Astonishment and Evocation: The Spell of Culture in Art and Anthropology 9780857459367

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Astonishment and Evocation

Studies in Rhetoric and Culture Edited by Ivo Strecker, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Stephen Tyler, Rice University, and Robert Hariman, Northwestern University Our minds are filled with images and ideas, but these remain unstable and incomplete as long as we do not manage to persuade both ourselves and others of their meanings. It is this inward and outward rhetoric which allows us to give some kind of shape and structure to our understanding of the world and which becomes central to the formation of individual and collective consciousness. This series is dedicated to the study of the interaction of rhetoric and culture and focuses on the concrete practices of discourse in which and through which the diverse and often also fantastic patterns of culture—including our own—are created, maintained, and contested.

Volume 1 Culture and Rhetoric Edited by Ivo Strecker and Stephen Tyler Volume 2 Culture, Rhetoric, and the Vicissitudes of Life Edited by Michael Carrithers Volume 3 Economic Persuasions Edited by Stephen Gudeman Volume 4 The Rhetorical Emergence of Culture Edited by Christian Meyer and Felix Girke Volume 5 Astonishment and Evocation: The Spell of Culture in Art and Anthropology Edited by Ivo Strecker and Markus Verne Volume 6 Chiasmus and Culture Edited by Boris Wiseman and Anthony Paul

Astonishment and Evocation The Spell of Culture in Art and Anthropology




Edited by

Ivo Strecker and Markus Verne

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2013 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com ©2013 Ivo Strecker and Markus Verne All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Astonishment and evocation : the spell of culture in art and anthropology / edited by Ivo Strecker and Markus Verne. — 1st ed. p. cm. — (Studies in rhetoric and culture ; volume 5) ISBN 978-0-85745-935-0 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-85745-936-7 (institutional ebook) 1. Art and anthropology. 2. Art and society. 3. Visual anthropology. 4. Visual perception. I. Strecker, Ivo A., 1940– II. Verne, Markus. N72.A56A77 2013 306.4'7—dc23 2012037869

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed in the United States on acid-free paper.

ISBN: 978-0-85745-935-0 hardback ISBN: 978-0-85745-936-7 institutional ebook

Contents








Acknowledgments

vii

List of Illustrations

ix

Introduction Ivo Strecker and Markus Verne

1

Part I




Image

1. Do Pictures Stare? Thoughts about Six Elements of Attention Todd Oakley

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2. Gazing at Paintings and the Evocation of Life Philippe-Joseph Salazar

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3. Tangled Up in Blue: Symbolism and Evocation Boris Wiseman

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4. Co-Presence, Astonishment, and Evocation in Cinematography Ivo Strecker

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Part II




Performance

5. Captivated by Ritual: Visceral Visitations and the Evocation of Community Klaus-Peter Köpping

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contents

6. The Spell of Riddles Among the Witoto Jürg Gasché

77

7. Sounds of the Past: Music, History, and Astonishment Markus Verne

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8. Tears, Not So Idle Tears: “Time Binding,” Lachrymose Emotionality, and Ethnographic Disambiguation James W. Fernandez

Part III




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Text

9. Stones, Drumbeats, and Footprints in the Writing of the Other Dennis Tedlock 10. The Translation of the Said and the Unsaid in Sikkanese Ritual Texts E. Douglas Lewis

133

146

11. Ethnographic Evocations and Evocative Ethnographies Barbara Tedlock

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12. Reading Public Culture: Reason and Excess in the Newspaper Robert Hariman

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Notes on Contributors

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Index

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Acknowledgments








To begin with, we express our gratitude to the Volkswagen Foundation for providing funds that enabled an international group of scholars to assemble at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany, and hold four conferences aimed at retrieving and further developing an ancient rhetorical theory of culture (see http://www.rhetoricculture.org). From 2006 onward, while we were busy preparing the results of our debates for publication, the 75th birthday of Stephen Tyler was also imminent. Because Stephen was considered a kind of “dean” of the project, it seemed appropriate to give his anniversary some special recognition. So word was sent to all the scholars involved in the rhetoric culture project, inviting them to contribute to a Festschrift devoted to Stephen’s ideas of ethnography as an art of evocation and a means for catharsis. In the event an amazing mix of texts was collected. They numbered more than forty, filling two improvised volumes that we printed out in a copy shop in Berlin and then presented personally to Stephen in Houston on his birthday. We read passages from the Festschrift to Stephen and the other guests, who attended the surprise party that James Faubion had arranged. Some of the pieces were entertaining, such as “Mockery of Animals,” “Miming the Anthropologist,” “My Favourite Shit Story,” or “The Emperor’s New Clothes”; others were disturbing, such as “Hitler at the Nile,” “Riots in the Balkans,” and “The Man Who Wanted to Unlearn Reading.” Here we want to mention all those who provided papers for this celebration and by doing so helped create the present book, as well as another that is still in the making. In particular we thank Jon Abbink, Marie-Cécile Bertau, Nurit Bird-David, Anna-Maria Brandstetter, Vincenzo Cannada Bartoli, Ralph Cintron, Jean de Bernardi, Susan du Mesnil, Susanne Epple, James Faubion, James Fernandez, James Fox, Paul Friedrich, Echi Gabbert, Jürg Gasché, Felix Girke, Robert Hariman, Alexander Henn, Holger Jebens, Klaus-Peter Köpping, Karl-Heinz Kohl, Shauna LaTosky, Douglas Lewis, Jean Lydall, David

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acknowledgments

MacDougall, Christian Meyer, Todd Oakley, Michael Oppitz, Anthony Paul, Philippe-Joseph Salazar, Nikolaus Scharaika, Bernhard Streck, Sophia Thubauville, Barbara Tedlock, Dennis Tedlock, and Boris Wiseman. The manuscript of Stephen’s Festschrift was left to rest for several years, but once the first four volumes of the Berghahn Books series “Studies in Rhetoric and Culture” had appeared in print, Marion Berghahn encouraged us to send her an outline of a volume that would contain those essays that focused on the themes of astonishment and evocation. Our task was to select, revise, and, if necessary, completely recast the contributions to create a book—quite different from a Festschrift—in which the whole is more than its parts and each chapter enhances the strength of the others. This demanded great efforts from all the contributors, whom we herewith wish to thank warmly. We also want to tell Marion how much we appreciate her good advice and patience. Finally we are grateful to the anonymous readers whose thoughtful comments helped us revise, not only the composition of the book, but even its very title. Ivo Strecker Up’n Hardigen, Melle Markus Verne Bayreuth

Illustrations








Figure 2.1. Sketch of Paul Cadmus, The Fleet’s In (by Philippe-Joseph Salazar)

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Figure 2.2. Sketch of Sir John Lavery, Tennis Party (by Philippe-Joseph Salazar)

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Figure 2.3. Sketch of Balthus. Le Jeu de cartes (by Philippe-Joseph Salazar)

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Introduction Ivo Strecker and Markus Verne








Wonder and astonishment lie at the heart of scholarship, as René Descartes noted in The Passions of the Soul: “When the first encounter with some object surprises us, and we judge it to be new or very different from what we formerly knew, or from what we suppose it ought to be, that causes us to wonder and be surprised; and because that may happen before we in any way know whether this object is agreeable to us or is not so, it appears to me that wonder is the first of all the passions” (1972: 358). Similarly, Margaret Mead once said that anthropology demands an “openmindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have been able to guess” (1977: IX). Thus, wonder and astonishment are part and parcel of the encounter with the world in our own and in other cultures, and they produce mental and emotional energy, which leads artists and anthropologists alike to look and examine closely a particular phenomenon that has caught their attention. Ethnographers and artists not only experience astonishment when in the field. They also relay it to others. As Clifford Geertz, in his genial fashion, has characterized these rhetorics: Anthropologists (and also artists, one might say) are “merchants of astonishment” who “hawk the anomalous, peddle the strange” and who have “with no little success, sought to keep the world off balance; pulling out rugs, upsetting tea tables, setting off firecrackers” (2001: 64). Yet even though scholars of art and anthropology have been aware of astonishment as an intrinsic part of their experience, they have as yet not explored it in any depth. Only Tim Ingold and Richard Buxton have recently identified astonishment as a topic for research. Ingold has called for a renewal of “the sense of astonishment banished from official science” (2006: 9), and Buxton has demonstrated how ancient Greek myth and storytelling may be best understood as an art aimed at creating various “forms of astonishment” (2009).

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Ingold’s and Buxton’s retrieval of astonishment as a scholarly concept goes well with the intentions of Stephen Tyler, in whose honor the contributions to the present book were written. According to Tyler’s theory—developed in The Said and the Unsaid—the use of language is precarious, full of risks and surprises and therefore prone to cause wonder and astonishment. Speaking, he writes, is “more like breathing than thinking” (1978: 25), and “the more we consciously attend to it, the less perfectly we do it” (1978: 24). There are “slips between the tongue and the lips,” and “our speaking often fails to convey what we had in mind” (1978: 137). Discourse typically contains “false starts, hesitations, and repeats,” which derive “from forgetting where we were going or from searching for a fugitive word or apt phrase, or merely from a desire to hold the floor, or because we want to create a dramatic effect, even to dissimulate. … One of the things we often sense in speaking is that we are not saying what we had in mind. The retrospective and prospective accommodation of phrases creates an order at variance with our original intention” (1978: 134). The use of language is thoroughly rhetorical, for “the match between words and things … is hardly complete or total; nor is it analytic, the combination of atomic elements into larger unities. It is instead indexical, analogical and inferential—a creative accommodation of words and things” (1978: 181). The ramifications of these and other related thoughts have led Tyler to emphasize the role of evocation in ethnography. He says that “ethnography is a cooperatively evolved text consisting of fragments of discourse intended to evoke in the minds of both reader and writer an emergent fantasy of a possible world of commonsense reality, and thus to provoke an aesthetic integration that will have a therapeutic effect. It is in a word, poetry—not in its textual form, but in its return to the original context and function of poetry, which, by means of its performative break with everyday speech, evoked memories of the ethos of the community and thereby provoked hearers to act ethically” (1987: 202). This attractive view of a liberated form of ethnography (and by implication, the interpretation of art) can only hold up its promise as long as we are aware that the source of evocation is astonishment, which, however, may also have its drawbacks. As Descartes observed, astonishment can cause “the whole body to remain as immobile as a statue,” and it can prevent one from “perceiving more of the object than the first face which is presented, or consequently of acquiring a more particular knowledge of it. That is what we commonly call being astonished, and astonishment is an excess of wonder which can never be otherwise than bad” (1972: 364). Furthermore, such an excess of wonder may become a habit—a so-called malady of blind curiosity—that leads people to “seek out things that are rare solely to wonder at them, and not for the purpose of really knowing them: for

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little by little they become so given over to wonder, that things of no importance are no less capable of arresting their attention than those whose investigation is more useful” (Descartes 1972: 366). How is one to judge what deserves wonder and what does not? Has the modern age not suffered less from an excess but rather from a lack of wonder, and is it not therefore the task of both ethnography and art to revive and cultivate the most important “passion of the soul”—that is, wonder, astonishment, or, as James Joyce has called it, epiphany? Joyce’s hero Stephen Daedalus, pondering the meaning of a clock in one of Dublin’s streets, told his friend: “Imagine my glimpses at that clock as the gropings of a spiritual eye which seeks to adjust its vision to an exact focus. The moment the focus is reached the object is epiphanized. It is just in this epiphany that I find the third, the supreme quality of beauty” (Joyce 1944: 211). The “spiritual eye” defamiliarizes the object and then focuses on it anew to achieve a heightened level of trance-like awareness—epiphany—which Stephen Daedalus explained, saying: “First we recognize that the object is one integral thing, then we recognize that it is an organized composite structure, a thing in fact: finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognize that it is that thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany” (Joyce 1944: 213; Joyce’s emphases). Overhearing a “fragment of colloquy” in the streets of Dublin, Stephen Daedalus thought of “collecting many such moments together in a book of epiphanies. By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments” (Joyce 1944: 211). Here, in the fantasy of a “book of epiphanies,” it seems that we are entering the realm of art and anthropology, for one may well understand ethnography and art criticism as an attempt to recall the spellbinding moments, the epiphanies people have experienced in their encounters with works of art or another culture. Note that Joyce not only mentions objects, gestures, and speech performance, but also thought itself. What he calls “a memorable phase of the mind” resembles Tyler’s cooperatively evolved text, which “evokes in the minds of both reader and writer an emergent fantasy of a possible world of commonsense reality” (Tyler 1987: 202). Epiphany and fantasy are both elusive and inaccessible to what Tyler calls “that inappropriate mode of scientific rhetoric” (1987: 207). The only appropriate response can be the art of evocation, which “makes available through

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absence what can be conceived but not presented” (1987: 199). This seemingly cryptic statement needs to be read against Tyler’s theory of tropes, especially metaphor. A full account is found in the paragraph on metaphor in The Said and the Unsaid, of which we quote three passages that are most relevant here. The first introduces the topic and runs as follows: Metaphor is perhaps the most fundamental process in language and thought, for it accounts not only for equivalence in a formal sense, it is the major means by which language changes and by which thought encompasses new ideas. A measure of its importance is the fact that it was one of the first purely semantic relations to be subjected to analysis in early philosophy (1978: 315–316).

The second outlines the role of metaphor in the extension of knowledge: We often speak of something being “just metaphor,” and this pejorative usage signifies a common attitude toward metaphor, that it is suitable only to poetic fancy and apt to be misleading in other contexts. How wrong this view is when we take into account the role of metaphor in extending our knowledge. Rather than an inferior means of reason properly restricted to the imagination at play or in its aesthetic moments, it assumes a rational function more fundamental than any yet described. As the principal means by which we establish equivalences, it must underlie all our classifications, for a classification is nothing more than a system of equivalences (1978: 335).

The third draws attention to the fact that the use of metaphor has its cost because metaphor both reveals and obscures: Metaphor is fundamental and unavoidable in meaningful discourse. True enough, it has its other uses, which have long been noted, of lending style and color to a text, and there can be no doubt but that a good metaphor has a dual role in the imagination, for it both reveals and obscures. By emphasizing certain features in a comparison, for example, it draws our attention to just those features, pushing others into the background. When we see something as something else we see only the similarities and not the differences. A metaphor may mislead in exact proportion to the amount it reveals, but this is the price of any revelation (1978: 335–336).

One cannot, therefore, escape metaphor (as well as other tropes) and the elusive meanings it entails. But Tyler is prepared to accept this as the price we have to pay for worthwhile ethnography. James Clifford held a similar view when he wrote that ethnographies are the work of rhetoric and that all ethnographic writing is “allegorical at the level both of its content (what it says about cultures and their histories) and of its form (what is implied by its mode of textualization” (1986: 98).

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However, allegory or, more generally, figuration is not only the means by which we “write culture,” it is also the means by which we create it. As Dennis Tedlock and Bruce Mannheim have pointed out, “cultures are produced, reproduced, and revised in dialogues among their members” (1995: 2) and, most important, “once culture is seen as arising from a dialogical ground, then ethnography itself is revealed as an emergent cultural (or intercultural) phenomenon, produced, reproduced, and revised in dialogues between fieldworkers and natives. The process of its production is of the same general kind as the process by which ethnic others produce the cultures that are the objects of ethnographic study” (1995: 2). To this we need to add that these dialogues abound with multivocal meanings and are saturated with tropes. Or, put differently, the dialogues make use of figures that despite or, as the present book argues, because of their elusiveness put us under their spell (Streck 2011), fire our imagination, and lead us jointly to conjure those fantasies and their manifestations, which we call culture.

Part I: Image Chapter 1, “Do Pictures Stare? Thoughts about Six Elements of Attention,” by Todd Oakley, draws on the author’s long-term research in the fields of rhetoric, linguistics, and cognitive science and is meant as a kind of overture to the present book, for attention—especially spellbinding attention—constitutes the precondition for astonishment and evocation. The chapter, short and written in a deceptively simple style, is in fact filled with deep thought and is a “fruitful heuristic” not only for an investigation of attention, but also the study of astonishment and evocation. Attention may be understood as the mental and emotional energy without which neither astonishment nor evocation will occur. But what exactly is attention? How does it come about? How is it sustained, controlled, harmonized? Oakley uses his experience of an art exhibition to provide answers to these questions. As it transpires, not only the individual items on display, but also the museum as a whole, may induce and celebrate astonishment and evocation. It is the Frick Gallery in New York where the author’s eureka occurred: His attention “zeroed in” on two Holbein portraits—one of Thomas Cromwell and the other of Thomas More—that were so cleverly placed it seemed that the two archenemies were staring at one another. Oakley remarks, “Frick probably savored the irony of this hang.” To understand fully the curiously evocative placement of the two paintings, one needs the “ability to construct on the fly mental simulations from disparate domains of knowledge, in this case, from the domains of artistic portraiture, curatorial practices, and political infighting.”

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Taking off from here, Oakley launches his ideas about six elements of attention. He calls the first alerting and defines it as “a general readiness to process novel stimuli.” The second he names orienting, the disposition “to attend to particular items over others.” These two are the “pre-attentive elements necessary for initiating a sequence of higher order processes,” which are the following: Selecting “directs attention toward items and away from other items” and is especially interesting for a theory of evocation in that it may involve unconscious filtering, blockage, and deprivation. The same applies to sustaining attention, which Oakley says needs time and effort: As the viewer perceives Cromwell eyeing More, evocations arise, “mental simulations” take place that are “anchored in the here-and-now of a museum visit but referencing the there-and-then of Tudor England.” Oakley calls this fifth element controlling attention and points out that it is “vital for functioning in complex, social and technological environments.” Harmonizing is the sixth and probably most relevant element in the context of the present book, because it involves the awareness of other people’s cognitive horizons and an ever-elusive yet indispensable anticipation of their thoughts and feelings. Chapter 2, “Gazing at Paintings and the Evocation of Life,” by PhilippeJoseph Salazar, similarly shows how the museum can be understood as an institution where spellbinding attention, astonishment, and evocation are cultivated. Like Oakley and Wiseman he recalls and reflects on what he experienced at particular exhibitions, but he does it in a very personal and dramatic way. Noting that visual experiences have often triggered an epiphany in the course of his life, he uses this term as a key concept in his “self-ethnography.” An epiphany happens “when the unexpected jolts the mind into confronting that, which had remained out of sight,” and whenever he went to a museum, Salazar looked forward not only to particular works of art that he was going to see, but also to writing about such “unexpected jolts.” Gazing and writing became one, as it were, in his moments of epiphany. The essay quotes three entries from his diaries, which show how paintings may “take possession of one’s life” by evoking “moral lessons.” He also provides details of elements of attention (see Oakley above) that influenced his gaze. The first entry is about Paul Cadmus’s The Fleet’s In (1934), which in Salazar’s mind “hails back” to the past, to the High Renaissance, to a “courtly theme.” The sailors, and the men and women of the Great Depression, who are portrayed in the painting, reminded him of the plenipotentiaries and courtiers depicted in a fresco at the Ambassador’s Staircase in Versailles. As he kept gazing, the individual figures in the painting captured his attention and he noticed what Wiseman would call their “immanent qualities.” With ever-increasing

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intensity he describes how these figures are depicted by the painter, and in an ever-widening realm of comparison, which includes other paintings and other contexts, Salazar lets us share his evocations. Finally, in an additional twist he conjures up what the figures in the painting may be facing, may themselves be thinking and feeling. John Lavery’s Tennis Party (1885) and Le Jeu de cartes (1948–1950) by Balthus (Balthazar Klossowski de Rola) led to similar cascades of evocation. Salazar was obviously captivated by the many pictorial tropes—especially irony—that abound in all of the paintings, and his diary entries show how they fueled his feelings of epiphany. Again, we note his attention to minute but telling details of form and function, and it can be said that both the painters who painted the pictures and Salazar who gazed at them are masters of attribution (see Strecker below). In addition they are masters of allegory. English tennis becomes a “game of adultery,” and the French belote becomes a “game of life.” Salazar supports this with an account of his internal rhetoric. Is the card game about cheating? No. Is it about a personal relationship? Yes. After attending to the most telling details he says, “This is the painterly lesson of Le Jeu de cartes: a life is lived fully if played at the edge of Life.” Each of the three paintings does even more than evoke the mood and modalities of individual lives, it also summons the vision of an historical period: Tennis Party brings to mind the impending end of the British Empire: “lawn tennis played on summery afternoons will disappear as proverbial clouds will gather over Empire”; The Fleet’s In rouses memories of an exulted moment in America’s history, when “Roosevelt and his emissaries design the New Deal”; and Le Jeu de cartes, Salazar concludes, “is a trope of the Cold War. That’s how I see it.” Chapter 3, “Tangled up in Blue. Symbolism and Evocation,” by Boris Wiseman, widens and deepens the topic of the present book by reminding us that the question of nonreferential language is still one of the “supreme enigmas” of cultural studies. In a short introductory paragraph he recalls that the French Symbolists (among them, Baudelaire and Mallarmé) and pioneers of abstract art (for example, Kandisky) experimented with the spellbinding capacity of language and other media, showing that art is above all a matter of “sensuous evocation.” Anthropologists and linguists have analyzed some of the more important ways in which evocation may be generated and kept in motion, for example, by using imaginative strings of homologies (Lévi-Strauss), analogies (Jakobson), and synaesthetic correlates (Whorf). In a second step, Wiseman remembers how an exhibition—Indigo—first roused his interest and led him to explore empirically and in minute detail the evocative power and symbolic ramifications of this blue dye. Astonishment, he observes, is enshrined in the production of indigo because an “extraordinary

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transmutation of the natural world” takes place whereby colorless plant fibers suddenly yield their “precious chromatic essence.” Evocation is involved when it comes to the social use of the color: the almost magical transformation observed in the natural world is projected onto the social world where the use of indigo dye plays a prominent role in rites of passage and is symbolically connected with death and regeneration. Drawing on his wide knowledge of both anthropology and art history, Wiseman goes on to provide examples from various cultural contexts that show how the symbolism of indigo weaves sensory experiences together and creates moods that derive from the immanent qualities of indigo. Then he returns to general theory—to Lévi-Strauss and the interpretation of Apollinaire’s Les colchiques. Once more we find ourselves “entangled in blue,” subject to astonishment and evocation, as Wiseman makes a refined analysis of the poetic language that entertains a comparison between the blue color of a flower (meadow saffron or naked lady) and the eyes of the enchanted poet’s mistress. Finally, Wiseman examines not only the evocations of blue but also of red and black as they appear in the writings of Merleau-Ponty, Claudel, Rilke, and Imbert. Particular colors relate to, and resonate with, others. This is not only true for colors present in the same perceptual field, but also for those that are part of a person’s memory or even the imaginary product of the mind’s eye. Thus, a field of indirect evocation extends beyond the field of direct perception and may be cultivated and carried over from one work to another, so that one may speak of a culture’s history of evocation and perception. Does this mean that all evocations associated with particular colors are culture-specific? Wiseman answers: “I see a close kinship between the figure of the dye-maker and that of the artist and by extension the museum or gallery visitor. They share the same fine grained attentiveness to the qualitative dimensions of things and the conviction that these signify.” In other words, because of indigo’s immanent qualities, we are all prone to fall under its spell. Regardless of our cultural background we get entangled in strings of evocation and are captivated by indigo’s mysterious blue. In chapter 4, “Co-Presence, Astonishment, and Evocation in Cinematography,” Ivo Strecker explores the spellbinding power of cinema. Like the museum, the cinema derives its raison d’être from the opportunity it provides visitors for astonishment and evocation. Literally as well as metaphorically, it is a site for focusing, for intense viewing, for sustained attention, and for mental and emotional epiphany (see Oakley and Salazar above). While working on his own films, or watching films made by others, Strecker often wondered about the evocative power of seemingly incidental phenomena, such as when a dog appears and is kicked away just as a baby is being born or a bird rises and circles above a dancer. Why are cinematogra-

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phers eager to capture images where co-presence of seemingly unrelated phenomena becomes visible? Why are they delighted when, while editing their footage, such forms of co-presence are unexpectedly revealed? To answer this and other questions related to the evocative dimensions of film, the author enlists the help of Stephen Tyler. The four basic meaning schemata of existence, attribution, function, and comparison—elucidated in The Said and the Unsaid—which allow us to act meaningfully in the world, also assist the task of ethnographic filming. They “guide our attention and provide the lens through which we can focus and produce images that catch our and other people’s attention and have the power to surprise and generate evocation.” Schemata of existence generally make ontological claims about the existence or nonexistence of things. Here it is only necessary to note that in as far as they point to the presence of things they are intrinsic to the camera, which is designed to alert, select, and sustain attention by means of framing, zooming, focusing, and such. Schemata of attribution are used to depict the specific qualities of things. As Wiseman’s chapter has shown, the immanent quality of a color may entrance people. The camera is able to capture and even enhance such wonderment. Conscious that they can only focus on what is visibly accessible, filmmakers often “magically evoke a totality by means of its attributes” (this compares with the use of attribution in the production and interpretation of paintings, as we saw in Salazar’s chapter). The same applies to the schemata of function, which involve a relationship between cause and effect, purpose and form. The nail evokes the hammer, and the hammer evokes the nail. Thus, the schemata of function entail forms of co-presence that may be exploited by the cinematographer. A further set of meaning schemata is found under the rubric of comparison. The schemata of time and space may be used in film not only to provide temporal and spatial orientation, but also to create a “higher order of awareness that allows for tension, drama and astonishment.” Schemata of resemblance—which are basic for the production of all forms of figuration—are even more important because they allow cinematographers to create a metaphorical and allegorical layering that increases the evocative power of their films.

Part II: Performance Chapter 5, “Captivated by Ritual: Visceral Visitations and the Evocation of Community,” by Klaus-Peter Köpping, begins with forms of astonishment arising in situations of first cultural contact. As a kind of prelude to his central theme—visceral visitations—Köpping reports how at first the New Guinea Highlanders held the whites to be god-like, but “the empirical proof that they

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shat made them rethink and newly categorize the visitors as human like themselves.” He also draws attention to Stephen Greeblatt’s study of the miraculous, which has characterized astonishment as “gut-wrenching” experience. Köpping describes his own feeling of astonishment as a form of shock and subsequent captivation (compare Oakley chapter 2). He experienced it when he attended a festival in a remote region of Japan where dances were performed to celebrate Yama-no-kami, a Japanese mountain god. The paraphernalia and performance of the dances expressed emotions of rage and fury, which eventually transformed into gentleness and peacefulness. Such reversals are not only part of Japanese ritual but can also be observed in European romantic traditions in which the “elusive polarity of bliss and dread” is used to evoke the Schaurig-Schöne and the sublime. After these reflections on the involving nature of performance and the need to participate to understand performance fully, Köpping moves from the ancient mountain god to a “living goddess,” Mrs. Sayo Kitamura, who claimed that her belly was a sanctuary of the whole Japanese nation and founded a successful cult on this extraordinary assertion. Noting that this cult used the metaphor of the belly in similar ways as the villagers in the mountains, Köpping began to wonder whether he had perhaps discovered a key metaphor of Japanese selfunderstanding and subsequently focused his research on this topic. In his essay he offers pertinent details of the results, and explains how the Japanese “evoke for each other the notions of ‘self ’ and ‘society’ by means of body metaphors.” There is a rich literature on the distinction between inner self and outer experience in Japanese culture, as well as on associated body metaphors, which Köpping mentions before he embarks on his main project, a comparison between the mountain village festival and the cult of Mrs. Kitamura. In both cases the belly is used as metaphorical “focus and locus of transgression, boundary crossing as well as finding the ‘inner self ’ on a collective as well as individual plane.” The festival of the mountain god is characterized by raucous, hilarious, exuberant performance understood as an expression of the belly. However, as a local lay priest explains, this outrageous behavior also “restores peace to the community.” The cult of Mrs. Kitamura—the “Great Goddess”—is staged at her headquarter in Tabuse and involves performances such as healing, dancing, and especially prophecy, in which the “visceral speaks” and a “new dawn of history” is “metaphorically expressed by the cleansed body of a woman who will be pregnant with a male-female divinity.” The chapter ends with reflections on how both rituals have to do with “evacuating” the mind through dancing. However, while the New Religious Movement wants to free the mind from visceral visitations of the belly, the Mountain Festival emphasizes them and uses the powers of the belly—the true

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seat of human natural drives—to induce a sense of community among all who take part in the performance. Chapter 6, “The Spell of Riddles Among the Witoto,” by Jürg Gasché, can be understood not only as an exploration of the spellbinding power of “fantastic” cultural inventions, but also as a kind of homage to the imaginative genius of the Witoto, who live in a world full of natural diversity and are not yet completely transformed by literacy and industrialization. Their otherness still meets us in full force, and their ethnography generates a host of surprises. The riddle songs and their translation and explanation, which are the subject of the essay, lead us to the mountains, valleys, and waters of the northern tributaries of the upper Amazon River, abounding with flora and fauna. This natural reservoir has imprinted itself on the Witoto and provides material for their analogical modes of thinking and figurative forms of expression that fire their riddle songs. The composition of the chapter is itself reminiscent of a riddle in that the reader is drawn into puzzling about questions, the answers to which are provided only at the end. The Witoto and their neighbors do not cultivate the asking and answering of riddles, as we do among family and friends, to entertain one another. Nor do they engage in it solely to feel the thrills of astonishment and evocation. Rather, the posing of riddles is meant to challenge the mental alertness of a festival owner and is used for momentary social prestige in a competitive and egalitarian society. It gives rise to “provocations, attacks, complaints, criticism, and mockery, but also to tributes and praise, to joy, laughter, and courtship.” Of particular interest is that the guest who poses his riddle to a festival owner also throws a spell over him. He sings a song that “conjures up bad luck, wishing that the heart or mind of the festival owner will not surmount the difficulties and will be left confused.” In other words, the posers of riddles try to block the paths that may lead to the right evocations. They aim at creating stupor, the negative effect of astonishment that Descartes has stressed and we mentioned at the beginning of this introduction. Part of the mix of pleasure and pain involved in posing and answering riddles among the Witoto is that the singer of a riddle will also provide keys to the kinds of association that nudge his host into finding the answer. After an outline of the general context, four riddle songs are presented, translated, and explained by referring to gradually widening contexts and ever more complex details. In fact, at times the chapter becomes such an intricate net of details that these features assume a metaphorical dimension. The attention to seemingly far-fetched relations as well as to the minutest details seems to mirror the art of formulating and answering riddles, for riddles constitute a

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game of disguise and revelation in which the most improbable relationship as well as the smallest detail may be decisive. Gasché’s masterly ethnography shows how rhetorical figures such as metonymy, synecdoche, and metaphor abound in Witoto riddle songs, which derive their mystery and drama to a large extent from a humanizing of the natural world or, seen the other way round, from a naturalizing of human thought. Chapter 7, “Sounds of the Past: Music, History, and Astonishment,” by Markus Verne, traces situations in which musicians, historians, and anthropologists were astonished by the presence of an unexpected past that was evoked in them through aesthetic experience. This past dates back to the times before Arab sailors became the masters of the Indian Ocean and tells the story of a considerable Indonesian influence not just all over the Indian Ocean, but also in large parts of Africa, up to its westernmost regions. Neither part of official records, nor of local traditions, this past is however still experienced by some, lying dormant in language, material culture, ritual practice—and in music. The chapter begins with Hanitrarivo Rasoanaivo, lead singer and head of the Malagasy music group Tarika, telling a story about being touched by the discovery of her own cultural traditions in Indonesian food, appearance, language, and music. This experience made her explore her country’s Indonesian roots more deeply and eventually led to the production of an album titled Soul Makassar, in which she sonically reestablishes the musical bond between Africa and Indonesia. The author then switches from artistic to scientific explorations and tells about scholars who, like Hanitra, were struck by the unthought-of presence of a past relating Africa to Indonesia. These scholars all witnessed musical performances in which they were able to hear this unknown history. As a result, they tried to make sense of their aesthetic experiences through historical research on instruments, scales, songs, tunings, and playing techniques. These studies continued throughout the twentieth century and led to quite similar reconstructions, even though the various approaches differed considerably from one another. Independently, von Hornbostel, Jones, Lomax, and others revealed a striking Indonesian influence on African music, as well as on aspects of material culture. Why then, Verne asks by way of conclusion, has this historical relation, suggested time and again by some of the most renown scholars of ethnomusicology, not become part of our collective memory, if only as a possibility? Has this perhaps to do with the fact that the meanings of musical performance are to a large extent elusive? Has it to do with the nature of aesthetic experience? Chapter 8, “Tears, Not So Idle Tears: ‘Time Binding,’ Lachrymose Emotionality, and Ethnographic Disambiguation,” by James Fernandez, seems at

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first puzzling. Why does Fernandez not aim at elucidating questions of interpretation but of disambiguation in a volume concerned with the “spell of culture,” and why does he call disambiguation a very Tylerian problem whereas Tyler himself rejects the formalism typically associated with WSD (word sense disambiguation), a favorite child of computer linguistics and artificial intelligence? The answer involves several twists: (1) Fernandez wants to move away from interpretation because the term evokes battling with the hermeneutical quandaries of written texts rather than live performance. Also, it puts, as he says, too much emphasis on the interpreter rather than the producer of meaning. (2) He proposes the use of disambiguation as a concept to address the “ever-present ambiguity of the human condition.” Mental and emotional uncertainty about the meanings of their ambiguous experiences may pose very real problems for people who therefore try to disambiguate them. (3) Fernandez also realizes that such disambiguation needs some figuring out and is largely done by means of tropes. Yet, rhetorical figures are themselves ambiguous and may lead to quite varied kinds of evocation. In his previous publications, Fernandez has explained metaphor as a tool to overcome a “gnawing sense of uncertainty” or “the inchoate.” Inchoateness is part of human experience, but “however inchoate our condition, we are bound to try and transcend it” (1986: xiii). Thus, we use metaphor and other tropes to make the effable more concrete, more easily graspable. Emotions are by their very nature in need of such figurative representation. Simultaneously, they are molded by the figures that help to express them. All tropes have their own mood, feeling, and emotional charge, which people use in their performances as means for inward and outward persuasion. Rituals, Fernandez has argued in his ethnographical and theoretical work, are a case in point, and their performance can be analyzed as “a series of organizing images or metaphors put into operation by a series of superordinate and subordinate ceremonial scenes.” (1986: 43). Seen in this light, Fernandez’s chapter can be read as thoughts about figuring out what particular forms of emotion may mean, as well as their artful employment in performance. The shedding of tears can be partly explained ethologically as a “function of the extended infancy and childhood of humans.” Also, the woes of human existence are such that “even adults do not escape the power of tears.” However, in terms of performance, weeping is more interesting when it has a “pronounced social rather than personal need function.” Fernandez reflects on his earlier ethnography of religious movements among the Bwiti and examines weeping as part of their “imaginative arguments and ritual actions” intent on creating emotional movement.

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Part III: Text Chapter 9, “Stones, drumbeats, and footprints in the writing of the Other,” by Dennis Tedlock, provides an extreme case of ethnographic investigation introducing us to the ironies and agonies of cross-cultural interlocution and the ever-present possibility of misunderstanding. It begins with the puzzles of Mayan epigraphy. For some time now, epigraphers have realized that “phoneticism plays a major role in the Maya script” and have treated Maya texts “as if they were the products of a code that could be cracked by discovering the laws that governed it.” Important as this discovery may have been, it has also “silenced the strands of Maya poetics that produce metaphors and, on a subtler level, sound plays that are more than just keys to rebus readings.” Tedlock laments this “objectifying discourse” and says that to save the evocative dimensions of Maya epigraphs, one would have to shift one’s position “from that of a code-cracker to that of a hypothetical Maya reader,” a shift that would require a dialogical mode of research that has sadly been missing in Mayan studies during the past. Or rather, it existed but in an alienated, even perverted form. Maya ethnography goes back to the writings of Fray Francisco de Landa, a catholic missionary who arrived in Yucatán in 1549. Like many others, he excluded the dialogues with native interlocutors in his ethnography and wrote “in the voice of an omniscient observer … leaving native terms as the last traces of the voices of the others.” Tedlock relates horrifying details of how Landa, the missionary and ethnographer, brought the inquisition to the Maya and “submitted them to questioning under torture.” From here on, the chapter becomes a parable about the dark potential of ethnographic investigation: the relationship between ethnographer and informant may at times be like the “intimate relationship between torturer and victim,” which allows that the “interrogator asks leading questions that contain clues to his fantasies, while the witness tries to imagine answers that will fulfill and even exceed those fantasies.” Something similar may happen when more benign ethnographers pose questions that have no relevance for the cultural Other. Tedlock argues that “the supreme irony of Landa’s suppression of dialogue is that epigraphers were able to make sense of his account of Maya writing only by putting his examples of hieroglyphic spellings back into the context of an interview. They started from the answers he wrote down and then reconstructed the questions he must have asked to get them.” But how should we picture Landa framing his questions, and how did his Maya informant, Nachi Cocom, respond to them? As we are led to imagine in our mind’s eye (and ear) how Landa interrogated Cocom, and how the latter struggled to answer questions that in his mind were senseless, even idiotic, Tedlock’s account assumes

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a weird character reminiscent of some of Samuel Beckett’s plays. In the end one wonders how it would be if the drama (tragedy or comedy?) of Landa and Cocom facing and misunderstanding one another, were to be reenacted on stage, in film or on the radio. Chapter 10, “The Translation of the Said and the Unsaid in Sikkanese Ritual Texts,” by Douglas Lewis, continues the theme of “mysteries in the writings of the Other.” However, Lewis is not concerned with problems of misunderstanding but with perplexing states of non-understanding. Also, not the cultural Other gets tortured in his account, but the ethnographer who engages in some kind of self-torture trying and failing forever to achieve a satisfying translation of particular kinds of text. Lewis begins by telling how his fieldwork in the regency of Sikka of the island of Flores involved astonishing moments of which the most exciting was the discovery of a “large cache of old papers” that contained the writings of Dominicus Dionitius Pareira Kondi and Alexius Boer Pareira, who as lay historians had recorded the history and myths of their the people. The preservation, correction, interpretation, and translation of these texts occupied Lewis for more than a dozen years and eventually led to the publishing of two books. Looking back on the work that he has completed, Lewis says: “Had I known when I began how difficult the translation … would be … I am not certain I would have persisted with what has become, to my mind, a task impossible to acquit fully.” Why was the translation so difficult? Because it involved not only the said, but also what Stephen Tyler has called the aureola of the unsaid. Making full use of Stephen Tyler’s The Said and the Unsaid and also George Steiner’s After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (1975), Lewis weaves his own and other scholars’ thoughts together in order to explain why it is wrong to assume that all meaningful texts can be translated satisfactorily. Translation must in many cases remain an unfulfilled promise, an opening up, an invitation—an inducement to evocation. This holds particularly true for utterances, which are intentionally cryptic like those found in Sikka ritual language. The “evocative genre of Sara Sikka ritual speech” involves complex forms of poiesis (pairing of word phrases, use of synonymy, antonymy, complementary opposition, etc.) that Lewis found he could render reasonably well, but then he adds, “For the ethnographer, it is frequently the case that no amount of conversation with or interrogation of a speaker of ritual language can reliably elicit the meaning of a speech or its words. Meaning in ritual speech is always elusive; it is as if the meaning of the words is their articulation.” Lewis illustrates this with several examples of Sikka ritual practice and mythic narration, demonstrating empirically how difficult it can be to address the “meaningfulness of intransigent words.”

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The chapter closes with reflections on Credo ut intelligam—I believe so that I may know. Tyler once inscribed these words for Lewis in his copy of The Said and the Unsaid. They are from St. Anselmus’s Proslogium and part of a longer sentence: “For I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe that I may understand.” Lewis explains at length how fruitfully this chiasmus evokes thoughts about the complementary relationship between faith and reason, and implies that the chiasmus also asserts itself in the work of translation. In the end we are made to understand that the inscription is typical for Tyler’s teaching, which is based on the art of evocation, or—perhaps better—subtle modes of provocation. Chapter 11, “Ethnographic evocations and evocative ethnographies,” by Barbara Tedlock, continues the chiastic mood with which the preceding chapter ends, but whereas Lewis ponders about the complementarity of faith and reason, Tedlock wonders about the relationship between world and text. The evocative elements of both the physical and social world—including the cultural Other—astound us, captivate our attention, and make us want to share our experience with others in speech, in writing and additional forms of communication. This is the first part of the chiasmus, “ethnographic evocations.” The second part follows in response to the first and asks how “evocative ethnographies” can be created that do not mute and destroy but give voice and life to the world as we and others have experienced it. At the center of the chiasmus lies a mental and emotional space in which the topic of discourse is negotiated: “the third space between self and other, interior and exterior, fact and fiction, thought and emotion, truth, and illusion.” The author’s personal roots of this ontological concern comes out most clearly at the end of the essay where she recalls how as a child she spent time with her Ojibwe grandmother who explained to her that rocks are alive, “since she herself had seen rocks move and heard them speak. In time, she said, I also might hear and speak with rocks.” Western, scientific taxonomies would insist that there are categorical differences between rocks and plants, but grandmother Nokomis admonished her daughter “not to choose one path over the other but instead to walk in balance along the edges of these worlds.” To find the right balance is all the more important, as it is part of a quest for global social and cultural justice. Backing up her first chiasmus with a second one, Tedlock argues, that under the imperial regime of natural science, anthropology has produced a hiatus between “reportable nonparticipatory observation and nonreportable total participation.” This is manifest in the history of ethnography, which has always discredited textual strategies that aimed at evocation and indirect communication of own and other people’s experience. Looking back on this alienated and alienating past, we realize that “[w]hen we agreed to such a split, we cultivated rapport not friendship, compassion not

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sympathy, respect not belief, understanding not solidarity, and admiration not love.” This is the critical perspective from which Tedlock has written her essay and from where it should be read. But she also offers a positive perspective, which she has derived from Stephen Tyler, who has suggested that we use ethnography as “a meditative vehicle because we come to it neither as to a map of knowledge nor as a guide to action, nor even for entertainment. We come to it as the start of a different kind of journey.” Asking what such different anthropological journeys might entail, Tedlock introduces us to several “evocative ethnographies” as well as the life circumstances of their authors. But before she comes to this, she plays out yet another chiasmus: “People today do not live in different worlds but live differently in the world.” This involves an often free-floating cultural identity of people, “cut loose from their moorings and meanings clash, creating dissociation, ending in a feeling of profound weirdness.” How does one respond to such changes ethnographically? Certainly not in plain style, for now is the time of an ethnography that “features the author as the active part of the story” and aims at “cultural coparticipation, solidarity, and friendship.” Tedlock distinguishes several kinds of “evocative ethnographies.” (1) Ethnographic fiction as exemplified by the work of Adolf Bandelier, Paul Hazoumé, Oliver LaFarge, José María Arguedas, and Zora Neale Hurston, which may lead readers “to find themselves in solidarity with forgotten, maligned, or misunderstood peoples”; (2) multigenre texts (Hurston); (3) autoethnography (Hurston); and (4) literary creole, a style that incorporates vernacular expressions into a dominant, national language (Arguedas). The essay culminates in an appraisal of Amitav Ghosh, whose “evocative documentary work seeks to balance clarity (enargeia) with excitement leading to astonishment (ekplêxis). His powerfully evocative writing engenders experiences in which things absent are presented to the reader’s imagination with such vividness that they seem to stand right before their eyes.” Chapter 12, “Reading Public Culture: Reason and Excess in the Newspaper,” by Robert Hariman, brings the book to a close by showing once again how astonishment and evocation are prone to arise when we are confronted with unexpected forms of collocation. As we have seen in preceding chapters, the media in which this happens may be visual, performative, or textual, and the collocations may be intentional or unintentional. The newspaper offers an amazing mix of texts in which the banal and the sublime, the mad and the sane are placed side by side offering countless opportunities for cross-references, semantic associations, resonance, and dissonance. But how can he make sense of this “cacophony of discourses,” asks Hariman, of this “crazy-quilt compendium of violence, waste, cruelty, and loss”

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that constitutes the news? His answer is to read the newspapers in an attitude of wonder reminiscent of the therapeutic use of ethnography suggested by Stephen Tyler: “Instead of a mere instrumentality that is valuable only for a day or as an archival document,” he says, “the newspaper as a source of astonishment and evocation can call for renewed appreciation of how society, culture, and more specific human capacities are strange things being continuously recreated.” Furthermore, as he studies the newspapers with an ethnographic eye, Hariman begins to see “how a culture continually reforms, almost kaleidoscopically and yet for better or worse, in its daily concatenation of many shards of meaning.” Newspapers may thus be likened to the “evocative ethnographies” explicated by Barbara Tedlock in the preceding chapter, for both reveal a similar heterogeneity of culture, the “mad” collocation of “reason and excess.” Although the author does not make it explicit, his is yet another essay driven by an underlying chiasmus. The two parts are reason and excess, and it is at moments of their reversal that astonishment and the full power of evocation set in, that is, at moments when the seemingly sane turns out to be mad and the seemingly mad turns out to be sane. This is Tedlock’s “third space” of chiasmus (chapter 11), which calls for a higher level of awareness and allows one to understand the paradox that “the odd, peculiar, outrageous, distorted, eccentric, and otherwise excessive character of the newspaper is as important to the constitution of modern public culture as is the commitment to public reason.” With this observation Hariman comes close to Tedlock’s Ojibwe grandmother who told her daughter to abandon all rigid scientific classifications (which, after all, are man-made) and listen to rocks as well as to people. Hariman advocates a similarly open attitude and argues that this may help us better understand the chiasmus of reason and excess that pervades not only the newspaper but inheres in all culture. “If analytical explanation requires the relentless discrimination of either-or distinctions,” he writes in one of his most pertinent passages, “then the attitude of wonder is necessary to recognize how social reality remains beholden to logics of both-and. Both reason and excess, both mad and tame, both beauty and horror. Good judgment requires no less: only by being able to marvel at the human world can one see exactly how it is both fallen and redeemed.” These, then, are the chapters of the book, with the various themes and strands of reasoning that run through them. As a form of closure, we now return to the beginning of this introduction in which we outlined Stephen Tyler’s thoughts about evocation. In conversation, Tyler has repeatedly drawn attention to the religious and magical roots of evocation, the ancient practice of calling forth, conjuring up or summoning spirits, believed to reside in particular places (shrines), objects (crystal balls), or substances (incense). Tyler

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also likens evocation to the age-old art of divination that uses figures such as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, etc. to detect meaning in the constellation of stars, the sound of birds, and the entrails of sacrificial animals. Evocation in art and anthropology may, thus, be likened to a calling forth and a mantic imagining of complex and deep lying meanings. But in as much as this comparison highlights the creative aspect of evocation, it also brings out how the use of this epistemological concept may open the floodgate to imagination and lead the mind to never ending flights of fancy. Yet, if we acknowledge the incomplete, provisional, and inferential nature of discourse in art and anthropology, we are necessarily obliged to include evocation (and similar notions) in our conceptual repertoire. As we do this, we enter the dangerous hermeneutical waters that are bordered on one side by the Scylla of excessively figurative and therefore obscure style, and on the other side by the Charybdis of inappropriate and therefore destructive literalness. Tyler thought it especially important to guard against the latter when he wrote: “Literalness in all its forms is reprehensible, but it is most odious in conversation, for its effect is obstructionist and is usually so intended. There is a certain ‘looseness’ about all of our conversational rules and our rules of social life generally, so that anyone who follows the rules literally, destroys the normative character of interaction and induces social paralysis. To ask for mathematical exactitude in our everyday rules and use of rules is to ask for disaster, the very destruction of the form sought rather than its fulfilment.” (1978: 396) References Buxton, Richard. 2009. Forms of Astonishment: Greek Myths of Metamorphosis. Oxford: Oxford University Press Clifford, James. 1986. “On Ethnographic Allegory.” In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, eds. James Clifford and George Marcus. Berkeley: University of California Press, 98–121. Descartes, René. 1972 [1649]. The Passions of the Soul. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Fernandez, James. 1986. Persuasions and Performances: The Play of Tropes in Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Geertz, Clifford. 2001. Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ingold, Tim. 2006. “Rethinking the Animate, Re-Animating Thought.” Ethnos 71, no. 1: 9–20. Joyce, James. 1944. Stephen Hero. New York. New Directions Books. Mead, Margaret. 1977. Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. London and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Steiner, George. 1975. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. London: Oxford University Press.

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Tedlock, Dennis, and Bruce Mannheim, eds. 1995. The Dialogical Emergence of Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Tyler, Stephen. 1978. The Said and the Unsaid: Mind, Meaning, and Culture. London and New York: Academic Press. ———. 1987. The Unspeakable. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.










