Framing cosmologies: The anthropology of worlds 9781847799098

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Framing cosmologies

Framing cosmologies The anthropology of worlds

Edited by Allen Abramson and Martin Holbraad

Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2014 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed in Canada exclusively by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 978 07190 9599 3 hardback First published 2014 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Edited and typeset by Frances Hackeson Freelance Publishing Services, Brinscall, Lancs

Contents Acknowledgements Notes on contributors

page vii ix

Introduction: the cosmological frame in anthropology Allen Abramson and Martin Holbraad

1

Part I Horizons of cosmological wonder: whither the whole? 1 To be a wonder: anthropology, cosmology, and alterity Michael W. Scott

31

2 A new man: the cosmological horizons of development, curses, and personhood in Vanuatu Knut Rio and Annelin Eriksen

55

3 Auto-relations: doing cosmology and transforming the self the Saiva way Soumhya Venkatesan

77

4 Inter-gration and intra-gration in cosmology Don Handelman

95

5 Coordinates of body and place: Chinese practices of centring Stephan Feuchtwang

116

Part II Cosmological constitutions: economies, politics, and the cosmos 6 Stranger kings in general: the cosmo-logics of power Marshall Sahlins

137

7 Transitional cosmologies: shamanism and postsocialism in Northern Mongolia Morten Axel Pedersen

164

8 Portioning loans: cosmologies of wealth and power in Mongolia Rebecca Empson

182

9 Maize mill sorcery: cosmologies of substance, production, and accumulation in Central Mozambique Bjørn Enge Bertelsen

199

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Contents

Part III Embedded modernities: cosmos, science, and the movies 10 A politico-astral cosmology in contemporary Russia Caroline Humphrey

223

11 Facebook and the origins of religion Daniel Miller

244

12 Don’t yell fire! The origin of humanity goes to the movies Gregory Schrempp

261

13 Cosmology and the mythic in Kubrick’s 2001: the imaginary     278 in the aesthetic of cinema Bruce Kapferer

Index

311

vi

Acknowledgements The idea for this volume originated in the work of the Cosmology Group (later renamed, somewhat more diffusely, the Cosmology, Religion, Ontology, and Culture Research Group – or CROC for short), which we have run with graduate students in the Department of Anthropology at University College London (UCL) since 2004. Initially we saw the notion of cosmology mainly as a banner that could cover an array of topics in which we had an interest – myth, ritual, witchcraft and sorcery, indigenous ideas of life and death, conceptions of the landscape, of time, and so on. Inevitably, however, the idea of cosmology itself became a running theme of our conversations from year to year. What might it mean, and why, notwithstanding its slightly crusty connotations in anthropology, were we all so interested in it at the dawn of the twenty-first century? These were the questions that led us, in May 2011, to hold a two-day symposium at UCL, inviting senior scholars who had worked on matters cosmological for decades, alongside younger ones seeking to recast these anthropological concerns in different ways, to speak on the theme ‘Contemporary cosmologies and the cultural imagination’. The present volume is based on the papers that were presented there. We thank the Department of Anthropology at UCL, UCL Grand Challenges, and the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen (and particularly Bruce Kapferer) for financing the symposium, as well as Ludovic Coupaye, Lane Denicola, Susanne Küchler, Mike Rowlands, and Alan Strathern for chairing or acting as discussants during the symposium. Alongside the contributors, student members of CROC were catalytic in making the event a success, and not least Becky Bloom, Alice Elliot, Tobia Farnetti, Vlad Jolidon, Alison Macdonald, Julia Sauma, Matan Shapiro, Daniel Stolfi, Beata Switek, and Catalina Tesar who helped run the show. We are also grateful for administrative help at the Department of Anthropology at UCL, particularly from Diana Goforth, Keiko Homewood, Martin O’Connor, and the indefatigable Chris Hagisavva. For comments and suggestions on various versions of our co-authored Introduction we are grateful to Alice Elliot, Ramon Sarró, Matan Shapiro, and two anonymous reviewers for Manchester University Press, as well as the students on our course ‘Cosmos, society and the political imagination’, which we have taught at UCL together with Bruce Kapferer since 2012. Above all, we owe thanks to the members of CROC who, through our discussions over the years, not only provided the prime inspiration vii

Acknowledgements

for the venture, but also helped form the substance of many of the ideas we have sought to develop in this book. We also record our appreciation to staff at Manchester University Press, and not least Tony Mason, for the care and efficiency with which they have worked on this project. Finally – why not! – we take this opportunity also to thank each other. Springing from our involvement with CROC, the question of cosmology has rather joined us at the hip for a number of years now, and the intellectual stimulation, of which this book is an expression, has been immense. Allen Abramson and Martin Holbraad

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Contributors

Allen Abramson teaches social anthropology at University College London, where he co-directs the Cosmology, Religion, Ontology and Culture Research (CROC) Group. He has published widely on myth, ritual, and gender in Oceania and on risk and cultural trans­formation in Britain. He is co-editor (with Dimitrios Theodossopoulos) of Land, Law and Environment: Mythical Land, Legal Boundaries (2000) and is currently researching aspects of the cosmology of modernity. Bjørn Enge Bertelsen is Associate Professor in the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen. Since 1998, his research has related to state formation, violence, poverty, and rural–urban connections in Mozambique. He publishes regularly in international journals and anthologies and his recent books include Violent Becomings: State Formation, Culture and Power in Mozambique (forthcoming); Crisis of the State: War and Social Upheaval (2012 [2009], co-edited with Bruce Kapferer), and Navigating Colonial Orders: Norwegian Entrepreneurship in Africa and Oceania (2014, co-edited with Kirsten A. Kjerland). Rebecca Empson lectures in social anthropology at University College London. Her work has focused on kinship, personhood, economics, and the performativity of the market in Mongolia’s emerging mineral economy. Her monograph, Harnessing Fortune (2011), explores contesting moralities of wealth accumulation in rural Mongolia through the local aesthetic technology of harnessing fortune.  Annelin Eriksen is Professor in the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen. She has worked since 1995 in Vanuatu, first on Ambrym and later also in Port Vila. Her work deals with social and cultural change and Christianity and gender relations. Her publications include Gender, Christianity and Change in Vanuatu: An Analysis of Social Movements in North Ambrym (2008); New Life: Pentecostalism as Social Critique in Vanuatu (2009); and Contemporary Religiosities: Emergent Socialities and the Post-Nation State (2010, co-edited with Bruce Kapferer and Kari Telle). Stefan Feuchtwang is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics. His main area of research has been China. He is the author of Popular Religion in China: the Imperial Metaphor (2001). More recent publications include The Anthropology of Religion, Charisma and Ghosts (2010); and as editor and contributor, Making Place: State Projects, Globalisation and Local Responses in China (2004); and ix

Contributors

(with Wang Mingming) Grassroots Charisma: Four Local Leaders in China (2001). He has been working with Michael Rowlands for the past ten years on a book now nearing completion on civilisation, re-­introducing the long term in a comparative approach to civilisations defined as spreads and mixtures with many centres rather than cultures that clash. Don Handelman is Shaine Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Hebrew University. His more recent field research is in South India and Israel. Among his publications are Models and Mirrors (2nd edn 1998); Nationalism and the Israeli State (2004); One God, Two Goddesses, Three Studies of Cosmology in South India (2014); and (co-authored with David Shulman) God Inside Out (1997); and Siva in the Forest of Pines (2004). With Galina Lindquist he co-edited Ritual in its Own Right (2005) and Religion, Politics and Globalization (2011). Martin Holbraad teaches social anthropology at University College London where he co-directs the Cosmology, Religion, Ontology and Culture Research (CROC) Group. He con­ducts ethnographic fieldwork on religion and socialism in Cuba and is the author of Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination (2012). Caroline Humphrey has worked in the USSR/Russia, Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, Nepal, and India. Her research interests include socialist and post-socialist society, religion, ritual, economy, history, and the contemporary transformations of cities. Until 2010 she was Sigrid Rausing Professor of Collaborative Anthropology at Cambridge and she is currently Director of Research at the University of Cambridge. Her publications include Karl Marx Collective: Economy, Society and Religion in a Siberian Collective Farm (1983); The Archetypal Actions of Ritual, Illustrated by the Jain Rite of Worship (with James Laidlaw, 1994); Shamans and Elders: Experience, Knowledge and Power among the Daur Mongols (with Urgunge Onon 1996); The End of Nomadism? Society, the State and the Environment in Inner Asia (with David Sneath (1999); Urban Life in Post-Soviet Central Asia; and (with Catherine Alexander and Victor Buchli, 2007). A Monastery in Time: the Making of Mongolian Buddhism (2013). Bruce Kapferer is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen and Honorary Professor of Anthropology at University College London. He has published monographs based on his fieldwork in Central Africa, India, Sri Lanka, and Australia. Much of his research has concentrated on healing rites in Sri Lanka and more recently on teyyam performances in Kerala. Major books include A Celebration of Demons (1983); The Feast of the Sorcerer (1997); and Legends of People, Myths of State (1988, 2nd edn 2011). He is currently editor of Social Analysis and the Journal of Anthropological Theory. He is also currently directing

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Contributors

an international research project on egalitarianism supported by an EU Advanced Grant. Daniel Miller is Professor of Anthropology at University College London and Director of the Global Social Media Impact Study funded by the European Research Council. Recent books include Webcam (with J. Sinanan, 2014); Migration and New Media (with M. Madianou, 2012); Digital Anthropology (co-edited with H. Horst, 2012); Blue Jeans (with S. Woodward, 2012); and Consumption and its Consequences (2012). Morten Axel Pederson is Professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen. He works on shamanic cosmology and the post-socialist city. His latest book is Not Quite Shamans: Spirit Worlds and Political Lives in Northern Mongolia (2011). Knut M. Rio is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen and is responsible for the ethnographic collections at the Bergen University Museum. He has worked on Melanesian ethnography since 1995, with fieldwork in Vanuatu. His work on social ontology, production, ceremonial exchange, witchcraft, and art in Vanuatu has resulted in journal publications and the monograph The Power of Perspective: Social Ontology and Agency on Ambrym Island, Vanuatu (2007). He has also co-edited Hierarchy. Persistence and Transformation in Social Formations (2009, with Olaf Smedal); Made in Oceania: Social Movements, Cultural Heritage and the State in the Pacific (2011, with Edvard Hviding); and The Arts of Government: Crime, Christianity and Policing in Melanesia (2011, with Andrew Lattas). Marshall Sahlins is the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy and is the author of numerous books, including Culture and Practical Reason (1978); How ‘Natives’ Think About Capt. Cook, for Example (1995); Islands of History (1985); and Apologies to Thucydides. Understanding History and Culture Vice Versa (2004). Gregory Schrempp is Professor in Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University. He has carried out research among the Maori people, and written widely on comparative mythology and cosmology and the relationship between mythology, philosophy, and science. He is author of Magical Arrows: The Maori, the Greeks, and the Folklore of the Universe (1992); The Ancient Mythology of Modern Science: A Mythologist Looks (Seriously) at Popular Science Writing (2012); and Science, Bread, & Circuses: Folkloristic Essays on Science for the Masses (forthcoming). Michael W. Scott teaches anthropology at the London School of Economics. He conducts field research in Solomon Islands, chiefly

xi

Contributors

among Arosi speakers on the island of Makira. In his monograph, The Severed Snake (2007), and journal articles, such as ‘Hybridity, Vacuity, and Blockage’, Comparative Studies in Society and History (2005, 47), he has explored diverse aspects of the relationship among cosmology, ontology, and practice in Melanesia and in anthropology. His current research considers wonder as an index of ontological crisis and transformation. Soumhya Venkatesan lectures in anthropology at the University of Manchester. She is the author of Craft Matters: Artisans, Development and the Indian Nation (2009); and co-editor of Differentiating Development: Beyond An Anthropology of Critique (2011). 

xii

Introduction The cosmological frame in anthropology Allen Abramson and Martin Holbraad

The cosmos has become cool again. (McKie 2012)

Addressing the Cosmology Group, an informal reading group that we run with our graduate students in the Anthropology Department at UCL, a few months before she died in May 2007, Mary Douglas expressed surprise that in this day and age anthropologists might still be interested in such a topic. Cosmology is the kind of thing the Lele had when she studied with them in the 1950s, she said, and no doubt they and other groups like them still live with its cultural remnants (see also Douglas 1963). But hasn’t the urbanisation of the developing world together with the concerted repatriation of anthropology to the metropolis in recent decades rendered our traditional concern with indigenous cosmologies well-nigh anachronistic? For astride the complexity of the modern world, Douglas ventured, surely people no longer share a cosmology, as the Lele and others may have done in pre-modern times. Notwithstanding the prestige enjoyed by professional cosmologists working in departments of theoretical physics and their growing popular appeal, the plain fact is that the contemporary world is just too complicated to sustain the kinds of unified and collective cosmology encountered by earlier generations of anthropologists amongst ‘primitive’ peoples. At any rate, Douglas concluded, the kinds of isomorphic correspondences between social organisation and cosmological reckonings from which anthropologists drew such theoretical mileage throughout much of the twentieth century are now probably rarely found. So what interest could the study of cosmology possibly hold for anthropologists today?

