that the supreme God was the patron of all Greeks in opposition to local deities whose protection was geographically limited is insufficient, even were there no other objections to it, to account for the priority of the stranger in Zeus’ favour and his connection with the sacred. In fact the stranger was not necessarily Zeus, but any God in disguise. A more complete explanation can be deduced from a general consideration of the association between divinity and the unknown. Omniscience is a divine attribute and one which is jealously guarded. The moral lessons put forward in the Book of Genesis regarding the Tree of Knowledge or the myths of Icarus or Prometheus are quite unequivocal: the Gods possess knowledge which is forbidden to mankind and are prepared to punish any attempt to encroach upon their privilege. Their ineffability is the essence of their divinity. The esoteric character of communication with them and the mystery of their presence and their will (which follows none of the standards of human conduct) are the basis of the fear which they inspire. Once comprehended they would no longer be revered. Human knowledge desecrates by rendering known (and therefore secular) that which was mysterious (and therefore sacred), by reducing to the level of the known world that which is essentially [101] unknowable. The character of the sacred as the inversion of the secular is implicit in all mythologies, those which define the status of the Gods or those which recount the origins of the world.12 Both types of myth set the bounds of the mortal world and, doing so, establish the gradations of proximity to the Divine in space and in time. The mortal world is confined by an inversion of that which preceded it and that which lies beyond it. For this reason, we find Gods of foreign origin in so many parts of the world and for this reason also no prophet is accepted in his own country. In the light of this general principle the association between the God and the stranger appears generic, and the sacredness of hospitality and the honour which it confers derive not from any functional consequence of the belief but from the fact that the meeting with the stranger is a confrontation between the known world and the realms of mystery. The stranger belongs to the ‘extra-ordinary’ world, and the mystery surrounding him allies him to the sacred13 and makes him a suitable vehicle for the apparition of the God,14 the revelation of a mystery. Therefore, to put it in the phrasing of the popular epigram, it was not in the least odd of God to choose the Jews, but on the contrary exactly what the anthropologist should expect of Him. The ambiguity of their status, as at the same time belonging and not belonging, within the gates yet beyond the pale, and their reputation as the possessors of cryptic knowledge, the initiates of the mysteries of finance and of precious metals, made them strangers par excellence, perfectly endowed to be chosen both to provide the God in the beginning and to remain thereafter as his renegade kin. For this reason they were the ‘sacred of the left hand’ and the natural associates of the fallen angel. That these ‘internalised strangers’ should have served for centuries as the focus of the ambivalences of their Christian neighbours is in no way surprising; what is surprising is that psychological studies of anti-semitism should not all start with a profile of the mythological character of Jewry. The stranger derives his danger, like his sacredness, from his membership of the ‘extra-ordinary’ world. If his danger is to be avoided he must either be denied admittance, chased or enticed away like evil spirits or vampires, or, if granted admittance, he must be socialised, that is to say secularised, a process which necessarily involves inversion. His transformation into the guest means therefore that, from being shunned and treated with hostility, he must be clasped to the bosom and honoured and given precedence; no longer to be suborned, he must be succoured; from being last, he must be first,15 from being a person who can be freely insulted he becomes one who under no conditions can be disparaged. The inversion implies a transformation from hostile stranger, hostis, into guest, hospes (or hosts),’” from one whose hostile intentions are assumed [102] to one whose hostility is laid in abeyance. The word hostis claims therefore as its radical sense, not the obligation to reciprocal violence, but the notion of ‘strangeness’ which underlies this transition. The further extension to host is perfectly congruent, since strangeness is logically reciprocal, whether it enjoins distrust or hospitality. Both senses of the word, l’hôte, are conserved in French which must find other ways to distinguish between host and guest. While the behaviour enjoined by the relationship is essentially reciprocal, just as gifts are, there is a difference between reciprocal hostility and reciprocal hospitality: the first is simultaneous, the second can never be. Host and guest can at no point within the context of a single occasion be allowed to be equal, since equality invites rivalry. Therefore their reciprocity resides, not in an identity, but in an alteration of roles. Even the hostile hosts of the Kwakiutl observed this order. The hostility which underlies the relation of ‘hôtes’ which they express so explicitly (‘we fight with property’)16 can be vented, not in simultaneous combat, but (like the blows exchanged between the south eastern tribes of the Central Eskimo and their visitors) by turns. Reciprocity implies an alternation of roles, not an identity of roles. As Radcliffe-Brown saw in the case of avoidances and joking relationships, it is conflict which is prohibited; the laws of hospitality transpose the conflict to a level where hostilities are avoided. This prohibition of the equality which leads to conflict applies to the beggar as well as to the guest, the one who cannot pay and the one who is not permitted to do so — is not a beggar simply one who aspires to be a guest? But if he aspires too assiduously, then his insistence implies a threat and at that point the host is liberated of all moral duty and instead of gaining honour by his charity he loses it through submitting to duress, for freedom of will is the first condition of honour, Therefore the claim of the beggar is paradoxically one which is lost if it is asserted as a right and from the moment it loses its character as suppliance, it invites hostility. By pressing his claim too hard the would-be guest destroys its basis and falls back into the role of hostile stranger.17 By asserting his rights he denies his status, for even though a diffuse obligation exists towards the beggar, he is not endowed with any corresponding right. He establishes his status by humiliating himself in the admission of indigence and the reciprocity which he concedes in return is on behalf of God. The customs regarding begging in Andalusia may be taken to illustrate the matter. The beggar establishes his status by the demand for assistance in the name of God (por Dios). Once gratified he replies: Dios se lo pague (May God repay you). ‘May God repay you’ means ‘Because I cannot’. Here the association between the beggar and the Deity takes on a subsidiary meaning: the axis of ex- [103] change is no longer on the mortal plane. Repayment will only be made in Heaven; there will be none on Earth. The beggar is so to speak trading in the name of God, under His protection. The name by which he is known, pordiosero, rubs in the point. The refusal of alms is traditionally made in a formal phrase which carries the same import: ‘ Vd. perdone por Dios, hermano’ (Excuse me, in God’s name, Brother). The refusal to lay up store in Heaven and assume on Earth the honorific role of patron to the beggar, includes the assertion of equality with him (‘brother’), since inability to do so is the only excuse for refusal valid in the eyes of God. An alternative form, Dios le ampare, hermano’ (May God protect you, Brother) carries the same implication: ‘Because I am not going to.’ To beg is always and everywhere shameful for it implies a loss of personal autonomy which is the negation of honour. Hence those who are reduced to this expedient are regarded as the lowest and treated with the least respect of all the members of a community.18 This is not the case however, when they have sacerdotal status, for then they have not been ‘reduced to begging’; their personal autonomy has been, not lost, but wilfully renounced. A vow of poverty derives from the will and commits it; it is not the same thing as the failed aspiration to affluence. We should recognise therefore that the action of begging does not suffice by itself to define the status of a beggar; the moral basis on which the begging is undertaken must be considered. Every town in Andalusia possesses a certain number of habitual beggars. These are known persons rather than strangers and they prey upon the local population. A certain number are gypsies whose reputation for shamelessness fits them for the role of beggar. Such beggars adopt a style which makes their loss of all claim to honour patent. They cringe and display their infirmity or their misery in such a way that no man can deny his good fortune in comparison with them and therefore his obligation to help them. But they are not the only persons who depend in fact upon charity. Andalusia is a land of large farms. Its rural proletariat live in their home town normally but go away to work either sporadically or regularly on a seasonal basis. Their lives are precarious and when necessity threatens they move forth in search of work. Frequently they find themselves away from home and without means of support, so that they are forced to depend on charity. Their style of begging is very different, however, from that of the professional beggar. They stop at the farm to ask for work and if none is offered, they expect and are prepared to ask for food to continue their journey in search for it. They are not seen begging on street-corners in the towns; they do not tug the sleeve of the passer-by; they do not cringe nor attempt to evoke pity and the techniques of moral blackmail practised by the beggars are denied them by their claim to shame. They [104] tend on the contrary to adopt a gruff and manly style to differentiate themselves from the professional beggars, for they are strangers, not beggars, and they sacrifice their shame no further than the implied (but not stated) confession of indigence. They are not referred to as pordioseros, for they do not invoke charity in the name of God, but simply as pobres, persons who in better times at home would be prepared to reciprocate charity. The distinction is made clear in a telling passage in the memoirs of Juan Belmonte. When as a novice bullfighter he travelled round the countryside with a companion, they were accustomed to stop at the farms and contrive to be fed for nothing by asking to buy ten centimes’ worth of oil. But one morning at a farm in Utrera which today is my own, the only answer I got was a dry Dios le ampare, hermano.The conventional refusal to a beggar! My face fell with shame. Had I sunk to that? I was seized with a great depression and a terrible indignation against the good-for-nothing vagabond who had degraded my lust for adventure to such a level. At least the San Jacinto gang never begged its bread from door to do or. If we were hungry we robbed an orchard in gay defiance of watch-dogs and armed guards.19 The confusion between poor man and beggar is not commonly made, for the difference of status is usually clear from the style of begging. The distinction relates to the place of the supplicant within the social structure. ‘Endomendicity’ can promise no reciprocity other than through the Deity. ‘Exomendicity’ claims to be a system of undifferentiated exchange. The giver does not contemplate finding himself one day in the position of the endomendicant, for he has shame, but he may well expect to send his son off to seek work seasonally even if a change in his fortunes, the loss of his lease previously or of his post as bailiff, do not oblige him to take to the road himself. Therefore the response to the two types of supplicant are as different as their techniques. The honourable poor man may be received with honour (though this is not always the case); the professional beggar is treated with a disdain which the honourable man would not stomach. Moreover the former is a witness from the outside in whose eyes the reputation of the community is at stake, the latter is merely a nuisance and a threat. The former offers the opportunity of gaining honour through the role of patron, the latter is feared for her evil tongue and, as often as not, her evil eye. For there is a final difference between them: the former is more often a man, the latter more often a woman. Convention demands that every stranger be made a guest in Andalu- [105] sia. The unincorporated stranger cannot be abided. The plebeian etiquette with regard to eating illustrates this general sentiment. The act of eating supposes a higher degree of intimacy than mere presence and to eat in front of a stranger is to offend this sentiment. His status must be changed therefore to that of guest and this is done by the formality of offering food. The diner at a wayside tavern or modest restaurant invites the new arrival with a standard phrase, the workman eating his lunch uses the same phrase to the passer-by, the traveller in the third class railway carriage presses his travelling companions to share his provisions before he will begin eating. A similar custom is found in North Africa where it has been explained in terms of the magical danger of the envy of uninvited strangers who might well be possessed of the evil eye.20 My own experiences with regard to hospitality in the town which I have named Alcalá were not without significance. I was invited to a drink by persons of various social classes and it was not long before I was permitted to return such hospitality to members of the plebeian community and even to play the role of patron to those with whom I had formed an appropriate relationship, but I was never permitted to pay for wine we had drunk together by men of the upper class of the town, the señoritos, who insisted always on maintaining my status as a guest. (I found it necessary to search for reciprocity in other ways.) They would use various formulae to explain their refusal: ‘We shall all one day come to London and drink with you there. Then we shall ruin you’ (laughter); or they would simply remind me that I was a foreigner and that they would be ashamed to let me pay in their town; or they would promise that next time I should be allowed to pay — a ‘next time’ which never came. The fact that I was never allowed to return hospitality within the town was significant above all (since I was accepted as a social equal in other ways), in regard to their conception of the stranger. For I was not only a stranger to the local community but to the national community — a foreigner, and an inquisitive one at that. The threat which I embodied was represented in the belief that I was a spy, which was discarded only after months of evident ineptness in that role. While my presence was in itself honorific, my potential hostility was nevertheless very great. Therefore I was never allowed to escape from my status as guest, where I had no rights, into that of community member where I might assert myself, make demands and criticisms and interfere in the social and political system. This long-extended hospitality for which I remain ever grateful carried the covert significance of a status barrier whereby the leaders of local society protected themselves from the threat that my strangeness represented. It was even suggested, after a minor govern- [106] mental authority with whom I had had a slight altercation happened to be transferred to another town, that I was really in the pay, not of the British government, but of the Spanish government. Zeus in disguise? An ingenuous young man hastened to take advantage of his connection with me to ask for a letter of recommendation which would get him into the secret police. The extraneous example of my own experiences does not suffice to make clear the code of hospitality. The treatment of the stranger depends very much upon his social status. A person of high status honours the whole community by his presence and must be made a guest by a leading member, if he is not to be shunned as someone too suspicious to have any contact with. In fact, he can usually find someone with whom to establish at least a tie of common friendships. Persons of lower status frequently have similar contacts. There are also those who are glad to extend the range of their friendships as a source of prestige and with a view to an eventual reciprocity. The greatest overt distrust is that shown towards the groups of young men who come through the town on their way to the plains to seek work. The fact that they come in groups and that their destination is elsewhere makes them poor candidates for any form of hospitality. There is however one class of stranger towards whom hostility is shown, the young men who come courting a local girl. An ancient custom relates how such a visitor was received. If he were not driven away by stoning he would be captured by the local lads and ducked in the fountain. It was not clear whether this might be done more than once, but if he survived this ordeal and persevered with his suit he was allowed to do so unmolested. He was then believed to have formed an unbreakable attachment to the place through the effect of the waters. It is not difficult to see the symbolism of this custom. The water of each pueblo is its pride and none is so brackish that it will not be proclaimed exceptional in taste and health giving qualities (‘una agua riquísima, ‘una agua muy sana, etc.), superior to that of all neighbouring places. It is the source of the virtues of the inhabitants. Thestranger who has been submitted to the ordeal of ducking survives no longer as a stranger but as a member of the community, one who has been reborn from its ‘source’.21 (The word used is either pila or fuente. Pila means both ‘font’ and ‘fountain’, fuente means both the town fountain and also ‘source’ or ‘origin’. The town fountain is a white-washed edifice of great social importance as a meeting-place through which gossip is diffused and it is commonly surmounted by a cross). The hostile treatment is a prelude to acceptance at a level which is not attained by the guest. By presenting himself as a suitor the visitor denies his intention to depart; on the [107] contrary he asserts his aspiration to enter the kinship system as an affine, that is, to acquire rights in the community. III The law of hospitality is founded upon ambivalence. It imposes order through an appeal to the sacred, makes the unknown knowable, and replaces conflict by reciprocal honour. It does not eliminate the conflict altogether but places it in abeyance and prohibits its expression. This is true also of the avoidance and the joking relationship. But whereas the joking relationship suppresses the conflict by the prohibition to take offence, hospitality achieves the same end by the prohibition to give offence; one by forbidding respect, the other by enforcing it, or it might be put: the avoidance of respect and the avoidance of disrespect. Both relationships are placed outside the struggle for supremacy by a tacit agreement enjoined by custom, but, while the custom of the joking relationship invokes the desecrable and employs the language of pollution in the exchange of obscenities, the custom of hospitality invokes the sacred and involves the exchange of honour. Host and guest must pay each other honour. The host requests the honour of the guest’s company — (and this is not merely a self-effacing formula: he gains honour through the number and quality of his guests). The guest is honoured by the invitation. Their mutual obligations are in essence unspecific, like those between spiritual kinsmen or blood-brothers; each must accede to the desires of the other. To this extent the relationship is reciprocal. But this reciprocity does not obscure the distinction between the roles. It is always the host who ordains, the guest who complies. The guest must be granted the place of precedence and he must eat first, but precedence is defined in relation to the host, on his right hand as a rule. (only royalty takes the head of the table in the house of another, for the obvious reason that royalty always ordains, cannot comply.) The duty of ordering the precedence among guests is the host’s responsibility and the guest who is dissatisfied with his treatment has no recourse but to retire from his role altogether by walking out. An intermediary solution was once furnished in diplomatic etiquette by the convention whereby a guest, dissatisfied with his position at table, could call attention to an error of protocol of which he was the victim by the gesture of turning his plate over and thereby making it impossible to serve him. In this way he retired from his role until the error was corrected, or at least until his protest had been registered, without showing any discourtesy to his host. To complain openly would infringe the host’s prerogative in the placing of his guests, while to refuse the food would be impolite since refusal [108] implies distaste and depreciation and amounts therefore to an insult. The spanish peasantry, conscious of this implication, commonly uses the expression ‘para no despreciarlo’ (in order not to despise it) when accepting food or drink. In this way the guest exonerates himself from the implication of being greedy or demanding and maintains that he accepts only out of respect for the host. Thus tipsy farmers down their umpteenth glass with the righteous air of obligation. Whether it is mandatory to refuse or accept, or to refuse at first and then accept, is a particularity of custom. The logic of the law of hospitality provides a justification for either refusal or acceptance: whether honour is done best by dec1aring the offer of hospitality excessive (which might imply distaste) or by demonstrating it to be welcome (which risks the implication that it may be taken for granted) is something which can only be known by reference to local convention. To gobble the peasant’s lunch in the railway carriage in order not to show contempt for it is incorrect because there is no reason why he, rather than another, should play the host in such circumstances. To refuse the food he offers in his home is another matter. The roles of host and guest have territorial limitations. A host is host only on the territory over which on a particular occasion he c1aims authority. Outside it he cannot maintain the role. A guest cannot be guest on ground where he has rights and responsibilities. So it is that the courtesy of showing a guest to the door or the gate both underlines a concern in his welfare as long as he is a guest, but it also defines precisely the point at which he ceases to be so, when the host is quit of his responsibility. At this point the roles lapse. The custom of the desert Arabs made this abundantly clear. Such was the sanctity of hospitality that the host’s protection was assured even towards those for whom he felt enmity. To take advantage of a guest or fugitive was unthinkable. Yet hospitality bequeathed no commitment beyond the precincts of the domestic sanctuary, so his guest might become his victim the moment he stepped outside them. Hence it was the custom for the guest to leave silently and unannounced during the darkest hours of the night for fear he should be followed and struck down. The custom of the Kalingas shows by a curious variation the true nature of this sociological space defined by hospitality. When the guest of a Kalinga is a local man his host is responsible for his protection only within the confines of his property. His hurt or murder on the premises must be avenged by his host. But if the guest is a foreigner his host remains responsible for his protection throughout the entire region.22The range within which their complementary relationship holds good coincides with the territory where their mutual status is unequal. Where neither has a greater claim [109] to authority than the other their complementarity lapses. For, while a host has rights and obligations in regard to his guest, the guest has no right other than to respect and no obligation other than to honour his host. He incurs however the right and obligation to return hospitality on a future occasion on territory where he can claim authority. The reciprocity between host and guest is thus transposed to a temporal sequence and a spatial alternation in which the roles are reversed. Only then can the covert hostility be vented in customs such as the potlatch where rivalry takes the form of a hospitality which is more than lavish and where failure to reciprocate spells bankruptcy. The fable of the fox and the stork provides a model of the law of hospitality and an object lesson in its exploitation: an affront which masquerades as a generous and honorific gesture cannot be resented without violating the law of hospitality, since it is the host’s privilege to ordain, but it can nevertheless be avenged by a similar ploy once the tables are turned. For the same reason that the criminal is said to define the law the essentials of the law of hospitality can best be seen in the actions which constitute its infringement. How is the law of hospitality infringed? The detail varies of course from place to place. To inquire after the health of a spouse or child may be a requirement of good manners according to one code or a faux pas according to another. Yet a certain general sense informs them all, entitling us to talk about the law of hospitality in the abstract in contrast to the specific codes of hospitality exemplified by different cultures. There is, so to speak, a ‘natural law’ of hospitality deriving not from divine revelation like so many particular codes of law, but from sociological necessity. A guest infringes the law of hospitality: If he insults his host or by any show of hostility or rivalry; he must honour his host. If he usurps the role of his host. He may do this by presuming upon what has not yet been offered, by ‘making himself at home’, taking precedence, helping himself, giving orders to the dependants of his host, and so forth. If he makes claims or demands, he usurps the host’s right to ordain according to his free will, even where custom lays down what he should wish to ordain. To attempt to sleep with the host’s wife23 or to refuse to do so may either of them be infractions of a code of hospitality, but be it noted that the cession of the conjugal role always depends upon the host’s will, like the precedence which he cedes. His wife’s favours are always his to dispose of as he wishes. To demand or take what is not offered is always an usurpation of the role of host; If, on the other hand, he refuses what is offered he infringes the role of guest. Food and drink always have ritual value, for the ingestion [110] together of a common substance creates a bond. Commensality is the basis of community in a whole number of contexts. Therefore the guest is bound above all to accept food. Any refusal reflects in fact upon the host’s capacity to do honour; and this is what the guest must uphold. Therefore he may be expected to give thanks and pay compliments in order to stress that he is conscious of the honour done him. On the other hand it may be considered ‘bad form’ to do so since this implies that honour might not have been done and this in turn throws doubt on the host’s capacity. The Victorian hostess who answered a florid compliment to her cook with the withering words: ‘But did you expect to have bad food in my house?’ made the point effectively. Failure to know what should be taken for granted can amount to insult. Therefore the details of codes of hospitality may be contraries, but, as in the treatment of twins or smiths in Africa, the contraries contain a common element of sociological meaning, which derives in this case from the law of hospitality. A host infringes the law of hospitality: If he insults his guest or by any show of hostility or rivalry; he must honour his guest. If he fails to protect his guest or the honour of his guest. For this reason, though fellow guests have no explicit relationship, they are bound to forego hostilities, since they offend their host in the act of attacking one another. The host must defend each against the other, since both are his guests. If he fails to attend to his guests, to grant them the precedence which is their due, to show concern for their needs and wishes or in general to earn the gratitude which guests should show. Failure to offer the best is to denigrate the guest. Therefore it must always be maintained that, however far from perfect his hospitality maybe, it is the best he can do. It will be noted that, while the first clause is the same for both parties, the second and third are complementary between host and guest. This complementarity provides the systematic basis of the institution, which reaches its full symmetry in reciprocal hospitality when the roles of host and guest are exchanged. This is never the case with hospitality to a stranger whose chance of reciprocating necessarily remains in the blue. Lacking reciprocity between individuals, hospitality to the stranger can nevertheless be viewed as a reciprocal relationship between communities. The customs relating to the stranger therefore concern the degree to which he is permitted to be incorporated into a community which is not his own, and the techniques whereby this is effected. These may be divided into those which establish him as a permanent member of the local group and those which assume his departure in the future. [111] If he comes only to visit, the visit may be returned, but if he intends to remain and change his affiliation, the reciprocity between communities ceases to operate. An ‘ordeal’ implies permanence since its significance is essentially that it marks an irreversible passage: the element of hostility in the character of the stranger is destroyed and he is able to emerge from it in a more acceptable status. He is no longer unknown, he has been tried. He forfeits his association with the sacred and his call upon hospitality which derived from it. The passage of an ordeal entitles the stranger to remain in a new role, more nearly incorporated even if he is not granted the full status of community membership; he may still be subject to a personal bond with one of its members through affinity, artificial kinship or clientship. Yet whatever his subsequent status it pro vides him with a mode of permanent incorporation. Where an elaborate code of hospitality applies to the stranger and he is made a guest by the mere fact of his appearance without any ‘ordeal’, an impermanent relationship is implied. His hostile character is not destroyed but inverted through the avoidance of disrespect. A limit is frequently set upon the time such a guest is expected to stay and, even when this is not so, it is always recognised that it is an abuse to outstay one’s welcome. Thus while the mode of permanent incorporation solidifies in time, the status of guest evaporates. The one faces a potential assimilation, the other an eventual departure. While it lasts, the tenuous nature of the relationship of host and guest depends upon respecting the complementarity of their roles. Any infringement of the code of hospitality destroys the structure of roles, since it implies an incorporation which has not in fact taken place; failure to return honour or avoid disrespect entitles the person slighted in this way to relinquish his role and revert to the hostility which it suppressed. The sacred quality in the relationship is not removed, but polluted. Once they are no longer host and guest they are enemies, not strangers. Enemies do compete and it requires at least a tacit test of strength to determine which is the better man who will remain in possession of the field while the other takes his distance. The ordeal of the judicial combat may be appealed to so that Divine judgement may decide the matter or the struggle may be quite unformalised. The ‘ordeal’ which failed to take place on the way in takes place on the way out. Then the antagonists can part and become strangers again, in life or in death. This is why the process of reverting from guest to stranger in the Mediterranean follows a course reminiscent of that whereby the stranger was accepted in Eskimo society. Both represent variations on the theme of the ambivalence which underlies the law of hospitality. Both involve a combat which carries the host-guest relationship beyond that state of [112] suspended hostility in which the exchange of honour overlays the contrast of allegiances, but beyond it in one of two directions: it may lead either to incorporation or rejection. Yet the logical foundation of the problem is the same and it is this which explains, perhaps, the similarity between Boas’ ethnographical account and the last scene of the odyssey.24 Epilogue The feast has been going on for years when the old beggar turns up. He is not, as one of the guests suspects, a god in disguise but the host. Only the old dog knows and the discovery is too much for him. The place is in disorder: the master’s substance is wasting, the suitors plague his widow (who is not his widow), the guests play the host, abuse the maid-servants and plot the son’s murder. A challenge is issued to a test of strength to see which guest can string the master’s bow. The lady will espouse the winner, she says. Finally, when all have failed, the old beggar picks up the challenge amidst their scorn, and by the strength of his right arm triumphantly reveals his true identity. After that, of course, the slaughter begins. (How could one pardon guests who have so far usurped the role of host?) Anyway the gods see to it that no quarter be given, for it is justice which is at issue here, not sentiment. The world turns the right way up once more. Order and peace are restored. ___________________ * Publisher’s note: This is a reprint of Julian Pitt-Rivers, “The law of hospitality”, 1977, from The Fate of Shechem or The Politics of Sex: Essays in the Anthropology of the Mediterranean, Julian Pitt-Rivers, 94-112. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. We are grateful to Françoise Pitt-Rivers for granting Hau permission to reprint the work. We remind the reader that we retain the style of the original text. Original pagination is indicated in square brackets. 1. Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Society, 1963. 2. F. Boas, The Central Eskimo (Washington, 1887), p. 609. Strangers are greeted with a feast in many parts of the world and are also frequently subject to a contest of skill or strength. 3. ‘Rite d’intégration’, in the words of A. van Gennep, Les rites de passage. Paris, (1909). 4. Fustel de Coulanges, La Cité antique (Paris, 15e éd., 1895), p. 232. 5. According to Fares, ancient Arab custom forbade asking the guest who he was, where he came from or where he was going (B. Fares, L’honneur chez les Árabes avant l’Islam, Paris, 1932, p. 95). Similarly Odysseus was asked such questions only as he was leaving Phaeacia. 6. Even within a single society whose communities are roughly similar in structure, an individual easily forfeits his status when away from home. The point was made tellingly by a plebeian member of the town of Alcalá; to a drunken summer visitor who attempted to patronise him he answered: ‘You may be Don Fulano de Tal in your own home, but here you’re just sh. .t’ (the story is probably apocryphal; I have only the testimony of the speaker that he actually said the words). In accordance with the same notions the system of nicknames in the townships of Andalusia seldom recognises an outsider by any identity other than the place of his origin. Only exceptionally and after many years of residence will he acquire a nickname which defines him as an individual, that is, as a member of the community. Since place of birth is what defines the essential nature of the individual, an outsider can never become totally incorporated. Cf. J. Pitt-Rivers, The People of the Sierra (London, 1954). 7. K. Birket-Smith, The Eskimos (London, 1959), p. 173. It is significant that the officiants at rites of passage frequently establish through them relationships of ritual kinships, as for example in the instance of godparenthood. 8. I admit none the less to a certain satisfaction when it was confirmed to me by Mr Keith Basso who was then immersed in Eskimo ethnography that there is indeed one tribe among whom the stranger, defeated in the ordeal of entry, is made the ritual kinsman of his victor. Here however the contest took the form of a wrestling match of which the object was to kick the opponents’ legs away from under him. Strength in the right leg, not arm, was the measure of superiority as indeed it is among the football fans of modern society. 9. ‘L’humeur voyageuse et sociale des Grecs, les fêtes, les besoins du commerce et très souvent aussi les exils politiques rendent toujours l’hospitalité nécessaire dans toutes les parties du monde grec’ (Ch. Daremberg and E. Saglio, Dictionnaire des antiquités grecques et romaines, vol. III, Paris, 1900, p. 294). 10. Cf. A. H. Abou-Seid, ‘Honour and Shame among the Bedouins of Egypt’, J. G. Peristiany, ed., Honour and Shame: the values of Mediterranean Society (London, 1965). So powerful is this idea that every home becomes a sanctuary guarded by the honour of the owner who is in duty bound to receive any fugitive who ask for refuge. Even his own enemy can demand sanctuary of him, and rest assured of protection against himself, since his obligation to respect the sanctity of his own home takes precedence over his right and desire for vengeance. It should be noted however that the sacredness of the home makes it a sanctuary only to the stranger, not to the fellow-member of the community. Further instances of the association between the sacred and the stranger are given by A. M. Hocart, in ‘The Divinity and the Guest’, The Life-giving Myth (London, 1935). 11. Bishr Fares, L’honneur chezles Arabes avantl’Islam (Paris, 1932). 12. ‘The first possible definition of the sacred is that it is the opposite of the profane’ (M. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, New York, 1959, p. 10). 13. ‘The sacredness of the stranger in many societies was recognised long before Van Gennep who refers to earlier discussions of this topic’ (Eliade, op. cit., p. 36). 14. ‘Le sacré n’est pas une valeur absolue, mais une valeur qui indique des situations respectives. Un homme qui vit chez lui . . . dans le profane . . . vit dans le sacré dès qu’il part en voyage et se trouve, en qualité d’étranger, à proximité d’un camp d’inconnus’ (Van Gennep, op. cit., p. 16; cf. also p. 36 et sq.). 15. The guest who is received in a house for the first time is given precedence over its habitual guests with whom a greater familiarity exists. In the same way diplomatic etiquette forbids placing a countryman of the host in the place of honour if foreigners are present. 16. R. Benedict, Patterns of Culture (London, 1952) p. 136. 17. The problem of the ‘sturdy beggars’ in sixteenth-century England revolved around this distinction of roles. The nursery rhyme preserves the terms of the choice which they imposed on the villagers: ‘some gave them black bread and some gave them brown, and some gave them a big stick and beat them out of town’. 18. Cf. M. Mauss, ‘Le don’, in Sociologie et Anthropologie, p. 258: ‘Le don non rendu rend encore inférieur celui qui l’a accepté . . .’; cf. also p.169. 19. J. Belmonte, Juan Belmonte, killer of bulls. The autobiography of a matador (New York, 1937), p. 109. 20. Havelock Ellis, The soul of Spain (London, 1908), p. 17. It might be noted that whereas the evil eye is a female attribute in Andalusia, it is also exerted by men across the straits. 21. A recent article by Susan Tax Freeman, ‘The Municipios of Northern Spain: a view from the fountain’ in Essays presented to Sol Tax (in press) examines in detail the symbolic value of the fountain and marks the analogy between pila, the baptismal font, and pila, the fountain. 22. R. F. Barton, The Kalingas (Chicago, 1949), p. 83. Regarding the status of stranger in Africa, see Meyer Fortes, ‘Strangers’ in Studies in African Social Anthropology: essays presented to I. Schapera, (eds.) M. Fortes and Sheila Patterson (London, 1975). 23. Cf. Van Gennep, op. cit., p. 47 et sq. 24. In order to demonstrate the universal validity of the logic of the law of hospitality, I have deliberately taken evidence from different spheres: ritual custom, the conventions of manners, habitual practice and the inventions of the poet. It is not intended to imply that there is no difference between them and that they must not be distinguished for other purposes.

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Burning the truck and holding the country This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Fred Myers. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau6.1.035 REPRINT Burning the truck and holding the country Pintupi forms of property and identity Fred MYERS, New York University   If they are not given their shares, this denies their kinship. . . . A man’s variegated relationships with others run through his chattels as well as his land; and the measure of how far he feels the correct sentiments in those relationships is the way he deals with his property and his produce (Gluckman 1965: 45). The social life of objects I am concerned here with the indigenous meanings attributed to a variety of “objects” among Pintupi-speaking Aborigines of the Australian Western Desert.1 My [554]argument is that “things” (objects, ritual, land, prerogatives, duties) have meaning—that is, significance or social value—for the Pintupi largely as an expression of autonomy and what I have elsewhere defined as “relatedness” or shared identity (Myers 1986a). In this regard, landownership is not a special kind of property, not a special set of rights defining relationships to an ecologically necessary “living space.”2 Instead, it is one more form of objectifying social relationships of shared identity. Among the Pintupi, as among many hunter-gatherers, the use-value of rights to things is not at all obvious. Rather than, as Radcliffe-Brown (1930–31) once thought, corporate groups forming around some valued property or estate, Pintupi seem to constitute social aggregations (see also Sansom 1980) and give them identity through time by projecting them into shared relationships to objects. My essay begins, then, not so much in disagreement with Gluckman’s views on property but in my discomfort with the notion of property as being too concrete and specific for the meanings that Pintupi give to objects. Legal language may be useful for characterizing certain similarities in the relationship between persons and things, but it does not make for entirely adequate translation. In exploration of this theoretical problem, and in search of deeper understanding of the social significance of things among hunter-gatherers, therefore, I want to focus on similarities and differences between land and other forms of property. The distinction on which I draw is not unlike the French contrast between propriété (personal property) and immeubles (real property), a contrast enshrined in Mauss’ (1954) The gift and recently resurrected in Weiner’s (1985) article, “Inalienable wealth.” Two basic issues arise. First, is land tenure different from relationships between (and among) people and other objects? Second, the question of concerns over temporal continuity is, according to Woodburn (1980) and Meillassoux (1973), central to understanding hunter gatherers. Whereas Woodburn attempted to locate the source of Aboriginal concerns over enduring relationships in the “farming” of women (in bestowal), I see the basis of temporal continuity in the process of objectification. In articulating this process, some sorts of objects have different capacities than others. It is of critical importance, as I shall show, that a Pintupi can “give away” (or share) some rights to named places without losing his or her own intrinsic identity with the place. This inalienability of land, that it cannot really be lost, differs from the way most other objects enter into processes of exchange. While these issues cannot be fully resolved here, I would like to begin by exploring the different ways personal identification with objects occurs in Pintupi social life. How is identity extended in the negotiation of shared rights to objects and processes of exchange? And why, for example, are “personal effects”—but not country—destroyed, effaced, and given away at death? What, if anything, is inherited, or what does inheritance accomplish?[555] Ownership and identification A basic issue at all levels of Pintupi social organization is transaction in shared identity. What is most impressive to me about the Pintupi conception of objects is the continual negotiation about relationships to them and a willingness to include others as what, for the want of a better heuristic term, I will call “co-owners.” Such ambiguity is deeply seated in the negotiated quality of much of Pintupi social life. Relationships among people are not totally given in the rules of a defining structure, not in landownership, kinship, or residence (Myers 1986a). Instead, the relationships must be worked out in a variety of social processes. The politics of Pintupi life, however, should not be confused with an aim for domination over others. Its roots lie in the emphasis placed on shared identity with others as a basis for social interaction. This framework suggests a simple and obvious conclusion, namely, that “property” be viewed as a sign. The immediate material use-value of most forms of propertied objects among the Pintupi (tools, clothing, food, etc.) is not great. While such objects are clearly useful, that which is necessary for simple production is rather easily obtained, constructed, or replaced. The rapidity and ease with which things move through a network of relatives and friends show that objects are important as opportunities to say something about oneself, to give to others, or to share. Like any signs, however obviously “useful” they might be, objects are tokens that represent an opportunity not so much to sustain exclusive use but to constitute other sorts of values defined by a larger system of exchange. That these values are ultimately convertible to labor or political support, far from subtracting from the significance of a semiotic analysis, suggests that such analysis should be based on a temporal perspective that focuses on value as being constituted in the process of reproducing social life. Analysis of the cultural relationships between persons and objects should begin appropriately with Pintupi ideas of “ownership”—a conception better translated as one of “identification.” The Pintupi words most closely approximating “property” in English are walytja or yulytja. While the former may be translated as “relative(s)” or as “one’s own personal effects” (see Hansen and Hansen 1977: 152) and the latter as “baggage and personal effects” (ibid.: 190), the significance of identification is clearer when one understands the entire semantic range of walytja. In addition to objects associated with a person, it can refer to “a relative,” to the possessive notion of “one’s own” (such as “my own camp” [ngayuku ngurra walytja] or “my own father” [ngayuku mama walytja]), or to reflexive conceptions like “oneself” (such as “I saw it myself” [ngayulu nyangu walytjalu] or “He sat there by himself” [nyinama walytja]). Examining this range of meanings offers some perspective on the almost natural reifying of legal conceptions of rights and duties in our common usage of “property.” Indeed, a similar foundation of property in rights deriving from some concept of personal identification is suggested by the shared root of “proper” (my proper father) and “property” in the Latin term proprius, “private or peculiar to oneself” (Partridge 1983: 529). There is a certain ambivalence or ambiguity about Pintupi relationships to objects. There is clearly a sense that objects might “belong to” someone—the idea [556]that X is the walytja of a person contrasts directly with the idea that an object X is yapunta, a word whose literal meaning is “orphan,” without parents. To follow the linguistic usage further, one’s parents are said to kanyininpa one, meaning “to have,” “to hold,” or, more loosely, “to look after one.” Thus, an object that is yapunta does not belong to anyone, but it appears that this might mean also that it has no one who is holding or looking after it. The question remains of what it means for something to belong to—to be walytja of—someone. An object becomes yapunta when it is no longer “held,” but has instead been wantingu, “lost” or “relinquished,” released from an active association with a subject. For objects to belong to someone means as much that they are expressive of that person’s identity as it does that they are simply identified with or related to that person. To say that something is “one’s own” implies, for the Pintupi, that one does not have to ask (or defer to) anyone about its use. Leaving aside for a moment the issue of co-owners, the right to use an object without asking—even the claim that it is “my own”—expresses one’s autonomy. By “autonomy,” I mean self-direction, although we will have occasion to see that this is not necessarily self-created. In contrast, rights to objects that might be regarded, as personal effects still seem less exclusive among the Pintupi than Americans, for example, would tolerate. The very notion of ownership as identification provides also a sense that rights to objects can, and should, be more widely distributed, a willingness (not always ungrudging, of course) to include others with oneself as co-owners. Rights to objects enter into a system of exchange that constantly negotiates the relationships of shared identity. In the examples that follow, I want to show how negotiation of the meaning of ownership rights moves within a dialectic of autonomy (as in the right to be asked) and relatedness (exemplified in the tendency to include others and to share rights with others who one recognizes as identified). This sense of property as potentially providing a temporally extended objectification of shared identity has much in common with Sansom’s (1980) treatment of fringe-dwelling Aborigines in Darwin as “people without property.” To share, perchance to give Let me begin with a simple and striking example of how Pintupi regard personal possessions. Cigarettes, purchased through the cash economy, are a popular item among Western Desert Aboriginal men. Men cadge each other’s tobacco and cigarettes almost without thought. Although my Pintupi comrades were generous with me in sharing their cigarettes, I often found my supply depleted all too quickly. On just such an occasion, a young man named Jimmy came to my camp and asked if I had any cigarettes. Aggrieved, I replied with some anger that people had taken all of mine, more or less including him in the group of those who had taken advantage of me. Rather than taking offense, he was sympathetic and offered me some of his cigarettes. Further, he took it upon himself to explain how I should not give my things away so easily. Instead, he suggested that I should hide what I had. He showed me how he had hidden a packet of cigarettes in his socks under his trousers and suggested that if I did the same, I could simply tell people that, unfortunately, I had no cigarettes—although I would surely give them if I had. Giving me a whole packet, Jimmy told me he had several buried near his camp.[557] This example illustrates some common themes in Pintupi action about sharing, owning, and asking. I interpreted Jimmy to mean I did not have to refuse anyone overtly. It is clear that it is very difficult for Pintupi to simply refuse or to accept from others. Sympathy and compassion are the appropriate and moral responses to co-residents or relatives. Outright refusal, conversely, constitutes an open rejection of the other’s claim to having a relationship with one (see Myers 1979). To “say no to someone’s face” is something very unusual and dangerous in Pintupi social life. Those so denied may respond with anger and violence. Were Jimmy’s buried cigarettes to be taken by others, he would certainly be angry. In similar cases, people talk of “theft.” That is, Jimmy might say, “Someone has taken my cigarettes, mulyartalu (“thieving”; ergative case).” Even though he might have been obligated on the basis of his relationship to a thief to give some cigarettes, to take “without asking” (tjapintja wiya) would be regarded as a violation of his personal rights to them. In other cases like this, people often argued that the owner got them with his own money. This is to say that the cigarettes were not a product of cooperative or joint activity through which others could claim identification with the product. No one else would be very concerned about such an event, as long as his or her ox was not gored. Indeed, it might be claimed, in counter, that Jimmy should not have hidden (yarkatjunu) his cigarettes, or, as I have heard in “thefts” of radios and cassette players, that he should have hidden them better (so the thief would not be tempted). Jimmy’s claim would be that he should have been asked. Under such circumstances, in which refusal is impossible, the only way to maintain one’s possessions is to place them out of immediate reach. To give one’s cigarettes in response to a request, however, is to build a right to ask others because reciprocity in these matters is expected. By not asking, it would appear, one is doing more than simply taking an object; one is denying to the “proprietor” the opportunity to give it, that is, to be generous and to thereby build a debt. “Theft,” defined as taking without asking, is a serious interruption to one’s ability to express the self, albeit through a gift, and to build through exchange an expanded, shared identity with the other. It is illuminating, finally, to reverse the conception offered here. Consider that one might claim a right to be given some object, claiming co-ownership or a relationship with the proprietor that obligated him or her to give. While the proprietor might choose to give, for propriety’s sake, or to be diplomatic, he or she might still claim that the other was really “nothing to do” (mungutja)—having no basis for shared identity either with the object or with the proprietor. The exchange of food It is obviously not possible here to circumscribe the entirety of Pintupi relationships to things. Nonetheless, consideration of rights in food that is gathered or hunted can inform us more deeply about what is at issue in establishing one’s primary identity with things. While women frequently forage for vegetable foods and small animals in a group, each woman has exclusive rights to what she produces when the actual productive activity is not cooperative. Much of her production is brought back to the residential camp for final preparation and consumption. Characteristically, women prepare what they collect themselves. In camp, the product is (1) shared with the [558]immediate family, (2) given in exchange for child care services rendered, for example, while a mother was foraging (B. Clark, personal communication), and/or (3) distributed to co-residents who had not fared well. While such people may have claims on the producer’s services, they have no special claim to the product itself. What she gives is conceptualized, therefore, as exchange. Although co-residents in this situation are expected to share with each other, the sharing often takes place only on request, giving to the distribution of production a character of “mutual taking.” Based on their technology and resources, cooperation in production among Pintupi men is unnecessary, though beneficial, in certain circumstances. When men engage in cooperative drives, the kill is distributed among all who participate. Most hunting, however, takes place alone or in small groups, and when a man is successful in hunting large game, it is distributed interdomestically, to those others in the residential group who have shared their production with the hunter. Gifts of meat could satisfy other exchange obligations as well, namely, to one’s in-laws or parents. Anthropologists have frequently pointed out the practical economic benefits of such interdomestic distribution, so I need not emphasize that point here. In any case, the preparation of large game treats it as a social product. A hunter is supposed to give the kangaroo he kills to others for preparation, although his activity in the hunt provides for him the right and responsibility to direct disposition of the cooked animal in exchange (if he uses another’s spear or rifle, the owner of the hunting implement has this privilege). Success in the hunt provides food for the hunter, of course, but this does not exhaust its significance. His success also secures a particular set of rights to the animal, providing him with an opportunity to give—to engage in interdomestic exchange that establishes or promotes a kind of moral identity with recipients. The social value of this exchange of meat is not simply that of caloric satisfaction. Rather, these exchanges among individuals provide a moral basis for continued and ongoing co-residence and cooperation among members of a group. They constitute, that is, a moment in the reproduction of shared identity (people who “help each other”) that is the foundation of band organization. Failure to share or, as I would prefer to describe the activity, to exchange within such groups, has predictable consequences. The idiom of shared identity sustained through exchange provides the very basis of possible criticism: conflict ensues as those neglected make accusations of being rejected or neglected as “relatives” (walytja). Such neglect is understood as “not loving,” not regarding people as related. Distribution of foraging production in a large group does present a problem. Frequently, the conflicts that develop in such aggregations concern sharing and are brought on by the difficulty of allocating products and services among a large group of co-resident “kin.” Since all such co-residents have claims on each other, at least to some extent, large groups place a considerable strain on individuals, producing conflicts of loyalty as well as continuous imposition on one’s generosity (not to say diminishing people’s incentive to overproduction). Thus, the rights to the kangaroo as property are involved immediately with an exchange used to maintain one’s relatedness to others. It is possible, of course, for a person to assert his (or her) autonomy, the right to decide who gets a kangaroo. Rights exist, but what do they mean? Insofar as exercise of choice may defy other people’s claims about their [559]relationship or obligations, these choices are likely to create a threat. Herein lies the tension between a valued autonomy and the claims and necessity of shared identity. How Pintupi people manage this tension is clear in a case of “hidden meat.” In 1979, I lived at the small outstation community of Yayayi, then, population 15. Having been successful the previous day in hunting kangaroos and bush bustards, we were enjoying the cooked fruits of our labor on one cold midmorning when we heard the approaching sounds of the tractor from the nearby community of Yinyilingki. Longtime and frequent co-residents with the Yayayi mob, the Yinyilingki people were close and often generous relatives only temporarily separated. To my surprise, the male leader of Yayayi decided we should hide our cooked meat, which we did, inside the many flour drums around the camp. When the Yinyilingki people arrived, they asked, of course, whether we had any meat. One of the Yayayi, Ronnie, sitting on top of some drums, replied that we were, unfortunately, empty-handed. His good friend from Yinyilingki, Ginger, was not fooled, since he could plainly see the evidence of recent cooking as well as the feathers we had plucked from the birds. Laughing and without any rancor, he opened a few flour drums until he found what he was looking for. Inescapably, for better or worse in his case, Ronnie’s identification with the cooked meat truly spoke to the world about him—communicated, that is, about his identity. Nonetheless, the case is instructive about the cultural meaning of “property” as an expression of identity, a node of personal identity caught at once in webs of shared identity. Materially, Ronnie’s strategy of the polite rejection through hiding was a failure, although it did not lead to the conflict or antagonism that shatters the sense of shared identity. I believe this is so because often enough he was generous. Indeed, the strategy of hiding one’s property to avoid either having to give it away or having to overtly deny the other is a common enough practice. Ginger recognized Ronnie’s rights to the meat, but these rights did not really sustain exclusive use. What Ronnie did with the meat was necessarily and unavoidably meaningful, a sign of their relationship, just as Ginger’s jocular but insistent demand highlighted his sense of a closeness that allowed him to intrude. The potential dangers of such selfishness, however, are clearly outlined in Pintupi myths, where long cycles of vengeance follow on a constant failure to share. And conflict over food has altered the relationships in many Pintupi camps, so that the continued identity of a community, what the Pintupi call “the people with one camp” (ngurra kutjungurrara), is essentially a temporary objectification of these relationships of exchange. Motor vehicles as media of identification Among the most valuable objects in contemporary Pintupi life are motor vehicles, especially the trucks and four-wheel drive Toyotas that are able to carry large loads (and people) in difficult terrain. Vehicles are necessary and valuable for getting supplies from the store, for hunting expedition, and for visits near and far. The problem of ownership is compounded in the case of such objects, of which there are few, in that Pintupi recognize two categories of “property”—what they call (in English) “private” as opposed to “community” or “company.” Vehicles that are private are those purchased with money that belongs to an individual or, occasionally, to some individuals who jointly buy a car. The purchaser is understood to be the proprietor of the vehicle, that is, to have the right to decide [560]on its use and nonuse. It is unlikely that the proprietor will be the sole user of a vehicle, but as in the case of other personal effects, relatives and friends must ask permission to gain its use. The very autonomy of ownership (the possibility of giving) is the basis for the establishment of extending shared identity with others. To have a car, one might say, is to find out how many relatives one has. Those without their own vehicles draw especially on their kin relations for help, placing those in possession of a car under almost constant pressure of such demands. Where the moral rubric of shared identity guides the relationships of those who live in the same camp, such requests are difficult to refuse, and open rejection is impossible. Those who refuse are said to be “hard” or “jealous” for the motorcar. Anyone who has lived in a Pintupi community will recognize just how much conflict, how many fights, are occasioned by relationships to motor vehicles because of misuse and requests for and refusals of use. Indeed, sometimes owners are relieved when their cars break down, only then seeming to be free of demands. Disputes among kin about the use of a vehicle have, I understand, led proprietors to set fire to and destroy their own cars as a desperate and angry resolution. In contrast, “ownership” provides an opportunity for a person to “give,” and one who helps his relatives is not only understood to be generous but also gains a degree of respect and authority for having “looked after” them. The demands on a proprietor are not entirely a bad thing, then, insofar as they provide one with an opportunity to “be someone.” Proprietorship can make a person central to the planning of activities that require transportation. More important, however, is the general attitude toward personal possessions. No matter what they cost, it would appear, Pintupi regard vehicles as replaceable, like spears or digging sticks. Thus, even when a $4,000 car is destroyed after only a few weeks of use, they say, “There are plenty more motorcars; no worries.” To be sure, this reflects an expectation that someone else will have a car, that another relative will help one to obtain the bare necessities—that is, an expectation of long-term reciprocity prevails. I believe this attitude to property underlies much of Pintupi social life. Put in familiar terms, if faced with a choice between caring for their property or for their relatives, they prefer to invest in people rather than things. Without granting this any special moral status, let me say that under the conditions of settlement in the traditional life of hunter-gatherers, such “investment priorities” may be a realistic appraisal of resources. Nonetheless, the conception of property as replaceable guides our attention to a conception of things as relatively transparent signs of social relationships, vehicles for another sort of value. Many Pintupi recognize a difference between their conception of the relationship between persons and things and that of whites. A long discussion I had with a middle-aged man resulted in his contemplating the difference thus: “You white people are always worrying for money. You don’t think about who will cry for you when you die.” This is a salutary comment on commodity fetishism as Marx comprehended it. The accumulation of private objects, while not entirely ignored (Pintupi do work and save to get cars), is not the means through which one’s identity is transmitted through time. That is secured in part through giving such things away. If it is difficult to refuse help, private cars are the basis on which a sort of shared identity is constructed, those with whom one shares the use reflecting an ongoing exchange. Pintupi themselves regard particular vehicles as representing a cluster of [561]associates who, often for the life of the car, travel together: a certain blue Holden is “that Yinyilingki motorcar,” identified with a group of young men. The car is the occasion for the temporary realization of their relationship and obligations to each other. When driving past old wrecks on the road, Pintupi habitually identify them with the persons, communities, and events they were involved with. Cars become, in other words, objectifications of a set of social relationships. The other category of motor vehicle, the “community” one, has been the occasion for conflict and confusion in many settlements. Such objects are usually the product of government or foundation grants, not the result of a community’s joint, voluntary contribution to a collective enterprise. The problem with community vehicles is, who actually can be said to own something that belongs to a community? Ordinarily, Pintupi have assimilated this problem of property to their ambiguous notion of kanyininpa (“to have, to hold, to look after”), and they recognize that Pintupi Village Councillors “look after” such vehicles. Indeed, in all the cases I have seen, a particular councillor assumes responsibility for a vehicle. “Shorty,” they might say, “is looking after that Bedford truck.” They do not mean, of course, that he is its “owner.” Their conception, as I understand it, is that Shorty must be asked, but conversely, as a Village Councilor he must help them. Although he might try to explain that there are other uses for the truck and try to relate these to everyone’s benefit, he cannot really refuse. These community vehicles are interesting from another point of view. To the Pintupi who are granted them, such vehicles seem to embody a recognized “community” identity. When Pintupi refer to the Yayayi Toyota or the New Bore Toyota, they are saying more than that the vehicle belongs to that place. In a particular Pintupi sense, such objects represent the community’s collective identity as an autonomous social entity. They do not do so, however, legally; if it crashes, the community is not held liable collectively, and individual members would undoubtedly claim that they were “nothing to do” (mungutja) with the action. For historical reasons, Pintupi associate the founding of past outstation communities with the granting of four-wheel drive Toyotas by the Department of Aboriginal Affairs or the Aboriginal Benefits Trust Fund. As a result of this association, it appears, they believe that a community’s autonomy will be recognized in the granting of such a vehicle. Men often say that they are the “boss” of an outstation at such and such a place, but they are waiting to go there because the government has not yet given them their Toyota. Possibly, the attraction of gaining control over such a vehicle is the very reason that people have been eager to establish outstations. Much of the politics of autonomy that matter so much to men gets worked out around control of the motor vehicles of the community. At the first Yayayi community where l worked in 1973, there were two community vehicles, each associated with historically and geographically distinctive segments of the camp, one for the people “from the east” and the other controlled by those whose traditional country had been farther “from the west.” The controllers of these resources became the nodes of community organization. The ambivalence about proprietorship of community vehicles is made clear in the case of the death of a person who controlled a vehicle. When the “boss” at Alumbra Bore died in 1981, the community was faced with the problem of what to do with the orange Toyota that was theirs from a community grant. Personal [562]property of a deceased is always destroyed or given away to that person’s “mother’s brothers” from far away, because a person’s effects are identified with him or her and make close relatives sad. The Alumbra community planned initially to swap vehicles with another community in order to remove their truck from sight because it reminded them of the dead man. They eventually thought better of this, realizing they would still have to see this truck often since it would be in the area. They decided to burn it and thus efface its association with sad memories. Owning the country If the objects considered so far are recognizable as personal effects in their extendibility to others, landownership is not a special kind of property. Among Pintupi, shared identity is readily extended to others in the form of recognizing their identity with named places, an identification formulated through a particular cultural logic. In contrast to traditional views of Aboriginal landowning groups as patrilineal, Pintupi landownership is better understood as the negotiated outcome of individual claims and assertions. Maintaining relatedness with others is a striking feature of this organization. The emphasis on sociability underlies the variety of claims that individuals make to multiple affiliations to landowning groups and gives an omnipresent quality of negotiation to the processes of local organization. Through allowing others to become joint custodians of one’s own estate, people maintain important ties with each other throughout the region. Landownership, then, is not first an ecological institution but rather an arena in which Pintupi organize relations of autonomy and shared identity with others. Ownership as the Pintupi understand it—that is, “holding a country” (kanyininpa ngurra)—provides opportunities for a person to be the organizer of a significant event and the focus of attention, albeit in limited contexts. Owners are in a position to exercise equality with other fully adult persons, to offer ceremonial roles to others (as part of an exchange), and to share rights in ritual paraphernalia. At the same time, people view “country” as the embodiment of kin networks and as a record of social ties that can be carried forward in time. Various means exist by which individuals may make claims of identification with the “country” (ngurra) as their “own.” But the fundamental notion of “identification with country,” rooted in the fact that places always bear the imprint of persons and their activities, refers to the whole range of relationships a person can claim or assert between himself or herself and place. These provide the cultural basis for its ownership. Thus, if the place is called A, the following constitute bases for such a claim: conception at the place A; conception at a place B made by and/or identified with the same Dreaming ancestors as A; conception at a place B whose Dreaming is associated mythologically with The Dreaming at A (the story lines cross); initiation at A (for a male); birth at A;[563] father conceived at A or conditions 2–5 true for father; mother conceived at A or conditions 2, 3, and 5 true for her; grandparents conceived at A or conditions 2–5 true; residence around A; death of close relative at or near A. Through this logic, individuals can have claims to more than one country, but it is through political process that claims of identification are converted into rights over aspects of a country and knowledge of its esoteric qualities. Identification is an ongoing process, subject to claim and counterclaim, dependent on validation and acceptance or invalidation and non-acceptance. It is by such political processes that claims of identification are transformed into rights over related aspects of a country. Such rights exist only where others accept them. The movement of the political process is along a graduated range of links or claims of increasing substantiality, from mere identification and residual interest in a place to actual control of its sacred associations. The possession of such rights as recognized by others, called holding a country, is the product of negotiation. Ultimately, ownership is not a given here but an accomplishment, although this historicity is disguised by the fact that the cultural basis of claims is the ontological priority of the Dreaming (tjukurrpa; see Myers 1986a, chap. 2). In the end, ownership of country, denoting close association among a set of individuals, is a projection into transhistorical time of the valued social relations of the present. This is accomplished, however, without calling attention to the boundaries it draws. In substance, ownership consists primarily in control over the stories, objects, and rituals associated with the mythological ancestors of the Dreaming at a particular place. Access to knowledge of these esoterica is requisite, and the creative essence they contain is restricted; one can acquire it only through instruction by those who have previously acquired it. Important ceremonies are conducted at some sacred sites, and other sites have ceremonies associated with them which adult men (particularly) may perform to instruct others in what happened in that important period (the Dreaming) in which all things took on their form. Because such knowledge is highly valued and vital to social reproduction, men seek to gain it and to be associated with its display and transmission. Their major responsibility, in fact, is to “follow up The Dreaming” (Stanner 1979), to look after these sacred estates by ensuring that proper rituals are conducted. From the Pintupi point of view, the emphasis is just as much on the social production of persons who can hold the country, that is, on initiating young men and teaching them the ritual knowledge necessary to look after the country, as it is on getting the country. The Pintupi image of social continuity is effectively one in which “country,” as an object, is passed down, is “given” as a contribution to the substance and identity of the recipient. This is a kind of transmission of one generation’s (or person’s) identity to the next. By learning about the Dreaming and seeing the rituals, one’s very being is altered. People become, Pintupi say, “different” and stronger. One cannot become adult without the help of others; to be sure, no one can become a man by himself. Certainly, while younger recipients are supposed to reciprocate for the gift of knowledge—in hunting meat for the givers and in deference—they cannot really repay what they have been given. They have, as it were, [564]acquired an obligation, a responsibility that they can repay only by teaching the next generation. Pintupi stress that men must hold the Law and pass it on. Men are enormously concerned to pass on their knowledge and identification with places to their “sons” and “sister’s sons.” This was evident on a trip to the Gibson Desert that I made with an older man, Wuta Wuta Tjangala, and several others. On our return, Wuta Wuta decided he wanted to take us all to see an important place to the north where his father had died in order to nintintjaku (“show” or “teach”) his katja (“son” or “sister’s son”), Ronnie (his brother’s son), Morris (his own son), and Hillary (his sister’s son). Two other older men opposed this, saying they were afraid the young men would use the sorcery spells from this place when they were drunk. Keen for knowledge of his country, Ronnie objected in a noteworthy fashion. “All right,” he said, “then nobody will ever know about that place when you all die. If people travel around out here, they’ll just go up and down this road only.” In other words, this place would be lost. Wuta Wuta hoped to establish an outstation near the place where his father had died. His brothers, he told me, were nearly dead; only he was still strong enough, and he was concerned to “give the country” (katjapirtilu witintjaku) for these descendants to hold. Ownership derives from such processes as well as those by which in-laws and other distant relatives come to be attached through exchange of obligations. Since knowledge and control of country are already in the hands of “owners” (my gloss for the Pintupi term ngurrakartu, referring particularly to custodians of named place), converting claims to an interest in a named place requires convincing the owners to include one in knowledge and activity. Identification with a country must be actualized and accepted by others through a process of negotiation. A group of individuals, then, can affiliate with each significant place. The groups may differ for each place considered; the corporations forming around these sacred sites are not “closed.” Instead, there are descending kindreds of persons who have or had primary claims to sites. Of all those persons “identified,” only a portion are said “to hold” (kanyininpa) a country and to control its related rituals. These primary custodians are the ones who must decide whether to teach an individual about it; it is they who decide on the status of claims. Men are quite willing to teach close kin about their country and to grant them thereby an interest in the place. For claimants who are remote genealogically, or are not co-residents, there is less persuasiveness to claims. These processes make it likely that claims of a patrifilial core will be acceptable. It is men who control these rights, and because at the height of his influence a man is likely to live in his own country, it is predictable that he will pass it on to his sons. Rights are also passed on to sister’s sons, who are also frequent co-residents. If such persons or those with other sorts of claims (conception from the Dreaming, a more distant relative from it, etc.) take up residence in an area and convince the custodians of their sincerity, they can become important custodians too. Conversely, failure to maintain some degree of regular association with a place seems to diminish one’s claims. As I have written elsewhere (Myers 1982), this is a process, then, by which cooperative ties among frequent co-residents (“those from one camp”) may be transformed into a more enduring one.[565] The fact that men do seek rights for many “countries” leads to extended associations of individuals with places, surrounding a core of those with primary claims. The Pintupi data show not only numerous individuals with extensive estate rights but also individuals having very different personal constellations of such rights. One’s identification with a named place is, in this sense, at once a definition of who one is and a statement of shared identity with others. In most cases of conflict, the agreement and disagreement about who should be accepted follows closely current ties of cooperation among people, attempting to project their associations into the past and to embody their contemporary shared identity in the same objective form. Thus, it is often difficult to determine exactly who is and who is not a member of a Pintupi “landowning group.” Rather than being given, membership is usually negotiated, often extended to include those present with one who is already an owner. If others show an interest and a willingness either to participate with owners in activities or to exchange with them, Pintupi seem inclined to include them rather than to negate the proffered shared identity. I have written at length elsewhere about the processes and politics of landownership (Myers 1982, 1986a). Here, I would like to offer an example to show how Pintupi reasoned about landownership as a form of identification, as they began to consider moving west to establish a new community in the Kintore Range. For most of the Pintupi, the possibility of a settlement in that area raised the question of who could live there and who would be the “boss” (mayutju) of the place. No one had lived out west in their country for twenty years, and no one had lived at Kintore for at least thirty. Its traditional custodians probably deserted the area in the 1930s, moving east to the missions. Warna Tjukurrpa Tjungurrayi, a man in his sixties who was anxious to move out of the Papunya area, had written to the government for help in setting up a community out west, and the grant of a truck had been promised. While he assumed that this would be under his control, the question of rightful ownership of Kintore brewed. (Two named places in the Kintore Range are central, Warlungurru and Yunytjunya.) Warna explained to me that Wiri and his brother Willy Nyakamparla were important owners. Their father, Murruntu Tjapaltjarri, who died at the settlement of Haasts Bluff, was associated with Kintore, and his brothers Ngapa Tjukurrpa Tjapaltjarri (Warna’s own father), Naapi Tjapaltjarri, and Kurupilyaru Tjapaltjarri were all from Kalipinnga (a place distantly to the north of Kintore) and Warlungurru. It is noteworthy that most people identify Warna closely with Kalipinnga; he has named an “ownership” base for Kintore that includes people associated with his own country and with Warlungurru, implicitly linking them to him. These places, he insisted, were not far apart; they were “one country.” This was in reference to the fact that people traveled frequently and easily between these places, residing, as it were, in a single range. Furthermore, Warna’s grandmother, Marrawilya Nangala, was the mother of Murruntu and Naapi. Also, Charley Tarawa’s father, Nuunnga Tjapaltjarri, was identified with Kintore. The “older brother” of all these Tjapaltjarri men, Tjangaratjanunya, according to Warna, died at Ngutjulnga, which is only a few miles from Kintore. Warna described the place as “part of Kintore.” The father of all these men, he said, was Kunkunnga, an owner of Kintore. Other genealogical information makes it clear that all these Tjapaltjarri men, while they consider themselves to be brothers, are not in fact biologically related. The “descent” [566]imputed by Warna is culturally constructed in the sense that Kunkunnga looked after these men, either when their fathers, his “brothers,” died or as part of a group of “brothers” who considered their sons to be sons collectively. The ultimate basis of the claim is not really explained in Warna’s account. From another man I found out that Murruntu, the very man with whom Warna began, was really “from Kintore” in the sense that it was his own conception Dreaming place. His Dreaming was the monitor lizard (Ngintaka), the mythological ancestor who created the hill known as Yunytjunya. This would, in the cultural logic of claims, make sense as a powerful starting point for ownership rights for his descendants. It is a measure of the multiplicity of means through which people establish and argue claims of identification that Warna did not even mention this. Other people were also related to Kintore, according to Warna’s reckoning: Marlkamarlka Tjupurrula, the grandfather of Pantjiya Nungurrayi and of Charley Tarawa (their “mother’s” father; Pantjiya’s mother was Charley’s father’s second wife), and Wartaru Tjupurrula were from Kintore—providing another link. Charley himself subsequently described Wartaru as being conceived at Putjanya, midway on the Dreaming track the Tingarri ancestors took from a place called Mitukatjirri to Warlungurru, and from these relatives he says he “grabbed,” or took on responsibility for, the place. This Dreamtime line I take to have provided a basis on which his descendants, who are deeply identified with Mitukatjirri, can argue their claim to Warlungurru and the Kintore Range as well. Thus, through Marlkamarlka and Wartaru, for example, based on genealogical connections, I could predict that Billy Baku Tjupurrula and his children, his sister Tartuli and her children, Mikini Tjupurrula and his children, and many others could lay claim to Kintore, all as grandchildren of the brothers Marlkamarlka and Wartaru. Indeed, this large related group continues to act together in visiting, residence, and marriage arrangements. Even in this incomplete reckoning, it is possible to see how a country-owning group objectifies past and present shared identity. The country stands for the relationship among those who are related through an earlier marital exchange and who continue to cooperate, based on that tie, as relatives. As Warna was giving me this account, Willy Nyakamparla, a classificatory brother whom he had imputed to be a co-owner with him, approached us. Whether he perceived what we had been talking about I do not know, but he immediately began to tell Warna that “some people are jealous for Kintore,” such as Nolan Tjapangarti. “He is nothing to do,” Warna replied; “his father is buried at Turkurrnga (another place)”—implying that Nolan belongs elsewhere. Willy tells me, then, that Kintore is the place of his mother and mother’s brother (Warna adds, in explanation, that it belonged to Willy’s grandfather), who were from Mitukatjirri and Nyurnmanu, two relatively nearby places. Papulu and Mikini Tjupurrula (descendants of Wartaru) might go too, he thinks, because they are owners of the country. The men tell me Papulu’s father was from Nyurnmanu and Mitukatjirri, a brother-in-law of the Tjapaltjarri people Warna had described. Warna regards Papulu’s father, Ngungkuyurriyurri Tjakamarra, as the brother of his own mother’s brother, Wintarru Tjakamarra (Mikini’s father). Finally, Willy explains to me that his father’s country was Nyirrpi and Kunatjarrayi, places ordinarily considered to be Warlpiri, north of Kintore and actually near Kalipinnga (as Warna had said). People of their country traveled regularly to the north and south to Kintore, meeting each other.[567] From their accounting as a whole, it becomes clearer that Kintore was a central place to which northerners came to visit and from which southerners traveled north. While Warna emphasized Kintore was their country through the father’s tie, Willy emphasized connection through his mother, talking about how his father came south to visit with in-laws. The basis of their claim, then, is that their fathers married women who had close association with Kintore and as a result spent a lot of time in the area, coming to take on ceremonial responsibilities for the country of their wives and brothers-in-law. More important, however the claim is ultimately decided, the conceptualization of country represents it as an objectification through time of a complex set of past activities. Kintore represents a node of shared identity for all of these people, the descendants of these marriages of several generations ago. Obviously, Warna and Willy have claims in other areas that represent their identity with other persons as well. According to Willy and Warna, Nolan was not an owner of Kintore, but Nolan firmly believed himself entitled to claim identification with the place. He had several reasons for this. First, he derived a claim from Long Jack Tjakamarra, his cross-cousin (his father’s sister’s son). “In the bush” (i.e., before white contact), Long Jack was the custodian (ngurrakartu), presumably somehow through his father. Second, Nolan maintained, his “father” Tatjiti Tjapanangka died at Tjukanyinanya (i.e., Sandy Blight Junction), very close to Kintore. This man was Nolan’s actual father’s younger brother, and his death and burial in the area is a source of identification. Nolan’s own mother was from the south, so he has important ties to that area as well, but Long Jack’s father, he argued, belonged to Kintore, and Nolan was related to him through his father’s sister’s marriage. Long Jack and Nolan should cooperate in ritual. This is not to say that Nolan rejected other people’s claims. Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula (a descendant of Marlkamarlka and Wartaru Tjupurrula, like Mikini), he suggested, had rights in Kintore and in Mitukatjirri. Nolan said that Long Jack was the proper custodian but that he had already “gotten” (mantjinu, obtained) a place in Pitjanytjatjarra country, so he was not concerned about taking control of Kintore as a community. Part of what was at issue for Nolan and what may have been inspiring conflicting claims was the question of who, rightly, should be given the Kintore truck. Even before this, however, a variety of claims of identification for Kintore had been bruited about. Shorty Lungkarta always claimed it as “his country” (but not exclusively) because his mother and her sisters (Nakamarra women) were from there and because he had lived around here as part of his range. According to Shorty, Likili Tjapaltjarri was a “holder” of Kintore—mamangkatja kanyinin, holds through the father. Likili’s “father,” Kamutu, one of the earliest Pintupi migrants to Hermannsburg (see Lohe et al 1977: 49, 53), is generally considered to have been a primary owner, although he was conceived further north at Tjunginnga. Likili’s own Dreaming-place (conception) was Nyurnmanu, to the east of Kintore. Likili died, however, before anything was settled in the control of Kintore, and his own children seem not to have been interested in pursuing their claim. Long Jack himself, when the question of moving to Kintore arose in a meeting, insisted that the people who were really from Kintore were dead. The people who were talking, he said, were all “from outside.” His own country was not far either, but he was not worrying about that country; then again, Long Jack did not think people should move.[568] What is important to recognize in the Kintore case is that claims to ownership are fairly widespread. Almost none of the claims are really those of direct genealogical descent, not only because members of the original landowning group have died out or disappeared. Instead, most of the claims to identification are traced through extensions in the past, established through affinal exchange and prolonged residence. Furthermore, the agreement and disagreement about who should, and should not, be accepted follow fairly closely current ties of cooperation among people, attempting to project their associations into the past, to embody their contemporary shared identity in some objective form. Conflicts emerged but were never vocalized overtly in a challenge that would have definitively excluded the “opposing” claimants from having a relationship. In subtle ways, despite their opposition, the two major protagonists in the conflict, Nolan Tjapangarrti and Warna Tjukurrpa, came to support each other as both having an influential relationship to Kintore. At last report, however, neither was actually in a position of control over the community. The significance of country (ngurra) as a cultural entity is twofold, both given form in processes of exchange. With its origin in the Dreaming, it is defined as a form of valued knowledge that is esoteric, transmitted—or, as the Pintupi say, “given” (yungu)—to younger men, but restricted in access. At the same time, country constitutes an object of exchange between equal men. Moreover, in this light, for Pintupi, country provides an (perhaps the) embodiment of identity that allows for the performance of autonomy in exchange.3 If we consider how people become “members” of landowning groups through politics of persuasion and exchange, it is clear that these groups represent an objectification of shared identity. That is, people’s joint relationship through time to a named place represents an aspect of an identity they share, however limited. The process through which membership is established is precisely one in which people attempt to convince others that they are already related, that they care. Each named place, then, commemorates, records, or objectifies past and present achieved relations of shared identity among participants. Each place, however, represents a different node of relations. The ultimate expression of this principle whereby shared identity among participants is projected out into the object world (and seen as deriving from it) is the way Pintupi verbally extend identification with a place, describing some important site as “belonging to everybody, whole family” or, as they say alternatively, “one country.” In reverse, one may and should read this as representing their sense of the Pintupi as a unity; that is to say, of themselves—people with no distinctive organization as a political entity—as “all related” (walytja tjurta), as one group, albeit this context-dependent claim is not to imply an identity for all time. Land is, for them, a sign that can carry expressions of identity. What Pintupi refer to in this fashion, it is critical to add, is not a “community” in the sociological sense of people who physically live together; rather, each place represents an aggregation of individuals [569]from a wide area of the region in which they live, a form of regional integration through individual ties. Sharing the boards A powerful example of the tendency to inclusion and proffering of shared identity is presented in rights to “sacred boards” (turlku), the sort of object referred to by Strehlow (1947) for the Aranda as churinga. As Lévi-Strauss (1966), among others, has noted, these objects may constitute title deeds for rights in land, although they are not reducible to this. Throughout Central Australia, sacred boards represent, for men at least, the epitome of value, objects said to be “left by The Dreaming” (although fashioned by men) and which men are permitted to know about and view only after initiation. Individual boards are always associated with particular Dreaming stories and usually with one or more named places created by that Dreaming. Rights to such objects, as to songs and stories, are part of the “estate” associated with mythologically constituted places. Presumably, a man has rights to manufacture and/or possess boards related to his own conception place. A number of men have described to me their conception, for instance, in the following terms: such and such a Dreaming was traveling at a place, performing ceremonies, and they forgot or left behind one of their sacred objects, which (eventually) became the person. The value of such sacred objects is constituted by their imputed indexical relationship to the Dreaming, by the restrictions on knowledge about them, by the difficulty of acquiring them, and by their historical associations with the subjectivity of people who once held them and have since died. Pintupi men often emphasize how such objects were “held” by people who are now dead (“ancestors”) and how seeing the objects makes men “sorrowful” and the objects “dear.” In some sense, a sacred object is a powerful representation of one’s identity, hidden from the sight of women and children and shown only to initiated men of one’s choosing. A man keeps his sacred objects in several places, many of them being held jointly with other men in one place or another. Only authorized men can manufacture a sacred object, that is, only a person who has passed through all the stages of initiation and has been granted (“has been given” [yungu]) the right to make a board for a particular site by being taught the design by a legitimate custodian. This is a province of Aboriginal life about which our understanding is unsatisfactory. Knowledge of such matters, as with much of religious life, is restricted in access, not only difficult to learn about but also problematic for publication because of the desire for secrecy. Nonetheless, it is clear that the exchange and circulation of these objects is a matter of intense interest and concern among men. Indeed, while such boards come “from the country,” more or less representing the country, as it were, they are detached from it and movable. In this, part of their power rests. Their exchange among men who may live far apart may constitute a distinctive level of organization, a transformation of marriage exchange, ritual exchange, and the like, through another medium that has the capacity to constitute a common identity among those not in daily contact. While it is much like these other “levels” of exchange, the negotiation of identity through sacred objects has its own properties.[570] Among the Pintupi, boards are frequently exchanged as a result of bestowals between a man and his male in-laws, sometimes as a result of initiation, sometimes to settle longstanding disputes (such as murders). Obviously, access to sacred boards is an important condition of autonomy and equality with other men. A young man must, consequently, rely on elder male relatives to supply him with sacred objects for marriage and for fulfilling his social obligations. What is involved in such transactions, however, is not completely revealed by this. Basing his analysis on Strehlow’s (1947) ethnography, Lévi-Strauss (1966) likened the exchange of such objects to the loaning out of one’s basic identity to the care of another group, the ultimate sign of trust. The first point I should like to make is that a Pintupi man has rights to more than one sacred board; his total identity is not wrapped up in one. Second, it was enormously difficult to find out who were the “owners” of the sacred boards that I was shown. While this derived partly, no doubt, from the secrecy surrounding boards, it is also the case that boards are rarely owned by a single person. When I was shown and told about boards, I noticed that a man would tell me this one belonged to him and also to such-and-such other men, that another one belonged to him and X, and so on. Frequently, a group of “brothers” (rarely genealogical, however) “held” boards in common. The way in which I was told made me feel that, as in landownership, there is a tendency for individuals to extend ownership of sacred objects to men with whom one identified. This is consistent with Pintupi stress on the enormous dangers involved if one should try to make a sacred object by oneself. To do so, I was told, would inevitably arouse the jealousy of other men who would kill him. Making a sacred object oneself, it would appear, is to assert one’s total autonomy, to deny other people’s relationship to oneself and to the object. One should have kunta, that is, “shame” or “respect” for others. Thus, I believe, Pintupi are inclined to share out ownership of, and responsibility for, sacred objects with men they regard as close. Conversely, their planning of, and participation in, cycles of exchange with other men always involves a set of men who cooperate as brothers as a node in the exchange, just as a group of brothers will stand as a party in arranging marriage bestowals. Joint participation in exchange, then, constitutes an identity among the men who jointly accept a responsibility: the boards they possess in common are an objectification of their shared activity, their joint responsibility, of who they are. Failure to fulfill one’s obligations in a board exchange is described as “having trouble” (kuunkarrinpa, i.e., being under threat of revenge and retaliation); fulfilling one’s obligations is described as “clearing oneself” (kilinipa) or being free. Joint participation may reduce the danger of failure. What happens in the exchange itself is equally illuminating. Men often described to me, for instance, how they had lived in other people’s country for some time (as young novices or in bride service), and when they made ready to return to their own country, “owners” of the host country “gave” them sacred boards. What they meant by this, they explained, was that the owners drew designs on a fashioned board that a young man then carved; he then took this finished object back with him to his own country. Effectively, he had been taught the design and given the right to reproduce it, although it appears, not the right to teach other people. His possession of the board from the host country recognizes his prolonged residence and shared identity with other owners of that country, converting residence [571]and cooperation through time into an identity projected into landownership. It is important to recognize also that in “giving” the board, the original owner had not actually lost it, indeed, had not lost anything. While he recognized or granted to another rights in the country and shared identity as embodied in that object, he still retained his own identification with the place. Death, memory, and the social transmission of identity My argument has been that the tendency to extend rights to property through exchange and the extension of rights in land bear much similarity. As objects, land and other forms of property have the capacity to embody the relationships among people in outward form. Proprietorship, then, provides a basis on which identity can be built through exchange, both establishing one’s autonomy through the possibility of taking part in an exchange and creating the possibility of expanding that identity to include others. Both possibilities are encoded in the meaning of walytja as “relative,” “oneself,” and “something owned.” Nonetheless, these objects have very different potentials as constituting identity through time. I believe this becomes dear when we consider how the Pintupi deploy them in the case of a proprietor’s death. In death, accumulation of personal effects throughout a lifetime is denied, not transmitted as an estate or as personal mementos, to those heirs most closely identified with the deceased. Because, in the Pintupi view, things associated with the identity of a dead person make the relatives of the deceased sad, such things are effaced. All of a person’s yulytja and walytja are given away to distant relatives, preferably of the mother’s brother kin category. Typically, these effects include a person’s blankets and swag (the bedroll in which the living person camped), his or her hair (which is cropped close at death), and his or her tools and personal items—even including an automobile if one had been owned. Objects are given away or destroyed. In the “finishing up” ceremonies, as Pintupi have called the distribution at death, the carefully rolled up swag of the dead person seems to stand for the body and is placed in front of the mourners as the silent and untouched focus of attention. For one such ceremony at least, it was the dead man’s wife who oversaw his swag, while it was the group of women mourners who carried it about preparatory to each performance of finishing up (i.e., for each arrival of groups of kin from other places whose willingness to take part shows they are not guilty of ill will). Invoking the identity of the dead, the swag occasions elaborate expressions of grief and anger at loss. The camp or house they inhabited is abandoned; relatives in other communities may move their own camps as well if they remind them of the dead person. In the seminomadic life of traditional times, the place of death and burial would be avoided for years until all traces of the dead were gone. For similar reason, the personal name(s) of the dead person, and anything sounding like it, is avoided, substituted for in everyday speech by synonyms or the avoidance phrase, kunmarnu. The deceased is subsequently referred to by the name of the place where he or she died. As an example of the degree to which such effacement may be extended, when Likili died, his relatives proposed burning the nearly new truck that had been [572]granted to the outstation community he led. Sight of the truck, even if they gave it away to distant relatives, would cause them grief. Despite the dramatically enacted grief at the loss of a relative, the symbolic effect of these practices is quite the opposite of commemorating the dead through inheritance. Relatives of the deceased’s own generation, rather than parents or children (in the case I was best acquainted with the deceased’s own close younger brothers), are responsible to collect his or her goods and to see to their dispersion among other distant relatives. As far as I could tell from the activity after Likili’s death, the sending off of the yulytja is the primary responsibility and activity for close relatives; the funeral, albeit a Christian one now, could not take place until this had been completed. Likili’s brothers collected his bag (which, I presume, contained some of his personal ritual paraphernalia—hair string, arm bands, small sacred objects), and his close mother’s brothers (who had actually been living with him) seem to have overseen the planning and organization of the “sorry business” of distribution of goods. The sense of obligation is pressing during such occasions. It was important, Likili’s mother’s brothers told me, to send this bag off to the mother’s brothers in Yuendumu quickly, lest people begin to talk about them (wangkakuturripayingka, “to avoid moving toward talk”). In a sense, these goods are not allowed to carry the deceased’s identity forward in time. This is accomplished in the grief and lives of those whom he or she “held” (or looked after), especially those he or she “grew up.” The Pintupi man who criticized white concerns with money and accumulation by asking “Who will cry for you when you die?” was pointing to this alternative form of accumulation, of investing identity in and increasing the social value of people through caring for them as a relative. This is the focus of Pintupi social reproduction, which emphasizes so strongly the role of seniors as “nurturing” those who come after. Pintupi often explain their grief at loss by referring to the way the person held them. Further, the people who have been looked after by the same person seem to consider themselves related as if they share substance by that contribution. It is also through such links to some shared predecessor that groups of people formulate their shared identity, referring to themselves as “real siblings,” for example, because they have “one father” or “one grandmother.” Unlike the personal effects (related to a transient historical identity that are dispersed at death, men particularly strive to pass on to their successors an identity formulated through ties to named places. Shorty Lungkarta, as a case in point, placed constant pressure on his son Donald to attend his ceremonies and to learn so that he could pass on his country. As Shorty and a number of other Pintupi explained to me, the process they desire is one in which “Mamalu wantintja, katjapirtilul pi witininpa,” that is, “The fathers having lost (relinquish) it, the group of sons grab it.” What they pass on, or transmit, in this way is not a personal property that they have created or accumulated themselves but an identity that is already objectified in the land. Recipients acquire rights to a named place that has preexisting relationships with other named places on its Dreaming track, and through rightful possession of this knowledge, inheritors gain the possibility of taking part in equal exchange with other men and the capacity to nurture the coming generation of men with the gift of their knowledge.[573] This knowledge of country and the rights to place represented in knowledge is a form of inalienable wealth, as Weiner (1985) describes it. Unlike the spear one has made or the kangaroo one has hunted and cooked, one can “give” one’s country to others, take part in exchanges, without really losing it. One has accepted others as sharing identity, represented in the shared relationship to an object that stands for one, but one has not lost the ability to give it away again. Indeed, by including more people as “co-owners,” one has to some extent increased the value and importance of a place, as long as one is recognized as the principal custodian. As Munn (1970) clearly realized, the country is perceived by Western Desert Aboriginal people as symbolically bearing an identity that when taken on (or “held”), comes to be possessed as one’s own identity. On death, these special “objects” with which a person came to be associated in life remain in the landscape, and those to whom that person contributed, by growing them up and teaching them, are precisely the people able—even obligated—to carry on responsibility for this country. This is the identity that endures and is reproduced through time in the social production of persons, an identity that each generation takes on from its forebears mediated through the “inheritance” of place. The freedom with which Pintupi are willing to part with their personal possessions owes something, I believe, to this enduring dimension of identity. Spears, rifles, clothing, food, even the costly automobile—these are all, in the Pintupi view, replaceable. There are always “plenty more motorcars.” While such objects provide a basis through which identity can be created and extended, the Pintupi take part in such exchanges with an assured foundation. Everyone, according to their conception beliefs, comes into the world with an association with the Dreaming at a place. In some critical way, Pintupi regard themselves as having an assured identity no matter what happens to personal possessions. This is very different from a world in which accumulated personal property constitutes the only medium in which identity can be realized. Several years ago, when the Native American activist Vine DeLoria spoke to a class I was teaching, a student with a beginner’s ethnocentric background in psychology tried to question him about the way in which some Indian religious concepts provided for them a sense of self. “The Self,” DeLoria snorted, “is not an Indian problem. That’s something white people worry about.” A recognition of hierarchy in Pintupi organization of relationships to objects takes away from “property rights” the simple notion of legal problems and suggests that objects, as property or not, have meanings for these people which cannot be limited to the analytic domains too often prescribed by our own Euroamerican cultures. For Pintupi, I would maintain, identification with place as an object assures an identity in the world whereby the more transient exchanges of daily life can take place without threatening to reduce participants to the emptiness of pure despair that economic failure too often brings to us. References Gluckman, Max. 1965. The ideas of Barotse jurisprudence. New Haven: Yale University Press.[574] Hansen, K. and L. Hansen. 1977. Pintupi-Luritja Dictionary. Alice Springs: Institute for Aboriginal Development. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1966. The savage mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lohe, M., F. Albrecht, and L. Leske. 1977. Hermannsburg: A vision and a mission. Adelaide: Lutheran Publishing House. Mauss, Marcel. 1954. The gift. Translated by Ian Cunnison. London: Cohen and West. Meillassoux, Claude. 1973. “On the mode of production of the hunting band.” In French perspectives in African studies, edited by P. O. Alexandre, 187–203. London: Oxford University Press. Munn, Nancy. 1970. “The transformation of subjects into objects in Walbiri and Pitjantjara myth.” In Australian Aboriginal anthropology, edited by Ronald Berndt, 141–63. Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press. Myers, Fred. 1982. “Always ask: Resource-use and landownership among Pintupi Aborigines. In Resource Managers, Edited by N. Williams and E. Hunn, 173–95. Boulder: Westview Press. ———. 1986a. Pintupi country, Pintupi self: Sentiment, place and politics among Western Desert Aborigines. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press; Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies Press. ———. 1986b. “The politics of representation: Anthropological discourse and Australian Aborigines.” American Ethnologist 13: 430–47. Partridge, E. 1983. Origins: A short etymological dictionary of modern English. New York: Greenwich House. Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 1930–31. “The social organization of Australian tribes.” Oceania Monograph 1. Sydney: Sydney University Press. Sansom, Basil. 1980. The camp at Wallaby Cross. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. Stanner, W. E. H. 1979. “The Dreaming.” In White man got no dreaming, 23–40. Canberra: Australian National University Press. Strehlow, T. G. H. 1947. Aranda traditions. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Weiner, Annette. 1985. “Inalienable wealth.” American Ethnologist 12: 210–27. Woodburn, James. 1980. “Hunters and gatherers today and reconstruction of the past.” In Soviet and Western anthropology, edited by Ernest Gellner, 95–117. London: Duckworth Press.   Fred MYERS is Silver Professor of Anthropology at New York University. He is the author and editor of many books, including Pintupi country, Pintupi self: Sentiment, place, and politics among Western Desert Aborigines (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986), The traffic in culture: Refiguring anthropology and art (University of California Press, 1995, with George Marcus) and Painting culture: The making of an Aboriginal high art (Duke University Press, 2002), and most recently, Experiments in self-determination: Histories of the outstation movement in Australia (ANU Press, 2016, with Nicolas Peterson). Fred MyersDepartment of AnthropologyNew York UniversityRufus D. Smith Hall25 Waverly PlaceNew York, NY 10003USAfred.myers@nyu.edu ___________________ 1. Fieldwork with the Pintupi has been funded by NSF, NIMH, and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies at Yayayi, NT (1973–75), Yayayi and Yinyilingki (1979), New Bore (1980–81), and the Central Land Council at Kintore and Kiwirrkura (1984). I would like to thank Annette Weiner and Faye Ginsburg for their helpful comments in organizing and editing this chapter. They are not, of course, responsible for whatever flaws remain. This article was previously published in Hunters and gatherers (volume II): Property, power, and ideology, edited by Tim Ingold, David Riches, and James Woodburn, Berg Publishers, 1988 (used by permission of Bloomsburg Publishing Plc.) A longer version, from which this current version is reprinted, was previously published in We are here: Politics of Aboriginal land tenure, edited by Ed Wilmsen, University of California Press, 1989. [Editor’s note: We are grateful to the author and to Berg Publishers and the University of California Press for granting permission to republish this text. We remind the reader that we retain the style of the original.] 2. The focus of this chapter stresses the logic of relatedness. This is not to deny entirely the ecological significance of land-ownership, but rather to point out that the uses to which land is put for the Pintupi are equally cultural. For more detailed discussion of the relationship to foraging uses, see Myers (1982; 1986a; 1986b). 3. The possibility of handling “country” in this way arrives for men through initiation and the very possibility of two other basic forms of autonomy through exchange: marriage and fighting.  

The pre-eminence of the right hand This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Robert Hertz, Rodney Needham, and Claudia Needham. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau3.2.024 Reprint The pre-eminence of the right hand A study in religious polarity Robert HERTZ Tranlsated by Rodney and Claudia Needham                   What resemblance more perfect than that between our two hands! And yet what a striking inequality there is! To the right hand go honours, 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 aristocracy, the left hand of all common people. What are the titles of nobility of the right hand? And whence comes the servitude of the left? Organic assymetry Every social hierarchy claims to be founded on the nature of things, ϕὐσει, oὐ νóμῳ 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. Similarly, according to common opinion, the pre-eminence of the right hand results directly from the organism and owes nothing to convention or to men’s changing beliefs. But in spite of appearances the testimony of nature is no more clear or decisive, when it is a question of ascribing attributes to the two hands, than in the conflict of races or the sexes. It is not that attempts have been lacking to assign an anatomical cause to righthandedness. Of all the hypotheses advanced1 only one seems to have stood up to factual test: that which links the preponderance of the right hand to the greater development in man of the left cerebral hemisphere, which, as we know, innervates the muscles of the opposite side. Just as the centre for articulate speech is found in this part of the brain, so the centres which govern voluntary movements are also mainly there. As Broca says, ‘We are right-handed because we are leftbrained.’ The prerogative of the right hand would then be founded on the asymmetric structure of the nervous centres, of which the cause, whatever it may be, is evidently organic.2 It is not to be doubted that a regular connection exists between the predominance of the right hand and the superior development of the left part of the brain.3 But of these two phenomena which is the cause and which the effect? What is there to prevent us turning Broca’s proposition round and saying, ‘We are leftbrained because we are right-handed’?4 It is a known fact that the exercise of an organ leads to the greater nourishment and consequent growth of that organ. The greater activity of the right hand, which involves more intensive work for the left nervous centres, has the necessary effect of favouring its development.5 If we abstract the effects produced by exercise and acquired habits, the physiological superiority of the left hemisphere is reduced to so little that it can at the most determine a slight preference in favour of the right side. The difficulty that is experienced in assigning a certain and adequate organic cause to the asymmetry of the upper limbs, joined to the fact that the animals most closely related to man are ambidextrous,6 has led some authors to disclaim any anatomical basis for the privilege of the right hand. This privilege would not then be inherent in the structure of genus homo but would owe its origin exclusively to conditions exterior to the organism.7 This radical denial is for the less bold. Doubtless the organic cause of righthandedness is dubious and insufficient, and difficult to distinguish from influences which act on the individual from outside and shape him; but this is no reason for dogmatically denying the action of the physical factor. Moreover, in some cases where external influence and organic tendency are in conflict, it is possible to affirm that the unequal skill of the hands is connected with an anatomical cause. In spite of the forcible and sometimes cruel pressure which society exerts from their childhood on people who are left-handed, they retain all their lives an instinctive preference for the use of the left hand.8 If we are forced to recognise here the presence of a congenital disposition to asymmetry we must admit that, inversely, for a certain number of people, the preponderant use of the right hand results from the structure of their bodies. The most probable view may be expressed, though not very rigorously, in mathematical form: in a hundred persons there are about two who are naturally left-handed, resistant to any contrary influence; a considerably larger proportion are right-handed by heredity; while between these two extremes oscillate the mass of people, who if left to themselves would be able to use either hand equally, with (in general) a slight preference in favour of the right.9 There is thus no need to deny the existence of organic tendencies towards asymmetry; but apart from some exceptional cases the vague disposition to righthandedness, which seems to be spread throughout the human species, would not be enough to bring about the absolute preponderance of the right hand if this were not reinforced and fixed by influences extraneous to the organism. But even if it were established that-the right hand: surpassed the left, by a gift of nature, in tactile sensibility, strength and competence, there would still remain to be explained why a humanly-instituted privilege should be added to this natural superiority; why only the best-endowed hand is exercised and trained. Would not reason advise the attempt to correct by education the weakness of the less favoured? Quite on the contrary, the left hand is repressed and kept inactive, its development methodically thwarted. Dr Jacobs tells us that in the course of his tours of medical inspection in the Netherlands Indies he often observed that native children had the left arm completely bound: it was to teach them not to use it.10 We have abolished material bonds—but that is all. One of the signs which distinguish a well brought-up child is that its left hand has become incapable of any independent action. Can it be said that any effort to develop the aptitude of the left hand is doomed to failure in advance? Experience shows the contrary. In the rare cases in which the left hand is properly exercised and trained, because of technical necessity, it is just about as useful as the right; for example, in playing the piano or violin, or in surgery. If an accident deprives a man of his right hand, the left acquires after some time the strength and skill that it lacked. The example of people who are lefthanded is even more conclusive, since this time education struggles against the instinctive tendency to ‘unidexterity’ instead of following and strengthening it. The consequence is that left-handers are generally ambidextrous and are often noted for their skill.11 This result would be attained, with even greater reason, by the majority of people, who have no irresistible preference for one side or the other and whose left hand asks only to be used. The methods of bimanual education, which have been applied for some years, particularly in English and American schools, have already shown conclusive results:12 there is nothing against the left hand receiving an artistic and technical training similar to that which has up to now been the monopoly of the right. So it is not because the left hand is weak and powerless that it is neglected: the contrary is true. This hand is subjected to a veritable mutilation, which is none the less marked because it affects the function and not the outer form of the organ, because it is physiological and not anatomical. The feelings of a left-hander in a backward society13 are analogous to those of an uncircumcised man in countries where circumcision is law. The fact is that righthandedness is not simply accepted, submitted to, like a natural necessity: it is an ideal to which everybody must conform and which society forces us to respect by positive sanctions. The child which actively uses its left hand is reprimanded, when it is riot slapped on the over-bold hand: similarly the fact of being left-handed is an offence which draws on the offender a more or less explicit social reproof. Organic asymmetry in man is at once a fact and an ideal. Anatomy accounts for the fact to the extent that it results from the structure of the organism; but however strong a determinant one may suppose it to be, it is incapable of explaining the origin of the ideal or the reason for its existence. Religious polarity The preponderance of the right hand is obligatory, imposed by coercion, and guaranteed by sanctions: contrarily, a veritable prohibition weighs on the left hand and paralyses it. The difference in value and function between the two sides of our body possesses therefore in an extreme degree the characteristics of a social institution; and a study which tries to account for it belongs to sociology. More precisely, it is a matter of tracing the genesis of an imperative which is half esthetic, half moral. Now the secularised ideas which still dominate our conduct have been born in a mystical form, in the realm of beliefs and religious emotions. We have therefore to seek the explanation of the preference for the right hand in a comparative study of collective representations.14 One fundamental opposition dominates the spiritual world of primitive men, that between the sacred and the profane.15 Certain beings or objects, by virtue of their nature or by the performance of rites, are as it were impregnated with a special essence which consecrates them, sets them apart, and bestows extraordinary powers on them, but which then subjects them to a set of rules and narrow restrictions. Things and persons which are denied this mystical quality have no power, no dignity: they are common and, except for the absolute interdiction on coming into contact with what is sacred, free. Any contact or confusion of beings and things belonging to the opposed classes would be baneful to both. Hence the multitude of prohibitions and taboos which, by keeping them separate, protect both worlds at once. The significance of the antithesis: between profane and sacred varies according to the position in the religious sphere of the mind which classifies beings and evaluates them. Supernatural powers are not all of the same order: some work in harmony with the nature of things, and inspire veneration and confidence by their regularity and majesty; others, on the contrary, violate and disturb the order of the universe, and the respect they impose is founded chiefly on aversion and fear. All these powers have in common the character of being opposed to the profane, to which they are all equally dangerous and forbidden. Contact with a corpse produces in a profane being the same effects as sacrilege. In this sense Robertson Smith was right when he said that the notion of taboo comprised simultaneously the sacred and the impure, the divine and the demoniac. But the perspective of a religious world changes when it is regarded no longer from the point of view of the profane but from that of the sacred. The confusion that Robertson Smith referred to no longer exists. A Polynesian chief, for example, knows very well that the religious quality which imbues a corpse is radically contrary to that which he himself possesses. The impure is separated from the sacred and is placed at the opposite pole of the religious universe. On the other hand, from this point of view the profane is no longer defined by purely negative features: it appears as the antagonistic element which by its very contact degrades, diminishes, and changes the essence of things that are sacred. It is a nothingness, as it were, but an active and contagious nothingness: the harmful influence that it exerts on things endowed with sanctity does not differ in intensity from that of baneful powers. There is an imperceptible transition between the lack of sacred powers and the possession of sinister powers.16 Thus in the classification which has dominated religious consciousness from the beginning and in increasing measure there is a natural affinity and almost an equivalence between the profane and the impure. The two notions are combined and, in opposition to the sacred, form the negative pole of the spiritual universe. Dualism which is of the essence of primitive thought, dominates primitive social organization.17 The two moieties or phratries which constitute the tribe are reciprocally opposed as sacred and profane. Everything that exists within my own phratry is sacred and forbidden to me: this is why I cannot eat my totem, or spill the blood of a member of my phratry, or even touch his corpse, or marry in my clan. Contrarily, the opposite moiety is profane to me: the clans which compose it supply me with provisions, wives, and human sacrificial victims, bury my dead and prepare my sacred ceremonies.18 Given the religious character with which the primitive community feels itself invested, the existence of an opposed and complementary section of the same tribe, which can freely carry out functions which are forbidden to members of the first group, is a necessary condition of social life.19 The evolution of society replaces this reversible dualism with a rigid hierarchical structure:20 instead of separate and equivalent clans there appear classes or castes, of which one, at the summit, is essentially sacred, noble, and devoted to superior works, while another, at the bottom, is profane or unclean and engaged in base tasks. The principle by which men are assigned rank and function remains the same: social polarity is still a reflection and a consequence of religious polarity. The whole universe is divided into two contrasted spheres: things, beings, and powers attract or repel each other, implicate or exclude each other, according to whether they gravitate towards one or the other of the two poles. Powers which maintain and increase life, which give health, social pre-eminence, courage in war and skill in work, all reside in the sacred principle. Contrarily, the profane (in so far as it infringes on the sacred sphere) and the impure are essentially weakening and deadly: the baleful influences which oppress, diminish and harm individuals come from this side. So on one side there is the pole of strength, good, and life; while on the other there is the pole of weakness, evil, and death. Or, if a more recent terminology is preferred, on one side gods, on the other demons. All the oppositions presented by nature exhibit this fundamental dualism. Light and dark, day and night, east and south in opposition to west and north, represent in imagery and localise in space the two contrary classes of supernatural powers: on one side life shines forth and rises, on the other it descends and is extinguished. The same with the contrast between high and low, sky and earth: on high, the sacred residence of the gods and the stars which know no death; here below, the profane region of mortals whom the earth engulfs; and, lower still, the dark places where lurk serpents and the host of demons.21 Primitive thought attributes a sex to all beings in the universe and even to inanimate objects; all of them are divided into two immense classes according to whether they are considered as male or female. Among the Maori the expression tama tane, ‘male side’, designates the most diverse things: men’s virility, descent in the paternal line, the east, creative force, offensive magic, and so on; while the expression tama wahine, ‘female side’, covers everything that is the contrary of these.22 This cosmic distinction rests on a primordial religious antithesis. In general, man is sacred, woman is profane: excluded from ceremonies, she is admitted to them only for a function characteristic of her status, when a taboo is to be lifted, i.e, to bring about an intended profanation.23 But if woman is powerless and passive in the religious order, she has her revenge in the domain of magic: she is particularly fitted for works of sorcery. ‘All evils, misery, and death’, says a Maori proverb, ‘come from the female element.’ Thus the two sexes correspond to the sacred and to the profane (or impure), to life and to death. An abyss separates them, and a rigorous division of labour apportions activities between men and women in such a way that there can never be mixing or confusion.24 If dualism marks the entire thought of primitive men, it influences no less their religious activity, their worship. This influence is nowhere more manifest than in the tira ceremony, which occurs very often in Maori ritual and serves the most diverse ends. The priest makes two small mounds on a sacred plot of ground, of which one, the male, is dedicated to the Sky, and the other, the female, to the Earth. On each of them he erects a stick: one, called the ‘wand of life’ and which is placed to the east, is the emblem and focus of health, strength, and life; the other, which is placed to the west, is the ‘wand of death’ and is the emblem and focus of all evil. The detail of the rites varies according to the end sought, but the fundamental theme is always the same: on the one hand, to repel towards the pole of mortality all impurities and evils which have penetrated and which threaten the community; on the other, to secure, strengthen, and attract to the tribe the beneficent influences which reside at the pole of life. At the end of the ceremony the priest knocks down the wand of Earth, leaving the wand of Sky standing: this is the sought-after triumph of life over death, the expulsion and abolition of evil, the well-being of the community and the ruin of its enemies.25 Thus ritual activity is directed with reference to two opposite poles, each of which has its essential function in the cult, and which correspond to the two contrary and complementary attitudes of religious life. How could man’s body, the microcosm, escape the law of polarity which governs everything? Society and the whole universe have a side which is sacred, noble and precious, and another which is profane and common: a male side, strong and active, and another, female, weak and passive; or, in two words, a right side and a left side–and yet the human organism alone should be symmetrical? A moment’s reflection shows us that that is an impossibility. Such an exception would not only be an inexplicable anomaly, it would ruin the entire economy of the spiritual world. For man is at the centre of creation: it is for him to manipulate and direct for the better the formidable forces which bring life and death. Is it conceivable that all these things and these powers, which are separated and contrasted and are mutually exclusive, should be confounded abominably in the hand of the priest or the artisan? It is a vital necessity that neither of the two hands should know what the other doeth:26 the evangelical precept merely applies to a particular situation this law of the incompatibility of opposites, which is valid for the whole world of religion.27 If organic asymmetry had not existed, it would have had to be invented. The characteristics of right and left The different way in which the collective consciousness envisages and values the right and the left appears clearly in language. There is a striking contrast in the words which in most Indo-European languages designate the two sides. While there is a single term for ‘right’ which extends over a very wide area and shows great stability,28 the idea of ‘left’ is expressed by a number of distinct terms, which are less widely spread and seem destined to disappear constantly in the face of new words.29 Some of these words are obvious euphemisms,30 others are of extremely obscure origin. ‘It seems’, says Meillet,31 ‘that when speaking of the left side one avoided pronouncing the proper word and tended to replace it by different ones which were constantly renewed.’ The multiplicity and instability of terms for the left, and their evasive and arbitrary character, may be explained by the sentiments of disquiet and aversion felt by the community with respect to the left side.32 Since the thing itself could not be changed the name for it was, in the hope of abolishing or reducing the evil. But in vain; for even words with happy meanings, when applied by antiphrasis to the left, are quickly contaminated by what they express and acquire a ‘sinister’ quality which soon forbids their use. Thus the opposition which exists between right and left is seen even in the different natures and destinies of their names. The same contrast appears if we consider the meaning of the words ‘right’ and ‘left’. The former is used to express ideas of physical strength and ‘dexterity’, of intellectual ‘rectitude’ and good judgement, of ‘uprightness’ and moral integrity, of good fortune and beauty, of juridical norm; while the word ‘left’ evokes most of the ideas contrary to these. To unite these many meanings, it is ordinarily supposed that the word ‘right’ meant first of all our better hand, then ‘the qualities of strength and skill which are natural to it’, and by extension diverse analogous virtues of the mind and heart.33 But this is an arbitrary construction. There is nothing to authorise the statement that the ancient Indo-European word for the right first had an exclusively physical connotation; and more recently formed words such as our droit34 and the Armenian adj,35 before being applied to one of the sides of the body, expressed the idea of a force which goes straight to its object, by ways which are normal and certain, in opposition to ways which are tortuous, oblique, and abortive. In fact, the different meanings of the word in our languages, which are the products of an advanced civilisation, are distinct and juxtaposed. If we trace them back by the comparative method to the source from which these fragmentary meanings derive, we find them fused together originally in one notion which encompasses and confounds them all. We have already met this notion: for the right, it is the idea of sacred power, regular and beneficent, the principle of all effective activity, the source of everything that is good, favourable and legitimate; for the left, this ambiguous conception of the profane and the impure, the feeble and incapable which is also maleficent and dreaded. Physical strength (or weakness) here is only a particular and derivative aspect of a much more vague and fundamental quality. Among the Maori the right is the sacred side, the seat of good and creative powers; the left is the profane side, possessing no virtue other than, as we shall see, certain disturbing and suspect powers.36 The same contrast reappears in the course of the evolution of religion, in more precise and less impersonal forms: the right is the side of the gods, where hovers the white figure of a good guardian angel; the left side is dedicated to demons, the devil; a black and wicked angel holds it in dominion.37 Even today, if the right hand is still called good and beautiful and the left bad and ugly,38 we can discern in these childish expressions the weakened echoes of designations and religious emotions which for many centuries have been attached to the two sides of our body. It is a notion current among the Maori that the right is the ‘side of life’ (and of strength) while the left is the ‘side of death’ (and of weakness).39 Fortunate and lifegiving influences enter us from the right and through our right side; and, inversely, death and misery penetrate to the core of our being from the left.40 So the resistance of the side which is particularly exposed and defenceless has to be strengthened by protective amulets; the ring that we wear on the third finger of the left hand is primarily intended to keep temptations and other bad things from us.41 Hence the great importance in divination of distinguishing the sides, both of the body and in space. If I have felt a convulsive tremor while sleeping it is a sign that a spirit has seized me, and according to whether the sign was on the right or on the left I can expect good fortune and life or ill fortune and death.42 The same rule holds in general for omens which consist in the appearance of animals thought to be bearers of fate: sometimes these messages are susceptible of two contradictory interpretations, according to whether the situation is seen from the point of view of the person who sees the animal or of the animal which he encounters;43 if it appears on the left it presents its right side, therefore it can be considered favourable. But these divergences, carefully maintained by the augurs for the confusion of the common people and the increase of their own prestige, only show in a still clearer light the affinity that exists between the right and life, and between the left and death. A no less significant concordance links the sides of the body to regions in space. The right represents what is high, the upper world, the sky; while the left is connected with the underworld and the earth.44 It is not by chance that in pictures of the Last Judgement it is the Lord’s raised right hand that indicates their sublime abode to the elect, while his lowered left hand shows the damned the gaping jaws of Hell ready to swallow them. The relation uniting the right to the east or south and the left to the north or west is even more constant and direct, to the extent that in many languages the same words denote the sides of the body and the cardinal points.45 The axis which divides the world into two halves, the one radiant and the other dark, also cuts through the human body and divides it between the empire of light and that of darkness.46 Right and left extend beyond the limits of our body to embrace the universe. According to a very widespread idea, at least in the Indo-European area, the community forms a closed circle at the centre of which is the altar, the Ark of the Covenant, where the gods descend and from which divine aid radiates. Order and harmony reign within the enclosure, while outside it extends a vast night, limitless and lawless, full of impure germs and traversed by chaotic forces. On the periphery of the sacred space the worshippers make a ritual circuit round the divine centre, their right shoulders turned towards it.47 They have everything to hope for from one side, everything to fear from the other. The right is the inside, the finite, assured well-being, and peace; the left is the outside, the infinite, hostile, and the perpetual menace of evil. The above equivalents would in themselves allow us to assume that the right side and the male element are of the same nature, and likewise the left side and the female element; but we are not reduced to simple conjecture on this point. The Maori apply the terms tama tane and tama wahine to the two sides of the body, terms whose almost universal extension we have already noted: man is compounded of two natures, masculine and feminine; the former is attributed to the right side, the latter to the left.48 Among the Wulwanga tribe of Australia two sticks are used to mark the beat during ceremonies: one is called the man and is held in the right hand, while the other, the woman, is held in the left. Naturally, it is always the ‘man’ which strikes and the ‘woman’ which receives the blows; the right which acts, the left which submits.49 Here we find intimately combined the privilege of the strong sex and that of the strong side. Undoubtedly God took one of Adam’s left ribs to create Eve, for one and the same essence characterizes woman and the left side of the body. It is a matter of the two parts of a weak and defenceless being, somewhat ambiguous and disquieting, destined by nature to a passive and receptive role and to a subordinate position.50 Thus the opposition of the right and the left has the same meaning and application as the series of contrasts, very different but reducible to common principles, presented by the universe. Sacred power, source of life, truth, beauty, virtue, the rising sun, the male sex, and—I can add—the right side; all these terms are interchangeable, as are their contraries, they designate under many aspects the same category of things, a common nature, the same orientation towards one of the two poles of the mystical world.51 Can one believe that a slight difference of degree in the physical strength of the two hands could be enough to account for such a trenchant and profound heterogeneity? The functions of the two hands The different characteristics of the right and the left determine the difference in rank and functions which exists between the two hands. It is well known that many primitive peoples, particularly the Indians of North America, can converse without saying a word, simply by movements of the head and arms. In this language each hand acts in accordance with its nature. The right hand stands for me, the left for not-me, others.52 To express the idea of high the right hand is raised above the left, which is held horizontal and motionless; while the idea of low is expressed by lowering the ‘inferior hand’ below the right.53 The raised right hand signifies bravery, power, virility; while on the contrary the same hand, turned to the left and placed below the left hand, signifies, according to context, the ideas of death, destruction and burial.54 These characteristic examples are enough to show that the contrast between right and left, and the relative positions of the hands, are of fundamental importance in ‘sign-language’. The hands are used only incidentally for the expression of ideas: they are primarily instruments with which man acts on the beings and things that surround him. It is in the diverse fields of human activity that we must observe the hands at work. In worship man seeks above all to communicate with sacred powers, in order to maintain and increase them, and to draw to himself the benefits of their action. Only the right hand is fit for these beneficial relations, since it participates in the nature of the things and beings on which the rites are to act. The gods are on our right, so we turn towards the right to pray.55 A holy place must be entered right foot first.56 Sacred offerings are presented to the gods with the right hand.57 It is the right hand that receives favours from heaven and which transmits them in the benediction.58 To bring about good effects in a ceremony, to bless or to consecrate, the Hindus and the Celts go three times round a person or an object, from left to right, like the sun, with the right side turned inwards. In this way they pour upon whatever is enclosed in the sacred circle the holy and beneficent virtue which emanates from the right side. The contrary movement and position, in similar circumstances, would be sacrilegious and unlucky.59 But worship does not consist entirely in the trusting adoration of friendly gods. Man would willingly forget the sinister powers which swarm at his left, but he cannot; for they impose themselves on his attention by their murderous blows, by threats which must be eluded, and demands which must be satisfied. A considerable part of a religious cult, and not the least important part, is devoted to containing or appeasing spiteful or angry supernatural beings, to banishing and destroying bad influences. In this domain it is the left hand that prevails: it is directly concerned with all that is demoniacal.60 In the Maori ceremony that we described it is the left hand that sets up and then knocks down the wand of death.61 If greedy spirits of the souls of the dead have to be placated by the making of a gift, it is the left hand that is specified for this sinister contact.62 Sinners are expelled from the Church by the left door.63 In funerary rites and in exorcism the ceremonial circuit is made ‘in the wrong direction’, presenting the left side.64 Is it not right that the destructive powers of the left side should sometimes be turned against the malicious spirits who themselves generally use them? Magical practices proliferate on the borders of regular liturgy. The left hand is at home here: it excels at neutralizing or annulling bad fortune,65 but above all in propagating death.66 ‘When you drink with a native [on the Guinea Coast] you must watch his left hand, for the very contact of his left thumb with the drink would suffice to make it fatal.’ It is said that every native conceals under his left thumb-nail a toxic substance that possesses almost ‘the devastating subtlety of prussic acid’.67 This poison, which is evidently imaginary, symbolises perfectly the murderous powers that lie in the left side. It is clear that there is no question here of strength or weakness, of skill or clumsiness, but of different and incompatible functions linked to contrary natures. If the left hand is despised and humiliated in the world of the gods and of the living, it has its domain where it is mistress and from which the right hand is excluded; but this is a dark and ill-famed region. The power of the left hand is always somewhat occult and illegitimate; it inspires terror and repulsion. Its movements are suspect; we should like it to remain quiet and discreet, hidden in the folds of the garment, so that its corruptive influence will not spread. As people in mourning, whom death has enveloped, have to veil themselves, neglect their bodies, let their hair and nails grow, so it would be out of place to take too much care of the bad hand: the nails are not cut and it is washed less than the other.68 Thus the belief in a profound disparity between the two hands sometimes goes so far as to produce a visible bodily asymmetry. Even if it is not betrayed by its appearance, the left still remains the cursed hand. A left hand that is too gifted and agile is the sign of a nature contrary to right order, of a perverse and devilish disposition: every lefthanded person is a possible sorcerer, justly to be distrusted.69 To the contrary, the exclusive preponderance of the right, and a repugnance for requiring anything of the left, are the marks of a soul unusually associated with the divine and immune to what is profane or impure: such are the Christian saints who in their cradle were pious to the extent of refusing the left breast of their mother.70 This is why social selection favours right-handers and why education is directed to paralyzing the left hand while developing the right. Life in society involves a large number of practices which, without being integrally part of religion, are closely connected with it. If it is the right hands that are joined in a marriage, if the right hand takes the oath, concludes contracts, takes possession, and lends assistance, it is because it is in man's right side that lie the powers and authority which give weight to the gestures, the force by which it exercises its hold on things.71 How could the left hand conclude valid acts since it is deprived of prestige anti spiritual power, since it has strength only for destruction and evil? Marriage contracted with the left hand is a clandestine and irregular union from which only bastards can issue. The left is the hand of perjury, treachery, and fraud.72 As with jural formalities, so also the rules of etiquette derive directly from worship: the gestures with which we adore the gods serve also to express the feelings of respect and affectionate esteem that we have for one another.73 In greeting and in friendship we offer the best we have, our right.74 The king bears the emblems of his sovereignty on his right side, he places at his right those whom he judges most worthy to receive, without polluting them, the precious emanations from his right side. It is because the right and the left are really of different value and dignity that it means so much to present the one or the other to our guests, according to their position in the social hierarchy.75 All these usages, which today seem to be pure conventions, are explained and acquire meaning if they are related to the beliefs which gave birth to them. Let us look more closely at the profane. Many primitive peoples, when they are in a state of impurity—during mourning, for example—may not use their hands, and in particular they may not use them for eating. They must be fed by others putting the food into their mouths, or they seize the food in their mouths like dogs, since if they touched the food with their polluted hands they would swallow their own death.76 In this case a sort of mystical infirmity affects both hands and for a time paralyses them. It is a prohibition of the same order that bears on the left hand, but as it is of the same nature as this hand itself the paralysis is permanent. This is why very commonly only the right hand can be actively used at meals. Among the tribes of the lower Niger it is even forbidden for women to use their left hands when cooking, evidently under pain of being accused of attempted poisoning and sorcery.77 The left hand, like those pariahs on whom all impure tasks are thrust, may concern itself only with disgusting duties.78 We are far from the sanctuary here; but the dominion of religious concepts is so powerful that it makes itself felt in the dining-room, the kitchen, and even in those places haunted by demons and which we dare not name. It seems, however, that there is one order of activity at least which escapes mystical influences, viz. the arts and industry: the different roles of right and left in these are held to be connected entirely with physical and utilitarian causes. But such a view fails to recognise the character of techniques in antiquity: these were impregnated with religiosity and dominated by mystery. What more sacred for primitive man than war or the hunt! These entail the possession of special powers and a state of sanctity that is difficult to acquire and still more difficult to preserve. The weapon itself is a sacred thing, endowed with a power which alone makes blows directed at the enemy effective. Unhappy the warrior who profanes his spear or sword and dissipates its virtue! Is it possible to entrust something so precious to the left hand? This would be monstrous sacrilege, as much as it would be to allow a woman to enter the warriors’ camp, i.e, to doom them to defeat and death. It is man’s right side that is dedicated to the god of war; it is the mana of the right shoulder that guides the spear to its target; it is therefore only the right hand that will carry and wield the weapon.79 The left hand, however, is not unemployed: it provides for the needs of profane life that even an intense consecration cannot interrupt, and which the right hand, strictly dedicated to war, must ignore.80 In battle, without actually taking part in the action, it can parry the adversary’s blows; its nature fits it for defence; it is the shield hand. The origin of ideas about right and left has often been sought in the different roles of the two hands in battle, a difference resulting from the structure of the organism or from a sort of instinct.81 This hypothesis, refuted by decisive arguments,82 takes for the cause what is really the effect. It is none the less true that the warlike functions of the two hands have sometimes reinforced the characteristics already attributed to them and the relations of one to the other. Consider an agricultural people who prefer peaceful works to pillage and conquest, and who never have recourse to arms except in defence: the ‘shield hand’ will rise in popular estimation, while the ‘spear hand’ will lose something of its prestige. This is notably the case among the Zuni, who personify the left and right sides of the body as two gods who are brothers: the former, the elder, is reflective, wise, and of sound judgement; while the latter is impetuous, impulsive, and made for action.83 But however interesting this secondary development may be, which considerably modifies the characteristic features of the two sides, it must not make us forget the primary religious significance of the contrast between the right and the left. What is true of military art applies also to other techniques; but a valuable account from the Maori enables us to see directly what makes the right hand preponderant in human industry. The account concerns the initiation of a young girl into the craft of weaving, a serious affair wrapped in mystery and full of danger. The apprentice sits in the presence of the master, who is both artisan and priest, in front of two carved posts which are stuck in the ground and form a sort of rudimentary loom. In the right post lie the sacred virtues which constitute the art of weaving and which make the work effectual; the left post is profane and empty of any power. While the priest recites his incantations the apprentice bites the right post in order to absorb its essence and consecrate herself to her vocation. Naturally, only the right hand comes into contact with the sacred post, the profanation of which would be fatal to the initiate; and it is the same hand that carries the thread, which is also sacred, from left to right. As for the profane hand, it can co-operate only humbly and at a distance in the solemn work that is done.84 Doubtless this division of labour is relaxed in the case of rougher and more profane pursuits. But none the less it remains the case that, as a rule, techniques consist in setting in motion, by delicate manipulation, dangerous mystical forces: only the sacred and effective hand can take the risk of initiative; if the baneful hand actively intervenes it will only dry up the source of success and vitiate the work that is undertaken.85 Thus, from one end to the other of the world of humanity, in the sacred places where the worshipper meets his god, in the cursed places where devilish pacts are made, on the throne as well as in the witness-box, on the battlefield and in the peaceful workroom of the weaver, everywhere one unchangeable law governs the functions of the two hands. No more than the profane is allowed to mix with the sacred is the left allowed to trespass on the right. A preponderant activity of the bad hand could only be illegitimate or exceptional; for it would be the end of man and everything else if the profane were ever allowed to prevail over the sacred and death over life. The supremacy of the right hand is at once an effect and a necessary condition of the order which governs and maintains the universe. Conclusion Analysis of the characteristics of the right and the left, and the functions attributed to them, has confirmed the thesis of which deduction gave us a glimpse. The obligatory differentiation between the sides of the body is a particular case and a consequence of the dualism which is inherent in primitive thought. But the religious necessities which make the pre-eminence of one of the hands inevitable do not determine which of them will be preferred. How is it that the sacred side should invariably be the right and the profane the left? According to some authors the differentiation of right and left is completely explained by the rules of religious orientation and sun-worship. The position of man in space is neither indifferent nor arbitrary. In his prayers and ceremonies the worshipper looks naturally to the region where the sun rises, the source of all life. Most sacred buildings, in different religions, are turned towards the east. Given this direction, the parts of the body are themselves assigned to cardinal points: west is behind, south to the right, and the north to the left. Consequently the characteristics of the heavenly regions are reflected in the human body. The full sunlight of the south shines on our right side, while the sinister shade of the north is projected to our left. The spectacle of nature, the contrast of daylight and darkness, of heat and cold, are held to have taught man to distinguish and to oppose his right and his left.86 This explanation rests on outmoded ideas about naturalistic conceptions. The external world, with its light and shade, enriches and gives precision to religious notions which issue from the depths of the collective consciousness; but it does not create them. It would be easy to formulate the same hypothesis in more correct terms and to restrict its application to the point that we are concerned with; but it would still run up against contrary facts of a decisive nature.87 In fact, there is nothing to allow us to assert that the distinctions applied to space are anterior to those that concern man’s body. They all have one and the same origin, the opposition of the sacred and the profane; therefore they are usually concordant and support each other; but they are not thereby less independent. We must therefore seek in the structure of the organism the dividing line which directs the beneficent flow of supernatural favours towards the right side. This ultimate recourse to anatomy should not be seen as a contradiction or concession. It is one thing to explain the nature and origin of a force, it is another to determine the point at which it is applied. The slight physiological advantages possessed by the right hand are merely the occasion of a qualitative differentiation of which the cause lies beyond the individual, in the constitution of the collective consciousness. An almost insignificant bodily asymmetry is enough to turn in one direction and the other contrary representations which are already completely formed. Thereafter, thanks to the plasticity of the organism, social constraint88 adds to the opposed members and incorporates in them those qualities of strength and weakness, dexterity and clumsiness,89 which in the adult appear to spring spontaneously from nature.90 The exclusive development of the right hand has sometimes been seen as a characteristic attribute of man and a sign of his moral pre-eminence. In a sense this is true. For centuries the systematic paralysation of the left arm has, like other mutilations, expressed the will animating man to make the sacred predominate over the profane, to sacrifice the desires and the interest of the individual to the demands felt by the collective consciousness, and to spiritualise the body itself by marking upon it the opposition of values and the violent contrasts of the world of morality. It is because man is a double being—homo duplex—that he possesses a right and a left that are profoundly differentiated. This is not the place to seek the cause and the meaning of this polarity which dominates religious life and is imposed on the body itself. This is one of the profoundest questions which the science of comparative religion and sociology in general have to solve; we ought not to tackle it indirectly. Perhaps we have been able to bring certain novel elements into this research; in any case, it is not without interest to see a particular problem reduced to another that is much more general. As philosophers have often remarked,91 the distinction between right and left is one of the essential articles of our intellectual equipment. It seems impossible, then, to explain the meaning and genesis of this distinction without taking the part, at least implicitly, of one or the other traditional doctrines of the origin of knowledge. What disputes there were formerly between the partisans of innate distinction and those of experience! And what a fine clash of dialectical arguments! The application of experimental and sociological method to human problems puts an end to this conflict of dogmatic and contradictory assertions. Those who believe in the innate capacity to differentiate have won their victory: the intellectual and moral representations of right and left are true categories, anterior to all individual experience, since they are linked to the very structure of social thought. But the advocates of experience were right too, for there is no question here of immutable instincts or of absolute metaphysical data. These categories are transcendent only in relation to the individual: placed in their original setting, the collective consciousness, they appear as facts of nature, subject to change and dependent on complex conditions. Even if, as it seems, the different attributes of the two hands, the dexterity of one and the clumsiness of the other, are in great part the work of human will, the dream of humanity gifted with two ‘right hands’ is not visionary: But from the fact that ambidexterity is possible it does not follow that it is desirable; the social causes which led to the differentiation of the two hands might be permanent. However, the evolution that we are now witnessing hardly justifies such a view. The tendency to level the value of the two hands is not an isolated or abnormal fact in our culture. The ancient religious ideas which put unbridgeable distance between things and beings, and which in particular founded the exclusive preponderance of the right hand, are today in full retreat. Neither aesthetics nor morality would suffer from the revolution of supposing that there were weighty physical and technical advantages to mankind in permitting the left hand at least to reach its full development. The distinction of good and evil, which for long was solidary with the antithesis of right and left, will not vanish from our conscience the moment the left hand makes a more effective contribution to human labour and is able, on occasion, to take the place of the right. If the constraint of a mystical ideal has for centuries been able to make man a unilateral being, physiologically mutilated, a liberated and foresighted community will strive to develop better the energies dormant in our left side and in our right cerebral hemisphere, and to assure by an appropriate training a more harmonious development of the organism. References Baldwin, James Mark. 1987. Développement mental dans l’enfant et dans la race. Paris. 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Bücher, Carl. 1897. ‘Arbeit und Rhythmus.’ Abhandlungen der Königlich Sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften 39, No. 5. Leipzig. Burckhardt, John Lewis. 1830. Arabic proverbs. London. Buyse, Omer. 1908. Méthodes américaines d’éducation générale et technique. Paris. Caland, W. 1898. ‘Een Indogermaansch lustratie-gebruik.’ Verslagen en Mededeelingen der Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen, Afd. Letterkunde, 4e reeks, 2: 275–325. Amsterdam. ———. 1900. ‘Altindisches Zauberritual.’ Verhandelingen der Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen, Afd. Letterkunde, nieuwe reeks 3, No. 2. Amsterdam. Colenso, William. 1868. ‘On the Maori races of New Zealand.’ TPNZI I [separate pagination]. Crawley, Ernest. 1902. The mystic rose: a study of primitive marriage. London. Cushing, Frank Hamilton. 1883. ‘Zuñi fetishes.’ ARBE 2: 1–45. ———. 1892. ‘Manual concepts: a study of the influence of hand-usage on culture-growth.’ AA 5: 289–317. Daremberg, C. V. & Saglio, E. 1873. Dictionnaire des antiquités grecques et romaines. Paris. Darmesteter, James. 1879. Zend-Avesta. London. Deniker, J. 1900. Races et peuples de la terre. Paris. Didron, Alphonse Napoléon. 1843. Iconographie chrétienne: histoire de dieu. Paris. Diez, Friedrich Christian. 1878. Etymologisches Wörterbuch der romanischen Sprachen. Bonn. Doutté, Edmond. 1909. La société musulmane du Maghrib: magie et religion dans l’Afrique du nord. Alger. Durkheim, Émile. 1898. ‘La prohibition de l’inceste et ses origins.’ Année Sociologique 1 (1896–97): 1–70. Paris Durkheim, Émile & Marcell Mauss. 1903. ‘De quelques formes primitives de la classification.’ Année Sociologique 6 (1901–2). 1–72. Paris. Erman. 1873. [Comment on Meyer 1873.] Verhandlungen der Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte p. 36. Berlin. Eylmann, Erhard. 1909. Die Eingeborenen der Kolonie Süd-Australiens. Berlin. ———. 1847. Ueber die Gottheiten der Etrusker. Berlin. Gill, William Wyatt. 1876. Myths and songs from the south Pacific. London. Goldie, W. H. 1904. ‘Maori medical lore.’ TPNZI 37: 1–120. Grimm, Jacob Ludwig Carl. 1818. Geschichte der deutschen Sprache. (2 vols). Leipzig. Gudgeon, W. E. 1905. ‘Maori religion.’ JPS 14: 107–30. Hamelin, O. 1907. Essai sur les elements principaux de la representation. Paris. Hofmann, F. 1870. ‘Ueber den Verlobungs-und den Trauring.’ Sitzungsberichte der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Phil.-Hist. Klasse 65: 825–63. Wien. Jackson, John. 1905. Ambidexterity: Two-handedness and two-brainedness, an argument for natural development and rational education. London. Jacobs, Jacob. 1892. Onze rechthandigheid. Amsterdam. Jamieson, John. 1808. Etymological dictionary of the Scottish language. Edinburgh. Kruyt, A. C. 1906. Het animisme in den Indischen Archipel. Den Haag. Lane, Edward William. 1836. Modern Egyptians. London. Lartigue. 1851. ‘Rapport sur les comptoirs de Grand-Bassam et d’Assinie.’ Revue Coloniale, 2e série, 7: 329–73. Leonard, Arthur Glyn. 1906. The lower Niger and its tribes. London-New York. Lidén, Evald. 1906. ‘Armenische Studien.’ Göteborgs Högskolas Arsskrift 12. Liersch, L. W. 1893. Die Linke Hand: eine physiologische und medizinisch-praktische Abhandlung. Berlin. Lombroso, C. 1903. ‘Lefthandedness.’ North American Review 177: 440. Lydon, F. F. 1900. Ambixtrous and free-form blackboard drawing and design. London. McGee, W. J. 1900. ‘Primitive numbers.’ ARBAE 19: 821–51. Mâle, Émile. 1898. L’art religieux du XIIIe siècle en France. Paris. Mallery, Garrick. 1881. ‘Sign-language among the North-American Indians.’ ARBE 1: 269–552. Martène, Edmond. 1736–37. De antiques Ecclesiae ritibus. (3 vols). Antwerp. Meillet, Paul Jules Antoine. 1906. Quelques hypothèses sur les interdictions de vocabulaire dans le langue indo-européennes. Chartres. Meyer, von. 1873. ‘Ueber den Ursprung von Rechts und Links.’ Verhandlungen der Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte 5:25–34. Nissen, Heinrich. 1906–10. Orientation: Studien zur Geschichte der Religion. (3 vols). Berlin. Pictet, Adolphe. 1859–63. Les origins indo-européennes. (2 vols). Paris. Pott, Augustus Friedrich. 1847. Die quinare und vegisimale Zählmethode bei Völkern aller Welttheile. Halle. Rollet, Etienne. 1889. ‘La taille des grands singes.’ Revue Scientifique 44: 196–201. Roth, H. Ling, ed. 1899. ‘Notes on the Jekris, Sobos and Ijos of the Warri District of the Niger Coast Protectorate.’ JAI 28: 104–26. Schrader, Otto. 1901. Reallexicon der indogermanischen Alterstumskunde. Strassburg. Schurtz, Heinrich. 1900. Urgeschichte der Kultur. Leipzig-Wien. Simpson, William. 1896. The Buddhist praying-wheel. London-New York. Sittl, Carl. 1890. Die Gebärden der Griechen und Römer. Leipzig. Smith, Percy. 1892. Futuna: Horne Island and its people, Western Pacific. JPS 1:33–52. Spencer, B. & Gillen, F. J. 1904. Northen tribes of central Australia. London. Spieth, Jakob. 1906. Die Ewe-Stämme. Berlin. Tregear, Edward. 1904. The Maori race. Wanganui, N.Z. Usener, Hermann. 1896. Götternamen. Bonn. Valeton. 1889. ‘De modis auspicandi Romanorum.’ Mnemosyne 17: 275–325. Walde, Alois. 1905–6. Lateinisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch. Heidelberg. Wellhausen, Julius. 1897. Reste des arabischen Heidenthums. Berlin. White, John. 1887–90. Ancient history of the Maori: His mythology and traditions. (6 vols). Wellington. Wilson, Daniel. 1891. Lefthandedness. London. Zeller, Eduard. 1876. Die Philosophie der Griechen. Leipzig.     Robert HERTZ (1881–1915) was a doctoral student of Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, a member of the L’Année Sociologique group, and one of the founders of the Groupe d’Etudes Socialistes. Before completing his dissertation (“Sin and expiation in primitive societies”), he was killed in action while serving in the French army during World War I. Hertz’s short yet canonical works have had a deep impact on anthropology, influencing the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Louis Dumont, Rodney Needham, and many others. He is author of Death and the right hand (1960, edited and translated by Rodney and Claudia Needham, Routledge) and “St. Besse: A study of an Alpine cult” (1984, in Saints and their cults: Studies in religious sociology, edited by Stephen Wilson, Cambridge University Press). ___________________ Publisher’s note: This is a reprint of Hertz, Robert. 1973. “The pre-eminence of the right hand.” In Right and left: Essays on dual symbolic classification, translated by Rodney and Claudia Needham, edited by Rodney Needham, 3–31. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. The essay was first published in 1909 as “La prééminence de la main droite : étude sur la polarité religieuse.” Revue Philosophique 68: 553–80. We are very grateful to the University of Chicago Press for granting us the permission to reprint the essay. We remind the reader that we retain the style of the original. 1. Some of which are set out and discussed in Wilson 1891: 149; Jacobs 1892: 22; and Jackson 1905: 41. 2. See Wilson 1891: 183; Baldwin 1897: 67; and van Biervliet 1899: 276. 3. Recent investigation has led to the finding by one anatomist that: ‘Although there is a functional asymmetry of the brain, in that the main speech centres tend to be situated in the left cerebral hemisphere, it is extremely doubtful whether there is any significant difference in the mass of the cerebral hemispheres. The conclusion must, therefore, be reached that cranial and cerebral asymmetry are not associated with handedness . . . ’ (G. B. D. Scott, ‘Cranial and cerebral asymmetry and handedness’, Man, Vol. 55, 1955, pp. 67-70.) —Ed. (Rodney Needham) 4. Jacobs 1892: 25. 5. Bastian and Brown-Sequard in Wilson 1891: 193–34. 6. Rollet 1889: 198; Jackson 1905: 27, 71. 7. Jacobs 1892: 30, 33. 8. Wilson 1891: 140, 142. 9. Wilson 1891: 127–28; Jackson 1905: 52, 97. The latter author estimates those who are naturally right-handed at 17 per cent; but he does not explain how this figure is arrived at. Van Biervliet (1899: 142, 373) does not admit ‘the existence of truly ambidextrous persons’; according to him, 98 per cent of people are right-handed. But these reckonings apply only to adults; and he assigns a far too narrow meaning to the word ‘ambidexterity’. What matters here is not so much the dimensions of the bones or the strength of the muscles as the possible use of one or the other member. 10. Jacobs 1892: 33. 11. Wilson 1891: 139, 148–49, 203. A left-handed person benefits from the inborn dexterity of the left hand and the skill acquired by the right. 12. See Jackson 1905: 195; Lydon 1900; Buyse 1908: 145. An ‘Ambidextral Culture Society’ has existed in England for some years. 13. Cf. (in peasants on Lombardy and Tuscany) Lombroso 1903: 444. Lombroso believes himself to have justified scientifically the old prejudice against left-handed people. 14. Most of the ethnographic facts on which this study is based come from the Maori, or more exactly from the very primitive Tuhoe tribe, whose conceptions have been recorded with admirable fidelity by Elsdon Best in his articles in the Transactions of the New Zealand Institute and the Journal of the Polynesian Society. 15. Our account of religious polarity is only intended to be a rapid sketch. Most of the ideas expressed here will be familiar to the reader who knows the works published by Durkheim, Hubert and Mauss in the Année Sociologique. As for certain novel views which this account may obtain, these will be taken up again elsewhere, with the necessary elaboration and proofs. 16. Some examples of this necessary confusion will be given below. See what is said later about the inferior class of woman, earth, and the left side. 17. On social dichotomy, see McGee 1900: 845, 863; Durkheim & Mauss 1903: 7. 18. On this last point, see chiefly Spencer & Gillen 1904: 298. 19. Note that the two moieties of the tribe are often localised, one occupying the right and the other the left (in camp, during ceremonies, etc.). Cf. Durkheim & Mauss 1903: 52; Spencer & Gillen 1904: 28, 577. 20. The outline of which exists from a primitive stage: women and children, in relation to men, form an essentially profane class. 21. On the identification of the sky with the sacred element and the earth with the profane or sinister, cf. (for the Maori) Tregear 1904: 408, 466, 486; Best 1905a: 150, 188; 1906:155. Compare the Greek opposition of celestial to chthonian divinities. 22. See especially Best 1905b: 206 and 1901: 73. 23. Best 1906: 26. 24. See, on the Maori, Colenso 1868: 348, and cf. Durkheim 1898: 40; Crawley 1902. 25. Best 1901: 87; 1906: 161–62; Tregear 1904: 330, 392, 515. Cf. Best 1898a: 241. 26. Matt. 6, 3. For the reciprocal interdiction, cf. Burckhardt 1830: 282. 27. McGee has described the dualistic structure of primitive thought from a point of view and in terms rather different from mine. He considers the distinction between right and left as an addition to a primitive system recognising only the opposition between before and behind. This assertion seems arbitrary to me. Cf. McGee 1900: 843. 28. This is the root deks-which is met with in different forms from the Indo-Iranian dăkšina to the Celtic dess, passing through Lithuanian, Slavonic, Albanian, Germanic and Greek. Cf. Walde 1905–6 s.v. dexter. 29. Concerning these terms (Skr. savyáh, Gr. λριστεóς, Gr. σκαιὀς etc .) cf. Schrader 1901 s.v. Rechts und Links; Brugmann 1888: 399. 30. Gr. εὐώνυμoς and ἀριστερóς, Zend vairyāstara (= better), OHG winistar (from wini, friend), Arabic aisar (= happy, cf. Wellhausen 1897, 2: 199), to which should be added, according to Brugmann, the Latin sinister. According to Grimm 1818, 2: 681, 689 and more recently Brugmann 1888: 399 the left was originally the favourable side for the Indo-Europeans; these philologists have been deceived by linguistic artifices intended to conceal the true nature of the left. It is certainly a question of antiphrasis. 31. In a letter which he has been so kind as to send me and for which I express my thanks, Meillet had already suggested this explanation (1906: 18). 32. Similarly, and for the same reason, ‘the names of illnesses and infirmities such as lameness, blindness, and deafness differ from one language to another’ (Meillet 1906:18). 33. Cf. for example Pictet 1863: 209. 34. From the low Latin directum; cf. Diez 1878, 5: 272 s.v. ritto. 35. Connected with the Skr. sādhyá, according to Lidén 1906: 75. Meillet, to whom I owe this note, considers the etymology irreproachable and very probable. 36. Best 1902: 25; 1904: 236. 37. Meyer 1873: 26. Cf. Gerhard 1847: 54; Pott 1847: 260. Among the Greeks and Romans the right is frequently invoked in formulas of obsecration; cf. Horace Ep. I, 7, 94—quod te per genium dextramque deosque penates obsecro et obtestor; see Sittl 1890: 29, n. 5. 38. Cf. Grimm 1818: 685. 39. Best 1898a: 123, 133. 40. Darmesteter 1879, 2: 129 n. 64. 41. The custom goes back to very ancient times (Egyptian, Greek, Roman). The metal (originally iron, later gold) is endowed with a beneficial virtue which protects from witchcraft: characters engraved on the ring add to its power. The names given to the third finger of the left hand prove its magical character and function: it is the finger ‘without a name’, ‘the doctor’, and in Welsh ‘the charm finger’. See the articles ‘Anulus’ and ‘Amuletum’ in Daremberg & Saglio 1873; Pott 1847: 284, 295; Hofmann 1870:850. On the word scaevola (from scaevus, left), meaning a protective charm, see Valeton 188g: 319. 42. Best 1898a: 130; Tregear 1904: 211. 43. Or, what amounts to the same thing, the god who sends the message. This explanation, already proposed by the ancients (Plutarch, Quaestiones Romanae, 78; Festus 17 s.v. sinistrae aves) has been definitely proved by Valeton (1889: 287). The same uncertainties are found among the Arabs: cf. Wellhausen 1897: 202 and Doutté 1909: 359. 44. The whirling dervishes keep the right hand raised with the palm upwards, to receive blessings from heaven which the left hand, held low towards the earth, transmits to the world below. Simpson 1896: 138. Cf. p. 104. 45. See Gill 1876: 128, 297. The Hebrew jamîn, Skr, dákshina, Irish dess mean both right and south; see Schrader 1901 s.v. Himmelsgegenden. For the Greeks the east is the right of the world and the west the left; cf. Stobaeus, Eclogae, I, 15, 6. 46. This is why the sun is the right eye of Horus and the moon his left. The same in Polynesia (Gill 1876: 153). In Christian representations of the crucifixion the sun shines on the region to the right of the cross, where the new Church triumphs, while the moon illuminates the side of the impenitent thief and the fallen synagogue. See Mâle 1898:224, 229. 47. See Simpson 1896; and below p. 104. 48. Best 1898a: 123; 1902: 25; Tregear 1904 : 506. 49. Eylmann 1909: 376. (I am indebted to M. Mauss for this reference.) 50. A contemporary physician naively formulates the same idea: see Liersch 1893: 46. 51. The table of contraries which, according to the Pythagoreans, balance each other and constitute the universe comprises finite and infinite, oddd and even, right and left, male and female, stable and changing, straight (εὑ#x03B8;ὑ) and curved, light and shade, good and evil, high and low; see Aristotle, Metaphysics, I, 5; and cf. Zeller 1876: 321. The correspondence with the table that I have set out is perfect: the Pythagoreans have simply defined and given shape to extremely ancient popular Ideas. 52. Wilson 189l: 18-l9. 53. Mallery 1881: 364. 54. Mallery 1881: 414, 416, 420. Cf. Quintilianus, XI, 3. 13 in Sittl 1890: 358 (on the gesture expressing abomination). 55. See Schrader 1901 s.v, Gruss. Cf. Bokhâri 1903: 153. 56. Bokhâri 1903: 157. Conversely, places haunted by djinn are entered left foot first (Lane 1836: 308). 57. When the left hand intervenes it is only to follow and duplicate the action of the right (White 1887: 197). It is still often ill-regarded (Sittl 1890: 51 n. 2, 88; Simpson 1896: 291). 58. See Genesis 48, 13. 59. On pradákshina and deasil, see Simpson 1896: 75, 90, 183, and especially the monograph by Caland (1898). Traces of this observance are found in the entire IndoEuropean area. 60. See Plato, Laws, 4, 717a– τοῖς χθονίοις θεοῖς … ἀριστερὰ νέµν ὀρθότατα τοῦ τῆς εὐσεβείας σκοποῦ τυγχάνοι; Cf. Sittl 1890: 188. 61. Gudgeon 1905: 125. 62. Kruyt 1906: 259, 380 n I. 63. Martène 1736, 2: 82; cf. Middoth in Simpson 1896: 142. 64. Simpson 1896; Caland 1898; Jamieson. 1808 s.v. widdersinnis. Sorceresses present the left to the devil to do him homage. 65. Best 1904: 76, 236; 1905: 3; 1901: 98; Goldie 1904: 75. 66. See Kaušika sutra 47, 4 in Caland 1900: 184. Blood extracted from the left side of the body causes death (Best 1897: 41). Contrarily, blood from the right side gives life, regenerates (the wounds of the crucified Christ are always in his right side). 67. Lartigue 1851: 365. 68. Lartigue 1851; Burckhard 1830: 186; Meyer 1873: 26, 28. 69. This is why beings, real or imaginary, which are believed to possess dreadful magical powers are represented as left-handed: this is the case with the bear among the Kamchadal and the Eskimo (Erman 1873: 36; J. Rae in Wilson 1891: 60). 70. Usener 1896: 190–91. When the Pythagoreans crossed their legs they took care never to place the left on top of the right. Plutarch, De vit. pud. 8. Cf. Bokhâri 1903: 75. 71. On the Roman manus, see Daremberg & Saglio 1873 s.v. manus; Sittl 1890: 129, 135. The Romans dedicated the right to good faith; in Arabic the oath is called jamîn, the right (Wellhausen 1897: 186). 72. In Persian, ‘give the left’ means to betray (Pictet 1877, 3: 227). Cf. Plautus, Persa, II, 2, 44–furtifica laeva 73. See Schrader 1901 s.v. Gruss; Caland 1898: 314–15. 74. Cf. Sittl 1890: 27, 31, 310 (δεξιoῦσθαι, dextrae). 75. On the importance of right and left in Christian iconography, see Didron 1843: 186 and Mâle 1898: 19. 76. Cf. (for the Maori) Best 1905a: 199, 221. 77. Leonard 1906: 310. Neither may a woman touch her husband with the left hand. 78. On the exclusive use of the left hand for cleansing the apertures of the body ‘below the navel’, see Lartigue 1851; Roth 1899: 122; Spieth 1906, I: 235; Jacobs 1892: 21 (on the Malays); Laws of Manu V, 132, 136; Bokhâri 1903: 69, 71; Lane 1836: 187. 79. Best 1902: 25; Tregear 1904: 332. 80. Tregear 1904. 81. For example, Carlyle, cited by Wilson (189l: 15); similarly, Cushing 1892: 290. 82. An account of this is to be found in Jackson 1905: 51, 54. But the weightiest argument has escaped him. It is extremely probable, as has been shown by Deniker (1900: 316) and Schurtz (1900: 352), that the shield derives from a parrying-stick, the manipulation of which required great dexterity. Moreover, there are many peoples who do not know the use of the shield; such indeed are the Maori (Smith 1892: 43; Tregear 1904: 316), among whom the distinction between right and left is particularly pronounced. 83. Cushing 1892; 1883: 13. Cf. a curious passage on Hermes the Thrice-Great in Stobaeus, Eclogae I, 59; and Brinton 1896: 176–77 (on the Chinese). 84. Just as it may not be touched with the left hand, so the sacred post must not be surprised in its upright state by night or by a (profane) stranger. See Best 1898b: 627, 656 and Tregear 1904: 225, who follows him. 85. The thread worn by a Brahman must be plaited from left to right (cf. above, p. 109); plaited the opposite way, it is consecrated to the ancestors and cannot be used by the living (Simpson 1896: 93). 86. See Meyer 1873: 27; Jacobs 1892: 33. 87. (I) The system of orientation postulated by the theory, though very general and probably primitive, is far from being universal; cf. Nissen 1907. (2) The heavenly regions are not characterised uniformly: e.g. for the Hindus and the Romans the north is the regio fausta and inhabited by the gods, while the south belongs to the dead. (3) If ideas about the sun played the part attributed to them, the right and the left would be inverted among peoples of the southern hemisphere; but the Australian and Maori right coincides with ours. 88. This constraint is exercised, not only in education properly speaking, but in games, dances, and work, which among primitive peoples have an intensely collective and rhythmic character (Bücher 1897). 89. Fr. Gaucherie, lit. ‘leftness’. —Ed. (Rodney Needham) 90. It could even be that constraint and social selection should at length have modified the human physical type, if it were proved that the proportion of left-handers is greater among primitives than among civilised peoples; but the evidence on this point is vague and of little weight. Cf. Colenso 1868: 343; Wilson 1891: 66; and, on Stone Age man, Wilson 1891: 31 and Brinton 1896: 175. 91. In particular, Hamelin 1907: 76.  