Part I

Image

CHAPTER 1

Do Pictures Stare? Thoughts about Six Elements of Attention Todd Oakley








Here I want to recount a curious experience that helped me in my ongoing attempt to envision a theory of attention. I was touring the famous Frick Gallery on East Seventieth Street overlooking Fifth Avenue and Central Park in New York City. As I entered the Living Hall—an oak-paneled room at the center of the gallery housing many of Henry Clay Frick’s most famous acquisitions—and oriented myself toward the fireplace, I took notice of three paintings: El Greco’s painting of St. Jerome (circa 1590) hanging directly above the fireplace mantle flanked by a portrait of Sir Thomas More (1527) to the left and Thomas Cromwell (1532) to the right, both creations of Hans Holbein, the Younger. In short time, my attention zeroed in on the two Holbein portraits. The portrait of More presents the subject in a three-quarter view facing left, while the portrait of Cromwell presents the subject in a more severe profile facing right. As I gazed out from the center of the room and listened intently to the art-phone commentary about these portraits, I experienced the odd feeling that Thomas Cromwell was staring at Thomas More, as if he were plotting against him (such animosity prompted by the commentator’s disclosure that Cromwell was More’s arch political enemy and partly responsible for his execution in 1535). Although gazing in Cromwell’s general direction, More appears unaware of his archenemy’s presence. It seems as though Cromwell has More right where he wants him. This odd feeling was not mine alone, as my companion, standing next to me and listening to the same commentary, remarked, “He’s staring at him.” An-

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other patron, overhearing this remark, nodded in agreement. We all thought that Frick probably savored the irony of this hang (the living hall is the only room left unchanged since Frick’s death). As strange as this feeling might seem, it is a normal occurrence based on workaday cognitive operations, namely the ability to construct on the fly mental simulations from disparate domains of knowledge, in this case, from the domains of artistic portraiture, curatorial practices, and political infighting. Understanding why and how such effects happen is the subject of my scientific endeavors. This curious incident helped me think about mind, language, and culture. It put in evidence a prime instance of human beings forging dramatic meanings from static images by blending items of attention from disparate domains of knowledge and experience; hence, it is a prime example of conceptual blending (Fauconnier and Turner 2002). But most fundamentally, this curious incident is important for what it says about human attention. Attention pops up repeatedly in discussions of meaning, but its appearance in these conversations has been more mentioned than understood. I do not claim to be arriving at a grand unified theory of meaning. Rather, I wish only to render an impressionistic landscape of what the arts and sciences of meaning may look like when brought into accord with the elements of attention. There are six basic elements of attention. We come to any situation with a general readiness to process novel stimuli, provided a stimulus falls within a certain range of electromagnetic frequency of visible light in the case of vision or within a certain sonic range in the case of sound, just to name two ways of being in the perceptual world. We come to any situation with a threshold of alertness to items in the environment. Alerting is the name I give to the first element of attention. This tells us precious little about the curious incident other than to note that human beings must possess a capacity to function and that the specific patterns of alerting are typical of all human beings regardless of geography, history, and culture. The setting of a quiet museum effectively improves the signal-to-noise ratio for attending to objects on display. My companion and I are disposed to attend to particular items over others. To experience the odd feeling of hostility, we must be oriented to specific items capable of eliciting such emotional responses. Orienting is the name I give to the second element of attention. The feeling described above would not have come about had we not stood at a proper distance from the two portraits: had we been too close to the fireplace, El Greco’s St. Jerome would have dominated the perceptual field; had we looked at the More painting close up we would not have seen it in relation to the Cromwell portrait. Thus, physical distance within the museum space is crucial for determining our disposition to select and consciously experience certain items. Taken together, alerting and orienting of are preattentive elements necessary for initiating a sequence

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of higher order processes of selecting, sustaining, controlling, and harmonizing attention. Selecting directs attention toward items and away from other items. Such a process can be a response to a strong external stimulus or imposed voluntarily. Selecting, in effect, can be viewed either as a process of filtering, in cases of stimulus being blocked and remaining unidentified, or as a process of depriving, in which already identified stimulus is denied sufficient cognitive resources to remain in consciousness. In short, selection is the process that initiates conscious experience. Patrons of the Frick Gallery routinely select portraiture as their main object of attention and in doing so are invited to ruminate on the meaning of these objects. A gallery effectively governs selective attention. In this instance, selecting includes focusing on the two portraits by Holbein at the expense of other proximate items, namely El Greco’s St. Jerome hanging directly above the fireplace. Turning to pay attention to something, selecting, is different from extended consciousness of something. Selecting attention gives way to sustaining attention. Ruminating on the curious scene of Cromwell eyeing More requires sustained attention, effectively marshaling the lion’s share of conscious mental resources from long-term and working memory. Mentally simulating a mini drama of Cromwell gazing with pernicious intent at More can be understood as a dynamic mental simulation anchored in the here-and-now of a museum visit but referencing the there-and-then of Tudor England. Ruminations such as this are very difficult to sustain for long periods, as too many external contingencies compete for limited attention, even in sites designed for rumination. A truck horn blasting from Fifth Avenue, a call from my companion to come over and look at Giovanni Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert on the opposing wall, or an announcement that the gallery is closing are all intervening events that will interrupt the political drama playing in my head. The ability to engage in one cognitively laborious task, suspend it to attend to something else only to return to it later on, seems a uniquely human ability. Controlling attention is vital for functioning in complex, social, and technological environments. I can ruminate, but I have to cross the street safely if I want to live to ruminate later. Finally, harmonizing (a.k.a., joint) attention is the metaphoric name I use to identify the element of attention that is most unique to human beings. Adult meaning making is paradoxically an individual act dependent upon the individual’s singular attitude, temperament, and knowledge, while simultaneously a richly social act dependent upon a community of shared signs, values, and needs. I adopt the position that meaning does not arise without the presence of the other (either real or imagined) and that one cannot legitimately talk about “private meanings” (Wittgenstein 1958). Human learning is predicated on joint attentional processes (cf. Tomasello 1999). My companion and I attend

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to the same objects in space, as did the nearby patron. All three of us came to focus on the More-Cromwell portraits as props for creating a three-part harmony. We produced a set of simultaneous tones on a common theme: the dramatic tension between Cromwell and More. I use the term harmony to suggest two crucial points: we were paying attention to the same objects and running similar mental simulations at the same time that we were doing so from subtly different perspectives. The result is a rich harmony of meaningful experiences with each tone at different intervals within the same dominant key. Alerting, orienting, selecting, sustaining, controlling, and harmonizing comprise six elements of attention. Together, these elements constitute a finite set of general points from which all the details of meaning construction follow. The six elements given here comprise not so much an accepted theory of meaning but rather a systematically organized set of working principles for guiding thinking about the problem of meaning. This distinction can also be used to describe our engagement with other media, such as the two Holbein portraits. Briefly, coded meaning in this instance can refer to the immediate relation between a likeness on canvas and its referent. One can focus attention on the particular pose of the individual and come to some appreciation of his temperament. A salient meaning of any portrait is that the very act of composing a portrait confers value onto subject: a portrait’s very existence presupposes the importance of the subject, especially as practiced in the court of King Henry VIII. However, the idea that Thomas Cromwell appears mean-spirited or that Holbein’s unfavorable portrayal of Cromwell is a derivation of many other meaningful relations working together. These relations can include salient characteristics of the portrait (for example, facial expressions), the curator’s commentary (for example, Cromwell’s relationship with More and Henry VIII), the arrangement of each portrait within the collection (for example, Cromwell appearing near More), biographical information about the artist, the conditions under which he was working, and so forth. These, then, are the thoughts that stirred my mind as I saw those pictures staring at one another at the Frick Gallery: There are six elements of attention that may serve as a fruitful heuristic for exploring the nature (or many natures) of mind, language, and culture. Much theoretical and empirical work awaits us.

References Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. 2002. The Way We Think. New York: Basic Books. Tomasello, Michael. 1999. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958. Philosophical Investigations. New York: Macmillan.

CHAPTER 2

Gazing at Paintings and the Evocation of Life Philippe-Joseph Salazar








My Diary I have kept a diary since I was born. That is, since I reached what Michel Leiris calls “manhood,” l’âge d’homme (Leiris 1992). Ever since, I have looked at pictures, often. And listened to opera, often. And lived most of my years away from home, the domus where we get tamed—domus, “home,” and domāre, “to tame,” are analogous in Latin, and who would contest that in home there is domination? So, when do you begin a diary, when do you decide to figure out yourself for yourself, and when do you tell yourself From now on, I will live and write, I will achieve nature by representing my own nature? When do you leave home and begin to build yourself (an homophone, via Greek: démō, “to build,” present in English “timber,” construction wood). I was born to be indomitable on 21 December 1976. Indeed, the inaugural entry of my diary is dated 21 December 1976. As expected, this first entry is a poem of sorts, what we call in French a poème en prose—a compromise, in other words, a promise of prose. This first entry mixes lyrics with ink drawings meant to illustrate chosen moments from operas, cries really, or vocal arrests. It is quickly followed by an account of Christmas skiing and self-defeating amorous, weekend up in the Pyrenees mountains, a liminal episode on which I could not find then a better commentary than “To ski the slopes of emotions.” As my diary began it wished

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to evoke more than merely recount. In short, my incipient diary, in French, a carnet, born by love at Christmastime, staged figurations of my inchoate self. Its premises have borne fruits, some eighty carnets later: voice and its figuring; writing and its figures; sex and its figurations. Yet, as I began this still evolving diary, I met people. Entries provoked or accompanied encounters. You write, you walk, you trace a roteiro (Salazar forthcoming b). First encounter. As I started work on a junior dissertation on voice, under Roland Barthes’s supervision, I had to confront what he called and dismissed as le fantasme du livre, a reminder I always administer to my own graduates: A thesis is not a book; don’t fall enamored with a thesis. Barthes’s terse admonition was an epiphany. It really turned me into a persistent diarist and muted my fleeting wish of being a writer of fiction or, worse, a poet. It did not turn me into an academic either, I must add, as an academic career was, as we say in French, le cadet de mes soucis—the Benjamin of my concerns. As we all know, however, the Benjamin of a family is usually the spoilt child, that is, the child that spoils. I would have rather plowed a field in China. Nearly did. Next encounter was with Georges Balandier, who was then side-stepping anthropology and writing on the “spectacular” nature of power. He asked me to write a book on opera. I had just published my first essay, semiological exertions on Die Walküre (Salazar 1976). Balandier’s offer set me on a course that Barthes did not really approve of. I recall how, sitting at Café Bonaparte, Barthes told me he disapproved of my having turned my thesis into a psychoopera of the self—portions of this strange dissertation, a text in the sense we gave then to texte, something part analysis, part self-critique, and wholly an exercise in haughty disaffection, appeared soon as Figures in Muslim psychoanalyst Michel Orcel’s literary journal, Avalanche (Salazar 1978a, 1978b). In fact, two years later or so, I did write an opera libretto, Icare. Published and never performed, except one night, in the Transvaal highveld when I recited it to a couple of friends, under the stars, of course. At that time, I had completed a study on Savonarola, which, more than anything else, brought me in touch with the operatic nature of politics, politics as staged reality (Salazar 1978c). Utmost violence and ugly sounds made agreeable (Salazar 2011a). That, I saw firsthand, as I was doing field work in South Africa, at the twin, unknown to one another, prompting of Louis Althusser, my tutor at Ecole normale supérieure, and Balandier. There, in apartheid South Africa, made lightheaded, almost deranged, by the odd familiarity of its unfamiliarity—to paraphrase Freud—I persisted in keeping my diaries as I observed that crepuscular society. Writing, as it were, with hands disjointed, I wrote Idéologies de l’opéra (Salazar 1980) and a PhD in

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anthropology, later published as L’Intrigue raciale (Salazar 1989). But my diary ran a steadier course through these years of disparate and, at times, desperate strivings to figure out my âge d’homme. Consider now that Polymnia, a representation of Ancient Greeks’ cultivation of rhetoric, is sometimes depicted holding a spkêtron in her left hand while extending her right hand. There is indeed no better symbol of, or gazing at, the transmission of one’s voice from encounter to diary than the spkêtron. This is the talking stick you will find in Homer when people assemble to debate: he who holds the stick may talk. With her right hand, with its two extending, slightly bent fingers, rapper style (I am sure this ancient gesture transited via Neapolitan culture to arrive in the slums of New York and Chicago and then be adopted by black migrants from the South), Polymnia indicates that someone wants to talk. Muse of rhetoric culture. The stick and the crooked fingers may as well be a staff and hook, like the wocko stick of the Hamar of Ethiopia. Or a pen and a hand. Or a brush and a scraper. Or a musical score and vocal cords. As you wish, depending upon your trade. We, anthropologists of voice, are friends of the three primordial muses who are nothing more than “a ripple of water and a rustle of air and a sound of voice” (Lilio Giraldi, De Musis Syntagma, 1539, after Varro). Why these ruminations, whereas by choice and from a long practice of Sextus Empiricus (Salazar 2000), I usually recoil at impositions from the past and resist impositions from the heart and deride reasoning made into justification. Why? Simply because, for better or for worse, my diary has come to sculpt my own life. It holds figures of a life destined, like all lives, to matter very little to the course of nature (Salazar 2008). What matters, however, is the aria, the tempo, the breathing, the pitch. Diaries evoke a rhetorical method of analysis I call the loxodrome, or rhumb line or the longest route one has to take, at a constant angle through the curvature of one’s subject, to arrive at the desired point (Salazar 2011b, 2012a, forthcoming a). I have chosen to extract from my diaries three epiphanic moments, three figurations of an ethnography of the self in foreign lands, three points on this rhumb-line called “gazing at paintings and evoking life.” They are moments of contemplation and meditation in front of paintings, in the course of travels. They attest to Descartes’s observation (as noted in the Introduction) in Les Passions de l’âme (LIII, LXXII, and LXXIII) that surprise is the first physical instance of an encounter, literally (in French) the “prise” (the catch, the seizure), a physical move that captures us via the senses and is always provoked by a physical object (in my case, a painting); this initial prise triggers in turn the passion itself of admiration—whereby imagination, intellect, and memory, in short the faculties of the soul, come into full play. The paintings pay a distant

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homage to the ink drawings of 1976. They possess the stolid obduracy images always have, which words and voices, figures indeed, are meant to recapture and make, I believe, far more enduring.

American Parade

Figure 2.1. Sketch of Paul Cadmus, The Fleet’s In (by Philippe-Joseph Salazar)

Diary entry: 22 May 2006. Naval Historical Museum, Navy Yard, Washington DC I was lucky, firstly, not to forget my passport for positive identification, secondly that the painting was there, and not on loan somewhere else or being repaired after having been defaced yet again: The Fleet’s In by Paul Cadmus (1934). The size is rather small for its agitated subject matter, a frieze, really, of no fewer that fourteen characters and a dog—in other words, on average one character per 7.28 inches or 18.34 cm across the whole width of the canvas, discounting the pooch. Why so many figures? The tradition of frescoes or paintings representing social encounters hails back to the High Renaissance. Once perspective had

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been fully mastered, in the sixteenth century, painters were able to achieve perfect trompe l’œil and have throngs of courtiers cavorting on walls, sometimes precariously, sometimes vicariously, depending upon the theme set by the painter’s patron or the location, from behind balustrades of galleries or arches of clerestories. The Fleet’s In is an American variation on a courtly theme, the epitome of which was the Ambassador’s Staircase at Versailles in which visitors bearing gifts and greetings to Louis were first met by a painted court of tempera gestures and frescoed faces. Cadmus’s painting is no exception to this tradition. A low wall overlooking San Francisco has replaced the ambassadorial staircase. The plenipotentiaries are sailors. Here, the courtiers are men and women in Depression-era civilian clothes. Cadmus paints an encounter, and because the 1930s were the age of cartoons, his painting can be read like a comic book. Who are the fourteen figures? Let me start on the left with the first character, the Old Lady. She wears a full-length dress as befits her age, with a cloche hat perched on top her white hair and boots like women wore before World War I. She holds a folded parasol in her right hand, merely adumbrated as it vanished off canvas, and in her left hand a leash on which a Maltese dog tugs. The Old Lady has shut her eyes and tilted her face away from the other thirteen characters. She faces us but does not look at us. She looks into herself. Her breasts have fallen to her waist, but the dog, especially that breed, is impervious to change. The resilient dog acts in the manner of a vital link, a lead indeed, as its pulls the Old Lady toward the center of the action and, one assumes, the midst of her own memories. The lead leash, taut under the tug, lifts the skirt of the next character, a wide-bottomed woman whom I call the Lady with a Bum. This Venus Callipygian, smartly dressed in a calf-length skirt, burnt orange, and an ochre blouse, both hemmed with frills, has her feet firmly planted on the flagstones. She is also tugging not on a leash, but on the right arm of a sailor who is falling backward, legs sprawled open, over the parapet. From the viewer’s position, the Drunken Supine Sailor resembles a character from a seventeenth-century history genre painting and is a mild parody of a pagan god in a Bacchanalia. His left arm is draped across the lap of a seated rough-looking sailor (character no. 5), and his hand comes to rest on the right knee of a third sailor. Now, as the Lady with a Bum pulls up the Drunken Supine Sailor, she watches his comrade in arms, the Rough Sailor, holding a cigarette for a civilian to light. The Civilian Man is seated on the wall, right opposite the Lady with a Bum. Sequentially, he is character no. 3. His neatly combed blond hair and patrician profile and the cut of his bespoke coat contrast vividly with the Rough Sailor’s brutal chin, boxer’s nose, mean forehead, and the sailor’s

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cap thrown back. The cigarette is a focal point of the four characters, and the lighter is an incandescent, sexual offering echoed by the erect pine tree in the background. By the artistry of composition the down arching of the leash to the right is picked up by the half circle made by the Drunken Supine Sailor’s exaggerated long arm falling from lap to knee. In fact the pooch’s little rat-like tail forms a perfect arc whose point grazes the tip of the Rough Sailor’s brogue, right beneath the Drunken Supine Sailor’s flaccid hand. In other words, the rounding movement initiated by the Old Lady traces a concave downward line to the right; it finds its course up along the tail, the boot, the arm of the Drunken Supine Sailor’s arm. At this point the ellipse runs back to the left of the canvas following the raised arm of the Rough Sailor; it jumps over the short gap of the cigarette offering, onto the hand of the Civilian Man; it traces its course down the waist of the Lady with a Bum. A frill sewn on her dress hem connects with the hand of the Old Lady as the leash lifts high her dress. Perfect. Characters two to five are a foursome gently tied up together by sex. The Bacchanalian freeze now moves to characters no. 6 and no. 7, the Tangled Couple. The visual link between the foursome and the Tangled Couple is provided by the Drunken Supine Sailor’s hand brushing the knee of his third mate, character no. 6. By contrast the Tangled Couple offers a scene of violence. The girl wears green and is younger than the Lady with a Bum, if one goes by the cut of her dress, her flat shoes, and her ankle socks. The Green Girl is thrusting her left arm forward, palm open, fingers splayed, right into the face of her sailor who grimaces with pain, his head and neck extended under the pressure. The Green Girl adds impetus to the jab by flinging her right arm back, as if to slap. However, the Repelled Sailor has clinched her in the vice of his legs and as she thrusts and swings, she loses balance and the Repelled Sailor tightens his grip around her waist, pelvis to pelvis. Should he let go of her he would topple over the parapet, unless the large pine tree whose trunk surges behind the Green Girl is close enough to prevent his fall. They are a tangle. She cannot let him fall; he will not release her. Whereas the foursome forms a near perfect erotic roundel, a tondo, the Tangled Couple is all forward and backward dynamics across the depth of the canvas. This is an American version of Poussin’s Rape of the Sabine Women. Next, three women walk pass. They are smartly attired in red, mauve, and blue summer frocks. The Three Friends hold one another by the waist as women do. The swinging pleats of the blue dress, the furthest one into the canvas, brush the hem of the Green Girl’s frock, and this provides, as flimsy as crêpe, a connection: the Blue Girl brushes past her own youth—the Green

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Girl she was herself not such a long time ago. Geometrically, a line runs along the hem of the green dress and the outer edge of the blue dress. Each one of the Three Friends expresses a different feeling, using facial mimicry, at being boisterously greeted by Two Sailors. The Red Girl, nearest to us, lowers her eyelids in exaggerated disdain, her face turned toward the viewer. Her expression is similar to that of the Old Lady; they echo one another almost to a T. Her cute 1930 pillbox hat echoes the Old Lady’s 1920 cloche. Do they represent one another’s future and past? The Mauve Girl, in the middle of the threesome, amicably greets the Two Sailors. She has fat ankles and is, well, rather large and nice. The Blue Girl grins, her eyes are eager slits, and she cranes her neck toward her companions. From feigned disdain to overt excitement, the Three Friends express three stages of the same erotic game, three temperaments and three physiques too. Arithmetic plays with erotic: Two Sailors, Three Friends. Which girl will be stranded? Unless as the logic of the painting tells us—recall the foursome— these are the premises of a fivesome. Anyway, the Two Sailors have none of the Rough Sailor’s or Drunken Supine Sailor’s suggested venality. They are not rabidly, sexually single-minded like the Repelled Sailor. They remind me of Frank Sinatra and his mates, in that movie set at San Diego naval base. Look at them: they are ready to sing a duet, arms outstretched, heads back, and breathing in deeply before crooning away, in Technicolor suntans. For all we know, the girls are lesbians and the guys are gay; and all are out to have a good time. The fivesome is deceptive; they are merely doing a cinematic routine. So far, the The Fleet’s In has presented me with three patterns of intercourse. A courtly game activates the first grouping, money against pleasure. Violence animates the second one, blow for blow. “Let’s have fun” could be the caption for the third encounter. But what about characters no. 13 and no. 14? And where are they? In an interstice between the Blue Girl and one of the Two Sailors the painter has inserted a slice of a male body. Of this sailor, we only see a pair of rounded buttocks, the outline of an arched back and a cap. The sailor is obviously leaning over the parapet. He is holding an invisible conversation with a girl of whom the painter has only revealed, against the right edge of the frame, the rounded shape of her buttocks, a strip of dress and the inner fold of her knees. Of this last pair, we see and know nothing else. What do they do? We do not know. However, we can safely assume that they are facing the wide open vista of the Pacific. They have turned their backs on the tumultuous stage where the others are playing life’s parts. They are facing reality. Or are they merely playing a part? On second thought, they may be watching a show, politics, just as the painted figures at Versailles Ambassadors’

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Staircase used to watch real ambassadors go up; they are watching Roosevelt and his emissaries design the New Deal. Their game is American. It is called hope and deceit.

English Game

Figure 2.2. Sketch of John Lavery, Tennis Party (by Philippe-Joseph Salazar)

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Diary entry: 10 June 1998. Aberdeen, Sir John Lavery’s Tennis Party (1885) Lavery is no Renoir. However, who is to judge? What I can judge is the subject matter, which is a game of lawn tennis. In a park, on a summer afternoon, the older set has asked the younger set to play doubles for their entertainment. Inside the large enclosure, they sit in a row, all ten of them—two families, one can assume surely linked by kinship or marriage. The enclosure is made of wooden posts and railings, the bottom section of which runs diagonally across the length of the canvas from the middle of the left side. An artful eye can detect that the rectangle of the enclosure is Lavery’s canvas itself tilted backward and elongated by perspective. In short, the tennis lawn is the painter’s field. The game of rackets is a painting game. The enclosure has two openings. On the bottom right a gate swings ajar. On the left, in the background, a gated arch of topiary leads the eye toward a forest clearing beyond which a river flows. The painting therefore has three vegetal planes. First, the grassy foreground that leads up to a terrace or steps where the painter has planted his easel in front of the country house whose owners are seated, watching the game. The second plane consists of the lawn itself with the audience sitting against a white fence as against a frame. The third plane, the upper third of the canvas, consists of the thick summer foliage of tall trees, planted on a regular module around the playing grounds, against a well-pruned hedge of conifers. A single tree, nearly at the center of the painting, above the middle plan, grows within the enclosure marking, as it were, a separation between the two playing lawns. The light falls on the lawn, in and around the white fence, in Impressionistic splashes organized nonetheless along two parallel luminous lines; the one on the left where its radiance brings out the white garments of two players (the man is serving), the other on the right and in the foreground, where it comes right up to the easel of the hidden painter. Tennis, before it became a money racket—words have an inner justice have they not?—was, like croquet, a social, summery, relaxation in the life of the leisured class. Alas, or fortunately, croquet does not have the same modern advertising appeal as does tennis. Who are the characters? Four players: two men in their whites, and two women also in white ankle-length dresses with bodices and gloves. There are three spectators with their backs turned to us: a young blond man in brownish knickerbockers and black stockings leans over the railing, a racket propped against it, smoking a cigarette; a lady in black and brown sits on a wicker highback armchair placed within the enclosure but against the fence; next to her

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a girl with a thick ponytail, in a knee-length blue dress and black stockings, rests, elbows out, against the top banister. She has placed her racket on top of it. The young man and she are waiting for their turn. They are playing doubles and the two younger players seem keen to have a go at it. Is that all? Why bother painting this? The game being playing here is an English game of sex and power. Wife and husband do not play with one another. Tennis partners are not life partners. The game of tennis is a game of adultery displaced. When the gentleman on the left serves, as he does now, he does not wish the lady with the raised racket to miss his ball. Quite the contrary. The hit is designed not to be a miss. The racket is no racket in her right hand; it has reverted to what it was initially, a net. This art of serving disguised intentions, and of handing back desired hits, resembles the leisured art of salon conversation in the civilizing process. Nothing must be direct, for nothing must be overt. The lady must just miss the ball now and again, as one pretends not to hear a remark in the course of a conversation. But not this time. The older crowd is watching. They have played the same game twenty or thirty years earlier. They observe how a tradition is being passed on. This is how a caste maintains power: the game of manners. Ethos. Lawn tennis is pure ethos. The two younger players, with idle rackets, are waiting for their turn. As a pair, they are astride the barrier of adulthood: the boy is still out; the girl is already in, as physiology demands. Both wear the black stockings of late adolescence. Their demeanor has the erotic nonchalance of their age: cigarette and ponytail, erect and flaccid, burning and shaking, red hot and hairy, sucked by lips and brushing skin, and so on. The gate is open. The field is open. Will the boy enter and join in the game? This is the simple question the painter is asking from his sun-splashed spot, straw hat above his eyes, brush in hand and palette on a side table with a jug of cold barley water next to it. My guess is that the boy will not walk through the gate, at least not this gate. Otherwise, if the conclusion was foregone, why would have the painter taken the trouble of this remarkable composition whereby a canvas is the playing field of an inherited life? Lavery says tradition will not endure, and the art of living and of making money that should ensure, for generations to come, that lawn tennis is played on summery afternoons will disappear as proverbial clouds will gather over Empire. Sunday afternoons will perish. This is what this painting is telling us. Without it, Jean Patou would have never invented sportswear in the mid-1920s. Sportswear is not about ethos but about pathos. Hence the hysteria essential to fashion and sport. And in totalitarian regimes.

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Cold Moves

Figure 2.3. Sketch of Balthus. Le Jeu de cartes (by Philippe-Joseph Salazar)

Diary entry: 20 December 2001. Madrid. Palacio de Villahermosa. Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection. Balthus. Le Jeu de cartes (1948–1950) Face to face, a woman on the left and a man on the right, both young, or meaning youth, which is the same. She is flat-chested, dressed in an extremely light blue dress, with her feet neatly nested in thin white slippers. She is sitting on a high-backed chair of a turquoise hue. He wears a long-sleeved red shirt and buttercup trousers so tight they resemble a gymnast’s outfit; his feet are shod in ballet shoes. His right arm supports the weight of his body as he leans forward to take a better look at the card that she is placing onto the table covered in green baize, a card we cannot read. The card players are set against the background of an ochre wall with a waist-high grey plinth. I think they play the popular French game belote. Belote is to France what poker is to America and bridge is to Britain. Balthus paints belote. A French game of life. Cards are rectangles and values. How do you fit rectangles and values on a canvas? Answer: through a careful composition. The light pours forth from the right, brushing in succession the buttocks of the male figure, his shoulder line, and the left side of his face as he tilts it toward us and looks at her card. The light then washes the girl’s bust with sharp whiteness, cutting her face into

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two zones divided by her nose, lips, and chin and illuminating its left side and her crimped hair. The painter has given the shadow, underneath the table, a greenish cast with a sharply defined edge that cuts across the floor. On this dark green line the girl’s feet are placed as on a rope, the right one thrust forward, the left one in poised aplomb with the vertical leg. The young man’s right foot also rests on this line, with his heel set against the bottom right corner of the frame. Her right leg and right arm form a single diagonal line that runs from the top left corner of the canvas to the middle of its lower side. Similarly, the young funambulist’s, or gymnast’s, right leg is extended backward and aligned with his back. His diagonal is a perfect parallel to hers. If you were to draw an imaginary line down and across the middle of the painting, it would connect with the two imaginary points where the diagonals encounter the frame (hers at the bottom; his at the top). The point is that this imaginary line cuts dramatically through a card the young man had placed on the baize a moment before the painter captured the scene. Finally her left forearm (concealed to him and us) and visible hand trace a line that runs parallel to that created by his left forearm and hand (concealed to her). The two playing bodies are linked in an unremitting game of intersecting and parallel lines, offset by a steady, unidirectional, and horizontal flow of light. Let me pause for a while and question this game of lines, as it may look somewhat puzzling. Are the card players related to the ragazzi cheating at cards in the famous Caravaggio painting, a picture Balthus may be commenting upon and subverting? No. Are they not rather equilibrists engaged in a perilous dance? Yes. They play cards but it is a dance, as is suggested by their leg movements. They are a pair of funambulists moving in unison, face to face, on the shadowy edge drawn on the floor. On this imaginary cable her right leg, in exact harmony with his right leg, glides forward and backward. Their lives hang on a thread. If she falls, he falls on the green floor, itself a duplicate of the green baize of the table. The cards players’ game table is the equilibrists’ ground where they may crash or somersault if they alight in triumph. This card game is played with feet, not hands. What about the candle on the table? Why a candle? It is unlit, which, technically speaking, is odd. Painters cultivate, since De La Tour mastered its art, the precipitous technique of light and shadows reflected by burning candles onto faces. But, this wick is aphotic. Light does not radiate from this candle although it is set at the near center of the painting and of the game. The candle does not illuminate two contentious faces that would stare at fortune over cards dealt by life (a trite Baroque painterly metaphor), while the rest of the

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canvas recedes into well-tempered darkness. Not here. Astonishing paradox, this aphotic candle. This is a paradoxical card game, lit from behind one of the players. This is a game in which the young man so distrusts his opponent that he conceals his hand, literally and figuratively, behind his back as she puts down a card. This painting depicts the exact moment the card touches the green baize of the table. She holds her next card, her next move, but she is not afraid of prying eyes. She holds her secret deal in front of her. Unafraid. Her secret is an open secret. This is a deadly game indeed, played between human beings who are at odds in the full sense of this word, who hold different values, who are at loggerheads with one another. These are two parallel lives on a paradoxical collision course. Yet these two players have one thing in common, the green shadowy line that simulates an equilibrist’s cable. Their only common ground that dictates their moves is that thin imaginary line. If she falls, he falls. This thin line is life. Time may resolve the paradox of the aphotic wick or deepen it—a paradox is an antidote to doxa, something that, like a parachute, prevents doxa, prejudice or prejudgment, to crash into certainty. This is the painterly lesson of Le Jeu de cartes: a life is lived fully if played at the edge of life. Painting can be deceiving. So can life be. Sometimes cards are steps and a table is a floor. And the candle? Well, the candle is what an unlit candle is, a promise of light. Yet it is cold, aphotic, paradoxical light. The year is 1948. The two figures are, I think, images of the game—nuclear politics. Balthus painted it as the Cold War set in, installing for forty years real mutual dissuasion and potential mutual destruction—the cold, nuclear wick that does not light anything, the game of nuclear belote. Le Jeu de cartes is a trope of the Cold War. That’s how I see it. Journal entry ends.

References Leiris, Michel. 1992. Manhood. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Salazar, Philippe-Joseph. 1976. “La Walkyrie: Wagner: Nom, Discours et Mythe.” Avant Scène Opéra 8 : 104–109. ———. 1978a. “Dites-moi que je vous aime.” Avalanche. Cahier de création et d’analyse 5 : 20–25. ———. 1978b. “Figures du contralto.” Avalanche. Cahier de création et d’analyse 4 : 21–26. ———. 1978c. “Savanarola: une dictature de la voix.” Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie 64 : 5–34. ———. 1980. Idéologies de l’opéra. Paris: Presses universitaires de France.

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———. 1989. L’Intrigue raciale. Essai de critique anthropologique. Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck. ———. 2000. La Divine Sceptique. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. ———. 2002. “Left Bank, Right Bank. Roland Barthes’ Gay Stroll.” Pretexts. Literary and Cultural Studies 11, no. 2: 189–196. ———. 2008. “Rhetoric on the Bleachers or, The Rhetorician as Melancholiac.” Philosophy & Rhetoric 41, no. 4: 356–374. ———. 2011a. “Picasso’s Music.” In Under the Boabab, ed., Philippe-Joseph Salazar. Cape Town: AfricaRhetoric Publishing, 61–68 (African Yearbook of Rhetoric, 2, no. 2, Special Series: The Elephant and the Obelisk, I). ———. 2011b. “Marx’s Freedom, or A Rhetorical Rhumb on his Theses on Feuerbach.” филозофија 32: 29–45. ———. 2012a. “La libertà di Marx. O una ‘lossodromia’ retorica sulle Tesi su Feuerbach.” Consecutio Temporum, Rivista critica della postmodernità 2, no. 2 . ———. forthcoming a. “Forking: Rhetoric χ Rhetoric.” In Chiasmus and Culture, ed., Anthony Paul and Boris Wiseman. New York: Berghahn. ———. forthcoming b. “Midnight Rhetor, ou le roteiro de Joe Buck l’indomptable.” Cahiers Michel Leiris 4.

CHAPTER 3

Tangled Up in Blue Symbolism and Evocation Boris Wiseman








As Claude Lévi-Strauss has remarked in the “Overture” to The Raw and the Cooked (1970: 26), music’s ability to evoke “similar ideas in different brains” (the phrase is taken from Baudelaire’s essay on Wagner) is one of the supreme enigmas that still faces the study of culture today. It is a question that has intrigued thinkers at least since the Greeks, for it confronts us with the problem of a nonreferential language. The pioneers of abstract art, among them Kandinsky, grappled with a similar problem at the start of the twentieth century. How can a painting renounce figuration, they asked, and still communicate a positive meaning, one that transcends and unites the multiplicity of subjective viewers’ reactions? In their development of an abstract language, painters were preceded by poets, Baudelaire in particular, and the Symbolists—Mallarmé, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Valéry, Maeterlinck—who found much of their inspiration in Baudelaire’s works, in his poetry but also his music and art criticism. For these poets, language was above all a matter of sensuous evocation, an incantatory magic, an art of deliberate imprecision in which signifiers were purposefully not reunited with their signifieds, yet still managed to covey a rich world of sense. They selected words for the particular phonetic qualities that they possessed. They explored the limits of poetic expression, working like plastic artists assembling shapes and forms or like composers combining tonalities. The fact that it had become possible for poetry to split sound and sense is captured by Mallarmé’s complaint in his “Crise de vers,” to the effect that French is perverse because it assigns a dark tonality to the word jour

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(“day”) and a light one to the word nuit (“night”), an inversion for which the poet must find ways of compensating. Mallarmé’s comment is already treating phonemes in the way that abstract painters would go on to treat color and line—as possessing inherent semantic values that are communicable, semantic values that stand apart from any denotative function. His poetic intuition was later revisited by the famous linguist Roman Jakobson, who revealed how widespread it was. He explains: “When, on testing such phonemic oppositions as grave vs. acute, we ask whether /i/ or /u/ is darker, some of the subjects may respond that this question makes no sense to them, but hardly one will state that /i/ is the darker of the two” (Jakobson 1981: 31). Lévi-Strauss would later explain colored audition as a typically structuralist four-term homology: /i/ is to /u/ such as light is to dark. Whorf, whom Jakobson cites, identifies two series of synaesthetic correlates that most human subjects would readily recognize, on the one hand “bright, cold, sharp, hard, high, light (in weight), quick, high-pitched, narrow,” and, on the other, “dark, warm, yielding, soft, blunt, low, heavy, slow, low-pitched, wide” (Whorf 1952: 186). There lies in these two strings of associations an invitation and a challenge to theorize a form of production of meaning that escapes processes of symbolization such as they are ordinarily conceptualized, particularly in semiotic terms. The Symbolists discovered an evocative capacity contained within language that exceeds the ordinary uses of language yet could be used to communicate complex and subtle meanings. My main argument here is that this brief but highly influential moment of aesthetic experimentation is of interest to the social and human sciences because it points toward the importance of supra- or infrasemiotic modes of producing meaning. It was a visit to the exhibition Indigo (20 January to 15 April 2007), held at the Whitworth Art Gallery (University of Manchester), that first brought some of the above issues into focus for me. The production of indigo is not only a highly skilled art form but a process akin to magic—hence one that is eminently well suited to the kind of curiosity-inducing astonishment with which this volume is concerned. As one expert comments: “Indigo and its close relation shellfish purple are chemically in a class apart. They form the extraordinary ‘indigoid’ group, whose production methods are so intriguing that they still tantalize today’s organic chemists” (Balfour-Paul 1998: 2). The heart of the mystery lies in the various processes whereby the much sought after blue dye is extracted from the seemingly anodyne green leaves of indigoproducing plants. In the absence of inorganic reducing agents, this requires a period of fermentation, which is the trigger for a series of complex chemical reactions. The task of the indigo maker is essentially to control these reactions, which he or she usually does, at least in traditional societies, without fully understanding their chemical basis. Indeed, it was not until the middle of the

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nineteenth century that scientist Edward Schunk discovered the compound indican and explained for the first time in what form the blue dye was contained in the plants that produce it. But even then, the mystery was far from solved, for indican is itself colorless. It took another fifty years for chemists to realize that the production of indigo required, first, a process of enzymic hydrolysis that transformed indican into indoxyl (indigo white) and glucose, and second, the transformation of indoxyl itself. The latter process was achieved by mixing it with oxygen. One of the best ways of doing this was developed in India in antiquity. Workers immersed themselves to the waist in great vats and whisked the fermenting liquid with paddles. It was an arduous and often dangerous task. It was also one that resulted in an extraordinary transmutation of the natural world—the colorless plant fibers, after lengthy treatments, suddenly yielded their precious chromatic essence. For the men and women who, several millennia ago, first elaborated the techniques for extracting indigo, this transmutation must have seemed almost miraculous. The extraordinary behavior of the dye is not limited to the production process. Dyeing itself is often equally magical. In certain cases, for example, it is not until the fabric is removed from the dye that it gradually acquires its blue tint. What matters in the context of this argument is not the production processes itself, but its relationship to the many customs and beliefs that developed around it. These are too numerous and diverse to enter into in a systematic way here. A quick survey suffices to show that many of these are completely intertwined with the material dimensions of the dyeing process and with the physical qualities of the dye itself. This is particularly apparent in the fact that so many of the customs and beliefs relating to indigo dyeing are, like the dyeing process, about transformation. They are typically about death, fertility, and the regeneration of life. A number of these beliefs are listed by Balfour-Paul (1998). For example, in the past, Coptic women would dye their clothes, curtains, and sheets indigo at the death of the head of the household. Occasionally, the face and body of the mourners, the house of the deceased and the funeral drum were also painted blue (Balfour-Paul 1998: 181). Two aspects of the use of the dye stand out: its codified relationship to death and mourning (a standard form of color symbolism) and the exploitation of a physical property of the pigment, the fact that it can be spread from one surface to another. The mourners are quite literally covered bodily by this symbol of death and the whole environment saturated by the color, as if by visual contagion. The same principle of contagion appears to be important in Thailand too and among the Toba Batak of northern Sumatra, where it is feared that when someone dies, his or her spirit may enter an indigo pot and kill the pot’s spirit. For this reason, when there is a death in the village, dyers will rush to cover their pots (Balfour-Paul 1998: 181).

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The funerary associations of indigo are counterbalanced by their opposite, beliefs about regeneration and fertility. The contents of dyeing pots are often thought to be alive, no doubt in part because of the fermentation techniques used in the extraction of the dye. The pots themselves are often associated with wombs and feminized. On the Indonesian island of Sumba, terms and rituals used in the context of pregnancy and birth are also used to designate dyeing processes (Balfour-Paul 1998: 127). In other societies, the pungent smell of dye pots is associated with female bodily smells. Wherever one turns, indigorelated customs and beliefs seem to deal with transition and liminality. It is as if they directly translated the transformational processes associated with the production and use of the dye into symbolic motifs. Among the Dogon of Mali and the Sahu of the Indonesian Moluccas the symbolism of indigo textiles is associated with agricultural and life cycles. In northern Sumatran myths, it is by means of an indigo-dyed yarn that various mythical beings transit between the spiritual world and the world of the here and now. On the Solomon Islands, brides were given a ritual apron dyed with indigo to symbolize their entry into the world of married women. The close connection between indigorelated beliefs and the physical processes of dyeing is further confirmed by the fact that in certain traditional societies where synthetic indigo has replaced natural dyeing processes, it is still the latter that are used in the production of ritual costumes. The darkness of the dye itself, as we have briefly seen already, is central to this weaving of sensory experiences into a fabric of intelligible signs. This is illustrated by an intriguing popular belief, common to southern India and the High Atlas mountains of Morocco, about how to put right a dyeing process that has gone wrong. As Jenny Balfour-Paul explains: “Telling lies would charm the potency back into a failed vat. Thus a female Berber dyer in Morocco would deliberately spread malicious falsehoods (i.e. blackness) around the neighborhood in order to revive her vat by outdoing the malevolent spirit that was thwarting her efforts (a kind of homeopathic lie!). So widespread was this habit that anyone hearing a malevolent rumor would declare, ‘That is another lie of the dyers’ or ‘Ah—there’s a failed vat’” (Balfour-Paul 1998: 128). Here, tracing the ways in which material practices are translated into beliefs involves an additional relay, that of figurative thought. Indeed, the above popular sayings suggest that metaphors are central to this translation process. However, their status here is difficult to determine. Is it the metaphor that is the means by which lying is associated to dyeing practices (like dyeing, it is a spreading of blackness)? Or, on the contrary, is it the intuition of a connection between linguistic practices—lying is a form of interrupted communication— and production processes—when the vat fails, production is interrupted—that calls forth the metaphor? Whatever the answer to this chicken-and-egg ques-

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tion, this example shows the way in which language (rhetoric), belief, and the sensorium are interconnected. What precedes suggests that it may not be entirely arbitrary that it is “that mood indigo” that makes Nina Simone want to “lie down and die.” In Western culture, indigo is often associated with mourning and melancholia. Krzystof Kieslowski’s film Blue (1993), which tells the story of how a woman comes to terms with the death of her daughter and husband in a car crash, is shot through numerous dark blue filters or screens. The blue in the title is meant to evoke the blue in the French flag, representing liberty, an important theme in the film. But the visual use of blue in the film conveys, more directly and viscerally, a strong melancholic atmosphere. There are three scenes in which the central character played by Juliette Binoche swims alone at night in the dark blue water of an indoor swimming pool, a powerful visual metaphor for her immersion in her thoughts about her own death (she is contemplating suicide). The funerary quality of indigo is first of all connected to its darkness—it is the most closely related of the chromatic hues to achromatic black. It also occupies a special place on the electromagnetic spectrum. Wavelengths shorter than about 450 nm are usually classified as violet. Hardy and Perrin (1932) place indigo between 446 and 464 nm wavelengths. In other words, it occupies a somewhat indeterminate position between blue and violet, a band where the human eye, furthermore, has difficulty in discriminating between wavelengths. It is a color, in short, with a natural affinity to negativity and absence. It was Newton who first identified indigo as one of the spectral colors, partly on the basis of his analogy between the seven colors of the spectrum and the seven notes of the western octave. Indigo was equated by Newton with a semitone (as was orange). Semitones are used in what musicologists refer to as a chromatic musical scale, which is a scale of small intervals. Revealingly, this scale was much used by Wagner and is well-known for its mournful qualities. The above examples challenge conventional wisdom about the range of ways in which symbols signify. They do not quite fit, for example, Peirce’s influential trichotomy, which distinguishes between icons (which establish a relation of resemblance between symbol and object), indices (which establish a causal relation between symbol and object), and signs (which establish an arbitrary or conventional relation between symbol and object). Indeed, symbolic meaning is not only a visual matter here because other features of indigo, such as its smell (indeed stench) are crucial to its signifying potential. Meaning attaches itself directly to qualities of things, as is the case with the phonetic values manipulated by Symbolist poets, the colors combined by abstract artists or the musical tones that make up musical patterns. To borrow a phrase used by contemporary French philosopher Claude Imbert, the above examples highlight the importance of “adherent symbolism.” As she writes: “The first

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moments of objectivity and consciousness, the adherent but no less shared mode of symbolization that all other modes of symbolization presuppose, are qualitative … the first geometries are qualities of forms.” (Imbert 2000: 234; my translation; for a presentation of Claude Imbert’s works, see Bontea and Wiseman 2011) We are here in the domain of the production of moods, which is also to say that of a theory of symbolic evocation. Moods, unlike the meanings of more traditionally conceived symbols, are to be derived largely from the psychological and physiological relationship to a perceptual experience. Moods are not designated; they are immanent to the qualities that vehicle them. Paradoxically, it is Claude Lévi-Strauss, who is usually presented as the chief exponent of a semiotic approach to symbolism, who has done the most to explore the implications of nineteenth-century poetics for a theory of culture (Wiseman 2007; Boon 1973). Although it is undeniable that structural linguistics (in particular Jakobsonian) informed Lévi-Strauss’s earlier works, from La Pensée sauvage onward another model emerges, one that makes a major contribution to sensory anthropology and a theory of symbolic evocation. Beyond the Symbolists, Lévi-Strauss was also taking up and giving new life to theories of sensory perception contained in Rousseau’s works, in particular his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (there is a sensory anthropologist in Rousseau). Lévi-Strauss derives the specificity of what was once called primitive thought from its way of engaging with the physical environment. Primitive science, which, he argues, is no less rigorous than modern science when viewed in terms of its essential cognitive operations, differs from modern science in that it is rooted in a form of speculation (hypothesis building) that takes the perceptible qualities of things as its starting point (modern science, by contrast, resorts to a plane of abstract formalization that allows the scientist to transcend the level of perceptible qualities). When it comes to mythical thought, structural anthropology develops a theory that is essentially about how human beings, living in different times and places, discover in their immediate perceptual environment the analogies with which they solve (symbolically, at least) the various problems with which they are confronted on a daily basis, whether they are social, economic, religious, practical, etc. It is an example seemingly far removed from anthropology that best illustrates Lévi-Straus’s understanding of the way in which symbolic meaning is derived from an exploration of the perceptible qualities of things, namely, his reading of Apollinaire’s poem, Les Colchiques (Lévi-Strauss 1983). The reading shows that poetry, like primitive science and myth, may also be found to rest on a “logic of perceptible qualities.” The poem is short enough to reproduce it in its entirety:

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Les Colchiques e pré est vénéneux mais joli en automne Les vaches y paissant Lentement s’empoisonnent Le colchique couleur de cerne et de lilas Y fleurit tes yeux sont comme cette fleur-la Violâtres comme leur cerne et comme cet automne Et ma vie pour tes yeux lentement s’empoisonne Les enfants de l’école viennent avec fracas Vêtus de hoquetons et jouant de l’harmonica Ils cueillent les colchiques qui sont comme des mères Filles de leurs filles et sont couleur de tes paupières Qui battent comme les fleurs battent au vent dément Le gardien du troupeau chante tout doucement Tandis que lentes et meuglant les vaches abandonnent Pour toujours ce grand pré mal fleuri par l’automne Meadow Saffron The meadow is poisonous but pretty in the fall The cows graze there Slowly poisoning themselves The saffron ringed and lilac-colored Blooms there your eyes are like that flower Near-violet like their rings and like this autumn And my life slowly poisons itself for your eyes The school children come up noisily Dressed in jackets and playing the harmonica They pick the saffron flowers which are like mothers Daughters of their daughters and the colour of your eyelids Which move as flowers wave in a demented wind The shepherd sings softly While slow and lowing the cows leave For ever this wide meadow evilly blooming in the autumn

The Colchicum autumnalis (meadow saffron in English, and commonly named naked ladies) belongs to the lily family and is a sinister, delicate, bruised-flesh-like flower, one that seems not far removed from the associations of indigo. It is very poisonous and fatal to livestock and is also the source

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of a narcotic drug, colchine. Richard Mabey, in his Flora Britannica, compares it to a flowering toadstool and quotes a twentieth-century agricultural report that indicates that children were sometimes sent out in the morning to inspect meadows to pick them before cattle were sent in (this may well be what Apollinaire’s children are doing). Geoffrey Grigson’s The Englishman’s Flora gives the ancient Assyrian name of the flower “Come Let Us Copulate.” In terms of our understanding of symbolism, it is revealing that the simple naming and classifying of the flower already maps out a very distinctive semantic field. It is another name sometimes given to the flower, that of Filius ante patrem, that retains Lévi-Strauss’s attention. It designates an oddity in the flower’s procreative cycle. The flower heads of crocuses are thrown up straight from the ground in autumn before the foliage appears the following spring. In other words, the procreative cycle of the crocus presents the image of an inverted genealogy in which the sons—the flowers—come before and seem to engender the fathers—the leaves. Lévi-Strauss evokes this name to explain why Apollinaire compares the flowers to “des mères / Filles de leurs filles” (mothers / Daughters of their daughters), a phrase that has puzzled Apollinaire scholars for decades (he also provide an explanation for Apollinaire’s feminization of the botanical epithet). As Lévi-Strauss further points out, Apollinaire’s poem itself rests on a genealogical inversion of another kind. The heart of the poem is the comparison between the lilac-colored flower and the eyes of the poet’s mistress. The latter are a narcotic poison for the poet in the same way that the flowers poison the field in which they grow. The Colchicum, in other words, are a signifier for the lover’s eyes—a metaphor, in short. However, when Apollinaire later describes the flowers as “the color of eye-shadow” (couleur de cerne) and as “the color of your eyelids” (couleur de tes paupières) and compares their fluttering in the wind to the batting of eyes, the metaphor is given a surrealist twist and the above relationship between signifier and signified is inverted. “[Apollinaire] is making the eyelids the signifier of the flowers, which are transformed from being the signifier of the eyelids into the signified.” The relevance of this reading lies in the fact that it shows the poem to have developed from and around the central image of its eponymous flower and its particular sensory attributes. In particular, its peculiar reproductive cycle contains, in embryonic form, the figure of thought (the inversion) that may be seen as the germinal cell of the poem. The metaphors and rhetoric of the poem adhere to its central image and vice versa. The Colchicum autumnalis is the key to the morphogenesis of the poem. Even the poem’s melancholy mood may be traced to the autumnal associations of the Colchicum, which in the nineteenth century was also known as veillote, a reference to the long evenings spent in darkness (in French veillées) at the time when the plant flowers. This is, in part, what I take Lévi-Strauss to mean when he writes about Apollinaire’s Colchicum

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autumnalis: “The concrete peculiarities given them by nature and the semantic function given them by the poet can be united in these flowers, which have become signs” (Lévi-Strauss 1983: 216–217). The more general anthropological significance of this model of the production of symbolic meaning is spelled out in La Pensée sauvage, in which Lévi-Strauss writes that “the mind … passes from empirical diversity to conceptual simplicity and then from conceptual simplicity to meaningful syntheses” (Lévi-Strauss 1962: 160). Color symbolism, as discussed above, reveals the importance of a polysemic realm of symbolic connotation and evocation. In a memorable passage of Le visible et l’invisible (1964), Merleau-Ponty considers the perceptual experience of a particular instance of red. To understand how we apprehend this quale, we need to take into account, he remarks, not only its relationship to the other reds that surround it, with which it entertains relations of attraction and repulsion, which it dominates or is dominated by, but also its relationship to reds that are not immediately visible, but that resonate through the perceptual field: the red flag of train guards, that of the Russian revolution, the red of roof tiles and that of certain kind of earth that can be found near Aix-en-Provence (Merleau-Ponty 1979: 172). What that instance of red is to the viewer gives an idea of the complex web of relations through which an intelligible experience emerges. They link disparate elements of the perceptual field, no doubt other sensory associations too (different reds have different textures) and bridge the gap between the external world and the realms of the symbolic and the imaginary. Merleau-Ponty goes on to evoke a passage by Claudel who says in substance that there is a certain blue of the sea that is so blue that only blood is redder (Merleau-Ponty 1979: 172). The web, in other words, is not confined to merely visually verifiable associations. In his Letters on Cézanne Rilke evokes the gondolas in Francesco de Guardi’s paintings of Venice, whose blackness is “more a dark mirror than … a color” (Rilke 1988: 30). Imbert has studied elsewhere Manet’s use of blacks and their visually new luminosity (Imbert 2011). One can see, here, how a color, by virtue of an “alternative logic” (Imbert 2004: 404) that precedes and predates the discursive logic of philosophers, may well transform into its opposite. And this transformation provides the basis for a type of production of meaning that is anthropologically important but does not fit a semiotic mold. In the same collection of letters from which the above citation was taken, Rilke imagines a biography of the color blue (Rilke 1988: 31–32). What Rilke has in mind is essentially an art-historical biography. His musings are prompted by his contemplation, during a visit to the Louvre in October 1907, of a blue cloak in a portrait by Rosalba Carriera. He immediately identifies Rosalba’s blue as particular to eighteenth-century paintings, a blue that can be found in La Tour, Peronnet, and Chardin, for example (Rilke 1988: 31). Chardin, how-

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ever, did not content himself with reproducing this shade of blue, says Rilke, he transformed it. Indeed, he adds, he stripped it of its pretension. For this reason, Rilke presents Chardin as a key intermediary figure who will eventually lead to Cézanne’s unique blue. The latter’s transformation of earlier blues is more difficult to grasp for Rilke. It involves a fundamental transformation of the whole of painting itself. Cézanne developed a new kind of realism that enabled him to render the “thinglike” presence of objects in a new way. What is therefore distinct about Cézanne’s blue is a certain refusal to signify anything other than itself—it is the very opposite of the blue in portraits of the Virgin Mary. As Rilke puts it: “In Cézanne [blue] no longer carries any secondary significance” (Rilke 1988: 32). It would be possible to add other blues to Rilke’s imagined biography, for example, Yves Klein’s International Klein Blue. The latter is a synthetic version of ultramarine whose semantic value is rooted in its rejection of any kind of naturalistic connotations. Klein’s blue is a celebration of radical artificiality. He chooses an entirely homogeneous blue that deliberately erases the trace of the work of the artist’s hand. The whole point of International Klein Blue is that it connotes its own mechanical reproducibility. The art of dyeing involves many variables: the initial condition of the fabric, the amount of dye used, the temperature of the water, its alkalinity, the amount of reduction, the speed of oxidation, the number of immersions, and others still (Balfour-Paul 1998: 118). The ideal pH for an indigo solution is 11.5. If the dye-maker lets it drop below this level, the fabric will become duller or greener. Above this pH, it will become reddish and lose its penetration (Balfour-Paul 1998: ibid.). Before the invention of thermometers and other measuring instruments, these variables had to be controlled by sensory perception alone. Even in modern laboratories, controlling them remains so difficult that irregular dyeing results continue to be a problem. In its traditional forms, dyeing is a craft that involves all the senses, including taste. It is said that a good dye-maker can tell if a dye-vat is about to go off from the way that it smells (Balfour-Paul 1998: 120). Exploring the art of dyeing reveals to what extent it relies on a form of perception that is extremely well attuned to small differentials. Japanese dye artists, whose skill and knowledge are so highly valued that they are today honored by the title of “living treasures,” give different names to different shades of indigo depending on the number of times they have been dipped. In the famous Paris Gobelin dye factory, nineteenth-century specialists differentiated no less than sixty shades of blue (Balfour-Paul 1998: 181). The exercise of the dyer’s craft requires a sort of hypersensoriality, one that is adapted to the specific requirements of the dyeing process but that also form the basis of something like a sensory community. It is debatable to what extent this kind of traditional sense-based knowledge has been lost in large-scale post-industrial societies (one might argue that

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it has only been displaced). Whatever position one might take on the debate, one area in which the dyer’s hypersensoriality is still mobilized is that of the production and consumption of art. I see a close kinship between the figure of the dye-maker and that of the artist and by extension the museum or gallery visitor. They share the same fine-grained attentiveness to the qualitative dimensions of things and the conviction that these signify, to once again paraphrase Claude Lévi-Strauss. My conclusion is that to understand the kind of production of meaning in which both figures are involved, we need a new way of thinking about the relationship of symbolism to color and to social codes. One might think of it as a materialist theory of symbolism. One in which the meaning is in the perceiving, as it were.