Introduction

Somewhat paradoxically given her anthropological age-set, Douglas’s comments expressed exactly the kind of weariness towards cosmology against which we felt we were working in our research and in the Cosmology Group. So, inevitably, coming from an anthropologist whose own work had for so long been so deeply invested in the study of cosmology (e.g. Douglas 1963, 1996), Douglas’s cosmo-weariness was particularly poignant (and also, untimely), adding a sense of urgency to the questions which our group had already for some time been deliberating. What is the relevance of the study of indigenous cosmologies to contemporary anthropology? Can one think cosmology beyond outmoded assumptions about tribal societies and the like? What might the role of cosmology be in modern society? And, in the end, what is cosmology? Born of the conversations Douglas’s challenge provoked, the present volume is the product of our invitation to selected anthropologists working in diverse ethnographic settings, and developing a variety of theoretical orientations, to tackle these questions and so consider the relevance of cosmological concerns to the anthropological understanding of the contemporary world. This, if you like, is a collective answer to Mary Douglas – albeit posthumously, alas – by anthropologists for whom the relevance of cosmology continues to be vital, even as it is refigured in ways she may not have anticipated. Providing some initial coordinates with reference to which the book’s chapters may be read, in this introduction we do three things. In the first section, we offer some reflections on the broad trends of thinking about cosmology in twentieth-century anthropology which led up to the kind of weariness towards the topic Douglas was expressing by the beginning of the twenty-first. Our key claim here is that the ambivalence with which the topic of cosmology came to be viewed in many quarters flowed from its association with certain tenets of what we call the ‘classical ethnological’ period of anthropological research: namely, on the one hand, the idea that primitive societies were natural wholes or totalities and, on the other, variously explicit epistemic hierarchies (us/them, West/rest, etc.), which tended to exoticise indigenous cosmologies. In the second section we go beyond ethnological anthropology to argue that the recent weariness towards cosmology in anthropology is nevertheless paradoxical, inasmuch as it is out of step with what, as we suggest, is a re-investment in matters cosmological – a v ­ eritable re-connection with cosmos – in ‘late modern’ social conditions. In this context, cosmology once again emerges as a prime ethnographic concern for anthropology, now located as a quintessentially contemporary orientation across all types of social formation. We then go on, on the final section, to present the chapters of the volume, showing how each of them expresses, as well as engages with, this renewed vitality of cosmology as a terrain for anthropological

2

Introduction

investigation. Grouping the chapters in three parts, we show how an abiding spirit of cosmologically inflected anthropological experimentation can be detected in the diverse ways in which the chapters’ authors overcome some of the core tenets on which older approaches to the study of so-called ‘indigenous cosmologies’ were founded. An adequate response to Douglas’s challenge, we suggest, must in part at least involve refiguring the very notion of cosmology she too was beginning to doubt. Cosmologies: anthropological and indigenous Imagine doing an ethnography of how anthropology was practised in the times Douglas remembered – anthropology’s classical ethnological period, running roughly from the 1920s to the 1970s – when the study of ‘indigenous cosmologies’ formed an integral part of anthropologists’ confident attempts to chart comparatively the social and cultural dimensions of (mainly ‘primitive’) people’s lives. In brief, one would find a set of highly educated nationals of colonial and post-colonial powers self-consciously travelling ‘outward’, to the edges of the world, in order to encounter, describe, and explicate what human society and culture looks like at its margins. The sense in which the societies anthropologists went out to study were marginal was, of course, itself part of the anthropological debate. In particular, while nineteenth-century evolutionism conceived the distance between ‘civilised society’ and the ‘savagery’ of people imagined as living at its furthest reaches (geographically, economically, politically, etc.) as a matter of natural differences, anthropologists spent much of the twentieth century showing that the distance between their own society and those which they studied was itself social and cultural. This involved developing a series of axes along which these socio-cultural differences could be articulated: primitive/advanced, simple/complex, stateless/state, non-literate/literate, non-modern/modern, myth/history, magic/science or – perhaps the most encompassing master contrast of all – tradition/modernity. Not unlike the evolutionist matrices of natural stages of socio-cultural development they purported to replace, these classical master contrasts presented an image of the world as a totality, marking its dimensions outwards, from the familiar centre (modern life as we know it) towards a socio-cultural series of differently construed unfamiliar margins. This is to say that, in its classic ethnological rendition, anthropology was itself an exercise in cosmology through and through, projecting images of human being concentrically outwards and spatio-temporally along a social and cultural gradient, stretching outwards from a series of civilised centres. Indeed, rather like cosmologists proper (physicists), anthropologists 3

Introduction

imagined themselves as charting the outer reaches of the social universe – its very horizons – in order to better theorise the human whole. Only for these anthropologists (Mary Douglas included), the universe consisted of the varied social and cultural manifestations that make up humanity as a globally juxtaposed domain of investigation. Central to this whole was a modern core that was organisationally complex and more or less culturally homogenous while, marginally, on the periphery of exploration, commerce and governance, this same whole curled inwards upon itself in myriad places, to form so many culturally differentiated and diverse worlds or integrated totalities. This was the cosmological picture that underpinned the classical ethnological project of anthropology. Historians of ideas have much to say about how this image of a human cosmos relates to broader arcs of thinking, including monotheistic conceptions of divine creation and Providence, Enlightenment images of the uniformity of nature, and the Romantic enchantment with the diversities of human genius (e.g. Dupré 1993). Here, however, we may note only that, based on an ontology of a uniform nature subject to a diversity of cultural viewpoints, this image provided also the framework for the anthropological study of indigenous cosmologies, as well as a template for their overall shape. In particular, it framed the study of indigenous cosmologies with reference to what we may call a topology of reflexive ethnocentrism. According to this image, the human cosmos marks out a particular kind of space whose chief peculiarity is that it contains within itself multiple perspectives on itself – it is in this sense a ‘reflexive’ space. Conceived as ‘cultures’, ‘collective representations’, ‘symbolic systems’ and so on, these perspectives on the world – each of them a ‘whole’ unto itself – are themselves deemed to be rooted in particular parts of the human world, designated as societies or other scales of grouping. Different social groupings may support different cultural perspectives, so each ‘ethnos’, in that metaphoric sense, provides a ‘centre’ unto itself. It follows that, conceived as a cosmological project, anthropology’s attempt to chart the horizons of the human world is just one actualisation of the vast cosmological potential this basic topology is able to engender. For if the human world is imagined as reflexively e­ thnocentric in this way, with each part of the world (each society) being able to generate a whole cosmological perspective of its own, then one can also ask what account each of these perspectives might provide of the world as such, which is to say as a single topos, populated by particular kinds of entities, organised in specific ways, according to their own dimensions and proportions. In this way, providing accounts of such ‘indigenous cosmologies’ became an integral part of an anthropology that imagined itself as charting the reflexive horizons of the human cosmos overall. Indeed, it became well-nigh indispensable to pursue this line of investigation,

4

Introduction

since such cosmologies were thought to provide the overall coordinates within which the people anthropologists studied conceived of themselves and their social practices. Thus, to take just two classic examples, Trobriand Islanders conceived of their social organisation with reference to spatio-temporal ideas about the auto-regeneration of insular spirits and totemic origins in the ground (Malinowski 1948); while Tallensi understood kinship not just in terms of immediate face-to-face relations between kin and affines but also in terms of founding ancestors who still resided in groves or caves in surrounding space (Fortes 1987). This way of construing the nature of indigenous cosmologies has three corollaries that, we would argue, are key to the story of the demise of this anthropological preoccupation in recent years. The first two relate to the role of holism. Firstly, with respect to their form, indigenous cosmologies on this classical image were imagined as wholes unto themselves, inasmuch as they were taken to present the varied accounts people in different societies provided of their culture taken as a totality. Thus, where societies were imagined as pre-structured wholes cosmology was given the role of reflecting upon the nature of this totality, providing an account of the kinds of entities and relations that together make up the world taken as a whole (spirits, divinities, forces, mythical or otherwise alternative realms of existence, times of origin, future horizons, and so on). One might say, in short, that indigenous cosmology was taken as that part of the total culture whose role it was to totalise it. Moreover, the expectation that indigenous cosmologies had to be constituted as integrated wholes went hand in hand with at least two related analytical orientations which, as we shall see, have become increasingly unfashionable in more recent years. On the one hand cosmologies tended to be presented as thoroughly local discourses, monolithic in each place and impervious to external influence; for example, Arunta cosmology, Nuer cosmology, Hopi cosmology. On the other hand, and as a consequence, this account tended to present cosmologies in more or less static terms. For, while it was recognised that cosmologies (just like societies and cultures) may change over time in the long run, the basic idea that cosmologies were derivative accounts of ‘the totalised world as such’ carried with it the assumption that they tended towards more or less monolithic order, their basic role being to bring the vagaries of the world at large under a unitary mode of cognitive or symbolic control. Hence also the strong tendency to associate cosmologies with all-encompassing ‘systems of classification’ (e.g. Durkheim and Mauss 1963), symbolic ‘categories’ or ‘structures’ (e.g. Lévi-Strauss 1964), or, more recently, all-pervasive cognitive ‘schemata’ or ‘models’ (e.g. Boyer 1994). If not itself wholly unchanging (e.g. Barth 1990), cosmology’s role according to this view was nevertheless, in one way or other, to rein in the ineluctable entropy 5

Introduction

of the world as imagined. Along with an essential socio-cultural parochialism, then, the holism of classical takes on cosmology also privileged static, uncontested images of worlds as self-contained, encapsulated ‘orders’. The second way in which cosmology was a function of holism had less to do with the form that indigenous cosmologies were imagined as taking, and more with their position in the broader economy of anthropological analysis. As we have seen, the idea of cosmologies as totalising orderings of the world is rooted in the idea that societies and cultures are themselves naturally integrated: cosmology as the totalising discourse the organic whole tells about itself. But seen in these terms, cosmology logically presents itself as a part of the total culture it serves discursively to totalise – one that must be studied alongside each of the other parts that go to make up a socio-cultural whole: kinship, social and political organisation, economic arrangements, ritual practices, and so on. Again, on the classical image, cosmology was imagined more or less deliberately as reflection of these other aspects of the total socio-cultural situation – one that, to be sure, was both sustained by them and, in turn, served to organise and symbolically legitimate them (here think of classical discussions of origin myths – e.g. Leenhardt 1979). Thus, conceiving of indigenous cosmology as a separate piece of the jigsaw puzzle of his or her ethnography, the anthropologist imagined its analysis as being always partly a matter of making it fit with all the other pieces, to recompose analytically what was already always imagined as amounting to a whole. The holistic principle of structural integration, in other words, went hand in hand with a notion of functional differentiation. The third consequence of the reflexive ethnocentrism of classical takes on indigenous cosmology has to do with the hierarchical way in which it ordered different perspectives on the world, and particularly the ­superiority it accorded to the cosmological project of the anthropologists at the expense of those of the people they study. For, if what holds the basic image together is the idea of a single and uniform world that acts as both ground and object for the diverse perspectives different societies may take within and upon it, it follows that such perspectives can be ranked in relation to how far they partake of this a priori grounding and truly apprehend the world as it is (Holbraad 2010; 2012: 18–34; Latour 1993). And in this respect, anthropologists have a constitutive advantage over the people they study since it is they who delineate cosmologically the conditions of existence of all marginal cosmologies, setting constraints upon the ways in which alternative images of the world can play out ‘in their own terms’. Construed as a science, which is to say as part of the broader project of systematically developing authoritatively accurate representations of the world, anthropology saw itself

6

Introduction

as being in the business of unequivocally describing/transcribing the real (human) world. And, from first anthropological/cosmological principles (so to speak), this involved describing a series of alternative images of the world (indigenous cosmologies distributed across the margins) which to varying extents were manifestly fanciful, even though valid at their own cosmic locus. The master contrasts of classical anthropology (tradition/ modernity and so on) lend analytical weight to this basic – and for most of the twentieth century self-evident – hierarchy of perspectives. Indeed, the contrast between indigenous cosmology (as something others have), and science (including of course the cosmological research of modern astrophysics) as ‘our’ ultimately truer equivalent, was just another iteration of these master contrasts. It goes without saying that deciding how to deal with this implication of anthropology’s cosmology of the social has been at the core of much theoretical debate within the discipline more or less from its inception – evolutionism versus diffusionism, universalism versus relativism, realism versus constructivism and so forth. While we cannot enter into these larger debates here, it is worth remarking that the status of indigenous cosmologies vis-à-vis ‘Western science’ was for long one of the principal arenas in which these tense implications were played out, and not least, when it came to disputes over the so-called ‘rationality’ of indigenous ‘beliefs’, which reached their peak in the 1960s and 1970s (e.g. Wilson 1974). That this should be so is hardly surprising, though not so much because of the putatively quasi-scientific nature of indigenous cosmologies (e.g. Horton 1967), we would argue, but rather due to the thoroughly cosmological character of science – and not least anthropology itself, as we have seen. Be that as it may, the fact is that, due to the very cosmological set-up within which indigenous cosmologies were conceptualised by anthropologists, their less-than-true character was felt to be their abiding theoretical problem. Even cultural relativism, with its refusal to pass judgement on the veracity of one cosmology over another while nonetheless framing the ground rules within which a fanciful cosmology might validly play out, was/is part of the problem – albeit a particularly liberal one.1 The standard response to the problem of indigenous cosmological fancy or fiction, however, was to reduce it. Indeed, as if to demonstrate how abiding the problem has traditionally been for anthropologists, one could even pinpoint the most distinctive features of the main theoretical currents in twentieth-century anthropology with reference to the particular ways in which they referred indigenous beliefs with their cosmological foundations to some other, ostensibly more real level of explanation. Basic human needs (functionalism), moral and socio-­ political order and reproduction (structural-functionalism), ecological 7