Divine kings and the “breath of men” This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Monica Wilson. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau7.2.044 REPRINT Divine kings and the “breath of men” The 1959 Frazer Lecture Monica WILSON, The University of Cape Town This article is a reprint of Wilson, Monica. 1959. “‘Divine kings’ and the breath of men.” The Frazer Lecture, Cambridge. We come today to do honor to Sir James Frazer and I have chosen to talk about the central idea of the Golden bough—divine kingship. This idea has been as fertile as a divine king was held to be; indeed we might liken Sir James to a divine king himself, in his intellectual fruitfulness. Diving kings have never existed in isolation. They are part of the practical organization of their societies, and men’s ideas about them and attitudes towards them form part of intellectual systems and symbolic patterns. This Sir James well understood, but his material on Africa was limited; he was dependent upon the reports of travellers and missionaries. My purpose this afternoon is first to examine the intellectual system and symbolic pattern of one African people, the Nyakyusa of Tanganyika and their kinsmen of Ngonde in Nyasaland, and try to show you how the conception of divine kinship fits into their categories of thought and symbolic form and then to discuss divine kingship as part of a changing political organization. The analysis relates primarily to one people, but there appears to be a close similarity of ideas and symbols among the peoples of Africa who speak one or other of the 200-odd Bantu languages—ideas and symbols are of course embedded in language—so the generalizations made may apply beyond the narrow boundaries of the Nyakyusa valley and Ngonde plain. Seven ideas seem to me to have dominated the Nyakyusa-Ngonde cosmology. The first is that vitality, energy, physical vigor, force of character are all important, and must be guarded and fostered. What men worshipped was life, the power of [564]procreation and growth.1 But that power was not left unchecked; it was combined with a wide spacing of births and a limitation of the period during which a woman was permitted to bear children. Moreover, energy and force of character were judged to be manifestations of power at least as great as a numerous offspring, so, in a climate in which inertia creeps over one, energy was admired and judged to be, in a sense, divine. I say ‘divine’ because the Nyakyusa and Ngonde believed that the source of this power was the very body and person of a king; that it passed through him to his men, their herds and fields; and that on his death the king became a god. A Nyakyusa chief was expected to show his vitality in dancing and hoeing, in the number of his children and the multiplying of his herds, in the success of his army, and his force of personality. He feared to lose vigor for that meant death: no people could afford to tolerate an ageing or ailing king. Perhaps the oddest manifestation of this idea was in Zululand, the last century, when Tshaka, the Zulu king, sent a party with eighty-six tusks of ivory to Cape Town, to buy Macassar hair oil, for he had heard that Macassar oil would prevent a man from growing grey, and he feared, above all things, such a sign of advancing age and declining vigor (Fynn 1950: 142–3, 269). It was the belief in the control of the divine king and chiefs over the power of growth that gave strength to the institution of chieftainship among the Nyakyusa and Ngonde and, I think, in other parts of Bantu Africa also. Raoul Allier, drawing on the material of the early French missionaries in Basutoland and Barotseland for his study of conversion, says that what made opposition to the chiefs impossible was the fear of breaking the mystical bond established through the chief with the shades (Allier 1925: 140), and as I shall show you, the shades are identified with the procreative principle. Vitality, fertility, the power of growth was innate in a divine king, but it was not confined to him. It was resident in a lesser degree in every lineage and controlled by the senior members, both living and dead, of the lineage. As one Nyakyusa put it: “The shade and the semen are brothers,” and all through the Nyakyusa rituals the control of the shades over potency and fertility is emphasized (Wilson 1956: 55, 205). The same idea appears further south also. In Bhaca, a dialect of Xhosa, one word, idlozi, is applied both to a shade of the lineage and to semen (Hammond-Tooke n.d.). This leads us to the idea that kinsmen in a lineage are “members of one another” in a mystical sense; what injures one may injure all, the infection seeping down the roads of kinship and leaving unscathed those who are not, in Nyakyusa phraseology, “of one blood”; and that seniors in the lineage, whether they are alive or dead, exercise power over juniors, bringing sickness or sterility upon them and their stock and fields, if they have offended by quarrelling with one another, or have neglected well-defined obligations. Commoners exercise this power only over members of their own lineage of three or four generations; the power derives from their kinship connections. It is, however, comparable to the power exercised by chiefs over the men and country they rule or ruled before their death, and that exercised by a divine king over a yet larger group of people and a wider area.[565] One manifestation of the mystical solidarity of kinsmen is the manner in which an heir assumes the name and obligations of a father or brother who has died. He takes on the whole social personality of the dead and becomes, as it were, his living representative. In private families, this form of inheritance is familiar but inconspicuous; it is of great political importance, however, when the dead man held public office, for his heir succeeds to that office. Among the Nyakyusa and Ngonde there are two founding heroes to whom men look back as sources of fertility, and the authors of civilized life, for they occupied a country (so the myth tells) in which men knew no fire but ate their food raw, and they brought fire, and iron, and cattle, and the institution of chieftainship itself. The heirs of these founding heroes are their living representatives and “divine kings.”2 Then there is the idea that power is resident in certain material substances classed as “medicines.” This power may be tapped by anyone with the “know how” and it is used to supplement or develop the power innate in a divine king, and the senior members of a lineage, as well as for innumerable other purposes. “Medicines” are thought to create dignity, majesty, awfulness (ubusisya) and are used by divine kings to buttress their authority in the same way as a modern state—or university—uses robes of office. The main ingredient of “medicines” are plants, but human flesh and blood are the strongest medicines of all, and that is why healthy men and women, or children, were traditionally and still sometimes are murdered, the murderers often believing that they have acted for the good of the community. The belief in “medicines” is one expression of a deep-rooted conviction that fortune and misfortune are personally controlled. There is no such thing as chance. If the crops of one village are destroyed by hail while those of another flourish the cause of destruction lies in the failing power of the chief, or quarrels between the leading men which have angered their shades; if one child falls ill while others are healthy the illness is due to the anger or jealousy of a kinsman or neighbor. This belief in personal causation is not directly destroyed by a knowledge of the proximate causes of disease. An intelligent teacher said to me, many years ago in Pondoland: “I understand that typhus is carried by lice, but who sent the louse? Why did the infected louse bite A and not his brother B?” So too with malaria. It may well be understood that infection is carried by mosquitoes, but in cases of death from malaria, Pondo and Nyakyusa will inquire of a diviner who has caused it. In the Pondo phrase, “If illness kills the people of one homestead and not of another, it has been sent.” The ultimate cause of sickness is thought to be anger, anger in men’s hearts. The manner in which it is pictured as operating varies: old-fashioned Nyakyusa speak of pythons in men’s bellies which have the power of flight and leave their owner [566]by night to gnaw his enemies’ vitals; or they describe a father muttering over the hearth in his anger and calling upon his shades to discipline his erring son. The more sophisticated talk about “poisons” which are placed by an angry man in his enemy’s hut, or buried under the lintel of the door. Anger, the Nyakyusa think, may be used to morally or immorally. Anthropologists have paid a great deal of attention to the supposed manipulation of medicines to injure others illegally, which we call sorcery, and to beliefs in the power of supposed witches to injure their enemies directly, but they have curiously neglected the implications of the belief that sickness is often a just retribution on a wrong-doer, a retribution brought upon him by the legitimate anger of senior kinsmen, or the leaders of the community. In the Nyakyusa view the legitimate anger of a man’s neighbors, particularly of his village headman, may cause him to fall ill of a fever; as they put it, men murmur (the word is that for the buzzing of a hive of bees) and their cold breath falls upon him. Similarly, if the commoners have good reason to be angry with their chief and murmur against him, he fears the chill of fever, or a paralysis of the limbs. This murmuring the Nyakyusa call “the breath of men.” It is held to be akin to witchcraft but is distinguished from it by the end to which it is put; both are the exercise of mystical power (amanga). Witchcraft is used by an individual for selfish and immoral purposes; the “breath of men” is used by the community to enforce law and morality. Which it is labelled, in any particular case, depends partly on the viewpoint of the speaker. A supposed victim or his kinsmen will speak of “witchcraft,” whereas other people may regard the illness as due to a sick man’s own misdeeds, and the neighbors’ just reproof.3 The anger of a father or other senior kinsman which brings illness or sterility to an erring son is always legitimate; if he were angry without cause his anger would be ineffective. And so strong is the idea of justice that it is even thought to be implicit in some medicines which are held to operate only against the guilty. There is evidence that a similar connection between sickness and sin was made traditionally by a number of African peoples. For example, J.D. Viccars, a missionary, writing on “witchcraft” among the Bolobo of the Congo says that “sometimes a man incurred the wrath of the baloki and is undergoing a just punishment.” “Quite often the victims—are resigned—and accept the judgement—that it is all their own fault” (1949: 223). R. G. Armstrong, writing on West Africa, says “witchcraft is fundamentally an expression of anger, often justified, of an elder” (1954: 1051–69). And Dr. Middleton, discussing witchcraft among the Lugbara of Uganda, shows that an elder has power to invoke shades to bring sickness on his dependents; this is legitimate but the same word, ole rozu, is applied to it as to bewitching (1955: 253–4).4 The idea that a power akin to witchcraft may be used legitimately is therefore in no sense peculiar to the Nyakyusa. But in communities which are changing rapidly interpretations in terms of just retribution are probably less common than in isolated societies. During a revolution ideas as to what is right conflict, and the authority of elders to enforce traditional [567]obligations is questioned; then misfortune is more readily attributed to the malice of an enemy than to the just anger of a kinsman or neighbor. In modern Africa there is acute controversy over the respective rights of individuals and groups: men and women who claim a certain freedom from traditional obligations to kin or fellow villagers are regarded by some people as irresponsible, by others as showing enterprise and initiative. Sorcery is thought of as the weapon of the go-getter, the individualist who rejects ancient economic obligations; witchcraft as the weapon of the woman who revolts against the traditional subservience to in-laws, or of the mother-in-law who unreasonably tries to enforce outworn rules. That, I suggest, is why accusations of witchcraft and sorcery come to overshadow ancient ideas of mystical power legitimately exercised. I said that the ultimate cause of misfortune in Nyakyusa eyes is men’s anger; therefore, the Nyakyusa say, it can only be cured by their confession and forgiveness; by men “speaking out” (ukusosya), admitting their anger and expressing good will. So, when someone is ill or another sort of misfortune befalls a family, or village, or chiefdom, the main concern is to discover whose anger has caused the illness and to persuade that person to confess it and express a wish for the patients recovery, or the welfare of the family, or village, or chiefdom. The occasions for “speaking out” are rituals. Family quarrels are expressed at the rituals celebrated at a death or birth or marriage, or in case of serious illness. Then kinsmen gather to feast and drink and admit to one another the hard thoughts they have harbored; they are pressed to drink deeply and speak out; it is the business of the priest or doctor who conducts the ritual to persuade them to speak out freely and so to compose the quarrels, for in the Nyakyusa view “anger in the heart,” a grudge nursed in secret, is what is really dangerous, and confession of anger or ill will is in itself part absolution. To a European it is odd to hear kinsmen at a funeral or marriage feast suddenly begin slanging one another. A man’s sisters start complaining of the stinginess and inhospitality of his wives when they come to visit; the wives retort that their sisters-in-law neglected to invite them to cook for the marriage of a daughter, or criticized the beer they sent, and a whole string of family quarrels are brought up; or a younger brother complains that his senior kinsman, the head of the family, did not come to visit him when he was ill, or bestir himself to find a doctor, and the elder speaks of the lack of respect shown by his junior, and so on. The airing of these grudges is as much part of the ritual as the General Confession is part of an Anglican Communion: the difference is that men admit directly to each other their anger and so the “speaking out” sounds very like a quarrel. Only towards the end will come the reconciliation: “I was angry, I had cause to be, but it is finished now;” or “In this I was wrong, I beg pardon, but he also insulted me and I was angry. It is finished now.” Quarrels between chiefs and people, between the divine king and his vassals, or the chiefdoms which acknowledge his overlordship; quarrels between villages, and personal quarrels between the leading men of the country, all these are brought up at the sacrifices to the founding heroes and in the chiefs’ groves. The priests and village headmen and chief express and reject their anger against one another, the commoner leaders being particularly forthright in their criticism of the chiefs. On such confession is thought to depend the efficacy of the rituals, and so the weather, the fertility of the soil, the increase of the herds, and the health of the participants themselves.[568] There was also a “cleansing of the country” celebrated annually by each Nyakyusa chiefdom and the kingdom of Ngonde just after the break of the rains (which is the New Year in Africa) when men cleared out the ashes from the hearths and cast them away at the crossroads in the bush. As they went in a body, the people danced alongside the village leaders who bore the ashes, and men lunged at one another with spears. “They said” and I am quoting one of the priests): “‘Let us dance, let us fight, that the homesteads may be peaceful.” “Let us throw out the ashes that death may leave the homesteads and they be at peace.” It is to bring out the war from within.’ Only if the symbolism of the rituals of kinship is ignored could this be interpreted as an expression of rebellion, rather than a confession, and, indeed, I suggest that much of what has been cited as evidence of rebellion in rituals elsewhere in Africa is in fact the formal admission of anger, the prelude to reconciliation (Gluckman 1952). The body politic is purged by the very act of “speaking out” (ukusyosya). Detailed evidence is available to show that admission and rejection of anger is a main theme of the rituals of the Nyakyusa (Wilson 1959). and I believe that it recurs in the rituals of reconciliation among the Thonga, and among the Xhosa and Tswana there is evidence of kinsmen “speaking out” at a sacrifice (Junod 1927: 398–400). In Xhosa it is said that a ritual is the occasion ukuzityand’igila—to cut open the gizzard. “Speaking out” in rituals is a direct corollary of the idea that anger is mystically dangerous and so linked to the notion of personal causation of misfortune. The idea that anger is dangerous has a further implication. Since anger is a real experience, and everyone is aware of it in themselves, most Nyakyusa (and I think many other Africans) find it impossible to imagine a Utopia without witchcraft or sorcery which, to them, is the logical expression of unbridled anger. One of my closest friends among the Nyakyusa said to me one day: “You are dissembling like all Europeans; you don’t want to admit the reality of witchcraft. You are just dissembling.” That is why witch-finders still attract so many followers in Africa—one has just swept through BuNyakyusa—and many of the Independent African Churches, such as the followers of Alice, now so numerous in Northern Rhodesia, stress protection from witchcraft, and the obligation to admit the use of “medicines” of sorcery, and to cast them out. Witch-finding campaigns were the revivalist movements of the pagan tradition and they continue today. You will notice that though the mechanisms believed in appear to us ridiculous the underlying principle is one that most people would accept. It is that individual good health and national prosperity depend ultimately on good social relationships—on amity between kinsmen, neighbors, and fellow-citizens. I want, now, to give you some inkling of the pattern of Nyakyusa-Ngonde symbolism. Twenty-four years ago (when I first lived among the Nyakyusa) this was no “forgotten language” but everyday usage, and the Nyakyusa priest had accepted forms to draw upon, just as did William Blake in his poetry (Raine 1958); but when a society changes very fast the ancient coherence of ideas and patterns of thought are shattered, and men seem to forget the meaning of the symbols recurring in their rituals than their parents were. I can only select a few examples from the thicket of symbols which it is the task of any interpreter of Nyakyusa ritual to penetrate. All the rituals celebrated for individuals—at puberty and marriage, birth and death—and those celebrated on behalf of the country at the accession of a chief or [569]divine king were dramas of death and resurrection. The nubile girl, the mother of a first-born child, or of twins, the principal mourners, the heir to the chieftainship or divine kingship died and were reborn in the ritual, emerged transformed. During their period of seclusion they sojourned with the shads and when they emerged they purified themselves, for the sacredness of the shades was felt to be contamination, corruption, not holiness and purity. Then vitality, the power of growth, was pictured as being embedded in the visibly growing parts of the body, the hair, and nails. An old Nyakyusa priest once took my husband’s hand and said to him: “When you cut these nails of yours do they not grow again? . . . Where, then, does their growth come from? Does it not come from the body? . . . The village headmen take the power of growth from the chief, his nails and his hair.” This they did lest the power of growth be buried with the chief and disappear. For a long time I was puzzled by accounts of how the shades lick the offerings made to them, and of how a priest keeping watch in the sacred grove of Lubaga in a little wicker cage made for him, must be licked by the python which was the manifestation of a founding ancestor, Lwembe.5 Then I understood that it was a symbol of acceptance and solicitude felt appropriate by a pastoral people who watch with joy a cow licking, and licking her newborn calf. But there was also the belief that a python licked its victim before swallowing it, and so licking was terrifying. The shades were the source of blessing, a shelter to their kin, but at the same time they were fearful; in the rituals they were “brought back to warm themselves at the hearth” and yet they were repeatedly driven off (M. Wilson 1956: 46–53, 59–60, 73–7, 204; 1959: 108–9; Casalis [1859] 1933: 312). Men feared any close connection with them; above all they feared any close connection with them; above all they feared lest a shade ‘brood over’ them as a hen broods over her chickens. Thus the ambivalence of their attitudes to fathers and uncles who, though dead, were still thought to exercise authority was expressed. Confession and forgiveness were symbolized by spitting, or blowing out water. As one informant put it: “When a father who has been angry forgives his son and spits on the ground all the anger that is in him comes out like spit.” That is why, in Nyakyusa rituals(and in the rituals of many other peoples in Africa) an essential act was the blowing out of water. It was a confession and expression of good will, in itself an absolution, which preceded sacrifice. It was linked, too, with the traditional ordeal, used through a great part of Central Africa, to distinguish truth from falsehood. When a charge of practicing witchcraft was made, or when sufficient evidence to decide a case of theft or adultery was lacking, defendant and plaintiff were given an infusion of the umwafi (Erythroploeum guineense) tree to drink. Those who vomited were judged innocent; those who failed to vomit, or retained the poison for some hours, were judged guilty. As one effect of the poison when retained is to cause gross swelling, swelling and guilt were widely associated. These symbols which are interpreted here had, I think, a very wide currency. Others were more limited, being linked to a particular economy, such as banana [570]cultivation. Among the Nyakyusa and Ganda, whose staple crop was bananas and plantains, male and female were represented by different varieties of banana and plantain, a corpse by the flower (for each stem only flowers once) and the lineage by the root which constantly sends up fresh suckers, and so on. This, then, is a very cursory account of the sort of intellectual climate in which the idea of divine kingship flourished. I turn now to the practical aspect, with which anthropologists have mostly been concerned, and to consider how the institution operated. A divine king presupposes a faithful people: he can have no existence apart from a following of commoners. And the nature of his divinity, as a repository of vitality, implies that his term of office must be limited. As his powers fail someone must see to it that he is replaced. So the divine kings of the Nyakyusa and their kinsmen in the Ngonde were controlled by commoner priests and councilors whose duty it was to smother the king when they judged it expedient. “A king was not ill,” and he died with the breath in his body lest the power of growth disappear with him. The priests told us that the initiative came from the king himself who, when he fell ill, would tell his men: “I am going, I have eaten food at home, at the place of the shades,” and then it was incumbent upon them to do what was necessary, removing his hair and nails and smothering him. Moreover, the king was no tyrant but subject to the law, and obliged to pay a fine to his own priests if he broke one of the innumerable taboos governing his eating, and drinking, and washing, and sleeping. The leaders of the people, the commoners, exercised this very practical weapon—the right and obligation of putting the divine king or chief to death when his powers failed—but they were thought of as having mystical power also, the power of witchcraft or “the breath of men.” Which it was called depended upon the viewpoint of the speaker. To chiefs the commoner priests were black witches exerting an innate power maliciously; to the commoners their village headmen and priests were responsible leaders, rightly criticizing the chief or king when he acted unconstitutionally or immorally so that their breath fell upon him and brought on an ague or paralysis. However the commoner’s power was viewed, there was felt to be a balance in the mystical sphere between the power of growth resident in kings and chiefs and the power of witchcraft or “breath” innate in men, and this matched the balance in practical affairs. Such an equilibrium between king and commoners was apparently foreign to Egypt (Frankfort 1948: 51–6), but it was widespread in Bantu Africa. For those anthropologists—including myself—whose main concern is with the forms of cooperation and conflict in human societies, and the basis of their coherence, it is on the interaction between ruler and subject, between divine king and commoner priests and village headmen, that interest fastens. The divine kings of the Nyakyusa and Ngonde were symbols of unity, and conflicts between chiefdoms, and between chiefs and king, were resolved in the rituals directed towards the founding heroes, while conflicts between chiefs and commoners were resolved in the rituals of each chiefdom. To understand this it is necessary to consider divine kings in time. Chieftainship and divine kingship is not an immemorial institution among the Nyakyusa-Ngonde and their neighbors in the corridor between the great lakes, Tanganyika and Nyasa; it was an innovation probably less than four hundred years ago. All the people of [571]that area speak of their chiefs coming as strangers (M. Wilson 1958: 12, 21–3, 32, 38–9, 41–5, 48), and of being ‘different in their bodies’ from the original occupants. The Nyakyusa and Ngonde trace their history back three to four hundred years, to the period when the institution of chieftainship was established among a primitive and scattered people by invaders from the east. The invaders were better fed and better armed—they had cattle and iron weapons which the original occupants of the Nyakyusa valley and Ngonde plain lacked—but there is no evidence that they established themselves by force. They may well have been welcomed as arbitrators in a manner so admirably described for the Alur (Southall 1953: 181–228), further north. Certainly they extended the area of the rule of law; before they came each tiny village or band of hunters was independent, and recognized no common authority. The founding heroes settled on hill-tops which became centers of worship, numerous sources of power; and gradually their descendants spread through the surrounding country establishing themselves as chiefs over the sparse and isolated settlements of the earlier inhabitants. The heirs of the two founding heroes became divine kings, as I have said, and other sons and their descendants became chiefs who participated in the prestige and supposed mystical qualities of these kings, but in a lesser degree. The leaders of the old scattered communities became village headmen, anafumu,6 but their office was not permitted to be hereditary lest they became chiefs. New village headmen were selected from among the commoners—the ancient inhabitants of the country—in each generation.7 Whether because they brought with them cattle which provided a plentiful supply of milk, and an efficient technique of cultivation with contour ridging and green manuring, or for some other reason, the invaders seem to have increased rapidly, and to have shown something of the driving energy with which divine kingship was thought to be endowed. The energy is still apparent today—employers on the Copperbelt speak of it in the same breath as they grumble about the truculence of Nyakyusa labor—and I, for one, believe it to be directly related to the plentiful food produced by their particular technique of stock-keeping and cultivation. However that may be, it is certain that the arrival of the heroes coincided with an increase in skill and of capital in the form of breeding stock; an extension of the area of trade and ritual cooperation, notably a trade in iron with the Kinga of the Livingstone Mountains which was exchanged for food in the Nyakyusa valley, and an export trade in ivory from Ngonde; and the participation of people of different languages and customs in sacrifice to the two founding heroes, Lwembe and Kyungu. The heroes and chiefs succeeded also in welding together people of different stocks; all the traditions stress that chiefs ‘differed in their bodies’ from commoners. The heroes were both duces and reges in de Jouvenel’s terms (1957: 21–2, 34, 298–9): they initiated new activities—traditions graphically describe the start of [572]cattle breeding, and Lwembe sending to Bukinga for iron hoes—and they established the beginnings of a king’s peace. I said that the conflicts were resolved in the rituals celebrated. At sacrifices to the founding hero, Lwembe, which were actually observed, quarrels between the priests of the Nyakyusa and those of the Kinga—who differ from the Nyakyusa in language and in custom—were brought out into the open and a reconciliation sought, though not fully achieved. And the tension created between the divine king and certain of his chiefs by the establishment of a Government Court in the capital of one of the chiefs and not at that of the divine king was admitted and smoothed over, the representative of the chiefdom which had secured the Court eventually admitting negligence in not having sent a cow for sacrifice to ask blessing on the Court. So also, a bitter quarrel within a chiefdom between commoner village headmen and a priest of the royal line was openly expressed, and a reconciliation effected at the drinking of beer which accompanied a sacrifice in the grove of the dead chiefs (M. Wilson 1959: 30–40, 46, 123–41. The force compelling the celebration of these rituals was hunger, due to a partial failure of crops first in the cold season and then in a drought, and the ill-health of one of the chief priests, Kasitile, who was convinced that his fever and cough were due to a quarrel with other leading men of the country. There is good reason to think that the rituals celebrated at puberty, and childbirth, and death helped in the integration of individuals; as well as uniting kinship groups; anti-social desires were expressed and rejected and approved attitudes reaffirmed (M. Wilson 1956: 46–85,101–17, 227–8, 231–2; cf. Bettelheim 1954: 27–45); and it is likely that the “speaking out” at sacrifices for the country helped the leading men like Kasitile to compose internal conflicts, as well as quarrels with their peers. The two heroes who established divine kingships among the Nyakyusa in Tanganyika and the men of Ngonde in Nyasaland sprang from the same lineage and spoke the same language, but the development of the institution in the two areas differed. In BuNyakyusa, the founding hero, Lwembe, was primarily a ritual leader and he never developed any extensive secular authority. His descendants became chiefs through the lower Nyakyusa valley and they sacrificed to him and recognized the spiritual overlordship of his heirs, but they did not pay taxes to him or refer appeals from their courts. That was why “the living Lwembe” did not get a Government Court. In Ngonde it was otherwise; there the divine king gradually acquired secular power. This power was based on the control of an external trade in ivory, and the import of cloth, and later of guns. The Nyakyusa had no such external trade because geographically they were much more isolated. They were cut off by an arc of mountains over which the lowest pass is 8000 feet, a great marsh, and the stormy waters of the northern tip of Nyasa. Their exchange of food for iron with the Kinga remained the merest trickle. There is a great deal of evidence from Central and South Africa to show that the development of centralized kingdoms, such as Ngonde gradually became, was directly linked either with an external trade in ivory and slaves, or with a high degree of internal specialization (G. Wilson 1939; M. Wilson 1958: 54–5).8 That Nyakyusa had neither and their divine king [573]remained a priest and god, whereas the Kyungu of Ngonde was transformed from god to magistrate. The process of centralization and the exchange of ritual for secular authority developed fast after the European occupation in Central Africa. The heir to the Lwembes refused to be installed as a divine king—the tenure of that office was always highly precarious and unpopular—and, though he failed to secure a Government Court in the thirties, he now sits on the District Council and warmly rejects the insinuations of some of his colleagues that he is really “just a priest.” And the place to “speak out” today, to air grievances and seek a reconciliation, is a council or committee, not a sacred grove. Perhaps the tradition of “speaking out,” the obligation to express anger fully, partly explains the violence of the speeches of some African leaders on formal occasions—leaders who are much less violent in ordinary conversation. In the English tradition men are more outspoken in private than in public; but African leaders are chosen by their followers partly for their very outspokenness. Sometimes it seems as if the rostrums of Hyde Park—that institution which delights and astonishes those of us who come from countries with a more rigid censorship—were made part of the formal process of government. I doubt whether the violence is solely a demagogue’s trick; the expression of anger is felt, in Africa, to be the first step towards the resolution of conflicts; “speaking out” is the prelude to compromise. Having said that, let me add, in my own country the public utterances of black South Africans are commonly more moderate than those of my fellow whites. Our great danger in the South is the absence of occasions on which blacks can speak their minds to whites. I keep asking myself, what will happen to divine kingship in modern Africa. The swing to popular leadership and against hereditary chieftainship has been very strong during the past two decades in South and Central Africa, and popular movements are still gathering momentum. At the same time there is evidence of the tenacity of belief in mystical power. As I said earlier, the belief in personal causation of fortune and misfortune is not directly destroyed by a knowledge of proximate causes. There is still the nagging doubt: who sent the louse? Recent tragic events in Basutoland and Kenya prove that there is still a lively belief in the efficacy of human flesh as a medicine; witch-finders are received enthusiastically; and there is evidence that some of the new popular leaders—or their followers on their behalf—are claiming mystical power. This is what the late John Bond called “the barrier of African mysticism”; it is one of the things that limits understanding between black and white in Africa. My friends among educated Africans who will speak openly of these things are least skeptical than most Europeans, and very conscious of the pressure of traditional beliefs. As one of them put it: “It is easy when I am here at the University not to believe any of it but when I go home and mother says: ‘Just use this medicine I have got for you, dear; people will be jealous of you now that you have got your BA and you must be careful,’’ then it is very hard not to believe.’ A general belief in personal causation and the manipulation of medicines to achieve good or evil fortune is more tenacious than belief in power resident in [574]certain lineages of divine kings, but men resort to the old gods very readily in time for drought or famine. As I have tried to show you, divine kingship was itself an innovation in at least some parts of Central Africa no more than four hundred years ago; its establishment coincided with a technical revolution—the introduction of cattle and of iron; an expansion of trade and ritual cooperation; an extension of the area of the rule of law; and the welding of people of different stocks in a common society. Like the founding heroes the whites came as both duceand reges, initiating new activities; the cultivation of valuable crops—coffee and tea—and exchange of these for manufactured goods; building roads and schools and hospitals; preaching the Christian Gospel; besides keeping the peace between peoples formerly at war. And the problems of government in contemporary Africa today are, in a sense, similar to those which confronted the founding heroes of BuNyakyusa and Ngonde. What is to be the adjustment to the new technical revolution and the modern expansion of trade and ritual cooperation, the extension of the area of the rule of law to embrace most of the world; and, above all, how are people of different races to be welded into a common society? Perhaps the new loyalty may be to national states which were the successors to divine kings in Europe; perhaps the stage of exclusive national sovereignty may be skipped in Africa as so many other stages have been skipped. What concerns me most is to know what will replace ‘the breath of men’, what will be the form of democratic control, and how a public conscience will operate, for it is much more difficult in Africa, as elsewhere, for these to be effective in large than in small units. Perhaps the heirs of divine kings and chiefs will provide local leaders, representatives of local interests, to check the over-weening power of central authorities. This, you will remember, is what the leaders of the scattered groups united by the heroes of Nyakyusa and Ngonde became; the leaders of the aborigines represented by the people, and village interests, as opposed to the chiefs. To conclude, it seems that Sir James’ idea of divine kingship is still relevant to any study of modern Africa, for an understanding and apprehension of the traditional intellectual systems and symbolic patters is a condition of understanding the revolution which is taking place. I feel that it is peculiarly incumbent upon those of us who claim it be African by birth and sympathy to seek to interpret the old ideas and symbols in terms of the new Africa. References Adams, P. C. G. 1958. “Disease concepts among Africans in the protectorate of Northern Rhodesia.” Human problems in British Central Africa. Allier, R. 1925. La psychologie de la conversion. Paris: Payot. Armstrong, R. G. 1954. “A West African inquest,” American Anthropologist, IVI, 1051–69. Bettelheim, B. 1954. Symbolic wounds.Glencoe: The Free Press. Bohannan, P. 1958. “Extra-processual events in Tiv political institutions,” American Anthropologist IX, 1–11. Casalis, E. (1859) 1933. Les Basuto. Paris.[575] de Jouvenel, B. 1957 Sovereignty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fairman, H. W. 1958. Myth, ritual and kinship. Ed. S. H. Hooke. London: Oxford University Press. Frankfort, H. 1948. Kingship and the gods. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fynn, Francis. 1950. The diary of Henry Francis Fynn. Ed. J. Stuart and D. McK. Malcolm. Pietermaritzburg: Shuter and Shooter. Gluckman, Max. 1952. “Rituals of rebellion in South East Africa.” The Frazer Lecture, Manchester. Hammond-Tooke, W. D. A general ethnographic survey of the amaBhaca (unpublished Ph. D. thesis, University of Cape Town). Junod, H. A. 1927. The life of a South African tribe. London: Macmillan. Revised edition. Middleton, J. 1955. “The concept of bewitching in Lugbara,” Africa, XXV. Mofolo, T. 1931. Chaka. Trans. F. H. Dutton, London: Oxford University Press. Raine, Kathleen. 1958. “A traditional language of symbols,” The Listener, 9 October. Southall, A. W. 1953. The Alur. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tempels, R. P. P. 1946. Bantoe-filosofie. Antwerp. Viccars, J. D. 1949. “Witchcraft in Bolobo.” Africa, XIX. Wilson, Godfrey. 1939. 1936. “An African morality,” Africa, IX. ———. The constitution of Ngonde. Rhodes Livingstone Papers, no. 3. Wilson, Monica. 1951. Good company: A study of Nyakyusa age-villages. London: Beacon Press. ———. 1956. Rituals of kinship among the Nyakyusa. London: Oxford University Press. ———. 1958. Peoples of the Nyasa-Tanganyika corridor. Cape Town: New Series. ———. 1959. Communal rituals of the Nyakyusa. London: Oxford University Press.   Monica WILSON (1908–1982) was a South African anthropologist, who taught at the University College of Fort Hare, Rhodes University, and the University of Cape Town. She published several monographs resulting from her fieldwork with the Nyakyusa in Tanzania between 1935 and 1938, notably Good company: A study of Nyakyusa age-villages (1951) and Rituals of kinship among the Nyakyusa (1956). ___________________ 1. This conception has been illustrated with a wealth of detail by R. P. P. Tempels (1946). 2. The notion of a living representative of a founding hero apparently surprises some Egyptologists, but it is in strict conformity with the ideas of the Nyakyusa and various other Bantu-speaking peoples regarding kinship and inheritance. Cf. H. W. Fairman: “Amenophils I and Rameses II are treated exactly as if they were contemporaries performing together the same ritual, though in fact they were separated by two and a half centuries. This extraordinary situation must imply not merely that the king celebrated the cult of his ancestors, but that he was literally identified with them, and that even in his life he was one of them” (1958: 103–4). 3. Cf. G. Wilson (1936: 167–9); M. Wilson (1951: 96–108). 4. Compare also: Adams (1958: 26–30); Bohannan (1958: 1–11). The Tiv concept of tsav is parallel to the Nyakyusa concept of amanga. 5. Cf. Mofolo (1931: 2, 25–31). Mr. Mofolo devotes a whole chapter of his novel to a description of a great snake licking Chaka. I am particularly grateful to my colleague, Dr. A. C. Jordan, for calling my attention to this passage. 6. The word for “chief” in a number of Bantu languages to the west of the Nyakyusa comes from this root, -fumu. 7. The Nyakyusa had an elaborate age organization and commoner village headmen were leaders of age groups, but this is not directly relevant to the position of divine kings. For an account of the age organization see M. Wilson (1951). 8. Godfrey Wilson, The constitution of Ngonde, Rhodes Livingstone Papers, no. 3 (1939); Monica Wilson, Peoples of the Nyasa-Tanganyika corridor, 54–5. Fynn shows that the development of trade in ivory and cattle with the Portuguese at Delagoa Bay coincided with the emergence of the Zulu kingdom (1950:8, 10, 16, 47–8).  

Winter ceremonial (I and II) This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Irving Goldman. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau4.3.032 REPRINT Winter ceremonial (I and II) Irving GOLDMAN   Winter Ceremonial: I The principal sources of information on the Winter Ceremonial are the family his-tories, Boas’s, volume on religious life (1930), and, of course, Boas’s great work, The Social Organization and Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl. The family histories, all of which were collected by George Hunt in the Kwakiutl language and translated by him with utter literalness, and then edited for greater intelligibility by Boas, are the authentic sources of the Kwakiutl viewpoint. They describe the ceremonies in their official context, which serves to authenticate the social standing and the supernatu-ral treasures and powers of each family. The narratives are for Kwakiutl ears. They assume Kwakiutl understanding, although in some instances Hunt, aware of his anthropological obligations, elicits explanatory comment. I have used the original, unpublished Hunt manuscripts as well as Boas’s edited and published version. The two sources are not all that different. In many places, however, the Hunt manuscript is more precise in rendering Kwakiutl meanings. For example, Boas characteristically converts Hunt’s “secret” to “sacred.” “Man eat-er” is converted to “cannibal,” even when the man-eater is not a human being. Boas prefers general anthropological terms to Hunt’s elementary but more descriptive English. Boas speaks, for example, of “initiates” and “half-initiates.” Hunt, more specific, speaks of “go through the rules” and “not go through the rules.” Boas, inex-plicably, does not in many instances publish Hunt’s translations of native terms or names of persons. For example, Boas speaks of certain dancers as Kwexilak, when Hunt has already meaningfully translated the word as “board fast beating,” an im-portant idea since fast and slow dance tempos have ritual significance. Apart from their descriptive content the family histories are important because they reveal the Kwakiutl idea of necessary sequence of events, of the line of devel-opment from myth time to the present, from the “true” events that had transpired at the Beginnings to their simulated presentation in present-day ritual. Kwakiutl insist on distinctions between the present and the mythical past, and between the reality of ritual and its mythical reality. Boas’s writing on the Winter Ceremonial may not be noteworthy for clarity of exposition, but it is masterfully detailed and therefore faithful to Kwakiutl thought. His 1897 work has two sections; a general and explanatory treatise is followed by notes on his firsthand observations of a Winter Ceremonial held at Fort Rupert in the winter of 1895–96. In the first section he attempts to synthesize all he has learned about the Ceremonial from informants, from myth narratives, and from family histories. Thus he fuses, and to some extent confuses, historical periods, the earlier precontact conditions and the newer situation of trade goods, trading language, and the consolidation of the tribes at Fort Rupert. Boas wrote this section before he had collected the bulk of his materials on the subject. The eyewitness ac-count, on the other hand, is of one piece; though postcontact it is a rich expression of Kwakiutl culture. It is, as Codere remarked, the work of a brilliant and dedi-cated observer. For background on the analytic essay that follows I have drawn only upon native narratives. No summary can possibly improve on Boas’s description of the actual performances, which is readily accessible in the new edition edited by Codere (1966). The basic idea of the Winter Ceremonial is to display inherited supernatural powers as a demonstration of the prowess of a line, and as a means of promoting the collective welfare by bringing supernatural powers into the community. The ritual structure arises from the individual but orchestrated enactments of myths of original acquisition of the supernatural powers. All traditions differ as to the nature of the original powers and as to the nature of the original encounter. Hence all rituals also differ, but only in details. Their common ritual theme is the introduction (initiation) of a young novice to the supernatural donor, which removes him from the human realm, and his subsequent recapture by his co-religionists. The ceremonial involves the entire community, some as spectators, the rest as actors. In 1865, 400 of 1000 at Fort Rupert were spectators only (Curtis 1915: 155). All acting roles are finely differentiated, almost in the manner of rank gradations. The actors form two grand divisions, Sparrows and Seals, each differentiated by grade or rank within itself. Sparrows (quequtsa), broadly speaking, are the of-ficiating officers of the entire Ceremonial. Their chief, who may indeed be a com-mon man, heads the Ceremonial, not merely in an administrative capacity but as a chief shaman who “has no fear” of any supernatural events that occur. Seals (meemqat) are in the front line as direct contacts with the spirit donors of the su-pernatural powers. Except for their chief, Sparrows are all former Seals. They have gone through the course of initiation and impersonation, and now as restored human beings are equipped like curing shamans to guide novices through their spiritual ordeal. In keeping with their human standing Sparrows are organized by age grades as follows: Boys Nuisances Youths Killer Whales Young Men Rock Cod Older Men Sea Lions Chiefs Whales Old Men Koskimo (a foreign tribe) Head chiefs Eaters (Boas 1966: 175) Seals represent the supernatural spirits, which numbered 53 in Boas’s list and 63 in that of Curtis, recorded some 25 years later. Curtis confirms Boas on a rank order of spirits, but a generation later the ranks are only approximately the same. Both lists agree in giving highest rank to the class of man-eating spirits and their human dance impersonators (Curtis 1915: 156–8; Boas 1897: 498–9). A general characterization of spirits impersonated by dancers should suffice. The top-ranking group includes (following Boas’s list) the war spirit and a variety of man-eating spirits and their animal and humanoid helpers. A middle group includes fool dancers (warrior figures), Wolves, Thunderbirds, Whales, Killer Whales, Otters, Dogs, Ravens, Sea Monsters, Mink, Sunrise, and Salmon. The low group includes Eagle, Shaman, Ghost, Wasp, Salmon, Property Distribution, and at the bottom, Eagle Down. No list or rank order can be final, since new dances are constantly being in-corporated into the Ceremonial from marriages, and may replace older ones in importance. Thus the hamatsa dance representing the Man Eater at the Mouth of the River became the major ritual of the Winter Ceremonial among the Kwakiutl in relatively recent times, supplanting the earlier hamshamtses (Man Eater of the Woods), which then became mainly a woman’s dance. The hamatsa is always male. Curtis’s list gives the sex of each dance impersonation. By his list, men generally impersonate the violent land mammals, ferocity in war, the powerful birds of heav-en, Thunderbird, Monster Crane, Raven. Women impersonate sorcery, military in-vulnerability, and some of the great mammals of the sea, the deadly Killer Whale and whales, as well as the Salmon and Rich Woman (Qominoqa). The latter two are the great symbols of wealth. Several dances are by either sex; most are male. All the spirit-impersonators fall into two hierarchical divisions. The highest are laxsa (“gone into the house”) and include all dancers who come under the influence of Man Eater at the Mouth of the River (Baxbakualanuxsiwae), namely, hamatsa, hamshamtses, Grizzly Bear of the Man Eater, Kinqalatlala, the female attendant and flesh procuress of the Man Eater, and Qominoqa. Laxsa refers to having gone into the house of the Man Eater to receive from him powers and dance instructions.1 In rit-ual, these dancers actually “disappear” into the woods and need to be “captured.” All other dancers are wixsa. They have not gone into the house, they have “only leaned against the walls” (Boas 1932a: 212). They need not leave the ceremonial house at all. The laxsa having “disappeared,” and representing also the most powerful and dangerous forces, become the focus of ritual attention. They must be “recaptured” and “tamed” by strenuous efforts.2 Among the wixsa, some are also subdued, mainly by song, but others simply exhibit their dance and songs. In all Kwakiutl Winter Ceremonials the Man Eater, either hamatsa or harnshamtses, is central. The ritual unity that finally emerges from disparate and individually owned dances is achieved through the symbolism of his figure. The Sparrows are a society of shamans, the Seals are their clients. As a perma-nent, expansive, and corporate society the Sparrows are grouped by age, represen-tative of the individual growth cycle, primarily a sign of their position on the hu-man side. As a transient but stable grouping of individual spirits the Seals represent a generational cycle; membership moves from man to son-in-law to grandchild. Sparrows are directors of action, managing the invitations, the seating, the order of dances, guiding the “taming” of the spirit-possessed, instructing in songs, and so on. Seals are passive (though energetic in action) replicas of their spirit tutelaries. The hereditary managerial posts in the Sparrows are all masculine and trans-mitted by male primogeniture. The privilege of dancing a spirit impersonation, however, comes mainly from the female line, that is, from the wife’s or mother’s father. These formal oppositions are then expressed in the ritual antagonisms of biting, teasing, scratching. Sparrows resist the efforts of laxsa Seals to give up their arduous calling. They punish ritual error, a missed dance step, a false word in a song, improperly using a summer name, and the like. Ritual error is a powerful concern because Kwakiutl understand the Winter Ceremonial, as a whole, as a se-ries of contests between persons and spirits, and as super natural power contests between rival tribes. The presence of power can be demonstrated, of course, by ac-complishment, but also by ability to overcome. Whoever commits an error is said to be overcome. If the error is serious the victim is as dead. At very least he must begin all over. With this skeletal structure of the Winter Ceremonial dances in mind we may pick up the essential inner details from the texts. Hunt recorded part of a family history of the Qomkyutis tribe of the Fort Rupert Kwakiutl. This important text deals with an ancestral chief Waxapalaso and the acquisition of hamshamtses and hence an early pre-hamatsa tradition (see Boas 1921: 1121–79, also Hunt ms. vol. 5 same pagination). Waxapalaso lies on his back in his house thinking what to do when he recalls a remark of a Qweqsotenox, “Look out for the one of our tribesmen who has a great treasure!—I mean Head Winter Dancer—for he will go around our world to play with the people of supernatural power, all around the world.” In the morning he scolds his still sleeping son saying: “Don't you think of Head-Winter-Dancer, the great shaman, the great war-dancer, who is famous all over the world, and who is looking for a great shaman to play with? I mean you ought to rise and wash yourself in this good river [Tselgwad].” He then strikes the youth with his fire tongs. The son, Xaxosenaso, leaves the house intending to kill himself. At the cascade of the river he comes upon a rock with two holes, and recognizes them as the eyes of Dzonoqwa, the Wild Woman of the Woods. A voice urges him to enter the eyes, saying, “Then nothing will be too difficult for you.” Xaxosenaso scrubs his body vigorously with hemlock branches while sitting first in the right eye and then in the left eye. After he has washed both sides of his body, the voice commands him to dive four times, staying under water a long time: “then you will obtain what makes you strong, so that nothing will be too difficult for you.” He dives deep, and stays under for a long time. When he comes to the surface he has fainted. The text ex-plains, “for he had been dead, and came back to his senses” (ibid.: 1125). Entering the forest he tests his newly won strength by twisting a spruce tree with his hands. Suddenly, a strange man appears before him and counsels him: “and you shall always purify yourself in the morning and in the evening so that no harm may befall you.” Xaxosenaso just stands there, in the words of the text, “as though he were out of his mind” (ibid.). He continues his sacred journey, walking up toward the headwaters of a river. Nearing the source, he comes upon the prize treasure. He sees a large, angry-looking human head, and knows that he has found Head Without Body. The head tries to frighten him with changing expressions. Finally, it opens its mouth to show the head of a man within. Its mouth remains open, and it utters the great cry of the hamshamtses dancer. At this the man within the mouth jumps out as a hamshamtses dancer. He squats in the traditional dance posture, his outspread arms trembling. Then he rushes upon Xaxosenaso to take a bite out of his arm, and jumps back into the mouth of Head Without Body, who immediately disappears. A disembodied voice tells Xaxosenaso that he has just obtained the hamshamtses dance as his treasure, the Head Without Body as a crest, and the name, Nanogwis, One Man Eater. The voice directs him to show his treasures, that is, to give a winter dance, and to do what the hamshamtses dancer had done to him. He starts down the river, pausing along the way to purify himself. He scrubs his body with hemlock branches and dives into the river four times. Whereupon another voice directs him to still another treasure. A Thunderbird is revealed to him sitting on a rock. He says to it, “I came to obtain you, Great Supernatural One, as a treasure.” Thunderbird takes him under his wing and flies with him around the world. Bringing him back to the same place he assures Xaxosenaso that with his help he would match the pow-ers of his rival among the Qweqsotenox, Head Winter Dancer. “And if he discovers that you are not an ordinary man,” Thunderbird tells him, “he will come at once to make war upon you; and as soon as you want me to help you, sing my sacred song:” Burn them, burn them, burn them you who burn the world! Hail, hail, hail, hail, hailstorm is brought by you! (ibid.: 1130) When Xaxosenaso approaches his village, he does not know that he has been away four years. He hears someone singing near the river. Going toward the voice, he comes upon a small man who escorts him to a large winter dance house. He sees within it all that had happened to him in his meeting with Head Without Body, but this time in the format of a dance performance. Head Without Body is represent-ed by a secret room painted with a head design. The hamshamtses dancer comes out from the doorway wearing a revolving head mask. The speaker of the house tells Xaxosenaso that all he has seen within is his new treasure. He is shown other treasures. A woman dancer, Wilenkagilis, dressed only in hemlock branches, and known as Great War Dancer, acts out the dismemberment of her own body. She urges a reluctant Xaxosenaso to dismember her. Her body recaptures its head and limbs and she is whole again. Her next trick is to throw her supernatural power on the dance floor. It brings a flood that puts out the fire. At that moment, the house and all within disappear, and Xaxosenaso is left alone. He sings her song: I was taken to the other side of the world, I was taken to the other side of the world, by the great supernatural power. I was taken to the other side of the world by the great supernatural power. I received everything, I received everything, from the great supernatural power. I received everything from the great supernatural power. We, we! I have everything, I have everything, belonging to his supernatural power. I have everything, I have everything belonging to his supernatural power. We, we! (ibid.: 1136) Finally back home, Xaxosenaso says nothing of the great supernatural treasures he has brought back. But the people are alarmed to learn that Head Winter Dancer of the Qweqsotenox is coming to them. Their shaman tells them, however, that Xaxosenaso has the name of Wilenkagilis, the War Dancer, as well as great super-natural powers; they are reassured and happy. The Qweqsotenox arrive with their champion, Head Winter Dancer. They come wearing cedar bark neck and head rings. They are feasted, and the contest of powers begins. Dancing naked to fast time, Head Winter Dancer throws his supernatural power on the floor. It brings a flood and puts out the fire. The hosts are unmoved, and the flood recedes and the fire is relighted. Head Winter Dancer allows his head to be cut off, and it is restored. But Xaxosenaso shows his superior powers, and the Qweqsotenox and their champion are forced to leave in shame. But they have not escaped, for they are subsequently killed by the Thunderbird song their conqueror sings against them. Now called Wilenkagilis, Xaxosenaso is feared by his people because of his great supernatural powers. The people, as the text says, desire to be his slaves. They work for him and bring him everything he wants, food, water, firewood, and canoes (ibid.: 1147). For a final display of his supernatural treasures, the new Wilenkagilis request his father to sponsor a Winter Ceremonial. In preparation, he returns to the place where he had first met Head Without Body. Living alone in the woods, he scrubs his body with hemlock boughs, and dives into the river mornings and evenings. After four months of ritual isolation he has a dream, in which all that had hap-pened during the first meeting is repeated. Now he returns to show his treasures at an actual winter dance. Sponsorship is called “begging for one’s life” (ibid.: 1153). The Sparrow chief lays his red cedar bark ring on the dance floor and says to the congregation: Go and consider whether you wish to remain alive. Then you will take up this red cedar hark and give a winter dance next year. If you do not take it up, you will die where we are sitting here. (ibid.) Whereas the Sparrows are all retired Seals, their chief has never been initiated as a Seal. He is usually the son of the preceding chief. To retain the connection with the Seals, however, his initiation is announced, and is about to take place when he is suddenly snatched back. The supernatural power is said to be frightened away, and it is possible to induct him instead as a Sparrow. He receives a cane, red cedar bark neck rings, and a Sparrow name. Winter dance performances reenact the encounters with the supernatural do-nors of the powers. The dancer is then an embodiment of the donor, and the con-gregation is in the position of the novice at the time of the encounter. Xaxosenaso dances as the hamshamtses he had seen; and as he had been bitten, he now bites the flesh of assembled Sparrows and Seals. He also displays the acquired treasures in simulated form. The Kwakiutl have often taken great pains with ingenious me-chanical contrivances to make the display as realistic as possible. The Sparrows as the shamans must restore the dancer to his normal human state. The condition of possession is considered a form of madness, of being bereft of the senses, of being wild and uncontrollable like a released force or passion. As the song for Xaxos-enaso, now Nanogwis, One Man Eater, says, to cure a holy madness is to tame: We will try to restore to his senses [Nanogwis], shamans We will tame [Nanogwis], shamans We will quiet [Nanogwis], shamans We will heal [Nanogwis], shamans. (ibid.: 1170) The hamatsa dance which replaced the hamshamtses, among the Kwakiutl, is in the same man-eating tradition, but more violent, and consequently, more highly val-ued. The hamshamtses was then relegated to the women: as more in keeping with its relative tranquility. The great spirit Face Without Body is a passive being, literally immobilized, and his hamshamtses is no more than an arm biter. The patron of the hamatsa is the most formidable and frightening of supernatural beings, Baxbakualanuxsiwae, Man Eater at the Mouth of the River. His dancer, the hamatsa is ravenous, an eater of whole, freshly killed bodies, of decayed corpses of relatives, and a biter of arms as well. Hamshamtses is a solitary dancer, but hamatsa is part of an ensemble that represents the great Man Eater and his retinue of spirits. The ritual design remains constant whether the dancer is hamshamtses or hamatsa. I cited the Xaxosenaso narrative because it seems the fullest, and illustrates most completely the stages of ritual development, beginning with the primary en-counter and the display of supernatural powers as actual, to the dream encounter and the simulated display of powers in pure ritual form. A Hunt Text from the Awikenox (Wikeno), a northern Kwakiutl tribe, demonstrates the basic similarity of the pattern in the case of hamatsa (see Boas 1921: 1222–1248). Among south-ern Kwakiutl, the tradition is basically the same. The following narrative is from Nakwaxdax, but involves an Awikenox chief (see Boas 1897: 396–400). Nakwaxdax tribesmen are disappearing mysteriously. And when the four sons of chief Nanwaqawe leave to hunt mountain goat he warns them to avoid the houses of the grizzly bear and of the Man Eater. The youths, of course, ignore the warnings. They come upon the grizzly bear, engage him in combat, and kill him. They con-tinue on their way and come to a house from which red smoke issues, the mark of Man Eater. They go in and find a woman seated on the floor. She says to them, “I am rooted to the floor. I will help you.” She tells them they are in the house of Man Eater, and how to kill him. They are to dig a fire pit, fill it with hot coals, and cover it with boards as a trap. Man Eater arrives crying hap! (eating) in a state of excitement. His body is covered with mouths. He lies down, and jumps up again in a newly excited state, calling out hap! hap!, and then retires into his secret room. His attendants come out and dance. They are Great Raven and Giant Crane. When they finish, Man Eater comes out with his female attendants, several Kinqalatlalas and the Qomi-noqas. When the dancing Man Eater steps on the fire trap, one of the youths pulls aside the boards. Man Eater falls in and is burned. At his “death” the women also die, but the Crane and Raven only faint. The youths seize the ritual ornaments and paraphernalia, the masks, the whistles, and the cannibal pole. The rooted woman instructs them in their uses, and teaches them the songs of Man Eater. They return home with their new possessions, and fetch Nanwaqawe their father. The rooted woman instructs him in the Man Eater ritual. She teaches him the names and songs of Man Eater and of his associates, and finally reveals herself to be Nan-waqawe’s daughter. Nanwaqawe would free her, but dares not cut her deep-set root for fear of killing her. She advises him to return home and present the hamatsa dance. Two new elements enter the Winter Ceremonial by way of the hamatsa legend; one is the killing of the tutelary, Man Eater, the other is the mediation of a woman in the process of transfer of powers. The act of killing transposes the winter ritual on to a new level: from mere biting to devouring; from being, in effect, born from the tutelary from whose body the dancer emerges, to becoming his conqueror; from being but a one-man-eater (Nanogwis) to being an insatiable devourer. The presence of the hamatsa elevates traditional ritual antagonism to higher levels. The presence of the rooted woman, the human daughter rooted within the house of the devourer of men, as an internal opponent is, of course, the mythological setting to marriage, still another phase in the cycle of transference of powers. The hamatsa dance does not enact the killing of Man Eater. It presents him rather as resurrected, and in his voracious aspect. Since the hamatsa is a human being, he is literally a cannibal. His state of being is, nevertheless, ambiguous. He is human, but he is also mad, and possessed by the Man Eater spirit; and it is the spirit that is the devourer of men. To sustain this conception of hamatsa dancer as a spirit being, he is made to vomit every trace of the human flesh he has swallowed. In one sense the vomiting signifies, ritually, the miracle of resurrection. At the same time, the human being must be free of the taint of cannibalism. Even his excrement is closely studied for traces of human flesh. The hamatsa does not return to the normal human condition for a full year, among some Kwakiutl tribes long as four years. During this period he does no work; he may not gamble, nor engage in sexual intercourse. Boas made the interesting observation that the restrictions upon the hamatsa are like those imposed on young women who are menstruating for the first time (1897: 538). The hamatsa and the menstruant are both separated from the domain of men, perhaps for similar reasons, each as a representative of the powers of death. The dancer symbolizes death the devourer, the menstruant is the symbol of the wounded being who could bleed to death, but will, in fact, recover and become a life giver. As the highest stage of shamanistic achievement, the hamatsa initiation can only be approached gradually. As in other North American Indian shamanistic initiations, the hamatsa has advanced through the world of spirits, impersonating others for six years before he is ready to meet the Man Eater. Only the hamatsa disappears for the full four months duration of the Winter Ceremonial. Thus the season opens with his disappearance and closes after he has been brought back and temporar-ily subdued. He is but one of some 50 spirit incarnates. But his role is ritually and thematically central. As he is for the moment the Man Eater spirit, the congregation must be ritually clean to capture him. There is a special affinity between him and the ghost dancers; but anyone in the house may unexpectedly hold the power to capture him. The hamatsa is accompanied by the retinue representing the spirits dwelling with Man Eater. While all form a single thematic ensemble, the male dancer is always paired directly with Kinqalatlala, a slave of Man Eater, and his procuress of bodies. Her dance signifies that she is both his feeder and his tamer. She carries a mummified human corpse to a drum inside the house, and from there feeds its flesh to the dancer and to all former hamatsas. In another dance she moves before him, facing him and drawing him into the house, gesturing with outstretched arms, palms up. She sings: I am the real tamer of [Baxbakualanuxsiwae] I pull the red cedar bark from [Baxbakualanuxsiwae’s] back. It is my power to pacify you when you are in a state of ecstasy. (Boas 1897: 527) The dancing of the procuress is slow and restrained, that of the hamatsa alternates between the excitement of rapid tempo and the subsidence of the slow drum beat. He is excited when he is naked and crouching low. His outstretched arms tremble and he is poised to attack the congregation. When standing, and fully dressed, he is in the human state, and is then quiet. Winter ceremonial: II Human beings have always seen the darkening of the days as the frightening drift into death, and have fought against the dying of the light as for their life. The en-ergy of ritual fills the void of the night, as though dusk to dawn were the true arena where the struggle for life must be fought. Daylight can take care of itself; the dark-ness must be subdued and tamed and made to turn back by the powers that human beings have won for themselves. For northern tribes, winter is the long night, the descent into darkness and death. For the tribes of the Northwest Coast, winter is the sacred season when all other work is put aside to fight the night, the darkness of death which can be made to yield, but will never let go on its own. The Kwakiutl Winter Ceremonial is a kind of shamanistic festival, a dazzling dis-play of powers, a pitting of human powers against the powers of alien supernatural beings, or, as the people often say, a time to see what the supernatural powers will do. On the human side there are two principal groups of protagonists: the chiefs, who for the occasion are called the “shamans,” and their children, boys and girls who are sent out to meet the supernaturals face to face. In diversity of incident and symbolic representation the Winter Ceremonial is bewilderingly complex. At some point or other, all supernatural powers the people possess and all their su-pernatural donors are brought out for display in song and in masked dances. In the course of the sacred winter season almost the entire content of myth on the acquisition of powers is dramatized in a kaleidoscope of image and sound, appar-ently uncoordinated in detail, as each set of dancers carried out its own portrayal on its own ground within the great dance house. Everything that goes on, however, carries out one elementary ritual theme: The young are allowed to be seized by su-pernatural antagonists and the “shamans” try to bring them back. When the young return afflicted with holy madness, the shamans cure them, restoring them to their ordinary state. Curing shaman and Ceremonial shaman are identified in the same title, paxala.3 The Ceremonial shaman is the curing shaman translated to the more general and hence higher level of ritual performance. The bringing down of nawalak so that the community may be assured of life for another year is basically the curing ritual socialized. Only in the most general sense, of course, is the Winter Ceremonial the magnified and socialized version of the curing ceremony. The elementary shaman is at the bottom of it, but the very magnitude of the Winter Ceremonial is itself a new phenomenon. The Winter Ceremonial is shamanistic, but in a guise where the central concepts of shamanism are asked to deal with all the major concerns of Kwakiutl culture—with lineage, with rank, with marriage, with distribution and exchange, as well as with all relations between men and spirits and between men and animals. The Winter Ceremonial has, of course, the central shamanistic theme of overcoming death. At the same time, it has a broad cultural compass, befitting the grandeur of the theme. It stands for that side of the culture that faces the coming of the night. The shamanic model for the Winter Ceremonial is readily discovered in the sur-rounding area, among northeastern Siberians, Eskimo, Athabascan, and Algonquian, and Salishan peoples (see Eliade 1964). In essence the shaman is a special person who has been able to recover from a mysterious affliction that has brought him close to death. Fellow shamans aid his recovery and prepare him professionally to become a healer and to command other powers. This rather mundane experience, in itself common enough, is transformed into a more profound religious event. Illness and recovery are metamorphosed into a concept of a dangerous journey from the hu-man world of the living to the spiritual world of the dead, and—most important—to return home. To cross what should be an absolute divide and return safely is an ex-ceptional feat confined to the exceptional person who has been chosen or accepted by the spirits. The shamans are the human emissaries who are to set up the means of continuous intercourse with the world of the spirits. Shaman and spirits form a bond of interdependence. Each at some point pos-sesses the other, the shaman acting as agent of his spirits, the spirits as agents of the shaman. Each in a sense sacrifices some part of its original identity for the sake of the new and mutually advantageous relationship. The spirits consort with human beings and respond to their commands. The shaman becomes established as a mar-ginal person who straddles the boundaries between his own kind and the universe of spirits. The nature of his original disorder marked by trance, vision, faintness, epileptoid seizure, wasting illness, the common signs of impending death, define his marginal state. The marginal state is volatile and ambiguous and, therefore, very dangerous. The shaman is compelled to battle. He must prove himself or define himself by demonstrating his powers, demonstrating to all as well as to himself that his spiritual connections are still reliable. He is at the border between his kind and the spirit world as a defender of the human community, an aggressive assignment. There may be a parallel between the pattern of relations between shamans and spirits, and between hunters and animals in northern North America. Each pairing involves a system of intercourse between two realms, originally joined in the primal myth era and now separate and hostile, but obliged to intersect and to col-laborate. Animals offer their lives, their flesh to human beings in return for respect and human collaboration in preservation of their species. Human beings, too, give up their flesh when they enter the spirit world, often at the hands of spirits who are hunters of lives. The shaman secures the safety of the souls, a link in preservation of the species. Eliade offers the important observation that the shamanic aspirant gives animal spirits his own flesh to eat (1964: 108), implying thereby a parallel with hunting. The parallel is perhaps rather self-evident, since the spirits with whom the shaman consorts, with whom he establishes a common identity, are the animals of the original mythic state (ibid.: 93). Ultimately the two patterns of relationship are not parallel, but intersecting. The shaman mediates both. The shaman of the Winter Ceremonial is a transformed version of the primordi-al shaman described by Eliade, and equally a transformation of his curing counter-part among Kwakiutl. The transformation deals with the issue of directness of the shamanic experience. In primary curing, shamanism is an experience personal and mystical; that is, immediate and spontaneous encounter with spirits. The shamans of the Winter Ceremonial, however, have themselves had no direct or immediate encounters with spirits; they inherit the primary experiences of their antecedents. Boas wrote of the transformation of the traditional North American vision quest from an individual experience to an accommodation to hereditary rank (see 1897: 336). This may be taken to mean the power of the social system to transform the religion. For the Kwakiutl, however, transmission by marriage and by descent along the lines of aristocracy adheres to religious principles. It is not sufficient to say that shamanism comes under the influence of the social system, rather, elemen-tary shamanism has become evidenced by association with those other sources of supernatural powers that belong to chiefs. Hereditary shamanism is not unusual in this region, in any case, so that Kwakiutl only formalizes an acknowledged practice. The decisive innovation is insistence that marriage symbolize the bridging of the divide between the home world and the alien realm, and that the father-in-law as donor stand as an equivalent to the supernatural spirits. It is in this sense, of course, that the father-in-law is the great magister. In the Winter Ceremonial the process of initiating the acquisition of generalized shamanistic powers starts at marriage, at a point when the groom is nearing the peak of his powers, and is simultaneously on the verge of becoming a full-fledged chief. His course is precisely opposite to that of the curing shaman, who must first descend to illness and to the crisis of death. This inversion defines precisely the distinction Kwakiutl imply between commoner and noble shamans. Nobility tran-scends common suffering. As Kwakiutl often say, it is the “little ones” who must struggle. The curing shaman is one of the “little ones” and it is he who submits to suffering and to self-divestment. The noble faces the spirits from a posture of strength. His rank has already advanced him to a plane of equivalence with the supernatural being. The Kwakiutl call the Winter Ceremonial tsetseqa, a word Boas initially trans-lated, too crudely, as “fraudulent, pretended, to cheat” (1966: 172), saying that: “Even in the most serious presentations of the ceremonial, it is clearly and definite-ly stated that it is planned as a fraud” (ibid.). Boas is left with this wry thought: “The peculiar attitude of the Indians towards the whole ceremonial makes it difficult to understand its fundamental meaning” (ibid.). The crudity is in the choice of such words as “fraud” and “cheat” for rites of such extraordinary religious importance as the Winter Ceremonial. The proper translation of tsetseqa finally appears in his posthumous grammar (1947) where tsekweda, based on the same stem, is given as “imitated.” Thus the label defines the ceremonial aptly as a simulated event. One should not conclude hastily that a simulated or theatrical performance is not there-by religious. The concept of tseka (the stem) has distinctive native overtones of meaning. Thus in an earlier stab at translation Boas suggested “secrets” (1897: 418). Among the neighboring Heiltsuq (Bella Bella), whose dialect is only slightly different, tseqa refers to shamans and to the Winter Ceremonial. From Heiltsuq usage Boas derived still another meaning, “exalted” or “unusual.” Taking all these suggested meanings into account, one arrives at an idea of hidden things, in the sense that the ceremonies deal with secret matters that are always hidden and can be experi-enced, therefore, only in a simulated form. The masks, the whistles, the ornaments, the dramatizations of mythical events simulate a hidden reality, a reality that does not literally exist on this side of the cosmos, belonging only, as the Kwakiutl always say, “on the other side.” The idea of simulating hidden things is one of profound religious sophistication, a recognition of the ineffable. In contrasting the Winter Ceremonial with “true shamanism” I had in mind gen-eral patterns of arctic shamanism, the historical model for the Kwakiutl. Unlike his more mystical and more spiritual counterparts, the Kwakiutl shaman relies heavily on elaborate tricks in his public demonstrations. He devises hidden trapdoors and partitions, and uses strings cleverly to manipulate artificial figures. He is in appear-ance the modern magician, and when his tricks through clumsiness are exposed he is humiliated. Hence, the curing shaman is an avowed simulator too. Is he a fraud? The possibility of fraud cannot be dismissed. Yet all shamanism relies on some tricks, on extraction of foreign crystals or worms from the body of the patient, on ventriloquism that suggests the presence of spirits in the vicinity, on sleight of hand and hypnotic suggestion. In some respect all shamanism is a simulated theater of spiritual mythology. Siberian tribes perhaps voice the feelings of many shamanistic congregations when they speak of contemporary practices as decadent. The origi-nal ancestors, they say, had real experiences with the spirit world. They actually did all the things shamans now pretend to do (see Eliade 1964: 68). The concept of decadence, which is clearly pertinent to a consideration of Kwakiutl shamanism and the Winter Ceremonial, probably states historically the more fundamental idea of an increasing separation between an original mythical state of being and a contemporary reality. All mythical states of first origins are by the nature of religious thought set in a pristine world no longer directly accessible. Founding ancestors remain connected with their descendants, but across a decided barrier, a barrier growing increasingly impenetrable. What is referred to as sha-manistic decadence is but an acknowledgment of distance as a function of aging. In their views of shamanism and of the Winter Ceremonial the Kwakiutl acknowledge the gaps between the true spirit world at the time when men were still in animal form, or had just emerged, and the present. What was real then is simulated now. In using terms such as “simulated” or “theatrical” we run the risk of seriously misrepresenting the Kwakiutl idea by secularizing what they specifically identify as the opposite of the secular. The summer season is known as baxus, translated by Boas as “secular” (1897: 418), and is said to be the opposite of the tsetseqa. In the summer, the Indians say, the baxus is on top and the tsetseqa is on the bot-tom (ibid.). In the winter the positions are reversed. The winter ceremonial season begins as a rule in our November and ends after January. It is a bracketed solstice observance, but not, strictly speaking, sidereal, for the season is launched not on a fixed day but always by the social event of transmitting winter dance privileges. These are, of course, handed over in the winter. The point is nevertheless made, and emphatically: The act of transmission initiates the Winter Ceremonial period even before the season has actually started. The distinction is important because it verifies the shamanistic analogy of having a mystical experience triggered by an extraordinary event; and it separates Kwakiutl ritual timing from the astronomical traditions of Plains and Pueblo Indians. The appearance of the Winter Ceremonial season totally reverses the order of human existence. People then represent another form of being. They abandon their summer names and their lineage affiliations as though they had returned to an ex-istence prior to the appearance of human beings. In the winter they are organized in animal societies, and, of course, as varieties of supernatural beings. No one then is, strictly speaking, a human being, and no one accordingly belongs to a lineage, for the Kwakiutl the quintessential organization of human beings. They live under a new spiritual jurisdiction, under dangerous spirits who punish remorselessly any lapse of ritual decorum. The winter condition does not actually duplicate the pre-human condition because it is unrelated, by design, to the lineage origins. What it seems to duplicate is a general state of being when human beings reestablish close contact with a spiritual existence by an act of identification. The house becomes a spirit residence, the people become simulated spirits, and the great supernatural spirits come to live among them as among their own kind. I believe we can satisfactorily distinguish between so-called genuine and sim-ulated participants and events. The impersonations are artifice, but the power brought by the spirits is genuine. The power of the Winter Ceremonial is nawalak, the most positively identified concept of supernatural power that the Kwakiutl voice. Boas compares nawalak with “holy” and with the Algonquian concept of manitou (1927). It seems to be, judging from contexts, the power associated with the unusual forms of life. Thus simulated actions, by establishing identity with the sources of power, acquire the powers. The semantic problem of contrasting simu-lated actions and genuine powers is self-evident. Implied is a religiously impossible equation between spurious recipients and genuine donors. Kwakiutl have no sense of charity; for them, a genuine donor can give only to a genuine recipient. Religious logic compels the conclusion that in the context of the Winter Ceremonial the simulated is not the profane. In no sense is it the antithesis of the holy. To receive nawalak from the supernatural, petitioners must be on the proper plane. While they are not, and cannot be, fully equal to the supernaturals they impersonate, they have raised themselves to a level of sanctity or, better still, of ritual purity at which they can receive powers. Actually, Kwakiutl follow a common ritual procedure in all transmissions: The recipient prepares himself by seeking identity with the do-nor. The viewpoint of tsetseqa, of simulation, seems to be that a true identity is not, and indeed cannot be attained with the supernatural beings. They remain distinct from human beings just as the ancestral founders, the animal-masked humans, are now eternally distinct from their human descendants. The Kwakiutl who told Boas the Winter Ceremonial was presented as simulation were surely not denigrating a ritual of great importance. They were stating, I would imagine, a position of true religious humility: Men can imitate the gods, they cannot be the gods. Imitation, even in tribal societies, is Flattery. Among Kwakiutl, as in all animist religions, the gods are seen as attracted to their own kind. If the impersonators are not genuine spirits but genuine impersonators of spirits, what about the nawalak that is received? The Kwakiutl view is that a well-conducted ritual brings the actual supernatural beings down into the house (Boas 1930: 69), which then becomes the abode of Healing Woman (ibid.: 121). They bring with them the nawalak, but not, of course, in the same form as in myth. In myth, the nawalak powers are both extraordinary and specific, restoring the dead to life, killing enemies effortlessly, accomplishing miracles in hunting, acquiring wealth, curing, and so on. On earth the miracles of myth are not altogether dis-counted, yet deferring to reality the congregation expects only general benefits. They speak of the period as “making the heart good” (aikegela), as wiping the slate clean of the ailments, the troubles, and the rancors of the secular time, and as “bringing down from above” (Boas 1897: 418), a conjunction of ideas about general benefits brought down from the sky world. A more specific benefit is the shamanis-tic preservation of life. Thus at the end of the season someone must at once promise the festivities for next year or else “we will die” (Boas 1921: 1153). Reality compels a compromise with the extravagant promises of myth, but not at the sacrifice of the fundamental premises of religious logic. The generalizing and softening of specific and extraordinary powers does not, we assume, violate the authenticity of a primeval condition; its reality cannot extend to contemporary conditions. The man can never again be the child, the tree can never again be the seed. Time is an authentic condition. The aim of myth is not to overcome time by fusing in superficial fashion present and primeval. On the contrary, myth insists on the implacable and irreversible separation between that which started a cycle and that which continues the cycle. The viewpoint of myth, as deeply rooted in the human consciousness as is the incest taboo, is that history must move forward from its origins. The connection with beginnings is not to be broken. Even more imperative is the distinction be-tween present and beginnings. The incest taboo remains a powerful psychic com-pulsion for similar reasons. Deepest incest revulsion among human beings is for the mother and son connection, which implies a return to the source of origin. Common to origin myths and to the incest taboo is the Orphic idea that life in its growth moves out and away from its primal source. Return is fraught with the dan-ger of rejecting life. Those who violate the incest taboo are dead, metaphorically. Since they are already “dead,” it is reasonable for religious societies to treat them as such—expelling them or killing them. The inescapable counterpart of the incest taboo is the sacred obligation to re-tain connections by endowing them with deep significance. The Garden of Eden is never again to be reentered, and never to be forgotten. And the Kwakiutl idea of simulation is unusual only in its remarkable explicitness. Like the biology of growth and development, gradations are recognized between (1) the supernaturals themselves, (2) the ancestral beings who acquired powers from them, and (3) the contemporary people who now simulate the earlier pristine conditions. Simulation, however, is no casual matter. It seeks identity even through danger, but dares not make identity absolute. The initiate enters the realm of the supernaturals, but as a differentiated human being who is firmly tied to others on the human side who will pull him to safety. Simulation of powers and of beings is the familiar sacred-profane distinction. Kwakiutl semantic sophistication enables us to understand a more subtle distinction, in which sacred-profane represents a gradation through which the sacred reaches toward but need not encompass the truly divine. By recapitulating the myth Kwakiutl gain a substantial benefit. But they are not mystics; and they do not delude themselves with the belief that what had been at the Beginning can ever be regained. They simulate the mystic doctrine through metaphysical enactment of the return to first and enduring principles. Apart from the simple positive good of the ritual series, the enactments have perhaps the more constructive benefit of setting forth the cultural metaphysics, using the language of visual symbols and the irresistible power of mimesis to impress upon all the meaning of Being. For the student of Kwakiutl thought, the Winter Ceremonial is the gateway to hidden meanings, its symbolic structure the Rosetta stone to an undeciphered code. As Levi-Strauss has so cogently reasoned, all myth versions are authentic. Each tells a part of the whole story. According to several traditions, the Winter Ceremo-nial first came down from the sky. The Dzawadenox tale cited in Chapter 4 about the marriage of a chief ’s daughter with the son of Abalone of the World attributes the origin of the rites to the celestial trinity of Sun, Moon, and Thunderbird (Boas and Hunt 1905: 58). A Qweqsotenox tradition is more specific and attributes ori-gins to Thunderbird, who is called Head Winter Dancer. The attribution of origins to the Thunderbird, who in myth represents the birds of the Sky World in their ever-losing combats with the birds and beasts of earth, is in keeping with major religious themes. In the former version the rites are brought to earth in marriage, thus authenticating the act of transmission. In the latter version, Thunderbird and his wife come to earth bringing with them the winter dances. In another version it is the Wolves who bring down the first rites (Boas 1930: 62ff).4 The original source is generally in the sky, and the secondary sources are on earth where the powers had been deposited. Yet finally, there is the tradition that the Winter Ceremonial, and privileges of giving coppers all over the world, come from Qomogwa, god of the sea (Boas and Hunt 1905: 85). Stories of the first origins are, however, general, dealing only with the broad framework of the rites and not with the supernatural beings who are imperson-ated. In the marriage story of the Dzawadenox chief ’s daughter a connection is established between the winter dances and incidents of having one’s brains eaten by Brain-Eating Woman and being restored to life after she vomits them out and they are sprinkled with the water of life. This brief incident contains the main idea of the rites. In stories of Thunderbird, who is also Head Winter Dancer, another connection is established. Head Winter Dancer (Tsaqame) becomes a great sha-man and demonstrates that his powers are at least equal to those of Qanekelak, one of the great Kwakiutl deities, a creator and a transformer. In the presence of Head Winter Dancer and in the presence of the Winter Ceremonial itself, when it is in progress, the god Qanekelak is diffident. He recognizes an inherent antagonism of powers and acknowledges his inability to conquer. Thus the Thunderbird, qua Head Winter Dancer, demonstrates that the powers of the winter dance, powers in the province of human beings, are on a par with those of the god who created many important features of earth. We cannot be sure to what extent Kwakiutl myth is conceptually unified. Are all qualities of Thunderbird, for example, pertinent to his role as Head Winter Dancer even when not in that specific context? Yet it is hard to escape the impression that the contexts of Thunderbird combats are related. If he is a contestant with Qanekelak in his guise as Head Winter Dancer, his heroic combats with the birds and beasts of earth, when he goes by the name of Thunderbird, may be part of a common theme. With Qanekelak he is equal, and they fight to a draw. Against the birds of earth, headed by Woodpecker, he is defeated and thereafter the thunder, a threat to life, is heard only in the proper season. The meaning of these narratives is not, I should think, that the birds, who represent the earth division, are stronger than Qanekelak and Head Winter Dancer, but rather that Thunderbird, as such, is for the moment subordinate. He is invincible, however, when he is both the great shaman and the Head Winter Dancer. The entire mythological tradition must dem-onstrate to the Kwakiutl how awesome and unconquerable are the powers of the Winter Ceremonial. (See Chapter 7 for Qanekelak and Head Winter Dancer as paradigms for ritual antagonism.) Even in the course of a single season at one village the ritual series represents a great variety of supernatural beings and their powers. Not all the supernaturals, each of whom is portrayed by a masked dance and song, are presented at any one time. Boas had grouped them into four great supernatural jurisdictions: the war spirit, Winalagilis, Making War All Over the Earth; the Man Eater spirit, Baxba-kualanuxsiwae; matem, the birds that give the power of flight; and Ghosts, who have the power of bringing back to life a person who has been killed. His classification does not incorporate all dances—for the ceremony is in fact a rapidly evolving system—rather the main religious themes they represent. The quadripartite grouping divides thematically into pairs of dualities: War and Man Eater as death and consummation; Birds and Ghosts as flight and resurrection. In myth, Man Eater and War Spirit are older and younger brother respectively. Man Eater is the chief and his younger brother “makes war around the world” to fetch corpses for him to feed upon. They form a natural pair (see Boas and Hunt 1905: 204ff). Birds and Ghosts form a different kind of pair. Birds are souls who ascend to the sky, the original source of nawalak; Ghosts live underground and in resurrection ascend to earth. Each pairing complements the other; all-devouring death is matched by means of overcoming it. Thus the main themes are set forth in a fairly obvious manner and repeat themselves. One of the songs representing the Man Eater states the point clearly: [Baxbakualauuxsiwae] made me a winter dancer [Baxbakualanuxsiwae] made me pure I do not destroy life. I am the life maker. (Boas 1897: 508) The major themes of devouring death and resurgent life resonate throughout the Winter Ceremonial and throughout all other rituals. In the Winter Ceremonial the theme is picked up at once in the statement of powers given as gifts by the supernaturals. These, too, come often as a set of four. They are: (1) the magic harpoon for gaining wealth, (2) the burning fire that destroys wealth, (3) the wa-ter of life that revives the dead, and (4) the death bringer usually a pointing stick (see Boas 1897: 415). Again the four form two pairs: magic harpoon/burning fire and water of life/death bringer, and magic harpoon/water of life and burning fire/ death bringer. The first pairing relates property to people, a theme picked up later in man-eater songs. The second pairing contrasts life enhancing and life destructive forces. The organization of supernatural powers and the gifts they bestow are in har-mony. The harmonic relation, however, is satisfyingly complex since each gift is not merely a special province of a single donor. All supernatural beings can give one or several, and often all. The statement in myth that the four gifts are usually a single treasure (tlogwe) helps convey the religious message of the unity of oppo-sites, a fundamental Kwakiutl dogma. I might as well establish this point at once. For Kwakiutl, all metaphysical issues of antagonism are resolved simply and neatly by the Hegelian trick of transformation into opposites: death turns to life, life to death. As the hamatsa dancer sings: “I do not destroy life. I am the life maker.” Perhaps the most ancient shamans, whose business it was to reverse the direction of the course from death to life, first discovered this fundamental biological and spiritual principle. The transmission of the four gifts was a historical event. It occurred, as a rule, during a shadowy historical period verging into the decadent present, after the an-cestors had assumed their human form, but at a time when their exploits were still legendary. This earlier period accounts for origins of the Winter Ceremonial and is, in this most important respect, distinct from the present era when the legendary events are merely enacted. The original recipient had met the supernatural directly and in receiving his treasures had himself become nawalak and possessor of the qualities of his supernatural donor. In the present era transmission is indirect, from the father-in-law who had himself received the powers in marriage, or from killing in the course of war,5 or from killing an initiate encountered in ritual isolation in the woods. These experiences are secondary, and hence attenuated. Even the ritual enactment by the initiate of being “seized” by the supernatural spirit is a secondary and fabricated event. In other words, the legendary events are the genuine experi-ences, and their ownership authenticates the ritual enactment. The dominant figure is Man Eater; his role is the exclusive prerogative of high-est-ranking chiefs (see Boas 1897: 411; Boas 1921: 1176). Though the four catego-ries of supernatural beings form a conceptual ensemble, all are subordinated to the central figure of Man Eater, who in his own being incorporates the necessary duality of devouring lives and of giving life. Further, he is devourer of property and sources of wealth and so binds together the ideas of life and wealth as two aspects of the same vital reality. Myth describes Man Eater as occupying, with wife and children, a house in the woods. Dwelling in mountainous forests, a spirit region in opposition to that of sea and sky, he has his closest associations with forest beasts and flesh-eating birds. The exact details of habitat and associations vary from tribe to tribe, but the symbolic pattern remains constant. The mountainous forest is a special domain of spirits; it is not a human habitat. When the myth people were still in animal form, according to a Mamaleleqala tradition, they lived as people now do, on the beach. The interior was a dangerous zone, which people entered to seek for nawalak. The forest was also the ancient cemetery, where the dead were draped in trees. So the forest is the appropriate habitat for the entire Winter Ceremonial, and especially for Man Eater. The mountains, moreover, are considered to give access to the sky; arising directly from the sea, as they do in many places, they appear to the Kwakiutl to connect that realm with the sky as well. In the Gwasela family histories a cannibal pole, Man Eater’s own tree that con-nects him with the sky, has carved representations of the entire set of animal associ-ations of Man Eater. The cannibal pole is also associated with the Milky Way (Boas 1897: 446). It is surmounted by Eagle, the lookout who discovers human flesh. Eagle stands on the head of Man Eater, who is perched above Raven at the North End of the World, who in turn rests on Grizzly Bear, the guardian of the doorway. At the bottom is Wolf, the “scent taker” of Man Eater (Boas 1921: 856). The figures of Eagle and Wolf at the top and bottom of this “totem pole” are especially inter-esting for two reasons. Both are shamanistic figures, and Eagle is the figure of the highest-ranking chiefs as well; neither is considered to be in the same class as Raven or Grizzly Bear, who like Man Eater are devourers of men. The eagle is a special shamanic tutelary among Eskimos and among Siberian tribes. The wolf, however, belongs particularly to the Kwakiutl brand of shamanism. Woodman the Wolf was a high chief among the myth people living at Crooked Beach, and Eagle was a chief of the birds. Wolves are described in myth as the first great shamans and as the first to have the Winter Ceremonial. As shaman figures, Eagle and Wolf are links to Man Eater but are, strictly speaking, not of him, as indeed they could not in all logic be. Man Eater is even more specifically located; he is at the headwaters of the rivers at the North End of the World. The north is for Kwakiutl the source of darkness, of disease, and of violent death. The rivers hold at their place of beginnings a ma-jor source of nawalak—seekers of nawalak commonly proceed upstream (see Boas and Hunt 1905: 150). Man Eater moves restlessly about the earth driven by his insatiable appetite for human flesh. An entourage that includes three categories of women assists him. Qominoqa is usually his wife. Kinqalatlala is a slave. A woman who is actually human is deeply rooted in the floor of his house. The women are his provisioners, bringing him victims and corpses. Others in his entourage are Grizzly Bear, a vicious and fearless killer of men; Raven, who feasts on men’s eyes; Hoxhoq the Great Crane, who devours men’s brains; and a humanoid male called Haialikilatl (Benefactor), all but the last in the general category of devourers. The chief devourer is Baxbakualanuxsiwae, whose insatiable appetite is depicted by the image of mouths all over his body (Boas 1897: 395). In a fairly transparent biological metaphor, the females are the suppliers of bodies, the great provisioners. Qominoqa, Rich Woman, defines what wealth means for Kwakiutl: not objects such as trinkets, coppers, or woolen, store-bought blankets, but lives. Wealth is life. Man Eater sings: “I am swallowing food alive; I eat living men. I swallow wealth. I swallow the wealth that my father is giving away” (Boas 1897: 459). I return later to this very important idea. The slave women are auxiliary provisioners. As for the rooted woman, her role as provisioner is only incidental to her human destiny as the persistent enemy within Man Eater’s house. She teaches men how to overcome devouring death. Death is tamed. Women have an important but not exclusive role in taming Man Eater. Those who feed him property also tame him by quenching his vora-ciousness. The brothers who seek him out and take his powers and “kill” him also tame him. If Man Eater can die and return to life, death, it must be assumed, can-not be final. Ultimately, Man Eater is tamed because that is his destiny. One of his many names is Wishing To Be Tamed (Boas 1897: 398). Frightening as he is said to be, he is easily overcome by simple guile, or else he yields readily. In one story, he welcomes the hero, saying: “My dear, do not be afraid. I want to give you magical power. This is my house. I am [Baxbakualanuxsiwae]. You shall see everything in my house” (ibid.: 404). All accounts, and each tribe has its own, bring out his dual qualities—his terrifying side, and the softer side, that can be made to yield to sim-ple perseverance. Almost all Kwakiutl supernatural beings submit to the persistent suitor. The man who meets Death-Dealing Woman in a stream embraces her, and copulates with her until she promises him the usual four treasures.6 The encounter with Man Eater and his company is stripped of total terror from the outset, since they are all seen in the ritual aspect of dancing and singing, rather than as raw forces. Ritual is by function the reshaper, the subduer, and the tamer of all raw states. Hence the gap between the human dancers and Man Eater and his entourage is reduced from the start. The mythical encounter serves to project not a raw image of devouring spirits, but a ritual format. In the human setting, the ritual containment of ultimate raw menace is completed. Since the impersonator of Man Eater is a high chief, or the son of a high chief, qualified by birth and marriage to bring Man Eater into the human community, he is also qualified in his role of sha-man and noble to be his supreme antagonist. The power of Man Eater and of the entire Winter Ceremonial, for that matter, is concentrated in rings of red cedar bark. Worn on the head, around the neck, at the wrists and ankles, the cedar bark rings are by form alone—the magic circle— the containers of power. The circle may stand among Kwakiutl as it does among Eskimo and other North American tribes for the cosmos (or sun or moon), the ultimate container of powers. In myth the ring is represented as a container of souls and spirits, like a primordial covering. Red cedar bark is a parallel source of power by virtue of substance. It stands for the blood of the sacred tree, the tree that, like the “cosmic tree” in Siberian shamanism, ascends to the sky. The rings hold the greatest concentration of powers, but not all powers. The remainder of the nawalak powers are in whistles and in face and forehead masks. The masks seem to repre-sent the form soul of Man Eater or other supernatural beings. The red cedar bark rings introduce an idea of generalized form soul, pertaining to abstract powers, perhaps to a religious idea as general as that of the Siouan wakan or the Algonquian manitou, which are essentially cosmic powers. The depicted spirit beings are pre-sumably not the ultimate powers; like people, they are themselves recipients, but from an unidentified donor. If an idea of a universal spirit, of a primal source of life and of its powers, does exist for Kwakiutl, it does so only as an implied possibility, not as a ritual reality. Ritual deals with the self-evident reality of universal distributions of power, but in graded degree. Thus Man Eater cannot contain within his person alone all the relevant powers, even though his symbolic character and his dual nature are com-plete within his figure. The complexity of the Man Eater rites alone—part of the more comprehensive plan of the Winter Ceremonial as a whole—is in accord with the doctrine of the essential incompleteness of any part of the whole. We may see in Man Eater the central metaphor for the Winter Ceremonial, but Kwakiutl are less reductive. For them, as pure imagery, the part may stand for the whole. In ritual practice the aim is to represent the totality of parts, as a mosaic. One is reminded of the Navajo dry paintings which painstakingly bring the supernatural power into being by the patient assembly of grains of sand, pollen, and other bits and pieces whose coloring and texture create symbolic designs, and finally a portion of myth to which song, dance, the sound of rattles, the beat of drum, the narrative of myth add the rest. If a portion is omitted the entire assembly, like a faulty chemical ex-periment, fails. The spirit of war, visualized as Winalagilis, Making War All Over the Earth, is a younger partner of Baxbakualanuxsiwae. Equivalent as life takers, they are, nevertheless ranked in order of their powers. Man Eater is potentially an ultimate devourer. Unless he can be tamed he consumes all. His is the natural image of death leading to final decay and dissolution. He devours flesh, but also skulls, the cases of the life spirit, the hardest bone, the body’s sole hope for material immortality. Dread of Man Eater may not be of mere death, but of the degradation of reduction to the end product of digestion-excrement. By contrast, the spirit of war is only a killer. He begins the task; Man Eater, who can feed on corpses, completes it. In this respect the war spirit is indeed a younger brother, the equivalent of an atten-dant. Man Eater’s women gather corpses, the masculine war spirit is an active killer. Among the Kwakiutl of Fort Rupert the war spirit has no mask or carving (Boas 1897: 394). He is a canoe figure which Kwakiutl think of as a receptacle (although the Trobriand Islanders’ idea of the canoe as a swift masculine projectile-phallus may also be present), as well as a conveyance. He also comes from the north and travels about the earth never leaving his canoe. He grants the dual powers of killing and of invulnerability in combat. Toxwid, usually a woman, represents military invincibility; awinalatl (War Dancer) represents insensibility to pain, and impreg-nability; Mamaqa represents the powers of sorcery. War powers are, to be sure, pertinent to the active Kwakiutl interest in military success. The concept of Winalagilis as a war spirit reaches, nevertheless, well be-yond ordinary expediency. The spirit of war also has shamanistic associations. He is a stealer of souls (Curtis 1915: 79), and is the supernatural patron who grants them their curing powers. Once again, we find the common principle: The source of the remedy is in the affliction. The death dealer is the healer. That a woman should play a key role in the war spirit configuration is in keeping with the thor-oughgoing Kwakiutl dualism that controls the entire Winter Ceremonial. Even as she is the companion and aide of death-dealing spirits, she is, at least by implication, a life-giving figure as well. Her association with Winalagilis projects the war theme onto a broader cosmic scale. The female Toxwid has her powers from the double-headed serpent, Sisiutl, a double supernatural being who kills and also pre-serves. Merely the sight of Sisiutl contorts and kills. Those who have his powers wear him as a belt that provides invulnerability (see Boas 1897: 487). The blood of the double-headed serpent applied to the skin gives it the impregnability of stone. At the same time, the serpent is seen as the salmon of the Thunderbird—not as an ordinary salmon, but rather as an incandescent version, seen by people as a blaze of light. This blaze of light is presumably the lightning flash that strikes the water, the forerunner of Thunderbird’s clap of thunder. In this set of symbolic associations, Sisiutl joins Man Eater as one of the key figures in the Winter Ceremonial. G. W. Locher (1932) has seen in the double-headed serpent the grand integrative image of Kwakiutl religion. One need not go so far in reductivism to recognize how deeply the serpent, even though a comparatively minor figure in the entire Winter Ceremonial, does succeed in portraying the main themes. Sisiutl, as Locher has painstakingly shown, has wide-ranging associative connections with almost the entire spectrum of Kwakiutl religious beliefs. Through it, we see as from an-other vantage point the panorama of forces and spirits that occupy the great lineage houses during the winter season. As the food of Thunderbird, a primary patron of the Winter Ceremonial, Sisiutl is a counterpart of Salmon. Salmon, the food of men, is also visualized as light in its associations with copper. Copper as Salmon and as light represents the wealth of the sea and the treasures of the sky. Broadly speaking, the double-headed serpent theme is conceptually akin to the man-eater theme, in that both supernaturals control life-taking and life-granting powers. Each, never-theless, has its own place within the total mosaic. Man Eater is the avowed and explicit devourer; the serpent, with his two mouths and his natural character of one who swallows creatures whole, is a devourer by implication only. As actually por-trayed, Sisiutl is essentially the lightning bolt, the traditional war symbol. Still, the imagery of devouring is so powerfully lodged in the Kwakiutl religious imagination that the double-headed serpent cannot escape it. Sisiutl is inevitably fused or else paired with Man Eater in myth as well as in ritual organization. In a Qweqsotenox tale, Head Winter Dancer (Thunderbird) kills a sisiutl that has been caught in his salmon trap in the form of a blazing salmon. He coats his son’s body with its blood, thereby turning him into a Dzonoqwa, whom he names Food Giver Stone Body. The traditions more commonly depict Dzonoqwas as fe-male devourers of human children. The masculine type of Dzonoqwa is a warrior who enslaves chiefs and robs them of their crests (souls). It is evidently the male Dzonoqwa who is fused with Sisiutl. Food Giver Stone Body then becomes paired with Man Eater as his warrior. He speaks to Man Eater: “I will go and make war to satiate you” (Boas and Hunt 1905: 206). His war cry of ho! is like the thunderclap that dazes or kills all within its range. Chiefs who own the right to his war cry use it when they are “selling” a copper. In that ritual context the menacing cry of the warrior marks the transmission of a copper across a tribal boundary as an act of antagonism. Man Eater, who devours all, including coppers, remains the central figure in ritual and the eminence behind all property transactions. Since all the great themes of the Winter Ceremonial are presented in song and dance, we must assume a special significance to these expressive forms. The dance presents the spirit characters in their characteristic motor forms, supplementing the masks which portray physical form. The songs reveal the essential nature of the beings, and the names establish their genre. In addition there are ornaments and instruments, cedar bark neck rings, eagle down, whistles, staffs, and the like. Each item is a vital (perhaps a soul) component of the being who is represented. The mission of the human community seems to be to assemble all separate components and thus to create, or rather to reconstitute among themselves, the spirit beings who would otherwise lack a human connection. Impersonation is therefore an act of creation. The human form, as in the transmission of names down the generations, is the carrier of spirit beings. In the spirit of mutuality of interchange, the human community grants life to the spirit beings who in turn are to grant life pre-serving powers to them. In this respect, the Winter Ceremonial must be seen as more than a general enactment of life renewal themes. It has the more immediate purpose of doing for the nonhuman spirits of the Kwakiutl cosmos what lineage and rank do, as a matter of course, for the human ancestors. The assembly of spiritual components to create or reconstitute a spirit being of the Winter Ceremonial provokes what the Kwakiutl call an “excitement.” The excitement informs the congregation that the spirit has entered the dancer and pos-sesses him. When the first winter spirit has arrived in this manner, the Ceremonial season has begun. The state of possession of but one man suffices to convert the entire community into an assembly of spirit beings. In due course, others will be seized by the excitement and will join in the dances. The ritual community, often intertribal, forms itself then into Sparrows, Seals, and commoner observers. Sparrows and Seals divide the ritual congregation into opposing and antagonis-tic spiritual divisions. The Sparrows are the earthbound division, and having in-herited office from their fathers are linked to the paternal lineages. Seals, the actual impersonators of the spirits, are the representatives of the other side, that is, of the spirit world. Having acquired these privileges from the wife’s or mother’s side, they are linked to maternal lineages. Only through the ritual connection can one recognize what is for Kwakiutl the religious significance of marriage. Sparrows are the officials and managers of the ritual, the Seals are their ecstatic clients. The Sparrows hold the role of shamans—the spirit controllers. Consequently, their chief is Head Shaman. Ritual antagonism between these two divisions acts to sustain the linkage and separation between what is set forth as two realms of existence. The Sparrows, as former Seals, must resist the premature efforts of those still in the spirit realm to leave it. From the texts it is not directly evident what significance the sparrow as a bird has for Kwakiutl. Presumably, sparrows represent the birds of earth, who, together with land mammals, once fought against Thunderbird and the birds of the sky and by their victory achieved the regulation of thundering. Since ritual contest is perceived as shamanistic, the Sparrows would appear as shamans against Head Winter Dancer (Thunderbird), himself a great shaman from the sky. In the Winter Ceremonial the Sparrow-Seal antagonisms are rather complex. In the broadest sense, the Sparrow shamans are in contest against the general powers of the spirit world, of which Head Winter Dancer is representative. In this contest they are allied with Seals to see what they both can do against the great powers. In the face of such major antagonism, the oppositions between Sparrows and Seals are relatively minor. The Seals are, after all, the clients of the Sparrows, who are charged with bringing them back to secular safety. The ritual concept of Seal illustrates a Kwakiutl penchant for fusing opposing images or opposing forces. Seal is the generic category for the 50 or more spirits of the Ceremonial who represent in their number the cosmic realms of earth, sky, sea, and the underworld of ghosts. Their designation as seals suggests at least a com-mon denominator of identity that transcends otherwise extraordinary differences among all the spirits. That they are sea mammals who move easily between two major realms is one bridging factor. Basically, they are of the sea, thus associates of Qomogwa, and they inhabit a world that is opposite in time orientation from that of human beings. Their summer is the earth winter, so they are always in their win-ter dances (see Boas 1935b: 164), when they appear among human beings. The sea, which is the source of salmon and copper, is even more generally considered to be the element that finally cures the hamatsa dancer and releases him from his state of possession. As the great source of wealth, the sea is the tamer of the Man Eater and of all associated spirits. Thus, once again, the principle of fusion of opposing ele-ments is drawn upon as a mystical mechanism for counteracting dangerous forces. Kwakiutl seem to give themselves all possible advantages in their cosmic contests. The novice who goes out to meet Man Eater is paired with shaman Sparrows who are to guide him back. At the same time, he is fused with Seal, the opponent of Man Eater from within. And, of course, the frightening spirits are themselves controlled and counteracted from within their own realm, and from within their own nature. Another division within the company of Seals distinguishes between those who “go through to the other side” (laxsa) and those who remain within the human realm or, as the Kwakiutl say, only lean against the wall (wixsa). Since dying is also spoken of as laxsa, they are the company of those who enter the realm of the spirits, on the analogy of the dead leaving their human habitat. In the course of ritual procedure the laxsa leave the house to disappear in the woods for a lengthy sojourn, returning as possessed by spirits. The wixsa need not leave the house at all; they retire briefly into a bedroom. Understandably, the laxsa are associated with the major spirits, and the wixsa with the minor. An unexplained reference to laxsa as “cedar bark boxes” suggests, simply by analogy with Kwakiutl concepts of containers, that the laxsa are actual possessors of great powers that need to be contained. Basically, laxsa comprise the joint complement of Man Eater and war spirits, the exponents of the major ritual themes; the wixsa are, perhaps, ancillary, but they complete the required mosaic. Viewed in the perspective of overall structure, the grand divisions of Sparrow and Seal, and laxsa and wixsa manifest a principle of gradation, not identical with the gradations of rank, but perhaps akin to it. Social rank among Kwakiutl is, after all, a religious configuration, as a gradation of the original ancestors by criteria of power. Gradation of winter spirits is entirely comparable to the gradation of ancestral spirits. Gradation does not divide a community. On the contrary, it establishes an unbroken chain, a connection implying diminution going back to the original sources. Implied in gradation is a metaphysical mechanics that “safely” links together the most power-ful and the weak. The weak are, accordingly, spared the dangers of direct association with great powers. From this point of view, the structure of the Winter Ceremonial provides an unbroken lifeline from the hamatsa dancer who is most exposed, to the Sparrows. The wixsa are an intermediary group, a bridge between the two. The minor spirits of the wixsa are not necessarily innocuous; and they are the-matically joined with those of the laxsa. The most important of the minor spirits are the fool dancers (nutlmatl) who are, in fact, lesser forms of war dancers. The nutlmatl represent the madness, the wildness, and the obscene side of war and de-struction. Like similar cults among Plains Indian warriors, they are “contrary ones” doing things backward, in opposition to conventional norms. They are figures of filth and obscenity, their long noses dripping snot. They urinate and defecate in the house and pretend to commit suicide. They are destructive madmen who rage through the congregation, knocking people over, destroying property, and, finally, in some instances, dismantling the entire house (see Boas 1897: 468ff). For their destructiveness, they pay with property. An indemnity, or a pacification of the spir-its of madness? In thematic consistency, the “payment” would have a significance parallel to the feeding of Man Eater. The fool dancers as destructive forces should, by the same principle of consistency, contain within themselves a countering and thus a restraining force. Property-giving is an example of a counterforce. Perhaps, the contrary behavior should be considered as another. Thematically, contrariness expresses reversal. Rage and madness, the fury of excess, are reversals of the com-mon order. But if the reversal theme is conceived of as general it can imply a move-ment back in either direction. In this sense, the contrary behavior of the nutlmatl conveys the counterpart theme, namely that every course of action can be reversed. The dances and spirit impersonations portray the religious essence of the Winter Ceremonial. It is also a period of feasts, “potlatches,” “sales” of coppers, and returns by fathers-in-law of “marriage payments.” Are these separate or co-ordinated events? Boas thought the dances were the real religious content of the Winter Ceremonial season, and the feasts and property distributions but unrelated secular events, conveniently placed at a time when people were at leisure and al-ready assembled.7 Had Boas recognized the religious import of oil feasts and of property exchanges, he might have come to a different conclusion about the total religious content of the Winter Ceremonial. The Winter Ceremonial is a complex ritual organization within which the shamanistic contests with spirits are carried out by a totality of means. I reserve a full scale discussion of the ritual totality for later chapters. But I cannot close this chapter on the Winter Ceremonial without at least outlining its full dimensions. It must be understood that the scope of a strange ritual is not obvious. Some events are so clearly cognate that their unity is recognized at once. Ordinarily, the conditions of space and time furnish sufficient clues as to what are the unities. But since ritual is only akin to, but is not theater, where the stage separates what is presented from what merely occurs, the fact of events occurring within the same space (the village) and at the same time (the winter season) does not in itself es-tablish a conceptual unity. In a situation as complex as that of the Kwakiutl Winter Ceremonial, understanding of conceptual unity is ultimately to be reached through understanding of the whole nature of the religious concepts. A most important clue to the ritual design comes from our understanding of Kwakiutl marriage. As Boas saw so clearly, the Winter Ceremonial is a response to the acquisition of rights in marriage and is indeed the occasion for what he called the return of the marriage payment. Having gone this far, Boas simply dropped the matter, failing to recognize the religious nature of marriage and of exchange. As we have seen, marriage is a climactic event that bridges the gap between two realms on what we would call the social level. In Kwakiutl marriage the closing of the gap, symbolized by the transport of a bride from across the sea, is analogous to the bridging of the gap between men and spirits. The bridging of a gap must provoke a chain of events. Since Kwakiutl symbolic imagery is biological, the chain is both develop-mental and circulatory. By bridging one gap, marriage leads to a new step by which the human-spirit separation is then temporarily overcome—a new and perhaps higher development, as though the ability to unify one type of realm provides the means to unify another. One developmental move demands another, and each calls forth a circulatory movement of property—coppers, animal skins (form souls), and oil. What Boas spoke of as the “sale” of a copper may be visualized “biologically” as part of the circulation engendered by marriage. The “sale” of a copper is associ-ated with the Winter Ceremonial because it and the winter dances are both related properties that are transmitted through marriage. The dances are exhibited and the coppers are set into circulation. Oil feasts are also part of the same transaction. Fish oil, the Kwakiutl say, is given in the name of the bride. Distributions of animal skins are mandatory for all demonstrations of acquired powers. The Winter Ceremonial is also the occasion for antagonistic displays between tribes; and as I show more fully in a subsequent chapter, social antagonism is essentially a ritual counterpart of the necessary antagonism between men and the dangerous spirits. I discuss Kwakiutl property concepts in the next chapter. These concepts, how-ever, become clear only in the context of the Winter Ceremonial and are, there-fore, most appropriately introduced at this point. The essential clue to the nature of property comes in the hamatsa songs. These are some examples: I hold down your great furor, great [hamatsa] I hold down your whistles, great [hamatsa] I appease your voracity, great [hamatsa] You are looking for food all the time great [hamatsa] You are looking for heads all the time great [hamatsa] You devour wealth, great [hamatsa] (Boas 1897: 460) He wants to eat with both hands, the great [hamatsa] at the house of the one who is trying to eat all himself all over the world; but he did not reach the coppers that he was going to obtain at the edge of the world. (ibid.) Wealth, which stands for the vitality of the people, is indeed an integral component of the festival. Wealth satiates the voracity of Man Eater, and is quite understand-ably a major ceremonial theme. The festival is inaugurated by a simple ceremony of the “winter dance pole,” a heavy staff some six to eight feet long. The pole rep-resents, as Boas reports, the amount of property that will be spent by a man in be-half of his son-in-law, property such as copper bracelets, blankets, food, and grease (ibid.: 502). A chief dancing with the pole in behalf of the young man demonstrates that it is too heavy for him to carry. Then he sings: The spirit of the Winter Dance came down The spirit of the Winter Dance came down and stays here with me. (ibid.) Thus is opened the Winter Ceremonial. When the people enter the dance house, they pass through a doorway surrounded by a ring of hemlock branches covered with eagle down. Hemlock, a cleansing agent, removes the human smell; eagle down is a symbol of wealth. References Boas, Franz. 1897. “The social organization and secret societies of the Kwakiutl.” United States National Museum, Report for 1895: 311–738. ———. 1921. “Ethnology of the Kwakiutl.” Bureau of American Ethnology, Thirty Fifth Annual Report, Pts. 1, 2. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. ———. 1927. “Die Ausdrucke fur Einige Religiose Begriffe der Kwakiutl Indianer.” In Festschrift Meinhof, 386–392. Hamburg. ———. 1930. “The religion of the Kwakiutl Indians.” Columbia University Contributions to Anthropology 10. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1932a. “Current beliefs of the Kwakiutl Indians.” Journal of American Folklore 45: 177–260. ———. 1935b. Kwakiutl culture as reflected in mythology. Memoirs of the American Folklore Society, vol. 28. New York, G. E. Stechert. ———. 1947. “Kwakiutl grammar with a glossary of the suffixes,” In Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, Pt. 3, edited by Helene Boas Yampolsky and Zelig S. Harris, 203–377. Philadelphia. Boas, Franz and Helen Codere, eds. 1966. Kwakiutl ethnography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Boas, Franz and George Hunt. 1905. Kwakiutl texts. Memoir of the American Museum of Natural History, vol. 5. Publication of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, vol. 3. Boas, Franz and George Hunt. n.d. Manuscript in the language of the Kwakiutl Indians of Vancouver Island, 14 vols. Special Collections. Columbia University Libraries. Curtis, Edward S. 1915. The North American Indian, vol. 10. New York: Johnson Reprint. Eliade, Mircea. 1964. Shamanism, archaic techniques of ecstasy. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Bollingen 77, New York: Pantheon. ———. n.d. See Boas and Hunt, Manuscript in the language of the Kwakiutl Indians of Vancouver Island. Locher, G. W. 1932. The serpent in Kwakiutl religion, a study in primitive culture. Leyden: E. O. Brill, Ltd.     Irving GOLDMAN (1911–2002) was an American anthropologist and Professor of Anthropology at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. A student of Franz Boas, Goldman was a pioneer in ethnographic theory and a celebrat-ed ethnologist. He is the author of The Cubeo: Indians of the Northwest Amazon (1963, University of Illinois Press), Ancient Polynesian Society (1970, University of Chicago Press), and The mouth of heaven: An introduction to Kwakiutl religious thought (1975, John Wiley & Sons), which was the first synthesis of the encyclo-pedic Kwakiutl and English ethnographic reports produced by Franz Boas and George Hunt. ___________________ Editor’s Note: This is a reprint of Chapters 5 and 6 from Goldman, Irving. 1975. The mouth of heaven: An introduction to Kwakiutl religious thought. New York: John Wiley and Sons. We remind the reader that we retain the style of the original. 1. Laxsa is also a common expression for dying, in the phrase, “he has gone through” (Boas 1932a: 212). 2. When initiates return, it is said, “What in the world can vanquish us? Even Baxbakual-anuxsiwae is unable to overcome us” (Boas 1966: 218). 3. The distinction between curing shaman and Winter Ceremonial shaman is genuine, but not absolute. A person “disappearing” in the course of the Winter Ceremonial may sicken and then receive real shamanistic power (see Boas 1921: 733–742 for a case history). 4. The myth of Mink and the Wolves (Boas 1930: 57–86) sets the Winter Ceremonial among animals prior to the existence of human beings. Thus the animals are granted priority as well as parity. The Laalaxsendayo lineage of Gwetela takes this tradition of wolves as the first Winter Ceremonial performers to be the source of their own rites. The sons of Head Wolf “disappear” as initiates, but are, in fact, ambushed in the woods by Mink and Deer, who kill them. The wolves then use their supernatural powers to try to restore the wolf youths to life, but are thwarted by Mink who has the powers of Sisiutl. In shame at their failure to overcome Mink and his powers, the wolves slink away into the woods to remain forever animals. When the Laalaxsendayo took over the rites from the wolves they added the hamshamtses dance. Among wolves there is no Man Eater, and no overt theme of devouring. They are in their natural element. Head Wolf sponsors a Winter Ceremonial because he is downcast at the coming of winter. The tale implies that the animals are primary sources of Winter Ceremonial powers. Deer, a warrior chief among animals, is the first Fool dancer. Deer, Mink, and Raven (Great Inventor) are the constant antagonists of wolves. Raven, who had secretly witnessed the ceremony, passes on his knowledge to the first ancestor of the Laalaxsendayo. 5. The man-eater powers are said to be greater when seized in war than when received in marriage (Boas 1921: 1,017). 6. Chief Tlawages meets Cause of Weeping Woman in a stream. Both faint. But he re-covers and embraces her until she gives him four treasures, the property obtainer, the property accumulator, the water of life, and the apron that burns everything. She gives him also the name Pulling off Roof Boards (a reference to death). After copulating with her he meets Man Eater who gives him two of his names, Man Eater and Swallowing Everything, the dance of being vomited out by Raven, and another set of powers that include red cedar bark, the fire bringer, the death bringer, the water of life, and the un-failing harpoon (Boas 1921: 107–111). 7. “There is no doubt that the winter ceremonial is essentially religious, but it is so inti-mately associated with nonreligious activities, such as feasts and potlatches, that it is difficult to assess its religious value. It is my impression that its essential religious ele-ment lies in the belief in the presence of a supernatural power in and around the village which sanctions all activities” (Boas 1966: 172).  