References Balfour-Paul, Jenny. 1998. Indigo in the Arab World. London: British Museum Press. Boon, James. 1973. From Symbolism to Structuralism: Lévi-Strauss in a Literary Tradition. New York: Harper and Row. Bontea, Adriana, and Boris Wiseman, eds. 2011. “Claude Imbert in Perspective: Creation, Cognition and Modern Experience.” Paragraph 34, no. 2 (special issue). Hardy A. C., and F. H. Perrin. 1932. The Principles of Optics. New York: McGraw-Hill. Imbert, Claude. 2000. “Philosophie, anthropologie: la fin d’un malentendu.” In Le XXe siècle en France: Art, Politique, Philosophie, ed., Alexandre Abensour. Paris: Berger-Levrault, 223–237. ———. 2004. “Qualia.” In Claude Lévi-Strauss, ed. Michel Izard. Paris: Editions de l’Herne, 432–441. ———. 2011. “Manet, Effects of Black.” In Paragraph 34, no. 2: 187–198. Jakobson, Roman 1981. Linguistics and Poetics. In Selected Writings, vol. III. The Hague: Mouton, 18–51. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1962. La Pensée sauvage. Paris: Plon. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1979. Le visible et l’invisible. Paris: Gallimard. Rilke, Rainer Maria. 1988. Letters on Cézanne. Translated by Joel Agee. London: Cape. Whorf, Benjamin. 1952. “Language, Mind, and Reality.” ETC. A Review of General Semantics 9: 167–188. Wiseman, Boris. 2007. Lévi-Strauss, Anthropology and Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Notes An earlier version of this chapter was published in 2013 under the title “The Materiality of Colour,” The Senses and Society 8(2) (forthcoming).

CHAPTER 4

Co-Presence, Astonishment, and Evocation in Cinematography Ivo Strecker








Here I like to introduce the notion of co-presence, which has much to do with astonishment, evocation, and the spell of culture. In the past, when I edited my own films or watched those made by others, I often wondered about the evocative power of different, seemingly unrelated, or only indirectly related phenomena in particular scenes. To give some examples: (1) I had filmed Hamar initiates painting one another’s faces. Later, when editing, and then again, when I first saw the film on a big screen, I was particularly surprised and fascinated by a sequence where the wind gently moves a feather across the face of one of the initiates. (2) I had filmed milk containers hanging on the fence of a Hamar homestead. Later, as I was viewing the material, I discovered that in one of the sequences flies were crawling over the fatty surface of one of the containers that had grown dark red and shiny with age. Of course, I said to myself, this sequence has to go into the film. (3) I had filmed a Hamar man dancing in front of women and his age mates. Later, when editing, I found that in one sequence where the man was raising his arms up high above his head, attention was drawn to a bird that had begun to circle in the sky above him. Of course, I was all too happy to include this detail in the film. (4) Jean Lydall (my wife) and Kaira Strecker (my daughter) had filmed a group of women holding and supporting Sago’s young second wife as she was giving birth to a baby outdoors and in the heat of the day. At the cli-

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max of this dramatic event, just as the baby is being born, a dog appears in the picture—sniffing and trying to get close to what is happening—only to be kicked away by the women. This scene was again an example of what I call co-presence, which—as I argue below—contributes much to the validity and evocative power of an ethnographic film. (5) The first time I watched Judith MacDougall’s film Diya I liked it especially because many seemingly accidental elements—like butterflies—kept entering the picture. The objects, subjects, actions, and events that were the central theme of the film were enriched, as it were, by the co-presence of other nonanticipated phenomena. Now, what is it that makes such co-presence in film so precious? In what follows I will try to answer this question and show how co-presence might be a useful concept to understand the evocative power of images not only in ethnographic film but in other domains of culture as well. Co-presence is constitutive of the world whether it is captured on film or not, for there is nothing that exists by itself. So, how should we approach this very wide and elusive topic? I suggest that the writings of Stephen Tyler can help us along, especially the chapters on collocation theory and meaning schemata in The Said and the Unsaid (Tyler 1978). According to Tyler there are four meaning schemata that govern our perception and naïve explanations of the world: (1) existence, (2) attribution, (3) function, and (4) comparison. To paraphrase Lakoff and Johnson (1980), these are schemata “we live by.” We use them constantly in our daily lives, and just as they allow us to act meaningfully in the world, they also help us with the task of ethnographic filming. Thus, meaning schemata guide our attention and provide the lens through which we can focus and produce images that catch our and other people’s attention and have the power to surprise and generate evocation. To begin with the schemata of existence: They allow us to find, realize, and discover the presence of something. They express the act of pointing, like when there is a bird or squirrel hidden in a tree and you point to it and say, “There it is; can’t you see it?” As we try to perceive the world, we almost immediately shift from schemata of existence to schemata of attribution. That is, we shift from the assertion that such and such a thing, subject, substance, etc. exists to focusing on the characteristics that are relevant in the present situation: “Can’t you see the bird? Look, it is yellow, bright yellow!” “Can’t you see the squirrel? It is brown, dark brown!” In other words, attribution allows us to attend more closely to specific qualities of particular phenomena. Very importantly, the process of attribution is part of our projective faculties. As Ray Jackendoff has pointed out in Semantics and Cognition (Jackendoff

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1983), our sensorium is not just a passive recipient but actively seeks out what it wants to experience. Therefore we live in a projected world. Our senses constantly search for relevant stimuli—good or bad—experienced as taste, touch, smell, hearing, or sight. Our senses dwell on what is relevant for us. Much of the astonishment and evocation arising from our primary experience of the world is related to attribution: we wonder and ponder about the redness of blood, the whiteness of snow, the blackness of coal, the translucence of the sky, the hardness of stone, the softness of a feather, and so on. The camera is able to capture and even enhance this wondering about the nature of things. In fact, photography and film were invented partly to explore and document the most primary states and processes in the world. Prototypical examples from the early days of the cinema are leaves falling, smoke rising, an animal running, or tears shimmering in a human eye. There would be much to say about the role of attribution both in our daily life and in the creation of ethnographic film, but let me now turn to a further set of meaning schemata. These are the schemata of function. Many distinctive features of substances, objects, subjects, and occurrences are perceived in terms of their use and function—by what they do and what they achieve. We see a mug and think of tea or coffee, we see a spoon and think of soup, we see a fork and think of spaghetti, we see a table knife and think of meat, and the like. Although the perception of attributes is primarily grounded in the senses, the perception of function is based mainly on mental interpretative power. But, as Giambattista Vico has noted already centuries ago, being human, we only really understand what we have created ourselves. All the myriad elements of the cosmos, the symphony of the stars at night, the rocks and soils of the earth, and even such things as the sweet smell of a flower remain ultimately mysterious to us. Only God, the Creator, can know their full meaning. With culture it is different. Here women and men are the creators and consequently can know the meaning of things in terms of their functions. This knowledge in turn is largely culture specific. Thus, a fork may in one culture speak of spaghetti (as was mentioned earlier), but in others it may not have this function or even have no function at all. Much of our active lives are governed by meaning schemata of function, for without knowing and communicating to one another how things are and how they work, we could not live together—in fact, we could not survive. One of the main tasks of anthropology is to illuminate functional meanings, be they universal or culture specific. This is why—ever since Bronislaw Malinowski—all sorts of functional schools have played an important role in ethnography and anthropological theory. Also, as Franz Boas pointed out in his writings about art, we have chains of functions that interrelate and become manifest in the appearance and the aesthetics of

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particular objects: A vessel made of clay reveals the hand that molded it; a vessel made of bronze reveals the hammer that shaped it; a vessel made of wood reveals the knife that carved it. Or better, the different vessels reveal a kind of human energy that is both mental and physical and may or may not involve the use of further objects (tools) that in turn are subject to the same process (for tools have their own appearance and aesthetics‚ and tools are themselves often made with the help of tools). An exploration of the relationship between form and function in culture lay at the heart of anthropology as practiced especially in the museums of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. In fact there were whole schools, like the Kulturkreislehre as developed by Graebner, Father Schmidt, and others, who devoted their research to the way in which particular functions may reveal themselves in particular forms, or, on the contrary, where similar forms would have different functions. The fact that different forms may serve similar functions, and that similar functions may lead to different forms, inspired not only much theorizing but also a whole range of research and documentation, and it is here where ethnographic film has an interesting role to play. Here, in the domain of how to do things with tools (to paraphrase Austin’s title “How to do Things with Words”: 1962) ethnographic film made its first major contributions. I think there is no need to go into further detail here, because it is wellknown that this genre of ethnographic film has played and still is playing a role at distinguished museums such as the British Museum, the Ethnographic Museum of Osaka, the Völkerkunde Museum at Berlin, the Museum of Natural History in New York, and so on. But before I turn to the meaning schemata of comparison, let me note again that both schemata of attribution and function entail some kind of co-presence and imply some kind of relationship between one phenomenon and another. Our senses “dwell”—as Heidegger says—on the “So-Sein” (so-being) of things; that is, they focus on their relevant attributes and distinctive features. Or, to use the more dramatic concept favored by Nietzsche: we experience the world and make it our own by incorporating its particular elements, just like gnawing on a piece of bone ore taking in the sweet smell of a flower. In terms of rhetoric, the relationship between subject/object and its attributes may be called metonymical because it entails causation. The flower causes sweet smell; the fire causes heat. All good filmmakers are keenly aware of this referential power of attributes and therefore try to make full use of it. In fact, following Frazer, one may speak of the magic of attributes because film as an art of the concrete always has to focus on the visibly accessible, which in turn magically evokes a totality by means of its attributes. As I pointed out earlier, subjects/objects may similarly “speak” about their functions. The nail

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evokes the hammer, and the hammer evokes the nail (and the nail evokes wood or similar material). Thus, like the meaning schemata of attribution, the schemata of function entail complex forms of co-presence that are constantly exploited in ethnographic film. The most important meaning schemata of comparison are (1) comparison in terms of time, (2) comparison in terms of space, and (3) comparison in terms of resemblance. Arguably, all these schemata of comparison have to do with some kind of co-presence. But what kind of co-presence is it, and how is it used for the creation of meaning—and also astonishment and evocation—in ethnographic film and elsewhere? Let me first turn to the meaning schemata of time. Time is one of the most elementary ways in which we experience life and also structure our films. There are many films that try to break out of time, for example, Robert Gardner’s Rivers of Sand, but as much as they may try, time is always there, and each time speaks of another time, for the past and the future are always implied by the present. At a conference of the American Anthropological Association that I once attended, Alessandro Duranti held a workshop about simultaneity, and it may be useful to recall some of the main points that were made then: We tend to think, as Jacobson and Lévi-Strauss would say, both in syntagmatic and paradigmatic fashion, we experience life both diachronically and synchronically. Thus, when we listen to a myth or when we engage in a telephone conversation and so on, our mind does both, it takes in what is being said at the moment and simultaneously it engages in prospective and retrospective thoughts that evaluate what will be said and what has been said. The story, the conversation, the events could go this way or that way, and it is precisely this higher order of awareness that allows for tension, drama, and astonishment. Filmmakers know this and exploit meaning schemata of time accordingly. The simplest and very effective way is to link schemata of time with schemata of function, like when you see a fisherman pull his boat into the water early in the morning. This scene immediately evokes a range of other possible scenes, and depending on the circumstances viewers will create anticipatory stories of good luck or disaster. There is no need to elaborate here, only to emphasize again, that good—that’s to say, both interesting and instructive ethnographic— films create a fabric of actual and potential events, and they live by the fruitful prospective and retrospective evocations that they are able to create. Meaning schemata of space are indispensable for orientation. Therefore, ethnographic filmmakers take care to create meaningful spatial textures in which the drama of everyday life takes place. Often the spatial order of things emerges automatically as events unfold, and the task of filming entails a noticing and making full use of existing dimensions of space. Yet there are also limitations, and there is probably no one who has not felt some kind of frus-

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tration when her or his experience of real—and often vast—expanses of space and time have to be shrunk and can only be evoked by means of thoughtful selection of images at the editing table. Just as with time, there is drama inherent in space: The here always evokes a there, as the now evokes a then. Or rather, the here may evoke a there, and the now may evoke a then, and it is part of the creativity of the filmmaker to lead the viewer in such a way that she/he wants—even longs—to know more about the there while being confronted with the here. To give an example: You can film an indoor scene in such a way that the outdoor environment intrudes at times that makes one want to know what is going on out there. Or, the other way round, you could film some outdoor events in such a way that the viewers would want to know what is going on inside. Bury the Spear!, my most recent film, begins, for example, with scenes of children playing outdoors. Then some of the children run to and vanish inside a house. This creates a moment of curiosity and interest. The viewers want to know what is happening in there and follow the children in their minds. Or take an example from David MacDougall’s camera work in Lorang’s Way. Here MacDougall has filmed the socio-drama of Lorang, his son, and his age-mates debating in the shade of a tree in such a way that the physical spaces between the participants mirror their social and emotional distances. At times the camera works by way of ellipsis. It deliberately excludes participants from the picture to show their isolation, and then again, it frames certain parts of the group in such a way that their social togetherness and complicity is brought to the fore. Further meaning schemata are those of resemblance. They abound in all ethnographic films because they provide the means by which figures like metaphor, allegory, hyperbole, irony, etc. are created. To better understand the relationship between schemata of resemblance, astonishment, and evocation, it may be useful to recall the recent and not so recent debates about representation in ethnography, especially the writing culture discussion in which Tyler also played a part. Ethnography, so the argument goes, inescapably carries allegorical meanings. Although the participant observers speak of the culturally others, they also speak of themselves and their own culture. Even more complicated: During the course of fieldwork, the distant becomes near and the near becomes distant, and the alien becomes familiar and the familiar becomes alien. It is this dynamic and interactive relationship between self and other—rhetorically expressed as a chiasmus—that underlies all anthropological projects, including ethnographic film. Now, either consciously knowing or unconsciously sensing that schemata of resemblance are their most powerful tools mentally and emotionally to in-

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volve and captivate their audiences, ethnographic filmmakers have always strived to give their films some kind of metaphorical or allegorical power. Or expressed differently, they would hope that during the making of their films such kind of higher order of meaning would emerge, a meaning that causes astonishment and evocation. Over the past thirty years, Jean Lydall and I have made several ethnographic films as part of our ethnographic work in southern Ethiopia, but only the titles of our latest films—Duka’s Dilemma and Bury the Spear!—signal that not only others but also our own lives might be involved, for who does not daily experience some kind of dilemma, and who does not feel involved when she or he hears the advice (or reprimand or command) Bury the Spear!? Duka is a woman, and her dilemma arises from a triangular relation involving a man and two women. This is a problematic that characterizes much of contemporary Western style of life, and it will come to no surprise that Jean had experienced the same kind of dilemma in her own life. Duka’s dilemma was also partly Jean’s, even though the circumstances and modalities of the conflict were different. It is precisely this simultaneous difference and sameness that activates the projective thoughts and feelings of the filmmaker and her audience. In other words, it is the co-presence of the self and the other that makes the film so enriching. Although Duka’s Dilemma primarily features women, Bury the Spear! mostly involves men, especially an old political spokesman—Grazmatch Surra—who puts all his energy into creating peace between culturally different groups that have been at war with one another. The film was edited during the then raging war on Iraq, and at times I would see Kofi Annan on television while simultaneously having Grazmatch Surra before me on the editing screen. In spite of difference in age and culture, I found a striking resemblance between the two men. Their spirit, their unperturbed insistence that right is right and wrong is wrong, was the same, and in the end I decided that nothing would please Grazmatch Surra more than a dedication of the film to his younger brother, the United Nations General Secretary. This endorsement of the analogical layering and aiming for metaphorical co-presence in ethnographic film should not be mistaken for a new kind of ethnocentrism. Rather it should be understood as a search for mutual relevance. David MacDougall has called his first collection of essays Trans-cultural Cinema (MacDougall 1998), and I think that he had precisely this kind of copresent relevance in mind. To conclude, let me return to where I started. The feather in the wind, the flies on the milk container, the bird above the dancer, the dog at the scene of birth, the butterflies above the wet clay, even though they may not have been noticed during the actual filming, later cast their spell on the filmmaker at the

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editing table and the audiences in the cinema. Maybe not everyone will be responsive, but those who are inclined to succumb to the magic of these images will agree that they have the power to cause evocations such as the following: The feather that moves across the initiate’s face may (but need not) evoke his feelings of being at the mercy of others; the flies that gather on the container may (but need not) evoke the richness of milk; the bird above the dancer may (but need not) evoke his ambition to rise high; the dog being kicked away from the scene of birth may (but need not) evoke the father who at this occasion has no place among the women; and the butterflies above the wet clay may (but need not) evoke the playful character of the potter’s family and the fanciful vessels they produce.

References Austin, John Langshaw. 1962. How to do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Jackendoff, Ray. 1983: Semantics and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. MacDougall, David. 1998. Transcultural Cinéma. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tyler, Stephen. 1978. The Said and the Unsaid. New York: Academic Press.










Part II

Performance

CHAPTER 5

Captivated by Ritual Visceral Visitations and the Evocation of Community Klaus-Peter Köpping








Historical Flashback: Astonishment, Evocation, and Inter-Cultural Encounter A nice case of astonishment is depicted in Bob Connally and Robin Anderson’s film First Contact (1983), which shows the response of New Guinean Highlanders who had never encountered white people. While at the beginning the whites were perceived by the New Guinea Highlanders as uncanny, as ghost- or god-like, marvelous creatures, the empirical proof that they shat made them rethink and newly categorize the visitors as human like themselves. This empiricism overcame the astonishment and led to a renegotiation of the relationships. It is this sense of wonder that lies at the very roots of the first historically documented ethnographer’s experience. A sense of curiosity about things non-Greek permeated the descriptions of Herodotus when he spoke of the so-called marvelous customs of foreign ethnic peoples. At the same time he incorporated these strange habits into the universe of Greek discourse, for instance through aligning foreign deities with Greek names (maybe one of the earliest incidences of evocation). However, Herodotus also drew a line for his own and his reader’s imaginations: things that were secret and sacred in the described foreign cultures were to be left unsaid. His Greek notion of aidos (“shame”) intervened and put limits to his curiosity.

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Stephen Greenblatt has devoted a whole oeuvre to this notion of the marvelous in describing the reactions of early explorers encountering the New World (Greenblatt 1991). He describes how the Calvinist French explorer Léry (1536–1613)1 changed from an attitude of denigrating South American women’s dance ceremonies as similar to the satanic practices ascribed to witches in sixteenth-century Europe to an attitude of utter ravishment. Once, driven by curiosity, he approached the women’s dancing place to witness himself what was happening. Whenever he recalled (remembered or reflected upon) this scene later, he reported that his heart began to flutter as he recalled the harmony and polyphony of the singing women. As Greenblatt points out, the source of new insight is here a physiological reaction for which European theology provided an underpinning through Albertus Magnus (1200–1280). Albertus characterized people’s reaction to miracles as a “constriction of the heart” and saw in astonishment a “gut-wrenching” internal, affective state. Only through Descartes and Spinoza was this affective center relocated in the brain, which becomes paralyzed, as astonishment blocks its normal functioning.

Shock Waves: Captivated by a Ritual Event In the middle of the 1990s I started out on research in a number of Japanese villages that had kept alive and had revived a unique form of ritual dances— their origins shrouded in mystery but with historical sources going back to the fifteenth century—conducted without the involvement of any canonized Buddhist or Shinto priests.2 Villagers were putting on the masks of Japanese deities from the classical Shinto mythology about the origins of creation (such as the Sun Goddess) and of a number of folk-religious divinities such as the spirits of the elements (among them water and fire) or of boundary-protecting theriomorphic spirits (such as the imaginary protector of boundaries, the Tengu, or “Hound from Heaven.” The latter’s grotesquely long nose always gives rise to expectable jocular interventions with double entendre allusions between performers and onlookers. The focus and center belonged to the performances of the main generic divinity of the whole Alpine region, the mountain god (Yama-no-kami) in his several manifestations. The modalities of the dances varied from slow-motion repetitions of the main steps during the dances of the age-cohort of the threeto five-year-old children, with their almost clumsy execution aided by elder brothers or uncles, to a frenzied whirling of skilled older youths. Only boys were admitted, and in due course they were followed by older men, some of them well into their late sixties, in sedate and choreographically perfected per-

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formances, all in very splendid clothing with a variety of emblems ranging from bird-shaped icons to stylized sacred color symbolism (the five colors of Taoism and the stock-forms of clans like lozenges or circles)3. All dancers were orchestrated by a lay-priest who was also the leader of the accompanying musical group playing flutes and drums. He himself was in charge of the leading instrument, a huge drum, which determined the speed, acceleration as well as denouement of the dancing mode. The elaborate dances were endlessly reiterated4 around a boiling cauldron put on a clay oven constructed only a few days before and situated under a multicolored canopy with sacred Shinto emblems (among them sun, moon, shrine, tree, or bird shapes). As we watched the spectacle, astonishment befell me, as much as my educated Japanese companions, though, as I shall extend further on, for different reasons. We all shared a sense of awe about these never-seen forms of nonconventional behavior, of frenzied communal dancing in the middle of the night in the (almost) impenetrable Alpine forests with meters of piled-up snow. The wild if choreographed extravaganza of the dancers and the strange ritual proceedings made some of my Japanese companions remark that this was “like being in Africa,” and they wondered whether this was indeed a part of their own, their familiar culture. As an educated woman from Tokyo—a classical piano player—remarked to me during some particularly wild dance: “It feels like stone age alive.” This was not meant as a derogatory statement about village people. Rather it was a comment on the strange attractiveness of these ritual dances of someone who had come as an indigenous tourist and who had been promised a return to the roots of truly authentic Japanese culture. Another response came from one of the university students who expressed his amazement saying, “This looks like an image of the ‘Western Paradise.’” By this, he referred to a specifically Buddhist concept of the Amida Buddhism, that of the merciful Amida Buddha who is surrounded by angelic spirits dancing and whirling through the air in colorful robes. For this student, the dances were thus a perfect expression of the idea of the sublime. This accorded with the interpretations the villagers gave themselves of the dancing of the mountain god: He appears in the beginning using very sedate steps and taking on the posture of authority by slowly stamping the ground, stemming his arms into his hips and planting his halberd into the ground. He turns his mask—a benevolent face—in all directions and then accelerates his steps and swings his halberd wildly around (often destroying seemingly unintentionally cameras of tourists who have come too close), ending with a wild and breathless stampede into which the village youths and many of the older already drunken men join in a veritable tohuwabohu. By this they express the other side of the god’s nature (and of the forces of nature): that of rage and fury,

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anger, aggression, even destruction before they leave the dancing ground and enter the seclusion of the “God-room” (kamibeya, taboo for women). Japanese nature philosophy of Shinto has coined the terms of nigi-mitama and ara-mitama, “gentle soul” and “angry soul,” for this dual or ambivalent spirit of the divinity—here perfectly enacted by the figure of the mountain god. In Western aesthetics—especially when it concerns the perception of nature as well as representations of it—one can find a similar ambivalence between the feeling of being attracted by unexpected, fascinating, even “unearthly” beauty on one side, and a feeling of fear and repulsion on the other side. German romantic philosophy experienced this elusive polarity of bliss and dread as the sublime, labeling it the Schaurig-Schöne. English romanticism similarly used the term to express the ambivalence of sensory impressions that evoke the infinity, grandeur, and elegance of the universe while at the same also activating imaginations of a fear about unnamable danger, the terror of the unknown (Burke 1990[1757]).5 This captivating wonder and astonishment was for Burke the wellspring of the sublime. Later, the philosopher Rudolf Otto was to go further when he postulated that awe, the awesome experience of the awful, is the source of all religion and the conception of the sacred (Otto 1917).

The Duty of Performative Participation Before I extend this notion of the awe-inspiring and awful forces of nature expected to appear and to invigorate the dancers and the whole festive assembly, extending to the community and the country at large, let me first turn to what happened when I had arrived and begun to take ethnographic notes. People said: “Don’t write, just dance with us!” They insisted that I should not maintain my role as observer with movie camera and pencil. I had to join with the singers and the lay-priest in intoning the sacred words by sitting at the same level with them on the tatami floor in front of the altar. I was forced, as it were, into the honor of becoming a part of the community. Later this was extended to several dance sequences, when I was invited by the drummer and at times by the dancers. This was a part of demonstrating the communal spirit of the occasion. This partly pleasant experience of being invited, and partly uncomfortable feeling of making a fool of myself in public to the raucous laughter of other festival visitors, made me remember my first field encounter decades before in another setting. In 1967 I had tried to interview the founder of a new religious movement, Mrs. Sayo Kitamura. But this so-called living goddess soon told me: “Don’t be an ass; don’t ask learned questions; just dance with us!” This finished my first attempt at getting to the bottom of her divine calling and her inner voices, and

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my whole scholarly endeavor was thrown into question before I could even start it. Yet, from that time onward I slowly began to understand that sharing in their performances was the only way to gain access and comprehend the villagers’ experiences. As I watched and took part in the ritual of the mountain god, my reason for astonishment, even bewilderment, began to take hold when remembering my earlier fieldwork experiences. Not that I did not also experience the astonishment at the elegance as well as exuberance, even raucousness of the occasion as did my Japanese companions, delving into the dancing mass of bodies and thus possibly experiencing something of that which Alfred Gell so aptly called “the abduction of agency.”6 It also struck me that I was encountering again a manifestation of an induction of hara, of “belly.” Mrs. Sayo Kitamura also had made hara the seat of her vocation, as she actually believed to have the divinity in her belly and that her belly was actually a replacement of the defunct sanctuary of the whole Japanese nation. What did I encounter here? Did the villagers use the metaphor of the belly in the same way as did businessmen when they get drunk after work? Or when Mrs. Kitamura spoke of herself as seat of the future divinity? My wondering has not diminished over the years, as I still ask myself, whether I did discover a key metaphor of Japanese self-understanding, of their perception of social and of communal life in terms of a body cosmology. The answer to this question will remain elusive. Nevertheless, let me cut and paste in a fragmentary manner a picture of how the Japanese manage to evoke for one another the notions of self and society by means of body metaphors.

Vertical and Horizontal Body Metaphors A plethora of literature has appeared on the difference that Japanese make in their daily interactions between private and public, between the inner self (uchi) and the outer appearance (soto), between omote (performance, “the front”) and ura (the inner self or hidden backside). The earliest reference was possibly by Portuguese priests who in the sixteenth century complained that they could not read Japanese faces, which seemed to appear vacant and not disclose their true intentions (see Valigniano 1581).7 The literature that has accumulated since Ruth Benedict’s study Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946; famous in anthropological circles, often considered notorious in Japanese interpretations and counteraccounts) and the less often quoted Mirror, Sword and Jewel by the German emigrant Kurt Singer (1997, first published in English in 1973) is proverbially unending, as are works on the Japanese character, soul, or personality.

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This general use of key metaphors of the house (entrance hall and public versus inner private quarters), with attending behavioral attitudes, generally stresses a horizontal axis, which, if the head is taken as model (as metaphor for the house and vice versa), draws a line from the face to the center of thinking (often translated as kokoro, actually the “heart,” yet implying a thinking, reflexive modality). The examples I am assembling here, however, use the metaphor of a vertical axis, contrasting the belly, hara, with the head, or the conventional behavior of the face, kao, as calculated performative act, thus making the belly a focus and locus of transgression, boundary crossing as well as finding the inner self on a collective as well as individual plane. To make my point and illustrate my amazement and enchantment, let me contrast the performances and interpretations of the mountain village festival with those of Mrs. Kitamura.

Community Spirit in Folk Rituals The general notion behind the dance rituals of the mountain god is the expectation that the deities will manifest themselves in the dancing persons, so that the mask that represents the divinity will take over the person underneath, bringing to the fore not the face of the dancer (hidden by the mask) but the power of the divinity permeating the inner person of the mask-wearer. The festival is considered a success if and when the divinity is felt to be present, the symptoms of which are the uncontrolled movements of the dancers (who however will still follow the predetermined rhythmic modes and choreographed steps of the performance). Uncontrollability is a sign for the presence of divine forces. The precondition for this partly desired, partly dreaded appearance of divine energy is not only the ritual invocation (the divinities of all of Japan have been called down upon the focus of the ceremonies, the boiling kettle of water around which the dancers whirl in endless repetitions, within the square ritual space, marked by the sacred rope, shimenawa, and the four poles holding the sacred baldaquin above the kettle),8 but the resonance emerging within the festive ritual space. The spirit permeating the festival is one of general hilarity, raucousness, and festive exuberance, induced by dancing, musical accompaniment—in particular through the leading drum—as well as the copious intake of rice wine. The major result is supposed to be a form of possession or madness, overtaking and taking over dancers and audience, revealing the power of the divine. In former times—before the suppression of these so-called obnoxious habits of the folk-religious practices through the enlightened push for rationalization through the Meiji government after the 1880s—excesses of sexual license, bawdiness, and uncontrolled forms of violence were reported, with the climax

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of the abode of the house owner sponsoring the festival in a particular year being ransacked and destroyed in a potlatch-like destruction.9 Some of the violence, sexual innuendo, and uncouth behavior can still be observed in some places today. The reasoning behind this is that the true personality of the individual normally governed by social mores, by face-saving as well as face-giving conventions and forms of politeness, can find expression at these occasions. The true nature of humans, unconstrained by any social norms, is given free reign. Much of this behavior is understood as an expression of hara, the belly as true seat of human natural drives. But, paradoxically, this behavior also regenerates the consociality of the villagers, “restores peace to the community,” as one leader of the lay priesthood expressed it. Indications about hara nature and how to have it induced are also given by performers, who when asked about their ability to learn on the spot what they had not done previously say that they acquired it through the skin, indicating that the body surface is seen as a porous cover that can be penetrated in much the same way as the divinity represented by the masks penetrates the inner parts of the dancing representative. One of the high points of hilarity and joyous consociality occurred when the sacred mask of the sun goddess appeared. This led to an improvised obscenity (admittedly not quite spontaneous but rather ritually expected and staged). In one instance the sidekick companion of the sun goddess, the widecheeked Okame-mask (actually a man) began to throw “herself ” onto a man in the crowd, initiating the movements of wild intercourse from the rear. The hilarity for the villagers derived not only from the joke on the particular member of the community, but from the inversion of role-play and the simulation of homosexual intercourse. The whole dance festival was a recollection of elements of the past (ancestors, myths) as well as an attempt to create or recreate a social solidarity for which the generic term matsuri is applied. All matsuri evoke the feeling of medetai, “well-being,” auspicious convivial, and communal laughter. Part of this is that the belly is regarded as the seat of life forces, of feelings and emotions. A person with guts is referred to in habitual speech as “one who has belly” (hara ga aru hito). The mask allows a person to show belly, whether as true nature or the appearance of the divine. The inner true nature is also the one that bounds in consociality with other bodies, and all of them may show in their nonconventional merging in the dancing mass the true nature of the Japanese spirit, referred to as yamato-damashii. This latter term has been used since at least the seventeenth century by a literary and religious revival movement that stressed the very specific nature of the Japanese spirit as being different from all foreign accretions, in particular from the Chinese influences. The writers of the seventeenth-century literary

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movement of Kokugaku, or “national learning” (forefathers of modern nationalism of the early 1900s and continued today in the unending literature on nihonjinron, on “theories of Japaneseness,” an obsessive quest), reverted to an older, more authentic Japanese culture and national understanding assumed to lie buried in the oldest mythological records of the eighth century the true etymological (and social as well as cultural) roots of which were to be discoverable through linguistic and literary reconstruction. Japan is in these sources referred to as Yamato, which early interpretations spelled with the ideograms of peacefulness and, of course, as the land that the sun goddess herself began to fashion, to populate, and to rule finally through her grandson (Ninigi no Mikoto, the first Tenno). The concept of yamato damashii, the “soul of Yamato,” is invoked in all cases when an individual shows, for instance, sudden rage, aggression or forcefulness, daring and dashing verve, or endurance in adversity and courage against all odds. Among the participants of the village festivals I could not detect any particular nationalistic attitude, but people did refer to the feeling of bodies in the dancing mass and the accruing consociality as an expression of inner selfhood as well as ethnic solidarity among all Japanese. It is partly for such adumbrations that many state institutions and travel agents as well as scholarly treaties recommend these particular festivals as a return to the true Japanese spirit, the authentic origins that an outside observer might easily debunk as self-exoticizing ideology. I would be more cautious and prone to stress the performative aspects of calling upon and embodying the unseen, bringing it into presence, be it the inner self or the communal spirit of solidarity or the divine forces. I am using performatively in the double sense of moving from playing alterity to being effectively and affectively overcome by it. The main feature that I think is too easily overlooked is the ambiguity that one is aiming to achieve through a performative practice, a surpassing of the boundaries of everyday conventionality, that is, to overcome also the dichotomy between face and true intention, governing the normal routine situations, by—paradoxically—putting on those masks that would innervate (to use Benjamin’s apt neologism)10 the inner being of hara (as a direct metaphor for divine forces), while hiding the face. Transgression as means to reach the true individual inner self as well as the driving force behind the craving for communal solidarity must not be conceived as contradictions in this repertoire of dancing for the gods, which simultaneously indicates that the gods are dancing.11 In the concrete imaginary of the participants (in particular the performing deities), the dance rituals are occasions when gods and men meet, and in the same way as one eats with them (after having presented the food offerings) after finishing the ritual dances, when everybody joins in a communal meal (naorai) on the dance ground in

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front of the temporary divinity shrines, one mingles during the dances with the gods, once a year, to incur auspiciousness for humans and the rest of nature as a form of cosmic regeneration.

The Spirit of the Nation in a Woman’s Belly When I met Mrs. Kitamura a year before her death, she was the acknowledged foundress and leader of the religious group called the Dancing Religion (Odoru Shukyo). She taught that the place of her first calling by the divine spirit lodged in her body. Her Headquarters at Tabuse (70 km south of Hiroshima in Yamaguchi Prefecture) was where the new paradise on earth was proclaimed and from which the salvation of mankind would be brought forth. The religious group identified with a female-male spiritual entitiy, of Tensho Kotai Jingu Kyo, as “Teachings of the Sun Goddess and the Sacred Shrine of Ise” (Kotai Jingu being the term for the inner shrine of Ise, whereas the concept of Tensho refers to the sun goddess herself, Amaterasu Omikami, literally, the “Heavenly Shining One”). Mrs. Kitamura implied that her body contained a double divinity, a male and female spirit encompassing the sun goddess Amaterasu Omikami and her sacred shrine at Ise, historically understood as the place where the emperor would worship his ancestress and where for all Japanese the spirit of the nation, yamato damashii, was embodied (according to mythological references from the eighth century). There is a remarkable reversal here: Mrs. Kitamura substituted the place of the Imperial Descent and took over the role of the emperor as living deity (ikigami) symbolizing the body politic and body social of the Japanese nation. In 1945, when she founded her religious group and began to preach the new way of salvation, she certainly subverted the whole imperial system when she aggressively pointed to the emptiness of imperial and called herself the radio of the universal god—the ruling classes maggot beggars. As a result, she was often charged with insult of the majesty and at times imprisoned. But after the constitutional declaration of the freedom of religion and the abolishment of the emperor’s divine status in 1945, she was spared the fate of many other religious founders with similar messages who after the mid1930s were thrown into prison and often died there. Mrs. Kitamura’s religious strategies were manifold: not only did she take over the national symbolism, she also inverted the gender orientation of priesthood and emperorship by having the principal deity residing in a peasant women’s body. She was thus the concretization of the abstract national symbol and the founding deity of Japan, the sun goddess Amaterasu. For her

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adherents, supposedly about 4 million people in Japan, with many thousands among the most prominent emigration settlements of Japanese in Hawaii, in other parts of the United States and in South America, Mrs. Kitamura was Ogamisama, the “Great Goddess,” who had not only the gift of prophecy and healing, but also the ritual method for everybody to reach personal salvation through a polishing of the soul. The main feature of this ritual consists in the simple dance of Muga-noOdori (“dance of the non-ego”) and the chanting of the verses of Na-myo-horenge-kyo, which in traditional reading refers to the introductory lines of the Lotus Sutra (Saddharma Pundarika Sutra in Sanskrit, Hokke-Kyo in Japanese), meaning “hail to the revered law of the Lotus Sutra,” or “hail to the revered dharma,” which in Mrs. Kitamura’s interpretation, however, means “hail to the humble woman of the sacred law of the Lotus Sutra” (substituting in the syllabic pronunciation of myo, normally added to the Buddhist Sutras and written with the ideogram of “mysterious,” in this particular case as Supreme Law of Buddha, myoho, by inserting the ideogram for a homophone meaning “humble woman”). I concentrated in previous writings about the group on this very feature of the subversive embodiment of the word-becoming-flesh notion in Japanese historical context and thus on theoretical considerations of millenarian and eschatological orientations (see Köpping 2001). However, I think that Mrs. Kitamura’s conversion and initiation narrative is of great relevance for an understanding of body symbolism, in particular of how the visceral speaks. As she told it, she certainly considered the state of being possessed by a divine spirit as a form of true visitation. She reported on the tribulations of this experience quite drastically. Thus, while the original objective of her penance of nightly visits and cold water ordeals at a local mountain shrine was to find the culprit in the village who had set fire to the barn of her family (or rather the family she had married into)—a typical kind of local folk-religious witch-finding ritual—she soon was possessed by an entity who gave her headaches. On consultation of a mendicant Buddhist healer, she was advised to exorcise this snake-spirit. However, all attempts at this failed, and the symptoms of headaches, dizziness, and spells of vertigo increased, until the entity in her head informed her that he was part of the Universal Divine Spirit, the male messenger who would prepare her body for the reception of his consort, the sun goddess. She, Mrs. Kitamura, addressed by the spirit as Oayos (her first name as honorific), was to be the mouthpiece of the new universal truth. If she would not obey, he, the spirit in her head, identified now as the Shrine of Ise (Kotai Jingu), would stamp on her entrails and make her bleed to death. In the meantime he had to cleanse her body, and Mrs. Kitamura reported that for a long time she vomited and had diarrhea and also blood in the stool.

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Although this initiatory narrative can easily be assimilated to a general paradigm of shamanic possession and calling, as found in many Northeast Asian reports on shamanism (see Czaplicka 1914), it seems to be of specific metaphoric relevance in regard to the notion of evacuation of the belly. Several transformations are involved here: the normal shamanic vocation changes from a village based healing cult or peripheral ritual to a central morality cult,12 replacing the existing major national morality cult of State Shinto and worship of the emperor as descendant of the sun goddess in direct blood line. It is now not the emperor who embodies the nation, but the living body of the peasant woman. This is achieved by a cleansing of the body in the form of the unassimilable (as Derrida labeled vomit) and transforming the old body contents into the formlessness of waste, debunking the old ideology and putting traditional power on the rubbish heap of history. The new dawn of history, of paradise on earth, is metaphorically expressed by the cleansed body of a woman who will be pregnant with a male-female divinity. Expulsion of detritus and the promising fertility of a new age are synthesized in multivalent body imagery. The belly stands for the historical abode of the sun goddess, the shrine of Ise. As this shrine is also periodically rebuilt, one may perceive the belly of Mrs. Kitamura as the last and final rebuilding. This was enacted by Mrs. Kitamura during her lifetime13 on a daily basis: Again and again she falls into trance, after which she speaks with different voices attributed her divine agencies, while her adherents chant the mantra that makes their bodies reverberate and achieve a somatic consonance the foundress, emptying their minds through body reverberations, chanting, and the dance of the non-ego (with closed eyes). Remarkable seems to me also Mrs. Kitamura’s changed sensory arsenal: as she could now hear the voices of the divine (having a cleansed hearing) and smell the musk of angels (a new sense of olfactory refinement), she also could no longer stand “the smell of rotten humanity.” Therefore she expelled her husband from her bedside (Köpping 2001).

The Paradox of the Belly and the Metaphor of Visitations Remarkable is the reference to visitations by the divinity. At one of my many revisits to the headquarters at Tabuse, the present leader of the group, the granddaughter of Mrs. Kitamura, who is addressed as Himegamisama (Divine Princess), herself having been educated in Oxford and Cambridge and also a gifted interpreter of German Lieder, often told me that she had not directly received the calling and actually dreaded it. Divine interventions are indeed perceived as longed for but at the same time terrifying expectations and experiences, as visitations.

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The New Religious Movement is almost free of jocular hilarity and sexual innuendo, rather evoking the viscerality of a new birth through the imagery of inter feces et urinam nascimur (an Augustinian as well as Rabelaisian basis in European thinking about birthing and being in the world). The carnevalesque modality of the same body imagery, inducing laughter and happiness, stands behind the obscene interlude of the folk ritual, pointing to a mythical precedent: the story of the sun goddess hiding in a cave, until, as it says, the fertility goddess Uzume performed an obscene dance by manipulating her genitalia (a Japanese referencing of a similar motif found in the Baubo stories of the Greek mythology surrounding the fertility goddess Demeter, historically reconstructable through being retold in veiled form by the Church Fathers, see Georges Devereux 1981; on Uzume/Baubo see Köpping 2009). However, both rituals play with the imagery of evacuating the mind through involvement in dancing. As an afterthought, it should be added here, that the ribald festivities of folk rituals are preceded through body- and soul-cleansing rituals of abstention, fasting, and cold water ordeals as well. No feasting without fasting, as it were: or on a more serious note, the main ritual or sacred dances had to be performed by those dancers who had emptied their bodies to receive the divine forces. This leads to the paradox that the very seat of emotional drives, uncontrollable desire, that is, hara, needs to be activated to cleanse the mind of those very drives. While the dancing religion wants to free the mind from obsession with hidden dimensions of the hara, the matsuri folk dances want to use these very powers to induce a consociality based upon the body. References Averbuch, Irit. 1995. The Gods Came Dancing. A Study of Japanese Ritual Dance of Yamabushi Kagura. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Bataille, Georges. 1958 [1932]. “The Notion of Expenditure.” In Georges Bataille—Visions of Excess; Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed., Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 116–129. Bataille, Georges. 1965 [1957]. L’erotisme. Paris: Édition de Minuit. Benedict, Ruth. 1946. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Patterns of Japanese Culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Burke, Edmund. 1990 [1757]. Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Caillois, Roger. 1950. L’homme et le sacre. Paris: Plon. Cooper, Michael, ed. 1965. They Came to Japan. An Anthology of European Reports on Japan, 1543–1640. London: Thames and Hudson Czaplicka, Marie Antoinette. 1914. Aboriginal Siberia. A Study in Social Anthropology. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Devereux, Georges. 1981. Baubo. Frankfurt: Syndikat.

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Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency. An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Greenblatt, Stepen. 1991. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hansen, Mirian. 1999. “Innervation—Not a One-Way Street.” Critical Inquiry 25: 306–343. Köpping, Klaus-Peter. 2001. “Shamanism, Female Possession and the Embodiment of National Symbols.” In The Concept of Shamanism: Uses and Abuses, eds., Henri-Paul Francfort and Roberte N. Hamayon. Budapest: Akademiai Klado, 349–366. ———. 2009. “Visceral Laughter and Cosmic Regeneration.” In Risus Sacer-Sacrum Risibile, eds., Katja Gozdeva and Werner Röcke. Frankfurt and Berlin: Peter Lang, 273–292. Léry, Jean de. 1992 [1578]. History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, Otherwise Called America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lewis, I. M. 1971. Ecstatic Religion. An Anthropological Study of Spirit Possession and Shamanism. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Otto, Rudolf. 1917. Das Heilige. Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen. Breslau: Trewendt und Garnier. Singer, Kurt. 1997 [1973]. Mirror, Sword and Jewel. A Study of Japanese Characteristics. London: Japanese Library.

Notes 1. Léry published his experiences about the encounter with the Tupinamba of Brazil in his book of 1578, describing the disastrous expedition of Villegagnon from 1555 to 1558 (Léry 1992). His travelogue was certainly known to Montaigne, whose descriptions of the New World in his Essais von 1580 make him a founding figure for modern anthropological paradigms about the relations of otherness and self. The travelogue was expectably in the reading luggage of Lévi-Strauss at his departure for South America. 2. The communal self-empowerment may only go back to the middle of the seventeenth century, whereas previously conducted rituals connected in this region to esoteric Buddhist teachings, may have been introduced by mendicant yamabushi, or mountain-ascetic priests. Only in Meiji times the appointed village Shinto priests may have gained more influence (see Lee 2006). This is still a contested issue in practice, as I found out in the confrontation with a Shinto priest who attended the first ritual parts of the dances, whereas villagers were performing the rest of the festival, whereby village lay-personnel in organizing the ritual would smirkingly admit to me, that the priest was only insisting on his prerogative because of his position, while in fact they, the lay-personnel, were really able to invoke through their performances the divine presence. 3. The continuity of the age-cohorts was considered an important activity. When I asked some older men why they still put up with this strenuous dancing for many hours at their age, they answered that certain roles were to be inherited by younger men within the family. If there was, for instance, only a grandchild of five years of age to take over the mask or role of an adult, the eldest, the grandfather, had to carry on in performance until the youngster was of the right age. 4. The sequences lasted from between thirty minutes to two hours, with directional change from forward, to the right to backward, to the left, symbolically loaded directionalities, the dancers’ formations opening to or turning away from the audience ar-

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ranged in a rectangle, bounded by sacred evergreens. The directionalities are also five, the four corners, and the center. Edmund Burke’s work carries the full title of Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. The second enlarged edition of 1757 is nowadays available under eBook@Adelaide, 2007. See Alfred Gell 1998. Valigniano was a Neapolitan Jesuit (1539–1606) who together with Ricci wrote the first treatise on Chinese language. He was made superior for the mission in Japan (having first resided in Macao) and introduced the notion of missionary adaptations, meaning that the Jesuits were to follow the ranking system of Japan by themselves having carriers and watchmen like the Japanese feudal lords and also aligning their teachings to precepts of Zen-Buddhism to make them palatable. His observations on his sojourn in Japan from 1579 to 1582 were recorded in his book of 1581, partly translated in Cooper 1965. It should be noted that the sacred ropes are fashioned from hemp by intertwining two huge bundles of strands in opposite directions, making the rope appear like an endlessly undulating wave of recursivity. The recursivity or braidedness of movements in ritual sacred dances seems to be one important feature of the overall performance as well, as the order of steps and the movements of dancers do not only vary from left to right and to and fro in regard to the sacred kettle, but also alternate between forward movements and backward stepping as singular units in the overall performing circle dance. This notion of repetitiveness in recursive manner is referred to in Japanese as modori (“reversal”). However, the discussion of the importance of this form of movement in the context of Japanese notions of the sacred is beyond the scope of this essay. The concept of potlatch as form of excessive expenditure and even destruction of wealth (as among the First Nations of Northern Oregon and Vancouver Island) has been perceived as the key metaphor for festive rituals such as yearly renewals (as extensions of cosmic regeneration)—and thus for limited transgressions—by Georges Bataille (1932), quoting as inspiration Marcel Mauss’s Essai sur le don of 1923–1924. Bataille (1965) extended this notion of excess and expenditure in his major work L’erotisme in 1957, where he also incorporated the observations by Roger Caillois in his L’homme et le sacre (1950). See the English translation of Bataille’s essay The Notion of Expenditure (in Bataille 1958: 116–129). The notion of innervation has been used by Walter Benjamin in relation to the power of the cinematic apparatus to influence the perception of spectators. The concept is highly controversial in what way Benjamin understood a corporeal, even intrasomatic affectation through sensory input. It may be, however, more relevant to experiences of performative encounters than the concept of immersion used by Clifford Geertz, even if caustically, for describing the intentionalities of fieldwork. A detailed analysis of the scope of the concept of innervation with masterly knowledge of the intricacies of Benjamin’s oeuvre has been published by the recently deceased doyenne of film studies, Miriam Hansen, first in the journal Critical Inquiry (see Hansen 1999). Similar theatrical rituals were observed in Northern Japan by Irit Averbuch, who gave her book the apt title The Gods Came Dancing (Averbuch 1995). The original distinction was introduced by I. M. Lewis in referring to trance religious phenomena (Lewis 1971). After her death in 1967 her words have been played to the present-day believers in all churches of the group via the particular tape recording of the sermon of that day.

CHAPTER 6

The Spell of Riddles Among the Witoto Jürg Gasché








I am pleased to contribute to this volume on astonishment and evocation a few pages extracted from my field notes containing transcriptions, translations, linguistic notes, and ethnographic commentaries on a class of songs intended to challenge the cognitive, rhetorical, speculative, and moral capacities of a festival owner among the Amazonian Witoto: the riddle songs. These are accompanied by an introduction situating them within the ritual context of Witoto society, which has been my interlocutor and field of learning for over thirty years. I limit myself to a strictly ethnographic study, without entering into broader scientific debates concerning the discursive genre of the riddles and their rhetorical properties, in the hope that the material itself will gratify a reader sensitive to the wealth of metaphoric and metonymic associations revealed by an Amerindian or Amazonian thought that is neither literary nor esoteric, but realist, competitive, and effective in material and discursive ceremonial exchanges. The Witoto of the Colombian and Peruvian Amazon possess a class of sung dances known as eeiki, a term the Witoto themselves translate as “riddle” or “enigma” (Spanish adivinanza). By means of this type of song, the invited dancers invite the festival owners (rafue naani)—men belonging to the patrilineage of the head of the hosts and their associates—to approach the circle and guess what the words of the song allude to. The youngest men generally make the first attempts to find a solution. Each time they fail, the leader of the singing dancers repeats the song with his companions providing the chorus,

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sometimes adding a few words to indicate the road to the solution. But ultimately the challenge is posed to the festival owner himself, whose knowledge is put on trial and who must prove himself to be a true father in possession of the knowledge appropriate to his role as festival owner. Throughout the preparation and celebration of the festival, he represents the Father-Creator, the Father of all humankind, represented in turn by all the festival’s participants, who are called uruki—a collective noun related to urue, “child.” The German ethnographer Konrad Theodor Preuss, who was collecting Witoto mythology in 1914 (Preuss 1921/1923), also penned a commentary on the uuiki festival, “Festival of the Ball,” in which riddles were sung. His informant relates the following concerning the festival’s function and its riddles: For us the ball is something sacred, it’s part of our soul, even though it looks like a simple game. The ball was given to us in the beginning [by the FatherCreator]. We live thanks to it. If it didn’t exist, the people would be sad. Thanks to it we are happy. During the festival we sing (put forward, pose) the eeiki songs. They’re very long. We get our children to dance just like the Father taught us to dance in the beginning. That’s why the eeiki songs are sung during the uuiki festival. The person who offers the festival is acclaimed among the people. If all that were forgotten, the people would be sad. … When they bring Amazon tree-grapes (Pourouma cecropiaefolia) they ask where the fruit originated from and sing eeiki songs. The people come to ask the chief about history, in order to know it. … If he doesn’t manage to decipher the riddle, the people make fun of him and say, “He doesn’t know.” “How come he doesn’t know the origin of football and yet nevertheless organized this event?” we wonder. On the other hand, if he deciphers it, we believe him and we are happy. … When the chief has deciphered the eeiki song, the group (of singers) disperses. “The song you presented has been deciphered.” “The chief is a man of great knowledge, he knows history since the beginning, he knows a great deal. That’s why he organizes the uuiki ceremony. The owner of this maloca is very knowledgeable, that’s why only he understands the eeiki song, and doesn’t tire.” The eeiki are always sung at night. … The festival is celebrated without any trouble, because at night the people dance and during the day they amuse themselves playing with the ball (Preuss 1994, II: 722–724, 731, 734, 378).