Introduction

adaptation (cultural materialism), individual agency (methodological individualism), the expression of underlying social values (interpretativism, symbolism), situated social relations (practice theory) or of a gestalt personality (culture and personality school), ideology and false consciousness (Marxism): all of these classic anthropological positions were posited as competing explanations as to why societies the world over set such great store in imagining the totality of the world in ways that have to be recognised as false. It is telling, in fact, that even anthropologists who have been most inclined to take indigenous cosmologies seriously enough to use them as a baseline for (rather than merely an object of) anthropological theorisation, such as Claude Lévi-Strauss or Mary Douglas herself, have also been inclined to ground indigenous cosmological reckonings in levels of analysis that could be recognised as really real – the underlying binary structures of the human mind for LéviStrauss (1963), or the abiding social and cognitive formations of ‘group and grid’ for Douglas (1996). And far from abating, this reductive impulse has strengthened to the point where in large zones of contemporary anthropology the very notion of cosmology has simply collapsed. The rise of cognitive anthropology in this period provides one obvious example: cosmological reckonings are traduced merely as instances of cognitive processes at work in the human brain (e.g. Boyer 1994; Sperber 1985; Whitehouse 2000). Conversely, and moving in the opposite explanatory direction, analyses one could group under the banner of ‘new political economy’ have tended to treat ‘local’ cosmologies as functions of ostensibly larger frames of explanation, presenting indigenous cosmologies as inventive reactions to, or refractions of, more encompassing – and in that sense also more real – global processes (e.g. Boddy 1989; Comaroff and Comaroff 1999; Geschiere 1997). Asserting the analytical priority of indigenous cosmologies over such ‘meta-narratives of modernity’ (Englund and Leach 2000) forms the crux of Bertelsen’s, Empson’s and Pedersen’s contributions in this volume. Finally, for its part, Actor Network Theory (ANT) has been performing similar forms of analytical displacement, though arguably for exactly the opposite reasons. Refusing as a matter of first methodological principle to accord more significance or explanatory power to any one part of the world over another (and hence opposed to all forms of reduction – see Latour 1993), ANT theorists treat all data – from an irritating pebble in one’s shoe to world banking or to the dogma of the Holy Trinity – as myriad elements that can make differences to each other through relations of determinate forms. Any added importance cosmological discourses might claim for themselves (as they so often do) therefore, becomes just a further local element to be described in its relations with others in the ‘network’ (e.g. Latour 2010; cf. Tsing 2010).

8

Introduction

In each of these trends of thinking, so prominent since the mid-1990s, indigenous cosmologies become contingent, neutered and ultimately epiphenomenal to something else. Still, while cosmology’s stock has undoubtedly declined as a result, in many quarters of anthropology stances towards the idea and analysis of cosmology remain more complex and ambivalent. Thus, while senior scholars continue to expand on the cosmological themes of their classic work (e.g. de Coppet and Iteanu 1995; Descola 2013; Handelman 2008; Kapferer 2010; Sahlins 2004; Schrempp 1992; Viveiros de Castro 2012), a number of younger researchers are taking the agenda forward in different ways (e.g. Da Col and Humphrey 2012; Tassi and Espirito Santo 2012; Willerslev and Pedersen 2010). Very much represented by the contributors to the present volume, one might think of this as cosmology’s ‘second wind’. Indeed, if anything, the fact that cosmology has been so unfashionable for so long has made its theoretical prosecution something of a staunchly contrary exercise, attractive to those who, with various degrees of self-consciousness, thrive best in swimming against the current – the present volume, we may admit, was conceived a little in this spirit. On the other hand, any resurgence of the cosmological project in anthropology has to re-route away from the three negative corollaries of the reflexively ethnocentric topology on which, as we saw, research on indigenous cosmologies used to rely – namely (a) cosmology as the structural integration as a discourse about the total ‘order’ of a corresponding socio-cultural whole (b) cosmology functionally differentiated from other parts of that whole (kinship, economy, politics, etc.), and (c) cosmology as the exoticised effect of the hierarchy of ‘modern us’ over ‘primitive them’. Each of these concepts have become abundantly problematic, and it is precisely in their critical transcendence, we suggest, that the cosmological frame for anthropology finds a creative way forwards. In the current anthropological climate, then, unreconstructed appeals to cosmology just feel wrong.2 Still, while many critiques of their negative corollaries are by now well taken, they have rarely been accompanied by a concerted reconstitution of the cosmological matrix which situates them and of which they are a function: namely the modern dispositif of a single world subject to plural worldviews. It is telling of this shortfall, for example, that aversion to holism and the cross-cultural authority of science is typically professed on grounds of a cultural relativism or social constructivism that works very much within the cosmological coordinates that engender holism and hierarchy in the first place. One way of dealing with this dilemma is to probe indigenous cosmologies in the theoretical expectation of finding a greater elasticity and openness of system and structure (as Handelman, Feuchtwang, Sahlins, Scott, and Kapferer essay in this volume), proceeding from less 9

Introduction

hierarchical but still representational stances anthropologically speaking. But another – indeed the royal – way out of the predicament offered by a half-hearted relativist concession towards indigenous cosmologies would be to advance, precisely, a thoroughgoing experimentation with anthropological cosmology itself. Indeed, such lines of research have been developing for some time now, with a number of anthropologists exploring the ‘recursive’ effects that ethnographic materials can have on the very terms in which they are analysed (e.g. Crook 2007; Strathern 1988; Wagner 1981) and showing how indigenous cosmological reckonings can provide analytical leverages for such experimentations within the very infrastructure of anthropological research itself (e.g. Bubandt & Otto 2010; Holbraad 2012; Viveiros de Castro 2009, 2012). Certainly, as we shall see in more detail, a number of the chapters of the present volume draw on this developing literature, taking the prospect of a cosmologically informed recasting of core anthropological concepts and orientations in a number of directions. Here, however, we limit ourselves to presenting some thoughts on what cosmologically oriented approaches could look like in the wake of the aforementioned critiques. For, as we propose to show, there is no need to throw the cosmological baby out with the bathwater: anthropological interest in cosmology can be thoroughly de-coupled from its traditional association with traditional holism and us/them hierarchies. Indeed, recognising this does more than merely render the concept of cosmology fit for contemporary anthropological purposes. For, as we shall argue, there is an important sense in which a concern with cosmology is now more apposite to the contemporary world than it ever was to putatively ‘primitive’ ones. In close correlation with political and economic shifts that have taken place since the 1970s (broadly speaking, from what we, following James Scott (1999), call ‘high modernity’ to neo-liberalism), our argument is that a new cosmological sensibility has begun to emerge – a new orientation towards the cosmos, generating novel ways of being concerned with it. In the next section we begin by briefly sketching the features of this reorientation in historical terms, identifying the emergence of newly immediate relationships with the cosmos as a defining feature of the ‘late’ and ‘liquid’ modernity of neo-liberalism. From high modernity to neo-liberal orders: re-connecting with cosmos Drawing on Alexandre Koyré’s consummate history of modern cosmology (1957), as well as Stephen Toulmin’s more philosophical critique of modern science (1992), the advent of high modernity can be told as a

10

Introduction

story of cosmological bifurcation – high modernity, if you will , as the emergence of a polarised dual cosmos. On the one hand, as Koyré has shown, if the medieval world was conceived as a vaulted whole with Earth at the centre, held together by a God who lorded a fixed order for all entities (Lovejoy 1936), then the modern cosmos that was delivered from its womb by astronomers and philosophers from the Renaissance onwards became increasingly ­de-­centred. With the Sun having taken the Earth’s place as cosmic centre, and the sacred power of God as guarantor of the order of cosmos as whole increasingly weakened, nineteenth- and twentieth-century physics in particular came to theorise the absence of any immanent force that could ultimately reverse the entropy of matter and energy within the universe. This left in situ no guarantee of harmonious process that might tip the earthly balance in favour of integration as opposed to chaos. However, while much of this physical thinking has carried the status of received cosmological wisdom since the middle of the nineteenth century in scientific quarters, even for literate and curious classes its meaning has largely remained obscure. From the theory of relativity to black holes, from quantum theory to Schrödinger’s Cat, from electrons to the ‘God particle’, such crucial propositions on the nature of being have attracted fascination in, more or less, inverse proportion to their comprehension. In effect, their understanding has mainly transposed into a ‘general knowledge’ of heroic names and momentous events, achieving supremacy at the level of science, iconic celebrity at the level of popular culture, and yet minimal penetration at the level of grassroots cosmology. This, as Toulmin has argued (1992), was because the official physical cosmology of modernity was culturally marginalised at the heart of the social system by the contrary pressure exerted upon it by progressive sensibility that sought certainty in cosmological closure. Cosmological openness was redacted because, axiomatically, progress was held to gradually aggregate and organise matter, exempting human nature and social formations from the centrifugal chaos of cosmic contingency. In fact, the immense power of the principle of progress was to endow modern subjects with the unquestioned sense that, as enlightened actors, they could rationally institute society (and history) in the same way as God synthetically created the heavens and the Earth, and that they could re-make human beings through society as he made them in the first place. This taken-for-granted eternal return to Creation amongst the grassroots of high modernity was putatively secured through the illusion of an hermetic sealing of rational practice from disruptive context (namely from accidents, side-effects, subjectivities, criminalities, insanities), mirroring microcosmically high modernity’s exemption of humankind from the infinite openness of the physical universe. 11

Introduction

In effect, the dual cosmos of high modernity involved the reproduction of an essentially medieval closure of the world at its heart, that inwardly spawned society cradled beneath an infinite, open universe. The esoteric study of the latter was to become the pursuit of a limited elite of natural scientists – indeed cosmologists. It is the unravelling of this duality, we argue, and, in particular, the significant weakening of the medieval residue at the heart of society, that establishes a new cosmological orientation in many contemporary contexts, and which underpins the sense (wherever it exists) that modernity has somehow entered a distinctive new phase that is post, late or liquid. What is the pattern of this unravelling? What cultural effects does it promote? What does it suggest for cosmologically conscious anthropology? Answering these questions discloses several anthropological possibilities, of which we shall briefly trace three in particular. The first directs attention to the ‘structure of the conjuncture’ (Sahlins 1985) in which the present-day cosmological re-orientation begins to occur. We can hypothesise that the neo-liberalisation of political space historically provokes this re-orientation, setting a stable and recurrent pattern in which contemporary subjects begin to feel spatiotemporally relocated. How so? How does a strident political economy of supposedly unfettered social relations open out onto an infinite universe? In many texts, anthropological ones amongst them, neo-liberalism dolefully means the commodification of everything, the consequent reduction of all human value to price, and the hyper-individualisation of agency. True enough. However, we can, if we theorise beyond the social categories of this ‘conscious model’, also register a more profound – because more ramifying – spatiotemporal consequence of this ­politicoeconomic re-arrangement. Indeed, the crucial cosmological outcome of economic de-regulation and tacit de-nationalisation spelled out politically as ‘freedom’ has frequently been for populations to feel not only severed from traditional communities and receding homelands (Clifford 1997; Giddens 1991), but also inchoately ‘thrown into a world’ without limits (Heidegger 1962): in effect, to be cast into a space that is no longer vaulted by the state above and by the nation below. The result is that, with the much-vaunted death of society, the social becomes part of an ill-definable felt infinity which can be portrayed in many registers, all of them allowing for the possibility – and in some cases the i­nescapability – of significant continuities with the immensities and nano-spherical minuteness of cosmic process ‘out there’ and within. Examples of this sense of being cut loose and cast out into an indeterminate space can be drawn from traditional subject areas in anthropology as well as in fields freshly opened up by new technologies, perceptions, and experiences. In the field of religion, for instance, ‘Western’ worshippers find

12

Introduction

themselves decreasingly drawn towards a sacredness that emanates from, and gravitates towards, some elevated altarpiece or architectural centre of a religious place. Rather, a new religious binary tends to emerge that, at the one pole, opens up to the maternal flows and energies of earth, sky, sea and mountain (the New Age), and at the other, allows for penetration by the overflowing paternity of infinitely diffuse spirit (e.g. in Pentecostal churches). These new religions rely upon amorphous redeemers in Nature and Heaven with energies that are not easily contained by either heroic personification or sacred buildings, and which may well ecologically overflow to attain regular apotheoses in forests, rivers (Baptist as well as New Age) as well as in the marketplace. The sacredness of these redemptive agencies seems much more at home in an infinite cosmos of myriad openings and flows. Similarly, the ‘Western’ body also now seems more open to ‘cosmic’ cause and affordance. ‘Sick’ buildings mysteriously transmit spectral affect over and above the rigorous materiality of their architectural design. Pathological pylons, tumour-inducing phones and leukaemia-producing substations generate putatively new illnesses that concentrate waves, particles and rays, while, more positively, extreme performers begin to both stretch athletic prowess beyond the staid confines of the arena and lido – to the mountain, to the desert, to wild waters, to simulated journeys to Mars, to space-stations – and, in reverse, to bring cosmic unboundedness subversively into the organised symmetry of the city. This happens increasingly when marathon-runners, free-runners and skate-boarders all in their own ways undo the integrity of purpose-built walls, slopes, and edges, pulling them onto the precarious planes of their own technical kinetics. In the process, the Euclidian geometry of the city is prised apart to accommodate new body practices, and the city – as well as venues made up of distant ecosystems – is invited to re-connect with the perilous curl and swirl of the essentially undisciplined universe. It is worth noting that these emergent anthropological concerns make no virtue of a necessity to associate cosmology with the bounded worlds of the ‘non-modern’ and to see the ‘modern’ as correspondingly socially a-cosmological. To the contrary, as we shall see in more detail with reference to the chapters of this volume, it is often precisely the heightened cosmic investments of late modernity that thrusts them onto the anthropological agenda, discarding earlier fixations with holism and the characterisation of cosmology as a practice peculiar to exotic others. Cosmology, on this argument, becomes peculiarly our game, where the ‘us’ designates that complex and multiply differentiated collectivity of all those who, across the globe, must live their lives in ultimate as well as immediate frames (i.e. all of ‘us’!)