Ardener: “Remote areas” This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Edwin Ardener. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online) “Remote areas” Some theoretical considerations Edwin Ardener   I hope that this title will be pleasantly misleading. I have gone behind the theme of this conference, to the idea of places, or peoples, or locations, that anthropologists have considered to be ‘fit’ for their study. For, if there is anything controversial about the idea of the social anthropologist working at home, or relatively near home, it is because some may fear that the very nature of the subject may therefore be transformed out of all recognition. There is clearly something in the idea that distance lends enhancement, if not enchantment, to the anthropological vision. Yet the work in Europe, for example, has clearly yielded results of great general interest. This paper therefore starts from a deliberately obscure and ill-defined term: ‘remote’. I choose it from the natural language, and show that in an anthropological sense it can be ‘unpacked’ in rather striking ways. This paper is related to my basic theoretical papers on the nature of social space (Ardener 1975, 1978). I shall refer to the new concept of ‘event-density’ or ‘event-richness’, which (since the space is analysable at all levels in essentially the same way) is the event-homologue of the phenomenon of ‘semantic-density’ described in the concluding parts of my recent paper on social anthropology and reality (Ardener 1982). ‘Semantic density’ is a statistical feature, at the point where definition and measurement intersect and collapse together. We have a number of difficult paths leading away from us, so let us start.1 The problem of identity It will be no surprise that interest in ‘minorities’, ‘embedded groups’, ‘plural societies’, and the like, has led us to problems of definition. The term ‘ethnicity’ was a useful step on the road, which produced its own difficulties. The resort to ‘identity’, as a term, was an attempt to restore the self-definitional element that seemed to be inherent in the idea of ‘ethnicity’, but which was shared by [39] entities other than ethnicities as normally conceived = many kinds of entities have identities. As far as ‘minorities’ are concerned, majorities are just as important for our comprehension of this problem. We know (at least since Ferguson in 1767) that the definition of entities by mutual (binary) opposition is part of the point.2 There is always the danger, however, that we may run the risk of so relativizing the distinction that we forget the original problem. The excellent volume called Belonging (Cohen 1982) has a title from a fuzzy part of the English lexicon which leaves all options open. Let me remind you of the statement, that ‘among the many things that society is or is like, it is or is like identity’ (Ardener and Ardener 1965). The social is, in virtue of its categorizing and classifying structures, a space that ‘identifies’. It is a chief source of any concept that we severally have of identity. That there is a multiplicity of identities that coexist together from any single perspective is not strictly speaking a problem theoretically. It is one of the proofs — and one of the costs — of the apparent paradox of the continuity between the space and the individuals that constitute it. They are defined by the space and are nevertheless the defining consciousness of the space. We hear now a great deal about ‘reflexivity’. Before that word loses its concreteness, let us remember that (to state it oversimply) our heads are full of categories generated by the social, which we project back upon the social. Perhaps, in the ‘normal course of events’ (as we put it), the ‘native actor’ does not perceive this interaction, for the social space is not for him or her an ‘object’, except intermittently. For the non-native social anthropologist the act of interacting with an alien social space, even relatively successfully, forms the basis of that ‘daily experience of misunderstanding’3 (at not only the ethnographic level but the theoretical level) which is the undoubted source of our greater readiness to see the space as object (of study), and thus, like Durkheim, to see ‘social facts as things’. To treat the social space as object is almost literally child’s play, when it is located in unfamiliar scenes and is already, in any case, predefined as ‘other’ in relation to our own world. ‘Reflexivity’ has become a popular, as opposed to a specialist, term in social anthropology as those conditions have changed. The task has not changed, however, save in that the individual/social interaction must be more minutely scrutinized. The currency of the term arises from an increase in theoretical awareness. It will no doubt acquire soft-centred connotations and be abandoned as the situation which produced it becomes commonplace. Nevertheless, it should not be confused with ‘subjectivity’. There was a time when the relativity of cultural categories was raised to a philosophical bogey as ‘relativism’. Anthropology was then discovering a mismatch between the categories of the observer and those generated by the purported object — other people. When the differences are more subtle, the gap is narrower between these two; the mismatch is virtually simultaneous. Since mismatch is our experience of relativity, then the reduction of ‘transmission time’ (between the observer and the purported object) and the [40] narrowing of the mismatch (between the categories of the observer and the other), demonstrates that the process that we first called relativization is not a form of anti-objectivity, but (as its application to ‘familiar’ experience more clearly shows) is on the contrary our only mode of objectivization. This is quite an important theoretical proof of what has for social anthropologists been intuitively sensed, and it will be illustrated in the treatment that follows.4 Remoteness: some phenomenology After these essential preliminaries, I start here from another English term: ‘remote’. For the moment it has no theoretical taint (sadly we may change that situation). I wish, by using it, to recapture the feature that started the personal interest of many anthropologists in their traditional areas of study. Elsewhere, I have pointed out that, for Europe, ‘remote areas’ of the globe have had a different conceptual geography, and have been perceived to exist on a different time-scale from the ‘central’ areas (Ardener 1975, 1985). But we are not now opening up a familiar ‘centre/periphery’ discussion — if only for the reason that most such discussion depends on an acceptance of known centres with known peripheries. On the contrary, the age of discovery showed us that the ‘remote’ was actually compounded of ‘imaginary’ as well as ‘real’ places; yet they were all of equal conceptual reality or unreality before the differences were revealed. ‘Brazil’, ‘California’, ‘India’, ‘Africa’, ‘Libya’, ‘Ethiopia’ — all were to one extent or other imagined (names ransacked from various sources), yet all were located eventually in limited and specific places.5 Occasionally we are conscious of a loss. Almost the most imaginary of all: the Antipodes (once the outlet of the Celtic Other World, and a home of King Arthur), and Australia (Terra Australis), are now almost the most mundane of all.6 On the other hand, and conversely, pockets of imaginary places have remained still unrealized within the European centre. When the far Antarctic was made real, Brittany and the Gaels were still ‘unrealized’, still ‘removed’ from the canons of Western realities, or indeed remote (Latin removeo). In the West, we are ‘space specialists’: we easily realize our conceptual spaces as physical spaces — for that is, in many respects, the European theme. ‘Remote’ areas are, for us, conventionally physically removed, but this obscures the conceptual phenomena associated with ‘remoteness’, which are real enough for biological anthropologists (for example) to perceive commuter-ridden villages of Otmoor (5-10 miles from Oxford) as ‘remote’. Let me begin from a naive point of view, with a little personal anthropology. The fact has frequently been noted that the discipline of social anthropology itself belongs to a part of the ‘academic vocabulary’ that is concerned with marginality, regarded from a Western perspective. In that sense, anywhere an anthropologist chooses to go is likely to show the quality I have just called ‘remoteness’. There are, however, interesting nuances. I [41] went first to the Ibo of South-Eastern Nigeria. It had, however, been expected that I would go to the Plateau area of Central-Northern Nigeria. I had read all the available literature on the many peoples of that zone at the International African Institute in Waterloo Place, guided by the quizzical attentions of Miss Barbara Pym, the then unpublished novelist, who was then embarking on her own peculiar fieldwork.7 In the event, the Nigerian government vetoed the worker who was going to the Ibo, and I went there instead. I did not personally like the change, for various reasons, and strangely, the Ibo never came to seem ‘remote’ to me. The Plateau certainly had seemed so. It was not that the Ibo were lacking in conventionally exotic features. In fact, no people were more ‘anthropological’ or ‘ethnographical’ in other ways than the Ibo, but they never fitted the qualities I now examine in retrospect as ‘remote’. Of course, once there, parts of Ibo country began themselves to acquire the purely topographical characteristics of ‘remoteness’ — places more than walking distance, then more than cycling distance, then places in the north and north-west of the area. Nevertheless, I now see that the Ibo were, in the particular sense I am trying to unpack, essentially definers of remoteness in others, although with normally unperceived pockets of internal remoteness — in a way, rather like England itself. Indeed, taken as a whole, Southern Nigeria has that quality, compared with certain other African countries. For the moment, I am merely trying to pinpoint the quality; what I mean may become clearer if one opposes Nigeria to the Cameroons, which are, in contrast, commonly experienced as ‘remote’ — not only by me, but by almost everyone else who visits the country, and it retains this quality even when after ten or twenty years you are an ‘expert’ in the area. The more expert, the lonelier you seem to become. To know the Cameroons well is to feel that you are outliving your contemporaries. The Cameroons does not become less ‘remote’: you become more and more remote yourself. Perhaps this condition is, at a higher level of opposition, one that is characteristic of all anthropologists — as against (say) sociologists. I am feeling towards the statement that although there are always ‘real’ centres, and ‘real’ peripheries which move relative to each other, there is an added feature of a more puzzling kind. There are certainly some topographical elements that are relevant. Mountains conventionally add to the ‘remoteness’ experience, but so very frequently do plains, forests, and rivers — so much so that the inhabitants of ‘unremote’ places sometimes say that they do not have ‘real’ mountains, plains, forests, or rivers — only something else, hills (say), woods, or streams. Contrariwise, some areas (like Brittany) call their hills ‘mountains’. The Scots, resisting the ‘remote’ vocabulary, perhaps, call their mountains ‘hills’. The actual geography is not the overriding feature — it is obviously necessary that ‘remoteness’ has a position in topographical space, but it is defined within a topological space whose features are expressed in a cultural vocabulary. The Bakweri of Cameroon cannot really be said to be objectively remote from the [42] coastal belt of that country. Their more elevated settlements overlook an area of superficial commercial modernization and the sea. Yet they live up the Cameroon Mountain, and the higher seems to be the remoter in this elastic semantic realm. With the Cameroons we are getting close to the problem I want to discuss. For example, the feature I describe of ‘remoteness’ (this term you see now is a label for something which is only gradually casting its shadow in language during my exposition) persists when it has lost its geographical correlates — that is, when the ‘remote’ area has been reached, and when it should now be merely present. Thus people would visit the Cameroons, and (as it were) stagger in to see us as if they had surmounted vast odds; as if the Cameroons had a protective barrier. Yet, from the inside outwards, there was an almost exaggerated contrary sense of the absence of any barrier to the world — a peculiar sense of excessive vulnerability, of ease of entry. With every improvement of communication over the decades, the more speedily did people appear to pour in uninvited; and yet the more they seemed to be on the last stages of an expedition to some Everest that terminated in the middle of your floor. That is a law of ‘remote’ areas — the basic paradox, for that is how you know you are in one. The West still maintains ideals of such places. ‘Shangri La’ is an image used by French visitors to the former British Cameroons, and by United Nations visitors to both Cameroons. You know you are ‘remote’ by the intense quality of the gaze of visitors, by a certain steely determination, by a slightly frenetic air, as if their clocks and yours move at different rates. Perhaps this is why the native of such an area sometimes feels strangely invisible — the visitors seem to blunder past, even through him. I think that to formulate this point you have to have stayed for very long successive periods in various spaces, in order to separate out this quality, which I take to be a real one and connected to the experience of time. It is, of course, a conceptual experience. The one-way invisible barrier is a singularity of in the social space, which I have mapped already in formal terms in the Munro lecture (Ardener 1975). Yet, as I have mentioned, remoteness does not appear to protect the ‘remote areas’. In the Cameroons we penetrated more and more parts which, on the ordinary level of the relativity of conventional geographical remoteness, were remote even in the Cameroons. There were areas so ‘remote’ anthropologically that there was nothing written on them. Yet, when reached, they seemed totally exposed to the outer world: they were continually in contact with it. Why were they not known equally to ‘the world’? Remote areas turn out to be like gangster hideouts — full of activity, and of half-recognized faces. As the years went by, we had the choice of the blankest part of the Cameroon map: the Fungom area of the Bamenda Plateau, and within that area the Chiefdom of Esu. A thatched house was built on a hill, round which the village-capital nestled. The paradox of living in that blank area summed up the experience of remoteness very well, some of [43] which I shall touch on soon. For the moment I will note that an uncompleted dirt road led to a log over a stream, and a path that wound up that hobbit-like hill. From its top any distant Land-Rover could be heard approaching for miles, its cloud of dust being visible for further miles, until its minuscule occupants alighted and began their ominous ascent, gathering children and helpers as they came. To the strange arrivals the village was either a scene of ‘traditional hospitality of a simple highland folk’ or the location of incomprehensible reticences. The very act of having arrived was its own justification. Years later, the new arrivals were a unit of gendarmerie, for this was the remote area of all remote areas for the new Francophone government and, like all areas of this peculiar type, not only perceived to be Shangri La but also the home of purported smugglers and spies. How shall the inhabitants of a ‘remote area’ evaluate the arbitrary love-hate of its visitors? Are alternating periods of ‘unspoiledness’ and violence their inevitable fate? After the destructions of one generation of strangers how is it that they are asked to play the role of ideal society to the next, before being unthinkingly redeveloped or underdeveloped out of existence by the next? The history of remoteness in Cameroon merges historically into the universal history of political states; my discussion is to show its minimal reflection in ‘states of mind’. The cognoscenti will recognize by now that Western Scotland is an area in which canonical levels of ‘remoteness’ are to be found. Indeed some may suspect that this has been an elaborate way of introducing the really basic economic and political factors. Such important matters as the Highland Clearances, for example, cannot surely derive from mere conceptualizations? That would be a false opposition, although the improver of the Duchess of Sutherland’s estates, the well-known James Loch, was fired with high levels of what looks suspiciously like conceptualization: late-eighteenth-century ideas of betterment, much more powerful than malice. And what conceptualizations fired the undoubted and more easily handled villains of the piece like the factor, Patrick Sellar?8 Those old ladies carried out of their houses so that the thatch could be burned: beware of being a conceptualization in another person’s mind! The great contribution of Malcolm Chapman’s book, The Gaelic Vision in Scottish Culture (1978), was to approach this point from its literary expression. A Gael once asked in a poem: ‘Co sgriobh mi? (‘Who wrote me?). When the anthropologist Chapman with the freshness of inexperience innocently replied, ‘Oh, didn’t you know?: it was Macpherson, Arnold, Renan, the Edinburgh intellectuals . . .’, all hell broke loose. Professor Derick Thomson, in his incarnation as Ruaraidh MacThomais, had himself often asked the same question, but he did not like that answer.9 The reasons are understandable as we shall see, for Chapman, in showing how the very definition of Celticity and Gaeldom was inescapably tainted at source, and how the imposition of it had led to a ‘symbolic expropriation’ of the [44] Gaelic identity, seemed to ignore the experienced reality of being a Gael. Nevertheless, for the first time, the paradox of Gaeldom was brought out from the comfortingly drifting layers of binary oppositions: development/underdevelopment, traditional/modern, centre/periphery, that had covered it for years like the soft patter of autumn leaves. A similar experience occurred for Maryon McDonald (1982) among the Bretons.10 In her case she showed brilliantly how the Breton militant language movement coexisted uneasily with the native speakers who were cast as ideal types by their kaftan-wearing admirers. This time it was the militants who filled the newspapers with their violent reactions. I am personally sure the work of Chapman and McDonald will stand as genuine advances. The Gaels and the Bretons have a proper point, however. They want to know, ‘Who then are we, really?’ They believe as if they were indeed privileged enough to require to know something that no one can ever know. It is, however, an important feature of the ‘remote’ social spaces — indeed, as I argue, it is of the peculiar structure of such spaces — that the question imposes itself; and so far it is true that we have given the appearance of tackling only one half of the problem. On one side ‘remote areas’ are indeed parts of an imaginary world. I have kept for some years an image to print as a dedication to this phase of our studies, and I gave it to Malcolm Chapman to use on his flyleaf; it is from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass: ‘ “He’s dreaming now,” said Tweedledee: “and what do you think he’s dreaming about? . . . Why, about you And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you’d be?” “Where I am now, of course,” said Alice.“Not you!” Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. “You’d be nowhere. Why, you’re only a sort of thing in his dream!”“If that there King was to wake,” added Tweedledum, “You’d go out — bang! — just like a candle!” ‘ The expropriation of the image of another is a puzzling thing. I have mentioned the novelist Barbara Pym. Now that she is dead, a strange simulacrum of her is taking shape, which is analogous in its processes to that effect caused by visitors to a remote area. Experts on Barbara Pym now begin to appear who know more about her than she knew herself, or than any single friend knew, while those of us inserted into her novels become symbolized figures, merely narrative elements.11 There never was, in any purely physical location, that Barbara Pym — it is all ‘true’ perhaps, but it never existed. The new Pym is a series of storage points in a fuzzy network of information, whose general distribution signals the existence of the ex-Pym, the late Pym, the Pym that passed away. And who has selected these points, and in what space are they located? Similarly, the Gaels, the Cameroonians, and others, have had the privileged experience of being made, as collectivities, part of a similar process. They have become, like Pym, at worst a ‘text’, at best ‘art’. The [45] ‘remote’ social spaces thus merely exhibit, in an exaggerated form, a feature which affects all human beings to some extent. Yet we assert that we are still ‘there’, in some experienced way, behind the textualization — at least while we are still alive. The social space consists of human persons, so it is right that the Gaels and others should assert: ‘However we are perceived or constructed in the worlds of others, nevertheless there are real Gaels.’ It is not necessary, therefore, with this readership, to say that the Western Islanders do not see themselves as resembling that artistic or textual remoteness. They are quite ordinary — as ordinary as anybody can be who has the regular experience of wild-eyed romantics tottering through his door. The social space is a material one. A lifetime of being treated as a princess turns you into an ordinary — princess; a lifetime as an untouchable makes you just an unexceptionable — untouchable. A lifetime of being in a remote area, turns you into an ordinary . . . ? What? To answer the question we must consider some paradoxes. Remote areas are full of strangers. I know people who hardly experience the idea of ‘a stranger’. No suburbanite sees the unknown mass of neighbours as ‘strangers’. The city-dweller does not inhabit a world of strangers. To make a city-dweller perceive a stranger he must be marked by such criteria that total rejection is likely to be his reaction. As a result incoming New Zealanders can really believe they are Londoners.12 Try to get away with that, however, in the Hebrides. There, every social interaction has its marking preliminaries (‘Co as a tha thu?’ ‘ Where are you from?’, or the like). People in remote areas have a wide definition of ‘strangers’, so that, whatever the real numbers of the latter, there will always appear to be a lot of them. This conceptualization interacts, however, with the undoubted tendency for perceived strangers actually to congregate in remote areas. We must be careful in formulating this point. First of all, the stranger remains ‘marked’ longer, perhaps for ever, so that the residue of strangeness accumulates. We can see already the difficulty of talking of ‘real’ highlanders, when biographies are well remembered. But even this is not enough, for the kinds of strangers that congregate in remote areas are quite peculiar and all over Europe one can list them: painters, jewellery-makers, vegetarians, cultists, hunters, prospectors, bird-watchers, and innovators as we shall see. Some of these categories have been present at all times under different historical guises, including those of monks and invaders.13 Remote areas are full of innovators. Anyone in a remote area feels free to innovate. There is always a new pier being planned, and always some novelty marking or marring the scene. For the Western Islanders there is always the new Highlands and Islands Development Board scheme. The next boom is always on the way: kelp, sheep, deer, sheep again, oil, [46] fishmeal. There is always a new quarry for new road materials. We are always seeing the end of some old order. Meanwhile, beyond the new pier is the old pier, and behind the old pier the even older pier. The Cameroons have had an endless sequence of innovations since 1884, or even since 1858: yet the innovations seem to have a short life.14 The paradox is that there is always change and intervention in remote areas, while in timeless Leeds stagnation seems to rule. Remote areas are full of ruins of the past. The corollary of the above is that the remains of failed innovations, and of dead economic periods, scatter the landscape. There is another paradox here: that remote areas cry out for development, but they are the continuous victims of visions of development. The Cameroons has presented a steady sequence of innovation and ruin. The Highlands and Islands Development Board has been in existence long enough for its history already to be marked by the monuments of its own failed projects: Breasclete on the Isle of Lewis, Ardveenish on Barra, bidding fair to join the even earlier projects of Lord Leverhulme — before the HIDB period itself passes away as another golden age of innovation, into the past.15 Remote areas offer images of unbridled pessimism or utopian optimism, of change and decay, in their memorials. The Highlands are, as a whole, a great monument at one level to a Malthusian experiment on a disastrous scale that filled most of the nineteenth century. Within that total landscape with ruins (and few human figures) nest smaller landscapes with their own lesser ruins. Remote areas are full of rubbish .This is a minor corollary of the last. Remote areas are the home of rubbish, because rubbish is not a category there. What appears remarkable is that people elsewhere expect to tidy up the formless universe. Such an aspiration belongs to the worlds that define remote areas. These defining worlds do not, of course, perceive their own refuse tips, their own black holes, full of rubbish. In the Hebrides German tourists feel free to criticize your rubbish.16 Remote areas are in constant contact with the world. We must interpret this carefully. Remote areas are obsessed with communications: the one road; the one ferry; the tarring of the road; the improvement of the boat; the airstrip on reclaimed ground or even on the sandy beach. The world always beckons — the Johnsonian road to England, or the coast, or wherever it is, is an attraction to the young, for it leads from your very door to everywhere. It is quite different in this respect from a city street. The road to Cathay does not flow from No. 7 Bloomsbury Mansions. The assiduity with which the television is watched in remote areas has a particular quality. A programme on the Mafia is squirrelled away as part of the endless phantasmagoria of life that begins at Oban or Kelvinside. Are we making the contradictory statement that, after all, remote areas are not remote? If it [47] seems like that, it is a result of out earlier perception that remote areas, from the inside, feel open and unprotected — the one-way barrier. Strangers and entrepreneurs or remote areas are full of pots. ‘ Lianish’ is on the very end of the road from the island centre, one of the longest continuous journeys: there are fifteen houses, two bed-and-breakfast ladies, an English potter/cowman/temporary postman, and one child under eleven. The postbus runs until 4 p.m. Only an incomer will work the ‘unsociable’ evening round. The Englishman takes seriously his ‘social service’ function, does the drunks’ trip to town, and gets home late in the evening. The real postman will be watching the television. A typical incomer, many Gaels will think, without animus. Incomers suffer frequently from remote-area anxiety: the arrival of another incomer is a sign that the fastness has been penetrated — we may call it the Crusoe effect. The incomer as entrepreneur, which we have been gradually approaching, is a cliché of the Hebrides (the phenomenon is widespread, however). On one island the best private bus is run by an in-married incomer — a woman. The place it stops for tea is at the ‘croft’ of a man from Bolton, Lancashire, who admirably carries on traditional crofting activities, such as weaving. Almost all of the hotels are run or managed by incomers. The Lewis Pakistanis may not all speak the fluent Gaelic that legend says, but the legend marks their assimilation to the averageness of strangeness that characterizes incomers. No amount of Gaelic would turn them into Gaels, but their existence is used to contrast with those incomers who have learnt no Gaelic at all. It is easy to document the entrepreneurs that are recent incomers. But when one looks at the ‘island-born’ entrepreneurs, there emerge the names of old tacksmen’s families, of introduced mainland shepherds, and persons of odd biography — internal incomers, former incomers, products of incomer-island marriages.One may easily concede that bed-and-breakfast ladies will be an exception, that they are from a random selection of hospitable families. Islands differ markedly and on the Long Island it is a matter of report that the Isle of Skye has taken to the hospitality trade to a remarkable extent. In the Outer Hebrides, the time, trouble, and expense of catering for guests can hardly be worth the £10 or £12 return that is characteristically charged. Once more, the bed-and-breakfast entrepreneur is likely to be upwardly mobile. A surprising number are not Gaelic-speaking. Indeed, the ubiquitous Scandinavian linguist is directed to lists issued by the Gaelhols enterprise. Gaels in the general trade are frequently families in which the husband is already the holder of another job. In remote areas the same set do everything. Connected to the last point is the interesting observation (which is an actually voiced complaint) that the [48] same people take all the new jobs. Although this seems at first sight strange, the phenomenon is not restricted to the Hebrides. Development money tends to channel through the same entrepreneurs, however tiny their activities by world standards. A kind of micro-economic pluralism is endemic, as a pen-picture will illustrate. Under Milk Wood of a remote island. 17 Down to the ferry every evening go the teenagers, earnest with purpose; the grocer fills the cars with petrol (he is in charge of both food and fuel); the taxi-driver hires out the cars, to drive to his two rentable holiday homes; the dustman drives up with the travelling library; the retired English officer’s daughter bakes the cakes, and ranges Sloanely to serve them to the airport passengers; the Commander bakes wholemeal bread (for incomers — Gaels prefer Mother’s Pride sliced); the retired teacher grows vegetables to be sold in his sister’s hostelry (she whose husband in Edinburgh writes for Acarsaid, the national journal, edited by the Revd Archie Hill alias Gillesbuig Mac an Duin, professional Gael), while the sister’s son discussing introducing ‘speed boats between the islands’ with Donald G., who bought an HIDB craft centre costing the EEC £200,000, for only £40,000, when two managers (incomers) each left to open their own shops; the latter, bearded, twice the size of an ordinary islander, spends much time on the plane to Glasgow and Corfu; seeing below Mr Mackenzie running his ferries, in turn with taking pay to skipper a subsidized ferry in competition with himself; the postman mows the lawns of his, the Caolas, guesthouse at Creagnaculist; Mrs McNeil inscribes her names on the list of Gaelhols for language learners; in the loch the Dean of Wyanunk Theological, Ohio, paints the wood of his restored castle with creosote; the Dutch wife of an Australian professor opens her guesthouse and craftshop; A. F., former serviceman and performer in Man of Arran, tells oft-told tales to an anthropologist; his charming daughter has 300 Christmas cards from Americans from whom she half-knowingly extracts the admiration due to the identity-constructing Gael . . . So we come to the nub. By now something in the paradox of remote areas can be seen to be systematic. It will be evident that I have used the terms ‘remote’ and ‘remote area’ as mere semantic grains upon which to grow a theoretical crystal. I wished to propose an ‘empty formative’ that would generate the interaction between the anthropologist and his field, the definer and the defined, the classifier and the classified, the imagined and the realized. The condition might have been given any code name, or a letter, or a number, and not illustrated by local colour. Nevertheless, the ‘remoteness’ paradoxes are well known (although not necessarily in all aspects everywhere the same), and so ‘remoteness’ may now finish its life in this paper as a technical term. I will therefore provide a theoretical conclusion, inevitably somewhat condensed. [49] Remote areas are event-rich, or event-dense In the social space, not everything that happens is an event. Much of what passes has for the participants an automaton-like quality. Events are defined within the space by a certain quality which, to avoid a special terminology, we may for the moment call ‘significance’. The nature of the event-matrix may be modelled synchronically (Ardener 1978), or diachronically (Ardener 1975). Essentially, specifying something in the space introduces a singularity into it, which ‘twists off’ the specified. The latter is bounded one way — from the perspective of the specifier. The phenomena outlined above may be expressed in another form, by saying that the information content is high. That is: randomization, the ultimate condition of active systems, is continually resisted. These areas delicately teeter on the edge of perpetual innovation. This feature is both internal and external. Thus ‘remoteness’ is a specification, and a perception, from elsewhere, from an outside standpoint; but from inside the people have their own perceptions — if you like, a counterspecification of the dominant, or defining space, working in the opposite direction. Thus in the Cameroons the Bakweri were defined by general repute, in their multi-ethnic area, as apathetic (Ardener 1956; Ardener, Ardener, and Warmington 1960), while the silent villagers saw themselves as involved in a life-and-death struggle with zombies and their masters, which gave deep significance to the slightest act (Ardener 1970). All the materialities of dominance, economic and conceptual, were present in their traumatic history. These spiritual events are, however, of the utmost seriousness, as serious as the Diwygiad in Wales, or the Disruption in the Kirk which led to the sense of continuous spiritual battle that marks the characteristic religious life of the Presbyterian Hebrides. Their materialities do not lack some possible analogies with those that summoned up the zombies: expropriation, depopulation, landlordism, and definition as dwindling, dying, and out of time. The double specification of remote areas, or double-markedness, produces that note of eccentricity and overdefinition of individuality, if you like an overdetermination — or to exaggerate slightly, a structure of strangers. In the large stable systems of dominant central areas, in contrast, there are equally large regularities, with more automatisms, in which only in periodic ‘prophetic situations’ do major singularities occur (Ardener 1975). They are event-poor. It is evident that the event quality is not a direct function of numbers or population for, in contrast, it is remote areas as we have defined them that are ‘event-rich’. Event-richness is like a small-scale, simmering, continuously generated set of singularities, which are not just the artefact of observer bias (as we have seen, observers commonly perceive only a puzzling blankness) — but due to some materiality, that I interpret to be related to the enhanced defining power of individuals. Event-richness is the result of the weakening of, or probably [50] the continuous threat to, the maintenance of a self-generating set of overriding social definitions (including those that control people’s own physical world), thus rendering possible the ‘disenchainment’ of individuals, and that overdetermination of individuality, to which I referred. The peculiar driving force of abortive innovation is precisely due to this, and the sense of vulnerability to intrusion experienced in such areas is genuine. The structural time is quite different, and in so far as a ‘remote’ area is (as it always is) part of a much wider definitional space (shall we say the dominant State) it will be perceived, itself, in toto, as a singularity in that space. If that is so, then event-richness can occur within any social space. That is the meaning of our earlier paradox, that we can travel to internal remotenesses that have not yet been actualized, or which still form singularities in our otherwise more informationally random social space. It will be recalled that all individuals are potentially singularities in a social space through their (only intermittently exercised) power of self-definition. Since remote areas are singularities in the total or wider space, all singularities there are reinforced. As more and more internal remotenesses are defined out of our changing societies, it will be no surprise that social anthropologists, addicts of the event-rich, will be disappearing into them. I am afraid that many will think this terminology unnecessarily arcane. They will not have far to seek in the literature for more conventional terms. For them I will, however, phrase it another way. The lesson of ‘remote’ areas is that this is a condition not related to periphery, but to the fact that certain peripheries are by definition not properly linked to the dominant zone. They are perceptions from the dominant zone, not part of its codified experience. Not all purely geographical peripheries are in this condition, and it is not restricted to peripheries. Finally, I do not need to stress here that while human beings have theoretically unlimited classifying power, not all classifications have equal experiential density. The feature of a ‘remote area’ (in our technical sense of a singularity of a particular type) is that those so defined are intermittently conscious of the defining processes of others that might absorb them. That is why they are the very crucibles of the creation of identity, why they are of great theoretical interest, and why the social anthropologist ‘at home’ may be very far away indeed. References Ardener, E. 1956 Coastal Bantu of the Cameroons. London: International African Institute. ———. 1970 Witchcraft, Economics and the Continuity of Belief. In M. Douglas (ed.) Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations. ASA Monographs 9. London: Tavistock Publications. ———. 1971 Introductory Essay. In E. Ardener (ed.) Social Anthropology and Language. ASA Monographs 10, ix-cii. London: Tavistock Publications. ———. 1975 The Voice of Prophecy: Further Problems in the Analysis of Events. The Munro Lecture, Edinburgh. Publication forthcoming. ———. (1978/1980) Some Outstanding Problems in the Analysis of Events. In E. Schwimmer (ed.) (1978) Yearbook of Symbolic Anthropology I: 103-21. London: Hurst. Reprinted in M. Foster and S. Brandes (eds) (1980) Symbol as Sense. New York: Academic Press. ———. 1982 Social Anthropology, Language, and Reality. In D. Parkin (ed.) Semantic Anthropology. ASA Monographs 22, 1-14. London: Academic Press. ———. 1985 Social Anthropology and the Decline of Modernism. In J. Overing (ed.) Reason and Morality. ASA Monographs 24, 24-47. London: Tavistock Publications. Ardener, E. and Ardener, S. 1965 A Directory Study of Social Anthropologists. British Journal of Sociology (16) 4: 295-313. Ardener, E., Ardener, S., Warmington, W. A. (1960) Plantation and Village in the Cameroons. London: Oxford University Press. Chapman, M. 1978 The Gaelic Vision in Scottish Culture. London: Croom Helm. Cohen, A. (ed.) (1982) Belonging. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Cooper, D. 1985 The Road to Mingulay. A View of the Western Isles. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Edwards, J. 1985 Language, Society and Identity. London: Blackwell/Deutsch. Ferguson, A. 1767 An Essay in the History of Civil Society. London. Gellner, E. 1968 The New Idealism: Cause and Meaning in the Social Sciences. In I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (eds) Problems in the Philosophy of Science. Amsterdam: North Holland. ———. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Holt, H. and Pym, H. H. (1984) A Very Private Eye. The Diaries, Letters and Notebooks of Barbara Pym. London: Macmillan. Johnson, S. and Boswell, J. (1775/1785) Journey to the Western Islands and A Tour to the Hebrides (edited by R. W. Chapman, 1930, and subsequent editions). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Loomis, R. S. (1956) Wales and the Arthurian Legend. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Macaulay, D. (ed.) (1976) Nua-Bhardachd Ghaidhlig (Modern Scottish Gaelic Poems). Edinburgh: Southside. Mcdonald, M. E. (1982) Social Aspects of Language and Education in Brittany. Oxford: unpublished thesis. Parkin, D. (ed.) Semantic Anthropology. ASA Monographs 22. London: Academic Press. Pocock, D. 1961 Social Anthropology. London: Sheed & Ward. Richards, E. 1982 A History of the Highland Clearances. Agrarian Transformation and the Evictions 1746-1886. London: Croom Helm. ___________________ * Publisher’s note: This is a reprint of Edwin Ardener, 1987, “ ‘Remote areas’: some theoretical considerations.” In Anthropology at Home, edited by Anthony Jackson, 38-54. ASA Monographs 25, London and New York: Tavistock Publications. We are grateful to the ASA for granting us the right to reprint it. We remind the reader that we retain the style of the original. The original pagination is indicated in the text in square brackets. 1. This is a paper of some degree of abstraction. It is not an account of the Western Isles, but it should not, despite the terminology, be other than obvious to Gaels. It takes a great deal of explanation, they will be aware, to state the facts to those outwith. 2. Adam Ferguson wrote, in An Essay in the History of Civil Society (1767: 31): ‘The titles of fellow citizen and countryman unopposed to those of alien and foreigner, to which they refer, would fall into disuse, and lose their meaning.’ This had a great influence on Evans-Pritchard (see Pocock 1961: 78; Ardener 1971: lix). Despite this, an ESRC correspondent referred to it as a recent and untried theory. 3. Ardener 1971: xvii. Also: ‘Even the most exemplary technical approach to language would not in fact have solved the basic problem of communication. The anthropological “experience” derives from the apprehension of a critical lack of fit of (at least) two entire world-views, one to the other.’ 4. There is endless useless confusion between relativity and relativization on the one hand, and a chimera called (usually by non-anthropologists) ‘cultural relativism’ on the other. Like many contemporaries (cf. Gellner 1983; Edwards 1985) I am not a ‘cultural relativist’. The very act of the comparison of cultures implies the existence of appropriate canons of comparison. By those canons judgements can be made. The relativity of social worlds is a mere fact, beyond all judgements: they are constructed differently, not equally. It is, of course, inappropriate to charge a culture with inferiority because it has few hue terms, or does not separate arm from hand terminologically. Judgements may, however, be made about the ‘adequacy’ of a terminological system. It is sufficient evidence to support this assertion to point out that judgements of inadequacy are daily made, even within a culture. Thus doctors devised anatomical terms, and artists construct colour charts. It is not great step further to assert, if we want to: ‘cultures are extremely unequal in their cognitive power’ (Gellner 1968: 401). The sentence remains, of course, a sentence in our language. 5. ‘Brazil’ was a red dye-wood; later an imaginary Atlantic island was so named in maps; even after it was located in South America, a non-existent ‘Brazil Rock’ remained on British Admiralty charts until the second half of the nineteenth century. California was then taken from a story of 1510, published in Madrid; it was near the Indies and the terrestrial paradise. India: variously placed, particularly in Indonesia and the Antilles. Libya: once Africa. Africa: once Tunisia. Ethiopia: once any African land occupied by people with ‘burnt faces’. 6. See Loomis (1956: 61-76) for the Arthurian Antipodes, and once more the terrestrial paradise. 7. Barbara Pym included known anthropologists and African linguists in several of her novels, in particular Less than Angels (1955), or as composite characters (‘Everard Bone’, and the like). 8. The Highland Clearances were already under way at the time of Samuel Johnson’s visit to the inner isles in 1776. The sagacious doctor greatly blamed the landlords for encouraging emigrations. In some sense they are still going on. The period for which the term is notorious, some time between 1790 and 1860, was marked as such precisely because of its ideological nature. The Duchess of Sutherland’s commissioner, James Loch, wrote: ‘It was one of the vast changes which the progress of the times demand and will have, and I shall feel ever grateful that I have had so much to do with (these) measures’ (cited in Richards 1982: 185). At ground level the Morayshire agricultural entrepreneur, Patrick Sellar, with his colleague, William Young, provided a practical sense of purpose to the implementation of the fashionable ideas after 1809. ‘It was during these removals (in Strathnaver) ‘that Patrick Sellar was alleged to have set fire to houses and barns, and caused the deaths of several people, including a nonagenarian woman called Chisholm. He was brought to trial and acquitted in 1816’ (Richards 1982: 312). Derick Thomson writes, in his well-known poem, ‘Srath Nabhair’: ‘Agus sud a’bhliadhna cuideachd a shlaod iad a’ chailleach do’n sitig, a shealltain cho eòlach ’s a bha iad air an Fhìrinn, oir bha nid aig eunlaith an adhair (agus cròthan aig na caoraich) ged nach robh aàt aice-se anns an cuireadh i a ceann fòidhpe.’ In his own translation: ‘And that too was the year/ they hauled the old woman out onto the dung heap,/ to demonstrate how knowledgeable they were in scripture,/ for the birds of the air had nests/ (and the sheep had folds)/ though she had no place in which to lay down her head’ (Macaulay 1976: 153). 9. The line is from Iain Mac a’ Ghobhain: ‘Cò sgriobh mi? Cò tha dèanamh bàrdachd shanas-reice de mo chnàmhan? Togaidh mi mo dhòrn gorm ruitha: ‘Gàidheal calma le a chànan.’ ‘Who wrote me? Who is making a poetry/of advertisements from my bones?/I will raise my blue fist to them:/ “The stout Highlander with his language”’ (Macaulay 1976: 179). Derick Thomson writes: ‘Cha do dh’aithnich mi ‘m brèid Beurla,an liomh Gallda bha dol air an fhiodh,cha do leugh mi na facail air a’ phrais,cha do thuig mi gu robh mo chinneadh a’ dol bàs.’ ‘I did not recognize the English braid,/ The Lowland varnish being applied to the wood,/ I did not read the words on the brass,/ I did not understand that my race was dying’ (Macaulay 1976: 157). The Glasgow and Edinburgh reviewers of Chapman’s book were unnecessarily outraged, but see the careful consideration, in two long articles by James Shaw Grant, in the Stornoway Gazette (1978), and the appreciative review by Parman in Man. 10. The tendency for publicists to react ambiguously to those using the threatened language in a non-private way is comprehensible. 11. See Holt and Pym (1984), and its reviews. 12. It is not thought odd that the London regional television programme should have the Scots presenter interviewing local representatives with northern accents. The suddenness of city explosions, when they occur, suggests that there are some pockets of remoteness within these blank spaces! 13. Adomnan’s Life of St Columba is a medieval classic of remote area studies. 14. The Baptist settlement of 1858 had an ‘improving’ philosophy; the German annexation of 1884 led to the establishment of plantations. 15. HIDB friends will not be offended; they read worse every day in the press. Ardveenish may yet take off. Lord Leverhulme’s ambitions for Lewis and Harris were a benign form of paternalism. 16. Round a crofthouse in Lewis were the following items, according to the writer Derek Cooper (one of the most sensitive reporters of the Hebrides): ‘5 cwt van (circa 1950s); Ford tractor minus one wheel; fragment of pre-Great War reaper; upright piano; 37 blue plastic fishboxes; 7 green lemonade crates; 2 chimney pots; a sizable pyramid of sand; a pile of cement blocks; 7 lobster creels; assorted timber; 2 bales of barbed wire (rusted); broken garden seat; Hercules bicycle frame; piece of unidentified machinery (loom?); a sofa’ (Cooper 1985: 192). 17. This is a carefully fictionalized picture, and several islands are combined. Tamara Kohn has pointed out that Hebrideans nevertheless are used to pulling apart composite pictures and painstakingly reassembling them. In any case, there are no prizes!

Lying, honor, and contradiction This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Michael Gilsenan. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau6.2.031 REPRINT Lying, honor, and contradiction Michael GILSENAN, New York University   Sociological structures differ profoundly according to the measure of lying which operates in them.– Georg Simmel This essay focuses on the ways in which meaning emerges in the practical reality of the everyday world rather than on the formal construction of systems of classification and symbolism.1 With a particular concentration on the manifold practices of what will be called “lying,” I shall try to show the way in which individuals in a Lebanese village negotiate and transact about the most important area of value in any culture, social personality and the significance with which behavior is invested. I shall go on to argue that kizb, the Arabic word translated here as “lying,” is a fundamental element not only of specific situations and individual actions, but of the cultural universe as a whole; and that further it is the product of, and produces in [498]turn, basic elements and contradictions in the social structure. Instead of proceeding by the study of taxonomic systems, I shall assume that tacit and explicit sets of meaning can be examined through everyday activity. For Simmel the lie is chiefly significant because it “engenders by its very nature an error concerning the lying subject” (Simmel 1964: 312), and because it fundamentally affects the reciprocal knowledge which is at the root of all interaction. The lie is a technique for the restriction of the social distribution of knowledge over time, and is thus ultimately woven into the system of power and control in a society. How it informs certain kinds of social relations, and in what spheres, becomes for Simmel the major problem, and this leads into his famous discussion of secrecy. His emphasis on the process of manipulation of meaning by the lying subject highlights the part lying plays in the constitution of the self. A lie by X about X is a classic instance of “creating the self,” of purposely fashioning a social personality “out there” for one’s own contemplation, of making an object of and to the subject for his own aesthetic self-regard. Knowing what he lies about in reference to himself and how he does so gives the key to the innermost realms of the individual. But lying in the everyday world is also a conscious act directed at another; it is always part of social meanings and social relations. Indeed, the lie is usually accessible to the observer, not in its original form in the actor’s intention, but as a judgment made by others (or an other) of certain verbal or behavioral signs.2 Lying often manifests itself to us socially as an attribution made by others to the actor of a specific intention, whether or not such an intention “in fact” existed. The modes and conditions of such attributions are sociologically as significant as the strategic, purposive use of lying by a subject. It is here, in the examination of the lie in action, that we learn the full meaning of the classification “that is a lie.”3 Such judgments may be public and discrediting, or they may be privately made by the other who for some reason has no interest in revealing his judgment and is prepared to go along “as if” things are as they seem. There may be tacit cooperation and collaboration, or challenge and social compromise. Moreover, all the while others may be unsure, unable to answer the question whether such and such an act or statement is a lie or not, and they may turn to procedures for testing it when it is relevant that they do so. Such “monitoring” will depend on whether there is information, uniformly or selectively available, for verifying the individual’s representation, or whether it is simply unverifiable and a matter of trust. Similarly, the lying subject may have difficulty in discovering if he is believed, and the nonlying subject in realizing that his conduct is labelled by some as a lie. Uncertainty as to the precise degree of lying or truth on both sides will always be present and subject to active assessment in problematic situations. For insofar as falseness undermines our notions of legitimate and right behavior, indeed the certainty of our grasp on the reality of the common-sense world, it constitutes a threat of a serious order to [499]our social reality.4 The conjunction or disjunction between appearance and reality, shifting and ever critical, is hedged with ambiguity concerning judgment and value, act and intention, what is concealed and what is revealed. The concept of Kizb The meanings and range of the word kizb5 will emerge in the course of this essay. Precisely because it is a thematic and constantly used concept in the everyday world, it has a wide span of meaning and reference, and as manifested in behavior it may take a complex range and form. Children rush up to other children in the street and falsely announce the death of a famous singer;6 a friend says he is going to a particular place and asks if he can do something for you, when in fact he will be somewhere else altogether; another has found 1,000 lire in a field, you can ask X and Y (carefully rehearsed) who were with him; and so on to infinity. Here the lie is simply a matter of tricking another, often by coordinated group effort, and demonstrating in a simple way an ability to fool him. The essence of it consists precisely in the liar’s ultimately revealing the lie and claiming his victory: I’m lying to you, you ate it! In the laughter there is the sense of superiority, the fleeting dominance of A over B. There is the risk too that it will fall flat, or even backfire on the perpetrator with direct denunciation of the kizb. These little scenes are played out constantly by children and young men among themselves, though rarely in this form by socially fully mature males. In this aspect kizb is associated with a rich inventiveness and imagination, a verbal quick-footedness and extemporaneous wit that have strong elements of public entertainment and play about them. Players are not necessarily called to account for the factual basis of their talk, providing that an appropriate setting of banter, camaraderie, and play has been established in interaction. Even so, though the young men may indulge in the (often competitive) verbal fantastic for its own sake, it does not accord with the weight and seriousness of anyone who claims a full social [500]“place,” a “station.” In such a case it would indicate a certain lightness and lack of self-respect, and a married man of, say, his middle thirties would risk becoming a joke himself if he told too many (a role, incidentally, which some, lacking prestige and social standing, settle for, thus capitalizing on verbal skills where more solid resources are lacking).7 This “artificial” quality of word play based on kizb brings us to two more general, complementary senses of the term that relate it specifically to judgments on the nature of the world. The first may be illustrated in the words of a taxi-driver friend, twenty-seven years old, married and known for his bravado, cockiness, and putting on the style, who had come back from a job driving people into Beirut for New Year’s Eve. He returned from the capital to the quiet impoverishment of the village, and ecstatically rehearsed the extraordinary nature of the scene with vast enthusiasm. The streets were all hung in lights, decorations everywhere, people all over the road and pavements and filling the open-air cafés. The girls’ dresses, heaven, the girls’ dresses were up to here [graphic gestures]! There were Buicks. Alfas. Mercedes. Porsches, and Jaguars bumper to bumper.8 People were kissing in the street, it was unbelievable, it would drive you mad, you can’t imagine, it was . . . like kizb . . . absolutely . . . like kizb! Here is a scene of glitter and artifice, style and fantasy; an ornate, baroque extravagance of wealth, display, and ornament, of gleaming chrome and glittering clothes, that goes beyond reality and is totally divorced from the everyday world of common experience—in short, like kizb. My notes are full of accounts of unusually vivid occurrences where people were all over the place, cars, bullets whizzing everywhere (seen in person, or on film or television), that in the end were characterized and summed up by the phrase “absolutely like kizb” (shi mithl al kizb abadan). Lying therefore is not to be understood only in terms of strategies and judgments in social relations, or as a technique for gaining or showing superiority. It possesses its own aesthetic of baroque invention and is part of a style, of a wide range of variations on the cultural theme of appearance and reality, and it is recognized at once for what it is. Now the social world in its aspect as part of God’s creation, and the Muslim community bound by His revealed imperatives, are part of Truth. Truth indeed is something “pre-eminently real, a living force which is operating in the very process of life and death in the world of existence.”9 But insofar as the world is the place [501]of men’s activity and a product of their own constructing without attention to its real underlying principles, it becomes the realm of the apparent, of what is vain and fraudulent. Though the Truth is present in the revelation of the Quran and the religious law, few men know the true, either of themselves, others, or the world. Or perhaps more accurately it should be said that the fact that Truth is accessible in Quran and Islamic teaching, could be known, and yet men spend their daily lives ignoring it, shows that they are not passively ignorant but actively liars. Moreover, lying is linked in the Revelation, as they well know, with ingratitude and hypocrisy, two other major and salient aspects of unbelief. Lying is thus a blasphemous act, the direct contradiction of the Truth, and the active opposite of the sacred. The sacred creates, its opposite destroys. These are not theological statements only, for they are used to characterize a world view by the villagers themselves, whose sense of the disjunction between apparent and real, born of a system of dominance in which status honor is critical, is very acute. Kizb is linked to endless reiteration of a world skepticism, and a pessimistic and detached sense of deception: “the world is a lie my friend, all of it’s a lie” (ad-dunya kizb ya’ ammi, kullu kizb). Why these elements of the Islamic cultural universe are selected rather than others, and why there exists the particular elective affinity of ideology and social group, can be understood by examining the operations of the lie in the widest and the most limited range of social relations. Lords and staff in North Lebanon The village in which I worked in North Lebanon was until the late 1960s one of the main centers of an old Bekawat family of Kurdish origin. It is still one of the most important rural foci of the family’s interests in terms of olive groves and agriculture, even though most of the lords now live in the cities of Beirut and Tripoli, from where they have easy access to the village. Estimates of the number in the family reach as high as 5,000, and it is a family in name only. Different segments of it are the most significant local-based land-owning groups in the area, the only real material resource of which is land. Though they now live for the most part outside the villages, the family members dominate the political economy of the region almost as effectively as in the days when their horsemen exercised in the fields below their imposing, thick-walled palaces. Up to contemporary times, the “houses” of Muhammad Pasha and Mustafa Pasha ruled this land and much of the mountain and plain across what is now the border with Syria, and their influence and power are by no means dissipated, though the modalities are in the process of transformation. Members of this stratum are bound by a constellation of interests founded on the direct monopoly of resources. In this situation we do not find a sanctifying tradition and legitimizing myth in the sense familiar to anthropologists. Rather, the historical charter is one of conquest and warrior leadership, backed originally by Ottoman appointment.10 The ideology is one of status honor, hierarchy, and coercion expressed in an elaborate idiom of respect. (“We kiss their hands in spite [502]of ourselves,” said one peasant to me, chasbin ‘anna, “whether we like it or not.”) This type of domination is personal, domestic, and quasi-manorial, and is also a persistent system of political and judicial authority. Under the Ottomans the lords were relatively independent of the central government. Powers of taxation and conscription were in their hands, as was control over the various exactions of produce, labor, and personal services which might with greater or lesser arbitrariness be claimed. They built up political connections with the notables of Syria and Mount Lebanon, and they have dominated all regional elections for the national assembly from the time elections were introduced under the French in the 1920s. Their estates were and are still sometimes of considerable size. The most important bey in the village, for example, possessed around 3,000 hectares of land on the plain, most of it in Syria, and passed back and forth with considerably more authority than the police or army of either government could command in the area. The common statement. “He had such and such a number of villages” is a reflection of a single and simple reality: land, houses, and, in many but not all cases, livestock and all the means of production were in the hands of the beys. Moreover, as I shall note later, the colonial period of the French mandate after the First World War strengthened their political and economic position considerably. The linchpin of the system as far as the village setting is concerned, and the group on which I shall particularly focus, is what might be called in Weberian terms the staff—those persons who put themselves at the disposal of the ruling order as instruments for ensuring the obedience of, and the production of a surplus by, the peasants and laborers. In the village these persons claim to be of one family, let us call it Beit Ahmad, claim to be Circassian in origin (i.e., from outside, non-Arab peoples), and claim to have established themselves independently as small landowners and horsemen (in the full honorific sense of the term). Their services could not be demanded through contractual or customary right; these services could be obtained only by incorporating Beit Ahmad into the system of domainal rule in a position of privilege and status. Beit Ahmad were important to the lords perhaps for two major reasons: first, the scale of the land holdings, at least in the case of the real men of power among the beys; and second, the size and nature of the ruled orders. To administer the one and control the other the population of the lords themselves, scattered among their villages of the plains and hills, was insufficient. The staff administered villages (indeed they still act as estate managers and bailiffs) and guarded the lands and honor of their lords against infringement by other lords or by truculent laborers. Yet despite, or perhaps because of, their common stake in the system of domination, the relationship of lords and staff is marked by constant ambivalence. The former, often divided by the very fact that their monopoly of political and economic power concentrated the struggle and competition for that power among themselves, needed their henchmen against members of other lordly groupings. Therefore the lords might encourage the corporate, family nature [503]of Beit Ahmad as a mobilizable force. But this was hazardous, since this corporate force founded on kinship and a shared sense of status and interest might on occasion be turned against a bey’s house (and even drive it from the village when a direct infringement of Beit Ahmad’s privilege occurred).11 And family links might prevent a henchman from protecting a lord against the “request” of the henchman’s cousin for money. Ambiguities in the relationship are recognized privately on both sides, particularly among the young men of the staff. “We made them, not the other way round” is an often-heard statement which, if not totally accurate historically, nonetheless reflects the real sense in which the lords depend on the staff (or aghawat, the honorific term by which they are known). Most significantly, the lords have been able for various reasons to buy out much of the staff’s own lands around the village, thereby separating the staff from the means of economic independence and administration. Beit Ahmad are therefore a much more heterogeneous grouping than the local lords. Divided into four major segments with a genealogical charter going back only four generations, they are united less in deeds than in words.12 Most of the older men were or are attached personally in some way to a bey’s service, though some held on to enough land to be free of such ties. Their generation shares a keen sense of the interest of the ranking groups as opposed to the “peasants,” though their lifestyles are in fact increasingly similar to those of the persons they regard as the lower strata.13 They themselves were men of the horse and gun in the interwar period especially and before significant patterns of social change had really impinged on the region. These elders still feel part of a traditional political economy in which beys and aghas are in a symbiotic relationship and committed to the perpetuation of the structure of domination. In the family as a whole some own a little land, or rent it on favorable terms from a bey; some rely entirely on the lords for employment as bodyguards or chauffeurs; some are mechanics, construction workers, and lorry drivers; others serve coffee and make water pipes for the lord’s guests; some are not much more than casual agricultural laborers. Beit Ahmad’s position as Beit Ahmad is riddled with contradictions, and I would argue that it is in this gray zone of contradiction that the lie comes into its own. For the family’s internal politics are highly fragmented, a series of day-to-day alliances in the context of minute fluctuations of influence and standing. Where low income, limited resources, and irregular work restrict wealth and the opportunities for real autonomy yet men are firmly attached to status honor [504]and hierarchy, personality becomes most critical and the social significance of the individual and his prestige the greatest resource. This is all the more the case because Beit Ahmad are part of a political and economic system based on monopolistic control of major resources and status honor by ruling groups, a system which produces among the privileged strata a primary stress on what a man is, his own individuality, his unique “place” and reputation. You cannot be trained for it in any formal sense; it must be your own creation (providing, that is, that you have been born into the “right” family and station in the first place). Though being of Beit Ahmad and of a certain descent has external reference, what counts within the family is the purely personal standing which a brother’s or father’s reputation will not make for you. The older men, in whose days the horse and gun were the dominant symbols of chevalier culture and prestige, scorned the idea of work as alien to their ethic and their being. An qabadi (a real man) did not work—the concept was meaningless. He simply was. To be a lord’s companion, to be a hunter, to praise the bey in elaborate courtesies, to be a horseman, to be the administrator of seven villages, was not work. That was left for peasants and had no place in the aristocratic code. You are so-and-so and what you can make that statement stand for by your own actions. You observe respect, hierarchy, and etiquette; you sit upright, or lean slightly forward, one hand on knee, legs uncrossed;14 you walk deliberately and slowly; you speak in a voice that demands attention and that silences others, assertively, emphatically. Such men, and some of their sons as well, were murafiqin (companions, bodyguards, followers) to the lords, a position in which their courage and their capacity to dominate others and deter opponents would in the nature of circumstances be tested. Their position as the aghawat could never be legitimated merely by sitting in a certain way and observing the niceties of style, though a lord might happily relax in Tripoli or Beirut with more concern for his inheritance than for his honor. Members of Beit Ahmad depend(ed) far more on day-to-day situations, encounters and performances of honor in which claims and challenges are always possible. The lords were at least in origin Ottoman appointees, men of government, noble rank, beys and pashas, part of the provincial politics of notables. Beit Ahmad has only what it can make of itself and is not able to command the range of alliances of the Bekawat or their economic base. The aghas are locally bound to a particular village and often individually bound to a particular bey. Their greatest deeds are usually on behalf of someone else and in response to someone else’s wishes in the idiom of the heroic aesthetic. Contrast this with Clifford Geertz’s analysis of the descriptive taxonomies of a society in which the whole weight is on ritualized anonymity and what Geertz calls a “settled haze of ceremony.” The anonymization of persons and the immobilization of time are thus but two sides of the same cultural process: the symbolic de-emphasis. in the everyday life of the Balinese, of the perception of fellow men as consociates. successors. or predecessors. in favor of the perception of them as contemporaries . . . [the] various symbolic orders of person-definition [505]conceal . . . [what] we call personality behind a dense screen of ready-made identities, iconic selves (Geertz 1966: 531). In our case, in complete contrast, where “weight” and personal prestige are crucial, anonymity is equivalent to relegation to a kind of neutral zone in which personal liking may be present but one would say “he’s a good man, poor fellow” with a shrug.15 He who “has value” and is “not easy” must make claims to that value. Those who do not, or cannot do so, but go about their lives within a restricted sphere of their immediate family lose out at election time or when influence is sought and traded with some lord, as well as in the day-to-day rehearsals of self and place. Anonymity is a judgment, even an attribution of social nonvaluation. Members of Beit Ahmad often demanded of me why I had been talking with such and such a one. The reply that I was asking him about his life history or descent would always produce roars of sardonic laughter. “That has a sira [a socially significant biography]? That has a tarikh [history]?”16 Such comments are made of a “peasant” by definition, as it were. To say any man is a fellah is to locate him in a nonhonorific stratum, to stamp him with anonymity, to label him one for whom questions of prestige and status cannot arise. Why talk to a peasant? Derisory comments of the same order are also made about members of Beit Ahmad by other members, though never in my experience in front of nonmembers. “He has a sira? He has a descent? I told the bey yesterday that you were asking about his descent and he said: ‘It’s well known what his descent is. He’s a dog and the son of a dog!’ So much for his genealogy! His father had nothing and he has less. He’s a liar [kazzab], just a liar.” Social status and patterns of Kizb One does not hide, then, behind various classificatory masking devices as in Bali. Rather one steps forward, differentiates oneself, invites judgment, and strives to establish a significant social biography. It is something to be insisted on, to be claimed as unique, always potentially at issue in the everyday world because circumstances may at any time throw up a crisis in which the self will be challenged and defined. I once upbraided a friend from Beit Ahmad for what I regarded as ridiculous swagger and putting on the style. “Look,” he replied, “here, if you don’t fannas [show off] you are dead. You have to put it on to live here. You think my brother isn’t a fannas because he never sits outside the shop and doesn’t talk much and people in the family think he’s weak and sickly? You should see him at the top of the village [where the “peasant” families live], he’s the biggest fannas in the whole village, talking about how he’ll organize these and those votes and who’s going to [506]pass exams, etc., etc. Up there he makes himself the lord of the village. Watch him.” I did, and it was true.17 Most important, these social-status performances take place for the most part before those with whom one is consociate.18 It is their judgment, rather than that of outsiders or the “peasants,” which is significant; it is with those who know one best that transactions over one’s social self occur. They are of all people best equipped to monitor one’s behavior, and they have the most knowledge of one’s biographical situation and life history. In my experience there is a high degree of consensus on readings of individual character in our sense of the term, and on mechanical abilities or skills (e.g., motor repair). I never heard men “lie” on these topics—perhaps there were too many practical and objective tests available. The variation and flexibility and transactions occur with respect to one’s social standing and the degree to which one “counts” in the everyday world. Your consociates share with you a childhood environment that emphasizes the importance of the fluctuations of individual prestige and a competitive idiom of social relations. Among the children patterns of joking and lying emerge over time between two or more in which one is mistillim (taken over) by the other(s); in which verbal ability to outmaneuver another is cultivated and an appreciative eye for the minutiae of personal and general style and strategy is developed. Onlookers would say istillmu, he “captured him,” “got him in his hand,” “got a hold over him.” Idioms of superiority abound to describe the sparring between individuals that is conducted through boasting of oneself or one’s father, through display and bravado, through deceiving another in kizb: akalha (he ate it, he was beaten), mawwithu (I killed him), māt abadan (he died).19 All the time the question of what lies behind this behavior is present. People ask “what does he mean by this, what does he intend?” (shu biyiqsud), “what’s he after?” (shu biddu), “what’s the goal?” (shu al hadaf), “what is his interest?” (shu maslahtu). Narratives about events are full of “I asked myself what he was really after.” When the actor particularly wishes to communicate something to another without an ulterior motive and without deception there are very simple cue phrases: ‘an jadd (seriously), bitsaddiq? (will you believe me?), ma mazah (without joking), wahyatak, wahyat abuk (by your life, by your father’s life).20 Many accounts [507]of confrontations or encounters include the question “how should I make myself out to be?” (literally, “how should I make/do my condition; how should I react and appear to him?”). So one often hears “I pretended that I had never heard of it” (‘amilt hali ma’ indi khabr, “had not information on the subject”). How one “makes oneself” and “having information” go together in lying and judging other’s appearances. Even with consociates the field of interpretation is relatively open, incidents can be glossed in many different ways, and the shifting everyday character of practical experience gives plenty of scope for individual style and display. There are other modes of display and performance: mazah (joking), haki (idle talk, empty words), and tafnis (showing off).21 All are terms which characterize that world of invention, fantasy, humorous elaboration, artifice, and pretense indicated by the word kizb; all focus on display. Khallina nfannas ‘aleihum, a man might say—“let’s show off in front of them.” And so he drives past at high speed, or cuts into a discussion with: “Politics? No one knows what I know about politics. I’m the lord of politics. I invented it.” Another wants to borrow a particularly fine set of prayer beads from a friend so that he can walk through the village with it for a few days, ostentatiously flicking it through his fingers in front of everyone. It is all show. Such are the idioms and styles which men manipulate and in which they work the variations in constituting a social self. The lie occurs throughout as a leitmotif in a constant interaction of judgment on the apparent and the real, what is and what seems. But what happens when the self becomes problematic in a radical way, quite beyond the everyday momentary interchange, so that it is critically threatened or threatens others? What constitutes such a crisis and how is it handled? In the next section I will discuss a series of events or sustained processes of action which demonstrate how crisis and the actors involved are defined, and the different collective and individual strategies that are adopted. Honor and the definition of Makhlu’ It is characteristic of the principles of this social world to be what I would call highly visible. The basis of politics, the armature of domination, is exposed rather than masked.22 At least at the general level the code of honorable male social conduct and values is equally articulated and “on the surface.” Similarly, status is negotiated in behavior that emphasizes visibility and making claims in the public domain [508]about one’s acts and biography. The status honor ethic sets the terms of relevance and provides what I shall call situations of ultimate reference within which and in the light of which men transact their socially significant selves. These ultimate situations are familiar from practical experience.23 When they occur, or more precisely, when they are defined as having occurred, loss of face or even social degradation is threatened.24 Once an act or series of events is defined as radically undermining the whole social ground of an individual or group, the responses become increasingly limited and prescribed on a kind of all-or-nothing basis. The question is how we reach that point. Such definition takes place over intervals of varying spans; the situation becomes critical as certain options are closed off or fail, as their failure narrows the alternative viable and socially reasonable definitions. In other cases the precipitating circumstances may be defined by their very nature as critical, as in a public killing or direct challenge. But for a killing the relevant time span may be open-ended, and the response may remain merely “potential” for years.25 For a face-to-face insult or blow, instant retaliation may be demanded, at least when an audience whose judgment is significant for the one challenged is present. Either the test is met at some proper point, or the individual is socially compromised, devalued in some degree, or even, in extreme circumstances, destroyed as a moral and social being. But even here the successful maintenance or degradation of self takes place as a process of definition over time, and in this process interest and strategies such as the lie are vital. It rarely involves a denunciation of an accuser by a perpetrator, but it becomes defined as socially visible at the terminal point of crisis, when room for maneuver and redefinition has vanished and persons can no longer agree on procedures for defining what has happened, or keep it socially invisible.26[509] The disruptive nature of the demands of honor is only too real in men’s experience.27 To define a situation publicly in terms of honor and to have that definition endorsed as socially authentic by the relevant performers rules out alternative choices to a large extent and entails serious risk and disruption. Within Beit Ahmad, therefore, much effort goes into preventing an event’s being categorized in these ultimate terms. Any one of the family who insists on such definitions and who presses every fine point of personal honor produces a kind of social reductio ad absurdum, pushing the code into chaos. Individualism and fearlessness then threaten the social value of others in the family by making what should be socially masked and invisible, public and visible. How can a counter definition be achieved? Such persons, ever likely to see an insult or a slight and ready to go for a gun, are “anonymized,” despite their emphatic egoism. They are defined in such a way that their conduct, however provocative, does not demand a response, causes no infringement on another’s place, but in fact socially validates that other’s nonresponse. Such men are makhlu’, reckless, mad, asocial, dislocated.28 Their talk and conduct can therefore be received without reaction, and no social devaluation is suffered. The shame, indeed, lies in making a response or setting them off. Their individuality is neutralized by tacit social collaboration and classification. One of the two men classified by this term in Beit Ahmad had in fact killed a member of a fellah family because the latter had wounded a cousin in a fight. The seventeen-year-old went up the hill a few days after to the fellah quarter of the village and fired six bullets into the offender. He ran out of the shop in which the shooting had occurred and was halfway down the hill when he realized he had left his sandals in the shop in his haste. He returned through the crowd of fellahin, gun in hand, and then walked slowly down the long hill with his back to them. Members of Beit Ahmad fired off their rifles in acclamation and a senior man (brother of the wounded cousin) shouted to him: “You went up the hill a boy and came down a man!” He was jailed for seven years and since his return has been regarded as makhlu’. (By the complex dialectic of self and others his behavior is in fact of this type. It is said that he was always fearless but that since his sentence he has become unstable and makhlu’.) While I was there he was shot and robbed by an excolleague in a gang from outside the village. The family’s only concern in the internal meetings which followed was whether one of the other families of the village had done it. Had it been so, there would have been little choice but to continue the cycle of revenge, since his being makhlu’ defined him as socially anonymous within the defining group but not vis-à-vis outsiders, to whom he remained “visible” and a member of Beit Ahmad.[510] The second case hinges on the process of individualizing rather than on anonymizing. A member of Beit Ahmad, also now said to have been known before his death as makhlu’ and famous for a whole series of robberies and extortions (from the lords and outside the village), was killed by another member of the family. The murdered man’s father, an elder of high prestige, defined his son as makhlu’. The boy had been violent-tempered, an outlaw, reckless and unfearing. He had persistently sought to get 10,000 lire from the great lord of the village, and it was because of this that his cousin, who was the lord’s bodyguard, had finally shot him in ambush. The father insisted that it was not “a killing that called for revenge,” that his son was fundamentally asocial and that therefore revenge would be “out of order.”29 Peace should and must be made. The victim had two brothers. In terms of the code, as long as a brother is unavenged one is, in a basic sense, in a state of social pollution. No one expects immediate revenge, but the situation of ultimate reference has occurred. Now here the killing is within the family, the victim is defined as makhlu’, peace has been made, and there is a collective interest in maintaining it.30 And yet. . . . How the two brothers cope with this situation is important. The elder always carries a gun very openly and is treated with great courtesy and etiquette of social “place”; much complimentary phrasing is directed to him by the young men, his peers, and the elders. He sits at the shop where members of Beit Ahmad often gather, goes on deputations to ask favors from local leaders, is full of the verbal performances of honor, and behaves very much like the man of position he is treated as. The younger brother, an army corporal who is seldom in the village, is quiet and much respected as a man of character. It is of him that men say the killer is frightened: “Why? Because he says nothing and silence frightens.31 The other’s a liar [i.e., the other brother]. That’s our family for you, we’re all kazzabin and there isn’t one who is worth a franc.” These [511]remarks, which could be made publicly within the family only at the cost of confrontation, were kept for an outsider.32 In these cases the category of makhlu’ has been used to devalue a social personality within the family. On the one hand the actor’s capacity for forcing the issue is neutralized. His behavior is defined as not requiring action in terms of the scheme of ultimate reference, which is the criterion he constantly and threateningly invokes. On the other hand, where the victim is classified as makhlu’ (and is now said to have been so regarded before the killing occurred, which may or may not be accurate), his death is defined as one for which revenge is “out of order.” He does not count. Yet ambiguity remains, and members cooperate to maintain and vigorously enact appropriate definitions of the relevant persons placed in this situation of ambiguity; men interact with them in the everyday world as full social, moral personalities. In both cases, the definition as makhlu’ was operative within the family only. In the second case, had the victim been killed by a villager from outside the family, a very different course would probably have been followed. For then the social position of Beit Ahmad as a whole, and its claim to corporate status honor, would have been radically challenged. Coping with the loss of honor How does one who has in fact lost out in the competition for prestige and regard cope with his devalued situation when the code retains its social power and importance for him? The speaker who commented sourly on the family being worth no more than a franc is a man who had sold his inherited land and had been prodigal in spending money on his friends until the money, and the friends, ran out. He had gone abroad following a local altercation and on his return drifted around, finishing up as an impoverished marafiq/servant at a lord’s house and as an outlaw. Apart from the memory of his father, who had been a celebrated hero of Beit Ahmad, he has no weight or prestige and is regarded as something of a joker (which indeed he is, or has become). He is on the fringe of the family in terms of social significance. He constantly attacked what he called the kizb of Beit Ahmad to me,33 and his definition and use of lying from our third case.[512] What follows is direct from notes, and I have interpolated relevant additional information in brackets. I had a row with Muhammad [a distant relative] in the shop. He insulted me, and I didn’t return the insult because he’s always drunk. A fight started and he called out Mustafa [another relative], “my brother,” and Mustafa came and clouted me with his staff on the head. I grabbed the staff and then he got me with a spanner as well. People finally separated us; you should have heard the screaming and shouting. I went off to my quarter of the village to those who are most closely related, and they wouldn’t do anything or go near it. My cousin even greeted Muhammad the next day! So I let my beard grow and said I wouldn’t go into the village but would sell all I had. Everyone thought, “By heaven, he’s going to kill someone.” Up came several of the men saying that they’d bring Muhammad to kiss my hand in atonement. So I said I wouldn’t have anything to do with them. But I knew what was going on and my heart was really happy. All the senior men came [and he proudly listed them] and Muhammad swore he meant nothing by it and there was much performance of respect behavior and he kissed my hand, etc., etc. They begged me to shave my beard, we ceremonially smoked a water pipe and drank coffee together, and off they went. But I knew I was all alone. No, I wanted to make a road for Muhammad on which he would die while he was still alive [i.e., force him to endure his own social death]. So I set out to become big friends with him. We drank arak together and became the best of friends. One day he came to me and said there’s a bit of thieving we could do, so we did a few jobs in that line. Then one of the young lords I now work for came to me and suggested a theft at the expense of another section of the behavat. So I said to myself. “Here’s the chance.” The boy gave me 150 lire and I went off to Muhammad and told him that they wanted us to burn the house and had given 150 each, and put the money straight into his hand. At night off he went. and I stood fifty yards off with a rifle while Muhammad stole the stuff. Muhammad fled, because he was already wanted for causing a car accident some months before and for robbery. I stayed in the village and they arrested me, though the family told me to run. So I told them that Muhammad had set up the whole thing, because I knew the lords would get me off with a year or so and pay me no money in jail. I got out on bail before sentence after seven months and the senior men brought Muhammad and me together. I said that I had been beaten up, so what could I do but talk? And within a few days we were close friends again. The village went crazy when they saw us together again. At the trial Muhammad was sentenced in absentia to fifteen years, and I to ten, but I wasn’t bothered because I knew the lord could fix it.34 That’s Muhammad settled. I’ve finished off his children’s future as well. But I keep up a show of friendship and sincerity. Yet in my heart, that’s [513]another thing. Now he’s an outlaw and has no way out. That’s what I call real vengeance. If he surrenders and goes to jail the kids will die of hunger. Rujula [manliness] does not lie in clouting someone who has clouted you [referring to his nonresponse to the blow in the first quarrel]; that is merely self defense. Look at the family. They’re all my relatives, though I have no paternal uncle or brothers [closest in cases of honor]. I did the whole thing myself, and it all started from a blow with a staff. The rest of the family just fight and have no respect for themselves—all noise and kizb. That’s the way of the village. Real manliness is destroying your enemy without all the talk and lies, doing it in secret. Here is a man who is faced with the fact that his social biography, formed by others’ judgments and his changing life situation, has become devalued over time. His father is cited as the acme of courage and honor while he, now married and of an age when men claim full social status, is virtually a servant and unable to mobilize support when threatened with a crisis. As a teenager he sold the olive groves of his inheritance and threw away the money in reckless generosity. Such generosity at that age gains him no social place, since teenagers are still dependent and not full members of the group; he also has no brothers or paternal uncles. Left with nothing, and publicly without position, he has constructed a valued self “that no one knows” which he defines as his real self. This self is constituted out of a manipulation of what is secret, not by a public performance of place-claiming, for this is denied him by his social biography and the monitoring of his consociates. Everything that passes for etiquette, respect, manliness, and so forth is for him interpreted as “all kizb.” It is not that he pretends to the superiority of a different code of honor. Quite the contrary: in his perspective it is he who has the greater sense of what the code of honor really is, since he understands just how far the talk and bravado of appearance is from the reality. Reality is concealed; therefore his conduct is in the same mode of concealment. The lie which destroys—pretense of friendship based on a full intention and not mere empty form—is for him true manliness. His self is founded not merely on something not revealed, but on something hidden deliberately, on the secret as a stratagem of aggression. It is a product of his manipulation of the lie to destroy another.35 (Muhammad is indeed spoken of as “dead,” meyyit, in the family.) But at the same time that the secret is his weapon and as it were frames his sense of personal distinctiveness, he has been forced into secrecy. He still has no way to status and social significance in his public biography. He cannot make claims on the basis of his view of the code, since that would involve a radical criticism of the dominant interpretation of others, and his strategies could lead to complete disgrace if made public as intentional acts. He cannot even say “I have a secret,” and indulge in the hint of superiority and guarded knowledge. He has constructed a private rationalizing ideology, based on what he sees as the [514]contradiction between others’ codified standards of honor and their actual practice. The real contradiction, however, is found in his attempt to create and legitimate his social biography by those same criteria of significance by which his social status will, in fact, be judged marginal and insignificant. Given the terms of the code, which he himself accepts and is forced by the system to accept, the contradiction can only be mediated by concealment and the lie. As Simmel (1964: 310) has put it: “We may think . . . of the ‘lebenslüge’ (the ‘vital lie’) of the individual who is so often in need of deceiving himself in regard to his capacities, even in regard to his feelings, and who cannot do without superstition about gods and men, in order to maintain his life and his potentialities.” Out of such a contradiction, generated in a specific set of social relations and meanings, is born an ideology, a “superstition” about self and others, at once individual and social, secret and public; an ideology which inevitably reflects the contradictions that generated and maintain it, and of which it has itself become an active element. Infringement of sexual honor poses similar crucial problems for the man who lacks social status and social support. One individual of Beit Ahmad, on his return from working abroad, gathered enough by intuition or hints to know that his wife might have been illicitly involved with another member of the family. This latter is a highly regarded and very forceful, assertive personality of almost the classic type. The situation was loaded, the choices limited and largely in the returning husband’s hands, though they depended also on the anticipation of likely collaboration and behavior. To acknowledge infidelity would be desecration of his total social self unless he killed the wife and challenged the alleged offender. The latter is a member of a large family of brothers and his nearest male kin are from a numerous segment of the family. Either way the husband’s existence within the family would have become impossible, though he could have simply left the village altogether and his social world with it. He chose instead to make a point of going regularly to the house of the supposed seducer, going around with him, praising him publicly, and acting the part of the friend and companion with enthusiasm. To my knowledge other family members extended the same collaboration as in our second case, and the matter never reached any form of public doubt. The husband and wife are treated “as though nothing has happened.” However, one day a relative who had a grudge against the husband, when drunk and complaining to me about our subject’s behavior over some matter, went on: “Why does he do this to me of all people? When he came back from abroad it was I who told him there was absolutely nothing to the talk about his wife and X. I pushed him off to X’s house, told him nothing had happened, and supported him.” I interpreted this as a way of assuring me that the husband’s status was in fact compromised and his honor destroyed; as a way also, under the guise of showing how great a friend he had been to the other, of making sure that I knew of the affair. Two of the younger men of the family who were with me, both close friends, said not a word and I joined their tacit pretense that nothing had been said or heard by making no reply or sign of reaction, though I was in fact shocked by this breach of collective performance. No one mentioned the outburst after we had left the relative’s house; we continued the vital lie of “as if” and avoided the definition of the situation that our host had almost thrust upon us. In a less dramatic setting, many of the younger men and those who had no social place also treasured the notion of the secret self hidden from the public gaze, [515]unknown by all yet knowing all. The secret and the sense of knowing others’ secrets are the two sides of this complex process of individuation of the self in a society where you as an individual personality are at issue, when for various reasons you may not “count.” Time and again, words to this effect would be said: “Look, you are here to write a book. Ah, if you knew about my life you could write three books or make a film! No one knows my life. But I keep a diary and write everything in it. I don’t say anything, but I know.” One man, asked to tell about his life history, said: “I used to be a bodyguard for such and such a bey and now I drive the car to transport laborers morning and evening.” After my suggestion that there might be more to his life than that, he suddenly added: “Oh, you want to know my real life, the truth. That would take days to tell. If you knew all my life you would never stop writing. No one knows me.” Now the point is not that this sense of self refers to what is “in fact” the ultimate individual reality. We should note rather that, for many, only this form of giving significance and uniqueness to the individual biography is available. The sole expression of the secret may be in a diary and in the satisfaction of really knowing what one’s self is, while the world sees only the appearances of a bodyguard and taxi driver. The world of interpretations is devalued, the self exalted. At the same time, the fact that the mode in which the self is exalted is one of secrecy bears witness to the public, pervasive dominance of the code of status honor. Only in the sanctuary of the private domain is the self free from running the gauntlet that public claims or definitions must face—the possibilities of challenge, of circumstances arising which reveal that what one claims for oneself is unfounded or kizb, the revelation of a gap between appearance and reality as others judge it. Our final illustration will be of a situation, very precisely bounded in space and time, in which claims were made and falsified without the claimant being aware of the true extent of the disaster. A religious case: A liar as the instrument of truth There is one social identity in which the relation of the hidden and the revealed is particularly important, and that is the role of the religious specialist. Perhaps the type case of the basis of authority in most societies is one concerning the control of significant knowledge. The questions are: what constitutes this knowledge (i.e., the culturally recognized components)? How is it constituted in practice in social situations? And how is access to it governed or achieved? Claims to such access have to be authenticated and given warranty by signs which other members accept as valid. “Knowledge” in Islamic teaching, and in the everyday world of the village, falls into two major categories, ‘ilm and ma’rifa. The first is essentially the knowledge of the religious sciences, such as is acquired by training in one of the religious colleges, and by familiarity with the Quran and theological texts. ‘Ilm is, as it were, external, existing independently of any individual. To become a specialist one goes through a formal process of passing examinations in a religious college and graduates as an ‘alim. Ma’rifa, however, might be crudely defined as knowledge which derives from illumination, or knowledge of God’s concealed purposes, of the batin which [516]lies behind the apparent world or zahir. Ma’rifa is an internal quality of a person, recognized by specific culturally authenticated signs and performances.36 An identity as sheikh (as a man with ma’rifa is called) must therefore be attributed to the individual by others on a different basis from that of ‘alim. If he is to achieve authentication he must be credited with illumination, with knowledge of the secret, of the concealed batin.37 The problem is how men come to credit the subject with knowledge of what by definition is hidden from them. How do they dress the individual in the mantle of holiness, award him sanctity—or, to put it another way, make his miracles for him? How do they grant holiness to or withhold it from those who claim it, and in what terms may it be claimed or demonstrated? One evening a sheikh from Syria and one of his followers appeared in the village and went to the reception room of the ra’is belediya (the mayor) for their right of hospitality. It happened that another sheikh who is well known to this section of the family and often visits it was also present, and it was decided to hold azikr (ritual of chanting the names of God in unison) with the guests. The room was crowded, mostly with young men of Beit Ahmad, but with some senior men as well. Our sheikh opened the ritual as we all sat around the room by asking the local singer to sing some of the hymns in praise of the Prophet Muhammad. The singer has what are commonly regarded as a beautiful voice and phrasing. He began, and the audience shouted out with pleasure at certain finely sung phrases, rocked back and forth, and sang the refrains. Our sheikh began to murmur prayers, until his face screwed up in an expression almost of pain and he began to weep copiously, occasionally giving a huge shout of “Allah” and shuddering violently. In this sea of movement the Syrian sheikh sat motionless and evinced no particular reaction. The singer stopped, and the guest’s follower was invited to take his turn. As soon as he did so, the visiting sheikh was seized with convulsions of the right shoulder and an agonized weeping. His murmurs of ecstasy continued throughout the singing. When it ended everyone stood in the crowded room for the zikr proper. Our sheikh led the proceedings until the visitor interrupted him to change the form and tempo of the chanting and movement. He substituted a far more rapid [517]and complex rhythm and swirled round, darting at different points in the circle with great violence and much shouting of the names of God. One boy of about ten collapsed, jerking and moaning; the mayor himself jumped up and down shouting and twitching, and rounded furiously on those who tried to restrain him; and the ritual eventually collapsed in chaos because the performers could not follow the visitor’s conducting. After a short rest and a sermon on religious values, our sheikh left the room. The visitor then started a long speech to the effect that our sheikh was now an old man and not up to the task of leading and teaching the young men. Were it not for him (the guest) there would have been no zikr. People should follow his way and take the path to him as members of his tariqa (religious fellowship). At this point one man stepped forward with an expression of immense piety and asked to take the oath. This caused suppressed amusement and exchanged glances, since he is one of the most disreputable members of the family, known for the very opposite of piety and for being a great joker and liar. The visitor instructed him to go off and make the ritual ablutions and then to pray the prescribed prayers of prostration twice. He disappeared into the next room and we heard a series of pious ejaculations. Meanwhile the guest enlarged on how he had knowledge of the batin and could see into the heart of a man, where others saw only the zahir of appearances. He was asked his opinion of the would-be disciple and he replied that as soon as he had seen him he had known that he was ready for admission to his fellowship. But should there not be some investigation first? “Nonsense,” he said. “If he has committed any sins or has not prayed and fasted, he will do so after taking the oath, whether he likes it or not” (in other words, he would be compelled by his new sheik’s power). The acolyte returned and went through the oath ceremony and was exhorted to bring many new members for the fellowship. The sheikh then told many stories of his miracles. He also explained that his violent shuddering during the chanting was because the spirit of the Prophet Muhammad had descended on him, while the waving of his arms was to clear away the evil spirits. The “disciple,” as soon as his master had left to sleep, exploded with laughter and said that all the pious ejaculations we had heard from the next room were between mouthfuls of food; that he had not ritually washed, just splashed water over his head and hands; moreover, that he was not even in a state of ritual purity (meaning he had had sexual intercourse with his wife that day and not carried out the prescribed ablutions afterwards). This liar, meaning the guest, had not even known that; it was a blessing our sheikh had gone off to sleep for he always knew (and he cited examples of other sheikhs who had this power of insight into the hidden). The visitor left the next day without succeeding in gathering any money from those he approached. Here the lie was used to unmask the claims of an individual to a specific social identity and to attribute to him the opposite of those socially valued powers of which he gave all the signs. How was it done? We should note that the visitor came as a stranger. He was not in his own community, where knowledge of his biography might have worked against or for him. He presented all the repertory of signs and behavior referring to and demonstrating religious power. He wore a beard, the green-banded turban, and long flowing outer garment, all assumed only by sheikhs; moreover, he appealed to the shared symbols and interpretations of the [518]religious province of meaning. But at the crucial point of knowing, of discerning the apparent from the true, he was discredited. His stranger status, far from being an advantage, became a handicap, since it meant that he lacked knowledge of the life histories and personalities of those to whom the claims were made, although those claims had to be authenticated by means of such knowledge. Had he not spoken of the age of our sheikh and his own superiority as teacher and ritual specialist, and gone on to attribute miracles to himself, such a discrediting would not have taken place. As it was, he made the members’ own biographies relevant, without himself having access to them. Of all men a sheikh deserves close monitoring, for “any fool can grow a beard,” and this above all others is the identity in which appearance and reality must be socially accepted as one. The mabruk may tum out to be the mal’ un. Our own sheikh had been a regular visitor for two years before making any attempt to adopt followers. He had come to the one house of the family which has a kinship relation with his own, a relation of whose great prestige the house’s members are highly conscious. In appearance, manner, tone of voice, and display of religious know ledge he was exemplary. Gradually he met more and more of the family and acquired great understanding through careful observation of the individuals’ conduct. He never claimed miraculous powers, invoking only the tradition of religious standing of his own family, which was celebrated throughout the region. By the time of this incident it was being said that our sheikh knew what you thought and felt; how you would not dare go before him in a state of ritual impurity, because he would send you away without a word. His little personal queries, backed by his long observation, were interpreted as evidence of personal insight into men’s inner, secret selves. (I knew one or two individuals who kept away from him because they were engaged in illicit affairs they were sure he knew of, and so avoided facing his anger, nervously looking for any sign that he really did know.) Indeed, it once happened that the man who featured as the unmasker and the kazzab in the incident with the Syrian was asked by the sheikh before they made the prayers whether he had made the ablutions or not. He had not, and at once attributed insight in secret things to the sheikh. This was the man who said to me after his performance to the unsuspecting Syrian that it was a blessing our sheikh had gone off to sleep, since he could never have behaved in that way in front of him. As it was, he was free to play on the shared knowledge of his own discreditable character and history and his capacity as a liar to expose the visitor as a “liar,” without the visitor realizing that his authenticity had been denied. The cues, glances, long looks of apparent piety with only a hint of eye movement—and the massive collaboration by others in this piece of theater—went past the guest. The guest claimed knowledge, and therefore authority, but the signs he gave of it were discredited. The signs and meanings in themselves are socially part of a shared attitude toward the religious domain and the nature of human reality. The unmasker carried out his devaluing with reference to them, and presented himself, by means of a lie, as the defender of their authenticity against a “liar.” The miracles were withheld. To say miracles were withheld is to repeat that miracles, knowledge of the secret, and therefore authority depend by their nature on the judgments and attributions made by relevant others. Clearly this process may be relatively independent of the acts of the person being judged or of face-to-face situations in which that person [519]is participating, once initial interaction has established the socially valid nature of the person.38 Our sheikh’s credit was built up through accounts of him, through interpretation of his conduct which drew on the socially accepted paradigm of what “real” sheikhs are and what defines them.39 Men refer then to their own biographies, to the common stock of knowledge at hand about what sheikhs in essence are, and to conduct. Out of these three elements emerges a man’s social significance. These attributions are made over time in social situations in which very often the person at issue is not present at all. Warrants and authentications are presented in individual accounts and in what men generally say. Authoritative sanctity, more perhaps than anything else in social life, is in the eye of the beholder. Let us shift the emphasis in Goffman’s (1962: 505) description of the cardinal social sin—“the sin of defining oneself in terms of a status while lacking the qualifications which an incumbent of that status is supposed to possess”—and say rather that others withhold the qualifications from one. Though the visitor presented all the outward typical signs of sheikhliness, he placed them in a context of challenge to our sheikh and explicit verbal claims to knowledge of the secret. Yet he provided no focus of interest which might incline people to accept his assertions and no reasons for such an acceptance. Without knowledge acquired over time of the particular social world, specific self-attributions have no interactional basis for validation (unless water is to be turned into wine, of course). It is not self-destruction and self-compromise that is at issue, so much as compromise by what might be termed others’ interpretative manipulations of your behavior. The visitor made the common-enough mistake of assuming that the transmitter of messages and culturally endorsed signs is in control of their meaning, and forgetting that meaning is also given to messages in social life by others. The stranger was thus led from claim to claim by our performer,40 without realizing the way in which he was being defined by his audience. The point of the whole performance was to show that our secret, or shared knowledge of the performer’s biography, which enabled us to interpret his elaborate piety as kizb, was a secret to one who should “know.” The liar used the lie to uncover the “truth”; that is, to make an attribution of meaning to the visitor’s behavior which was validated by our shared secret. Every typical mark of holiness became an additional mark of kizb. The liar became the instrument of truth and revealed/created the lie of the unwitting subject.[520] Conclusion Lying in its various forms is clearly important in all societies, yet few detailed studies of lying practices and the social distribution of knowledge have been done.41 There are many tantalizing hints as to what a study of lying in everyday interaction might reveal to the anthropologist. Gombrich notes that in a Sinhalese village the truth, exalted in theory as a major value, is in fact endlessly sabotaged by lying, which “is bound to be frequent in a culture much concerned with the preservation of status and dignity”; Burridge says that the relations between Kanakas and whites are characterized by both sides as relations of habitual lying and hypocrisy; Talal Asad offers the interesting observation that the Kababish of the Sudan represent themselves as “liars, thieves and deceivers,” each man recognizing “that the only resistance his fellows can offer to the absolute power of their rulers consists in varying degrees of evasion.”42 All these authors show lying as a generalized element within sets of social relations in which, in different ways and for different reasons, mutual knowledge and power or status are individually and structurally crucial.43 In all these accounts, the main problem for actors is one of controlling certain kinds of information, and this also remains basic outside systems of domination and status containing separate social groupings of unequal rank and power. Robert Murphy has referred to the example of the Mehinacu Indians of Brazil, who are forced to live in close proximity to one another and have such an inordinate stock of knowledge of each other that achieving nonrelations is vital if social life is to persist. Such nonrelations are attained by scrambling the messages with an excess of information and by employing enormous skills in mendacity, thus producing a setting in which “nobody really knows . . . what is true and what is false; they are given ample doubts and few convictions.” Lying is vital to the life of this society—indeed, lying makes it possible.44 This question of doubt leads us back to our case study. The importance of the ambiguity of native categories has been stressed by Leach in his work on Kachin social structure.45 I would argue that the Lebanese example shows us the other side [521]of the same sociological coin. Here, it seems to me, people have to deal with a normative social order regarded as primary in the sphere of politics, prestige, and rank—the status honor code. This code is distinguished by its public nature, relative simplicity, prescriptive-imperative character, and apparent precision of reference; if certain acts are performed, certain others should follow, and the line between honor and dishonor is absolute and clear, a kind of all-or-nothing proposition. But people actually live by secrecy and kizb, in complex situations, by tacit collaboration and flexibility, and by blurred definitions. They exist by creating ambiguities out of the unambiguous exigencies of status honor, the private out of the public, the invisible out of the visible. And they do so in ways that must at the same time appear to others to satisfy the demands of the normative code, all the while conscious that situations may arise which pose critical challenges of violence or shame. In the setting of the village the ideology of honor, in terms of which prestige transactions are apparently conducted, gives rise to certain central ambiguities and contradictions—particularly so because it is an integral part of a historical context in which honor as a mark of group status ranking has been “oversanctified” as an instrument in the use and legitimation of power. So on the one hand honor is crucial to the status position of Beit Ahmad and each individual, while on the other it is only in fact by kizb that social life can go on at all and the group’s fragile corporateness be preserved. Hence, for example, those who are most fearless in defining situations in terms of the code of challenge and response, and who should be the most prestigious, do most to threaten the common interests of the consociate group and are defined as makhlu’, “asocial.” The ideology itself produces kizb out of the tensions between it and the demands of the everyday world. Still, in this aspect, lying, along with the ambiguity which it reflects and produces, acts as a positive, “enabling” element in the everyday world. It makes the coexistence of code and social life possible. If we relate ideology and social structure more concretely, however, kizb appears as an image and a source of alienation. For in the overall social setting the terms of exchange in which status is negotiated are changing. The lords have, over the years, bought up most of the independent landowners of Beit Ahmad. They have, at the same time. increased the local dependence of many of the staff by tying them to personal service and encouraging them to insist on the hierarchy of status honor. (They have also exacerbated peasant-staff relations by using Beit Ahmad where necessary against the fellahin.) Honor has become more and more a primary value and resource over which men transact, while it less and less reflects the realities of power and structural position. Its real economic and political base has been undercut, since the family has been progressively separated by the lords from the independent means of administration and autonomy.[522] This has entailed significant transformations in the social position of the family and its different segments, transformations that are masked by kizb as well as by the public performances of claim making and honor. The younger men are acutely aware that there is one major difference between their own and their fathers’ generation. The cars, tractors, and harvesters that they drive and the guns that they carry belong to others, not to them. The young men are separated, in terms of the ethic of Beit Ahmad, from what gives them significance. The boasting, talk, bravado, and kizb are now, so to say, at one remove and on a secondhand basis. Men argue about the various qualities of’ “their” cars, but the knowledge that they drive them for other people, that they are to be hired and fired, and that outside the village the boast of being from the family would be an insignificant claim, is a source of bitterness. The sense of everyday reality, the practice of the everyday social world, has become problematic in its relations to those values that give the social world and the self their meaning. It is noticeable that the young men work mainly in family groups and in specific kinds of occupations. Twenty-three of them worked on the new airport runway in Beirut; five go to Syria in the summer to man a combine harvester and thresher; others travel to different areas of Lebanon in threes or fours. Wherever they go they go as members of Beit Ahmad, and only in very few cases does one take employment on his own. Furthermore, they work in a very particular kind of occupation: tractor driver, bulldozer driver, harvester driver, taxi driver, and so on. They do not go to Tripoli or Beirut to jobs in light industry or services or trades.46 Now the notion of “work,” as I have mentioned, is alien to the chevalier ethic of status honor. Work is a reality of the life situation of many of the family and they have become specialists in the semiskilled field of driving heavy vehicles. But in the village a man is not a driver, he is a “chauffeur.” Indeed it does not seem to me fanciful to designate them “horsemen on tractors.” The young men swing a tractor up the hill, roar past those sitting outside the shop, spin it three times on its axis (to the ruin of tires they can scarcely afford), and display their driving in much the same way as their fathers did their horsemanship. Horse and tractor alike are vehicles for display. It is driving style about which one boasts; it is the make and power of the tractor or lord’s car that you drive (and the make of revolver that goes with it too) that you discuss with immense technical expertise. A “peasant” once told me that Beit Ahmad were “all mechanics,” which is true. But among themselves they are “chauffeurs,” as their fathers are qabidiyat (men of valor). Yet at the same time the complex contradictions between ethos and reality are ever present. One friend said sardonically to me: “Look, you saw what I was saying over there and all the showing off about the Buick and being a chauffeur? Kizb, my friend. What am I? I’m a taxi driver, that’s what I am.” Kizb bridges the gap between form and substance, ethos and the actualities of the political economy, but at the same time men directly experience and know that it is a false “solution” to the problem. It is this complex situation which explains the elective affinity between this stratum and a view of the world (the world as constituted by men’s actions, divorced [523]from what is religiously right) as itself kizb. If we move beyond the narrower definition of the term “ideology” into the realm of religion and belief, “lying” emerges as a principle opposed to, and actively in the world opposing, the truth and the sacred. “Knowing” the interior, “real” world of the batin becomes the supreme mark of authority for the man of religion (the mabruk or blessed); but it also, in the profane dimension, is the mark of the dangerous, manipulative skills of the liar (the mal’un or cursed). The latter is dangerous precisely because the everyday life men live is a domain of lying, both theologically and in practice. Both mal’un and mabruk can see behind the veil of men’s acts, and they present mirror images of each other. Kizb thus is a vital theme in ideology and the code of honor, in social practice and social structure, and in the world view and belief system.47 The last sphere in which it is also thematic is that of dramaturgy, situational interaction, and the creating/performing of a self. It can be argued that exactly because honor is increasingly separated from a base in political relations much behavior described as kizb takes on the appearance of a kind of game. Men play at and with lying, and it has its own generalized aesthetic and styles. It might seem, therefore, that nothing is “really” at stake, that it is “only” a game, and that statuses are not actually changed. For any given encounter or performance this may be quite true. But encounters and making claims are part of processes over time participated in by your consociates, not one-time events before different audiences. They become part of you, of your style, of what you are. The aesthetics of honor are crucial; ritualism and individualism go together. The honor code forms what C. Wright Mills (1940) has called a “vocabulary of motives” with its own societal controls. Lying is important because it is part of the language by which men set up what they hope are socially authentic and legitimate grounds for conduct. The adequacy of their claims may at any time be tested, as we saw in the example of the Syrian sheikh. One has always to think in terms of the long perspective, of anticipated consequences for one’s “name” and “place,” for one’s performance is expected to be relevant to future phases of social action. Games are deadly serious after all, and none more so than those concerning honor and the significance of the person in his social world. For the ultimate stake, when all the bravado, joking, talk, swagger, word play, and kizb are over, is your self. Original acknowledgments I am most grateful for the comments and suggestions of Drs. Ken Brown, Ernest Gellner, Bruce Kapferer, and Basil Sansom. Professor Leo Kuper very kindly performed a detailed critical reading of the paper in its first draft. The research was carried out between April 1971 and July 1972 for the Manchester University anthropology department project on politics in the Lebanon, directed by Professor [524]Emrys Peters and financed by the SSRC. I am very grateful for their support and for the unending cooperation and hospitality of those with whom I worked in the Lebanon. References Ammar, Hamed. 1954. Growing up in an Egyptian village. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Asad, Talal. 1970. The kababish Arabs. London: C. Hurst. Berreman. Gerald. 1972. Hindus of the Himalayas. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bohannan. Paul. 1957. Justice and judgment among the Tiv. London: Oxford University Press. Bourdieu. Pierre. 1965. “The sentiment of honour in Kabyle society.” In Honour and shame, edited by J. G. Peristiany, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Burridge. Kenelm. 1970. Mambu. New York: Harper and Row. Campbell, John Kennedy. 1964. Honour, family and patronage. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Garfinkel. Harold. 1956. “Conditions of successful degradation ceremonies.” American Journal of Sociology, 61: 420–24. Geertz. Clifford. 1966. Person, time, and conduct in Bali. New Haven: Yale University Press. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The presentation of self in everyday life. New York: Doubleday. ———. 1962. “On cooling the mark out.” In Human Behaviour and Social Processes, edited by A. Rose. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Gombrich. Richard. 1971. Precept and practice. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gulliver. Philip. 1963. Social control in an African society. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Izutsu. Toshihiko. 1966. Ethico-Religious concepts in the Quran. Montreal: McGill University Press. Kiefer. Thomas. 1972. The Tausug. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Leach, Edmund R. 1965. Political systems of highland Burma. Boston: Beacon Press. Meszaros. Istvan. 1971. Aspects of history and class consciousness. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Mills, C. Wright. 1940. “Situated actions and vocabularies of motive.” American Sociological Review, 5 (December). Murphy. Robert. 1972. The dialectics of social life. London: George Allen and Unwin. Schutz, Alfred. 1962. Collected Papers, Vol. 1. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1964. Collected Papers, Vol. 2. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.[525] Simmel, Georg. 1964. The sociology of Georg Simmel. Translated, edited, and with an introduction by Kurt H. Wolff. New York: Free Press. Weber. Max. 1958. The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.   Michael GILSENAN is David B. Kriser Professor in the Humanities, and Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, Anthropology at New York University. At the time of writing this reprinted article (1973), he had done ethnographic research in Egypt on the Sufi Orders and in Lebanon on power and violence in the Akkar region. He became Lecturer and later Reader in Anthropology at University College, London, and then Chair in the Study of the Contemporary Arab World at Magdalen College, Oxford from 1984–1995. Since 1995, he has been Chair in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies at New York University. He is the author of many books, including Saint and sufi in modern Egypt: An essay in the sociology of religion (Oxford University Press and Clarendon Press, 1973), Recognizing Islam (Croom Helm/Pantheon, 1982/83, with later reprints), and Lords of the Lebanese marches (I. B. Tauris/University of California Press, 1996). He is now researching the history of the Hadhrami diaspora across the Indian Ocean, the transmission of goods, and law (1880–1990). Michael GilsenanDepartment of AnthropologyNew York University25 Waverly PlaceNew York, NY 10003michael.gilsenan@nyu.edu ___________________ Editors’ Note: This article is a reprint of Gilsenan, Michael. 1976. “Lying, honour, and contradiction.” In Transaction and Meaning: Directions in the Anthropology of Exchange and Symbolic Behavior, Edited by Bruce Kapferer, 191–219. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues. We would like to thank Bruce Kapferer and Michael Gilsenan for permission to reprint this work. We remind the reader that we retain the style of the original with some minor formatting changes. 1. The work of Mary Douglas on purity and pollution of V. W. Turner on symbolism and of Cl. Lévi-Strauss on la pensèe sauvage and the structure of myth has a different focus. I would hope that the approach here complements their theoretical perspectives. 2. I exclude of course situations in which the observer knows as a matter of fact that such and such a statement is untrue—for example, that X was not in his house when he claimed to have been. 3. “Lying” is to be understood in the rest of this essay in this double sense of intentional act and/or attributional judgment by others. 4. See Goffman 1959 (58–70) for a discussion of misrepresentation in social performances and its threatening aspects. 5. Properly, in classical Arabic, it is kidhb defined in Wehr’s Arabic dictionary as “lie; deceit, falsehood, untruth.” 6. Hamid Ammar (1954: 138–39) describes deception and lying by children in an Egyptian village: among other children in games and in attempts to triumph by showing another’s credulity; by the children to parents, because punishment is administered inconsistently and capriciously with no chance for the child to explain or justify his acts. About the latter type of lie Ammar writes: “the effects of these techniques of fear as forcing children to resort to lies and deception are reflected in the prevailing atmosphere of adult life which is charged with suspicion, secrecy and apprehension . . . it is not surprising to find the common saying that ‘fear is a blissful thing.’” The connection here between lies and dominance and control, though it takes different forms in the Lebanon, is of the greatest importance for this discussion, not least with respect to the pervasiveness of lying and secrecy in interaction and at the broader level of culture and social relations. 7. Pierre Bourdieu, writing of a Berber society in which honor and appearance are crucial, also notes the limitation on joking and verbal extravagance for the restrained and self-effacing man of honor (Bourdieu 1965: 210–11). 8. Nothing, save a rifle, is the object of more knowledge and discussion than the car. Why this is so will become clear later. 9. See Izutsu 1966: 98. This book gives a valuable account of the place of lying (takdhib) in the Quran, and a suggestive analysis of its semantic field. He points out that lying is the opposite of truth both as an objective property and as the subjective property of a particular speaker whose language conforms to reality (89). 10. The Ottoman state ruled the region until the end of World War I. 11. There are instances of individual and group pressure on a lord arising from some clash of issue or personality, and one family of lords does appear to have been driven from the village some eighty years ago. Now acts of personal intimidation or extortion are by no means infrequent. 12. There are some fifty-six family households of Beit Ahmad in the village, most of them concentrated in the same area. The overall general pattern is for brothers as they marry to build rooms on their father’s house and share a common courtyard, though as these rooms are added to they also become referred to as houses. I have reckoned them here as separate units. The basic pattern of agnatic compound households is still dominant, though some of the young men now save for long enough to build a separate house that does not share the courtyard of the father’s house. 13. As will become clear, the term “peasant” has multiple meanings, mostly pejorative and referring to those of no social standing. The topic is briefly explored later in this chapter. 14. People talk with some discrimination about X’s way of sitting in the reception room and on public occasions and about general modes of sitting posture. 15. Adami, “a good man,” is a term of moral approval but not of prestige. It relates to personal characteristics but not to social rank, save insofar as it is frequently followed by miskin, “poor chap.” 16. The view from the other side I shall describe later when discussing notions of the self and secrecy in the village. 17. Unable by physique and temperament to compete in the family, he wore his learning like a banner among the “peasants.” No other member of Beit Ahmad, it might be noted, had ever reached his level of education. 18. I use the term “consociate,” derived from Alfred Schutz’s work, to mean those with whose personal biographies one is intimately linked and with whom one has grown up and/or is in daily face-to-face interaction; the community with whom one shares a history and stock of common knowledge about the world; and so on. (See Schutz 1962: 16–17). 19. The last phrase is applied to one to whom, under the guise of innocence and perhaps in collaboration with others, you have delivered a telling verbal blow or innuendo to which he cannot reply and which forces him involuntarily to show his hurt. 20. I once refused to believe that a friend had been shot and killed until the young men who rushed to my house swore wahyatak. These cue words are particularly important among the young men, who carry on so much joking in their relations that without sign phrases it would be difficult to indicate the boundary between the authentic/real and the inauthentic/invented-apparent. These cues establish a different domain of relevance and reference. I never heard them used otherwise (to my knowledge!). 21. A distinguished Lebanese scholar suggested to me that fannas as a Lebanese colloquial Arabic verb and the noun tafnis come from the French finesse. The etymology is certainly plausible, not to say appropriate. 22. As Bottomore puts it: “Neither the slave nor the serf can be in any doubt that he works in whole or in part for the benefit of another man” (in Mészáros 1971: 51). It is quite clear in this society who is dominating whom, particularly at the lords’ and peasants’ levels. Perhaps the middle is more uncertain and ambiguous. 23. These situations include, for example, infringements on family sexual honor (sharaf), which desecrate the family; and attacks on individual honor (karama), such as serious insults or armed confrontation, or the murder of a relative, when a man may be thought by others to be a coward or timid. 24. The term “social degradation” is Harold Garfinkel’s (1956). The main difference between our approaches is that he proposes a framework for analyzing how a specific ceremony of social degradation takes place, succeeds or fails. Rather than with direct confrontation, I am concerned here with degradation as emerging or becoming potential through processes of definition and transaction. 25. One man I knew was walking down the street in town with a distant relative when the latter suddenly indicated an old man walking ahead of them and said that that was the man who forty years ago had shot my friend’s paternal uncle. My friend drew his revolver and killed the old man on the spot. What motivated the relative I do not know. The point is that he forced a definition of the situation on my friend, who had to recognize that his total social identity was at issue. His identity would be degraded if he did not maintain it by wiping out the old blood debt. He was jailed but is now free again, and is himself a potential victim. 26. The little boy may cry “The Emperor has no clothes”; the question is whether anyone will pay attention. 27. In a killing, for example, time is open-ended, and even when blood money is paid the exchange remains ambiguous. Though there is Quranic and traditional warrant for blood price, the convertibility of blood to money is problematic: “a brother is not sold,” and who knows what member of the victim’s family may take it on himself, or be egged on, to seize an opportunity for revenge years later? The open-ended time span gives the situation flexibility from the revengers’ point of view and allows for the maintenance of self without compromise. But it generates its own uncertainties. 28. From a verb root meaning to renounce, cast off, disown, repudiate, depose, have done with (see Wehr’s Arabic dictionary). 29. However critical a circumstance killing may be, it is still of course subject to processes of social definition and transaction. 30. In one small family of the village that has no significant collective interest or collective social identity, there have been four murders of close relatives since 1935. The latest killer is in jail, and the one on whom the new duty of revenge falls is now of such an age that he is said to be waiting for the other’s release. The grim cycle is expected to continue. There is no conflicted definition by which to restructure the situation so that peace may be made. Everything is visible, and each event has generated a new momentum. One man I knew well had one brother killed, and the other is the one currently in jail for seeking revenge. 31. Silence is of all signs the one regarded as most indicative of full intention. It was often said to me of different individuals that they would not do anything about an event, just produce a a lot of talk and threatening while friends rushed forward and pleaded and restrained. It is the one who makes no fuss of protest who is really nawi shi, intending something, and who may take revenge. That is when the offender keeps to his house or even leaves the village. The public declaration of sacred intention used on occasions of death or wounding is growing the beard, which is also a claim on other support in a sacred duty of revenge. As an act of self-degradation it places the person in the category of polluted until “right” in blood has been taken. It is an insistence on a very specific and narrow definition of the situation. 32. It is noteworthy that the brother of the man killed in the shop (the case discussed earlier) also makes much of carrying a gun and a staff, talks very emphatically, and is a very “public” personality in his own quarter of the village. Beit Ahmad describe him in the main as “a good man, poor fellow.” The killer “respects” (avoids) the quarter altogether. 33. For example, when the young man defined as makhlu’ in the first case described earlier insulted someone of the family who did not reply, this man used to turn to me on the quiet and tell me that when it came to a crunch all the family’s bravado and status honor were lies and show: “When this fellow goes for them, then it’s mouths closed and eyes down and not a sound. Liars!” He is also, ironically, something of an expert on points of honor, the subtleties of the code, and proper behavior. He invokes the Bedouin heroes as “real men,” can quote much classical Arabic poetry concerning them, and is a stringent and sarcastic judge of others’ actions. 34. In fact our friend jumped bail on the lord’s advice and was sentenced to ten years in jail. He is now an outlaw and even more dependent on the lord, whose level of trickery exceeds his own. He does not sleep in his own house any more than does Muhammad, though he lives perpetually in the hope that the lord will arrange clemency for him. The young lord involved came out of jail after a few months. 35. Simmel’s (1964: 334–35) discussion of secrecy and individualization is of considerable relevance here: “The measure in which the dispositions and complications of personalities form secrets depends . . . on the social structure in which their lives are placed . . . the secret is a first-rate element of individualization . . . social conditions of strong personal differentiation permit and require [my emphasis] secrecy in a high degree; and conversely, the secret embodies and intensifies such differentiation.” 36. I must add here a further gloss, though there is no space in which to develop the point as it deserves. This division of the world has enormous resonance in the village Weltanschauung, and is often referred to in discussions of religion, the meaning of Islam, and men’s place in the world. People often gloss the zāhir (apparent) as kizb and the bātin (concealed, inward meaning) as truth. He who has knowledge of the bātin is mabrūk (blessed), one of sacred status. But on the other hand he who has knowledge of the secrets of the everyday world, and can manipulate others because of his cunning, deceit, and kizb, is spoken of as mal’ūn (literally, cursed). This too is insight into the hidden, but of men’s, not God’s, purposes. Such understanding and manipulation through penetration into others’ kizb, as I have already pointed out, the man best able to know others’ lies is in a powerful and dangerous position. Futhermore, given the nature of things, one meets up with the mal’ūn a great deal more than with the mabrūk and he has far more daily, practical relevance. 37. It might be properly called the secret, since the batin of God’s purpose is of illimitable range and significance. It is the ground of all that is hidden and all that is revealed. Its signs are the verses of the Divine Revelation. 38. The validity may be established through a number of means: for instance, pasty history, a performance “to type,” personality and character, or selection of an audience who may have an elective affinity for the call or message. 39. Even in our sheikh’s case there were some who were rivals of the house to which the sheikh regularly came, and some who were simply skeptical, who said of him that “the only reason he comes to our village is that here they kiss his hand and in his own they don’t. There they know him.” 40. The unmasker, for example, piously asked how he would get the sheikh’s aid when the latter left the village, and the sheikh replied that his follower should simply shout his (the sheikh’s) name from the hilltop and he would appear. 41. The extent to which anthropologists themselves are caught up in patterns of concealment and secrecy, a rich field for research, is analyzed by Berreman (1972: xvii–lvii). 42. Gombrich 1971: 262–63; Burridge 1970: 37; Asad 1970: 242. None of these works centers on interaction patterns. 43. Cf. Bohannan (1957: 48–49), Keifer (1972: 101), and Gulliver (1963: 229). These authors are concerned with lying as an expected part of specific, highly formalized situations of legal dispute. They are not immediately concered with its patterns in other areas of social interaction. J.K. Campbell (1964: 279–83, 316) shows that in the highly competitive world of the Sarakatsani shepherds of Northern Greece, also characterized by an elaborated honor code, it is a virtue to lie to and cheat non-kin in the bitter fight for scarce resources. 44. Murphy 1972: 227–28. He refers to a thesis by Thomas Gregor of Cornell University, 1969. 45. Leach 1965: 106, “The ambiguity of native categories is absolutely fundamental to the operation of the Kachin social system . . . It is only because the meaning of his sundry structural categories is, for a Kachin, extremely elastic that he is able to interpret the actuality of his social life as conforming to the formal pattern of the traditional, mythically defined, structural system.” In usage, Arabic terms such as beit (house) and ‘ailat (family) are every bit as vague and flexible as Kachin categories of village and other groupings. In both societies the ideal structure is elaborate and rigid. I am stressing the importance of the practices through which ambiguity is produced, not only the conceptual-categorical elasticity. 46. It might be noted, though I shall not discuss the matter in detail, that there are very few marriages with women from outside the family, and that endogamy here is not only ideology but actuality for Beit Ahmad. 47. Max Weber (1958: 52) long ago pointed out the implications inherent in the utilitarian ethic which, like the ethic discussed here, has its own logic and breeds its own lies: “Honesty is useful, because it assures credit; so are punctuality, industry, frugality, and that is the reason they are virtues. A logical deduction from this would be that where, for instance, the appearance of honesty serves the same purpose, that would suffice . . .”  