By day, the guests of the uuiki festival play in the front yard of the maloca—the great multifamily house—with the rubber ball known as uuiki, trying to keep it in the air with their knees. This festival is part of one of the various ceremonial careers that distinguish Witoto men and which are characterized by a rising then falling curve of ceremonial prestations and cooperations: extending from the moment a young festival owner succeeds his father and be-

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gins with a modest festival, until his festival of old age, when, again in a more modest festival, he transmits his name and career to his son and takes an old man’s name, passing by the point culminating in his maturity, when, thanks to his numerous sons and matrimonial alliances, he is capable of producing the greatest quantities of bitter manioc, sweet manioc, coca, and tobacco, which are the principle goods used to pay for the ceremonial services (songs, musical instruments, masks, etc.) and the fruits, fish, or meat brought by the many invited guests. The uuiki festival is celebrated when the festival owner is at the peak of his career. At its inception, however, the festivals he organizes are called lluaki and are relatively small. Currently, the uuiki festival is no longer observed in practice. I know a young man who has inherited this career but has not assumed its responsibilities. With his father, in 1974, I was able to record and annotate some ceremonial discourses from his career that he dictated, but I have never attended a ball festival. The lluaki festival, however, is among those that have been preserved to this day, due precisely to its modest requirements and ability to be celebrated by anyone who has horticultural production and wishes to share it for entertainment purposes. It is less prestigious, for having been given to the third and youngest son of the Creator; the dancing beam festival (lladiko) and the bamboo festival (sikii) are meanwhile attributed to the Father and older son, and to the second-born son, respectively, and consequently carry with them greater prestige. They are characterized by great works of wood comprising dancing beam (lladiko), around 12 meters long, hollowed out for resonance and carved with the figures of an alligator and a woman’s face, and either two heavy monoxylous drums (juuai, juuarai), male and female, or two life-sized wooden statues ( janarai) also male and female, depending on the variations of the sikii career. The uuiki ball is the lightest feature of the career of the same name, and its manufacture demands a much smaller investment of work and cooperation than the aforementioned great wooden artifacts, whose elaboration involves a significant labor force in complex relations of ceremonial exchanges. The more prestigious lladiko and sikii ceremonial careers are distinguished from the lluaki and uuiki by the type of ceremonial exchange. In the former festivals, the guests bring fresh or smoked meat to the maloca, where it is celebrated; in the lluaki and uuiki festivals, the guests bring the fruits that the festival owner has commissioned, accompanied by fish and, possibly—if they had the luck to find animals in the forest—smoked meat. For this reason, the lluaki festival is known as the fruit festival ( fiesta or baile de frutos in Spanish). At all the events, the owner pays for the guests’ contributions with goods made from horticultural produce: manioc bread, boiled portions of manioc starch wrapped in palm leaves, peanuts (Arachis hypogaea), yams (Dioscorea sp.), and pineapple (Ananas sativa). A thick broth made from sweet manioc

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(jaigabi), on the part of the women, and coca (jiibie) and tobacco paste (llera), on the part of the men, should be offered to the guests in abundance. All the goods offered by the festival owner have been prepared by the women and men of the maloca (the patrilineage and its wives) and by their affines, who together form the group of workers (nakollae, nakoni), to whom the festival owner redistributes the fruits, fish, or meat received from the guests. In his work on Witoto mythology, K. Th. Preuss has published a series of riddle songs in the Witoto language, together with translations, and the Ethnographic Museum of Berlin preserves the wax cylinders on which he recorded this class of song attributed to the uuiki festival. According to Preuss’s informant, the clans in the northeast region of Witoto territory where he researched, who spoke the mika dialect, practiced a ceremonial exchange different to that observed among the clans who spoke the minika and buue dialects: “So the people (the guests) come to play ball and eat meat” (Preuss 1994, II: 722). “The chief rewards the groups who have brought fruit with meat to eat” (Preuss 1994, II: 738). In addition, among the fruits brought by the guests and mentioned by Preuss’s informant are manioc (Manihot esculenta) (also presented in the form of boiled portions wrapped in palm leaves: juari), yams (Dioscorea sp.), Guinea arrowroot (Calathea allouia)—that is, garden tubers—and sugarcane and plantains (Musa sp.), which were not presented to the festival owner in any of the lluaki festivals I have attended; rather, cooked manioc (in the form of either bread or boiled portions), yams, and Guinea arrowroot were part of the payment with which the festival owner compensated the guests for the fruits received. The author of these lines has recorded, transcribed, and translated riddles from the lluaki festival in 1969–1970 and 1973–1974 on the Igaraparaná River (Colombian Amazon), among Witoto who speak the minika dialect, and again in 2005 and 2006 with Alfonso García, the headman of Pucaurquillo on the Ampiyacu River (Peruvian Amazon), who speaks the buue dialect. The riddles sung in chorus, of course, are lluaki and uuiki songs, that is, from the initial phase and the mature phase of the same ceremonial career. Another genre of the riddle songs consists of the eeiki bitaraki, the “set” or “posed” riddles or those “about the placed fruit: brought and delivered,”1 reserved for the celebration of uuiki and sung to challenge the festival owner by just two men, who receive a special payment from him. When Preuss’s informant, in his commentary on the uuiki festival, of which an extract was cited above, repeats several times that the guests come to ask about the origin (jeniki), the creation (komuillano) of each fruit they hand over and that the festival owner then recounts, in his answer to this question, the history (bakaki) of their origin and creation, he is probably referring to the eeiki bitaraki genre, sung in duet, because after the ordinary eeiki—which I shall call the simple eeiki and which are sung in chorus—I have never observed a response in the form of history.

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In addition, commenting on a simple eeiki, Preuss himself evokes a simple response: the uuiki ball (Preuss 1994, II: 745), whereas the comments of G. Petersen and E. Becerra (the Witoto collaborator) are to the same effect (ibid.). In the present study, I limit myself to the examination and interpretation of the simple eeiki, leaving aside the eeiki bitaraki for another opportunity. During my stay in Igaraparaná, I was able to attend two lluaki festivals, in which some of these songs—not all—were presented as a challenge to the knowledge of the festival owner, who responded with the appropriate solution. On the Ampiyacu river, I saw a lluaki festival in 2005, but in this instance the riddles were sung just for the sake of singing, with no challenge to the festival owner. This would suggest a tendency to abandon the competitive function of these songs due to the death of the older men in possession of ritual knowledge and the failure to transmit this discursive knowledge to the younger generation. The songs that are sung and danced in the lluaki and uuiki festivals are of four genres, distinguished by their inventory of songs, melodies, dance steps, and ritual paraphernalia. The guests who arrive at the festival from downstream sing muinaki songs and dance with a long stick (radosi, tooirai) held in both hands; those who come from upstream, muruiki (iduiki, among the Witoto of the mika dialect studied by Preuss), shake in their hands a bunch of fern fronds ( jokome) to the rhythm of the dance; those of the center north of the forest, jaioki, dance with a leaf of the Chambira palm (Astrocaryum chambira) (jaioforo, jaiotii); and those of the central south of the forest, jimoki, dress themselves in Chambira palm fibres (jimotii). Each genre uses a distinct Witoto dialect, with the exception of the jimoki, which are sung in an unknown and incomprehensible language attributed by the Witoto to the supposed ancient inhabitants of the region, the Jimuai, whom they identify with the Yagua. In the first three genres there exists the subgenre of the riddle songs. As for the jimoki, there is a degree of doubt, as documentation of this genre is limited. It is noteworthy that for today’s lluaki festivals, the owners are happy to invite ceremonial associates from upstream to chant muruiki and from downstream to chant muinaki. For the four groups to be invited, it would need to be a large festival with a greater investment of drink, food, tobacco paste, and coca than usually occurs at present. The language of the songs differs from the everyday language through the use of specialized ritual terms and morphology, which, as the Witoto say, serve to disguise the meanings of the words and yet which the most knowledgeable men can understand. In this paper the songs are presented in five ways. Firstly, I supply the transcription in the Witoto language and then note the linguistic particularities of the ritual and dialect, offering their equivalents in the quotidian language and in the minika dialect of the commentators. Thirdly, I present the literal translation and, fourthly, the interpretive translation, adding (be-

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tween parentheses) the underlying ideas to which the song alludes and which must be deduced in order to arrive at the solution to the riddle. Finally, I add a detailed explanation situating the meaning of the song within the ecological, cultural and ritual universe of Witoto society.

Muruiki eeiki (I) Sung by Marcelo Diaillarai of the Aimeni (“Heron”) clan in the lluaki of Augusto Kuiru, Jitomagaro (“Sun”) clan. 1 O o kolliri o o kolliri kolli kolli kollii jaai jaai jaaii 2 O o kolliri fuirijeko namaki billari kaimade 3 jakojeko namaki billari kaimade 4 afaijeko namaki billari kaimade 5 Words added to facilitate the solution: monifue billari kaimade Solution: Monifue kallakina abi mameda dukisaibitiiii!

Linguistic Notes (I) 1 O o kolliri o o kolliri kolli kolli kollii jaai jaai jaaii: Amongst onomatopoeic words, this line integrates the name of the kolliri bird, from which the onomatopoeic syllables kolli kolli kolli are derived. As will be seen in the examples below, onomatopoeia is found in all the songs and is used to put rhythm to the dance. My indigenous commentators explained: “It’s pure music.” 2 fuirijeko = fuirifeko: fuiri-fe-ko: “downstream-side of,” semispheric form, nominal classifier, “maloca on the downstream side,” namaki “people” 3 jakojeko = afaijeko = afaifeko: “maloca on the upstream side” 4 afaijeko = afaifeko: “maloca on the upstream side”

Literal Translation (I) 1 O o kolliri o o kolliri kolli kolli kollii jaai jaai jaaii 2 O o kolliri is content because the people from the downstream maloca are coming 3 is content because the people from the upstream maloca are coming 4 is content because the people from the upstream maloca are coming 5 Words added to facilitate the solution: is content because the food is coming Solution: Considering themselves as “sitaracuy” ants of the food, they have arrived.

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Interpretive Translation (I) 1 O o kolliri (sings the kolliri bird, who eats grasshoppers) 2 O o kolliri (the bird) is pleased because the (fruits from) the downstream maloca are coming (ripening) 3 (the bird) is pleased because those (“sitaracuy” ants) of the upstream maloca are coming (eating and scaring away the grasshoppers) 4 (the bird) is pleased because those (“sitaracuy” ants) of the upstream maloca are coming 5 Words added to facilitate the solution: (the bird and the “sitaracuy” ants) are pleased because the food is coming Solution: Considering themselves as “sitaracuy” ants (who eat) food, they (the guests from upstream) have arrived (to dance and sing).

Explanation (I) The song begins with an onomatopoeic line that imitates the kolliri bird as it sings for pleasure whilst eating grasshoppers. This line expressing the bird’s noisy happiness is later repeated with pleasure, energy, and spirit as a refrain after each line. With the words “because those of the downstream/upstream maloca are coming,” the second and third lines allude to the reason for the bird’s happiness: “those from the downstream maloca” are the wild and cultivated fruits that always ripen downstream first, then gradually ripen in the upstream direction; “those from upstream” are the “sitaracuy” ants (Eciton sp.), which form a long, dense army, eating any fruits, e.g. umarí (Poraqueiba sericea), ungurahui/milpeso (Jessenia polycarpa), aguaje/canangucho (Mauritia flexuosa), grasshoppers, insects, or carcasses they find in their path. Coming from upstream, these ants arrive at where the fruits are gradually ripening from downstream, scaring away the grasshoppers as they go, such that the kolliri bird is easily able to find its food—which is why it is happy. In this way, the bird is associated with the grasshoppers, which are associated with the “sitaracuy” ants, which are in turn associated with the ripe fruit—in other words, with a component of the Witoto diet (monifue), and of course precisely that component which is celebrated by the lluaki festival. By saying “those from the upstream/downstream maloca,” the song humanizes and personalizes the sitaracuy and the fruits,2 a common rhetorical device that enables the singers also to refer to themselves because the muruiki songs are sung by the guests who arrive at the festival maloca from upstream. They are of course the “sitaracuy” ants, who come from upstream in search of food, as happy as the kolliri bird who takes advantage of the grasshoppers facilitated by these ants, and as the “sitaracuy” ants who eat ripe fruit. In coming to the festival where food

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and drink are abundant, the singers and dancers identify themselves with the “‘sitaracuy’ ants of subsistence,” as the festival owner puts it in his response to the riddle. Should the festival owner fail to find the correct answer after the first four lines have been repeated several times, the song’s leader might add the words of the fifth line, which indicate that “because food comes, (the bird or the ants) are pleased.”3 The singer thereby directs the thoughts of the guesser toward the associations needed to find the solution. Food (of the ants) is the fruit that ripens from downstream, food (of the kolliri bird) is the grasshoppers scared away by the ants, food (fruit) is what the lluaki festival celebrates. The word monifue expresses the general concept of everything that feeds and nourishes the Witoto and was created or introduced by the Creator-Father so that human beings may live. It refers to the material good that sustains human life, but, just as horticultural produce and forest fruits (and meat, in a broader sense) are the monifue of human beings, so, too, are grasshoppers the monifue of the kolliri bird, whereas forest fruits, grasshoppers, and meat are the monifue of the “sitaracuy” ants. The song equates the notion of “primordial existential good of the human being” with that of “primordial existential good of the animals,” not metaphorically but essentially: as living beings, we all have our food, but each species has its own, from which it derives satisfaction and pleasure. To this group of associations that enable the riddle’s solution to be found, it is fitting to add another idea that lies at the heart of the song and motivates the joy and satisfaction it expresses: the idea not only of happiness at having food, but also of enjoying its abundance. Both the hosts and the guests accumulate food in the Witoto festivals: garden produce among the former; among the latter, fruits associated with fish in the lluaki and uuiki festivals and forest animals in the other ceremonial careers. The festivals celebrate the abundance of food as the fruits of horticultural labor and the gathering of fruits, fishing, or hunting. The verb kaimade refers to the feeling of satisfaction—or better, the joy and delight—resulting from the abundance of food enjoyed by the kolliri, the “sitaracuy” ants, and the dancers from upstream who sing and identify with them. As such, this riddle articulates one of the fundamental ideals that sustains Witoto ceremonial practices.

Muruiki eeiki (II–III) Sung by Gabriel Fairiratofe of the Aimeni (“Heron”) clan in the lluaki of Augusto Kuiru, Jitomagaro (“Sun”) Clan. 1 okuena daiarilli manibuima daiarilli naimaniri jai 2 giriiri giriiri lleneji lleneji

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3 giriiri giriiri lleneji lleneji 4 ana ille amuillima kudillima noirilli naimaniri jai 5 giriiri giriiri lleneji lleneji 6 giriiri giriiri lleneji lleneji 7 Invitation to guess: Nii mookaidi? 8 Abelino Kuiru’s answer: Nii ua birui biuaina itino lloiroji juillana llotio. 9 Rejection of the answer: Na ikino, na ikino. 10 G. Fairiratofe repeats the song: Fakaitikuesa kakarei! 11 Repetition of the song … 12 Invitation to guess: Jii, nii? 13 Abelino Kuiru’s answer: Fimona bailla giririna llollodiuuu! 14 G. Fairiratofe repeats the song: Fakaitikuesa kakarei! 15 Repetition of the song … Song added to facilitate the solution: 16 ñugami ñugami ñugami ñugami lleneji lleneji 17 ana ille sotaraima illa jai-ii lleneji lleneji 18 ana ille enuka-kurina raine lleneji lleneji 19 ñugami ñugami ñugami ñugami lleneji lleneji 20 Invitation to guess: Ja kue llogasa. 21 Abelino Kuiru finds the answer: Jidima jigi riidote llollodiuuu! 22 Approval of the singers: Jii, jii! 23 Abelino Kuiru responds: Buuedi uruiai kaimadotima.

Linguistic Notes (II-III) 1 okuena...jai: “musical” words considered meaningless by the commentators; daiarilli = daiarilla “jump up and down repeatedly” in the buue dialect = tikarilla in the minika dialect; a final -a often becomes -i in the songs; manibuima = manibui “a species of bird”; the suffix -ma “masculine person” personifies the bird in the song: “Mr. Manibui”; naimani, “this big river” in buue dialect, afemani in minika dialect. This form of the demonstrative indicates that the song is sung in the buue dialect, whose speakers are geographically situated upstream of the speakers of the minika dialect. For this reason, the songs in this dialect are sung by the dancers who arrive at the festival from upstream, even when in their everyday life they speak the minika dialect. To know how to sing in a dialect other than that spoken on a daily basis is part of all the singers’ ritual knowledge.

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2 giriiri: onomatopoeia related to the verb giride “it thunders,” but which can evoke various kinds of noise; lleneji: musical word with a rhythmical function in many of the lluaki festival songs; 4 amuillima = amuilliki “dragonfly;” the suffix -ki is replaced in the song with the personifying suffix -ma; kudillima = kudi + amuillima “plant from which red dye is obtained + personified dragonfly,” hence: “personified red dragonfly, Mr. Red-Dragonfly”; nooirilli = nooirilla, “to bathe repeatedly” (see above); 16 ñugami ñugami ñugami ñugami lleneji lleneji: my commentators were unable to attach any meaning to the word ñugami; they claimed it is “pure music,” which, like onomatopoeia, constitutes the fat ( farede) of the songs—a Witoto expression evoking the oral pleasure derived by the singers from the pronunciation, singing, and rhythms of these words. Of the same nature are the words lleneji (see above) and those found in the two following lines: 17 jai-ii lleneji lleneji 18 raine lleneji lleneji; enukakuri = enokakuri: this ritual term is usually employed to name both the wolf fish and the alligator; in one Witoto myth, the korango frog, standing on the banks, calls out to the alligator to carry him to the other side of the river: “Mr. Alligator, my brother, come to carry me to the other side.” The wolf fish and the alligator are both aquatic carnivores; enokaki is a leaf that is mixed with another species in order to produce a black dye; jidima, the name of the wolf fish in Witoto, contains the root ji-, which means “black, dark,” as the wolf fish generally dwells peacefully in the shade of the banks of a stream; the name “sleepy” (dormilón, as it is called in Colombian Spanish), refers to its tendency to stay motionless in the darkness of the riverbanks.

Literal Translation (II–III) 1 okuena jumps the bird Mr. Manibui jumps in the big river jai 2 giriiri giriiri lleneji lleneji 3 giriiri giriiri lleneji lleneji 4 Mr. Dragonfly, Mr. Red-Dragonfly from below in the stream bathes in the big river jai 5 giriiri giriiri lleneji lleneji 6 giriiri giriiri lleneji lleneji 7 Invitation to guess: Where is our father? 8 Abelino Kuiru’s answer: You are announcing the fall of the little green peach palm fruits in this current season. 9 Rejection of the answer: It is not, it is not.

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10 G. Fairiratofe repeats the song: Well I will try, listen! 11 Repetition of the song … 12 Invitation to guess: Yes, where? 13 Abelino Kuiru’s answer: You are announcing the noise of the summer wind. 14 G. Fairiratofe repeats the song: Well I’m going to try, listen! 15 Repetition of the song … Song added to facilitate the solution: 16 ñugami ñugami ñugami ñugami lleneji lleneji 17 beneath the river is the biter jai-ii lleneji lleneji 18 beneath the river like “enukakuri” raine lleneji lleneji 19 ñugami ñugami ñugami ñugami lleneji lleneji 20 Invitation to guess: Right then I’ve told. 21 Abelino Kuiru finds the answer: You are announcing that the wolf fish is being stingy with its eggs. 22 Approval of the singers: Yes! Yes! 23 Abelino Kuiru answers them: I am cherishing my children.

Interpretive Translation (II–III) 1 okuena jumps, the bird Mr. Manibui jumps (on the banks), in the big river (in the stream) jai 2 the noise of the rising waters are heard: giriiri giriiri lleneji lleneji 3 giriiri giriiri lleneji lleneji 4 Mr. Dragonfly, Mr. Red Dragonfly of beneath the river bathes, in the big river (in the brook) jai 5 the noise of the rising waters are heard: giriiri giriiri lleneji lleneji 6 giriiri giriiri lleneji lleneji 7 Invitation to guess: Where is our father (so he can come to guess and demonstrate his knowledge)? 8 Abelino Kuiru’s answer: You are announcing the fall of the little green peach palm fruits in this current season. 9 Rejection of the answer: It is not, it is not. 10 G. Fairiratofe repeates the song: Well I will try (again), listen! 11 Repetition of the song … 12 Invitation to guess: Yes, where (is the father)?

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13 Abelino Kuiru’s answer: You are announcing the noise of this summer’s wind. 14 G. Fairiratofe repeats the song: Well I will try (again), listen! 15 Repetition of the song … Song added to facilitate the solution: 16 ñugami ñugami ñugami ñugami lleneji lleneji 17 beneath the river is the biter jai-ii lleneji lleneji 18 beneath the river (is the biter) as “enuka-kuri” raine lleneji lleneji 19 ñugami ñugami ñugami ñugami lleneji lleneji 20 Invitation to guess: Alright I told! 21 Abelino Kuiri finds the solution: You are announcing that the wolf fish is being stingy with its eggs (he defends them biting the aggressor). 22 Approval of the singers: Yes, yes! 23 Abelino Kuiru answers them: I am caressing my children (to give them pleasure and joy).

Explanation (II–III) We are dealing here with two riddle songs that point to the same solution: the wolf fish (Hoplias malabaricus), known as fasaco in the Peruvian Amazon and dormilón (“sleepy”) in the Colombian Amazon. Around the time of the first rise in water levels for the year, when it is still summer, this fish swims up smaller streams en masse—the song says “big river” to confuse the guesser— and jumps where there are snags, or submerged large woody debris, much as dragonflies also jump as they bathe themselves, splashing the water at the surface of the river with their curved tail, and as the little manibui bird jumps near the banks. The noise of the rising waters and of the wolf fish that swim upstream is imitated with the onomatopoeia giriiri giriiri. The older son of the festival owner accepts the challenge and attempts to guess, but is wrong twice. Importance is rightly attributed to the onomatopoeia as, firstly, it is associated with the noise of the green embryos of the peach palm (Bactris gasipaes) that fall to the ground as though aborted before those that will be able to be harvested begin to ripen, and then it is associated with the noise of the wind that blows in summer, the season in which the festival is celebrated and that produces the greatest variety and quantity of fruits. Abelino knows that the riddles refer to phenomena that characterize the fruits, their biological processes, and their ecological and cultural functions, as well as seasonal weather conditions, but does not know the meanings of the ritual name enokakuri and

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fails to take into account the fact that the song speaks of the river (ille, imani), of the aquatic world—of the manibui bird that jumps in the riverbanks, of the dragonfly that bathes itself in the water—such that the noise should also be associated with an aquatic element: the rising water levels in the streams and the wolf fish as it swims upstream and jumps in the snags. In fact, the fish and the aquatic world are another domain to which the riddle songs often allude. In Witoto society, fish are associated with fruit because the origin myth of manioc and all edible fruits involves the satiation tree (monilla amena) that bore all the fruits, but that the first men felled because it had grown too tall, making the fruits inaccessible. Upon felling the tree, the splinters became fish, and the tree itself, as it fell, transformed into the river system, with its larger rivers and smaller streams and tributaries. Another indication of this association between fruit and fish is the fact that, on the one hand, the owner of the lluaki and uuiki festivals specifies which species of fruit his guests should bring to the festival, where they will be paid with biscuits, manioc bread (taingoji, airiji), or portions of manioc starch cooked in leaves ( juari), and on the other hand, the guests usually add some fish to their quota of fruits. As Abelino’s first two attempts failed, the singer added a second song to help him find the solution. The key word, in line 17, is sotaraima, the substantivated actor’s name of the verb sotade, which means “to attack” or “to bite,” referring, for example, to a snake or to a bitch defending her offspring. The biter here is, precisely, the wolf fish, a carnivorous fish that uses its teeth to attack those who approach during its time of spawning, having swum upstream toward the headwaters. “The wolf fish is being stingy, defending its eggs,” says Abelino correctly. In line 18, this fish is called by a disguised ritual name: enokakuri, which is not common knowledge, but is used in ritual discourses to refer to either the wolf fish or to the alligator. In this ritual scene of the challenge posed by the riddle song and accepted by a member of the group of the festival owners—in this case, the oldest son of the owner himself—it remains for us to evoke some of the ceremonial gestures that accompany the exchange of words. When he decides to go to guess, Abelino rises from the coca courtyard (jiibibiri) in the periphery of the maloca, where his group of men are united around a pot of tobacco paste diluted with water (llerabi) and where he licks this liquid and munches coca powder. He then approaches the circle of dancers taking a small portion of tobacco paste (llera), and, in tribute to the song and the challenge, delivers it to the principle singer before announcing his proposed solution. Tobacco paste (mixed with vegetal salt, iaisai) and coca powder are the masculine means of ritual payment in Witoto society. The leader of the song, Gabriel Fairiratofe, goes in turn at the end of his performance to sit next to Abelino in the circle of the festival owners, in the

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coca courtyard, handing over to him a portion of coca powder wrapped in a length of cloth, explaining to him the meaning of all the words of the song. Abelino comments: “That’s how the people who know do it; they hand over the coca and hand over to the other the meaning of the song.” Transmission of knowledge is part of the ritual exchanges that take place during the festival.

Jaioki eeiki (IV) Dictated by Calisto Kuiru. 1 kuvukuvu kuvuji jai lleneji jojo jiiji lleneji lleneji 2 uni aichue uni aichue naimani arife ojere nabena jofo kue mirerillani jojo jiji lleneji 3 kuvukuvu kuvuji jai lleneji jojo jiiji lleneji lleneji

Linguistic Notes (IV) 1 the first line, like the third, is purely onomatopoeic and musical. 2 aichue = aillue “large”; the pronunciation ch (voiceless palatal occlusive) instead of ll (voiced palatal occlusive) characterizes the jaioki dialect of the songs; mirerilla in the dialect of the song = mitaja in the minika dialect: “to have in the mouth (without biting)”; the ending –ni or –ne is common in certain sung verbal styles, without having a defined grammatical value; ojere means “stand of oje,” a plant or tree that my commentators were unable to identify. What the Witoto always have in their mouths is coca powder, but my interpreter did not relate this line to the custom of munching coca.

Literal translation (IV) 1 kuvukuvu kuvuji jai lleneji jojo jiiji lleneji lleneji 2 Inside my mouth I have a leaf from the stand of oje on the upstream side of the large river over there 3 kuvukuvu kuvuji jai lleneji jojo jiiji lleneji lleneji

Interpretive translation (IV) 1 kuvukuvu kuvuji jai lleneji jojo jiiji lleneji lleneji 2 Inside my mouth I have a leaf from the stand of oje (trees) over there on the upstream side (in the headwaters) of the large river over there 3 kuvukuvu kuvuji jai lleneji jojo jiiji lleneji lleneji

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Explanation (IV) This song, although very modest in size, allows us to clarify a new aspect of the riddles thanks to the commentaries received during the annotation and translation. My translator remembered that the deceased Kueredina Sánchez of the Aimeni (“Heron”) clan had sung this eeiki in a festival to which he brought smoked fish from a brook in which he had thrown barbasco poison. The solution “fishing with barbasco poison” refers to these, as kuvukuvu kuvuji evokes the noise the feet make as they stir up the clay riverbed to dissolve and mix the clay with the barbasco, already dispersed in the water, and improve its efficacy. The festival owner must have present in his memory just what fruits, fish, or game animal each dancer has brought to the festival and handed over to him, as the riddle frequently refers to some characteristic of the species donated by the singer. It is evident in this song that the onomatopoeia and the headwaters of the large river are the two spoken elements which, together with the little fish brought to the festival, should help the festival owners find the answer to the riddle. The rest—“to have in the mouth the leaf from the stand of oje”—has no relevance in this respect. This song shows that the relationship between the formulation and the solution can be haphazard and circumstantial. There are riddles that have a time-honored traditional answer, as in the examples (I) and (II–III), but there is also a certain creative freedom that permits a singer to associate the words of an already known song with the fruit, fish, or animal that he has brought to the festival. In any case, on the eve of the dance the singer usually prepares three or four songs that he will sing consecutively, and at this time he decides which eeiki he will pose to the festival owner and which songs (that also could eventually be eeiki) he will sing just for fun (kaimataillena). This optional use of the songs demonstrates that the eeiki subgenre does not possess formal properties that distinguish it from the lluaki songs that are sung merely for the pleasure of singing and dancing without posing the challenge of the riddle. What makes a lluaki song into an eeiki is the fact that the singer utilizes its meaning to allude to some natural or cultural element, linked to the celebration of the lluaki festival in a broad sense, challenging the festival owner with this allusion to guess or explain. The eeiki subgenre is therefore a pragmatic rather than a formal genre. It is perfectly possible that, on some other occasion, the part of the same short song that had no relevance in the situation analyzed—“I have in my mouth a leaf from the oje stand”—could become relevant and allude to some other cultural fact, possibly related to coca, its consumption and its associations. For example, the variety of coca known as kudu jiibie, “‘sambico’ fish coca,” associates what Witoto men always have in their mouths with the aquatic universe of the little “sambico” fish. This is my own speculation, unconfirmed by Witoto discourse, but inspired nevertheless by the operative categories of Witoto thought.

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To indicate to the festival owners that an eeiki is being sung, and as seen in the example (II–III), the singer uses the formula: “Where is our father?” (meaning: to come to guess and prove his knowledge as Father of humanity.) But there are more elaborate formulas, one of which I was able to record. It is a spell or curse for preventing the festival owner from finding the answer. After finishing the song, the singer who posed the riddle cries aloud:

Conjuring Formula Enunciated by Luciano Martínez of the Jeeiai (“Opossum”) clan. 1 jisabai komeki naganomo jigidonoite 2 jisabai komeki iri iri duaide 3 okisa oñenito

Linguistic Notes 1 jisa “daughter,” but jisabai refers to the festival owner; komeki “heart,” for the Witoto the organ of thought and feeling; naganomo “in all places, everywhere,” jigidonoite = janaiite “shall be in trouble”; 2 iri iri duaide was interpreted in two ways: as iridonoite “shall become mixed up” and as iri iri doode, “said ‘iri iri,’ said ‘mix up, mix up,’” in the mika dialect; 3 okisa “careful, listen!”; oñenito = oñeitio “you shall not take it, you shall not grab it.”

Literal Translation 1 The heart of the festival owner will find itself in trouble everywhere! 2 The heart of the festival owner will get mixed up! 3 Careful, listen, you will not take it!

Interpretive translation 1 The heart of the festival owner has to be in trouble under all circumstances! 2 The heart of the festival owner has to become confused! 3 Careful, listen, you must not take (the bag of coca that I would give to he who finds the solution to my riddle)!

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Explanation The future tense employed in the verbal forms of this formula has a desiderative value, respectively prohibitive (in the case of the negation): “It has to happen … should happen.” The singer conjures up bad luck, wishing that the heart or mind of the festival owner will not surmount the difficulties and will be left confused and that the festival owner receives no recompense: namely, the bag of coca that the singer should pay him for the solution to the riddle. Besides disguising the clues to the solution of the riddle with ritual terminology and morphology and establishing only tenuous links with the onomatopoeia, the singer also uses this formula to conjure the failure of the guesser’s intellectual efforts, while at the same time inviting the festival owners publicly to meet the challenge. Riddles comprise a social game that is familiar to us and that we practice in a small group of friends or relatives. The one who poses the riddle establishes a personal relation with all members of the group who accept the challenge by listening to its formulation, striving to reflect and find the solution. Among the indigenous peoples of Amazonia, the Shipibo practice this social game in the same way, in a small group, as illustrated in the examples cited by Illius (1999: 74–81). But to the extent that solutions to five of the six riddles comprise nonindigenous items (broom, mosquito net, outboard motor, wooden sugar cane press, money), and only one an item of Shipibo culture (the canoe), one could conclude that the Shipibo have adopted this game from mestizo society. The sung riddles of the Huitito, who share this ceremonial and pragmatic genre with their Ocaina, Nonuya and Muinani neighbors, are part of a larger set of competitive social relations activated by the various festivals that unfold through the course of the ceremonial careers, giving rise to provocations, attacks, complaints, criticism, and mockery, but also to tributes and praise, to joy, laughter, and courtship. As mentioned above, the guests use the riddles to put to the test publicly—before all the groups participating in the festival (owners of the festival, workers, guests)—the knowledge of the owner of the festival and his group, the hosts of the festival. In the simple eeiki, this knowledge consists, more precisely, in the ability to associate certain sung words and onomatopoeia—not all—with fruit, fish, animals, including insects, meteorological phenomena, cultural elements, and gestures. This capacity relies on the memory of the gift delivered by the singer (his fruit, his fish, his meat); remembering this gift can guide the chain of associations toward the right answer. In the first example, the speculative point of departure is the notion of monifue, “food,” which is the source of the satisfaction evoked (kaimade) and which the same singer can name if he wants to help his interlocutor. In the

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festival, food is always linked to abundance, a source of joy and happiness that exists not only among human beings—particularly the dancers that come from upstream to enjoy the festival—but also among other living beings, such as the kolliri bird, which enjoys the abundance of grasshoppers produced by the massive march of “sitaracuy” ants (kallai), which also eat the fruits that gradually ripen from downstream and that the lluaki festival celebrates, in its exchange of fruits for goods made from garden produce. In the second example, the evocation of a stream by a bird that frequents its banks, by the aquatic behavior of the dragonfly, and—antiphrastically—by the large river, should guide the guesser’s associations, as he attempts to interpret the meaning of the onomatopoeia giriiri, toward the characteristic sounds of a stream’s rising waters and the wolf fish that swims upriver and jumps among the snags. The notion of biter, associated in the third example with the evocation of “down in the river” and with a ritual name that disguises its name in the everyday language, serves to pinpoint, beyond the sounds evoked in the previous song, the aggressive and carnivorous behavior of the fish species contemplated by the riddle, thus channeling the possible solutions toward the single successful one. The fourth example presents the most tenuous link between the song and the solution. The onomatopoeia kuvukuvu kuvuji alone should prompt the associations needed to arrive at fishing with barbasco poison, or in other words, among the many possible interpretations, the noise of the feet in the water as they stir up the clay at the bottom of the stream to improve the efficiency of the barbasco. But in this case the singer’s gift—small smoked fish, indicators of fishing in a stream with barbasco—are available to orient the guesser’s search, on the condition that he remembers precisely what each dancer brought to his festival. That in itself seems to me quite a challenge, having witnessed the often massive influx of dancers at this kind of festival, each one of whom delivers their gift—usually wrapped in leaves—to the women of the host maloca. However, prior to the sung riddles the festival owner has been present during the payment made by the women to the owner of each gift, observing at that moment what each dancer has brought. Each payment is personal, and the owner of the festival identifies all the visitors with their gift. I have noticed that years later, a festival owner continues to remember what animal or fish a person brought to a festival celebrated at a given point in time. The ritual exchanges of the festivals give material support to personal social relations that, between the festival owner and each of his guests, are necessarily asymmetrical. The material substance of these mutual but asymmetrical obligations lays the foundations of Witoto society and is indelibly inscribed in the memory of the actors. In the same way, the sung riddles of a festival, and their correct or incorrect answers, lend a structure of lively competition to the relations

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between a festival owner and his invited opponents and stay inscribed in the memory of the general public before whom the challenge was posed and assumed. Witoto commentators thus often remember who has sung which eeiki in the lluaki of which festival owner, who found which solution, or conversely got angry (ikirite) for not having guessed correctly—improper behavior for a festival owner, who should always remain calm in the face of provocations and soothe heated tempers with his cool, pacifying words, converting the bad into the good through jokes, laughter, and generous action. As we have seen, the riddles provide a challenge beyond the intellectual and rhetorical solution. The festival owner’s prestige is at stake, his ability to withstand a possible fiasco and to maintain good composure in adverse conditions. My commentators told me that in one lluaki on the Igaraparaná river, an eeiki was sung in the (today virtually extinct) Nonuya language, which the dance owner could not understand, nor did he have a translator available. Failing to receive the awaited answer, the singer tirelessly repeated his song but clearly in bad faith, a gesture intended to provoke the festival owner’s ire. He finally succeeded, which only served to increase the embarrassment of the festival participants due to the inability and weakness of the festival owner and to awaken their malevolent criticism. Such humiliating behavior on the part of an invited guest is nevertheless censured by a rule of good conduct laid down by the elders, who maintain that a guest should only pose riddles that circulate in the coca courtyards of malocas of the same region that are related amongst themselves through mutual visits and shared nocturnal conversations. One should not challenge a dance owner with riddles imported from another geographical region, where the wise words that circulate in the coca courtyards are different and have their own tradition.4 But as in all societies, good conduct is a rule that is not always respected, and we have seen that the lluaki festival, with its possibilities for challenging the festival owner, opens up a space for the guest who arrives with hostile and aggressive feelings toward the festival owner—probably for some old grudge—to humiliate him publicly, thereby ruining the atmosphere of fun and joy if the owner is incapable of playfully defusing the situation with a joke or some other provocation on his part that makes the participants laugh. As a moral challenge in the management of social and ritual relationships, the riddles of the Witoto (and the Ocaina, Nonuya and Muinani) are a total rhetorical fact that commits all the physical energy (voice, body, memory) and social energy (chorus and dance, viewers and listeners, competition and challenge, ritual exchange) that is summoned, organized, channeled, and ritually dissipated in the festival (rafue), which, for the Witoto—as for the Bora, Ocaina, Nonuya, Muinane, Resígaro, and Andoke—makes their society, which precisely is not reducible to a local community.

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References Illius, Bruno. 1999. Das Shipibo. Texte, Kontexte, Kommentare. Berlin: Reimer. Preuss, Konrad Theodor. 1921–1923. Die Religion und Mythologie der Uitoto. Heidelberg: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. ———. 1994. Religión y mitología de los Uitotos. Traducción y revisión de la trascripción por Gabriela Petersen de Piñeros, Eudocio Becerra (Bigidima), Ricardo Castañeda Nieto. Bogotá: Editorial de la Universidad.

Notes The author is very grateful to Harry Walker for translating this chapter from the original Spanish. 1. In interpreting his single example, Preuss (1921–1923) translates the term bitaraki eeiki as “to place the fruits.” His translator and commentator, Gabriele Petersen (Preuss 1994: 740), writes eeiki bitaraki (which I also heard on the Ampiyacu river), explaining: “Bitaraki is derived from the verb bitade, ‘one or two people dancing around on the spot.’” The more common meaning of this verb, however, is “to place,” as she herself notes in her dictionary. Preuss interpreted bita-raki as “to place fruit (raki)”; for my part I am inclined to interpret bita-ra-ki as “to place-nominalizing suffix-nominal classifier” (anticipating eei-ki in concordance with its classifier suffix -ki): “placement riddle,” such that the riddle is raised, referring to its placement, that is, the fruit brought. 2. The forest is the maloca of the animals and its owner is the “mother of the forest, of the animals,” in accordance with the Witoto vision of the world, whereby human beings and nature’s beings inhabit a single society. 3. In Witoto, the verbal form of the third person does not indicate number; it can be singular or plural, according to context. 4. I am grateful to my colleague Juan Álvaro Echeverri for this clarification.

CHAPTER 7

Sounds of the Past Music, History, and Astonishment Markus Verne








Looking into dragons, not domesticating or abominating them, nor drowning them in vats of theory, is what anthropology has been all about. … We have, with no little success, sought to keep the world off balance; pulling out rugs, upsetting tea tables, setting off firecrackers. It has been the office of others to reassure; ours to unsettle. Australopithecenes, Tricksters, Clicks, Megaliths—we hawk the anomalous, peddle the strange. Merchants of astonishment (Geertz 2000: 64). What is important in music is, indeed, elusive (McClary and Walser 1990: 289).

Exposition The song begins with the clacking sound of an angklung, an Indonesian rattle made of bamboo, setting at once both the beat and the key of the song. A moment later an acoustic guitar comes in with a characteristic phrase oscillating between the keynote and the dominant, anticipating the repetitive, loop-like, Asian character of the title. Then, like a clarion call, comes the first chant of Hanitra and her sister Noro, followed by an intro on the bass. The e-guitar, an Indonesian ghendang-drum, and the marovany, a Malagasy zither, join in as the Indonesian flutes rise to their first moaning solo. As soon as the introduction is over, the singing begins. Voices are arranged in homophone style with a strong focus on thirds, which is typical

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for Malagasy music, traditional as well as popular. The lyrics describe koba, a traditional Malagasy dish of Indonesian heritage, and Hanitra’s discovery that even after hundreds of years, this dish is still being prepared in exactly the same way on opposite sides of the Indian Ocean. Koba, hot koba! / It’s called longtong / It’s a Javanese rice pudding? / Put some raw rice inside some banana leaves / Cook it in steam for about two hours / Slice it thinly / Pour the sauce on top afterward / Coconut sauce with chilli / Fish with onions / Pour on some peanut sauce / Serve hot, piping hot!2

Another flute solo follows, again evoking the melancholy of a timeless past. The guitar and ghendang-drum provide the bridge, and the ethnography of koba continues. Koba, hot koba! / Black koba on the road side / We never knew its origin / There is a very sweet peanut in the middle / We have it at teatime / A famous old man who comes all the way from the countryside / Stands in the middle of Analakely3 / He brings a rare koba / Very long koba / Expensive, sliced thinly / Barrels are the cooking pot / Our koba stay intact / Koba, hot Koba!

The flutes take up their doleful theme for a last time and then, before the song ends with a final chant, it is the zither’s turn. Thus far, it has primarily supported the F major chord, in which the whole tune is kept, adding rhythm as well as a local flavor to the song. Now, it comes to the fore and its bright sound erupts in a final, cascading solo. “Koba” is the powerful opening track of the album Soul Makassar, released in 2001 by the Malagasy world music group Tarika. In this album, Hanitrarivo Rasoanaivo, lead singer and charismatic head of the band, explores Madagascar’s Indonesian roots. Not all the songs on the album address this subject explicitly; nonetheless the topic is present throughout. Whereas the song “Koba” talks of a dish found in both Indonesian and Madagascan culture, another track, “Sulawesi,” evokes the moment more than a thousand years ago, when sailors prepared their outrigger canoes for the long journey westwards. “Tovovavy” tells of Indonesian women hiding indoors for the sake of lighter skin, an ideology many of the umbrella-carrying Malagasy women are well familiar with. “Set Me Free” criticizes tourism as a golden cage, “Aretina” is a rather harsh view of globalization and its homogenizing effects on living conditions all over the world, and the final track, “Madindo,” combines impressions of Hanitra’s journey with a final evocation of the shared musical heritage of Indonesia and Madagascar. The music is even more global than the lyrics, spanning not only the Indian Ocean but also integrating Western, African, and Caribbean sounds, to

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name just the most obvious. Malagasy music generally comprises sounds inherited from various ancestries, which are often hard to trace. In the case of Tarika’s album Soul Makassar, however, a fusion of worlds is part of the story, as the goal here is to blend musical traditions from opposite ends of the Indian Ocean. Hanitra wrote most of the album’s songs while traveling in Indonesia, and the presence of Indonesian instruments has expanded Tarika’s lineup considerably. Besides, after Tarika and some British guest musicians had finished their recordings, Indonesian musicians added some tracks in further recording sessions in studios in Bandung and Jakarta. And even the character of the music itself often echoes Asian patterns of style. The whole idea of the album is to bring together what is at the same time similar yet different; two kinds of people4 who have been separated for a thousand years or more, but who still belong together, not simply due to a shared ancestry, but because this shared ancestry is still experienced today. Although Hanitra is possibly the first artist to create a world music album centerd on historical relations between Madagascar and Indonesia, she is not the only person combining curiosity for this aspect of world history with an interest in music. Others have done so both before and after, albeit in a scientific rather than an artistic mode. Indeed, music seems to be one of the areas where history’s longue durée comes to the fore in an exceptionally obvious manner, which is why, time and again, anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, and historians have been trying to prove Indonesia’s influence by looking at the distribution of instruments, tunings, tonal scales, playing techniques, and general musical styles.5 In contrast to Hanitra, however, most academic research has focused on historical relations between Indonesia and large parts of Africa, stretching from Kenya and Tanzania via Mozambique to South Africa, from Zimbabwe via Congo and Gabon to Southern Nigeria and even further to the West, to the heartlands of the griot traditions. Another difference is that whereas Hanitra topped various world music charts with her album, academic researchers have not been successful with their theories, although they managed to compile an impressive amount of evidence. The reason lies in the quality of this evidence: It is neither written nor material, but sonic instead, a form of evidence that we are not actually used to consider convincing. Moreover, this evidence questions our understanding of the world’s history, in which Indonesians and their outrigger canoes, to say the least, are not considered to be among Africa’s culture heroes. What Hanitra and most of the academic researchers do share (and I include myself here), is a moment of great surprise when confronted with the presence of a past hitherto unknown to them. In Hanitra’s case, she was first struck by this presence whilst watching a television program at home in London.

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Astonishment I was sitting in my living-room watching television, when suddenly they showed this traditional ceremony which looked like a famadihana—people taking corpses out of tombs, wrapping them with cloth and putting them back in—but it definitively wasn’t in Madagascar! I really was shocked when I noticed that there are other people in the world practicing famadihana, and I desperately wanted to know where on earth this was! I looked at the map and found out that they were in Sulawesi—in Indonesia! That was something that really intrigued me, and I immediately thought: I have to go there, I have to go to this island! So what I immediately did was to propose this plan to my record company. “Listen,” I said, “something is calling me to go to this place called Sulawesi, maybe it’s the spirit of the ancestors. They practice famadihana there, maybe my oldest ancestors are in those tombs. I want to go there.” Their first reply was characterized by a complete lack of comprehension: “What are you going to find there? Your ancestors?” I replied: “Listen, I don’t know how I am going to feel, I don’t know if these people are Malagasy or not, but I want to go there and see what it is like. And if I come back, full of ideas and songs, we will have a new album.” And so they finally trusted me and let me go. … For me this was all a big discovery: Being one of these people that have once upon a time travelled through the sea to Madagascar—and then: Here I was, back in Sulawesi! And still, after all this time, all those people look like me, speak like me, eat rice like me, and play instruments like me! Particularly the music was incredible. Imagine, I sang them a song and they said “Oh— that sounds like our traditional song!” And then they played a song back to me and I said “That sounds very much like the music at home in Madagascar! What does it say?” And they were using all these metaphors we use, and the way they write, they beat around the bush—you remember that Malagasy never say things directly? That you have to think about what they are trying to say—the way they compose, the use of the melody, the use of the instrument: It’s all the same thing! It’s amazing! (Hanitra, in September 2006).

Hanitra’s amazement at such similarities is shared by scholars who have also approached the topic of Africa’s Indonesian roots—or who, as one should rather say, were themselves approached by the topic. In fact, what happened to Hanitra in front of her TV is a central feature of this historiographical niche: the experience of being astounded by unanticipated historical evidence. In a similar way to Hanitra, these scholars have found themselves confronted with unexpected insights, which triggered them into action. While Hanitra’s experience resulted in a spontaneous journey to Indonesia, for the scholars, it

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led to a quest to prove what, up until this moment, they had only heard: the Indonesian heritage of at least some aspects of African music. Because Indonesian influence on African culture is not part of any curriculum, it is not surprising that the interest of those few academics who have chosen to work in this area was sparked less by academic debate than by incidents somewhere in Africa. It is surprising though that music, a subject not known to be crucially important for historians or anthropologists, plays such an important role when it comes to exploring these matters. It seems as if music has a special capacity, not only for preserving history over very long periods, but also for presenting it in both a surprising and convincing manner. By far the most impressive account in this context is given by Reverend A.M. Jones, who first worked as a missionary in Zambia and later became a renowned ethnomusicologist at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. In his case, it was the performance of a Sierra Leone griot in London that first awakened him and triggered his immersion in research on the diffusion of Indonesian music to Africa. Jones’s story was first published in 1964 and is so convincing—and so convincingly told—that even today it courses through the limited literature on the subject (see, for example, DickReed 2005: 127, Oliver 2005: 25): One morning, a few years ago, there was a tap at the door, and in walked an African—a total stranger—carrying a large object wrapped in ticking. He was Mr. Bana Kanuteh, one of those griots—professional wandering minstrels of Sierra Leone—and has just come to London, seeking his fortune. Untying his parcel, and drawing from it a typical xylophone of the Malinke tribe, which he said he had made himself, he sat down and gave an expert performance. To say that we were astonished is to put it mildly. The fascination lay not in the expertise of the player but in the sounds of the xylophone notes. Here was something quite unexpected, a range of notes which seemed very different from the vocal sounds by which we had for over twenty years been surrounded in Northern Rhodesia, living as we did, in an area of that territory which does not use the fully developed xylophone. The sounds at once recalled Hugh Tracey’s work among the Chopi tribe in Portuguese East Africa. It has to be confessed that when Hugh Tracey’s book appeared in 1948, we regarded his assessment of the Chopi xylophone scale with somewhat grave suspicion; because it was contrary to our experience. Hence our astonishment. “Can Tracey really be right?—it sounds as if I am hearing the sort of scale he described. I must, at all costs, find out:”—and we thereupon hustled Mr Kanuteh into the recording room. Thus was set in train the research of which this book is the outcome. Plainly, this was not the testing of a previously held hypothesis: it was forced

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on us unsuspecting and unexpectedly. … The broad conclusion to which we have been inexorably driven had better be stated at once, and it is this:—that at some time long before the Portuguese appeared in the Southern Seas, the coasts of Africa were visited by Indonesians. This was no case of a forlorn boat-load or two of storm-tossed mariners driven before the monsoon and wrecked on the African shore. Rather, one has to envisage an Indonesian influence on a considerable scale, an influence whose surviving traces indicate a long period of colonization reinforced by successive migrations from more than one part of Indonesia, and the indications are that the areas of Africa which became the focal points of this colonization were the Niger basin and the Congo basin. Whether the evidence we shall produce is patent of any other explanations, the reader himself may judge (Jones 1971[1964]: 1f.).

According to Jones, migrating Indonesians reached the Niger basin by ship, passing around the Cape of Good Hope. It is here where Robert DickReed experienced a whole series of astonishments, the most significant being in the area of music. Though not a professional himself (Dick-Reed 2005: 1), but someone “with long experience as a museum collector and dealer in African art” (Oliver 2005: 25), Dick-Reed was initially drawn into this kind of research in 1957. That year, he spent several months in the North of Mozambique, where he first heard of Malagasy people who had raided the coast of Mozambique with large outrigger canoes. As, according to him, he “had never until then given a minute’s thought to Madagascar,” this story—similar to the aforementioned cases—came to him completely unexpectedly and “aroused [his] interest in the Indonesian connection.” This eventually led him not only to take several history courses at SOAS, but to turn the Indonesian connection into a lifelong hobby (Dick-Reed 2005: 1). Although familiar with the idea of Indonesian influence in East Africa, it came as a huge surprise to him when he heard a group of musicians in what was then the British Cameroons playing a kind of music that immediately reminded him of what he had heard in South Africa. It was music again inspired by Indonesian instruments, playing techniques, scales, and tunings (Dick-Reed 2005: 126–134, Hogan 2006): Some years ago when setting up a museum in what was still the British Cameroons I and my band of collectors—museum assistant, interpreter, cook, bearers of camping gear, bearers of empty trophy boxes, bearers of sacks of cash-money—came into the remote forest village of Bamumbu where we entertained to a performance of double-gong music that to the best of my knowledge had not until been written about. … In all there were ten pairs— twenty tuned gongs—ranging in size from about ten inches to three feet tall. In addition there were two tall drums and a pair of grass rattles—the same in-

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strumental mix as a standard Chopi orchestra in Moçambique: plus a bunch of single percussion gongs. … The phenomenal produced that day among ramshackle houses on that rain-sodden spur gnawed at every nerve; but this was no wild-cat jazz. Each player conformed to well-defined and practiced rhythms. Only once had I heard anything like these incredible sounds before—in South Africa, listening to a xylophone orchestra. Every beat of the gongs, every interlocking harmony, every throb of the drums, and susurration of the shakers, brought back vivid memories of the Chopi. I had no recording equipment; so a memory it had to remain—a memory as vivid as Andrew Tracey’s must be of when he first heard an orchestra of panpipes6—but the crux of that memory was the similarity of the sounds from two disparate orchestras on different sides of the continent (Dick-Reed 2005: 135).