13

Introduction

This goes just as much for a second terrain calling for anthropological attention in the midst of these contemporary shifts: namely research on the explicit production and consumption of cosmology per se. This occurs, of course, not just at professionally official sites like NASA, CERN, university physics departments, museums, theological seminaries, film studios, but increasingly amongst both passionate amateurs and grassroots consumers. In fact, while anthropology has borne witness repeatedly to the elaborate cosmoi and cosmology-making of informants abroad, of its own cosmos it has had very little to say (for reasons explained in the last section). The situation begins to change though when, from inside a social realm that increasingly ‘breaks out’ of imagined enclosure to open out onto cosmos, increasing numbers of people begin to intimately engage. Take popular engagements with the solar system as just one example. Already an influential field in Europe and America, amateur astronomy is now burgeoning. Thus: ‘Amazon has reported a 500% increase in telescope sales … and subscriptions to amateur astronomy magazines, such as the BBC’s Sky At Night are rocketing’ (McKie 2012). Often obsessive, these citizen scientists respond not only to the traditional lure of discovering and naming new stars and planets (and, thereby, of placing themselves celestially), but also, increasingly, to invitations by ‘real’ astronomers to take crucial measurements by proxy. Undoubtedly, the rise and rise of popular astronomy reflects the almost daily media coverage of discovery in the heavens and in the (Hadron) collider. TV cosmologists become household names. Big Bang, dark matter, and black hole books proliferate. New newspapers run cosmology columns that begin to displace traditional horoscopes while, bolstered by dyspeptic attitudes to science, astrology itself remains in good health (Schrempp 2012; Willis and Curry 2004). Moreover, at the wackier – but even more popular – end of this cosmological extroversion, surveys show that the bulk of modern populations confidently expect (and want) that life will be found elsewhere in the Universe (Battaglia 2005). Consequently, many amateurs spend hours of their life helping professional listeners listen for it under the very respectable auspices of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Institute (SETI), indicating a prevalent estimation that ‘life on Earth’ is special – but not that special. More conventionally, new big powers (India, China) predictably compete (once again) to put humans on the Moon, while old big powers continue to probe, photograph, and sample the mineral content of the Universe and even plot lunar agricultural colonies. The privately established Artemis Project writes on its website: ‘As the lunar outpost develops and a permanent population is established, it will no longer be acceptable to import food from earth’ (Artemis Society International

14

Introduction

2004). Cosmology begins to factualise phantastic ‘lines of flight’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). In this new conjuncture, anthropology has a lot of catching up to do in matching popular interest in cosmos and deepening comparisons with the cosmological compulsions of others. Indeed, we can hypothesise that a new cosmological sensibility in the anthropological heartlands sensitises the ethnographic impulse towards cosmological sensibilities everywhere. Consequently, our third anthropological possibility re-directs the couplet of theory and ethnography once again to the margins of modern governance where, in both distributed populations and tight-knit communities, ‘becoming modern’ and striving for greater worldliness nonetheless remain projects, strongly intertwined with primordial frames and their irreducibly cosmological dimensions. So that, while for many anthropologists the indigenous cosmos will forever be a largely powerless fictional representation, the trend represented in this collection connects with cosmological openness by to illuminate the plethora of actual ways in which foreign forms (e.g. mines, money, medicines, white persons, white gods) are not only incorporated into customary ‘ways of life’ but are radically re-signified within and through existing cosmological frames (e.g. Kirsch 2006; Sahlins 1981; Taussig 1983). More than half of the chapters that follow chart these kinds of ethnographic terrains in an array of socio-cultural situations. Indeed, the second wind of interest in the study of indigenous cosmologies that this volume exemplifies can itself be placed in the context of this late modern investment in cosmology tout court. Once again, it seems, the anthropological imagination is being captured by that of the natives – which is to say, our informants. Only that now cosmology is no longer assumed to connote a dedicated cultural domain reserved for naturally total, totalising and always exotic discourses about the world as such, that may act either as the baseline for ‘cultural explanation’ or otherwise become itself the object of explanatory reduction. Rather, what distinguishes some of the most compelling writings in contemporary anthropology is a spirit of abiding experimentation with matters cosmological, carving novel ethnographic and analytical terrains out of their multiple and ever emergent imbrications with other dimensions of people’s lives. For studies such as these, to even raise the question of ‘holism’ (let alone a hierarchy of distinct ‘worldviews’) as anything other than a moot ethnographic question (as opposed to an analytical predilection) is altogether a category mistake.

15

Introduction

The structure and content of the book The chapters of the present volume have been selected to reflect the full diversity of this spirit of cosmological experimentation – both, that is, as an analytical impulse on the part of the anthropologist and as an ethnographic observation about the people anthropologists study, the latter to be taken seriously in its own terms. For purposes of exposition, we have grouped the chapters into three parts that correspond to the three critical departures for which, as we have argued, the recent literature on cosmology in anthropology is in different ways reaching. Titled ‘Horizons of cosmological wonder: whither the whole?’, Part I sets the conceptual underpinnings for the book as a whole. In different ways, the chapters address the ways in which fresh anthropological interest in cosmology problematises traditional conceptions of holism understood as a ‘totalising’ discourse. What happens to the anthropological imagining of cosmos once it slips free of frames which organically impart an a priori wholeness and mandatory integration to the organisation of constituent parts? Indeed, what happens to totality once cosmos is both fluidly comprehended and understood as a dispersal of entitles and relations? Addressing these questions, the five chapters that comprise this part of the volume are united in locating pattern a posteriori, rendering it as much, if not more, an effect of singular cosmological imaginings as their premise. Michael Scott’s Chapter 1 opens the volume with a critical reflection on the relationship between cosmology, ontology, and alterity in recent anthropological writings. Detecting in the recent resurgence of cosmologically and ontologically oriented anthropology an ethical agenda that elevates an openness to alterity as a disposition tantamount to ‘wonder’, Scott seeks to delineate the ‘meta-cosmology’ that is implicit (or sometimes explicit) in this approach to anthropological analysis. Focusing on the ontological disposition towards what he calls ‘non-dualism’ which, as he argues, is often married with this anthropological fascination with wondrous effects of difference, Scott uses his own ethnographic engagement with the role of cosmological wonder among his Makiran informants in the Solomon Islands effectively to multiply the ways in which anthropologists might wonder about wonder. Questioning whether non-dualism really is more conducive to wonder and ethical relations than any of the possible forms of mono- or poly-ontology (including Cartesian dualism, as well as the particular configurations of Makira cosmology), the chapter offers a concerted argument in favour of a new anthropology of wonder: namely, the comparative ethnography of wonder as a mood that may assume diverse modalities according

16

Introduction

to diverse cosmological configurations of ontology and their historical transformations. Staying with Island Melanesia (Ambrym island in the nation of Vanuatu), Chapter 2 by Knut Rio and Annelin Eriksen shifts attention from the meta-cosmological effects that cosmological wonder can have on anthropologists’ imagination to the transformative effects it precipitates on the ground, Here, the complex imbrications between origin myths, local understandings of the Bible, national projects of ‘development’, and the promise of the creation of a New Man, make it impossible to understand processes of political and ideological change without reference to people’s shifting cosmological concerns with life, land and growth – which is to say, their cosmologically inflected preoccupations with ‘world-making’ in a wider sense. In this way, Rio and Eriksen show, that far from serving only as totalising depictions of social wholes, cosmologies can become prime engines that in their own right set processes of social transformation in motion in accordance with responsive cosmo-logics Exploring the cosmological, ontological, and ethical coordinates of self-cultivation among devotees of the Hindu god Siva in Tamilnadu in South India, Soumhya Venkatesan’s Chapter 3 extends this consideration of the transformative properties of cosmology into the interior terrain of human subjectivity itself. Refusing to treat cosmology as a totalising frame that might be given analytical priority over the human actions that it might be imagined as ‘encompassing’, Venkatesen treats whatever ‘wholes’ Sivite cosmology might posit as a function of devotees’ practical enactment of worship. In a world in which everything is ultimately cosmological (indeed, everything is Siva), cosmology is as much something that is done as something that is represented or imagined. In this sense of Siddhanta, the complex principles that inform the worship of Siva, constitute both the idea and the actual practice of action itself (volition, devotion, self-cultivation). And, the inordinate interest that devotees themselves show towards cosmological reflection is a direct corollary of the logic of Siddhanta: to be devoted to Siva is above all to engage with the cosmological principles in which he is ever-manifest and transforming. Cosmology, then, is conceived as a whole, yes, but one which contains within itself its own ‘auto-relational’ principle of becoming. Devotees become the conduits through which Siva thinks and makes himself whole. Don Handelman’s Chapter 4 further illuminates the cosmological conditions and possibilities of Hindi divinity, now in the guise of Paidatali, a goddess-cosmos from Ander Pradash, as well as Siva. Drawing on a close ethnographic examination of how Paidatali’s cosmic entirety is generated through her own ritual self-transformations, Handelman’s task is to 17

Introduction

theorise, as he says, ‘how worlds are held together through the metaphysics of the human’. To do so, he juxtaposes two fundamentally different kinds of cosmos that engender radically opposing images of the whole. In the first (exemplified by the cosmic dynamics and ritual incarnations of Paidatali), cosmos may be temporarily gradated but always dynamically composes itself continuously; and, while it holds together even as it expands, it is never encompassed from without. Instead, it ‘incompasses’ from within, fractally dispersing its wholeness through each of its parts and, in Handelman’s terms, is ‘intra-grated’, and is always ‘intra-grating’. Characteristically, this topology is of worlds prior to their monotheistic externalisation from divinity and their subsequent encompassment from without. Such monotheistic hierarchy extends holistic transformations that ‘inter-grate’ as they bound, and create finitude as a betweenness of parts that inter-relate, in strong contrast to a cosmos that exists as a ‘thick mesh of intensities of mutual being’ that fluidly intra-relate. A similar concern to theorise ritual frames and political centres of power in China and Taiwan in ways that might depart from the simple Euclidian figuration of wholes informs Stephan Feuchtwang’s Chapter 5. Interrogating an array of ritual and healing practices which tie the human body to cosmological orders, Feuchtwang explores how the very idea of China as an identifiable whole is upheld in irreducibly cosmological terms: in effect, by way of ever-varying but always kindred cosmological and ritual renderings of the relationship between a centre and its outside. Reflecting centuries of resistance to the unifying centre of imperial power, rituals creatively mix Buddhist, Daoist and other local cosmological forms to contrasting performative and ceremonial effect. But what defines them civilisationally are their variations on the same theme of interiority and exteriority. Essentially, the rites always present an image of cosmos that holds itself (and all the social and political formations that hang on them) together from the centre. But as Feuchtwang argues, this is a centre that is always paradoxically defined by its capacity to hold its own ‘outside’ within itself. Cosmologically, in effect, Chinese civilisation exists as an allotropic coexistence of elementally identical forms: as a dispersion of parts clustering around imperial and provincial centres and, simultaneously, condensed within them. The five chapters of Part I, then, are united in abandoning ideas about wholes that are naturally pre-given and of cosmos being the medium of their structural and psychic integration. Titled ‘Cosmological constitutions: economies, politics, and the cosmos’, Part II includes chapters that amplify critiques of the notion that cosmology can be seen as a functionally differentiated and distinct part of the total social order to be studied alongside other parts, including kinship, economy or politics (which are then usually seen as more determining or fundamental). In

18

Introduction

doing so, each of the chapters shines light on the varied imbrications of cosmological concerns with political and economic practices in particular. Given the enormous influence that Marshall Sahlins’ work has had in such cosmological trains of thought about politics and economics in anthropology (e.g. 1976, 1985, 1996), we find it fitting that this part of the book begins with a chapter by Sahlins himself. Providing a synthesis on a global (cultural and historical) scale of his longstanding research on the cosmological constitution of political power and ritual process, Sahlins draws out core properties of polities that enshrine the person of the sacred stranger and organise institutionally around his/her divinely sanctioned authority – in Polynesian terms, his mana. These polities bring about (as they are mythically premised upon) strong cosmic convergences, driven by the mysterious channelling of nobly rootless power to autochthonous fields of being. The characteristic result is rule in which, as Viveiros de Castro put it (1992: 118) ‘the symbolic attributes of positions linked to alterity encompass hierarchically the material dimensions of society’. Because of its cosmic otherness, such power remains external even as it is terrestrially enthroned, and it thereby carries with its heroic embodiment, both the means of holistically encompassing the autochthonous realm and the reversal of the compass. Conceived in this way, Sahlins shows, dynastic real-politics can only partly evade the foundational logics of the state’s cosmic dramaturgy, so that, as he says here, ‘In our ordinary (inappropriate) terms, the practical is also the mystical’. Chapters 7, 8, and 9 by Morten Pedersen, Rebecca Empson, and Bjørn Bertelsen respectively, all take forward the Sahlinsian agenda of counteracting reductionism in the study of cosmology. In particular, the three chapters are united in their critical stance towards the recent tendency, exemplified most clearly in influential writings on witchcraft in Africa, to see contemporary cosmological elaborations as localised indigenous ‘responses’ to the (putatively more real) global political-economic forces of capitalism, neoliberalism, and empire (e.g. Comaroff and Comaroff 1999; Geschiere 1997). More or less explicitly pitting their arguments against these approaches, Pedersen, Empson, and Bertelsen all treat cosmology, politics, and economy as deeply intertwined and mutually constitutive aspects of social process – not as socio-cultural ‘domains’ that may act as each other’s external causes, effects or even interpretations. Together they coalesce inextricable aspects of a single (albeit irreducibly complex) object of ethnographic inquiry. Political economy, on this view, is cosmological, just as cosmology is, as the case may be, political and economic – a realisation that immediately precipitates a redefinition of the very terms ‘cosmology’, ‘economy’, or ‘politics’ to take account of their contingently mutual constitutions in any given ethnographic situation. 19