The “becoming-past” of places This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Nancy D. Munn. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau3.2.025 Reprint The “becoming-past” of places Spacetime and memory in nineteenth-century, pre-Civil War New York The Edward Westermarck Lecture, 2003 Nancy D. MUNN Revised and updated by the author                   I want to thank you for the honor of being asked to give this lecture in memory of Edward Westermarck. Westermarck had a long-term interest in articulating the generalizations of moral philosophy with the complications of ethnographic and historical particulars. The present paper, although very different in orientation and aim, takes up the analysis of some classic philosophical topics of interest in contemporary anthropology—namely spacetime, place, and memory—attempting to make self-evident how they are constituted as experiential forms only in and through the sociocultural complexities of a specific lived world. Among the diverse anthropological and related approaches to place, space, and time, much attention has recently been given to places as tangible mnemonics for spatially presencing the past or for mediating history in the experience of the present. In this paper, however, I shift from these perspectives to an exploration of the becoming-past-of-places: Considering disappearances and appearances of new places in a people’s lived place-world, I ask how these processes were configured in certain spatiotemporalizing practices in pre-Civil War, nineteenth-century New York. Interrelations being formed between the past, present, and future, placemnemonics and forgetting will then reemerge within this processual viewpoint. By “spatiotemporalizing practices,” I refer, on the one hand, to a particular nexus of common descriptions and related commentaries on observable changes in the city that we find in newspapers, magazines, speeches, and other everyday sources of the era. I think of these accounts as elements in what Bakhtin (1984: 6) calls a “polyphonous” discourse, “a plurality of independent . . . voices and consciousnesses,” an open-ended, diffuse discourse rich in verbal clichés and habitual usages. On the other hand, I refer to modes of action or practices and states of the city place-world1 which concretely engage and manifest these changes; and which are articulated in diverse (yet as we will see, thematic) ways in this discourse. In general, I look at some ways places are meaningfully constituted through the interplay between both discursive and concrete practices of the place-world. For present purposes, I characterize “a place” in simplified terms as a meaningful, concrete locale with distinctive features and qualities, invested with different layers and kinds of identities (such as, at the most particular level, “Stevens’ mansion,” “Collect Pond,” or “New York City”)—a stretch of habitable space within which persons (and other entities) can “be,” or to and from which they can come and go. Places in this sense should be understood as significant, meaningful forms in process rather than as static givens, since their existence is ongoingly subject to the varied ways they enter into human practices—into people’s actions, expectations, pasts, and sense of their pasts—i.e., into particular social and cultural milieus. The antebellum era of New York life was one of profound spatio-temporal transformation when the island was turning from a town set within a rural/suburban landscape into a metropolis with an increasingly capitalistic economy. People were not just constantly noticing change, but they often remarked on the rapidity with which their familiar place-world was disappearing; as Richard Terdiman (1993: 119) says of 1850s Paris, the changes going on had “not yet become routinized or transparent”; “memory of the time before [was] . . . still active.” New Yorkers could still travel from southern Manhattan—the city’s commercial center—into a hilly more open landscape as they went north—but one had to go further and further north to do so. In 1830 a writer could say of a walk not far north of Canal Street, “We passed over a part of the city which in my time [youth] had been hills, hollows, marshes and rivulets without having observed anything to awaken . . . a recollection of what the place was before the surface had been leveled and the houses erected” (Bryant, et al 1830: 338). Twenty five years later, this sort of experience, in which a locale’s remembered features could no longer be recognized in its present face, could have been had as far north perhaps as fortieth street. But even before the rectangular street grid, which leveled the island’s topography piece by piece, was laid down in a given region, the rural world was being penetrated by industrial and other developments such as “shanty towns” beyond the city proper. Simultaneously, expansive pressures of commerce, industry, finance (including land speculation), and radical population increases within the city, while pumping out these expansions up the island, were also defamiliarizing the face of the already built-up city: among other practices this entailed demolitions of older buildings and the construction of new ones—events which, the editor of Harper’s Monthly wrote “were always going on before the eyes.” (Curtis 1862: 409).2 In such markedly transformative contexts, problems involving relative duration emerge: places become old or are destroyed before their ordinary or appropriate times and such habitual expectancies themselves are changing or grasped as having to change. But a focus on the rapidity of change is merely one of the ways in which shifts in the ordinary duration, the temporal continuance or existence of places comes into consciousness. A sense of rapid change, acceleration, transience, and loss are commonly noted characteristics of both nineteenthand twentieth-century Western “modernities.” Pierre Nora, for instance (1989: 7), referring to the twentieth century, has noted the “increasingly rapid slippage of the present into a historical past”; while Richard Terdiman, discussing modernity and memory in mid-nineteenth-century Paris, examines the “mnemonics of dispossession” of places in Baudelaire and other literary sources. Moreover, students of capitalism and urbanism, from Marx and Engels to more recent commentators, have variously remarked on the paradox of rapid destruction inherent in the productivity of capitalism. As Marshall Berman (1988: 99) has put it, referring to nineteenth-century urban material change: “everything that Bourgeois society builds is built to be torn down. . . . [Even] bourgeois monuments . . . are “blown away like frail reeds by the very forces of capitalist development they celebrate.” So also, in Consciousness and the urban experience, Harvey (1985: 28) draws on comments about city change from writers like Baudelaire and Henry James in arguing that the accelerating turnover time of capital generates a “continuous [spatial] reshaping” of the city: “We look at the material solidity of a building [or landscape], [he says,] . . . and behind it we see . . . the insecurity . . . within a circulation process of capital, which always asks: how much more time in this . . . space?” But to the extent that Harvey addresses nineteenth-century “consciousness” on this matter, his account is what Bakhtin calls “monological”: that is, it turns citations of contemporary perceptions of transience into emblems of Harvey’s own unitary, general ideas about the relation between spacetime and the economy, rather than analyzing the complexity of peoples’ heterogeneous ways of configuring the spacetime of places in their lived worlds. In this paper, my interest is not capitalism and “modernity” per se, but rather a microanalysis of some spatiotemporalizations of New York places in which we will see how a certain problematic was informing people’s sense of place. This problematic resonates in some respects with the paradox of capitalism as expressed by Berman or Harvey, but cannot be abstractly summarized or subsumed by it, for it is made in its own forms out of experiences of the New York and American lived world of the time. Microanalysis can reveal at least some of its multidimensionality, showing how rapidity, motion, and memory take shape in different local apprehensions of events and practices involving the dissolution of places. Accordingly, I take a kind of exploratory “walk” through different facets of this spacetime in some ordinary commentaries on the city between about 1830 and 1860 (focusing on the 1850s). Obviously, this “walk” provides only a limited viewing of city viewpoints and places. My commentators, who reflect a particular, but influential vision of the city, include journalists, editors, an educator, and a wealthy ex-mayor—they are professionals, intellectuals, or other elites—but the discourse conveyed and probably contributed to perspectives held more widely among the city’s “middling” class. In fact, some of its features belonged to a diffuse American public discourse, as I explain later. Although these perspectives tended to be “Whiggish”—to resonate with the so-called “enlightened” conservatism of American Whigs who, as Daniel Walker Howe (1979: 74, 181) has pointed out, supported social and institutional continuities combined with “benevolent change”—they do not in themselves necessarily indicate affiliation with the Whig rather than the Democratic party.3 Additionally, Whiggish viewpoints overlapped in part with romantic construals of spacetime, such as those of Edgar Allen Poe whom we are about to meet roaming around Manhattan in 1844. Coming on certain “neglected—unimproved” localities on the island’s east side, Poe ([1844] 1929: 25–26) wrote of them for his New York newsletters to a Pennsylvania paper: The old [“wood”] mansions upon [these “picturesque” localities] . . . remain unrepaired, and present a melancholy spectacle of decrepitude. In fact, these magnificent places are doomed. The spirit of Improvement has withered them with its acrid breath. Streets are already “mapped” through them, and they are no longer suburban residences, but “town-lots.” Poe’s description shows these mansions in terms of different temporalities and values: their “decrepitude” displays a neglected old age—loss of support for the value still visible in their “magnificence”; they are “doomed” to imminent disappearance. Surveyed and mapped by 1811, the grid of streets subsequently appeared on later maps as well, even where the planned streets themselves had not yet appeared. Empowered by state law (and energizing the activities of developers and speculators), the map prefigured the city’s spatial future within these mansions, which disclosed this aspect of the place-world as they were becoming subject to dislocating powers. So Poe was not just speaking figuratively when he described the mansions and their surroundings through the prism of this destined future with “the streets . . . already mapped through them,” as if they and their “picturesque” landscapes had already become “town lots.” Indeed, newspapers sometimes listed such impending dislocations of well-known “country houses”: for example, in 1843 The Commercial Advertiser said of the historic Kip Farm mansion: “when the [City] Corporation shall open and regulate Thirty Fifth Street, it will take off . . . one third of the old mansion” (cited in Stokes 1915: 1782). Poe had a Gothic eye, and an uneasy relation with old mansions, but he also knew the city well. I infer that he saw the mansions as self-evidently this way for he lived in the world shaping them as part of a larger ensemble of its practices. He gave verbal expression to these places as a crystallization of what was happening to them—certain potentials and pasts which he saw emerging in them, at that moment. In this sense, the place can be thought of as disclosing itself to him as part of a specific place-world, a tangible concentration of certain spatio-temporalizations, even while he, of course, refashioned it in a distinctive verbal form which disclosed to others something of the way he took things to be. Here I draw on Heidegger’s notion of “disclosure” to emphasize that, as elements of the everyday world, places show themselves forth to people in ways reflecting their nesting in wider placepractices, situations, and understandings as well as a person’s specific perspectives of the moment; people then “bring out” and configure these disclosures through their own formulations which can in turn enter into others’ understandings and formulations of places and the place-world.4 The spacetime Poe shows us emerging here embodies contradictory values conveyed in his use of the term “improvement.” The standard label for all projects and products of urban construction was “city improvements.” The notion of “improvement” derived from the much earlier English concept of cultivating land for monetary profit (see Wood 2002: 106), but had also long held its more general sense of a value-enhancing alteration of a present state, and, as noted above, could be used broadly to refer to any such change. Yet Poe’s ironic “the Spirit of Improvement has withered them” points to a disturbing dialectic invading the eastside mansions: what passes as material “improvement” from one point of view, or with respect to one state of the lived world, may destroy from or with respect to another.5 “The Spirit of Improvement” was materially shaping these places with a spacetime of contradictory values: old estates carrying family identities, and their open, landscape surroundings were being “withered” rather than “improved” by the soon-to-come legally empowered expansion of urban “improvements.” Dwellings of this kind embodied certain prior values of localized perpetuity: namely, family continuity, male authority and stored, inherited wealth in land themselves ambivalently viewed in the wider socio-economic milieu of changing family relations (including decreasing paternal authority) and the increasing commodification of land. Such residences epitomized an older place-world in the process of becoming past. And so, nostalgically recalling the early 19th century “renown” of the Kip Farm’s garden and others, one elderly physician (Francis 1858:21) remarked on “the havoc of progressive improvement” which had destroyed all “traces” of them. Wealthy residences (newer ones as well as old) were among the places often regarded as “landmarks” and will turn up again. The awareness of a problem emerging in the ongoing process of city improvements took varied forms. During one spate of city building, a New York Times article put it: “old landmarks are swept away, and even good buildings are pulled down to make room for better. The iconoclastic hand of improvement is everywhere busy and everywhere visible” (New York Times, October 12, 1860: 8). Here, the new buildings are produced in an inherently “iconoclastic” process which “sweeps away” (an often-used cliché connoting the rapidity of spatial obliteration) whatever is there, indifferent to already extant positive values, yet producing value increment in the new buildings. The writer of this article was not expressing a blanket opposition to such “improvements.” Elite New Yorkers, whether or not they perceived a negative side to “improvements,” or to some “improvements,” generally found them “splendid” and progressive. The label “city improvements” held in tension within it both poles of this dialectic; however, the negative evaluation was, in effect, hidden within the overtly positive sense of the notion, only released and made overt as improvements were problematized and their negative aspects experienced. A moralistic version of this problematic is developed in a speech by the educator, Henry Tappan, a New Yorker who had taught philosophy at New York University (but was then the first President of the University of Michigan). Speaking to the New York Geographical Society on “The Growth of Cities” in 1855, he asked what New York requires to become a memorable, “immortal” city comparable to other famous cities. Tappan was among those New York elites who held the Whiggish view that New York’s (and the nation’s) “improvement” required intellectual and aesthetic “works” or “culture” to counterbalance “commerce” (Bender 1987: 56, 111). (Given the breadth of Tappan’s commentary, I will keep returning to different parts of it as we go along.) Regarding New York’s ongoing material “improvements,” which he linked to aims of commercial and monetary gain, and viewed as essential to the city’s growth, Tappan (1855: 31, 32) argued nonetheless that they could not give the city enduring identity. The works of one generation [Tappan says] are swept away by the works of the next. The improvements of one generation do indeed introduce the higher improvements of the next; but the old and abrogated are ever prone to be forgotten in the new. . . . If [New York] . . . goes on increasing . . . [in the future,] must not all the works of the present and prosperous generation . . . leave not a trace behind in the more magnificent prosperity of generations that follow? Shall we not be forgotten as we have forgotten our fathers? In this view, the “iconoclasm” of “improvements” derives from the fact that the value increment they create over the value they displace engenders their own future displacement: Each generation, obliterating the works of the previous one in its own superior “improvements,” prefigures the future, soon-to-be obsolescence of its own “works.” The problematic inherent in “improvements” reproduces itself, taking with it moreover, memories of past “improvements” and their makers. This seems to be less a “mnemonics of dispossession” (in Terdiman’s 1993: 110 passim phrase) than a reiterated, ongoing “dispossession of memory.” We can see that the subversive power in “improvements” not only destroys “works” (i.e., here, city places), but in this process disrupts relations between persons and places (i.e., peoples’ “works”) and relations between persons; for each generation the production of its own “being forgotten” begins in the next descending generation as a moral retribution for its own forgetting of the previous generation. Each generation’s works become saturated with its own forgetfulness of the past, prefiguring its own fated (predetermined) future of being forgotten: “Shall we not be forgotten,” Tappan asks, “as we have forgotten our fathers?” In short, generativity as a reproduction of social persons who sustain a consciousness of others before and after them—i.e., a crucial aspect of the fundamental socio-temporal logic of generation—is negated. Tappan’s model does not just depict what the literary historian R. W. B. Lewis (1955: 16) characterized in a related context as “the disjunction between generations”: more tellingly, it conveys a cyclic process in which the basic “self-other” relations defining generation as a social form are ongoingly negated—namely, the kinship-modeled form centered in an ego who, in effect, is always looking both “before,” towards his or her immediate antecedents and “after,” towards descendants. Tappan’s generational model is part of an historically rooted, polyphonic discourse—a “language of generations [that] was corporate, national, civic” (Wallach: 1997: 7)—concerned in this era of marked sociocultural and economic change with dilemmas of American national identity and historicity. American historians have long occupied themselves with these dilemmas and widely documented this polemical, public language variously penetrating the arguments of national politics, property inheritance, and the generational conflicts posed by “Young America” Movements active in New York City (and elsewhere) in the precivil war era.6 The historian J. V. Mathews (1978: 195) points to the obsession of Whig politicians with the sorts of mnemonic-generational disconnections remarked by Tocqueville (2000, v.2: 483) in his famous passage on the constantly dissolving and reforming families in a democratic society: “the fabric of time is torn at every moment and the trace of generations is effaced. You easily forget those who have preceded you, and you have no idea of those who will follow you.” And one of Tocqueville’s American informants said to him: “[In America] almost all families disappear after the second or third generation” (Tocqueville 1959: 20). According to Mathews (ibid.: 195), Whigs regarded such disconnections as “[isolating] . . . the individual . . . in his own . . . willfulness, unaware of the claims of ancestors or future progeny.” This was, in fact, a preoccupation of the famous Federalist (later Whig) orator, Daniel Webster in his Plymouth Rock oration of 1820 where he argued for “looking before and after to hold communion at once with our ancestors and our posterity” (Webster 1891: 26). But Tappan’s argument was shaped not just by this ubiquitous discourse of the wider sociocultural milieu, but also by his experiences and knowledge of New York’s place-world and its building practices. Moreover, he was hardly the first for whom a dispossession of generational memory was disclosed in the improvements seen as coursing rapidly through the city. “Continual alteration [of the city] is so rapid,” the poet-editor William Cullen Bryant and his coauthors (1830: 338), the latter, two native New Yorkers, had written some twenty years before, “that a few years sweep away . . . the memory and the external vestiges of the generation that precedes us.”7 If city changes in general were disclosing this problematic spacetime, so also, as we saw in the case of “Poe’s mansions,” it was shown in particular events engulfing places. In 1856 the elegant Stevens home (which Stevens had left to move back to New Jersey) was being torn down: “The Irish laborers [recklessly] insert their crowbars into the frescoe painting and choice joiner work,” said one account of its dismemberment (Home Journal 1856: 2). Another journalist wrote: We saw the busy hands of the ruthless destroyer pulling out its vitals and scattering its costly walls. . . . Little do those who are pulling down old landmarks to build up a new one think of the day when another generation will also be engaged in the great work of pulling down. (Daily Tribune 1856, cited in Lockwood 1976: 104–5) The future disclosed to this observer in the spatial rupturing of the Stevens house, in effect, jumps over the more immediate future—the next building’s construction—to the latter’s subsequent pulling down. Unlike those behind the current demolition, with their more short-sighted focus on the new building (to consist of stores), he foregrounds a transgenerational repetition of the present destructive activity—a long-term view based, I infer, on his awareness of recurrent city practices. The continuous dissolution and increasingly “higher improvements” invading the city place-world were being asserted in other ways. Rebuilding and urban expansion were disrupting the experience of the city as a whole as a continuous, enduring identity in people’s lives. Loss of recognition of the city known even in the recent past or over one’s lifespan was variously emphasized. For instance, Washington Irving wrote to his sister in 1847: “I often think what a strange world you would find yourself in, if you could revisit your native place. . . . [The New York you knew] . . . was a mere corner of the present . . . city, and that corner is [itself] all changed” (1982: 148). And an 1850s magazine editorial observed more generally: “It is never the same city for a dozen years together. A man born in New York forty years ago finds absolutely nothing of the New York he knew” (Curtis 1856: 272). In noting that the new ongoingly abolishes the old, Tappan (ibid.: 31) situates this altering of city identity in terms of a repetitive process ongoing into the future. “The New York of to-day is not the New York of fifty years ago; and fifty years hence where will the New York of to-day be?” he asks. Tappan’s phrasing is one variant of a conventional indexical frame conveying the sense of ongoing rapid change in the city. Centered in the present, this frame draws the audience’s awareness backward and forward from the present, as do generational relations, towards past and future.8 But this spacetime turns on a parallelism of year-measured retrospect and prospect: the retrospect marks the time difference between now and then, defining a prospect like itself for the same number of years into the future. Again we see the configuring of an ongoing negation, in this instance an unstoppable transformation of the city’s identity into the future, but framed here in terms of units of annual time rather than generations. Like “generations” this frame reconstitutes particulars within a larger, selfreproductive process in which the future coursing through the city appears not simply as a progress of increasing value, but also as a construction of loss—in this case of the city’s identity. While expectations of open-ended change informed this view, it did not “detach . . . [expectations] from past experience” but actually “introduced the past into the future” contra Koselleck’s (1985: 279, 8) characterization (on a different level of analysis) of historical time in European modernity. Tappan typifies this transformation of identity by a sequence of place-changes within the city. His aim is not just to point to successive dislocations of places, but also to the concomitant dislodging of certain significant person-place identifications, notably between wealthy homes and their owners: “The palaces [wealthy homes] of the last generation [Tappan says] were forsaken and turned into boarding-houses, then pulled down and replaced by warehouses.” Furthermore, a present builder’s work contains the same cycle in potentia: “He who erects his magnificent palace on Fifth Avenue to-day, has only fitted out a future boarding house, and probably occupied the site of a future warehouse” (ibid.: 31). We can view each alteration of place-identity (from palatial residence to boarding house to warehouse) within this repetitive cycle as if it were a phase in the life history of a wealthy family home destined to decline and disappear. Although this sequence may seem merely stereotypic, it actually reflects commonly reported place changes going on in the spatial transformations within which New Yorkers were living: as business establishments spread out and expanded north in the increasingly crowded, noisy city, well-off New Yorkers left their downtown residences to move north to more desirable edges of the city. For instance, 1853 accounts state that along Greenwich Street “[once] the residence of the old aristocratic families . . . elegant old mansions are [now] occupied by immigrant foreigners . . . almost every house being a beer shop or boarding house”; and on Dey street, off of lower Broadway, as businesses engulf this area, “private dwellings and boarding houses . . . [have] been entirely torn down and rebuilt for . . . drygoods dealers [i.e., for warehouses, also called “stores”] (New York Daily Times 1853: 3; [Cook] 1853: 358). Although Tappan ignores it in his comment, large new retail stores (which might also have wholesale floors) could be described as the “splendid” “palaces” of their owners, suggesting the wealth and expansive energy they condensed; and the admiration for the business development that was displacing the earlier downtown place-world of elite residences (as the grid and urban “improvements” were displacing uptown residences like those of Poe’s country mansions). Tappan’s conversion cycle implies a world in which the house is infused with motion as it is caught up in both the departure of owning residents and the circulation of money which subvert and transform it. The house is first identified with an elite, wealthy family which then moves away, taking the house’s sociopersonal and functional identity with it and leaving behind an empty shell to take on the new lower class identity of an outsider—often a widow of lower status who leases the house from the prior-owner and rents out rooms (Blackmar 1980: 140; cf. [Cook] 1854: 246). This creates a multi-tenant house riddled with commercial units whose typically single, often working class men are relatively transient residents.9 The house itself loses both familial and elite identity as it becomes invested with monetary circulation and transient renters. Finally, the old house is demolished and replaced with a commercial building, a temporary location for transient commodities on their way to future purchasers. These last “inhabitants” are literally “for sale.” We might say that the house is shown in a “commodity phase” of its biography (in Appadurai’s 1986: 13ff. and Kopytoff’s 1986: 65ff. sense), but instead of itself physically moving away (like a mobile exchange object), it reflects in itself the transience of its inhabitants, enabled by monetary transactions: Monetary circulation (like human transience) is, to loosely paraphrase Marx (1906: 123), increasingly depicting itself in the body of the house as it is converted into extinction. Consider this monetary “depiction” from the perspective of one home-owner’s dilemma. In 1836 Philip Hone, wealthy, conservative auctioneer and ex-Mayor of New York, was torn between his attachment to his home near City Hall and his desire to escape the neighborhood’s increasing noisy commercialization; but, as he records in his diary, it was the considerable money offered for his home which finally enticed him to move north: “The splendid rooms . . . my snug library, well-arranged books . . . what will become of them? [he asks]. I have turned myself out of doors; but $60,000 is a great deal of money” (Hone 1889: 203). The problematic spacetime of the city is reflected in Hone’s personal conflict: which will gain empowerment—the tempting monetary value of his house and the expanding commerce encouraging him to move to a new home, or the value to him of his current house as loved home (rather than commodity)? His departure acts reciprocally on his own biography and that of his house which he leaves behind to be metamorphosed into a hotel annex and stores. Three years after his move, he writes of the “Brickbats, rafters and slates . . . showering down . . . in every direction” during the mass “pulling down” of houses and stores in the area of his old home, and he laments: “my poor, dear house . . . is coming down . . . [soon] the home of my happy days will be incontinently swept from the earth” (ibid.: 359). The circulation potential of money in the monetary offer for the house prefigures Hone’s departure and the house’s future; his previous home is in effect set loose by his decision and his own mobility, and only three years later is spatially ruptured and extinguished. For Tappan, the inevitable disappearance of personally or family owned palatial houses, implying their dissolution into monetary value, also points to the forgetting of the personal and familial identities of the owner-builders. So he chides his audience: “How soon you yourselves will be forgotten if you leave nothing but your money behind you” (Tappan ibid.: 37). (Tappan has an alternative to this rather dismal future I will return to later.) In short, the shaping of spacetime through “improvements” was disrupting expectations about the tangible durability of places and by the same token these altered expectancies were affecting the remembrance of persons who might otherwise remain objectified in home-places saturated with their identities. In these respects, the spacetime was “out of joint.” Nevertheless, more recent wealthy homes were being built without attention to these altered expectancies. One architectural critic saw this in the contradiction between the futures materially built into new wealthy residences and the actual futures they could sustain. According to his detailed survey of New York’s 1850s buildings, the solid “self-glorifying” and “costly” houses being built by “merchants and land speculators” as if to be inhabited in perpetuity by their descendants had little chance to survive the builders: the rapid “accumulation and dispersal” of family fortunes and the lack of an inheritance “law of primogeniture” worked against their retention within the family after the builder’s death ([Cook] 1854:245–47). Yet these mansions, the essay notes, would even meet John Ruskin’s requirement that houses “be built as durably as the pyramids” (ibid.: 246–47). This romantic image reflects Ruskin’s vision that houses like these should be memorials to the original builders whose life experiences and rights inhering in them after death were to “be respected by . . . [their] children” and descendant generations ([1880] 1989: 182, 197). As the historian Gillian Brown (1990: 74) has put this: “Such houses would be monuments to their builders, museums to their lasting ownership.” But, of course, these are just the mnemonic powers the New York mansions are unable to muster. Instead, they disclose a contradictory spacetime: invested with the identity of an affluent family, they are built as if forever, but are unable to transmit that identity down the generations; they have only a lifetime (at most) in them. The inheritance of land through male primogeniture and the “entailment” of this type of inheritance within the specified line of descent down the generations had largely disappeared in America by the end of the eighteenth century. In New York state, these constraints on land circulation had been legally abolished in 1782.10 Yet they led an active afterlife in American political and legal discourse as a stereotypic symbol of European feudal hierarchy (taken as the antithesis of the American republic), epitomizing the power of elites to concentrate wealth over time and perpetuate the nonpartible, transgenerational inheritance of land within a single family, as against releasing it to the circulating, monetary powers of the market.11 If primogeniture was viewed (in Henry Maine’s words) as “a source of . . . durabilty” ([1861] 1963: 229), in the present context its lack was made to convey the transgenerational power that wasn’t there: the capacity, that is, to constrain the commodification of property separating families and their residential places.12 Consequently, (in this view) these places, although new, even improved manifestations of a solidary condensed wealth, can only be demolished in the monetization practices of further improvement as if they were old. Neither wealth nor remembrance of past generations can be stored in them and transmitted down the generations. Such social dimensions of descent and inheritance, as well as their embedding in the material forms of enduring houses are familiar themes in anthropology and history, but here it is their nonexistence, their negative, that is at issue. * * * Now let us pay closer attention to places viewed as “external vestiges” of the past. In this context, certain fundamental conditions of human being-in-the-world involving the basic situatedness or emplacement of persons come into focus. New Yorkers, we have seen, were sometimes troubled with the realization that not only were tangible forms and identities of familiar places (themselves traces of the city’s earlier place world) being rapidly swept away but that disappearing in them were the “traces” of persons and events or of generations who had themselves disappeared. Older citizens might remember the particulars of a vanished place and some of the more distant people and events identified with it, but such places also sometimes held for them historical identifications with persons beyond their personal memories, keeping these persons within the “living present” of that earlier time by maintaining them in place. What was being problematized of course was the capacity to presence the past on an ongoing basis within one’s mundane placeworld. If we consider memory with respect to this felt capacity of places, the line between the past outside and that inside lived memory blurs, as Halbwachs ([1950] 1980: 57) has suggested. I want to look briefly at some ways the mnemonic power of places to presence the historical past emerges as part of this problematized place-world. For Tappan, reversing the cycle of each generation’s forgetfulness of the previous one and assuring the city’s memorability and renown as a distinctive place, required constructing landmark places with staying power beyond the mortal life span, not subject to the disruptive powers of “improvement.” Instead of buildings incrementing private property and personal wealth, New Yorkers should construct places of civic value, institutions that contribute to the public good. (This vision was in accord with Whig ideals of moral interventions balancing the city’s selfaggrandizing commercialism.) The identities of both the city and those who supported the construction of such landmarks will then be “remembered.” To follow Tappan’s argument we need to depart the city for a moment. His exemplary place—intended as a moral for his New York audience—is the research observatory he himself created at the University of Michigan; just finished, it stood at the time of his speech, on a hilltop then overlooking “a beautiful [natural] locality.”13 Assuming that as the home of a scientific institution this new building will endure into future generations, Tappan (ibid.: 30) imagines a future astronomer descending from the observatory and recalling those “who erected [it] for him” as he reads their names on the plaque at its foot. Tappan thus draws his present audience to look both forward to the future rememberer remembering them (the audience) and backward from the rememberer’s spatiotemporal locus in the future to their own present, the future rememberer’s past. That is, he constructs a repaired transgenerational (social) spacetime—a reciprocity of spatiotemporal perspectives being worked out between the generations within the medium of this “long-lived” place. Tappan also sees the observatory’s surrounding land as a region for future building. Returning to a contemporary vantage point, he imagines himself situated in the observatory’s “beautiful locality . . . looking around” at the landscape. In this image, space is formed indexically: Tappan becomes its center from which it stretches out as his own view, his spatial field; by the same token, Tappan is centered in and oriented by this place. And just when this mutual centering of the place “in” the person (that is, as his spatial field) and the person in the place (that is, as the surroundings in which he is immersed) takes over, he hears the voice of “the genius of the place,” inviting him to “improve” the area by “adorning” nature with institutions of art and learning (ibid.: 30). The ancient notion of the “genius of the place” was part of a larger view of nature’s primacy in guiding human practices of landscape art or aesthetic “improvements” to land. Deriving from English landscape architecture, such views were also prominent among the American pioneers of these practices, including the soon-to-be designers of what would become at the end of the decade New York’s Central Park, then a stretch of rocky, hilly land, sparsely populated by the poor, which the city—intending to save a portion of “nature” and “open space” from inevitable urban advance—was purchasing for parkland up town. Tappan’s place “genius” was the persona of “nature’s” creativity animated as its prior authority; Tappan shows himself heeding “nature’s” authorization to make future “improvements” (here, institutions of art and learning) that will, in his view, adorn rather than obliterate the landscape. In this romantic vision, the disturbing contradiction in “improvement” drops from view: the improvements prefigured in the land are to maintain a spatiotemporal continuum, rather than to demolish what is already present in what is to come. Similarly, a mediating sense of “improvements” was later materially embodied in Central Park by its designers who aimed to preserve what they could of the topography while altering or “improving” it. This kind of aesthetic improvement was explicitly worked out in their construction practices.14 Tappan sympathized with the idea of creating a large park uptown. In the lower city, he remarks, most of “the [natural] beauty” has been lost. For instance, instead of being improved (“preserved and embellished”)—made into a healthful, attractive place (like a city park)—New York’s “Collect Pond” was filled-in with the soil of the surrounding hills and the whole area leveled; now the city prison (known as “The Tombs”) stands on the site in a degraded, slum neighborhood. “The [city] fathers,” he says, “absorbed in . . . [money-making]” heard not the voice of the Genius of the place; “they formed no strong local attachment” (ibid.: 34). American lack of “local attachment” was associated with the transience of both people and places, some of which were noted earlier. As one commentator remarked: “We accomplish our object in one place and remove to another, leaving behind us nothing . . . permanent” (Home Journal 1855: 2). And George Curtis (1856: 272), the editor of Harpers Monthly asked why people born in New York some forty years before should “love” the city, since so many places that had defined the city for them were gone. The symbolism of “attachment” involved some mix of “being” or “staying there” and paying attention to, caring about a place—for instance, by preserving rather than destroying it. Tappan demonstrates “local attachment” when he situates himself on the observatory hill and attends to what the landscape tells or shows him; and the future astronomer demonstrates it when he reads the plaque bringing to his mind the place’s past creators. Efforts to bring the past to life in felt experience through concrete imagery and tangible memorials are well-known features of this era of American history.15 Whig orators, says Mathews (1978: 195), worried about the loss of social constraints when the individual consciousness was slipped out of the “network of generations,” aimed in this way to stimulate in people’s minds “a vivid, emotional and filial attachment to the past.” Undergirding this concern with experiencing the past is an emphasis upon subject-centered space or deixis, on “being here” (or “being there”) in a particular place. Consider Daniel Webster’s Plymouth Rock speech of 1820 in which, drawing on “familiar tropes” (Seelye 1998: 63), he addresses the people as if they were assembled on the Rock where the original English settlers were supposed to have first arrived (although the commemoration was actually being held elsewhere). There is a local feeling connected with this occasion . . . a sort of genius of the place. . . .We are here, at the season . . . [when the landing] took place. . . . We cast our eyes abroad on the ocean and we see where the little bark . . . progress[ed] to the shore. We look around us and behold the hills and promontories where . . . our fathers first saw the[se] places. . . . We feel the cold which benumbed, and listen to the winds which pierced them. Beneath us is the Rock on which New England received . . . [their] feet. We seem even to behold them . . . gain[ing] the shore. (Webster [1820] 1891: 27) Plymouth Rock was what Pierre Nora (1989: 7) calls a national lieu de mémoire where memory was being made to “crystallize and secrete itself.” One audience member who visited “Forefather’s rock” (as he referred to it) beforehand to prepare himself for this talk recorded how deeply its historic associations moved him, and how subsequently he was overwhelmed by Webster’s commemoration (cited in Seelye 1998: 65–66). Webster aims to infuse the gathering with a sense that they are standing on the Rock, scanning the sea from the land which the original settlers once saw from the reverse orientation as they sailed towards the rock. In effect, the place is to be experienced as joining within it the two temporally discrete, centered spatial fields of actors, making their bodily orientations reciprocal—one field stretching seaward from the present rememberers, the other landward from the incoming ancestral arrivals looking to land. The place’s unifying embrace almost evokes the copresence of the two groups: the present generation looking backward, as it were, to the original settlers who are looking forward to their own immediate arrival. As in Tappan’s talk, the present generation is being spatiotemporally reconstituted, not simply through evocation of an enduring place, but more precisely through what I have described as the centering of persons in places and places in the action-fields of persons. We can see how person and place are being formed as aspects of each other, coordinates of what Merleau-Ponty (1962: 102) calls “a practical system” integral to the constitution of the embodied subject, but also, I have argued, to the constitution of the place. The presence of the past is not grounded in either the subject or the place per se, but in the subject as always oriented, located, moving through or in “some place” and equally, in the place as a concrete location and center orienting and surrounding the subject. The importance of places to memory is founded in this complex of relations as the philosophers Edward Casey (1987, 1993) and Jeff Malpas (1999) have also argued in other ways than I have here. In New York, this power of presencing the past was problematized in the spatiotemporal disorders of vanishing places. “The other day,” wrote George Curtis, “they were tearing down the Irving House [Hotel]. It is too old [he says ironically]; it has been built at least ten years” (1856: 272–73). In effect, aging is being speeded up in the hotel, making it ready for its demise, when it is actually young. In London, however: “Ah! With what emotion a man awakes . . . and walks out to see the famous places! . . . Great men not only lived in London, but in this London. . . . Here are . . . [Thomas] Gray’s Inn . . . Charles Lamb’s Islington [and so forth].” Not so in New York: “[Who] . . . can pause before any building . . . and say, ‘There sat Washington’ . . . [yet he] has been dead . . . little more than half a century” (ibid.: 272–73). In London where landmark places have longer lives, one can, in effect, center within one’s own bodily field of action and be centered by and within places that give concrete spatial presence to the past bodily orientations of known historic figures. Curtis, like Tappan, moralized New York’s spatiotemporal disorders. He described decent citizens’ “local love” for the city being torn down in this “eternal demolition” of the city’s landmarks. Leaving its governance to corrupt “trading politicians” (in fact, the then city Councilmen, were known as “the forty thieves”), these decent citizens themselves “merely pull down their warehouses and build greater [ones] and move from one fine dwelling to another” (ibid.: 273). In sum, Curtis points to the dislodging of local bonds and place identities, and the abstraction of self from places manifested in the restless relocation of homes and businesses as people pursue their own monetary self-interests rather than the civic good. It is thus a disturbance of the sociomoral self (a lack of local caring) which Curtis (like Tappan) in the moralizing fashion of the time, finds ramifying in (and being furthered by) the disappearances of places from people and the mobility of people departing from places. It is as if both places and people depart from each other, each disappearing from the other’s view. We have in fact already noted some ways in which the problematized duration of places is directly connected with the final departures of people identified with them as aspects of their (the places’) spatial being. When owners moved away from their residences, this refracted back on the places: For instance, in the supercession of one place by another, places lost critical aspects of their identities and some of their previous visible qualities; similarly, they came to manifest the volatility of monetary circulation rather than familistic bonds of continuity. Demolishment is the finalizing “rite of passage” into oblivion in which (as made graphic in the cases of the Hone and Stevens houses) the whole spatial form is ruptured, the walls are opened up and the houses disappear into rubble. Indeed, these places do look back at people “with intimate eyes” (to draw on Baudelaire’s expressive phrase), but with the spatiotemporally disturbed “looks” that come from being left behind. In this respect, the “practical system” of persons and places discussed above is shown in its characteristic operation as an arena for transposing the action of persons to objectifying forms, which then “look back” at people in these given shapes as aspects of themselves. Memory and forgetting also apparently had some direct associations with departures. One commentator lamented the mobility of Americans who leaving their rural “paternal homes” for elsewhere were likely to find by the time they returned that these homes had been “ruined by improvements”; consequently, “nothing is left . . . in one’s memory, save the blank surface where he [sic] vainly endeavors to picture to his mind the absent landmarks” (Flagg 1861: 306, 308). Just as places take on negating forms put into motion by their inhabitants’ departures, in this case, the departing inhabitant’s memory takes on the mental blank left by the absent places. * * * To conclude. In his study of place, the philosopher Jeff Malpas (1999: 40–41) uses an apt analogy from geographical surveying to describe his analytic method: It is only by operating within the complicated topography of the region to gain a relational account of the surface—“through . . . journeying, sighting and resighting [he says—] that place can be understood.” In this paper, I have journeyed, sighted, and resighted some features of New York’s mid-nineteenth-century placeworld to analyze certain problematized spatiotemporal relations being formed there in a particular interplay of discursive and concrete practices. Accordingly, my account emerges here not in generalized glosses such as “rapidity of change,” “flux,” or “the annihilation of space by time” (and its variants)—often used to characterize spatiotemporal features of Western “modernity”—but in an analysis of spatiotemporal relations internal to specific sociocultural practices. As I have argued, aspects of the sociocultural milieu such as, for example, mnemonicgenerational discontinuities, contradictions between fluid monetary wealth and inherited property, and between mobility and local attachments were integral to these relations. Thus my aim has been to show how the spacetime and identities synthesized in places were unraveling and being transformed in and as part of a particular lived world. The sense of a problematized duration was not given just in some quantifiable phase of time of a place’s existence, but more fundamentally in the ways varied pasts and expected futures were being configured in its present spatial being at any given “moment.” For instance, we saw that the forthcoming arrival of a “city improvement”—a street opening—could presage impending spatial segmentation in the bodily being of an old place. In this case, the place was experienced as being caught up in the potential expansive motion of the street grid. Disintegration of a place might also be initiated or prefigured in the severance of its sociopersonal identity, which could be drawn away from its spatial “body” in the departure of those inhabitants who gave it their identity. In the moment of demolition, a place’s entire existence—the concrete space, temporal pasts and futures, and current identity held together in it were consumed as it was torn apart. And ongoing disappearances and transformations could prefigure a transgenerational spacetime of repeated vanishing and mnemonic loss in the current, changing face of the city. Further, the ongoing loss of many places brought into play a sense of disturbed mnemonic relations between persons and places—i.e., disturbances of the basic “practical system” of locative connections. If this seems like a litany of negative spatio-temporalizations, recall that this spacetime operated as part of a world of positively viewed “improvements.” Contexts of radical material transformation in people’s lived worlds are especially revealing for studies of spacetime and place. For when there are “breaks” in the tangible environments of mundane experience “circumspection comes up against [some things gone missing]” (Heidegger 1962: 105)—or in the current case, against places going missing earlier than one might ordinarily expect or desire—and attention is then drawn “afresh” to them; the spacetime of the placeworld becomes problematized and must be worked out, as it were, “anew,” taking into account just this problematic form. It is this “working out” (or some aspects of it) in one local world which has occupied me here. References Alexander, Gregory. 1997. Commodity and propriety: Competing visions of property in American legal thought 1776–1970. 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London: Verso.     Nancy MUNN is Professor Emerita of Anthropology and of Social Sciences in the College at the University of Chicago. She has conducted fieldwork in both Papua New Guinea and Australia, and more recently has been working on aspects of place-change and related issues in early-nineteenth-century New York City. Munn’s research has been concerned with such topics as value, exchange, spacetime, memory, and aesthetics. Her works include “The decline and fall of Richmond Hill: Commodification and place-change in late 18th–early 19th century New York” (Anthropological Theory, 2013), “An essay on the symbolic construction of memory in the Kahluli Gisalo” (In Cosmos and society in Oceania, edited by Daniel de Coppet and André Iteanu, Berg, 1995), “The cultural anthropology of time: A critical essay” (Annual Reviews in Anthropology, 1992), The fame of Gawa: A symbolic study of value transformation in a Massim (Papua New Guinea) society (Cambridge University Press, 1986), and Walbiri iconography: Graphic representation and cultural symbolism in a Central Australian society (Cornell University Press, 1973). Department of AnthropologyUniversity of Chicago1126 E. 59th St.Chicago, IL 60637USAndmunn@uchicago.edu ___________________ Publisher’s note: This is a reprint of Nancy D. Munn, 2004. “The ‘Becoming-Past’ of Places: Spacetime and Memory in Pre-Civil War, 19th Century New York.” The Edward Westermarck Memorial Lecture, 2003. In Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society (Suomen Antropologi) 29 (1): 2–19. We are very grateful to Nancy Munn and the editors at Suomen Antropologi for granting us the permission to reprint this lecture. We remind the reader that we retain the style of the original, except where the author has provided revisions and minor modifications. 1. Edward Casey (1993: xv, passim) introduced the term “place-world” to give concreteness to Heidegger’s more abstract notion of “being in the world” by re-phrasing it as “being-in-the-place-world.” Here I use the term to convey the notion of a place as involving a mundane world of practices, material forms, understandings, occurrences, situations, and so forth. 2. The amount of building was actually uneven throughout the era. Construction slumped during economic downturns or financial panics such as that of 1837, while recoveries led to increased building. Fire as well as demolition destroyed many buildings, but the former is outside my concerns here. 3. The Whig party was not formed until the 1830s; however, according to Howe (1979: 3) Whiggery was not merely a party but a powerful “culture.” Among the people I quote, Edgar Allen Poe aligned himself at different times with both Whigs and Democrats but by and large scorned party politics (Kennedy 2001: 44, 51). The poet-editor William Cullen Bryant started as a Federalist but after the collapse of the Federalist party turned to the Democrats, shifting to a third anti-slavery party in the late 1840s (Spann 1972: 168–69, passim). Daniel Webster, many of whose ideas reflected Whig sentiments, also became a Whig party member after the collapse of the Federalists. Most of the other known figures I discuss were Whigs or probably Whig in their political orientations. For example, the ex-mayor Philip Hone was a well-known, influential Whig. In the case of the moral philosopher and educator, Henry Tappan, one may speculate that his political sympathies were Whig; this appears to follow both from the views conveyed in his speech on city growth discussed below and his profession of moral philosophy. Howe (1979: 28) comments that “the majority of [American] academic moral philosophers [of the era] . . . seem to have been Whigs,” although his biographer (Perry 1933: 65) points out that Tappan left no explicit evidence on this matter. However, questions of views on political issues and party affiliations are outside the scope of my argument. 4. I use the term “disclose” without attempting to take account of Heidegger’s multifaceted argument, which invokes a family of analytic terms (such as “discover/uncover” or “show” as well as the basic term “disclose”). What I wish to convey especially is a dynamic interaction between persons and the place-world. As Heidegger (1982: 173) puts it in one context, meanings are not “imagined into” things but are “actually in” them—“The world, being-in-the-world, . . . leaps toward us from the things.” Since “being-in-the-world” is intrinsic to the human way of being, the person-world relation itself—or the involvements it engages in a given case—actually confronts us in and comes to us from things. The passage from Heidegger I have quoted is particularly apt for the present paper, since it refers to an excerpt from Rilke’s The notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge which describes how an exposed wall, once the inner side of a demolished city home, manifests the traces of the absent house and of the everyday living, the daily involvements, it once housed. 5. One can find a negative awareness penetrating the sense of “city improvements” as early as post-revolutionary, eighteenth-century New York at a time when there was widespread “confidence in the beneficent nature of change and innovation” (Hartog 1989: 92). Opposing this “spirit of improvement,” the conservative chancellor, Robert Livingston, warned the city’s mayor about building port facilities along the Hudson River: “Put a stop,” he said, “to your improvements (as they are falsely called) upon the north river” (cited in Hartog, ibid.: 33, emphasis added). Similarly, referring to the stripping of ornament from a room at Independence Hall in Philadelphia three years before his visit there in 1819, one commentator noted sadly: “The spirit of innovation . . . violated its venerable walls by modern improvement as it is called” (cited in Kammen 1991: 53, emphasis added). 6. Wallach’s history of the “language of generations” examines its ongoing elaboration, and the shifting forms and contexts of its American usages from the seventeen century (Wallach 1997). The concern with developing transgenerational continuities in the face of the sense of their dissolution in the place-world of the city as illustrated in Tappan’s argument is, of course, matrixed in the larger complex of conflicted attitudes toward these continuities themselves in the antebellum era. Moreover, Tappan’s polemic against forgetting the previous generation can be viewed as speaking to what R. W. B. Lewis (1955: 16, 18) describes as the “deepening sense of the disjunction between generations.” More recently, in his study of New York’s Democratic youth groups, Edward Widmer (1999: 23) has argued that “generational tension” should be viewed as one of the basic problems facing antebellum America. As Widmer points out, however, New York’s “Young Democrats” of the 1830s and 1840s, while stressing that the present “rising generation” should radically separate themselves from the politics of their seniors, did not necessarily disdain transgenerational bonds with the past (cf. also Wallach 1997). Rather, “Looking backward and forward at the same time, young Democrats peered through history to Jefferson and Paine [prototypes of revolutionary change], and also projected themselves [as “role models”] into the future.” In this respect, they created a kind of mediation of generational ruptures and connectivities by rejecting the adjacent parental generation for its “conformity” and “materialism,” while identifying with the alternate, grandparental generation as models for their opposition (Widmer ibid.: 6, 23). 7. Cf. also the remarks of Philip Hone (the ex-mayor of New York whom I consider below). Prompted by the discovery of buried Revolutionary War cannon during excavations for the construction of a new house, Hone (1889, v.2: 246) wrote in an 1845 diary entry: “[in New York] one generation of men seems studious to overthrow all relics of those which [sic] preceded them.” 8. I refer here to this frame in its temporally most comprehensive form rather than in its partial form, which is merely retrospective (for example, “Only twenty years ago . . . ”). 9. Boarding houses were of different kinds and levels, but they commonly accommodated single working class men, and in the poorer ones the basic commercial “unit” could often be a single bed in a multi-bed room (See for example, Blackmar 1989: 134, 314n, 44, passim). 10. See Blackmar (1989: 220) and Shammas, Salmon, and Dalhin (1987: 63, 67). The dates that these regulations were abolished varied from state to state. 11. Cf. Alexander (1997: 56, 81). Alexander points out that in early post-revolutionary legal thinking, primogeniture and entail “symbolized the connection between what was thought of as ‘feudal property’ and social hierarchy.” According to Alexander, these principles of inheritance actually had little “practical significance in [American] legal practice” after the mid-eighteenth century; if American post-revolutionary lawyers gave so much attention to abolishing them, they were driven primarily by this charged symbolism. Indeed, he points out, the thematic emphasis upon destroying primogeniture and entail persisted “even after . . . [they] had been virtually eliminated everywhere,” precisely because they “continued to act as powerful symbols” of what was antithetical to certain asserted ideals of American polity. Primogeniture and entail also drew these and related associations into the nineteenth century, living on, as my example suggests, in the wider cultural/political milieu. 12. It is striking in this respect that some fifty years later, Henry James’s famous address to the affluent Fifth Avenue mansions he saw on his return to New York, figures this same sort of lack: Noting that the qualities of these mansions would seem “to imply that they are ‘entailed’,” James says to them that in fact, although new, they have no future any more than they have a past: “[For] you sit here only in the lurid light of ‘business,’ and you know . . . what majestic continuity . . . that represents. Where are . . . your eldest son and his oldest son, those prime indispensables for any real projection of your estate? . . . No, . . . you are reduced to . . . the present . . . squaring itself between an absent future and an absent past” ([1907] 1967: 160–61). In James’ cynical encounter, the buildings disclose to him their inherent powerlessness to command any time for themselves, even though they are massively materialized showcases of wealth, for they lack the protection of laws of primogeniture and entail. 13. In fact, the observatory, recently saved from demolition, is now a historical museum, a lieu de mémoire in Pierre Nora’s (1989) sense—not what Tappan imagined, but still there. See Steneck (1991). For a detailed history of Tappan’s observatory see Whitesell (1998). 14. For example, the lake to be constructed between the Fifth and Sixth Avenue entrances at 59th street was “suggested by the [rather swampy] present . . . ground,” and was expected to “heighten” the “picturesque” qualities of the bordering “bluffs.” Consequently, the “rocky” character of this location (exemplified in the bluffs) was to be preserved and enhanced by the lake; although the watery potential of the undesirable swamp would be developed into the “ornamental lake” (and in this sense preserved), the swamp itself would disappear in this aesthetic transformation. (See Olmsted 1983: 127). Contrast what happened to New York’s “Collect Pond,” as noted below. 15. See among others, Browne (1993); Byer (1993); Harris (1982: 188–98, 205–7); Levin (1959: 7–9); Seelye (1998); Mathews (1978).  

Schneider: Some muddles in the models This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © David M. Schneider. Some muddles in the models: or, how the system really works1 David M. Schneider, University of Chicago   Part one. Alliance I. The phrase ‘alliance theory’ and its opposition to what has been called ‘descent theory’ was first suggested by Dumont (1961a). Alliance theory, with roots clearly in Durkheim and Mauss, has specifically arisen out of Lévi-Strauss’s Structures élémentaires … (1949) and has been developed by Lévi-Strauss, Dumont, Leach, and Needham. Descent theory also has its roots in Durkheim and Mauss, but its development has been through Radcliffe-Brown to Fortes, Goody, Gough, Gluckman, and, in certain respects, Firth. This is an oversimplified picture, of course, but one which provides a reasonable beginning. It would oversimplify matters, too, but also be useful to point out, that where Durkheim tried to bridge the gap between positivism and idealism and ended up as an idealist in the remnants of some positivist clothing, Needham’s version of alliance theory is, if anything, squarely on the side of the idealists. Lévi-Strauss and Dumont, on the other hand, go with Hegel (Murphy 1963). Descent theory has moved in the direction of positivism; some of its misunderstandings stem from its positivist premises; and the direction which the younger descent theory people (Goody, Gough) have taken seems to me to be consistent with this view. The dilemma of positivism is exemplified by a statement of Lévi-Strauss. Replying to Maybury-Lewis’s criticisms, Lévi-Strauss says: ‘… Mr. M. L. remains, to some extent, the prisoner of the naturalistic misconceptions which have so long pervaded the British school … he is still a structuralist in Radcliffe-Brown’s terms, namely, he believes the structure to lie at the level of empirical reality, and to be a part of it. Therefore, when he is presented a structural model which departs from empirical reality, he feels cheated in some devious way. To him, social [25] structure is like a kind of jigsaw puzzle, and everything is achieved when one has discovered how the pieces fit together. But, if the pieces have been arbitrarily cut, there is no structure at all. On the other hand, if, as is sometimes done, the pieces were automatically cut in different shapes by a mechanical saw, the movements of which are regularly modified by a cam- shaft, the structure of the puzzle exists, not at the empirical level (since there are many ways of recognizing the pieces which fit together); its key lies in the mathematical formula expressing the shape of the cams and their speed of rotation; something very remote from the puzzle as it appears to the player, although it “explains” the puzzle in the one and only intelligible way’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1960, p. 52). The contrast may be put more specifically. To a degree, both alliance and descent theory are concerned with social structure. But, for descent theory, social structure is considered one or another variant of the concept of (a) concrete relations or groupings, socially defined, which (b) endure over time. To Radcliffe-Brown, social structure is the network of ‘actual social relations’; for Evans-Pritchard in discussing the Nuer (Evans-Pritchard 1940) it is the enduring social groups, the concrete lineages.3 For alliance theory, the problem is not what the concrete patterns of social relations actually are, although these are not neglected; it is not the actual organization of any specific group like a lineage. It is, instead, that construct or model which is fabricated by the anthropologist and which is presumed to have, as its concrete expression, the norms for social relations and the rules governing the constitution of social groups and their inter-relations (Lévi-Strauss, 1953). Alliance theory grows out of (1) Durkheim’s distinction between mechanical and organic solidarity; (2) his notion of collective representations and specifically his and Mauss’s insistence that the fundamental socio-cultural categories of the culture itself must be understood in its own terms; and (3) out of Mauss’s ideas that are expressed in his essay, The Gift. This is perhaps the minimal and most immediately relevant set of ideas. others more derivative or tangential are involved, but need not detain us at this point. [26] First, organic solidarity is essentially a state of affairs in which functionally differentiated parts are each non-viable parts but, when joined together, become a single, coherent, and viable ‘organism’. Functional differentiation is in turn based on two kinds of condition. One is that the parts have different roles which get those things done which need to be done if the whole is to survive. The other is that for the parts to work properly they must be oriented toward common goals. if the goals of one part are disparate from the goals of the other, then the parts will not make up a single, coherent, viable whole. This second feature may be considered to be most intimately related to ‘coherence’. Each part by itself means nothing; the parts together make an integrated and viable unit. The simplest example is of two unilineal lineages, each being able to provide for its essential needs in all ways except one: the rule of exogamy requires that marriage partners come from outside the group. These two lineages, both having a common aim — to provide for wives — exchange wives. The two lineages together, then, make up one viable and coherent society. That they may also exchange differentiated economic products only elaborates and reinforces their differentiation and interdependence. The simplest form of differentiation centers on the definition of opposed but interrelated parts. Again, exogamy is the pertinent example. From the point of view of either of the two lineages, one ‘needs’ wives, the other ‘has wives to give’. The definitions are plus and minus, have and have not, and so on. These are essentially opposed elements, defined in terms of their polar qualities. Just what particular form this differentiation will take in any society is an empirical question. Yet it is implied, i think, that all societies operate in fundamentally this way: at every point of differentiation, there is at rock-bottom a polar, opposite kind of differentiating definition which in any particular case may be elaborated into gradients, subdivided into qualities, but basically, and in some sense ‘originally’, the elements are oppositional, unitary, and polar. (Lévi-Strauss, 1945, 1949, 1955, 1962, 1963; Needham 1958a, 1960d.) There remains always the substantive problem: how is this particular social structure differentiated? What are its constituent parts? How are they interrelated? Here the idealistic [27] foundation of the theory becomes apparent. On the one hand, as a fundamental category of human mentality, dualism is expressed in a wide variety of particular social forms; on the other hand, it is the particular ideational categories, as these are consciously or unconsciously conceived by the members of the society itself, which play a role in regulating their action. For example, in a matrilateral cross-cousin marriage system, where a ‘positive marriage rule’ (Dumont’s phrase (Dumont, 1961); a prescriptive system in Needham’s terms) obtains, the system is conceived of, from the point of view of any given lineage in that system, as one which is made up of dual relations — ‘we’ versus ‘they’ as wife-givers to wife-takers; ‘they’ versus ‘we’ as wife-takers to wife-givers. The system as a system is triadic; yet the conceptualization of the system from the point of view of the given lineage is dyadic (Lévi-Strauss, 1949, 1956; Needham, 1958a, 1960d, 1962a.) But one must go further; in any society having a positive marriage rule, that class of persons who are potential wives is categorized in some particular way. To call this, for instance, MoBrDa is to commit the error of imposing our way of thinking on their system when these may (though they may not) be radically different. It is thus necessary to find out how they conceptualize their system, what their categories of social objects and actors are, how they are constituted and how they are conceived to behave. This raises a core problem: symbolism. In alliance theory, it is held that a given structural relationship in a very important sense cannot be seen or observed as such. It is, instead, ‘expressed’ in a wide variety of different ways, and the ‘expressions’ of the relationship tend to be reiterative, though seldom identical from one form of expression to another. The problem in analyzing social structure is thus to search out the various forms of expression in order to comprehend the basic relationship which is structurally operative, but no particular form of it, no particular expression of it, can be taken as ‘it’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1960). The contrast here with Radcliffe-Brown’s, Murdock’s, and similar conceptions is very clear. For Murdock, it is the concrete fact of where specific people actually reside which, bringing them [28] in proximity with one another, creates unilineal descent groups (Murdock, 1949). For the intellectualist, where they live, how they are brought into proximity with one another, and how the unilineal descent group is organized are all equally symbols of, or expressions of, the same inherent structural principle. Where residence rules cause or determine descent groups for Murdock, it is structural principles which account for both residence rules and descent groups for alliance theorists (Lévi-Strauss, 1960, p. 54; see Murphy, 1963, in this connection). II. Lévi-Strauss, Needham, and George Homans are all psychological reductionists - each in his own way, of course. Lévi-Strauss is quite emphatic that ‘sentiments’ and ‘emotion’ explain very little, if anything. His discussion of ‘anxiety’ as an explanation (either in Malinowski’s or Freud’s terms) is, however, the only discussion provided in any detail in his book Totemism. Here he rests his case on Radcliffe-Brown’s ‘turn about’ argument, namely, that it is not because people feel anxiety that they make magic, but that they feel anxiety because they make magic. Further, he adds an apparent empirical exception to Malinowski’s supposed ‘rule’, saying, ‘The empirical relationship postulated by Malinowski is thus not verified’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1963, p. 67). He bases this on the case of the Ngindo beekeepers, but he does not cite Kroeber’s earlier example of the Eskimo (Kroeber, 1948, pp. 603-604). But for the rest, his position against sentiment, emotion, or anxiety remains an assertion. ‘Contrary to what Freud maintained, social constraints, whether positive or negative, cannot be explained, either in their origin or in their persistence, as the effects of impulses or emotions which appear again and again, with the same characteristics and during the course of centuries and millennia, in different individuals. For if the recurrence of the sentiments explained the persistence of customs, the origin of the customs ought to coincide with the origin of the appearance of the sentiments, and Freud’s thesis would be unchanged even if the parricidal impulse corresponded to a typical situation instead of to a historical event. [29]We do not know, and never shall know, anything about the first origin of beliefs and customs the roots of which plunge into a distant past but, as far as the present is concerned, it is certain that social behavior is not produced spontaneously by each individual, under the influence of emotions of the moment. Men do not act, as members of a group, in accordance with what each feels as an individual; each man feels as a function of the way in which he is permitted or obliged to act’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1963, pp. 69-70). Lévi-Strauss sharply dissociates himself from Durkheim’s position. ‘… in the last analysis Durkheim derives social phenomena as well from affectivity. His theory of totemism starts with an urge, and ends with a recourse to sentiment’ (ibid., pp. 70-71). ‘Actually, impulses and emotions explain nothing: they are always results, either of the power of the body or of the impotence of the mind. In both cases they are consequences, never causes. The latter can be sought only in the organism, which is the exclusive concern of biology, or in the intellect, which is the sole way offered to psychology, and to anthropology as well’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1963. pp. 70-71). And so the intellect, cognition, how people think and not their emotions are the explanatory conditions for social phenomena. But notice how close is the pattern to that which is explicitly repudiated when phrased in terms of sentiment. ‘The advent of culture thus coincides with the birth of the intellect. Furthermore, the opposition between the continuous and the discontinuous, which seems irreducible on the biological plane because it is expressed by the seriality of individuals within the species, and in the heterogeniety of the species among each other, is surmounted in culture, which is based on the aptitude of man to perfect himself …’ (ibid., p. 100). Origins, in other words, are not recoverable if we try to locate their emotional beginnings, but they are recoverable if we consider them to be in the intellect. This, it would seem, is because [30] the intellect is the source, the beginning and the continuing source. ‘… Bergson and Rousseau … have succeeded in getting right to the psychological foundations of exotic institutions … by a process of internalization, i.e., by trying on themselves modes of thought taken from elsewhere or simply imagined. They thus demonstrate that every human mind is a locus of virtual experience where what goes on in the minds of men, however remote they may be, can be investigated’ (ibid., p. 103). The mathematical formula expressing the shape of the cams and their speed of rotation now assumes the form of the human intellect. It is the inventiveness of the human intellect, the rules of operation of the human mind, the fundamental qualities of mind which are the explanations. ‘It is certainly the case that one consequence of modern structuralism (not, however, clearly enunciated) ought to be to rescue associational psychology from the discredit into which it has fallen. Associationism had the great merit of sketching the contours of this elementary logic, which is like the least common denominator of all thought, and its only failure was not to recognize that it was an original logic, a direct expression of the structure of the mind (and behind the mind, probably, of the brain), and not an inert product of the action of the environment on an amorphous consciousness.’ (ibid., p. 90). Except for minor embellishments, Lévi-Strauss has returned to the position at the turn of this century which Durkheim, Lévy-Bruhl, Boas, and Kroeber held. This is simply the position that culture, custom, belief, or social constraints are products of the human mind, understandable only when the laws of the human mind are known. It is disconcerting, therefore, to follow the discussion of Totemism (Lévi-Strauss, 1963), which seems to review the history of our understanding of that phenomenon. It moves with care from the illusion of an entity shattered by Boas and Goldenweiser’s cold analysis, on to Elkin’s fumbling with too many broken pieces, and then on through to functionalism’s confusions until it reaches the climax in Chapter 4, ‘Toward the Intellect’. [31] Toward the intellect, away from emotion and sentiment, using structural linguistics as the vehicle to ride to the rescue of associational psychology! But one suddenly notices that the intellect toward which one is headed is in one case fresh from the eighteenth century, and in the other from the earliest past of the twentieth; that the confusions of functionalism are all historically later developments; that the devastation of the entity called totemism by Goldenweiser, following directions clearly stated by Boas, comes after the very time and the very position to which Lévi-Strauss has returned by such a circuitous route. It was Boas, of course, who first wrote The mind of primitive man, in 1911, and Kroeber who insisted that kinship terms could be understood only as linguistic and psychological phenomena in 1917, just as it is Lévi-Strauss in 1962 who says that totemism is understandable as a product of the human mind. One can only suppose that the separation of mind into ‘intellect’ and ‘emotion’ is the end-product of the same series of events which have led Homans up the Skinnerian path. Skinnerian psychology is not really too far from structural linguistics and Lévi-Strauss’s ‘intellect’ (Homans, 1962). Homans and Lévi-Strauss have converged on the same intellectual position, each from his own very different starting-point, each backing away from the other with more than passing vigor, each denying any validity to the other’s position. Homans along a path of positivism, Lévi-Strauss following the course of intellectualism, both as psychological reductionists. III. In certain respects three very old ideas form the core of all cross-cousin marriage theories: the first is the idea that cross-cousin marriage is somehow an integrative device. The second, that different cross-cousin marriage rules with different rules of descent form different kinds of units, so that, for instance, bilateral cross-cousin marriage yields a very different kind of arrangement from unilateral forms. The implications of the different forms of unilateral rule for the kind of integration which ensues is the third old idea, and this one dates at least back to Fortune (1933). Cross-cousin marriage theories differ in significant details, on the ‘meaning’ of these details, and on ‘how the system really [32] works’ (Needham, 1957, p. 168). The derivation of much of the analysis from Rivers (Rivers, 1914a and b), and particularly the terminological correlates of the different forms of cross-cousin marriage, should be noted. What Lévi-Strauss, Dumont, Leach, and Needham have done is to set these fairly well-established points in the context of a general theory of society, and to develop from that combination certain specific and specifically useful (as well as debatable) ideas which were not generally available before. The first such specific outcome to be taken up here is that the relationship between intermarrying units in a society practicing cross-cousin marriage is one of ‘alliance’. And the problematic aspect of this is the question of just what is meant by ‘alliance’. There is a series of closely interrelated ideas at work here. First, of course, there is the notion of organic solidarity, that is, the interrelation of differentiated parts no one of which can by itself be autonomous. Second, there is the notion that every social definition must in the nature of human mentality and in the nature of society be stipulated in terms of opposition, complementary dualism, and so forth. Third, there is the notion that structure inheres not in the concrete constitution of any particular society, but rather in the ‘model’ or the construct which must be developed by the anthropologist in order to understand that society; yet the structural principles which are ‘at work’, so to speak (my phrase, my phrasing), are somehow ‘real’, ‘existent’, ‘substantive’ and are expressed in the social definitions, the social conventions, the social rules of a particular society (Lévi-Strauss, 1953, 1960). Briefly, there are two enduring structural features of any society practicing cross-cousin marriage, or having any ‘positive marriage rule’ (sister exchange, asymmetrical marriage rules, etc.). First, the rule of descent which aligns (not allies) a group into one unit; second, that of ‘alliance’, the relationship between two or more such units of which marriage is an expression. Alliance theory insists that in the nature of social definitions, arising as they do from the inherent features of human mentality, ‘consanguinity’ can be defined only in opposition to ‘affinity’, and ‘affinity’ in opposition to ‘consanguinity’. Hence it is incon- [33] ceivable that a society with a positive marriage rule could consist in one consanguineally related group of social persons. Radcliffe-Brown (1953, p. 169), in criticizing Dumont’s treatment of Dravidian kinship terms, brings this issue out clearly. Radcliffe-Brown asserts that for the Kariera, ‘the terms “nuba”, “kaga” and “toa”, which are applied to large numbers of persons, are not terms for relatives by marriage’. In short, he denies that affinity, as a principle, is applicable to this society, and by implication that a society can consist only in statuses socially defined by consanguinity So far as cross-cousin marriage systems are concerned, this problem of the necessary existence of a principle of alliance opposed to one of descent brings into question both the interpretation of the terminological system and the nature of the integration of such systems. The problem of integration focuses on the implications of the idea of general exchange as proposed by Mauss (1954). Specifically, Lévi-Strauss follows Mauss in suggesting that if marriage is one mode of exchange, and if exchange between differentiated parts is seen as the basic mode of integration, not one exchange, nor one kind of exchange, but rather a series of exchanges of various kinds will all occur, and will all reinforce and reiterate the integration between exchanging groups. Hence the exchange of bridewealth, of goods and services, and so on are all understandable as part of the total exchange system and are all equally fundamental expressions of the structural principle of alliance. All expressions of alliance, be they pigs, gongs, food and services, or women, are equally expressions of this structural principle. In this sense, each expresses the principle. Yet it is difficult to distinguish in the writings of alliance theorists between marriage as an expression of alliance, and marriage as creating alliance. It is one thing to say that marriage is one among many expressions of the structural principle of alliance; it is quite another to say that marriage creates alliance. To go a step further and say that both statements are true is to move into yet a third and not at all compatible position. IV. In an asymmetrical marriage system, a prescriptive system with a positive marriage rule, the system is essentially triadic. [34] Nevertheless, the symbolic system is dyadic. This is shown by both Lévi-Strauss and Needham, and Leach seems to concur (Leach, 1961). The reason for this is that from the point of view of any given lineage or ego there are only two relations: wife-giver or wife-taker. Needham may help to explicate matters. Near the conclusion of his reiterated exposition of Purum he says: ‘We see here, as elsewhere with prescriptive alliance, a mode of classification by which things, individuals, groups, qualities, values, spatial notions, and other ideas of the most disparate kinds are identically ordered within one system of relations. In particular, I would draw attention to the remarkable concordance and interconnection of social and symbolic structure [emphasis supplied]. In spite of the fact that structurally there must be three cyclically-related lines in the alliance system, the basic scheme of Purum society is not triadic but dyadic. Any given alliance group is wife-taker and therefore inferior to another, but it is also wife-giver and therefore superior to another group in a different context. That is, alliance status is not absolute but relative. The distinction to be appreciated is that between the triadic system and its component dyadic relation. It is through this mode of relation that the social order concords with the symbolic order’ (Needham, 1962a, pp. 95-96). But a closer inspection reveals that both triadic systems and dyadic systems concord with dyadic symbolic systems. Needham says, ‘… the Aimol scheme of symbolic classification, which accompanies a two-section (symmetric) system, exhibits the same principles and even embodies some of the same pairs of terms as the Purum scheme, which accompanies an asymmetric system … our task is to see how a common mode of symbolic classification can cohere with these different social forms.‘The key to this question is that in spite of the necessarily triadic structure of an asymmetric system its fundamental relation is dyadic…, and that the fundamental relation of Aimol society, though differently defined, is also dyadic. Here lies the basic similarity between the two social systems, and the structural feature with which the dualistic symbolic [35] classification is in both cases concordant. We may now regard these two systems as different but related means of ordering social relations as well as other phenomena by the same (dualistic) mode of thought. if this is the ease, it is this mode of thought itself which demands our attention if we are to understand them in any radical fashion’ (Needham, 1960d, pp. 100-101). One must distinguish, then, between dyadic and triadic systems the first a two-section system, and one of symmetrical cross-cousin marriage, and the other an asymmetric, perhaps matrilateral, cross-cousin marriage system. These, in turn, are distinct from the symbolic system, that is, ‘…a mode of classification by which things, individuals, groups, qualities, values, spatial notions, and other ideas of the most disperate kinds are identically ordered within one system of relations’ (Needham, 1962, p. 95). The symbolic system ‘…concords with…’ the social system. But just what does this concordance mean? Needham explains it in this way: ‘…what one is really dealing with in such a society as this is a classification, a system of categories, which orders both social life and the cosmos. That is, Purum social organization is ideologically a part of a cosmological conceptual order and is governed identically by its ruling ideas’ (Needham, 1962, p. 96). In other words, ‘the social order’ is itself a symbolic order and is on no account to be confused with actual living persons, concrete groups, actual numbers, or actual relations between actual persons or groups. V. The descent theory which follows from Radcliffe-Brown deals with actual living persons, concrete groups, actual relations between actual persons or groups. Consistent with such a view, Livingstone (1959) attacked Needham’s Purum analysis precisely on the ground that the system, if it worked at all, could not work very well, since some of the units in the exchange system have too many women to dispose of, and some not enough. Livingstone’s point is that, at best, the rules are difficult for people to follow; at worst, the rules are unworkable in real life. Needham’s reply stresses, as one might well expect, that the structure of the system does not lie in the concrete constitution [36] of any particular exchanging group, nor in any particular cycle of exchanges. ‘Particular alliances and alliance groups may be expected to change, but the essential point is that the rules (matrilateral prescription, patrilateral prohibition) have not changed’ (Needham, 1960h, p. 499). Needham continues: ‘A social system is an abstraction relating (in this context) to lineal descent groups which are also abstractions. There is no place in an abstraction for substantive “specific groups”. It would be an odd and profitless use of the notion of social system to so identify it with substantive reality that every change … would be said to constitute a “breakdown”’ (p. 499). ‘I do not claim, though, that it is utterly unknown for a marriage to take place within the clan in an asymmetric system …’ (p. 499-500). ‘That the definition of alliance groups can be changed, and that alliances can be reversed, are well known facts in the literature on such systems as the Purum’ (p. 501). ‘When I used the word “stable”, on the other hand, I meant precisely (as I wrote) that in spite of demographic changes and fission of segments the rules of the alliance system continue to maintain the same type of social order between whatever groups are pragmatically distinguished’ (p. 502). Needham’s reply to Livingstone clarifies this matter. But to my knowledge, no one has published a reply to Leach’s paper, ‘Structural Implications …’ (Leach, 1962). One of the points which Leach makes in this paper is that it is not ‘social segments’ conceived of as diagram lines which actually undertake marriage-in-a-circle; it is the social segment which Leach calls ‘local descent lines’, concrete units ‘on the ground’, which undertakes such marriages. For Needham’s version of alliance theory, Leach’s distinction, however true, is quite irrelevant. It is the social order as a conceptual order, the social system as a system of relational rules, which is the concern of alliance theory. Alliance theory is precisely and explicitly diagram lines as models of a social order for Needham. Not so for Lévi-Strauss (or Dumont), however. Maybury-Lewis (1960) takes Lévi-Strauss sternly to task for this same error. Indeed, one may say that the criticism is the Leach Criticism, and consists in accusing Lévi-Strauss of confusing models with [37] reality, of mixing phenomena from disparate levels of abstraction in the same analytic image. And Lévi-Strauss’s reply to Maybury-Lewis (1960) should apply to Leach’s paper as well: ‘…I cannot be reproached for confusing dual organization, dualist system and dualism. As a matter of fact, I was avowedly trying to override these classical distinctions, with the aim of finding out if they could be dealt with as open — and to some extent conflicting — expressions of a reality, to be looked for at a deeper level’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1960, p. 46. Emphasis supplied). Or again, in the same vein, later in the same paper: ‘Hence the conclusion that “actual social segments” and “symbolic representations” may not be as heterogeneous as it seems, but that, to some extent, they may correspond to permutable codes. Here lies one’s right to deal with social segments and symbolic representations as parts of an underlying system endowed with a better explanatory value, although — or rather, because — empirical observation will never apprehend it as such’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1960, p. 54). This should also help to clarify Lévi-Strauss’s view of the nature of ‘reductionism’. Where, for some, the reduction of one order of phenomenon to another constitutes a breach of analytic rules, it constitutes a proper form of explanation for Lévi-Strauss, Needham, and Dumont at least. VI. Alliance theory continues a phrase closely associated with Durkheim, but alters its meaning in some respects. Durkheim saw and described ‘the social order’ as a system of norms and rules and regulations, values and ethical elements, and so he described it as a moral system, because it constrained people’s action. The phrase ‘moral system’ and the notion of morality are notably missing from Lévi-Strauss, Dumont, Needham, and Leach. In Durkheim’s treatment of the problem of suicide the intimate, close connection between norms, values, constructs, and actual behavior is the very essence of the analysis. Perhaps it had to be, since he had forced himself by the skill of his intellect to deal with a problem of rate, which he was among the very first to distinguish clearly from that of incidence. The actor’s commitment to the norms and not the constitution of the norm itself, decided his fate. [38] The problem of social order for Durkheim was the question of explaining how constraints actually operated to define, guide, and channel the behavior — the actual behavior — of people: real, living people. Social order is the order that is imposed on a person’s action (Parsons, 1949). But ‘social order’ for Needham is the congruence of symbolic systems seen in logical terms; it has almost nothing to do with ‘groups pragmatically distinguished’. The word pragmatic can only make sense if it is taken to mean ‘conceptually’, and this in turn can mean that some native will talk about it. A figment of a figment of a figment of a native’s imagination will do — and indeed this is precisely the susbstantive element in the social order. Needham does not ever raise or deal with the problem of social order in this Durkheimian sense, which is the problem which Livingstone put to him: the symbolic system cannot order the actual marriages of the Purum very well. Needham replied that the social order that he is discussing is not to be located in the ‘rate’, but instead occurs at the level of the symbols, constructs, ideas, categories, rules for relating these, and so on (Needham, 1960, p. 499). VII. Is it at this point that Lévi-Strauss’s separation of mind into intellect, on the one hand, and emotions and sentiments, on the other, becomes a less arbitrary action than it first seemed? It is not at all clear from his assertions just why this separation is necessary. It is conceivable that if Lévi-Strauss is concerned with the social order as a symbolic order, with the organization and configuration of that symbolic order, with the relationships between sub-systems of symbols, that the enormous weight, and almost indisputable weight, of Freud’s work on symbolism would serve him well. But instead Lévi-Strauss tells us that, unlike Kroeber’s, his own attitude toward Totem and Taboo has hardened over the years (Lévi-Strauss, 1963, p. 70). It is odd, too, that the non-logical and irrational character of the logic of the unconscious as Freud describes it should fail to appeal to Lévi-Strauss. But the other side remains clear. Durkheim was concerned with the actor’s commitment; Lévi-Strauss is concerned with what the actor may be committed to. Durkheim was concerned [39] with the integration of the objects of the actor’s commitment in the actor, as the actor saw it and was impelled to act on it; Lévi-Strauss is concerned with the integration of the system of objects of commitment, and how they integrate one with another. Durkheim needed something like an ‘urge’ and a ‘sentiment’ to explain how actors got and remained committed to objects; Lévi-Strauss needs something like intellect to explain the logic of the order among symbols. And, of course, how can there be, either in nature or in theory, intellect without emotion or emotion without intellect? Perhaps this explains why Freud haunts the pages of Lévi-Strauss, from the Structures élémentaires through the recent Totemisme. The social order is a symbolic order, an order of ideas and categories, concepts and rules all ‘ordered’ by their logical relation. What imposes this order? How are the different levels of order related? Needham brings it all together in a single, felicitous paragraph which may well be the brief outline for a series of detailed volumes: ‘The present analysis [Aimol], together with that of Purum society, permits the proposition that both of the major types of prescriptive alliance feature basically a dyadic social relationship, and that with this there concords in these cases a dualistic scheme of symbolic classification [footnote omitted]. Furthermore, wherever the ethnography is adequate to the purposes of this type of investigation, it can be seen that in societies practising prescriptive alliance it is a dualistic symbolic classification which orders both the social and the symbolic system, characterizing both by the same mode of thought. This type of classification is the analogical elaboration, in all spheres of social concern, of a structural principle of complementary dualism; and this itself is one manifestation of the logical principle of opposition. It is in this sense that societies founded on prescriptive alliance may be interpreted as the most direct forms known of the social expression of a fundamental feature of the human mind’ (Needham, 1960d, p. 106). In the same place, Needham stipulates some of his differences with Lévi-Strauss: [40] ‘In trying to pin down Lévi-Strauss’ idea of what is fundamentally important in the analysis of the sort of system we are examining two conclusions seem me [sic] to emerge: (1) in the matter of features of the human mind he proposes a number of formulations, each rather different from the others, which he declines to analyse further on the ground that they are psychological data; (2) for him the radically and essentially important idea is that of reciprocity. Admittedly, he is concerned with marriage regulation as means of exchanging women, a context in which reciprocity has an especially important place, but even here I think he over-rates its importance; for he disregards the conceptual systems of the societies within which women are exchanged, systems which are solidary with the exchange systems and which cannot be explained by the notion of reciprocity. Durkheim and Mauss indeed tried to derive concepts from social organization … but Lévi-Strauss would surely not do so in this case, since the notions he isolates are far more general than the forms of affinal alliance he examines’ (Needham, 1960d, p. 102). VIII. A rule is certainly not the same thing as its observance. The rule that good little children go to heaven while those who are naughty go elsewhere must certainly be distinguished from an actual census conducted in Heaven, although the latter might possibly provide a statistical model (Lévi-Strauss, 1953). And even if it could be shown that not a single good child actually got to heaven, it would hardly alter the fact that this remains a rule, at least in some circles. How can such a rule be ‘expressed by’ or ‘contained in’ some terminological pattern about children, goodness, naughtiness, heaven, or hell? This is perhaps difficult. But the matter is quite different with kinship terms. Here are symbols which, in some aspect of their character, can ‘embody’ or ‘express’ marriage rules. So Dumont (1953, 1957) and Yalman (1962) affirm for Dravidian kin terms, though Epling (1961) denies this. (We will come to Radcliffe-Brown’s objections shortly.) This brings us around again to the question raised earlier, is marriage an expression of alliance, or does it create alliance as well as express it? [41] This problem can be seen best in the matter of the radical distinction between prescriptive and preferential systems which Needham has drawn. It seems doubtful that Lévi-Strauss and Dumont follow this distinction, but we have Leach’s statement which implies that he does (Leach, 1961). If a marriage rule is to be treated as an expression of a structural principle, and if a marriage rule such as MoBrDa is taken as one expression of that principle, then it would seem to follow that a preferential rule (as distinct from the prescriptive rule) is equally clearly an expression of that same structural principle. One might say that the preferential rule is modified, as an expression of the principle (as in Lévi-Strauss, 1960) but that in effect the ‘type of social-order’ (Needham, 1960h, p. 502) is unmodified. If the marriage rule is an expression of the principle of alliance, is it any less so if the rule is not, for some set of good reasons, required? The principle is still there. It is still expressed in the marriage rule. Just as the concrete number of actual marriages which follow the rule has no bearing on the structural analysis, so too it might seem that the rule expressed as an obligation or the rule expressed as a preference is equally clearly an expression of one and the same structural principle. The marriage rule, like the terminological pattern and the goods which are exchanged, all reflect the principle of alliance Hence it does not seem clear why Needham should insist that for any given society there must simultaneously be certain forms of expression, and that each should be perfectly internally consistent as a form of expression of the structural principle. Needham insists that the terminological pattern must be consistent, or that the ethnographer has made a mistake (Purum); that the marriage rule must be prescriptive; he further finds it very hard to accept the fact that certain marriages which are wrong marriages (according to the rule) occur, though he contents himself that they are very few in number. (Dumont seems to differ on this point, if his genealogical examples in Hierarchy and Marriage Alliance are to be taken as an expression of his own views in this matter.) Let me restate this in another way. Needham makes the radical distinction between prescriptive systems and preferential [42] systems. He goes to considerable trouble to assert which of thirty-three societies are prescriptive and which preferential (i.e. Needham, 1962). He then proceeds to deal with the prescriptive systems alone. He has not dealt with preferential systems, neither has he stated in understandable terms why preferential systems cannot be treated as having the same structure as prescriptive systems. It is by no means self-evident that they are different from the point of view of alliance theory. Indeed, I suggest that it is an induction from alliance theory that they are not different at all and that Needham fails to understand his own theory when he says that they are. Part two. Segments IX. The suggestion that Needham does not understand the implications of the theory he is following is perhaps premature at this point. It is true that Needham does not discuss at length the distinction between prescriptive and preferential systems. Neither does he explain why he insists on the radical distinction which he makes. It is certainly true that he might have analyzed a society like the Yaroro of Venezuela to show ‘… how such a system really works’ (Needham, 1957, 1958c, p. 323), for he obviously considers the material on that society valid and reliable, although he describes the source as being ‘unimpressive’, a word he does not clarify (Needham, 1962, p. 62). It is easy to see that the analysis of Purum as a prescriptive matrilateral system would be immeasurably strengthened by the analysis of a preferential matrilateral system to show, by contrast and example, precisely where the differences between such systems do lie and just what is at issue here. What is at issue here is the idea that is best expressed by the oft-repeated phrase ‘… the same type of social order…’ (Needham, 1960, p. 502), or ‘a certain type of society’ (Dumont, 1961, for instance, where the phrase is also found as ‘… different types of societies’). In its simplest form, this means that one type of society has ‘a positive marriage rule’ and the other has not (Dumont, like Lévi-Strauss, sometimes says ‘… a “marriage preference”’ Dumont, 1961). The type without a positive marriage rule is one in which individual choice is exercised not with respect to aesthetic or purely personal considerations, but [43] one in which there is no limitation in principle on the social category (kinship category is a particular social category) from which the spouse is drawn, provided that the incest prohibition is observed (Lévi-Strauss, 1949). This basic distinction, developed in this particular form by Lévi-Strauss in 1949, has a long history and a wide group of supporters of one or another of its forms, including Leach (1962), Goody (1959, 1961), Fortes (1959), and Freeman (1961). The distinction follows from Durkheim’s notion of a ‘segmental society’. The image is that of a concrete society formed of homogeneous, repetitive parts. The parts are clans, and clans grow out of territorially based hordes (Durkheim, 1947, pp. 175 ff). The link between the homogeneous parts, in the limiting case which Durkheim posed, is nothing more than similarity, a kind of ‘birds-of-a-feather-flock-together’ principle. Only when the parts become functionally differentiated does a society begin to move away from, and fall on a point of the scale away from, that of mechanical solidarity and segmental organization (Durkheim’s evolutionary view is retained here). But the problem which Durkheim did not solve satisfactorily remains. How are the segments defined and in what do they consist? How are they formed or maintained? Durkheim swung back and forth between a physically discrete aggregate or group of real persons, and the ideas (‘collective representations’) in terms of which such a physically discrete category might be formed. As I have already suggested, Radcliffe-Brown wrote as if he had the physical segment in mind (‘actual social relations’), Lévi-Strauss, Dumont, and Needham confine themselves to the rules which flow from the structural principles. But in either case, some kind of ‘rules’ yields this particular ‘kind’ of society. Any other kind of ‘rules’ should not produce such a society. The contrast between unilineal descent and bilateral systems seems to have been one of the most enduring models for this problem. (See Leach, 1962b, p. 132, quoted in Section XVII below, for a clear statement of this position.) With any of the unilineal descent rules (matrilineal, patrilineal, double unilineal), discrete, exclusive, multifunctional units can be formed within a single society when the unilineal units are exogamic. Where there [44] is no unilineal rule, such units cannot form within the endogamic boundary. Any endogamic unit can be discrete, exclusive, multifunctional as well and, given that it has certain other minimal characteristics, can form a self-sufficient entity within a society. Thus a caste within a society can be discrete, exclusive, multifunctional. The endogamic-exogamic boundaries must be stated in this problem. It is, therefore, the exclusive, discrete unit which can be multifunctional. A unit which is discrete and exclusive and multifunctional, which is a self-contained, self-consistent, and self- perpetuating unit is, of course, a society. If it lacks one function necessary to maintain itself as such a unit it can nevertheless be a major social segment in a ‘segmental’ system, and, of course, one could conceivably scale societies according to the degree to which they are segmental. We can now return to the problem of the conditions which can yield such segments, and of how within-segment and between-segment relations are defined. And this is the problem about which ideas and phrases such as ‘a certain type of society’ center; it is the problem between Fortes and Goody on the one hand, and Lévi-Strauss, Leach, and Dumont on the other. For alliance theory, and for Lévi-Strauss who developed this variant of the notion, ‘… a certain type of society’ means a society which is very close to or approaches the model of the segmental society first stated by Durkheim. The limiting case of mechanical solidarity occurring entirely in terms of similarity is dropped as a model. Instead the next simplest form of organic solidarity — exogamy with a marriage rule — is used. Hence ‘… a certain type of society’ has a positive marriage rule, not a state of free choice, which is its opposite. But this is the crux of the difference with Fortes and Goody. They do not concern themselves with the problem of whether the simplest form of organic solidarity is formed by a marriage rule and exogamy. They are concerned with segmental societies because they have a special theory of their own about how segments are formed and in what they consist, and how within-segment relations are ordered and how between-segment relations are structured. Marriage enters into this theory, but in a very different way. [45] X. on one point both alliance theory and descent theory are in agreement. If a segment is to remain discrete, conceptually or concretely, it cannot have overlapping membership with any other segment. It can have relationships, but not overlapping membership. Freeman (1961, pp. 200, 202) and Goodenough (1955), to cite but two writers on this point, maintain that the kindred cannot form a ‘group’, or corporate group, but must remain a category. Freeman makes the very useful distinction between the kindred and a kindred-based group, for portions of a kindred can come together for some specific purpose, for some limited time and thus form an ad hoc group. The point remains the same. The kindred itself cannot be a group because it is defined by reference to a specific ego, because the category has overlapping interlocking membership, because at best it can become a discrete physical unit and remain so only for a limited time, by permitting some members to drop out (the ‘optive’ condition in Freeman, 1961, pp. 209-211) and rallying the rest for a stipulated short-run goal. The whole man has to be in one and only one group, so that the group can be a physical as well as a conceptual group. But why is it necessary to be able to separate physically all of the groups? I think that the reason for this, one to which both alliance theory and descent theory subscribe, is not that segments have to be spatially and physically separate and identifiable as such, but that the whole person as an aggregate of different commitments must be able to provide unqualified solidarity with the unit to which he belongs. It is this which permits the segment under certain conditions to be physically identifiable as such. But if a single person’s solidarity is qualified by membership in two or more different units of like order, then his commitment to, his solidarity with, one of them is qualified by the claims of the other upon him. Conflicting claims on two different persons are easily soluble; one goes one way, the other his own way. But conflicting claims on one person have to be adjudicated; one wins, the other wins, or both are qualified and compromised in some way. If a system of intersecting claims on persons requires the adjudication of those claims, then this in itself becomes a mode of integration in such situations and also in such societies. This [46] has been repeatedly shown for feuds and so forth. It should not require explicit demonstration for the social system as a whole. The whole person is thus of significance to both descent and alliance theory, and this notion constitutes, I suggest, an unanalyzed and unspecified condition of the model which alliance theory has produced. It is the condition of unqualified commitment which is requisite to the constitution of the segment — conceptually for alliance theory, concretely for descent theory — and it is this condition which radically reduces the kinds of segmental system to the few which have been pointed out. These are always based on kinship, because it is only descent rules — more precisely, unilineal descent rules or rigid endogamy — which dispose the whole man to one or another segment of society. (At this point the argument could proceed along one of two different lines. One line would be to turn to the problem of choice, for Rivers, Fortes, Leach, Lévi-Strauss, and Needham are all quite explicit that it is only under conditions of unilineal descent, where choice is excluded, that the kinds of segment with which they are concerned can be formed. Rather than continue with that problem here, I have delayed its consideration to Section XVII and proceeded to discuss the descent theory views of the nature and constitution of segments.) XI. A segment is a discrete conceptual or concrete entity in a segmental society. It is the descent rule which allocates whole persons to one or another segment. It is the descent rule which is the mode of recruitment that replaces the dead by the living. Because a discrete, exclusive unit is formed, this unit can be a perpetual unit (conceptually though not concretely; its members die and are replaced by new members). A unit is one thing; a corporate group quite another. A descent rule, rigidly followed, only creates a conceptually distinct category. Its organization as a corporate unit depends upon other factors. As a minimal definition, a corporate unit is one which is treated as internally undifferentiated by the other unit or units with which it has a specific relationship. Such units may be a person in a particular role, a group acting as a whole, a group represented by a person, and so forth.4 [47] A corporate unit has a relationship with some other unit. The other’s treatment of it is consistent with its conception of that unit. If the unit is conceived of by the other as having an undifferentiated, unitary identity, then for that purpose, or for that particular relationship, it is corporate. But it may be argued that to be corporate for some purpose or other equally means that the unit must also be able to act in a corporate fashion. Not only must it be conceived of as corporate but it must be able to act as a corporate unit. Both of these conditions are met when the members of the unit see their relationship to each other as being ‘the same’, and when that same relationship is seen as ‘the same’ for all outsiders. Thus a unit may be treated as consisting entirely of agnates, and the members may define their relationship to each other not as father-son, brother-brother, etc, but rather as one of agnates. The degree to which members have solidary bonds with each other, then, may be held as a condition or at least as a related condition, to the unit’s capacity to act as a unit and be treated as a unit. Following Durkheim, it is presumed that solidarity is increased when different kinds of bond replicate each other. Hence the group which raises its food together, processes it, distributes it, consumes it; the group that is interdependent for its labor; the group which worships its own ancestors and thus is the same ‘church’; the group which owns its property as a unit — such a group, with repetitive bonds, each reinforcing the other, is more strongly solidary than is the group which merely shares a single function — say, its name or its emblem. And the degree to which it is solidary is directly proportional to the number of different solidary bonds among its members, and this is inversely proportional to the strength of any particular member’s bonds outside that unit So that if the agnates within a descent unit all are tied with repetitive bonds, and none of them has any very strong bonds with persons outside the group, a strongly corporate unit results. The multifunctional character of a social segment, then, is one of the conditions which helps to maintain a segment’s segmental character. A unifunctional unit can hardly constitute a social segment. [48] The segmental character of a society, therefore, depends on the corporate character of its segments, and the corporate character of its segments depends on the strength of the bonds among the members of the segment. The strength of the bonds among the members is in turn dependent in part upon having no compromising allegiance for some members of a group outside the group, but is in part also dependent on the kind of functions which the members undertake in common, and it is from this that the intensity of their commitment, the strength of the bonds among them, the degree of the corporateness of the group derives. What kind of function so unites a group? If a unilineal descent group holds property rights in love magic, does this so unite a group? If it controls a dance or a form of poetry? If it has the right to recite certain prayers? Hardly. If a unilineal descent unit owns and controls property, productive property, real estate or cattle, then and only then does its status as a true segment emerge. It is property, productive property, an estate, which makes a. segment a segment for Goody (1961), and it is at least the jural and political functions for Fortes, if I read him correctly (1959, 1962). And so one sees the descent group defined by certain of its functions for Goody and Fortes. A descent group is a property-holding group where the property is productive property; it is (along with its descent rule) thereby corporate, a jural and political unit XII. Fortes and Leach agree that the term ‘descent’ should be confined to unilineal descent and continually invoke Rivers’s name in ways that suggest that in this context, at least, it is sacred (Fortes, 1959; Leach, 1962). Freeman (1961) performs feats of eloquence with the ethnography of All Souls and Wales to help maintain Rivers’s division between descent as unilineal and a personal kindred as purely ego-centered. This unexpected concurrence arises, I suggest, from the fact that all three are committed to a particular model for a type of society, a segmental type of society. Note that this is not merely a descent rule, nor a combination of types of descent rules, nor a classification of descent systems. It is a type of society as a whole that is at stake. Both descent theory and alliance theory have a vested interest, [49] so to speak, in particular definitions of segments which go to make up somewhat different theoretical models of segmental societies. Where alliance theory defines its model of a segment strictly in terms of a unilineal descent rule and exogamy, descent theory defines its segment in terms of corporate character. The corporate character of the segment is seen as a consequence of a unilineal descent rule, exogamy, and a high degree of solidarity related to the fact that it is the holder of productive property and so also is a jural and political unit. If alliance theory depends on the image of a descent rule plus marriage rule, descent theory depends on the image of a descent rule plus the jural and political functions which are connected with property ownership. The last piece in the model of the segmental society, then, is the relationship between segments. And here is where so much of the smoke seems to come from. For alliance theory, the segments are related to each other by alliance, and alliance is either created by or expressed by (or both) marriage. For descent theory, the segments can be related to each other in a variety of different ways, among them, the bonds of complementary filiation and levels of segmentation. Some alliance theorists have complained that complementary filiation is just another name for descent and that descent theorists do not recognize marriage as a structural principle. XIII. ‘It is the whole nature of the concept of “descent” which is at issue’ (Leach, 1961, p. 121). Fortes, Freeman, and Goody have all gone to great pains to confine the concept of ‘descent’ to unilineal rules, forming corporate groups which have jural, political, and/or property-holding functions. Fortes (1959, pp. 207-208; 1962) also suggests that descent is, in the first instance, a matter of title to member ship, citizenship, and that group membership, although of major importance, is not the only defining criterion. Fortes agrees that affinity is important in any society but, according to Leach, he seems to deny that alliance constitutes a structural principle for certain of them. Fortes seems to say that for the Tallensi, the fundamental structural principle is that of descent, as well as the lineage principle which is so closely interwoven with descent; that alliance is not a structural principle for [50] certain of the African lineage systems. (NB: Fortes seems to say. He does not say it in so many words.) Leach is on the offensive, yet cautious. Leach has not to my knowledge boldly asserted that, for Tallensi, alliance is just as fundamental a structural principle as the lineage principle. Instead, he has picked away from sheltered ground; he asserts that ‘Fortes … disguises [affinity] under his expression “complementary filiation”…. For Fortes, marriage ties, as such, do not form part of the structural system’ (Leach, 1957a, p. 54). But Leach makes a more positive point, in criticizing Fortes’s notion of ‘filiation’. His criticism, if I take it correctly, focuses on the fact that ‘filiation.’ consists in a kind of descent rule, a relationship of consanguinity, when in fact it would seem that that relationship is precisely affinal. Hence his statement that ‘It is the whole nature of the concept of “descent” which is at issue’ (Leach, 1962, p. 121). One confusion arises because of the somewhat different ways in which alliance theory and descent theory treat kinship terms. For alliance theory, kinship terms can be analyzed and understood without direct reference to the constitution of descent groups. For descent theory, this is not possible. This can be seen from Dumont’s treatment of Dravidian kinship terms. (That this is also part of the MoBr-SiSo problem will become evident.) Dumont (1953) says that in Dravidian kinship terminology the MoBr is defined in opposition to the father as father’s brother-in-law, the FaSi as the Mo’s Si-in-Law, and the Mo as a consanguine. Now, this looks like sheer nonsense in descent theory terms. If one takes mother alone for a moment, descent theorists treat her as father’s wife; given a patrilineal lineage, she cannot ever be completely incorporated into ego’s lineage since her lineage membership is gained through her father; hence her relationship to her husband, her children, and to the men of her husband’s lineage is simply as an affinal, an in-marrying woman. The whole understanding of the levirate, the sororate, marital stability, and bridewealth turn on this. Thus marriage is brittle for the Hopi precisely because a woman is never released by her natal matrilineal lineage, her ties to her lineage remain strong, and so too the man’s ties to his own natal matrilineal lineage are strong; hence the [51] strain which is put on the marital tie. Descent group strength, that is, the various kinds of descent group solidarity, are seen as inversely related to conjugal ties and as proportional to parent-child and sibling ties (see in this connection, Schneider, 1961). Mother is a consanguine to ego for descent group theory, but her relationship is not the same as the relationship of co-members of the same descent group. The consanguineal tie of father to son in patriliny is not the same as mother to son, yet both are consanguineal ties. The father-son tie consists both in a tie of consanguinity and in common descent group membership where the tie of mother to son is that of consanguinity, is opposed to the common descent group membership tie of father-son, and is as an affinal to the son in his capacity as father’s descent group member. Mother, therefore, has a kind of composite status; this status turns on two kinds of relationship, one of affinity with respect to ego’s descent group, if it is patrilineal, and one of consanguinity to ego. Hence she is terminologically ‘wife’ to her husband, ‘mother’ to her son. As mother is affinal to ego’s descent group, father’s sister is a consanguineal and cannot ordinarily lose her descent group membership. Hence, under no conditions could she possibly be seen as an affinal to ego. Conversely, as mother is a consanguineal relative for her son, and as her brother is a consanguineal relative to her, mother’s brother is, through that series of links, a consanguineal of ego’s. And this consanguineal line, since it is ‘complementary’ to the descent line, is the line of ‘complementary filiation’. Let me clear out immediately the misunderstanding based on Dumont’s treatment of kinship terms apart from group structure or behavior. Dumont’s position is not so startling as it may look. Dumont is emphatically concerned with kinship terminology, he is not dealing with descent groups as such. Further, kinship terminology has to do with social categories. In his reply to Radcliffe-Brown, Dumont (1953b) is explicit; he is not dealing with behavior, but with the social definition of categories. There is a difference between kinship terminology and the structure of descent groups or the relation between the prescribed forms of behavior to ways in which kin are categorized. Kinship terminology ‘… is a con- [52] stellation revolving around the Ego … what is here called kin has, of course, nothing to do with actual groups, being only an abstraction arising from the oppositions; this again centres in Ego…. The whole could be called “terminological kin” to avoid confusion, and opposed to “terminological affines”. This is only a framework which is used and shaped by each group according to its particular institutions’ (Dumont, 1953a, p. 37. See also Dumont’s (1961a) attack on Gough, where the same position is reiterated). But this begs the issue. If, for Dumont, kinship terminology is not kinship behavior, and if it ‘has … nothing to do with actual groups’, and if it yields conclusions which seem contrary to those which follow if behavior and actual groups are to be considered, how are these differences to be explained or reconciled? Dumont does not face this issue. The problem is whether or not MoBr can be considered an affinal or a consanguineal relative, or both. The problem is whether FaSi is to be considered an affinal or consanguineal relative, or both. The problem is to explain the MoBr-SiSo relationship. The problem is whether these are terminologically affinal or consanguineal relatives. To insist, as Dumont does, that terminology is and must be an ego-centered system is only to raise the question of how the ego-centered system articulates with the system as a total system. one cannot take shelter behind the assertion that these are different. The very difference itself is problematic. Leach in his essay Rethinking Anthropology (1962a) seems to be showing that the Trobriand father is symbolized as an affine and this may contradict what Dumont’s Dravidian analysis seems to show with reference to mother. Dumont may be able to show that the Trobriand father is terminologically consanguineal if taken from the point of view of his child as ego and that Leach’s symbolic designation of the father as an affine is stated from the point of view of the wife and her matrilineal lineage vis-à-vis the husband and his influence on the child. Dumont could have considered such a problem in replying to Radcliffe-Brown, but he chose instead to say that he was dealing neither with behavior nor with Australian aborigines, a reply which i find almost totally irrelevant to any significant issue whatever. [53] XIV. What, then, is the relationship of MoBr-SiSo? Is this to be seen as one of affinity, expressing alliance, or as one of complementary filiation? For Goody (1959), the problem is quite simple. He is able to dispose of Lévi-Strauss in a little over two pages, reduce Dumont to a pale imitation of Lévi-Strauss, dismiss Leach in a phrase or two, and proceed to deal with the MoBr-SiSo relationship ‘… in West Africa’ in terms of the holder-heir conflict. The snatching and ritual stealing of objects by the SiSo is seen as a residual claim which he gets from his mother’s membership in her natal patrilineal property-holding group. As a member of the group, she has rights in property. But as a woman she can exercise only a few of these rights, and her rights in inheritance are ‘residual claims’. ‘…the legitimate sister’s son has nevertheless a shadowy claim upon the group by virtue of his mother’s position’ (p. 82). Leach’s disquiet over such terms as ‘shadowy claim’, ‘submerged rights’ and ‘residual sibling’ is not entirely misplaced, in my view. His criticism that descent, in the hands of Fortes, Goody, Gluckman, Gough, becomes a sliding scale, the boundaries of which can never be clearly stipulated, is not without merit. The point is that if the rights of the sister’s son over bits of property held by the mother’s brother, including perhaps the mother’s brother’s wife, whom sister’s son may ‘inherit’, are rights which are based on the consanguineal tie through his mother, and rights which depend on descent group membership of his mother, then these rights are transmitted exactly as is descent group membership. These are rights, that is, that are based on descent. If this is so, the problem is whether matrilateral filiation is not in this sense a ‘descent rule’ and so all patrilineal descent systems with matrilateral filiation are by definition double unilineal descent systems. Goody (1961) takes up this problem specifically and tries to break the impasse by saying that time double descent should be defined as a situation in which both matrilineal and patrilineal groups have property-holding functions. That when one group is a property-holding group and the other is not, this should be regarded as ‘a unilineal system with complementary descent group’ (Goody, 1961). The outcome is clear for Goody and for Fortes. Descent has to do with group membership. When membership in a corporate [54] group is defined by one or other parent’s affiliation, then we can speak of ‘unilineal’ descent (Fortes, 1959). Goody insists that the group must be a property-holding group, and that the property, to qualify as proper or true double descent, must be real property. Goody’s position seems to depend on the assumption that in the long run it is things like food and wealth and power which really count, and if he criticizes Malinowski for reducing extra-familial kinship to intra-familial usages, and Lévi-Strauss for reducing kinship to marriage, it might be said with some grain of truth that property and power are what Goody prefers to reduce things to. (Goody’s position seems to have been modified somewhat in his 1962 book.) But the issue is clear. For Fortes, descent means unilineal descent groups. All other systems are systems of filiation, and filiation is universally bilateral. Fortes returns to Rivers’s definition of descent as meaning unilineal rules and group membership. Briefly, then, Goody, following Fortes and Radcliffe-Brown, sees the MoBr-SiSo relationship as one in which residual sibling’s rights are transmitted in attenuated form and, therefore, the right of the SiSo to snatch or steal property as a right based on filiation — ‘… a shadowy claim upon the group by virtue of his mother’s position’. Leach criticizes the notions of shadowy claim, residual siblings, variable group strength, as basically making the notion of descent meaningless. He, following Lévi-Strauss, sees the claim of the mother’s brother on the bridewealth of the sister’s daughter as part of a continuing series of affinal exchanges of which the first bridewealth payment for the sister was but an initial act in the exchange. He would see the SiSo rights in the bits and pieces of the MoBr property as the other side of that exchange between allied, affinal groups. This view certainly avoids the involved and uncertain judgements of how shadowy a shadowy claim can be, or how residual a residual sibling may be, or how submerged a submerged right may be. Hence, for him, MoBr-SiSo is an affinal relationship, not a consanguineal one at all. But if it is an affinal relationship one must pose the question, can there be an affinal relationship without alliance? Can there be an affinal relationship between SiSo and MoBr without the structural principle of alliance being ‘there’ as one equal, if not more significant, structural feature of the system? [55] The problem with respect to bridewealth and marital stability is very much the same. There is no room here to spell it out in particular detail. Briefly, if marital stability depends, in Gluckman’s formulation, on variable descent group strength, then the principle of descent is so elastic and so difficult to stipulate as to be virtually useless — in Leach’s view. The distinction between consanguinity and descent which Fortes draws, reserving descent for ‘group membership’ and confining it only to unilineal groups, is such as to make much oceanic and Southeast Asian material impossible to deal with in the framework of that theory. Leach’s position seems to be the orthodox one we have encountered thus far. Bridewealth and marital stability depend on the particular expression of alliance which obtains in the particular society. XV. We have come a long way from whether Needham does or does not understand the implications of the theory he is following. There is some reason to believe that he does not, but we are not yet in a position to decide. First we must ask what is the role which marriage plays in that theory. Does it merely symbolize alliance, as the exchange of pigs or gongs may do? For both alliance and descent theory, it is a type of society which is at issue. The segments are constituted by a unilineal descent rule for descent theory as well as for alliance theory. For both alliance and descent theory, the segments are internally differentiated in terms of kinship relations. For alliance theory, the segment is maintained (given its definition in terms of a unilineal descent rule) by its systematic relationship in opposition to other like units and its systematic relationship of marriage with a particular category of kinsmen in the segment to which it is related. This is a scheme, it is a conceptual system which relies on the logical development of a series of dichotomous elements. it is the conceptual. definition of the segments and the conceptual stipulation of how they are related which are the nub, the core, of alliance theory. There are, then, two closely connected issues which create more unnecessary confusion than there need be. one is the issue of how the segments are conceptually defined, and of their ‘formal’ relationship to each other. The conceptual definition has a ‘function’, but it is not the function of a ‘degree of corporateness’ [56] as a concrete state of affairs. its function consists in its logical implications at a conceptual level. The second issue is the issue of how marriage relates two segments. It. ‘relates’ two segments in that it is a kind of relationship, not an act undertaken by two passionate persons. As a relationship, it is defined in terms precisely opposite to those of descent, the principle in terms of which the solidarity of the descent unit is expressed. And it is one more thing: it is that kind of relationship which explicitly and systematically entails particular categories within each segment and at the same time the entire segment. The relationship between segments is one of exchange; the categories within the segments which represent the systematic nexuses of the linkages are MoBrDa-FaSiSo or perhaps simply cross-cousin. But it is this linkage between categories which are at once categories within the descent unit and anchors between descent units which constitutes ‘marriage’. Marriage, in this type of segmental system, is not the same thing as it is in a system constituted by unilineal descent units where the same kinship category is not the ‘anchor point’ between descent units. Where a man marries a woman who is until then in no sense a kinswoman, one may perhaps by stretching the term, speak of marriage creating an alliance. if the man represents one descent unit, and the woman represents another, and these two units are not already in a set or formal relationship to each other, then that particular marriage may create a bond and reiterate it in another way by the offspring of that union. But the classification of kinsmen within and between the descent units is not such that any particular union merely gives particular value to a relationship which existed beforehand in the classification of the kinship categories and their relationship. In such a system, the definition of marriage is one which exists only with reference to and depends logically on the definition of the descent units, which in turn is dependent on the classification of kinship categories and aggregations of categories (units). These elements all depend on each other for their logical definition. To take marriage apart from the classification of kinsmen, or the mode of descent apart from the relationship between the segments, or the ‘corporateness’ of the segments apart from the way in which they are related to each other is simply to distort [57] and to deny their meaning. Marriage in such a system is not exactly the same thing as marriage in another system. It is this, of course, that Dumont means when he says that Dravidian kinship terminology is an ‘expression of marriage’, and ‘embodies a marriage rule’ and so on. The terminology, as a system of classification, is so closely and inextricably articulated with the particular rule, that together they make a kind of unit to which each, apart, simply fails to add up. What is marriage for a system without ‘a positive marriage rule’? This is the innovative, inaugurative relationship which ‘creates’. It does, as Fortes has so repeatedly stressed, constitute the core of a system of individuation, relating the child of the marriage to the class of mother’s brothers to and through those who are brother to his mother. The exchange between the descent units and the relationship between the descent units is a very different thing. In one system, descent units are already related; in the other, they become related. In one system they are necessarily related in a particular way, in the other they are not necessarily related until they become so. In one kind of system, therefore, marriage plays one kind of role in the maintenance of the segment, in its definition, and in the definition of within-unit and between-unit relations. In the other kind of system — and this is the crux of one of the matters — it is not marriage so much as exogamy which maintains the definition of the segment, and of its within-unit and between-unit relations. For such a segment it is only exogamy which is necessary; for segments where a marriage rule obtains, it is both exogamy and marriage which are crucial elements in the system. XVI. Two different kinds of system, each made up of identically structured segments, are really at issue. In one system, the segments are articulated into a logically interrelated system by the descent rule, the mode of classification of kinsmen, and the relationship of perpetual alliance between segments. In the other, the segments are defined by the descent rule, exogamy, and the variable bounding of the segments in terms of specific functions (domestic, jural, political, residential, territorial, and so on). This second kind of system consists in the proliferation of segments along genealogical lines. [58] The first type of system can be called ‘segmental’, the second ‘segmentary’. Marriage, as we have seen, plays a very different structural role in each. But it is not marriage alone which decisively separates the two types. The segmental and the segmentary are two types of a whole society or a whole system. Fortes has defended the segmentary type with skill and intellectual force, but he is defending a type. He may sometimes use different names, but he clearly distinguishes this type from all others. In his most recent paper, he uses the term ‘tribal society’, and he remains concerned with ‘residual rights’. ‘A man has unrestricted rights over his wife’s reproductive capacity in virtue of the bride-price he has paid to her father. But she never wholly forfeits her status as her father’s daughter This gives her residual claims on her father’s protection and him a lien on her’ (Fortes, 1962, p. 63). And Gluckman, in defending his sliding scale of corporateness, protests that he is only talking about a particular type of society. Needham, in his turn, is defending a type; a whole closely articulated construct, but a type as a whole. He calls this ‘prescriptive’ and names the residual category, non-prescriptive types, ‘preferential’ and declines to discuss preferential systems. If one compares, as we have, for instance, what has been called ‘marriage’ in the two different types of society, it is evident that these are hardly the same phenomena, and perhaps should not be called by the same name and certainly should not be the bone of contention which Leach, Gough, and the others make of it. In a segmental system, a condition of perpetual alliance obtains conceptually; in a segmentary system, marriage is but the residuum of exogamy, the mark of the legitimate application of a descent rule, the condition providing for complementary filiation. To call these two things ‘marriage’ is to say that apples and eggs are both fruit because one is the fruit of a tree, the other of a hen. In sum, the point of the discussion of this section is to show that the ‘segmental type’ and the ‘segmentary type’ do not refer to societies but to models. Any resemblance between these models (the models of Fortes, Leach, Lévi-Strauss, and Needham) and actual societies is wholly irrelevant to the point of this discussion, which is to show that Fortes’s model of a ‘segmentary’ society is a [59] type which is but one part of a typology; that Lévi-Strauss’s model of a ‘segmental’ society is also one type of a typology; that Needham’s ‘prescriptive’ and ‘preferential’ types are but two types of a typology; and that most of the heat of the discussion among these gentlemen is generated by the lively defense of a particular typology. Only occasionally (Livingstone is an example, Maybury-Lewis is another) has anyone said that the applicability of the model to a real society was gravely at fault. In the main, one author has argued that the other’s model has features which are inconsistent with the model of the first. Or they have argued that the names for the parts of the model are not used correctly. (‘Fortes … disguises [affinity] under his expression “complementary filiation” …’ Leach, 1957a, p. 54). My distinction between ‘segmental’ and ‘segmentary’ thus applies to models, not to societies. But it should not be concluded from this that the models under no circumstances relate or are applicable to real societies. This is perhaps, for some of us, the ultimate concern and the ultimate test. Part three. Choice and Needham’s typology XVII. Following Lévi-Strauss, Needham formulates the basic difference between his prescriptive and preferential types in terms of whether ego has any choice in marriage. In a prescriptive system, ‘… the emphasis is on the very lack of choice; the category or type of person to be married is precisely determined, and this marriage is obligatory’ (Needham, 1962b, p. 9). Leach takes substantially the same position, even to the point of apparently accepting Needham’s typology of prescriptive and preferential where it might pay a few short-run polemic dividends (Leach, 1961). Later he elaborates at some length on the significance of choice (Leach, 1962b) and this elaboration is worth considering in detail to see just how the idea of choice operates in these different models. Leach starts the discussion of double descent with the explicit declaration that he will follow Rivers’s definition so that ‘descent’ means unilineal descent units which are not such that ‘… membership itself is at all times ambiguous’ (Leach, 1962b, p. 132). The latter condition he exemplifies in terms of his ownership of shares [60] in the British-American Tobacco Company and the Samoan kin groups called aiga sa and fatelama. ‘… in such groups, not only is it the case that membership derives from choice rather than from descent, but the membership itself is at all times ambiguous. In a structure of this kind the potential groupings overlap, so that constantly each individual must ask himself: “Is it more to my advantage to fulfil my obligations towards group A or my very similar obligations towards group B?” It is because this ambiguity and choice does not automatically arise in true (that is, in unilineal) descent systems that Fortes and others have found it satisfactory to analyze unilineal descent systems as structures of jural obligation. In contrast, the analysis of any kind of cognatic kinship structure invariably ends by throwing the emphasis upon mechanisms of individual choice …’ (Leach, 1962b, p. 132). Leach then proceeds to argue that ‘… with a simple unilineal descent … each individual is a member by birth of one exclusive segment of the total society and is linked by ties of filiation or of affinity (or perhaps both) with various other analogous segments. While Ego’s freedom of action with respect to membership of his own descent group is very severely restricted, his freedom of action with regard to his affinal and filiatory links with other descent groups is ordinarily wide’ (Leach, 1962b, p. 132). Let us begin with Leach’s assertion that if ego is permitted to choose between being a member of one group or another, then by virtue of that mode of recruitment — actor’s choice as against ascription — the membership of those groups will overlap and be ambiguous. There is a series of different elements involved which should each be distinguished. First, there is the question of the rules governing membership. Can one belong to one and only one such group, or can membership be multiple? Second, if multiple membership is possible, can these member ships be simultaneous or must they be successive? Third, if multiple membership is possible, are the units com- [61] plementary or competitive? That is, from the dialogue of soul-searching which Leach describes for his ego, it would seem that groups A and B both compete for ego’s commitment, and each requires the same token of commitment from ego. Ego is trying to resolve this conflict of competing claims by calling on his enlightened self-interest to guide him. Fourth, if multiple membership is possible, and the units are competitive, do they call for the same or different tokens of commitment? Thus in two groups of like order, each claiming ego’s commitment against the claims of the other, one claims ego’s strength as a warrior, the other his skill as a farmer or the two groups could both call upon ego to contribute his labor. Finally, there is the time dimension. For what period is membership required; is it single or multiple; for a year, for life, or for no stipulated period? If the groups are single membership groups, and if, once choice is exercised, it cannot be changed but endures for life, then it is hard to see how the condition of choice makes membership in any sense ‘ambiguous’. Choice and ascription yield equally unambiguous groups under this set of conditions, so far as I can see. If the groups are multiple membership groups, and if these are sequential rather than simultaneous (ego belongs in series, first to group A, then B. then C, etc.), again I find it difficult to understand how Leach can claim that the membership of such groups is by virtue of the matter of choice, overlapping and ambiguous. It may be that ego’s membership in a group is kept secret and so an outsider may not know who belongs and who does not, and an insider may be equally uncertain. Such a condition would surely make the membership of such a set of groups ambiguous. This is not a consequence of choice, but of secrecy. If membership is multiple, and by choice, and the units are complementary, as in the case of double descent which Leach describes, then again there need be no ambiguity about membership as a consequence of choice, for it is quite clear from the case of double descent (in the pure sense in which Rivers defines descent) that if membership is by choice, or if it is by ascription, the consequences are precisely the same so far as ambiguity of membership is concerned. Within the units of like order — the patrilineal units, for instance — there is no overlapping, of course. [62] But those who are related to each other patrilineally, may not be related to each other matrilineally, and there is thus considerable overlapping, though there need be no ambiguity, in double descent systems. But if we once start considering double descent we must consider the problem of overlapping from the point of view of every kind of group and classificatory category within the society. It is obvious that there is always overlapping, there are always intersecting categories, and that some system of role segregation is required to integrate and articulate every social system. It should be quite clear by now that what makes for ambiguous and overlapping membership is not necessarily the mode of recruitment at all. Even if recruitment is prescriptive and without choice, membership can be ambiguous if the criteria in terms of which membership is ascribed are ambiguous. Thus if recruitment is prescriptive on the basis of patrilineal descent and the criteria for establishing paternity are ambiguous, then multiple claims might well obfuscate membership lines. In the particular form in which he presents it, Leach’s argument that the mode of recruitment is closely related to the ambiguity of the membership unit does not stand up. Nevertheless, it seems obvious that in general the mode of recruitment must relate to certain aspects of the structure of the unit and the system within which it occurs. But here we return to our major theme. The model which Leach uses implicitly here is the model of the segmentary system, and the muddled part of that model is the notion that somehow the segment is not only a conceptual segment, but also in some way a physically distinct and concrete segment. For it is only with a segment so conceived that choice of membership, and frequent changes of membership, and multiple membership may create the kind of ambiguity which Leach describes. If we turn now to Needham’s typology of prescriptive versus preferential, it seems clear why he uses choice as the essential discriminating element between these two types. The problem is that the segmental model requires that units be in an asymmetrical exchange relationship so that if A gives to B, A cannot receive that same kind of item from B, but must receive that kind of item from another unit. Thus, if A is a wife-giving unit, and B [63] a wife-taking unit, then A must take wives from a unit other than B — perhaps unit C. Since the act of ‘giving’ is constituted by a woman who marries, and the act of ‘taking’ consists in a man’s marriage, then the specification of obligation on the act of the man and the woman is simply another statement of the kind of relationship which obtains between the two units. If a man is required to take his wife from a wife-giving unit, there can be no mistake about the kind of relationship which obtains between those two units This seems perfectly straightforward and simple. It is true in yet another sense. If units A and B are in a wife-giving to wife-taking relationship, then the rule that a man of B must take his wife from unit A is really nothing more than an injunction that he obey the rules of the relationship between the two units. For him to go elsewhere for a wife would be to repudiate that alliance. And this too, seems perfectly straightforward and simple. The relationship of alliance between units is the essence of the prescriptive type; it is the fact that the exchange between the units is asymmetric, that what one receives, it cannot return directly. Indeed, if one can argue that the obligation to marry a particular category is not the precise correlate, at the level of individual action, of the structural relationship of the exchanging units, one may easily argue that the essence of the affiance model is corrupted by using the element of choice as the differentiating characteristic of the two major types. But such an argument seems unwarranted. It seems unwarranted because the guide to action, the imperative by which the men of such a system live, is only the necessary translation into action of the structural relationship of exchange. The requirement to marry MoBrDa is the statement at the level of action of the relationship of asymmetrical alliance between exchanging units. Or so it would seem, except for two things. The first is that we are comparing the wrong things and so come to the wrong conclusion. When we say that the system is prescriptive and mean by this ‘… the emphasis is on the very lack of choice; the category or type of person to be married is precisely determined, and this marriage is obligatory’ (Needham, 1962, p. 9), we can understand such a statement in contrast to and in contradistinction to some [64] category to which it is opposed. Here prescription is contrasted to choice. We know what a prescription is. It is the obligation to marry MoBrDa in an asymmetrical alliance system. What is ‘choice’ then? Choice obviously is where ego can marry MoBrDa or FaSiDa; or MoMoBrDaDa, or anyone else who pleases him. Look at the array of categories! One against an almost unlimited number. But is this the proper contrast? Are these indeed the correctly opposed categories? Is MoBrDa in one system in any sense the comparable contrast with MoBrDa, FaSiDa, MoMoBrDaDa, and so on in the other system? By some stretch of the imagination it might be, if one had not learned by now the pitfalls of genealogy as against category (Needham, 1962b). We early learned that in cross-cousin marriage systems the own real daughter of the own real brother of the own real mother in fact was not often married. We then learned that anyone who was ‘classified’ as mother’s brother’s daughter was an acceptable bride according to the rules in such cases, and this often included kin types such as mother’s mother’s brother’s daughter’s daughter, and so on. ‘And so on’ turned out, on analysis, to include women from certain lines, many of whom could not even trace a genealogical connection to ego, nor bothered to try. Moreover, if their actual genealogical connections prohibited them from being married, a rite could re-classify them into the marriageable category, as for instance is done in some societies like Purum. We learned too from Lévi-Strauss and Needham that although diagrams showed three lines in a circle, actually any given line might take wives from two, three, or four lines and might in turn give wives to two, three, or four lines, so that the chances of actually getting a genealogical category to coincide with marriage or alliance category were fairly slim indeed. And Lévi-Strauss showed how the essence of such a system was that of indirect exchange as opposed to direct exchange. A wife came from a wife-giving unit; a wife was given to a wife-taking unit; the unit which gave must take from elsewhere. Hence the better gloss for this category was ‘marriageable woman, i.e. a woman from a wife-giving unit’. Two very important points now follow. First, for us to think of such a system as a MoBrDa system is wrong, for the category [65] is much more properly translated not by an irrelevant genealogical specification, but rather by such phrases as ‘marriageable woman’. Second, the essential element in the system is the asymmetrical alliance. Having found the correct translations and discarded the inappropriate and inaccurate ones, we may now return to the formula and do some simple substitution. A prescriptive system is one in which ego has no choice, but must marry a ‘marriageable woman’. A ‘marriageable woman’ is a woman from a wife-giving unit. If this is a prescriptive system, what then is the opposite type? What is the contrast? Is it a system in which ego has a ‘choice’? If so, what can that choice consist in? The opposite of a marriageable woman is an unmarriageable woman, or a prohibited woman. Is this the proper opposition? Can we say that a prescriptive system is one in which ego is obliged to marry a woman whom he is permitted to marry and a preferential system one in which ego is permitted to marry a woman who is prohibited? This seems sheer nonsense, but it is to such sheer nonsense that one is led if one starts with a structural problem and tries to define it in terms of individual action (Needham, 1962) on a choice versus no-choice basis. In all models that we have heard anything about, a man is obliged to marry a marriageable woman and prohibited from marrying a woman of prohibited category. This applies to segmental and segmentary models alike. A woman who is not marriageable is one to whom the incest taboo applies. This too applies in segmentary as well as segmental models. In alliance theory as well as in descent theory, then, ego must marry a permitted and not a prohibited woman. In alliance theory a permitted woman is defined as one who comes from or who is a member of a wife-giving unit; in descent theory she is one who is from any unit other than ego’s, since in that model units are not in an alliance relationship with each other. To specify that in one system choice is permitted and in the other system it. is precluded is to confound two different levels of analysis and to fail to deal with the categories in terms of their proper conceptual definition. But it is one more thing, and this perhaps is its gravest error: it is essentially to nullify and con- [66] found most of the clarification which Lévi-Strauss, Needham, and Leach have all contributed to this question. It is fair to say that what started out as the study of cross-cousin marriage has made sense in proportion to the degree to which we have gotten away from genealogical cross-cousins. The more our terminology has clung to the traditional names, like MoBrDa and FaSiDa, the more confused the problem has become. This brings me to the final point in this connection. When the definition of the system as a system is stated in terms of the conditions under which an individual may act, it does so within the context of a given structure. The word ‘choice’ in English takes as its focus the problem of the individual’s action within the framework of a particular structure of the situation, and this structure is treated as given. Hence, it is a misplaced definition so far as the analysis of structure is concerned to discriminate two structures in terms of individual choice. The models are systemic models, they are not usable as models of situations within which actors choose among alternate courses. We are concerned with the question ‘How is this system structured?’ not with the question ‘Given this structure, how can a man pick his way through it?’ We are concerned with the question ‘What is the structure of the relationship between segments?’ not with the question ‘Is a man allowed to marry his cousin?’ Needham’s distinction between his prescriptive and preferential types is thus, from the point of view of alliance theory, untenable when it is stated in terms of choice. In both prescriptive and preferential systems, men are obliged to marry marriageable women and prohibited from marrying prohibited women. It is the definition of who is in the category of marriageable women which differs, not whether there is choice; it is how the lines are related, not whom the men are free to marry. XVIII. The difficulties of dealing with types are clear, but they are easily forgotten. Just what is the ‘type’? Is it a Weberian ‘ideal type’? Is it an analytic construct which the anthropologist finds pedagogically useful? Is it a point on an evolutionary scale like ‘preliterate’, or ‘use of fossil fuels’? Is it a summary of the most frequently encountered characteristics in a finite array of items [67] that corresponds to no one concrete case? What function has the segmentary type in Fortes’s thinking or in his scheme of things? For Dumont, is it only a way of dividing those societies where affiance theory seems to hold from those in which it does not? Typologies have been used for more trivial purposes than these in the history of anthropology. The difficulties of dealing with types are clear, but Needham’s work is an illuminating instance of some of the pitfalls. In 1956 he said, ‘The greatest difficulty of all, however, is that we do not know what the facts are. There is no adequate account of unilateral cross-cousin marriage anywhere in the literature; and, until there is, there can be no great theoretical progress’ (Needham, 1956, p. 108). As if to contradict this grave pronouncement, Needham proceeded to publish more than 16 papers and a short book on this subject, discussing Eastern Sumba, Purum, Vaiphei, Korn, Lamet, Chawte, Aimol, Siriono, and Wikmunkan at greater or lesser length. These have all been literary analyses (Needham, 1957) of material largely available when Needham wrote his pronouncement of 1956. The remarkable thing about the ethnography available to Needham up to 1956 (and possibly even now) is that according to him it has all been plagued by a host of errors made by the ethnographers. The ethnographers have made mistakes and failed to provide crucial information. For instance, Needham feels that there is enough evidence to show that the Siriono are matrilineal, but that the ethnographer failed to note it (Needham, 1961, 1962, p. 64; Coult, 1962; Needham, 1963b). For the Wikmunkan, ‘I must say, too, that I should prefer to rely on his reports [those of Professor D. F. Thomson], for reasons which my analysis makes plain, than on those of the late Miss McConnell’ (Needham, 1963b, p. 145)… on this point Das’ ethnography is contradictory and that the categorized totals of marriages above are wrong’ (Needham, 1958a, p. 81). ‘These are consistent with a lineal descent system, and given the general patrilineal character of Kuki society we may safely assume that the Vaiphei are patrilineal also’ (Needham, 1959a, p. 401). ‘ZS (ws) cannot be interpreted in this way, and is apparently incorrect’ (Needham, 1960b, p. 103). Indeed, pages 102-104 of this paper are almost entirely devoted to [68] sorting out the presumed inconsistencies reported by the ethnographer. Errors and inadequacies of ethnographers are one side of the coin. The other side shows up when others have re-analyzed some of the same data. Needham’s presentation can only then be appreciated for the true elegance and order which it imposes on the data. A closer look at the Purum, for instance, makes it appear to fit only very loosely into Needham’s type (White, 1963, pp. 130-145; Leaf, 1963). A closer look at Lamet does not yield so neat a picture as one might have expected from Needham’s 1960b paper. The material on the Pende is not so simply and decisively and undebatably ‘preferential’ as Needham claims, nor is the case of the Tismulan quite so clear (Needham, 1963, p. 68; Lane, 1962b). The issue is simple. The inconsistencies, errors, inadequacies may in fact be inconsistencies, errors, inadequacies of the fieldwork and/or the reporting. Ethnographers do make mistakes. Informants do get their facts wrong. No one in the field can check every single bit of information he has collected. No ethnographer claims to infallibility. The question, then, is this: Is this particular bit an inconsistency, an error in the data or not? Needham takes the ethnographic report and matches it against his model, his type. Every deviation of the ethnography from one or another element in the type suggests to Needham that the ethnography is wrong in one way or another. Needham never alters his type to accommodate the ethnography. Needham never changes his model to fit the data. It seems, therefore, that Needham expects to find, free in nature, a concrete system which precisely replicates his type. If the type has characteristics X, Y, and Z in that order, then Needham expects to find that the Purum or the Lamet have characteristics X, Y, and Z in that order. Needham works with this type as if it were a kind of ‘missing link’, a real entity which a really good ethnographer who is a good hunter will be able to find — on Sumba perhaps, or among the Old Kuki. once it is found we will see ‘… how the system really works’ (Needham, 1958c, p. 323). What else can we understand by such phrases as ‘… a pre- [69] scriptive alliance system based on exclusive patrilateral cross-cousin marriage not only does not exist, but on both formal and pragmatic grounds cannot exist — and this is the answer to the problem of unilateral “choice”’ (Needham, 1962a, p. 118). To our astonishment, we are now told that the system cannot exist as a social system if, in fact, it cannot work. Livingston’s demonstration that the Purum system could not actually work with the numbers of people reported now seems to be acknowledged to be true and just and the whole attack on it (Needham, 1960h) misconceived. At what level does the system exist? For Needham, ‘the system’ seems to exist at the concrete level, at the manifest level, at the level of the explicit institutionalization of the categories and the rules relating those categories. There must be a prohibition on FaSiDa and a requirement to marry MoBrDa; these must be in unilineal descent units; MoBrDa must be terminologically distinguished from FaSiDa, etc. Any variation in the report is an error in the ethnography, not in the model. For Needham, a society (Purum. Pende, Tismulan) is prescriptive or it is preferential. Needham can provide a list of those which are concretely and wholly in one or the other classification (Needham, 1962a, pp. 55-57). Contrast this position with that of Lévi-Strauss. For the latter ‘the system’ is far more subtle. It exists and it is real. But its existence is only roughly manifest in the concrete categories and the socially institutionalized rules for relating these categories. Time, ecology, and a variety of factors affect the concrete manifestation of the principles. Needham’s typology is one of whole, concrete entities. If they exist as such, Needham feels that they ought to be discoverable and when they are found, they ought to be ‘perfect crystals’, so to speak. It seems apparent that Needham who has been to Sumba, Sarawak, and Malaya has not even been able to find these perfect specimens himself. Needham’s passionate dedication to his concrete types leads him into absurdities, into denying the existence of certain data which seem undeniable His repeated assertions that patrilateral prescriptive systems ‘cannot exist’ (Needham, 1962, p. 118) can only be maintained if he insists on seeing a perfect specimen [70] which, in its ethnographic report, is even more perfect than the matrilateral cases which have been so imperfectly reported. In addition to the Pende and Tismulan (Lane, 1962b), Salisbury’s Siane (Salisbury, 1962), the Busuma, Iatmul, and perhaps others seem fit to the models advanced, provided there is no insistence on the kind of perfection in their concrete manifestation which Needham demands. Needham’s effort to force the Siorono into a unilineal descent system because it has Crow-type terms is another example of the absurdity his typology requires of him. Needham feels that a proper alliance system cannot exist in the absence of unilineal descent groups. That Yalman’s Sinhalese manage without unilineal descent groups either proves that Yalman (like Holmberg) simply failed to see what must have been there, or that this is, in fact, like the Pende and Tismulan, really a case in the other category — preferential — and can therefore be dismissed from consideration. There is, however, still another and perhaps more important error that Needham commits by the use of his concrete types: this is the implicit assumption that each social norm and rule has one and only one function and, because each norm and rule has only one function, its particular shape can be wholly determined or explained by that function. The rules which categorize kinsmen, Needham implies, function so to order the social universe as to constitute and maintain a system of asymmetrical alliance. For it is Needham’s assumption that kinship terms function only as the names by which social categories bearing a single mode of relationship with each other are designated. Yet it seems clear that kinship terms have other functions than that of designating the categories to be related in an asymmetric alliance system. Among the Lamet or the Purum, for example, there may very well exist a system of asymmetric alliance, although the kinship terms may not be perfectly concordant with that system. Other loosely related systems occur too; sub-systems of variant modes may occur within the major framework; alternate modes of designation and categorization may occur. As I have tried to show elsewhere (Schneider & Homans, 1955), the alternate terms of American kinship are, on the one hand, consistent with a single, overall pattern, yet vary within the framework of that pattern, whereas the Zuni treatment of [71] FaSiDa as either FaSi or ESi varies across the lines of a basic framework (Schneider & Roberts, 1956). Alternate terms, as an order of data from a wide variety of different kinds of societies, from America to Zulu, from Zuni to Truk, constitute the decisive bit of evidence against any simple, unicausal view of the determination of a terminological pattern. In short, Needham’s model differs in certain important respects from those of Leach and Lévi-Strauss. Needham expects that his model is a close approximation of the concrete shape and content. of concrete societies. He thus expects to find a society which approximates in the closest terms the model he has built. Like the descent theory model of the segmentary system, Needham’s prescriptive and preferential types are concrete types, they have exact counterparts in nature. So he has examined the literature and himself gone into the field. He has been able to show a large number of gaps and mistakes in the ethnographic reports because his model is perfect, but the work of the ethnographers is not. Though he speaks of principles at times, and though ideas like dualism and reciprocity are present in his work, he has moved, relentlessly almost, into the positivist position from which at first he had fled along with Lévi-Strauss. But he has backed into it at the end. His treatment of kinship terms is another example of this, for he acts as if the kin term system was a system determined entirely by the need to name categories whose only significance is their operation in a system of prescriptive alliance. Part four. Conclusion XIX. I have set up what might seem to be two types; alliance theory and descent theory. By alliance theory I mean only what Lévi-Strauss, Leach, Needham, or Dumont have said, and by descent theory what Fortes, Goody, Gough, or Gluckman have said. I do not pretend that all is peace and harmony within the ranks of those I group together. Early in Section IV, I quoted Needham on his differences with Lévi-Strauss and I have pointed out other differences when they seem relevant. I do not believe that Fortes agrees with everything which Goody has written, or vice versa. I do not think that there is a ‘thing’ or a ‘school’ or a specific [72] body of doctrine apart from what each person has said. I have used the names ‘alliance theory’ and ‘descent theory’ on Dumont’s suggestion and these words only mean that in certain carefully designated respects, Lévi-Strauss, Leach, Dumont, and Needham are in general agreement with each other and disagree with Fortes, Goody, Gough, and Gluckman, who are in closer agreement with each other on specific points than with the former. My concern has been with the models these people use, with their internal consistency, and with certain of the implicit elements in the models. I have not tried to fit their models to the ethnographic facts. That is an entirely different problem from the one I have tried to deal with here. The major criticism I have offered is that both the alliance theorists and the descent theorists have a tendency toward the development and propagation of whole-system, over-simple typologies. There has been a tendency to erect a typology and to defend it to the death against all corners; even against the facts where these prove stubborn. This tendency toward the total-system typology is unevenly distributed among the theorists. Fortes is mildly addicted to his practice; Needham has a severe, and perhaps fatal case of it. Leach, despite his eloquent sermons (Leach, 1962a), is not entirely free of this vice himself (Leach, 1961). I suspect that the addiction to such fruitless whole-system typologies is related to polemic tendencies. The greater the author’s commitment to polemic goals, the greater the exaggeration into which he is forced, the greater the extremes of one sort or another he finds himself using, the greater the oversimplification of idea and expression. The time when Leach seems to accept the prescriptive-preferential typology as a serious possibility is when he is angrily after the scalp of Barbara Lane (Leach, 1961). In his more reasonable moments, he is not too seriously taken with that particular device for the classification of ethnographic butterflies (Leach, 1962a). The fact that Lane made some fair, cogent and important points may or may not be related to the magnitude of Leach’s polemic explosion (also see Needham, 1963d). One of the most serious difficulties with the descent theory [73] model, and a difficulty of which the alliance theory model is not entirely free, is the failure to distinguish the segment as a conceptual entity from the segment as a concrete, physical entity in the total system. I have tried to suggest in Sections X and XVI that there may be a single limiting case where the segment as a conceptual as well as a concrete entity would seem to be a workable model, but in fact, of course, even that model makes no sense. Even if the segment is totally self-sufficient except for a single function — that is, it must marry outside and thus must be linked by marriage with other like segments — that one link turns out, on closer inspection, to consist in a veritable network of highly differentiated modes of relationship. For the marriage, if it does not entail co-residence (and if it entails co-residence, the segment is not physically distinct), must at least entail visiting husbands and/or visiting wives, and these in turn, related to their children as well as their agnates, set up an intricate network of filiative bonds, and these, in their turn, proliferate into gift exchanges, favors, claims and counter claims, agnates versus affines, and the warmth of the mother’s brother for his sister’s son and daughter. Leach’s down-to-earth discussion of local descent lines as the real things and not diagram lines, gives this good, hard feeling of a segment as a concrete entity (Leach, 1951). Evans-Pritchard’s classic treatment of the Nuer (Evans-Pritchard, 1940) is one of the early statements of this confusion, for it is evident when Evans-Pritchard is faced with the odd fact that, although the lineages are territorial units, and although they seem to be as patrilineal as patrilineal can be, descent is traced through women and many people live matrilocally. In order to reconcile these apparent contradictions, we were treated to those special gems of paradoxical obfuscation for which Evans-Pritchard is justly famous, such as the remark that ‘it is the clear, consistent, and deeply rooted lineage structure of the Nuer which permits persons and families to move about and attach themselves freely … to whatever community they choose by whatever cognatic or affinal tie they find it convenient to emphasize …’ (Evans-Pritchard, 1951, p. 28) or, to go it one better, ‘It would seem it may be partly just because the agnatic principle is unchallenged in Nuer society that the tracing of descent through women is so prominent and matrilocality so [74] prevalent’ (Evans-Pritchard, 1951, p. 28). The failure clearly to distinguish the segment as a conceptual entity from its concrete counterpart as a group leads to the special requirement that its modes of recruitment, and the rules governing membership, must be such as to permit the segment to be a physically distinct entity — perhaps, even, to assemble in its full force for some ceremony or other. Therefore, that mode of recruitment to group membership which yields a distinct, concrete entity should not be confused with others. The unilineal descent rule is believed to be such a mode of recruitment par excellence, for this allocates a whole man to a group (see Section X above). In order, therefore, to protect the model of a segment as a physically distinct entity, unilineal descent is separated from all other modes of recruitment and we are left with a new and wholly odd definition of descent as only the unilineal form, everything else must be called by some other name. I find it strange and perverse that Rivers, Fortes, and Leach insist that it is not even possible to say that there are two different kinds of descent rules, one unilineal, the other not; that the one yields unambiguous group boundaries, the other yields ambiguous group boundaries; the one yields what are regarded as ‘true social segments’, the other not. Rivers. Fortes, and Leach (Leach, 1962b) require that we must not even call that second kind of descent ‘descent’. We must banish its very name! As if calling it by another name would in fact banish it. I have suggested, therefore, but perhaps too obliquely, that this is a perversion of the notion of descent, undertaken in the interest of protecting a typology of segmentary system, and of a model of a segment which is untenable to begin with. As an analytic scheme, it is misleading and thus harmful rather than useless. Closely connected with this model of a segment is the notion that those forms of membership rule which permit any choice are different and yield different kinds of segment or group from those where no choice is permitted; that is, where the rule is ascriptive. Choice comes into the segmentary system model as an element opposed to ascription by ‘true’ unilineal descent, and it has a contrasting effect on group structure as well. Where choice is per- [75] mitted, it is believed that group boundaries are ambiguous and one must expect to encounter the entertaining dialogues which Leach offers us, of people patiently trying to unravel the tangled strands of their affiliation with different groups in terms of their enlightened self-interest (Leach, 1962b). I have tried to show that this is nonsense; that boundaries are ambiguous when the criteria for membership are ambiguous, not when choice is involved. I outlined a series of different kinds of choice condition, showing that the group boundary problem in each case is anything but ambiguous — indeed, quite as clear as in the purest case of ‘true’ (unilineal) descent. In this section (XVII), I made the same case against Needham’s use of choice as the criterion for distinguishing his prescriptive from his preferential types. My argument here was that Needham had confused his oppositional categories. In both preferential and prescriptive systems ego is obliged to marry a marriageable woman; he has no choice about that in either type, and the word ‘choice’ is misapplied hero. In Needham’s prescriptive type, the marriageable woman comes from a wife-giving unit whereas in the preferential type she does not, and this is what distinguishes Needham’s two types, not the question of choice. (That the whole typology of preferential versus prescriptive is untenable for other reasons as well is beside the point here, which is that the use of choice only further confounds these issues.) The point that choice is simply not a structurally relevant category applies to Lévi-Strauss’s use of it too, for choice is basically a statement of an actor’s course of action when the structure of the situation is taken as given. Lévi-Strauss, Needham, Leach, Fortes at least, and Gluckman (1950; see also Schneider, 1953a) in some of his writings, are primarily concerned with structure, not with individual action within the context of a structure. Choice does not say anything of significance or use about structure. This is what Parsons has properly called the confusion between the actor as the point of reference and the system as the object of reference. I did not go into the matter in detail, but the problem of the ambiguity of boundaries, the rule of descent, the mode of recruitment are all closely linked with the problem of whether an alliance system requires unilineal descent. Yalman’s paper on the [76] Sinhalese is of importance in two respects. First, it is a case where the system of alliance is perfectly clear, and where it works perfectly well without having, what Fortes and Leach insist be called ‘true’ or unilineal descent. The opposition between affinity and consanguinity, in the form of the unilineal segment or descent group, does not stand up as a necessary condition to such systems if Yalman’s account is to be relied on. Ego-oriented systems do not lead to mires of confusion and boundary-ambiguity as Leach so vehemently claims. The second point of relevance is, of course, Needham’s desperate efforts to make unilineal systems out of the Siriono and the Vaiphei, for instance. His failure to deal with the Sinhalese case in this respect is significant. And this brings us back to the first major criticism, instead of working with models made up of distinct pieces which are arranged and re-arranged into a variety of different permutations and combinations, Needham has saddled himself with a total-system model. Each little piece must be linked with every other little piece in a particular way to make a perfect constellation of a whole, crystal-clear system. The system must be lineal; the kin terms must be consistent with (patrilineal or matrilineal) lineal systems; the exchange units must be descent units, etc., etc., etc. So if the Siriono are not said to be matrilineal, then Holmberg must be wrong because as a total-system type, every piece must be in its proper place. Never once are we shown why a system, to be a prescriptive system, as a whole system, must be unilineal; why FaSiDa must be distinguished from MoBrDa. Here Leach makes more sense than Needham. Where Needham is chained to his types. Leach is able to push alliance theory pieces as far as they can go without worrying about what is happening to a typology. Because of this, the structural role of marriage in segmentary systems now requires careful re-examination and restatement; the notion of filiation must be restated and redefined, though I expect it will survive; the sliding scale of corporateness, the residual rights and submerged rights, and imprecisely defined ‘strengths’ are now shown to be in dire need of repair. At the same time, by using Leach’s technique of pushing parts of the alliance theory model into new and untried areas, clear defects in that model itself have become apparent. I have already referred to Yalman’s Sinhalese kindred; Dumont [77] has already noted the problems raised by Barth’s FaBrDa marriage material and his Pathan work. Let me be very clear on this problem. The model which is a total-system model, which yields a typology, and where there is no specific aim or purpose for which that typology is constructed is, I think, demonstrably a mistake. Too much time, effort, and energy are spent in mending the model, in protecting it from new data, in insuring its survival against attacks. It is too late in the history of the social sciences to think we can go out among societies and, by keeping our eyes open, sort them into their natural classes. It is not possible to operate like those in the story of the blind men and the elephant and hope that if only we can put enough blind men on the elephant we will get a good factual description of the beast — the total elephant. A typology is for a problem, it is not for sorting of concrete societies into unchangeable, inherent, inalienable categories. (I agree completely with Leach in this matter, as should be clear by now (Leach, 1962a).) Instead of typologies we need a series of relevant elements, like descent, classification, exchange, residence, filiation, marriage, and so on; these need to be rigorously defined as analytic categories and then combined and recombined into various combinations and permutations, in different sizes, shapes, constellations. The model of defined parts can be constructed with, or without Levi-Strauss’s kind of intellectualist or Hegelian assumptions, or the kind of positivism which Fortes requires. I have dwelt somewhat longer on some of the positivist difficulties than on the intellectualist problems, but each has its fair share of problems. Finally, there is one point which needs stressing and which I only touched on. Alliance theory as a theory is capable of dealing with the symbol system as a system apart from, yet related to, the network of social relations. It has a way of dealing with problems of meaning which the descent theory of Radcliffe-Brown and Fortes does not have. Alliance theory, in the footsteps of Durkheim here as elsewhere, is cognizant of the importance of how the actor conceptualizes the structure (‘how the natives think’ perhaps) and the difference between this conceptualization and an outsider’s analytic construct of the system as a system. Where Radcliffe-Brown rejected culture in favor of what he was [78] pleased to call structure, and where Leach in an earlier work separated out cultural ornaments, alliance theorists have brought culture and social structure into an ordered relationship which even Needham’s gross manipulations of the Purum data cannot obscure. Acknowledgements Thanks are due to the following for permission to quote passagee from published works: Beacon Press, New York, and Merlin Press, London, in respect of Totemism by C. Lévi-Strauss, translated by Rodney Needham; the Editor of Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land-, en Volkenkunde in respect of ‘On Manipulated Sociological Models’ by C. Lévi-Strauss and ‘A Structural Analysis of Aimol Society’ by Rodney Needham; Dr E. R. Leach and the Council of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland in respect of ‘On Certain Unconsidered Aspects of Double Descent Systems’, Man, 62, by E. R. Leach; The University of Chicago Press in respect of Structure and Sentiment: A Test Case in Social Anthropology by Rodney Needham, © 1962 by the University of Chicago. [79] Bibliography Names of journals are abbreviated as follows: AA American AnthropologistBijdragen Bijdragen tot de taal-, land-, en volkenkundeJPS Journal of the Polynesian SocietyJRAI Journal of the Royal Anthropological InstituteSWJ Southwestern Journal of Anthropology Beattie, J. H. M. 1957-58. Nyoro Kinship, Marriage and Affinity. Africa 27, 28. Coult, A. D. 1962. An Analysis of Needham’s Critique of the Homans-Schneider Theory. SWJ 18. De Josselin de Jong, J. P. B. 1952. Lévi-Strauss’ Theory on Kinship and Marriage. 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Bijdragen 116. Murdoch, G. P. 1949. Social Structure. New York: Macmillan. ———. 1960. Social Structure in S.E. Asia. Viking Fund Pubs. No. 29. Chicago: Quadrangle. Murphy, R. F. 1963. On Zen Marxism: Filiation and Alliance. Man 63, 21. Needham, R. 1954a. Reference to the Dead among the Penan. Man 54. ———. 1954b. The System of Teknonyms and Death-names of the Penan. SWJ 10. ———. 1954c. A Penan Mourning-Usage. Bijdragen 110. ———. 1955. A Note on some Murut Kinship Terms. J. Mal. Br. R. Asiatic Soc. 28. ———. 1956a. Ethnographic Notes on the Siwang of Central Malaya. J. Mal. Br. R. Asiatic Soc. 29. ———. 1956b. Review of Homans and Schneider. Am. J. Sociology 66. ———. 1956c. A Note on Kinship and Marriage on Pantara. Bijdragen 112. ———. 1957. Circulating Connubium in Eastern Sumba. A Literary Analysis. Bijdragen 113. ———. 1958a. A Structural Analysis of Purum Society. AA 60. ———. 1958b. The Formal Analysis of Prescriptive Patrilateral Cross-Cousin Marriage. SWJ 14. ———. 1958c. 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Unilineal Descent Groups in the New Guinea Highlands. Man 56, No. 2. ———. 1962b. From Stone to Steel. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Schneider, D. M. 1953a. A Note on Bridewealth and the Stability of Marriage. Man 53, No. 73. Schneider, D. M. 1953b. Yap Kinship Terminology and Kin Groups. AA 55. ———. 1957. Political Organization, Supernatural Sanctions and the Punishment for Incest on Yap. AA 59. ———. 1961. The distinctive Features of Matrilineal Descent Groups. In Schneider, D. M. & Gough, K., Matrilineal Kinship. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1962. Double Descent on Yap. JPS 71. Schneider, D. M. & Homans, G. C. 1955. Kinship Terminology and the American Kinship System. AA 57. Schneider, D. M. & Roberts, J. M. 1956. Zuñi Kin Terms. Notebook No. 3, Laboratory of Anthropology, University of Nebraska. White, H. 1963. An Anatomy of Kinship. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Yalman, N. 1962. The Structure of the Sinhalese Kindred: A Re-Examination of the Dravidian Terminology. AA 64. Publisher’s note: This is a reprint of D. M. Schneider. 1965. “Some muddles in the models: or, ‘how the system really works’.” In The Relevance of Models for Social Anthropology, edited by M. Banton, 25-86. ASA Monographs 1, London: Tavistock Publications; New York: Frederick A. Preager. We are very grateful to the ASA for granting us the right to reprint it. We remind the reader that we retain the style of the original, and indicate in the text the original page numbers in square brackets. ___________________ 1. Since its presentation to the Cambridge Conference, I have added Sections XVII, XVIII, and XIX, clarified minor portions of the argument, and profited from the suggestions of Paul W. Friedrich, F. K. Lehman, Melford Spiro, Richard F. Salisbury, and Fred Eggan. Professor Claude Lévi-Strauss made some helpful suggestions, which led me to delete some of the material from the earlier draft which was incorrect or unclear. In particular, he pointed out that I had misunderstood him if I regarded him as an ‘idealist’ in the sense of treating ideas as such as fundamental to social life. Rather, if I understand his position correctly now, he regards himself as an ‘intellectualist’ in the sense that both ideas and action derive from qualities of mind, and that neither action nor ideas has any particular priority. Murphy (1963) has described this most accurately, I think. I had hoped to revise and greatly expand Section II, discussing in detail the problems raised by Homans’s and Lévi-Strauss’s psychological reductionism and their emphasis on the actor’s view of the system as distinct from the observer’s view. But all of this proved another very long essay for which space was not provided here. 3. In fact, of course, Evans-Pritchard seems to have implied very strongly that it was the idea of the lineage quite as much as the actual groups; for it becomes apparent on close inspection that the lineages as actual groups are not nearly so enduring, nor so concrete, nor so strongly localized as might be inferred from a hasty reading of his monograph. 4. I have used the term ‘corporate unit’, since the definition of the word ‘group’ and its associations and meanings are so problematic. A modern nation has a corporate identity. but it is not possible for it to act in unison and concert and as a physically corporate group in the sense, let us say, of a small village assembling in its entirety for a religious ritual (Schneider, 1961).