Music and History Although sometime in the 1950s, Jones and Dick-Reed were marvelling at the presence of an unexpected past, the Southeast Asian influence on Africa had already been established as fact about half a century earlier, though only among certain specialists working in another scholarly tradition. This tradition, generally labeled culture history or diffusionism, had its centers in Berlin and Vienna and goes back as far as to Friedrich Ratzel’s geographical-historical Völkerkunde (Ratzel 1885, 1887a). Of particular importance is an article written in 1887, on the “geographical distribution of the bow and arrows in Africa,” in which Ratzel explores the distribution of different kinds of bows in Africa and traces some of them to Southeast Asia (Ratzel 1887b). Others then took up this research and expanded it, with Leo Frobenius being the first to extend it in a systematic way to the area of music. In a comprehensive, quadripartite essay published in 1897–1998, he attempts to prove the Asian influence on large sections of Central and West African culture. Music fits well with the diffusionist world history program, as it does perfect justice to what Graebner, in his “Methode der Ethnologie” (“Method of Ethnology”), refers to as the criterion of form (Graebner 1911). This criterion demands that for historical reconstruction, only nonfunctional aspects of culture may be considered, as in their cases multiple invention is far less plausible. Whereas functional aspects of objects or cultural traits, so the general idea behind this argument, could always be explained in relation to certain needs or ecological factors, aspects of form, that is, a certain type of adornment, particular types of knots, or in the context of music, specific playing techniques,

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tunings, or tonal systems, were much more likely to indicate historical relations. To be considered particularly significant, however, this criterion of form always had to be combined with the criterion of quantity, thus minimizing the effects of chance by assembling various items all pointing to the same historical processes.7 Responding to both requirements, Frobenius presented an impressive array of similarities between Indonesian and African material and musical culture: bows and shields, houses and costumes, masks and figurines, pipes, tattoos, knives, and cordophones, wooden drums and “tinkle instruments.” His final aim was to prove the Indonesian, or as he preferred to call it, the “malaionigritic” origin of the “West African Culture Area”—in this case, West Africa spans from what is now the Congo to Southern Nigeria via Western Angola and Gabon, continuing in a narrow stretch along the West African coast until it reaches Sierra Leone (Frobenius 1897–1998, 1898). In other words, Frobenius refers precisely to the region, whose cultural relatedness and Indonesian background was so strongly felt by Jones and Dick-Reed as they listened to the music of different and quite distant places located within that region. Three years after Frobenius had published his findings, Bernhard Ankermann was awarded a doctorate in Leipzig by Ratzel. In his thesis, “The African Musical Instruments,” he also reflects on Indonesian influences on Africa, this time in the context of African instruments (Ankermann 1901). In theoretical terms, his work culminated in a programmatic double lecture that he gave, together with his colleague Fritz Graebner, at the Gesellschaft für Völkerkunde conference in Berlin in 1904. At this lecture, both scholars dealt with the distribution and diffusion of artifacts and cultural traits, Graebner in terms of Oceania, and Ankermann in relation to Africa (Ankermann 1905, Graebner 1905). The impact of the Indonesian expansion was a central focus of both presentations, and in terms of Africa, Ankermann was able to add further evidence to Frobenius’ historical reconstructions. Since then and in contrast to mainstream anthropology, processes of cultural diffusion have continued to play a role in academic explorations of African music—as promoted for example by one of the leaders of the field, Erich von Hornbostel, in a famous article published in 1911. The question of how Indonesian and African music relates was raised time and again, often by renowned representatives of comparative musicology, or ethnomusicology, as the discipline was named from the 1950s onward. Jaap Kunst, famous for his extensive knowledge of Indonesian gamelan music, tried to “establish an incontestable proof ” of von Hornbostel’s theory of the overblown fifth—a theory relating the tunings of both Indonesian as well as African xylophones to ancient Chinese music theory—by measuring the tunings of ninety-six African marimbas (Kunst 1936). He discovered that although “the number of possible

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scale-types is practically unlimited,” nearly all of the instruments were tuned according to the Javanese system, which made it unreasonable “to ascribe the conformity … to mere chance” (Kunst 1936: 68). Kunst drew the conclusion “that it is to old Javanese cultural influence that Central Africa—either directly, or indirectly—owes its marimbas of this highly specialized type” (Kunst 1936: 68). Another thirty years later, Alan Lomax became known for his cantometric project, whereby with the use of statistics, he related styles of traditional music to forms of social organization. Focusing on folk music all over the world, he isolated one African song style, whose geographical span paralleled that of Frobenius’s “West African Culture Area” in a very striking way. However, it would appear that Lomax was unfamiliar with Frobenius’s historical construct; he certainly never cited it, nor did he cite Jones or von Hornbostel: Another similarity trace links the Guinea Coast to Madagascar, with a score of 86 percent. Ethiopia and the Northeast Bantu also join this cluster, though at a somewhat lower level. Here again, cantometrics may have caught the song-style echoes of an important distribution, the transcontinental reverberations of the East Indian maritime trade. The Eastern and Western ends of this cluster mark the terminals of a trans-Sudanic trade route, along which, according to Murdock’s reconstruction, yams, taro, bananas, and other important food crops from Malaysia reached West Africa (Lomax 1968: 94).

Of course, there were also many voices of doubt and criticism. For example, M.D.W. Jeffreys (1961) tried to argue that due to the Arab slave trade, the diffusion process should be understood the other way round, namely, from Africa to Asia (Jeffreys 1961). Or Roger Blench, who in 1982 complained of the lack of scientific evidence concerning the way music was used to write cultural history (Blench 1982), a criticism that was heavily based on two reviews written by Blacking and Hood on Jones’s “Indonesia and Africa” (Blacking 1966, Hood 1965). Although Blench refrains from questioning the historical relations of Indonesia and large parts of Africa per se, he echoes the scepticism of those critical of the diffusionist endeavor in general. Turning his eyes from the emerging whole to single details, he points out other possible histories for these details, and concludes that musicologist approaches are “thoroughly insubstantial” (Blench 1982: 91). For him, as for many others, the aesthetic perception of an all-embracing scenario, in which all the composite elements suddenly make sense—although the historical implications may be completely unexpected—does not constitute something that so-called real science should be based upon. It matters little, as Blench himself is forced to admit, that “the case of Madagascar shows us how data from musical instruments anticipated the conclusions of lexicostatistical and haematological studies” (Blench 1982:

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81). Here, he is referring to a scholarly piece by Curt Sachs, who in 1938 deduced Malagasy migration patterns from the distribution of musical instruments all over the island (Sachs 1938). Sachs was considered by Blench to be remarkably accurate in his interpretations—not due to his comprehensive approach, though, but “in spite of its lack of formal criteria” (Blench 1982: 82). Although the question of how Indonesia potentially influenced Africa remained alive in the field of ethnomusicology,8 it has not been considered in general anthropology since the end of diffusionism in the 1940s. Malinowski’s disgust regarding an academic tradition that explicitly approaches the question of culture from a nonfunctionalist, inorganic perspective (Malinowski 1965: 15–36) resulted in a complete reorganization of the field of African Studies. This led not only to a different understanding of culture, but also to different methodologies and thus to completely different research agendas—a paradigm change that affected not only anthropology, but also African history, which was influenced by the same sociological currents, resulting in a shift of focus from general world history to more recent and more regional histories. However, having lain dormant for nearly a century, the question of whether and how Indonesians traveled to Africa and whether and how Indonesian culture left some kind of imprint in certain regions of Africa, may be facing an interesting comeback, in line with what is commonly referred to as the mobility turn. This turn not only refers to the recent growth of academic interest in the movements of people, things and ideas all over the world, but more importantly, it also implies that to be on the move is, and has always been, a natural state of affairs and not just an exception caused by particular needs. Thus, although the diffusionist (re)constructions themselves remain unchanged, the context in which they may now be read is different, which might render them more plausible than they were only a few years ago. At any rate, the historiography of the Indian Ocean looks different if reconsidered from a mobile perspective, which assumes that even two thousand years ago, various groups of people about whom we only know very little were busy traveling the world, with Indonesians undoubtedly among them (Randrianja and Ellis 2009: 17–44).

Recapitulation It was the enormous amount of evidence collected by German diffusionists, this vast array of both big and small clues indicating an Indonesian influence not just in Madagascar and on the East African coast, but in regions spread all over Africa, that triggered my own first moment of great surprise. When I first read the introductory pages of Frobenius’s “Der westafrikanische Kulturkreis,” I was mainly struck by the arrogance of the author and the outdatedness of his

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approach. Reading about “Africans as the most important representatives of the absorbing folk character,” or about a “Malay flood of people” to Africa that resulted in an “African Malaio-Nigritic flotsam belt” that encircles large areas of Africa and continues to exist today (Frobenius 1897: 225) seemed to represent nothing more than obsolete ideologies. However, as I continued reading, my attitude toward the text became more ambiguous. How is it possible for all these bows, shields, knives, houses, dresses, masks, figurines, pipes, tattoos, jewelery, and, above all, different types of musical instruments found in vast regions of Africa to be so incredibly similar to others found in Indonesia in ways it is difficult to find a rational explanation for? Why is it that they can all be found in Central and West Africa, whereas they are absent in other areas? As I read on, I felt that I started to run out of arguments that would help me oppose the idea of what Frobenius labeled the “West African Culture Area.” And in spite of all the well-known criticisms—essentializing, homogenizing, lack of meaning, lack of context —a nagging feeling remained. However, as I had begun to prepare for ethnographic fieldwork on popular music in Madagascar’s capital at that point in time, I decided not to delve any deeper into this somewhat delicate topic. Listening to Tarika’s album Soul Makassar and hanging out with Hanitra at the Antshow Cultural Centre that she had just finished building was, as it turned out, not helpful in this respect. Like a Malagasy ancestor who is not honored by sufficient remembrance, the matter of Southeast Asian influence on Africa began to haunt me just as I decided to turn my back on it. Hearing Hanitra’s persuasive stories of how she felt at home in what should have been a strange and distant place and how she and her hosts became aware of their shared cultural heritage when singing what they thought were their respective traditional songs, I was finally convinced—maybe not of an Indonesian influence on large parts of Africa, but definitely that history can be traced in music, even if it dates back a thousand years and more.

References Ankermann, Bernhard. 1905. “Kulturkreise und Kulturschichten in Afrika.” Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 37: 54–84. Astuti, Rita. 1995. People of the Sea. Identity and Descent among the Vezo of Madagascar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blacking, John. 1966. “Africa and Indonesia: The Evidence of the Xylophone and other Musical and Cultural Factors (Review Article).” African Studies 25: 48–51. Blench, Roger. 1982. “Evidence for the Indonesian Origins of Certain Elements of African Cultures: A Review, with Special Reference to the Arguments of A. M. Jones.” African Music 6, no. 2: 81–93.

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Bloch, Maurice. 1971. Placing the Dead. Tombs, Ancestral Villages, and Kinship Organization in Madagascar. London et al.: Seminar Press. Dick-Reed, Robert. 2005. The Phantom Voyagers. Evidence of Indonesian Settlement in Africa in Ancient Times. Winchester: Thurlton. Frobenius, Leo. 1897–1898. Der Westafrikanische Kulturkreis. Petermanns Mitteilungen 43, no. X, 225–236; 43, no. XI: 262–267; 44: 193–204 and 265–271. ———. 1898. Der Ursprung der afrikanischen Kulturen. Berlin: Gebr. Borntraeger (=Der Ursprung der Kultur, Bd.1). Geertz, Clifford. 2000. Available Light. Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Graebner, Fritz. 1905. “Kulturkreise und Kulturschichten in Ozeanien.” Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 37: 28–53. ———. 1911. Methode der Ethnologie. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Graeber, David. 1995. “Dancing with Corpses Reconsidered. An Interpretation of famadihana (in Arivonimamo, Madagascar).” American Anthropologist, 22, no. 2: 258–278. Hogan, Brian. 2006. “Locating the Chopi Xylophone Ensembles of Southern Mozambique.” Pacific Review of Ethnomusicology 11: 1–18. Hood, Mantle. 1965. “Africa and Indonesia: The Evidence of the Xylophone and other Musical Factors (Review article).” American Anthropologist 67: 1579–1581. Jeffreys, J. D. W. 1961. “Negro Influences on Indonesia.” African Music 2, no. 4: 10–16. Jones, A. M. 1971[1964]. Africa and Indonesia. The Evidence of the Xylophone and Other Musical and Cultural Factors. Leiden: Brill. Kubik, Gerhard. 2004. Zum Verstehen afrikanischer Musik. Wien: Lit. Kunst, Jaap. 1936. “A Musicological Argument for Cultural Relationship Between Indonesia, Probably the Java and Central Africa.” Proceedings of the Musical Association 65: 57–69. ———. 1954. Cultural Relations between the Balkans and Indonesia. Amsterdam: Royal Tropical Institut. Lambek, Michael. 1998. “The Sakalava Poiesis of History. Realizing the Past through Spirit Possession in Madagascar.” American Ethnologist 25, no. 2: 106–127. Lomax, Alan. 1968. Folk Song Style and Culture. New Brunswick: Transaction Books. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1965[1944]. A Scientific Theory of Culture and Other Essays. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. McClary, Susan, and Robert Walser. 1990[1988]. “Start Making Sense. Musicology Wrestles with Rock.” In On Record. Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, eds., Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin. London and New York: Routledge, 277–292. Meinhof, Ulrike H. 2005. “Initiating a Public: Malagasy Music and Live Audiences in Differentiated Cultural Contexts.” In Audiences and Publics. When Cultural Engagement Matters for the Public Sphere, ed., S. Livingstone. Bristol and Portland: Intellect, 115–138. Meinhof, Ulrike H., and Zafimahaleo Rasolofondraosolo. 2003. “Popular Malagasy Music and the Construction of Cultural Identities.” Aila Review 16: 127–148. Oliver, Roland. 2005. “On Xylophone.” Times Literary Supplement, Dec. 9, 25. Rakotomalala, Mireille Mialy. 2003. Madagascar. La musique dans l’histoire. Fontenais-SurBois: Anako Èditions. Randrianja, Solofo, and Stephen Ellis. 2009. Madagascar. A Short History. Chicago et al.: Chicago University Press.

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Ratzel, Friedrich. 1885. Völkerkunde. Erster Band: Die Naturvölker Afrikas. Leipzig: Verlag des Bibliographischen Instituts. ———. 1887a. Völkerkunde. Zweiter Band: Die Naturvölker Ozeaniens, Amerikas und Asiens. Leipzig: Verlag des Bibliographischen Instituts. ———. 1887b. “Die geographische Verbreitung des Bogens und der Pfeile in Afrika.” Berichte über die Verhandlungen der Königlich Sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaft 39: 233–252. Sachs, Carl. 1938. Les instruments de musique de Madagascar. Paris: Institut d’Éthnologie. Schmid, Wilhelm. 1937. Handbuch der Methode der kulturhistorischen Ethnologie. Münster: Aschendorff. Schmidthofer, August. 1994. “Kabôsy, mandoliny, gitara. Zur Entwicklung neuerer Popularmusikformen in Madagaskar.” In For Gerhard Kubik. Festschrift on the Occasion of his 60th Birthday, eds., August Schmidthofer and Dietrich Schüller. Frankfurt a.M. et al.: Peter Lang, 179–191. ———. 1995. Das Xylophonspiel der Mädchen. Zum afrikanischen Erbe in der Musik Madagaskars. Frankfurt a.M. et al.: Peter Lang. ———. 1998. “Zur Geschichte der Musik am Merina-Hofe vor 1828.” In Österreichische Musik—Musik in Österreich. Beiträge zur Musikgeschichte Mitteleuropas. Theophil Antonicek zum 60. Geburtstag, ed., Elisabeth Theresia Hilscher. Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 327–336. ———. 2005. “Some Remarks on the Austronesian Background of Malagasy Music.” In 2005—The International Forum of Ethnomusicology in Taiwan: Interpretation and Evolvement of Musical Sound. Conference proceedings. Taipei, 75–93. ———. 1976. Musikwissenschaft und Kulturkreislehre. Zur Methodik und Geschichte der Vergleichenden Musikwissenschaft. Bonn: Verlag für systematische Musikwissenschaft. Tracey, Andrew. 1971. “The Nyanga Panpipe Dance.” African Music 5, no. 1, 73–89. von Hornbostel, Erich. 1911. “Über ein akustisches Kriterium für Kulturzusammenhänge.” Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 43: 601–615. ———. 1928. “Die Maßnorm als kulturgeschichtliches Forschungsmittel.” In Festschrift. Publication d’ Hommage offerte au P.W. Schmidt, ed. by Wilhelm Koppers. Wien: Mechitharisten-Congregations-Buchdruckerei, 303–323.

Notes 1. This research is generously supported by the European Union (Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship within the 7th European Community Framework Programme) and by the German Research Council (DFG), two institutions to which I want to express my sincere gratitude. 2. This is Hanitra’s own translation of the Malagasy lyrics that she provides in the CD booklet. For the role of text in Malagasy world music see Meinhof and Rasolofondraosolo 2003, Meinhof 2005. 3. Analakely is the central market of Antananarivo, Madagascar’s capital. 4. To borrow a formulation from Rita Astuti (1995) that helps understand Malagasy identity constructions, in which ethnic ascriptions strongly intermingle with kinbased identities centering around a politics of the tomb (Bloch 1971, Graeber 1995, Lambek 1998: 123–124).

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5. Robert Dick-Read, the author who provided the latest exhaustive book on the topic, refers to the realm of music as “perhaps the field in which there has been the widest acceptance of Indonesian influence in Africa” (Dick-Reed 2005: 3; see also Kubik 2004: 12, 25–26). In a similar vein, Schneider refers to the xylophone as a “means for historical research” (“historisches Forschungsmittel,” Schneider 1976: 146). 6. The story Dick-Reed refers to is by the ethnomusicologist Andrew Tracey, who heard an ensemble of “about 50 men and women singing and playing panpipes” in a Nyungwe village on the Zambezi river, which made him feel “like being in an organ loft among the pipes” (Tracey 1971: 73). 7. Graebner 1911: 71ff.; the whole idea of a Formkriterium dates back, as he himself states, to Ratzel and even beyond (Graebner 1911: 98). Also in 1911, von Hornbostel claimed a similar approach in the field of comparative musicology (von Hornbostel 1911: 604, see also von Hornbostel 1928). A quarter of a century later, Schmidt published a book on the methodology of culture-historic anthropology, trying to render the whole approach even more precise (Schmidt 1938, esp. 129–160). For a general overview on how musicology and diffusionist anthropology interrelate, see Schneider 1976: 9–65. 8. See, for example, Hogan 2006, on Mozambican xylophone orchestras; August Schmidhofer, concerned with the musics of Madagascar, is also working on this topic (Schmidhofer 1994, 1995, 2005). Both are, however, eager to show how this possibly Indonesian music is also shaped by African influences and contexts.

CHAPTER 8

Tears, Not So Idle Tears “Time Binding,” Lachrymose Emotionality, and Ethnographic Disambiguation James W. Fernandez








On Phylogenetic and Comparative Emotionality For the anthropologist inevitably anchored in all things human there are several introductory and contextualizing references to our subject matter in this essay, which treats, however briefly, of the place and ponderability of the emotions in culture, which is to say the challenges to our ethnographic task of their disambiguation. First of all, there is the resonance of this subject matter with Darwin’s classic tome The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) and what he argues there, and secondly there is the more complex matter of the differences between cultures in giving access to tearfulness and what meaning is to be attached to their emission. In respect to the emotions Darwin puzzled over the almost complete lack of “emotional weeping” among other animals and particularly other primates. The ready and sometimes copious flow of tears that humans everywhere emit in certain, most often in culturally influenced circumstances, seemed to him and for subsequent students of the phenomena to be a function of our neotony, the extended infancy and childhood of humans, a state of helplessness and dependency well served by these distress and need signals of tearful crying as guarantors of the required sympathetic attentions of long put-upon adults. And, of course, even adults do not escape the power of tears. Numerous have been the instances among tough-skinned politicians of being caught

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up, sometimes surprising even themselves, in sudden tearfulness during an otherwise sobering oration or declamation. The interpretation of these lachrymose interludes is various, but, in democratic society, many a seeker of power has been brought low and out of the running by his seeming powerlessness in controlling an outwelling of tears. In any event the need to exact sympathy through a long period of infantchild dependency, and extended maturation in general, offers to all human societies, with variable expression of course, the possibility, throughout the life cycle, of otherwise inarticulate but highly expressive tearful emotionality that other animal societies do not possess.2 We are tearful animals, for crying out loud, and, one might add, an animal always aware of not only the tearful frailties, always present in our transitory and imperfect mortal natures, but also, however boastful of our indomitable natures, our always possible dependencies and our exposure to projects gone awry and that have come to tears. Recently our looming fate seems to be that of the sorcerer’s apprentice, too clever by half, but all too often, as in the present consequences of our clever use of fossil fuels over the last several hundred years, finding ourselves their victims and an unanticipated contamination of our own creation. It makes one want to cry! While it may bring tears to the eyes to think of the unpredictability of our situation and our final dependencies upon one another, to say it in that way addresses the second part of the theory of emotional weeping. We weep not only to signal unattended mainly biological discomfort over the numbers of years of our dependency, but we weep by reason of our social natures. We weep because we are not only, in the end, highly dependent animals we are highly dependent social animals with strong capacities for identifying ourselves with the group from whence our dependency derives and to which we owe, though we may live in societies excessively dedicated to featuring our supposed individualism, a corresponding devotion. This was the emphasis in the theory of the British social anthropologist A. R. Radcliffe-Brown concerning obligatory ceremonial weeping among the Andamanese Islanders. Weeping here has a pronounced social solidarity rather than personal need function.3 I regard it as being the affirmation of a bond of social solidarity between those taking part … arousing the sentiment of attachment, serving to renew social relations where they have been interrupted … or weakened or modified. In all instances we may say the purpose of the rite is to bring about a new state of the affective dispositions that regulate the conduct of persons to one another, either by reviving sentiments that have lain dormant or producing a recognition of a change in the condition of personal relations (RadcliffeBrown 1922: 245).

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Warlike imperial peoples of Euro-America can perhaps relate to this explanation by recalling the massed marching of military parades and the passing by of one’s country’s flag capable of producing tears in bystanders although otherwise they are experiencing no personal discomfort or need that requires immediate attention. It may have been because of the ever present possibility of such welling up and loss of composure, such loss of independency of judgment that Einstein, painfully acquainted with such parades in his increasingly authoritarian native land of the 1930s, was caused to warn against attendance at parades much less participation in them. Those social tears of collective identity, we might call them, caused in the social animal by the formalized massing and passing in review of his fellows, tears of unwitting recognition of our dependent social natures perhaps, were, for Einstein, emotions too subject to manipulation by predatory political interests. His century, his people, and he himself in a nascent Nazi Germany had suffered many times over from the fateful consequences of such mustering of mass emotion, such misdirected but unifying passion of the crowd, as stirred up in military parades and in less formalized gatherings of the masses. We have a lot to cry about when we think about the holocausts of the century past in important part conditioned by the tearful or near tearful emotions of a manipulated crowd identification! The tears provoked by parades are no doubt heartfelt in their way, in so much as the heart is a social organ, but often enough they end up having been crocodile tears as they have been exercised by predatory and ravenous nation states. In any event this brief introduction to the contrarieties of tearfulness, its signaling of both dependency and empowering solidarity, has been stimulated by thoughts of several situations of crying in my own field materials, is intended, in part also, to suggest the challenge to our ethnographic work of disambiguating the meaning these usually unarticulated, I like to call them inchoate, moments express. And I want also to register a sea change that my approach to the disambiguating task has undergone over the several decades in significant part congruent with Stephen Tyler’s work of the late 1970s and 1980s. How we manage to meaningfully and not imperiously and simplemindedly disambiguate the inchoate, so often invested with the complex, so often contradictory, emotionality of human relations, has been a long-term interest (Fernandez 1980). Here, taking weeping as an inchoate moment in social relations I only want to think a little more about it as an instance of the never easy challenge always before us of disambiguating meanings in the deep well of human emotion at moments of its welling up! I will also, from the memory part of my own deep well bring up or bring back an old but revelatory idea about our challenged human situation and our subject matter in this collection, the idea of time binding.4

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What It Means to be Moved: From Cartesian Coordinates to the Tangled Emotions Embedded and Embodied in the Narration of Revelatory Incidents Emotion: From the Latin e + movere (to move out of). A migration, a transference, an agitation or disturbance of state whether physical or social. Any such departure from the usual calm state of the organism, individual or social.

Let me turn now to the presence and challenge to our ethnographic understanding of especially emotional moments, just a few, in our own fieldwork in Africa and Northern Spain. I would first point up an early, but eventually transformed, interest in understanding emotion through the self-reflective use of the metaphor of movement (or motion) that is embedded in it (Fernandez 1978, 1979). This was a disambiguation in structuralist-functionalist mode that saw intense emotional expression as arising in moments of instability, of too intense social interaction or in a sudden cessation of interaction, and as movement back or forward to a status quo before or after. It was a notion that suffered from the predispositions of structural-functionalism but perhaps apt, if not redundant, in the study of religious movements that sought by definition to move their adepts forward to new convictions and adherences or to move them back to an established pathway of salvation when they were at risk of falling away from or abandonment of (Fernandez 1964, 1979). The question was evident. What were these religious movements about and why were they so moving to their participants? The answer is redundant but not uselessly so if accompanied by detailed ethnography! They were about emotional movement! Accordingly I endeavored to understand the religious and revitalization movements I was then studying in Africa as, in important part, imaginative arguments and ritual actions intent on making emotional movement toward the revitalization of once and future new religious realities, in both movement and membership, or the reaffirmation of those once accepted but fading or fallen out of favor. I was seeing religious conversion, that is, as movement from, as Thomas Carlyle once said, “the anxieties of the everlasting No! to the peaceful assuagements and acceptances of the everlasting Yes!” In those African religious milieus that held the sacred very much in awe that expectation of movement to its accession, this conversion from no to yes was one of the most charged, which is to say, moving, of available experiences in the lived religious culture under investigation. Tears came readily to the eyes of adepts. I saw it many times with my own eyes, when their eyes suddenly found themselves, or so they imagined, in the visionary presence of the sacred, usually represented in the personages of their ancestral dead. This supernatural reaffirmation of social solidarity beyond the grave could be a very dramatic thing.

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And one sought naturally to attend in detail to these personages in their moving interaction with their fellows both living and dead, that is, with the truly dramatis personae real and imagined of their religious lives. Indeed, I came to anchor the ethnography in those dramatic or dramatizing persons so central and energizing to the religious movement. (1982: 13–23) And I was especially interested in those personages whose communicative interactions with their fellows in the collectivity were central both to the coherence and dynamics of the movement that they both embodied in their person and inspired in others. I focused especially on the texts they produced in figuring out and thus dramatizing the natural and supernatural situation of the group.5 I ought to say that there was early on in this work, mainly of the 1960s and 1970s, something more powerfully explanatory, that is to say, powerful, at a higher level of abstraction, than the multiple figurations of their emotion in the central personages involved in figuring a way out of the inchoate circumstances of their religion and of their fellows. This was especially so in the arguments arising in especially dramatic moments in its and their social life. I was especially alert to revelatory incidents in which that figuring out was implicated in one way or another. And in the ethnography I began every chapter with these incidents. But I early on accompanied this approach, and to a considerable degree essentialized it, with a vectored argument from the late 1950s and early 1960s psychological work on the semantic differential (Osgood et al.: 1957), seeing this emotional movement, as a consequence, that is, in terms of, the shifts, characteristic of the differential, along a coordinate system of three vectors of power, significant activity, and goodness. The argument was that all emotions were tied up or coordinate with changes in one’s powers over one’s social circumstances, one’s capacity for active effective involvement in one’s social circumstances and one’s affective sense of the goodness of one’s active involvements in the world as socially defined.6 That formalistic and ethnological approach—it was a precipitous disambiguation that saw all emotion as movement in sense of matters of sufficient power, adequate activity, and the axiological approval of others in the self-reflective sense—was suggestive, perhaps, and even powerful to those persuaded by a scientific paradigm that celebrated the virtues of parsimonious explanation . It was certainly typical of its period, the later 1950s and 1960s. It did not, however, fully and finally, satisfy my sense of ethnographic obligation to the complexity of the lived experiences of the field especially the experiences involved in describing and teasing apart the implications of the revelatory incidents and their figurations that were under focus! Indeed it may have answered a big question or set of questions with a powerful paradigm, but it begged or obviated the always and ever ready com-

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plexity and contrarieties in the host of little questions of ethnographic work. Hence it gave way, in my work, to a more concentrated attempt to understand emotional movement in local terms, which meant mainly a focus on the local figurations, tropes, if one wills, of experience.7 I became interested in the heightened emotions attached to or produced by these revelatory incidents and, where possible, their associated trope-rich texts. I attempted to tease apart these conjunctive and highly charged moments in social life whose tensions as embodied in local figurations could give us insight into structural tensions of the social order, the family order, and the individual order. This interest was influenced in part by Victor Turner’s 1960s work on those emotional processes of breach, repair, and resolution in social order he called social dramas and Lévi-Strauss’s focus on the recurrent unwelcome contradictions in culture that were emotionally provocative and that energized efforts at structural transformation through myth and ritual. I was surely not the only anthropologist of the period to turn toward a focus on revelatory incidents, that is to dramatic narratives of cultural and social encounters resonant with the unwelcome contradictions of local life, nor the only one to find special illumination in the imagistic figurations, what I liked to call the argument of images, occurring at these moments. I, at any rate, undertook in ethnographic write-up to employ narrative descriptions of revelatory incidents followed by ethnographic interpretations of these moments or events, these revelatory incidents, always with an interest in grasping, as much as possible, their anchoring tropes and their emotional tenor.8 This necessarily implied an ethnographic interest in the living through of the vicissitudes of social life in culture and in grasping ethnographically the emotional contours of that living through. To be sure, my long-term interest in that enduring theme in anthropological inquiry, cultural revitalization, and revitalization movements has long implied an interest in such vicissitudes mainly the reaction to devitalizing times and the rhetorical search for vitality in culture that they reflected. This interest in devitalization and revitalization in culture might be regarded, I think, as fundamentally and foundationally an interest in the emotional movement occurring in the social order! It became my ethnographic practice, then, to begin each chapter of an ethnography with these emotionally charged revelatory moments, and their accompanying texts, in the company of which we might tease out, subsequently in the chapter, an explanatory matrix of direct causes and collateral stimuli and motivations, long smoldering aggravations, and precipitating provocations, both antecedent and subsequent to the event itself. The ethnographic challenge of teasing out this matrix of emotionally charged instigations and inspirations carried one, almost inevitably, a considerable way from a Cartesian coordinate system with its overly precise vectors of power, activity and

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goodness into the more inchoate and self-contradictory conditions of life in culture as lived. We can examine just one instance of a revelatory and emotionally laden moment of weeping in the ethnography of the Bwiti, an ethnography focused on revelatory incidents in Fang life, on the dramatis personae of the fieldwork and on the figuring out, by both ethnographer and practitioners, of their situation. This incident introduces chapter 9, “The Occult Search for Capacity” (Fernandez 1982: 215–216).

The Crying of the Death of Mba Muzwi In the early morning hours not long before sunrise of a September night on the threshold of the long rainy season, Muzwi Ekwaga came slowly wailing through the village. Villagers were already in that deep and final stage of sleep of which Fang spoke. But Muzwi’s cry as he passed through the village sank ominously into our reviving consciousness. We awoke struggling to understand what he was saying. He sang keening: “I have lost my son! The only son that was left to me … the son that would take my place in the family. I am an old man. Who shall take up my work? I am an old man and he is dead. Finally the wail passed away as the old man entered the forest on the other side of the village with his lantern. He was on his way to Assok Bele to cry the death there. Everyone knew now that Mba Muzwi was finally dead. He had already lain three days as a dead man, refusing all food and drink (Fernandez 1982: 215).

The chapter after recounting this incident then goes on to tease out all the many factors involved in this death by mesmerized stupefaction: Mba Muzwi’s ambitious and spiritually adventurous nature, the inability of village life to satisfy his ambitions, the overbearing power of the elderly age grades, the exploitation of village naiveté by the African and European merchants of occult literature, the still strong traditional belief in the acquiring of a protective and life-success guaranteeing guardian spirit, evus, with its associated taboos and dangerous possibilities of violation, his arrogance and lack of social solidarity with his own siblings and age mates, and his ready domination and disobedience of a benevolent but weak-willed father and overly nurturing mother, the failure of Christian evangelization to make any significant headway in converting the young like Mba Muzwi! This “complex matrix of ethnographic interpretation of such a highly emotional event” is surely overdetermined by such a vectored understanding as proposed by the semantic differential. At the very least such an incident deserved the long chapter following, devoted to its disambiguation. The simpler idea that it was some combination of frustrated

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power, constrained activity, and denied approbation, had, indeed, explanatory value and maybe in some ultimate sense grasped at the core of this particular instance of human complexity. But I saw, or field experience deeply attended to showed me, that it could not capture on the ground or on the deathbed, as it were, the complexities of the living society and extant culture embodied in various ways in this once ambitious but then flickering and finally snuffed out young life and in his weak and conflicted and itinerant wailing father. A social scientist qua scientist might be satisfied with a three-vectored account of the movement in a Cartesian world toward death and despair, but an ethnographer attuned to the complexities of social and cultural life, not at all!

Time Binding: The Tears of Family Loss My wife (also an anthropologist) and I have now left African research after a quarter century of involvement, and in the last three decades we have been working in the North Coast of Spain, Asturias. Let me turn now to just two highly charged moments we have experienced in that mountainous seaside land and landscape in the eastern half of the Province of Asturias. One of the most recurrent moments of emotion for us or for any ethnographer very probably who has been long engaged is the study of a particular culture and society—we have been working there off and on now for several decades—are those moments after a year or two of absence, of returning to take up field relationships again. Often enough these are emotional moments in which tears well up as unhappy loss and happy gain in family life is almost always the first thing to be recounted, those mortal moments in which time past and those social beings who populated it has become unbound by the stroke of mortality. When it is a matter of the death of a loved one, and especially one who was well-known to the ethnographer and the narrator, it is frequently accompanied by an upwelling of tears, though much less frequently accompanied by anything as dramatic as actual weeping. This is so in women particularly, whereas in men, the loss is usually of briefest statement in order, perhaps, to avoid the tears that might accompany longer narration. Of course, these tearful recountings, can, hopefully, soon afterward be complimented by the happy account of a new birth in the family. Such tearful moments are not particularly challenging to ethnographic explanation: the sudden reappearance of a former social relation, from a time when the one recently passed away was part of former social relationships, is sure to remind, often tearfully, of the weight of that loss in the obligation to recount it! In our currently concluding project9 on the struggles of a “new” cheese10 to make itself commercially viable, we have come to know through ethnographic

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work twenty different cheese-making families. Because these mountain folk do not have a culture of cooperation among families, the cheese making—because of the animal husbandry involved, along with the constant flow of the milk which demands working into cheese—is a 24/7 operation. This constancy of hard work involved in the cheese making itself tends to fall particularly on the wives and mothers of the family. One of the hardest workers of these cheese-making families is Rosa, mainly because her family has the largest production of cheese in this cheese-making group of twenty families. A somber, matter-of-fact, and overworked woman, she rarely smiles. But on several occasions in our engagements with her, tears have come to her eyes. The one occasion that has a natural enough explanation was when we went to offer to her our condolences at news of the death of her oldest son from a heart ailment that he had long suffered. This son, a boy of considerable intelligence, had been sent away to school for a business education so that he might eventually take over the business management of the family enterprise that was becoming, in its growth, a considerable challenge to the family. We might take her tears at the moment of the condolences as very natural to the loss of an offspring of whose hopeful but now ended career we already had, Rosa knew, considerable knowledge. But these tears also came from the knowledge of the loss to the family of an offspring upon which the family cheese business had become increasingly dependent for its continuation. The future of family enterprises of any kind depends finally on the preparation and strength and readiness of the next generation to take over the business. In the case of cheese making, the hard work associated with it has not made it always easy to convince the next generation, aware of the forty- to sixty-hour weeks of otherwise available wage labor, with weekends free, to accept the 24/7 obligations. So this was not only the loss of a loved one for whom one had personal maternal and parental hopes, but one who the family was increasingly going to be dependent upon for the continuation of its enterprise. These were not idle tears at all, but tears of expectations and hopes denied on a number of levels of the family’s arduous lifeway. The presence in Rosa’s tears of the threatened loss of material hopes for the family as well, surely, as the sentiments of affection and family attachment was perhaps seen more recently when Rosa discussed with us the failure of a local commercializing enterprise that had been buying their cheese and of which they had become committed as socios, co-owners of a kind, to pay them for these purchases because of a cash flow problem. Here, too, tears came to her eyes that can be perhaps most easily explained (one says perhaps because of the difficulty to inquire in such emotional moments for the reason of weeping and getting any kind of an adequate response) by reference to the immediate threat to the family enterprise of such loss of income. But it must also be

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speculated that we were ourselves special stimuli for these tears, because not only were we bound to her in former acts of condolence, but we had also done with her a brief life history and, thereby, were privy, and to a degree confidants, to a special knowledge of the temporalities of her life, a knowledge at a deeper level than most of her neighbors and fellows possessed and where lay the wellsprings of her tears. I doubt that tears welled up for her in talking about these family difficulties with others not as bound up in her life time and the unbindings that had characterized it. In any event, in Rosa’s tears we have a complex construction of emotion lying in matters of previous kinship, economic, and social interactions with strangers become confidants, not easily disambiguated, though perhaps glimpsed through understandings of time bound and unbound in her career as mother and chief cheese maker.

The Tears of “Language Death” and the Emotions of Language Revitalization Of course, the coming to terms of the play of emotions in culture, and the welling up of tears, is not simply limited to family loss and gain in kinship and economic terms, the most obvious and ever present source of the welling up of speechless emotionality in any society perhaps. There is, for example, a complex set of emotions we have been seeking to grasp and come to terms with that have to do with language use and language loss and language revitalization, that has to do, that is, with matters of expressivity in communicative interaction in general. One can only suggest the complexity of the emotions present here, but they are deeply lodged in historical time, both nationalhistorical (or world historical) and generational time in Asturias and in Spain. At the present time and over the last quarter century, an attempt has been and is being made largely by an emerging generation of university people to revitalize the Asturian language, bable Asturiano, the first Romance, Latinbased, language of modern Spain (since the beginning of the Reconquest of the Iberian peninsula in the eighth century). It was the Latin-based language after all, used in the Asturian court (on the north coast of Spain) from the eighth to the mid-tenth century and subsequently replaced by the later and eventually dominant Romance language, Castillian. Highly emotional debates on this issue of shifting language dominance and subordinance and language rights pro and con have been recurrent in the last several hundred years. Currently these have been going on, as we say, for more than a quarter century, at least since the writing of the ethno-genetic12 Spanish Constitution of 1978 and the founding of the Asturian Academy of the Language in 1980. These documents and institutions have produced many revelatory incidents, some of such

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degree of frustration or expectation as to bring participants in this effort at language revival and language defense close to tears. From time to time things become eventful and quite emotional in the debates between Asturian and Castillian language proponents. And we have witnessed tears of anger come to the eyes during these debates as well as, at other moments, tears of joy and appreciation when, for example, a mass or a sermon after long years of prohibition by the Catholic Church, which in respect to language use has passed directly from Latin to Castillian, is said or sung in Asturian rather than Castillian. It is, once again, a challenge to disambiguate what is resonant in this periodic emotionality, and one is attentive to the terms and figurations that can be usefully explanatory in accounting for it. Surely there is involved an age-old structural tension in the history of many modern European states between enforced centralization of formerly distinct feudal or otherwise separated political economic entities and identities and the accompanying promotion of national identification, on the one hand, contesting with a lingering sense of peripheral realities and rights on the other. This center-periphery tension has been particularly characteristic of Iberia since Roman times, and it has been a prevalent tension, often thought of in language terms, throughout the centuries in modern Spain. The civil war was in part fought over this issue, where the pole of enforced centralization in politics and language, came to be represented in Francoist (nationalist) authoritarianism, whereas the second pole, of provincial (including language) revival was represented in the more federalist-oriented republic antecedent to Francosim, and then subsequently, in the present democratic state, with its periphery oriented autonomy-encouraging democratic constitution. The emotions provoked by issues of centrism or peripheralism are deeply anchored in Spanish history but were much exacerbated by the many cruelties and atrocities of the civil war and in the subsequent repressions, in the name of administrative and religious centralism,13 exercised by the victorious military-religious regime. Language debates seem charged, more than anyone is willing to speak about, with these lingering antagonisms and resentments surrounding centralized or peripheralized identities, often charged enough to bring tears to the eyes. But there is more than resentments, surrounding center-periphery struggles, to the sentiments associated with language loss and language revitalization. Some of these emotions can be discovered by examining carefully the terms for that particular kind of nostalgia tinged with sense of final loss so frequently referenced and manifest in northeast Iberia, señardá or especially murnia or morriña. The contexts of usage of these terms suggest connotations of sad loss, of a dying away14 of something of cherished and familiar value and pronouncement, a natal landscape and its people, and in this case the lan-

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guage of that landscape and its inhabitants’ ways of speaking. Such a complex of sentiments of the moribund, of a fading language past that once securely reposed in the parental and grandparental generation and that might possibly be recovered are present in the frequent celebrations by the Academy of the Asturian Language, whose object is to bring about the revitalization of the Asturian language. The emotionality of those opposed to the revitalization of the local language is rather different and dry eyed. They most usually consider the local language as little more than a folkloric survival, although at the same time they often can find it quaint and entertaining, a source of pleasure in the way that country bumpkin tales are pleasing and confirmatory to an urban elite. Mainly these urban elites are affronted by the naiveté, divisiveness, and dangers to the efficiencies of Spain as a modern centralized state in a modern Europe that would come from the revival of Asturian as a competing official language to Castillian in the schools and the administration. For these opponents above all it is only such a modern state that can do justice to the grandeur of a lost but perhaps still revivable international, that is to say imperial, golden past. The opponents of language revitalization here very often have a larger “worldhistorical” worry at play, which is the centuries-long history of Spain’s decline as an imperial presence and power in the world coupled to the belief that this decline has been brought about by the weakening effects of the separatisms in the body of the whole Spanish nation represented by these local language revitalization movements. The contradictory emotions bound up in language nostalgia or world status nostalgia, in the complexities of the murnia-señardá complex, challenge understanding. In both parties whose heated debates we briefly suggest here, there is some sense of the loss of contact with the receding past, some sense of a failure in time binding of past to present that accompanies the accession to Castilian. But this nostalgia for a lost or disappearing past is, comparing the two parties, much differently configured in its relation to the deep imperial past on the one hand and the more recent family and generational past on the other. To disambiguate these varying emotions as only arising in the hearts and minds of those on one side of the argument who advocate a restoration of a declining or dying local language is to miss the different mix of nostalgic sentiments in the two parties! It is to miss the way that, in the one case, these feelings are attached to the loss of a recent past still living on in surviving members of the grandparental generation, feelings very much associated with the emotions of generational replacement and family loss. In the other case there is nostalgia, much less familial, for a much more distant imperial past and a once imposing imperial state. That loss of state has been reduced to virtual legendary status by the vicissitudes of history, the well-documented

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historian’s theme of “Spanish decline” as indicated, but its place in the world can now, in some part, be restored by a successful and efficient modern state, a state freed from useless debates over local languages. But in both cases there is a sense of time unbound and an obligation to bind it up again. Meanings and identities at a deep level are in struggle but the tear-producing, familyanchored time bindings are more the characteristic of the local language revitalizers, and the dry-eyed empire-anchored time bindings of imperial past to a national no-nonsense present are more the characteristic of the local-language deniers. The struggle over modes of time binding is an emotional struggle, although conditioned by different levels of political and social identification. It is a struggle over whether there can be any really secure connection to a rapidly retreating and disappearing yet reenforcing and beloved past amidst a vertiginous and constantly competence-testing presence on the national and international stage of European modernity. In any case my view is that it is the vicissitudes of these complex feelings embodied in revelatory incidents and expressive figurations that should be of concern for the ethnographer in his own struggle for understanding of the local relation of past to present. It is a relevant fact for the ethnographer of this particular argument, that the majority of the local language revitalizers have rural roots and have had cherished relations with grandparents or great grandparents who were Asturian speakers. There impulse for binding up the generations through language is palpable. Many if not the majority of the Castillianizers, on the other hand, have either urban or extra provincial roots and loyalties, often they are bureaucrats with functional responsibilities to the provincial and national state and thus hardly open to experiencing the nostalgia for the more immediate and local ancestral voices and the sense of a direct emotional connection to them. For such reasons the terms murnia or señarda plays no easy part in the vocabulary of the Castillianizers as far as the language question is concerned. Their murnia or señarda, if it exists—there is very little welling up among them—is that for a lost Spanish presence on the world stage. It is not that they do not hear voices from the past; it is that they are not family voices but more distant national and heroic imperial voices. Of course, one does not wish to deny them their own nostalgia for their family past, their own problems of time binding, their own moments of tearfulness in the rapid passage of family generations amidst an encroaching modernity, the more common occurrences of tearfulness in the human equation. But in respect to language death, their effort at time binding is to a more distant past of imperial power and glory from which modern Spain risks becoming unbound. In any event the terms murnia or señarda in contemporary debate over language revitalization must be, as is the case with so many of the difficult although important local words of ethnography, a part of the ethnographic glos-

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sary of the anthropologist who seeks to understand those emotions that are so fundamental to this particular problem of language loss and language gain. Although only a part of the skein of human relationships in Asturias the emotionality bound up in family anchored nostalgia is an important part of local experience because it has to do, in such a history burdened society, with the most immediate sense of the fading presence of the past and what to do about it and with it. To be sure language revitalization in practice and in effect so often comes down to questions of grammatical and lexical normalization. It is often discussed in purely formal and intellectual terms as a challenge to decision making amidst the variety of grammatical, dialectal and lexical possibilities that exist in any unstudied and objectified language, each variety of which makes it separate claims and has its loyalists. But the whole question of language loyalty is also a very emotional question, a question of comparative nostalgias we might say to give a register to the constant effort in the human equation at time binding. The associated tears are not so idle after all. In any event any ethnographic approach to language revitalization has also to address the configurations of that compelling and tear producing emotionality such as is bound up in the notion of family solidarity and family loyalty and family reproduction itself where original tears lie. The stimuli to tears always first found in the family life of infancy and is ultimately found there as well in the insertion of human mortality into the family life of old age, can also be projected into more abstract and distant matters of life lived on the stage of provincial and national politics and history. That is to say that it is first and primarily found in the complexities of the passage of or reproductions of generations a precinct of investigation, and of time binding need it be said, which it falls to the ethnographer who is above all involved as a consequence of his very local and grounded work to try and disambiguate?

Conclusion: Tears Not So Idle Tears: Some Challenges to Disambiguation If there ever was in human affairs an instance of the welling up into social life of the inchoate, that which might also be referred to in Stephen Tyler’s fruitful phrasings as the realm of unsaid and the unspeakable (Tyler 1978, 1987), it is present in human tearfulness.15 I have engaged here with as much dry-eyed attention as possible, and all too briefly, in giving it and some of its instantiations in our own field experience as much of that attention as possible in so few pages. We have briefly endeavored to disambiguate what it may be about in various situations of tear-accompanied stress in Africa and Spain, the like

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of which are frequent enough in the human condition and, more particularly, perhaps, in the uncertain participations with the not fully predictable others of ethnographic practice. Most of us ethnographers, I hazard, have had occasion, figuratively speaking of course, to shed tears of frustration ourselves at this particular and special challenge of our task. Sometimes they could be real tears. We started with Darwin’s efforts to derive evolutionary implications in respect to human neoteny and Radcliffe Brown’s structural functionalist explanations for such unique expressivity and have come to the conclusion that the tools of understanding that have been used, evolutionary-adaptive, structural functionalist, do pry open some useful sense meaning out of a contorted face, the upwelling of tears and perhaps even the sound of sobs and wails, but they do not exhaust a fully satisfying disambiguation of this unique behavior of we social animals. Since Malinowski we have been challenged with the imponderabilia of human social life in culture. We recurrently return to the deep well of lived experience alive with discordant impulses amidst cross-currents of sympathetic and parasympathetic feelings. Techniques of disambiguation and final vocabularies adequate to that task are hard to combine. Especially because we ethnographers cannot lay our culture upon the couch or cram it into a laboratory fully subject to our methods and our extant vocabularies. And more especially as our ethnographic method of participant observation procedure if truly practiced immerses us in the flow and swirl of everyday life challenging to even the most accomplished narrator to describe and interpret. Such a subtle, introspective, self-conscious, often volatile, and contrary creature, we have before beside and behind us, however ultimately dependent social animal he or she may be. Disambiguation has, to be sure, an established place in the human sciences and particularly in linguistic science where WSD, word sense disambiguation, is a subdisciplinary specialty of importance.16 The advantage of the term disambiguation is that it put at the very center of our concerns the ever-present ambiguity, the inchoateness, of the human condition and the very substantial challenges it continuously offers to our figuring out that which we study. Indeed the terms, figuration, refiguration, configuration, and figuring out, it is our argument here, should always be accompanying terms whenever we set about the disambiguation of the well springs of ultimate human belief and action, relief and traction, out of which often enough these tears not so idle tears well up! In any event we have challenged ourselves in this essay with one feature of the volatility and vitality of the emotions in social interaction and particularly those emotions evidenced in sudden tearfulness. Anthropology, it should be said, has at hand much important work more penetrating by far, I think, than my brief effort here in addressing these moments; the works for example of Re-

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nato Rosaldo and Edward Schieffelin (just to mention two) whose authors are quite perceptively involved, though quite differently placed in the quite shaken social structure whose emotionality they observe and feel and disambiguate (Rosaldo 1984, Schieffelin 1976). Emotions and tearful emotions are so often ambiguous in their understanding even or especially to the tearful that they set a special task and special challenge to disambiguation. Surely, as we see, there is also a politics of disambiguation as suddenly tearful politicians rapidly discover. Tears there, in that arena of contests over power, are not idle at all but quickly work to the favor or disfavor of he who finds himself crying out loud over hidden and not so hidden agendas. Nor are tears idle, as they well up at moments of passage in the transitory, human condition as a means, perhaps of socializing the pain of the ephemerality of that condition, the challenge of time binding, amidst the anxious temporalities and preoccupying mortalities men and women face. The tears communicate most powerfully our humanity, or human animality, and in that sense socialize the sense of loss or gain most effectively. But we have not wanted to become too confident in our making sense, in our disambiguations, of these underlying complexities of human lives as lived. In our own career we have, in search of greater depth of understanding, moved from a once quite satisfyingly formal (Cartesian) disambiguation to a more meaningful method that by a narrative art attentive to the figurative seeks to probe more deeply, by attunement to revelatory incidents and in their configurations, into the very heart of the excluded middle of human existence. We might end here with two phrasings, the one of my PhD professor, Melville J. Herskovits, who recurrently argued that a concept in anthropological ethnography was a tool to be always held lightly in the hand. The other is a phrasing of Stephen Tyler, our primus inter pares here, about the ever possibility of legerdemain in the anthropology of decoding and arriving confidently and parsimoniously at some universal sense of things. What we should always be reminded of, he tells us, is that what we are engaged in discovering possible worlds of understanding and not absolute ones. This present author as well, would echo these cautions in affirming that though the human world is, in its ultimate inchoateness, not ours to capture fully and render interpretable or explainable in any final sense it yet possesses signals, signs, symbols, and tropes, such as tears themselves, whose pondering can bring us closer to the lived world of a very temporal and temporary, time binding class of creature. References Darwin, Charles. 1872. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. London: John Murray.