Introduction

Pedersen makes the argument most explicitly, showing how the upheavals of post-socialist transition in Mongolia in the 1990s can be understood not as political and economic realities that are locally interpreted through cosmological schemes, but rather as constituting a cosmic landscape in their own right. The collapse of socialism in 1990s Mongolia took the form of an apparently ‘broken cosmos … jolted out of shape’, as he puts it, that might best be interpreted as inherently shamanic. From the point of view of his informants, Pedersen argues, the chaotically invisible forces that the end of socialism unleashed on people in Mongolia were indistinguishable from the cosmological forces that shamans of earlier generations were assumed to deal in. Taking this manner of identification seriously negates the familiar anthropological tack Pedersen brands as ‘symbolic functionalism’, according to which the cosmology of shamanism would be taken as a local interpretive frame through which Mongolians domesticate their experience of the unbridled forces of post-socialist politics and economy – the image of cosmology (or culture in general) as a comfort blanket to which people turn when confronting existential uncertainties into which novel political-economic forces throw them. Rather, the isomorphic relationship between the unbridled forces of political and economic ‘transition’ in 1990s Mongolia and the labile nature of shamanic spirits rendered shamanism inherently a cosmology of (because always also in) transition. Such an approach, argues Pedersen, also has consequences for the broader discussion about how cosmology itself might be understood. Cutting against the classical associations of the word, cosmology in this context should be imagined as precisely the opposite of an ordered redaction of the world, and rather conceived as a ‘specific enactment of [the world’s] complexity’ – an isomorphic, non-representational emanation of cosmos rather than a logical reduction of it – a point that recalls Venkatesan’s analysis of cosmology as generative activity in its own right rather than just its representation. In Chapter 8, Empson deals with another facet of the cosmological constitution of economic relations in Mongolia in the so-called ‘age of the market’, examining how ideas and practices associated with Mongols’ pastoral and nomadic engagement with features of the landscape (e.g. concerns with fortune, wealth, custodianship, spirit masters, sacrifice) come to operate in the credit economy of bank-loans that is currently flourishing in the Mongolian countryside. While Empson is clear on the extent to which her argument relies on classic analyses of how alien (often ‘global’) elements may be assimilated to local cosmological orders, she also emphasises that such cosmological incorporations should not be seen as forms of cultural reduction. More than local herders simply ‘refracting’ the forces of capitalism in local terms, what we have here according to Empson is a thoroughgoing ‘mix’ of cosmology and economy

20

Introduction

– an instance of what she brands as ‘cosmo-economics’. Ritually enacted relationships to herds and their spirit masters in their landscape, as she shows, are internally extended to relations with bank-workers and the monetary wealth that they are able to provide, such that the two become inextricably linked on a single, dynamic, and ever-emergent cosmo-­ economic axis. An emphasis on the mutually constitutive, dynamic and characteristically open-ended relationship between cosmos and economy is central also to Bertelsen’s account of sorcery in maize mill production in Chimoio, central Mozambique in Chapter 9. Seeking to understand why maize mill owners are so frequently suspected or openly accused of sorcery in the entrepreneurial economy of contemporary Mozambique, Bertelsen focuses on the cosmological significance of maize production and the ways in which the mills subversively innovate upon it. A core household staple, maize meal is intimately bound up with the reproductive capacities of women, exemplifying their power to ‘enrich’ sustenance through the gendered activity of cooking. In disrupting this connection, the male operators and owners of the mills effectively short-circuit the cosmological cycle of production. This renders maize production cosmologically abominable, and thus a manner of sorcery, construed as the realm of abomination par excellence. As with Pedersen’s and Empson’s chapters, however, this account is not meant just as a cosmologically informed analysis of local responses to the global forces of ‘millennial capitalism’ and its ‘occult economies’. Rather, drawing on Deleuze’s (2004) and Castoriadis’s (1997) conceptualisations of potentiality, Bertelsen offers this analysis as an account of how cosmologies provide the conditions of possibility of their transformation as contingently historical dynamics in their own right. In line also with Rio and Eriksen’s argument about cosmology as a dynamic source of change, for Bertelsen, cosmologies become horizons ‘not only of particular visions and societal origins (i.e. looking backwards) but as sites of tension and creation that are present-oriented as well as future-oriented in their concern with creative and degenerative forces’. An emphasis on the present as well as future orientation of cosmological horizons is central also to Part II, which is titled ‘Embedded modernities: cosmos, science, and the movies’ and focuses on the ways in which social phenomena that a classically inclined anthropology would designate as ‘modern’ are as cosmologically embedded (indeed saturated) as any ‘pre-modern’ society ever was. Of course, the idea that social phenomena that are as ‘modern’, ‘contemporary’ or even ‘Western’ as one may wish might be understood with reference to their own cosmological dimensions is hardly new – just think of Max Weber’s treatise on the Protestant inflections of capitalism (2002); or Sahlins ‘sadness and 21

Introduction

sweetness’ of capitalism’s inner vision (1996). While making similar arguments about the cosmological constitution of modernity, however, the chapters presented here all also seek to show how such quintessential ciphers of modernity as digital technology (Miller), sci-fi movies (Kapferer, Schrempp), and the practice of science itself (Schrempp, Humphrey) are not just underpinned by cosmological premises, but actively generate the cosmological coordinates in terms of which people live their lives. Caroline Humphrey’s Chapter 10 opens Part III since it effectively extends the argument of Part II, showing how the cosmological constitution of political economies is particularly bound up with the breakdown of classical dichotomies between modern science and pre-modern cosmologies. Focusing on contemporary discourses on ‘Eurasianism’ in the Russian republic of Kalmykia, Humphrey shows how the political force of these geo-political imaginaries relies on a phantasmagorical melding of concepts drawn from popular science – particularly astrophysics – with notions and assumptions associated with local religious forms. As she writes, ‘[t]hese are cosmologies in which “gods” coexist with planets, electrons, black holes and mysterious, invisible cosmic forces, and where concatenations of vitality cause the rise and fall of civilisations’. Hence, she continues, ‘cosmology in contemporary Russia cannot be tidied away into a capsule called something like “religion” and separated from practical consequences’. Instead, her chapter develops an account of Eurasianist discourses and their ritual and political uses as a distinctive ‘political cosmology’, aimed at changing the people’s relation to the world, often in direct opposition to what is seen as Euro-American values and global domination. The final three chapters of the book reveal the abiding role that different technological forms play in sustaining cosmological concerns at the heart of contemporary life in the West. Daniel Miller’s Chapter 11 begins with a concerted attempt to show that the intensive networks of sociality instantiated by Facebook have more in common with the way anthropologists have imagined personhood in such places as Melanesia than with the kind of familiar tale of digital technology as a vehicle for fashioning individualised selves. Rather than an ‘alone-together’ inability fully to relate, if anything social networking sites such as Facebook display a surplus of relational communications showing that, over and above the relational network of Facebook ‘friends’, what is ultimately at stake here is also a relationship with Facebook itself – Facebook as ‘meta-friend’, as Miller puts it, ‘a kind of generic other … the whoever that exists primarily as the audience to our revelations about ourselves. They are the ones who see us for what we are and judge us.’ Intriguingly, for Miller, the contours of this meta-relation are distinctly Abrahamic, speaking to

22

Introduction

the very origins of monotheistic religion. Miller’s argument in this regard turns on a key analogy between the witness that Facebook as a ‘metafriend’ bears to the lives of its users and the more archegonic notion of witness established in the Akheda – the Biblical account of Abraham’s (non) sacrifice of Isaac. What makes an action morally accountable, according to this cosmologically inscribed image, is the fact that it always involves precisely the kind of generic (transcendent) Other who may act as witness to the ordinary (or indeed extraordinary) social situations in which the action is instantiated. Facebook, then, occupies just that cosmological site the Bible fashions for God, and thus social networking becomes the site for subjects’ moral constitution as relational beings par excellence – a deliciously provocative thought that Miller’s chapter explores in great depth. Now if Facebook is popular because it crystallises personhood before a somewhat spectral cosmic judge, it could be argued that, at its best, cinema sets up audiences as themselves witnesses of similarly cosmic proportions – particularly when it comes to the kinds of grand cosmological allegories with which Gregory Schrempp and Bruce Kapferer’s chapters are concerned. In Chapter 12, Schrempp broaches the strong affinity between cinema and cosmology in an analysis of two films concerned with the origin of humanity, namely Kubrick’s 2001: Space Odyssey and La Guerre de Feu by Jean-Jacques Annaud. Contrasting the iconic status of the former to the relative obscurity of the latter, Schrempp compares the two films in terms of their formal genre – the ‘epic’ of humans’ quest for fire in La Guerre de Feu as opposed to the irreducibly ‘mythic’ quality of Kubrick’s classic. Allotting a central ontogenetic role to the iconic monolith that descends from outer space, 2001 distances itself from the popular scientific account of human origins by way of an overtly contrasting appeal to myth, thus revealing a certain insufficiency in the scientific account of human ontogenesis. ‘For experiencing our first origins … even a scientifically-aware audience wants a story that is not just geo-logical but cosmological. We want a myth’, Schrempp writes. And Kubrick provides it. Rather as with Miller on Facebook and the Akheda, then, Schrempp’s chapter is an argument about how the global affordance of contemporary technologies supplements people’s lives with a broader cosmic reference, which may be imagined variously as extension, transcendence, encompassment, envelopment, suffusion, or what have you (the connotations are irreducibly theological, and that, precisely, is part of Miller’s and Schrempp’s point). This sets up the final chapter of the book, in which, by way of a coda to the whole venture, Kapferer seeks to provide nothing short of a complete cosmological rendering of modernity by way of an in-depth analysis of Kubrick’s 2001. In Kapferer’s rigorous treatment, the film develops as ‘a 23

Introduction

vision of human being from outside the perspectives of human being in itself’, and, for that purpose, mobilises cosmos as its critical point of view. Through a close reading of the visual logic of the film, as well as its ­philosophical underpinnings in Nietzsche in particular, Kapferer develops an exhaustive interpretation that places the abiding image of the black monolith as the transformational principle of, as he puts it, ‘the cosmic totality’. Built up to encompass notions of culture, and particularly the epic progress of a civilisation founded as a project of technological control, this image of cosmos has an abidingly de-centring effect for Kapferer, casting human beings into cosmos, but also containing within itself the possibility of new beginnings and becomings. Indeed, recalling Miller as well as Schrempp, we may note that on Kapferer’s account cosmic renewal, as with cosmic origin, requires not just an irreducibly mythical engagement, but also keeping the possibility of sacrifice as an open horizon – giving up oneself in order to find oneself anew. Conclusion Kapferer’s emphasis on the de-centring effects of Kubrick’s vision of cosmic renewal is perhaps germane also to our aims in this book. For one way to present our overall message here is to counterpose the essays of this volume to a tendency in much of recent anthropology, precisely, to centre the otherwise virtually intractable forces of contemporary living by championing localisation at various levels – the cultural inscription of global trends, the embodiment of cultural representations as habitus, the transformation of existence as dwelling, the synesthetic internalisation of dwelling as experience. Tamed and reframed, the supra-local is brought down to earth, grounded in the intensity of intimate loci. Distance – defined by what cannot be swaddled and subjected – is expunged. The periphery, if you like, is centred. In counterpoising a renewed interest in cosmology to these strategies of analytical (but also cosmic) anchoring, our point is not to try to take a stance as to how relations between, say, ‘the local and the global’, ‘centre and periphery’, ‘particular and universal, or indeed ‘ethnographic and analytical’ are to be apportioned. Rather, switching to the cosmological frame consists in an attempt to lay just such questions open to ethnographic and analytic scrutiny – a matter of a posteriori research rather than a priori conviction. Framing anthropos and cosmos together in this way allows us above all to ask how human universes, their tracts and their folds (everywhere) become variably visualised – centre, periphery, local, global – certainly; but also, perhaps, or even hopefully, totally otherwise? What other axes of space and time, and in what kinds of relations with one other, come to define the loci of people’s lives? Which 24

Introduction

loci and dimensions of being attain significance, and how these significances might interrelate, is never a given, but rather always singularly conceived and enacted – a matter, of variable cosmological imaginations. Hence the impetus to this volume: theoretically to inform the ethnographic disclosure of determinate horizons, axes of being, and worlds of possibility. All of these are effectively brought into view through the cosmological frame. Notes 1

2

To get a sense of how timid anthropologists’ relativism actually is, one only needs to consider the disciplinary censorship visited on those who have seriously flirted with asserting the reality credentials of indigenous cosmologies – the controversies surrounding the work of Carlos Castaneda (1968) and Marcel Griaule (1975) provide stark examples of this. See Chu (2010: 6) for an example of the careful embarrassment with which anthropologists now feel they must appeal to the term.