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Human and proud of it! This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Robert McKinley. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau5.2.031 REPRINT Human and proud of it! A structural treatment of headhunting rites and the social definition of enemies Robert MCKINLEY, Michigan State University   Introduction Headhunting is one of those customs which was almost certain to attract a great deal of attention from early western observers because it fits so well with the western world’s fantasies regarding the savagery of primitive life. One is tempted to believe that the discovery of this custom was immediately welcomed by the various Euro-American colonial powers of the last two centuries as living proof that there were indeed genuine blood thirsty savages in their tropical possessions. Any lingering doubts on this point were easily dispelled by the mere price of admission to an occasional traveling circus where a “Wild Man of Borneo” was certain to appear among the side show attractions. And if headhunters they were, then quite clearly such wayward members of the human species were in sad need of the civilizing influences of both Christianity and mercantilism. It was in this ethnocentric climate of missionizing zeal, colonial domination, and, I must add, with the decided advantage of superior fire power, that an adventurer like the first Rajah Brooke of Sarawak could be acclaimed as a champion [444]of civilization, the perfect hero for British school boys. Ultimately, he and other administrators like him did succeed in ending headhunting raids; although there were times, no doubt, when it would have been rather difficult to distinguish between such raids themselves and some of the punitive expeditions meant to stop them. By 1930 headhunting as an active pursuit survived in only a few corners of the entire region from Northeast India to Melanesia, a region in which it is quite possible that a third or more of the tribal groups had been practicing this type of warfare at the time of European contact. Of current interest is the fact that though headhunting has been made obsolete as a mode of warfare, many groups continue to perform the rituals which were once associated with it. In many parts of Borneo head feasts are still held and the songs of ancient heroes are still sung. The only difference is that now the rites are performed over relics of the past, old skulls taken long ago rather than fresh ones from a recent raid. Some groups even use coconuts or wooden carvings as substitutes for trophy heads. The original purpose of a head feast was to install or incorporate into a village the severed heads of enemies slain on a recent war raid. This chapter seeks to determine the underlying structure and meaning of some of these rituals. What symbolic messages did they carry? Why were they so often considered essential to tribal well-being? Finally, what is so special about the head itself in its role as a ritual symbol? The following headings and comments provide a fairly close outline of the arguments contained in this chapter. 1. Introduction 2. Asking the right questions 3. Aims and assumptionsThe central question of why enemy heads should be treated as ritual objects is raised. The answer cannot be derived until much later in the chapter, but the contention is made that such a derivation must be guided by a theory which claims that the meanings of all ritual symbols are largely social in nature. 4. The native viewWhile native theories of headhunting are essential to any analysis of the custom, we find that they give no direct answer to the original question of why enemy heads should be selected as ritual objects. Instead, headhunting myths point to other matters of religious concern. Important among these is an implicit equation between war raids and cosmic journeys. 5. Inferences from tribal cosmologySince head hunts are mythically equated with cosmic journeys, a summary of Southeast Asian tribal cosmology is presented. 6. Implications of this cosmologyThe cosmological remoteness of enemies which is almost always indicated in the myths is shown to be consistent with the relatively [445]great social and geographic distances between most headhunters and their enemies. 7. Headhunting ideology and three contradictions in tribal lifeHeadhunting ritual and ideology are seen as mechanisms used in maintaining the reality structures and the world views of certain tribal communities. They give the social world a greater plausibility in the face of the contradictions between (A) life and death, (B) familiar and foreign, and (C) human and non-human. 8. The ritual incorporation of the enemy as friendA discussion of the reasons why headhunters are not content with only killing their enemies, but rather must bring home parts of them, is presented. 9. The choice of the head: Names, faces, and the social personThe central question of why the head is the part of the enemy which, more than any other, should be selected for ritual treatment is answered. Briefly, heads contain the face, and the face signifies the social personhood of the enemy, now transformed and established as a ritual friend. 10. Headhunting rites and the social definition of enemiesFriends and enemies are defined sociologically in terms of the locus of social personhood, and not solely in terms of group affiliation. The headhunting rites are able to shift the enemy’s locus of personhood from external to internal, thus making him more like a friend. 11. Life and death and the internal/external oppositionAmong many Bornean groups a successful headhunt was regarded as a necessary prerequisite to the rituals which ended a period of mourning. This connection between headhunting and mourning is explained in terms of the arguments about social personhood developed in the previous section. 12. Conclusion Asking the right questions In reflecting upon colonialism and the historical currents which eventually led to the demise of headhunting, we are reminded that for the first westerners who speculated about this custom there was no reason to see anything more in headhunting than a vivid confirmation of their own worst suspicions regarding life in tribal societies. The earliest writers looked for depraved motivations behind the treachery and violence of headhunting raids. A somewhat more sympathetic view was presented by those who had been inspired by the animistic school of primitive religion. These writers often claimed that headhunting was conceived as a way of capturing the soul force of an enemy and placing it in the service of one’s own people. For the animistic school, headhunting was at least rational, although still misguided. In a sense it was another example of the savage’s inherent propensity to place moral folly on top of erroneous thought.[446] Perhaps the most revealing discussion showing the discrepancy between the meaning of headhunting for the western observer and its meaning to some of the people who actually practiced it was presented by William Henry Furness (1902: 59) in his account of a visit with a Kayan chief on the Baram River. The following dialogue may read contrived, but I submit it as an indicator of the picture we might get if a fuller testimony were available: “O Sabilah (Blood-brother) why is it that all you people of Kalamantan kill each other and hang up these heads? In the land I come from such a thing is never known; I fear that it would be ill-spoken of there, indeed perhaps, thought quite horrible. What does Aban Avit think of it?” He turned to me in utter, absolute surprise, at first with eyes half closed, as doubting that he heard aright, and letting the smoke curl slowly out of his mouth for a moment, he then replied, with unwonted vehemence: — “No, Tuan! No the custom is not horrible. It is an ancient custom, a good, beneficient custom, bequeathed to us by our fathers and our fathers’ fathers; it brings us blessings, plentiful harvests, and keeps off sickness, and pains. Those who were once our enemies, hereby become our guardians, our friends, our benefactors.” “But,” I interrupted, “how does Aban Avit know that these dried heads do all this? Don’t you make it an excuse just because you like to shed blood and to kill?” “Ah, Tuan, you whitemen had no great Chief, like Tokong, to show you what was right; haven’t you ever heard the story of Tokong and his people?” (Furness 1902: 59) Furness continues to tell the story of Tokong and his people. It is a story in which the hero Tokong is advised by a frog to cut off the heads of his enemies. At first Tokong finds this a very repulsive idea and does not heed the frog’s advice. As a consequence, although Tokong’s men are successful in battle, their village suffers badly from famine, disease, and infertility. Finally, he decides to obey the frog, and sure enough, the crops in the fields undergo a miraculous growth, house shingles refurbish themselves, the people themselves look younger and healthier, babies are conceived, and, most remarkable of all, canoes paddle themselves and rice pounders work under their own power. The interesting point about the story is its emphasis on the fact that killing one’s enemies is not enough. It is the acquisition of the heads and not victory alone which offers mystical benefits. While the present chapter is in no way intended as an apology for headhunting, it does insist that ritual symbols as well as native theories about them be allowed to speak for themselves in order that we might better interpret their social relevance. The conclusion to be derived below is that, in a sense, Aban Avit was right in what he said in the dialogue quoted above. He was able to tell something about headhunting which has nearly always eluded foreign observers. He saw that the ritual treatment of the heads was a community’s way of saying to itself: “Those who were once our enemies, hereby become our guardians, our friends, our benefactors.” The methods which I have used in supporting this conclusion may seem overly comparative for a study which purports to be a structural analysis of a single system of meanings. I have drawn upon myths and rituals from a number of separate ethnographic contexts. In defense of this method I can say two things. First, most of my examples come from Southeast Asia or Oceania, where, prior to the [447]formation of the state on the mainland (around 200 ad) and in the Indonesian islands (around 350 ad), the custom of headhunting may have had a near continuous distribution. So within this broad region I may actually be dealing with a single tradition. Second, I think it is necessary when studying a single, though widespread ritual form, such as that of incorporating enemy heads into a community, that we pay full attention to as many variations as possible. Since all the variations are attempts to deal with the same ritual problem (in this case the problem of making the external enemy an internal friend), it takes many versions to show us the full dimensions of the problem itself. In this way I have approached headhunting ritual and myth in much the same way as Lévi-Strauss (1969) approaches mythology in general; that is, by examining many variations of a single form, and without claiming that any one version is the “true” form. Since the problems dealt with in mythology often are among the most contradictory aspects of our existence, they are not easily resolved by any single version of the myths about them, nor by a few symbolic mediations. Rather such problems seem to call for many repeated assaults of meaning. In fact such problems can never be entirely disposed of by myth. They can, however, be pushed around a bit here and there, and thus they can be placed in more convenient positions vis-à-vis the particular meaning system of any given society. Since the central problem of a myth must be worked out through variations, it is the variations which, upon analysis, can often give us the clearest picture of the structure of the myth. I would say that this is sometimes as true for ritual as it is for myth. I believe that headhunting ritual is such a case. Headhunting, as a complex of myth and ritual, seems to be much concerned with how to manage the existential limits of the social world. This concern involves symbolic modes of placing the secure inner world of community life in an acceptable relation to such unending contradictions as those between life and death, familiar and foreign, culture and nature, and friend and enemy. Naturally, no single version of the ritual complex in question has achieved a total resolution of these problems. But by examining a number of attempted solutions, I believe we are better able to discern some pattern to the problem itself. Aims and assumptions In her book Natural symbols, Mary Douglas states the following assumption: Symbols are the only means of communication. They are the only means of expressing value; the main instruments of thought, the only regulators of experience. For any communication to take place, the symbols must be structured. For communication about religion to take place, the structure of the symbols must be able to express something relevant to the social order. (1970: 38) This is a strong declaration of the importance of symbols in human affairs. It is an equally strong statement about the social relevance of religious symbols. It claims that religious symbols are so structured as to convey significant messages about social relations. [448]Implicit in all this is the notion that ritual symbols are not selected in an arbitrary way, but that they are chosen for their symbolic appropriateness to the ritual contexts in which they are employed. There is some irony in this because the primary symbol which allows humans to communicate their ideas to one another is the “word” that is based on man’s unique capacity arbitrarily to bestow meaning onto clusters of sound produced by the organs of speech. So the word, which is the primary symbol, is based on a very arbitrary link between concepts and sound structures. Yet ritual symbols, which are in a sense secondary symbols, are based on direct links between concepts themselves and therefore stand in a much less arbitrary relationship to each other. Said in another way there is always more logic to metaphor than there is to nominalism. There should always be some logic to the structural links which join a number of ritual symbols into a meaningful statement about human experience with social reality. A structural analysis of ritual symbols aims at uncovering this logic and then exploring the social relevance of the statements made by a particular rite or ceremony. Ritual symbols can be expressed either verbally or non-verbally, and as actions or objects. Quite often concrete representations which we can for convenience call “ritual objects” are able to convey the ideas to be expressed by a certain rite in a far more powerful way than could words alone. There are probably many kinds of socially relevant meanings which would have no impact on people if stated in a prosaic speech, but which can have a profound effect when expressed through the metaphorical idiom of concrete ritual symbols. Because of this some serious attention must be paid to the various physical objects, whether products of nature or man-made artifacts, which are made to take on the role of ritual symbols. Since such physical objects have fixed properties and certain typical relationships with other objects and events, they quickly develop standing relationships with the everyday system of meanings and categories held by a society. Therefore all familiar physical objects are a bit like concepts themselves in that their selection as ritual symbols is not made on an arbitrary basis but in terms of the ritual or symbolic appropriateness of the meanings already assigned to or associated with them in everyday life. If these meanings are especially appropriate to the message and structure of a given ritual context then it is likely that the object will be incorporated as a ritual symbol. Thus it is that religions are always forced to borrow systematically from the mundane world of familiar objects for the symbolic hardware with which they portray the sacred. If we follow van Baal (1971: 1–8) in defining religion as a concern with “a non-empirical reality” then it is clear that religion is dependent upon the selective use of items from empirical reality now transposed as ritual objects and symbols to express its non-empirical conceptual content. Human history has seen ritual treatment accorded to a very wide and heterogeneous assortment of things, any one of which would appear fairly mundane when viewed in isolation. No extremes of iconoclasm can escape this paradox of the need for concrete ritual symbols in religions. It is essential that such symbols be borrowed from the mundane sphere, and it is by the logic of symbolic appropriateness that the selections are made. This chapter will present an analysis of the symbolic appropriateness of one such concrete symbol, namely the human head, as it occurred in certain ritual contexts which were either directly or indirectly related to headhunting warfare. It will [449]also deal with the social relevance of the meanings conveyed by these rites. Most of all this presentation will focus on what these rites had to say about the social definition of enemies. The leading idea throughout the discussion will be that in the concrete symbol of the head a categorical enemy as a special type of social person can be ritually converted into a friend. The native view Until the first decades of the twentieth century many of the tribal peoples of Borneo, as well as those in other parts of Southeast Asia and Oceania, viewed the severed heads of their slain enemies as important ritual symbols. In fact a great deal of religious efficacy was attributed to these symbols. Large public feasts were held to celebrate their installation into the community, and it was believed that their presence would somehow increase fertility and generally improve the health and well-being of the group that acquired them. Of course there were a number of significant variations on this over-all theme. But the one important fact to remember about the institutional complex referred to as headhunting is that not only did groups practicing this custom feel that it was beneficial to the well-being of their communities, they believed it was essential. So we must ask, what does the head symbol mean—particularly the enemy head? Additionally, what was the underlying structure of the rituals surrounding the head? Finally, and most crucially of all; how did the head “express something relevant to the social order” of the tribal societies which practiced this custom? Knowledge of native theories regarding this custom is essential if we are to answer any of these three questions. Fortunately the literature on the many peoples who used to be active headhunters contains quite a number of native statements on the matter. More importantly, where large bodies of tribal mythology have been transcribed and translated we come across charter myths that “explain” the origin of the custom and indicate some of its benefits. In these charter myths it is typical for a spiritual being or culture hero to instruct ancestral members of the tribe in the proper and most effective ways of conducting warfare. The secret of using omens and charms may be taught, including the method of cutting off the head. Then this hero teaches them how to prepare the head and how best to conduct the elaborate ceremonies connected with its arrival in the village. Even in myths which are not explicit charters telling of the first introduction of headhunting to the tribe, there are long tales of the heroic deeds of legendary warriors who journey far and wide in taking heads and who succeed in winning secret magical powers away from the spirits and demons of many fabulous and unearthly realms. Such tales as these often outline by example the way in which the head feast should be celebrated. These myths, because of their structure and intimate relation to the tribal cosmology as a whole, must be viewed as our best source of insight into the full meaning of the custom. Usually they go much deeper and are far more revealing than the standard off-the-cuff explanations, which many informants gave to the first western observers to come on the scene. For instance they teach one that the headhunting expedition can be equated with journeys to and from other worlds—especially the [450]sky world and the underworld, but also in a more general sense the “after world” or place of the dead. For some excellent examples of stories built on this theme consider the following: The Iban story of “Klieng’s War Raid to the Sky” (Perham 1896: 311–25). In this tale the hero Klieng is able through his great courage, cunning, and magic to wage war “in the halved deep heavens.” His opponent is the cruel Tedai who has captured the parents of the beautiful Kumang, whom Klieng seeks to marry. To reach the heavens he must first go to the horizon where he receives help from the wind spirit, Hantu Ribut. Also his men use the beak of a hornbill and the wing feathers of a hawk to move up into the sky vault. Klieng succeeds in rescuing Kumang’s parents. He then returns to earth, and marries Kumang. Klieng was such a great headhunter that he boasts: “Every month I get a seed of the nibong palm [i.e., an enemy head].” The Iban myth of Siu (Gomes 1911: 278–300). In this tale a young hero becomes lost from his companions while hunting birds with his blow pipe. Wandering deep through the forest and then crossing some hills, he comes to the vast longhouse of the supreme sky deity, Singalang Burong. He is represented on earth as a species of kite. Siu marries the deity’s youngest daughter, and they return to earth. They have a son, Seragunting. Later, after a quarrel in which Siu commits an offense against birds, his divine wife leaves him to return to her village in the sky. Both Siu and Seragunting set out to follow her. In one version of the myth they wear feather garments to get to the heavens. During their visit to the upper-world, Singalang Burong teaches young Seragunting about warfare, bird omens, and padi planting. Seragunting gets practice by joining the bird deities in their war raids against enemies who live on the horizon (Howell 1963: 97). He then returns to earth with his newly acquired knowledge. The Land Dayak myth of Kichapi (Geddes 1957). As a small boy, Kichapi was already mature and skilled enough to go out hunting. However, he gets lost in the forest and is raised by a pair of giant ogres. While staying in their realm he eats only raw food. Next he is sent to a powerful female shaman of the upperworld who chops him up and cooks him. Skimming off the fat and ugly parts, she remakes him into a very handsome young man. Although he is now the perfect man, the old shaman gives him an orangutan skin to wear as a disguise in the presence of humans. The ogres then escort him to the second-year swidden fields on the outskirts of the village where Gumiloh, a wise and beautiful girl, lives. She and her village are at this time in mourning over the death of her father whose head had been taken by Minyawi, their most feared enemy. Although Kichapi is still dressed as an orangutan and has the terrifying ogres as companions, Gumiloh has the wisdom to calmly and politely invite them into the village. Kichapi now has his first cooked food after a year of wandering in the non-human realm. As a guest Kichapi participates in the daily life of Gumiloh’s village. But in addition he also makes a journey to the under-world where he makes love to the daughter of the treacherous dragon king. He gets her to help him steal secret [451]magical charms from her father. Now he is ready to lead the war raid to avenge Gumiloh’s father. The enemy, Minyawi, so it seems, was somewhat under the protection of the under-world dragon. Of course Kichapi is successful; he recovers the father’s head, cuts off Minyawi’s, reveals his own true identity, confronts several other fearsome adversaries, and finally returns to marry Gumiloh and unite her village with his village of birth. Together they celebrate a huge head feast. The Baree-speaking Toradja myth of Tambuja (Downs 1955: 47–49). This hero avenges the death of his parents at the hands of a remote enemy from across the sea. In some versions this enemy is located in the upper-world or is called “The King of the Horizon.” So the Toradja headhunting hero must also journey to other worlds. He follows the rainbow to reach the sky and may then be thrown down into the underworld where he takes the heads of the enemy’s ghosts. Meanwhile the severed head itself speaks to the warrior telling him what to do with it for the head feast. A special feature of the Toradja myth seems to be that in certain tales the daughter of the enemy is given the power to become small and conceal herself in a flute carried along with the head. From here she gives betel nut to the father. Then her presence is revealed to the warrior, and, after the head feast is properly celebrated, they marry. The two Ifugao myths: “Virgin Birth” and “Self-Beheaded” (Barton 1955: 46–96). Both these myths are about the headhunting hero, Balitok, who encounters and gains control over the under-world ghoul “Self-Beheaded.” In the “Virgin Birth” story Balitok is conceived when a male sky deity named Mayingat descends through the upstream region to the central region of earth. He impregnates Balitok’s mother by giving her some betel to chew. At that time Balitok’s mother is an unmarried young woman who has a reputation for being choosy for she refuses all suitors and lovers. Her pregnancy raises a lot of talk about how she must prefer men of distant regions, enemies no doubt. After Balitok is born, he is raised by his maternal grandfather. They have no other kin, so young Balitok takes a great deal of ridicule from other boys who like to compete with him. One day in anger he kills one of these rivals. The kin of the dead boy want revenge, and Balitok and his grandfather are quite vulnerable alone. At this point Balitok’s divine father steps in to rescue him by teaching him how to use magic prior to warfare. In particular he learns the dances and types of omen-taking which must be done prior to a headhunt. With this help Balitok prevails. In the myth of the Self-Beheaded, Balitok realizes that his enemies in another village are preparing to make war on him. So he journeys to the bottom of the lake of the downstream region seeking some strong sorcery to aim at these enemies. In the under-world he meets the stump-necked ghoul, Self-Beheaded. As long as Balitok will give raw food to Self-Beheaded this unpleasant creature will work for him against his enemies. A key fact to relate to this myth is that the Ifugao held special rites over the beheaded corpses of their own villagers fallen in ambush. Their spirits are implored to seek revenge against the outsiders who brought about their untimely deaths. Meanwhile, the victors would try to counteract this rite by imploring the heads, themselves, to turn their anger against their own former kin. Thus, Balitok’s rapport with Self-Beheaded seems [452]to represent a general ability to subvert the war magic of his enemies. In another Balitok myth, Wigan, the major sky deity and the patron of headhunters, teaches Balitok to hold preparatory headhunting rites to ensure the ability to overcome the loss of a dead relative through a successful revenge attack (Barton 1955: 207–09). The Marind-anim pig totem myths (van Baal 1966: 211–12; 395–405). Nazr is the central figure in one of the Marind myths of the origin of headhunting. He was a totem (dema) of the pig clan and could exist as either a wild boar or a man. (The wild pig, by the way, is viewed by these people as strong and courageous.) During the day he appeared to his covillagers as a man. But at night he would go into their sago groves as a pig and devour their food. One night his pig-self was trapped and later eaten in a big feast. Nazr himself, though, continued on to become a great wanderer confronting various demons. Unlike the previous Indonesian headhunting heroes, he did not go to the upper-world or under-world during the mythic era. Instead a powerful female spirit named Sobra came down to him from the upper-world to be his wife. She also taught him to hunt heads. He would build large war canoes to carry him on journeys for this purpose. His travels took him to all the most distant geographic areas known to the Marind. These areas were inhabited by people regarded as semi-human and who were therefore also regarded as fair game for headhunting. In some of the mythic journeys of the Marind totemic figures we find that events occur which are thought to be responsible for present geographic features. For example, one island off the New Guinea coast is thought to be the severed head of a mythical being. Allegedly it was this violent act which cut the island off from the mainland. Its original place was along the eastern limits of the Marind warring zone. From there it drifted west, following the course of the sun. The totem beings, themselves, now live in the under-world. At night they follow the course of the “night-time sun” moving from the west to east. The sun apparently is associated with the head as a symbol. The acquisition of heads from the extreme east and west regions is viewed as a way of reestablishing, on a cosmic level, the living community’s sacred ties with these original beings. Thus a headhunt is a suitable corollary to the large initiation and renewal ceremonies held in the village. At these ceremonies the totemic beings reappear as masked dancers to reenact the creation drama, the primeval events which even now have the power to make new men. Both the reappearance of the original beings and the creation of new men at initiation and name-giving have, in fact, been made dependent upon the acquisition of enemy heads from foreign lands. There are many more myths and tales involving headhunters which could be presented. But I stop with these six because they are sufficient to make clear the point that in native mythologies there is a close parallel between the headhunting expeditions of the legendary heroes and transits back and forth between distant and unseen, even unearthly, parts of the universe. Since the singing and recital of these tales normally accompanies the rituals which celebrate or, as in the case of the Ifugao, help to bring about a successful headhunt, we can safely conclude that this [453]parallel in myth between the headhunting expedition and journeys to other worlds is meant to be extended to the contemporary deeds of living warriors. Further evidence for this extension, at least among the Bornean groups, seems to be present in the fact that the formal war dress of a successful headhunter included feathered war jackets and head dresses with the tail feathers of the hornbill or the argus pheasant. In some cases helmets with hornbill beaks were attached to them (see Roth 1896: Vol. 2, Chapter XX). The living warrior dresses with some of the same items that helped carry Kleing and his men to the sky. Other favored items such as tiger and leopard teeth used as ear ornaments and the skins of various jungle animals worn as jackets appear to follow the theme of the Land Dayak hero Kichapi. Kichapi became identified with the wild by wearing an orangutan skin as a disguise and thereby gained some control over the wild forces of the non-human world. It is implicit in the choice of the natural ornaments which adorn the costume of the ideal headhunter that he is a man who can reach beyond the world of everyday life in his home village. He can go beyond and bring back some of the secrets and powers which belong to other spheres of the universe. In the war costume this belief is implicit, while in the myths it is explicit. This major fact of the native theory of headhunting is of great importance. It informs us that headhunting bears the same relationship to tribal cosmology as does shamanism. The shaman likewise makes transcendent journeys from one realm to the next whenever he or she seeks to track down and lure back the fleeting soul of a person weakened by illness. But in the case of the shaman, it is more obvious that this is a religious act. For the shaman goes into a trance and is visited by spirits. To accompany this trance experience, the shaman recites long chants which narrate the eventful journey of his or her own soul or spirit guide as it goes through the far away realms and into the beyond. The highly subjective and mystical nature of the shaman’s journey causes us to recognize almost immediately its religious character. On the other hand, the objective and empirical nature of the living headhunter’s journey tends to obscure the fact that it too has this same religious character, when viewed from the perspective of native mythology. At first we are tempted to say that the shaman is a religious practitioner, because his journeys are purely symbolic; while the headhunter appears only as a warrior, because his expeditions are real (in an empirical sense), However, when a head has been taken and a head feast is held, we find that the headhunt is ritually re-enacted. Chants are sung long into the night inviting the deities and the ancestors to be present for the festivities. It is hoped they will bring blessings. Myths are then told which link the recent headhunt with those more fabulous ones of the past. At this point the empirical gap between the warrior and the religious practitioner begins to narrow. Ultimately, we must recognize that this parallel between the shaman and the headhunter is a firm one. In a sense the headhunter is but a shaman on the march. This is so much the case that we find stories such as the Kenyah Dayak tale of the warrior Balan Nyaring’s expedition to Alo Malau, the Kenyah after-world located along a great river in the sky (Galvin 1970). He went there because his young wife, Bungan Lisu Lasuan, had died from loss of blood after pricking herself with a needle during a period when all work such as sewing and embroidery was taboo. She had taken up her needle work in violation of the taboo, which is why her accident had such dire consequences. It was Balan Nyaring’s aim to go to the land of [454]the dead to rescue her spirit and bring her back to life. To do this he had to climb to the heavens on stairs. He fashioned these by shooting blow gun darts into the sky vault so that each dart stuck into the butt of the one that preceded it. Once into Alo Malau, Balan Nyaring successfully did battle with the warriors of that region and cut off their heads. The fascinating thing about this story is that in this case of someone who had died, it took a headhunter to do the work of a shaman, namely to recover another person’s spirit or soul. We might note that this link between headhunting and concern with the dead, which is so apparent in the present example, goes very deep. Often it appears in the requirement that heads be taken in order to avenge deaths or to end mourning periods. This matter will be explored later. To summarize what has been developed so far, the native mythologies which deal with headhunting make one major point. It is that the headhunter stands in somewhat the same relationship to tribal cosmology as does the shaman. This parallel is brought out in several ways. Perhaps the most evident is that there is a strong resemblance between the chants sung in curing ceremonies to recover the patient’s soul, at burial feasts to send the spirit of a dead person on to the after-world (see Sandin 1966), and at head feasts and other ceremonies related to warfare. In all these three examples transcosmic or intercosmic journeys are narrated, whether the journey be that of a shaman’s spirit, the souls of the dead, or the immortal gods coming to a feast. Inferences from tribal cosmology Unfortunately, however, to know that headhunting is integrated with the tribal cosmology in a way similar to shamanism does not answer our original question of why the enemy head has been selected as an appropriate symbol for certain ritual purposes. What else can the native theory tell one about this topic? Perhaps the next question should be: if headhunters are given such an important place in tribal cosmology, what is the nature of the cosmologies of the tribes which practice headhunting? Although the answer to this question will not give us any immediate answer to our other question about the symbolic appropriateness of the enemy head, it could help. More direct answers will have to be postponed until we know more about the native view of the ritual context of headhunting, even if that view never states exactly why enemy heads should belong to that context. Ultimately our explanation may have to come from outside the native system. But until we have learned something of the content and structure of that system from the inside we will not know even what we are explaining. For this reason a brief sketch is inserted of what seems to be the common outline of the tribal cosmologies of the Southeast Asian hill peoples. Many, but certainly not all, were headhunters until relatively recent times. The termination dates for headhunting in Southeast Asia fall in the period from 1840–1930. For our present purposes, and at the risk of passing over some highly significant differences in detail among the many distinct cultures of this region, this sketch is a very general one. The basic structure is taken from Barton’s characterization of Ifugao cosmology (1946) and Jensen’s summary of the world view of Iban culture (1966a). For illustrative purposes a composite version of these two cases is treated as being representative of the “ideal type” for the region as a whole. [455]Basically these cosmologies place one’s own village, which is located along a river, at the center of the universe (See Figure 1). Barton (1946: 10–11) calls this the “known world.” It is the earth and its inhabitants, who are one’s own fellow villagers, who are the only true “earth dwellers,” which is what the word Ifugao means. This ethnocentric view which places one’s own tribe in the center of the universe is fairly common in the primitive world. But certain elaborations such as the importance of the riverine location of the “tribal village” are particularly Southeast Asian in character. The river serves to orient the relations between the village and the various outside worlds so that there is an upstream region and a downstream region. From the upstream region, which may imply a mountain as well, the immortal deities and culture heroes come and go between the earth and the upper-world either in or “above” the sky. Figure 1. Southeast Asian tribal cosmology. 1) Known earth—the home country; 2) Upstream region; 3) Downstream region; 4) UpperworId—home of bird and sky deities; 5) Underworld—home of serpents, dragons and agricultural deities. A great river connects all regions. Boats with feathered serpent motives (hornbill/naga) often are pictured as carrying the souls of the dead around to all regions. Coffins are built with this same representation. Burial and other ritual poles, often featuring a hornbill effigy on the top (as pictured here), are erected to provide access to the upperworld. The upstream and the downstream regions are shown in Figure 1 in positions that would be equivalent to east and west, respectively, provided the village were oriented to the courses of the sun as well as to the course of the great river. At times these themes are merged. [456]The Infugao envision this upper-world area as having many layers, while the Bornean groups tend to concentrate on the notion that a great river runs through it with many branches along which are settled the deities, the ancestors, and even some foreign people known to live very far away. The Ifugao believe that the spirits of the dead make only a brief sojourn to the upper-world. They then are made to retire on an intermediate hill or in the downstream region. The Bornean groups, on the other hand, tend to view the duration of the departed soul’s stay in the upperworld as permanent. As the upstream region leads to the sky, so the downstream region leads to the under-world. The latter usually is entered through a deep point in a river confluence or through the bottom of a deep lake. The five main regions in the universe are listed in Table 1 with the Ifugao terms and with the apparent meanings attached to the common Malayo-Polynesian roots in these words, as suggested by Barton (1946: 10-11; and 1930: 122). Table 1. Five main regions of the universe The connection between the root meanings of the terms and the regions which bear them as names is obvious in all but one case. It is not immediately apparent why the sky world should have something to do with “killing” or “being killed.” Barton (1930: 122) suggests that likely this name is given the sky world because the immortal beings of the region are thought to require many sacrifices of chickens and pigs. In Ifugao bunu means sacrifice in particular. Of course we cannot be certain of this. The use of this term may be linked with many other ideas. For example, the sky is a place visited by the dead even if they do not remain there for long. Another more intriguing possibility is that the sky is also the place of the deities who are the “patrons” of headhunting. In fact among the Tinguan, another group in northern Luzon, the term Kabunian is not the name for a place in the universe but rather the name of their leading sky-dwelling god, who was a great fighter and “the patron of headhunters” (DeRaedt 1964: 312). Regardless of the reason for calling the sky world by a term meaning “killing,” “killed,” or “killer,” it is interesting to note that among the five regions it is the only one named in an indirect or “euphemistic” way. It is almost an epithet, when compared with the transparent meanings of the terms for the other regions. This suggests that the focus on the sky world in this cosmological system has been so important as to trigger more intense emotional reactions than has been the case with the other four domains. Thus, while this is a cosmology which definitely involves a complementary opposition between the upper-world and the under-world, [457]attention seems to be more strongly focused on the former. Warfare and shamanism especially are believed to have their divine sponsors and originators in the heavens, while the gods who control agriculture seem to reside in the under-world. The under-world, seen perhaps as a great interior (dalum), is also accorded some importance with regard to human fertility. Understandably, it seems that the necessity of creative interaction between upper-world and under-world receives greater stress with respect to this matter than with respect to any of the others so far mentioned. The Iban view of the world is roughly the same as that described for the Ifugao. However, there is less concern about demarcating specific upstream and downstream regions on earth as mediators to the regions above and below. Instead the horizon and a pair of mythical gates to the sky and the under-worlds are more prominent. An outstanding feature of the Iban cosmology is that all of the main upper-world deities are birds. At least they normally appear to men as birds. But in their own home, which is a great longhouse in the sky world, they exist as humans. One of these birds is clearly supreme over the others. He is Singalang Burong, the brahminy kite. The seven other most prominent birds are his sons-in-law. These birds act as his messengers to mankind, for they are the omen birds. They are able to give warnings and convey other messages of vital importance to men and women on earth. I might add that this notion of son-in-law relationships as a means of mediation between gods and men carries over into all aspects of Iban folklore. For example, the male culture heroes often marry the daughters of the gods whom they meet in other realms and from whom they receive special charms or perhaps instruction in important rituals and customs. This theme appears in the kinship terminology where the word menantu, meaning “sonor daughter-in-law” looks suspiciously like the verbal Prefix men, plus antu, or “spirit being.” So a childin-law is one who has formed new and potentially good or useful relations between unrelated people who were previously antu-like strangers to each other. Omens, whether sounded or shown by birds, deer, or other creatures, are all regarded as divine messages. Of course, they are considered important to warfare and nearly all other pursuits. Singalang Burong himself is most directly concerned with success in warfare. It was he who taught the Iban to celebrate the head feast which is called Gawai Burong, “Bird Feast” or alternatively Gawai Kenyalang, “Hornbill Feast.” The Iban do not view the hornbill as an omen bird, and so the prominence of this bird, in the form of beautifully carved effigies, at the head feast has remained an obscure point in Iban religion. However, we must remember that hornbill beaks are said to have adorned the battle helmets of the great legendary warriors in their journeys to the sky. Certain other Bornean groups (Scharer 1963 on the Ngaju) have viewed the hornbill as a cosmic bird who nests in the tree of life, and then again as a psychopomp who escorts souls and religious offerings to all corners of the universe. Beneath the Iban earth is the realm of a powerful and mysterious ruler who can control the growth of forests and command all the animals on earth to do his bidding. He probably is a dragon, or Naga, king, that is, an under-world serpent. He holds many charms and secrets of life giving power in his rich domain beneath the earth. Humans encroach on his domain when they burn swidden fields. So he [458]must be placated with offerings. But these cannot be given directly to him. They are given to his favored son-in-law, Pulang Gana. An Iban culture hero, this same Pulang Gana, now perhaps a god, married a daughter of this chief of the under-world. He acquired a knowledge of all the rules that the Iban should observe in planting rice. In fact he made the rules up himself since his father-in-law gave him complete control over agriculture. Pulang Gana continues to live in the under-world. He is called up to earth, mainly for the Gawai Batu, or “Wet-stone Feast” at the beginning of the agricultural year. He expects certain offerings of food, and he does not want people to harm worms when clearing or burning the fields. Worms and serpents appear to be under-world symbols in logical opposition to the bird deities of the upper-world. In some accounts, Pulang Gana himself is said to have been born with no arms or legs. The frog that in this case is a somewhat transitional, under-world animal deserves mention. When Pulang Gana comes to earth the last zone of the underworld passed through on the way to the door to the earth is inhabited by frogs (Jensen 1966a: 29). A crayfish-like spirit actually guards the door. I mention the position of the frog in Iban cosmology, although he is a minor figure, because this animal appears again in other headhunting myths and also on the ancient bronze drums of Southeast Asia which I believe express these same cosmological themes. The frog teaches the Kayan that taking heads brings fertility. The Iban dead go to the sky world where they are reunited with their own ancestors, the culture heroes, and the gods. Large death feasts are held. But the ancestors as such do not continually demand sacrifices, as seems to be the case with some groups in northern Luzon (see DeRaedt 1964). Implications of this cosmology We have presented a picture of the Southeast Asian tribal view of the universe, with the living community at its center yet oriented on a cosmic scale to other realms by means of a far-reaching river. Distant realms are also pictured as lying past the forests and hills of one’s own river valley and therefore across the watershed and into the next river basin. Implicit in this whole frame of reference is the notion that other human communities are slightly beyond the pale. They are in the realm where spirits dwell and therefore cannot be viewed as humans on the same basis as the members of one’s own community. Whenever one ventures into the territories of such complete strangers, a certain amount of direct physical risk is involved. But at the same time, there can be an even greater fear that in these places one is exposed to serious dangers of a more mystical nature. The inhabitants of these places are similar to the spirits residing in other strange and wild places. It should be added that it is from this same zone that the heads of enemies should be taken. It might happen that a man kills another man from his own tribe who happens to be a bitter personal enemy. But the head of such an internal enemy should never be taken after the killing. Ideally, it is only those enemies who are from far outside the home community whose heads should be sought. One of the important implications of tribal cosmology, in terms of the actual relationships involved in headhunting warfare, is that it ascribes to the enemy, [459]i.e ., to the target groups of headhunting raids, a remote cosmological locus. For the headhunter, the ideal enemy should come from one of the theoretically nonhuman spheres posited by the cosmology. In particular it seems that actual living enemies are felt to be harbored in the more intermediate spheres, e.g., in the upstream region, the downstream region, the places towards the horizon, through the deep haunted forests, and across watersheds. They are not in the worlds believed to lie above or below the earth’s surface. As yet, however, the details of this cosmology are not completely clear. What is clear is that a cosmological view which treats enemies as being fairly remote should have some bearing on the way in which real live enemies are selected. Later this chapter will indicate that this remote locus assigned to the enemy by the cosmology is, for the most part, actually born out also in spatial and social terms. Most headhunters, often traveling by canoe, actually do make most of their war raids in relatively distant areas. Our immediate concern now is with how such activities look when viewed from the standpoint of native cosmology. What we have discovered is that by their ethnocentrism these systems of belief pose a profound contradiction. For they insist that human enemies must come from non-human spheres of the universe. It is as if the actual humanity of the living strangers—people who in Iban are called orang bukai, “people negated” or “people who are not people,” posed a clear threat to one’s self and to the entire belief system of one’s own society. This is most acutely the case because it was through the original ethnocentric assertion of the exclusive humanity of one’s own people, as being the only true earth dwellers, that the strangers first came to be classified as non-humans. By strangers is implied a relationship between separate tribal communities who have few common bonds or shared activities other than possible opposition in warfare. They, nonetheless, are aware of each other’s existence and mutually acknowledge this on some terms. No doubt the strangers were a problem to begin with, because of their peculiar ways. These would tend to point out the relativity of one’s own culture’s assumptions about how people should live. But after discounting them as not being real people, they should not go turning things around by asserting their humanity. The catch is that the only thing they have to do to accomplish this assertion is to be. Therefore, we have the following predicament: – One’s own humanity depends on the classification of strangers as being sub-human or non-human. That is, this classification depends on downgrading or negating their humanity; – Yet they are in fact human beings; – Therefore, any potential recognition of their humanity, whether it comes through their own assertion of human qualities or in other ways, clearly is a threat to one’s own humanity. In other words, the enemy poses a phenomenological threat. His actual human existence in the non-human cosmological zone is more than this ideological system can take. It completely upsets and contradicts the view of reality which proclaims the exclusive humanity status of one’s own people. As suggested earlier, the idea that one’s own group has a complete monopoly on human status has come about as an attempted resolution of other important contradictions in tribal life, especially [460]those brought on by the fact of cultural relativity. (See Berger and Luckmann 1967; and Berger 1967: 29–51; for interesting treatments of the phenomenological bases of xenophobia.) What exists is a chain of social contradictions and a series of successive attempts at their ideological reconciliation. The question of defining and then deciding what to do with remote strangers comes at the end of this chain. It is therefore crucial in a cumulative sense. The problem, however, is that the policy of defining these strangers as being non-human raises a new contradiction of its own: for the non-human is really human. It is this final contradiction which headhunting and headhunting rites seek to overcome. This chain of successive contradictions is fairly intricate, so at the risk of seeming repetitious I will retrace some points in the hope of unraveling the cumulative effects of defining remote strangers as semi-human and as categorical enemies. For an immediate overall understanding of the development of the ideological system involved, the best clue is to regard it as growing out of the social process which Peter Berger has aptly termed “reality maintenance.” (See Figure 2 ). Headhunting ideology and three contradictions in tribal life The cultural understandings that make up any society’s view of the way society itself and the world in general are put together and given order and meaning are always man-made. Nonetheless the members of a society, especially if it is a small scale and homogeneous one, tend to treat this human product, i.e., their total culture, as though it were real in a more permanent sense. This is Contradiction One. In order to maintain the plausibility of this basic assumption about the permanence of one’s own cultural world, in the face of disturbing evidence to the contrary, ideologies are formed which tend to “explain” and incorporate these disturbing facts. Somehow they must be fitted into the existing system. Such challenges to the permanent validity of your society’s understanding of what makes life meaningful come both from within and from outside the society itself. Internally the regular occurrences of misfortune and death come to trouble the waters of a smooth running community life. These events call into question all of the meanings and goals that go to make up what, under more everyday perceptions, seems to be a very full and well established way of life. They must be accommodated in such a way as to reinstate the more comforting assumption that one’s way of life does have a lasting and universal validity. So to meet this particular challenge cosmological theories are designed which anchor one’s social world to the more permanent structures of the natural world: the sky and the earth; east and west; the land and the sea; animal species; etc. Such a universe can even provide a place for both the living and the dead. This we might call Reconciliation One. That this first reconciliation does indeed make a claim for the universal validity of one’s own way of life is eminently clear in the macrocosm/microcosm view of the universe which I have described for the Southeast Asian tribes. For if one’s own village can be viewed as occupying the center of the universe, being at the same time perfectly oriented toward all of the main coordinates of the latter, then it follows that one’s own way of life has been totalized to the point where it should be accorded the same finality as the sky and earth, the rivers and mountains. Figure 2. Headhunting as reality maintenance: The dialectic moments in the development of the ideological basis of headhunting. The slanting arrows show the dialectic interaction between human activity and the products of that activity. This dialectic is explained as follows: A society forms a system of cultural understandings to which it then attributes a reality status above and beyond its basic existence as a human product. This is the social formation and objectivation of one’s way of life. Contradiction One. Death, misfortune and other events come to contradict the claims to absolute validity and meaning made for one’s culture. Reconciliation One. A cosmological system is designed so the social world can be anchored to the more permanent structures of nature. The dead are given their place in this cosmos. Contradiction Two. Other peoples with noticeably different cultures present another contradiction to the presumed universal validity of one’s society’s way of life. Reconciliation Two. The inconvenient strangers are made into a “non-human” pseudospecies, thereby neutralizing the effects of their strange ways of lfie. Contradiction Three. The “non-human” strangers actually are human and keep asserting their common humanity with one’s own group. Reconciliation Three. Whatever it is that may be human about the remote stranger, especially his existence as a “social person,” is symbolically incorporated into one’s own group. This is done through the rituals of headhunting which make the former enemy into a friend. Reconciliation Two (E) is linked to Reconciliation One (C) by the fact that in Reconciliation One, one’s own society is placed in the center of the universe. The cosmization of society has laid the foundation for the unique position of one’s own group which is later stated in terms of the “non-human” status of strangers. There are also direct links between Reconciliation Three (G), headhunting, and concern with the problem of death, Contradiction One (B). These links will be discussed later in this chapter. The small tribal society, having shorn up its own world of social reality by reference to the more permanent totality of nature, now faces another challenge. This new challenge to the absolute validity of its own way of life comes from outside the tribe itself. It comes in the form of other human communities living noticeably different ways of life. These people seem almost like some different species. Worst of all, while they do not observe the principles and customs that compose one’s own way of life, they seem nonetheless to be getting on well—if not, in fact, thriving. This [462]comes as a critique of the assumed broad validity of one’s own way of life, i.e., it is Contradiction Two. This new challenge is met by viewing the foreign communities as only pseudohumans or perhaps pseudo-species of their own type. The Marind-anim headhunters of southern New Guinea have a special term for all non-Marind peoples of New Guinea. This word means something like “semi-human objects of headhunts.” The Mundurucú headhunters of Brazil had a similar system for dividing humankind into real people and a pseudo-species to be hunted. Southeast Asian hill tribes, however, tend to leave this non-human or semi-human classification of strangers somewhat more implicit in the cosmology itself. Nevertheless, this classificatory scheme resolves the problem of the inconvenient strangers. We can refer to it as Reconciliation Two. So far the contradictions pointed out as well as their ideological resolutions have been of a general sort. They appear in most tribal societies, those whose members are headhunters as well as non-headhunters. But we are now coming to points which seem to be of much greater concern to headhunting tribes than to other peoples—Contradiction Three: the supposed “non-humans” are really human. But before examining this final contradiction, it is necessary to make some suggestion why the concerns and contradictions examined in this account take a more acute form among headhunters than they do among other tribal peoples. In Southeast Asia this situation seems to be related to the pronounced riverine settlement pattern of most of the headhunting tribes. Often the favored location for a village is along rivers navigable by canoe. This settlement pattern dates back to at least the village farming stage of the Southeast Asian neolithic, beginning around 6000 BC (Solheim 1972). At that time no state-organized societies existed in the region. River-based tribal communities of swidden cultivators, growing root crops and sago at first and later dry rice as well, were able to occupy the middle and lower reaches of the great river systems, including those which later came to serve as the heartlands for the historic Southeast Asian kingdoms. These kingdoms were economically based on wet-rice cultivation and international trade, After the formation of the state in the region, around 200 BC to 200 AD, riverine swidden cultivation continued on as a way of life primarily in the “hill regions” that were beyond the control of the state-organized societies of the plains. Headhunting and the ideological complex of which it is a part seem to have developed as far back in time as the early period of riverine village agriculture in Southeast Asia—perhaps older. The reason why a riverine settlement pattern has been so conducive to the development of this ideological complex is explained by various factors. It leads to the formation of tribal groups on the basis of unity within a small river basin or, in the case of large rivers, unity among the people of a particular river section. One result is that geographic accessibility and social distance tend to conform closely to each other. Gaps in each region normally coincide with the geographic barriers separating river systems or subsystems one from another. Since marriage everywhere is influenced by proximity, a tendency develops for most marriages to occur within the river-based tribal group (see Freeman 1970; Toichi Mabuchi 1966). Under these conditions, both the geographic remoteness of other tribes as well as the relatively slow pace of the material encroachments made [463]by any one tribe into the domain of another, tend to accentuate the plausibility of the cosmological system outlined here. Headhunting tribes seldom, if ever, find themselves in the position of many tribal groups in the New Guinea highlands who say that they marry the same people whom they fight (Meggitt 1964). The enemies of headhunting groups are in all respects more remote. They do not come showing their strength to contend rights in land. Nor do they stand accused of using marriage as a pretense to steal one’s body dirt to work a pointed sorcery against the members of one’s own group. They are too remote for this deed. They live in the counter-spheres of the universe and they are less human than sorcerers. The riverine settlement pattern promotes these illusions. The inter-tribal distance and the geographic, rather than human, barriers imposed by this pattern partly permit a concentration on the enemy as an existential problem independent of direct material concerns. The use of canoe transport on the relatively large river systems adds to the practical possibility of making forays into distant enemy territories and then fleeing in hasty retreat with the heads taken. In the highlands of northeast India and northern Luzon, where such river navigation is not always possible, the returning war parties put sharp bamboo spikes in the path of their retreat to slow the enemy’s counterattack. Where a quick getaway by canoe is possible these spikes on the trail are not so important. The use of canoes on large river systems is also instrumental to allowing a small tribal society, with no great chiefs or kings, to envision the possibility of laying claim to, if not actually exploiting, an environmental domain which is spatially greater in scope than the hamlets the tribe can actually “occupy” during given agricultural cycles. The gathering of wild sago in delta areas seems to create a similar situation if the necessary canoes are available. In this manner there are pressures both for river basin unity and for keeping other groups at a distance. Returning now to the third contradiction, we find that it emerges as a direct result of Reconciliation Two. In Reconciliation Two strangers are regarded as a semi-human or non-human pseudo-species. This mode of classifying those who do not observe one’s own customs and who do not marry with one’s own people is a way of defending the integrity of one’s culture. But if the strangers should start appearing too human, this presents a new challenge to one’s own way of life. This challenge is as deep as the earlier one presented by their original act of living such an aberrant way of life. This is Contradiction Three. It occurs because the supposed non-humans of Reconciliation Two are actually members of the species Homo sapiens. As a result they keep doing things which would remind the most xenophobic observers of their common humanity. For example, there are such possibilities as intermarriage at some future time or of learning a smattering of each other’s languages. However, except in mythology and in dreams, men and women never have these kinds of exchanges and encounters with members of any other species than their own. At first the foreigner’s culture was upsetting. His humanity now has become the central problem. It is this third contradiction which headhunting seeks to reconcile. By now the seriousness of the problem can be sensed. The nonhuman classification of the remote stranger has become the linchpin in an ideological system which seeks to reconcile a series of successive contradictions inherent in tribal life. Should this pin become loose then this philosophy of ethnocentrism could recoil on itself. [464]What makes this situation more precarious is that all that the stranger needs to do to bring about this crisis is to assert his own humanity. This he can do by merely existing. The remote stranger nonetheless poses a threat even without committing any acts of aggression and without being in direct competition with one’s own people over women, riches, land or other natural resources. The threat is that he too may be human. If he is human, then by the wisdom of the ethnocentric philosophy previously outlined, one’s own community loses its special place in the world. The reality status of one’s culture would again be in question. Since the stranger poses an existential threat, he should be killed. Murphy (1957: 1026) has written, in regard to headhunting among the Mundurucú, who would go on expeditions of over a thousand miles to take heads: “the enemy tribes caused the Mundurucú to go to war simply by existing.” It can now be seen why this is so. For by existing the enemy or remote stranger contradicts an entire ideological system. The crucial point, so it appears, is that it is not enough for headhunters to kill their enemies. They must take their heads and bring them home. This is what makes them headhunters. The ritual incorporation of the enemy as friend Apparently death is not sufficient to remove the phenomenological threat posed by the humanness of the enemy. Something more must be done. A part of his body must be brought to one’s community. Many parts may be brought home: hands, whole limbs, scrota, genitalia and the like, but most of all the head. Before we discuss why the head in particular receives such special treatment we must ask why killing the enemy is not enough. Why bring any part of his body home for public ceremonial treatment? Some might say that this is done to provide conclusive evidence of the victor’s own prowess in warfare. These reasons seem obvious at first. Certainly they have had much to do with the way in which war trophies have been collected and appreciated by all societies who practiced warfare in one form or another. But still these answers do not satisfy the question being asked. What is now asked is, in essence, how does bringing back a part of the enemy’s body speak to or help to reconcile the third contradiction that has been posed, i.e., that between the enemy’s actual humanness and the belief that one’s own humanity depends on classifying remote strangers cum enemies as being non-human? All headhunting tribes have beliefs and customs that go beyond trophy collecting. They treat the severed enemy head as a mystically efficacious ritual symbol and not as another secular trophy. The best clue to this puzzle is that headhunters, for the most part, treat the trophy heads brought to their communities in a very friendly way. They feed them and keep the fire warm for them on cold nights. Usually the rituals for installing the heads in the community involve the offering of food, wine, and betel, so that a symbolism of friendliness marks their reception. This treatment of heads is common in Borneo and is familiar to those who have read the ethnography of that region. In Northeast India and the Philippines similar practices associated with head trophies occur. A few examples are presented below.[465] 1. Konyak Nagas. Fürer-Haimendorf (1969: 95) reports that whenever the heads of enemies were taken, “They were carefully preserved and fed with rice beer at all feasts.” 2. Land Dayaks. Geddes (1954a: 21) writes that in the Land Dayak head ceremony, “a woman skilled in the necessary ritual placed the head on her knees and chanted to it, in words calculated to destroy the will of its spirit to retaliate upon the village for the outrage which had been done to it. Other women might repeat the procedure, after which all the men and women present took it in turns to dance with the head held in their hands, this being apparently to please the head with the honor paid to it and partly to please themselves and the ancestors with the spectacle.” Later on food offerings were made to the spirit of the head. When the festival finally ended “the head was taken to be hung up in the headhouse. By this time the malice of its spirit should have been rendered inactive, but it seems that sometimes it was considered a precaution to give it daily offerings of food for up to nine months to make certain that it [the malice] would not revive.” Once in the headhouse the heads are somewhat ignored but “As a sign of respect they may occasionally be tidied, and hung by fresh strings.” 3. Iban. Gomes (1911: 213) says that at the major Iban head feast “Some human heads are placed in large brass dishes in the public hall of the Dayak house, and to these offerings of food and drink are made. Some of this food is stuffed into the mouths of these heads, and the rest is placed before them.” Both Howell (1963: 104–05) and Dunn (1906: 408) point out that there is a mocking element in this as well as a friendship theme. But however ambivalent, good treatment is essential. Howell asserts that there is a belief among the Iban that “unless they give the head something to eat its ghost will eat them.” More expressive of ritual incorporation are the verses, sung by the women of the longhouse, in which they claim to care for the newly-acquired heads much as they do for a new born infant. Dunn (1906: 424–25) gives these as follows: What! O Goddess dwelling in the head waters of Tapang Betenong.Why? O Senawai, will these heads not cease to weep so loud and bitterly.Have I not rocked them in the two-roped swings?And sung to them like the sweet-voiced Manang Lambong?Have I not nursed them in blankets of choicest pattern?Yet they cease not to weep so bitterly? 4. Kayan. Hose and McDougall (1912: 20–23) report that the heads brought into a Kayan longhouse are believed to provide a habitation for certain spirits or Toh. Regular attention must be paid to the heads or the Toh might get angry and cause some misfortune. “Barak [rice wine] is offered to the heads by pouring it into small bamboo cups suspended beside them; and a bit of fat pork is pushed into the mouth of each. The heads, or rather the Toh associated with them, are supposed to eat and drink these offerings.” Also “The fire beneath the heads is always kept alight in order that they shall be warm, and dry, and comfortable.” A curious fact is that if a Kayan community had collected too many heads, the [466]obligation to make these offerings could become a nuisance. At times a group would abandon an old longhouse, heads and all, sneaking away under the distraction of a fire which prevented the head spirits from following. Then the process could be resumed again. 5. Ifugao. Barton (1930: 167–96) gives a full account of how the Ifugao treat the enemy head differently at different points in the ritual series held for a fresh head. After taking the head they roll it around to shake out a “Deceiver spirit” which previously had been made to enter the victim and make him vulnerable to attack. When the head enters into the village, lime is rubbed in its eyes. This abuse is done to express the wish that neither the head nor its surviving kindred will look towards the actual slayers in seeking revenge. The friendship theme comes later when the head is about to be buried. Later it will be unearthed when the skull is dry. It is addressed as follows: “Hark thee, hark thee, Head! Thou art taken down, but do not take us down. Take down thy father and mother and all they kindred. Let them serve to avenge thee in order that thou have companions. Take down Sickness and Famine and Sorcery, and even the evil-bringing deities of the Downstream region and of the Upstream region. For you have become one of us; you have become familiar with us.” And again, “Thou art buried, Head, so that thou wilt become one of us” (Barton 1930: 192). It is clear in these examples that the special treatment accorded the head has something to do with the ritual incorporation of the enemy himself, or, alternatively, some alien spirit into one’s own group. Although there is some ambivalence shown at different points in the ceremonies, the symbolism involved clearly suggests that this incorporation is thought to take place on a friendly basis. On the other hand, not all headhunters show such special and hospitable treatment of the heads. For instance, the groups in southern New Guinea, particularly, the Marind-anim, while they do decorate newly acquired heads in an elaborate way, make no such fuss about showing them any great hospitality. The heads are not regarded as being sacred by these groups. But these groups do something that is most remarkable. They name their own children after the victims killed in the headhunt (see Vertenten 1923; van der Kroef 1952; and van Baal 1966). In this way their reception of a part of the slain enemy into their own social world is the most intimate of all. They give as their stated purpose for a headhunt the procurement of new names for their young children. All known headhunting groups in Southeast Asia and Oceania tend to do something with the head (or with the name associated with the head) which symbolizes the incorporation of the former enemy as a new member of one’s own society. The enemy becomes a friend, and often a good friend. As a vehicle for spirits, the enemy’s head brings fertility and many other mystical benefits. The only variation is that for the New Guinea groups the head is used only as a vehicle for the enemy’s name and not for a spiritual being or force. But its name is fully accepted as a member of one’s own group through the custom of naming children after slain enemies. So the New Guinea case is really not an exception. Indeed, it furnishes our sharpest and most revealing expression of this strong underlying theme. Not only is the enemy incorporated, but the next generation of one’s own people cannot emerge without this union. This implies a profound dependence upon “the enemy.” [467]It is these acts of ritual incorporation that ultimately reconcile the final contradiction confronting the hyper-ethnocentric headhunting peoples. Headhunting, followed by the ritual incorporation of the enemy, supplies Reconciliation Three in the process previously outlined. How this resolution is accomplished can be understood better if we borrow Mary Douglas’ (1966: 48) notion that ritual peril can be defined as being “matter out of place.” Any perceived contradiction in the way one’s culture structures reality can create such a ritual state of danger. Headhunters are confronted with a very special form of matter out of place, namely humanness. What they require is a concrete symbol of a human so they can put it “back in place.” The severed head seems to fit this purpose. This perspective presents a new way of viewing the contradiction presented by the cosmologically remote stranger. He is supposed to be “non-human.” But the apparently inescapable and empirical fact of his humanity keeps putting humanness where it should not be. This is why something has to be brought back and, in one way or another, made a member of one’s own society. Otherwise headhunting would be pointless for it is impossible to kill a phenomenological threat. Since this threat cannot be directly removed, a means must be found of giving it a proper place in one’s own favored view of reality. In the case of the headhunter’s enemy, this is done by making sure that if something about him is human, that part can belong to one’s own society and no longer be out of place. We now have come to a position in this analysis where the reasons for headhunting rituals are understandable. As Mary Douglas expresses in the quotation beginning this chapter, we now know that these rites “express something relevant to the social order” of the tribal societies that perform them. They bring the inconvenient humanness of the theoretically nonhuman enemy “back” into society where it belongs. By so doing they rescue an entire ideological system from being destroyed by its own inherent contradictions. But for this ritual conversion of an enemy into a friend to occur some ritual object representing him must be made available for incorporation. The choice of the head: Names, faces, and the social person The ritual context in which the severed human head is used as a central ritual symbol is a rite which incorporates the humanness of a categorically non-human enemy into one’s own group. But what makes the head the part of the human body symbolically the most appropriate for conveying this ritual message about social relations with remote strangers? Would not cannibalism and subsequent disposal of the skeletal remains serve as well for symbolic incorporation? This would be a literal incorporation. Apparently cannibalism is not sufficient. One possible reason why it is not is that such a policy of digestion and discard would leave no tangible remains that could continue to represent the old enemy as a new friend. In the Land Dayak myth of Kichapi, which is their charter myth for the head feasts, there is an incident which seems to underline the futility of cannibalism as opposed to headhunting. The two giants who adopted Kichapi, when he is lost in the forest, wanted to keep him in their house in a cave. “The giant and his wife said to each other that they must make sure he could not escape. They agreed that [468]the best of all ways to make sure was to eat him. So the husband swallowed him. But Silanting Kuning [Kichapi, by his childhood name] immediately slipped right through his body. Then the giantess tried but he slipped right through her. The giant tried again, with the same result. Seven times the husband tried and seven times the wife tried, but neither could keep him inside his or her stomach. Having failed, they began to like him” (Geddes 1957: 82). Incidentally, while Kichapi, as the hero of this myth, is pictured as a young boy miraculously transformed into a great warrior, it is quite possible that he actually is a head as much as a headhunter. For example, while in the forests he is always carried by the giants on their backs. When he comes to Gumiloh’s village, her reception of him, as opposed to that by the men of her village—he is fed from her dish although he appears as an orangutan—suggests the proper reception for a fresh head. Kichapi also has a peculiar preference for sleeping in the rafters of the headhouse where captured heads are hung. The failure of the giants to keep him in their cave by cannibalism is significant. If cannibalism will not work, why not bring home body parts other than the head? As already mentioned other body parts are carried home as souvenirs but no major cults form around them. The collection of scalps by Indians in North America was more a reflection of war deeds than the incorporation of enemies as mystical friends. There are, in fact, many societies which took heads in this way. For them the head trophy was a mere adjunct to warfare, not one of its main objects. The head was not the focal symbol of a religious system. The Kwakiutl and the Maori fit this pattern. Peoples with this practice may be viewed as “head takers” not full headhunters. At the level of individual trophies used for the purpose of counting coup, it seems that almost any body part will do—depending, of course, on each culture’s pornography of violence. Yet when it comes to the ritual purpose of reconciling some of the contradictions discussed in this chapter, only heads will do. There appears to be something about the head which causes it to be selected for. It is not a case of all the other body parts being selected against. The choice of the head must have been a positive one based on its symbolic appropriateness and not a negative one based on default with respect to the symbolic values of all the other body parts. What is appropriate about the head? The answer comes by reconsidering the Marind-anim custom of naming their children after slain enemies. In brief, any last utterance of the enemy can be taken as his “name,” and several men on a single successful expedition are privileged to pass on the newly acquired name to their separate children and sister’s children. This custom forces one to ask a slightly different question about the symbolic valence of heads: “Why is a head like a name?” The answer is that it contains the face, and both names and faces are overt symbols of the individual as a social person. Both express the uniqueness of the individual in a form that can be presented to society. Names and faces express individuality at the social level and social being at the individual level. In the case of names, this is why many cultures such as our own refer to personal names or nicknames as, “handles.” They are the handles that give society-at-large access to the individual person—they create for the individual a social personhood. To have a name is to be a social person. Likewise to have a [469]recognized face is to be drawn into social relationships as one’s personal self and not as an anonymous (in the literal sense) occupant of an official social position. Personal names and recognized faces are truly the most intimate expressions of social identity. While they present us to society, they also present us as our own unique selves and not some stereotyped social category. This is so in spite of the fact that many societies permit a number of people to have the same personal name. For special usages tend to grow up around the sharing of names. In many cultures people who are namesakes to each other are viewed as sharing in each other’s social identities. They will extend kinship terms to each other’s relatives on the understanding that as social persons they are inter-changeable or somehow the same. The uniqueness of each person’s face has much to do with the value of the face as a symbol of the individual as a social person. No doubt an added factor is that in direct social interaction (called “face-to-face” interaction) it is the face which can with the least amount of movement be the most expressive of human thoughts and feelings (Simmel 1965). Interestingly, the face is not technically a true anatomical unit. It is not a single organ of the body and not the center for other organs. The entire head is used to house the distinct sensory and other organs, some of which appear on the face. In defining the face it must be viewed as an outward configuration composed of certain more distinct anatomical referents, e.g., eyes, nose, mouth, etc. Most of these referents are located on the frontal portion of the head. There is room for disagreement in this topic. What about the ears, hair-line, cheeks, and chin? In some cultures a face would not be considered the face of a true social person unless it were tattooed or ornamented. In summary, there are cultural as well as anatomical referents in the total configuration of the face. One must conclude, therefore, that the face is more a sociological than an anatomical concept. In social situations it is through the face, more than other body regions, that individual identity and expressivity are recognized and conveyed. The best we can do in defining the face is to assert that it is a head-located configuration of both anatomical and cultural referents. All these facts converge to make the face, and the head to which it belongs, the most likely concrete symbol of the total social person. The overriding importance of the face, as a symbol of social personhood, appears repetitively in art and drama. For example, houses, canoes, and other manmade objects that are given proper and perhaps “personal” names in southern New Guinea have faces either carved or painted on them. Throughout the world performers must wear masks in ritual dramas. Masks are more able to separate the everyday identity of the performer from his assumed identity as the character portrayed in the drama than are shoes, sleeves, gloves, jackets, or the like. Indeed, the concept of the social person is so linked with an appreciation of the face that the English word for person comes from the Latin persona, for “mask.” In conclusion, it is common experience for specific names and familiar faces to serve as the bridge between a unique individual taken in isolation and that same unique individual treated as a social person. In like manner, names in general and unknown or stylized faces can be taken as symbols of the social person as a generalized concept. [470]Headhunters take a head for the sake of its face. Obtaining the face allows them to deal with their enemy as a generalized social person. In this form it is meaningful ritually to convert such a person from an enemy to a friend. The head, which must include the face is a concrete symbol of the social person as names are verbal symbols of this same concept. As ritual symbols these two parallel symbols are highly appropriate to the ritual context where they are used. They were not chosen in an arbitrary way. The head (and face) has the capacity to represent what is most human about the supposedly non-human enemy. As a social person the enemy can clearly and meaningfully be brought in from without and made a friend. In this way his problematic humanness is properly put “back” where it belongs. Headhunting rites and the social definition of enemies The general meaning of the headhunting rites and the symbolism of the head has been explained. The next step is to examine the structural relationships among the concepts symbolized in the incorporation rites for the head. One main insight is that the heads are equivalent to names and that both names and heads are equivalent to the generalized notion of the social person. The next question must be what kinds of social persons are there? Since the head is involved in the symbolic conversion of one kind of social person into another, there must be at least two general kinds involved. These two general types of social persons I call internal social and external social persons. These terms obviously correspond to the notions of friend as opposed to enemy or “we” as opposed to “they.” However, internal and external social persons are used to emphasize the formal and topological properties of these social concepts rather than the fact of their bearing on such organizational matters as group affiliation per se. In fact, this formal treatment will demonstrate that such concepts as friendship or enmity are compound notions not resting solely on the matter of group affiliation. There is a topological side to these two concepts. They imply social distances and a formal relationship to the status of being either within or without the implicit margins of social units. Being within the bounds of a particular social margin is not necessarily the same as belonging to a particular social group. The reasons for this stalemate will soon become apparent. For now one must accept, as a working understanding, that the relativity of the relationship between friends and enemies, or “our people” versus “strangers,” can usefully be conceived as one between insiders and outsiders. This conceptualization helps rephrase with greater precision what, in the most general sense, is the underlying structural form of all headhunting rituals. It is to convert an external social person into an internal social person. Stated in this way the logical balance of what is attempted in these rites is clearer. The concepts of internal versus external have the same logical property of such binary oppositions as black and white and day and night. “In and out” is of the same order as these other paired concepts but with the added advantage that it seems to fit the quality of certain kinds of social relationships. In short, the notion of internal social person as against external social person presents a topological and formal expression of what is otherwise [471]viewed only according to the dimension of “own” versus “other.” The in/out opposition is the second dimension of group affiliation. Its neat logical structure quickly tells why other peoples or categorical strangers and enemies are viewed almost as “counter people.” The imagery of strangers and spiritual beings as being upside down and backwards in what they do takes on a greater meaning than that which usually is made so immediately apparent by the symbolic inversions themselves. There are four logically possible types of social person if one takes the social dimension of group affiliation and combines it with the social dimension of topological locus, whether internal or external, with respect to social margins. These four types are indicated in Table 2. Table 2. Figure 3 shows these same four types in a two-by-two presentation. Social persons of Type 1, own and internal, are easy to recognize as being represented by one’s own people or “friends.” Social persons of Type 4 are also familiar as enemies or strangers. Our usual understanding of “we” as opposed to “they” involves the two compound types: 1, own and internal; and 4, other and external, respectively. Figure 3. Four logically possible types of social problems.2 [472]It is the logical Types 2 and 3 that are more difficult to fill with our ordinary sociological categories of people. But Type 2, own and external, can be filled if one looks to religious beliefs. Ancestral spirits, for example, are members of one’s own group, although death has made them external to the everyday social world. The spirit helper of a shaman might also fit logically into this type. For most cultures, however, the dead of one’s own group are the prime representatives of Type 2. Type 3, other and internal, is more outside the range of our normal sociological vocabulary than is Type 2. But for headhunters, the incorporated head-name-face of a former enemy fills this logical type. In other words if it is possible for enemies to be other and external social persons and for ancestors to be own and external social persons, why should the newly incorporated symbol of the enemy as a general social person not be viewed as other but internal social person? So for headhunters all of the logical possibilities are represented. Life and death and the internal/external opposition In the world of tribal societies, the imagery of external social persons as being “counter people” is no where more vividly expressed than in the conception of the afterworld or the place of the dead. There day is night, and night is day. Although the content of “life” for the departed soul is much like that for the living, its structure is reversed or inverted. A single example will suffice to show how the dead are viewed as external or counter people dwelling in a counter world. The Rengma Nagas have a story about why the dead had to be separated from the living. It relates how the dead observe gennas (ritual periods) of rest when there is a taboo on working the field, in an opposite way from the living (Mills 1937: 271): At the beginning of time day and night were the same, and the dead lived in the same world as the living and worked at the same time. But since the dead and the living were in different villages, their gennas, when they abstained from work in the fields, fell on different days. Often when the living were observing a genna day the dead used to go to their deserted fields and pick things, and so break the genna, and the living did the same thing to the dead. This led to so many quarrels that God divided time into day and night, and gave the day to the living in which to work, and the night to the dead. And he moved the dead to another world, too, for when the dead and the living lived in the same world they were so numerous that there was a danger of there not being enough land to jhum [swidden agriculture]. The dead, even if they once belonged to one’s own group, are external social persons dwelling in a counter world. Significantly, this means they have something in common with strangers and potential enemies who are alive but also on the outside of one’s everyday world. This observation takes one a long way to understanding the link between headhunting and death. We have the common belief among the Bornean tribes that the acquisition of a fresh enemy head was a necessary prerequisite to end the period of mourning for the dead or to hold a public “death feast” which marked the [473]final arrival of the dead person’s soul into the afterworld. This ritual requirement was necessary if the movement from one reality sphere into another were to be balanced. Earlier interpretations based on theories of the desire for revenge at the loss of a relative, or on the animistic notion that the soul of the headhunting victim would in the afterworld become a servant to the dead of the victor’s group, seem superficial in terms of their failure to grasp the deeper structure of the native theory. The only extent to which the victim becomes the servant of the victor, or of the victor’s own deceased relatives, is that he can help one make the journey to the afterworld. It is the matter of balancing movement or transition through reality spheres which is crucial, not the acquisition of servants in the afterlife itself—although that notion may be a pleasing embellishment on the deeper theme. On this topic, the following notation is offered for the Naga of Manipur. Our forefathers have told us that when a man dies in fight, he is clad in his war-dress. If he does not die in fight, he is not so clad. When he who kills him dies, the man who was killed comes to him [the killer] and tells him to carry his basket. “I will not carry it,” says the conquerer, “for I defeated you in your life-time.” They fight about this. “You did not defeat me” says the other. Says the conqueror, “If you deny, rub your face and see.” Then he rubs his face, and find marks of a dao [bladed spear] on it. “It is true,” he says, “my friend, you defeated me. I will carry the basket,” so he does so. (Hodson 1911: 195) So in a single stroke the ritual of headhunting reconciles all the major contradictions of human existence in the tribal world. It balances out life and death at the same time it makes enemies friends. In Figure 3 line a to b shows the movement from life to death (Contradiction One). People of one’s own group, although still retaining their group affiliation as ancestral spirits, become external social persons when they die. This movement is balanced or reversed by the movement shown by line d to c where an enemy who is both an external social person and someone with an “other” group affiliation is made into an internal social person. The group affiliation of trophy heads remains problematic. It seems that a tugof-war goes on between the head-losers and the headtakers for the loyalty and good will of the ancestral soul of the slain person (see Beyer and Barton’s 1911 description of “head losers” mourning rites among the Ifugao). This may explain why one’s own people who die by violence often are buried in a separate and out-of-the way place. In line d to c headhunting reconciles the contradiction between life and death. The loss of one’s own people is made up for in the acquisition of a new internal social person. Line a — d of Figure 3 represents the contradiction among the living between one’s own people and their culture and other peoples with strange other cultures. The movement from c to d reconciles this contradiction by making the stranger cum enemy who is at first an external social person into an internal one. Conclusion This chapter has provided some new answers to the following questions: 1) What kind of statement about the social order of a tribal society is made by and through headhunting ritual?; and 2) Why has the severed human head been selected as the most apt symbol for expressing certain of the key meanings contained in that ritual statement? These answers are now summarized and some of their broader implications are explored. The major statement made by and through headhunting rituals can be phrased as a searching concern with the limits of the social world. To celebrate a head feast is to declare that much of what is alien and threatening—what lurks beyond the edges of a tribal life-world—can be successfully absorbed by the tribe. It can be placed in a more friendly relationship with other things, things which belong to the more familiar inner zones of hearth and home. This is an important claim for a society to make. It assures a people that their way of life need not be surrendered to all that is foreign and hostile to its basic tenets. As a shaman’s trance traditionally succeeds in bringing the external forces of nature and the spirit world into a closer, less threatening relation with the inner spheres of community life, so the rituals of headhunting lessen the threat posed by human (or “semi-human”) outsiders. More specifically, the rituals of headhunting serve to incorporate into one’s own social world the remote stranger or enemy. The rite makes an external social person into an internal one, an enemy into a friend. In addition, and this is crucial to this analysis, the rite restores the stranger’s misplaced humanity to one’s own community, the only place where true human qualities belong. Whatever the particular history of raiding and vengeance may be in a given locale, one main crime of the enemy is that he is so strikingly human yet he lives in a region that has been zoned as non-human. He resides in an area which is regarded as hostile to the ordinary tenets of one’s own way of life. A relocation of the enemy’s humanity is a needed correction. The head is chosen as the most apt symbol for these rites because it contains the face, which, in a manner akin to the social value of personal names, is the most concrete symbol of social personhood. Social personhood, in turn, is the enemy’s most human attribute, and is therefore the attribute which must be claimed for one’s own community. Some headhunters appropriate this attribute in the form of the head itself, while others do so in the form of the personal name which belonged to the living enemy. In either case, something is done which places the symbolic personhood of the enemy in one’s own community. The rituals offer some resolution of the recurring problem of the misplaced humanity of strangers. Beyond these conclusions, some more general comments are in order now. The material causes and consequences of headhunting warfare have been slighted. Vayda (1961: 346–58) argues that Iban warfare was a mechanism for territorial expansion; the history of the Iban seems to support him. However, warfare and headhunting are not identical. Headhunting implies some degree of warfare, but warfare does not necessarily imply ritual treatment of heads. Only the meaning of the cult of enemy heads has been explained in this chapter. And this is independent of the intensity of material conflict going on in any given region at any given time. [475]How this complex of meaning relates to other matters cannot be fully considered in this account. It is suggested that the relations between the head cult, on the one hand, and the material conditions of warfare, on the other, are not as obvious as they may first appear. Nor are they as obvious as would be the case if the cult of trophy heads could be reduced to a functional legitimation of warfare and killing, functioning, ultimately, in the interests of material competition or population dispersal. In fact, what seems most typical is that the material conditions existing between headhunters and their enemies are ones of great physical distance to begin with and of little or no direct environmental competition. What competition does exist is usually indirect or gradual. It is over reserves of land (and other resources) which would not be used intensively by either group until the future. I have called this condition a slow pace of material encroachment. Nor does it seem that the head cult, with its concomitant raiding pattern, is primarily responsible for promoting the relatively great distances between groups which characterize this condition. The cult is a response to these conditions of distribution and settlement, not a promoter of them. The slow pace of material encroachment brings about a situation in which the enemy can be perceived as an existential threat long before he can be viewed as a direct material threat. This seems to be the way that the institution of headhunting, and the elaborate traditions surrounding it, evolved. In any given case, however, the raiding that goes with headhunting can take on other seemingly adaptive functions as envisioned by Vayda. At times these adaptive functions will be expansionary, as in the case of the Iban; at other times they will be more defensive, as in the case of the Marind-anim of West Irian. While raiding far and wide and incorporating many captives into their very sizeable home villages, they did surprisingly little in the way of taking over the vacated territories of the groups whom they had victimized. Instead, their reputation as treacherous warriors helped only in securing a firmer hold on the favored coastal zone which they already occupied. In terms of its possible adaptive values, headhunting often has served more this second or generally defensive function than it has expansion. One reason is that the ritual complex continues to add greatly to a strong sense of community life, without much active raiding. This tends to promote rather large and cohesive village formations that would produce a defensive advantage. Under most conditions of primitive warfare a significantly large and cohesive village cannot easily be dislodged from its preferred area. Such a group is too capable of effective retaliation to be made a regular target of raiding by other groups. When it comes to tracing the emic, or culturally meaningful, connections between the head cult and the material conditions of warfare, one should not place too much weight on any of these possible adaptive advantages, whether defensive or expansionary. They are, in a sense, only specialized applications of the cult, not its source. The basic issue is identifying the general condition of a slow pace of material encroachment as the material condition which most encourages a contemplation of the enemy as being primarily an existential threat. From a recognition of this condition one is led immediately to consider the kinds of moral and philosophical questions which the head cult seeks to resolve regardless of the current intensity of warfare. It is this insight alone which enables one to appreciate the separate importance of elaborate head rituals, independent of killing per se. [476]The most telling point about headhunting is that killing alone is insufficient to do away with the phenomenological threat posed by the headhunter’s categorical enemy. He, or his most human qualities, must be brought into the fold to further totalize the headhunter’s society as the only human realm. Some might say that in picking out remote enemies the headhunting societies are externalizing violence. But this is a pessimistic view. It assumes that as humans we all carry a heavy internal load of hostility and aggression. It implies that if we do not find an external object as an outlet for innate aggressive tendencies, we will all stew in our collective juices. But headhunters have a different theory. While at times aggressive and proud, they do not rationalize the act of killing the enemy in terms of some biological necessity to externalize violence. For them that would be intellectual child’s play. They claim the converse: they are internalizing friendship; they are winning souls for humanity. Regarded philosophically, the mission of the headhunter was a worthwhile one. It is sad but true that with respect to warfare the moral philosophy of the headhunter is superior to our own. This is sad because we are capable of causing more destruction and death than were headhunters. Our methods of warfare allow us to forget that our enemies have faces and names. Although the headhunter on a raid was a treacherous and indiscriminate killer of men, women and children, there were at least some human as well as technological limits to the brutality of the system in which he acted. His wars were waged in the mystical upstream and downstream regions against people who could provide links with the eternal powers of the gods and ancestors. Our wars can be fought on electronic battlefields with the same strategies commonly used to eliminate vermin. If there was something wrong in the humanistic moral philosophy that led headhunters to conduct their raids, it is mainly that it had a severe sociological handicap. Their joy about being human always had a narrow social base. Outsiders could be fitted into this scheme only through violence. As with most peoples the humanism of the headhunters fell short of encompassing the brotherhood of man. Appendix: An exchange between Jan van Baal and the author on the topic of headhunting Out of a deep admiration for Jan van Baal’s ethnography of southern New Guinea and for his illuminating reappraisal of the anthropology of religion (van Baal 1971), in March of 1978, quite out of the blue, I sent him a copy of “Human and proud of it!.” I took the liberty of expanding on a point about the Marind-anim, for whom he was the authority. My hand printed notes covered the bottoms of six consecutive pages. This Marind-anim example had become important to my argument because it was the best documented example of the practice of naming children after an enemy whose head had been taken. Justus M. van der Kroef had written quite tellingly in 1952 about this same practice among the nearby Asmat people, but van Baal’s monumental ethnography of the Marind-anim in 1966, simply called Dema, made him the authority. Since names, heads, and faces all seemed to be overt symbols of social personhood, this allowed me to advance the claim that headunting always seemed to be a ritual means of making an external social person, an “enemy,” into an internal social person, a “friend.” [477]van Baal kindly replied to me in a carefully thought out letter of seven long single-spaced pages. In it he gave credit to my analysis for at last adding something new to our understanding of headhunting, but he wanted to correct some errors and express some general disagreement about whether or not headhunting could be understood purely in terms of ritual. He thought I had ignored the emotional side of headhunting, which he felt involved much aggression, anger, and classic assertions of masculine pride. He also responded to my hand printed notes. These supplementary notes are as follows: There is much more to this example [of Marind-anim child naming]. The Marind-anim give names to many things, some of which express a series of differences in degrees of social distance. For example, children, pigs, dogs, and canoes are all named. In this series it is clear that children are the closest and most loved; pigs are fond pets; dogs are less loved and are mainly used for hunting; canoes may be a matter of pride but they also take people far away. In myths canoes turn into serpents when they reach the limits of the known world. Thus we have the following series of named things from near to remote: Near – children – pigs – dogs – canoes – Remote The names given to the members of this series derive from another one, which also expresses degrees of social distance. The dema, or totem beings, are the prototypical Marind-anim. They reside directly under one’s village and represent the cosmological home base of the Marindanim. Next come the names of places in friendly territory. Then come the names of places in enemy territory. Finally, there are the names of enemies themselves. Thus the order here is as follows: Near – dema beings – friendly places – enemy places – enemies – Remote The naming system actually reverses this pattern of order so that near things from the first series are named after far things from the second series, as follows: Things named Near – children – pigs – dogs – canoes – Remote Sources of names Remote – enemies – enemy places – friendly places – dema beings – Near By use of names, what goes out in one series is brought back in in the other. The systematic nature of this alignment verifies that names taken form enemy heads are used to bring the enemy into a closer relation with the home group. I now present the opening of van Baal’s letter to me: Dear Professor McKinley, Your heart warming letter of March the 12th caught me in one of my earliest interests in anthropology. Headhunting was the subject which, in youthful over-confidence, I had chosen as the subject for my doctoral [478]thesis. Old De Josselin de Jong, my teacher, directed my attention to the New Guinea data. I soon foundered on the Marind-anim as presented in the then available literature. The result was a dissertation on Marindanim religion and society which appeared in 1934. It did not solve the Marind-anim problem, let alone that of headhunting. Its major merit was that it soon became instrumental in my being appointed controleur in the Marind-anim region, an appointment which revived my interest in this remarkable culture that, thirty years later, led to my book Dema. By then my interest in headhunting had faded away, though not completely. I think it was kept alive by the Japanese who were my custodians during the war. They proved themselves fond of beheading; they practiced it on a couple of my comrades. Heads apparently were important to the Japanese. As a matter of fact the head is an important symbol almost everywhere. Your association of the head with face and persona is enlightening. The head also played a role in European culture which almost certainly cannot be due to the story of David and Goliath. Beheading was the honourable form of capital punishment. Sometimes the head is regarded as a trophy. So, for example, in the old medieval song of Lord Halewyn, who was killed by a young lady when he tried to assault her. The girl certainly could take care of herself. She took his head and brought it home, and the story ends with an interesting clause which, in translation, runs as follows: “Then there was a great banquet, and Halewyn’s head on the table set.” The problem of headhunting is that here the capture of the head is not a more less accidental booty won by an act of warfare, but the explicit aim of the act. Headhunting is an institutionalized form of warfare which is not primarily motivated by revenge, hatred or greed, but by ritual ends or—other possibility—by a lust for prestige or aggression which adopted ritual forms. In your theory the ritual ends prevail. Here is where van Baal and I were in complete agreement. Headhunting is more than just beheading or execution; more than just incidental trophy collection. It is “an institutionalized form of warfare” where “the capture of the head” is “the explicit aim of the act.” Where we differed was on the degree to which “the ritual ends prevail.” If the ritual ends prevailed, then headhunting was an institutionalized form of religion as much as it was an institutionalized form of warfare. On this we for some time disagreed. Only much later, and much to my surprise, did van Baal come around to my point of view on this, and he did so in print. In his letter, van Baal raised four serious objections to my analysis. First, he saw “a certain disbalance between cause and effect.” He asked, “Is dissatisfaction with cultural incongruity (the humanity of a peripheral group qualified as not really human) a sufficient ground for purposive manslaughter?” He doubted this. He further thought that “once it has been agreed that the strangers are nonor semihuman, there is no sufficient ground for their rehumanization.” My answer to this was that the phenomenology of xenophobia, as I had analyzed it, always ran up against the possibility of people living at a distance becoming, in certain contexts, mutually aware of signs of their common humanity. I thought it was this kind of awareness that was addressed by headhunting. He still saw the final step in my series of “reconciliations of contradictions” in Figure 3 of my article—i.e., “Headhunting as Reality Maintenance”—as one too many. [479]van Baal’s second objection was that although the Marind-anim fit my model of headhunting peoples (usually) traveling fairly great distances to attack enemies and take their heads, they were in fact exceptional in this regard. Some surrounding peoples in southern New Guinea, who also took heads, raided peoples who were much closer to them. Knowing this, he saw a weakness in my general argument. He did say that fighting near-by peoples was common throughout New Guinea, but these neighboring coastal groups had combined that general pattern with the distinctive regional pattern of headhunting. I thanked van Baal for this additional information but went on to say that even if this were true, it still seemed to be the case that most headhunting peoples drew a moral distinction between enemies whose heads could, and in all likelihood should, be taken and other enemies or opponents whose heads should not be taken should a killing occur. So with this familiar distinction in mind, I said that that actual distances between headhunters and their targeted enemies were probably more relative than my model implied. I also pointed out that my model owed a great deal to Mabuchi Toichi’s 1968 account of spheres of geographical knowledge and sociopolitical organization among aboriginal peoples of Taiwan. He identified people’s home group spheres, their main in-law groups, then the in-laws of their in-laws, then a much less familiar hear-sayzone, and then, finally, complete strangers (who were not viewed as truly human). Most Taiwan aboriginals took heads from people in the hear-say-zone or in the dangerous-to-enter complete stranger zone. van Baal’s third objection had to do with the Marind-anim practice of naming children after enemies. Here he corrected my hand printed notes. He said while the overall pattern seemed substantive and true, I was in error about the dema beings as residing beneath one’s village. He corrected me by saying, “Their places of retirement may be far away.” I admitted that I had misunderstood this because of over interpreting the primordial sense of who the dema are in Marind-cosmology. Curiously, van Baal said that the enemy names bestowed on children were rarely used by people. Such names were reserved for formal occasions such as initiations where they were invoked “to remind the community of the killer’s prowess.” So the incorporation of the victim in the child “never becomes apparent.” I still regarded incorporation as a tacit meaning to this custom, though apparently under-emphasized by the Marind-anim. I cited van der Kroef ’s (1952) account of the Asmat who actually went so far as to attempt to build on relations between the child named for a victim and the victim’s surviving relatives. This was viewed as a potential ground for cross-tribal alliances, to be drawn upon in future wars against people further afield. Here the conversion of enemies to friends through headhunting could become literal. van Baal also said that, in addition to naming children after slain enemies, the Marind-anim also fully assimilated captives brought back from war raids. He said that this implied that they did not, in fact, regard enemies as non-human. They could be fully embraced as fellow humans. I saw no contradiction in this since, in the adoption of captives, kinship is allowed to transcend and more or less erase political and ethnic differences. I had written about a similar tendency of the Iban of Borneo to assimilate former enemies (McKinley 1978). van Baal’s fourth objection was his most fundamental. It was based on his view that aggression, not ritual, was at the base of headhunting. He said, “Taking all [480]things together I hold it impossible to explain New Guinea headhunting by a theory which does not account for the aggressiveness that is basic to it.” He said that my argument about the ritual goal of winning symbolic friends could just as well “be explained as a later rationalization of an existing practice.” But he then went on to say that his objections to my theory saddled him “with the task to explain this aggressiveness.” He attempted to do this not by calling upon innate instincts, but through a critical concern with the place of males in technologically simpler societies. Here it is women who do most of the productive work and also have the most to do with children, fertility, and so much else of real importance. Men, with time on their hands, “try to prove their mettle by making rituals and war.” So many cultures construct manliness as deadliness. Headhunting was a great achievement from this standpoint. It glorified the work of war as highly ritualized and added much sexual and fertility symbolism to boot. While I never thought van Baal’s theory of headhunting and my own were mutually exclusive, I have always thought that my own explained much that previously had not been explained. I regard his explanation as an important reminder that headhunting was always a violent institution and violence means aggression. So, from that standpoint, there was real merit to van Baal’s explanation. But on a comparative basis there was much more to headhunting than aggression and male pride. There were religious and cosmological implications. These showed up in my comparative treatment of the problem. When van Baal’s book Man’s quest for partnership: The anthropological foundations of ethics and religion came out in 1981, he expressed again his disagreement with my ritual interpretation: “Although McKinley (1976) ... recently arrived at a ... ritual-centered conclusion” about headhunting, “I have not been persuaded that the ritual aspects of headhunting are so preponderant that the aggressive and military aspects can be considered secondary.” However, within a year of these comments, I received in the mail a copy of Jan Verschueren’ description of Yei-nan culture edited by van Baal (1982). Verscheuren had been a Roman Catholic missionary in southern Irian from 1931 to 1970. He had left an ethnographic manuscript on the Yei-nan and their rituals. The Yei-nan are neighbors of the Marind-anim. They share many aspects of culture, including, in former times, headhunting. van Baal had edited Verschueren’s manuscript and provided a much expanded and typically judicious commentary of his own. When I opened the book, I found an inscription from van Baal on the title page. It read: “To Dr. Robert McKinley and on page 102 an apology from the author. J. van Baal.” Turning to page 102, I found this statement: The Yei-nan data (which was perfectly new to me) have now strengthened me in this supposition [of the importance of fertility symbolism in war rituals], even to the extent that I now feel I should have given McKinley’s view that headhunting is primarily a religious rite more thought in my book of 1981. This was a very generous gesture on van Baal’s part. I am still greatly moved by it. In returning to the original article, I know there are some flaws in it with regard to etymological arguments and some other details, all of which van Baal pointed out in his original letter to me. But I am perhaps even more convinced now than [481]ever before of the general validity of the original argument. I must thank the editors of HAU for bringing me back to take a fresh look at “Human and proud of it!”—warts and all. I can remember when I was first working on the paper, talking to friends, and pointing out that I had reached the point where headhunting had come to seem to me so logical as a system of beliefs, that I had more trouble trying to explain why some people were not headhunters than why other people were. Headhunting is a topic still very much worthy of further investigation. For example, see the interesting and important contributions in the 1996 volume edited by Janet Hoskins (Hoskins 1996). Headhunting probably existed in Southeast Asia for about 6000 years, which is a much longer run than those institutions we so presumptuously call “world religions.” References Barton, Roy Franklin. 1930. The half-way sun. New York: Brewer & Warren. ———. 1946. Ifugao religion. American Anthropological Association Memoir, 65. ———. 1955. The mythology of the Ifaguo. Memoir of the American Folklore Society, Vol. 46. Berger, Peter L. 1967. The sacred canopy: Elements of a sociological theory of religion. Garden City: Doubleday. Berger, Peter and Thomas Luckmann. 1967. The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. Garden City: Anchor Books. Beyer, H. Otley and Roy Franklin Barton. 1911. “An Ifugao burial ceremony.” Philippine Journal of Science 6-D (5): 227–52. DeRaedt, Jules. 1964. “Religious representations in Northern Luzon.” Baguio City, Saint Louis Quarterly, Vol. 2, No. 3. Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and danger: An analysis of concepts of poluution and taboo. New York: Fredrick A. Praeger. ———. 1970. Natural symbols: Explorations in cosmology. New York: Pantheon Books. Downs, R. E. 1955. “Headhunting in Indonesia.” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Landen Volkenkunde 111: 40–70. Dunn, Rev. Edmund. 1906. “Religious rites and customs of the Ibans or Dayaks of Sarawak Borneo.” Anthropos 1: 11–24; 165–85; 403–25. Freeman, J. D. 1970. Report on the Iban. London School of Economics Monograph on Social Anthropology 41. London: Athlone Press. Fürer-Haimendorf, Christoph von. 1969. The Konyak Nagas: An Indian frontier tribe. New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston. Furness, William Henry. 1902. The home life of Borneo head-hunters. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott. Galvin, Rt. Rev. A. D., ed. 1970. “How Baland Nyaring ventured to Alo Malau.” Sarawak Museum Journal 18: 220–63.[482] Geddes, William R. 1954. The Land Dayaks of Sarwak: A report on the social economic survey of the Land Dayaks of Sarawak presented to the colonial social science research council. Colonial Research Studies, No. 14. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. ———. 1957. Nine Dayak nights. London: Oxford Unviersity Press. Gomes, Rev. Edwin H. 1911. Seventeen years among the Sea Dayaks of Borneo. London: Seeley. Hodson, T. C. 1911. The Naga tribes of Manipur. London: Macmillan. Hose, Charles and William McDougall. 1912. The Pagan tribes of Borneo. New York: Barnes & Noble. Hoskins, Janet, ed. 1996. Headhunting and the social imagination in Southeast Asia. Stanford: Stanford University Press Howell, William. 1963. “Hornbill or kenyalang.” In The Sea Dayaks and other races of Sarawak. Kuching, The Borneo Literature Bureau, 93–98 (Originally published in the Sarawak Gazette, 1909: 185). Jensen, Eric. 1966. “The Iban world.” Sarawak Museum Journal 13: 1–31. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1969. The raw and the cooked: Introduction to a science of mythology. Translated by John and Doreen Weightman. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Mabuchi, Toichi. 1966. “Sphere of geographical knowledge and socio-political organization among mountain peoples of Formosa.” In Folk cultures of Japan and East Asia. Monuments Nipponica Monographs, No. 25. Tokyo: Sophia University Press. McKinley, Robert. 1978. “Pioneer expansion, assimilation, and the foundations of ethnic unity among the Iban.” Sarawak Museum Journal 26 (47): 15–27. Meggitt, Mervyn J. 1964. “Male-female relations in the highlands of Australian New Guinea.” In New Guinea, the Central Highlands, edited by James B. Watson. American Anthropologist 66 (4): 204–24. Mills, J. P. 1937. The Rengma Nagas. London: Macmillan. Murphy, Robert. 1957. “Intergroup hostility and social cohesion.” American Anthropologist 59: 1018–35. Perham, Archdeacon J. 1896. “Klieng’s war-raid to the skies.” In The natives of Sarawak and British North Borneo, Vol. 1, by Henry Ling Roth, 311–25. London: Truslove & Hanson. Roth, Henry Ling. 1896. The natives of Sarawak and British North Borneo. Two Volumes. London: Truslove & Hanson. Sandin, Benedict. 1966. “A Saribas Iban death dirge.” Sarawak Museum Journal 14: 15–80. Scharer, Hans. 1963. Ngaju religion, and the conception of God among a South Borneo people. Translated by Rodney Needham. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Simmel, Georg. 1965. “The aesthetic significance of the face.” In Essays on sociology, philosophy and aesthetics, edited by Kurt Wolff. New York: Harper & Row. Solheim, II, Wilhelm G. 1972. “An earlier agricultural revolution.” Scientific American 226 (4): 34–41.[483] van Baal, Jan. 1966. Dema, description and analysis of Marind-anim culture (South New Guinea). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1971. Symbols for communication: An introduction to the anthropological study of religion. The Hague: Van Gorcum. ———. 1981. Man’s quest for partnership: The anthropological foundations of ethics and religion. Assen: Van Gorcum. ———. 1983. Jan Verschueren’s descrption of Yei-nan culture. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. van der Kroef, Justus M. 1952. “Some head-hunting traditions of Southern New Guinea.” American Anthropologist 54: 221–35. Vayda, A. P. 1961. “Expansion and warfare among swidden agriculturalists.” American Anthropologist 63: 346–58. Vertenten, P. 1923. “Het Koppensnellen in Zuid-Nieuw-Guina.” Bijragen tot de Taal-, Landen Volkenkunde, Vol. 79.   Robert MCKINLEY received his PhD in anthropology in 1975 from the University of Michigan. His primary reseach has been on child transfers and siblingship within a Malay community in Malaysia. He has concentrated his work on kinship, ritual, religion, and social theory. Since 1973, he hast taught at Michigan State University, first in anthropology and presently in religious studies. He has been a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Malaya, a visiting lecturer at the National University of Singapore, and at the University of Michigan. He is currently working on a book about pre-state societies called Stone age world system: Why humans were in global networks from day one (whenever that was!). That will be followed by works on anthropology as a fourth way of knowing, the diversity of religious views among hunter-gatherers, the structure of human volition, and a long term perspective on Malay culture. Robert McKinleyDepartment of Religious StudiesMichigan State University732 Wells HallEast Lansing, Michigan 48824, USAmckinle5@msu.edu ___________________ Editors’ note: This article is a reprint of McKinley, Robert. 1976. “Human and proud of it! A structural treatment of headhunting rites and the social definition of enemies.” In Studies in Borneo societies: Social process and anthropological explanation, edited by G. N. Appell, 92–126. DeKalb, IL: The Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Northern Illinois University. The appendix, containing reflections on a debate between J. van Baal and the author, was written for publication in HAU. We are grateful to the author for permission to reprint this article. 2. 1. Movement a → b equals life to death, while movement d → c equals external to internal (enemy to friend). Diagonal line a — d is the living contradiction between own and other cultures.  

Wagner: Figure-ground reversal among the Barok This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Roy Wagner. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online) Figure-ground reversal among the Barok* Roy Wagner, University of Virginia   What is the relation of art, of thinking and feeling in images, to the form and being of a human culture? We in the modern Western cultures often say that our greatest art transcends the age and cultural surroundings in which it was created. But of course Shakespeare, Vermeer, and Mozart were very much persons of their own times and cultures, and their art, however transcendent, must manifest a significant part of the creativity of the age and culture. My experience in studying the Usen Barok people of Central New Ireland has convinced me that their culture is very much a matter of thinking and feeling in images. This means that the conception and motivation behind the malagan and other New Ireland art styles manifests something very basic in the cultures of this remarkable island. The fact that the Barok do not participate in the malagan tradition may serve, through the examples I present, to give the reader a broader and more varied sense of the possibility of a culture organized around art principles — around thinking and feeling in images. Let me first clarify an important point. By “image” I do not simply mean “visual image,” though New Irelanders often show a predilection for the visual. A cultural image can be verbal, as in the tropes, conceits, and other word pictures that carry much of the force of Shakespeare’s expression; it can be expressed in the nonrepresentational forms of music; or it can be kinesthetic or architectural, as it often is in New Ireland. An image has the power of synthesis: it condenses whole realms of possible ideas and interpretations and allows complex relationships to be perceived and grasped in an instant. I shall illustrate this by using a common Barok verbal image as an example. Like other New Irelanders, Barok trace clan membership through the mother’s line (though blood connection, traced through the father, is also very important). The Barok term for “clan” is a bung marapun, literally “the gathering in the bird’s eye.” The image is in constant, daily use, though most of those who use it will claim, when asked, that they have no idea what the image means. Older men, knowledgeable about ritual, will often say that the bird involved is the sek, a bird that ornithologists call the colonial starling. This bird is distinctive for its ruby-red eyes, perhaps suggestive of maternal blood (since paternal “blood” is semen, and white). But the sek is also distinctive for its habit of making its domed, thatch-covered nests in large communal colonies in trees above human gardens or villages. Since the Barok word for “eye,” mara, likewise connotes “clearing” or “focal epicenter,” the “gathering in the bird’s eye” might also image the human clearing placed “in view” of the birds’ “village.” There are other possibilities as well, each bringing its own nuance or creative insight to the understanding of the image. It is, of course, possible that all of these interpretations of mara are implied. But it is also possible that the ambiguity itself, the similarity among various interpretations, is more important than the specific interpretations. And there are those who say that the “eye” really refers to the spot of blood in the fertilized egg of another bird, not the sek. The fact of the matter is that whatever interpretations we make, whether specific or general, naive or subtle, and whatever authority we may base it on, it will always be open to doubt. Only the image itself is certain, and therefore the image itself is all that is needed. It has the power of eliciting (causing to perceive) all sorts of meanings in those who use and hear it, as well as the power of containing all the possible meanings that may be so elicited; for the image itself, [57] and only the image itself, is equal to all of them. By holding images in common, rather than the interpretations of images, Barok culture makes the synthesizing power of its collective images into the power of culture itself. Interpretation is an individual matter. Because we can only experience the world through the images of it that we perceive, the Barok culture of collective images exists on the scale of human experience, rather than that of human talk about experience. Thus Barok say that words can trick you, that the only real knowledge is that which is directly experienced — knowledge, that is, of the images of culture or the world around us. In a world where reality is image, and true knowledge can only be acquired by experiencing images, the ultimate power is power over images and perceptual effects — the power of image-transformations. Barok call this power a lolos, and it is the source of all things in the world and all actions in the world, including human action. When it occurs spontaneously, it is identified with form-changing place-spirits called a tadak. Tadak have no essential form, for their essence is their ability to change forms; they have no names, other than those of the several forms they habitually assume, and they are immortal, for the tadak whose form is threatened or dying need only change into a less evanescent form. Tadak are associated with specific locales, and also with specific human clans, whose members are at least nominally under their protection. The spirits are also jealous, willful, and capricious, and those whom they attack do not die, but are “swallowed,” to live “within” the tadak and do its bidding forever. They are contained, so to speak, within the tadak’s immortality. Any sort of natural anomaly — unusual rock formations, strange behavior of plants or animals, the birth of a hydrocephalic child — is attributed to the activities of tadak. The tadak of Wutom Clan is said to animate the depictions of animals drawn by human beings on the walls of a particular cave, bringing them to life by transforming itself into the creatures depicted. Tadak in this case is something like the force of artistic creativity acting spontaneously in the world. But of course the human artists who originally drew the cave pictures were, like the human artists who carve, paint, and prepare malagan, also engaged in image-transformation. Hence, their talent, their creativity, is an instance of a lolos, of the power over images. The great image-transformers of the Western tradition, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Shakespeare, Milton, Beethoven, Rodin, Rilke, may well be our tadak. They are unpredictable or antisocial in their spontaneity, impinging upon our conventional forms from the outside, as it were, containing, perhaps, our imaginations within their immortality. This unpredictability arises because Western tradition emphasizes verbal and rationalistic (linear) procedures and identifies itself with the predictable. But the main point of this essay is that the essence of artistic creativity, image-transformation, serves as the conscious center and effective constitutor of Usen Barok culture. It is the power of human ritual, in other words, rather than codified law, group solidarity, individual self-interest, or physical coercion, that guarantees property rights, moral status, and public standing of any kind. Usen Barok call the power of their public ritual (kastam)1 by the term iri lolos, meaning finished or manifest power, qualifying the noun with the perfective verbal affix (-in-). It is power that has been wholly fixed or contained in customary usage. We do not normally think of our public rites, however moving they may be, as rites of power, though we might be persuaded to describe Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, a portrait by Rembrandt, or the integral calculus as “finished power.” And so the question arises of just how the Barok consider their kastam to embody power. In my earliest conversations with the Barok, they would often use the borrowed English word “meaning” (many Barok have at least a passing familiarity with the English language) to describe the importance of a ritual object or usage (“You see this tree? It has a big meaning for us.”) At first I assumed they were simply using an important-sounding word for emphasis, without paying much attention to its more specific sense. But after I came to know something of their ritual life, I realized that the meaning referred to here is in fact that profoundly synthetic, condensed sense of the word that we might use to describe a great work of art or a significant triumph in mathematics. Iri lolos is power, then, because of its ability to elicit the essential cultural meanings in people, an ability that is inherent in the self-demonstrating, synthetic character of its images. Taken as a whole, it contains, or synthesizes, the ranges of significance in Barok culture, which, in this respect, is self-analytic. Because it is articulated through images, Barok social structure also reflects, reciprocally, the properties of image itself, elicitation and containment. It contains, and it also elicits, the totality of life and life-process. All the claims that human beings can make regarding one another, and all the claims they can make to property, come down to two things: the male act of conception and of giving food and nurturance to others — the elicitation of life; and the female act of contain- [58] ing the body in the womb, finalized by the ultimate containment of the body in the ground — the containment of life. The legitimation of all social statuses or claims must be realized through the ritual enactment and resolution of these principles, via feasting and containment. Because they are matrilineal, tracing group membership and descent through the maternal line, Barok depict the image of group membership through the containment of the body in the mother’s womb, and eventually in the ground of the group’s territory. All Barok people, and all Barok clans, belong to one or another of the two halves, or moieties, of society. The moieties are designated malaba, the sea eagle, or “greater bird,” and tago, the fish hawk, or “lesser bird.” They are exogamous; members of one moiety can only marry those of the other, on pain of universal ostracism for those who do not comply. Each moiety claims both the containment of its own and the animation — the elicitation of life process within — of the other. Thus each moiety contains the proffered nurturance of the other and also nurtures the containment of the other. The iri lolos, or public ritual, of the Barok has, therefore, two main components: feasting and containment. Every major event or social transition (including, for instance, a day spent in preparation for a major feast) requires a feast, and every death requires a cycle of them. With one significant exception (which will be described later), every feast must be held in a men’s house, or taun, according to a strict protocol. The taun is in fact an enclosure, a large, rectangular, dry stone wall, a balat, surrounding an open space. More or less in the center is the men’s house proper, a gunun, a highly stylized edifice that divides the taun space in two. The forepart of the taun is the konono, or feasting space, with a display table for food in the center and low benches for feasters along the edges. At the front of the konono is the only entrance to the taun, the olagabo, or “gate of the pig.” This takes the form of a stile carved at the base of a tree-fork, with the extending branches projecting outward on either side like a giant V. The rear space of the taun is the ligu, or clan burial ground. Barok say that the forepart of the taun is like the upper part of a tree, the branches (imaged by the entrance stile) that “feast” others with fruit, whereas the rear is where the ancestors, like roots of the clan, lie fixed in the ground. The taun is both the image and the enactment of containment, enclosing both the elicitation of feasting and the encompassment of burial. Any male person is welcome to sleep and take refreshment in a taun at any time, or to stay there, and all men, regardless of affiliation, are welcome to attend all feasts and are entitled to an equal share of the foods and refreshers served there. By the same token, the taun is sacred space, pervaded by the ethic of malum — respect and forbearance out of compassion for the deceased; and malili — the ethic of good fellowship and generosity in feasting. And the taun itself, container of feasting, is literally made out of feasts, for every step in its construction, every few feet of balat finished, every detail of the structure, must be solemnized with a feast and with the killing of pigs. Just as the taun’s enclosure is divided between feasting and containment proper, or burial, so the organization of the feast itself includes an initial phase, when the assembled food is contained within the hollow rectangle of seated feasters within the taun, and a second phase, when it is distributed and eaten. The first phase includes speeches explaining the purpose of the feast, the purchase and cutting of the cooked pigs, and any criticism (usually vociferous and scathing) the assembled “big men” may wish to make of the protocol followed on the occasion. Thus the format of the feast itself is an image no less than the layout of the taun that contains it. But the taun and the feast in the taun together make a coordinate image, linking feasting and burial, and Barok say that all important taun feasts should follow the sequence of mortuary feasting. This sequence extends the imagery of containment and elicitation featured in the format of the individual feast to a schema involving a succession of kinds of feasts. Fig. 1. Taun enclosure with olagabo, or gate of the pig in foreground (Drawing by the author) When any Usen Barok person dies, the whole Usen area goes under a mortuary interdict called the lebe, in which loud talking, displays of anger or unseemly behavior, and the lighting of large fires are prohibited. The lebe effectively extends the ethic of malum to the whole region; it remains in effect until the imagery of kinds of feasts is realized. Until that time, the feasts that are given (two or three, at the least) are closed feasts, imaging malum and containment. The body of the deceased is still in process of being absorbed in the ground; all food for the feasts must be nurturance brought in by the opposite moiety, no food (or even refuse) may be taken out of the taun, the pigs are placed facing inwards, toward the burial area, and distribution of the food proceeds from the front toward the rear. Afterward, ideally when the body has totally decomposed and has been absorbed into the clan ground (but nowadays much sooner, in deference to schedules), the first open feast is held, ending the lebe. The moiety has now encompassed the deceased and can turn to nurturing the other; it supplies the food in [61] such plenitude that all can (and may) take some home afterward, the pigs are placed facing outward, toward the gate, and distribution of food proceeds from the rear toward the front of the feasting area. When the sequence is applied in a context other than mortuary, two successive feasts, a closed and an open, are sufficient. Apart from its curious holography — the fact that the ways in which it works (elicitation, containment) are the same as the ways in which it is structured, in other words, that component elements replicate in detail the larger structures that contain them — the system — of iri lolos described thus far does not differ radically from more familiar forms of organization. Allowing for the peculiarities of image (e.g. holography), it suggests a social order based on certain premises that are translated into nonverbal means, on the principle of the rebus. It looks, in short, very predictable, as we might fondly imagine our own system is. Where, then, is the tadak-like creativity, the power of image-transformation that I spoke of earlier? The answer is given by a final, and most unpredictable, twist of the holography. The distinction between elicitation and containment, feasting and burial, paternal and maternal role, keeps the Barok world in order. The ancestors, buried at the “root” of the taun, are guarantors of that world, and the trunk and branches (actually the branching V of the olagabo, and a trunk-section, known as bagot, that serves as a threshold-log of the men’s house proper) contain its feasts. But in the great culminating mortuary feast, the kaba, performed on behalf of all who have died over a number of years, or of a very distinguished person who has died, the Barok world is overturned and negated. In the kaba, the feast contains the tree. A tree is set up outside of the taun amid great ceremony and numerous feasts, and the kaba, at which a great many pigs are slaughtered (over 60, at one I attended in 1979), is held around it. Of the two kinds of kaba, that of the branch (agana ya) and that of the rootstock (una ya), the latter embodies the imagery at its fullest and is regarded by the Barok as the greater and more important. In this version, a huge forest tree is lopped off six feet from the ground and all the roots are dug out of the soil, one by one; a feast with pork is given for the uncovering of each major root, and an especially large feast for the taproot. The roots are then trimmed to a six-foot radius, and the huge rootstock is raised and taken into the village, with the winawu (ideally an orong-to-be: a “big man” initiate) standing atop it, crying out the invocation of the kaba: “asiwinarong.” (“the need of a big man”). It is erected upside-down in the village, with the roots in the air. After days of preparation and subsidiary feasting, during which the tree is decorated, the rite reaches its culmination: The roots of the tree are made into a platform, with the aid of poles, and the pigs slaughtered for the feast are piled on it. Around the base of the tree nubile young girls sit on dawan chairs (seating frames made in the shape of branch-fork); on top of the pigs stands the winawu, invoking the kaba with a standardized formula: “Asiwi-narong! . . .”2 Fig. 2. Diagram of feasting display as an inversion of una ya kaba image (Drawing by the author). Not only does the feast contain the tree, then, but the main course, the pigs, are placed directly atop the “burial” section of the tree, supported by the upper (“feasting”) section, which is buried in the ground! Feasting and burial are collapsed together and shown to be one and the same thing in an act that Barok refer to as “cooking the pigs on top of the ancestors,” “cooking the souls of the dead,” or “finishing all thought of the dead.” Since feasting and burial are equivalent to elicitation and containment, paternity and maternity, and thus also to the ways in which the moieties interrelate and are constituted, the kaba accomplishes the negation of gender and of the moiety distinction — indeed, of all social categories in Barok culture. This is especially clear in the positioning of the winawu, a man, atop the pigs, for he takes the place of the tree’s taproot, which before had been identified with the original ancestress of a clan. The nubile young women seated around the base of the kaba on stylized “branches” correspondingly take the role normally ascribed to men, marrying into other clans and giving them nurturance. The young women at the kaba are in fact spoken of as “food,” as if they were fruit dangling upward from imaginary branches of the inverted, underground tree. The una ya kaba is thus no simple inversion, but a methodical and consistent figure-ground reversal (pire-wuo) of the meaningful imagery of Barok life. It does not simply negate, it consummates its denial by demonstrating also that the inversion makes as much sense as the order it inverts — that a feast on tree roots is indeed a feast (as well as the burial of all burials), that a man can be taproot of a maternal line, that young women, who constitute lineages, can also be seen as nurturance bestowed elsewhere. Like my earlier example of the image for clan, a bung marapun, the significance contained in the kaba image is larger and more intense than any verbal interpretation could encompass. Its implication, however, is perfectly clear. If feasting and containment are completely interchangeable, and there is no difference between the moieties or the gender-roles they manifest, then the force behind so- [62] ciety cannot simply consist of categories or substantives such as arbitrary social distinctions, human body functions, gender, or nurturance. These are but images, society’s illusions, to be projected or dispelled at will by the power of image-transformation, in lolos. The kaba is the revelation of a transcendental power over society, rather than a statement of the things society is about, its principles, forces, ideals, or goals. The parallel with art is apt, for, as with a significant work of art, the true power of the kaba lies in the transformations of meaning that it elicits in its audience. Barok say that figure-ground reversal, pire-wuo, is “the way in which power is put into art,” for it elicits a change of perspective within the viewer — an image of transformation formed by the transformation of an image. If so rarefied a basis for human social order seems a bit too far removed from everyday affairs for easy credence, then consider a definition of mankind offered by the Tolai people of Rabaul, speakers of a language closely related to Barok. The Tolai say that man is a tabapot, a figure-ground reversal, forever desiring that which is outside of his form (body), only to hunger again for the human form once the external has be attained.3 Iri lolos and malagan What analogies can be drawn between the Usen Barok transformation of a lolos, power in the world, into the iri lolos of cultural form, and the malagan of peoples to the north? A suggestion can be found in the work of Dr. Elizabeth Brouwer, who lived among the southern Mandak people of Panatgin Village. In her thesis,4 Dr. Brouwer speaks of the spirit forms of malagan (as well as those of plants, animals, insects, and birds) being contained within the randa, the masalai-spirit of a clan. The southern Mandak randa is thus like the Barok tadak, which is said in some cases to animate certain depictions on the walls of caves. Images of the malagan within a randa can be communicated to clan members in dreams,5 then carved, decorated, and revealed (together with a “meaning,” or lesson) at a mortuary feast. By analogy, the spirit-forms or images of malagan are like Barok a lolos, power in the world, which become human power (iri lolos) when carved and presented by human beings at a mortuary feast. Individual malagan are like Barok pidik, “mysteries” whose presentation is at the same time a revelation of knowledge. ___________________ * Publisher’s note: This is a reprint of Roy Wagner, 1987. “Figure-Ground Reversal Among the Barok.” In Assemblage of Spirits: Idea and Image in New Ireland, edited by Louise Lincoln, 56-62. New York: George Braziller. We are very grateful to George Braziller, Inc. for granting us the permission to reprint it. We remind the reader that we retain the style of the original, and indicate in the text the original page numbers in square brackets. 1. This word, actually quite widespread as a synonym for “culture” in modern Melanesia, is a loan-word, borrowed from the English “custom.” 2. The complete text is given in R. Wagner, Asiwinarong. Ethos, Image, and Social Power among the Usen Barok of New Ireland (Princeton. Princeton University Press, 1986) pp. 204-205. 3. Discovery of this concept in Tolai is credited to Roselene Dousset-Leenhardt; see R. Wagner, Asiwinarong, p. 100n. In a somewhat different sense, the modern discovery of brain-laterality tends to make man a “figure-ground reversal.” 4. Elizabeth C. Brouwer, “A Malagan to Cover the Grave: Funerary Ceremonies in Mandak,” Ph.D. diss., University of Queensland, 1980, pp . 80-81. 5. Ibid., p. 165 ff.