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Dorian, Nancy C. 1981. Language Death: The Life Cycle of a Scottish Gaelic Dialect. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Fernandez, James W. 1964. “African Religious Movements, Types and Dynamics.” In Journal of Modern African Studies 3, no. 4: 428–446. ———. 1978. “African Religious Movements.” Annual Review of Anthropology 7: 195–234. ———. 1979. “On the Notion of Religious Movement.” Social Research 46, no. 1: 36–62. ———. 1980. “The Dark at the Bottom of the Stairs: The Inchoate in Symbolic Inquiry and Some Strategies for Coping with It.” In On Symbols in Anthropology, ed., J. Maquet. Malibu: Undena Publishers, 13-43. ———. 1982. Bwiti: An Ethnography of the Religious Imagination in Africa. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Guthrie, Stewart, 1980. “A Cognitive Theory of Religion.” Current Anthropology 21, no. 2: 181–203. Korzybski, Alfred. 1921. Manhood of Humanity. Lakewood, CT: Institute of General Semantics. Osgood, Charles Edgerton, George J. Suci, and Percy H. Tannenbaum. 1957. The Measurement of Meaning. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred Reginald. 1922. Andaman Islanders. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rosaldo, Renato. 1984. “Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage. On the Cultural Force of Emotions.” In Text, Play and Story: The Construction and Re-construction of Self and Society, ed., Edward M. Bruner. Washington DC: Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society, 178–195. Schieffelin, Edward. 1976. The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Strecker, Ivo. 2011. “Tenor in Culture.” In The Rhetorical Emergence of Culture, eds., Christian Meyer and Felix Girke. New York: Berghahn Books, 137–156. Tyler, Stephen A. 1978. The Said and the Unsaid: Mind, Meaning and Culture. New York: Academic Press. ———. 1987. The Unspeakable: Discourse, Dialogue and Rhetoric in the Postmodern World. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Notes For Stephen Tyler 1. I play here on Alfred Lord Tennyson’s famous poem, “Tears idle tears, I know not what they mean,” which is a moving evocation of the ultimate inchoateness of human temporality, our uncertain place with others in time! But of course I want here in this essay to try and disambiguate, with, alas, ambiguous results, something of the springs of that emotional inchoateness, or charged idleness, in Tennyson’s terms, loss of momentum in time, and time binding, that tearfulness expresses and brings about! 2. Of course, crying need not be accompanied by tears. But the fact that prolonged dry expressive crying for attention is detrimental to the mucous membranes and exposes the organism to disease may help explain tears as a copious naso-lacrimal wash, protective to the mucal passages and restorative in such exaggerated moments of unspeakable emotion.

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3. See also here Edward Schieffelin’s classic evocation of this form of solidarity-affirming expressivity (Schieffelin 1976). 4. In my college years at Amherst College, 1948–1952, the English department faculty there, with whom I shared a philosophy major, was much influenced by the General Semantics movement then at its apogee of influence, particularly the work of its founder, the Polish émigré, Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950). Time binding was a central term of Korzybski’s philosophy of human engineering (See his Manhood of Humanity, 1921). It identified humans as that class of living beings, different from the plant class and the animal class, with the capacity to knit together past, present and future. The inability to exercise that capacity rationally, efficiently and humanely was, for Korzybski, a chief source of human distress and suffering. His non-Aristotelian social psychological engineering aimed at correcting that inability. Korzybski developed a complex method and practice at his Institute of General Semantics. I have always regarded the concept of time binding as relevant to the human condition but do not otherwise follow all of the Korzybskian over determined edifice of general semantic theory. I employ his concept here in this paper only as one suggestive disambiguation of the tearful situations I address. My first contact with General Semantics arose 1948–1949, in the freshman English course at Amherst required of all students, where the faculty repeatedly probed in weekly assigned papers what they labeled, after Korzybski, the speechless point in the recounting of human experience, and as a challenge I suppose to the too ready verbosity and loquacity of many freshman undergraduates at an SAT-emphasizing institution such as Amherst. They were probing what might well be labeled in Tyler’s terms, the unsaid or the unspeakable. In one of these freshman essays I remember attempting to account for tears of my own, in my high school years, that welled up when I deeply disappointed my father, or so I fancied, in confessing to him that I had not made the freshman year basketball team (my father was a champion basketball player in his youth and young manhood). For one thing I was not yet fully grown and was not very tall. It is true I could not articulate to him my complex feelings of failure, of failing to meet my own expectations, and, in important part, of failing to meet his expectations and thus unable to bind myself effectively to family history and family heroics. One conclusion I came to from these freshman exercises was that there were complexities of human experience, the inchoate, constantly present in our being and becoming. That presence deeply challenged and often much surpassed language for its accounting. However we might struggle to come to terms with it, at least express it primarily in language, perhaps, sometimes we had turn to other signals, signs and symbols such as tears or touch! 5. One ought to say that the monograph Bwiti: An Ethnography of the Religious Imagination in Africa was long in the writing, several decades, and consequently was influenced by the changing paradigms of anthropological interest during this period. But the 1950s social drama paradigm of Victor Turner was a constant throughout and the 1970s and 1980s anthropology-as-text paradigm of Clifford Geertz was influential, not uncritically, at the end of the multidecade effort. 6. As seen first in Fernandez 1964, then in Fernandez 1978, and finally in Fernandez 1980. 7. This change of perspective away from the fruitfulness of parsimony in explanation to a focus on the local figurations of experience in communicative interaction of local personages, dramatis personae, is addressed in Fernandez 1978.

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8. Cf. recent argument by the German Africanist and culture rhetorician Ivo Strecker, based on long fieldwork in Ethiopia and many narrative and life history (as well as observational) interactions with the Hamar of South Omo; Strecker argues that the vitality of life in culture, a main object of ethnographic interest, lies in the feeling tone, or tenor (Grundstimmung), of human interaction and that we should be attentive to both the rhetoric that nurtures that feeling tone as well as to the epiphany or revelatory moments in which the tensions in that feeling tone rise or erupt into a synthesis of apprehension that is into confrontational moments revelatory, at one level of intensity or another, of the entangled emotional vectors, sometimes tear producing, of social life (Strecker 2011). 9. It is mainly the project of Renate L. Fernandez in which the present author has been a collaborator. 10. This mild blue cheese has been made in the peaks of Europe mountains of northern Spain for many centuries, but has come to be newly named and commercialized only in the last fifty years. 11. The figuration-personification of language as a mortal being subject to dying and resurrection-revitalization is frequent enough in the literature, for example, in Dorian 1981. 12. A phrase of David Greenwood’s coined because this democratic constitution sought, in reaction to the dictatorial centrism and religio-cultural monism, the National Catholicism, of the Franco regime, to encourage cultural and political expression of the millennial cultural differences found in the various regions, by the creation of eight autonomas regions to replace the much greater division into subordinated provinces and Madrid dominated provincial organization of Nationalist Spain. 13. In the name of National Socialism and National Catholicism. 14. Insofar as murnia or morriña is concerned it is seen by some as a diminutive of the word morir, to die, hence “little death,” the kind of sudden confoundments and sudden severances of which life is full. 15. Both of Tyler’s terms have a logocentric anchorage in the sense that they would presume, as one well might, that the order of language and language use is central and primary to being human and that all things human are to be judged and measured in respect to its presence and absence. Loquacious and articulate creatures as we are there is very evidently strong argument for such logocentrism. The word inchoate is intended to suggest, however, an underlying primordial condition, an underlying pillar of wisdom or ur-proposition of inquiry (Guthrie 1980: 187) that the world as initially known through our senses is initially ambiguous. It wants to suggest that here is a core ambiguity in the human condition, a centrality of uncertainty and inability that recurrently stimulates, tests, and ultimately defeats our logocentric capacities ever to articulate adequately and definitively and thereby master. Our experiences at the deeper levels of their occurrence are ever frustrated and accompaniment to living that can well lead to tears. In this paper we have attempted to articulate it as the recurrent human effort at time binding, the tears of joy that accompany the temporary successes at doing so and the tears of despair at the recurrent failure to do so. I am not so sure, however, that Tyler and I do not arrive at the same center point of human experience in the end! 16. It is of interest to note that in that flourishing WWW open-source enterprise, Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, disambiguation or Wikipedia disambiguation has become a core set of rules and techniques by which decisions are made in adjudicating differ-

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ences in readings, alternate meanings, and use of words in the voluntary contributions of the participants to this ongoing open source enterprise. This was probably a necessary scholarly response to the suspicion provoked in the academy with its cultivated hierarchies by Wikipedia’s egalitarian and unprivileged approach to knowledge.










Part III

Text

CHAPTER 9

Stones, Drumbeats, and Footprints in the Writing of the Other Dennis Tedlock








The postmodern world is in a sense timeless: past, present, and future coexist in all discourse (Stephen A. Tyler).

Among the Maya of Yucatán, there was an era when the completion of measured periods of time was marked by the dedication of stone monuments. A period lasting 360 k’in, literally “suns,” was called a tun, literally a “stone.” But it happens that the term for a slit drum is tunk’ul (in which tun is onomatopoeic) and that slit drums were played at dedications. It also happens that when tun, in its sense as a period of 360 suns, was written on the lakam tun or “tall stones” that were dedicated to the sound of a tunk’ul, one of the glyphs that was chosen for this purpose takes the form of a diagram of the drum:

Many of the surviving tall stones commemorate the completion of a period lasting 20 × 360 = 7,200 suns (or multiples thereof), which was called a k’atun, meaning “twenty stones.” K’a is from k’al, a common way of saying twenty, but it resonates with k’ab’, the term for “hand.” The hands have only ten digits, but when the Maya counted to twenty and beyond they brought the feet into play,

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thinking in twenties rather than tens, as speakers of English once did when they wrote and spoke such words as fourscore years. When anthropologists and other Mayanists write about the Maya, the k’in always becomes a “day” (or its equivalent in other European languages), which moves it some distance away from the naked-eye astronomy practiced by the Maya. K’a and k’al fare a little better when they become “twenty,” since twenty carries an audible (and readable) trace of having once been two tens. Tun is usually left untranslated because there is no European term for a period of 360 days, but making it into a native term for such a period and embedding it in an objectifying discourse that avoids metaphor and sound play has the effect of removing the stones and drumbeats with which the Maya gave weight and sound to the phenomenon we call time. Recently, epigraphers who specialize in Maya writing have found a way to rid the original texts of the resonances produced by tun. There are a few inscriptions in which a glyph that refers to the 360-day period and would otherwise be read as tun carries a phonetic suffix for the syllable b’i, which usually serves as sign for the consonant b’ when it occurs in a final position and happens to be the final sound in ha’b’, the term for a year of 365 days. From this the epigraphers conclude that the classic Maya, if not the postclassic and colonial Maya, extended the term ha’b’ to the 360-day period. This finding has been given the status of a law, so that any glyph that serves to designate a 360-day period, even when it lacks the suffix (which most of them do), must now be read ha’b’ and translated as “year” (as it is in Coe and Van Stone 2001: 47). To understand how epigraphers might have been led to take this new position we must recall, first of all, that their work still enjoys a momentum that was produced when they proved beyond doubt (and against considerable resistance) that phoneticism plays a major role in the Maya script (see Coe 1992). The heuristic that made this accomplishment possible consisted of treating Maya texts as if they were the products of a code that could be cracked by discovering the laws that governed it. Signs standing for entire words, which are common in these texts, became something of an inconvenience as a result, and iconic signs were of little value unless they could be given rebus readings. In this hierarchy of signs, a glyph that consisted of a diagram of a slit drum or the image of a stone was most useful if it could be read as an unambiguous reference to something else, in this case a time period. The subsequent discovery of the occasional addition of the suffix –b’ took the reading to a higher level by eliminating the lingering echo of the drum and the stone in the term for the time period. What we are left with at the end of this reduction is ha’b’ in its sense as a real year lasting 365 days, together with its metonymic reference to

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that nonconforming Maya period lasting 360 days, which we can now call a year if we use literal or figurative quotation marks. The otherness of Maya time reckoning has not completely disappeared, but it has been made easier to talk about in European languages. What gets silenced when the phonetic aspect of Maya writing is allowed too high a rank in the reading of texts are the strands of Maya poetics that produce metaphors and, on a subtler level, sound plays that are more than just keys to rebus readings. If we shift our position from that of a code-cracker to that of a hypothetical Maya reader whose interest in a text transcends the task of reading it aloud in the manner of a grammar-school test of literacy, even the –b’i suffix is open to an alternative interpretation. Not only do the drum, the stone, and the otherness of the 360-day period still linger when this sign is added, but b’i means “road” if it is interpreted as a word, and the sign that stands for it is often rendered in the form of a human footprint. The two examples shown here, one of them Classic (at left) and the other colonial (at right), stand for b’i and b’e respectively, the latter being the way the word for “road” (or should we say “footpath”) was and still is pronounced in Yucatán:

When writers (or graphic artists) among the Maya and other Mesoamerican peoples created diagrams of time and space, they represented what we might call the road of time with a series of footprints. What this means for our hypothetical reader is that the addition of the –b’i suffix, rather than tightening the hold of the phonetic code on the text, evokes yet another dimension of the Maya poetics of time. When the Maya of northern Yucatán used the alphabet to write books during the colonial period, they always used ha’b’ for the 365-day year and tun when referring to periods lasting 360 days. Among other things they composed chronicles in which each division is a k’atun, or “score of stones,” named for the position of its final day within the Maya divinatory calendar of 260 days. One of the scores of stones in their account began on May 31, 1500, and ended on February 15, 1520, as measured by the Julian calendar then in use in Europe. It was named for the divinatory date Kab’il Ajaw, or “Two Lord.” For most Maya the main event of this score of stones was an epidemic of a previously unknown disease, the one called smallpox in English because of the signs it makes on the skin. The Spanish term is viruela, from “virus,” a Latin term for a slimy liquid that is malodorous and poisonous. In Yucatán the Maya

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named it k’ak’, literally “fire.” For most Maya this disease arrived before they first caught sight of the foreigners who brought it. At some point the foreigners were observed picking and eating fruit from a tree. It was op’, a variety of anona or cherimoya the Maya considered insipid and therefore inedible, and for that reason they gave the foreigners the name aj tz’utz’ op’, “anona suckers.” The next score of stones, named Thirteen Lord, began in 1520 and ended late in 1539. This period brought two major Spanish attempts to conquer Yucatán, both of which failed. During the next score, named Eleven Lord and running from 1539 to 1559, the invaders won what they interpreted as a final victory in 1546. Among other things, their victory opened the way for the establishment of a network of Franciscan missions. The most famous of the early evangelists was Fray Francisco de Landa, a Castilian who arrived in 1549. During the following score of stones, named Nine Lord and running from 1559 to 1579, he was recalled to Spain in 1564 and remained there for several years. He was charged with falsely claiming the authority of the Holy Office of the Inquisition when he conducted an investigation of Maya religious practices in 1562, but he was eventually exonerated. During his long wait for a hearing he wrote his Relación de las cosas de Yucatán, which remained unpublished until the late nineteenth century. Landa introduces his Relación with an account of the geography and history of Yucatán, but his main purpose is to describe the customs of its indigenous people. It has become traditional among ethnographers to name Fray Bernardino de Sahagún rather than Landa when seeking an early predecessor in the Americas, but if we are searching for a predecessor in the writing of the ethnographic genre that dominated most of the twentieth century, then Landa’s Relación makes him a far better candidate than Sahagún. The genre in question is the ethnographic monograph, in which the culture of the other is presented almost entirely in the voice of an omniscient observer who writes in the third person plural. One of the main differences is that Landa wrote largely in the historical past rather than the ethnographic present. In effect, this choice foreclosed the future of a past that was in fact living a clandestine life in the present of his actions as a writer. The sequence of Landa’s topics seems a bit disorganized by twentiethcentury standards, but their overall effect is familiar enough: house construction, food and drink, music and drama, commerce, agriculture, kinship, religion, warfare, the life cycle, the ceremonial cycle, the writing system, and native knowledge of plants and animals. He is also like many later ethnographers in the extent to which he excludes dialogues, leaving native terms as the last traces of the voices of the others. Indeed, he narrates only a single face-to-

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face exchange, a dialogue to which he himself was not a party. It took place in 1517, during the score of stones named Two Lord. The person on the Spanish side, who is not quoted directly, is the explorer Hernández de Córdoba, on the occasion of his landing at the spot now known as Cabo Cotoche in Yucatán: He found some Indian fishermen and asked them what land it was and they replied “Cotoch,” which means “our houses and our country,” and from this the name was given to that point, and asking them further by signs about the character of their land, they replied “Ci uthan,” which means, “They say so.” The Spaniards called it Yucatán (Tozzer 1941: 4).

It is indicative of the low value Landa placed on dialogue as such that his sole reported example documents the production of misinformation. Worse yet, he himself missed the meaning of the statement ci uthan, or ki’ u t’an in modern orthography. The Maya were actually making a comment about Hernández de Córdoba, saying, “The way he talks is funny.” The supreme irony of Landa’s suppression of dialogue is that epigraphers were able to make sense of his account of Maya writing only by putting his examples of hieroglyphic spellings back into the context of an interview. They started from the answers he wrote down and then reconstructed the questions he must have asked to get them (see Schele 1992: 12–15, and Coe 1992: 104– 105). This was a radical departure from the work of many of the researchers who reinterpreted the literature of the encounter during the period that culminated in the Columbian quincentennial. Many of the contributors to that discourse, lacking in ethnographic sensibilities, read their way back up inside the heads of the conquerors through the words of those same conquerors without considering what the actors on the other side were reported as saying and why they might have said it. Landa wrote his Relación from his field notes and his memory, at a distance from the site of his research. Stephen Tyler could have been describing what Landa did when he wrote these words: “Experience became experience only in the writing of ethnography. Before that it was only a disconnected array of chance happenings” (Tyler 1987: 215). One of the things that happens during this process is that “an ethnography weaves a locus of judgment within itself ” (Tyler 1987: 216). In the field, Landa had gone through an early period when he took an interest in Maya culture and history, but when he discovered that Maya religious practices had not receded safely into an ever more distant past he turned on his own parishioners and submitted them to questioning under torture. A third stage came when, in the process of writing his ethnography at a distance from the scene of his shock and anger, he wound his way back toward something closer to his original openness.

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There is more than one locus of judgment in Landa’s Relación, but the only locus that concerns us here is the one that centers on the man he acknowledges as having been his principal informant—in the ethnographic rather than the inquisitorial sense of the term. That man was Nachi Cocom, baptized Juan, from the town of Sotuta. Some years after his conversations with Juan Nachi Cocom, Landa had brought the Inquisition to Sotuta. The stories of apostasy and blasphemy he extracted from witnesses turned out to feature Juan and his brother Lorenzo as the main characters. Juan had died some years before, and his brother had committed suicide before he could be submitted to interrogation. The most sensational story about them concerned the fate of two girls they had allegedly taken to the churchyard, where they had set up idols. They tied the girls to crosses, stood the crosses up, and then sermonized, saying, “Let these girls die crucified, even as Jesus Christ did, he whom they say is our lord, though we do not know whether this is so.” Then the two brothers took the girls down and cut them open, offering their hearts to the idols and their bodies to a nearby well. At the time of the trial Landa seems to have had no doubt that this was a true story, revealing an act that could scarcely have been more diabolical. For recent generations of scholars, who have also taken the story to be true, it has served as an especially striking example of syncretism, the process whereby native peoples combine Christian rites with their own. But what seems more likely, now that we better understand the intimate relationship between torturer and victim in the proceedings of the Inquisition, is that the story was created by two imaginations, working together (see Ginzburg 1990). The interrogator asks leading questions that contain clues to his fantasies, whereas the witness tries to imagine answers that will fulfill and even exceed those fantasies. If the story that emerges lacks enough circumstantial detail to make it seem as though it really happened, the interrogator will demand more details and the witness will provide them. But there are limits. The witness in the present case, who may have been repulsed by the thought of nails in the hands and feet of the two children, declared that they had been tied to the crosses. As for the general plot of the story of the crucified children, it was already well known to the interrogators (see Tedlock 1993). At the end of the fifteenth century, tales of ritual murders committed by Jews had circulated throughout Spain. The most sensational story was that of the Santo Niño de la Guardia, which resulted in the trial and execution of six Jews and six Jewish converts to Christianity in 1491. According to their own testimony, taken under torture, they had carried out a ritual in which they crucified a Christian child, a boy, and then cut his heart out. For Landa and his colleagues, Old World history was repeating itself in the New.

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In theory, at least, Landa would have been compelled by the testimony at Sotuta to exhume the bodies of the Cocom brothers and cremate them in a public ritual. But he excludes this entire episode from his Relación. What he does say is that Juan Nachi Cocom was “a man of great reputation, learned in their affairs, and of remarkable discernment and well acquainted with native matters. He was very intimate with the author of this book, Fray Diego de Landa” (Tozzer 1941: 43–44). A reductive interpretation of this statement could make it into nothing more than Landa’s assertion of the reliability of his principal source, but his words go beyond that. “Remarkable discernment” speaks of admiration, and the phrase “very intimate with the author of this book” seems tinged with affection and a sense of loss. What follows below is an interpretation of the conversation between Diego de Landa and Juan Nachi Cocom on the subject of Maya writing and books. The sources it draws on include Landa’s Relación (as translated and annotated in Tozzer 1941), the interpretations of the glyphs he elicited that have been worked out by epigraphers, and a passage from the hieroglyphic book known as the Madrid Codex. I am especially indebted to the late Linda Schele, who told and retold her oral version of the epigraphic part of the story at the annual Maya Hieroglyphic Workshop at the University of Texas (see Schele 1992 for a written example of her version). The speculations as to what Landa and Cocom could have been thinking about during their conversation, including Cocom’s reactions to what Landa seemed to be saying in Maya without knowing it, are mostly my own. In one of their meetings, Nachi Cocom showed Diego de Landa a book. It was bound between two boards that had been stained with verdigris to keep fungus and insects away. Between them was a single long strip of paper, folded back and forth to make pages that Landa measured as being one handbreadth wide and two handbreadths high. On one of these pages he saw a picture of a “large deer.” This is a puzzling description, since the images on a given page in a Mayan book are neither drawn to scale nor in perspective. There can be larger and smaller images of deer, but there is no way to tell the image of a large deer from that of a small deer. Shown on the next page is a page from a section of the Madrid Codex that deals with the trapping of deer. In the middle register is a large picture of a splayed male deer, while the bottom register has two small pictures of deer that were hoisted off the ground by bent saplings when they stepped into nooses. As with so many other things Landa says about Mayan books and writing, the best way to understand his “large deer” is to reconstruct what he might have said in his conversation with Cocom, working backward from his account of what Cocom said. Landa may have pointed to a particular picture of a

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deer and said something like, “Why is this one so large?” He describes Cocom’s response this way: “His grandfather had told him that when large deer of this kind came into that country,” meaning the cows that Spaniards brought with them, “the worship of the gods would cease.” When we consider that Cocom was continuing Mayan religious practices in secret at this time (though we may doubt that he was doing all the things witnesses said he was doing), it seems likely that his interpretation of the image of the deer was meant to keep Landa in the dark. In any case, it would have appealed to Landa’s sense of pride. The early missionaries were tireless seekers after evidence that their arrival in the New World had been prophesied, just as the arrival of the Messiah in Palestine had been prophesied in the Old Testament. The system of writing used in the book seemed ponderous to Landa. Most of the characters were more complicated than letters of the alphabet, and they were far greater in number. Even so, he decided to find out how the spelling might go for some of the Maya words he had learned. Perhaps because he had seen pictures of trapped deer in Cocom’s book, the first word he thought of was le, the term for “noose.” This was an ominous choice, since he would later conduct Inquisition trials in which the primary torture consisted in closing nooses around the wrists of Mayan witnesses and then hoisting them off the ground with their feet dangling, sometimes with stones tied to their ankles. Landa assumed from the start that he was dealing with an alphabetic writing system, but he could not understand why the results of his inquiry were so complicated. When he asked for the spelling of le he made Cocom “understand that there are two letters,” but this is what he got:

As we now know, the first and third signs stand for the syllable e, whereas the second and fourth are for the syllable le. To understand why Cocom wrote four signs we must imagine what he heard. When Landa asked for two letters he must have gone on to spell the word, naming its letters in Spanish as “ele, e” and then pronouncing it, saying “le.” Cocom heard four syllables—e, le, e, le—and that is exactly what he wrote. As for Landa, he interpreted the second and third signs as being the two letters he had expected, l and e. He imagined that the extra e at the beginning was an indication of the breathiness with which the l sound is pronounced in Mayan, a sort of hissing in which he thought he heard a faint foretaste of the vowel that follows l in le. Having gotten this far, he still had one more sign to

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account for, the fourth one. Not realizing that it was the same as the second sign, he must have entered into an exchange that went something like this: “But what’s this?” Landa asked, pointing to the fourth sign. “Well, that is le,” Cocom replied. “All by itself?” Landa asked. “Yes,” said Cocom. From this Landa concluded that it must be customary to follow the spelling of the individual sounds of a word with a final character that summed everything up. He could have found out, had he asked, that the second and fourth signs were the same, though they looked slightly different. But it seems that his discomfort with casting himself in the role of student was such that he preferred the invention of a private theory about the information he had been given to the embarrassment of seeming to be a slow learner. Cocom, on his side, must have been wondering what Landa’s problem was. Had not he been given a spelling in which only two different “letters” were used? Not that anyone but he would ever say something like ele e le, which was nonsense. Unless he actually meant to be saying what it almost sounded like he was saying, namely, “testicle blade noose.” Still hoping for simplicity, Landa chose another monosyllabic word for the next step in his writing lesson. It was ja, the word for “water,” spelled with an h in the orthography used by missionaries. He demanded just two letters again, naming them as “ache, a,” and then saying “ha.” By now Cocom understood that what Landa really wanted was two “letters” and two only, even though he had once again pronounced a total of four syllables. The solution that came to Cocom was to omit one syllable and write ache ja with two glyphs:

There are two syllables in the first of these glyphs: the left half is a particular sign for a that can used as a prefix and the right half is che. When Landa asked for an explanation he must have rested his finger on the left half of the glyph and then moved on without asking about the other half, because his transcription is limited to a. As in the case of the e before le, the extra a before ha seemed to call for a breathy pronunciation of the consonant. In the case of the sign that follows this compound glyph he correctly wrote ha. Again, Cocom must have been wondering whether Landa had any idea what he was saying when he asked that his statements be written down. It

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happens that ache is a word, and that ache ja, if anyone ever said such a thing, would mean “Hello, water.” Now Landa decided to ask Cocom to write something longer, and while he was at it he may have tried to explain what a “sentence” was. In any case he left the choice of words up to Cocom, and the result was a sentence:

The first sign stands for the syllable ma, which in this context is a word that makes the sentence negative. Then comes in, meaning the pronoun “I,” spelled with two signs. The first one is for i and the second for ne, it being understood from context that the final e is not pronounced. The last two signs, standing for k’a and ti, spell the verb k’ati, “to want.” Ma in k’ati is the result, meaning, “I do not want to.” Landa transcribed this entire sentence into alphabetic writing as if it were a single word, but he wrote down a correct translation. At this point in the interview there may have been a moment of a silence while he struggled with the thought that there might be a message in Cocom’s sentence. Whether or not he was troubled by this possibility he decided to press on, but with another change in his line of questioning. His new project was to elicit what he called the Mayan abecedario, or ABCs, letter by letter. When he asked for a, he got three different versions:

All of these are now known to be signs for the syllable a, and the first one is the same sign Cocom used in his spelling of ache. When Landa asked for the next letter, whose name is “be” in Spanish, he got two versions:

Both of these stand for the syllable b’e, and the first one, as we have already seen, happens to be iconic. It is a shorthand footprint with only three dots for

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the toes, placed between two lines that diagram a footpath. But Landa was not interested in what any of these signs looked like. He only wanted to know how they matched up with the letters of his alphabet, which do not look like anything except themselves. Once he had his b’e, or rather two of them, he moved on, not realizing that he was dealing with signs for syllables and should ask for b’a, b’i, b’o, and b’u. Because Landa was from Castile, he would have sounded as though he had a lisp when he asked for c, saying “the” rather than “se.” There is no “th” sound in Maya, but Cocom came as close as he could:

Landa labeled this glyph as c, but the syllable it stands for has turned out to be tze. By the time they got to z, Cocom was probably at the end of his patience. The name of this letter, in Landa’s pronunciation, would have come out as “theta.” So Cocom heard two syllables, not one, with a “th” sound into the bargain. Here is what he wrote in response:

No one, in all the time since then, has ever been able to figure out what he meant by this.

References Coe, Michael D. 1992. Breaking the Maya Code. New York: Thames & Hudson. Coe, Michael D., and Mark Van Stone. 2001. Reading the Maya Glyphs. London: Thames & Hudson. Ginzburg, Carlo. 1990. Myths, Emblems, Clues. London: Hutchinson Radius. Schele, Linda. 1992. Workbook for the XVIth Maya Hieroglyphic Workshop at Texas. Austin: Department of Art History, University of Texas. Tedlock, Dennis. 1993. Torture in the Archives : Mayans Meet Europeans. American Anthropologist 95: 139–152.

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Tozzer, Alfred M. 1941. Landa’s Relación de las cosas de Yucatán. Cambridge, Mass.: The Peabody Museum, Harvard University. Tyler, Stephen A. 1987. The Unspeakable: Discourse, Dialogue, and Rhetoric in the Postmodern World. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

CHAPTER 10

The Translation of the Said and the Unsaid in Sikkanese Ritual Texts E. Douglas Lewis








intelligo ut credam (I understand in order to believe) (Pierre Abelard, Sic et Non). It is not necessary to come out and state everything so directly. A well-formed Narration says as much by what is left out of it as by what is put in (Capt. Van Hoek to the crew of Minerva riding at anchor in Manila Bay, May, 1700; Neal Stephenson, The Confusion, 2004: 703).

To Make a Long Story Short Like most ethnographers, I have written in the field—field notes, letters, even, in later years, ethnographic essays, papers, reports. But to my mind the most interesting and challenging thing I have done in the field in the way of words on paper is reading the writing of those among whom I have done research, the peoples of the Regency of Sikka of the island of Flores in eastern Indonesia.1 Since 1994 I have been especially interested in the written works of two men who might well have been my most important informants had they not died, in one case, before my arrival on their island, and, in the other, before I knew him as an author. The two men—Dominicus Dionitius Pareira Kondi

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and Alexius Boer Pareira2—wrote on the history of the Ata Sikka and recorded myths of the origins of the peoples of the district, which had not otherwise survived to the time I began fieldwork on Flores. Both Boer and Kondi wrote prodigiously in a period that began in about 1920 or 1925 and ended in the late 1950s, when the old Sikkanese rajadom was coming to an end after the establishment of the Republic of Indonesia. In 1994, seventeen years after first arriving on Flores, I was introduced to a large cache of old papers—notebooks, manuscripts, and typescripts—stored in a high, double-doored cupboard in the home of the son of a man with whom I was collaborating on a dictionary of Sara Sikka, the Sikkanese language. The papers proved to be a large part of the literary output of Boer and Kondi. Among the more than a hundred manuscripts that make up their surviving papers are two book-length manuscripts, one each by Boer and Kondi. The long works are devoted mainly to written versions of the myth of origin of the Sikkanese and the Sikkanese ruling house. They are, in other words, the history of the rajadom of Sikka, which had been transmitted orally for the longest time and then finally committed to writing by these two extraordinary men. Most significantly, large parts of Boer’s and Kondi’s records of myth are written in ritual language, which leads to problems not easily treated by their translator. The discovery of the Boer and Kondi papers was the single most astonishing and important event during the thirty-six years in which I have now worked among the Sikkanese-speaking peoples. The greatest part of my work as an ethnographer since 1994 has been the preservation, correction, interpretation, and translation of Boer’s and Kondi’s histories of the rajadom. Two books have resulted from research on the manuscripts. Hikayat Kerajaan Sikka (The Chronicles of the Rajadom of Sikka) (Lewis and Mandalangi 2008) is an integrated edition of the two longest of the Boer and Kondi manuscripts.3 The Stranger-Kings of Sikka (Lewis 2010) is a monograph on the mythic-history of the Sikkanese rajadom set against the institutions of Sikkanese society in the last century of the rajadom. It includes an abridged version of the Hikayat in English translation. Had I known when I began how difficult the translation of the Hikayat into English would be, down how many ever narrowing paths to dead ends it would take me, and for how many years it would be a preoccupation, I am not certain I would have persisted with what has become, to my mind, a task impossible to acquit fully. The tale of how the manuscripts came to light and how they were corrected and translated for publication is told more fully in The Stranger-Kings of Sikka. Here, I will treat a few of the problems I have encountered in this work and suggest the debts of intellect I owe to the American, Stephen A. Tyler, and

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to the European, George Steiner, whose essays on language and translation I find intriguingly concordant.

The Said and the Unsaid in Sikka’s Hikayat Stephen Tyler ends The Said and the Unsaid: Mind, Meaning, and Culture with a conclusion on “The Said and the Unsaid,” which includes a brief essay on “The Act of Saying.” The act of saying can take place in the medium of writing as well as in the medium of speaking. Tyler’s thesis is straightforward: Every act of saying is a momentary intersection of the “said” and the “unsaid.” Because it is surrounded by an aureola of the unsaid, an utterance speaks of more than it says, mediates between past and future, transcends the speaker’s conscious thought, passes beyond his manipulative control, and creates in the mind of the hearer worlds unanticipated. From within the infinity of the “unsaid,” the speaker and the hearer [or the writer and the reader], by a joint act of will, bring into being what was “said” (Tyler 1978: 459).

I was gratified to be reminded when I reread the book’s conclusion recently that Tyler included writers and readers as speakers and hearers because I have been engaged the past sixteen years in a sometimes astonishing and always evocative interlocution with Boer and Kondi, the reading and translation of their written works, and in conversations with their descendants. From reading their texts, neither of them seems to have had a particular audience in mind when they wrote. This is unusual, and I shall say more about it in what follows. But in all fairness, they were of the first generation of literate Sikkanese and were writing before there really was much of an audience among their fellows to address. And it is likely the case that, while they were taught to read and write, they were not taught that effective writing requires the establishment of a degree of intersubjectivity between an author and his readers, if only to the extent that an author assumes he shares with his readers a common language and the vast unsaid to which any utterance in it refers. Indeed, as I will show, in the case of Boer’s and Kondi’s literary efforts, the main challenge has been to read the intentionality of their works in such a way as to understand the world in and about which they wrote. The act of saying, Tyler goes on to say, which signifies speaking, reading, and writing: is a symbolic unity of the “said” and the “unsaid.” … The “said” consists of three components: the “saying,” the actual utterance itself; “what has been said,” the reconstruction of prior saying; and “what will be said,” the anticipation of say-

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ing to come. It is the utterance within its retrospective and prospective context of pertinent remembered and imagined utterances (Tyler 1978: 459).

He then argues that: The “act of saying” thus creates a symbolic unity that transcends the mere concatenation of signs. Consequently, the meaning and the understanding of the “saying” are not given at the level of its signs nor in the rules of its sign combinations. To put it differently, knowing and understanding a language is not just a case of knowing rules for connecting signs and their attendant meanings. The “saying” and its structure have no priority in the understanding, for except as noise—as a disembodied specter—it never appears there apart from the other components of the “act of saying” (Tyler 1978: 460–461).

Furthermore: The meaning of a sentence is apprehended not by analyzing the meanings of its signs and their rules of combination, but by attending to the symbolic unity created in the “act of saying.” The movement of understanding is from the whole to its parts, not vice versa (Tyler 1978: 462).

Tyler’s last point bears directly on the translation of Sikkanese ritual speech, in which complete sentences are rare but which nonetheless reflects unities of culture in acts of saying.

Ritual Speech, an Evocative Genre of Sara Sikka While the language of narrative in both Boer’s and Kondi’s texts is mainly Malay, they both include many sometimes lengthy passages in Sara Sikka. The majority of these passages are transcriptions of ritual language, the special formulaic language in which the myths and origin stories of Sikka were once told. Kondi translates some of these passages into Malay but leaves others untranslated. In addition, he quotes characters who speak in the origin myths in Sara Sikka, in some cases using inverted commas to enclose these passages in the text. As with the citations of ritual language, some of these quotations are translated into Malay, whereas others are not. In no case does Boer provide translations of Sara Sikka passages in his writing. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch once told the young gentlemen of Jesus College, Cambridge: “[T]he printed book—the written word—presupposes a speaking voice, and must ever have at its back some sense in us of the speaking voice” (Quiller-Couch 1916: 45).

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It would not surprise me to learn that, almost a century after they were written, Quiller-Couch’s opinions are not especially well thought of. Yet in reading and translating the texts of Boer and Kondi I have found it most useful to imagine that I am listening to spoken words in Sara Sikka and Malay rather than reading words on a page. Indeed, there have been a few occasions on which, having become completely stuck for the translation of one of Mo’ang Boer’s long passages, one wholly lacking in punctuation and uppercase sentence starts, I have made progress only by reading the text aloud to my collaborator or by asking him to read it aloud to me. On these occasions, the speaking voice has brought to the fore the sense of that voice presupposed in Boer’s written words and thus has facilitated the translation of his texts. This simple technique has lent weight to my suspicion that neither Boer nor Kondi wrote as if for a literate audience fully grounded in the implicit and unsaid culture of Sikka. They were instead transcribing oral tradition in such a way that their texts would be sensible when read aloud to such an audience. With this I am familiar, for I have spent uncounted thousands of hours doing the same thing with audio recordings of Sikkanese conversation and ritual speech, that is, reducing them to written texts. Boer and Kondi were not auteurs, two among a pantheon of writers who were before them and to whose works they responded, directly or subliminally, in their own writing. In their day, they were not the last authors born of a long and established literary tradition. They were, not the last of an old, but rather the first authors of a new literary tradition. They are best viewed as scribes who sought to render the spoken words of their ancestors as faithfully as they were able in what was to them and their fellows an entirely new medium for recording knowledge. Elsewhere, Quiller-Couch asks a provocative question: “[W]hen a nation of men starts making literature it invariably starts on the difficult emprise of verse, and goes on to prose as by an afterthought. Why should men start upon the more difficult form and proceed to the easier?” (Quiller-Couch 1916: 57–58). Much of what Boer and Kondi recorded was Sikkanese ritual speech, rendered, in writing, as ritual language. Ritual speech is a poetical genre of Sara Sikka. Tales, invocations, genealogies, and clan histories told in ritual speech are rendered in a formal poiesis, unlike that of normal, quotidian speech. The fundamental principle of ritual speech as a poetic form is semantic parallelism. In English, poetry is commonly thought of as speech that rhymes. But, of course, it is not, neither in English nor more generally. Milton himself explained his own Paradise Lost and railed against the constraints of rhyme: The measure is English heroic verse without rime, as that of Homer in Greek, and of Virgil in Latin—rime being no necessary adjunct or true ornament of

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poem or good verse, in longer works especially, but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame metre; graced indeed since by the use of some famous modern poets, carried away by custom, but much to their own vexation, hindrance, and constraint to express many things otherwise, and for the most part worse then else they would have expressed them. … This neglect then of rime so little is to be taken for a defect, though it may seem so perhaps to vulgar readers, that it rather is to be esteemed an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recovered to heroic poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of riming (Milton 1909–1914 [1668]).

Nevertheless, Sikkanese ritual speech is constrained to phrases most commonly four words in length, each word later paired, in the fifth through the eighth positions, with another word bearing a close semantic relation to it. The relation of paired words can be one of synonymy, antonymy, or complementary opposition or the two together may be paired by classificatory (Brahminy kite and White Sea eagle, for example) or another convention. Thus the old Sikkanese deity is identified in ritual speech as: “Ina nian tana wawa, Ama lero wulan réta; Mother land and earth below, Father sun and moon above.” I am far from the first to make the suggestion, but if I were charged, as are the ritual specialists of Tana Wai Brama, with holding in memory and reciting on ceremonial occasions the histories of my domain’s clans, I would likely find my duty more easily discharged in ritual speech than in prose. I think QuillerCouch was right about verse perhaps preceding prose, at least in ritual, but wrong about which is more difficult.

The Translation of Ritual Language in the Hikayat and Its Tribulations Although speaking in ritual language may help a ritualist get things right when addressing spirits and the deity, Quiller-Couch was right, as his comment applies to an ethnographer aiming to translate a text of ritual speech into Indonesian or English. Here, the sequence of steps leading to a text to be translated should be recalled. To begin with, ritual speech is speech. It is spoken by a ritualist. If I work from written texts, it is because someone—I, in the case of ritual speech from Wai Brama, or Kondi and Boer, in the case of Sikkanese ritual speech—has written down spoken words. When working with written texts from Wai Brama, it must be borne in mind that the oral narration of myth occurs frequently in the public domain, which includes audiences of other ritualists. Thus, politics hovers around the event. A chanter of one clan, for example, may have good reason not to reveal the details of his clan’s history

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to ritualists of other clans. It then makes sense to speak around a point rather than directly to it. One’s auditors are left convinced that one knows the history, even if one has not told it in detail. Such performances consist largely of the unsaid. The textual transcription of ritual speech of this kind contains a lot of words, but, to the ethnographer, at least, is short on narrative sense. Because there is no canonical text against which the rightness of a performance can be gauged, teasing a narrative out of a performance and translation can become quagmires. To extricate himself, the translator needs a good knowledge of the social and political context of the performance. Kondi’s and Boer’s texts are reasonably clear, in comparison with many transcriptions of performances in Wai Brama. Since they included in their work myths they heard spoken, I suspect that they may have massaged their texts here and there in the interests of coherence and clarity. Nevertheless, there is no shortage of puzzlements in translating Boer’s and Kondi’s works. In the work of translation, I frequently am confident I have the words right, but wonder if I have missed the meaning of a passage. There is a constant sense of the elusiveness of the utterance. Words may reflect the intention of their speaker. The important word is the conditional may. Words are material things in the physical world, either as acoustic disturbances in the gases of the atmosphere or as conventional squiggles on paper. Either way, words are symbols; they index neither their speaker’s or writer’s intentions nor their meaning. That is to say, there is no causal, mechanical, or necessary relation between a word and its meaning. As we have long known, words require interpretation, the participation of their hearer or reader. George Steiner, Kenneth Burke, and Roy Rappaport (among others) have addressed the nature of words to misrepresent both meaning and their originators’ intentions, the “vices of language” as Rappaport (1999: 10– 22) calls it (which, in his view, ritual ameliorates). Much of ritual speech in Wai Brama is intentionless beyond the ritualist’s intention to say words in ritual language required in the performance of a ritual. For the ethnographer, it is frequently the case that no amount of conversation with or interrogation of a speaker of ritual language can reliably elicit the meaning of a speech or its words. Meaning in ritual speech is always elusive; it is as if the meaning of the words is their articulation. Intention itself is an odd word. It can refer to the communicative aims of a speaker or writer, including the aim of deception. We imagine a process by which a speaker first resolves something such as, “I will say the following words (in order to, with the aim or end of, intention of) conveying the following message, …” and then speaks the words. This process may occur. But it need not. Then, intentionality is the quality of being intentional, in the dictionary definition, the characteristic of being conscious of intending an object; or, intension as simply having or implying an object or an objective.

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In the last sense, the intentionality of ritual language need not necessarily be the object or objective of communicating (for want of a better term) a narrative. Ritual speech may convey a narrative, but it need not, and narrative may be incidental to the act of speaking words in ritual language. This is why it is proper to refer to this genre of speech and language, in the Wai Brama and Sikkanese contexts, as ritual speech and ritual language. Rappaport (1999) suggests that ritual transforms symbols, whose meaning is arbitrary and established by convention, into indices, whose meanings are unambiguously and necessarily attached to the sign as synecdoche (part for whole), causal relationship (smoke indexes fire), or as the result of another functional or mechanical relation. Speech in ritual may not exhibit the vices of language. It can become intrinsically true, but it does not follow that its meanings are clear, either to participants in a ritual or to a translator. Bronislaw Malinowski once referred to “the meaning of meaningless words” (Malinowski 1965: 213–218)4 in the verbal utterances of a Trobriander gardener. The Trobriander’s magical spells are spoken, but are meaningless, which is to say, Malinowski could not translate them meaningfully. This led him to suggest that the meanings of the garden magicians’ spells derived not from their words but from the situational context in which they were uttered. In other words, the spells contained no information, but were meaningful in their context, which included the gardener, the structure of his actions in performing them, and his intentions, none of which are said in the spell. For an Ata Tana ’Ai present at the performance of a ritual, the fixed order of a sequence of words in ritual speech is informationless because it is already known and expected. Indeed, only a deviation from the expected order is informational; it communicates that an error has occurred. Or, more surprising, hence more informational, that a change or a potential change in tradition has been announced. It is the performance itself that is meaningful. In contrast, for the ethnographer, whom should perhaps be pitied in such circumstances, the messages of ritual speech are meaningless because the information content of ritual speech is too great.5 Perhaps the ethnographer expects too much—or too little. All of which leads us to the main question: why do human beings, who otherwise are always on the lookout for significance and meaning in the universe, spend so much time and energy and so many resources on doing and attending to things that have no informational value? Whatever the answer to this larger question, the upshot is that beyond its performance as a speech act, a hearer need not understand the meaning of the language for the speech to be effective. For an ethnographer, who struggles to make what is said there sensible to people of another language here, the task is daunting, as the meanings of ritual language remain elusive.

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This does not mean that the translations of ritual language included in this essay are wrong, but it does mean that no full accord can be established between my translations of a passage in ritual language and its meaning for an Ata Sikka or Ata Tana ’Ai who participated in the ritual in which the passage was spoken. The translations are right, but cannot be taken as indexing what the passages mean to an Ata Sikka—beyond, of course, what they have told me about the passages’ meanings. Nevertheless, we must assume some correspondence between the speech act and the translation of the words spoken if the result is not to be completely senseless. Steiner has suggested that “a cardinal definition of genius points … to the capacity to originate myths, to devise parables” (Steiner 2003: 35). Myths are “open-ended in that they provoke inexhaustible multiplicities and potentialities of interpretation. They keep the human spirit off-balance. They elide [sic; “elude”?] our paraphrase and understanding even as we seem to grasp them” (Steiner 2003: 35). It is important to remember that however strange their themes and resistant to translation their language, myths are stories. In Tana ’Ai and Sikka, mythic narratives are about origins: of the world and things in it, but mostly about the origins of the diverse groups of people that make up society. The entire Hikayat is the myth of origin of one group of Sikkanese, those who were rulers. Elsewhere I have suggested that we can translate the origin myth of the Sikkanese rajas with a purpose, an intention; in this case, what the myth (which is about the history of the Sikkanese rajadom) says about the history of the rajadom and other questions relating to that subject, taken as an object of the texts (see Lewis 2010: 49–51). I also suggested that a translator must make certain compromises of both a technical and literary kind. The required compromises arise from interpretation. Indeed, Steiner writes sensibly on this matter in a passage that immediately brings to mind the argument against formalism that Tyler constructs in The Said and the Unsaid. “The complete penetrative grasp of a text, the complete discovery and recreative apprehension of its life-forms (prise de conscience),” writes Steiner, is an act whose realization can be precisely felt but is nearly impossible to paraphrase or systematize. It is a matter of what Coleridge, in whom the capacity for vital comprehension was striking, called “speculative instruments.” An informed, avid awareness of the history of the relevant language, of the transforming energies of feeling which make of syntax a record of social being, is indispensable. One must master the temporal and local setting of one’s text, the moorings which attach even the most idiosyncratic of poetic expressions to the surrounding idiom. … But neither erudition nor industry make up the sum of insight, the intuitive thrust to the center (Steiner 1975: 25).

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The intuitive thrust is interpretation, which gives language life beyond the moment and place of immediate utterance or transcription. … The French word interprète concentrates all the relevant values. An actor is interprète of Racine; a pianist gives une interprétation of a Beethoven sonata. … As it does not include the world of the actor, and includes that of the musician only by analogy, the English term interpreter is less strong. But it is congruent with French when reaching out in another crucial direction. Interprète/interpreter are commonly used to mean translator (Steiner 1975: 27–28).

Steiner’s thinking gives translators of Sikkanese ritual language cause for confidence. Although it may be the case that a Sikkanese audience attends to the performance while missing (or ignoring) the tale the narration of a myth tells, the story is in the words spoken. It is there for anyone, such as an ethnographer, to hear, to comprehend and, eventually, to translate. Surely, the translator interprets and recreates a text. But translatory praxis, that is, technique, is also required, if only to constrain the interpretive imagination of the translator, who attempts to create one of Coleridge’s speculative instruments. Consider a matter as fundamental as translating the couplet, cited above, common to both the ritual languages of Sikka and Wai Brama: “Ina nian tana wawa, Ama lero wulan réta.” The words, translated, are simple and straightforward: “Mother land and earth below, Father sun and moon above.” In writing about Sikkanese religion and ritual language I have identified this formulaic couplet as denoting the deity. That said, a whole minor thesis can be devoted to untangling the implications of the original. The gender classifications implicit in the attribution of two aspects of the deity as male and female and the relation of that classification to Sikkanese cosmology would require a chapter alone. Then there is the question about whether or not the entity to which the couplet refers, that entity to which sacrifices are made, is actually a deity, as a god. In Wai Brama, Nian Tana Lero Wulan is invoked in sacrifices for requests, for protection, and to bring about the starts of the rainy and dry seasons, but in the myth of origin of the world, this entity is identified only implicitly as the creator being who brought the sea, the land, and the firmament into being (Lewis 1988: 262–276). Thus, the apparently straightforward translation of the couplet into English fails to capture all that is said in the original but it serves well enough the themes of the longer passages in which it occurs and evokes that which is unsaid. Steiner was well aware of the essential problem: Any thorough reading of a text out of the past of one’s own language and literature is a manifold act of interpretation. In the great majority of cases, this act is hardly performed or even consciously recognized. At best, the common reader will rely on what instant crutches footnotes or a glossary provide.

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When reading any piece of English prose after about 1800 and most verse, the general reader assumes that the words on the page, with a few “difficult” or whimsical exceptions, mean what they would in his own idiom. In the case of “classics” such as Defoe and Swift that assumption may be extended back to the early eighteenth century. It almost reaches Dryden, but it is, of course, a fiction. … Language is in perpetual change (Steiner 1975: 17).

How much more difficult is it to achieve the “manifold act of interpretation” of texts such as those of the early Sikkanese writers? No number of footnotes and glossary entries will suffice as crutches. Only a full ethnography oriented toward the texts will do. What then are we to make of an attempt to read a text that is in languages not one’s own, out of a past not one’s own, by authors now dead, and they of a society and culture not one’s own? Should one judge as a waster of time an essayer who attempts not merely a reading of such a text, but its translation into English? Not entirely, otherwise the reading and translation of Greek and Roman classics is a waste of time. On this question, Steiner notes: At a deeper level, the relative dimensions and intensities of the spoken and the unspoken alter. … Different civilizations, different epochs do not necessarily produce the same “speech mass;” certain cultures speak less than others; some modes of sensibility prize taciturnity and elision, others reward prolixity and semantic ornamentation.6 Inward discourse has its complex, probably unrecapturable history: both in amount and significant content, the divisions between what we say to ourselves and what we communicate to others have not been the same in all cultures or stages of linguistic development (Steiner 1975: 18–19).

Framed thus, Steiner’s idea will perhaps meet with objections, but his “intensities of the spoken and the unspoken” closely parallel Tyler’s insistence that the said (or written) is comprehensible only by hearers (or readers) for whom the said evokes the manifold possibilities of the unsaid. If the translation of a classic work requires the reconstruction of the word uses in which it is expressed as part of the unsaid that illuminates the said (as the said illuminates the unsaid), then the translation of a work, classic or otherwise, in another language and culture requires setting out the culture (the unsaid) in which the text is located and only in which the text makes sense. We translators must assume that a text’s said is a synecdoche of the culture’s unsaid. Translation, to turn around E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s often quoted saying, is perhaps more an ethnographic emprise than a linguistic or philological one. In the end, in the argot of our times, the act of translation is nonalgorithmic.