References Abramson, Allen. 2013. Abramson, Allen. 2013. A locus of exogenisation in Fiji: traditions of disjuncture and the renunciation of tradition in a Western Polynesian context. Suomen Antroologi, Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 38(2). Artemis Society International. 2004. www.asi.org/adb/02/12/01/, accessed 3 August 2012. Barth, Fredrik. 1990. Cosmologies in the Making: A Generative Approach to Cultural Variation in Inner New Guinea. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Battaglia, Debbora (ed.) 2005. E.T. Culture: Anthropology in Outerspaces. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Boddy, Janice. 1989. Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men, and the Zār Cult in Northern Sudan. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Boyer, Pascal. 1994. The Naturalness of Religious Ideas. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bubandt, Nils and Ton Otto. 2010. Anthropology and the predicaments of holism. In Ton Otto and Nils Bubandt (eds), Experiments with Holism. Oxford: Blackwell. Pp. 1–15. Castaneda, Carlos. 1968. The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1997. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Chu, Julie Y. 2010. Cosmologies of Credit: Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.

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Introduction Clifford, James. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Comaroff, Jean and John L. Comaroff. 1999. Occult economies and the violence of abstraction: notes from the South African postcolony. American Ethnologist 26(2): 279–303. Crook, Tony. 2007. Exchanging Skin: Anthropological Knowledge, Secrecy and Bolivip, Papua New Guinea. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Da Col, Giovanni and Caroline Humphrey (eds) 2012. Contingency, Morality and the Anticipation of Everyday Life. Special Issue of Social Analysis 56(2). de Coppet, Daniel and Andre Iteanu (eds) 1995. Cosmos and Society in Oceania: Their Interrelations or Their Coalescence in Melanesia. Oxford: Berg. Deleuze, Gilles. 1987. Difference and Repetition. London and New York: Continuum. —— and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum. Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture. Trans. Janet Lloyd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Douglas, Mary. 1963. The Lele of the Kasai. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— 1996. Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology. London and New York: Routledge. Dupré, Louis. 1993. Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Durkheim, Emile and Marcel Mauss. 1963. Primitive Classification. Trans. Rodney Needham. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Englund, Hari and James Leach. 2000. Ethnography and the meta-narratives of modernity. Current Anthropology 41(2): 225–248. Fortes, Meyer. 1987. Religion, Morality and the Person: Essays on Tallensi Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Geschiere, Peter. 1997. The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa. Trans. P. Geschiere and J. Roitman. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia. Giddens, Anthony. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Griaule, Marcel. 1975. Conversations with Ogotemmêli: an Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Handelman, Don. 2008. Afterword: returning to cosmology – thoughts on the positioning of belief. Social Analysis 52(1): 181–195. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell. Holbraad, Martin. 2010. The whole beyond holism: gambling, divination and ethnography in Cuba. In Ton Otto and Nils Bubandt (eds), Experiments with Holism: Theory and Practice in Contemporary Anthropology. Oxford: Blackwell. Pp. 65–85. —— 2012. Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Horton, Robin. 1967. African traditional thought and Western science. Africa 37(1–2): 50–71, 155–187.

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Introduction Kapferer, Bruce. 2010. Legends of People, Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance, and Political Culture in Sri Lanka and Australia. Oxford: Berghahn Press. Kirsch, Stuart. 2006. Reverse Anthropology: Indigenous Analysis of Social and Environmental Relations in New Guinea. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Koyré, Alexandre. 1957. From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. London: Prentice-Hall. —— 2010. On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Leenhardt, Maurice. 1979. Do Kamo: Persons and Myth in the Melanesian World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1963. Structural Anthropology. Trans. C. Jacobson and B.G. Schoepf. New York: Basic Books. —— 1964. Totemism. Trans. R. Needham. London: Merlin Press. Lovejoy, Arthur, O. 1936. The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McKie, Robin. 2012. Britons reach for telescopes as BBC and Brian Cox spark interest in astronomy. The Observer, 21 January. Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1948. Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. Sahlins, Marshall. 1976. Culture and Practical Reason. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. —— 1981. Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. —— 1985. Islands of History. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. —— 1996. The sadness of sweetness: the native anthropology of Western cosmology. Current Anthropology 37(3): 395–428. —— 2004. Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Schrempp, Gregory. 1992. Magical Arrows: The Maori, Greeks, and the Folklore of the Universe. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. —— 2012. The Ancient Mythology of Modern Science: A Mythologist Looks (Seriously) at Popular Science Writing. Montreal and Kingston, Ontario: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Scott, James C. 1999. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sperber, Dan. 1985. On Anthropological Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Tassi, Nico and Diana Espirito Santo (eds) 2012. Making Spirits: Materiality and Transcendence in Contemporary Religion. London: I.B. Tauris. Taussig, Michael. 1983. Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

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Introduction Toulmin, Stephen, 1992. Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Tsing, Anna. 2010. Worlding the Matsutake diaspora – or, can actor-network theory experiment with holism? In Ton Otto and Nils Bubandt (eds), Experiments with Holism: Theory and Practice in Contemporary Anthropology. Oxford: Blackwell. Pp. 47–66. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 1992. From the Enemy’s Point of View: Humanity and Divinity in an Amazonian Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —— 2009. Métaphysiques cannibales. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. —— 2012. Cosmological perspectivism in Amazonia and elsewhere. Hau Journal, Masterclass Series 1: 45–168. Wagner, Roy. 1981. The Invention of Culture (New and Revised Edition). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Weber, Max. 2002. The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism. Trans. Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells. New York: Penguin Books. Whitehouse, Harvey. 2000. Arguments and Icons: Divergent Modes of Religiosity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Willerslev, Rane and Morten A. Pedersen. 2010. Proportional holism: joking the cosmos into the right shape in North Asia. In Ton Otto and Nils Bubandt (eds), Experiments with Holism: Theory and Practice in Contemporary Anthropology. Oxford: Blackwell. Pp. 262–279. Willis, Roy and Patrick Curry. 2004. Astrology, Science and Culture: Pulling down the Moon. Oxford: Berg Publishers. Wilson, Brian, ed. 1974. Rationality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Part I Horizons of cosmological wonder: whither the whole?

1 To be a wonder: anthropology, cosmology, and alterity Michael W. Scott

Respect for one’s fellow men cannot be based on certain special dignities that humanity claims for itself as such, because then one fraction of humanity will … decide that it embodies those dignities in some pre-eminent manner. We should rather assert at the outset a sort of a priori humility … Humility in the face of life, because life represents the rarest and most astonishing creations observable in the universe. (Lévi-Strauss 1979: 24, in Hepburn 1984: 146)

Wonder is the beginning This chapter offers reflections on the relationship among wonder, cosmology, ontology, and anthropology as stimulated by two sources: my fieldwork among the Arosi of the island of Makira in Solomon Islands and my engagement with current trends in anthropological approaches to ontology. In order to suggest a logical and historical relationship among these four terms, I begin with two propositions laid out in syllogistic style. The first proposition runs as follows: if, as Plato makes Socrates say in the Theaetetus, wonder is the beginning of philosophy; and if, as Luce Irigaray (1993: 72) points out, Western philosophy has traditionally comprised both physics and metaphysics and thus cosmology – then it follows that we might unpack Socrates’s dictum as implying that wonder is the beginning of cosmology. To this proposition I juxtapose a second. If, as Descartes (1989 [1649]: 52) posited, wonder is the first passion, an intuitive response to ‘first encounter’ with an object or phenomenon we experience as new or

Horizons of cosmological wonder

different from what we thought we knew; and if, as could be argued, precisely this type of first encounter at the scale of the human is what gave rise to anthropology, then there must be something of wonder that is ingredient to anthropology. Clearly, anthropology is not pure wonder, but – like philosophy and cosmology – a development from it, a theorising response to the primal response of wonder in the face of alterity. Wonder, in other words, is the beginning of anthropology – even if the discipline has not always kept the memory of this origin alive (cf. Mead 1954). It may seem at this point that I am reducing Socrates’s dictum to its most banal implication – that wonder is the beginning of thinking itself, of all theorising and projects of knowing about anything. But if we take my two syllogistic propositions together they may provide a shortcut for identifying something more specific about the relationship between cosmology and anthropology. Among the many offspring of wonder, cosmology and anthropology are, I suggest, fraternal twins concerned specifically with ontology. Both, that is to say, are concerned with diverse experiences and models of the configuration of being: with questions of whether everything is fundamentally one, or many, or somehow both; with the conundrum of whether entities precede relations, or vice versa, or somehow both; and with problems arising from the apparent co-existence of different configurations of being and their transformations. Until relatively recently, cosmology and anthropology have focused on different scales of ontology. Cosmology, whether ‘religious’, ‘traditional’, or ‘scientific’, has focused on the macrocosm, whereas anthropology – albeit with an interest in ‘traditional’ cosmologies – has focused on the microcosm of human variation. Increasingly, however, these two trajectories are tending to converge; anthropologists interested in ontology are no longer content to study humanity apart from the rest of the cosmos. Indigenous, philosophical, and scientific cosmologies have all become linked and mutually informing in anthropological cosmologising. Examining this convergence between macro- and microcosmic theorising in the anthropology of ontology, this chapter has two aspects, one analytical and one ethnographic entailing methodological implications for a constructive agenda. First, I offer a reading of current trends in the anthropology of ontology, identifying an emergent theoretical meta-­ cosmology that is furthermore part of a project of moral philosophy. By meta-cosmology, I mean the fundamental assumptions about the prevailing processes and/or configuration of things and relations – especially the ontological assumptions held – whether overtly or implicitly – by theorists and ethnographers as they approach their studies (Scott 2005). Accordingly, my focus will be chiefly on precipitating from the work of selected authors the ontology that this theoretical meta-cosmology

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models. Although this ontology goes by many names – among them, animism, relationalism, post-pluralism, post-humanism, nondualism – I will refer to nondualism as implying all of these.1 And I will highlight my perception that this nondualist ontology is often intertwined with an ethical agenda that elevates openness to alterity as a disposition tantamount to wonder, recommending this disposition as the best moral orientation towards alterity, both human and non-human. It could even be said that, according to nondualism and its attendant moral philosophy, wonder is not only the best disposition, it is itself a mode of being, the mode of being – being as wonder. As a second project in this chapter, I further develop my analysis of this theoretical nondualist meta-cosmology and its ethical agenda with reference to what I have termed the poly-ontological cosmology of the Arosi of Solomon Islands. Arguing that Arosi poly-ontology resists assimilation to nondualism as the full extent of ‘their vision of the world’ (Strathern 1992: 114), I present this ethnography, not as evidence that ethical nondualism is fatally flawed or vitiated by counterfactuals. Rather than writing against nondualism (whether in anthropological theory or ethnographic contexts), I seek to temper what I perceive to be the, perhaps inadvertent, tendency within the literature I review to allow relations to encompass entities hierarchically (sensu Dumont). I conclude that, having advanced a radical critique of dualism (and all forms of essentialism) in classic anthropology, the anthropology of ontology needs now to imagine a meta-cosmology in which entities and relations are truly coeval and in which primary attention to either is equally possible and permissible (whether in anthropological theory or ethnographic contexts). In this spirit, I initiate a more intentional anthropological exploration of wonder as a mood that may assume diverse modalities according to diverse cosmological configurations of ontology. The nondualist meta-cosmology In this section I identify a non-unified but collective trend across a wide range of literature. It is not my intention to assert that every aspect I ascribe to this trend is equally evident in the work of every author I cite, or that the literature I cite is monological. For lack of a better label that aggregates this proliferating literature, I place it under the broader rubric of ‘the anthropology of ontology’, deliberately resisting naming practices that might over-identify the concept of ontology with any particular subset of anthropologists. The theoretical meta-cosmology with attendant nondualist ontology that I wish to foreground is the co-­ production of many anthropologists engaged in field research in different geographical regions and drawing on disparate intellectual antecedents. 33

Horizons of cosmological wonder

The most recognisable descriptors attached to the discourses contributing to anthropological nondualist cosmologising include: phenomenological anthropology, perspectival anthropology, the anthropology of personhood and sociality (especially as developed by Roy Wagner and Marilyn Strathern), material semiotics, ‘the ontological turn’, re-theorisations of animism, and the study of human-nonhuman interactions. Taken together, these approaches iterate three recurrent themes I take to be evidence of a theoretical meta-cosmology: first, a common critique of Cartesian dualism as the ontology of Euro-American modernity; second, ascriptions of nondualist ontology to ethnographic others and/or efforts to model this ontology in terms of multiplicity, flux, and generativity; and, third, an explicit impetus – in some cases – to correlate these models of nondualist ontology with the nonlinear models of dynamical open systems now available from the physical sciences. Anthropologists interested in questions of being often draw a fundamental contrast between the ontology they ascribe to Euro-American modernity – frequently, if not universally, designated Cartesian dualism – and an alternative ontology they wish to theorise with reference to ethnographic others (e.g. Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007; Ingold 2000: 11–26, 87–110; Pedersen 2011; Willerslev 2007).2 Cartesian dualists, they say, live and think in terms of two absolutely sequestered ontological categories: the immaterial and the material. To translate this into my own analytical vocabulary, Cartesian dualists are poly-ontologists of the simplest kind; they posit a plurality of essential categories, but in this case only two (Scott 2007: 12). These two, moreover, form a root pair aligning a series of analogous oppositions: mind/body, transcendent/immanent, animate/inanimate, subject/object, linguistic sign/‘real-world’ referent, culture/nature, etc. According to many anthropologists of ontology, this minimalist form of poly-ontology has been an historical Western convention, prejudice – even a delusion – with a morally double-edged legacy. It has been the sine qua non for the development of modern science and technology – with all its goods and evils – and it is implicated in the history of anthropology as an obstacle to apprehension of other ways of being and knowing and as a form and facilitator of imperialist domination (e.g. Clammer, Poirier, and Schwimmer 2004; Descola 2008; Evens 2008; Latour 1993; Viveiros de Castro 2003). As part of this critique of Cartesianism, many anthropologists of ontology present various versions of what I am here terming nondualism as its logical inverse. In so doing, I suggest, they effectively posit nondualism, either directly or indirectly, as the way things really are. Based on ethnography from many contexts, these theorists assert that, or conduct their analyses as though, the ontology in which we all inhere is not only non-Cartesian but equally non-monistic and non-pluralist by