Viscerality, faith, and skepticism This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Michael Taussig. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau6.3.033 REPRINT Viscerality, faith, and skepticism Another theory of magic Michael TAUSSIG, Columbia University   “Underlying all our mystic states are corporeal techniques, biological methods of entering into [454]communication with God.”– Marcel Mauss, “Les techniques du corps,” 1960 “The sorcerer generally learns his time-honored profession in good faith, and retains his belief in it more or less from first to last; at once dupe and cheat, he combines the energy of a believer with the cunning of a hypocrite.”– Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive culture, 1871 Habituated as we are these post–9/11 days to the dramaturgy of Homeland Security—who can still remember the color-coded warnings of terror whenever the president’s ratings were falling or the advice to place plastic sheeting on the windows?—there is one act of theater that still seems fresh and daring: the revealing glimpse of stately being provided by U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft when he ordered Justice have her fulsome breast covered by suitable drapes. It was as if he had taken to heart what, according to students’ notes, the learned anthropologist Marcel Mauss had said in Paris sometime in the 1920s, that “underlying all our mystic states are corporeal techniques, biological methods of entering into communication with God” (Mauss 1979). Later on with untold millions watching the 2004 Super Bowl on television, the singer Janet Jackson had a wardrobe malfunction in which her dress slipped to reveal for an instant the breast that the attorney general had had to cover up. Laws were instantly drafted against indecency in the media. A year later the noted evangelist Pat Robertson told viewers on his television show that the United States should kill Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, described in the New York Times as “a leftist whose country has the largest oil reserves outside of the Middle East.” Claiming that “this is even more threatening to hemispheric stability than the flash of a breast on television during a ballgame,” the Reverend Jesse Jackson called for the Federal Communications Commission to investigate, just as it did when Janet Jackson’s breast was exposed (Goodstein and Forero 2005, A10). Mauss hardly needed to add that clothing—that second skin—goes hand in hand with “corporeal techniques” for reaching the holy. One has only to think of the passions aroused by the veil in Islam, nuns’ and priests’ habits in Christianity, the scarlet robes of cardinals, the pope’s miter, the orange robes and haircuts of Buddhist monks, and the layers of black and white cloth, white string, and large black hats of Jewish men’s orthodoxy, let alone the postures and body movements for praying, to get the point, strange as it may seem. Even nudism is a kind of religion. It is strange, is it not, that something so intensely spirited and spiritual as communicating with God should be so tied to the flesh and, at the very same time, be so tied to covering it, uncovering it, and even mutilating it? Intense it certainly is. Those of us fortunate enough to live in the United States have become acutely aware these days of such “corporeal techniques” that in media form allow the populace to enter into communication with God, techniques so downright earthy and body-saturated that they leave the Christian and Muslim penitents lashing themselves to bloody frenzy far behind, no less than the nuns of early modern Europe glorying in their infected wounds. In Flemish painting of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it is common to see Christ the Crucified with a neatly made, vagina-shaped, incision on his right chest, level with the nipple. In one painting I know of, the wound emits golden rays of fine droplets that take up a good third of the painting. Leo Steinberg has dedicated much of his formidable scholarship to the ubiquity in Renaissance painting, north and south of the Alps, of what looks like a large, sometimes very large, erection on Christ’s part while on the cross (Steinberg 1996). What is just as noteworthy is the cover-up. For not only is Christ naked except for an awkwardly bulging sheet, but centuries have passed without mentioning this unmentionable, as likewise with the equally large number of paintings of the Virgin adoring the baby Christ’s dick. If it wasn’t for the fact that people choose, perhaps unconsciously, not to see this, one can only imagine what a busy time people like the attorney general could be having in the War against This Terror. But fortunately for us those barbarous displays of spiritual devotion devoted to covering and uncovering the body are long past. Today in the West, church and temple have long been sanitized, and the evidence lies safely ensconced in the no-less-sanitary and no-less-hallowed rooms of art museums. Instead, religion has found other and better “corporeal techniques for entering into communication with God,” absolutely life-and-death issues including fanatical opposition to [455]abortion, gay marriage, embryonic stem-cell research, euthanasia, condoms, and the sale of “morning-after” pill. (But not Viagra.) That this opposition wins national elections and hence shapes the fate of the world is now painfully obvious, and thus these corporeal techniques merit closer examination. In the sorts of societies traditionally studied by anthropologists, in which religion was in the hands of so-called shamans, witch-doctors, and sorcerers, such corporeal techniques can be viewed as forms of conjuring based on sleight of hand, which is what assures them their ability to enter into communication with God. This is conjuring, but with a twist. And what is this twist? It is quite marvelous and amounts to the skilled revelation of skilled concealment—witness Janet Jackson’s briefest of brief revelations and the attorney general’s cover-up. Witness the crucified Christ’s erection that nobody sees. What we have here is an art form dedicated to cheating, or should I say contrived misperception, a corporeal technique that not only evokes something sacred but that involves deceiving oneself as well. Religion is certainly strange. In the mid-nineteenth century in Oxford, England, the celebrated founder of anthropology, Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, put it like this: The sorcerer generally learns his time-honored profession in good faith, and retains his belief in it more or less from first to last; at once dupe and cheat, he combines the energy of a believer with the cunning of a hypocrite. (Tylor 1871) By “sorcerer,” Tylor was not necessarily thinking of attorneys general, but it is established in the ethnographic record that law in so-called primitive societies is very much a matter of sorcery, if by that term we include, as is generally the case, medicine and religion. What is more, Tylor puts his finger on something timeless here, fascinating and timeless, which is that faith seems to require that one be taken in by what one professes while at the same time suspecting it is a lot of hooey. At once dupe and cheat, Tylor said—truly an amazing state of affairs, mixing recognition with denial, blindness with insight. Here faith seems to not only happily coexist with skepticism but demands it, hence the interminable, mysterious, and complex movement back and forth between revelation and concealment. Could it follow, therefore, that magic is efficacious not despite the trick but on account of its exposure? Let me flesh this out, beginning with what for me stands as the primal scene of conjuring on the part of the sorcerer. Uttermost parts and humbuggery In his wonderfully evocative and informative autobiography, Lucas Bridges, son of a missionary turned sheep farmer, tells us how he grew up playing with Indian children around 1900 on Isla Grande, one of many islands, peninsulas, and waterways that make up Tierra del Fuego. He learnt at least one of the native languages, and by the time he was an adult he was tempted to learn the ways of the sorcerer, ways which were, in essence, very puzzling because the fear of magic coexisted with disbelief in the magicians. Note that magic, in the form of killing by means of sorcery, was common. The first among the Ona Indian superstitions, according to Bridges, was “fear of magic and of the power of magicians, even on the part of those [456]who, professing that art, must have known that they themselves were humbugs. They had great fear of the power of others” (Bridges 1951: 406). He went to say that “some of these humbugs were excellent actors,” and it will be useful for us to follow him in his description of what he calls “acting” and observe the focus, if not obsession, with the “object,” an object withdrawn from the interstices of the living, human, body. Standing or kneeling beside the patient, gazing intently at the spot where the pain was situated, the doctor would allow a look of horror to come over his face. Evidently he could see something invisible to the rest of us. . . . With his hands he would try to gather the malign presence into one part of the patient’s body—generally the chest—where he would then apply his mouth and suck violently. Sometimes this struggle went on for an hour, to be repeated later. At other times the joon would draw away from his patient with the pretense of holding something in his mouth with his hands. Then always facing away from the encampment, he would take his hands from his mouth gripping them tightly together, and, with a guttural shout difficult to describe and impossible to spell, fling this invisible object to the ground and stamp fiercely upon it. Occasionally a little mud, some flint or even a tiny, very young mouse might be produced as the cause of the patient’s indisposition. (Bridges 1951: 262)1 As an aside let us take note of the eyes of the great medicine man, Houshken, perforce an expert in physiognomy. He was over six feet tall and his eyes were exceedingly dark, almost blue black. “I had never seen eyes of such color,” muses Bridges, and he wondered whether Houshken was nearsighted. Far from it. For not only was the man a mighty hunter, but it was said that he could look through mountains. These are also the sort of eyes that can look through the human body, as was brought out when Bridges allowed another famous medicine man, Tininisk (who twenty years later became one of Father Martin Gusinde’s most important informants), to induct him into the ways of the medicine man. Half-reclining naked on guanaco skins by the fire sheltered by a windbreak, Bridges’s chest was gone over by the medicine man’s hands and mouth as intently, said Bridges, as any doctor with a stethoscope, “moving in the prescribed manner from place to place, pausing to listen here and there.” Then come those eyes again, those eyes that can see through mountains, the mountain of the body. “He also gazed intently at my body, as though he saw through it like an X-ray manipulator” (Bridges 1951: 406). Having eyes like these eyes is helpful for seeing through the world, but perhaps the implication this carries is misleading. For penetrating as these eye are, it could be the nature of the material looked through that is special. For it seems that solids, like the body, are, under certain conditions at least, unstable and transparent. The medicine man and his helper stripped naked. The medicine man’s wife, one of the rare women healers, took off her outer garment, and the three of them huddled and produced something Bridges thought was of the lightest gray down, shaped like a puppy and about four inches long with pointed ears. It had the [457]semblance of life, perhaps due to the handlers’ breathing and the trembling of their hands. There was a peculiar scent as the “puppy” was placed by the three pairs of hands to his chest, where, without any sudden movement, it disappeared. Three times this was repeated, and then after a solemn pause Tininisk asked whether Bridges felt anything moving in his heart or if he could see something strange in his mind, like in a dream? But Bridges felt nothing, and eventually decided to abandon what he had found to be a fascinating course of studies because for one thing, he would have to frequently lie, “at which I was not very clever,” and for another, it would separate him from his Ona friends. “They feared the sorcerers; I did not wish them to fear me, too” (Bridges 1951: 264).2 Yet, although his desire to learn magic waned, it never completely left him. Some twenty years later Father Martin Gusinde was informed by the Indians that the “puppy” was made of the white feathers of newborn birds and a shaman’s entire body, other than the skin, was made of this stuff. It was this substance that gave the shaman his special powers—his penetrating sight, his ability to divine, to reach out and kill, and sing as well (Gusinde 1982: 18). When he later met up with the famous Houshken, about whom he had heard so much, Bridges told him he had heard of his great powers and would like to see some of his magic. The moon was full that night. Reflected on the snow on the ground, it cast the scene like daylight. Returning from the river, Houshken began to chant, put his hands to his mouth, and withdrew a strip of guanaco hide three times the thickness of a shoelace and about eighteen inches long. His hands shook and gradually drew apart, the strip stretching to about four feet. His companion took one end and the four feet extended to eight, then suddenly disappeared back into Houshken’s hands to become smaller and smaller such that when his hands were almost together he clapped them to his mouth, uttered a prolonged shriek, and then held out his hands, completely empty. Even an ostrich, comments Bridges, could not have swallowed those eight feet of hide without a visible gulp. But where else could it have gone but back into the man’s body? He had no sleeves. He stood butt naked in the snow with his robe on the ground. What’s more, there were between twenty and thirty men present, but only a third of them were Houshken’s people and the rest were far from being friendly. “Had they detected some simple trick,” writes Bridges, “the great medicine man would have lost his influence; they would no longer have believed in any of his magic” (Bridges 1951: 285). Houshken put on his robe and seemed to go into a trance as he stepped toward Bridges, let his robe fall to the ground, put his hands to his mouth again, withdrew them, and when they were less than two feet from Bridges’s face slowly drew them apart to reveal a small, almost opaque, object, about an inch in diameter, tapering [458]into his hands. It could have been semitransparent elastic or dough but whatever it was, it seemed to be alive, revolving at great speed. The moon was bright enough to read by as he drew his hands apart, and Bridges realized suddenly the object was no longer there. “It did not break or burst like a bubble; it simply disappeared.” There was a gasp from the onlookers. Houshken turned his hands over for inspection. They were clean and dry. Bridges looked down at the ground. Stoic as he was, Houshken could not resist a chuckle, for there was nothing to be seen. “Don’t let it trouble you. I shall call it back to myself again.” By way of ethnographic explanation, Bridges tells us that this curious object was believed to be “an incredibly malignant spirit belonging to, or possibly part of, the joon (medicine man) from whom it emanated.” It could take a physical form. Or it could be invisible. It had the power to introduce insects, tiny mice, mud, sharp flints, or even a jellyfish or a baby octopus into the body of one’s enemy. “I have seen a strong man shudder involuntarily at the thought of this horror and its evil potentialities” (Bridges 1951: 286). “It was a curious fact,” he adds, that “although every magician must have known himself to be a fraud and a trickster, he always believed in and greatly feared the supernatural abilities of other medicine-men” (Bridges 1951: 286). Viscerality and The gay science At this juncture I want to draw your attention to several things about the sleight of hand involved here in the manipulation of the human body. First, there is the use of the body as a receptacle, a “holy temple,” whose boundary has to be traversed. This is the basic, the essential, staging for the perpetual play of moving inside and outside, implanting and extracting . . . whether it be the shaman’s body, the patient’s body, the enemy’s body, or the body of a novice shaman during training. Then there is the exceedingly curious object that is said to be a spirit belonging to the body of the medicine man; it appears to be alive yet is an object all the same; it marks the exit from and reentry into the body; it has a remarkably indeterminate quality—note the weird elasticity of the guanaco strip and the semitransparent dough or elastic revolving at high speed—all acting like extensions of the human body and thus capable of connecting with and entering into other bodies, human and nonhuman. There exists a Central European version of this weird doughlike spinning thing and it is called Odradek, the hero of a one-and-a-half page story, “The cares of a family man” (Kafka 1983). The author, Franz Kafka, tells us that the origin of the name Odradek is perplexing, and from his account it is impossible to know whether Odradek is a person, an animal, or an object. Odradek seems like a person in some ways, can speak and respond to questions, for instance, and can move fairly nimbly, like an animal. Yet it is nothing but an old star-shaped cotton reel with bits of different colored thread and a couple of little sticks poking out either end. It lurks on thresholds and cul-de-sacs, on the stairs and in the hallway. When it laughs it is like the rustling of dead leaves. We are unsure as to whether he can die. Kafka himself did not employ sleight of hand. His writing was sufficient. Odradek was an extension of Kafka, his body no less than his mind, similar to the [459]“puppy” of white feathers of newborn birds emerging from Tininisk to enter the body of his patients or victims. Kafka’s stories are not stories at all. They rely on gesture, the bodily equivalent of words, words that suddenly shoot out of syntax and take on a life of their own, like the Selk’nam revolving dough emergent from the shaman’s mouth. Kafka never felt at home in his body. He was bound to empathy and metamorphosis. Remember the man who became a bug? And the facial tic that tics away on its own? In Kafka’s account, Odradek is both exotic and familiar, fantastic and ordinary. Perhaps this is the same for the “puppy” among the Selk’nam described by Lucas Bridges and by Father Gusinde. Such creatures are more than creaturely; they are sudden appearances and equally mysterious disappearances; they are movement, most notably bodily movement, meaning not only the place of the body in space, nor simply rapid extension of limbs in what is almost a form of dance, but also movements of egress and ingress, of insides into outsides and vice versa combined with a movement of sheer becoming in which being and nonbeing are transformed into the beingness of transforming forms. Such creatures refer us to the metamorphosing capacity of curious unnamable animated objects able to become more clearly recognizable but out-of-place things such as baby octopi or mud or a flint in the body of the enemy rendered sick and dying, a capacity on the part of these creatures not only for change but also for an implosive viscerality that would seem to hurl us beyond the world of the symbol and that penny-in-the-slot resolution called meaning. Above all at this point, I want to draw attention to the spectacular display of magical feats and tricks and to wonder about their relationship to the utterly serious business of killing and healing people. This combination of trickery, spectacle, and death must fill us with some confusion, even anxiety, about the notion of the trick and its relation to both theater and science, let alone to truth and fraud. We therefore need to dwell upon this corrosive power creeping along the otherwise imperceptible fault lines in the sturdy structure of language and thought, splicing games and deceit to matters of life and death, theater to reality, this world to the spirit world, and trickery to the illusion of a world without trickery—the most problematic trick of all. Here one can sympathize with Friedrich Nietzsche where he writes that “all of life is based on semblance, art, deception, points of view and the necessity of perspectives and error,” no less than with the attempt by Horkheimer and Adorno to position not Eve and the tree of knowledge of good and evil but shamanism and its magic as the true fall from grace onto the first faltering steps of Enlightenment and what has come to be called science, imitating nature so as to control nature, including human nature, transforming the trick into techniques of domination over nature and people (Nietzsche 1968: 23; Horkheimer and Adorno 1969: 3-43). Faced with this world based on semblance, art, and deception, Nietzsche advises us not to labor under the illusion of eliminating trickery on the assumption that there is some other world out there beyond and bereft of trickery. The trick will always win, especially when exposed. What we should do instead is practice our own form of shamanism, if that’s the word, and come up with a set of tricks, simulations, and deceptions in a continuous movement of counterfeint and feint strangely contiguous with yet set against those weighing on us. It is something like [460]this nervous system, I believe, that Nietzsche had in mind with his Gay science, a “mocking, light, fleeting, divinely untroubled, divinely artificial art” built around the idea, if I may put it this way, that exposure of the trick is no less necessary to the magic of magic than is its concealment (Nietzsche 1974: 37).3 “To describe any considerable number of tricks carried out by the shamans, both Chuckchee and Eskimo, would require too much space” When Catherine the Great opened up the wastes of Siberia to European explorers in the eighteenth century they were first not called shamans but jugglers—jugglers as in conjurers. The name shaman came later, being the name used by one of the indigenous cultures, that of the Tungus, for one of several classes of their healers. From its inception, the naming and presentation of the figure of the shaman by anthropologists was profoundly linked to trickery by means of startling revelations about ventriloquism, imitations of animal spirit voices, curtained chambers, mysterious disappearances and reappearances, semisecret trapdoors, knife tricks, and so forth, including—if trick is the word here, and why not?—sex changes by men and women. By the last quarter of the twentieth century, so-called shamans came to be thought of by anthropologists and by laymen as existing everywhere throughout the world and throughout history as a universal type of magical and religious being, and the trickery tended to be downplayed as the mystical took center stage. The term itself had become early on diffused throughout Western languages, thanks to the ethnography of Siberia begun in the late nineteenth century, the phenomenon thus joining an illustrious company of colonially derived native terms enriching European languages such as totemism, taboo, mana, and even cannibalism, words at once familiar yet mysterious as if freighted by their indigenous meanings and contexts.4 Hearken to the wonderful tricks presented by Waldemar Bogoras for the Chukchi shaman he met in Siberia, Bogoras’s 1904 monograph being one of the high points in the birth of shamanism as a Western object of study (Bogoras 1969: 433-67). Bogoras was fascinated, for instance, by the shamans’ skill in ventriloquy creating soundscapes so complex and multiply layered that it seemed like you had become immersed in a spirit world. Bogoras took pains to capture the trick of [461]voice throwing onto a wax cylinder, phonographic record, and was surprised that he could do so, delighted by his own trickery. The shaman sat over there, throwing his voice, but the voice emerged right here, out of the phonogram! I heard the same thing a century later, two years ago in the oral examination of a doctoral student who had gotten hold of a copy. This was one of those especially fine tricks from everyone’s point of view. To the white man it conflated two magics, that of the mimetically capacious shaman with that of the modern mimetic machine. To the native it must have been satisfying to have another happy client. Another form of trick performed by a shaman was wringing her hands to make a large pebble reproduce a continuous row of small pebbles on top of her drum. Bogoras tried to trick her into revealing her trick, but he was unable to. This is an important moment in the Western investigation of shamanism and we should not let it pass unnoticed no matter how much our attention is focused on the shaman’s tricks. It is a touching moment when the anthropologist tries to outsmart the shaman, something you don’t generally come across as recommended in standard texts on field methods such as Notes and queries. We shall observe it in detail later with E. E. Evans-Pritchard in Africa in the early 1930s. Another of this shaman’s tricks was to rip open the abdomen of her son to find and remove the cause of illness. “It certainly looked as if the flesh was really cut open,” said Bogoras. On both sides, from under the fingers flowed little streams of blood, trickling to the ground. “The boy lay motionless; but once or twice moaned feebly, and complained that the knife had touched his entrails.” The shaman placed her mouth to the incision and spoke into it. After some moments she lifted her head, and the boy’s body was quite sound. Other shamans made much of stabbing themselves with knives. Tricks are everywhere. As Bogoras concludes, “To describe any considerable number of tricks carried out by the shamans, both Chuckchee and Eskimo, would require too much space” (Bogoras 1969: 447). Yet can we resist mentioning a couple more? Upune, for instance, “pretended to draw a cord through her body, passing it from one spot to another. Then suddenly she drew it out, and immediately afterward pretended to cut it in two and with it the bodies of several of her children, who sat in front of her. These and other tricks resemble to a surprising degree the feats of jugglers all over the world. Before each performance, Upune would even open her hands, in the graceful manner of a professor of magic, to show us she had nothing in them.” The greatest trick was not that of being able to descend and walk in the underground but to change one’s sex, thanks to help from the spirits, a change that could well eventuate, at least in the case of a man, in his taking male lovers or becoming married to a man. Such “soft men,” as they were called, were feared for their magic more than unchanged men or women (Bogoras 1969: 447). A can of worms Every year from 1975 to 1997 I would visit the Putumayo region of Colombia’s southwest, a strikingly beautiful landscape of cloud forested steeply sloped ravines saturated in sorcery. I lived with my shaman friend, Santiago Mutumbajoy, a well-known indigenous healer using hallucinogens and music, and at onepoint, before [462]the guerrilla war became really serious, we were thinking of setting up a dual practice. I would do the Western medicine, he would do the rest. He would laugh a lot and loved jokes, usually in the form of gossip or stories about people and the strange situations in which they found themselves. There was one joke he loved in particular. It summed up centuries of colonial history and the ways by which history played a trick on itself: Europe’s conquest of the New World imputed magical powers to the savage such that modern-day colonists of the region, poor whites and blacks, and lately well-to-do urbanites, would seek out forest Indians for their alleged shamanic powers. Santiago Mutumbajoy found this uproariously funny, a trick to beat all tricks, as if keeping in reserve the other sort of magic, the “true” magic we might say, that came from centuries if not millennia of Indian history and culture. But of course was it possible in practice to separate these two sorts of magics? But the joke was on me in other ways as well. Like when I asked him how he became a shaman. When he was young and recently married, he replied, his wife was constantly ill. He and she consulted shaman after shaman at great expense with no relief until, one day, they heard that a white doctor was being sent by the government to the nearby town to treat Indians. They dressed in their finery, including swathes of necklaces of tiny colored glass beads, and walked to town. “Make way for the Indians! Make way for the Indians!” people said. On the balcony of a two-story house was the doctor. To her consternation he made his wife take off her shirt and began to palpate her chest, drumming one finger on top of another, laid flat, such that hollow booms followed muffled ones. He said she was anemic and gave her parasite medicine. A small boy they met going home explained there was more than one type of anemia. When she defecated a day or so later she expelled a lot of worms. “Look here!” she exclaimed. Santiago Mutumbajoy went over and looked. A great rage seized him. All those shamans had been fakes. And at that moment he decided to become a shaman. “A peculiar state of mind . . . it would be wonderful if a man could talk with animals and fishes” “It is perfectly well-known by all concerned,” wrote the eminent anthropologist Franz Boas toward the end of his career, that “a great part of the shamanistic procedure is based on fraud; still it is believed in by the shaman as well as by his patients and their friends. Exposures do not weaken the belief in the ‘true’ power of shamanism. Owing to this peculiar state of mind, the shaman himself is doubtful in regard to his powers and is always ready to bolster them up by fraud” (Boas 1966: 121). At the risk of being odiously pedantic, allow me to try to catch this slippery fish of Kwakiutl shamanism by itemizing its contradictory components as they come across here in Boas’s rendering. I am aware that all I demonstrate is that the more you try to pin this down, the more it wriggles, and this is, I guess, my labored point, to watch the figure of logic emerge as a vengeful force of pins and points bent on restraint.[463] All concerned know that a great part of shamanistic procedure is a fraud. Yet shaman, patient, and friends all believe in shamanism. Moreover, exposure of shamanism’s fraudulence does not weaken belief in it. But contrary to points 2 and 3, the presence of fraud does make the shaman doubt his or her worth. Point 4 has the effect that the shaman resorts to (further) fraud. Now start with point 1 again. A student of Franz Boas, Irving Goldman, emphasizes that “the Kwakiutl shaman relies heavily on elaborate tricks in his public demonstrations. He devises hidden trapdoors and partitions, and uses strings to cleverly manipulate artificial figures. He is in appearance the modern magician” (Goldman 1975: 102). Well, not quite. After all, magicians who screw up are not usually killed. After all, it’s only a trick. But hearken to Stanley Walens. “Anthropologists have often wondered,” he says, “why it is that the natives do not complain that the shamans are performing tricks and not real cures. They have found it difficult to explain the seeming paradox that while Kwakiutl shamans are admired for their abilities at legerdemain, if a shaman bungles one of these tricks, he is immediately killed” (Walens 1981: 24-25). At this point, let us pause and cast an eye over the strategies one might pursue to understand fraud as somehow not fraudulent at all but something true and even efficacious, what I keep referring to as the trick as technique. One could find relief in Boas’s statement that not all but only a (great) part of the shamanistic procedure is based on fraud and hope that the lesser part may turn out to be the more important. One could interrogate the meaning of belief as in “still it is believed in by the shaman as well as by his patients,” thus forcing the issue about the difference between belief as in a personal psychological state, versus belief as in “tradition” as some sort of cultural “script” (the British “intellectualist” approach to magic versus the French à la Emile Durkheim and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl), and so forth. One would also want to ask questions such as to what extent is belief ever an unflawed, confident, and consistent thing anyway? How much does one have to “believe” for shamanism to work? And so on (a well-worn path, actually). Or one could play the E. B. Tylor maneuver taken up, as we shall see later, by Evans-Pritchard, that because procedures for verification or falsification of the efficacy of magical healing are either not available, not practiced, or by definition inapplicable, there is always a way of explaining failure away (e.g., malevolence or ritual error on the part of the healer, a stronger sorcerer or spirit at work in the background). This argument is usually packaged with another: that this infamously “closed system,” about which so much has been written as regards Africa, is in some yet to be plausibly connected way associated with the yet to be explained belief that although any particular shaman may be fraudulent, shamanism is nevertheless valid (believed in, plausible, worth a shot?). It takes more than a few bad apples . . . Or one could substitute simulation or mimesis for fraud. This has remarkable fallout poetically as much as philosophically and is uncannily resonant with the ethnographic record itself—as we shall later see. With this, perhaps, our fish would [464]stop wiggling and start to swim, a manner of “resolving” contradiction I find preferable to that of pins and points.   Boas’s intimate knowledge concerning this “peculiar state of mind” came from his forty-year relationship with his Kwakiutl informant George Hunt and the ten thousand pages of material they published, plus several thousand more existing in manuscript form. Franz Boas’s texts on Kwakiutl society have been described by Stanley Walens as “one of the monuments of American cultural anthropology” (Walens 1981: 7). Walens also points out that the “degree to which the excellence of Boas’ work is the result of the meticulousness and diligence of both men [Hunt as well as Boas] has never been amply discussed” (Walens 1981: 9). Irving Goldman describes these texts as “probably the greatest single ethnographic treasure [in existence]” (Goldman 1975: vii). Hunt and Boas’s conversations concerning Hunt’s shamanic experiences began in 1897 and reached a peak almost thirty years later in the 1925 autobiographical text of Hunt’s that was published in both Kwakiutl and in English in 1930 as “I desired to learn the ways of the shaman” (Hunt 1930: 1-41). This text was miraculously delivered from obscurity two decades later by Claude Lévi-Strauss in a famous essay entitled “The sorcerer and his magic,” which was an attempt to provide what must seem now more of an expression of faith, as in structuralism, than an explanation of faith, as in magic, the point being that Hunt, known at the beginning of the 1930 essay as Giving-Potlatches-in-the-World, becomes by his own admission a famous shaman not so much despite but because of his profoundly skeptical attitude (Lévi-Strauss 1967: 161-80). In fact, over the twenty-nine years from 1897 to 1925, Hunt had given Boas no less than four accounts of his experience in becoming a shaman, and it was for Boas remarkable how the last account—the one that became published as “I desired to learn the ways of the shaman”—eliminated what Boas called all the supernatural elements in the earlier versions, in which Hunt vividly described his mysterious fainting fits as a child; finding himself naked in the graveyard at night; the visits by powerful spirits such as the killer whale named Tilting-in-Mid-Ocean who told him how to cure the chief ’s sick boy the following day; how the down indicative of disease just appeared of its own accord in his mouth as he was sucking out the disease; how killer whales accompanied his canoe; how he ate of the corpse of the shaman Life-Maker, and so forth. Most of the time, it seems, in the early versions, he was falling unconscious, passing out into these other realms, while in the last version, that of 1925, Hunt takes the position, as Boas puts it, that “his only object was to discover the frauds perpetrated by Shamans” (Boas 1966: 121). Small wonder then that confronted with contradictions such as these, and resolute to the facts at hand, Boas—unlike the fledgling field of British social anthropology, in the pioneering hands of Bronislaw Malinowski with his functionalist formula relating part to whole—never came up with a general theory or panoramic picture of Kwakiutl society. At one point Boas commonsensically noted that the skepticism displayed by Kwakiutl people toward magic should be seen as a political defense because Indians did not want to come across to whites as irrational and so would fake a critical attitude toward shamanism. (How things have changed now that “shamanism” has [465]become a darling of the white man!) Hence at one stroke we could dismiss questions concerning the place of skepticism in faith and simply view such perplexity as mere artifact of another sort of fraud—or is it mimesis?—namely, that of Indian self-representation to whites at that time and place. But then of course another hypothesis intrudes, that if fraud is an essential part of (Kwakiutl) shamanism, or at least of its “greater part,” as Boas elsewhere states with much vigor, and if skepticism exists alongside such fraud, then it probably wouldn’t require much eff ort, if any at all, to “adopt” (as Boas puts it) a skeptical attitude toward shamanism when talking to whites, and this would hold true for two connected reasons. The first is that skepticism is part of the greater part and that the Indian is merely being honest and is in fact giving “the native’s point of view” in admitting to the fraud, and the second is that insofar as one is being fraudulent vis-à-vis the white interlocutor, presumably one has had much practice with fraud and skepticism in discussing shamanism with fellow Indians anyway. And what are we to make of the fact that Hunt’s scathingly skeptical 1925 autobiographical account of shamanism comes not at the beginning but after forty years of friendship with Boas and that it is the earlier, not the last, versions that are mystical and not skeptical? Does not this timing tend to contradict Boas’s attempt to interpret the veracity of his Indian informant when he states that as a general rule the Indian is likely to stress skepticism with whites in order to appear rational? Wouldn’t the later version be more likely to be more honest and less concerned with creating a good—that is, rational—impression? What was there to hide about the culture after forty years?5 In any event, the colonial relationship through which such sensitive and imaginative activity as shamanism is to be conveyed inevitably becomes no less part of our object of study than the activity itself. To get to the truth about shamanism, we start to realize, means getting to the truth of an intercultural relationship objectified by means of autoethnographic intercultural texts such as the fourth version over three decades of “I Wished to Discover the Ways of the Shaman.”6 But this is most definitely not to say that the pervasive influence of colonialism accounts for skepticism with regards to the autoethnography of magic. On the contrary. The magic at stake here first and foremost concerns the way in which the colonial presence provides yet another figure to be caught in the legerdemain of revelation and concealment.[466] Perhaps an outline of Hunt’s meteoric shamanic career, as he presents it in his final, 1925, text, will assist us here, although the comforting sense of a career does scant justice to the zigzagging through contradiction that is entailed. First let us dwell on the fact that from the first line of his account, he presents himself as the arch-doubter, yet wants to learn the ways of the shamans. The tension here seems so carefully highlighted that it would surely be reasonable to venture the hypothesis that learning shamanism means sinking ever deeper into ambivalence—an interesting dilemma, perhaps, even a mystical exercise?— doubting it while believing it, doubting practitioners but not the practice, such that continuous oscillation without any resolution is what this learning process is all about. “I desired to learn about the shaman,” he starts off, “whether it is true or whether it is made up and whether they pretend to be shamans.” His doubting is all the more striking given that the two shamans with whom he is involved were also, as he states, his “intimate friends.” His first step is to be the target of a shaman’s vomited quartz crystal during a public healing ceremony. He himself, we might say, becomes a display object, a ritual within a ritual, a trick not unlike the trick with the concealed down in the mouth that he later learns for healing. Next he appears as a powerful shaman in the dream of a sick boy, the son of a chief, whose dream acts as a detailed script full of technique for the subsequently effective cure he practices on the young dreamer, and with this his fame is ensured, his name is changed, and a succession of shamanic competitions ensue as he travels the land in search of truth and technique in which he exposes other shamans as fakes or at the least puts the healing efficacy of their techniques in grave doubt, such that they are convinced that he possesses a secret more powerful than their own. At this point it should be noted that there is a curious substitution of secret for sacred. Irving Goldman tells us, for instance, that in many places “the Hunt manuscript is more precise [than Boas’s edited and published version] in rendering Kwakiutl meanings. For example, Boas characteristically converts Hunt’s ‘secret’ to ‘sacred’” (Goldman 1975: 86-87). The implications of this seem devastating. We are immediately alerted to a sort of game, even a conjuring game, in which the sense of something as secret has to be maintained at a pretty high level in the community of believers, but the secret itself must remain secret. What is important is the demand here for the continuous evocation of revelation and concealment. From the outset Hunt not only privately doubts shamanism but goes out of his way to publicize the fact. It seems culturally important to do this, making it clear that he is “the principal one” who does “not believe in all the ways of the shamans, for I had said so aloud to them” (Hunt 1930: 5). Yet far from his being the “principal one,” he lets you know that one of the first persons he meets after the quartz has been shot into him asks, “Have you not felt the quartz crystals of the liars, the shamans, the one that they referred to that was thrown into your stomach? . . . You will never feel it, for these are just great lies what the shamans say” (Hunt 1930: 5). And the head chief, Causing-to-be-Well, the next person with whom he speaks, similarly disabuses him: “They are just lies what the shamans say.”[467] Just about everyone, so it seems, revels in declaring shamans to be fakes and rarely lets an opportunity slip to insist on this elemental fact. What’s more, each time Hunt, known here as Giving-Potlatches-in-the-World, serves as a target of opportunity for the revelation of this fakery, his desire to learn the ways of the shamans redoubles. One really has to admire his enthusiasm—no less than that which the accomplished shamans bring to bear to the task of revealing their secrets. Take the case of the famous Koskimo shaman Aixagidalagilis, he who so proudly sang his sacred song, Nobody can see through the magic powerNobody can see through my magic power. But when Giving-Potlatches-in-the-World (i.e., George Hunt) cured the patient whom Aixagidalagilis was unable to cure, and did this through his pretense of trembling and through his pretense of sucking out the bloody worm of disease (I am merely emphasizing here what he says in his text), then Aixagidalagilis implores Hunt to reveal his secret: I pray you to have mercy and tell me what stuck on the palm of your hand last night. Was it the true sickness or was it only made up? (Hunt 1930: 31) This from the man who used to sing, “Nobody can see through my magic power.” “Your saying to me is not quite good,” responds Giving-Potlatches-in-the World, “for you said ‘Is it the true sickness, or is it only made up?’” Note that this is the very same Giving-Potlatches-in-the-World who has just finished singing his sacred song on completing his successful cure in front of the assembled throng, humiliating Aixagidalagilis: He tried to prevent me from succeeding, the one who does not succeed.Ah, I shall not try to fail to have no sacred secrets. (Hunt 1930: 30) Having been bettered, an amazing thing occurs. Aixagidalagilis pours out his secrets: “Let me tell you the way of my head ring of red cedar bark,” he says. Truly, it is made up what is thought by all the men it is done this way. Go on! Feel the thin sharp-pointed nail at the back of the head of this my cedarbark ring, for I tell a lie when I say that the alleged sickness which I pretend to suck out from the sick person. . . . All these fools believe it is truly biting the palm of my hand.” (Hunt 1930: 31-32) Once they lose out in competition, established shamans beseech Hunt for the secret of his technique. In doing so, however, they seem even more concerned with telling him theirs. In fact their predisposition to confess their secrets is breathtaking. The secret teaching of shamanism has thus built into it this emphatic and deliberate tirade of revelation!7[468] Thus the ways by which the deception was achieved is divulged in passionate and loving detail. And what a world is revealed! Nothing seems to have been without pretense, other, of course, than this exposure itself (and the doubleheaded serpent with the head of a human in its middle, about which more below). “It would be wonderful,” Aixagidalagilis says at one point, “if a man could talk with animals and fishes. And so the shamans are liars who say they catch the soul of the sick person, for I know we all own a soul” (Hunt 1930: 32). It is his daughter, Inviter-Woman, who then recounts what happened to this cynical manipulator that is her shaman-father—of the great unholiness that befell herself and him when, on account of his shame, they fled the haunts of men and in their wandering came across a creature lying crossways on a rock, which they recognized as the double-headed serpent, with a head at each end and a large human head in the middle. Seeing this they died, to be brought back to life by a man who told them he would have brought them good fortune, but because she was menstruating they would have trouble until they died.8 And from then on they were driven out of their minds. She was laughing as she told this, and then she would cry, pulling out her hair, and her father, the great pretender, died crazed within three winters. And the moral? “Now this is the end of talk about Aixagidalagilis who was believed by all the tribes to be really a great shaman who had gone through (all the secrets). Then I found out that he was just a great liar about everything that he did in his shamanism” (Hunt 1930: 35). Thus, we might say, shamans might be liars, but menstruation and doubleheaded serpents are not without a decidedly nasty potential. And surely this is one of those tales that not only belies the satisfaction of a moral or any other system but delights in exploiting the idea of one? This we might with truth call a “nervous system,” in which shamanism thrives on a corrosive skepticism and in which skepticism and belief actively cannibalize one another so that continuous injections of recruits, such as Giving-Potlatches-in-the-World, who are full of questioning are required. They are required, so it would seem, to test and therewith brace the mix by serving not as raw material of doubt positioned to terminate as believers, nor yet as cynical manipulators, but as exposers—vehicles for confession for the next revelation of the secret.   Technique is thus revealed as trick and it behooves us to inquire further into this momentous distinction—recalling how fundamental a role the passage from trick to technique is in Horkheimer and Adorno’s beguiling argument regarding the role of mimesis in the shamanism that in their opinion stands, so to speak, as doorway to Enlightenment and modern technology. Here I am indebted to Stanley Walen’s [469]reading of shamanic tricks as technique in the Boas-Hunt texts because of his pointing out the awesome magic of mimesis in which the practitioner sets up a performance, which, through its perfection, spirits will copy. This follows from the fact that the Kwakiutl believe their world is mimetically doubled in several ways, that “animals and spirits lead lives exactly equivalent to those of humans. They live in winter villages, perform dances, wear masks, marry, pray, and perform all other acts that humans perform.” When the shaman sucks disease from the human body, the spirits are there, sucking too. In this way magic involves what Walens calls “the magnification and intensification of a human action to a greater level of power” (Walens 1981: 24). Hence he can claim that there is no real paradox involved in shamanism, because the tricks turn out to be models or scenes for the spirits to follow, and it is the spirits who ultimately supply the cure. The apparent paradox is a result of the way Enlightenment disenchants the world such that for most of us spirits are to be explained rather than providing the explanation. It is devastating, I think, to read Walens when he tells us that the shaman is at all times dependent on the spirits and that “Kwakiutl pay no attention to the thoughts of the shaman while he is performing the act because the spirits effect the cure using the shaman as their instrument and the shaman’s thoughts are irrelevant to the efficacy of his cure” (Walens 1981: 25).9 In the Hunt text we read of a shaman talking to his rattle and getting it to swallow the disease of a sick man. Then he says to the spectators: “Did you see my rattle as it bit the palm of my hand after it had swallowed the great sickness?” Then he tells the song leaders to sing after him the words of his sacred song. Do those supernatural ones really see it?Those supernatural ones see it plainly, those supernatural onesNo one can imitate our great friends the supernatural onesWae. (Hunt 1930: 27-28) Nevertheless, a fundamental objection raises itself here: how does this explanation invoking spirits help us understand the continuous anxiety about pretense and the continuous excavation of fraud through revelation of the secret? In other words, given the creation of these marvelous simulacrums that instigate action on the part of the spirits, why is there continuous concealment and revelation, this other play of viscerality, faith, and skepticism, this play-within-the-play?[470] I doubt there is a satisfactory answer to this. Yet there is a clue where Walens points out that the “critical part of the cure is the fluidity, skill, and physical perfection with which the shaman performs his tricks, for it is the motions of the tricks (reinforced by their exact duplication by the spirits) that effect the cure” (Walens 1981: 25). “Motions of the tricks.” Walens calls it fluidity. I call it sheer becoming in which being and nonbeing are transformed into the beingness of transforming forms. In other words, “fluidity” to me suggests mimesis as a sort of streaming metamorphicity rather than replication as with a photograph. In the language set forth by The golden bough, this is magic of contagion and not of likeness, what Roman Jakobson, the famous linguist, inspired by the terms set forth in The golden bough, later called metonomy, meaning a sense of physical connection, versus metaphor, meaning likeness. Yet neither of these terms do justice to the fluidity that Walens refers to as “the critical part of the cure” because they are both too static and draw attention away from the sheer becoming and instead direct it towards the end result. What is required of us, I suggest, is that we adopt a particular view of what it is to reciprocate. We have to wrench ourselves away from the idea of reciprocation as a contract between humans and spirits responsible for effecting the cure. Instead it is the fluidity of the mimesis that is at stake and not some form of instrumentally conceived mutual aid. By this I mean that the performer is neither asking for a gift nor entering into a contract with the spirits so much as gearing into their world through the perfection of his performance of beingness. In later life, Nietzsche saw this as essential to the Dionysian state, in trance or ecstasy, with music and dance, the Dionysian character becomes totally plastic and protean in a rush of becoming other. This is not so much becoming any specific other so much as becoming becoming itself. Perhaps we could say, therefore, that the crucial thing is the repetition of concealment and revelation, for which moving in and out of the human body is the quintessential staging. “The characteristics of the physical movement made by the ritualist are of the greatest importance,” says Walens, “for the particular qualities of the movement he makes during the performance of the ritual will be repeated exactly in form, but with greatly increased power by the spirits” (Walens 1981: 25). An immensely suggestive feature is left hanging here, along with perfection and skill. “As long as the shaman performs his actions fluidly,” insists Walens, “the spirits are conjoined by cosmic forces to use their power to cure” (Walens 1981: 24). And whatever fluidity is, it is not bungling. “The shaman who bungles his tricks,” Walens goes on to say, “forces the spirits to perform actions that are as disjointed, undirected, and destructive as his.” Not only does this bungling not result in a cure, but far worse, it actually kills people by unleashing what Walens refers to as “uncontrollable chaotic power on the world.” For this reason, the bungler must be immediately killed before he or she can do greater damage. To say the least, this puts Giving-Potlatches-in-the-World’s desire to learn the ways of the shaman in admirable perspective. If what Walens states is true, then it would seem almost suicidal to be a shaman. I am reminded of Boas describing the reaction of members of the seal society when they notice a mistake in the dancing or singing of the performer in the Winter Ceremonial; they jump from their seats and bite and scratch the person who [471]made the mistake, who then pretends to faint, meaning that the spirit has taken the performer away. Members of the seal society sit on the platform of the house or stand during the dances to be certain of discovering mistakes. It is said that in former times, if the cannibal dancer fell while dancing, he was killed by the other cannibal dancers, often at the insistence of the dancer’s father (Walens 1981: 25; Boas 1895: 433-34).   Whatever we might mean here by sacredness, it surely has a great deal to do with the flow in technique in Kwakiutl shamanism, a shamanism that bears heavily on the facility with which soul can be dislocated from the body, implicating not one but several bodies and energies flowing into and out of one another across borders accessed by dream, surrealism, and animal visitations. Take the toad or the wolves come down the beach vomiting foam over the human body while the others lie dying on account of the holocaust brought by white society in the form of smallpox, reducing the Kwakiutl population by an unbelievable 80 to 90 percent from 1862 to 1929. (The precontact population has been estimated as between 15,000 to 20,000 persons [Masco 1995: 55-56].) As I understand it, the flow is in the song, the body of the song, which takes speech to another plane of being’s being. Flow is what is going on between animals and humans—as from the very beginning of Kwakiutl time when the original ancestors took off their animal masks and skins to present their human selves. The flow is also from the clothes, presumably of the white people, the flow of the pox. “After we had stepped from our canoe,” recounts Fool, describing how he became a shaman, “we found much clothing and flour. We took them and ten days later became sick with the great smallpox. We lay in bed in our tent. I was laying among them. Now I saw that all our bodies swelled and were dark red. Our skins burst open and I did not know that they were all dead and I was laying among them. Then I thought I also was dead.” Wolves came down to the beach, whining and howling, licking his body, he recounted, vomiting foam, which they put into his body. They tried hard, he explains, to put foam all over his body, continuously licking him and turning him all over. When it was all licked off, they vomited over him again, licking off the scabs of smallpox in the process. All manner of incredible things happen here, beginning with the devastating smallpox left by the white man. Then there is the fact that the wolf speaks as a human and it is the same wolf who said his name was Harpooner-Body that Fool had saved out at sea on a rock earlier choking to death on a bone. The wolf not only vomits foam over the dying Fool but nuzzles his nose into his sternum as if trying hard to enter into him too. Perhaps Fool is making all this up, equivalent to the legerdemain for which shamanism is famous. But then this weaving in and out of other realities, akin to weaving in and out of other bodies, is what living in that Kwakiutal world is all about. “He sat down seaward from me and nudged me with his nose that I should lie down on my back, and he vomited and pushed his nose against the lower end of my sternum. He vomited the magic power into me . . . Now I was a shaman” (Boas 1930: 41ff). Above all, however, what I find outstanding is a certain quality of flow-within-flow provided by materials such as vomit and foam, how they are made to cover the human body while with equal assiduity they are then removed through licking. [472]This amounts to the same action as concealing and revealing, reinforced by the fact that it is clothes, outer coverings, that are left on the beach that attract the Indians, and that the smallpox has one its leading manifestations, the pustules and redness of the swollen skin, blowing out as an envelope from the frame of the body. What is more it is the wolf ’s insides—its tongue—licking up the exteriorized material from its deeper insides—its own foam-vomit—that clinches this engagement of insides with outsides, endlessly repeated at the point of immense death there on the smallpox scene of the beach. “Now I saw I was lying among my dead past nephews” (Hunt 1930: 41).   “We might say,” says Walens, “that the Kwakiutl play games as much with the spirits as with their human opponents” (Walens 1981: 26). In this regard it is illuminating to read the vicissitudes of Boas’s translation of the Kwakiutl name of the stupendously important Winter Ceremonial, when the spirits emerge in their fullness from November well into the following year and take over the life of the villages. This is when humans impersonate the spirits. They enact the myths pertaining to the origins of human acquisition of supernatural powers from some fifty-three human-animal doubles such as Wolf, Killer Whale, Eagle, Thunderbird, and Man Eater (“Cannibal Dancer”).10 The name of the Winter Ceremonial, tsetseqa, is curious. Boas says it means “fraudulent” or “to cheat,” as well as being synonymous with to be good-minded and happy. “For instance, when a person wants to find out whether a shaman has real power or whether his power is based on pretense, he uses the same term meaning ‘pretended, fraudulent, made-up’ shaman. Even in the most serious presentations of the ceremonial, it is clearly and definitely stated that it is planned as a fraud” (Hunt 1930: 172). In The mouth of heaven, Irving Goldman tries to mitigate this curiousness by arguing that Boas’s translation is crude. It should, claims Goldman, using Boas’s posthumous grammar, mean imitated (Goldman 1975: 102). Here, I think, fortuitous as it may be, we have located the core of the riddle, especially when one notes that Boas had, according to Goldman, “in an earlier stab at translation” suggested that the stem of the word for the winter ceremonial, tseka, meant secrets. There is a certain anxiety, even pain and craziness, here, as Goldman heatedly insists that to imitate is not necessarily to secularize. Who ever said it was? What’s the problem? All these words start to swim in multiple and multiply conflicting configurations of overlapping associations and streams of reversible meanings: fraud simulation exalted imitation secret happiness sacred [473]From here on, the ground becomes steep and slippery and perhaps only fools dare go further, as the impenetrable mysteries of representation and reality, within Western philosophy alone, not to mention Kwakiutl, emerge full force.   Yet if there is a moral, it might be this: that the real novice-shaman in “I Wished to Discover the Ways of the Shaman” was Franz Boas and, beyond him, by implication, the science of man he came to spearhead and the momentous historical moment of modernity that spawned this science. This, of course, very much implicates us too and yet gives us the choice provided by this insight. For the point of the text as I read it (and as is amply confirmed by Boas’s later commentary) is not that Boas as a neutral observer and recording angel somehow lucked out and found the one unique Enlightenment individual ready to challenge hocus-pocus and give the inside story to our man from New York, nor even that there seems to be a ready supply of such skeptics, but that the text in itself, an artifact of the fledgling science of anthropology, especially one given over to giving the natives’ point of view, is an utterly perfect instance of the confession of the secret, the very acme of the skilled revelation of skilled concealment—in this case using a scholarly inflected academic anthropological text—another form of “winter ceremonial,” another form of rite, as the vehicle for carrying this out. In other words, this text is not so much about shamanism as it is shamanic in its conformity to the cannibalistic logic of having to have ever-fresh recruits for ceaseless confession, such that in its very skepticism lies its profound magic, making it difficult to accept Lévi-Strauss’s conclusion that at the end Giving-Potlatches-in-the-World seems to have lost sight of his fallacious technique and, by implication, has crossed the threshold from skepticism to faith, from science to magic. For Levi-Strauss’s mistake lies in not having taken with enough seriousness the necessity for skepticism in magic as relayed through rituals of exposure and unmasking and, second, in not having seen the text “I desired to learn the ways of the shaman” as in itself just this very ritual transposed into textual form and readied as science by the anthropologist. Leaving this text as Kwakiutal speak in the mode of Boas or recruiting it as does Lévi-Strauss for the purpose of validating structuralism, misses the point but also the invitation that such ritual offers—that it lives as magic and makes claims even on us non-Indians in its request for a reciprocal response composed in equal measure of confessional responsibility and judicious and intricately moving medleys of skepticism and faith, continuously deferred through the opening and closing of the secret.   For we have our tricks to develop too, “the trick of the floating quartz crystal,” we might call this, involving a heightened sensitivity to fluidity, mass, and movement no less than to ecstatic moments of appearance and disappearance of objects inside and between bodies as when the liberated quartz crystal vomited out by the shaman Making-Alive enters the body of our friend here, Giving-Potlatches-in-the-World. “‘Now this one will be a great shaman,’ said he” (Hunt 1930: 4). This suggests a certain fluidity of performance with human identities, if not with the logic of becoming itself, the song leaders beating fast time as Fool looks upward, watching the quartz float around in the cedar beams, while Making-Alive staggers like a drunk around the fire in the middle of the house in front of a great mass of onlookers.[474] Might we not say that the reality of shamanism hangs on the reality of this fragment of flickering light in tumbling stone, passing between intestines through streams of vomit, lost for the moment in a graceful float up there in the cedar rafters? There are many issues here, but keep your eye on the quartz crystal floating free. For who knows how short or long a time it stays up in the air heavy with the tension of bodily interconnection? The quartz is a trick and the trick is a figure and the figure of the trick is one of continuous movement and metamorphosis in, through, and between bodies, carrying power one jump ahead of its interpretation. The language of true or false seems not just peculiarly inept here but deliberately so. At one point, struggling to understand the place of theater and spirit impersonation in the Winter Ceremonial, Irving Goldman seems to be stating that mimetic simulation is a way of keeping hidden things hidden while at the same time revealing them, of keeping secret things secret while displaying them. “The ceremonies deal with the secret matters that are always hidden and can be experienced, therefore, only in a simulated form” (Goldman 1975: 102). I can think of no better way of expressing my thesis regarding the skilled revelation of skilled concealment. Dancing the question Indeed, skepticism is included in the pattern of belief in witchdoctors.Faith and skepticism are alike traditional. (Evans-Pritchard 1937: 193) Witchcraft was ubiquitous in Zande life when Evans-Pritchard, fondly remembered in anthropological circles as EP, carried out fieldwork in the watersheds of the Nile and Congo rivers in the early 1930s, and it was witchcraft, oracles, and magic that were the focus of interest of his first publication about these people in a book that through the sheer brilliance of its writing and intellect came to define the field of study of magic, and much else besides. Yet at the outset, it should be emphasized how curiously unclear this transparently transparent book actually is when any particular point is examined, how certainties dissolve into ever more mystifying contradictions magically dispelled, momentarily, as it were, by the author’s self-assured explanations of the multifarious aspects of magical phenomena. I take this to be striking confirmation of how magic begs for and at the same time resists explanation most when appearing to be explained and that therefore in its unmasking, magic is in fact made even more opaque, a point given a special twist here through the technique, or is it a trick? of (what Clifford Geertz has called) EP’s “transparencies” (Geertz 1983: 62-80). Now, witch-doctors are those persons, generally male, whose task it is to divine the presence and identity of a witch in this witch-infested Zande land and heal the sicknesses arising therefrom. They belong to corporations with group secrets. Initiation into the group is long and arduous. These secrets are the knowledge of medicines together with what EP calls their “tricks of the trade,” principal of which is the actual extraction by hand or mouth of objects such as bits of charcoal, splinters, black beetles, or worms from the body of the victim of witchcraft. There are [475]plenty of other tricks too, such as vomiting blood, extracting worms from one’s own person, resting heavy weights on one’s chest, and shooting black beetles and bits of charcoal from one’s leg into the body of somebody else, even over large distances. But no trick is as secretly guarded, in EP’s narrative, as that of extracting the witchcraft object from the body of the sick. Whether we are to call these tricks or techniques, I for the moment leave for you to decide. (That is pretty much an EP sort of sentence, in both senses of the word.) The doctors would not divulge their secrets to EP. He in turn decided that entering into the corporation himself would be counterproductive and so instead paid for his Zande servant, Kamanga, to undergo initiation in order to “to learn all about the techniques of witchdoctors.” Kamanga, we are told, was a gullible man with profound faith in witch-doctors.11 EP was able to learn even more by using the secrets elicited by Kamanga to play on rivalries between doctors. But he felt sure that certain things, notably the extraction of witchcraft objects, would not be told to Kamanga because he had been “straightforward,” as he says, in telling the doctors that he expected Kamanga to pass on all he had learned. “In the long run, however,” EP adds, striking a militant note, “an ethnographer is bound to triumph. Armed with preliminary knowledge nothing can prevent him from driving a deeper and deeper wedge if he is interested and persistent” (Evans-Pritchard 1937: 152). We seem a long way from Nietzsche’s gay science, in which “We no longer believe that truth remains truth when the veils are withdrawn. . . . What is required for that is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance” (Nietzsche 1974: 38). But like most of us, EP just has to get to the bottom with his wedge driving deeper and deeper—his aim is to expose the exposure of the witchcraft object extracted through the surface, the fold, the skin, as if penetrated by surgical incision. What’s more, his obsessive search for truth seems to share a good deal with the doctors whose secrets he is intent on uncovering. Like them he uses artifice and like them he extracts worms, or their equivalent: “It would,” he declares, “have been possible by using every artifice to have eventually wormed out all their secrets, but this would have meant bringing undue pressure on people to divulge what they wished to hide” (emphasis added, Evans-Pritchard 1937: 151). And while the anthropologist digs deep, be it noted, the witch-doctor brings the secret to the surface, counterposed movements destined to meet in the pages of the monograph, a triumphant conjunction of movements through which the anthropologist is drawn into a ritual scheme, neither of his own choosing nor understanding—that in telling the witch-doctors his servant is to reveal to him the secrets they tell to him, he is thereby fulfilling to the letter the need for unmasking that the secrets of their magic actually demand. In other words, there is this oblique ritual of exposure of the secret within the witch-doctors’ ritual, which the presence of the anthropologist has here drawn from its otherwise obscure existence.[476] Such rituals of exposure seemed common enough. Young nobles loved to expose witch-doctors by tricking them—an activity EP refers to as “testing” and as “playing a joke.” He tells us how a commoner friend of his, Mbira, once placed a knife in a covered pot and asked doctors to divine what lay within. The three doctors danced in the fierce sun the better part of the day, trying unsuccessfully to ascertain the contents, and, grabbing the opportunity, one sought out Mbira in his hut and pleaded he be secretly told the answer and thus avoid humiliation. Mbira refused, calling him a knave (Evans-Pritchard 1974: 186). Only a people imbued with a measure of skepticism could indulge in such activities, EP points out (neglecting to wonder at the witch-doctors’ motivation in agreeing to participate in such tests), and yet Mbira believed firmly in every kind of magic, was himself a magician of standing, and consulted witch-doctors when he had a problem. But I want to go further and ask why a sincere or even just your middling sort of skeptic would want to indulge in such sport given such skepticism? And the answer, I submit, has a good deal to do with the need for rites of exposure built into rites of magic in order to strengthen magic itself. There is in EP’s book a dramatic moment of great poignancy concerning rites of exposure, and as an aside, I would like to note how wonderfully postmodern this 1930s straight-from-the-hip text is, how it has sneaked into the canon for other than what it is, you might say, with its anecdotal form of analysis; its studious, almost manic aversion to theory in place of storytelling; its constant swerving away from what is supposed to be the point; and, above all, the way its contradictions not merely pass for a seamless argument regarding the explanation of witchcraft, for instance, but are indispensable to it. The “closed system” of witchcraft consisting of a web of mutually reinforcing propositions impervious to contradiction, made famous by this book, is exemplified by the book itself. The book is the best example of the witchcraft it purports to explain. Far be it for me to expose such exposure. Instead I want to recall that memorable day EP out-tricked the trickster when his servant, Kamanga, under the tutelage of his instructor, Bogwozu, was about to wipe the body of a sick man (another servant of EP’s) with the poultice of grass prepared by Bogwozu. This, we are told, is standard medical practice. It is wiped over the abdomen of the patient with the aim of extracting an object of witchcraft, which, if extracted, is shown to the patient, who is then likely to recover. But it was this technique that, to EP’s chagrin, the witch-doctors stubbornly refused to impart to Kamanga because “they were naturally anxious that” EP “should not know their trade secret (Evans-Pritchard 1974: 230). It was a complicated state of affairs, made even more so by the fact that Kamanga himself stubbornly held to the belief that there was no trickery involved in this technique. Now I want you to concentrate on the complexity of this situation in its various shadings of gullibility and trickery, faith and skepticism. First, the anthropologist tricks the witch-doctor: When the teacher handed over the poultice to his pupil I took it from him to pass it to Kamanga, but in doing so I felt for the object which it contained and removed it between my finger and thumb while pretending to make a casual examination of the kind of stuff the poultice consisted of and commenting on the material.[477]It was a disagreeable surprise for Kamanga when, after massaging his patient’s abdomen through the poultice, in the usual manner of witch-doctors, and after then removing the poultice, he could not find any object of witchcraft in it. (Evans-Pritchard 1974: 231) Then, the exposure: I considered the time had now come to stop proceedings and I asked Kamanga and his teacher to come to my hut a few yards away, where I told them that I had removed the charcoal from the poultice, and asked Bogwozu to explain how it had got there. For a few minutes he pretended incredulity and asked to see the object, since he said that such a thing was impossible, but he was clever enough to see that further pretence would be useless, and, as we were in private, he made no further difficulty about admitting the imposture. (Evans-Pritchard 1974: 231) We can read this as yet another crass instance of colonial power flexing Enlightenment muscle against primitive magic, staging its own rites of scientific method right there in the heartland of magic. We could also read this a quite different way, that the anthropologist was doing little more than the culturally appropriate thing. For just as Mbira took delight in ridiculing witch-doctors as described above, so the anthropologist was following a well-worn path, although there are no instances described of Zande’s being as sneaky or as daring as EP in actually removing the key to the trick midway through the healing of a sick person. After all, it is one thing to test a doctor’s powers. It is another thing to trick him and, who knows? thereby contribute to the death of the sick person. In any case, the point to consider here is whether the anthropologist was himself part of a larger and more complex staging in which exposure of tricks is the name of the game and that what we are witness to via the text is an imaginative, albeit unintended and serendipitous, rendition of the skilled revelation of the skilled concealment necessary to the mix of faith and skepticism necessary to magic. Finally, we have to consider the effect that the teacher’s confession and the revelation of trickery had on the young pupil: It seems like unmasking actually adds to, rather than eliminates, the mysterium tremendum of magic’s magic. The effects of these disclosures on Kamanga was devastating. When he had recovered from his astonishment he was in serious doubt whether he ought to continue his initiation. He could not at first believe his eyes and ears, but in a day or two he had completely recovered his poise and developed a marked degree of self-assurance which if I am not mistaken he had not shown before this incident. (emphasis added, Evans-Pritchard 1974: 231) We see this paradoxical impact of unmasking again when the anthropologist, constantly on the lookout for “tricks,” fails to see that he is instead party to the skilled revelation of skilled concealment. For example, Kisanga, “a man of unusual brilliance,” told EP how a witch-doctor begins his treatment: When a man becomes sick they send for a witch-doctor. Before the witchdoctor comes to the sick man he scrapes down an animal’s bone and hammers it till it is quite small and then drops it into the medicines [478]in his horn. He later arrives at the homestead of the sick man and takes a mouthful of water and swills his mouth round with it and opens his mouth so that people can look into it. He also spreads out his hands to them so that everyone can see them, and speaks thus to them: “Observe me well, I am not a cheat, since I have no desire to take anything from any one fraudulently” (Evans-Pritchard 1974: 191-92). “Some training in trickery is essential,” writes the anthropologist in that confidence-restoring tone that talking about other people’s trickery seems to always instill. In the first place, the Zande has a broad streak of skepticism towards his leeches who have therefore to be careful that their sleight-of-hand is not observed. . . . If the treatment is carried out in a certain manner, as when the bingba grass is used as a poultice, he will be frankly suspicious. But if the witch-doctor sits down on a stool and calls upon a third person to cut kpoyo bast and make a poultice of it, rinses his mouth with water, and holds his hands for inspection, suspicions will be allayed.12 It is hard not to feel these ostentatiously demonstrative acts of denial are saying the very opposite and that everyone knows (and probably enjoys) that. It is also hard to believe that the anthropologist is alone in detecting skilled concealment of trickery as when he writes, “If you accompany a witch-doctor on one of his visits you will be convinced, if not of the validity of his cures, at least of his skill. As far as you can observe, everything which he does appears to be aboveboard, and you will notice nothing which might help you to detect fraud” (Evans-Pritchard 1974: 232-33). EP is so busy looking for concealed trickery he doesn’t realize that he might be a privileged witness of its skilled revelation and that the secret of the secret is that there is none or, rather, that the secret is a public secret, something generally known but that cannot generally be articulated. This is not a question of seeing more or seeing less or seeing behind the skin of appearance. Instead it turns on seeing how one is seeing. Whatever magic is, it must also involve this turn within the known unknown and on what this turn turns on, namely, a new attitude to skin. As Nietzsche would have it, the biggest secret of all is that there is no “underneath” or “behind.” God is dead and metaphysics is magic. Deferral, performed The way I read him there are by EP’s reckoning two ways by which faith manages to live with and overcome skepticism concerning witch-doctors. One is what was noted by E. B. Tylor by way of probabilities wherein one says that even though most doctors are fake, there are some who are not, and it is often the case, says EP, that a Zande never knows whether any particular doctor is a cheat or not and hence faith [479]in any particular practitioner is tempered by skepticism. There is, in other words, a rock-steady ideal of the truly endowed witch-doctor who can divine and cure the evil effects of witches, and now and again the ideal appears actualized. Let it be noted that the probability of the ideal being actualized increases the farther you go from home; the magic of the other is more truly magical, and faith lies in distance and hence difference. The second way by which faith coexists with and even triumphs over skepticism lies in the use of substances, of which there are two: herbal medicines; and the human body, as with the body of the witch, inheritor of witchcraft substance, mangu, and as with the witch-doctor’s medicine-laden body in motion, dancing the questions.13 If the first mode, that of probabilities, rests on the logic of the general and the particular, the ideal and the actual; the second rests on the heterogeneity of matter as force. It is deferment that these two apparently dissimilar explanations for the coexistence of faith with skepticism have in common, a continuous and relentless deferral—a positing and flow of intellection that stands in marked contrast to the driving of the wedge, the wedge itself being driven by the quest for the catharsis of the triumphant revelation of the secret. The explanation through probabilities refers us back to where we started in the middle of the problem of magic’s truth, which is a truth continuously questioning its own veracity of being. Circular reasoning and doublings back are the movements of intellection here, not the wedge. Deferral also lies here in the power of the “stranger effect,” meaning that truth lies in a never-attainable beyond and that cheating is merely the continuous and expected prelude to the mere possibility of authenticity, for behind this cheat stands the shadow of the real in all its perfection, but even this real is strange and never homely or destined for homeliness for all of that. Authenticity is that beyond that is permanently beyond the horizon of being. As for medicines, in many ways the bedrock of the entire system of witch-doctoring, subject of careful instruction over years of training and of much secrecy as well, deferral could not be more obvious on account of the massive, world-consuming tautology on which the medicines rest; namely, that not only do they serve as the basis for faith in witch-doctoring, as EP’s text tirelessly informs us, but the medicines are themselves the quintessence of magical power, and so we end up with no end in sight but that of tracing an endless circle in which magic explains magic. It [480]is medicine that ensures magical power, as in accuracy of divination. “Thus my old friend Ongosi used to tell me,” the anthropologist informs us, that “most of what the witch-doctors told their audiences was just bera, just ‘supposition’: they think out what is the most likely cause of any trouble, and put it forward, in the guise of an inspired oracle, as a likely guess, but it is not sangba ngua, the words of medicine, i.e., it is not derived from the medicines they have eaten (Evans-Pritchard 1974: 184).” To become a witch-doctor, one must learn the medicines and partake in the communal meal of these medicines with other doctors as well as be taken to their legendary source, a stream in the watershed of the Nile and Congo rivers, where, in caves, some of the more powerful plants are to be found. There are many magical things about medicine, beginning with the fact that medicine connects the interiority of one’s body with other bodies and with substances exterior to one’s body. Indeed it is with medicine that the very force of being—as opposed to meaning—is best established, medicines being the fluid flow by which the exterior penetrates the interior to fundamentally empower the soul of the doctor-in-training. The novice must hold his face in the steam of the cooking pot but with his eyes open so that the medicines will eventually allow him to see witches and witchcraft. The medicines are served in a highly ritualistic way, with the server offering the spoonful of medicine from the cooking pot to the mouth of one man, only to quickly remove it as he goes to swallow it by offering it to another. Incisions are made on the chest, above the shoulder blades, and on the wrists and face, and medicine is rubbed in (Evans-Pritchard 1974: 210-211). The medicines are spoken to as they are being cooked and as they are being rubbed into the novice’s body. As soon as a novice has eaten medicine, he begins to dance. Medicine must be paid for, that is, it must be reciprocated by another gift otherwise the medicine may not work, and payment must be made in sight of the medicine. “Purchase is part of the ritual conditioning of the magic which gives it potency,” we are told, and this seems to imply some humanlike mentation and capacity for retribution on the part of the medicine itself, as much as of a dissatisfied vendor. EP tells us of a witch-doctor placing money—an Egyptian piaster—of his own on the ground when treating a patient, explaining “that it would be a bad thing if the medicine did not observe a fee, for it might lose its potency” (Evans-Pritchard 1974: 209). At one point, EP refers to this exchange as a gift. If angered, a witch-doctor can use magic to remove the magic of the medicine he has “sold” to a novice by taking a forest creeper and attaching it to the top of a flexible stick stuck in the ground to form a sort of bowstring, to which he brings a few drops of the magic of thunder such that the medicine will roar and break the creeper, the top half flying on high, the lower staying in the earth. As the top half flies, so the medicine flies out of the novice (Evans-Pritchard 1974: 213-14). This is one of the very few instances where magic depends on metaphor—as opposed to substances in contact with one another. By far the bulk of the instances supplied in this long text referring to witch-doctors are visceral and concern flows of physical force and interruptions to such flows in chains of metamorphic connectedness. In any event, it certainly seems like that what we have here are powerful instances of magic explaining magic in a circular, albeit staggered, manner, and that this is the movement of deferral par excellence in which the very idea of a secret [481]behind a façade to be unearthed by the zealous ethnographer driving his wedge is extraordinarily naïve. Nowhere does the existence of deferral intrinsic to the mix required of faith and skepticism find more dramatic expression than in the witch-doctors’ séance of divination. “A witch-doctor does not only divine with his lips, but with his whole body. He dances the questions which are put to him,” states the anthropologist in what must be the most exquisite description of dance in anthropological writing, comparable to that of Maya Deren (1983; Evans-Pritchard 1974: 154-82). He dances the questions. His body moves back and forth in the semicircle bounded by the witch-doctors’ upturned horns filled with medicines. He kicks up his leg if annoyed by the slackness of the chorus of young boys and may shoot black beetles into them. The spectators throw their questions concerning the witchcraft bothering them. Back and forth, question and answer, another circle is being traced as the doctor leaps and swirls through the heat of the day for hours on end as the answer is ever more refined through clever elimination of alternatives and leaps of intuition. Gongs and drums resound. Back and forth go the questions and the answers as the public secrets of envy and resentment are aired in this flurry and fury of intellect and bodies in motion. The dancing is ecstatic and violent. The dancer slashes his body, and blood flows. Saliva froths around the lips. The medicines in the body are activated by the dance, just as the medicines in their turn activate dancing. When a question is put to a particular doctor, he responds by going up to the drummers to give a solo performance, and when he can dance no more, as if intoxicated, he shakes his hand bells to tell the drummers to cease and, his body doubled over, looks into the medicines obtained in his upturned horns on the ground and he voices his oracular reply. He dances the question, and the dancing is spectacular. “The dance of the Zande witch-doctors,” writes the anthropologist, “is one of the few performances I have witnessed in Africa which really comes up to the standards of sensational journalism. It is weird and intoxicating” (Evans-Pritchard 1974: 162). Here trickery is deferred, transmuted into theater where theater meets the magic—the weirdness and intoxication—of a ritual. The various dichotomies of trick and technique, intellect and intuition, secrecy and public secrecy, are deferred by a series of other types of knowledge given in a body dancing the question under an open sky. This is neither a question of replacing mind by body nor of sense by the senses but of giving to the skilled revelation of skilled concealment a density and fluidity almost sufficient to dispel the craving for certainty that secrecy inspires. It is this revelation of the already known, the public secret, that the witch-doctor dances in his dance of faith and skepticism. Turning tricks All along I have been asking myself, What, then, is a trick? I keep thinking of the way a trick is a subterfuge but also something that highlights nature’s mysteries as well as those inherent to social institutions and personal relationships. I think of the tricks performed by an acrobat or by a diver performing twists and somersaults or a cardsharp pulling aces. All these tricks require inordinate skill, inordinate [482]technique, inordinate empathy with reality. Wouldn’t this make the trick equivalent to technology, that inner knowing, the art and magic, which has to be added to technology so it fully functions? By the same token, is magic cheating on technique, or is it instead the supreme level of technique, so rarified, so skilled, that it passes from mere technique to something we might dignify as magical or sacred—as with a musician, a brain surgeon, or a short-order cook? Like a gambler or a shaman, the practitioners of such skills take on the laws— the natural laws—of chance and scorning distance they use mimesis to merge with the object imitated. This is a sexual act as that devout gambler, Walter Benjamin, noted in describing gambling as an erotic passion whose thrill lay in cheating on fate (Benjamin 2002). This brings us back to the beginning, to those “corporeal techniques” that Marcel Mauss said underlie all our mystic states for entering into communication with God. As I have tried to show, such techniques of the body notably employ sleight of hand involving revelation and concealment, that is to say, skilled revelation of skilled concealment. Whether God really listens is another matter, but between the bosom of Justice and that of Janet Jackson, we can surely plot the curve of our epoch and its hopes. References Benjamin, Walter. 2002. Convolute 0, “Prostitution and Gambling” in The arcades project. Boston: Harvard University Press. Boas, Franz. 1985. The social organization and the secret societies of the Kwakiutal Indians. Washington, D.C.: United States National Museum report. ———. 1930. “Talk about the great shaman of the Nak!waxdax called fool,” in The religion of the Kwakiutal Indians, part 2, Translations. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1966. “Religion of the Kwakiutal Indians,” in Kwakiutal ethnography, edited by Helen Codere. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bogoras, Waldemar. 1969. The Chukchee, edited by Franz Boas, American Museum of Natural History memoirs, 11. New York: Johnson. Reprint. Bridges, E. Lucas. 1951. Uttermost part of the Earth. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Curtis, Edward S. 1915. The North American Indian, vol. 10. New York: Johnson. Reprint. Cushing, Frank Hamilton. 1979. “My adventures in Zuni,” in Zuni: selected writings of Frank Hamilton Cushing, edited by Jesse Green. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Deren, Maya. 1983. Divine horsemen: The living Gods of Haiti. New Paltz, NY: McPherson. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1937. Witchcraft, oracles, and magic among the Azande. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Flaherty, Gloria. 1992. Shamanism and the eighteenth century. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1980. The history of sexuality, vol. 1, An introduction, translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage.[483] Geertz, Clifford. 1983. “Slide show: Evans Pritchard’s African transparencies,” Raritan 3 (2): 62–80. Goodstein, Laurie and Juan Forero. 2005. “Robertson suggests U.S. kill Venezuela’s leader,” New York Times, 24 August. Gusinde, Martin. 1982. Los Selk’nam, vol. 1 of Los indios del Tierra del Fuego, translated by Werner Hoffman. Buenos Aires: Centro Argentina de Etnología Americano. Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. 1969. Dialectic of enlightenment, translated by John Cumming. New York: Continuum. Hunt, George. 1930. “I desired to learn the ways of the shaman,” in Franz Boas, The religion of the Kwakiutal Indians, part 2, Translations. New York: Columbia University Press. Kafka, Franz. 1983. “Cares of a family man” in The complete stories. New York: Schocken Books. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1967. “The sorcerer and his magic,” in Structural anthropology. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967. Masco, Joseph. 1995. “’It’s a strict law which bids us dance’: Cosmologies, colonialism, death, and ritual authority in the Kwakwaka’wakw potlatch, 1849 to 1922,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37.01: 41-75. Mauss, Marcel. 1979. “Body techniques,” in Marcel Mauss, Sociology and psychology translated by Ben Brewster from “Les techniques du corps,” lecture 17 May, 1934. London: Routledge. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1968. The birth of tragedy, translated with commentary by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage. ———. 1974. The gay science, translated with commentary by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage. Steinberg, Leo. 1996. The sexuality of Christ in Renaissance art and in modern oblivion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Second edition. Taussig, Michael. 1992. “Why the nervous system?” in The nervous system. New York: Routledge. Tylor, Edward Burnett. (1871) 2010. Primitive culture. New York: Cambridge University Press Walens, Stanley. 1981. Feasting with cannibals: An essay on Kwakiutl cosmology. Princeton: Princeton University Press.   Michael TAUSSIG is the Class of 1933 Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. His books include The devil and commodity fetishism in South America (University of North Carolina Press, 1980), Shamanism, colonialism, and the wild man (University of Chicago Press, 1987) and, most recently, The corn wolf (University of Chicago Press, 2015). ___________________ Editorial Note: This article is a reprint of Taussig, Michael. 1998. “Viscerality, faith, and skepticism: Another theory of magic.” In In near ruins: Cultural theory at the end of the century, edited by Nicholas B. Dirks, 221–56. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. We warmly thank the author and the University of Minnesota Press for extending permission to reprint this article. We remind the reader that, with the exception of minor changes to formatting, we retain the style of the original. 1. Note that Bridges spoke the Ona (Selk’nam is the native term) language, and when he describes speech as guttural he is not necessarily mistaken. Joon is the word for shaman or native doctor. 2. And note the story in Gusinde’s more than one thousand pages of ethnography on the Selk’nam (based on fieldwork undertaken over four trips between 1918 and 1924) of how in 1919 a group of medicine men had been offered presents by Bridges’s brother, Guillermo, if they could kill one of his dogs with magic. The medicine men refused, as they believed their magic to be of no use against white men or their dogs (Gusinde 1982: 698-99). 3. See also Michael Taussig, “Why the Nervous System?” (1992). 4. On the importance of the eighteenth-century explorations in Siberia for the dissemination of the very notion of shamanism, see Flaherty (1992). These terms are splendid examples of hybrids emitting much cultural and historical mischief. “Totemism,” for example, was brought to European attention by a whisky-peddling fur trader on the late eighteenth-century North American frontier and then professionalized by certified anthropologists in the twentieth century as a worldwide institution by which clans were thought to identify with a particular plant or animal species or other natural phenomenon such as lightning. Later it was easy for Claude Lévi-Strauss to disassemble it for his purposes of demonstrating his thesis that culture is like a language. But the story does not end there, as this essay demonstrates. 5. This is hardly the place to make an extended analysis, but it needs to be observed that Hunt’s mode of ethnography contains enormous problems for the interpretation of Kwakiutl culture precisely because the character of the relationship between Hunt and Boas is not opened to analysis. Why did Hunt write? How did he see his task? What instructions did Boas give him? What did Hunt think he was doing telling a white man about the secrets of shamanism? How could Boas publish a text under his name that was one hundred percent written by Hunt? Only when we get a better understanding of their relationship will we be able to understand the subtleties of the culture being investigated. 6. I acquired this terminology of intercultural autoethnography from Mary Louise Pratt. 7. I am tempted by this to overturn the distinction essential to Michel Foucault’s discussion of transgression and confession—where he contrasts the transmission of bodily knowledge through a premodern master-apprentice system he calls ars erotica, versus confession which he sees as part of modern Western sexuality, confession here amounting to the secret that has to be spoken in order to remain secret! It is the latter, the so-called “modern” mode, which fits perfectly with the Kwakiutal shamanism! See Foucault’s introduction in The History of Sexuality (1980). 8. In his first major monograph Boas described this double-headed serpent, the Sisiul, as perhaps the most important of the fabulous monsters whose help was obtained by the ancestors and had therefore become the crest of a clan. To eat, touch, or see it was to have one’s joints dislocated, to have one’s head turned backward, and to meet with eventual death. But to those persons who had supernatural help, it may instead bring power (Boas 1895: 371-72). 9. Claude Lévi-Strauss makes the mistake of omitting this native understanding from both of his famous essays on magic, “The Effectiveness of Symbols,” concerned with Cuna shamanism in the San Blas Archipelago off Panama, and “A sorcerer and his magic” most of which works through George Hunt’s 1925 account of his shamanic experiences that I discuss in this essay. In the Cuna case, Lévi-Strauss assumes that the sick person understands the curing song sung in a specialized shamanic language— a dubious proposition because the ethnography indicates that ordinary Cuna do not understand such language and because the song is intended not for the patient but for the spirits, providing, through words, the same sort of simulacrum Walens describes for the performances practiced by the Kwakiutl shamans. It is curious how this error is made in both of Lévi-Strauss’s essays and through which he is able thereby to supplant the mimetic (a form of bodily knowing through empathy) with the semiotic (a form of intellectual knowing). 10. Goldman (1975) gives a figure of fifty-three from Boas’s report of 1895, and sixty-three from Curtis (1915). 11. In this regard Evans-Pritchard was unlike Frank Hamilton Cushing, who through bluff and trickery forced himself into the priesthood of the Bow Lodge of the Zuni. See Cushing (1979). 12. Here, the word leech is an archaic English term for a folk healer. Like other terms used by Evans-Pritchard, such as ensorcell and knave, this term creates its own mystique combined with an implicit notion that African medicine occupies a stage on an evolutionary line of development that British society superseded. This is unfortunate and probably far from the author’s intention. 13. I have not here analyzed the deceit wherein the witch doctor is supposed to cut a deal with the witch who caused the disease so that both will share in the fee for curing (see Evans-Pritchard 1974: 191–93). Here the skepticism in the magical powers of the witch doctor is balanced by faith in those of the witch to cause and withdraw misfortune by mystical means and that these means reside in mangu substance inherited at birth in the body of the witch. The question begged by this account is, Why would there be a need for the elaborate performance of the witch doctor? Why can’t the doctor act more like a lawyer or peacemaker? Why the art? In the healing practiced by the people indigenous to the New World (if I may be so bold as to generalize), the answer lies readily at hand: the art is essential as the mode of establishing a mimetic model with the spirits. I know too little about Africa to comment, but I suspect the New World notion is applicable there, too, raising a totally different approach to the one of rationality and philosophy of science that has dogged British commentary on magic.  

The galactic polity in Southeast Asia This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Stanley Tambiah. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau3.3.034 REPRINT The galactic polity in Southeast Asia Stanley Jeyaraja TAMBIAH, Harvard University   I have coined the label galactic polity to represent the design of traditional Southeast Asian kingdoms, a design that coded in a composite way cosmological, topographical, and politico-economic features. The label itself is derived from the concept of mandala, which according to a common Indo-Tibetan tradition is composed of two elements—a core (manda) and a container or enclosing element (la). Mandala designs, both simple and complex of satellites arranged around a center, occur with such insistence at various levels of Hindu-Buddhist thought and practice that one is invited to probe their representational efficacy. Mandala as cosmological topography Cosmological schemes of various sorts in Tantric Hinduism and Buddhism have been referred to as mandala—for example, the cosmos as constituted of Mount Meru in the center surrounded by oceans and mountain ranges. At a philosophical and doctrinal level, the Buddhist Sarvastivadin school represented the relation between consciousness (citta) and its associated mental phenomena (caitta) in terms of the law of satellites, wherein consciousness placed in the center is surrounded by ten caitta, each of which again is surrounded by four laksana, or satellites (Stcherbatsky 1923; Conze 1970). The design and arrangement of the magnificent architectural monuments like Borobodur and Angkor Vat have been called mandala (Mus 1935, 1936). At quite a different level, Kautilya in his Arthashastra used mandala as a geopolitical concept to discuss the spatial configuration of friendly and enemy states from the perspective of a particular kingdom (Shamasastry 1960). The human body is likened to a mandala (Tucci 1971), a description that finds its resonances in ritual and medical practices. Finally, mandala designs are printed on textiles or are reproduced in the transitory designs drawn with powdered colors on numerous occasions. My primary interest in this paper is the traditional Southeast Asian kingdoms that are described as conforming to the mandala scheme in their arrangement at various levels. Mandala as geometrical, topographical, cosmological, and societal blueprints are not a distinctive feature of complex kingdoms and polities only. The evidence is quite clear that simpler mandala designs appear in tribal lineage-based segmentary societies practicing slash-and-burn agriculture, and that the most elaborate designs are manifest in the more complex centralized polities of valley-based sedentary rice cultivators (for example, see Mus 1935; Heine-Geldern 1942; de Jong 1952; Schrieke 1955; Shorto 1963; Moertono 1968; Wheatley 1971). But this is a simplification. There are indeed expressions both simple and complex found in phenomena standing between these poles—at the level of tribal polities and local communities. An excellent case in point are the Atoni of Timor. They have named patrilineal descent groups, live in villages, grow maize and rice by shifting agriculture on mountainous terrain, and at the same time belong to princedoms. Their village houses are made to a complex center-oriented design wherein con-cepts of inner and outer, right and left, four major mother posts, twelve peripheral chicken posts, and so on build up a scheme that simultaneously has cosmological, ritual, sexual, and practical ramifications (Cunningham 1973). And, as may be expected, the wider encompassing polity as such is constituted according to an ela-borate design of center and satellites and of successive bipartitions of various kinds (Nordholt 1971). Examples of the elementary geometric designs are the five-unit (quinary) and nine-unit samples. The first consists of four units deployed around a central one, and the second is composed of a center, four places in the major cardinal positions, and four more placed in between at the lesser cardinal points (Figures 1 and 2). In Indonesia, for example, the quinary formula called mantjapat (“five-four”) had various usages: it denoted the arrangement of four village tracts around a fifth cen-tral one; it represented the rotational location of village markets in a five-day cycle; it made its appearance in the settlement of Minangkabau land-ownership disputes in that the unanimous testimony of the heads of families owning the four surrounding plots was required (de Jong 1952); it described the headman’s council at the village level (in the same sense as that of the panchayat in village India); and it appears (Schrieke 1955) to have been the underlying pattern of the Mataram king-dom during the second quarter of the eighteenth century, arrived at by successive bipartitions (Figure 1, upper right). Similarly, the nine-unit design appears in stereotyped accounts of the king and his ministers arranged in two concentric circles. It also appears in the territorial design of the traditional Negrisembilan polity (Figure 2), with the domain of Sri Menanti in the center, immediately surrounded by four “verandah” (serambi tracts and these again being flanked by four major districts (de Jong 1952). Figure 1 : Upper left: The mantjapat. Upper right: The Mataram state—a five-unit system through successive bipartitions (after Schrieke 1955) Lower left: Nine-unit system, showing a radical pattern. Lower right: The king’s council, showing two concentric circles. Here is the first problem posed by these facts: because these geometrical and radial constructs, traditionally conceived as cosmological designs, occur in slash-and-burn and wet-rice economies, occur at the level of local community and the widest conception of polity, and occur in simpler and more complex societies, there are no prima facie grounds for explaining their manifestation as immediate and direct projections of ecological considerations or the logistical constraints of sociopolitical organization. The logic of their use cannot be reduced to a simple causal explanation. It is clear that if we approached these center-oriented constructs or models as a form of classification, we could start with an initial pentadic or quinary system and progressively build up an expanding series of mandala circles comprising seventeen, thirty-three, and still larger clusters of units. Perhaps the most famous of these complex schemes was realized in the Hindu-Buddhist polities of Southeast Asia that employed the thirty-three-unit scheme to express and organize cosmogonies and pantheons as well as religio-political groupings. In this scheme the king as wielder of dharma (the moral law), as the chakra-vartin (universal emperor) and bodhisattva (buddha-to-be), was seen as the pivot of the polity and as the mediating link between the upper regions of the cosmos, composed of the gods and their heavens, and the lower plane of humans and lesser beings.1 Figure 2 : Negrisembilan (after de Jong 1952). Bottom: Schematic design of the Negrisembilan polity as a nine-unit system. The best expression of this scheme is the thirty-two myos of the medieval Mon kingdom and the thirty-seven nats of the subsequent Burmese pantheon so well elucidated for us by Heine-Geldern (1942) and Shorto (1963); both these schemes derive from the paradigmatic heavenly scheme of the god Indra, flanked by the four guardians of the world (lokapala) and twenty-eight lesser devatas as retinue. For example, Thaton, the Mon kingdom overrun by Anawrahta in 1057, had thirty-two myos or provinces, each the seat of a subordinate prince, ringing the capital. All these political and territorial units were further linked together by the Buddhist cetiya cult of relic pagodas, also thirty-three in number. Similarly, the kingdom of Pegu in 1650 and the Mon kingdom of Rammanadesa of Lower Burma had their own permutations and variations of these schemes (Shorto 1963). All these Buddhist courts also provided prolix examples of such mandala schemes as the king surrounded by thirty-three queens and thirty-three lineages into which they married, and the like. Following is the second problem of interpretation. The classical descriptions of these Southeast Asian polities arranged in center-oriented galactic schemes were and are accompanied by a certain interpretation of their raison d’etre, which I shall label as the cosmological mode. It is best exemplified by the writings of Eliade and Heine-Geldern (among others), and repeated by Shorto and Wheatley; surprisingly, it is also espoused by Riggs (1967) in his characterization of the traditional Siamese polity. Even Geertz’s (1973) trinitarian formulation of the traditional Javanese and Balinese polities in terms of the doctrines of exemplary center, graded spirituality, and theater state resonates with a “cosmological” ontology, which provides the impulsion for the politics in these traditional kingdoms to be the enactment of ritual. The doyen of contemporary cosmological interpreters is Eliade, who for instance in his Cosmos and history: The myth of the eternal return (1959) argues that Archaic Man, as opposed to Modern Man, constantly enacted archetypes or exemplary models in his rituals (as well as other activities), of which the symbolism of the center as the axis mundi is the most celebrated. For Eliade, these center-oriented cosmologies are enacted and implemented by the archaic mentality, not because of any rational or practical considerations but because they constitute a prior ontology and therefore an absolute reality for the actors. in other words, the “sacred” orientation provides the impulsions and guidelines for the “profane” activities of traditional man. Thus, in Eliade’s vision, archaic man’s “reality is a function of the imitation of a celestial archetype [and this] reality is conferred through participation in the ‘symbolism of the center’: cities, temples, houses become real by the fact of being assimilated to the ‘centre of the world.’“ Again, more recently, Wheatley, the author of a large work, The pivot of the four quarters (1971), repeats in his inaugural lecture the same interpretive perspective: “in these religions which held that human order was brought into being at the creation of the world there was a pervasive tendency to dramatize the cosmogony by constructing on earth a reduced version of the cosmos, usually in the form of a state capital. in other words, Reality was achieved through the imitation of a celestial archetype by giving material expression to that parallelism between macrocosmos and microcosmos without which there could be no prosperity in the world of men” (1969: 10). Let me be clear about what i am questioning in the received wisdom so persuasively purveyed by these eminent scholars. My own stand is far from a vulgar utilitarianism or pragmatism in terms of which the schemes in question ought to be explained. one must grant the validity of the galactic model as a collective representation. But what i question is seeing the rationale for this model in a cosmo-logical mode of thought as an ontological priority, which is so interpreted as to constitute a sociological anteriority as well, such that for the imputed “traditional” or “archaic” mentality a notion of the “sacred” is alleged to engulf the “secular” and to serve as the ground of reality. Apart from the limitation that such a cosmological mode of explanation is static and cannot account for either variations between the schemes employed by societies or polities or dynamic changes in the schemes over time, there is the major objection that in these examples of traditional thought and practice, the sacred as such cannot be persuasively distinguished from a profane domain, and that the cosmological, religious, political, economic dimensions cannot be disaggregated. What the Western analytical tradition separates and identifies as religion, economy, politics may have either been combined differently, or more likely constituted a single interpenetrating totality. If, as I believe, these entities under scrutiny were total social phenomena in the Maussian sense, then one has to employ a different analytical strategy from those already cited so as to recover something of their con-tours and relations. My approach, which I shall call “totalization,” aims to give an integrated account that is, as far as possible, a true representation of the traditional Southeast Asian kingdoms as extant actualities. But the task is not easy, least of all the problem of translation of indigenous concepts and their elucidation in terms of the analyst’s concepts and vocabulary. My thesis is that the kingdoms in question were arranged according to a galactic scheme, and that this scheme was conceptualized and actualized in ways that are best elucidated in terms of certain key indigenous concepts. The most central of these concepts is mandala (Thai: monthon), standing for an arrangement of a center and its surrounding satellites and employed in multiple contexts to describe, for example: the structure of a pantheon of gods; the deployment spatially of a capital region and its provinces; the arrangement socially of a ruler, princes, nobles, and their respective retinues; and the devolution of graduated power on a scale of decreasing autonomies. Other key concepts in the Thai language (which have th eir counterpar ts in other Southeast Asian languages as well) are: muang, which in a politico-territorial sense signifies kingdom/principality in terms of center-oriented space, and of central and satellite domains; and krom, which represents the radial mapping of an administrative system of departments and their subdivisions, as well as the constitution of successively expanding circles of leaders and followers or factions. The range of meanings of these and other concepts will emerge in due course. Here I shall note certain features integral to the notion of totalization. First, there is a semantic overlap and a certain amount of redundancy in the meanings attributable to the Thai concepts cited, although they are not identical and do not occupy equal semantic space. Second, these (and other similar) concepts are polyvalent, and if their meanings are mapped onto a Western conceptual grid of “levels,” they are revealed to be, in varying degrees of overlap, at once cosmological, territorial, politico-economic, administrative, and so on. Thus, from the standpoint of the integrity of these traditional polities, it would be a mistake to disaggregate them into the above-mentioned Western conceptual levels and to treat them as analytically adequate and exegetically sufficient. Although not committing this error, I, as translator and analyst, can only give some idea of the totality by showing that the key concepts do resonate with the polyvalent implications that we attribute to these levels. Therefore, I shall adopt the descriptive strategy of showing that the galactic scheme was characterized by certain structured relations, which were reflected at various levels that I disaggregate or deal with in succession only so that later I can reconstitute the totality. My descriptive strategy has two implications, which are paradoxically the two sides of the same coin. On the one hand, because the levels—cosmological, territorial, politico-economic, and so on—have no true analytical validity, it follows as a corollary that we cannot assign a deterministic and privileged role to any of them. on the other hand, because the key polyvalent concepts are totalistic and simultaneously carry those significances which we descriptively disaggregate (as cosmo-logical, political, economic), we have to see the galactic scheme as encoding all the impulsions that we customarily attribute to each level. Thus, in requiring us not to assign priority to any one level or to ignore its impulsion—cosmological or logis-tical—the approach makes it possible to integrate the claims of a cosmological imperative with other imperatives without contradiction. Finally, the approach also makes it possible to relate the model of the galactic polity to certain parameters that define the outer limits of its existence and explain processual oscillations within those limits. From cosmology to political process The so-called cosmological schemes can be seen dynamically as serving as frames for political processes and outcomes of a pulsating kind. Furthermore, and this is i hope a novel argument, the cosmological idiom together with its grandeur and imagery, if read correctly, can be shown to be a realistic reflection of the political pulls and pushes of these center-oriented but centrifugally fragmenting polities. in this instance myth and reality are closer than we think. Before I enumerate its salient political and economic features, let me provide some factual illustrations of the galactic polity. The kingdom of Sukhothai The kingdom of Sukhothai, which historically marked the first political emergence and realization of a Thai polity in the thirteenth century (in what is now Thailand), bore the unmistakable marks of a galactic polity (principal sources here are Wales 1934; Griswold 1967). The concept of muang (the Mon parallel is dun) had a range of meanings signifying kingdom, country, province, town, capital, and region. The most relevant gloss for that concept is that it referred to “centered” or “center-oriented” space as opposed to “bounded” space, and typically stood for a capital, town, or settlement with the surrounding territory over which it exercised jurisdiction. At the widest limit it was commonly the case that the name of a kingdom was synonymous with the name of the capital city (Sukhothai, Ayutthaya, Pagan, Pegu, Majapahit). The Javanese analogy was that of a torch with its light radiating outward with decreasing intensity; the power of the center determined the range of its illumination (Moertono 1968: 112). This conception of territory as a variable space, control over which diminished as royal power radiated from a center, is integral to the schematic characterization of the traditional polity as a mandala composed of concentric circles, usually three in number. This concentric circle system, representing the center-periphery relations, was ordered thus: in the center was the king’s capital and the region of its direct control, which was surrounded by a circle of “provinces” ruled by princes or “governors” appointed by the king, and these again were surrounded by tributary polities more or less independent. Note that the capital itself was an architectural representation of a mandala. Thus, the Sukhothai capital had in the inner core of the city the king’s palace and the major temple and monastery (Wat Mahadhatu) standing side by side; this center was surrounded by three circles of earthern ramparts, with four gateways at the cardinal points (Griswold 1967). Prince Damrong is cited by Wales (1934) as giving this description of the territorial and administrative distribution of Sukhothai, after it had freed itself from Khmer control and had succeeded in bringing three neighboring muang—Sawankalok, Phitsanulok, and Kamphaengpet, all, situated within a distance of two days’ march—under its sway: 1) At the center was the capital province or region, ruled by the king, muang luang (great or chief muang). Within this royal domain, the king was situated in his capital “city” and within it again in his palace. 2) At the four cardinal points were the muang, each ruled by a son of the king (and their sons in turn often succeeded them). These regions, ruled by the princes as almost independent kingdoms, were regarded as having the status of “children” with respect to the capital province, as signified by the expression muang luk luang. The provinces were received from the king and governed on the same lines as the capital, the sons being sworn to cooperate with the father for mutual defense and on campaigns of conquest. 3) This principle of a decentralized constellation of units that replicate one another, in that they show minimal differentiation of function, finds expression also among those units recognized as the building blocks of the internal structure of a muang, whether capital or provincial. Examples of these lower-level components are the pau ban, “father” of the village settlement, and, following at the lowest level, the pau krua, the “father” of the hearth (head of commensal household / family). 4) The outer ring, the third concentric circle beyond the four provinces, was the region of independent kingdoms, which, wherever brought under sway, were in a tributary relation—that is, in a relation of overlord-ship rather than direct political control. When King Ram Kamheng claimed as part of his kingdom various Lao polities of the north and northeast, the old kingdom of Nagara Sri Dharmaraja in the south, and the kingdom of Pegu to the west, he was at best claiming this indirect overlordship. King Ram Kamheng’s inscriptions give evidence of the following social classification of the ruling stratum (and are reminiscent of the Mon concepts cited earlier): khun, the ruling princes / nobles, especially of the relatively autonomous “provinces”; pau khun, the “father” of the khun, the appellation for the king, who was also called chao muang; luk khun, literally “children” of the khun, who were lesser princes / nobles confined to the capital muang and who as “chiefs of the great body of retainers which formed the population of his capital and the land immediately surrounding, assisted the king in matters of administration” (Wales 1934: 69). Before taking up other examples of the galactic polity, I shall underline a fundamental duality concerning the constitution of the central or capital region of the king and its provinces, and the relations between them. On the one hand, there is a faithful reproduction on a reduced scale of the center in its outlying components; on the other, the satellites pose the constant threat of fission and incorporation in another sphere of influence. If we constantly keep in mind the expanding and shrinking character of the political constellations under scrutiny, we can grasp the central reality that although the constituent political units differed in size, each lesser unit was a reproduction and imitation of the larger. What emerges is a galactic picture of a central planet surrounded by differentiated satellites, which are more or less “autonomous” entities held in orbit and within the sphere of influence of the center. If we introduce at the margin other similar competing central principalities and their satellites, we shall be able to appreciate the logic of a system that as a hierarchy of central points is continually subject to the dynamics of pulsation and changing spheres of influence. It is clear that the fortunes of the Sukhothai rulers waxed and waned with regard to territorial control. Although Ram Kamheng boasted of his vast area of control, Lu Thai (1347–1374), who succeeded a few generations later, ascended a throne that was on the verge of extinction. He had first to fight for his throne and then to regain as many of the lost vassal states as possible.2 The problem of territorial control was related to the distribution of rival foci of power. To the north of Sukhothai was the kingdom of Lan Na, further to the northwest was pagan, in the south was Ayutthaya, to the west Lan chang, and far to the southeast Angkor. The interstitial provinces under governors and principalities under petty rulers were always disputed—for example, prabang and Kamhaengpet frequently changed hands between Sukhothai and Ayutthaya in the middle of the fourteenth century. Furthermore, the exigencies of warfare and rebellions, and the overall fissiparous nature of the polities frequently dictated that the capital of the ruler shift its physical location. When Lu Thai began a campaign of pacification around 1362, he first went to Nan, from there eastward to pra Sak, and finally for tactical reasons took up residence in Kong Swe and remained there for seven years before returning to Sukhothai. Thus, a measure of sober realism ought to teach us that we must match the doctrine of the capital as the exemplary center with the fact of a moving center of improvised bamboo palaces, and field camps of the warrior king on the march or on the run, whose area of control was hotly disputed and liable to shrink or expand with the fortunes of battle. The son of Lu Tai (Mahadharmaraja II) was reduced to a vassal of Ayutthaya in 1378, and by 1438 the Sukhothai provinces were decisively and irrevocably incorporated into the kingdom of Ayutthaya. The Ayutthayan polity circa 1460–1590 I have in a previous work (1976) given a detailed description of the design of the kingdom of Ayutthaya and the pattern of its political process and administrative involution at certain points in its history. Here I shall briefly give a formal sketch of the Ayutthayan polity around the third quarter of the fifteenth century onward, so as to confirm the point that although more complexly ordered, the underlying principles of Ayutthaya’s territorial and administrative organization conformed to the scheme of the galactic polity. Figure 3 : Schematic representation of the Ayutthayan polity (ca. 1460–1590). The shaded portion represents Van Rachathani (Van Rajadani), the royal domain of Ayutthaya. 1 = Brahyamahanagara (Phra Mahanakhon)—major provinces/principalities. 2 = Moan Luk Hluari (Muang Luk Luang)—provinces ruled by “sons” of the king. 3 = Moan Hlan Hlvan (Muang Lan Luang)—provinces ruled by grandsons/nephews of the king. 4. = Moan Noi (Muang Noi)—small provinces making up the Van Rachathani. 5 = Moan Pradhesa Raja— foreign (independent) kingdoms. King Trailok is credited at this time with the reorganization of his kingdom. The emergent pattern was as follows (see Figure 3): 1. Va rachathani: This comprises the capital of Ayutthaya and its core region or royal domain, which was internally divided into small provinces (muang noi, later called “fourth class” provinces). These lesser provinces were in theory administered by officials directly responsible to the ministers (senapati) resident in the capital. 2a. Muang luk luang: In theory these were the provinces ruled by the king’s sons of chao fa status of the highest class (born of mothers of royal status). (In a later classification they were called provinces of first-class status.) The principalities that fitted this description were in fact the three muang that previously composed the major portion of the now defunct kingdoms of Sukhothai-Phitsanulok, Sawankalok, and Kahamphaengpet. 2b. Phra mahanakorn: Roughly of the same category as muang luk luang, but with a firmer history of local rulership and of more or less autonomy, were the principalities of Nakhon Rachasima in the east, Tenasserim in the west, and most famous of all, Nakhon Srithammarat in the south. These autonomous provinces provide the best historical evidence of reproducing the conceptions and arrangements prevailing in the capital do-main.3 All princely governors and rulers of categories 2a and 2b maintained their own armies. 3. Between categories 1 and 2 were situated the muang lan luang (literally, “provinces ruled by the grandsons/nephews of the king”), administered by chao fa princes of the second class; these were smaller, buffer provin-ces separating the central domain from the large provinces. 4. At the perimeter were ranged the independent polities, such as the northern kingdoms of chiangmai, chiangsaen, Phrae, and Nan, and the peninsular Malay states of Johore and Malacca: all these stood in a tributary relationship to Ayutthaya. Then there were the cambodian and Burmese polities; vis-a-vis the former, Ayutthaya exercised tributary privileges intermittently, while the latter were unambiguously of enemy status and powerful foci of galactic formation in their own right. A still more complex mandala model representing the formal design of the Ayutthaya kingdom was developed in the seventeenth century in King Naresuan’s time (Wales 1934). Provinces were now classed into four types: there were two of the first class, six of the second class, seven of the third, and thirty-four of the fourth class directly under the control of the capital. The first-, second-, and third-class provinces also had minor provinces directly subordinate to them rather than to the capital. It was this classification that was written into the Palatine Law and the Law of Military Ranks and Ranks of Provinces, which was reproduced in the law code revised by Rama I in 1805. It is most apposite to note of this classification that, in theory, the first-class provinces were entitled to a full set of ministries and damruot officials duplicating those of the capital, second- and third-class provinces had the same number of ministries but fewer official positions, and all of these officials were appointed locally by the governor, except the Yokrabat sent from the capital. The fourth-class provinces lacked such local official ranks and in theory were controlled by the ministries in the capital, with governors appointed for three-year terms (Vickery 1970: 865–866). Of course, reality deviated from the theory— but that leads us into the political dynamics of the galactic polity. This center-oriented concentric circle view of the polity was pervasive in Southeast Asia. The Javanese text called Nagarakertagama, which documents various features of the Majapahit kingdom in the fourteenth century, gives most valuable evidence supporting my thesis of the galactic polity (Pigeaud 1962). An analysis of the text read in relation to my concerns is presented as an appendix; here I shall note that the text’s grand tapestry of the exemplary center and its “ring kingdoms,” of the kings’ royal progresses and the staging of court festivals, is systematically balanced by the countervailing scenario of dual powers within the capital and of dual (but complementary) religions within the kingdom, of the capital itself revolving into relatively self-contained compounds, just as the kingdom fragmented into the central domain and outer satellite province enjoying various degrees of autonomy. It appears that Majapahit’s successor, Mataram, also recognized three categories: nagaragung (the core region), mantjanegara and the pasisir (the outlying provinces), and the tanah sabrang (the lands across the sea). Moertono, having presented the above information, expounds a basic feature of these center-oriented pulsating polities (1968: 112): “What we have observed about the relative position of officials in the nagaragung and in the mantjanegara leads us to conclude that a territory was allocated to one of the three categories on the basis of the degree of influence that the center, that is, the king, exercised there. Consequently, territorial jurisdiction could not be strictly defined by permanent boundaries, but was characterized by a fluidity or flexibility of boundary dependent on the diminishing or increasing power of the center.” The salient political features of the traditional kingdoms At a surface level the cosmological account gives a magnificent picture of the exemplary center pulling together and holding in balance the surrounding polity. But we can properly appreciate in what manner the center attempted to hold the remainder—the centripetal role of the center—only after we have properly understood the decentralized locational propensity of the traditional polity and its replication of like entities on a decreasing scale; in other words, only after we have grasped the structure of the galactic constellation, which is a far cry from a bureaucratic hierarchy in the Weberian sense. One of the principal implications of the cosmological model is that the center ideologically represents the totality and embodies the unity of the whole. The mechanisms that both express unity and that seek to achieve it are so well known that it will suffice to merely enumerate them: The cosmology is realized in the architecture and layout of the palace and the capital; for example, the capital is the Mount Meru of the kingdom, and within the capital, the palace represents the same central pillar of the world ringed by concentric circles. The capital is the starting point for the performance of annual cosmic rites— rites of regeneration and purification—and in a ripple effect the graduated provincial centers replicate in temporal succession the same rites on a diminishing scale (see Archaimbault 1971). The royal harem and its forbidden women (nang hang—forbidden in the double sense of the women’s not being allowed, save on rare occasions, to leave the inner palace grounds, and of being in accessible to men save the king himself— given to the king by princes, nobles, and officials, is a prime expression of the king as husband of the kingdom. In a sense, the king actively represented the subjects through obligatory and/or politically feasible marriage or concubinage alliances with women kinfolk of princes and officials and rulers of regional provinces and principalities. Once again, true to the galactic model, the princes, nobles, and officials in turn replicated the kingly model with courts and harems of their own. In Thailand the biannual ceremony of drinking the water of allegiance to the king (there were of course similar ceremonies in other kingdoms) brought the officials and rulers of the outer periphery to the capital. Similarly, it was to the center that these same persons came to receive their titles and regalia of office. Again in Thailand the institution of the royal corps of pages (mahatlek), whose members were sons of princes and nobles attached to the court, was a valued training in the arts of courtly life and royal administration, as well as a guarantee of the loyalty of the kings’ agents and provincial rulers (chao muang) located outside the capital. There were other administrative devices by which the center attempted to control or over see directly the activities of the provincial rulers: for the Bangkok period we have evidence of the king posting his own agents, the yokkrabat, who, though formally invested with judicial tasks, were charged with the duty of spying on behalf of the king. Again, the king was strongly suspicious of the possible collusion between provincial governors and rulers against his own person and powers, and therefore treated unauthorized visiting among the latter as treason. In theory, the king was safe only when these rulers and officials had dyadic relations solely with him as the radial center of the network. The paradoxes of kingship The institution of kingship was shot through with many paradoxes. The dharma of kingship—the very concept of dharmaraja itself—can hardly be interpreted as the king’s capacity and warrant to innovate creatively and to initiate change in the field of legislation. As Mus (1964) put it, the king’s role is better described as “inefficient causality,” or an ordinating principle that represents and maintains an eternal order rather than initiating progressive change toward an ideal order in the future. Ideas of fixed regularity and noninterference inform this notion of dharma as order, and this sense instructively emerges in the Mon-Burmese-Thai juridical distinction between dhammasatham/thamasat as eternal order and rajasatham as the rules and orders issued by particular kings, which may or may not find their way into the dharma code (Lingat 1950). But the king’s relatively passive and enduring aspect as maintainer of order is punctuated by his active heroic aspect in the conduct of warfare, which was an irregular activity, usually undertaken for the acquisition of booty and manpower (in the form of slaves). The campaigns themselves were brief, more in the form of raids than sustained battles, a feature that is also related to the fact that the soldiers were primarily the peasantry mobilized ad hoc from the immediate area or province in which or near which the war in question was being waged. The technology and weaponry of traditional warfare were of course primitive, and the peasantry brought their own weapons. Some kings may have had their own limited number of mercenaries, who would be more effective if the king’s engagement in foreign trade gave him access to European guns. Thus, warfare, in principle a quintessential royal activity, was in fact episodic and spasmodic, constrained by the prevalent mechanisms of manpower recruitment, technology of warfare, and its control. Warfare, then, is related to the larger questions of the institutional arrangements for manpower mobilization (normally called corvée in the literature), the pattern of extraction and distribution of agricultural surplus, and the volume of internal and overseas external trade directly entered upon or indirectly regulated and taxed by the political authorities. As already mentioned, the objectives of warfare were really capture of booty, and, more importantly, prisoners for resettlement in the kingdom. “Loss of population by captivity was infinitely more serious than the comparatively small numbers of those killed in actual fighting” (Wales 1934: 9). We should not for a moment lose sight of the manpower shortage and of the low demographic densities in all the traditional Southeast Asian mainland polities, and of the fact that control over men rather than over land was the dominant principle of their political organi-zation.4 The foregoing is intimately connected with the major paradox of divine kingship and perennial rebellions that was the hallmark of the galactic polities. Any of the traditional chronicles such as the Sinhalese Mahavamsa or the Burmese, Thai, or Javanese counterparts will reveal the pattern of brief reigns, frequent rebellions, usurpations, and assassinations that characterize court politics. It is well known that there were no settled succession rules, and that the princes, procreated in profusion in the harems, formed a multitude of contestants, whose propensity for hatching intrigues was matched by the reigning king’s own tendency to kill off his rivals. (In Burma, for instance, it appears that it was in part this goriness surrounding kingship that morally outraged the British of the nineteenth century and allegedly spurred them on to subdue the Burmese and deliver them from their savagery.) It is precisely because there were perennial rebellions and usurpations and because legitimation through orderly succession was absent that the rituals of kingship, particularly the periodic abhiseka, which purified and replenished kings with sacred power, were so elaborate and considered so essential. Of course, usurpers frequently married royal women and fabricated royal genealogies retroactively in order to buttress their position. But equally important in such political systems was the charisma gained by special initiation or by ascetic practice or even by auspicious birth, all of which were recognized as signs of merit and power and capable of upstaging hereditary claims to kingship. A royal person was automatically conceived as possessing merit accumulated in previous lives. But it was the dharma of a king to act in the world, and therefore to expend his potency and to distribute his merit. He had, therefore, periodically to recoup his potency by withdrawal and engaging in ascetic practice, and by depending on transfer of power from the professional ascetic priest, whose vocation was to store up mystical powers by retreat from the world. But the king emerged from solitude or from ceremony charged with potency only to demonstrate his virility and to expend his potency in the harem or in war. Just why and how divine kingship was dialectically conjoined with perennial rebellion can be better understood by studying the pattern of political relations that generated volatile factional struggles. I shall later describe the seedbed of factionalism for both Ayutthaya and early Bangkok periods under the label of administrative involution. Here I shall merely note that in a situation where power and wealth stemmed from the control of men, and where, as in the Thai kingdoms, the pool of subjects or commoners was divided between those who served the king (phrai luang) and those who served the princes (phrai som), and the king’s men were at the same time allotted to administrative “departments” (krom) placed under the control of officials and nobles, the ground was laid for those kinds of factional struggles and aggrandizing exploits that produced an intermittent chain of usurpations and rebellions. Parameters of the galactic polity: The weaker and stronger states The lifecycles and trajectories of the traditional polities of Southeast Asia can be viewed as taking place within certain parameters that are the product of certain basic factors. The polities can be said to have had a weaker form, which was perhaps the more usual state, and a stronger form, which was perhaps achieved during exceptional periods. The weaker picture of the “origins” of the polity is as follows: Among certain decentralized “autonomous” petty principalities or chiefdoms (for example, muang ruled by chao, in Thai terminology) already existing on the ground, a dominant principality emerges that attempts to pull them together and hold them as a differentiated whole, but this centripetality is achieved not so much by real exercise of power and control but by the devices and mechanisms of a “ritual” kind which have, to use the English philosopher Austin’s phrase, “performative validity.” Perhaps among contemporary studies, Gullick’s Political systems of Western Malaya (1958) is an apt illustration of this weaker state of the traditional polities—in this case, in the period immediately preceding their coming under British control in 1874. The sultan at the apex of each Malay state “did not in most states of the nineteenth century embody any exceptional concentration of administrative authority. Powerful district chiefs could and sometimes did flout his wishes with impunity; some of them were wealthier than he was.”5 “A sultan was generally in control of a royal district which he governed after the fashion of a district chief. But his role in the political system of the state, as distinct from his additional and local role of district chief of the royal district, did not consist in the exercise of preeminent power” (1958: 44).6 The glue that held together the Western Malay polity was largely symbolic. The sultan’s position of great dignity was related to his role as the apex of the political system of the state, as the symbol of its unity and the titular source of rank and authority for the chiefs, among whom the real power was divided (1958: 54). No doubt considerations such as threat of external attack, the need for a larger trade unit than the inland district, and even “sheer facts of geography” may have helped preserve the sultan and his satellite chiefs as a polity. But the collective representation of the polity, given the “replication” of the sultan by his chiefs, rested on exemplary enactments that took place at court. The sultan was the source of aristocratic and chiefly titles, in that the impress of his seal was the concrete validation of titled position, and the regalia of office handed by the sultan to the chiefs and officials were again concrete “embodiments” of validation, and were “repositories” of efficacious “power.” The regalia of office (kebasaran—”symbols of greatness”) which the sultan distributed consisted of musical instruments (drums, pipes, flutes, and trumpets), insignia of office such as scepter, betel box, jewels, umbrella, seal of state, and secret verbal formulas, and weapons such as swords, lances, and long daggers of execution. There were also sumptuary privileges, such as kinds of clothing, domestic architecture and furnishings, rare meats and food, “anomalous” rare animals, and humans (albino elephants and buffaloes, dwarfs, and freak humans), which were associated with and considered the special possessions of titled offices and their objective signifiers. Finally, whatever the realities of power, formal obeisance ceremonies on the part of chiefs toward the sultan, and the enactment of a graded cosmos at the sultan’s installation and mortuary rites, were indeed not merely an expression but the creation of the galactic polity in its usual form. In Weber’s discussion of “patrimonialism” (1968: vol. 3, ch. 12), the section entitled “Decentralized Patrimonial Domination: Satrapies and Divisional Principalities,” which highlights the decentralized nature of the center’s domination and the high degree of autonomy enjoyed by the dependent rulers, approximates in some respects my account of the galactic polity.7 But much the greater part of Weber’s discussion is devoted to the expansion of patrimonial domination over the “extrapatrimonial” areas. To turn, then, to the stronger form of the polity. The processes by which this form of the polity was reached in Southeast Asia approximate some of those discussed by Weber in his classic treatment of patrimonial domination: how a patrimonial prince attempts to expand his direct control over the outlying extra-patrimonial are as by extending the relations and links of personal dependency, loyalty, and fidelity; by enlarging his control over the judicial institutions; by securing military control, by directly levying taxes and dues, and, more importantly, through forming an independent army which freed him from his dependence on his vassals; and by enforcing a monopolistic control over trade in luxury goods and weapons, and trade involving money. The dispatch of ministeriales and the incorporation of honoratiores were parallel processes.8 Returning to Southeast Asia, it can be confidendy asserted that the stronger form of the polity was only rarely and temporarily achieved by strong rulers seizing the opportunities of favorable circumstances. i shall propose a hypothesis of transformation whereby the stronger form of the patrimonial polity is realized: Given a central domain and a surrounding field of satellite principalities, the process of cumulative strengthening of the center’s hold over the satellites goes hand in hand with the cumulative strengthening of the hold of the satellite rulers and local authorities over their own subjects. There is, so to say, a ‘payoff’ to all parties in this process by which a loose scattering of political aggregates is brought into a tighter relationship in a polity in which the central ruler exercises for a time decisive control. Schrieke (1955) imagines the process thus: “A change comes about in the character of the leaders of the primitive communities: henceforth they have not only to act as intermediaries for the will of the central authority …but the support of the central authority opens a possibility for them to advance from primi inter pares to being ruling notables insofar as they are capable of this” (p. 172). Schrieke, the Dutch historian of Indonesia (no doubt benefiting from Max Weber’s discussion of patrimonial domination), enumerated certain means by which the increased authority of the central government was enforced in traditional Java, means which are exactly paralleled elsewhere. A well-worn method was the attempt to tighten dynastic links by marriage alliances, should the kingdom be composed of a number of smaller principalities in a state of loose coherence. But in more energetic and expansionary times, the king strove to neutralize the power of the princes by appointing ministeriales of humble origin as provincial rulers; but in the long run they too became hereditary and the ministeriales system did not escape the cleaving process of decentralization. Another strategy was for the ruler to form his own hired guard of praetors whose task would be to make the king independent of his vassals. Schrieke gives a historical illustration of this attempted change from “a loose coherence” to “state” system in the seventeenth-century Mat-aram Empire.9 Comparing the policies of sultan Agung (1613–1646) and Mang-kurat I (1646–1677), he points out the difference between the former’s older policy of requiring autochthonous princes to remain at court and binding them to himself through marriage alliances, and Mangkurat’s policy of destroying the princes, replacing them with closely supervised ministeriales, and introducing a more effective system of enriching his coffers by farming out revenue collection to them in exchange for fixed annual sums and by making trade with foreign lands a state monopoly. Internal limits of the galactic polity’s politico-economic basis But this process of incremental centralization was abortive, because of certain parameters of the traditional polity that defined the internal limits of the agricultural base, the arrangements for revenue collection, the logistical and communication facilities, and so on. I shall demarcate the parameters of the traditional polity by reference to twin motors in an engine room, one being the rice-plains economy with a particular relation of people to land and the patterns of mobilization of their services, and the other being the ruler’s attempt to monopolize foreign trade, to tax riverine trade (and, in certain instances, to be a beneficiary of mining operations). The first motor, which was concerned with the extraction of agricultural goods, peasant labor (corvée), and military service, was more unwieldy and ramshackle than the official theory would have us believe. In theory the king, raja, or sultan was the “lord of the land,” “the lord of life,” and so on. He distributed to his superior officials, both at the center and in the provinces, the rights over certain kinds of revenue collection and services in specified territories; the lesser officials in turn enjoyed from their superiors rights over smaller domains; and so on. In respect of these “rights” over land, in many a traditional polity a distinction was made between rights over territory and people attached to an office (that is, nonhereditary rights, unlike a “fief” in later European feudalism) and similar rights alienated by a king or ruler to a subject as a private estate in perpetuity (or until confis-cation).10 The formal view of the traditional land tenure system is usually from the top: it sees the hierarchy of rights as radiating outward from the center and from the apex downward to the lower rungs of the king’s functionaries. But the entire picture changes when we look at the process of extraction from the bottom upward as a process of collection and creaming off at each successive level of officers, until what trickles in to the king’s treasury and warehouses is really a minuscule part of the gross produce and profits extracted at the ground level. To understand this process of how successive layers of political intermediaries slice off a portion of the revenue—a phenomenon that is remarkably like the small margins of profit successively appropriated by a chain of middlemen in contemporary peasant marketing structures (Mintz 1960; Dewey 1962; Geertz 1963), also revealing a close fit between administrative involution and agricultural involution—we have to appreciate the mode of remuneration of officials and functionaries in the traditional polity. They appropriated a portion of the taxes they collected and the fees and fines they imposed, and commanded for their own use some of the corvée owed to the king. Thus, this process of collection and transmission of “revenue” upward made possible the support of a large number of functionaries, but scarcely put in the hands of the king a large capital that derived from outside his royal domain—that is, from his provinces and satellite principalities.11 From these territories kings were able at the best of times to mobilize large-scale labor (corvée) for building palaces and religious monuments and as temporary armies to fight wars. But these were extraordinary projects, and the success of such mobilization was highly variable in these pulsating kingdoms.12 The rice-growing, land-based sector of the economy could support an administrative system of replicated courts and redundant retinues, and could at special times provide massive labor pools and armies for brief periods of time, but could not put directly in the hands of the center large economic resources which it could disburse and manipulate and thereby control the recipients. it is because of this insufficiency that the monopolistic control of certain items of foreign imports and exports, and the direct taxation of other kinds of trade goods, were crucial in the emergence and maintenance of the Southeast Asian kingdoms. It is primarily through this sector of the economy that in Thailand, the Ayutthaya-type polity (whose features persisted well into the early Bangkok period) achieved a transformation that in turn implicated the agricultural base. A brief gloss on the role of trade in the traditional polity is relevant, especially because there was a complementary linkage between riverine rice-growing settlements on the one side and politically controlled and monopolized foreign trade on the other. That the emergence of the ancient kingdoms, and their physical location on strategic coastal points or on river mouths in Southeast Asia was importantly related to the impact of an explosive expansion of trade at the beginning of the Christian era is well attested. The sea lanes of the great maritime trade route extending from the Red Sea to South China, and operated by Arabs, Indians, indigenous entrepreneurs of the Malayan waters, and Chinese, connected the emergent polities with riparian economies (producing exchangeable commodities, luxuries, and rare products) with one another. The earliest polities in existence by the third century AD were located in the valleys and plains of the lower Mekong (the central Vietnam of today) and on the Isthmian tracts of the Thai Malay peninsula (Briggs 1951; Wheatley 1961; Coedes 1968). Later, by the sixth century, other polities had emerged in Sumatra and west Java, virtually all crystallizing along the maritime thoroughfare between India and China.13 And in subsequent centuries “states predicated on similar principles came to occupy the Pyu country of central and upper Burma, the coastal plains of Arakan, the Mon lands around the lower courses of the Irawadi and Chao Phraya rivers, and other parts of Java and Sumatra. All, with significant exception of some of the Javanese kingdoms, were based in, and in most parts restricted to, the lowlands” (P. Wheatley, n.d.). In their attempts to answer the riddle of the primary determinants of the emergence of these Southeast Asian polities, most writers have highlighted the impact of the activities of trading entrepreneurs and warrior adventurers, and of the consecratory and ideological roles of the Brahman priesthood that accompanied them. The resources, in the form of luxury goods for redistribution, of arms and weapons for strategic use of force, or of new ideas and concepts for representing new political horizons, which trade must have put in the hands of the newly emergent rulers and their satellites, are without question. But I also would like to insist that the riparian communities practicing rice agriculture, whose scale and density of settlement probably kept pace with the expansion of the trading sector, were an equally indispensable factor, in that they supported a stratum of rulers and officials and a network of ceremonial centers and religious foundations, provided labor for the projects of warfare and monument building, and, not to be minimized, collected and channeled to the center those forest products, spices, minerals (espe-cially gold), and handicraft products that foreign traders avidly sought. The vast distance from the early centuries of the Christian era to the late nineteenth century did not efface in Southeast Asia the importance of trade and rice cultivation in the petty chiefdoms and sultanates (which would soon be engulfed by colonial conquest). For example, Gullick (1958: 21) paints this general picture of the Malay polities of the last century: “The territory comprised in a State was related to the geographical structure of the peninsula and to the use of rivers as the main lines of communication and trade. A State was typically the basin of a large river or (less often) of a group of adjacent rivers, forming a block of land extending from the coast inland to the central watershed. The capital of the State was the point at which the main river ran into the sea. At this point the ruler of the State could control the movement of all persons who entered or left his State, he could defend it from external attack and he could levy taxes on its imports and exports.”14 The importance of the river system for location of agricultural settlements, for transport and trade, in the Malay Sultanates, the Javanese kingdoms of Madjapahit and Mataram, the Thai kingdoms of Sukhodaya, and, even more significantly, Ayutthaya, needs no underlining. The increasing stabilization and cumulative centralization of the Thai kingdom in the Bangkok era were in large part both cause and result of the expansion of trade, and of the manner in which the agricultural sector articulated with it. The implications of administrative involution Let me make a fuller comment now on the feature of administrative involution, which, as I said before, revealed a close fit with the agricultural involution so characteristic of Asian peasant societies. It has already been suggested that the agricultural base of a developed traditional polity was capable of supporting not only the agriculturists themselves but also a heavy administrative overhead that skimmed off portions of the taxes and revenue as it was transmitted upward to the king’s treasury and storehouses. The arrangement of this administrative system itself is remarkable for its reflection of the mandala pattern. The principle of replication of the center on a progressively reduced scale by the satellites that were the major characteristic of the polity’s territorial arrangement now finds its counterpart in the administrative system in the form of multiple palaces replicating the king’s own palaces, and redundant retinues surrounding the individual princes, nobles, and officials. Structurally even more remarkable was the duplication of administrative, military, and judicial departments (krom) and subdepartments, and the fragmentation of administrative tasks not necessarily, or only remotely, dictated by considerations of functional specialization. i shall call this feature of administrative involution the principle of bipartition and duplication of similar units, so that not only are “departments” balanced against one another, duplicating functions, but also within departments there occurs bipartition into parallel, virtually redundant units. (See Wales 1934; Riggs 1967; and Rabibhadana 1969 for ample evidence for these features of bipartition and replication during the late Ayutthaya and early Bangkok periods.) Weber himself observed the occurrence of a similar feature in the patrimonial administrative structure which he called typification (in the sense, i think, of stereo-typy), and which he said contrasted markedly with the principle of functional specialization in the rational bureaucratic system. Weber remarked that in the patrimonial system, office and person tend to become conflated; the king’s power is regarded as a “personal possession,” and this power is fragmented and allocated to princes and ministers of the royal house. “Since all powers economic as well as political are considered the ruler’s personal property, hereditary division is a normal phenomenon” (Weber 1968: 1052). Such subdivision on a hereditary basis on the one hand does not produce definitive division and on the other strives for equalization of revenues and seigneurial rights among the divisional rulers and claimants. Weber further argued that every prebendial decentralization and distribution of fee incomes among competitors and every appropriation of benefices signified typification rather than rationalization. As the appropriation of offices progresses, the ruler’s political power “disintegrates into a bundle of powers separately appropriated by various individuals by virtue of special privileges” (p. 1040). Weber’s sociological explanation of administrative involution, bipartitioning, and replication—only partially satisfactory and capable of being taken further—nevertheless stands in stark contrast to that kind of explanation which (stemming from Heine-Geldern) attributes these features simply to the working of a cosmological (and therefore nonpragmatic) orientation (see, for example, Riggs 1967). I want to go beyond the Heine-Geldern-type explanation of attributing these features simply and solely to a cosmological orientation, and establish that the pattern of administrative involution faith fully mirrors the structure of political and social relations of a factional sort and that these relations translated into space so to say, represent the galactic polity in its territorial aspect. Apart from meaning an administrative “department,” the concept krom in Thailand additionally meant, as Rabibhadana (1969) tells us, a leader and his attached followers and retainers. A prince or chao muang (chief of a principality/province) had his own personal following, and a king assigned princes graduated krom privileges, primarily in the form of titles and retainers (phrai som). The most conspicuous examples were the princes who resided in the front and rear palaces (van na and van lang) and reproduced the king’s own court and functionaries on a reduced scale. The khunnang, the nobility, who in the main ran the king’s departments, similarly had control over the subjects owing service directly to the king (phrai luang) and who were allocated to the royal administrative divisions and units. in fact, groups of these free men were registered under the name of individual leaders, nai, and the network of these nai from whom the nobility was recruited provided the grid for mobilization of subjects for royal tasks. In short, the galactic structure is again reproduced in the domain of politico-social interpersonal relations, and can, in this context, be likened to an “emulsion” made of globules joined in (temporary) allegiance to leaders of the next-higher rank and so on until the entire political society is constituted of interlocking nai-phrai (leader-follower) circles or factions of varying size. The point of the emulsion metaphor is that these factions are impermanent, and that their constituent units can and do change their affiliations . Such factionalism, for instance, resolved into a contest and strategy of divide and rule among three parties: the king and his following, the princes and their clients, and the nobility/officials and their circles. The death throes of the Ayutthaya kingdom were characterized by a suicidal conflict between the king and the princes; the early Bangkok period, including the reign of King Mongkut in the mid-nine-teenth century, witnessed the corrective measure whereby the king curbed the pow-er of the princes by seeking support among the nobility. This move, however, led in turn to the rise of powerful nobles such as the Bunnag family who successfully circumscribed the king’s power. Thus, it comes as no surprise that the succeeding King Chulalongkorn managed to come into his own politically in the 1880s only by finding a way of superseding the nobles by means of an active reliance on and support from his princely half-brothers—such as Princes Damrong, Nares, Rabi, and Dewawong—who also spearheaded the program of modernization. Reverting to a classical anthropological problem, I want also to suggest that the much misunderstood “debt bondage” or “debt slavery” which is reported to have been a common phenomenon in Southeast Asian polities—as also in “tribal” societies which were familiar with rank and political structures—is best understood in relation to the structure of patron-client relations and factionalism, and the premium placed on control of manpower. As an illustration suggestive of a general paradigm, let me cite the debt bondage in the Malayan Sultanates, as described by Gullick (1958: 103): “Contra the prejudicial account of many British administrators, it is clear that debt-bondage was usually an asymmetrical relation of mutual advantage to the creditor-master and the debtor. Of particular relevance here are the bondsmen who were in actuality members of the household and the personal following of the creditor, usually the political chiefs. For the chiefs the bondsmen constituted followers who owed loyalty and service and were preferable to both mercenaries and free volunteers in the arena of political maneuvering. The bondsman in turn, especially if poor, wifeless and homeless, found his main wants satisfied by his master’s ‘bounty.’ It was a recognized custom that a follower might ask his chief to give him a wife from among the women of his household.” Gullick (1958: 100) accounts for the institution of debt bondage in nineteenth-century Malaya thus: “A part of the population was mere flotsam and jetsam in a hostile world. In these circumstances, a homeless man might be tempted to attach himself in bondage to a chief. He thus got a living, the protection of a powerful patron, access to women and the ultimate prospect of obtaining a wife …The follower needed a patron, a living and a wife. But the chief on his side needed a private army. On balance it would appear that the bondsman’s position, as Hugh Clifford put it, involved “no special hardship.” And although the debtor’s services did not count towards a reduction of the debt, he had a certain margin for manoeuvering as indicated by the rule that a debtor ‘could demand to be transferred to any other creditor who would pay off his debt to the original creditor.’“ These features of debt slavery closely resemble accounts of the phenomenon reported in other Southeast Asian contexts—including the “tribal” societies of Upper Burma, which were familiar with rank and chiefly institutions. Examples are Leach’s account of the Kachin mayam (Leach 1954) and Stevenson’s of the Chin tefa systems (1968). Leach, for example, has this to say about Kachin mayam, usually translated as “slavery” but in many respects similar to the serf system in England and the boi system among the Chins (p. 299): There were two types of mayam—the outside (nong mayam, and the household (tinung) mayam, some grades of which may rightly be called slaves. The outside mayam, serf-like in many respects, owned their house and property and, when living in a mayam village, shared in the ownership of communal land. The dues they paid their master were heavy in goods, labour and half the marriage price, and although they had no rights in relation to their owner, few owners seemed to have been oppressive. Some of them even become slaves voluntarily and pay their dues in return for land and protection. The household mayam had no rights in relation to their master (paralleling unmarried children in relation to their fathers) and no rights of ownership. In practice, however, they are well cared for and hardly distinguishable from a child of the house. They are generally contented to receive their food, clothing, drink and opium. They are given wives and sacrifices are made on their behalf when they are sick. And although a socially inferior being, in practice there was very little difference between the life of a mayam and an ordinary member of the chief’s household. Mayam were occasionally bought and sold. Nearly every unmarried household mayam woman was burdened with one or two children by fathers from the ruling class, and these children were known as surawng. It was customary for parents of chiefly status to give their daughter upon her marriage a slave as handmaiden. The large majority of mayam were inherited or born in that status, though some were bought, purchased as wives and obtained as handmaids to brides (and therefore sexually available to their husbands). Some mayam became so voluntarily, either in payment of debts or in order to get wives and food, forfeiting their liberty by taking on a mayam woman and thereby becoming themselves the property of her owner. According to a 1931 census, the Triangle and adjacent areas in the Kachin hills had an estimated free population of 80,000; the total number of slaves was 3,989 (less than 4 percent), of whom 2,367 were born in bondage. Conclusion In this analysis of the traditional kingdoms of Southeast Asia as pulsating galactic polities, I hope I have escaped being impaled on the horns of a dilemma by not resorting to any of the following frameworks, to the exclusion of the others: 1) the “archaic” cosmological mentality, which entails the acceptance of the galactic structure as a given cultural system that serves as its own explanation without resort to historical or sociological factors—that is, an extreme form of priority attributed to the cultural order that verges on idealism; 2) a simpleminded determinism which believes it can directly and pragmatically generate the political and ideological superstructure of the galactic polity from a type of ecological and economic base; 3) a model of patrimonial domination that focuses on the imperatives of power and political control as the true arena for the emergence of the galactic structure; 4) a certain kind of laissez-faire utilitarianism as portrayed by the “central-place” theory which seeks to explain the location and hierarchy of central places (towns) in terms of their economic (and administrative) service functions.15 I have preferred to rely on a method of exposition that I have called totalization. I have tried to show that the geometry of the galactic polity is manifest as a recur-ring design at various levels that the analyst labeled cosmological, territorial, admin-istrative, politico-economic, but of which the accurate exegesis is that his recurring design is the reflection of the multifaceted polyvalence built into the dominant indi-genous concepts, and of the traditional idea of a simultaneous convergence of phenomena in a mandala pattern. A corollary of this demonstration is that the cult-ural model and the pragmatic parameters are in concordance and buttress one another, and cannot be disaggregated. The galactic polity as a totalization is not, as I have indicated, a smooth and harmonious entity but one ridden with paradoxes and even contradictions. If it represents man’s imposition of a conception upon the world, it is also a reflection of the contours of the politico-economic reality. The rhetoric and ritual display of the exemplary center and divine kingship is frequently deflated by perennial rebellions and sordid succession disputes at the capital, and defections and secessions at the periphery. A politico-economic system premised on the control of manpower as its chief resource, and whose building blocks are circles of leaders and followers that form and reform in highly unstable factions, frequently deteriorates into power struggles within and suffers continuous intrusions from without. These movements in political relations and groupings in turn disorient and redraw the boundaries of the polity’s territorial space. Moreover, agricultural involution is matched by administrative involution. Just as at base the society has its mundane existence in a multitude of decentered rice-growing peasant communities, existing save for intermittent and spectacular intrusions from the theater state, in relative isolation from the capital’s network of political exaction, so does the hierarchy of graduated power and merit fragment and shatter into the multitude of replicated, redundant, and competing administrative cells. The patterns for the mobilization of men, resources, and produce and the mechanisms of regulation and deployment of authority have their logistical limits. These are some of the paradoxes, restraints, and contradictions that motor the pulsations and oscillations of the traditional Southeast Asian polities within the parameters of their existence. They are also the features that match the cosmology and the actuality of the galactic polity in a closer fit than anyone has previously imagined. A further implication, which I have not spelled out in this essay, is that these polities are not timeless entities but historically grounded, and that they can be subject to irreversible transformation—as, for example, happened with the impact of Western colonial powers during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Thailand there was a change from a galactic to a more centralized “radial” polity that is by no means modern in the Western sense; in the ex-colonial new nations, galactic propensities still find their transformed expression in regionalism and com-munalism, despite the exaggerated hopes of an “integrative revolution.” APPENDIX Some galactic features of the Majapahit Kingdom of fourteenth-century Java What I propose to do in this brief account is begin with the conventional representation of a traditional Javanese polity—in this case Hayam Wuruk’s Maja-pahit kingdom—as a mandala system allegedly expressing the cosmic symmetry of a graded ordering from an exemplary center outward to its periphery of “ring kingdoms,” and then take the subversive step of revealing how this same account also contains other galactic features, such as asymmetrical bipartitioning (or dualism) and graded multicenteredness, which serve to explain why the substance of politics practiced by and allotted to the center was more ritualistic and exemplary than administrative and regulatory. (The principal source for this account is Pigeaud 1962, vols. 1–5.) My source for this illustration is the famous Javanese text called the Nagara-Kertaggama (ca. AD 1365), attributed to a Buddhist court cleric; the title can be loosely translated as “a manual for the cosmic ordering of the capital and kingdom.” The poet calls his poem deshawarnana, which is rendered as “topography” by Pigeaud (1962: vol. 4, 509). The text describes, among other things, the formal layout of the palace, capital, and kingdom, and treats at length the tribute-collecting and redistributive “royal progresses” (circuits) to parts of the kingdom, the staging of a court festival, and so on. Majapahit was an inland rice-based agrarian kingdom and is to be contrasted with the harbor-focused mercantile coast (pasisir) principalities of the north coast of Java, which were the first to go Islamic in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But we should be careful that in calling Majapahit an inland agrarian kingdom we do not obscure the fact that trade—overseas, interinsular, and internal—was a crucial arm of the royal economy. While the capital of Majapahit itself lay in the foothills of the East Java massif at some distance from the river Brantas, there was the important port of Bubat situated on the river, having as its inhabitants colonies of Chinese, Indian, and other merchants. (Another river port was Canggu.) Javanese rice was traded for Indian cloth and Chinese ceramics. The chief difference between the trade of Majapahit and the coastal mercantile principalities of North Java lay in this: in the latter, such as Tuban and Surabaya, the ruling aristocrats were directly involved as entrepreneurs in trading activities, while in the former the political rulers granted royal patents to traders for overseas trade, exacted tolls and duties on internal trade, and probably appointed port governors who regulated trade.16 Majapahit’s rulers administered trade rather than being merchant princes themselves. (See Pigeaud 1962: vol. 4, pp. 37–38, 498, 502–504, 509.) The mandala ordering of Majapahit is depicted in an exaggerated panegyric in keeping with the composer’s court affiliation. The glorification of the king emphasizes three things: “Successively the King’s works [especially public (kirtis) and religious (dharmas) foundations], the King’s zenana, and the expanse of the King’s dominions are praised.” An example of the last is Canto 17, stanza 3, which states (Pigeaud 1962): The whole expanse of Yawa-land (Java) is to be compared with one town in the Prince’s reign. By thousands are (counted) the people’s dwelling-places, to be compared with manors of Royal servants, surrounding the body of the Royal compound. All kinds of foreign islands; to be compared with them are the cultivated lands’ are as, made happy and quiet. Of the aspect of the parks, then, are the forests and mountains, all of them set foot on by Him, without feeling anxiety. The canto makes four comparisons and equivalences that derive from the mandala geometry which mirrors the outer in terms of the inner core: The prince’s town (capital) : the whole of Java; The royal manors surrounding the royal compound : the multitude of common people’s homesteads; The cultivated lands : the other islands; The parks : the forests and mountains. Again, in Canto 12, stanza 6, the parts of the kingdom are correlated with the cosmic pattern of the heavenly bodies: the two central compounds of the capital with the sun and the moon, the groves surrounding the compounds and manors with the halos of light surrounding the sun and the moon, the towns and other islands (nusantara) of the kingdom with stars and planets. (The last circle—the ring kingdoms, or mandalikarastra—are described as dependent states.) This is no doubt the imagery of an unrivaled exemplary center, a unified gradient of spirituality and cosmic symmetry—but let us look at the picture again and reconstitute it with additional details contained in the text. To begin with the poem is, not surprisingly, partial in suppressing any reference to the West Javanese kingdom of Sunda, Majapahit’s immediate neighbor and rival, because the latter could not be included as either a friend or a tributary within the circle of dominion. Similarly, the prominent coastal mercantile harbor-principality of Tuban is ignored, for it too had cheekily defied Majapahit. Again, the expansive world ruler’s claims have to be scaled down to the actuality: the Majapahit king’s effective domain of control was East Java, the perimeters of which delineated area were made the “royal progresses.” The king’s effective power also possibly extended over the east-erly islands of Bali and Madura, whose chiefs are described in the royal progress of 1359 as meeting with tribute the king’s caravan when it arrived at the eastern coast of Java.17 Next, let us focus on those features that imply that the mandala is constituted by asymmetrical dualism and by a cluster of replicated entities, the net effect of which is to produce a centrifugality and a pointillist mosaic of the whole. The previous reference to the sun and moon is a statement of the relation between the two central compounds within the capital complex, and of the two urban centers within the kingdom, standing in a dualistic though asymmetrical relation. The moon stands for the eastern pura of Wengker-Daha, the sun to the western royal compound of Majapahat-Singasari-Jiwana. Again, the town of Daha and the capital are lined up similarly. “Evidently the idea is that Daha is the chief of the lesser towns like the moon ruling over the stars and planets. Majapahit of course is the sun, spending [sic] light to all and sundry” (Pigeaud 1962: vol. 4, p. 26). The following excerpts from Pigeaud highlight a crosswise balancing of powers between the king of Majapahit and the Prince of Wengker, and their respective vizirs. Canto 12, stanza 3, 4. It is remarkable that the vizir of Daha had his manor north of the Royal compound and the vizir of Majapahit east of it, probably north of the Daha-Wengker compound. The four most important compounds and manors of the centre of the town appear to have been situated on the corners of a quadrangle. The holy crossroads of canto 8–2-4 probably was the point of intersection of the diagonals of that quadrangle and so it was considered as the centre of the town. The distances between the compounds and the manors are unknown and so the exact centre of the town can not be determined. Probably the Maja-pahit Javanese were perfectly satisfied with the notion that the holy centre of their town was situated somewhere north-east of the Royal compound. The crosswise relation between the compounds and the vizirs’ manors is an instance of the imp ort ance attached to cross connections in Javanese thought. The idea of unity and cosmic interrelationship pervades Java-nese social and religious organization to a very high degree. (Vol. 4, p. 24 .) According to the Nagara-Kertagama, Majapahit contained two main compounds and four main manors. Of the two compounds the western, the Royal compound, was inhabited by the family of Majapahit-Singasari-Jiwana, to which King Hayam Wuruk belonged; the eastern compound was the residence of the family of Wengker-Daha. Two of the manors were situated north of the compounds. The north-western manor was inhabited by the vizir of Daha, the north-eastern one by the vizir of Maja-pahit. The other two manors lay south of the compounds. The southeastern one was the residence of the bishop of the Shiwaites, the southwestern one was inhabited by the bishop of the Buddhists. Besides those six main compounds and manors there were many more manors of mandarins and noblemen along the edge of the great complex. (V ol. 4, p. 27). Thus, the capital of Majapahit was more a complex of compounds than a single walled-in fortress town of the medieval European type. And the royal compound itself at the very center of the complex resolved into three areas of accessibility graded from public to private. Topographically, then, the capital of Majapahit, the center of the mandala, was composed of a number of relatively self-contained and walled-in compounds; each of these was composed of the central residence of the patron, surrounded by the lesser residences of his personal following and retinue, and then again by the bondsmen’s dwellings at the periphery. Open spaces intervened between compounds, whose gradation was indexed by their size and location. Finally, there was no city wall at the outer boundary of the town: “As neither any kind of fortification nor any city gate is mentioned at the boundary, Majapahit could not be defended as a town. Only the compounds and the manors had walls and gates. That state of things survived in all Javanese towns [and, one might add, Thai and Burmese and other Southeast Asian towns as well] up to modern times” (vol. 4, p. 157). There are many other examples which can be adduced to support the thesis that the mandala unity is in good measure achieved through parallel structures and bipartitions. The glory and power of King Hayam Wuruk was rivaled not only by other princes but also by his grand-vizier, Gajah Mada.18 as, for example, suggested by the poem’s pointed mention in its account of the Royal Progress of 1359 (to eastern Java) that the Gajah Mada’s caravan leading the procession (with the king’s at the opposite end) contained some 400 carts. At the level of religious cults and functionaries, parallelism and duality were manifested in the coexistence and mutual relations of Shiwaism and Buddhism, the former apparently exoteric and associated with the “material element” and with “worldly rule,” the latter esoteric and expressive of the “immaterial” and the “inconceivable” (vol. 4, p. 4). The two clergies collaborated and competed in the annual purification ceremonies (p. 14). The two sets of shrines were located side by side in the eastern part of the main public courtyard of the palace compound, and the houses of the Shiwaite clergy were located on the eastern boundaries and those of the Buddhist on the southern boundaries of the royal compound. The asymmetry between the two systems was manifest in the fact that the Shiwaite cult and clergy were accorded a slight superiority over the Buddhist, but their common meeting in a single unity was achieved in the architecture of the central building, the Jajawa temple, whose ornamentation of the base and body was Shiwaite and of the top Buddhistic in design and motif. References Archaimbault, Charles. 1971. The new year ceremony at Basak (south Laos). Southeast Asia Program Data Papers, 78. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Berry, Brian J. L., and Allen Pred. 1961. Central place studies: A bibliography of theory and application. Regional Science Research Institute Bibliography Series, 1. 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Tambiah, Stanley J. 1976. World conqueror and world renouncer: A study of religion and polity in Thailand against a historical background. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tucci, Stanley. 1971. The theory and practice of the mandala. London: Rider. Vickery, Michael. 1970. “Thai regional elites and the reforms of King Chulalongkorn.” Journal of Asian Studies 24 (4): 863–81. Wales, Quaritch H. G. 1934. Ancient Siamese government and administration. London: B. Quaritch. Weber, Max. 1968. Economy and society. Vol. 3. Edited by G. Roth and C. Wittich. New York: Bedminster Press. Wenk, Klaus. 1968. The resotoration of Thailand under Rama I, 1782–1809. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Wheatley, Paul. 1961. The golden Khersonese. Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press. ———. 1969. City as symbol. Text of lecture delivered at University College London, 1967. London: H. K. Lewis. ———. 1971. The pivot of the four quarters. Chicago: Aldine. ———. (n.d.) “Satyantra in Suvarnadvipa: From reciprocity to redistribution in ancient Southeast Asia.” Unpublished manuscript. Wolters, O. W. 1967. Early Indonesia commerce: A study on the origins of Sri Vijaya. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.   Stalney Jeyaraja TAMBIAH is the Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor (Emeritus) of Anthropology at Harvard University. He has conducted fieldwork in Sri Lanka and Thailand and is one of the discipline’s foremost specialists in the anthropology of religion, political anthropology, semiotics, and the study of ethnic conflict. Some of his works include: World Conquerer and World Renouncer: A study of Buddhism and polity in Thailand against a historical background (Cambridge, 1976), Magic, science and religion and the scope of rationality (Cambridge, 1990), Buddhism betrayed?: Religion, politics, and violence in Sri Lanka (Chicago, 1992), Leveling crowds: Ethnonationalist conflicts and collective violence in South Asia (California, 1996), and Edmund Leach: An anthropological life (Cambridge, 2002). ___________________ Publisher’s note: This is a reprint of Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja. 1973. “The galactic polity in Southeast Asia.” In Culture, thought, and social action, 3–31. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. We are very grateful to Jonathan Tambiah and Harvard University Press for granting us permission to reprint. We also thank Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney for helping Hau acquire permission. We remind the reader that we retain the style of the original. 1. The cosmological scheme contains three lokas: the kama loka (world of sense and form), the rupa loka (world of form), and the arupa loka (world of no sense and no form). In this context I am primarily referring to the kama loka, which is divided into eleven levels—six inhabited by gods (including the second heaven of Indra, and the fourth Tusita heaven which is the abode of the next Buddha, Maitreya), and the remaining five divided among the four lower worlds of men, animals, asuras (demons), and ghosts (preta), and the last world which consists of various abominable hells. 2. See Griswold (1967: 33–34) for inscriptional evidence of the muang that had broken away before Lu Thai’s ascension and returned to his suzerainty between 1347 and 1357. 3. For instance, see Wenk’s description (1968: 29) of the administrative arrangements prevailing in the southern province of Phattalung at a much later time, at the beginning of the Bangkok era. The traditional divisions (krom) of the capital’s administration into the treasury (khlang), city (muang), palace (wang), and fields (na) were reproduced in the province. 4. The same point is cogently argued for Ayutthaya and early Bangkok by Rabibhadana (1969: 16). It is clear that similar considerations applied in traditional Java, where control of populations was more important than control of territory, and rulers also attempted wholesale deportations of prisoners (Anderson, in Holt, 1970: 30). 5. This discrepancy was partly, at least, an accident of the economic activities, especially tin mining, of Western and Chinese entrepreneurs. These activities made chiefs in whose territory the mines were located wealthier than others. 6. Clive Kessler (personal communication) informs me that in comparison with the Western Malay Sultanates, those on the east coast were even more weakly centralized and larger in scale. He has kindly made available to me chapter 2 of his dissertation (1974), in which he states: “The basic riverine state did not fail to emerge in Kelantan, but it developed in the midst of an expanding area of independent districts and chiefdoms” (p. 47); “Prior to the nineteenth century Kelantan constituted a mosaic of coastal baronies and principalities arranged about a politically turbulent core” (p. 51). 7. With regard to the light Weber may throw on the understanding of the “galactic polity,” Weber’s presentation has two inadequacies. First, he was curiously “unmusical” toward the cosmological and ritual aspects of the galactic polity; second, he envisaged “patrimonial domination” as grounded in the ruler’s control of land on which he settled dependents or which he distributed to them. To cite his own words: “Patrimonial domination is thus a special case of patriarchal domination—domestic authority decentralized through assignment of land and sometimes of equipment to the sons of the house or other dependents” (1968: 1011). The nuclear idea that patrimonial domination is the “patriarchal household” writ large, or that it was basically realized in a manoral-type system, does not correspond to the politico-economic facts of the traditional polity in Thailand (and elsewhere), in which it is the leader’s control over men (that is, a leader surrounded by his followers) and not his control over land per se that is the nuclear cell. 8. Patrimonial domination historically adopted two strategies. In the first instance, the king’s own agents, and officials directly dependent on him—the ministeriales—managed to exercise administrative power both at the center and in the provinces. This was achieved in Egypt and China and in the Ottoman Empire (via the famous Janissaries). In the second instance, the local landed interests and the gentry—the honoratiores—were coopted through compromise and concessions, and made to serve the interests of the ruling power. Cases in point were the nobility of Tsarist Russia, and the gentry of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England (who were made justices of the peace). 9. Schrieke defined the “state” as a type of political organization “in which the state prevents the disruption of component parts of the kingdom and makes the local notables more effective in its service” (1955: 173). Wertheim (in Soetajatmoko 1965: 346–347) compares this description to Weber’s “Patrimonial bureaucratic state.” 10. Regarding Java of the later Mataram period, scholars have distinguished between “appanage” (lungguh) and “salary field” (bengkok or tjatu). An appanage has been defined as an assigned region where one has the right to gain from the land and from the inhabitants a profit, from which the king him self can draw a portion, but which gives no rights over the land itself. Taxes, fees, services, and incomes from domains are examples of the profit accruing. A “salary field,” by contrast, is a piece of arable land that is part of the lands of the king and is assigned to an official, kinsman, or favored person. It is tilled by levy-service to the benefit of the person granted (Moertono, 1968: 117). 11. Wenk (1968: 34–35) gives an account of taxes collected and the distribution of income in the early Bangkok period that provides additional supporting evidence for our thesis. 12. In my view, Polanyi’s concept of “redistribution” as operating in such traditional “centric” polities tends to be applied indiscriminately. In the polities that I am discussing, redistribution of the consumable-agricultural surplus extracted appears less sumptuous and elaborate than is commonly assumed. 13. For example, Wolters says this of the maritime empire of Srivijaya, based in southeastern Sumatra: “Srivijaya, sometimes in control of territory on the Malay peninsula, has been ascribed a career from the seventh to the fourteenth century, spanning much of the history of Asian maritime trade and responsible in no small measure for its expansion by providing efficient harbor facilities for merchants making the long voyage between Middle East and China” (1967: 1). 14. Perhaps the most historic of the Malay Sultanates, the Malacca Sultanate, was a compact centralized polity which lived on the foreign trade of its port; it perhaps approaches Polanyi’s conception of “the port of trade” which mediated between serviceand agriculture-based kingdoms. Gullick leaves us in no doubt as to the importance of tin mining for the maintenance of the Malay polities in the nineteenth century: “Malay chiefs taxed tin mines in various ways and thus diverted into their own hands from a fifth to a third of the value of the output. Revenue from tin was the mainstay of the Malay political system” (1958: 6). 15. The possible contribution of central-place theory to my subject can be fully treated only in a separate paper. The theory is primarily concerned with the principles that order the distribution and hierarchy of cities and towns in their role as service centers; it is a theory of location of tertiary activity. It is not this major aspect of the theory, but another that was relatively marginal to it—namely, the system of central places according to the sociopolitical principle (rather than according to the marketing and traffic principles)—that is germane to my discussion of the traditional Southeast Asian kingdoms. For example, Christaller’s application of the “separation principle” based on political and administrative considerations produces a distinct system of central places reminiscent of my galactic pattern: “The ideal of such a spatial community has the nucleus as the capital (a central place of higher rank), around it, a wreath of satellite places of lesser importance, and toward the edge of the region a thinning population density” (1966: 77). While we may remark on the convergence of design at a general level, we can truth fully say that Christaller’s fragmentary discussion of the pattern deduced from sociopolitical and administrative considerations neither profitably adds to or subtracts from my fuller account of the galactic polity as it is inflected by several factors—cosmological, territorial, administrative, and political. It, however, helps support my view that in a comprehensive under standing of the galactic polity, what we customarily see as political and administrative orientations and considerations cannot be ignored. 16. A comparison with Ayutthaya, an inland capital but built on the main river artery of Chaophraya, is interesting. In Ayutthaya (as well as in early Bangkok), trade with foreigners was conducted via royal monopolies (controlled directly in the king’s interest or farmed out to ruling princes and nobles), and there was an important administrative division called the Khlang which administered the coastal ports in the gulf, supervised overseas trade, and collected the revenue accruing from it. 17. In other words, as in Ayutthaya, the central royal domain is the area of direct control, the outer provinces being satellites enjoying varying degrees of autonomy. 18. “The grand-vizier Gajah Mada, the mediator (of wealth) was considered as chthonic in opposition to the Royal Family” (Pigeaud 1962: vol. 4, p. 54).  