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On the Meaningfulness of Intransigent Words Nowhere does the said in Sikkanese ritual language texts evoke more directly the unsaid and present clearer dilemmas for the translator than in those sometimes quite lengthy passages that consist of recitations of the names of ancestors and places in the landscape of the regency of Sikka. Proper names, as others have observed, are a special case in language because they connote not taxa in a system of linguistic classifications based on resemblances and differences, but denote specific and singular persons and things rather than categories of persons and things. Although we may be justified in translating on historical linguistic principles the French name Pierre into English as Peter, there is no English equivalent of the Sikkanese name Hading. The same holds with place names, with the difference that some, but not all, Sikkanese place names are compounds of words that are translatable: Watuwolon consists of two Sikkanese words meaning “stone mountain,” Talibura means “white vine (or cord),” and Dala’ela means “fallen star.” In some cases, the origin of a place name is recounted in a myth. The place Dala’ela acquired its name when, in the myth of origin of the Sikkanese rajas, the son of the leader of the castaways whose descendants became rulers saw a falling star on his journey of exploration of the land on which he was shipwrecked. But, as often as not, place names are simply that, and, if they are translatable, the significance of their meanings is lost or there was none to begin with. Let me illustrate the translator’s problem with an example of ritual language passages from the Hikayat Kerajaan Sikka. The Hikayat is a good example of a stranger-king myth, that is, an account of how the descendants of strangers from far to the west were cast onto the island of Flores and came to rule the district of Sikka. In the history of Sikka’s rulers, Mo’ang Bata Jawa was a descendant, several generations removed, of the shipwrecked strangers. He himself was not a raja, for the Sikkanese rajas arose twelve generations after the arrival of the newcomers, but he was an early law-giver to those whom the newcomers viewed as Sikka’s autochthons. In Boer’s and Kondi’s texts (in Lewis 2010: 246–247), he is introduced by speaking thus: A’u Bata Mo’ang Jati Jawa, ’Ora wai ata Du’a Supung Sipi Luju Bati, ’Ora men ata wai Wonga, Wéa, Palé, Rohé, ’Ora kérang ata Mo’ang Toda Lanur Molek Balik,

I am Bata Mo’ang Jati Jawa, Along with my wife Du’a Supung Sipi Luju Bati, Along with my daughters Wonga, Wéa, Palé, and Rohé, And my brothers-in-law Mo’ang Toda Lanur Molek Balik,

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Sawu Sia Wuli Béwat, Lora wai ata du’a, Du’a wai Palé Plou, ’Léwe plo’ung poi limang, Nora Nusur wai Balik, Mole Dodi wai Timu, Mora wari ata Leleng Prukang, Prukang Mo’ang Gero Geté, Geté la’i Tala Nuder, Lora wai ata du’a, Nora Naki wai Tair, Tair wai Pura Limek, ’Ora pun ata ga’e, Pun Jala Mo’ang Ulung, Resi Riwung Sira pung, Nora Té la’i Tera, Tera la’i Rena Romet, Mole Nago la’i Tigar, Nora Lelo wai Halé, Pona Plaing limang kimang, Esa wungung bao pagang, ’Ora riwung ha riwu, Brau hunur benu detung, ’Ora ngasung ha ngasu,

Blemu tu’ur ’loir lesok, Brau mora poi Edo Inang, Eh, ke’o we’ot ’ami deri éné mewang gi’it, Blemu mora poi Kleka Amang Eh biha wolong, Hile heput réta waéng ‘ami,

Gera éné mewang mangang,

Sawu Sia Wuli Béwat, Along with his wife, the woman, Du’a Palé Plou, Who liked straightening out her hand downward,7 Along with Du’a Nusur, his wife Balik, And Dodi and his wife Timu, Along with my younger brother who was from Leleng Prukang, That was Mo’ang Gero Geté, Geté the husband of Tala Nuder, Along with his wife, Du’a Naki and his wife Tair, Tair Pura Limek, With his grandchildren, whom he cradled, Jala Mo’ang Ulung, Resi Riwung Sirapung, Along with Té and her husband Tera, Tera La’i Rena Romet, And Nago and her husband Tigar, Along with Lelo and his wife Halé, Pona Plaing, in fine raiment, Esa wungung in the purple of Papa’s Banyan Along with thousands of his people, Fearing in their hearts it was not safe, Along with hundreds of his community, So afraid they felt their knees would give way, Terrified of Mother Earthquake, Whose shaking prevented us from standing upright, Frightened by Father Thunderbolt, Who lit up the hills with fire, Whose thunderbolts and lightning flashes above illuminated our faces, Making us too weak to stand,

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’Omi ngeng loar le’u niang, Eh Mekeng Detung Wolo Laru, Eh Méi Ēring woér, Eh Blata Tating namang, Niang bu’e wu’ang tukeng, Tana paré wulir hading,




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Almost making our descendants give up their land, At Mekeng Detung Wolo Laru, At the houseyard of Méi Ēring, At the courtyard of Blata Tating, A land which yields luxuriant beans, An earth replete with grain heads of rice.

All strangely reminiscent of the who-begat-whom of the Old Testament Bible, it is plain that the only translation immediately available to us here are the words to be translated themselves, that is, the names of the persons to whom the text refers. Who, exactly, are these people (a reader will ask), without knowledge of whom—even when translated—the text is not completely comprehensible? At this point, the question becomes, in becoming obsessed with the texts of Sikka’s Hikayat, with the interpretation of the tales it tells and their translation, for what does one search? What is there to be learned? These turn out to be difficult questions to answer. Sense can be made of the text, but not within the translation itself. In the case of the Sikkanese Hikayat, at least, the only solution to this dilemma I have found is to write down, in a co- or meta-text, as much of the unsaid as may be required to translate the translation. I cannot say, in principle, where the hermeneutic ends, but, in my case, and in the hope it will be sufficient, the buck stops here. Matters are slightly different for the Ata Sikka. To begin with, the discovery of the literary Hikayat was astonishing, certainly to the ethnographer and likely to Ata Sikka who knew neither the remarkable story it tells nor that two of their predecessors created a new genre of literature. It is also a challenge. That Boer’s and Kondi’s works were unknown to most of their contemporaries (except by rumor) and are unknown to the largest majority of contemporary Sikkanese is a puzzle to be solved. But, what is to be made of the texts is most difficult of all, for this question can be rephrased: what images, indeed, what truths, of an all but forgotten society, culture, and time do these dusty and tattered old bits of ink on paper evoke? As the people, their time, and their society that the Hikayat is about slips past living memory, the existence of the literary Hikayat will demand contextualization. Thus any of the Ata Sikka who read it may find a need to remake Sikkanese culture, to the extent that it can accommodate the Hikayat’s tale in the unsaid in which stories find their meaning.

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Coda: An Evocative Inscription Eleven years after I finished my studies with Professor Tyler at Rice University, I asked him to inscribe a copy of The Said and the Unsaid for me. He wrote on the flyleaf of my copy of his book: Credo ut intellegam—for Doug—Steve The aphorism is from the prayer and confession at the beginning of St. Anselmus’s “Proslogium”: Neque enim quaero intelligere ut credam, sed credo ut intelligam. Nam et hoc credo, quia, nisi credidero, non intelligam; “for I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this also I believe, that unless I believed, I should not understand.”8 St Anselm held that, with faith, one must try to demonstrate by reason the truth of that which one believes. The attempt is a moral imperative for a Christian, a requirement expressed through the words of Boso, Anselm’s student, who is his interlocutor in “Cur Deus Homo”: Negligentiae mihi esse videtur, si, postquam confirmati sumus in fide, non studemus quod credimus, intelligere; “[so to my mind] it appears a neglect if, after we are established in the faith, we do not seek to understand what we believe.”9 As on many occasions when I was his young student, Steve had, with his inscription, once again challenged me with an ambiguity, for in the English translation the aphorism excerpted from Anselm’s text is thus. The translation is “I believe that I may understand,” but also, “I believe in order to understand.” In the first reading, knowledge is conditional and reason is weak and prone to error. In the second reading, knowledge is more certain and reason is a reliable means to it if one has faith. Thus reason and faith are complementary rather than antagonistic, but there is no understanding, no knowledge, without prior belief. Indeed, the fields on which reason plays are not the products of reason itself, but are brought into being by inspiration and through faith. St. Anselm, who became Archbishop of Canterbury, was a teacher of the noncanonized Anselm of Laon;10 Anselm was a teacher (for a year) of Peter Abelard (1079–1142), who disagreed with his teacher over the problem of universals and argued (foreshadowing Gödel?) that, while words can signify, truth cannot be demonstrated with language. Thus, it seems to me (and to Steve in 1978, if I read his book correctly) that if truth is to be found, it lies in the unsaid and not in the said. After thinking about the matter for many years, I find I agree more with Anselm of Laon’s student, Peter Abelard, with whose thought I have always thought Steve’s writing is closer in spirit, than with St. Anselm. Both because of Steve’s sic et non approach to teaching, but even more because I have always detected at the heart of Steve’s writing Abelard’s intelligo ut credam—I understand in order to believe—rather than Anselm’s credo ut intelligam. “By doubt-

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ing we come to examine, and by examining we reach the truth,” wrote Abelard in Sic et Non (Aye and Nay, 1120). But doubt is the antonym of faith, with which it is incompatible. Faith can too easily absolve the believer from acquiring knowledge and seeking truth. Doubt, not knowing for certain, makes us uncomfortable and can stir us into action, which is also close to that I learned from Steve Tyler. When I was a student, Steve’s lectures (I still have my notes of them) were creatures of reason; spare of language, rhetorically unambiguous, luminescent, and illuminating. They were without doubt the work of a rationalist, and it is that outlook I took with me from his classrooms.11 In Abelard’s writing, faith and reason are consonant but reason takes precedence over faith, which is to say, belief must adapt itself to knowledge. His is the scientist’s view of knowledge and faith; St. Anselm’s is that of the humanist. Was this theological disagreement a source of Snow’s two cultures? For many years I wondered why Steve chose St. Anselm’s aphorism as an inscription for me. I may never know with certainty, but I now have a hypothesis. The vast aureole of the unsaid that accompanies St. Anselm’s aphorism encompasses his student’s student’s intelligo ut credam. The two ideas are incompatible, and so either a choice, toward the one or the other, or a synthesis, is required. Many years after taking an undergraduate philosophy course at Rice I reviewed my student copy of St. Anselm’s Basic Writings and found that, two or three years before I met Steve, I had underscored: “For I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this also I believe,—that unless I believed, I should not understand” (Anselm 1962: 7). Notwithstanding my sophomoric underscoring, I was uncomfortable with St. Anselm’s idea from the moment I translated Steve’s inscription several years later. I now think, that is, believe, that Steve knew I would be, and was perhaps thinking of Abelard, when he inscribed his book for me. On reflection, I now realize I failed to appreciate the juxtaposition of Anselm’s aphorism and the title of the book in which it was inscribed. Would teachers ever scheme in this way? Now that I am one myself, I know that they do. Or, at least, that I do. Perhaps such pedagogical plotting was latent in the aureola of unspoken possibilities implicated by Steve Tyler’s said lessons. I now believe that Steve saw in me someone who put knowledge before faith, and so intended, with his quotation of Anselm, to draw my attention to the complementary view. Perhaps not his own at all, but then great teachers inevitably care less about the content and more about the form and practice of reason and belief (an irony here—given Tyler’s aversion to formalism). The student will always find something to think; the content of thought changes, with the circumstances of the moment, the growth of knowledge, and with age. Is it a teacher’s responsibility to teach a student what to think? What matters

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is that the student knows how to think, can distinguish straight from shoddy thinking, and learns to make the fine calls of judgment required of an educated citizen. So it matters less that I disagree with Anselm and rather more that I know the grounds for believing Anselm to have been wrong. That toward which Steve was pointing, the unsaid of three Latin words inscribed in my copy of his book, is what matters most. References Anselm. 1962. Saint Anselm: Basic Writings, ed., S. N. Deane. Illinois: Open Court Publishing Company. Lewis, E. Douglas. 1988. “A Quest for the Source: The Ontogenesis of a Creation Myth of the Ata Tana ’Ai.” In To Speak in Pairs. Essays on the Ritual Languages of Eastern Indonesia, ed., James J. Fox. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 246–281. ———. 2010. The Stranger-Kings of Sikka. Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 257, Leiden: KITLV Press. Lewis, E. Douglas and Oscar Pareira Mandalangi. 2008. Hikayat Kerajaan Sikka. Maumere, Flores: Penerbit Ledalero. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1923. “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages.” In The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and the Science of Symbolism, eds., C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 296–336. ———. 1965 [1935]. Coral Gardens and Their Magic, Volume II: The Language of Magic and Gardening. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Milton, John. 1909 [1668]. Complete Poems in English. New York: P. F. Collier & Son (Harvard Classics, Vol. 4). Quiller-Couch, Arthur. 1916. On the Art of Writing: Lectures Delivered in the University of Cambridge, 1913–1914. Cambridge: At the University Press. Rappaport, Roy A. 1999. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Steiner, George. 1975. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. London: Oxford University Press. Stephenson, Neal. 2004. The Confusion: Vol. II of The Baroque Cycle. New York: William Morrow/HarperCollins Publishers. Tyler, Stephen A. 1978. The Said and the Unsaid: Mind, Meaning, and Culture. New York: Academic Press. ———. 1987. The Unspeakable: Discourse, Dialogue, and Rhetoric in the Postmodern World. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Wallace, Anthony F. C. 1966. Religion: An Anthropological View. New York: Random House.

Notes 1. They are the Ata Sikka of the south coast and the people of the domain of Wai Brama in the eastern region of Sikka known as Tana ’Ai. 2. The Portuguese were on the north coast of Timor, Solor, and eastern Flores in the eastern Lesser Sunda Islands by 1515, mainly for the sandalwood trade. Sikka, on the

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6. 7.

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south coast of east central Flores, came under the influence of the Zwarte Portugeezen (as the Dutch later called them), the Black Portuguese, or Topasses from at least 1550. The Topasses were a mestiço race, the offspring of the Portuguese and indigenous women, who rapidly grew in numbers and power in the eastern Lesser Sunda Islands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Sikkanese converted to Catholicism in the early years of their encounters with the Portuguese and Topasses and, like the Topasses, adopted Portuguese names. In the Malayo-Indonesian world, a hikayat is a story, a narrative, a tale, or a chronicle. It can be historically factual, an allegory, or a written version of myths transmitted orally before finally being committed to a literary form. See also Malinowski (1923: 306), “the whole utterance … becomes only intelligible when it is placed within its context of situation … the situation in which words are uttered can never be passed over as irrelevant to the linguistic expression.” Compare Wallace (1966: 236): “Not all meaningful messages are informational” and “not all informational messages are meaningful. In other words, a sequence of meaningful signals whose order is fixed, so that the receiver always knows what signal will follow the preceding one, will have no information value because there is no uncertainty to be reduced by the outcome of each successive event. Conversely, a message may be meaningless either because its information value is too high or because the component signals are arbitrary.” Cases of both of the last are familiar to an ethnographer. Both Ata Tana ’Ai and Sikkanese ritualists are decidedly at the taciturnity and elision end of Steiner’s continuum. That is, she is industrious in working with her hands (as in carrying things, weaving, and so forth) rather than just sitting with her arms crossed doing nothing. One who Apet poi limang (Sara Sikka to cross one’s arms), klameng poi toger (Sara Sikka to clasp one’s hands behind the neck) is orang malas (Bahasa Indonesia, a “lazy soul”). Here we have a pesky footnote as a crutch of translation. Proslogium, Anselm (1962: 7); alternative translation: “Nor do I seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe that I may understand. For this too I believe, that unless I first believe, I shall not understand.” Cur Deus Homo, Anselm (1962: 179); alternate translation: “I hold it to be a failure in duty if after we have become steadfast in our faith we do not strive to understand what we believe.” The Church has canonized four Anselms: St. Anselm of Lerins (ca. 750), St. Anselm of Nonantola (ca. 803), St. Anselm of Lucca (1036–1086), and St. Anselm (1033–1109), Archbishop of Canterbury, who is best known today. Either Anselm was a popular name for boys in the middle ages or, in that age, with the name Anselm came an inclination toward spiritual pursuits. In 1988, having attempted to read Steve’s The Unspeakable three times, I wrote him a note to complain that the book should have been titled The Unreadable. Steve replied, without perplexity, “Well, Douglas, you always did go your own way.” I should now like to retract my note to him. It is difficult to disagree with the proposition that there is a poiesis at work in ethnography (as in all narrative), but I remain unconvinced that ethnography, as “break with everyday reality,” “is a journey apart into strange lands … into the heart of darkness” (Tyler 1987: 202). I see it, rather, as taking us out of the heart of darkness through the conjunction of strange lands in texts. Of course, he was writing specifically of postmodern ethnography, with which I am uncomfortable, without disallowing other kinds.

CHAPTER 11

Ethnographic Evocations and Evocative Ethnographies Barbara Tedlock








I hear, tell, see, and inscribe stories. They lurk inside conversations with Mayan women returning from market holding netted baskets overflowing with squawking chickens. Stories burst forth in the sharing of a pink kola nut with a Yoruba woman on a 747 lazily circling the island of Manhattan. Chanted songs and stories swell up inside a Mongolian felt-lined circular tent filled with redand-gold lacquered chests, Chinese bonze divinatory mirrors, reindeer-hide tambourine drums, and wispy spirit placements pinned to photographs. An elder in a folded headscarf, with a striped Pendleton blanket across his shoulders, stares through midnight snow at masked dancers inside a kiva. Leaning over he whispers to me that when the gods gave humans a choice of eggs, Zunis chose the sky-blue speckled one. It cracked, releasing a sooty-black raven that flew straight north into a blizzard. Mayans chose the plain gray egg. It broke revealing a multicolored military macaw that flew south to the tropics. “So, Tsilu, always remember, Zunis choose something beautiful.” Being, being present, being absent, and being there seeing, speaking, hearing, reading, inscribing, describing, meditating, dreaming, and remembering. How does one evoke such a reality? If, as Stephen Tyler said, “writing is an illness we cannot treat but only recover from” (Tyler 1992: 5), why do we keep up this incessant scribbling? Tapes, notes, sketches, slides, and maps tell of an overanxious urge to preserve. More obsesses ethnographers than these artifacts contain; we spend our lives not so much in walking a path, but rather in the tracking down and following of alternative paths.

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Writing evokes other writing and mirrors reflect other selves. The Velázquez painting Las Meninas, or “The Ladies in Waiting,” captures a suspended moment with members of the royal court including the child Margarita, heir to the Spanish throne, staring outward implicating us as both observers and the observed. Behind and above Margarita’s right shoulder hangs a mirror painted on the back wall reflecting her parents, the royal couple, as the king and queen in each of us. An actual mirror set up in the small room devoted to the painting at the Museo del Prado enhances the illusion; we see ourselves reflected in the vacuous center of the canvas. This mise en scène is an anomalous third space between self and other, interior and exterior, fact and fiction, thought and emotion, truth and illusion. By creating such an enchanted fantasy world we encourage interactions in which each moment doubles becoming two moments—history and memory—suspended in consciousness. Such double consciousness or twinning negates the strict control of Euro-American lineal history with its regime of cool curiosity, impersonal self-confidence, cultural completeness, ethnic purity, rationalism, essentialism, and exoticism. Holders of brushes and holders of cameras cannot trace a really real reality outside the self, but instead mirror reality. Why not admit that we ourselves are busy generating writerly mumblings? A brush-and-camera fantasy reality: a contact zone where people meet, hauntings happen, and horizons fuse. Alternatively, we may be done with such sensitivity and ready to embrace the coolly smooth world of industrial ready-mades: inflatable plastic toys, cute bunnies, and hard flowers, glued to hardware-store mirrors. A locomotive running into a lecherous doctor from the rear as he examines his woman patient is captured in flawless stainless steel with mirror-perfect reflectability (Tomkins 2007: 58–67). With our current postmodern sensibility we celebrate seductive yet gutsy feminine figures like Madonna and Britney with Arabic henna hand designs and Hindu forehead bindis over their sixth chakra, seat of concealed wisdom (Denzin 1993: 179). These free-floating cultural icons cut loose from their moorings and meanings clash, creating dissociation, ending in a feeling of profound weirdness. In the universities, as Tyler noted twenty-five years ago, postmodernity has become “a meditative vehicle because we come to it neither as to a map of knowledge nor as a guide to action, nor even for entertainment. We come to it as the start of a different kind of journey” (Tyler 1986: 140). But what exactly is the nature of this different journey? Field ethnographers still, like their friends and relatives the street photographers, seek the magical in the quotidian. We go on capturing lemon-yellow clematis flowers framed in gray-and-purple thunderstorms. Raghubir Singh, one of India’s foremost photographers, portrays a specifically Indian way of artfully shaping the world to his liking. Instead of using his camera to create an abject Indian subject—or a boring inventory of Indian objects, peoples, and

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sites—he uses it to evoke the serge of Indian life within his own ongoing act of living it. In his photo book River of Colour the India of Raghubir Singh (1998), he arranges and writes about his photographs tenderly yet starkly, revealing his emotional engagement with his subjects. This rich documentation offers cultural immersion in the ongoing rush of experiencing common lifeways: cowdung cakes drying in the morning sun, people gathering at the village well, a ragged peacock picking up grains of millet, children shooting marbles while their fathers push carts and label shipping crates. Unlike colonial documentarians of India, who probed the intensely wounded life of the slums of Calcutta, Singh’s postmodern photos playfully capture the natural beauty and lyric poetry of rural life at home, what he calls “the high range of the colouratura of every day India” (Singh 1998: 15). People today do not live in different worlds but live differently in the world. Tasting other ways of life in cultural co-participation, solidarity, and friendship is central to what is emerging now, a form of gung-ho, or “gonzo,” ethnography. Gonzo is South Boston Irish-American slang for the last person left standing after an all-night drinking marathon—the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, for example, in Miramax’s film Frida (2002). Gonzo is also the name of a 1960 hit song written by James Booker, a flamboyant New Orleans rhythm and blues keyboardist famous for his heroin addiction and raw-wired musical arrangements. As a documentary life form, gonzo encourages ethnographers to blend observation with participation, fact with fiction, and rationality with altered states of consciousness. By doing so we hope to evoke a fantasy time-space in solidarity with cultural others—an exuberant unnamed and unmapped meditative place. Now is the time of gonzo ethnography, a style of writing that uses a firstperson driving narrative line in which the writer is “telling it like it is.” This new documentation features the author as the active part of the story, a person so enthralled by hearing her own and others’ telling of the tale that she cannot remove herself from the subjects or objects of that telling. The closest parallels are gonzo journalism, POV radio, docudramas with unscripted ridiculously humorous situations, and Japanese Gakino tsukai, or “crazy television.” All these, and undoubtedly other postmodern fantasy forms, create contact zones between performers and audiences. Gritty spaces opening out into enchanted ways of knowing and being in the world. How does one evoke such changes in methodology, culture, and the world? Not by writing tedious tourist tales or manners-and-customs ethnographies; for as Tyler has observed, “ethnography is a genre that discredits or discourages narrative, subjectivity, confessional, personal anecdote, or accounts of the ethnographer’s or anyone else’s experience” (Tyler 1987: 92). Fieldwork under this imperial regime produced two entirely independent things: reportable

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nonparticipatory observation and nonreportable total participation. When we agreed to such a split, we cultivated rapport not friendship, compassion not sympathy, respect not belief, understanding not solidarity, and admiration not love. We did this, I fear, because we thought that if we cultivated friendship, sympathy, belief, solidarity, and love, we might lose it, join history to memory and solidarity to objectivity, and “go native.” Or so our tribal elders scared us silly into actually believing. A way out of this impasse has been to take the gamble and, as Australians like to say, “go troppo,” by which they mean “go mad” or “go crazy.” George Harrison, lead guitarist of the Beatles, released his album Gone Troppo in 1982, but his melancholy self-absorbed lyrics caused it to flop. After his death, his son Dhani remastered and reissued the album in 2004, and ever since it has been building an international audience. Apparently, it was a matter of timing, a mere twenty-two years, between failure and success. This also holds true for ethnography. I’m thinking here about my graduate-school classmate Timothy Knab, who during the 1980s undertook linguistic research on Nahuatl in Cuetzalan, Mexico. During his fieldwork, he was ensnared and ended up apprenticing himself to two old-time storytellers. He wrote his dissertation in the early 1980s but was unable to find a publisher until the mid-1990s when he released his evocative ethnography showing how he learned to see, hear, feel, and tell traditional stories and his own dreams in recognizably Aztec ways. A few years later, he published a scholarly analysis of these same discursive materials (Knab 1995 and 2004). His looking-glass books display how the job of linguist to a dying language opened out into the role of apprentice to a living culture that created in him a double consciousness. Gonzo entanglement stresses the performativity, rather than the sovereignty, of a nomad like Knab who learned to live another culture without giving up his own culture. Another way out has been to write ethnographic fiction enabling readers to find themselves in solidarity with forgotten, maligned, or misunderstood peoples. Swiss explorer and archaeologist Adolf Bandelier chose this fictive path when he wrote Die Koshäre (1890) a prehistoric novel of Native Americans living in the Southwest. In his preface he noted, “While scientific works may tell the truth about the Indian, they exercise always a limited influence upon the general public; and to that public, in our country as well as abroad, the Indian has remained as good as unknown” (Bandelier 1980: xxiii). His letters reveal he felt compelled to present real flesh-and-blood Indians rather than the James Fennimore Cooper’s romanticized version or the military ethnographer’s violent tomahawk-carrying version (Hertzog 1942). He wrote against the military ethnology of his day typified by the work of Captain John Gregory Bourke of the Third Cavalry US Army, who served as adjutant general of troops in Western operations against so-called hostile Indians. In the period stretching from

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November 20, 1872, through March 4, 1895, he compiled 124 diaries stuffed with observations, color sketches, photographs, and newspaper clippings from which he constructed public talks, written lectures, and pamphlets. In 1885, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he gave a sensational lecture titled “The Urine Dance of the Zuñi Indians of New Mexico.” A year later, he privately published and circulated the talk, in pamphlet form, among his friends and fellow military officers.1 Bourke was not alone in reporting his disgust with pueblo clowns; other Victorians did likewise. In an 1882 diary entry, Adolf Bandelier reported observing “a filthy and obscene affair” at Cochiti pueblo where clowns were “drinking urine out of bowls and jars used as privies on the house tops” (Lange 1968: 304). Colonel James Stevenson and his wife, Matilda Coxe Stevenson, shared in his disgust. In the early 1880s, she got access to a large-format military camera and used it to make photographs of the Zuni, whom she called “children of nature” and “children of the human family.” Among her photographs is one of a Zuni woman standing on a rooftop emptying a bowl of urine over a row of clowns passing below. On the evening of October 18, 1884, she forced entry into a ceremonial chamber, or kiva, and reported that she saw the clowns “indulging in excremental filthy practices.”2 While these Victorian ethnologists never investigated the significance of clowning in context, Bandelier did and changed his initial negative response into a positive portrayal. Leaping nimbly from archaeology to ethnography, then on to linguistics, he laced information together with a running commentary. After publishing a chapter a week from January to May 1890 in the New Yorker Beletristiches Journal, he translated the chapters into English and expanded his text into a 490-page book. The English title, The Delight Makers, expressed his growing appreciation for sacred clowning. Instead of the disgusting scatological rites sensationalized by Bourke, he now portrayed pueblo clowns as powerful sacred healers able to eat the inedible and use their whips of laughter as a social corrective. Although reviewers immediately recognized his novel as a classic, it failed to attract the general audience he desired, partly because it portrayed Indians in a positive light, and partly because Bandelier “had taken the adventure out of the Old West” (Jovanovich 1971: xvii). In Europe a few years later, Paul Hazoumé, a francophone museum director born in Porto-Novo Dahomey (now Benin), wrote a long, heavily footnoted historical novel to set the record straight. In Doguicimi (1935), he addressed the issue of human sacrifice and slavery during the nineteenth century in his native land. Whereas colonial traveler-ethnographers of the time wrote about human sacrifice in a distanced and antiseptic manner, he unflinchingly described the social practice and placed it within the intercultural EuropeanAfrican historical context of the slave economy. To accomplish this he used

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ethnography counter-ethnographically as a form of history. His audience misunderstood his strategy, however, which flattened out the temporal scheme for European readers, whereas it appeared as a justification for colonial rule for African readers. Two years after it appeared he retreated from novelistic expression and published a standard ethnographic monograph. In that book, he attempted to explain in a straightforward manner both the historic and the ethnographic importance of another controversial African social practice, the pact of blood brotherhood.3 Today Hazoumé’s ethnographic writing is justly famous for portraying the negative effects of European (especially Portuguese) colonization. Doguicimi was the first literary effort by an African to use a colonial language (French) to preserve an author’s honor, dignity, and identity. Ironically, the preface to the novel, written by the colonial administrator A. M. Georges Hardy, reduced the author to but one of many brilliant francophone novelists. He noted how unjust it would be to praise Hazoumé while ignoring the role of Africa herself: “The vitality of her soul, the supple adaptability of her strong young races, better still the fecundity of civilizations which a barbaric mask disfigured and which in reality contained all kinds of virtues!” (Hardy 1938). This racist paratext placed Hazoumé in debt to a metropolitan culture that although it legitimized his status as a writer it also transferred this authority to the colonial system that dominated him and his people.4 At the time he was researching his home community in Africa—balancing the role of anthropologist with that of novelist—an American woman by the name of Zora Neale Hurston, set off along a similar path. She arrived in New York City in 1924, where she became a literary figure in the Harlem Renaissance and a student of anthropology at Columbia University. Her university friends and mentors—Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Gladys Reichard—encouraged her to collect folklore in her hometown, Eatonville, Florida. In time she recorded, collected, and documented hundreds of work songs, as well as blues and spirituals, dances, and folk stories. She, also, as did her anthropology mentors, became a passionate and fearless social constructionist writing about “race as a fiction” at the height of the strength of the rapacious Ku Klux Klan (Hemenway 1977: 32–37). She used her ethnographic stories, folk songs, and vignettes to highlight racial and ethnic differences and ponder the theme of racial justice. As an ethnographer, she believed in the power of race and talked constantly about her own “blackness” or “Negroness.” Her short stories “The Bone of Contention” (unpublished) and “Spunk” (1926), together with her novels Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934) and Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), center on the issue of justice. They hinge on court cases that invite readers to consider the way courts make decisions. Her first folklore collection, Mules and Men (1935), titled af-

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ter a folk expression combining mules, those overworked beasts of burden, together with human beings. Her explicit goal in the book was to use “the spy-glass of Anthropology” (Hurston 1935: 1) to introduce a mostly northern white audience to the southern black discourse of tall tales and lying contests. To accomplish this she placed seventy folktales together with an essay on New Orleans hoodoo rituals (Hurston 1931). Then, instead of using an ostensibly neutral scientific voice to introduce the materials to her audience, she combined the roles of midwife and master-of-ceremonies. Three years later, she published another mixed genre autoethnography, Tell My Horse (1938), in which she combined ethnographic sketches, songs, recipes, stories, photographs, and myths she gathered during her fieldwork in Haiti and Jamaica (Hurston 1938). She described the main voodoo loas (gods), their needs, desires, and powers, together with comments on the religious practice of spirit possession. Once again she sewed her multigenre text together by using her chatty, funny, and ironic midwife and master-of-ceremonies voices. “If you stay in Haiti long enough and really mingle with the people, the time will come when you hear secret societies mentioned” (Hurston 1938: 199). When she published Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography (1942), she again produced an autoethnography, this time in the guise of an autobiography. It sidestepped most autobiographically expected personal events; she fails to tell us her birth date, the name of her first husband, or even that she married a second time. Instead, she includes a rich celebration of her life within African-American culture. The book reveals her as a cultural translator interpreting one culture to another. In her anthropological role she observes, “Nothing that God ever made is the same thing to more than one person. That is natural. There is no single face in nature, because every eye that looks upon it sees it from its own angle. So every man’s spice-box seasons his own food.”5 These three books—two folklore collections and an autobiography—established a new literary genre, that of autoethnography. A key characteristic in this genre is that the writer blends ethnographic content together with autobiographical details, or “spice,” from her own life.6 In her celebrated novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), whereas she again presented the picturesque setting, dialect, and experiences of black folks in her Florida hometown, she chose not to represent herself as an ethnographer. Rather, she created an alter ego, Janie Mae Crawford, who was raised by her grandmother. One day when she was flirting with a neighbor boy, her grandmother warned her not to. De white man is de ruler of everything as far as Ah been able tuh find out … de white man throw down de load and tell de nigger man tuh pick it up. He pick it up because he have to, but he don’t tote it. He hand it to his women-

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folks. De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so far as Ah can see (Hurston 1937: 29).

This image of a black woman as a mule is a root metaphor for the demeaning role Janie repudiates in her quest for career fulfillment and love between equals. Hurston, together with her friend, the poet Langston Hughes, wrote a comedic play titled Mule Bone (1930) based on a folktale she collected, “The Bone of Contention.” She wrote the dialogue in southern Black vernacular English. Because of the origin of the storyline, she felt the play was rightfully hers and copyrighted it under her own name. Hughes did not agree, and as a result, they had a serious falling out resulting in a legal battle that blocked the production of the play until 1991, long after both of their deaths.7 Like Bandelier, Hazoumé, and Hurston before him, Oliver La Farge wrote evocative ethnography in the form of imaginative literature to set the historical record straight. Because issues of honest cultural representation of Native Americans were central to him, he wrote short stories and novels that portrayed them as intellectually complex human beings. In 1930 he unexpectedly won the Pulitzer Prize in literature for his debut novel, Laughing Boy. This book, which became the basis for the 1934 motion picture of the same name, is the story of an indigenous couple caught in a rapidly modernizing world. The central figure is a young Navajo silversmith, Laughing Boy, who meets an acculturated young woman, Slim Girl. Their love affair helps her return to the Navajo world, but tragedy follows when her husband’s rival shoots at both of them and succeeds in killing only her (1929). In both his fiction and autobiography, La Farge explored the mixed motives that drove Anglo Americans, like himself, to befriend and study Native Americans. In “Hard Winter” (1937) the main character was an Apache who succumbed to the attentions of a white woman (Mabel Dodge Luhan) who he portrays as selfishly “collecting Indians” for her Taos artists’ colony.8 Later, in his autobiography, Raw Material (1945), La Farge depicted the invasive quality of ethnography and observed that many researchers, including himself, studied Indians “because they were escapists,” yearning to capture some of the “simplicity of Native American lifeways.” On the other hand, he portrayed his Indian characters using ethnographic methods to further their own causes. In the short story “Policeman Follow Order” (1938), the main character is an Apache tracker closely following the movements of an Anglo who eloped with a wealthy landowner’s daughter. He tells the story from the point of view of the tracker, Spotted Shield, who “liked studying the white man’s ways.” Here we see Anglo-American culture portrayed by an accomplished observer, an indigenous tracker who behaves like an ethnographer (La Farge 1945: 326–342 and 1988: 127–139).

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La Farge’s literary success enabled him to give up his research position at Tulane University in New Orleans and move to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he devoted himself to social advocacy and freelance writing. He developed a linguistic orthography to speed up bilingual education and provide translations of federal Indian policies for the Navajo. Restructuring the Association on American Indian Affairs into an advocacy group focusing on Native American rights, he fought alongside pueblo governments helping to protect tribal sovereignty and regain stolen lands.9 During these activist years he wrote four more ethnographic novels and dozens of short stories based on his knowledge of the culture of anthropology and the indigenous cultures of the American Southwest and Central America. The greatest pleasure he found was in the newspaper column he contributed to the Santa Fe New Mexican each Sunday from 1950 until his death in 1963. The present tense and first-person-singular voice he used created the impression of an eternal ethnographic present, a sense that what is happening now is always happening and will always be happening. To solve this writerly problem, he created two alter egos. One was the Man with the Calabash Pipe, a sardonic bachelor who refused to turn on his heater because a mouse lived beneath it. The other was the Horned Husband Kachina Chief, a hilariously funny Hopi. One summer Sunday, when La Farge attempted to turn over his column to the Kachina Chief, he flatly declined the assignment, saying, “Greetings, my friends. Ain’t going to be no pillar (no words piled up on each other holding up the roof) this week. All the Indians at Gallup playing Indian. I got to run now and catch bus to go there too. Good-bye” (La Farge 1966). This anecdote contradicts the stoic Indian stereotype found in Western dime novels. Instead, we see a reflexive Native American who “plays Indian,” refusing to write a column for Santa Fe’s cosmopolitan readers. Instead, he crosses the state and attends the powwow in Gallup. This annual event features Indians from many tribes acting as outrageous clowns, rodeo-style cowboys riding bucking buffalos, Zuni maidens balancing clay heirloom water vessels on their heads while singing traditional songs, and Indian fancy dancers in dyed chartreuse-and-fuchsia feathers gyrating madly for an audience of naïve tourists. Similar combinations of insider knowledge, a search for the language of social advocacy, and a talent for novelistic expression are at work in the writings of Peruvian anthropologist José María Arguedas. Born white, but raised by rural Quechua-speaking Indians, he visited Lima, the capital of Peru, for the first time when he enrolled in the Facultad de Letras of the University of San Marcos. After graduation, he worked as a schoolteacher in an Indian village. Three years later, he returned to Lima to earn his doctorate in anthropology. In his controversial dissertation, he argued that indigenous peoples were autono-

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mous actors capable of negotiating modernization; thus, acculturation was not foreordained but a political choice people made for themselves. This understanding of social change as the result of human choices rather than inhuman structural processes was many years ahead of its time (Biswas-Sen 2006). During the 1930s, Arguedas began writing scholarly monographs and short stories that evoked the Indians’ feelings for nature, their love of the soil and animals, and their deep frustration with the landholding class that oppressed them. His carefully crafted descriptions of ongoing feudal repression placed him within the ranks of Latin American social reformers. He embedded Quechua songs and folktales, as well as personal, family, and historical narratives in his novels to evoke the indigenous world. His most important literary work was a collection of short stories titled Agua (1935). In the lead story his main character, Ernesto, was a teenaged boy who like himself maintained his Quechua language, culture, and identity while living in Lima. He originally wrote the story in correct literary Spanish but soon realized that it sounded strange. To solve the problem, he created a literary Creole, or “Quechuaized-Spanish,” with Spanish words incorporated into Quechua syntax. He alternated short simple sentences with abrupt phraseology, with long sentences containing complex ideas. The result was an evocation of a subaltern aesthetics of difference carried by a language nowhere ever spoken: a drama of the unspeakable and linguistically untranslatable (Aldrich 1962). In his debut novel, Yawar Fiesta (1941), he used his Quechuaized-Spanish once again. Narrating it in the past tense in Spanish using a distant-thirdperson voice emphasized the discontinuities of cultures and classes in his boyhood village. For all place names, dialogues amongst the Indians, and songs and prayers, he used Quechua, with neither translations nor explanations. Conversations between the mestizos and the Indians and between the Indians and the Creole property owners were in Quechuaized-Spanish. These linguistic moves emphasized Quechua, which emerged in his writing as a spiritual or holy language.10 In Deep Rivers (1958), again based on his own life story, the narrator and central character, Ernesto, a teenaged boy who sleeps in the kitchen with the Indian servants, is told in the first-person-singular voice in strict chronological order without flashbacks or flash-forwards. From time to time, he includes beautifully crafted descriptive passages and folkloric sections taken directly from his diaries and translations. When he won the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega Prize for the novel, he proclaimed, “I have not become acculturated!” (Columbus 1986: 23). This statement struck many as strange given that Arguedas was not, in fact, Quechua. On the other hand, he lived his entire life with equal influences from indigenous Quechua and Spanish-American cultures, his resulting transculturation produced a heterogeneity that enriched his writing and suggested ways of achieving a more just society.

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Arguedas went on to write six more novels in which he used outsiders, like himself, as narrators. While most of his literary work earned him only modest public acclaim, his impassioned pubic portrayal of indigenous oppression brought him into contact with the Dominican priest Gustavo Gutiérrez, the architect of liberation theology. Not only did Gutiérrez dedicate his famous book to Arguedas, he also included citations of him as the source of many theological insights, including that the gods of the rich and the gods of the poor are different: those of the rich are idols, whereas those of the poor are not. Based on this and other evidence of a close friendship between these men Arguedas has been widely considered the godfather of liberationism. All of his novels centered on the struggle between poor and powerful in Peru, which he treated not only as a cruel sociopolitical reality but also and, perhaps more importantly, as a deeply spiritual conflict. In 1969, when Arguedas committed suicide, a mortal sin in Roman Catholicism, it was Gutiérrez who celebrated his funeral mass (Gutiérrez 1971, Wall-Smith 1987). Today, Hispano-American literature, including Arguedas’s work, and East Indian writing in English are considered postcolonial writing. Mexican author and diplomat Octavio Paz, in his essay collection In Light of India (1997), described many parallels between tribal Indian and American-Indian cultures. Anita Desai, a well-known Indian author, situated her most recent novel, The Zigzag Way (2004), in Mexico rather than in India because of what she saw as the many cultural similarities between the hill tribes of India and the indigenous peoples of Mexico (Sales Salvador 2004). Amitav Ghosh is a well-known anthropologist practicing a blend of cultural advocacy and evocative ethnography within his award-winning postcolonial novels. Born in Calcutta and raised in Bangladeshi, Iran, and Sri Lanka, he teaches anthropology in New Delhi and comparative literature in New York City. During his undergraduate years, he studied sociology and received a master’s degree at Delhi University. Upon graduation, he enrolled in social anthropology at Oxford where he learned about letters between an Egyptian merchant and a Jewish merchant in Tunisia. In a letter posted in 1148, he sent greetings to Ben Yiju, the Jewish merchant’s Indian slave. This seemingly unlikely, yet clearly documented historical connection encouraged Ghosh to explore precolonial trade routes connecting the Indian subcontinent with the Arabian Peninsula. He went to Egypt to work in the archives and to undertake fieldwork in a peasant village. He received his Ph.D. in social anthropology from Oxford for his thesis, “Kinship in Relation to the Economic and Social Organization of an Egyptian Village Community” (1981).11 The following year he took a job as a journalist with the New Delhi Indian Express and began his first novel, The Circle of Reason (1986). The theme was the nature of modernity in contemporary postcolonial India with its strange

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relationship between Enlightenment discourses of reason and brutally coercive police responses to subaltern insurgency. When the New Delhi riots erupted in the midst of his writing, he put it aside to volunteer with an Indian citizen’s relief organization (Ghosh 1986, Jones 2003). Structurally, the novel follows the tripartite form of a classical Indian melody known as a raga. The first part (over a third of the book) is titled “Satwa” in Sanskrit meaning reason, and it spans many decades. The second part “Rajas,” meaning passion, unfolds in just over three weeks in a Middle Eastern oil-rich state. The third part “Tamas,” meaning death, takes place during a single day. The story opens in a small Bengali village with the hero, an eight-year-old orphan boy named Nachiketa Bose, is renamed Alu, meaning “potato,” after the lumpy shape of his head. When Balaram, a passionate phrenologist, sees the boy’s head, he adopts him to conduct a scientific study of his brain. Carefully measuring the bony bumps on the boy’s skull, Balaram finds to his astonishment the exact proportion of a loom. This encourages him to apprentice Alu to a master weaver, who insists that the boy memorize the name for each part of the loom in three languages. His other passion is Louis Pasteur, who encourages him to rid the village of germs. To do so he begins stockpiling huge vats of carbolic acid, which attracts the attention of local police, who decide he must be a terrorist. They surround his house and fire a warning flare that explodes the acid, killing everyone inside. Alu, who was in the forest at the time, flees to Calcutta where he catches a boat that delivers him to a mythical trading port on the Arabian Peninsula where he disappears into the underworld of illegal migrant laborers. Etymological diversions from oral storytelling, mostly punning and onomatopoeia, together with magical realist images, swirl through these pages built with techniques of sublime astonishment. There are tongue-less Chinamen; children who perpetually frown because their mothers dreamt of barbed wire the night before they were born; an old woman so ugly she scares sharks into tearing out their own entrails; and a crossed-eyed egg-seller who sees Cairo and Bombay simultaneously. His ethnographic and literary practice of the Romantic sublime in which words and images become ever more radically unstable and meaning is always in question, seizes control of us, his reader and takes us outside ourselves with the startling intensity of a thunderbolt. In In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveller’s Tale (1992), Ghosh returns to and elaborates the back story of his dissertation. While he portrays the day-to-day life of Arab peasants in Egypt, he also writes himself into the ethnography. His central characters are a medieval Indian slave (Ben Yiju) and himself, a contemporary Indian anthropologist. The novel is a brilliantly constructed intergenre faction, or imaginative writing about real people in real places at real times (Geertz 1988: 141). In addition, given the amount of

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space he devotes to his own life, it is also an autoethnography. Upon publication, the New York Times chose it as the Notable Book of 1993, and it became the central subject for a BBC III forty-minute TV documentary about life in Egypt (Ghosh 1992). Ghosh, who went on to write several more novels as well as dozens of newspaper essays, is assuming the role of a public intellectual,12 a position once reserved for English and French colonizers rather than for postcolonial ethnographers and novelists. His evocative documentary work seeks to balance clarity (enargeia) with excitement leading to astonishment (ekplêxis). His powerfully evocative writing engenders experiences in which things absent are presented to the reader’s imagination with such vividness that they seem to stand right before their eyes. As a child, I spent holidays and summers in my grandmother’s log home on the prairie of northern Saskatchewan (Tedlock 2005). Skipping behind her on riverside trails, she pointed out dozens of living rocks and edible plants: blackberries, bearberries, deerberries, violets, mints, fiddleheads, chickweed, and wild mushrooms. Sitting together on boulders nibbling violets and mints, she told me stories of a world filled with people, only some of whom were human beings. My favorites were rock persons and cumulous clouds who gave advice, and deer, badger, and bear persons who healed. To keep her language alive in me, my grandmother Nokomis explained key words in Ojibwe; rocks are asin in the singular and asiniig in the plural. Since the -iig suffix is used only for animate possessions, this means that rocks are alive. She was certain about this because she herself had seen rocks move and heard them speak. In time, she said, I also might hear and speak with rocks. She warned me that it would only come about, however, if I spent time in the North alone so that my catechism classes could not erase from my mind and heart the magic of the natural world. As an Anglican lay preacher herself, as well as an Ojibwe herbalist, midwife, and storyteller, she explained the differences and similarities between these spiritualities, pointing out that whereas Christians talked about guardian angels, Indians talked to guardian spirits. “These are our brothers and sisters, the animals,” she explained. For her the two ideas were nearly the same thing. She admonished me not to choose one path over the other but instead to walk in balance along the edges of these worlds. “There is beauty, strength, and power in being and loving both: a double calling.” Becoming an ethnographer, a suspect profession in most Native North American communities, ironically enabled me to fulfill her expectations. In telling my own bicultural evocative story alongside and entangled with the telling of other stories, I have learned that many narrative scraps are mirages, seductively real phenomena that I photograph and measure only to discover

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they depend upon my imagination for breath. Other scraps, like rainbow spokes and wheels in air, evaporate because the shadows we cast, the ones other people see, are not accurate reflections of who we really are, were, or ever will be. The memories we hide from eventually catch us, overtake us like spiders weaving the dream catchers of our personal history.

References Aldrich, Earl M. 1962. “The Quechua world of José María Arguedas.” Hispania 45, no. 1: 62–66. Bandelier, Adolf F. 1980. The Delight Makers: A Novel of Prehistoric Pueblo Indians. New York: Dodd, Mead. Biswas-Sen, Lip. 2006. “Breaking the Linguistic Alienation in José María Arguedas’ Yawar Fiesta.” Politics and Culture 1, , accessed March 22, 2011. Bourke, John Gregory. 1986. The Urine Dance of the Zuñi Indians of New Mexico. Salem: np. Caffey, David., ed. 1988. Yellow Sun, Bring Sky: The Indian Country Stories of Oliver La Farge. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Columbus, Claudette Kemper. 1986. Mythological Consciousness and the Future. New York: Peter Lang. Cook, Mercer. 1939. “Doguicimi by Paul Hazoumé.” Journal of Negro History 24, no. 2: 229–232. Deck, Alice A. 1990. “Autoethnography: Zora Neale Hurston, Noni Jabavu, and CrossDisciplinary Discourse.” Black American Literature Forum 24, no. 2: 237–256. Denzin, Norman. 1993. “The Postmodern Sensibility.” Studies in Symbolic Interaction 15, 179. Geertz, Clifford. 1988. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Ghosh, Amitav. 1986. The Circle of Reason. New York: Viking. ———. 1992. In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveller’s Tale. London: Granta Books. ———. 1998. Dancing in Cambodia and at Large in Burma. London: Granta Books. ———. 2002. The Imam and the Indian. London: Granta Books. ———. 2006. Incendiary Circumstances: A Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Gutiérrez, Gustavo. 1971. A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, Salvation. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Boos. Hardy, A. M. Georges. 1938. “Preface.” In Doguicimi, Paul Hazoumé. Paris: Larose, 17–32. Hazoumé, Paul. 1935. Doguicimi. Paris: Larose. ———. 1937. Le pacte de sang au Dahomey. Paris: Institute d’Ethnologie. Hecht, Robert A. 1991. Oliver La Farge and the American Indian: A Biography. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press. Hemenway, Robert. 1977. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

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Hertzog, Carl. 1942. The Unpublished Letters of Adolphe [sic] F. Bandelier: Concerning the Writing and Publication of The Delight Makers. With an introduction by Paul Radin. El Paso, TX: Facsimile. Hurston, Zora Neale. 1935. Mules and Men. Philadelphia: Lippincott. ———. 1937. Their Eyes Were Watching God. Philadelphia: Lippincott. ———. 1938. Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica. Philadelphia: Lippincott. ———. 1984. Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Isaac, Gwyneira. 2005. “Re-observation and the Recognition of Change in the Photographs of Matilda Coxe Stevenson (1879–1915).” Journal of the Southwest 47, Autumn: 411–455. Jones, Stephanie. 2003. “A Novel Genre: Polylingualism and Magical Realism in Amitav Ghosh’s ‘The Circle of Reason.’” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 66, no. 3: 431–441. Jovanovich, Stefan. 1971. “Adolf Bandelier: An Introduction.” In The Delight Makers, ed., Adolf Bandelier. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, i-xxix. Kaplan, Carla. 2002. Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters. New York: Doubleday. Karanja, Ayana I. 1999. Zora Neale Hurston: The Breath of Her Voice. New York: Peter Lang. Knab, Timothy J. 2004. The Dialogue of Earth and Sky: Dreams, Souls, Curing, and the Modern Aztec Underworld. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. ———. 1995. The War of the Witches: A Journey into the Underworld of the Contemporary Aztecs. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco. La Farge, Oliver. 1935. “Hard Winter.” In All the Young Men. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 3–28. ———. 1945. Raw Material. Boston: Houghton Mifflin ———. 1966. “Horned Husband Kachina Chief, Pillar of the Press.” In The Man with the Calabash Pipe. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 167–169. ———. 1988. “Policeman Follow Order.” In Yellow Sun, Bring Sky: The Indian Country Stories of Oliver La Farge, ed., David Caffey. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 127–139. Lange, Charles. 1968. Cochiti. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. McNee, Lisa. 2002. “Claiming History: Colonialism, Ethnography, and the Novel.” Research in African Literatures 32, no. 4: 219. Parman, Donald. 1976. The Navajos and the New Deal. New Haven: Yale University Press. Porter, Joseph C. 1986. Paper Medicine Man: John Gregory Bourke and His American West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Reed-Danahay, Deborah E. 1997. Auto/Ethnography: Rewriting the Self and the Social. Oxford: Berg. Sales Salvador, Dora. 2004. Puentes sobre el mundo: Cultura, traducción y forma literaria en las narrativas de transculturación de José María Arguedas y Vikram Chandra. Berne: Lang. Singh, Raghubir. 1998. River of Colour the India of Raghubir Singh. London: Phaidon. Sommers, Joseph. 1964. “The Indian-oriented Novel in Latin America: New Spirit, New Forms, New Scope.” Journal of Inter-American Studies 6, no. 2: 253. Stevenson, Matilda Coxe. 1904. The Zuñi Indians: Their Mythology, Esoteric Fraternities, and Ceremonies. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office (=Twenty-Third Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology).

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Tedlock, Barbara. 2005. The Woman in the Shaman’s Body: Reclaiming the Feminine in Religion and Medicine. New York: Random House. Tomkins, Calvin. 2007. “The Turnaround Artist: Jeff Koons, Up from Banality.” The New Yorker, April 23, 60. Tyler, Stephen A. 1986. “Postmodern Ethnography: From Document of the Occult to Occult Document.” In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, eds., James Clifford and George Marcus. Berkeley: University of California Press, 122–140. ———. 1987. The Unspeakable: Discourse, Dialogue, and Rhetoric in the Postmodern World. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. ———. 1992. On Being Out of Words. In Rereading Cultural Anthropology, ed., George Marcus. Durham: Duke University Press, 1–7. Wall-Smith, Stephen B. 1987. “José María Arguedas: Godfather of Liberationism.” Christian Century, November 18: 1034–1035. Watts, Richard. 2005. Packaging Post/Coloniality: The Manufacture of Literary Identity in the Francophone. Lanham: Lexington Books.