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any multiple, by any criterion of distinction (e.g. Evens 2008; Holbraad and Pedersen 2009; Strathern 2004; Viveiros de Castro 2007). In their efforts to describe nondualism, these anthropologists often in fact imply that, along with Cartesianism, all other supposed forms of pluralism and all forms of monism are incoherent and even morally suspect. Terence Evens makes this rejection of both monism and pluralism most explicit, arguing that the positing of monads at any scale is, in effect, a form of dualistic thinking ‘decisively conditioned by the idea of a perfect boundary, a boundary that separates but does not connect’ (2008: 301 n. 1). I take Viveiros de Castro to be making a logically congruent anti-monistic point when he observes that hermeneutical attempts to assimilate ethnographic others to anthropological selves are expressions of a misguided ‘desire for ontological monism’ that produces ‘an inflationary emission of epistemological dualisms – emic and etic, metaphoric and literal, conscious and unconscious, representation and reality, illusion and truth, et cetera’ (2004b: 16). The language used to characterise nondualism is inventive and sometimes poetic as theorists grope for imagery able to convey a condition both free of hard and absolute limits but rich in varied and meaningful forms. Tim Ingold, for example, describes nondualist existence as ‘immersion’ in an ‘ocean of materials’, an unstable condition of being ‘borne along’ in a ‘flux’ of ‘continual generation and transformation’ (2011: 24). In this flux of interactions, all entities – despite their appearance of solidity – are intrinsically multiple, ephemeral, constantly emerging, disintegrating, and dispersing into disparate new ‘quasi-objects’/‘quasi-subjects’ (Latour 1993). For Martin Holbraad, nonduality is best conceptualised as ‘­motility’ or ‘a continuum of motion’ (2012: 171, italics omitted) in which truth is radically contingent and emergent. And Evens uses the terms ‘ambiguity or between-ness’ to indicate ‘an ontologically dynamic state in which boundaries connect as they separate and a thing is always also other than what it is’ (2008: xx). What these and other authors emphasise is the perpetual movement and mutability of that which is always already mixed – a kind of ceaseless surrealist metamorphosis or recycling of transiently stable and co-mingling beings. Sometimes contributors to these characterisations of nondualism display a desire to coordinate their models with models of complex nonlinear systems currently found in many of the physical sciences. Eduardo Kohn (2013), for example, is in direct dialogue with representatives of what has been called the ‘new biology’ when he frames his proposal for an ‘anthropology beyond the human’. In contrast with neo-­Darwinian accounts of evolution as the story of the ‘ascent of man’ from amoral unconscious nature towards moral transcendent culture, the new biology narrates evolution in ways that elide the organism-environment 35

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interface and model heredity as an unfinished process of multilevel interactions and feedbacks (Masters 1995; cf. De Landa 1997; Hoffmeyer 2008). Consonant with such a nonlinear narrative, Kohn calls for an ­anthropology that locates human sign-making within the ‘living’ semiotic processes of all organisms. Also in dialogue with representatives of the new biology, Ingold moves towards redefining life itself as encompassing the abiotic as well as the biotic. For Ingold, life means ‘the dynamic, transformative potential of the entire field of relations within which beings of all kinds, more or less person-like or thing-like, continually and reciprocally bring one another into existence’ (2011: 68). In all of this, the implication is that some scientists – Ingold (2000: 173) identifies some he describes as a ‘handful of courageous … ­developmental biologists’ – have begun to apprehend ontology in ways that resonate with the experiences and values of a variety of indigenous peoples (cf. Ingold 2011: 29; Nadasdy 2007: 31). So-called modern science, often taken to be the locus classicus of Cartesianism, is in some quarters disabusing itself of its dualistic presuppositions and finding its own paths towards a nonmodern (sensu Latour) nondualism. We might say that some scientists are sawing off the branch on which they have been sitting and are falling back – not onto a solid earth surface, Ingold (2011: 126–135) would argue – but into an open ‘weather-world’. Accordingly, their models of complexity, conjoined with the ethnographic record from multiple indigenous contexts, are providing some anthropologists with seemingly corroborative resources for theorising and advocating nondualism. Arguably, there is one clear fault line that runs through the literature I have been citing. Among anthropologists for whom some version of the opposition between Cartesianism and nondualism has become central to ethnographic analysis, there are those who appear unapologetically to give truth to indigenous others. These anthropologists not only criticise Cartesianism in ways that could be described as writing against dualism (or pluralism, or monism), they also suggest that the nondualist orientation of their ethnographic consultants constitutes a fuller apprehension of the true flow and ambiguity of being as becoming (e.g. Evens 2008; Ingold 2000: 40–60, 89–110; Nadasdy 2007; Rose 2011). The ontological assumptions of others can be less self-evident, however. This is especially true in the work of core contributors to the particular ‘ontological turn’ that originated at the University of Cambridge in the late 1990s and early 2000s (cf. Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007). These anthropologists of ontology often write against Cartesianism (by one name or another) and often ascribe nondualism (by one name or another) to ethnographic others; but with Viveiros de Castro’s (2003) reconceptualisation of anthropology as ‘the science of the ontological self-determination of the world’s peoples’ in view, they have not set about deliberately to develop

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and prescribe any particular theory of reality. In order to abstain from forcing the principles of Cartesianism onto others, and in order not to constrain the potential of others (and themselves) for ontological plasticity, they adopt a position of apositionality, a motile analytical transit that, because it is potentially every theoretical position, everywhere and every-when, is simultaneously no theoretical position, nowhere and no-when (e.g. Holbraad 2012: 263–265; Holbraad and Pedersen 2009; Holbraad and Willerslev 2007). Thus far, however, attempts to achieve ontological neutrality through analytical versatility have been undermined by a tendency to base such versatility in the relationist principles of nondualism alone. When contributors to the Cambridge-originated ‘turn’, and those of us constructively engaged with their work, have sought to demonstrate or theorise analytical mobility between a nondualist perspective and a ‘conventional’ or ‘representationist’ (i.e. dualist/essentialist) perspective, we have done so, I suggest, solely on the grounds that these two ontologies contain and presuppose one another in a given relation of ‘partial duality’ (cf. Viveiros de Castro 2010: 226–229). We have taken encompassing pre-relatedness as the condition of the possibility for shifting analytical attention between the two ontologies in the same way that one might shift between the two aspects of a figure-ground composition or the two sides of a Möbius strip (cf. Scott 2013b). This bid for versatility recognises no real gap between the two ontologies to be overcome. Shape-shifting between the two requires only a morph – the externalisation of an internal potential – never a jump across non-relational space. Cast in this way, the relation between nondualism and any form of essentialism – like the relation between relations and entities in general – is always asymmetrical (Viveiros de Castro 2010: 228): essentialisms and their sealed-off entities can only ever be the ‘apparently non-relational’ figures intrinsically pre-immersed in an all-permeating relational ground (Pedersen 2012: 64). Nothing is permitted to escape the prevenience and pervasiveness of relations. This analytical strategy may not give truth directly to indigenous others; nevertheless, it gives methodological and therefore ontological ascendancy to relations, rendering entities secondary and subordinate, if not in fact illusory. In 2011, while still in the process of developing this chapter, I argued in favour of something like this asymmetrical meta-cosmology under the label ‘methodological nondualism’ (Scott 2013b). Today, I would not subtract from that argument; rather, as I indicate in returning to this theme in my conclusion, I would add to it. Methodological nondualism requires, I suggest, a parallel post-Cartesian methodological essentialism capable, in its turn, of taking seriously evidence that some people grant ontological priority to entities that, whether they be conceptualised 37

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as intrinsically self-same or multiple, are nevertheless held to be self-­ sufficient and always already autonomous. If, as I am suggesting, diverse voices within the anthropology of ontology are converging to develop a theoretical nondualist meta-­ cosmology, what if any might be the models of cosmogony that go with it? I know of no specific treatment of this question in the literature, but we might infer that, especially for anthropologists who seek engagement with the physical sciences, the presumptive cosmogony may be simply the Big Bang and all the ongoing scientific debate about its exact nature, consequences, and antecedents. I do not pretend to understand scientific models of ‘eternal inflation’ or the ‘multiverse’, but neither am I aware of anything precluding the possibility of more than one big bang. And this would be more in keeping with the logic of nonduality, which requires that there be both difference and connectivity at every scale of being. In fact, if theorists of nonduality posit anything that could be called a cosmogony it must be something that resembles the classic Buddhist concept of ‘dependent origination’ according to which there is no prime mover, only movement itself (e.g. Ronkin 2009). Every present thing presupposes an infinite regress of interdependent things. Does the concept of cosmology necessarily signify a complete and bounded whole? Not at all. Envisioning no monadic point or points of origin, anthropological theories of nondualism – like scientific models of eternal inflation and Buddhism – amount to a cosmology that describes an open dynamical system (cf. Rubenstein 2012). Here it should be noted that all this interest in nondualism within the broader anthropology of ontology is dependently originating as one of many directly and indirectly linked sites of interest in complex systems. Geographer Nigel Clark aptly describes what he terms ‘the new interdisciplinary studies of dynamical systems’ (2000: 12) in terms that well evoke how this phenomenon is an example of what it is about. This ‘burgeoning interdisciplinary field’, he writes, is ‘as likely to concern itself with the flow of traffic or the networking of human actors in a city as it is with turbulent meteorological phenomena, the relationship between species in an ecosystem, or the functioning of neurones in the brain’ (2000: 22). Being a Deleuzo-Guattarian rhizome of dynamic open systems (like a nondualist cosmology), the study of complexity has no single point of origin, but consists in many paths of feedback among diverse disciplines. Although it is true that the physical sciences appear to be – or are often taken to be – among the key drivers in the turn to complexity (Urry 2006), the turn itself renders the question ‘Who thought of it first?’ inadmissible. As some might say – or hope – we are simply in the midst of a complex phase transition towards nondualism.

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Before turning to a consideration of Arosi cosmology and ontology, I point finally to the ways in which the nondualist meta-cosmology evident in much of the anthropology of ontology entails an ethical agenda that furthermore returns to the concept of wonder. In the literature I have been discussing, there are, I suggest, diverse endorsements of nondualism as ethically preferable to any form of essentialism. The claim that ­nondualism is the key to ethical agency is stated most directly in Evens’s project, Anthropology as Ethics (2008), but it is also stated indirectly in assertions that Cartesian dualism constitutes an intrinsically unethical mode of seeking to dominate others as analogues to an inert world. Nondualism is the implied remedy. With its rejection of both radical pluralism and absolute monism, and its emphasis on intrinsic relations as constituting given connectivity across all scales, nondualism, it is said, informs processes of self-other engagement that are most conducive to responsible and creative interactions. Those who apprehend that they participate in all things and that all things participate in them and that there are no stable categories to which they or others can be reduced are less likely to treat others – either human or nonhuman – as objects at their disposal (e.g. Rose 2011). Going one step further than Lévi-Strauss, as quoted in the epigraph to this chapter, proponents of nondualism endorse an a priori humility in the face of sheer trans-categorical existence as the ‘most astonishing’ thing of all. Although Viveiros de Castro appears to sideline p ­ henomenological approaches to nondualism as ‘sentimental pseudo-immanentism’ (2010: 220), he nevertheless clearly advocates, in lieu of this, a political anthropology that indicates a meta-cosmology of Deleuzian multiplicity. This meta-cosmology, like his Deleuzian accounts of Amerindian cosmogonic myth, ‘posits an ontological regime commanded by a fluent intensive difference which incides on each point of a heterogenic continuum, where transformation is anterior to form, relation is superior to terms, and interval is interior to being’ (Viveiros de Castro 2007: 158). The ethical appeal of this version of nondualism is that fractal multiplicity – the idea that everything contains everything else as intrinsic difference and potential becoming – promises a ‘flat ontology’, a mode of becoming ‘at long last freed from all complicity with transcendence’ (Viveiros de Castro 2010: 224, 220). As in Amerindian cosmology, there is no hierarchy of subjects over objects in such a meta-cosmology; there are only subjects, because ‘an object is an incompletely interpreted subject’ (Viveiros de Castro 2004a: 470, italics omitted). This meta-cosmological nondualism, transposed from Amerindian cosmology into the register of theory as perspectival anthropology, acts, according to Viveiros de Castro, as a ‘bomb’, exploding the dualist assumptions of conventional