Pitt-Rivers: The place of grace in anthropology This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Julian A. Pitt-Rivers. The place of grace in anthropology Julian Pitt-Rivers   Prologue In the introduction to this book we observed that the word “honor” had entered anthropology only in the 1960s and we gave some considerations to account for this, to my mind curious, lacuna. The word “grace” is today in a condition somewhat comparable to “honor” in the 1960s and it is one of the aims of this essay to endow it with the recognition it deserves. I have found only three authors who have called attention to its existence as a general anthropological concept - briefly only1 - and none who has undertaken a detailed examination of its logic and potential usage. This, despite the enormous importance of a concept of this order in Christianity, Judaism and Islam, the huge theological literature on the subject — (surely the anthropology of religion can no more ignore Western theology than the anthropology of law can ignore Western jurisprudence?) — and the fact that a large number of Christian heresies were provoked by disagreements as to the nature of grace, from the Pelagians onwards. But blindness in this matter can hardly be attributed simply to the parochialism of modem university disciplines or the social scientists’ distrust of the expertise of the theologians: no anthropologist has to my knowledge asked himself whether there is anything remotely equivalent to grace among the concepts of Buddhism, Hinduism, Shintoism, or Taoism, though the sinologists have used it freely to translate the extensions of the wordfu (in origin a sacrificial offering, but also, the return of grace, thanks), whether the problem to which the doctrines of grace tender an answer has no echo beyond the religions of the Book, let alone the peoples without writing, or whether grace can be treated as a universal concept or only as an element of Western culture, a question which I asked with regard to “honor” in the introduction to The Fate of Shechem (Pitt-Rivers 1977). Personal destiny, with which grace is very much concerned, looms large in the works of Evans-Pritchard, both on Zande witchcraft and on Nuer religion, [216] yet he who favored employing Catholic theological terms as the nearest equivalents to the concepts of the Azande or the Nuer, seems never to have used the word.2 But these are all petty reasons for astonishment in comparison with the immense importance of the derivatives of grace outside the realms of theology, in the notion of gratuity. (At least gratuity is an abstract, universal, and theoretical concept). Not only is “grace” said before and sometimes after every meal in an Oxford college, I doubt whether any Englishman can get through a single day of his life without saying “thank you” at least a hundred times. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “Thank” is: “1) Thought (M.E.) [It comes from the same Old Teutonic root as “think”]. 2) Goodwill, graciousness, favor. 3) Grateful thought, gratitude. 4) Expression of the grateful acknowledgement of a benefit or favor.” Is not “thank you” in the “hundred-times-a-day” sense, simply the recognition and acceptance of a gratuitous gesture? The romance languages connect the notion rather more explicitly with grace: French, merci, Spanish, gracias; Italian, grazie, etc. It may be that this notion is not evoked when saying thanks because the Old Teutonic root (thank), used in casual conversation is not recognized as having anything to do with it. The romance root (gratus), which recalls the word “grace,” is reserved for more formal occasions when gratitude may really be felt. Yet it remains an enigma that the notion of grace should have escaped the anthropologists for so long. This is only the more remarkable in view of the attention they have given, in recent decades, to the problem of reciprocity. Can one explain systems of reciprocity adequately without considering the possibility of non-reciprocity, i.e. gratuity? Reciprocity is the basis of all sociation, in the form of systems of exchange, of women and of food, of labor and services, of hospitality and of violence. Anthropologists attach importance, rightly, to the detail of personal conduct in their understanding of human relations. And are not thanks the common coinage of encounters between persons? Yet what do they imply? What is their logic? Not even Goffman nor the ethnomethodologists have told us. This oversight might be accounted for simply by a regrettable tendency among those of a functionalist turn to mind to jump to conclusions regarding the significance of human actions on the basis of expressed intentions, without examining their mode of expression; to reduce each institution to “what it amounts to” or “what it does” in terms of practical results, ignoring its cultural roots, thinking that there is nothing more to be known about the culture of a people than what they themselves consciously recognize. Such accusations cannot be leveled at more than a minority of the profession today. That grace should have been ignored for so long is still puzzling. It is true one does not think of theology every time one says “thank you,” or wonder why the word “grace” and its derivatives have such diverse [217] connotations in different settings: why grace is engraved on English coins (Elizabeth II REG. D.G.) as well as said before a meal, why it is used in writing to a duke as well as bestowed on the congregation at the end of Matins, why it is invoked to applaud a dancer as well as to explain the success of a politician, why it names the three pagan goddesses concerned with personal endowment as well as voluntary embellishments added to a musical score, why it is left on the café table for the waitress as well as implored of God in the hope of salvation. One is justified in wondering whether it is still the same word or has become through the wear and tear of time a virtual homonym (Pitt-Rivers 1967). Yet this semantic richness does not mean that there is no association between the different senses. The meanings which a single word has in different contexts, or had in the forgotten past, are guides to the premises which underlie its daily conscious usage, but daily usage is indifferent to contradictions arising between its various senses, and leaves them to be sorted out at the level of action. (This is the case of honor also). Thus it is not necessary to analyze a word in order to know how to use it correctly. Moreover, the implications of the concept differ from place to place; expressions of gratitude are wont to follow different rules of etiquette in different social milieux, as in different cultures, and it is only by reflecting on all potential differences that one comes to understand the concept as a whole, and I maintain that grace is a whole. Thanks can in some situations be interpreted as a reluctance to pay what the recipient expects as his due; in others, on the contrary, to thank is to recognize indebtedness and represents a promise to return the gift or service in the future. (Such cultures might be described as “Maussian,” for they have already understood “the necessity to return presents,” as Mauss put it in the subtitle of his great essay on the gift). But the etiquette concerning the return of gifts contains more subtleties than Mauss explained. The only general rule that can be cited is that grace is always something extra, over and above “what counts,” what is obligatory or predictable; it belongs on the register of the extraordinary (hence its association with the sacred). Nevertheless whenever a favor has been done the return of grace is always expected, whether in the form of a material manifestation (regardless of the material value of that which is returned) or merely in verbal expression. However, there are also conventional formulae for the acknowledgement of thanks which follow the same principle in all European languages. They consist curiously enough in denying that a favor has been done. Hence in Spanish de nada, in Italian de nulla and in French de rien (though this is considered undistinguished; it is more elegant to say c’était un plaisir or je vous en prie as in Italian prego, in German Bitte). In English “Don’t mention it,” but in American English “It was a pleasure” is the most explicit form. The [218] denial is not in fact the denial of the sentiment which inspired the act of grace but rather that any obligation has been incurred. It is a way of asserting that the grace was real, that the favor was indeed gratuitous. It is a guarantee of the purity of the motives of the gratifier, a way of saying (as we shall see below) you owe nothing for this favor, it is an act of grace. Without wishing to sound cynical, I must nevertheless point out that by, so to speak, stressing the gratuitous nature of the gesture by denying that any obligation has been incurred, it not only maintains the purity of the motives of the gratifier, it maintains his moral supremacy, which is not to be modified simply by verbal thanks but leaves him a creditor, should the occasion ever arise where a more serious return of grace is possible. The modem tendency in England to say “thank you” when no thanks are conceivably due, almost as a pause-word when one does not know how otherwise to bring the conversation to a close, appears to me to impoverish the notion and things have gone so far that it has now become common custom in commercial aeroplanes to use the phrase to terminate an emission over the intercom system, indicating thereby that the unknown, unseen, uninvited speaker has finished what he had it in mind to announce and is switching off. He thinks perhaps that he is giving thanks for the attention that has been paid to his message. But little does he know it when there is an anthropologist in the cabin who responds to this proffered hypocritical gesture of grace by cursing the interruption of his reading or his snooze. (A curse is, of course, an expression of negative grace — like witchcraft as we shall later see — and on that account alone is worthy of attention.) Such excessive use of the catch-phrase of thanks does not always ingratiate the thanker and among the simple folk of southern Europe to thank when no thanks are due was commonly regarded as “uncouth” behavior and raised suspicions as to the speaker’s ability to recognize when gratitude was due.3 This devaluation of thanks, encountered in British or American airliners is, no doubt, inspired by the feeling that some attempt at sociation is due between the crew and the passengers in their charge, even if one cannot determine what: a wave of the hand or a wink suffice in some contexts to establish it, but the trouble with intercom systems is that you cannot actually see your interlocutor. Reciprocity is the essence of sociation, as has been said, whether in mechanical or organic solidarity, whether in exchanging salutations or in business and whether the return be immediate or protracted; it is, as it were, the cement that holds any society together, for it establishes relations between persons; once you have exchanged something, you are related. The often meaningless salutations on the path have no other function than this (Firth 1973). Exchange is not merely an economic fact making the division of labor possible and enabling peoples of differing ecology and cultural achievement to make their products available to each other and thus extend the potentialities of [219] their lifestyle, it is above all a social fact, for, as a principle, it governs much more than the exchange of “useful goods” and functions: one can exchange pleasures, woes, secrets, women, insults, vengeance, hospitality, conversation, stories or songs, and above all gifts, but the economic justification for exchange is, as often as not, subsidiary or lacking altogether, even in the exchange of goods, as in those Somali marriages, studied by L. M. Lewis (1961: 139), in which camels, paid as bride-price, return as part of the bride’s dowry to their original owners. Yet morally they are no longer the same camels. For something of the giver always accompanies the object exchanged, and if in the first place the camels were exchanged for the bride; in the second they testify to the rights of her kinsmen in regard to her children. That the principle of exchange reigns over many more aspects of society than the economic has been recognized ever since Mauss’ essay on the gift, and Lévi-Strauss later applied the principle to kinship and marriage, stressing the importance of the groups between whom exchange takes place. This was the point of departure for the structural study of kinship. Yet an aspect that has attracted less attention is that which determines the ways in which, and the extent to which, reciprocity is evaluated and equivalence is established. In the elementary structures of kinship there is no problem: one woman is fair exchange for another. But in other forms of exchange the degree of specificity varies; one man’s labor is known in advance not to be as productive as another’s, even though this can rarely be admitted openly, yet when it is a matter of exchanging goods their relative values are discussed freely. This is the basis of all bargaining and indeed of commerce itself. But this is not at all: the mythology of our times assumes that agreement as to economic equivalence is the condition of all exchange, and to establish this, some kind of estimation must be made. Yet, in fact, such equivalence is necessary only if the aim is commercial, not if it is moral, for example in the field of religion, as the parable of the widow’s mite made quite explicit. There are also reciprocal relations which do not involve a contract of any sort, nor any estimation of value, for they are between participants whose interests are solidary (in the legal sense that all responsibilities are shared and all benefits are held in common). Nothing is specified by way of a return. The nature of the relationship suffices to determine what is due and when. This is what Meyer Fortes called “kinship amity,” “where there is no mine nor thine but only ours.” The basic distinction between the parties involved, which is essential to the notion of commerce, is missing and in the field of reciprocity we must therefore differentiate between relations of equivalent exchange and relations of amity, between contract and benevolence, between precise commitments, entailing estimations of equivalence, and mutual aid whensoever needed. Yet beyond the realms of kinship amity where all is held in common and [220] without entering the field of exchange as the law defines it (“a mutual grant of equal interests, the one in consideration of the other,” Blackstone in O.E.D.), it is possible to speak of the exchange of favors. Both favors and contracts involve reciprocity, but contractual reciprocity, the basis of trade, is not the same thing as the reciprocity of the heart. The latter escapes the attention of economists (and fiscal authorities, though they have introduced “gift tax” in the attempt to frustrate the evasion of other more onerous taxes). The ties of kinship or of friendship, the hidden incentive, the act of forbearance, the incalculable benefits of favorable decisions, the aim to please, evade the notice of both, for they cannot be evaluated, yet at the micro-level that concerns the anthropologist they are primordial, the very tissue of social relations, and in the end they bear fruit at the macro-level of society and distort the calculations of those who suppose they can be ignored. Hence, for example, the problem of “corruption” in Latin America has received much comment, especially from foreign analysts who have tended to deplore it as a vice in the administration, if not in “the Latin-American character.” The mordida, literally “the bite” (and the word is used in syndical affairs in the United States in quite the same sense) is sometimes blamed for the various ills of the Mexican economy; it is indeed quite current that those empowered by the State to give their assent to the operations which are subject to legislative control expect to be thanked for giving it, for personal relations remain personal in Mexico regardless of the legal function of the participants. This “customary expectation of the return of favors” may be reprehensible from the viewpoint of modem Anglo-Saxon values, yet what could be more natural than the principle from which the mordida springs: that a favor requires to be returned, and all the more imperatively when the possibility is open that it may be withdrawn if reciprocity is not forthcoming. in Mexico, as in most of the non-European world, the values of the heart are rated higher than those of the law, and the confrontation between the two leads sometimes to anomalies, as in the case of that Governor of the State of Chiapas who ruined his political career by refusing to accept mordidas. Apart from the moral pretensions of his stance which were resented by those he governed, it was felt that such a man could not be trusted in personal relations. Moreover, is it not also frequently the case in Europe that the values of the heart take precedence over legal and economic considerations? The example of neighborly cooperation between small peasant farmers will be examined below. indeed, wherever the idea of gratuity appears, contracts, calculation, and legal obligations step into the back seat and the counter-principle of grace takes over. Yet the back seat is never empty and from the moment that grace reigns over the order of the day, the clever ones start calculating the odds and exploiting the situation to their advantage. Hence it comes as no surprise to learn that there are plenty of people in Mexico who strongly resent having to give a mordida to an official [221] who is already paid to do his job, yet if they are not quixotic they give it all the same. But since the servants of the state are poorly paid in Mexico it is difficult to see what advantage anyone would have in entering its service if he could not look forward to making something on the side. Thus, as things stand at present, those who require the State’s services are those who pay for them. What could appear more equitable? However, applied at a higher level, of government, rather than of petty local administration, these principles produce a rather different result: the concentration of power in the hands of a political class whose existence is not recognized by the ideology of the State. Thus, behind the facade of administrative law the personal policies of the administrators reign and the values of the heart are exploited by their calculations of how to increase their fortune or their power. There are, then, two parallel modes of conduct, ideally, even if they are not always easily distinguished, which correspond to the old opposition between the heart and the head: that which is felt and that which is known, the subjective and the objective vision of the world, the mysterious and the rational, the sacred and the profane. They are governed, respectively, by the principle of grace and by the principle of law, that is to say, predictable regularity, as well as justice and the law which impose order in human affairs — from which pardon (grace) authorizes a departure. Under the heading of “grace” it is possible to group all the phenomena that evade the conscious reasoned control of conduct. Etymology: theological origins and extensions Let us look then first of all at the notion of grace in general before dealing with its different aspects. From the Greek root Χάρις (Charis), we get charity, charisma, eucharist and so forth; from the Latin, derived from it, gracious, gratitude, congratulations, etc. The origin of the word is religious; it is a theological idea which has found various spheres of extension outside the realm of theology. Benveniste (1969: 199) traces it to an Indo-Iranian root: the Sanskrit gir, a song or hymn of praise or of grace, or to give thanks. He notes also that, like all other economic notions, its economic sense derives from the totality of human relations or relations with gods rather than the contrary. Gratuity is the core of the notion, that which is undertaken not in order to obtain a return but to give pleasure. We must certainly start with the theological concept of grace, for it appears that the structure of the religious notion is able to account for the elaboration of the popular senses, though whether popular theology is derived from the reasoning of the learned or whether the latter have based their doctrines on the popular premises which they absorbed in infancy — an argument that has raged for a century with regard to other aspects of culture — is an issue that we need not raise now, but it is worth observing that, unlike honor, grace seems never [222] to have quite forgotten its etymological roots. Without entering into the subtleties of the numerous varieties of grace and the excessively optimistic or pessimistic doctrines which have been condemned as heresy from time to time, we can give, as its starting point, the pure gratuitous gift of God. Louis Ott (1955) defines it as “a free gift of God unmerited by men” (“un don gratuit de la part de Dieu et immérité de la part de l’homme”). According to St. Thomas Aquinas it is especially the gift of the Holy Spirit, but it is also, in the pauline view, associated particularly with christ whose death redeemed us from original sin. As pardon obtained through Him, it is the key to salvation. It develops within us as a habitus,4 an acquired disposition to cooperate with the will of God, and this involves human will also, upon which the will of God operates, in St. Augustine’s opinion. It is a supernatural accident created in our nature in such a manner as to adapt it to divine life, in the Thomist doctrine. Ott, again, says (1955: 314): “The unfathomable mystery of the doctrine of grace is to be found in the intimate collaboration and reciprocal intervention of divine power and human freedom. All the controversies and heresies regarding grace have their point of departure in this.” (“Dans la collaboration intime et l’intervention réciproque de la puissance divine et de la liberté humaine se trouve le mystère insondable de la doctrine de la Grâce. Toutes les controverses et hérésies relatives à la grâce ont là leur point de départ.”) And (pp. 348ff.) he discusses the relations between grace and freedom. It is clear that the discussions center upon the role of human will which is insufficient by itself to attain salvation, but which cannot be dispensed with without falling into determinism. If individual will is the essence of honor, the essence of grace is the will of God, which necessarily restricts the individual’s will in some degree, but the attainment of grace can only be achieved with the cooperation of human will since God requires his benificence to be returned; the rites of the Catholic Church require the appropriate intentions on the part of the beneficiary in order to be valid. The Catholic solution to the paradox of theodicy resides in this mysterious conjunction of the will of God and the will of man. Grace is connected with the will in another way also, for it is associated with purity. To be “in a state of grace” is to be sinless, to be redeemed, through confession, from the state of sin into which our all too human will has led us. To be in a condition to receive grace one must be cleansed of sinfulness, not only of original sin, of which one was discharged by the grace of the Holy Spirit at baptism, but of the sins which result from a will inadequately accorded to the will of God. Yet such provisions are necessarily insufficient to assure the attainment of grace, since the will of God on which this depends is by definition arbitrary. On account of this unpredictability, grace comes in popular usage to mean good fortune, that which cannot be foreseen. [223] Benveniste (1969), etymologist rather than theologian, discusses grace in less mystical terms, easier to grasp for one who is not versed in theology: “The Latin words show that, in origin, the procedure consists in giving service for nothing, without reimbursement; this literally gracious or gratuitous service provokes in return the manifestation that is called ‘acknowledgment’.” (“Les mots latins montrent que le procès, à l’origine, consiste à rendre un service pour rien, sans contre-partie;” ce service littéralement ‘gracieux’ provoque en retour la manifestation que nous appelons ‘reconnaissance’.”) And later: Everything that refers to economic notions is tied to much vaster representations which bring into play the totality of human relations’ with divinities. Over and above the normal circuit of exchanges, that which one gives in order to obtain a counterpart, there is a second circuit, that of bounty and acknowledgment which is given without any consideration of a return of that which is offered, as an act of thanks. (Tout ce qui se rapporte à des notions économiques est lié à des représentations beaucoup plus vastes qui mettent enjeu l’ensemble des relations humaines ou des relations avec des divinités. Au-dessus du circuit normal des échanges, de ce qu’on donne pour obtenir — il y a un deuxième circuit, celui du bienfait et de la reconnaissance, ce qui est donné sans esprit de retour, de ce qui est offert pour “remercier.”) Thus he distinguishes clearly between the two “circuits” of reciprocity, that which is properly called “exchange,” an interchange of interests, and that which is inspired by a generous impulse, good will, gratuity, which demands only a reciprocity of sentiment. The former, subject to contract, can be simultaneous or protracted over a specified time. The latter, an exchange of grace, is simultaneous only in the handshake or the act of embracing, and normally requires an initiatory gesture, followed by a response, as in hospitality, or the return of favors. On account of its gratuitous nature there is no need, as in contractual exchange, to determine in advance what the value of the return shall be, nor when it shall be made, since none is envisaged, even though it may be hopefully expected. Whether any is to come depends not upon mutual agreement but upon the wishes of the recipient. The word “boon” expresses the notion of gratuity better than any other in English, for it is both a prayer, a request for a favor and the favor granted, a blessing and an unpaid service, such as ploughing or shearing, for a neighbor. Though grace is a free gift of God, unpredictable, arbitrary and mysterious, there are nonetheless means of obtaining it: first of all through the sacraments. This is the main function of the rites of the Church, indeed of any church. Sacrifice is always a tentative to embark upon an exchange of grace with the Deity. The offering invites a return-gift of grace, the friendship of God, as it has been called. The Eucharist, the commensality of the mass, confession, prayer, and penance, the usage of “gratiferous” substances: incense, corn, wine, oil, and salt and water too, are all employed in the enterprise of obtaining grace, [224] whether for the salvation of the souls of the faithful or their material prosperity. But the passage of grace is never guaranteed, even by the state of grace, the purity of intentions or the correct administration of the rite, because grace is a mystery which remains in the free gift of God. If God is the source of grace, this does not mean that humans cannot generate it, and dispense it to others. The dictionaries’ lists of meanings provide an abundance of examples, which we can leave the reader to examine at his leisure. The central core remains always the notion of gratuity, on the social as on the theological plane, and the essential opposition is to that which is rational, predictable, calculated, legally or even morally obligatory, contractually binding, creating a right to reciprocity. Grace is a “free” gift, a favor, an expression of esteem, of the desire to please, a product of the arbitrary will, human or divine, an unaccountable love. Hence it is gratuitous in yet another sense: that of being not answerable to coherent reasoning, un justifiable, as when an insult is said to be gratuitous, or when a payment is made, over and above that which is due. Thus it ranges from the tip left on the table for the waitress to the “golden handshake” of the company director who has lost his company a fortune through his bad judgment and swollen head, obstinacy or plain idleness, but who cannot be permitted to depart unrewarded for his “long and loyal service,” lest he do the company yet more damage by revealing its secrets. The tip displays the principles involved; it is called “a small gratuity” in self-consciously pompous language and this corresponds to our definition, for it is a sum paid over and above what is owed, whose amount is ‘left to the appreciation of the client’ as it used to be put on French restaurant menus, until, in blatant contempt of the very principle of grace, it became a compulsory charge of ten, and later fifteen percent. But the principle of grace is not so easily dismissed; the attempt to rationalize the system of payment and do away with the gratuity was unsuccessful, for no sooner had the clients become used to being charged more, than the custom crept in to leave a small tip extra in order to maintain their status relationship with those who served them. George M. Foster’s essay, “The analysis of envy” (1972) attributes the tip to the need to assuage the envy which a server might be supposed to feel towards those whom he serves, rather as the envy of witches is sometimes bought off by a gesture of gratuity, and there is certainly some substance to this explanation, but as a freely chosen expression of goodwill, the tip does no more than underline the absence of a contractual obligation, the opposition between that which is owed and that which is given and hence the superior social status of the giver, sealed by this petty gesture of patronization. For, if the offer of favor between equals awaits a return of grace, between unequals if it cannot be returned it can also mean a claim to superior status, and can thus even be resented by a person who does not wish to admit this claim. [225] In somewhat the same way a payment made under duress bears the opposite meaning in terms of honor to a payment made at the instigation only of the man who pays and who thus, provided it be accepted, accretes honor by his bounty. The economic result is identical in the two cases, but the social significance is the opposite. The man who is forced to pay is humiliated because he is shown to be inferior or dominated, the bountiful man demonstrates his superiority, his dominance, even though he may have been manipulated into giving his bounty. In each case the superior is the man who apparently imposes his will. Equally a gift may honor the recipient as an expression of sympathy and admiration or it may put him down if it can be interpreted to imply that he is in need of help. An excess of hospitality can humiliate as much as an insufficiency. For honor looks al ways up, pity, the poor relation of grace, looks down, but it is not always easy to tell which way people are looking, the same gesture can mean either homage or contempt, and it can even imply a measure of both simultaneously. The techniques of begging illustrate this ambiguity well: they range from those who, sacrificing all shame, attempt to inspire pity by a display of their misery to those who propose a very expensive seat at a charity dinner they are professionally employed to organize. Who is helping whom? Is the donor of alms helping the beggar to stay alive, or is the recipient, of priestly caste perhaps, offering the donor the opportunity to acquire grace by becoming associated, through this act of charity, with the divinity? The ambivalence, so often encountered in the analysis of honor, as of grace, derives precisely from the possibility of giving different interpretations of the moral value attaching to an economically identical transaction. To offer a lady flowers is to pay her homage, to honor her — the donor has sacrificed to her the cost of the flowers, but she is none the richer, save in prestige — but if he offers her diamonds, she may be justified in wondering what are his intentions and whether she should accept. What exactly is the favor he hopes to receive in return? Grace, positive and negative, in Grazalema The connotations of grace are as varied as those of honor, the more so in Spanish than in English, it appears, for this reason, and also because I have previously examined the concept of honor in Andalusia (1977), I shall deal with grace as it operates in that part of Spain where its logic, thanks to its richness, can be seen more clearly. The variations in the daily use of grace, as of honor, distinguish different national cultures, and to some extent regions and classes as well, while the theological variants are matters of doctrine rather than usage and depend upon individual thinkers, cults and heresies — and historical periods. Let us see then how the word gracia is used in the everyday life of a small Andalusian town, Grazalema (Pitt-Rivers 1954), starting with its role in [226] popular theology. It figures in the subjectivity of the townsmen and, above all, townswomen as a state of grace, forgiveness subsequent to confession, the achievement of atonement which makes a person eligible to receive divine grace through the sacraments, or in answer to prayers. It is the essence of redemption through baptism; the rite of baptism assures the entry of a new-born child into the religious, that is to say, the human community. It expunges the sin of Adam through the application of the water, the salt, and the chrism, the unguent vehicle of grace which figures also in the last rites. It establishes the tie of spiritual affinity between the god-child and the god-parents who give the child its name. A person’s first name is sometimes called his gracia. The godparents, padrinos, are also called padres de gracia, spiritual parents or parents of the christian name, in opposition to natural parents whose duties towards their children stand in marked contrast to those of the god-parents. The tie of spiritual affinity still exists in the popular view, with all the obligations of respect and the usage of the third person in speech between the compadres (parents and god-parents in relation to each other), despite the recent abolition of this tie in the dogma of the Roman catholic (but not the Orthodox) Church (Pitt-Rivers 1976). The grace of God is obtained through other sacraments, and prayers are offered to God and to the saints, above all to the various manifestations of the Holy virgin, for their intercession to obtain divine favor in the form of personal advantages, cures, or miracles. Promises (promesass were made to reciprocate the favor, if the prayers were answered, by wearing a robe recalling that of the image of the saint who had obtained the miracle or by performing a penance such as bearing a wooden cross, going barefoot or on knees during the processions in the celebration of Holy Week. The relationship with the saints is similar to that in Sicily described by Maria Pia Di Bella in her contribution to this volume (chapter eight). Grace, like honor, is not at all the same thing for both sexes. While masculine honor is a matter of precedence in the first place and the man of honor strives to establish his name in the forefront of his group, the honor of women is rather a matter of virtue and sexual purity. The distinction is clearly marked in Sicily under the titles of “Name” and “Blood.” The first is active and positive, a matter of attaining or inhering status and prestige or, in the plebeian community, the respect due to an honorable member. The second is negative and passive, a matter of avoiding any action that might stain the reputation of the family. Male honor is something to be won, increased, and defended against a rival; female honor is something to be conserved and protected from the evil tongues of the envious. Grace is rather the reverse of masculine honor which depends upon individual will and ambition and this aligns it with female honor. In the first place women have, as it were, a prior claim to grace, not merely on religious grounds [227] (they are more active in religious practice than men), but in the attribution of it in most of its forms. Aesthetic grace is purely feminine: men are not expected to have grace of movement, though they may dance with grace, and professional dancers are commonly assumed to be effeminate. The curanderas (curers), also called sabias (wise women), possess an individual grace which comes to them from the saint of their devotion and enables them to cure through the grace in their hand and the performance of ritual gestures (signs of the cross on various parts of the patient’s body), anointment with blessed oil, and prayers, muttered rather than declaimed because addressed to the divine powers rather than to the patient or the audience. The whole rite bears a general resemblance to baptism or to coronation, but the divinities to whom the prayers are addressed show the rite to be anything but orthodox christianity. They include, apart from Jesus christ and the virgin Mary (in the manifestation which is the particular devotion of the sabia), the holy salt, addressed as a divine personage (“Salt, Salt, they call you salt, but I call you Holy Salt … ”), the Seven Lions, venus and Astarte, and others of an equally heterodox character. Aided by the holy oil, the evil leaves the patient’s body and enters the arm of the curer who endures the pain for the next twenty four hours or so. Were a sabia to accept a gift of money in recompense for the cure she had performed, she would immediately lose her grace, for it belongs to God and would be withdrawn if she were to use it to obtain material gain. in return for her grace she can accept only symbols of grace, blessed candles to bum in front of the virgin or holy oil, for she is operating upon that second circuit in which only grace can be returned for grace. Given the ambivalence of magical powers, a general phenomenon in anthropology, it is not surprising that the first people to be suspected of witchcraft were the sabias. Could they not use their grace for evil ends also? Nothing appeared more plausible, for just as cursing is the reverse of blessing, so magical damage is the reverse of magic al healing. it suffices to invert the intention to produce the opposite result. Witches are commonly credited with the power to inflict damage on man or beast, to do love-magic, to foretell the future, to drive men mad, etc., in brief to operate upon the health or sentiments of their victims. Witchcraft everywhere depends upon envy, the will to do harm. But to do harm to an enemy is quite legitimate conduct; it is part of the game to take vengeance against the man who has damaged you or your reputation in order to recuperate your honor, “restore it to a state of grace.” Witchcraft, however, is the attempt to take vengeance, not openly, but by covert dishonorable means, negative grace, invoking the aid of the Devil. For this reason the curer who enjoyed the greatest popularity in Grazalema never tired of repeating that she did “nothing but the things of God” and gave every outward sign of her piety. [228] In brief, witchcraft can here, as anywhere else moreover, be defined as a habitus of negative grace. Just as positive grace is opposed to reasoned empirical means of doing good, so negative grace is opposed to overt vengeance and employs the supernatural. The grace of the sabias, the source of their magical power, was something inherent in their bodies, like their sex. And it must be added that the female sex produces maleficent manifestations at the time of the period. Other forms of involuntary evil attributed to certain women were the Evil Eye and that quality, called calio in Grazalema, which makes them permanently dangerous as though they were menstruating. (A similar belief is found elsewhere in the region, though under different names, which all however recall the notion of heat: Pitt-Rivers 1954, where a more complete account is given). Witches can in fact be of either sex, though in Grazalema their techniques are totally distinct. Women cure by their grace which comes from God and if they bewitch it is, implicitly, by a misuse of that grace which has power even when perverted to nefarious ends, rather as the black mass, by inverting the symbols, uses the powers of religion to accomplish the work of the Devil. Men have no grace in this sense; they cure and they bewitch not by the mysterious power of grace but by techniques which are supposedly rational and depend upon knowledge (though this is not general throughout Spain; men who cure by grace are to be found in the northern half of the country and as far south as the provinces of Alicante and Caceres). Thus apart from the practitioners of “scientific medicine,” doctors and chemists, all of them men, those of folk medicine were limited to bone-setters and herbalists (the latter could also be women). The techniques of witchcraft practiced by men consisted of spells, and above all of spells to invoke the aid of the Devil through reading a book of magic. Since poltergeists were the work of the Devil, they were necessarily caused by “reading” and consequently by men only, though their victims were all women. Thus the distinction established by Evans-Pritchard between witchcraft and sorcery with regard to the ethnography of the Azande was exemplified in Grazalema, with the additional rider that witches were all, and by definition, female, while sorcerers were all male. None of the sabias knew how to read. Newspapers and notices on the municipal notice board were the main reading matter, that is to say, reading concerned the male sphere of relations with the administration and news of the outside world. Hence reading was an essentially male activity. News regarding the inner sphere of the community was passed by word of mouth at the fountain whither every household had to send a member every day to wash clothing if they wished to keep up with events. Other manifestations of grace are accorded to people on different grounds. The signs of grace are various: the seventh child of a seventh child or, according to Brenan (1957: 99), the ninth child of a woman who has only male [229] children, those born on a Friday, especially Good Friday, etc. The signs of grace are not confined to women, but they tend to reinforce its connection with the female sex: to begin with, in popular theology the source of grace was the Virgin Mary, who is announced as such in the Ave Maria. Hence all women named Maria have grace and this accounts for half the female population, for they are named after a specific manifestation of the Virgin, and are generally called, for abbreviation, only by the name of that manifestation. Hence Dolores, Carmen, Luz, Pilar, Mercedes, Milagros, Imaculada, and the place names of her appearance, Lourdes, Fatima, etc., are all in fact Maria. But in any case it is said that all women are Mary simply by virtue of their sex. Good luck is also grace, prosperity on earth as well as salvation in the hereafter, for they are all given by God. In this sense it corresponds to baraka, as in a number of others which the reader may have noted. “To have grace” also refers to the possession of natural “gifts” for they too are given by God (in classical mythology they were given by the Three Graces). Grace in this sense is the power to operate upon others, pleasing or amusing them or compelling their admiration and assent, hence it means not only grace in movement, as in English, but charm, wit, humor, a knack for something which others may not succeed in acquiring. Thus it is located in parts of the body: in facial expression, in the tongue, in the head, or in the hand. As such it is worth more than mere beauty (though beauty also is grace in the sense of being an unaccountable favor of nature) because it is more active than beauty which is passive and therefore less compelling than charm and wit. This is made clear in an Andalusian copia (popular verse form), put into the mouth of a highly self-confident young woman (which I translate very freely): Mi novio tiene una noviaque es mas bonita que yoMas bonita, si, seràPero mas graciosa no! My boy-friend has a girl-friendWho is prettier than mePrettier, yes, she may beBut nothing like as much Fun[literally: but more graciosa, no!] The greater value of grace as opposed to beauty is a commonplace of the folklore, underlined in rhymes such as: “La suerte de la fea, la guapa la desea” (The luck of the plain girl, the pretty girl envies her). As charm, the power to please, it is as mysterious as religious grace, and like this it belongs to the above, as a gift of God. To lack grace in this sense is to be pesado, literally heavy, hence boring. As in the work of Simone Weil, weight is the antithesis of grace — which contravenes all laws including the law of gravity. [230] As an unpredictable boon, “the grace of God” is used to refer to sunshine in the north of Spain and to rain in the south. It is from this general sense of grace as the power to operate upon the will of others that Max Weber derived his conception of charisma, an extraordinary power of personal leadership. He treated it “as a property attributed to great innovating personalities who disrupt traditionally and rationally-legally legitimated systems of authority and who establish, or aspire to establish, a system of authority claiming to be legitimated by the direct experience of divine grace.” (Shils 1968: 386). It should be noted, however, that Weber did not conceive of charisma, as popular usage does today, uniquely as a type of political power, but as a much more general principle of social and cultural organization related to individual freedom and innovation. A “distinctive moral fervor” lies at the root of the attachment to charismatic authority which contrasts with submissive attitudes to traditional authority and sober calculation with regard to it. The general opposition between the ordinary and rational, on the one hand, and charisma, which is the essence of grace, on the other, assimilates the latter to the sacred, but at the same time the rejection of formalized forms may inspire “a fear and hence an opposition to the sacred itself” (Eisenstadt 1968: xviii). But Weber recognized that charismatic and traditional authority come together, within the framework of social life, in “the routinization of charisma.” In the same way the routinization imposed by the rules governing the rituals of the Church do not suffice to negate the charismatic power of their sacred origins. Hence the grace, inherent in the royal rituals described by Lafages, endows a very traditional form of government with the moral fervor associated with innovative forms, but, thanks to its fundamental ambiguity, it can equally well be acquired by rebels and used against sacralized royal authority, for, as Weber stressed, charisma contains destructive as well as creative tendencies. Here we have the solution to the paradox that, despite the superlative moral value of the monarch’s coronation at Reims, rebellion against the legitimized royal ruler was always possible from time to time, for no ritual can guarantee the passage of grace. This ambiguity, admirably discussed by Eisenstadt, which its opposition to rationality engenders in charisma, is all the more striking in the instance of the baraka acquired by the successor to the Sultanate of Morocco in Jamous’ essay: it is his de facto success in defeating his rivals in war that provides proof of the new Sultan’s baraka, yet his charisma becomes routinized once he has succeeded to the throne. In such circumstances “the dichotomy between the charismatic and the orderly routine of social organisation seems to be obliterated” (Eisenstadt 1968: xxi). The routinization, not to say the abuse, of grace reaches its peak in the formulae of social etiquette. In Spain “Your Mercy” (Su Merced) was used formerly as a form of address to a person of high status, just as in English “Your [231] Grace” is the title of a Duke or Archbishop (Pitt-Rivers 1974). Those who come immediately after the sovereign, “His Gracious Majesty,” the source of all earthly grace, as of all honor (in whose gift is pardon, for he, alone, is above the law) participate, through their proximity to him, in his gracious nature. The title of Your Grace was also used formerly to royalty itself and the association was still extant in Shakespeare’s day: “to have his daughter come into grace,” i.e., marry into the Royal Family (A Winter’s Tale IV.iii). To summarize, in the sense of benefaction, gift, demonstration of benevolence, concession, graciousness, pardon, or indulgence, grace is inspired by the notion of something over and above what is due, economically, legally, or morally; it is neither foreseeable, predictable by reasoning, nor subject to guarantee. It stands outside the system of reciprocal services. It cannot be owed or won, specified in advance or merited. Hence it can mean remission of a sin or a debt, mercy, pardon, or forgiveness and thus it is opposed to justice and the law. As gratitude it is the only return-gift that conserves the nature of the initial prestation. You cannot pay for a favor in any way or it ceases to be one, you can only thank, though on a later occasion you can demonstrate gratitude by making an equally “free” gift in return. Like hospitality, which is a manifestation of it, or like violence, its contrary, a demonstration of malevolence, it can only be exchanged against its own kind (Jamous 1981). To attempt to reply to violence by invoking the sanctions of the law is behavior not approved by the code of honor (Pitt-Rivers 1977). Grace, then, allows of no payment, no explanation, and requires no justification. It is not just illogical, but opposed to logic, a counter-principle, unpredictable as the hand of God, “an unfathomable mystery” which stretches far beyond the confines of theology. The opposition is clear and applies in every case: grace is opposed to calculation, as chance is to the control of destiny, as the free gift is to the contract, as the heart is to the head, as the total commitment is to the limited responsibility, as thanks are to the stipulated counterpart, as the notion of community is to that of alterity, as Gemeinschaft is to Gesellschaft, as kinship amity is to political alliance, as the open cheque is to the audited account. Of course accounts are kept in fact much more often than is admitted, even if they are no more precise than a vague tally of favors, made in recollection. A lady of the bourgeoisie of south-western France remarked to intimates that she was terribly behindhand with her invitations; she “owed” God knows how many dinners! But the peasants of the same region never admit to keeping an account of the favors they have done in lending a helping hand to their neighbors, and one cannot help wondering whether it was not once so in England also, given the expressions “boon-ploughing” and “boonshearing.” [232] Gratuity as insurance in rural south-western France It is well known that traditional small farmers in Europe practice a system of reciprocal service in agriculture and in general within the social life of the community. In fact there is great variety in the form this takes. The first anthropological account of such a system, in western Ireland, was given by Arensberg and Kimball (1949). “Cooring” was a relationship in which “friends” exchanged help on their farms. But the authors discovered that to be classed as a “friend” one had to have a tie of kinship. Those who had no kinsman in the community had no friend with whom to cooperate. A more recent account of another such system was provided by Sandra Ott who studied a French Basque sheep-farming village where the ties of neighborship are defined in terms not of kinship but of space. The roles of “first neighbor” and of the other “neighbors” depend upon the geographical position of their farms. In “Magnac,” the name I gave to a village in the Quercy in south-western France, neighborly cooperation depends upon a system of undifferentiated exchange, based upon the moral principle that neighbors must help each other. When asked to lend a hand one must, if at all possible, agree to do so, and under certain conditions help may even be proposed unrequested. This helping hand is lent without payment, without any reciprocity envisaged, and if the helper is asked what he is owed, he replies “nothing at all”; he explains that he has come to lend a hand in a quite disinterested spirit, because “we must all help each other,” and he adds by way of explanation the traditional phrase, Je ne suis pas regardant, which might be translated as “i don’t keep accounts.” it is the denial that any obligation has been incurred by the recipient of the service. But small farmers have very good memories and the less they read and write the more they depend upon them. However, to admit to keeping accounts obliterates the virtue of this good-hearted gesture, just as recognizing that the intention of a gift was to provoke a counter-gift destroys the grace conveyed by it. Accounts are for public reckoning and contractual relations only, not for the exchange of favors. Where reciprocity is governed by specific rules defining the duties of each party the equivalence of the contribution of each can easily be established, but where there are no duties, no time limit, and the partners are unspecified, they cannot. The moral imbalance remains until the helper makes a request that will balance the unmentionable debt and there is no way he can be pressured to do so. Thus prescribed exchange is opposed to unspecified and open-ended reciprocity, just as market values and immediate reciprocity are opposed to the exchange of grace. Here we have a system of exchange of favor manifested through mutual services, rather than an exchange of services, that is to say, a demonstration of community solidarity which involves the sacrifice of immediate individual interests in favor of long-term collective ones (Bloch 1974). The technological conditions for such a system have been explained [233] elsewhere (Pitt-Rivers 1981). The harvest was traditionally the occasion for the display of neighborly relations when a considerable labor force was required to service the threshing machine. The day ended with a sumptuous meal, but the introduction of the combine harvester (which requires no work-force at all and works on contract paid by the hour) put an end to this institution. Heavy capitalization has unbalanced the system of reciprocity. The one equivalence that was implicit, if not stated, was that one man’s labor was as good as another’s. Even if this was not always true, the difference could not become apparent, since men worked in a chain forking the sheaves, which necessarily moved at the speed of the slowest man, but today, though the loan of machinery between neighbors has perhaps increased, the day of a man with a sixty horse-power tractor is no longer the same thing as the day of a man with a horse. Nevertheless the system continues to function; the solidarity of the farming community struggles to maintain itself, the ideal remains intact. Great prestige attaches to a good reputation as a neighbor. Everyone would like to be in credit with everybody and those who show reluctance to lend a hand when they are asked to do so soon acquire a bad reputation which is commented on by innuendo. Those who fail to return the favor done to them come to be excluded from the system altogether. Those of good repute can be sure of compliance on all sides. Thus the imbalance of favors provides the basis of an incipient system of patronage. The general opinion that so-and-so has “done much” for the community is the surest ticket for election or re-election in local politics. But there is another factor which in a sense explains all the rest. A single family farm is particularly vulnerable to situations of crisis. If the husband breaks a leg who is going to milk the cows now that women no longer learn to milk? If the wife goes into hospital who is going to look after the children? The open-endedness of the system is justified ultimately as a mode of insurance. A good name as a neighbor is the most precious form of guarantee against disaster. In times of urgent need the neighbors come to offer their services. Who knows when they may not be in need of help themselves? Grace in Kula: paradox in friendship and the gift Community solidarity in the face of common dangers and difficulties prohibits the calculation of mine and thine. Yet the gift of one’s time and energy is no different in moral terms from any other gift and it is therefore also subject to the paradox of the gift which descends from the theological mystery of grace — is not the doctrine of mystery theology’s answer to an insoluble paradox? It is the same paradox as that of friendship. It derives from the fact that a gift is not a gift unless it is a free gift, i.e., involving no obligation on the part of the receiver, and yet, as Mauss so well explained, it nevertheless requires to be returned. In French a gift is “offered” not “given,” just as an offering to the [234] gods is. It is an expression of esteem, an honoring gesture, and as such complete in itself, requiring only to be accepted in order to achieve its end, which is, as in sacrifice, to convert “having” into “being,” the dispossession of self in favor of another; the article or service which the donor sacrifices is transformed into becoming associated with the recipient, establishing or maintaining a particular tie with him. It cannot be made with the intention of provoking a return-gift, for then it is not a free gift. If put to calculated ends, a gift is false charity, a manoeuvre abusing the notion of generosity. There is then no dispossession of self; the grace does not pass. But on the other hand, if it is not made in the hope of a return of the favor shown (which can itself only be shown by a reciprocatory gesture), then it is not a true gift either, but an act of largesse, a gesture of pity or a demonstration of superiority or power over the recipient. This was what Timon of Athens failed to understand. He made the mistake of humiliating his friends by an excess of generosity and he got what he deserved. Like the code of honor in which it might be taken to figure as a clause, the gift is shot through with ambivalence; any gratuitous gesture can “mean” one thing or its contrary according to circumstances. And the interpretation remains always debatable. The gift, unrequited, implies either that it has been accepted as the receiver’s due, a repayment or a tribute to him that he deserved and which consequently requires no recompense, but only amiable thanks, or that the recipient is unable to return it because he is not up to the standard of the donor and unwilling to appear inferior through making a return of lesser value. Finally, the gift, if not actually refused, may not be recognized at all. In the first case the giver is slighted because his gift has been taken for granted; in the second case, as in the potlatch, the receiver is humiliated because he has failed to “keep his end up”; in the third case the giver is rejected, for his favor is not welcome — the receiver does not wish to correspond, to initiate or to maintain his association with the giver. Possibly the latter was suspected of false intentions or pretentiousness in making such a gift in the first place. If a gift is not returned the donor cannot complain, for he has placed his honor in the hands of the recipient. Were he to do so he would dishonor himself still further, for he would thereby imply that he made his gift only in order to obtain a hold on the receiver, to exploit him, to oblige him to reciprocate and in that case he deserved to be slighted. The question of how soon the return gift should be made is also open to differing interpretations. That which is made too promptly stinks of payment, that is to say, it indicates a refusal to accept the favor as a free gift, a reluctance to remain in moral debt to a person whom you mistrust. (This over-hasty reciprocity is commonly found among persons who fear patronization by their social superiors). It may equally, if returned immediately, mean the opposite: that the receiver is so grateful that he cannot wait to express his gratitude. The [235] longer the delay the greater the confidence shown. On the other hand, to delay the return of a favor for too long may be taken to indicate, not the desire to show confidence in the sentiments of the donor and remain in his due until a worthy occasion presents itself to reciprocate, but indifference. Just as vengeance is all the more effective — for being delayed — it is a dish that is to be served cold, so it is said — so gratitude is the more touching for having awaited the proper occasion to be expressed. But if the delay is too great the matter may appear to have been forgotten. In the meantime the receiver awaits his “revenge,” as jokers sometimes say, playing on the ambivalence of the notion that the recipient can also be represented as “one down” in the competition to do favor. In every case the interpretation depends upon the relative status of the participants, in terms of honor, power, prestige, morality, the nature of their relationship, and the customs of their milieu. In attempting to explain the paradox on which the notion of the gift is founded I have several times referred to Marcel Mauss and the reader may have noticed a certain indebtedness to his ideas at different points. However, note should be taken of the differences between our two approaches. Mauss was aware of no paradox. His aim was, briefly, to explain that, though gifts are “in theory voluntary, in fact they are given and repaid under obligation,” “prestations which are in theory voluntary, disinterested and spontaneous, are in fact obligatory and interested. The form [of such exchanges] is that of the gift generously offered; but the accompanying behavior is formal pretence and social deception … ” (1966). He demonstrated this by reference to extra-European and historical materials, whereas I have dealt mainly, if not quite entirely, with Europe. He makes no mention of grace, and the gratuity of the gift is, for him, a sociological delusion. Thanks have no legal or material reality and they do not come into the question. I believe that the gratuity of the gift is no delusion; however much it may have been abused, it is still the essence not only of sacrifice but of everyday gestures of favor. The concept of grace which lay at the basis of my explanation cannot be assumed to exist elsewhere, even if Mauss’ essay suffices to establish that the gift corresponds to a general sociological category. The basic opposition between human attempts to foresee and control the future through calculation and a law of contract, on the one hand, and the inscrutability of the will of God, who se grace is a mystery, on the other, is missing in primitive cultures. The christian concept of grace is above all concerned with individual salvation, from the religious point of view, and this I put forward as the root of the extended senses of the word. It might be thought to follow therefore that there is nothing like grace to be found where there is no salvation, that is to say, outside christianity. However we have suggested that, lacking such a fertile theological soil to grow in, a concept very similar to grace is found in Judaism [236] (hesed) and in Islam (baraka). Reciprocity of favor, like friendship,5 which is nothing more than this, is universal whether between man and God or between men. It is the other term of the opposition that is missing; legal contract is specific to societies that keep written records. The Indians of the Pacific coast of Canada have barely more of a juridical system than the Polynesians and Melanesians with whom Mauss was equally concerned, yet he seems to speak of both as though they had: he credits the Maori with a juridical mentality and he underlines the obligatory nature of the duty to return a gift, using the word “obligatory” in its pristine legal sense (binding by oath, promise or contract) and maintaining that this is defended by sanctions. (The sanctions that he mentions are uniquely warfare and witchcraft). Mauss was interested in the evolution of the notion of contract whose history he had traced back to a religious origin in the oath. I cannot help suspecting that his interest in contract and his lack of a notion of grace have produced a slightly warped vision of the gift. The only sanctions that ensure the necessity to return a gift are magical, and social only in so far as the refusal to return grace entails automatically negative grace and the breakdown of sociation which in primitive society leads easily, if not necessarily, to hostilities. The same is true in our own world. The slight represented by the failure to return grace provokes sentiments of resentment (malevolence) which far surpass in their virulence those which the simple evasion of contractual obligations inspires. one supports with equanimity the attempt to swindle one, especially when it fails, whatever one may think of the swindler, but one’s amour propre is wounded by the refusal to respond to the offer of grace, for much more than material interests are at stake: one’s intimate self is damaged. Mauss wrote no ethnography himself, but he was a wonderfully perceptive reader of the field reports of others. However, his readings of those which support his essay on the gift appear to be far from unquestionable. They scarcely confirm the conclusions he drew. Whether or not to reply to the challenge represented by the potlatch is surely a voluntary decision, a matter of capacities and will, rather than an obligation. It is no more obligatory than to pick up the glove of any one who chooses to challenge you. If you refuse the challenge you may, depending upon the circumstances, lose prestige, that’s all. But you do not risk losing your life. The exploitation of the principle of reciprocity in order “to fight with property,” as the Kwakiutl put it, is a style of rivalry which has been recognized in our own society. In the Kwakiutl case the grace, proffered in the hospitality of the feast, conceals a negative aspect of hostility that is always lurking beneath the surface of hospitable relations. Mauss attributed this to the obligation to return the gift, and I gave a slightly different explanation in “The Law of Hospitality” (Pitt-Rivers 1977, chapter five). in fact, as we have seen, grace is always in danger of being changed into negative grace when the sentiments in which it abides are lacking. [237] The obligation to return a gift is set forth above all in the example on which Mauss founded his theory. The hau, “the spirit of the gift” among the Maori, demands to be returned to its initial donor, and the man who scorns this demand risks supematural sickness or even death. Leaving aside the criticisms that have been leveled at the interpretations of hau by Mauss and by others — Sahlins (1974) examines them — I note that many of the senses of this multi-faceted concept (though by no means all) are analogous with either grace, baraka or indarra, all of which are highly varied, as we have seen. One finds in them the essence of the gift, its non-contractual nature and something like the soul of the donor contained in it. Hau, like grace and like baraka, is that which is in excess, left over or supplementary, transcending exact reciprocity. Like indarra, especially, it is good fortune, fruitfulness, the power of increase, the power of Nature that makes the plants grow. And like indarra, it is also the wind. Moreover it should be recalled that the demands of the hau are reinforced only by the sanctions of witchcraft, which it has been suggested is supernatural malevolence, negative or inverted grace. At the same time there are many senses of grace, etc., that are not given for hau which, like mana, another Maori concept (Pitt-Rivers 1974), can also reside in stones, a capacity that seems quite foreign to grace — until one considers the Stone of Scone which demanded to be returned from Westminster to Scotland a few years ago (or so some students of St. Andrews University seemed to think). I am not pretending that hau can be translated as grace, baraka, or indarra, but only that it is a concept of the same order, with all the differences that are implied by the contrast between a monotheistic and a polytheistic mode of thought. But it is no good trying to explain hau by an analogy with our own economic (or juridicial) institutions when it is clearly closer to the religious ones that Benveniste found to be their source. One should rather take the totality of usages and search for their common qualities. Just as I have pointed to the similarity between honor and mana, so I can see that hau can be, at least in many contexts, assimilated to grace. it stands as a guardian of the second circuit, the embodiment of the abstract principle of gratuity. I shall take for more detailed scrutiny the Kula gift-exchange of the Trobriand islanders, not only because Mauss gives it as one of his main examples, but because it is, perhaps thanks to Malinowski, the most widely known ethnographic phenomenon in anthropological literature. in this elaborate system gifts of individual, named arm-shells and necklaces, which have no practical utility and in fact are seldom worn, circulate in opposite directions round a ring of islands over a span of several years and serve as the armature of a number of other more Utilitarian exchanges and indeed of the whole system of social relations between islands. Unlike the Nuer who, as Evans-Pritchard explained (1956: 223–4), were [238] always cheated by Arab traders because they had no understanding of money and commercial transactions and thought they were establishing personal relations through an exchange of gifts, as in sacrifice - “a relation between persons rather than between things. it is the merchant who is bought, rather than the goods” — the Trobrianders understood trading very well, were skilled in barter and bargaining, though they had no currency, but did not confuse the counter-gift that is owed in payment with the ceremonial exchange of Kula. “The Kula exchange has always to be a gift, followed by a counter-gift; it can never be a ‘barter’, a direct exchange with assessment of equivalents and with haggling” (despite Mauss 1966: 187, where it is classified as “ceremonial barter”). “There must always be in the Kula two transactions, distinct in name, in nature and in time” (ibid.: 352). “There are means of soliciting, but no pressure can be employed.” The valuable given in return is “under pressure of a certain obligation” but the only sanction is the partner’s anger (ibid.: 353). Kula is “sharply distinguished from barter, gimwali.” The equivalence of the counter-gift is never discussed, bargained about or computed (there is no standard by which this could be done anyway, ibid.: 359); it is “left to the giver and it cannot he enforced by any kind of coercion”; there is no direct means of redress, “or of putting an end to the whole transaction” (ibid.: 95, 96) nor indeed to the specific Kula-partnership. What kind of a contract is this? “Kula is never used as a medium of exchange or as measure of value,” “the equivalence of the values exchanged is essential, but it must be the result of the repayer’s own sense of what is due to custom and to his own dignity” (ibid.: 511). Kula objects are offered to the spirits (including land-crabs) to make them benevolent, “to make their minds good” (ibid.: 512). The choice of which valuable to offer to a given partner is free, but the owner can be influenced by solicitory gifts of food or petty valuables, by “rites and spells, acting on the mind of a partner to make him soft, unsteady in mind, eager to give kula” (ibid.: 102). Resentment caused by disappointment at not receiving a given famous arm-shell or necklace cannot be expressed openly and directly, but it can be avenged by black magic; “many men died because of [such-and-such a necklace]” (ibid.: 359), i.e. by witchcraft. When unable to find a suitable return-gift to offer to a partner one may make an “intermediate gift” in order to avoid the accusation of being “slow” or “hard” in Kula, but this is “a token of good faith,” not, as Mauss thought, interest on an outstanding debt. The definitive proof of this, if needed, is that an equivalent return is expected for the intermediate gift (ibid.: 98). In a word, the Trobriand Islanders distinguish as clearly as Benveniste between the two circuits and in Kula there is no trace of contract,’ nor of sanctions other than the spoiled grace which is sorcery and the desire for vengeance which is allowed no overt expression. The bad heart of the unsatisfactory partner can be [239] dealt with only by magical charms. The only obligation on the circuit of grace, a moral one, is the return of grace. Kula valuables are vehicles of grace like the chrism of baptism or the oil of the Holy Ampulla; they have no material utility and no value in relation to utilities. A Kula partnership is no more contractual than the relation between blood-brothers in Africa or compadres in Spain or Latin America and like them it contains no possibility of annulment. A contract, on the other hand, to be valid in English law must specify its duration. Hence one might conclude by inverting the proposition of Mauss, saying that the gift is not in theory voluntary while in fact obligatory, but in theory according to the theory of Mauss — obligatory while in reality voluntary, for it depends uniquely upon the will of the partner; nothing is specified with regard to the return gift, what it should be or when it should he returned. The moral obligation is only to return grace and what is resented if it is not returned is not the material loss but the rejection of the donor’s self. It is always the thought look back to its etymology — that counts. If the anthropological study of friendship was so slow to be broached it was perhaps not unconnected with the failure to recognize the importance of grace. For grace is the essence of friendship. It is defined by the theologians as “the friendship of God” and on the terrestrial plane it remains the essence of that institution, as its subsidiary vocabulary makes clear: bounty, boon, favor, gratuity, thanks, etc. Since reciprocal favor is the basis of friendship and the exchange of gifts its mark, it is no surprise that the paradox of the gift, as I have explained it, is present in friendship which, like the gift, and like honor also, possesses both a subjective aspect, that which is felt in the heart and which determines the will, the aspect that relates it to the sacred, and the objective aspect which relates it to material interests, to others and to society in general. The paradox is that, while friendship to be true should be inspired by sentiment only and disinterested, yet it must be reciprocal not only in sentiment but in material gifts and services, for sentiments must he expressed by deeds. Hence it must he disinterested in motive, but profitable all the same, since the test of a friend is that he devotes himself to your interests. Actions speak louder than words. It is vain to attempt to split the paradox and found a typology of friendship upon its two terms, distinguishing between the “affective” and the “instrumental” types, as Eric Wolf proposed in a well-known essay, for how can the ethnographer know whose feelings are pure and whose are not? It is hard to guarantee the former in the face of the constraints of daily life, but no one admits to the latter. The distinction then rests upon a factor that is exceedingly difficult to establish. The same difficulty faces the Church in determining the validity of its rites: how to know the true intentions of the participants. But the church at least, through the court of the Rota, summons evidence and goes [240] through a judicial process before giving judgment, while each man must judge the heart of his friend for himself. Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethic did better than anyone since at disentangling the two aspects, by distinguishing between friends who are useful, friends who are amusing, and friends who are loved, but on account of the paradox it is not normally made clear who is to be classed as which and it is always a disappointment to those who thought they were loved to discover that they were merely useful. crossed lines between the two circuits always lead to trouble (Pitt-Rivers 1984). Once more, the uncertainty of grace, one of its essential aspects in the religious sphere (and one which gives rise to the sin of presuming on the grace of God), is demonstrated in everyday social relations. Honor and grace: their mediative function We have tried to encompass the totality of grace and explain the coherence of the whole concept and the relation between its different meanings. In defining a notion of such variety, it is not enough to study only the concept by itself, one must place it within sets of wider range and look for its connections with others. The one of particular interest for this book is that which forms, with grace, its title, honor, for it seems to deal with problems in the same field: the destiny of a man and his relations with other people and with God. It shares with honor the same tendency to be evanescent and self-contradictory. Sometimes the two words are almost interchangeable: you pay honor in offering grace, for it is an expression of sentiment freely willed. You expose your honor in doing so, precisely because there is no obligation to return grace unless it comes from the heart — and you are dishonored if you get a “brush-off,” in which case you are justified in being offended. Hence it can be seen that exchanges of honor are very similar to exchanges of grace. To be favored or privileged is to be honored, exalted above those who are not favored. Rituals of honor are continually marking distinctions of this sort. Grace, as a verb, underscores the similarity (O.E.D.): “To confer honour or dignity upon, do honour or credit. ” Grace, like honor, is associated with power and with royalty, as we have seen. To lose power is “to fall from grace,” “to be put down,” “to go out of favor,” “to be disgraced.” Moreover, physical contact is all important in the conveyance of both: one is dubbed a knight by a touch on the shoulder with the sovereign’s sword; one ingests the host; one is “touched” by grace; the transmission of grace at baptism involves the application of blessed substances to the body of the initiate. Anointing, whether of kings or neophytes, is a ritual technique for according grace. The affront to honor is expressed by a slap on the face. The rituals of dishonor involve the physical person also: the stocks, the stripping of honorific symbols, the defilement of the head, cutting the hair, marking the [241] body in castigation; honorific status is inscribed upon the body. All these rites relate to the person-in-himself where the will is centered. In other contexts grace’ appears not similar to but complementary to honor, as in the coronation ritual analyzed by Lafages in chapter two: the king is inducted simultaneously as knight and bishop, temporal and spiritual leader, fount of honor, whose legitimacy is guaranteed by grace. They can also be seen as alternative bases for renown as in Di Bella’s account of the relation between Name and Blood: titles to honor, on the one hand, and miracles, manifestations of divine grace, on the other. Miracles step outside the worldly hierarchy and by appealing to the principle of anti-honor achieve more than can be won in the competition for precedence. Finally there are those contexts in which honor is frankly opposed to grace, as for example in the sense that honor depends only upon the individual will to win, while grace depends upon the will of God and cannot be won. Grace (O.E.D.) is “hap, luck or fortune,” while honor can be saved when all else is lost by fortitude and determination; each man is guardian of his own honor, for it depends upon his will, his worth as a person, or his rank. Grace ignores moral and social qualities. It is arbitrary as the divine whim. Honor implies combat, rivalry, and triumph, while grace means peace. The unverifiability of intentions and the state of the heart, which are necessary to both honor and grace, the paradoxes which assail both and the uncertainty of divine judgment which refuses to submit to mundane reasoning, have encouraged societies with writing to replace the reciprocity of the heart by the law of contract and provide sanctions for its enforcement. Taking reciprocity out of the field of grace detaches it from the sentiments and objectifies it, making it abstract and depersonalized. As soon as the monarchy was strong enough, it suppressed the judicial combat and took justice out of the unpredictable hands of fate, curtailing the problem of theodicy. Yet the affective side of life cannot be obliterated. Despite their contrary aspects grace and honor remain and contribute each to the composition of the other. When the conquistador went to America “to win honor with my lance in my hand” and at the same time to get the gold needed to support such pretensions to honor, he depended upon his own ambition, courage, toughness, and wiles, but once he had risen to eminence, power, and wealth, he had the means of dispensing grace. Only those with power can favor or pardon; you must possess a thing before you can give it away; the beggar can return grace only in the form of a blessing and the hope that God may reciprocate the gesture of charity. But grace is closer to God than the ambition to succeed, and for that reason he who has renounced all pretension to honor by demanding (and exploiting) pity enjoys a privileged relationship with the Almighty. Grace, not honor, is the ideal enjoined by the Beatitudes. indeed the contradiction is spectacular, the lesson clear: one must renounce one’s claim to honor as precedence if one is to [242] attain the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, or more precisely one must invert it, adopt the counter-principle represented by the honor of women, whose sex excludes them in theory from the agonistic sphere. (The resemblance between feminine honor and grace has already been noted.) in somewhat similar vein the sacred status of priests imposes upon them the renunciation of violence and worldly ambition as well as the right to play the male role in relation to women. One might be tempted to jump to the conclusion that this opposition between masculine honor and grace is a product of the moral revolution imposed by Christianity — this was what Nietsche thought — yet grace is much older than Christianity and Mauss (1966: 15) had already noted the generic connection between the gods and the poor through whom they can be approached; we also know from classical Greece that Zeus was accustomed to adopt the disguise of the beggar who enjoyed his special protection. The opposition is therefore more general than its connection with Christianity. The sacred status of beggars can be found in india also. Moreover, this apparent anomaly is not without solution. To begin with, in the logic of agon, rivalry is wedded to equality, for one must feel one self to be the equal of one’s antagonist in order to compete, yet the test of strength aims always to destroy this equality and establish hierarchy: a victor and a vanquished (Pitt-Rivers 1960). The latter can demand revenge “when all is lost save honor,” but, theoretically at least, they can no longer issue or accept a challenge if they are not conceived as equal. The institution of the handicap is the means of enabling them to do so, by making them equal. However, once the hierarchy is established, the competition is over, and from that moment the man who has achieved power, preeminence, the dominant position, wishes only to legitimize it in the public consensus. His honor changes its nature and from striving to achieve precedence it becomes honor validated in the view of others, honor as virtue, recognized by his subordinates and dependants, whom he protects. This simplistic paradigm of power would have no interest if it did not correspond to a transition from agonistic honor to grace which we can detect in other circumstances. it would appear that there are in Western civilization two opposed — and ultimately complementary registers: the first associated with honor, competition, triumph, the male sex, possession, and the profane world, and the other with peace, amity, grace, purity, renunciation, the female sex, dispossession in favor of others, and the sacred. The ambitious man, when he has succeeded, won honor, and achieved dominance, requires that the qualities by which he has done so he confirmed and consecrated, that what he has achieved be conserved for the future. Thus he must then show qualities that are the contrary: generosity and moderation (which cannot now be taken for weakness), forbearance (his status entitles him to ignore what would once have constituted a slight), wisdom and, in order to [243] represent the collectivity, a regard for the feelings and opinions of others. We have given examples: those old Cypriot sophrons, described by Peristiany, whose ideal is to end up with nothing, having distributed all their possessions among their children, or the builder of the hospital described by caro Baroja, or the Sultan of Morocco who, having fought and slaughtered to win the succession, becomes a sacred figure, a man of peace, able to settle the quarrels of others in accordance with the norms of Islam, for feud and vendetta can be ended only by an appeal to the sacred which such persons represent. The shorfa, peace-makers of the Rif, do not enter the struggle for precedence, for they belong to sacred lineages, the guardians of the shrine which is a sanctuary. The man of honor must in a sense convert his honor into grace and thus render himself impregnable, because legitimate, be loved by those he has defeated, make peace where once he made war, trade his de facto power for right, his dominance for status, his business acumen for magnanimity. He must struggle to achieve honor, but the proof that he has achieved it is that he no longer needs to struggle. Hence that which appears at first as an anomaly if not a contradiction becomes, once viewed in the perspective of the life cycle, a relation of complementarity and in the end concordance, for, since grace is the will of God, it is by His grace that the triumphant hero received his endowment in the first place, was predestined to win. If one ends up dishonored, it was for lack of grace in the first place. Honor stands before the event; his honorable qualities produce the victor. Grace stands behind it; the will of God is revealed in the outcome. Each is therefore a precondition of the other. If you lack grace you will not attain honor, in which case you will lack the means to he gracious. However, there are those who do not have to achieve honor and convert it into grace, for they are born with both. Louis XIV became king at the age of six and he had so much grace that he thought himself entitled to elevate his bastards over the heads of those whose kinship with him was more distant, if more conventionally respectable. As Leroy Ladurie makes clear, the Little Duke was not of that opinion! Their difference was understandable, for the royal bastard is always of ambiguous status: he has the honor attaching to his recognized descent, he was conceived by personal will, not for reasons of state, a “love-child,” and he is usually his father’s favorite, but he bears the stigma of illegitimacy. (Though let us remember that grace is opposed to and above the law). Therefore royal bastards are superior in a covert, mystical sense, while being at the same time inferior, socially, to their legitimate kinsmen. There are those also whose honor and grace is consecrated by less obvious rituals than a coronation. The administrators of modern France, former students of the Grandes Ecoles, win their honor by triumph over rivals in the entrance [244] examination — personal excellence has replaced genealogical descent or wealth as the criterion of the elect — and thereafter, their intelligence and competence certified by their status as normaliens, politechniciens, etc., they remain, whatever they do or say, as Bourdieu explains in chapter four, with a kind of grace, the living embodiment of the will, not of God but of the French Republic. Both honor and grace are mediative concepts; they interpret events in accordance with the prevailing values of society, putting the seal of legitimacy on to the established order. Together they constitute the frame of reference by which people and situations are to be judged. They are indistinguishably blended in the Basque concept of indarra, in which natural, cultural, and social forces come together; the life force of men, plants and the wine, the grace of the Holy virgin, and the legitimacy of property rights in houses. Elements of both honor and grace are found in Polynesian mana, and other “legitimizing concepts” can be found in the ethnographies of other parts of the world.6 They supply the point of junction between the ideal and the real world, the sacred and the profane, culture and society. References Arensberg, Conrad and Kimball. 1949. Family and Community in Western Ireland. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Balandier, Georges. 1967. Anthropologie Politique. Paris: Presses Universitaires De France. Bateson, Gregory. 1972. “Style, Grace and Information in Primitive Art.” In Steps to an Ecology of Mind; Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. New York: Ballantine Books. Beattie, John M. 1960. “On the Nyoro concept of mahano.” African Studies. 19(3): 145-150. Benveniste, Emile. 1969. Le Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes, Vol. 1, Economie, parenté, société. Paris: Editions de Minuit. Bloch, Maurice. 1974. “The long term and the short term: the economic and political significance of the morality of kinship.” In The Character of Kinship, edited by L. Goody, 75-87. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1987. Choses dites. Paris: Editions de Minuit. Brenan, Gerald. 1957. South from Granada. London: Penguin. Catedra, Maria. 1981. Death as a cultural process. Ph.D. Thesis, Penn University. ———. 1988. La Muerte y otros mundos, Madrid: Jucar Universidad. Eisenstadt, Shmuel. N. 1968. Preface to Weber 1968. Evans-Pritchard, Edward E. 1937. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1956. Nuer Religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Firth, Raymond. 1973. “Bond-friendship in Tikopia.” In Custom is King: Essays in Honour of R. R. Marett, edited by Dudley Buxton, 229-327. London: Aldine. ———. 1973. “Bodily symbols of greeting and parting.” In R. Firth, Symbols Public and Private. London: Allen and Unwin. Fortes, Meyer. 1969. Kinship and the Social Order: Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures, London: Routledge. Foster, George. 1972. “The Analysis of Envy.” Current Anthropology 13(2): 165-86 Gellner, Ernest. 1973. “Concepts and society.” In Cause and Meaning in the Social Sciences, London. Gilsenan, Michael. 1973. Saint and Sufi in Modern Egypt: An Essay in the Sociology of Religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gusdorf, Georges. 1948. L’Expérience humaine du sacrifice. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Hamayon, Roberte. 1987. La chasse à l’âme, le chamanisme sibérien à partir de l’exemple bouriate. Doctoral thesis: Université de Paris. Hertz, Robert. 1960. “Représentations collectives de la mort.” In Mélanges de sociologie religieuse, translated In Death and the Right Hand, London Jamous, Raymond. 1981. Honneur et baraka: les structures traditionnelles dans le Rif, Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1962. La Pensée sauvage (translated as The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lewis, Ioan M. 1961. A Pastoral Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1922. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London: Routledge. Mauss, Marcel. 1966. The Gift. London: Cohen & West. ———. 1968. Oeuvres, vol. 1, Les Fonctions sociales du sacré, Paris: Editions de Minuit. Ott, Louis. 1955. Précis de théologie dogmatique, Paris: Editions Savator. [246] Ott, Sandra. 1981. The Circle of Mountains: A Basque Shepherding Community. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Peristiany, John G. 1966. “Honor and Shame in a Cypriot Highland Village.” In Honour and Shame: the Values of Mediterranean Society, 171-90. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Pitt-Rivers, Julian. [1954] 1971. The People of the Sierra. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. ———. 1960. “The Egalitarian society.” In Actes du Colloque International d’Ethnologie. 1(2). Paris. ———. 1967. “Contextual analysis or the locus of the model”. In European Journal of Sociology. ———. 1973. “The kith and the kin”. In The Character of Kinship, edited by J. Goody, 89-105. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1974. Mana: An Inaugural Lecture. London: London School of Economics and Political Science. ———. 1976. “Ritual kinship in the Mediterranean: Spain and the Balkans”. In Mediterranean Family Structures, 317-34, edited by J. G. Peristiany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1977. The Fate of Shechem or the Politics of Sex. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1981. Lending a hand. Oxford conference on conflict and cooperation (unpublished) ———. 1984–5. La revanche du rituel dans l’Europe contemporaine, in Annuaire de l’Ecole Pratique des hautes Etudes. 17(5) 5th section, vol. XVII, reprinted in Les Temps modernes, 1987 Pitt-Rivers, Julian, in press. Le paradoxe de l’amitié, Actes du Colloque de Palerme, 1984. Rabinow, Paul. 1975. Symbolic Domination: Cultural Form and Historical Change in Morocco, Chicago University of Chicago Press. Sahlins, Marshall. 1974. “The spirit of the gift”. In Stone Age Economics, 168-83. London: Tavistock Publications. Shils, Edward. 1968. “Charisma”. In International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. New York: Macmillan and Free Press. Weber, Max. 1968. On Charisma and Institution Building, with Preface by S. N. Eisenstadt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Weil, Simone. 1948. La Pesanteur et la grâce. Paris: Plon. Wolf, Eric R. 1965. “Systems of patronage and friendship”. In The Anthropology of Complex Societies 1-2, edited by Michael Banton. London: Tavistock Publications. Publisher’s note: This is a reprint of J. A. Pitt-Rivers, “Postscript: the place of grace in anthropology.” In Honor and Grace in Anthropology, edited by J. G. Peristiany and J. Pitt-Rivers, 215–246. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Published with authorization by Cambridge University Press (P 117–37). ISBN 390559 9780521390552. We remind the reader that we retain the style of the original, and indicate in the text the original page number in square brackets. ___________________ 1. Hertz 1960: 72; Mauss 1968: 201, 206; Lévi-Strauss 1962: 298: “Le scheme du sacrifice consiste en une opération irréversible (la destruction de la victime) afin de déclencher, sur un autre plan, une opération également irréversible (l’octroi de la grâce divine), dont la nécessité résulte de la mise en communication préalable de deux ‘récipients’ qui ne sont pas au même niveau.” Gilsenan also uses the word when explaining what baraka is (1973: 33, 35, 76), as do many other Islamists since Westermarck (e.g., Gellner 1973: 40): “it can mean simply ‘enough’, but it also means plenitude, and above all blessedness manifested among other things in prosperity”; Rabinow 1975: 2: “the central symbol of vitality in Moroccan culture”, “source of charismatic authority and cornerstone of legitimacy, ” “the manifestation of God’s grace on earth” (ibid.: 25). 2. In fact, however, the Nuer word mue which he translates as “God’s free gift in return for a sacrifice” (1956: 331) appears to correspond exactly to the sense of “divine grace” as Lévi-Strauss used it in the passage quoted in note 1, which was largely based on Evans-Pritchard’s ethnography. 3. An anthropologist’s wife was reproved by her friends in the village where he worked for saying “thank you” too often. Did she not realize, they asked, that you don’t thank friends for petty services; for to do so destroys the confianza which exists between friends. You should take such minor services for granted to show confianza (William Kavanagh, personal communication). 4. The term has been borrowed by the philosophers and, finally, by the social sciences. For its utilization in the latter, see Bourdieu 1987: 23: “a system of acquired schemas functioning practically as categories of perception and assessment or as classificatory principles as well as the organising principles of action.” 5. Any reader who might be tempted to follow those authors who have maintained that there is no friendship, only kinship, in primitive society is referred to Firth 1936. 6. For example, the concept of mahano (Beattie 1960) has much in common with mana, as noted by Balandier (1967: 119–30), who compares it with other African concepts. See also the Bouriate concept of xeseg, translated into Russian as “grace” in Hamayon (1987: 606–10,620–5).

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Anthropology is the science of the sense of humour This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Bronislaw Malinowski. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau5.3.020 REPRINT Anthropology is the science of the sense of humour An introduction to Julius Lips’ The savage hits back, or the white man through native eyes Bronislaw MALINOWSKI   Anthropology is the science of the sense of humour.1 It can be thus defined without too much pretention or facetiousness. For to see ourselves as others see us is but the reverse and the counterpart of the gift to see others as they really are and as they want to be. And this is the métier of the anthropologist. He has to break down the barriers of race and cultural diversity; he has to find the human being in the savage; he has to discover the primitive in the highly sophisticated Westerner of today, and, perhaps, to see that the animal, and the divine as well, are to be found everywhere in man. We are learning by the growing wisdom of the theoretician and by its complete dissociation from political affairs that the dividing line between savage and civilized is by no means easy to draw. Where can we find cruder magic than in the political propaganda of today? What type of witch-hunting or witch trial will not appear decent and reasonable in comparison with some of the forms of persecution of racial minorities in Central Europe? Cannibalism shocks us terribly. Yet I remember talking to an old cannibal who from missionary and administrator had heard news of the Great War raging then in Europe. What he was most curious to know was how we Europeans managed to eat such enormous quantities of human flesh, as the casualties of a battle seemed to imply. When I told him indignantly that Europeans do not eat their slain foes, he looked at me with real horror and asked me what sort of barbarians we were to kill without any real object. In such incidents [302]as these the anthropologist learns to appreciate that Socratic wisdom can be best reached by sympathetic insight into the lives and viewpoints of others. If anthropology be defined as the art and craft in the sense of humour, then the present book [The savage hits back] is one of the first contributions to real anthropology—first in rank and first in priority of time. In it Professor [Julius] Lips works out one of the most fruitful approaches to anthropology. He inquires into the vision of white humanity as held by the native. The book is perhaps the first clearly planned, fully documented, and vigorously written analysis of the white man from the point of view of the coloured races. In this Professor Lips is a worthy successor of Montesquieu and Oliver Goldsmith, with this difference that, having at his disposal much fuller material, he does not romance, but lets sober truth, illustrated with a wealth of excellent pictures, speak for itself. The main interest of the book and its chief value will, of course, consist in the pictorial documents collected, classified, and annotated by the writer. In this Professor Lips shows himself a real scholar, and his analysis of painting, sketch, and carving will be of great value to all interested in primitive art. Scientifically, however, this approach is yet more significant. Professor Lips presents us with the only objective, clear, and telling documentation of native opinion on Europeans, because it is in the plastic and decorative arts that man expresses himself fully, unambiguously, and in a manner which lasts and can be reproduced. The writer in his interesting autobiographical introduction makes us well understand why he can sympathize with the native. He belongs to a minority, the minority of German refugees; and even to a minority within the minority, for he is a ’Nordic’ who has left the country because he could not stand the prevalence of Nordic brutalities. The writer speaks out honestly and fearlessly in his book, as he has done in his line of conduct. Once more it is with real pleasure that one finds an anthropological work in which the writer is frankly the native’s spokesman, not only of the native point of view, but also of native interests and grievances. It has always appeared to me remarkable how little the trained anthropologist, with his highly perfected technique of fieldwork and his theoretical knowledge, has so far worked and fought side by side with those who are usually described as pro-native. Was it because science makes people too cautious and pedantry too timid? Or was it because the anthropologist, enamoured of the unspoiled primitive, lost all interest in the native enslaved, oppressed, or detribalized? However that might be, I for one believe in the anthropologist’s being not only the interpreter of the native but also his champion. From this point of view I can find no fault with the book. Take for instance the first chapter. It is more general than the others; it gives an excellent history of European colonization and the first contacts. It presents the facts succinctly, but with great outspokenness, and in excellent perspective. When it comes to modern times, the writer’s strictures on German policy are interesting. “The return of the smallest fraction of Africa, even in the form of a mandate, to Hitler would inevitably bring shame on the whole white civilized world.” I am afraid Professor Lips is right. But I am even more afraid that the shameful catastrophe may occur. There is much talk in England now about the need of placating the ’have-nots’; so much generosity on the part of the ’haves’, and so much regarding of the Africans educated and tribal, Christian and heathen, as though they were [303]mere chattels whose lives, welfare, and happiness can be sold for some imaginary diplomatic advantage in Europe. In Chapter II, we pass more definitely to pictorial art, and here the scholar will enjoy the clarity of the argument and the wealth of fact. But for the lay reader there is still the current of human interest running right throughout the book. It would be tedious as it would be unnecessary to summarize the details of the following chapters. As an ex-Melanesian I have found the chapter on ships perhaps the most fascinating. Many will be interested in that on European women. The structure of the whole book shows a wise distribution of factual material. The Europeans are seen by the native in a professional capacity; as individuals and in mass-formation; as carriers of material culture, and as exponents of its spiritual worth. The chapter on missionaries in native art and ideology is of special value because it is an interesting contribution to the psychology of a new religion in process of being grafted on to a different culture. It is refreshing to find that the writer does not indulge in the cheap jokes against missionaries, so trite in ethnographic works. On the contrary, he shows that the Christian art of the savage ’primitive’ has a dignity, grace, and theological depth almost comparable with the art of the Italian Primitives of the Quattrocento. It is no exaggeration to say that, in giving this beautifully illustrated and richly documented Corpus of tangible, plastic, and decorative expressions of native opinion on the white world, Professor Lips has laid the foundations of a new approach to the most vexed problem of culture change and diffusion. BRONISLAW MALINOWSKIApril, 1937 ___________________ 1. Editors’ Note: This article is a reprint of Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1937. “Introduction.” In The savage hits back, or the white man through native eyes, by Julius E. Lips, vii–ix. London: Lovat Dickinson. We remind the reader that we retain the style of the original.  