Notes 1. Porter 1986: 12, Bourke 1886; microfilm copies of Bourke’s diaries can be found in the Center of Southwest Studies at Fort Lewis College. See , accessed March 22, 2011. 2. Stevenson 1904: 204, 430, 608; during her time in the American Southwest she created over nine hundred research photographs, now housed at the National Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC (Isaac 2005: 411–455). 3. Hazoumé 1935, 1937; for critiques, see Cook 1939 and McNee 2002: 219. 4. For a discussion of postcolonial paratexts, see Watts 2005. 5. Hurston 1984: 61; this is an expanded edition of her original 1942 book. 6. Deck 1990; Karanja 1999: 1–10; also noted this unusual writing strategy, which she labeled postmodern ethnography. Excellent discussions of autoethnography appear in Reed-Danahay 1997. 7. Kaplan 2002; for more about the controversy surrounding the authorship of the play see Karanja 1999: 14–17 and “Mule Bone: Introduction” , accessed March 22, 2011. 8. La Farge 1935; I agree with David Caffey, who suggested that the central female character was Mabel Dodge Luhan (Caffey 1988: 6). 9. Parman 1976: 210; La Farge helped Taos Pueblo regain Blue Lake, see Hecht 1991. 10. José María Arguedas, Yawar Fiesta published in Spanish in 1941. Yawar is Quechua for “blood” and fiesta is Spanish for “celebration.” Francis Horning Barraclough translated the novel into English, and the University of Texas Press published it together with an important essay Arguedas wrote in 1950, “The Novel and the Problem of Literary Expression in Peru” in 1985. Here he described in detail his struggle to find an appropriate linguistic register in which to write his Andean fiction (see Sommers 1964: 253). 11. For details of Amitav Ghosh’s educational and publishing career, see his curriculum vitae on his website , accessed March 22, 2011. 12. Many of these essays are available in Ghosh’s prose anthologies (Ghosh 1998, 2002, 2006).

CHAPTER 12

Reading Public Culture Reason and Excess in the Newspaper Robert Hariman








I’m on vacation at a cabin on the shore of a beautiful lake. The water shimmers in the morning light, doves coo in the warm summer air, and life is good. So what do I do? I get in my car to drive to the nearest town to buy a newspaper. As much as I love being at the lake, I’m also going through withdrawal from my daily routine. At the small town grocery store I pick up every paper they’ve got: the regional large city daily, the nearest small city daily, the local weekly, the area shopping weekly, and, if available, the real estate flyer and the local singles guide even though I’m a married homeowner. I also grab some pastries to go with the coffee that I’ll brew as soon as I get back to the cabin, where I’ll spend the first part of the morning immersed in news, entertainment, sports, and other categories of modern civil society. Only then will I have the right mixture of serenity and mental activity, of a leisured getaway and continued involvement in the world. But that puts too good a face on the situation. The truth is, I’m addicted to the paper, and my “involvement in the world” will consist entirely of reading. On another occasion I’m returning from a conference outside the United States, still aglow with the stimulation of travel, the intellectual engagement of the conference, and the gracious hospitality provided by my hosts. This trip was to Capetown, where I savored life in the jazz clubs and cafés of a cosmopolitan city currently outside the news cycle of the American imperial system. I had scanned their papers, of course, in English and Afrikaans (which I don’t read), but for once I hadn’t missed my usual fare. As I’m walking through the

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Atlanta airport, I’m suddenly and then repeatedly shocked by the front pages blaring at me from the newsstands. The president stands with other dignitaries and officials before a panoply of flags. Large-type headlines blare Terror, Crisis, Threat, Force. Lurid emotions stoked by media events, gross distortions of magnitude, somehow ordinary civic interactions have been displaced by a virtual reality game of World Power. I stop to read, but the disorientation continues, as if I’m getting used to a new pair of glasses. I can see what is there but I can’t easily adjust to the picture as a whole. While ashamed by the arrogant projection of such a partial, egocentric view of the world, I also note that not much is happening on a slow news day. Back home, I’m in my morning routine. Breakfast, coffee, two newspapers (the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune). I sort them side by side and by section to arrange each paper in my preferred order: sports, comics, news and editorial, metro/weather, arts/entertainment/style, business, and a pile of the additional sections (food, real estate, etc.) that vary by the day of the week and will be read incidentally. The only exceptions are the science section in the Tuesday Times, which will be read thoroughly during the week, and the regular fare of automotive and classified ads, which are thrown into the recycling bin with barely a glance. This sorting is deeply satisfying: I am ordering the world around me. More to the point, I am situating myself in an ordered world, one where politics is here and business there, one where a broad range of human arts and activities can be classified and then taken up each on its own terms. And I get to do this every day of the year, no holiday or catastrophe excepted. This periodicity is reassuring, and the ordering is as good an illusion of control as I’m likely to have all day. I read the sections, in order, to bring myself into both the world and a specific form of myself. First, a glance at the front page to see if this is the rare day when there is real news—that is, something dramatic or involving immediate threat, obligation, or concern; then the sports pages, to constitute my gender identity and the idea of a rule-governed world. Then the comics, for a laugh, maybe, and a sense of the essential playfulness necessary to appreciate human affairs. Then the major news stories and, more important, the editorial pages for commentary, letters to the editor, and the practice of forming judgments. Most important are those editorials or letters that reason well; indeed, there the entire exercise of the morning is made clear: I am reading to become constituted within the deliberative mentality of print media. That mentality includes my rational capacity for classification, analytical thinking, inductive and deductive argument, and assessment of documentary evidence, and a normative framework that includes ideals of liberty, equality, justice, civility, transparency, and rule of law. As I read the newspaper, I am transformed gradually but reliably from whatever I was that morning—whether groggy or

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alert, ambitious or lazy, dreamy or depressed, whatever the night might have done—into someone able to reason about public affairs, form judgments, and make decisions with regard to other perspectives and democratic procedures. I have become a citizen. But what was I reading? By sorting and sifting and weighing the hundreds of individual stories, advertisements, announcements, photographs, puzzles, and other offerings, I was making sense of what is a cacophony of discourses. Diplomatic negotiations are placed alongside large lingerie ads, murders are next to stories about lost pets, veterans administration policies are alongside a column on laundry etiquette, medical advances compete with obituaries, which include civic saints, publicity hounds (“the Hebrew Hercules”), and eccentric hobbyists. Agricultural price supports, signage disputes, soccer mobs, This Day in History, astrology, hospital administration, tips for the holidays, it’s all there. On the same page: “Cops: Mom offered man sex with daughter”; “Has Viagra let you down?” And everywhere the images: Fashion models holding thousand dollar handbags, working men repairing infrastructure, teens at a highway memorial for yet another fatal car crash, emaciated famine victims, beauty queen wannabes, athletes making yet another dunk, another swing, another victory salute, which rockers do to the extreme while a Hindu holy man stares into the void and riot police beat demonstrators and a cartoon character opens an auto show while a celebrity gets a mug shot. And I don’t read the tabloids. Roland Barthes asked, “Mad or tame? Photography can be one or the other: tame if its realism remains relative, tempered by aesthetic or empirical habits (to leaf through a magazine at the hairdresser’s, the dentist’s); mad if this realism is absolute and, so to speak, original, obliging the loving and terrified consciousness to return to the very letter of Time” (Barthes 1981: 119). The same question can be asked not merely of the visual image but of the newspaper itself, which is a compendium of habits while aspiring to be the very letter of Time. Much of the time most people have no good reason to set aside their habits of reading. They read for the news and other information contained within the conventions of print journalism, and they receive in the bargain a domestication of reality and similar assurances. Occasionally a reader might be jostled out of this economy of comprehension: say, when a story intersects one’s direct experience or when its editorial line crosses a deeply held political conviction. Then one can see how the telling of the story is an exceedingly partial retelling and how ideology is directing coverage without regard for either objectivity or empathy or any other value. For the most part, however, the illusion of transparency is maintained; as long as one reads regularly, it also proves to be relatively reliable and useful.

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For the most part. But what if one were to take the other approach, to step back for a moment and then walk all the way inside the world of the newspaper? Rather than continue to rely on the many conventions of public reading as they tame the news, one could begin with an absolute realism that would register everything that is there, as it is there, prior to its being selected, sorted, and then set aside for this or that reading. What would one see, and to what end, and to what result? Briefly: the result is as Barthes suggests: a consciousness that is at once loving and terrified. I love the newspaper and don’t want to live without the modern, public, liberal-democratic civic mentality that it constitutes, a world of freedom, pluralism, mutual obligation, common playfulness, and much more. And I am terrified at what is really there: a crazy-quilt compendium of violence, waste, cruelty, and loss, along with everything taken to hide the evidence and buffer the pain. What one sees are the surface features of a world both mad and tame. To see this at all—or, to see into the relationships between madness and domestication, reason and excess—one might need to assume an attitude of wonder. This is not an obvious response to the newspaper, which is much more typically described in terms of its banality. The beauty of nature, the mystery of the cosmos, the profound elusiveness of reality before the inquiring mind— these are not likely to be found in yet another who-what-where-when-why report on an automotive recall. Even when astonishing human achievements are reported, they often become reduced to curiosities or embalmed as stock references. If philosophy begins in wonder, it is not likely to end in reading the sports section.1 And that may be part of the problem with philosophy. That is, a tame distribution of wonder and banality is itself already in place—culturally and thus somewhat arbitrarily—much like the separate sections of the newspaper. Wonder is itself a form of (sanctioned) excess: a license for delaying whatever one is doing otherwise to take additional time, time to perceive with unusual openness or attentiveness and to think beyond pragmatic obligations. To look at the newspaper in an attitude of wonder is to be astonished that it is there at all, to consider how unlikely and fragile it is as a cultural form, and to see through its ordering function to appreciate both how much chaos it is managing and how it also is chaotic, ever on the edge of dissolution. That dissolution includes both its demise as a specific enterprise or institution and more significantly its participation in society’s slowly unfolding catastrophes. Most important, by making the banal an object of wonderment, one both exposes and transforms it. The exposure reveals how it is not one thing but rather a surprisingly elusive combination of disparate elements, mad and tame—necessarily both mad and tame. The transformation lifts it from the merely ordinary,

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formulaic, conventional object on its way to oblivion to become something alien because human. Instead of a mere instrumentality that is valuable only for a day or as an archival document, the newspaper as a source of astonishment and evocation can call for renewed appreciation of how society, culture, and more specific human capacities are strange things being continuously recreated. Thus, the madness evident in the newspaper is not only in what is reported but also in the conventions of representation, which can vary but never escape a strange combination of loony polyglossia and bureaucratic organization. (At times the organization maintains mass delusion while silliness is the key to sanity.) One reason there is no escape is that one sees the world as it is in time: the newspaper chronicles (repetitively, performatively) a world of constant movement. This forward motion is managed by an array of discursive and visual conventions but always fitfully and inadequately. Time always corrodes any aesthetic resolution, and the reassurance of periodic publication only goes so far as the paper always communicates the social fact that we live in history. This deep secularization of the world carries with it little of the lawfulness of nature; instead, one sees contingency, convention, imagination, excess, and other features of culture—and of culture as it has become synchronized with the news cycle. Hence, my purpose, which is one end toward which an attitude of wonder can lead: to see how a culture continually reforms, almost kaleidoscopically and yet for better or worse, in its daily concatenation of many shards of meaning within a fixed frame. The newspaper is one such frame. The paper is both ritually repetitive and relentlessly diachronic, its array of information is at once orderly and deranged, and it creates a public world while reproducing regimes of habituation that serve both civil society and systemic violence. To see it as an object of wonder is to adopt Barthes’ photographic literalism, that is, to encounter what is really there and what is actually being exposed rather than automatically read it into a given pattern of rationalization. That “madness” is undertaken to expose other forms of structured disorder that range from the inevitable arbitrariness of human mores to the deep insanity of some forms of civilization. This sense of wonder as it can be a critical attitude requires continual oscillation between seeing through and returning to conventions of interpretation. Marveling at what is there should not be a naïve enthrallment, nor is the more direct encounter with the artifact an unmediated view of a more authentic reality. The object of astonishment will be what one was seeing all along, albeit tamely, and one should be able to contribute to the culture on its own terms. Thus, any attempt to see the newspaper anew will have to return to its own self-understanding as something distinctively and rightly public.

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The nature of “the public” has always been both contested and idealized. From the “phantom public” to the “public sphere,” the terms of analysis have implicitly registered that a public is a virtual reality that can never be localized in a single place. Thus, it makes sense to either deny its existence or its significance or to establish it as an ideal type against which actual practice always is alienated, corrupted, or incomplete. These reactions are the result of a particular conceptual deficit, and the missing term is culture. Once the public is understood to be a distinctive cultural phenomenon, it becomes grounded in specific media, arts, discourses, and other patterns of virtual interaction. The focus on public culture isolates the use of modern communicative media to define the relationships among strangers in civil society and between citizens and the state.2 Terms such as public speech, public opinion, public interest, and the like articulate a zone of intelligibility wherein specific forms of discourse, interaction, and responsibility are recognized and capable of becoming authoritative. The newspaper remains the most representative document. One goes there for much the same reason that Willy Sutton robbed banks: that’s where the meaning is. Some argue that the significance of print journalism is waning, and they can point to shifting habits of consumption amidst the proliferation of other media. As media use changes, so does the culture; most notably, the argument is that citizens are turning into consumers as the public culture of Walter Cronkite becomes displaced by the popular culture of American Idol. This critique fits neatly with the defense of the public sphere as a bastion of rationality. For Habermas, the verdict is clear: when the public assumed its specific form, “it was the bourgeois reading public … rooted in the world of letters,” and the subsequent disintegration of that culture was accomplished in part through the rise of the electronic mass media and its displacement of public debate by political spectacles.3 Thus, the newspaper is seen as a model of public reason, and the rise and expansion of other media have turned the public sphere into an echo chamber of catch phrases and other bad speech and, worse yet, a simulacrum made of images. Both the ideal type and the arguments about displacement are mistaken, however. The newspaper and the public never were quite as they have been portrayed, nor are new media wholly new. In fact, the shift from paper to digital distribution will not be as wrenching as is believed precisely because so much of what are supposedly features of the new medium were already there (but unrecognized) in print.4 The newspaper is only a model of public reason when one already has read it through the conventions of bourgeois reading. That paper is indeed there to be read, and any paper encourages that reading. But the paper and the public culture it creates are also polyglot, excessive, fragmented, and crazy. The paper is a model of reasoned reportage and commentary, and it is a bestiary.

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It organizes the world into a remarkably durable category system for decisionmaking about the general welfare, and it reproduces the complex identities, relationships, and contingencies of modern societies undergoing continual change driven in part by ever-higher rates of communication. Like the world it would order, it is both mad and tame. It both rationalizes and exposes a world of desire and terror. My work in public culture begins at this point of ambivalence, from which there is no exit. The newspaper trains one to read, and that reading becomes an exercise in practical reasoning, informed judgment, and citizenship. But one is also looking at the paper and being pulled into other acts of perception and other modes of reading and response beyond the deliberative. One is learning about commercial trends and foreign policy, but also considering whether a rock star did or did not snort his deceased father’s ashes along with a hit of cocaine. He was reported as saying so and has denied it subsequently. (The experienced reader of the celebrity page is rightly skeptical of both the story and the denial.) The important point here is that such stories are not a premodern residue or concession to marketing to a mass audience: the odd, peculiar, outrageous, distorted, eccentric, and otherwise excessive character of the newspaper is as important to the constitution of modern public culture as is the commitment to public reason.5 The public culture is excessive in two senses: first, it has to be to be a culture at all; second, and the more important point, the distinctive excessiveness of the newspaper provides essential resources for the constitution of modernity, including (but not limited to) the construction of reasoning itself, a distinctively secular openness to the social world, the characteristic totality of a liberal-democratic society (which is consistent but not identical with the social imaginary of the democratic nation), the negotiation of distinctive social forms of public life such as stranger relationality, and more as well.6 Obviously, there are risks in adopting an attitude that values excess and goes against the grain of a rational structure that is in fact in place. One need not be (or remain) astonished to explain important institutions of the public sphere, and demystification remains an important attitude of modern thought and politics alike. Wonderment, moreover, risks becoming captured by the object. Within a capitalist society, openness to reality can lead straight to the commodity fetish. The choice is not really between knowledge and enchantment, however, but rather between two attitudes toward modernity. One can believe that modern communicative practices really are or could be rational, or one can marvel at how reason and excess, reference and repetition, text and image, and many other contradictions are in play and not always aligned in a set of fixed equivalences (reason = reference = text, etc.). If analytical explanation requires the relentless discrimination of either-or distinctions, then the attitude of wonder is necessary to recognize how social reality remains beholden

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to logics of both-and. Both reason and excess, both mad and tame, both beauty and horror. Good judgment requires no less: only by being able to marvel at the human world can one see exactly how it is both fallen and redeemed. Thus, it is important to be able to see how the newspaper can appear to be the work of a dithering idiot. Or, more ominously, how reading the newspaper can be like talking to someone who is remarkably articulate, erudite, and witty, only to have the dawning realization that he is completely insane. And so we come to the last limit of wonder, that of looking into the abyss while awaiting the impending catastrophe. Walter Benjamin described that moment as the point where one’s annihilation could be experienced as a supreme aesthetic pleasure (Benjamin 2008: 42). But even that warning is not excessive enough, as it falls back into a set of either-or equivalences. The choice is not between either pleasure or politics, or between either catastrophe or action, or between either self-alienation or authenticity. Not yet, anyway. To think otherwise is to abandon fragile but still available resources for collective life. And as both Benjamin and Barthes understood, one must pursue the intensities that lie within modern forms of communication if one is to understand what is at stake. Nor should one be fooled that terror can be prevented by becoming suitably serious, thoroughly rational, and immune to distraction. So, I read the newspaper. News junkie, citizen, tourist, spectator, flaneur, phenomenologist, ethnographer of a virtual world, fool. … The task is both simple and exhausting: read with absolute realism—registering everything— to identify how the medium constitutes a mentality that is both rational and excessive. It does so by bracketing and exposing, organizing and leaking, bringing the distant near and setting the familiar in the middle distance of the public gaze, and by a radical parataxis of settings, topics, and discourses, and through other operations as well. I read alone and in common, parsing arguments and gazing at the society’s curiosity cabinet, forming judgments and becoming part of a vast system of surveillance, absorbing social knowledge and supporting writers I will never meet. I read of rape, murder, torture, war, and genocide, and I smile at the clever puns in the headlines and captions. The result is something like a dialogic imagination; more to the point, the reader comes to live in a world where every discourse is irrevocably partial, limited, incomplete, and part of a comprehensive experience of incongruity. Thus, despite the rectilinear frame, uniform type, standard style, and related features of impersonality defining the medium, the newspaper creates a public world that can never be represented by a single discourse. Instead, there can only be more: more variety, more information, more outlets, more updates, the continual production of excess. It is, after all, modern. The amount of information is staggering: entire stock exchanges, housing markets, auto markets, box scores, weather reports, movie theater listings,

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obituaries, and on and on. Much more than I can account for here. For the moment, let it be enough to say that an FBI agent in New Jersey was killed when his partner’s gun discharged accidentally; a folk rocker is bringing his “warm, polished stylings” to a local club; new homes are going up in another suburb; a corporate raider is making a move for Chrysler; a librarian in Iowa has signed a $1.2 million book deal to tell the story of her cat. I don’t know anyone in the FBI or in New Jersey, nor do I own a handgun; I don’t attend the club; I don’t live in a suburb nor do I want to; I’ll never own the car or the stock; I don’t have a cat and I’ll never read the book. But I read each story. I have to: it’s in the paper.

References Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections of Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Bender, Thomas. 1986. “Wholes and Parts: The Need for Synthesis in American History.” Journal of American History 73: 120–136. Benjamin, Walter. 2008. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (Second Version).” In The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, eds., Walter W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge: Harvard/Belknap, 19–55. Habermas, Jürgen. 1989. Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge: MIT Press. Hariman, Robert. 2008. “Political Parody and Public Culture.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 94, no. 3: 247–272. ———. 2009. “Future Imperfect: Imagining Rhetorical Culture Theory.” In Culture & Rhetoric, eds., Ivo Strecker and Stephen Tyler. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 221–237. Hariman, Robert, and John Louis Lucaites. 2007. No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1971 [1784]. “What Is Enlightenment?” In Kant’s Political Writings, ed., Hans Reiss. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 85–92. Shaffer, Marguerite S., ed. 2008. Public Culture: Diversity, Democracy, and Community in the United States. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Warner, Michael. 2002. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1938. Modes of Thought. Toronto: MacMillan/Free Press.

Notes 1. Plato, Theaeteus, 155c; Aristotle, Metaphysics 982b; Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Book I, lesson 3; Whitehead 1938: 168. Note that a genealogy of wonder would reveal considerable latitude in use of the term: for example, Aquinas has philosophy replacing wonder with knowledge, whereas Whitehead declares that if philosophy is done right wonder will remain. And here, Whitehead’s observation that philosophy is a series of footnotes on Plato may hold rather well.

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2. Hariman and Lucaites 2007: 25–27; Thomas Bender articulated a more elite-centered model in Bender 1986: 120–136. More recent contributions include Shaffer 2008. 3. Habermas 1989: 85; see also Kant 1971 [1784]: 85–92. 4. Of course, the new technologies and corresponding changes in reading practices will still be consequential, but that is another topic. In the meantime, I’ll continue to check The Huffington Post and other online news sites compulsively throughout the day. 5. I say more about the relationships between excess, culture, public culture, and rhetorical analysis in Hariman 2008 and 2009. 6. On stranger relationality, see Warner 2002: 74ff.

Contributors








James W. Fernandez, emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago, still teaches an annual course on “The Figuration of Social Thought and Action.” He was a member in the early 1970s of the Metaphor Group, whose papers at the Annual Anthropology Meetings in San Diego of 1970 resulted in The Social Use of Metaphor (David Sapir and Chris Crocker 1977) and whose teachings and further publications stimulated the interest in The Play of Tropes in Culture (Fernandez 1986), which we witness in contemporary anthropology. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Academy of the Asturian Language. Jürg Gasché did extended fieldwork in the Colombian and the Peruvian rain forests. He cooperated in the creation and execution of the Indian Intercultural and Bilingual Teacher Education Program in Iquitos, the principles and experiences of which he then transferred to similar programs in Mexico and Brazil. To illustrate the ritual and everyday uses of the huitoto language, he participated in the DOBES documentation project People of the Center. During the last years, he dedicated himself to elaborate and illustrate the concept of the Forest Dweller Society (Sociedad Bosquesina). Robert Hariman is professor of rhetoric and public culture in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. His publications include Political Style: The Artistry of Power (University of Chicago Press, 1995) and No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 2007), coauthored with John Louis Lucaites. He posts regularly at http://nocaptionneeded.com, a blog on photojournalism, politics, and culture. Together with Stephen Tyler and Ivo Strecker, he is editor of the Berghahn Books series Studies in Rhetoric and Culture.

contributors




191

Klaus-Peter Köpping, emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Heidelberg, has done field research on millenarian and nativistic religious movements in modern Japan and has published widely on this and related topics. He has taught at Berkeley and Fullerton in California, as well as in Brisbane and Melbourne in Australia. After retirement he continued teaching and research at the Goldsmiths College, London, and the Free University in Berlin. His most recent book is Rituals in an Unstable World (edited together with Alexander Henn, 2008) E. Douglas Lewis was a student of Stephen Tyler at Rice University, and since 1977 he has done research among the peoples and societies of Sikka on the island of Flores in eastern Indonesia. He has taught at the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Australia, and he is author of People of the Source: The Social and Ceremonial Order of Tana Wai Brama on Flores (1988), Hikayat Kerajaan Sikka: The Chronicles of the Rajadom of Sikka (2008), and The Stranger-Kings of Sikka (2010). Todd Oakley is professor and chair of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. In addition, he is director of the master's program in cognitive science and director of the Center for Cognition and Culture. His two most recent books are Mental Spaces in Discourse and Interaction (2008) and From Attention to Meaning: Explorations in Semiotics, Linguistics, and Rhetoric (2009), now in its second printing. Philippe-Joseph Salazar is alumnus of École Normale Supérieure and past director at Collège international de philosophie, Paris. Currently he is distinguished professor of rhetoric and humane letters at the University of Cape Town. A French public intellectual, he writes for http://www.lesinfluences.fr and Le Nouvel Observateur Plus. He is editor of Powers of Persuasion and founding editor of the African Yearbook of Rhetoric. His three most recent books are L'Hyperpolitique (2009), Paroles de Leaders (2010), and De l'art de séduire l'électeur indécis (2011). He received the Harry Oppenheimer Fellowship Award in 2008. Ivo Strecker is emeritus professor of cultural anthropology at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. He did and still does research with the Hamar in southern Ethiopia and has published widely about them. His film Father of the Goats (1984) received the Prix Nanook at the Bilan in Paris, and his theoretical study The Social Practice of Symbolization (1988) was selected by Choice as one of the “outstanding academic books of the year.” Together with Stephen

192




contributors

Tyler and Robert Hariman, he is editor of the Berghahn Books series Studies in Rhetoric and Culture. Barbara Tedlock is distinguished professor of anthropology at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where she teaches Maya ethnography, psychological anthropology, and religion, as well as holistic health and integrative medicine. She has published widely on Maya and Zuni culture and was editor of the groundbreaking anthology Dreaming. Anthropological and Psychological Interpretations (1987). Her newest book, The Woman in the Shaman’s Body: Reclaiming the Feminine in Religion and Medicine (2005), won two awards and has been translated into several languages. Dennis Tedlock has held positions at Iowa State, Berkeley, Brooklyn College, Yale, and Boston University and presently is the McNulty Professor of English and Research Professor of Anthropology at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He has done most of his fieldwork in the company of his wife, Barbara, and while living in Guatemala, they learnt the ancient methods of divination and dream interpretation of the Quiché Maya. Among his many publications are The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation (1983) and The Dialogic Emergence of Culture (with Bruce Manheim 1995), which pioneered both the theory and practice of dialogical anthropology. He has received numerous honors and awards, and together with his wife held a four-year term as editorsin-chief of the American Anthropologist. Markus Verne is assistant professor for anthropology at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. From 2010 to 2012, he was Marie Curie Experienced Researcher at the Department of Ethnomusicology, University of California, Los Angeles, and the Department of Anthropology, University of Bayreuth. For his book on consumption and scarcity in a Sahelian village (Der Mangel an Mitteln, 2007) he received the Research Sponsorship Award of the Frobenius Society and the Junior Scientists Award of the Association of African Studies in Germany. Boris Wiseman is associate professor of French and Francophone Studies at Copenhagen University. His past research has focused on French anthropology, in particular in its relations to aesthetic theory. In 2007, he published Lévi-Strauss Anthropology and Aesthetics, and he has edited two collections of essays on Lévi-Strauss, a special issue of Les Temps modernes (2004) and the Cambridge Companion to Lévi-Strauss (2009). He has coedited, with Adriana Bontea, a special issue of the journal Paragraph on the works of French philosopher Claude Imbert, titled: Claude Imbert in Perspective: Creation, Cognition and Modern Experience (2011).

Index








Abelard, Pierre, 146, 160–61 aesthetic, 2, 4, 12, 54–55, 66, 105, 173, 182, 184, 187 aesthetic experience, 12, 187 Africa, 65, 114, 117–18, 124 Indonesia and, 12, 98–102, 104, 106–7, 110 writing about, 168–70 African-American culture, 170 aidos, 63 alerting, 6, 24, 26 allegorical, 4, 9, 57–58 alterity, 70 alternative, 49, 135, 163–64 ambiguity, 13, 70, 125, 129, 160 ambiguous experiences, 13, 126, 129 analysis, 4, 8, 28–29, 76, 167, 185, 189 Andersons, Robin, 63 anthropology, 28–29, 104, 106, 125–26, 172, 174 and art, 3, 8, 54–55 and astonishment, 1, 97 and evocation, 19, 46 writing in, 16, 19, 128, 169–70, 172 antonymy, 15, 151 Appolinaire, Guillaume, 8, 46, 48 Arguedas, José María, 17, 172–74, 177–79 art, 2, 23, 38, 41–42, 49–51, 102 and astonishment, 1 and evocation, 3, 5–7, 16, 55 and anthropology, 3, 8, 19, 54 of speech, 11, 36, 126 artistic, 5, 12, 24, 99 artists, 1, 41, 45, 50, 135, 171

astonishment (ekplêxis), 7, 10, 17, 42, 63–64 and art, 9, 100 and evocation, 5–6, 8, 11, 17–18, 52–58, 77, 184 and scholarship, 1–3, 12, 65–67, 97, 101–03, 175–76 astonishing, 15, 39, 148, 159, 183 attention, 1, 3–10, 16, 18, 23–26, 52–53, 111, 113, 124, 127 attentiveness, 8, 51, 183 aureola, 15, 148, 161 Averbuch, Irit, 74, 76 awe, 65–66, 114 Bacchanalia, 31–32 Balandier, Georges, 28 Balfour-Paul, Jenny, 42–44, 50–51 Balthus, 7, 37–39 Bandelier, Adolf, 17, 167–68, 171, 177–78 Baroque, 38, 162 Barthes, Roland, 28, 40, 182–84, 187–88 Bataille, Georges, 74, 76 Baudelaire, Charles, 7, 41 Bellini, Giovanni, 25 belote, 7, 37, 39 Benedict, Ruth, 67, 74, 169 Benjamin, Walter, 28, 70, 76, 187–88 blue, 7–8, 32–33, 36–37, 41–43, 45, 49–50, 129, 164 Boas, Franz, 54, 112, 169 body metaphors, 10, 67 belly, 10, 67–69, 71, 73 tears, 12–13, 54, 111–14, 118–21, 124–29

194




index

Booker, James, 166 Bourke, John Gregory, 167–68, 177–79 Brama, Tana Wai, 151, 153, 155, 162 Buddhism, 65, 72, 75, 76 Burke, Edmund, 66, 74, 76 Burke, Kenneth, 152 Buxton, Richard, 1–2, 19 cacophony, 17, 182 Cadmus, Paul, 6, 30–31 Caillois, Roger, 74, 76 canonical text, 152 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, 38 Cézanne, Paul, 49–51 change, 31, 75, 106, 112–13, 143, 153, 156, 173, 186 Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon, 49–50 cheating, 7, 38 chiasmus, 16–18, 57 cinema, 8, 33, 52, 54, 58–59, 76 clarity (enargeia), 17, 152, 176 Claudel, Paul, 8, 49 Clifford, James, 4, 19, 179 Cocom, Nachi, 14, 138–39 co-presence, 8–9, 52–53, 55–59 cognition, 5–6, 24–25, 46, 53–54, 77, 127 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 154–55 collocation, 17–18, 53 communication, 16, 44, 186–87 community, 2, 9–11, 50, 63, 66, 68–69, 95, 109, 158, 169, 174 competition, 94–95 conceptual blending, 24 Connally, Bob, 63 consciousness, 25, 46, 117, 165–67, 182 contact zone, 165–66 contemplation, 29, 49 context, 14, 44, 101, 103–04, 107, 168 cultural, 76, 77, 110, 153 historical, 72, 106, 168 in performance, 2, 4, 11, 96, 121, 137, 143, 149, 163 in translation, 152, convention, 45, 65, 68, 70, 151–53, 182–85 cosmology, 67, 155 Crawford, Janie Mae, 170 criticism, 3, 11, 41, 93, 95, 105, 107 Cromwell, Thomas, 5, 23, 26

culture, 18, 24, 26, 53, 55, 57–58, 117–19, 148–49, 159, 161, 166, 173 African-American, 170–72 African, 101, in anthropology, 4–5, 57, 106, 116, 125, 172 cosmopolitan, 169 and difference, 1, 3, 8, 54, 63, 111, 129, 136–37, 156, 167, 170 emotions in, 111, 120 heroes, 99 history, 103, 110 Indian, 174 Indonesian, 106 Japanese, 10, 65, 70, 74, Madagascan, 98 material, 12, 104 Maya, 137 Neapolitan, 29, public, 17–18, 180–81, 185–86, 189 Quetchua, 173 religious, 114 Shipibo, 93, Sikkanese, 150, 159 Spanish-American, 173 spell of, 52, study of, 41 West African, 103–05, 107 Western, 45, transculturation, 173 cultural complexity, 118 completeness, 165 co-participation, 166 cross-cultural interlocution, encounter, 14, 116 difference, 14–15, 57–58, 63 ethnography as cultural phenomenon, 5 enigma of cultural studies, 7 fantastic cultural invention, 11 form and chaos, 183 identity, 17 influence, 105, 111 justice, 16 public as cultural phenomenon, 185 relatedness, 104–05, 174 representation, 171

index

translator, 170 curiosity, 2, 42, 63–64, 99, 165, 187 dance, 10, 38, 64, 68–78, 82, 95, 168–69, 177 dancer, 8, 58, 65–66, 68, 74–77, 84–85, 89, 91, 94, 127, 164, 172 dancing, 10, 52, 64–71, 74–76, 79, 91, 96, 108 dead, deadly 39, 114–15, 117, 147, 156 deceiving, 39 deity, 71, 151, 155 Desai, Anita, 174 Descartes, René, 2–3, 11, 19, 29, 64 dialogue, 5, 14, 137, 171, 173 dialogical, 5, 14, 20 diary, 7, 27–30, 35, 37, 168 disambiguation, 12–13, 111, 114–15, 117, 124–26, 128–29 discourse black, 170 cacophony of, 17, 182 ceremonial, ritual, 79, 89 Greek, 63 inferential nature of, 19 inward, 116 and metaphor, 4 newspaper, 182–87 objectifying, 14, 134 post-modern, 133 theory of, 2 and “third space,” 16 disgust, 106, 168 dissociation, 17, 165 dissonance, 17 dissuasion, 39 divinity, 10, 64, 66–69, 71, 73 divination, 19 Diya, 53 doubt, 4, 44, 49, 81, 105–06, 113, 120, 134, 138, 141, 160–61, 166 Duranti, Alessandro, 56 dye, 7–8, 42–44, 50–51, 86, 172 El Greco, 23–25 elusive, 3–6, 10, 12, 15, 53, 66–67, 97, 152–53, 183 embodiment, 72, 75




195

emotion, 10, 27, 69, 111–26, 165, 181 emotional distance, 57 drives, 74 energy, 1, 5, 55 engagement, 166 epiphany, 8 inchoateness, 127 uncertainty, 13 space, 16 tenor, 129 moments, 114 response, 24 empirical, 7, 9, 15, 26, 49, 63, 182 empowerment, 75, 113 entanglement, 167 epiphany, 3, 6–8, 28–29, 129 epistemological, 19 erotic, 32–33, 36 eschatological, 72 ethnography allegorical meaning of, 57 anchor of, 115 and anthropological theory, 126 auto-, of self, 6, 17, 29, 170, 176, 179 cooperative, 2, 17 dialogical, 5 evocative, 16–18 “gonzo,” 167–68 local words of, 123 postmodern, 163 task of, 3–6, 17 textual strategies of, 16 therapeutical use of, 18 and translation, 156 writing of, 57, 137, 166–71, 174–75 ethnomusicology, 12, 99, 101, 104, 106, 110 Euro-American, 165 Evans-Pritchard, E.E., 156 evocation, 2–3, 5–9, 11, 13–19, 27, 41–42, 46, 49, 52–54, 56–59, 63, 77, 94, 98, 127–28, 148–49, 160, 164, 173, 184 ethnography, 16–18, 167, 171, 174, 176 excess, 2–3, 17–18, 68, 74, 180, 183–84, 187, 189 faith, 16, 95, 150, 160–61, 163 fantasy, 2–3, 11, 165–66

196




index

Fernandez, James W., 12, 114, 117, 128–30 festival, 10–11, 66, 68–70, 75, 77–81, 83–86, 88–95 fiction, 16–17, 28, 156, 165–67, 169, 171, 179 fieldwork, 5, 15, 28, 57, 67, 76, 107, 114 figures, 5, 9, 28–29, 41, 115–16, 121, 123–25, 128–29 film, 9, 15, 45, 52–58, 63, 76, 166 Flores, 15, 146–47, 157, 162–63 formalism, 13, 46, 154, 161 formulaic couplet, 155 freedom, 34, 71, 91, 183 game, 7, 12, 33–39, 78, 91, 93, 181 Gardner, Robert, 56 Gasché, Jürg, 11–12 Geertz, Clifford, 1, 19, 76, 97, 108, 128, 175, 177 Gell, Alfred, 67, 75–76 gender, 71, 155, 181 Ghosh, Amitav, 17, 174–79 ghost, 63 gift, 31, 72, 93–94 Giraldi, Lilio, 29 god, 9–10, 31, 54, 63–68, 71, 76, 141, 155, 160, 164, 169, 170, 174, 178 goddess, 69–70, 72–74 Graebner, Fritz, 55, 103–04, 108, 110 Greenblatt, Stephen, 10, 64, 75 Grigson, Geoffrey, 48 Hamar, 29, 52, 129 Hansen, Miriam, 75–76 Hariman, Robert, 17–18, 180, 188–89 harmony, 6, 25, 26, 38 Harrison, George, 167 Hazoumé, Paul, 17, 168–69, 171, 177, 179 Heidegger, Martin, 55 hermeneutic, 19, 159 Herodotus, 63 heterogeneity, 18, 173 hikayat, 147–48, 151, 154, 157, 159, 162–63 history, 10, 12, 15–16, 24, 31, 73, 78, 80, 97, 101–02, 121–22, 124, 128, 137, 156, 169, 175, 182, 184 American history, 7

art history, 8 historiography, 100, 106 life history, 120, 129, 177 and memory, 165, 167 of Sikka, 147, 151–52, 154, 157 world history, 99–100, 103, 105–07, 139 Holbein, Hans, 23 hope, 34, 58, 77, 159, 166 Hopi, 172 Hornbostel, Erich von, 12, 104–05, 110 hostile, 95, 176 Hughes, Langston, 171 humiliating, 95 Hurston, Zora Neale, 17, 169–71, 177–79 icon, 45, 65, 134, 144, 165, 188 identity, 17, 109, 113, 169, 173, 181 ideology, 70, 73, 98, 182 illusion, 16, 165, 181 image, 23–59, 159, 171, 175, 182, 185–86 argument of, 116 black woman, 171 blending attention, 24 body, 73–74 capture and surprise, 9 crocus, inverted genealogy, 48 evocative power of, 53, 57, 59, 159, 175, 182, 186 in Mayan epigraphy, 134–41 ritual, 13 imagery, 73–74 imaginary, 8, 38–39, 49, 64, 70, 186 imagination, 4–5, 17, 19, 29, 63, 66, 138, 155, 176–77, 184, 187 Imbert, Claude, 8, 45–46, 49, 51 imprecision, 41 inchoate, the, 13, 113, 115, 124, 127–28 inchoateness, 13, 125–27 India, 43–44, 165–66, 174 Indian, 105, 137, 165–67, 171–75 Indian Ocean, 12, 98–99, 106 indigo, 7–8, 42–45, 47, 50–51 Indonesia, 12, 44, 97–102, 105–07, 110, 147 Ingold, Tim, 1–2, 19 intention, 2, 15, 17, 36, 67, 70, 76, 148, 152–54 interlocution, 14, 148

index

intersubjectivity, 148 irony, 5, 7, 14, 24, 57, 137, 161 Jackendoff, Ray, 53 Jakobson, Roman, 7, 42, 46 Japan, Japanese, 10, 50, 64, 66–69, 70–72, 74, 76, 166 Johnson, Mark, 53 Jones, Arthur Morris, 12, 101–05 Jones, Stephanie, 175 Joyce, James, 3 Kahlo, Frida, 166 Kandinsky, Wassily, 41 Kieslowski, Krzystof, 45 Kitamura, Sayo, 10, 66–67 Kondi, Dominicus Dionitius Pareira, 15, 146–52,157–58 Köpping, Klaus-Peter, 9–10, 72–74 Kulturkreis, 106–08 Kulturkreislehre, 55, 109 La Farge, Oliver, 17, 171–72, 177, 179 La Tour, Georges de, 38, 49 Lakoff, George, 53, Landa, Fray Francisco de, 14, 136 language Chinese, 76, and culture, 24, 26 European, 134–35, evocative capacity of, 42, 45 incomprehensible, 81 limitations of, 128 and metaphor, 4 nonreferential, 7, 41 Nonuya, 95 Quetchua, 173 revival, 120–24, 176 ritual language, 150–51, 153–55, 157 Sikkanese, 147 social advocacy, 172 theory, 2, 148–49 and thought, reason, 4, 160–61 Witoto, 80 laugh, 11, 66, 69, 74–75, 93, 95, 168, 181 Lavery, John, 7, 34–36 Leiris, Michel, 27, 39–40 leisure, 35–36, 180




197

Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 7–8, 41–42, 46, 48–49, 51, 56, 75, 116 Lewis, Douglas, 15–16, 146–47, 154–55, 157 Lewis, I.M., 76 literalness, 19 Lomax, Alan, 12, 105, 108 loxodrome, 29 Mabey, Richard, 48 MacDougall, David, 53, 57–59 Madagascar, 98–100, 102, 105–10 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 41 magic, 41–42, 55, 59, 176 of attributes, 9, 55 magical, 8–9, 18, 43, 55, 153, 165, 175 Magnus, Albertus, 64 Malaysia, 105 Malay, 107, 149–50, 163 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 54, 106, 108, 125, 153, 162–63 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 7, 41–42 Mannheim, Bruce, 5, 20 mantic, 19 materialist, 51 Mauss, Marcel, 76 Maya, 14, 133–37, 139, 141, 143–45, 164 Mayan epigraphy, 14 poetics, 14, 135 McClary, Susan, 97, 108 Mead, Margaret, 1, 19 meaning absent, lack of, 86, 88, 107, 153, 157 arbitrary, 153 and astonishment, 58 and attention, 24–26 challenge, 91 clash of, 165 elusive, 12 emergent, in act of saying, 149 and disambiguation, 113, 126 disguise of, 81 and divination, 19 dramatic, 24 and identity, 17 and intention, 152 and metaphor, 4 onomatopoeic, 94

198




index

ponder, 3 positive, 41 production of, 13, 42, 49, 51 of riddles, 82 ritual, 152–54 shards of, 18, 184 schemata, 9, 53–57 subtle, 42 symbolic, 45–46, 49 of tears, 111, 123, 124 translation of, 15 transmission, 90 and the unsaid, 159 meditation, 29 memory, 8, 12, 25, 29, 91, 93–95, 103, 113, 137, 151, 159, 165, 167 mentality, 181, 183, 187 mental, 1, 5–6, 11, 13, 16, 24–26, 54–55, 57, 180 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 8, 49, 51 metaphor avoidance of, 134 belly, 10, 67–68, 73 dimension, 11 in divination, 19 of divine force, 70 in ethnographic film, 57–59 in Mayan epigraphy, 14, 135 of movement, 114 in riddles, 12, 77 surreal, 48 theory of, 4, 13, 44 visual, 45 metonymy, 55 Milton, John, 150–51, 162 mirror, 11, 49, 57, 67, 164–65 misunderstanding, 14–15 Montaigne, Michel de, 75 More, Thomas, 5, 23, 26 multivocal, 5 museum, 5–6, 8, 24–25, 30, 51, 55, 80, 102, 168 music, 12, 41, 82, 97, 98–103, 105, 110, 136 musical, 12, 29, 45, 68, 85, 86, 90, 98–99, 105–08 musician, 12, 99, 102, 155 mythic, 15, 147, 154 narration, 15

mythical, 44, 46, 74, 175 nation, 10, 67, 125, 186 national, 17, 70–71, 73, 75–76, 120–21, 123–24, 129 Native American, 167–68, 171–72, 176 Navajo, 171–72, 178 Ojibwe, 16, 18, 176 Zuni, 164, 168, 172, 177–78 narration, 15, 114, 118, 146, 151, 155 New Guinea, 9, 63 newspaper, 17–18, 168, 172, 176, 180–81, 183–87 Oakley, Todd, 5–6, 8, 10, 23–24, 26 observation, 18, 29, 76, 125, 129, 166–68, 188 Old Testament, 149, 159 onomatopoeia, 82–83, 86, 88, 90–91, 93–94, 133 opera, 27–28 Orcel, Michel, 28 orienting, 6, 24, 26 origin, 76, 78, 80, 98, 104, 147, 149, 154–55, 157, 171 other, the, 14–15, 25, 49, 58, 133, 136 Otto, Rudolf, 66, 75 paintings, 5–7, 9, 27, 29–30, 49 paradise, 65, 71, 73, 150 paradox, 18, 39, 73–74 paradoxical, 25, 39, 46, 69–70 parallelism, 150 paralysis, 19 Pareira, Alexius Boer, 15, 147 participation, 16–17, 66, 113, 125, 152, 166–67, 183 passion, 1, 3, 19, 29, 113, 175 Patou, Jean, 36 Paz, Octavio, 174 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 45 penetrative grasp, 154 performance, 3, 9–13, 64, 67–68, 75–76, 89, 101–02, 152–53, 155 perceiving, 51 perilous, 38 Peronnet Briggs, Henry, 49 photographs, 164, 166, 168, 170, 179, 182

index

picture, 5, 7, 14, 23, 26–27, 38, 53, 57, 67, 139, 141, 170–71, 181 pitch, 29 place names, 157, 173 poetry, 2, 41, 46, 150 poetic, 4, 8, 14, 41–42, 46, 135, 150, 154 expression, 41, 154 poiesis, 15, 108, 150, 163 politics, 28, 33, 39, 109, 121, 124, 126, 179, 181, 186–87 poliphony, 64 polysemic, 49 Polymnia, 29 postcolonial, 174, 179 writing, 174 postmodern, 133, 163, 165–66, 179 Preuss, Konrad Theodor, 78, 80–81, 96 prospective, 2, 56, 149 punning, 175 Quiller-Couch, Arthur, 149–51, 162 racial, 29, 39, 169 justice, 169 raga, 38, 175 Rappaport, Roy, 152–53, 162 Rasoanaivo, Hanitrarivo, 12, 98 Ratzel, Friedrich, 103–04, 109–10 realism, 50, 178, 182–83, 187 reality, 2–3, 18, 28, 51, 163–65, 169, 174 reason discourse of, 175 and excess, 17–18, 181–86 and faith, 16, 160–61 and metaphor, 4 recitations, 157 Renaissance, 6, 30 Renoir, Pierre Auguste, 35 resonance, 17, 68, 79, 111, 134 resonate, 8, 49, 134 retrospective, 2, 56, 149 rhetoric, 1, 3–4, 7, 29, 45, 48, 55 culture, 29, 129 rhetorical capacity, 77 device, 83 figures, 12–13, 29, 57 metonymy, 12, 19




199

search, 116 solution, 95 synecdoche, 12, 19, 153 trope, 7, 39, 116 use of language, 2 rhyme, 150 Ricci, Matteo, 76 riddle, 11–12, 77–85, 87–89, 91–96 songs, 11–12, 77–78, 80–82, 86, 88–91 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 8, 49–51 Rimbaud, Arthur, 41 ritual and astonishment, 67 apron, costume, 44 attractiveness, 65 competition, 77–95 dance, 70, 74 evacuation of mind, 74 exchange, 77, 90, 94 hoodoo, 170 invocation, 68 knowledge, universe, 81–82, 88–93 language, 15, 147, 149–55, 157 manifestation, 68 of pregnancy, 44 repetitive, 184 reversal, 10 salvation, revitalization, 72, 114 space, 68 torture, murder, 138–39 transformation, 116 romantic, 10, 66, 167, 175 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 46 rule, 19, 70, 95, 129, 149, 169–70, 181 sacred, 63, 65–66, 68–69, 71–72, 74, 76, 78, 114, 168 clowning, 168 Salazar, Philippe-Joseph, 6–9, 27–30, 32, 34, 36–40 Sara Sikka, 15, 147, 149–50, 163 Saskatchewan, 176 scribbling, 164 secret, 39, 58, 63, 141, 170 self, the, 28–29, 58, 165, 178 semiotic, 42, 46, 49 sense affective, 115

200




index

of astonishment, wonder, awe, 1–2, 63, 65, 184 capture, 29 of community, connection, 11, 123 convey, 41 double, 70 full, 39, 41 immediate, 124 inquisitorial, 138 lingering, 121 of loss, 139 make sense, 12–14, 17, 105, 125, 137, 152, 156, 159, 182, 185 narrative, 152 nonsense, 142 perception, 54–55 physical, 50, 73 of playfulness, 181 of pride, 141 of text, 28 ultimate, 118 senseless, 154 senses, 29, 50, 54–55, 73, 129, 186 sensibility, 156, 165, 177 sex, 19, 28, 36, 182 sexual, 32–33, 68–69, 74 Sextus Empiricus, 29 Shinto, 64–66, 73, 75 Shinto priest, 64, 75 significance, 49–50, 153, 157, 168, 185 Sikkanese, 15, 146–47, 149–51, 153–57, 159, 163 Simone, Nina, 45 Singer, Kurt, 67, 75 Singh, Raghubir, 165–66, 178 singing, 64, 77, 81, 86, 91, 97, 107, 110, 172 songs, 98–100, 107, 164, 169–70, 172–73 Soul Makassar, 12, 98–99, 107 sound, 12, 14, 19, 24, 28–29, 41, 94, 97, 98–101, 103, 125, 133–35, 141–42 South Africa, 28, 99, 103 South America, 64, 72, 75 speaking, 2, 38, 122, 125, 147–51, 153, 164, 172 speculation, 46, 91, 139 speech, 2–3, 15–16, 69, 120, 128, 149–54, 156, 185, 188

spell attention, 6 cast on filmmaker, 58 co-presence, 52 elusive meanings, 5 evocation, 7 immanent qualities, 8 magical, 92, 153 moments, epiphany, 3 riddles, 11 Spinoza, Baruch de 64 spirit, 18, 43, 58, 64–66, 68–72, 83, 100, 151, 154, 160, 164, 170 spiritual, 3, 44, 71, 117, 163, 173–74 spirituals, 169 spirituality, 176 St. Anselmus, 16, 160 Steiner, George, 15, 19, 148, 152, 154–56, 162–63 Stephenson, Neal, 146, 162 Stevenson, James, 168 Stevenson, Matilda Coxe, 168, 178–79 stranger-king myth, 147, 157, 162 Strecker, Ivo, 1, 7, 52, 127, 129, 188 style, 4–5, 17, 19, 29, 58, 90, 97, 99, 105, 166, 172, 181, 187 subverting, 38 symbol, 29, 41, 45, 75, 126, 127–28, 152–53 symbolic, 7–8, 44–46, 49, 75, 127, 148–49, 177 symbolism, 7, 41, 43, 48, 51, 65, 72, 162 color, 43, 49, 51, 65 symbolist, 42, 45–46 French Symbolists, 7 symbolization, 42, 46 synaesthetic, 7, 42 synonymy, 15, 151 Taoism, 65 Tarika, 12, 98–99, 107 Tedlock, Barbara, 16–18, 164, 176, 179 Tedlock, Dennis, 5, 14, 20, 133, 138, 145 third space, 16, 18, 165 Toba Batak, 43 totality, 9, 55 Tracey, Andrew, 103, 109–10 Tracey, Hugh, 101

index

transcend, 41, 135, 148–49 transcription, 81, 142, 152, 155 transformation, 8, 43, 49–50, 73, 183, 188 transgression, 10, 68, 70, 76 translation, 11, 15–16, 44, 81, 143, 146–52, 154–56, 159–60, 163, 173 Trobriander, 153 Tyler, Stephen A., 2–4, 9, 13, 15–19, 53, 57, 113, 124, 126, 128–29, 133, 137, 147–49, 154, 156, 160–161, 163–66 uncertainty, 13, 129, 163 uncontrollability, 68 Valéry, Paul, 41 Valigniano, Alessandro, 67, 76 Varro, 29 Verlaine, Paul, 41




201

Verne, Markus, 1, 12, 97 Versailles, 6, 31, 33 Vico, Giambattista, 54 visceral, 9–10, 45, 63, 72, 75 viscerality, 74 visitation, 9–10, 63, 72–73 Wagner, Richard, 39, 41, 45 Walser, Robert, 97, 108 weirdness, 17, 165 well-tempered, 38 Whorf, Benjamin, 7, 42, 51 Witoto, 11–12, 77–78, 81–84, 86, 89–92, 94–96 Wiseman, Boris, 6–9, 41, 46 wonder, 1–3, 18, 63, 66, 75, 183–84, 187–88 Yama-no-kami, 10, 64