Turner: The social skin This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Terence S. Turner. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online) The social skin Terence S. Turner, Cornell University   Man is born naked but is everywhere in clothes (or their symbolic equivalents). We cannot tell how this came to be, but we can say something about why it should be so and what it means. Decorating, covering, uncovering or otherwise altering the human form in accordance with social notions of everyday propriety or sacred dress, beauty or solemnity, status or changes in status, or on occasion of the violation and inversion of such notions, seems to have been a concern of every human society of which we have knowledge. This objectively universal fact is associated with another of a more subjective nature—that the surface of the body seems everywhere to be treated, not only as the boundary of the individual as a biological and psychological entity but as the frontier of the social self as well. As these two entities are quite different, and as cultures differ widely in the ways they define both, the relation between them is highly problematic. The problems involved, however, are ones that all societies must solve in one way or another, because upon the solution must rest a society’s ways of ‘socialising’ individuals, that is, of integrating them into the societies to which they belong, not only as children but throughout their lives. The surface of the body, as the common frontier of society, the social self, and the psycho-biological individual; becomes the symbolic stage upon which the drama of socialization is enacted, and bodily adornment (in all its culturally multifarious forms, from body-painting to clothing and from feather head-dresses to cosmetics) becomes the language through which it is expressed. The adornment and public presentation of the body, however inconsequential or even frivolous a business it may appear to individuals, is for cultures a serious matter: de la vie sérieuse, as Durkheim said of religion. Wilde observed that the feeling of being in harmony with the fashion gives a man a measure of security he rarely derives from his religion. The seriousness with which we take questions of dress and appearance is betrayed by the way we regard not taking them seriously as an index, either of a ‘serious’ disposition or of serious psychological problems. As Lord Chesterfield remarked: Dress is a very foolish thing; and yet it is a very foolish thing for a man not to be well dressed, according to his rank and way of life; and it is so far from being a disparagement to any man’s understanding, that it is rather a proof of it, to be as well dressed as those whom he lives with: the difference in this case, between a man of sense and a fop, is, that the fop values himself upon his dress; and the man of sense laughs at it, at the same time that he knows that he must not neglect it (cited in Bell 1949, p. 13). The most significant point of this passage is not the explicit assertion that a man of sense should regard dress with a mixture of contempt and attentiveness, but the implicit claim that by doing so, and thus maintaining his appearance in a way compatible with ‘those he lives with’, he defines himself as a man of sense. The uneasy ambivalence of the man of sense, whose ‘sense’ consists in conforming to a practice he laughs at, is the consciousness of a truth that seems as scandalous today as it did in the eighteenth century. This is that culture, which we neither understand nor control, is not only the necessary medium through which we communicate our social status, attitudes, desires, beliefs and ideals (in short, our identities) to others, but also to a large extent constitutes these identities, in ways with which we are compelled to conform regardless of our self-consciousness or even our contempt. Dress and bodily adornment constitute one such cultural medium, perhaps the one most specialised in the shaping and communication of personal and social identity. The Kayapo are a native tribe of the southern borders of the Amazon forest. They live in widely scattered villages which may attain populations of several hundred. The economy is a mixture of forest horticulture, and hunting and gathering. The social organisation of the villages is based on a relatively complex system of institutions, which are clearly defined and uniform for the population as a whole. The basic social unit is the extended family household, in which residence is based on the principle that men must leave their maternal households as boys and go to live in the households of their wives upon marriage. In between they live as bachelors in a ‘men’s house’, generally built in the centre of the circular village plaza, round the edges of which are ranged the ‘women’s houses’ (as the extended family households are called). Women, on the other hand, remain from birth to death in the households into which they are born. The Kayapo possess a quite elaborate code of what could be called ‘dress’, a fact which might escape notice by a casual Western observer because it does not involve the use of clothing. A well turned out adult Kayapo male, with his large lower-lip plug (a saucer-like disc some six centimetres across), penis sheath (a small cone made of palm leaves covering the glans penis), large holes pierced through the ear lobes from which hang small strings of beads, overall body paint in red and black patterns, plucked eyebrows, eyelashes and facial hair, and head shaved to a point at the crown with the hair left long at the sides and back, could on the other hand hardly leave the most insensitive traveller with the impression that bodily adornment is a neglected art among the Kayapo. There are, however, very few Western observers, including anthropologists, who have ever taken the trouble to go beyond the superficial recording of such exotic paraphernalia to inquire into the system of meanings and values which it evokes for its wearers. A closer look at Kayapo bodily adornment discloses that the apparently naked savage is as fully covered in a fabric of cultural meaning as the most elaborately draped Victorian lady or gentleman. The first point that should be made about Kayapo notions of propriety in bodily appearance is the importance of cleanliness. All Kayapo bathe at least once a day. To be dirty, and especially to allow traces of meat, blood or other animal substances or food to remain on the skin, is considered not merely slovenly or dirty but actively anti-social. It is, moreover, dangerous to the health of the unwashed person. ‘Health’ is conceived as a state of full and proper integration into the social world, while illness is conceived in terms of the encroachment of natural, and particularly animal forces upon the domain of social relations. Cleanliness, as the removal of all ‘natural’ excrescence from the surface of the body, is thus the essential first step in ‘socialising’ the interface between self and society, embodied in concrete terms by the skin. The removal of facial and bodily hair carries out this same fundamental principle of transforming the skin from a mere ‘natural’ envelope of the physical body into a sort of social filter, able to contain within a social form the biological forces and libidinal energies that lie beneath. The mention of bodily hair leads on to a consideration of the treatment of the hair of the head. The principles that govern coiffure are consistent with the general notions of cleanliness, hygiene, and sociality, but are considerably more developed, and accord with those features of the head-hair which the Kayapo emphasise as setting it apart from bodily hair (it is even called by a different name). Hair, like skin, is a ‘natural’ part of the surface of the body, but unlike skin it continually grows outwards, erupting from the body into the social space beyond it. Inside the body, beneath the skin, it is alive and growing; outside, beyond the skin, it is dead and without sensation, although its growth manifests the unsocialised biological forces within. The hair of the head thus focuses the dynamic and unstable quality of the frontier between the ‘natural’, bio-libidinous forces of the inner body and the external sphere of social relations. In this context, hair offers itself as a symbol of the libidinal energies of the self and of the never-ending struggle to constrain within acceptable forms their eruption into social space. So important is this symbolic function of hair as a focus of the socialising function, not only among the Kayapo but among Central Brazilian tribes in general, that variations in coiffure have become the principal visible means of distinguishing one tribe from another. Each people has its own distinctive hairstyle, which stands as the emblem of its own culture and social community (and as such, in its own eyes, for the highest level of sociality to have been attained by humanity). The Kayapo tribal coiffure, used by both men and women, consists of shaving the hair above the forehead upwards to a point at the crown, leaving the hair long at the back and sides of the head (unless the individual belongs to one of the special categories of people who wear their hair cut short, as described below). Men may tease up a little widow’s peak at the point of the triangular shaved area. The sides of this area are often painted in black with bands of geometrical patterns. Certain categories of people in Kayapo society are privileged to wear their hair long. Others must keep it cut short. Nursing infants, women who have borne children, and men who have received their penis sheaths and have been through initiation (that is, those who have been socially certified as able to carry on sexual relations) wear their hair long. Children and adolescents of both sexes (girls from weaning to childbirth, boys from weaning to initiation) and those mourning the death of a member of their immediate family (for example, a spouse, sibling or child) have their hair cut short. To understand this social distribution of long and short hair it is necessary to comprehend Kayapo notions about the nature of family relations. Parents are thought to be connected to their children, and siblings to one another, by a tie that goes deeper than a mere social or emotional bond. This tie is imagined as a sort of spiritual continuation of the common physical substance that they share through conception and the womb. This relation of biological participation lasts throughout life but is broken by death. The death of a person’s child or sibling thus directly diminishes his or her own biological being and energies. Although spouses lack the intrinsic biological link of blood relations, their sexual relationship constitutes a ‘natural’ procreative, libidinal community that is its counterpart. In as much as both sorts of biological relationship are cut off by death, cutting off the hair, conceived as the extension of the biological energy of the self into social space, is the symbolically appropriate response to the death of a spouse as well as a child. The same concrete logic accounts for the treatment of children’s hair. While a child is still nursing, it is still, as it were, an extension of the biological being and energies of its parents, and above all, at this stage, the mother. in these terms nursing constitutes a kind of external and attenuated final stage of pregnancy. Weaning is the decisive moment of the ‘birth’ of the child as a separate biological and social being. Thus nursing infants’ hair is never cut, and is left to grow as long as that of sexually active adults: infants at this stage are still the extensions of the biological and sexual being of their long-haired parents. Cutting the infant’s hair at the onset of weaning aptly symbolises the severance of this bio-sexual continuity (or, as we would say, its repression). Henceforth, the child’s hair remains short as a sign of its biological separation from its parents, on the one hand, and the undeveloped state of its own bio-sexual powers on the other. When these become strong enough to be socially extended, through sexual intercourse and procreation, as the basis of a new family, the hair is once again allowed to grow to full length. For men this point is considered to arrive at puberty, and specifically with the bestowal of a penis sheath, which is ideally soon followed by initiation (a symbolic ‘marriage’ which signals marriageability, or ‘bachelorhood’, rather than being a binding union in and of itself). The discrepancy in the timing of the return to long hair for the two sexes reflects a fundamental difference in Kayapo notions of their respective social roles. ‘Society’ is epitomized for the Kayapo by the system of communal societies and age sets centred on the men’s house. These collective organisations are primarily a male domain, as their association with the men’s house suggests, although women have certain societies of their own. The communal societies are defined in terms of the criteria for recruitment, and this is always defined as a corollary of some important transformation in family or household structure (such as a boy’s moving out of his maternal family household to the men’s house, marriage, the birth of children, etc.). These transformations in family relations are themselves associated with key points in the process of growth and sexual development. The structure of communal groups, then, constitutes a sort of sociological mechanism for reproducing, not only itself but the structure of the extended family households that form the lower level or personal sphere of Kayapo social organisation. This communal institutional structure, on the other hand, is itself defined in terms of the various stages of the bio-sexual development of men (and to a much lesser extent, women). All this comes down to the proposition that men reproduce society through the transformation of their ‘natural’ biological and libidinal powers into collective social form. This conception can be found elaborated in Kayapo mythology. Women, by contrast, reproduce the natural biological individual, and, as a corollary, the elementary family, which the Kayapo conceive as a ‘natural’ or infra-social set of essentially physical relations. Inasmuch as the whole Kayapo system works on the principle of the cooption of ‘natural’ forces and their channelling into social form, it follows that women’s biological forces of reproduction should be exercised only within the framework of the structure of social relations reproduced by men. The effective social extension of a woman’s biological reproductive powers therefore occurs at the moment of the first childbirth within the context of marriage, husband and household. This is, accordingly, the moment at which a woman begins to let her hair grow long again. For men, as we have seen, the decisive social cooption of libidinal energy or reproductive power comes earlier, at the point at which those powers are publicly appropriated for purposes of the reproduction of the collective social order. This is the moment symbolically marked by the bestowal of the penis sheath at puberty. The penis sheath, then, symbolises the collective appropriation of male powers of sexual reproduction for the purposes of social reproduction. To the Kayapo, the appropriation of ‘natural’ or biological powers for social purposes implies the suppression of their ‘natural’ or socially unrestrained forms of expression. The penis sheath works as a symbol of the chanelling of male libidinal energies into social form by effectively restraining the spontaneous, ‘natural’ expression of male sexuality: in a word, erection. The sheath, the small cone of woven palm leaf, is open at both the wide and narrow ends. The wide end fits over the tip of the penis, while the narrow end has an aperture just wide enough to enable the foreskin to be drawn through it. Once pulled through, it bunches up in a way that holds the sheath down on the glans penis, and pushes the penis as a whole back into the body. This obviously renders erection impossible. A public erection, or even the publicly visible protrusion of the glans penis through the foreskin without erection, is as embarrassing for a Kayapo male as walking naked through one’s town or work place would be for a Westerner. It is the action of the sheath in preventing such an eventuality that is the basis of its symbolic meaning. Just as the cutting or growing of hair becomes a code for defining and expressing a whole system of ideas about the nature of the individual and society and the relations between the two, so other types of bodily adornment are used to express other modalities of the same basic relationships. Pierced ears, ear-plugs, and lip-plugs comprise a similar distinct complex of social meanings. Here the emphasis is on the socialisation, not of sexual powers, but of the faculties of understanding and active self-expression. The Kayapo distinguish between passive and active modes of knowing. Passive understanding is associated with hearing, active knowledge of how to make and do things with seeing. The most important aspect of the socialisation of the passive faculty of understanding is the development of the ability to ‘hear’ language. To be able to hear and understand speech is spoken of in terms of ‘having a hole in one’s ear’; to be deaf is ‘to have the hole in one’s ear closed off’. The ear lobes of infants of both sexes are pierced, and large cigar-shaped ear-plugs, painted red, are inserted to stretch the holes to a diameter of two or three centimetres (I shall return to the significance of the red colour). At weaning (by which time the child has learned to speak and understand language) the ear-plugs are removed, and little strings of beads like earrings are tied through the holes to keep them open. Kayapo continue to wear these bead earrings, or simply leave their ear-lobe-holes empty throughout adult life. I suggest that the piercing and stretching of these secondary, social ‘holes-in-the-ear’ through the early use of the ear-plugs for infants is a metaphor for the socialisation of the understanding, the opening of the ears to language and all that implies, which takes place during the first years of infancy. The lip-plug, which reaches such a large size among older men, is incontestably the most striking piece of Kayapo finery. Only males have their lips pierced. This happens soon after birth, but at first only a string of beads with a bit of shell is placed in the hole to keep it open. After initiation, young bachelors begin to put progressively larger wooden pins through the hole to enlarge it. This gradual process continues through the early years of adult manhood, but accelerates when a man graduates to the senior male grade of ‘fathers-of-many children’. These are men of an age to have become heads of their wives’ households, with married daughters and thus sons-in-law living under, their roofs as quasi-dependents. Such men have considerable social authority, but they wield it, not within the household itself (which is considered a woman’s domain) but rather in the public arena of the communal men’s house, in the form of political oratory. Public speaking, in an ornate and blustering style, is the most characteristic attribute of senior manhood, and is the essential medium of political power. An even more specialised form of speaking, a kind of metrical chanting known as ben, is the distinctive prerogative of chiefs, who are called ‘chanters’ in reference to the activity that most embodies their authority. Public speaking, and chanting as its more rarified and potent form, are the supreme expression of the values of Kayapo society considered as a politically ordered hierarchy. Senior men, and, among them, chiefs, are the dominant figures in this hierarchy, and it can therefore be said that oratory and chanting as public activities express this dominance as a value implicit in the Kayapo social order. The lip-plug of the senior male, as a physical expression of the oral assertiveness and pre-eminence of the orator, embodies the social dominance and expressiveness of the senior males of whom it is the distinctive badge. The senior male lip-plug is in these terms the complement of the pierced ears of both sexes and the infantile ear-plugs from which they derive. The former is associated with the active expression and political construction of the social order, while the latter betoken the receptiveness to such expressions as the attribute of all socialised persons. Speaking and ‘hearing’ (that is, understanding and conforming) are the complementary and interdependent functions that constitute the Kayapo polity. Through the symbolic medium of bodily adornment, the body of every Kayapo becomes a microcosm of the Kayapo body politic. As a man grows old he retires from active political life. He speaks in public less often, and on the occasions when he does it is to assume an elder statesman’s role of appealing to common values and interests rather than to take sides. The transformation from the politically active role of the senior man to the more honorific if less dynamic role of elder statesman is once again signalled by a change in the style and shape of the lip-plug. The simplest form this can take is a diminution in the size of the familiar wooden disc. It may, however, take the form of the most precious and prestigious object in the entire Kayapo wardrobe—the cylindrical lip-plug of ground and polished rock crystal worn only by elder males. These neolithic valuables, which may reach six inches in length and one inch in diameter, with two small flanges at the upper end to keep them from sliding through the hole in the lip, require immense amounts of time to make and are passed down as heirlooms within families. They are generally clear to milky white in colour. White is associated with old age and with ghosts, and thus in general terms with the transcendence of the social divisions and transformations whose qualities are evoked by the two main Kayapo colours, black and red. This quality of transcendence of social conflict, and of direct involvement in the processes of suppression and appropriation of libidinal energies and their transformation into social form which constitute Kayapo public life in its political and ritual aspects, is characteristic of the content of the oratory of old men, and is what lends it its great if relatively innocuous prestige. Once again, then, we find that the symbolic qualities of the lip-plug match the social qualities of the speech of its wearer. Before the advent of Western clothes, Kayapo of both sexes and all ages constantly went about with their bodies painted (many still do, especially in the more remote villages). The Kayapo have raised body painting to an art, and the variety and elaborateness of the designs is apt to seem overwhelming upon first acquaintance. Analysis, however, reveals that a few simple principles run through the variation of forms and styles and lend coherence to the whole. These principles, in turn, can be seen to add a further dimension to the total system of meanings conveyed by Kayapo bodily adornment. There are two main aspects to the Kayapo art of body painting, one concerning the association of the two main colours used (red and black) on distinct zones of the body, the other concerning the two basic styles employed in painting that part of the body for which black is used. To begin with the first aspect, the use of the two colours, black and red, and their association with different regions of the body reveal yet another dimension of Kayapo ideas about the make-up of the person as biological being and social actor. Black is applied to the trunk of the body, the upper arms and thighs. Black designs or stripes are also painted on the cheeks, forehead, and occasionally across the eyes or mouth. Red is applied to the calves and feet, forearms and hands, and face, especially around the eyes. Sometimes it is smeared over black designs already painted on the face, to render the whole face red. Black is associated with the idea of transformation between society and unsocialised nature. The word for black is applied to the zone just outside the village that one passes through to enter the ‘wild’ forest (the domain of nature). It is also the word for death (that is, the first phase of death, while the body is still decomposing and the soul has not yet forsaken its social ties to become a ghost: ghosts are white). In both of these usages, the term for black applies to a spatial or temporal zone of transition between the social world and the world of natural or infra-social forces that is closed off from society proper and lies beyond its borders. It is therefore appropriate that black is applied to the surface of those parts of the body conceived to be the seat of its ‘natural’ powers and energies (the trunk, internal and reproductive organs, major muscles, etc.) that are in themselves beyond the reach of socialisation (an analogy might be drawn here to the Freudian notion of the id). The black skin becomes the repressive boundary between the natural powers of the individual and the external domain of social relations. Red, by contrast, is associated with notions of vitality, energy and intensification. It is applied to the peripheral points of the body that come directly into contact with the outside world (the hands and feet, and the face with its sensory organs, especially the eyes). The principle here seems to be the intensification of the individual’s powers of relating to the external (that is, primarily, the social) world. Notice that the opposition between red (intensification, vitalisation) and black (repression) coincides with that between the peripheral and central parts of the body, which is itself treated as a form of the relationship between the surface and inside of the body respectively. The contrasting use of the two colours thus establishes a binary classification of the human body and its powers and relates that classification back to the conceptual oppositions, inside: surface: outside, that underlies the system of bodily adornment as a whole. Turning now to the second major aspect of the system of body painting, that is, the two main styles of painting in black, the best place to begin is with the observation that one style is used primarily for children and one primarily for adults. The children’s style is by far the more elaborate. It consists of intricate geometrical designs traced in black with a narrow stylus made from the central rib of a leaf. A child’s entire body from the neck to below the knees, and down the arms to below the elbows, is covered. To do the job properly requires a couple of hours. Mothers (occasionally doting aunts or grandmothers) spend much time in this way keeping their children ‘well dressed’. The style involves building up a coherent overall pattern out of many individually insignificant lines, dots, etc. The final result is unique, as a snowflake is unique. The idiosyncratic nature of the design reflects the relationship between the painter and the child being decorated. Only one child is painted at a time, in his or her own house, by his or her own mother or another relation. All of this reflects the social position of the young child and the nature of the process of socialization it is undergoing. The child is the object of a prolonged and intensive process of creating a socially acceptable form out of a myriad of individually unordered elements. It must lie still and submit to this process, which requires a certain amount of discipline. The finished product is the unique expression of the child’s relationship to its own mother and household. It is not a collectively stereotyped pattern establishing a common identity with children from other families. This again conforms with the social situation of the child, which is not integrated into communal society above the level of its particular family. Boys cease to be painted in this style, except for rare ceremonial occasions, when they leave home to live in the men’s house. Older girls and women, however, continue to paint one another in this way as an occasional pastime. This use of the infantile style by women reflects the extent to which they remain identified with their individual families and households, in contrast to men’s identification with collective groups at the communal level. The second style, which can be used for children when a mother lacks the time or inclination for a full-scale job in the first style, is primarily associated with adults. It consists of standardised designs, many of which have names (generally names of the animals they are supposed to resemble). These designs are simple, consisting of broad strokes that can be applied quickly with the hand, rather than by the time-consuming stylus method. Their social context of application is typically collective: men’s age sets gathered in the men’s house, or women’s societies, which meet fortnightly in the village plaza for the purpose of painting one another. On such occasions, a uniform style is generally used for the whole group (different styles may be used to distinguish structurally distinct groups, such as bachelors and mature men). The second style is thus typically used by fully socialized adults, acting in a collective capacity (that is, at a level defined by common participation in the structure of the community as a whole rather than at the individual family level). Collective action (typically, though not necessarily, of a ritual character) is ‘socialising’ in the higher sense of directly constituting and reproducing the structure of society as a whole: those painted in the adult style are thus acting, not in the capacity of objects of socialisation, but as its agents. The ‘animal’ quality of the designs is evocative of this role; the Kayapo conceive of collective society-constituting activities, like their communal ceremonies, as the transformation of ‘natural’ or animal qualities into social form by means of collective social replication. The adult style, with its ‘animal’ designs applied collectively to social groups as an accompaniment to collective activity, epitomises these meanings and ideas. The contrasts between the children’s and adults’ styles of body painting thus model key contrasts in the social attributes of children and adults, specifically, their relative levels of social integration or, which comes to the same thing, their degree of ‘socialisation’. The greater part of Kayapo communal activity consists of the celebration of long and complex ceremonies, which generally take the form of collective dances by all the men and boys or all the women and girls of the village, and occasionally of both. These sacred events are always distinguished by collective body-painting and renewed coiffures in the tribal pattern, as well as by numerous special items of ritual regalia, such as feather head-dresses, elaborate bracelets, ear- and lip-plugs of special design, belts and leg bands hung with noise-making objects like tapir or peccary hooves, etc. The more important ceremonies are rites either of ‘baptism’, that is, the bestowal of ceremonially prestigious names, or initiation. Certain items of regalia distinguish those actually receiving names or being initiated from the mass of celebrants. In a more fundamental sense, the entire repertoire of ceremonial costume marks ceremonial activity in contrast to everyday activities and relations. In the ceremonial context itself, the contrast is preserved between the celebrants of the ceremony and the non-participating spectators, who wear no special costume. An important group in the latter category are the parents of the children being named or initiated in the ceremony, who may not take a direct part in the dancing but must work hard to supply the many dancers with food. In this role they are treated with great rudeness and disrespect by the actual celebrants, who shout at them to bring food and then complain loudly about its quantity and quality. Kayapo bodily adornment in its secular and sacred forms constitutes an integral system of differentiated categories of social status, together with the roles, or modes of activity and relationship characteristic of each status. This comprehensive social classification is represented in Table lA. The various forms of bodily adornment that distinguish each category, together with the roles or modes of activity they symbolise, are summarised in Table 1B. Note that the distinctions among the various forms of sacred and secular ‘dress’ in Table 1B generate the full structure of Table 1A. Table 1A: Kayapo Social Classification: Status Table 1B: Kayapo Classification of Roles (Qualities and Modes of Social Activity) With ‘Dress’ Indicators The names bestowed in the great naming ceremonies belong to a special class of ‘beautiful’ names which are passed down from certain categories of kinsmen (mother’s brother, and both maternal and paternal grandfathers for boys, father’s sister and both grandmothers for girls). In keeping with the ritual prestige of the names being transmitted to them, the children being honoured in the ceremony are adorned with special regalia, notably elaborate bracelets with bead and feather pendants. Initiands are similarly distinguished by bracelets, although they are so huge as to cover the whole forearm, and are exceptionally heavy and bulky in construction. The initiation ceremony itself is named after these bracelets; it is known as ‘the black bracelets’, or literally ‘black bone marrow’. The name at first strikes one as odd, since the bracelets are painted bright red. It may be suggested that the symbolic appropriateness of bracelets as the badges of initiands and baptisands derives from the same set of ideas about the connotations of different parts of the body and the associated colour symbolism. If the extremities of the body represent the extension of the psycho-biological level of the self into social space, and if the hands are in a sense the prototypical extremities in this regard, elaborate bracelets are an apt symbol for the imposition of social form upon this extension. This is, of course, what is happening in the ceremonies in question. In the case of initiation into manhood, which involves a first, symbolic marriage, both the repression of childish, merely individualistic libido and the accentuation of sexuality and procreativity in the service of social reproduction are involved. Black and red, as we have seen, are the symbols of repression and sensory accentuation, respectively, and the accentuation of sexuality and procreativity in the service of social reproduction are involved. That what is ‘blackened’ or repressed is the inner substance of the bones aptly conveys the idea of the suppression of the pre-social, biological basis of social relatedness, while the actual redness of the so-called ‘black’ bracelets through which this is achieved simultaneously expresses the activation of this basis in the social form represented by the bracelets themselves. The initiation bracelets thus condense within themselves a number of the fundamental principles of the whole system of bodily adornment and the social concepts it expresses. Among the ordinary ritual celebrants, there is considerable variation within the standard categories of ritual wear, such as feather head-dresses, ear-plugs, necklaces, bracelets and belts or leg bands already described. Many of these variations (for example, the use of feathers from a particular sort of bird for a head-dress, or distinctive materials such as wound cotton string or perhaps fresh-water mussel shells for ear-plugs, or the breast plumage of the red macaw for bracelets, etc.) are passed down like names themselves from uncle or grandfather to nephew or grandson (or the corresponding female categories). They thus denote an aspect of the social identity of the wearer that he or she owes to his or her relationship with a particular kinsman. These distinctive items of ritual dress make up the ‘paraphernalia’ mentioned above that is bestowed, in parallel to, but separately from, names, in the ritual setting. The Kayapo call such accessories by their general (and only) term for ‘valuables’, ‘wealth’, or ‘riches’. Ask a Kayapo why he is wearing a certain sort of head-dress for a ceremonial dance, and he will be likely to answer, ‘It is my wealth.’ Ask him why he dances, or indeed why the ceremony is being performed, and he will almost certainly answer, ‘To be beautiful’ (‘For the sake of beauty’ would be an equally accurate Englishing of the usual Kayapo expression). Wealth and beauty are closely connected notions among the Kayapo and both refer to aspects of the person coded by items of prestigious ritual dress. Certain ‘beautiful’ names are, in fact, associated with specific forms of adornment (that is, with certain types of ‘wealth’) such as ear-plugs. ‘Beautiful people’ (those who have received ‘beautiful’ names in ceremonies) generally possess more ‘wealth’ than ‘common people’ who have not gone through a ritual baptism, and thus possess only ‘common’ names. The connection of ‘beauty’ with ‘wealth’ in the form of bodily adornment is strikingly expressed in the lyrics of the choral hymns sung by the massed ritual celebrants as they dance, with uniform steps which vary with each song, the successive rites that constitute a ‘great’ or ‘beautiful’ naming ceremony. These songs are almost invariably those of animals, especially birds, the muses of Kayapo lyric and dance, who have communicated them to humans in various ways. Two verses from the vast Kayapo repertoire may serve as examples. A bird proudly boasts to his human listener, Can we [birds] not reach up to the sky? Why, we can snatch the very clouds, Wind them round our legs as bracelets, And sit thus, regaled by their thunder. Another calls out a stirring summons to earthbound humanity: I fly among the branches [rays] of the sun; I fly among the branches of the sun. I perch on its branches and Sit gazing over the whole world. Throw yourselves into the sky beside me! Throw yourselves into the sky beside me! Cover yourselves with the blood and feathers of birds And follow after me! The admonition about blood and feathers refers to the technique of covering the body of a dancer with his or her own blood, which is then used as an adhesive to which the breast plumage or down of macaws, vultures or eagles is fixed. This is perhaps the most prestigious (‘beautiful’) form of sacred costume. These verses may help one to grasp the connotations of the fact that dancing (and by extension, the celebration of any ritual) is called ‘flying’ in Kayapo, and of the term for the most common item of ceremonial adornment, the feather head-dress, which is the ritual form of the word for ‘bird’. Birds fly, and ‘can scan’ the whole world. They are not confined by its divisions, but transcend them in a way that to a Kayapo seems the supreme natural metaphor for the direct experience of totality, the integration of the self through the perception of the wholeness of the world. This principle of wholeness, the transcendental integration of what ordinary human (that is, social) life separates and puts at odds, is the essence of the Kayapo notion of ‘beauty’. Two aspects of this notion, as embodied in items of ritual costume and the sacred activities in which they are worn, seem incongruous and even contradictory in the context of what has already been said about everyday Kayapo ‘dress’ and its underlying assumptions. First, whereas everyday bodily adornment stresses the imposition of social form upon the ‘natural’ energies and powers of the individual, ritual costume (such as feather head-dresses, body painting with ‘animal’ designs or the covering of the body with blood and feathers) seems to represent the opposite idea: that is, the imposition of natural form upon social actors engaged in what are the most important social activities of all, the great sacred performances that periodically reconstitute the fabric of society itself. Secondly, sacred costume, together with the notion that the ritual songs and dances themselves originate among wild animals and birds, seems to reverse the meaning of everyday bodily-adornment. The latter is implicitly based upon a relation between a ‘natural’ core (the human body, or on the sociological level, the elementary family) and a ‘social’ periphery (the space outside the body in which social interaction takes place, or in the structure of kinship, the more distant blood relations outside the immediate family who bestow names and ritual paraphernalia upon the child). Ritual space, in contrast, seems based on the relationship between a ‘natural’ periphery (the jungle beyond the village boundary, as the abode of the birds and animals that are the sources both of ritual costume and of the rituals themselves) and a ‘social’ centre (the central plaza of the village, where the sacred dances are actually performed). This inversion of space and the fundamental relationship of nature to society encoded in sacred costume turns out upon closer examination to parallel two other inversions in the organisation of everyday social relations which form the very basis of the sacred ceremonial system. The first of these involves the types of kinship relations involved in the key ritual relations of name giving and the best owing of ritual ‘wealth’ (such as special paraphernalia), as contrasted with those involved in the transformations of family relations marked by the everyday complex of bodily adornment (penis sheath, ear- and lip-plugs, etc.). The latter typically involve immediate family relations like parent-child, husband-wife, or the key extended-family relationship of son-in-law to father-in-law. These relations have in common that they directly link status within the family, or two families by marriage; they may therefore be thought of as direct relations. Ritual relations, on the other hand, connect grandparents and grandchildren, uncles and nephews, aunts and nieces: they skip over the connecting relatives (the parents of the children receiving the ritual names or paraphernalia, who are themselves the children or siblings of the name-bestowing relatives) and may thus be described as indirect relations. The structure of direct relations functions as a sort of ladder or series of steps up which the developing individual moves from status to status within the structure of the families, extended families and households to which he or she belongs in the course of his or her life. The first step in this process is the ‘natural’ domain of immediate family relations, within which the individual is at first defined as merely an extension of his or her parents’ ‘natural’ powers of reproduction. The course of the life cycle from there on is a series of steps by which the individual is detached from this primal ‘natural’ unity and integrated in to the social life of the community. As a corollary of this process, his or her own ‘natural’ powers develop until they can in turn become the basis of a new family. The highest step in the socialisation process, however, comes when this second ‘natural’ family unit is dispersed, and the individual becomes a parent-in-law, thus moving into the prestigious role of extended family household head at home and, in the case of men, political leader in the community at large. Each major step in this process is marked, as we have seen, by modifications of bodily adornment of the ‘everyday’ sort. The overall form of the process is that of a progressive evacuation of ‘natural’ energy and powers from the ‘central’ sources of body and elementary family and its extrapolation into social forms and powers standing in a ‘peripheral’ relation to these sources in physical and social space. The result is that ‘social’ structure is created at the expense of the evacuation and dispersal of the ‘natural’ powers and relational units (elementary families) that comprise its foundation. The ‘natural’ at any given moment is the socially unintegrated: embodied at the beginning of the process by the newborn infant or new family, as yet not completely absorbed into the wider community of social relations, by the end of the process it is represented by the scattered members of dispersed families, whose younger members have gone on to form new families. The integration of society made possible by this transformation is achieved at the cost of the dis-integration of the primal natural community of the immediate family and the externalisation and social appropriation of the ‘natural’ powers of the individual. Seen in this perspective the ritual system represents a balancing of accounts. The dispersed direct, ‘natural’ relations of the parents (their parents and siblings from the family they have left behind) now become the key indirect relations whose identification with the children of these same parents becomes the point of the ritual. I use the term ‘identification’ deliberately, for this is what is implied by the sharing of personal names and idiosyncratic items of ritual costume. The point of this identification is, of course, that it reasserts a connection between, or in other words reintegrates, the dispersed, dis-integrated or ‘natural’ relations of the parents’ previous families with the not-yet-socially-integrated relations of the parents’ present family (their children). This integration, however, is achieved, not on the basis of direct relations as is characteristic of ‘natural’ groups like the elementary family, but on a new, indirect footing with no natural basis; in short, on a purely ‘social’ basis. The new integrated ‘whole’ that is established through ritual action is thus defined simultaneously as reintegrating and transcending the ‘natural’ basis of social relations. It therefore becomes the quintessential prototype of ‘social’ relationship, and as such, the appropriate vehicle of the basic components of individual social identity, personal names, distinctive ritual dress and other personal ‘wealth’. In terms of social space, what has happened from the point of view of the central name-receiving individual and her or his family is that ‘socialisation’ has been achieved through the transference of attributes of the identity of ‘natural’ relations located on the periphery of the family to the actor located at its centre. In terms of the equilibrium of ‘natural’ and ‘social’ forces and qualities, the prospective evacuation of natural powers from the individual and family has been offset (in advance) by an infusion of social attributes, which are themselves the products of the reintegration, through the social mechanism of ritual action, of elements of the ‘natural’ infrastructure dispersed as the price of social integration. The symbolic integration of ‘natural’ attributes from the periphery of social space as aspects of the social identity of actors located at its centre, can now be understood as a metaphorical embodiment of the integrative (‘beautiful’) structural proper ties of the social relations evoked by the rituals. The regalia, of course, does more than simply encode this process. It is the concrete medium (along with names) through which the identity of the ritual celebrants is simultaneously redefined, ‘socialised’, and infused with ‘beauty’. The foregoing analysis should help to clarify the full meaning of the Kayapo notion of beauty as wholeness, integration or completion. In its primary context, that of sacred ritual, it is the value associated with the creation of a social whole based on indirect (mediate) relations, capable of reintegrating the dismembered elements of simpler natural, wholes (elementary families) constituted by direct (immediate) relations. ‘Beauty’ is an ideal expression of society itself in its holistic capacity. It is, as such, one of the primary values of Kayapo social life. Just as the value of beauty is associated with the complex of social relations and cultural notions involved in ritual action, so the complex of relations and categories that constitutes the social structure of everyday life is focused upon another general social value. This value is in a sense the opposite of beauty, since it pertains to relations of separation, opposition, and inequality. We may call it ‘dominance’, meaning by that the combination of prestige, authority, individual autonomy and ability to control others that accrues in increasing measure to individuals as they move through the stages of social development, passing from lower to higher status in the structure of the extended family and community. It is doubtless significant that the Kayapo themselves do not name this intrinsically divisive value with any term in their own language, whereas they continually employ the adjective ‘beautiful’ in connection with the most varied activities, including those of a divisive (and thus ‘ugly’) character which they wish to put in a better light. The lack of a term notwithstanding, there can be no doubt of the existence of the value in question and its importance as the organising focus of Kayapo social and political life outside the ritual sphere. It reaches its highest and most concentrated expression in the public activities of senior men, for example their characteristic activity of aggressively flamboyant oratory. The lip-plug, and particularly the senior man’s lip-plug as the largest and most spectacularly obtrusive in the entire age-graded lip-plug series, is directly associated with this value as a quality of male, and particularly senior male, social identity. ‘Dominance’ is, however, to be understood as a symbolic attribute, a culturally imputed quality expressing a person’s place in the hierarchy of extended family and community structure, rather than as a relation of naked power or forcible oppression. It is, as such, an expression of the whole edifice of age, sex, family and communal status-categories marked by the whole system of everyday bodily accoutrements described earlier. Younger men and women can acquire this quality in some measure within their own proper spheres, making due allowance for the fact that in the context of community-wide relations they are subordinate to the dominant senior males. These two values, ‘dominance’ and ‘beauty’, inform the social activities and goals of every Kayapo, and constitute the most general purposes of social action and the most important qualities of personal identity. The identity of social actors is constituted as much by the goals towards which they direct their activities, as by their classification according to status, sex, age, degree of socialisation, etc. I have tried to show that bodily adornment encodes these values as well as the other sorts of categories; it may thus be said to define the total social identity of the individual, meaning his or her subjective identity as a social actor, as well as objective identity conceived in terms of a set of social categories. It does this by mediating between individuals, considered both in their objective and subjective capacities, and society, also considered both in its objective capacity as a structure of relations and its subjective capacity as a system of values. I have attempted to demonstrate that the symbolic mediation effected by the code of bodily adornment in both these respects is, in the terms of Kayapo culture, systematically and finely attuned to the nuances of Kayapo social relations. The structure of Kayapo society, including its highest values and its most fundamental conceptual presuppositions (such as the nature-culture relationship, the modes of expression and understanding, the character of ‘socialisation’, etc.) could be read from the paint and ornaments of a representative collection of Kayapo of all ages, sexes, and secular and ritual roles. Bodily adornment, considered as a symbolic medium, is not unique in these respects: every society has a number of such media or languages, the most important among which is of course language itself. The distinctive place of the adornment of the body among these is that it is the medium most directly and concretely concerned with the construction of the individual as social actor or cultural ‘subject’. This is a fundamental concern of all societies and social groups, and this is why the imposition of a standardised symbolic form upon the body, as a symbol or ‘objective correlative’ of the social self, invariably becomes a serious business for all societies, regardless of whether their members as individuals consciously take the matter seriously or not. It may be suggested that the ‘construction of the subject’, is a process which is broadly similar in all human societies, and the study of systems of bodily adornment is one of the best ways of comprehending what it involves. As the Kayapo example serves to illustrate, it is essentially a question of the conflation of certain basic types of social notions and categories, among which can be listed categories of time and space, modes of activity (for example, individual or collective, secular or sacred), types of social status (sex, age, family roles, political positions, etc.), personal qualities (degree of ‘socialisation’, relative passivity or activity as a social actor, etc.) and modes of social value, for example, ‘dominance’ or ‘beauty’. In any given society, of course, these basic categories will be combined in culturally idiosyncratic ways to constitute the symbolic medium of bodily adornment, and these synthetic patterns reveal much about the basic notions of value, social action, and person- or self-hood of the culture in question. In the case of the Kayapo, three broad synthetic clusters of meanings and values of this type emerge from analysis. One is concerned with the Kayapo notion of socialisation, conceived as the transformation of ‘natural’ powers and attributes into social forms. The basic symbolic vehicle for this notion, after the general concern for cleanliness, is the form of body painting by which the trunk is contrasted with the extremities as black and red zones, respectively. This fundamental mapping of the body’s ‘natural’ and ‘social’ areas is inflected, at a higher level of articulation, by hair style. The contrast between long and short hair is used to mark the successive phases of the development and social extension of the individual’s libidinous and reproductive powers. Finally, the penis sheath (correlated with the shift to long hair for men) serves to mark the decisive point in the social appropriation of male reproductive powers and, perhaps more important, the collective nature of this appropriation. A second major complex concerns the distinction and relationship between the passive and active qualities of social agency. The basic indicator here is again body painting, in this case the distinction between the infantile and adult styles. This basic distinction is once again inflected by the set composed of pierced ears and ear-plugs, on the one hand, and pierced lips and lipplugs on the other. This set adds the specific meanings associated with the notions of hearing and speaking as passive knowledge and the active expression of decisions and programmes of action, respectively. Finally, both these clusters are crosscut by a broad distinction between modes of activity. The most strongly marked distinction here is between secular and sacred (ritual) action, with the latter distinguished from the former by a rich variety of regalia. This distinction, however, may be considered a heightened inflection of the more basic distinction between individual or family-level activities and communal activities, not all of which are of a sacred character. Secular men’s house gatherings or meetings of women’s societies, for example, may be accompanied by collective painting and perhaps the wearing of simple head-dresses of palm leaves, even though there is no ceremony. An important structural principle emerges from this analysis of the Kayapo system—the hierarchical or iterative structure of the symbolic code. Each major cluster of symbolic meanings is seen to be arranged in a series of increasingly specific modulations or inflections of the general notions expressed by the most basic symbol in the cluster. A second structural principle is the multiplicative character of the system as a whole. By this I mean that the three basic clusters are necessarily simultaneously present or conflated in the ‘dress’ of any individual Kayapo at any time. One cannot paint an infant or adult in the appropriate style without at the same time observing the concentric distinction between trunk and extremities common to both styles. The conflation first of the levels of meaning within each cluster, secondly of each cluster with the others, and finally of the more basic categories of meaning and value listed above that are combined in different ways to form each cluster, is what I mean by ‘the construction of the cultural subject’ or actor. (It is sometimes necessary to speak in terms of collective subjects, such as the class of young men, or of workers, but for the sake of simplicity I shall leave this issue aside here.) It is, by the same token, the construction of the social universe within which he or she acts (that is, an aspect of that construction). As the Kayapo example suggests, this is a dynamic process that proceeds as it were in opposite directions at the same time, towards equilibrium or equilibrated growth at both the individual and social levels (it goes without saying that in speaking of equilibrium I am referring to cultural ideals rather than concrete realities, either social or individual). In the Kayapo case, the externalisation of the internal biological and libidinous (‘natural’) powers of individuals as the basis of social reproduction, and the socialisation of ‘external’ natural powers as the basis of social structure and the social identity of actors otherwise defined only as biological extensions of their parents, are clearly metaphorical inversions of one another. Each complements the other, just as the social values respectively associated with the two aspects of the process, ‘dominance’ and ‘beauty’, complement each other; a balance between the two processes and their associated values is the ideal state of Kayapo society as a dynamic equilibrium. It is also, and equally, the basis of the unity and balance of the personality of the socialised individual, likewise conceived as a dynamic equilibrium. The point I have sought to demonstrate is that this balance between opposing yet complementary forces, which is the most fundamental structural principle of Kayapo society, is systematically articulated and, as it were, played out on the bodies of every member of Kayapo society through the medium of bodily adornment. This finding supports the general hypothesis with which we began, namely that the surface of the body becomes, in any human society, a boundary of a peculiarly complex kind, which simultaneously separates domains lying on either side of it and conflates different levels of social, individual and intra-psychic meaning. The skin (and hair) are the concrete boundary between the self and the other, the individual and society. It is, however, a truism to which our investigation has also attested, that the ‘self’ is a composite product of social and ‘natural’ (libidinous) components. At one level, the ‘social skin’ models the social boundary between the individual actor and other actors; but at a deeper level it models the internal, psychic diaphragm between the pre-social, libidinous energies of the individual and the ‘internalised others’, or social meanings and values that make up what Freud called the ‘ego’ and ‘super-ego’. At yet a third, macro-social level, the conventionalised modifications of skin and hair that comprise the ‘social skin’ define, not individuals, but categories or classes of individuals, (for example, infants, senior males, women of child-bearing age, etc.). The system of bodily adornment as a whole (all the transformations of the ‘social skin’ considered as a set) defines each class in terms of its relations with all the others. The ‘social skin’ thus becomes, at this third level of interpretation, the boundary between social classes. That the physical surface of the human body is systematically modified in all human societies so as to conflate these three levels of relations (which most modern social science devotes itself to separating and treating in mutual isolation), should give us cause for reflection. Are we dealing here with a mere exotic phenomenon, a primitive expression of human society at a relatively undifferenti-ated level of development, or is our own code of dress and grooming a cultural device of the same type? Bibliography Bell, Quentin. 1949. On human finery. New York: A. A. Wyn. Sahlins, Marshall. 1976. Culture and praticai reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Turner, Terence S. 1978. “The Kayapo of Central Brazil.” In Face values: Some anthropological themes, edited by Anne Sutherland, 245–79. London: BBC Publications.   Publisher’s note: This is a reprint of Terence S. Turner, 1980. “The Social Skin.” In Not work alone: A cross-cultural view of activities superfluous to survival, edited by Jeremy Cherfas and Roger Lewin, 112–140. London: Temple Smith. We are very grateful to Terence Turner for granting us the permission to reprint it. We remind the reader that we retain the style of the original.

Remarks on the verb “to believe” This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Jean Pouillon. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau6.3.034 REPRINT Remarks on the verb “to believe” Jean POUILLON Translated from the French by John Leavitt   The French verb croire [“to believe”]1 is paradoxical in that it expresses doubt as well as assurance. To believe [croire] is to state a conviction; it is also to add a nuance to that conviction: “I believe” [je crois] often signifies “I’m not sure.” This ambiguity involves the subjective side of belief [croyance]. As regards its object, the situation is no less equivocal, since the complement of the verb can be produced in two ways: direct or indirect. What is more, the indirect construction itself has two forms: croire á . . . [“to believe in,” “to think of”] is not the same thing as croire en. . . [“to believe in,” in the sense of being willing to rely on], which both differ from croire + direct object and croire que . . . [“to believe that . . .”]. Finally, the meaning of the verb and the construction of the complement can vary depending on the nature of the object: man, god, fact, value, statement. . . .[486] This suggests two questions (at least): is it possible to order this diversity of usages? If so, is this order universal or does it characterize only a certain type of culture, and in this case what is the basis for the word’s unity? In other words: how is it that multiple meanings do not require diverse expressions?2 But since this is apparently the case, is a translation of the verb in all its senses possible in other languages, using a single term? Croire á . . . is to state that something exists; croire en . . . is to have confidence; croire que . . . is for something to be represented in a certain way. Although the difference between the two indirect constructions may appear slight, it is undeniable, as the following example shows: a person believes in [croire en, “trusts in”] God, while one believes in [croire á] the Devil, that is, one recognizes that he exists without, by definition, putting one’s faith in him: one cannot croire en the Devil. Croyance en [“belief in, trust in”] God does imply croyance á [“belief in”] his existence, but implication is not identity. On the other hand, this implication seems so obvious that it often goes unformulated: a believer believes in [croire en, “trusts in”] God, he feels no need to say that he believes in [croire á] it, one would say, implicitly. But is this certain? In fact, the believer not only need not say that he believes in [croire á] the existence of God, but he did not even believe in [croire á] it; precisely because in his eyes there can be no doubt about it: the existence of God is not believed in [crue], but perceived. On the contrary, to make God’s existence an object of belief, to state this belief, is to open up the possibility of doubt—which begins to clarify the ambiguity with which we started. So one could say that it is the unbeliever who believes that the believer believes in [croire á] the existence of God. One could call this a play upon words; but these words do lend themselves to it, and it is precisely this possibility that must be explored, if not elucidated, in trying to organize the field of their usages. Besides, what I have just said will appear much simpler if we leave the religious domain. If I have confidence in a friend, if I believe in [croire en, “have faith in”] him, will I say that I believe in [croire á] his existence? Certainly not; that existence is, simply, undeniable. It is only if it were not unquestionable that I would have to believe in [croire á] it, and believe in it explicitly. Again, it will probably be said that this is playing on words, this time on the word “existence,” for the man’s existence, by definition, is not the same level as that of the deity. By definition, yes, but by cultural definition: the distinction between a cultural world and a natural world, or between a “this world” and a “beyond,” is widespread, but it is not universal. It is this distinction between two modes of existence that leads to a knowledge on one side, belief [croyance] on the other. From this kind of perspective, the existence of supernatural beings can only be an object of belief, and this is why wherever this distinction is made the phenomenon of belief as the affirmation of existence takes on this ambiguous aspect, between the certain and the questionable. This is not the only reason. Let us now consider the relations between croire á . . . [“to believe in (a fact)] and croire que . . . [“to believe that . . .”]. To believe in [croire á] the existence of X—“god, table, or washbasin”—can be expressed in a direct [487]construction: to believe that [croire que] X exists. But this is a statement of a peculiar type—the existence of a god or of a hundred thalers is not an attribute—and is different from the statement that endows X with certain characteristics which permit X to be represented to oneself. The representation, the content of belief, is accompanied by an affirmation of existence but is separable from this affirmation; the affirmation can be bracketed—the Husserlian epoché—and this is what makes possible studies of beliefs as such: one need not believe in [croire á] what one believes in order to analyze it. The “I believe” [je crois] which precedes so many statements of the most diverse kinds, is the mark of a distancing and not of an adhesion. These two movements, which a single verb is able to express, appear radically opposed, or else completely unrelated. Belief as representation, as statement, pertains to what is also called ideology; there is no isolated belief, every representation is part of a global system which is more or less clearly, more or less consciously articulated, a system which may be religious but may also be philosophical, political . . . . Believe as faith [confiance] is the conviction that he to whom one has given something will reciprocate in the form of support or protection; it calls forth a relationship of exchange, of which the relationship between the believe and his god is only a particular case, even if a frequently privileged one. One puts one’s faith [confiance] to the same end, whether in an individual, in a party, in an institution. It is significant in this regard that Benveniste, in his Indo-European Language and Society (1969; English edition, London, 1973), discusses belief [la croyance] not in the section on “religion” but in that on “economic obligations.” For he sees the original meaning of belief in this credit which has been accorded and should be returned. Must we then see belief-as-representation as a derivative meaning? Or else as a meaning that has been added on, and which would turn the verb “to believe” into a conglomerate without unity? This derivation is certainly a possible one: to beliefe in [croire en] someone, to give him credit, is, among other things, to believe [croire] what he says, and in this way one goes from the trust to the statement that it allows one to take as established fact. This is especially evident when the belief appears in the form of religious faith: trust in [croyance en] a god is usually the basis of what we call a credo, a group of statements which become the direct object of belief. The same is true in many other domains. For political examples, there is an overabundance of choices. But it is also possible (more often than is usually . . . believed!) to accept a proposition that is said to be scientific just as one accepts a dogma or even the possibly fantastic assertion of a man who is judged worthy of trust; I believe it not because I am able to prove it, but because I have faith in those who say they have proven it, for example, in Einstein when, following him, I write E=mc2. But we would miss the essential part of belief-as-representation if we reduced it to this sole case in which it is based on the argument of authority. The specific trait of a representation is to appear obvious, to be self-evident, and the fact that it is always possible to bracket the judgment or the feeling of obviousness changes nothing: the obvious is replaced by the arbitrary, but both simply mean that this form of belief is based on nothing but itself or the cultural system within which it finds its meaning. So it seems impossible to overcome the polysemy of the word. Its religious usage does allow us to unify the verb’s three constructions, but it does not eliminate the other usages; over and above this, it only unites the three constructions in religions [488]of a certain type. This observation leaves us to question its anthropological usage, now well established and apparently unproblematic.3 What anthropologist would deny that he seeks to uncover the beliefs of those of whom he studies, to compare them with our own beliefs or those of other peoples, as if this object of study and its designation presented no a priori problem, as if it were obvious that every human being “believes” [croire]—this being one of our beliefs—in the same way, if not, of course, in the same things? The danger in this situation is not simply the well-known if not always foreseen one of inappropriately applying a category that may have meaning only in our own culture; it has to do with the fact that this category may not be a single, unified one at all, even for us, or at the least that is a shattered category, whose fragmentation is, precisely, a singular cultural phenomenon. What is more, anthropological usage reduplicates the paradox I emphasized above when I said that it is the unbeliever who believes that the believer believes. If for example I say that the Dangaleat4 believe in [croire á] it in the same way that I imagine I could, if I did. But how can one tell whether they believe [croire] and in what way? What question can one ask them, using what word of their language, in what context? Or, inversely, how is it possible to translate into French the word or words they use to talk about what is to our eyes an object of belief? In J. Fédry’s Dictionnaire dangaleat,5 we find the verb àbidé “to perform the rites faithfully.” It comes from the local Arabic abada, “to adore God,” adoration being understood as a ritualized activity. It is a matter of worship [du culte], of faith in action, and not of the representation of a being whose existence must also be affirmed. This verb is used with a direct-object complement: this being, God for converts to Christianity or Islam, or the margaï for others. The best way to translate it is thus “to serve,” in the biblical sense of the trm: to worship [rendere un culte à]. No abday margaï, “I serve the margaï.” Another verb, amniye, signifies “to bestow one’s trust on,” “to rest on,” “to believe in” [croire en]. It is constructed with an indirect-object complement, introduced by the preposition ku: no amnay ku marigo, “I have faith in the margaï,” “I give my faith to the margaï”; this is the verb that Christian use to say “I believe in [croire en] God,” no amnay ku bungir. In contrast to the foregoing, this verb is not used exclusively in religious contexts: one can evidently, as in French, put one’s faith in another person. The first sense given by the dictionary, besides this, is “to be used to, familiar with . . . ,” and one will say, for example: no amniy-iy-g pisò, “I am used to horses.” This too is a word of Arabic origin whose Semitic root has given us the “amen” of Christian liturgy which, as Fédry points out, marks adhesion to a person more than to a conceptual “truth.” As this author notes, “one may wonder about the fact that both of these verbs come from Arabic, [489]whose linguistic influence is very strong Dangaleat have taken what fits their own way of “believing” [croire]: the terms that designate a specific behavior and mental attitude—worshipping [rendre un culte] and trusting in the addressee of the worship—and not terms that are based on definite representations or propositions. One may thus translate our “believe in” [croire en] into Dangaleat, and the fact that the Hadjeraï took the word from Arabic suggests that for them it expresses the essential aspect of belief (and of religious faith in general, says Fédry, who belongs to the Society of Jesus and should know whereof he speaks): faith [la confiance]. But in this case, how can we translate “to believe [that]” [croire que]? To find out, to know, to know about something, is ibiné; pakkine serves to render: think, suppose, figure out, foresee. These two verbs are pure Dangaleat. The first will be used to mark certainty and so translates “to believe” [croire] in cases where the French verb is more or less equivalent with “to know,” when for instance Don Juan says to Sganarelle, who is questioning him about belief, “I believe that two and two make four.” The second verb covers the doubtful usages of our verb, all those in which the speaker takes a certain distance with regard to what he is talking about. In sum, we can translate all aspects of the verb “to believe” . . . except the verb itself. What we have been able to translate has been the French equivalent of “to believe” in each of its particular usages, but in Dangaleat there is no single term that serves at the basis of their unification. In other words, we can translate everything except the ambiguity. We must therefore return to the reasons for this ambiguity. Ambiguity is not simply polysemy, the fact that a verb sometimes has one meaning and sometimes another, each of them unequivocal; it is, rather, that all of these meanings, even the contradictory ones, are intrinsically liked; that, above all, there is always doubt at the heart of the conviction, and that the affirmation itself indicated that it could always be suspended. But why condense this paradoxical liason into a single word instead of sorting out its elements, as the Hadjeraï do? The answer, “I believe,” lies in the comparison between a religion like Christianity and a religion like that of the Dangaleat. It is not so much the believer, I would say, who affirms his belief as such, it is rather the unbeliever who reduces to mere believing what, for the believer, is more like knowing. Nevertheless, the Christian cannot avoid expressing his faith not only as trust in God [confiance en], but also as belief in [croyance à] his existence and belief that [croyance que] God possesses such and such attributes, that the world was created, and so forth. He states this as a belief, even though he knows it—but also because he knows that by this very fact it is contestable and contested. Above all he knows that there are other beliefs, on the one hand, because his religion has a history and was constituted against the “false” gods, on the other because this history is not over yet and there are still idols to be eliminated; and there can be other beliefs only because his own belief is one among others. Next, he knows—it is even an essential point in his credo—that the object of his belief is in a “reality” of a different order than the realities of the world of creation, which are the object of a permanently revisable scientific knowledge, or of calculations, of predictions that can be proven wrong; and he also knows that this possibility of revision lies in the demonstrable or verifiable character of the knowledge or the hypothesis, a character whose legitimacy he challenges in the case of his belief, but which, inversely, challenges the legitimacy of his belief. Thus he must simultaneously assume both [490]his affirmation and the challenge to it, a challenge that belief is, nonetheless, supposed to make impossible on its own level. In other words, the contradiction is inside his faith, and that is what it is “to believe.”6 This situation is the result of the distinction made between two worlds: the Kingdom of God and this world. In our culture such a distinction seems so characteristic of religion, to those who reject it as much as to its adherents, that religion in general and so-called “primitive” religions in particular are usually defined by a belief in supernatural powers and by their worship. There is even a tendency to think that the extent and importance of the supernatural world are much greater for “primitives” than for “moderns,” that super-nature is not only the domain of gods and spirits but also, for example, the domain in which the power of the magician and the sorcerer operates. I certainly do not mean to deny that at any latitudes one can find people who believe in [croire à] the supernatural, but one equally finds people for whom such an affirmation is completely meaningless—without them being, for all that, areligious—far from it. For here we have a major misunderstanding: because we have constructed the concept of natural law, we are ready to admit the supernatural (whether as illusion or as other reality hardly matters) as a place to put whatever contravenes, or seems to contravene, natural law; but this is our own notion, whether we judge it well grounded or not, and not that of the people to whom we abusively attribute it. As Evans-Pritchard remarks, “many peoples are convinced that deaths are caused by witchcraft. To speak of witchcraft being for these peoples a supernatural agency hardly reflects their own view of the matter, since from their point of view nothing could be more natural.”7 For his part, Claude Lévi-Strauss has stressed the realist, materialist character of magic, its monistic, not dualistic, conception of the world.8 The margaï, the spirits who have such an important place in the individual and social lives of the Hadjeraï, are invisible, nonhuman powers; they act unpredictably, and are the cause of whatever disturbs the natural course of things. But they are no less a part of the same world as human beings. The latter believe in [croire à] the existence of the margaï like they believe in their own existence, in that of animals, things, atmospheric phenomena . . . . Or rather they do not believe in [croire à] it: this existence is simply a fact of experience:9 there is no more need to believe in [croire à] the margaï than to believe that if you throw a stone it will fall. [491]One fears and/or trusts in them, one gets to know them, one gets used to them, one performs the special sacrifices that please each margaï, and one is careful to make no mistakes, for fear of getting sick or being affected in some unpleasant way. If we can speak of a Dangaleat religion—another untranslatable expression—it is not in the sense in which the faithful share a single elaborated body of beliefs about supernatural beings, but rather in the etymological sense, according to Benveniste, of the Latin religiō:10 that of a meticulous concern for the proper carrying out of the cult, without, however, being able to define the necessary correctives in advance; at every occasion, one takes aim within uncertainty. One can only estimate what each margaï desires. The four verbs mentioned above define these behaviors equivocally and without contradictions: one serves the margaï, one trusts in them (that is, in the mutually fruitful nature of the exchange inaugurated by the sacrifice), one knows from experience that they exist, and one tries to guess their intentions. All this does presuppose a particular representation of the world, but one which excludes the possibility of its explanation in the form of “belief,” of an assertion that in spite of itself is doubtful, relativized. The Dangaleat certainly know that others think differently, and it happens that many of them convert to Islam or to Christianity. But this situation cannot surprise them: one does not believe in [croire à] the margaï; one experiences them, and this experience is first of all a local one; such spirits do not necessarily exist everywhere. While the encounter with otherness relativizes Christian belief in an otherworldly absolute, it confirms the Dangaleat experience of the world, which is relative from the beginning and so cannot be disturbed by diversity. This is why religions of the Dangaleat type are without the proselytizing inherent in religions founded on beliefs whose vulnerability impels their formidable dynamism.11 If the Dangaleat have no need of the verb “to believe” this is not solely because of their monism, as opposed to Christian dualism. Equally in play is another opposition, one between the historicism of the Christian religion and the empiricism of Dangaleat religion. This empiricism assures everyone of the presence of the margaï, and has no need of an intercessor. Every man performs his own sacrifices and will have recourse to the diviner only to know what animal, or what sex and what color, he should kill and on what day. A religion like Christianity or Islam is based, on contrary, on a revelation, testimony, a transmission whose fidelity is guaranteed by a church or specialized experts. This revelation is, precisely, that another world exists; the revelation is a unique historical event, its content is constituted by the words of its protagonist, God incarnate or prophet. So everything rests on a faith, which is simultaneously a trust and a specific credo. All the meanings of the verb “to believe” should then come together, but his necessity is nothing more or less than a cultural necessity. It is only in this perspective, in my opinion, that we can speak of “religious belief,” and it is only when it is understood that this notion does not have universal value that we can appreciate how difficult the problem of a general definition of religion really is; but this may also be the point from which we can try to resolve the problem.[492] References Benveniste, Emile. 1973. Indo-European Language and Society. London: Faber and Faber. Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1956. Nuer Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1965. Theories of Primitive Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fédry, Jacques. 1971. Dictionnaire dangaleat. PhD diss., Lyon. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1966. The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Needham, Rodney. 1973. Belief, Language, Experience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.   Jean POUILLON was a French anthropologist and was the editor of the journal L’Homme since its foundation in 1961 to 1996. He is the author of many works, including Temps et roman (Gallimard, 1946) and Le Cru et le su (Editions Seuil, 1993). ___________________ Editorial Note: This article is a reprint of Pouillon, Jean. 1982. “Remarks on the verb ‘to believe.’” In Between belief and transgression: Structuralist essays in religion, history, and myth. Edited by Michel Izard and Pierre Smith, translated by John Leavitt, 1–8. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. The French original was published in Izard, Michel and Pierre Smith, eds. 1979. La fonction symbolique. Paris: Gallimard. 43–51. We thank the University of Chicago Press for permission to publish this reprint, and we remind the reader that we retain the style of the original translation with some minor formatting changes. 1. The author’s distinctions among different meanings of the verbs croire, croire en, croire á, etc., bear on the semantics of the word, not directly in its morphology. For this reason I have not followed the inflections of the French verb in my bracketed clarifications, but have usually put the infinitive form, whatever the tense, person, etc. of the verb in the text. For example, when the French text says il croit I have put “he believes” [croire], to make clear the opposition with, say, il croit en, which I translate “he believes in.” —Trans. 2. Diverse expressions do exist, however: credit [créance], confidence, trust [confiance], faith [foi] . . . . But while one might turn to these for the sake of precision, they are not required by usage. 3. Rodney Needham has done this (Belief, Language, and Experience), in a perspective different from my own. The two do overlap, however: the themes are necessarily the same, but they are put together in different ways. 4. The Dangaleat are one of the groups called Hadjeraï, who live in the central region of the Republic of Chad, Department of Guera. They worship [rendent un culte á] what one could summarily call local spirits: the margaï. 5. Thése du troisième cycle, mimeographed (1971). I thank the author for having added to the information included in his thesis with a personal communication. 6. It would be easy to show that today many “political believers” find themselves in an analogous situation. But they are not always as aware of it as Saint Augustine was when, according to Tertullian, he said: credo quia absurdum. 7. Theories of Primitive Religion (Oxford, 1965), pp. 109-10. 8. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, English translation (Chicago, 1966), pp. 221-22. 9. In the same way, among the Nuer the expression Kwoth a thin (“God is present”) “does not mean ‘there is a God.’ That would be for the Nuer a pointless remark. God’s existence is taken for granted by everybody. Consequently, when we say, as we can do, that all Nuer have faith in God, the word ‘faith’ must be understood in the Old Testament sense of trust (the Nuer Ngath). . . . There is in any case, I think, no word in the Nuer language which could stand for ‘I believe’.” Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion (Oxford, 1956), p. 9. 10. Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society. 11. I do not mean to say that some beliefs are vulnerable and others are not. Any belief, in the fact of its communication, makes itself, and know itself to be, vulnerable.  

Synthetic images This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Rodney Needham. ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau4.1.039 REPRINT Synthetic images Rodney NEEDHAM   “I have ever beleeved, and doe now know, that there are Witches.” It is little more than three hundred years since a humane and learned doctor, Sir Thomas Browne, made that decided declaration. Some years later even he acted as medical witness for the prosecution in sending two old women to their deaths for the crime of witchcraft. Since his day we in the West have not been free of the obsession, for even when the last poor creature had been burnt or put to the test, the power of the collective representation survived. Historians reverted again and again to the trials and the edicts and the fulminations; folklorists traced the continued expression of ideas about witchcraft into modern society; eccentrics claimed to be, or tried to be, witches and formed themselves into covens on desolate farms and in sedate suburbs; and the anthropologists, of course, made it into one of the stock and indispensable topics of their subject. In these regards it can be said that we are still in the power of the idea of witchcraft, just as we resort to its dramatic power in our metaphors of moral condemnation and political castigation. If it is objected that we do not actually do anything about it, this is true in the sense that we do not arrest and torture those whom we call witches, and that we do not presume to be witches those who are the victims of witch hunts. But we do not have to do and think so in order to conform to a collective representation; for neither did most people, I can conceive, in the days when such things really were done. It was the church and the state that provided the authority and the punitive means: they were the sustainers of the institution, and in this respect were parts of it. We cannot say that the authorities responded to the common conviction that there were witches, for to the common people the fearsome notion of witchcraft was not a spontaneous apprehension but had all the autonomy, generality, and coercive force of a social fact. And if we were to say that they believed in the dread powers of witchcraft, and hence collaborated in the gruesome procedures by which the authorities tried to extirpate witches, we should be on even shakier ground. In spite of the volume of contemporary reports, we do not know what the greater number of the populace believed (on the assumption that we have a clear idea of what “believe” means), but only that the collective representation was in force. We can well conclude, moreover, that people in the past no more positively acquiesced in the execution of witches, or played any other deliberate part in the enactment of the representation, than do we today in the operation of the institutions that govern our own lives, even when the instruments of state are called representative or the corporations are called public. If we agree that people really did think there were witches, this does not justify us in imputing any particular state of mind to them. There have been crazes and scares, but these are not generically characteristic of the institution. We ourselves know, just as objectively (let us say), that hundreds of thousands of people are killed and maimed on the turnpikes; and although we regard this as deplorable, and try to make turnpikes less dangerous or to avoid the dangers if we travel on them, the knowledge and the consequent precautions do not argue for any special kind of judgment or apprehension that is distinctively associated with turnpikes. Indeed, this is much what we find when we read ethnographic accounts of societies where witches are just as real, and also just as normal an aspect of everyday life, as are turnpikes to us. There are witches, all right, and people rely on regular precautions and techniques in order to cope with them. I have been stressing the points in these preliminary remarks in order to throw into contrast the aspect of witchcraft that I think really important and that is to be the subject of this lecture. The more normal the idea of witchcraft is taken to be, in a society where it is in force, the more striking is that aspect. The less we assume that the institution of witchcraft involves a special inner state, the more readily we shall be able to analyze the power and persistence of the complex that defines the institution. If on the other hand, we regard the institution of witchcraft merely as a cognitive aberration, a kind of collective nightmare that can be exorcised by science, then I think we are missing some of its most interesting and instructive features. Actually, the case I intend to make first is that social anthropology, in the ways it has approached witchcraft, has tended to pass over these features and at the same time has not made a good scientific argument in any other respect. Difficulty began with the definition of a witch, and sporadically a fair amount of literary energy went into discriminating between witch and sorcerer, the former working by some intrinsic property, the latter by recourse to material means; then in deciding whether in a certain society a mystical practitioner was the one or the other, or maybe both at the same time; and then in qualifying propositions about witchcraft according to whether a witch or a sorcerer was in question, not to mention the alternative statuses of wizard, magician, conjuror, and so on. Moreover, beyond the range of the English words there were the numerous terms in other languages that were indifferently translated as “witch” and the like, and each of these constituted a semantic problem that did not readily conduce to comparative generalizations. And against this tangled back ground anthropologists still found it possible to speak of “genuine” witches or of witches “proper,” to differ over whether witches were essentially immoral, and, expectably enough, to become diverted by one new typological consideration after another according to the ethnographic data adduced or the cast put upon them by the anthropological commentator. At the end of the day, it remains a question if there is yet a definition of a witch that is agreeable, in the rigorous acceptation seemingly required, to anthropologists as a body. If you ask whether that really matters, the answer is that it depends on the theoretical or comparative propositions that have “witch” as their subject. We shall come to some of these in a moment. For the present occasion, I shall give the word its common, or garden, meaning of someone who causes harm to others by mystical means. If you are inclined to protest that this is altogether too rough and ready, let me invite you to wait a little until I show that this vagueness of definition has no importance for the purpose I have in view. You may, by the way, find it interesting to keep in mind later a point about Germanic etymology. The English word witch comes from the Old English wicce, the feminine form of wicca, which is rendered as a male magician, sorcerer, or wizard, and this is the end of the trail, since the source of these words is not understood. But in German the equivalent Hexe comes from the Middle High German hag, meaning a “fence,” “hedge,” or “enclosure”; and the Icelandic tūnriða, witch, means literally a female “fencerider.” There is thus a connection, which will acquire its point as we proceed, between witches and boundaries. It would be instructive to learn if this association is to be found in other linguistic traditions. Another preliminary matter that ought to be mentioned is the almost universal premise subscribed to by anthropologists, that witches do not really exist: that is, no human beings have the secret power to inflict harm or do evil as witches are supposed to do. This is a curious presumption, though I do not maintain that it has led to any pragmatic difficulty in the study of witchcraft. It is odd because it is a flagrant instance of sheer prejudice of the kind that anthropologists are usually careful to avoid when dealing with other mystical institutions. They do not as a rule begin by declaring that God does not exist or that ancestral spirits are merely imaginary or that the benefits of blessing are illusory. They say that these notions are to be treated as social facts, and that there is simply no need to pronounce on their truth or falsity. But in the case of witchcraft there is no such compunction: witches just do not exist, and the question posed is hence why men universally but misguidedly think that they do. I must say this strikes me as pure dogma. I myself have no idea, empirically, whether any human beings possess a secret capacity to inflict harm by some immaterial and unseen means. This seems to me something of an open question. I have no evidence that there is such a power, whether generic or confined to a minority of individuals, and my inclination is to suspect that most probably there is none. But the one thing I am sure of, simply as a point of method, is that we ought not to base our investigation into witchcraft on an unsure (even unexamined) premise, let alone the premise that the essential attribute of witches— namely the malign power—does not exist. The standard concession to reality made by anthropologists is that the idea of witchcraft must be related, as Philip Mayer ([1954] 1970) has put it, to something real in human experience; but the next move is none the less to fall back on another prejudice, namely, that the reality in question consists in social and psychological strains to which the postulation of witchcraft is a social response. I am not saying that correlations of the kind cannot be made (though what they are worth is a different matter), but that the presumed locus of the reality of witchcraft corresponds in the first place to the sociological predilections of anthropologists. An extreme expression of this leaning is to be seen in an assertion, by two leading authorities, that sociological analysis “must” be employed if we wish to develop explanatory formulations which can subsume the facts from more than one society. However that may be, the notion that witchcraft accusations point to “weak spots in the social structure” has had a considerable prevalence. Related propositions are that the accusations derive from a conflict between ideal and actual social relations; that they are a means to break relationships that have become insupportable; or that they act as a safety valve by which aggressive impulses are sublimated. The ethnographic accounts presented in these terms may be very informative, and the focus on tensions and strains can certainly contribute to a true description of social life, but the approach is nevertheless subverted by a number of considerations that cannot be countered by the improvement of fieldwork. First, it is tautological to say that witchcraft accusations point to weak spots or to difficult relationships, for it is in part the accusations themselves that characterize the spots as weak or the relationships as uneasy. Moreover, what is needed is an independent gauge of strength and smoothness by which the ethnographer could assess these qualities in the absence of their liability to accusations; but in the nature of the case the possibility of correlating witchcraft accusations and social vulnerability, as independent variables, cannot be had. And in any case a test by concomitant variation is called for: to identify “strong” points in the social structure and to check that they are free of witchcraft accusations; and to check the “weak” points and see if they are regularly the targets of accusations. These however are tasks that in the main have not been earned out in ethnographical analyses, and lacking their results we are left without satisfactory empirical proof of the alleged connection. Finally, even if the connection could be established in particular instances, the question would remain whether the weak and difficult spots were so precisely because, for some other reason perhaps, they were conventionally regarded as the loci of witchcraft. This is a question that applies similarly to the safety valve, or sublimation, hypothesis, for we cannot know to what extent the tension or the aggression is a product of the institution itself. As matters stand, at any rate, I think it is true to say that no sociological or psychological explanation of the differential incidence of witchcraft accusations has been borne out empirically as a general proposition that is valid for witchcraft everywhere. Witches are neighbors, or else they are distant; they are relatives, or else they cannot be relatives; they are marginal, or else they are enemies within; they are lowly misfits, or else they are secure and prosperous just because of their witchcraft; they are so categorized that not everybody can be a witch, or else they are such that anyone may be a witch. Occasionally a sociological proposition is framed in even more detailed terms: for example, that witchcraft beliefs tend to be utilized in societies in which unilineal kinship principles are employed in the formation of local residential groups larger than the domestic household. The literature of anthropology is replete with propositions like these, each perhaps persuasive in its own ethnographic setting, but none survives as a key to the institution wheresoever it may be found. No wonder that a historian such as Trevor-Roper asserts that witchcraft beliefs are inseparable from the ideology of the time. But this conclusion does not allow for, even if it does not rule out, the comparativism that is proper to social anthropology and that alone may provide a general interpretation an institution that has such a global distribution. The historian’s conclusion is the ethnographer’s indispensable premise. There is still one other kind of explanation, however, that seems to fare better and that is not cast in terms of jural institutions and social systems. This is the view that the idea of witchcraft provides a theory of misfortune. If that termite-riddled granary (the bane of anthropological examiners) falls on you and not on someone else, just as you happened to be sitting under it, the activity of a witch provides not only an answer to the question “Why me?” but a final and complete answer. Also it enables you to do something definite, dramatic, and perhaps personally advantageous about the source of your misfortune. No doubt the institution of witchcraft does have these occasional uses, but they do not explain why it is that this particular institution is employed in order to explain misfortune. After all, there are many ways to do that. If misfortune strikes, you can blame an inscrutable god or capricious spirits; you can concede that it is the just retribution of your own sin, or else that it is the automatic consequence of some unintended fault; you can put it down to bad luck (if your culture happens to have this Germanic concept), or more calculatingly you can ascribe it to chance (though this is an even more difficult notion). Theories of these kinds are legion, they are found also in societies that ascribe misfortune to witchcraft as well, and even people obsessed by witches do not blame every misfortune on their malign intervention. Why then should people hold to a theory that places responsibility for their misfortunes on other people? From a pragmatic point of view, it does not even seem a particularly desirable theory. If people think they are afflicted by an inscrutable god, they can at least band together in an attempt to placate their divine scourge by communal means that do not foster suspicion and set them one against another. But to blame individual human beings for riddled posts or failing crops or the attacks of unpredictable wild animals seems the most self-damaging theory of any. All the same, the idea is remarkably prevalent in history and in world ethnography, and for all its apparent social disadvantages we have to accept that in fact this theory of blame is the way in which a great many peoples have chosen to think about the sources of their troubles. This fact in itself tells us something about the inclinations of human beings under stress, but I do not think the theory of misfortune hypothesis tells us anything interesting or revealing about the institution of witchcraft. In a sense, indeed, we might well not have expected it to do so, for this proposition too is tautologous by definition: ideas about witchcraft account for the blows of misfortune after all not for the blessings of comity. It has taken me some little while to run through this essential introductory survey of the state of theory with regard to witchcraft, and as you see I cannot find that there is much in the way of positive results to report. This is not surprising, let alone dejecting, if only because it is a delusion to suppose that we shall do best at explaining widespread and constant social facts. We can do much better with limited and variant institutions, that is, when the weight of comparativism can least be brought to bear. If comparison is the characteristic method of social anthropology, it does not follow that we shall be very effective with it. At any rate, we have not in fact got very far in the scientific treatment of the idea of witchcraft. It is against this background that I now want to turn to the features of witchcraft that earlier on I said struck me as interesting and as anthropologically neglected. I am not going to claim any great progress or revelation, and the matter is not one for decisive argument; but when we are so much baffled by an institution as we are in this case, an oblique attention to it, from another standpoint, may just make a difference. You will already be familiar with the features themselves, but it is perhaps when we think we are most familiar with a thing that a change of aspect can best disclose its further properties. The aspect that I want to focus on is the image of the witch, and I shall try to make sense of its components by resort to what were introduced in the first lecture as primary factors of experience. There is, as you will see, no technique for doing this, and at points I have to rely on conjectures that are no more than plausible; but what follows is at any rate a way of thinking about witchcraft that may lead somewhere interesting. The first reason for taking the image as the object of analysis, rather than the sociological matters that have hitherto preoccupied most anthropologists, is that amid a welter of contingent social facts (which, as we have found, have not been brought into a consistent theoretical order) this complex construction of the imagination displays a very remarkable constancy. I do not mean by this that the components of the image of the witch are always the same in number and character, from one tradition to another, but that there are characteristic features which combine polythetically (that is, by sporadic resemblances) to compose a recognizable imaginative definition of the witch. Let us approach this representation by way of its moral component. The witch is said to do such horrible things as to eat children, practice cannibalism by secretly devouring people’s organs, commit incest, and otherwise act in a vile and malevolent manner such as only the right-minded could imagine. (Eating children, incidentally, has a special vogue: Domitian charged Apollonius with it; the Romans accused the Christians; the Christians in turn the Jews.) Such particulars are infinitely elaborated on, but these are some of the major attributes. Anthropologists have frequently remarked that such conduct is grossly abnormal, or shocking, or contrary to decent norms; but I suggest that those commentators are more exact who say that morally the witch is the very opposite of the right values of society. This is not a trite point of vocabulary, but it corresponds significantly to the estimations of members of society. Typically, moral evaluations are scalar, such that actions are judged as more or less good, more or less bad. There are extreme instances at the polar ends of the scale, but at one end these are hypothetical; even societies that recognize saints concede that these exemplars have blemishes (as the saints themselves of course have to insist) and are not absolutely good. It would be both expectable and practicable, therefore, if societies were to place witches at various points toward the opprobrious end of the moral scale; certainly they would be bad, but more or less bad, and this means that they would be allowed to possess some virtues. But in fact the witch is not given the benefit of this moral nicety: the witch is absolutely and irremediably evil, a real instance of the polar type that merits utter condemnation. The witch’s conduct is not merely contrasted with the ideal: there is nothing worse than the acts that the witch is imagined to perpetrate, so that the witch’s conduct is strictly the opposite of the ideal. This gives us our first factor in the complex, namely, the relation of conceptual opposition. I need not say much about this, for after Hertz a great deal has been written about polarities, complementaries, and syzygies in dual symbolic classification, especially with regard to the sets of opposed values signaled by right and left. It is important, however, not merely to isolate the relation of opposition from the moral definition of the witch, but also to stress that this relation has a fundamental character that makes it apt to the purpose of relegating the witch to the point of extreme censure. In other words, people resort to opposition as the simplest and most efficacious means of classification. They do so in innumerable institutions and contexts, including moiety systems and symmetric alliance and Manichean theologies, and witchcraft is merely one example of this proclivity. I mentioned just now that opposite values may be signaled by the opposition of right and left. This spatial expression of nonspatial values, including moral qualities, has an analogue in a second component of the image of the witch. The behavior of the witch is commonly described as inverted, or the witch is said to embody inverted values. This is not simply a metaphor (like “opposite,” for that matter), but is frequently a description of the witch’s physical posture: the witch proceeds upside down, walking on his hands as the Kaguru imagine, or presents himself backwards. This imaginary inversion makes an apt picture of the perverse nature of the witch, and in itself it is both comprehensible and telling; but once again what we encounter in this component also is simply one example of the operation of a primary factor. When the Lugbara advert to the alien nature of their neighbors, members of other tribes just over the horizon, they say that the latter normally go about upside down. (It is only when you look at them instantaneously they turn the right way up.) The Lugbara are not saying that all strange peoples are witches: they are expressing the strangeness by resorting to the image of inversion. This is in fact a very common symbolic means of marking a boundary. Similarly, many peoples imagine the world of the dead as the opposite of this, in that the spirits there speak backwards or place opposite values on things; and the Batak say also that the dead climb house-steps downwards, head first, that is, upside down. They are not saying that the spirits of the departed are witches: they are expressing the spirituality of ghosts, in opposition to terrestrial natures, by resorting to the image of inversion. The symbolic operation is the exploitation of the imaginative recourse. Inversion is an elementary mode of marking a contrast—especially at a moral or temporal boundary—and the wide extent to which it is employed, in many customs and ideologies, indicates that it is not merely a formal possibility that is available to the imagination, but that it is a positive proclivity by which men tend to be influenced in their collective representations. Next, witches habitually go about their business at night. This looks obvious enough, for they work secretly and wish to avoid the gaze of decent people, including that of their victims. An Apache raiding party also used to travel at night, in order to gain the advantage of surprise; and burglars are supposed to operate at night in order not to be seen, either by their victims or by potential witnesses for the prosecution. But of course there is more to the witch’s association with night than a practical precaution, especially since it is doubtful that anyone does travel as a witch at night anyway. What we are dealing with is a symbolic, I dare say universal, image by which light and the absence or deprivation of light stand for opposed values and properties of innumerable kinds. The Bible is full of examples of the precellence of light and the opposite condition of darkness; mystical ideology continually resorts to the contrast; and it is a rich source of metaphor in estimating clarity of understanding and moral inclinations. As for the specific connection of witches with night, this too has analogues in other institutions. The first to come to mind is shamanism, in which it is a standard feature that the shaman holds his seance either at night or in a darkened enclosure. This is no doubt because the proceedings have to do with hidden things, with the mystical. (Recall that this word comes from the Greek mūein,“to close the eyes.”) There is no implication that a shaman is a nefarious person, acting at night in order to conceal his iniquity. Nor of course do I imply that the mystical is symbolized only by darkness, for under some aspects it is enacted in the full radiance of bright light. But the image of the witch combines both the fearsome presence of the powers of darkness and the nocturnal setting of spiritual activity. This is sometimes symbolized by the color that is appropriate to night, namely, black. European witches used to smear themselves with soot, and witches in other cultures are on occasion distinguished by black appurtenances. In this case again, though, it is not witches alone that are symbolized by black. Our own priests wear black, so does the Mugwe of the Meru, and so also does a Gurung medium: In each instance the color, like night, stands for the mystical character of the status or the undertaking. There is no implication that all persons whose offices are symbolized by black share the horrible attributes of a witch. What particular attributes may be shared, beyond the mystical connection, is a contingent matter of local ideology. The imaginative constant is the resort to color in order to convey the significance. This general feature is nicely glossed by the example of the Kaguru witch: naturally black of skin, he is supposed to cover himself with white ashes, thus employing symbolic color in an image that is opposite to normal human appearance. So the generic factor is color, we may say, while the specific mystical significance is predominantly but not always conveyed by the color of darkness. The association of a witch with night is reinforced by the usual character of the witch’s animal familiar, or of the creature into which the witch can transform himself. Some of the species are the black cat in Europe, the polecat in North America, the fox in Japan, the maned wolf in Brazil, the owl in India, the hyena in East Africa, the bat in the Congo. The obvious and well-recognized attribute that they share is that they are all nocturnal. Some moreover are predators, others carrion-eaters, and yet others are menaces in the dark. These attributes are easy enough to grasp as being appropriate to the nocturnal operation and the dark character of the witch. But once more this is not a singular kind of symbolism that distinguishes only the witch. The individual species are indeed particularly apposite to the image of the witch, but the fact that the status is symbolized by animals is not. The classical demonstration of this fact in anthropology is totemism, in which the classification of men into social groups is symbolized by a parallel classification of animal species. In totemism, a clan may even be associated with a nocturnal species, but there is no usual implication that the social group is composed of witches or that its members have the character of witches. What is happening in this institution is that in discriminating social statuses the members of totemic societies are resorting, by virtue of their tradition, to an extremely common method of symbolism. Ready examples are the animal supporters, such as the lion and the unicorn, in European heraldry; the animal “vehicles,” such as the bull of Shiva, that help to identify Hindu deities; the animal-headed gods of Egypt; the birds and other species that represent nations or the states of the U.S.A.; the nicknames and emblems of military formations and sports teams; the terms of moral appraisal that ascribe the strengths and failings of animals to human beings. In all these cases, and in a great many other institutions and figures of speech, men are resorting to a mode of symbolism that has little to do with the particular social facts and a great deal to do with a natural imaginative impulsion. The animal familiar of the witch is merely one instance of the operation of this factor. Another prominent component in the complex image that we are examining is that very often the witch is supposed to have the power of flight. There is one apparent reason for this, namely, that the action of the witch is usually considered to take place over some distance, either very rapidly or almost instantaneously, and in any case at such a range as could not be covered in the time by a normal human being. The attribute of flight is a simple way to imagine the witch at his swift work, and it is reinforced by those familiars, such as owls and bats, that as natural species are themselves actually capable of flying. That speed is a contributory feature is indicated by the example of the Kalapalo, who explain the rapidity with which a man travels (at night, incidentally) by stating that he came like a maned wolf, the creature that is associated with their witches. We can conjecture also a negative basis to the employment of the image of flight. When we conceive the operation of some force at a distance, we have the scientific knowledge to enable us to think of a wavelike action, as in the form of a radio beam or a laser or a death ray. But in what terms could we represent such an action, on the part of a witch, if we had not this idiom of physics to rely on? The mystical task, let us consider, is to bring the malign power of one individual to bear, rapidly and over a distance, on another. Lacking the concept of wavelike force, we shall I think find ourselves conceiving that the witch comes directly into contact with his victim; and an immediate recourse is to imagine, with the inspiration of observing airborne species, that the witch flies. Sometimes this action is represented as a detached head (in certain cases with entrails hanging from it) flying through the air; examples come from as far afield as Borneo and Chile. But this image reminds us of Durer’s angels, who appear as cherubic heads equipped with wings, and these lead to a far more general significance in the imagined power of flight. It is a worldwide notion that persons of supernormal status are capable of flight: not only gods and angels and other spirits, but also men who are associated with them or who draw upon their powers; so that saints and shamans and yogis are all credited with mystical flight and sometimes (in Christian tradition, for instance) with physical levitation. Hocart has suggested furthermore that the common practice of carrying kings and other potentates so that they are never in contact with the earth is a ceremonial surrogate for the imagined gift of flight. Once more therefore we have to conclude that a prominent and universal component in the image of the witch has nothing exclusively to do with witches, but is merely one instance of a widely exploited recourse of the imagination in representing persons who possess abnormal powers. Lastly, let me just mention one more component. I need only mention it, since it is too naturalistic a matter to be very interesting. This is the feature that a witch is supposed to emit a fiery trail or glow as he travels through the air. I am afraid all this means is that marsh gas and similar nocturnal illuminations are very commonly found in the world, and that peoples who imagine witches to fly at night are highly likely to associate their trajectories with the passage of these eerie lights. If the Trobrianders hold that the glow is emitted from the witch’s anus, this is just a dramatic touch added to the natural observation. Nevertheless, the component of the aerial light is a very common feature in the image of the witch, and it does reinforce the component of flight. It may not be symbolically so informative as other features, but it is still a contribution to the complex image of the witch. In some cases, moreover, it is a manifestation of fire, and we need no reminder of the fundamental importance everywhere of this lively symbol. So much, and by necessity rather superficially, for certain factors that characteristically constitute the image: opposition, inversion, darkness, color, animals, flight, and nocturnal lights. I am not asserting that these features alone compose the image, or that all of them must be present, or that witches are necessarily represented by this image. The notion that I am putting forward is in fact doubly polythetic: first, in that disparate phenomena are grouped together under any one factor; second, that the disparate factors are variously and sporadically combined into the image of the witch. In the first lecture I stressed that the primary factors are heterogeneous and that they are independent of the will. We now see these attributes manifested with special force in the synthetic image of the witch. The operative factors include the relational abstraction of opposition, the spatial metaphor of inversion, and a variety of observable phenomena of nature. The complex that they form has a global distribution and constancy that make it out of the question that each instance should be the result of individual or even traditional invention. As a collective representation, the complex is autonomous, and men have merely altered its particulars according to their circumstances—according to whether they themselves had white or black skins, or whether they had hyenas or the Japanese fox in their environment. It is as though the complex in itself, and not only the several factors out of which it is synthesized, were also primary. The factors constitute a steady image of the witch, but they are also to be found in the constitution of other images and institutions. For example, the relations and phenomena that we have just surveyed can be combined, with different semantic values according to the appositeness of the materials, into the image of a saint or a shaman. If mystical action at a distance is taken to be definitive, then this too is found in blessing and prayer and spiritual healing. So it is as though men have at their disposal, innately, a limited repertory of imaginative resources, and these, the primary factors, are differentially synthesized into distinct complexes representing disparate social concerns. The factors accrete to the concern, and their meaning in combination corresponds to the concern. In the case of witchcraft, how are we to account for the synthesis, that is, for the fact that certain primary factors characteristically combine into a recognizable and comprehensible image? I am not at all sure that in principle we can hope to do so. We may in one case or another be able to see how it is that one feature or another is present or has certain value (white ashes instead of black soot, incest instead of cannibalism), but these diacritical variations are only secondary to the process of synthesis. Even where there is a naturalistic or demonstrable ground to the presence of a particular feature, still we cannot give this a causal expression, and the local explanation does not explain the synthesis. For example, if we assume that there is a patent similarity between the idea of a flying witch and the observation of a will-o’-the-wisp, the phenomenon does not explain the idea, since the idea exists where there is no marsh gas; and the adventitious occurrence of the nocturnal glow, apposite though it may be, does nothing to explain the polythetic synthesis with other factors. Similar conclusions follow even when a causal connection can be shown to be possible between a feature of the image and some material agent. For example, it has been known for decades that European witches used an ointment containing certain chemical substances, and that they rubbed this into their bodies, apparently into the vaginal membranes and the legs, through which the substances could have entered the blood stream. These substances included hemlock, henbane, belladonna, and aconite, drugs which could conduce to hallucinations, including the sensation of flight. But this does not explain why witches are imagined to fly in societies that do not employ the drugs. Where the image is supported by drug-induced hallucinations, it does not explain the synthesis of the other factors that make up the total image. And in any case the hallucinations do not in themselves explain the factor of flight as an attribute of spirits and saints, shamans and heroes. If we say then merely that the primary factors accrete around a social concern, what is the concern that underlies the image of the witch? It is articulated as a fear of other men, who can do evil by secret and invisible means. Certainly men have given one another ample occasion to fear other men, but this does not explain the complexity of the image of the witch or its characteristic components. Men everywhere are disposed to fear some other men, yet they adopt many ways apart from the institution of witchcraft in expressing their apprehension and in taking precautions against its object. Actually, it may not be right to say that the factors accrete around the concern, as though the concern came first and the image afterwards. All we know empirically is that the concern, in the form of a conventional unease about certain categories of persons, and the image, as a complex construction of the imagination given also in part by tradition, are found together. The true force of the metaphor of accretion is perhaps that the stated concern, namely, about malign mystical action at a distance, is the most constant definitive feature of the institution and also the theme that imparts a fit meaning to such features as trailing intestines or the invisible draining of the strength of the victims. Moreover, to concentrate on the social concern, which people are conscious of and can express, leads to the view that witchcraft is a cognitive institution. The burden of my argument however has been that witchcraft is a complex product of the imagination and that it provides evidence of certain proclivities of the imagination. Certainly the institution has a cognitive aspect, for men reflect on their experience and they explain certain untoward events by witchcraft, but the form of the experience and the interpretation of the events are not the results of independent deliberation. If there is a “reality” to the idea of witchcraft, it is to be sought in the grounds and occasions of the image of the witch. Since the components of the image can be seen as products of factors that compose other complex images, the problematical focus is the process of synthesis that combines the components into the characteristic image. This process is not necessarily a response to experience, and we may not presume that it is otherwise determined by social facts. The synthesis may be, as I have suggested earlier, just as “primary” as are the factors that it integrates. In other words, the image of the witch is autonomous and can be conceived as an archetype of the unconscious imagination. The concept of an archetype, in the sense of a primordial mental image, has suffered from obscurity and also from obscurantism, and it has fallen into discredit in the eyes of those for whom the work of Jung is not entirely creditable. In adverting to this concept, however, I am not trying to darken or diminish understanding but to advance analysis; and in formulating the results of comparative study by means of the word archetype I am not subscribing to Jung’s psychology as a system. In undertaking the present investigation, I was not committed in advance to a Jungian view of the unconscious. My question was, how is social anthropology possible? The outcome, so far as the institution of witchcraft is concerned, is the notion of a psychic constant in the form of an autonomous image to which the human mind is naturally predisposed. Archetype happens to be the right word to denote this complex product of the unconscious. There is in particular a distinction of method to be made. Typically, I take it, Jung’s ideas on archetypes were derived from correspondences between images in the dreams or fantasies of patients and in alchemical manuscripts and hermeneutic sources. For the social anthropologist, on the other hand, the major sources are the reports of world ethnography, an incomparably vaster field of evidence and one that the comparativist nevertheless manages to comprehend as the widest testimony to the collective forms of human experience. As for the present investigation, moreover, there is a marked contrast between Jung’s studies and the approach that I have outlined. I think I am right in saying that Jung’s analyses of what he regarded as archetypes were not only culturally limited but were also highly particularistic, and even idiosyncratic, in that each archetype was interpreted in terms of its own proper significance. My own method, though, has been to investigate the archetype of the witch by analysis into primary factors that are not exelusively associated with witchcraft. If I have on occasion referred to the products of these factors (particular colors, sides, sounds, textures) as semantic units, this was with the explicit gloss that the units could carry variable and even opposite meanings from one cultural context to another. In postulating a repertory of primary factors, I have presented a possibility that so far as I know Jung was not concerned with; and by concentrating on the principles of synthesis that constitute primary factors into archetypes and that discriminate one archetype from another, I have taken what appears to be a quite different direction of research. Nevertheless, both of these approaches to the topic of archetypes are exercises in depth psychology. If the evidence of the social anthropologist consists in the first place of social facts and collective representations, this affords him only an advantage; for as social facts these representations have a relative autonomy, a generality, and a coercive force that objectify them for the purposes of analysis and comparison. Durkheim was quite right, I think, in propounding the notion of an entirely formal psychology that would be a sort of common ground for individual psychology and for sociology, and in suggesting that the comparative study of collective representations might seek the “laws of collective ideation” or of “social mentality” in general. This enterprise would lead, hypothetically, to the establishment of propositions that were valid equally for the individual and for the collective, with an exclusive substantive locus in neither. The essential, if we are to say anything fundamental about human nature, is to find the common term of individual and collective. I have spoken here as though “the imagination” were in effect such a common term; and in analyzing the image of the witch I have alluded to properties that can be common both to individual consciousnesses and to collective representations. But these properties are such as, empirically, must inhere in some locus or entity or system of phenomena that is common to both types of manifestation of the imagination. According to received ideas, which I have no reason to question in this instance, this can reside only in the human organism; and the plainest and most economical inference is that this means the brain. The present state of knowledge concerning this organ, the most complicated natural system known, is, I gather, still relatively superficial and partial; and I am not relying on neurophysiology when I say that I interpret the primary factors and the modes of synthesis as spontaneous manifestations of properties of the brain. The strength of this accommodating hypothesis is that it accounts for the global distribution of the characteristic image of the witch, and at the same time for the constancy of the factors as apparently innate predispositions. It is on these premises that I find it convenient to regard the archetypes as vectors of consciousness. There is nothing in principle that is particularly difficult to accept in this metaphor. All it necessarily implies, in the first place, is that the brain responds to percepts differentially; for instance, that it responds especially to red rather than to other hues, or to percussion as distinct from more mellifluous sounds. There is some experimental support for this assumption, in addition to the weight of ethnographic indications. In some cases, in connection with certain primary factors or archetypes (such as percussion, the half man), it is moreover possible to suggest empirical grounds for their presence or their prominence. Among the heterogeneous primary factors there falls a line that divides them into two types: those that are abstract (such as the relation of binary opposition) and those that are perceptual (such as color, texture). There is an inviting correspondence here with the contrasted functions of the cerebral hemispheres. It is tempting to link the respective factors causally to these functions: the abstract factors to the left hemisphere, the perceptual ones to the right. A plausible hypothesis is that the comparatively restricted number of abstract factors has to do with the analytical function of the left hemisphere, and the more extensive range of the perceptual factors with the function of the right. A conceivable process is that these contrasted cerebral functions combine in an imaginative tropism, a synthetic response to natural foci of attraction among phenomena, whether social or physical, and that the product is the archetype. With these considerations we are far beyond the present limits of proof, but I am not suggesting that it is essential to fall in with speculations of this kind in order to assent to to the method that I have proposed. I suggest only that the dichotomy among the primary factors, and their synthesis into the archetype, are consistent with current opinion about the lateral functions of the brain; and that this ultimate locus is consistent with the unconscious generation of the archetypes and with the likelihood that these complex images are the products of genetically inherited predispositions. What may lie at a deeper level of probing into the imaginative operations of the brain, in the form of neuroelectrical events, is a tantalizing sequel among further questions that propose themselves, if hardly one that a comparativist can have an opinion about. I mention it, however, in order to put us on our guard against inappropriate preconceptions when, as is almost inevitable, we do speculate on the cerebral grounds to collective representations. I am alluding to Wittgenstein’s (1967: §608–09) salutary comments: No supposition seems to me more natural than that there is no process in the brain correlated with associating or with thinking; so that it would be impossible to read off thought processes from brain-processes. I mean this: if I talk or write there is, I assume, a system of impulses going out from my brain and correlated with my spoken or written thoughts. But why should the system continue further in the direction of the centre? … It is … perfectly possible that certain psychological phenomena cannot be investigated physiologically, because physiologically nothing corresponds to them. For the more ascertainable present, let me conclude this lecture by resuming some of the main points. We have moved from the sociology of mystical crime, by way of induction from the global comparison of social facts, to certain apparent properties of the human brain. These properties are seen as determinants in the constitution of collective representations, not only of witchcraft but in effect universally and with regard to numerous other institutions. As such, they act as initial limits to the imagination, rather as do certain logical constraints on the forms of discursive reasoning. This conclusion runs contrary to the received idea of romantic individualism that, however constrained we may be by the dictates of society and the puny capacities of the human organism, we have an unfettered liberty in the exercise of the imagination. At the level of collective representations, our investigation of the image of the witch tends to reduce the scope and assurance of this comfortable assumption. 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The Pelican Freud Library, vol. 2. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books. Hampshire, Stuart. 1959. Thought and action. London: Chatto and Windus. Hocart, A. M. 1970. The life-giving myth. Edited by Lord Raglan. Second impression edited with a foreword by Rodney Needham. London: Methuen. Jacobi, Jolande. 1959. Complex/archetype/symbol in the psychology of C. G. ]ung. Translated by Ralph Manheim. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Lafitau, Joseph François. 1724. Moeurs des sauvages amériquains comparées aux moeurs des premiers temps. 2 vols. Paris. Lloyd, Geoffrey. 1966. Polarity and analogy: Two types of argumentation in early Greek thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mayer, Philip. (1954) 1970. “Witches. Inaugural lecture, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa.” Reprinted in Witchcraft and sorcery, edited by Max Marwick, 45–64. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books. Needham, Rodney. 1972. Belief, language, and experience. Oxford: Basil Blackwell; Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1973, ed. Right & left: Essays on dual symbolic classification. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1974. Remarks and inventions: Skeptical essays about kinship. London: Tavistock; New York: Barnes & Noble. ———. 1975. “Polythetic classification.” Man 10: 349–69. ———. 1976. “Skulls and causality.” Man 11: 71–88. ———. 1978. Essential perplexities: Inaugural lecture, University of Oxford. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1978. Symbolic classification. Santa Monica, CA: Goodyear Publishing Co. Rycroft, Charles. 1975. “Freud and the imagination.” New York Review April 3, 26–30. Waismann, Friedrich. 1968. How I see philosophy. Edited by R. Harre. London: Macmillan. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1927. Symbolism: Its meaning and effect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1967. Zettel. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. ———. 1969. The blue and brown books. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.   Rodney NEEDHAM (1923–2006) was a British social anthropologist and Professor of Social Anthropology at Oxford Unviersity. An ethnographer of the Penan of Borneo and the Siwang of Malaysia, Needham was also a major figure responsible for the popularization of French structuralism in British social anthropology, having translated many of the theoretical movement’s foundational texts into English. A prolific writer, Needham’s theoretical works on symbolism, causality, belief, kinship, ritual, classification, and others are now classic and remain influential among new generations of anthropologists. Among his many publications are Belief, language and experience (1972, University of Chicago Press), Primordial characters (1978, University of Virginia Press), Reconnaissances (1980, University of Toronto Press), and Exemplars (1985, University of California Press). ___________________ Publisher’s note: This lecture is a reprint of Needham, Rodney. 1978. “Synthetic images.” In Primordial characters, 23–50. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. We are grateful to Tristan Needham for extending permission to publish this work. We remind the reader that we retain the style of the original publication.  

Evans-Pritchard: The divine kingship of the Shilluk of the Nilotic Sudan This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © E.E. Evans-Pritchard. The divine kingship of the Shilluk of the Nilotic Sudan The Frazer Lecture, 1948 E. E. Evans-Pritchard   Introduction The central theme of The Golden Bough was the divine kingship, and it has seemed to me appropriate that a lecture established in its author’s honour and now dedicated to his memory should be on that subject. I propose, therefore, to examine one of the examples of divine kingship cited by Sir James Frazer, that of the Shilluk of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, and to discuss it as a problem of social structure. It was recorded as early as 1905 that it was a Shilluk custom to kill their kings1 and much information about the Shilluk kingship in general has since been collected. Professor and Mrs Seligman studied the institution in 1909-10 and it was they who brought it to the notice of Sir James Frazer and into the main stream of ethnological theory. Apart from the writings of the Seligmans and a number of articles by other hands there are two monographs on the Shilluk, The [1] Shilluk People by Professor Diedrich Westermann, who conducted linguistic research among the Shilluk in 1910, and Father Wilhelm Hofmayr’s Die Schilluk, largely based on the observations of Father Banholzer and other of his fellow catholic missionaries, which date from the beginning of the century. Father Hofmayr himself worked among the Shilluk from 1906 to 1916. There has, indeed, long been a considerable body of knowledge about the Shilluk and I would not have considered it profitable to discuss the Shilluk kingship afresh were it not that new light has recently been shed on their social structure, and more particularly on the place of the kingship in it, by officers of the Sudan Political Service. It is significant that two of them studied anthropology before joining the Sudan Service, Mr P. P. Howell at Cambridge, from where he had carried out some research among the Shilluk before joining the Service, and Mr W. P. G. Thomson at Oxford. It is from this literature, and especially from the more recent accounts, that I have drawn the material for my lecture, for though the Shilluk live in a part of the world with which I am very familiar, my contact with them has been slight. The Shilluk are the most northern of the Nilotic peoples and have been for centuries in contact [2] with the Arab population of the northern Sudan. Their country was first subjected to intermittent taxation and raiding by the Turks about 1820 and was finally conquered by them in 1867 and became part of the Ottoman Empire. When the Turkish Administration succumbed to the Sudanese Mahdi the Shilluk were involved in a struggle against this new ruler and afterwards against his Khalifa. Lord Kitchener arrived in Shillukland at the end of 1898 and since that time the people have been under Anglo-Egyptian administration. I mention these political events because they have strongly influenced the Shilluk kingship for close on a century, during which the kings have been executed, exiled, deposed, and nominated, by foreign governments. The funerary rites of a dead king and the procedures of election and investiture of a new king were probably not performed in the full traditional manner during this period. Social structure The hamlets of the Shilluk, who number about 110,000 souls, are almost continuous, like beads on a string, along the west bank of the Nile from near Lake No to about lat. 12 N. with a number of [3] settlements on the east bank and along the lower reaches of the Sobat. Their country is treeless savannah but, unlike their cousins the Nuer and Dinka, they are predominantly agricultural and sedentary, for their long river frontage gives them adequate water and grazing in the dry season for the comparatively few cattle (about 25,000) they possess.2 The brief account I give of their social structure is mostly derived from articles in Sudan Notes and Records by Mr Pumphrey and Mr Howell.3 The hamlets (myer, sing. pac), built from 100 yards to a mile or so apart on high ground parallel to the river, vary in size from one to fifty homesteads; a homestead (gol), the residence of a family (gol), consisting usually of two huts encircled by a fence. Each hamlet is occupied by members of an extended family, or small lineage, with their wives, and the homesteads of this group are arranged in a rough horseshoe shape around a common cattle-byre, which shelters the animals in the rains and is used as a club at all seasons, and a common kraal. The headman of a hamlet (jal dwong pac) who is also the head of a lineage in [4] the settlement of which it forms part represents the hamlet on the council of the settlement and receives in consequence a robe of honour from the king or from the chief of the settlement. If his hamlet is only a subsidiary seat of a lineage in the settlement he is regarded merely as its senior member. The settlement to which I have just referred is called podh, a word which has a number of meanings but generally designates a group of hamlets, occupied by different lineages, which, though there may be much competition between them, unite for defence, for the ritual of age-sets (an institution otherwise of little political importance), and in intersettlement and national affairs, and have a common chief. There are about a hundred of these settlements in Shillukland, each having a population of from less than 100 to more than 600 adult males. They are structurally distinct groups of a political kind though the distance that divides a settlement from adjacent settlements may be no greater than that which separates a hamlet from its nearest neighbours in the same settlement. In every settlement there is a dominant lineage, the dyil, the owners of the soil, with whom the various stranger and immigrant accretions (wedh) identify themselves politically and with whom they [5] form a separate social community with its own corporate life. This lineage is generally dominant in numbers as well as in virtue of the prestige derived from its traditional association with the settlement site. The chief of the settlement is chosen from it and by its members, though the stranger lineages have some say in the election, which must be confirmed by the king (reth) of the Shilluk. Even when a stranger lineage, sometimes a branch of the royal clan (kwareth), becomes more numerous in a settlement than its dominant lineage and dispossesses its members of the chieftainship they still retain some prestige as owners of the soil. unity in a settlement and the authority of its chief are said to depend on its integration around a powerful dominant lineage. I must, therefore, say something here about Shilluk lineages. There has been, and still is, some obscurity about Shilluk descent groups. There are said to be in Shillukland about 100 groups designated by the word kwa (descendants) followed by the name of the ancestor of the group. These are often described in the literature as exogamous clans but many of them might perhaps be better spoken of as lineages. They have a typical lineage structure with its characteristic branching off in response to the formation [6] of new territorial units. Colonies of the same lineage are found in several settlements, so that in any settlement several different descent groups are represented, one of them, as I have already explained, being always dominant in it and identified with the settlement politically. Although the dispersed lineages of a clan do not intermarry, and sometimes acknowledge their common descent in other ways, a man generally thinks in terms of his localized lineage, reference being usually to the ancestor who founded the lineage in his settlement. it is interesting to note a further common feature of lineage systems: the descendants of a man who has settled with his wife’s people trace their descent through the wife to the lineage in whose home they live. This practice is, as among the other Nilotic peoples, one of the ways in which stranger lineages are grafted into the genealogical structure of the dominant lineage in a settlement. However, until we know more than we do at present about the distribution of lineages, about their genealogical structure, and about the part they play in inter-settlement relations it will not be possible to estimate fully their political significance. All the Shilluk settlements compose a common polity, the kingdom of Shillukland. They are [7] segments of an organization. It seems that in pre-Turkish times there was a tendency for contiguous settlements to combine for war against other settlements or under the leadership of an outstanding personality, but such combinations were not permanent, or even consistent enough for us to speak of them as political groups. The Turkish Administration tried to give greater consistency to them so that they could be used as administrative units, and the Anglo-Egyptian Government has done the same and calls them divisions and appoints a chief for each. Previously they appear to have been little more than districts or localities, and the only chiefs between the king and the chiefs of settlements were those of Ger, northern Shillukland, and Luak, southern shillukland, whose functions had, as we shall see, a ritual rather than an administrative character, and those of Muomo and Tonga, the settlements which are the northern and southern marches of Shillukland, whose functions were also partly ritual. In Shilluk speech Muomo and Tonga correspond exactly, Professor Westermann tells us, to the expression of the ancient Hebrews: from Dan unto Beersheba.4 [8] Northern Shillukland and southern Shillukland are the arches of the politico-religious kingdom of the Shilluk of which the kingship is the keystone. That segmentation has taken this particular form is doubtless due to the peculiar ribbon-distribution of the Shilluk settlements. The whole Shilluk people recognize a single head and we can therefore speak of the Shilluk nation and of their king, and it is with his place in the national polity that this lecture is particularly concerned. According to Shilluk tradition the present king is the thirty-first of his line. All the kings are believed to be descended from Nyikang, the leader of the Shilluk in their heroic age, who led them into their present homeland, conquering it from its inhabitants and dividing it among the lineages of his followers; and Nyikang, or, as we would say, the spirit of Nyikang, is believed to be in every king and to have passed from king to king down the line of his successors. Nyikang is thus a mythological personification of the timeless kingship which itself symbolizes the national structure, a changeless moral order. The rule of succession is that only a son of a king can be invested with the kingship. As many sons of kings have never succeeded to the throne, there [9] are today numerous and widely diffused branches of the royal clan whose members are ineligible for royal office and lack authority, unless they are also chiefs of settlements, although they are treated with deference by commoners in virtue of their descent. Indeed, the royal clan is easily the largest single clan in the whole country, being said to comprise perhaps a fifteenth of the nation. In some areas its members are more numerous than commoners and have supplanted commoner lineages in the chieftainship of settlements. This process, which continues today, has been going on for a long time, for it is said that Abudok, the eighth ruler (and only queen) of the Shilluk, prophesied that one day the royal clan would eat up the rest of the Shilluk.5 It results from the custom of sending pregnant wives of a king from the royal capital to bear their children in other, generally their natal settlements. Their daughters are not allowed to marry and therefore do not start lines of descent which would count as sisters’ sons to the royal house. Their sons are brought up by settlement chiefs, often their mothers’ brothers, and not in the capital. When a prince (nyireth) marries he builds a separate hamlet near that of the settlement chief [10] who has reared him and there his descendants live. Some lineages of the royal clan, the ororo, have been formally deprived of their noble status and can now intermarry with their parent clan. They are said to be descendants of Ocolo, the fifth king, who were degraded by his successor, but Father Hofmayr’s and Father Crazzolara’s accounts6 would suggest that some of them may be descended from the nobles degraded by other kinds, and furthur research will probably confirm this. They are few in number but they hold the important chieftainship of Tonga settlement and they play a leading part in the royal funerary and investiture rites. A king always has some of their daughters among his wives and it is said to be their duty to smother him in certain circumstances. The emergence of what may be called aristocratic status has been accompanies by the formation of numerous groups of persons of the category of bang reth, royal clients. They are descendants of retainers of past kings—captured enemies, certain homicides, persons who have become possessed by the spirit of Nyikang, and poor men who have [11] attached themselves to the court—and have been given the fictional collectivity of exogamous lineages. They are said to be rather more numerous than the royal clan. During a king’s lifetime his special band of retainers used, until the practice was discouraged by the Government, to live near the capital in a hamlet of their own, but when their master was buried in his natal settlement some of them moved there with his elderly widows, and their descendants remained there to tend his shrine. Also, when a prince was ‘planted out’, as the Shilluk say, in a settlement, his father sent some of his retainers to live there and these became bang nyireth, a prince’s clients. They served the prince during his lifetime, and after his death their descendants continued to live near the prince’s descendants as a fictitious lineage. consequently, where there is a branch of the royal clan in a settlement there is usually a lineage of clients in the same settlement. The clients are merged in the general category of commoners, colo, of which word ‘Shilluk’ is an Arabic corruption, though it is said of them that they have a slightly lower social status than members of other commoner clans because they have no traditional rights in the settlements in which they live. [12] The development of the Shilluk kingship has thus produced, though not in a very pronounced or rigid form, a social hierarchy of royal house, nobility (other members of the royal clan), and commoners (including persons of client origin). The kingship If we are to understand the place of the kingship in Shilluk society we must, I think, beware of attempts to define it in terms of judicial and administrative functions and view it rather as a ritual office and in a wider political context. in 1903 Father Tappi wrote that the authority of the king is ‘absolute’.7 Professor and Mrs Seligman have described the king as ‘absolute head—temporal and spiritual—of a state whose territory is divided into a number of provinces, each administered by a chief directly responsible to the sovereign and acting as his proxy’,8 and Professor Westermann has also written of the power of the king as ‘absolute’.9 Father Hofmayr says that ‘Mit dem Regierungsantritt ist der König Herr des Landes, das er nach Belieben vergeben [13] kann, und Herr sogar des Eigentums seiner Untertanen’.10 These statements would seem to require some modification. As Mr Pumphrey has pointed out, it is unlikely that the so-called ‘provinces’ were in fact more than districts or that they were in any sense administrative departments before they were made into something of the kind by foreign governments.11 Moreover, though doubtless the king exercised considerable influence in the country and may, have confirmed settlement chiefs in office, he did not nominate them. They were heads of settlements in virtue of their position as heads of lineages dominant in those settlements and although they had certain duties to the king it is, I think, wrong to describe them as being in any sense administrative officials. To use such terms as ‘state’, ‘government’, and ‘administration’ in speaking of the shilluk political system would appear to me, in the light of what is now known of it, to be a mistake. It is true that the more recent authorities imply rather than explicitly state what in their opinion is the position of the king. Mr Howell and Mr Thomson speak of the ‘theoretical omnipotence’ of the king and of a ‘theoretically omnipotent [14] monarchy’.12 Mr Pumphrey says that in the old days ‘justice was probably rough and large-scale fighting more prevalent than litigation’.13 Indeed, feuds appear to have been rampant in the past, and it is not very clear how they were composed. We are told that major disputes were sometimes brought before the king, but he can hardly be said to have tried such cases. If he intervened at all it was to support partially one side to a quarrel. We are told that when a settlement waged ‘unjustifiable’ war on another or refused persistently to listen to the king he might raise a ‘royal levy’ from the adjacent settlements and with this force and his own retainers raid the recalcitrants, seizing their cattle and burning their homesteads. He kept some of the cattle for himself and the rest were taken by those who supported his action. The raiding force would generally be strong enough to discourage resistance.14 Compensation for injury seems, therefore, to have been obtained by self-help, sometimes backed by royal intervention. Without confirmation I am not inclined to accept Father Hofmayr’s statement that compensation for homicide was [15] paid to the king alone.15 A different picture of the king’s part in the settlement of disputes is painted by Mr Oyler of the American Mission, who witnessed the settlement of a feud, which had been going on in a district for more than three years, by the joint intervention of the king and the Government. From his account it is evident that the king could not have imposed a settlement had the disputants not been ready to accept one, that the part played in it by the king was that of peacemaker and not of judge, and that his participation can better be described as sacerdotal than as governmenta1.16 The king of the Shilluk reigns but does not govern. The king’s sacerdotal role in the settlement of feuds gives us a clue to what is confirmed by a great weight of further evidence: his sacral position in Shilluk society. Our authorities, indeed, speak of the king as the ‘Hoherpriester des Landes’,17 of ‘the royal and priestly line’ and of its ‘priestly function’,18 and of the king as ‘the high priest of the tribal religion’.19 Both his functions and his status are primarily of a ritual order. He makes sacrifices on [16] important occasions, especially for rain and for victory in war, and it is his duty to provide cattle for the sacred herds of Nyikang at Nyilual and Wau and a canoe for Nyikang’s shrine at Nyibodho. Nyikang, the culture hero of the Shilluk, their first king, and the creator of their nation, is immanent in him and this makes him the double pivot of Shilluk society, the political head of the nation and the centre of the national cult. The kingship is the common symbol of the Shilluk people and, Nyikang being immortal, an abiding institution which binds past and present and future generations. The correspondence of political structure with religious cult can be seen at every point of the structure. The territorial segments of the nation and their association with lineages is, as we have noted, validated by the myth of Nyikang’s parcelling out of his conquests among the clans, the strands of which are, moreover, caught up into a single mythological point, Nyikang. Some trace their descent from his companions, some from his collateral relatives, others from the original inhabitants of the country conquered by him, and yet others from men who played some part in his saga. The lineage heads who are the chiefs of settlements have ritual duties to the kingship: in [17] particular, ceremonial services at the king’s investiture, the building of huts at Fashoda, which is both the royal capital and the cult centre of Nyikang, and the upkeep of Nyikang’s other shrines and those of past kings. These shrines are widely distributed throughout the country so that every section of it participates in the cult of Nyikang, who is, it must be borne in mind, not only the semi-divine hero of Shilluk mythology but also the king at every period of their history. Indeed, the shrines of Nyikang, what professor Seligman calls his cenotaphs, are indistinguishable from the tomb-shrines of dead kings and they have the same ceremonial functions in the life of the people: in the rain-making ceremonies, at harvest-time, and in times of sickness and pestilence.20 The religion and cosmogony of the Shilluk are bound up with the political system through the identification of Nyikang with the king. The kingship stands at the centre of Shilluk moral values. We can only understand the place of the kingship in Shilluk society when we realize that it is not the individual at any time reigning who is king, but [18] Nyikang who is the medium between man and God (Juok) and is believed in some way to participate in God as he does in the king. ‘Nyikang is the reth but the reth is not Nyikang.’21 The participation of Nyikang in the king raises the kingship to a plane above all sectional interests, whether local or of descent. All the Shilluk share in the kingship, however their loyalties may pull them apart in other matters, because in Nyikang are centred all those interests which are common to all the people: success in war against foreigners and the fertility and health of men, cattle, crops, and of those wild beasts which are of service to man. Professor Westermann tells us that ‘everything they value most in their national and private life, has its origin in him’.22 Mr Howell and Mr Thomson tell us that when a king died the Shilluk say piny bugon, ‘there is no land’23 —the centre of the Shilluks’ world has fallen out. It is restored by the investiture of a new king, for though kings may perish the kingship, that is Nyikang, endures. Mr Oyler tells us: ‘They say that if Nikawng should die, the whole Shilluk race would perish.’24 [19] Because of the mystical values associated with the kingship and centred in the person of the king he must keep himself in a state of ritual purity, by performing certain actions and observing certain prescriptions, and in a state of physical perfection. Our authorities say that the Shilluk believe that should the king become physically weak the whole people might suffer, and, further, that if a king becomes sick or senile he should be killed to avoid some grave national misfortune, such as defeat in war, epidemic, or famine. The king must be killed to save the kingship and with it the whole Shilluk people. This would seem to be the reasoning behind Shilluk statements that the king may be strangled, or suffocated, or walled up in a hut and left to die there, if he fails to satisfy his wives or shows signs of illness or senility. In view of the great importance Sir James Frazer and others have attached to these statements I must confess that I consider them of interest more as an indication of the mystical nature of the kingship than as evidence that the kings were, in fact, ever killed in the ways mentioned or for the reasons given. It is true that Professor and Mrs Seligman state categorically that ‘there is not the least doubt that kings of the Shilluk were killed with due ceremony when they began to show [20] signs of old age or ill health’,25 but I have failed to find convincing evidence that any Shilluk king was put to death in either circumstance, although some of the kings must have qualified long before they died for execution on the grounds alleged; and I am persuaded that the story of kings being walled up in a hut is a confusion arising from the usual walling up of the remains of a dead king, the bones being buried after decomposition of the flesh. In the absence of other than traditional evidence of royal executions in Shilluk history and in view of the contradictory accounts cited I conclude that the ceremonial putting to death of kings is probably a fiction. It possibly arises from the dual personality of the king, who is both himself and Nyikang, both an individual and an institution, which accounts also for the linguistic convention that a king does not die but disappears just as Nyikang is said not to have died but to have disappeared, in his case in a storm. I will return to this question of regicide after I have reviewed the procedures of election and investiture of kings to show what light they shed on the nature of the kingship. [21] Royal election and investiture The phases of the investiture of a new king were excellently described by Mr P. Munro26 of the Sudan Political Service, who was an eye-witness of the investiture of King Fafiti Yor, the twenty-ninth king, in 1918. However, the recent accounts by Mr Howell and Mr Thomson, who were able to make detailed observations on what happened on the death of King Fafiti Yor in 1943 and on the election and investiture of his successor, King Anei, in 1944 and again (Mr Thomson) on the death of King Anei and on the election and investiture of King Dak Fadiet in 1945, are descriptively fuller and analytically more illuminating and are therefore followed in the present summary. On the death of a king his corpse is walled for some months in a hut and his bones are then buried in his natal hamlet, and not in the royal capital. The remains are disposed of, and the mortuary ceremonies conducted, by royal clients, ororo, and members of the royal clan (the head of which is not the ruling king but the chief of Fadiang settlement). [22] It is more a clan, than a national, affair. The election of the new king, which takes place a few days after his predecessor’s death, is, on the contrary, an affair of the whole Shilluk people, who participate in the election through the chiefs of the north and the south, to whom I have already referred. These persons reflect in their roles in the election and in the ceremonies of investiture the structural dichotomy of Shillukland. We have seen that the Shilluk kingdom has a double configuration, political in its territorial setting, in its division into north and south and marches and settlements, and ritual in its religious setting, its arrangement in relation to the cult of Nyikang. In the ritual configuration the dichotomy is represented by the ceremonial division of the country into Gol Dhiang the northern division, and Gol Nyikang, the southern division, which correspond structurally to the political division of the kingdom into Ger, the northern half, and Luak, the southern half, though geographically they are not exactly coterminous. The chiefs of the ceremonial divisions in this ritual representation of the Shilluk polity are also the political chiefs of Golbany and Kwom, the two settlements which are to the north and south adjacent to the capital and cult-centre, [23] Fashoda, which is almost where the halves meet and is the focal point in the ceremonies of investiture. I wish to emphasize that the procedure of election ensures that the prince selected to be king must have the backing of the whole country. Mr Thomson tells us that ‘the choice rests entirely with the chiefs of Gol Dhiang and Gol Nyikang’27 and cannot take place unless they agree, and it is clear that agreement does not depend on the personal feelings of the two men but that they are spokesmen for the halves of the country they represent. The other members of what Mr Howell and Mr Thomsom call the ‘electoral college’ and which they say ‘is a very conscious survival of the traditional structure of the Shilluk tribe’28 have ‘only to listen to the decision’29 of these two men. The other members are the two influential chiefs of the northern and southern marches, Muomo and Tonga, nine chiefs of settlements who are descended from the original chiefs among whom Nyikang divided Shillukland when he conquered and settled his followers in it, and three important [24] chiefs of branches of the royal clan which have become dominant in powerful settlements in the country. Thus the backing, if only passive, of all parts of the kingdom is necessary before a prince can be invested with the kingship. The participation of the halves of Shillukland in the making of a king is further emphasized in the intense opposition between them expressed in the drama of the investiture, which at the same time enacts the conquest and settlement of the country by Nyikang and his followers. Without the collective participation of the halves of the country the investiture of a king, which takes place about a year after his election, cannot be held. The ceremonies would seem to have precisely this function, for the kingship represents the whole country and a king can only be made by rites in which the whole country takes part. Hence also in the investiture all sections of the population are represented. The royal clan, its dispossessed branch, the commoner clans, especially those whose ancestors were among the original followers of Nyikang, and the client clans, all have essential roles in the drama. Different settlements in different districts of Shillukland and different clans are responsible for performing various parts of the [25] ceremonial and for providing the various objects required in its enactment: silver and cloth from the Arabs of the north (presumably obtained by raiding in the old days), ostrich feathers for the effigies of Nyikang and his son, skins of the rare Mrs Gray antelope from Fanyikang island for the ceremonial robes of the king and the other more important participants in the ceremony, sacred spears, royal drums, fibre of the dom palm for ceremonial robes, cowrie shells, new huts, beasts for sacrifice, and so forth. I will recount briefly the chief phases by which the kingship envelops the king-elect. The effigy of Nyikang, which is kept in the principal of his provincial shrines, at Akurwa in the most northerly district of Shillukland, is brought out by his priests, to whom the king-elect has to make considerable gifts for their service in this matter, and together with the effigy of his son Dak is taken to beat the northern bounds of the kingdom and then southwards, supported by an army of the north, to fight the king-elect for possession of the capital. As the effigies pass through each district the people gather to pay their respects to Nyikang and to escort him to the next district, for it appears that during the interregnum the effigy is believed to contain the [26] spirit of Nyikang, to be Nyikang in fact. Nyikang’s army of the north meets in mock combat an army of the south, supporting the king-elect, at the Arepejur watercourse just outside the royal capital. In the words of Mr Howell and Mr Thomson, this meeting in battle of the two armies on the Arepejur, the boundary between north and south, ‘symbolizes the ceremonial division of the country into two moieties. The balance between them is strongly emphasized at all points.’30 The army of the king-elect is defeated and he is captured by Nyikang and taken by him to the capital. The kingship captures the king. There Nyikang is placed on the royal stool. After a while he is taken off it and the king-elect sits on it in his stead and the spirit of Nyikang enters into him, causing him to tremble, and he becomes king, that is he becomes possessed by Nyikang. The concluding ritual acts follow. The new king has married a girl, traditionally provided by a certain clan, and this girl has an important role in the ceremonies of investiture. After the king’s enthronement Nyikang seizes the girl and refuses to surrender her to the king on the ground that she was married with cattle from the royal herd, which is Nyikang’s herd, and is therefore Nyikang’s wife. [27] On this issue Nyikang and the king summon their supporters to a second mock battle, in which the king captures the girl. Nyikang thereupon pays the king a visit to make his peace with him. On the following morning the king receives the homage and exhortations of the chiefs and undertakes to be a good king. Nyikang does not again contest the king’s authority and some weeks later the effigies are sent back to the shrine at Akurwa. Even so brief a sketch as I have given enables us to perceive the basic symbolism of the events of investiture. Nyikang is always king of the Shilluk and when a king dies his spirit is conceived of as departing in some manner from the king’s body to take up its abode in the new effigy specially made for its accommodation at the shrine of Akurwa. By entering anew into the body of a prince Nyikang once again rules in his capital. The most adequate interpretation of the succession of rites of investiture would therefore seem to be that when the effigy and the king fight for possession of the capital the army of the effigy is victorious because Nyikang is in the effigy, but when they fight again over the king’s bride the army of the king is victorious because Nyikang is now in the king. Power has passed from the Nyikang of the [28] shrine of Akurwa to the Nyikang of the king in Fashoda. The king is now reverenced and the effigy is sent back to Akurwa. It is Nyikang, mark you, the symbol of the whole Shilluk people, who is the king-maker. The kingship belongs to all the people and not to the royal clan. Indeed, I think it significant that when Nyikang captures the king-elect the latter is ostentatiously surrounded by a block of his own clan. In this connection it is to be hoped that more will be learnt about the distribution now and in the past of the royal clan. The traditional home of Nyikang was Fanyikang, a settlement in the south, and the ritual equivalent to the southern half of the kingdom is Gol Nyikang. it seems likely on these, and on other, grounds that the royal clan was at one time found chiefly, perhaps only, in the south and spread from there to those northern settlements in which it is found to-day, as has happened among the closely related Anuak people. Hence in the ceremonies of investiture it seems as though the Shilluk people, represented by Nyikang and the army of the north, capture the king and take him away from his clan, represented by the army of the south, to be the head of the whole nation. The ritual, of investiture appears to be an [29] enactment of this central dogma, that it is not an individual who belongs to a particular clan or to a particular part of the country who is king, but Nyikang in whom are the continuity and welfare of the whole Shilluk people. Royal succession and regicide We may now examine, in the light of what we have learnt about the position of the kingship in Shilluk society and particularly about the polarity so clearly expressed in the ceremonies I have reviewed, the mode of succession to royal office and the tradition of regicide which is so closely connected with it. Although Professor and Mrs Seligman say, ‘We found no basis for the belief, common among Europeans in the Shilluk country, that there were two, or even three or four, branches of the royal house from which the kings were elected in turn’31 the early Sudan intelligence Reports make it clear that this was the case in recent decades and also that rivalry between claimants to the kingship in the second half of the nineteenth century was connected with the balanced opposition between north and south, for the halves of the kingdom fairly [30] consistently supported rival candidates. Moreover, it is difficult to believe that the practice of the present day, by which it is more or less understood that the surviving lines of kings take it in turn to provide the king,32 is new. A collateral royal line does not to-day contest an election on the understanding that they have next turn. The custom is for the reigning king to take under his wing a scion of a rival line and by so doing to indicate him as his successor, though he cannot nominate him and his choice may not be followed by the people. When this prince becomes king he takes under his wing a son of his protector. The reigning king insures by this convention against both rebellion by a rival line and his own line being excluded from the kingship in the future. There can be no doubt that in recent times there has been an alternation on the throne of branches of the royal house, nor that the alternation is related to the structural dichotomy of Shillukland. We are told that if the ceremonial chiefs of the north and south fail to reach agreement in the election of a new king the chiefs of the northern settlements follow their representative and the chiefs of the southern settlements follow their representative and the [31] issue is fought out. It would seem probable that when there is disagreement it is an expression not of divergence of opinion about the merits of the candidates but of local loyalties in which different members of the royal house are associated with different parts of Shillukland. Whether disputed succession in the past was a product of local rivalries cannot perhaps now be determined, but it seems likely in view of the fact that in earlier times the king ruled from the settlement in which he was brought up or moved from one settlement to another and did not have a fixed residence at the central and neutral point of Fashoda.33 I would also suggest that the association of princes with settlements and districts is clearly related to the custom by which they are brought up away from the capital. it is probable that the backing given by north and south to candidates for the kingship in past times arose from the fact that some princes were brought up in the north and some in the south. That this is the case is clear from Father Hofmayr’s detailed notes on each of [32] the Shilluk kings.34 It is easy to determine because the shrines of dead kings are still maintained today where they were born and brought up. I would further suggest that the maternal descent of princes may be of great significance in that it may be the association of maternal lineages with settlements which attaches local loyalties to a particular prince or to a particular branch of the royal house. it is therefore important that the maternal clans of the Shilluk kings should be recorded by some future observer. The Shilluk statement that kings should be put to death if they grow old or become sick and their further statement that any prince may at any time challenge the king to mortal combat, in which the king may not call for help, cannot, I think, like the mode of succession, be understood except in relation to the political structure as a whole. There is only traditional evidence that any king has ever been killed in either way but, as Mr Howell and Mr Thomson point out,35 the belief that kings have been, or might be, so killed has political implications. The assertion that a sick or old king should be killed probably means that when some disaster falls upon the Shilluk nation the tensions inherent [33] in its political structure become manifest in the attribution of the disaster to his failing powers. The unpopularity which national misfortune brings on a king enables a prince to raise rebellion. The belief that a king may legitimately be assassinated by a personal rival is not substantiated by recent Shilluk history any more than the belief that he may be put to death, but it draws some support from tradition and from anxiety on this score shown by the king and his attendants and from the precautions he takes to protect himself against assassination, especially between his election and investiture and during the ceremonies of investiture. However, the evidence suggests that the anxiety may not be expressed, nor the precautions taken, solely on account of the king’s feelings of insecurity but partly, if not chiefly, because he is compelled by tradition to act furtively. Moreover, it is difficult to reconcile the tradition that kings were killed in this fashion with the account we have of royal election and investiture. On the other hand there seems little doubt that Shilluk kings generally met a violent death. My own opinion is that we must interpret Shilluk statements about the matter as indicating not that any prince may slay the king on his own initiative, as [34] has been suggested,36 but that any prince may lead a rebellion as the candidate of discontent, particularly of the part of the kingdom to which the prince belongs. if the king has lost support in the part to which he belongs he will probably lose also both the resulting contest and his life in it. This is the conclusion I have drawn from Father Hofmayr’s involved chronicle of the Shilluk kings.37 it must here be remarked that Shilluk rebellions have not been made against the kingship. On the contrary, they were made to preserve the values embodied in the kingship which were being weakened, or it was believed so, by the individual who held office. They were not revolutions but rebellions against the king in the name of kingship. Conclusion The divine kingship, to one, perhaps the best known, of the examples of which I have devoted this lecture, has been extensively written about by ethnologists, particularly in reference to its occur- [35] rence in Africa.38 I cannot discuss their conclusions here though I feel that I must say about them that they are not, for me at any rate, well founded. In this lecture I thought that I could make a more valuable contribution by a detailed discussion of a particular instance than by what would necessarily have been a very general and superficial review of the whole field, especially as the case selected for discussion has been investigated by a number of gifted observers over half a century and still permits further and more systematic research. In discussing the Shilluk kingship I have not, as you will have noted, followed Sir James Frazer’s method of interpretation. In my view kingship everywhere and at all times has been in some degree a sacred office. Rex est mixta persona cum sacerdote. This is because a king symbolizes a whole society and must not be identified with any part of it. He must be in the society and yet stand outside it and this is only possibly if his office is raised to a mystical plane. It is the kingship and not the king who is divine. But though I would insist that a sufficient explana- [36] tion of the sacral kingship can only be derived from a detailed and painstaking comparative study of a wide range of monarchical institutions, which implies a yet wider comparative study of types of political structure, I do not wish to maintain that because all kingship has some of the features of the divine kingship the divine kingship is not in respect of other features a distinct type of institution. It is to the credit of Sir James Frazer to have shown that it is; and I would suggest that it is an institution typical of, though doubtless not restricted to, societies with pronounced lineage systems in which the political segments are parts of a loosely organized structure without governmental functions. In societies of this kind the political organization takes a ritual or symbolic form which in polities with a higher degree of organization gives way, though never entirely, to centralized administration. I would further suggest that the acceptance of regicide in one form or another as customary can be explained in the same structural terms. The moral density is great enough for the segments to be represented by a common symbol in the kingship but not great enough to eliminate the powerful tendencies towards fission in the structure they [37] compose. These tendencies are expressed in relation to the symbol, and either the kingship itself, or the king himself, circulates through the competitive segments, as among the Anuak and in past times also in Shillukland, or the segments struggle for royal representation in the capital. In either case their particularist sentiments operate through dynastic rivalries. The kingship, that is Nyikang, is changeless and acknowledged as a supreme value by all the Shilluk. In that permanence and in that acknowledgement the unity of the nation is manifested. In the rebellions against the kings and in the regicides the segmentary structure with its opposed local loyalties is equally present to the view of the observer. The kingship tends in such societies to become identified, by the attachment of the king’s person to one locality, with sectional interests and when this happens other sections assert their rights, and by their action the common interest of all the Shilluk, in the kingship at the expense of the king’s person. The kingship embodies a contradiction between dogma and social facts, in a sense between office and person, which is produced by a combination of centripetal and centrifugal tendencies in the national structure and this contradiction is solved by customary regicide. [38] Bibliography BANHOLZER, P. L. and GIFFEN, J. K. The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (ed. Count Gleichen), ch. VIII. 1905. CANN, CAPT. G. P. ‘A Day in the Life of an idle Shilluk.’ S.N. and R. 1929. CRAZZOLARA, P. J. P. ‘Beiträge zur Kenntnis der Religion und Zauberei bei den Schilluk.’ Anthropos. 1932. D.I. ‘Conspiracy against the Mek of the Shilluks in 1917.’ S.N. and R. 1922. HOFMAYR, P. WILHELM. ‘Zur Geschichte und sozialen und politischen Gliederung des Stammes der Schillukneger.’ Anthropos. 1910. HOFMAYR, P. WILHELM. ‘Religion der Schilluk.’ Anthropos. 1911. HOFMAYR, P. WILHELM. Die Schilluk. Geschichte, Religion und Leben eines Niloten-Stammes. 1925. HOWELL, P. P. ‘The Shilluk Settlement.’ S.N. and R. 1941. HOWELL, P. P. and THOMSON, W. P. G. ‘The Death of a Reth of the Shilluk and the Installation of his Successor.’ S.N. and R. 1946. MUNRO, P. ‘Installation of the Ret of the Chol (King of the Shilluks).’ S.N. and R. 1918. OYLER, REV. D. S. ‘Nikawng and the Shilluk Migration.’ S.N. and R. 1918. OYLER, REV. D. S. ‘Nikawng’s Place in the Shilluk Religion.’ S.N. and R. 1918. OYLER, REV. D. S. ‘The Shilluk’s Belief in the Evil Eye. The Evil Medicine Man.’ S.N. and R. 1919. OYLER, REV. D. S. ‘The Shilluk’s Belief in the Good Medicine Men.’ S.N. and R. 1920. OYLER, REV. D. S. ‘The Shilluk Peace Ceremony.’ S.N. and R. 1920. OYLER, REV. D. S. ‘Shilluk Notes.’ S.N. and R. 1926. OYLER, MRS. D. S. ‘Examples of Shilluk Folk-Lore.’ S.N. and R. 1919. PUMPHREY, M. E. C. ‘Shilluk “royal” Language Conventions.’ S.N. and R. 1937. PUMPHREY, M. E. C. ‘The Shilluk Tribe.’ S.N. and R. 1941. SELIGMAN, PROFESSOR C. G. ‘The Cult of Nyakang and the Divine Kings of the Shilluk.’ Report of the Wellcome Tropical Research Laboratories. 1911. SELIGMAN, PROFESSOR C. G. and MRS B. Z. Pagan Tribes of the Nilotic Sudan, chs. II and III. 1932. TAPPI, P. C. ‘Notes Ethnologiques sur les Chillouks.’ Bull. Soc. Khediv. de Geog. 1903. TAPPI, P. C. ‘Le Pays des Chillouks.’ Bull. Soc. Khediv. de Geog. 1904. THOMSON, W. P. G. ‘Further Notes on the Death of a Reth of the Shilluk, 1945’. (Manuscript.) WESTERMANN, PROFESSOR DIEDRICH. The Shilluk People. Their Language and Folklore. 1912. Publisher’s note: We are very grateful to Prof. E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s family to have given HAU the permission to reprint this work. We remind the reader that we retain the style of the original, and indicate in the text the original page number in square brackets. ___________________ 1. Banholzer, P. and Giffen, J. K., The Anglo-Egyyptian Sudan (edited by Count Gleichen, 1905), ch. VIII, p. 199. 2. I am indebted to Mr John Donald of the Sudan Political Service for the most recent figures of human and bovine population. 3. M. E. C. Pumphrey, ‘The Shilluk Tribe’, S.N. and R. (1941); P. P. Howell, ‘The Shilluk Settlement’, ibid. (1941). 4. Diedrich Westermann, The Shilluk People. Their Language and Folklore (1912), p. xx. 5. Westermann, op. cit. p. 149. 6. Wilhelm Hofmayr, Die Schilluk (1925), pp. 66, 83, and 261-2; P. J. P. Crazzolara, ‘Beiträge zur Kenntnis der Religion und Zauberei bei den Schilluk’, Anthropos (1932), p. 185. 7. P. C. Tappi, ‘Notes Ethnologiques sur les Chillouks’, Bull. Soc. Khediv. de Géog. (1903), p. 122. 8. Pagan Tribes of the Nilotic Sudan (1932), p. 39. 9. Op. cit. p. xlvii. 10. Op. cit .pp. 150-1. 11. Op. cit .pp. 18-19. 12. Howell, op. cit. p. 57; P. P. Howell and W. P. G. Thomson, ‘The Death of a Reth of the Shilluk and the Installation of his Successor’, S.N. and R. (1946), p. 8. 13. Op. cit. p. 19. 14. Ibid. p. 12. 15. Op. cit. p. 162. 16. ‘The Shilluk Peace Ceremony’, S.N. and R. (1920), pp. 296-9. 17. Hofmayr, op. cit. p. 152. 18. Banholzer and Giffen, op. cit. p. 197. 19. Pumphrey, op. cit p. 19. 20. Prof. C. G. Seligman, ‘The Cult of Nyakang and the Divine Kings of the Shilluk’, Report of the Wellcome Tropical Research Laboratories (1911), pp. 221 and 225. 21. Howell and Thomson, op. cit p. 8. 22. Op. cit. p. xliii. 23. Howell and Thomson, op. cit. p. 18. 24. Rev. D. S. Oyler, ‘Nikawng and the Shilluk Migration’, S. N. andR. (1918), p. 115. 25. Report of the Wellcome Tropical Research Laboratories, p. 221; also Pagan Tribes of the Nilotic Sudan, pp. 90-2. Howell and Thomson say (op. cit p. 19) that ceremonial strangulation is traditional for all members of the royal clan. 26. P. Munro, ‘Installation of the Ret of the Chol (King of the Shilluks)’, S.N. and R. (1918). 27. W. P. G. Thomson, ‘Further Notes on the Death of a Reth of the Shilluk, 1945’ (manuscript). 28. Op. cit. p. 29. 29. Thomson, op. cit. 30. Op. cit. p. 48. 31. Pagan Tribes of the Nilotic Sudan, pp. 44-5. 32. Westermann, op. cit. p. xlvi; Hofmayr, op. cit. p. 145; Howell and Thomson, op. cit. p. 27. 33. Seligman, Report of the Wellcome Tropical Research Laboratories, p. 229, citing information given by Father Banholzer and Dr Lambie; Westermann, op. cit. p. 138; Hofmayr, op. cit. p. 76. 34. Op. cit. pp. 59-136. 35. Op. cit. p. 11. 36. Hofmayr, op. cit. p. 64; Prof. and Mrs Seligman, Pagan Tribes of the Nilotic Sudan, pp. 90-1. Howell and Thomson (op. cit p. 11 et passim) are more reserved. 37. Op. cit pp. 59-136. 38. Leo Frobenius, Atlas Africanus, Heft 2, Blatt 7, ‘Der König ein Gott’; C. G. Seligman, Egypt and Negro Africa (the Frazer Lecture for 1933), 1934; Tor Irstam, The King of Ganda. Studies in the Institutions of Sacral Kingship in Africa (1944).

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