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Euro-American thought and enabling anthropology to emerge as ‘the theory and practice of permanent decolonization’ (in Latour 2009: 2). Participants in the Cambridge-originated ‘ontological turn’ have innovated on this perspectivist version of meta-cosmological nondualism, connecting it with its intrinsically pre-related siblings – Strathernian post-pluralism and Wagnerian fractality – and subjecting it to the possibility of becoming-other through encounter with ethnography from diverse contexts (e.g. Holbraad and Willerslev 2007). Their ­ methodological experiments and recommendations aim at conducting anthropological research and producing ethnography as if the cosmos were a nondualist one of fractal multiplicity, rich in infinite possibilities for unpredictable becomings. It often seems, moreover, that for these anthropologists of ontology, the principal virtue of such an analytical device-cum-meta-­ cosmology is that it offers the best hope for a conscionable solution to the problem of so-called irrational beliefs, re-thought as the problem of alterity (e.g. Holbraad 2009; 2012: xv-xvii, 246–59). Only a meta-­ cosmology of ‘partial connections’ (Strathern 2004) between self and other allows ethnographic others to be alter-human: to be neither non-human (­pluralism) nor ignorant and deluded (or, indeed, nobler and wiser) versions of The Human (monism). Nondualism opens up the possibility for a ground-flux from which to practice anthropology as ‘permanent decolonization’, letting others elicit one’s capacities to think new thoughts while letting others remain other. As previously indicated, however, there may be a problem here. Despite the hope that nondualism may be resistant to hierarchy, hierarchy reappears. Terms become inferior to relations, and the apparent intervals between them are treated as belied by the deeper ligatures of intrinsic multiplicity. A new version of the old ‘illusion versus truth’ dualism transpires (cf. Viveiros de Castro 2004b: 16). We now have a problem of apparently rational beliefs (the propensity to see or define discrete entities or kinds) and a will to correct such beliefs via the analytical imposition of nondualism. As the emphasis on being transformed by others suggests, a key concept in the ethical agenda legible in much of the anthropology of ontology is openness. The premise is that, just as all quasi-entitative things in a nondualist cosmos are complex open dynamical systems receptive to input from one another, people who assume the flux of nonduality are open to others in a morally positive way. Often informed by philosophers such as Heidegger, Levinas, and Merleau-Ponty, as well as by complexity studies at large, anthropologists describe nondualists (whether ethnographic others or analytically positioned selves) as people who make themselves (and their anthropological theories) permeable – people who accept the impact of others, hold their own being in abeyance in order to let others flourish and flow into them, and approach others in humility, awe, and

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reverence (e.g. Evens 2008; Ingold 2011: 74–75; Rose 2011; cf. Holbraad 2012: 255–265). Nondualists, in short, receive others in wonder. More than that, however, wonder is their orientation to life, to being itself as becoming – an open receding horizon of unpredictable disclosures and disintegrations, including the potential disintegration of their own implicitly nondualist ethnographic methods (Holbraad 2012: 264–265). Nondualists live in the eternal ‘Wow!’ They alone, it is intimated, engage with others without closing down the first passion that is the beginning of all thinking; they alone manage to deal with others in ways that leave them free to be whatever they will become. In contrast, Cartesian dualists – most notably practitioners of modern science, including some anthropologists – are said both to be closed to wonder and to close down wonder (Evens 2008: 223; Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007: 1; Ingold 2011: 74–75; cf. Scott 2013a). By means of analysis, theory, and classification, they allegedly seek to banish wonder and contain all beings in fixed, controllable, predictable, categories and relations. Thus, the supposed presence or absence of an affect – a particular modality of wonder – becomes a kind of litmus test for evaluating the relative moral merits of various possible ontologies. But the people of Arosi cause me to wonder about this. ‘Je est un autre’3 I first began wondering about wonder in response to the way some Arosi experience various phenomena they say may be signs that their island – Makira in the south-east Solomons – constitutes and conceals a marvellous power. In Arosi discourses, a kind of canon of key images, elements of custom, and alleged incidents have become the chief indices of this power, although it is also said to pervade all things truly autochthonous to Makira. Among these chief indices are, for example, the legendary creatures known as kakamora, dwarf-like beings said to be uniquely autochthonous to Makira and to possess extraordinary capabilities: the powers of invisibility and speed amounting to teleportation, prescience and telepathy-like insight into moral and ontological states, keen senses and amazing physical strength. On another level, stories often repeated as possible evidence that there is something mysterious and special about Makira include accounts of how Queen Elizabeth II, when visiting Solomon Islands as part of a royal tour of the Pacific following the 1974 New Zealand Commonwealth Games, landed first on Makira upon reaching the Solomons archipelago. Averring that Makira is ostensibly remote, obscure, and of no account, Arosi regard this fact as astonishing and explicable only if Makira exercises some strange influence that either 41

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drew the Queen or about which the Queen, by esoteric royal means, knew and to which she paid tacit homage through her choice of initial port of call. By a similar logic, they find it perplexingly improbable that Solomon S. Mamaloni (1943–2000) – not only a Makiran, but a man from Arosi – became one of the most famous and successful politicians in Solomon Islands, serving as the first Chief Minister prior to independence in 1978, Prime Minister of three governments, and leader of the opposition for many years. Only by virtue of some normally dormant but occasionally active Makiran force, some Arosi speculate, could Mamaloni have risen to such positions of authority and consequence. I could list many other traditions and events that Arosi cite as examples of ha‘abu‘oahu – ‘amazing things’, ‘wonders’, ‘miracles’ – about their island, but the most totalising and semantically revealing of these is what they call bahai nai ano, ‘the underground’. This phrase refers to the idea that, inside Makira, there is a secret subterranean urban-military complex of superordinary technological capability and wealth. According to a dialogic complex of folkloric traditions, stories, rumours, and eyewitness claims, this underground realm serves as the base for a fabulous army that works with and derives its superhuman powers from the autochthonous kakamora. Together, moreover, the army and the kakamora preserve the original language and custom of Makira, which if restored above ground would bring peace and prosperity. Prophecies that this will one day occur are intrinsic, some Arosi say, to a variety of geophysical features and place names on the island. Among these are a constellation of limestone formations, names, and associated folktales concentrated at the north-west end of the island and known collectively as the ‘Seven Wonders of Makira’. Interpreted in tandem with biblical prophecies, these seven wonders foretell that the army will eventually transform the island, reintroducing true Makiran language and custom, unlocking all manner of stored-up resources and riches, and fulfilling the destiny of Makira to become the dominant power in the region or even the place where the end times will erupt. Some Arosi further speculate that Mamaloni owed his political successes to the covert support of the underground. Giving credence to a widespread conspiracy theory that Mamaloni falsified his own death in January 2000, they suggest that he is now in some way leading or assisting the army as it prepares to initiate these changes. And virtually all Arosi avidly repeat reports of unidentified air and sea vehicles said to appear and disappear around their island. These sightings, they are open to considering, may be evidence that the underground army is keeping Makira under surveillance. The purpose of this vigilance, they hope, is to protect the island and, in particular, to repel attacks by people from Malaita – a category Arosi tend to perceive as pre-colonial enemies and as the instigators of a period of civil conflict

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around the turn of the millennium that chiefly affected the national capital on Guadalcanal. When I first encountered them in 2003 and again in 2006, what was most palpable to me in these and other Arosi discourses was the will to be a wonder – to collect accounts of wonders as revelations that Makira is a wonder and that Makirans exist both in and as this wondrous Makiran being. I want to suggest that this Arosi experience of wonder is an example of what I will call the Wonder of Identity. The Wonder of Identity, I want further to suggest, correlates with intimations – whether thrilling or terrifying – of identity of being with a monad at any scale. In the Arosi case, the monad in question is Makira, which Arosi are experiencing as divulging itself to them – chiefly, though not exclusively, through manifestations of the underground – and calling them to rediscover and actualise the powers of their true Makiran selves. For Arosi, the ‘I’ that, as Rimbaud put it, ‘is another self’ is the island. But this true ‘I’, Arosi discourses imply, has been occluded by a history of mixing with people from other islands and the loss of authentic Makiran custom. There appears to be a widespread assumption, however, that all ‘true’ Makirans – that is, members of the putatively autochthonous Makiran matrilineages – can nevertheless access and revitalise the power of their core Makiran ontology. In such ‘real’ or true Makirans, many of my consultants would say, the submerged but not lost force of original Makiran custom innately expresses itself, causing them to be outwardly quiet, gentle, and generous, but also endowed with an inner fortitude that will show out – sometimes in astonishing and fearful ways – if others try to abuse them. They are, as one man put it, ‘soft as wool but strong as iron’. In a sense, then, true Makirans are icons of their island; they seem small, weak, and unassuming but, like the island, they conceal a hidden force within. For some Arosi, this Wonder of Identity is inspiring an orientation to the island I have previously analysed as kastom mysticism (Scott 2011). Kastom mystics actively seek to close the gap of imperfection between themselves and the island through disciplines aimed at conforming their own image to the image of the island. This typically takes the form of drives to research and revive customary practices and calls to purify Makira of foreign ways and even people. And for a few uncommonly devoted kastom mystics this can also involve plans or efforts to contact agents from the underground – aspirations motivated by a desire, like that of Mallarmé’s Hérodiade, to gaze upon themselves as mirrored in the underground and achieve the splendid isolation of a parthenogenic whole (cf. Weinfield 1994: 25–37, 168–179; Williams 1970: 58–66). Elsewhere I have considered the many causes of this Arosi will to be a wonder, which clearly pertains to a long history of geopolitical 43

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definition, insular stereotyping, and marginalisation, first under colonial rule and now in the context of a troubled nation-state (Scott 2012). Here, however, my focus is on wonder per se and what, if anything consistent or general, it may index in relation to ontology. The question to be explored is: Might it be the case that, wherever there is a strong or intensified mood of wonder – any kind of wonder – this may be a clue that received ontological assumptions are in crisis and undergoing processes of transformation? ‘[W]onder strikes’, writes philosopher of religion Mary-Jane Rubenstein (2008: 4), ‘when something that seemed reasonable and self-evident becomes strange and insupportable’. Playing on the possible etymological relationship between the English words ‘wonder’ and ‘wound’, she elaborates that wonder responds to ‘a destabilizing and unassimilable interruption in the ordinary course of things, an uncanny opening, rift, or wound in the everyday’ (2008: 10). What shows out from this wound is an unsuspected reality that promises – or threatens – to rupture and reconfigure all previously recognised categories. Wonder arises from experiences that, in the words of philosopher Jerome A. Miller, ‘are charged with ontological significance’, because they ‘transform our knowledge of what is by awakening us to realities of which we would otherwise be oblivious’ (Miller 1992: xii). I suspect that the wonder I have described as prevalent among Arosi today is accompanying just such an ontological transformation. This transformation could be described as an upward shift in scale at the level of fundamental root categories rather than a total cosmological paradigm shift, however. It constitutes the reconfiguring of a poly-ontological cosmology from a plurality of monadic matrilineally defined categories to a plurality of monadic insular categories. Arosi poly-ontology already assumes a global scale, envisioned as the aggregate of matrilineally reproduced but unchanging core essences extending all over the world through the movements of women (Scott 2007: 291). What is changing, therefore, is not the outer limit of the cosmological frame but the nature and scale of its constitutive monads. The received categories of Arosi cosmology have long been a plurality of independently arising and matrilineally reproduced continuities. Although these categories must come into exogamous relationship in order to reproduce themselves, Arosi maintain that this procreative mixing of substances is transient and that their matrilineal categories extend through women as pure and unbroken umbilical cords (Scott 2007: 141–143). Historical and comparative ethnographic data furthermore suggest that pre-colonial Arosi posited that death disarticulates people from all interlineage relations and returns them to these discrete categorical essences (Scott 2007: 194–196, 290).

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Theorists of nondualism have critiqued monism on the grounds that it precludes relationship; if everything at a particular scale is fundamentally one, the concept of relationship within that scale becomes meaningless (e.g. Evens 2008: xx, 1–2; Strathern 2004: 52–53; Viveiros de Castro 2010: 223–225). Apparently without finding this possibility a problem, Arosi state unequivocally that they are ‘not related’ to other members of their own matrilineages as they are, through practices such as marriage or adoption, to members of other matrilineages. Rather, the members of a matrilineage – both the living and the dead – are, Arosi emphasise, ‘just one’ (Scott 2007: 141–143, 194). Arguably, therefore, there has always been scope for the Wonder of Identity in Arosi poly-ontology, and in fact Arosi accounts of how their matrilineages came to settle in their putatively unique ancestral territories could be analysed as accounts of how previous generations encountered manifestations – both marvellous and awful – of their respective ontological categories. Through encounters with various powers – ancestors and other agents in the land, including animals, things, and the effects of things – they divined their own powers and natures and innovated lineage-specific customs: place-­specific prescriptions and taboos, personal names, conventions for rapport with specific ancestors, methods of healing, figural designs, etc. These experiences showed each matrilineage how to be its category, what was proper to it, and how to govern its relations with people from other categories living in its land. Arosi today are, I suggest, especially open to new experiences of the Wonder of Identity owing to a variety of changes rooted in colonial history, but culminating since the turn of the millennium in civil violence that is hardening already incipient ethnicised insular categories in Solomon Islands. In this context, Arosi are attuned, not only to their ancestral territories, but also to their island as a whole in unprecedented and, to them, perplexing ways. Virtually anything – earthquakes, porpoise beachings, a strange light at night, and all the lore associated with the underground – can give them an uncanny feeling about their island. They are in a mood to discover that the island is trying to tell them something about themselves, to open up for them new possible selves. For some, especially those most attuned to receive messages from the underground, the island is suggesting that the ontological configuration of the world is other than what past wonders had led them to presuppose. The weird manifestations of the underground are opening a wound in their reality through which the island as underlying unity is showing out. And this new wondrous disclosure is threatening to rupture the cellular nature of their matrilineal categories, suggesting the possible repositioning of ­matrilineal difference to a real but relatively superficial level while

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pushing the boundaries of autonomous difference to the interface with other islands, especially Malaita – Makira’s nearest neighbour. I acknowledge that it might be possible for me to re-analyse my ­ethnography to support a reading of Arosi ontology as nondualist. I could argue that Arosi actually inhabit a cosmos in which – by reason of aspects of their own discursive and non-discursive practices to which they have tended to turn a blind eye – their matrilineally reproduced categories should be modelled as always having been different but intrinsically pre-connected. Even where Arosi have appeared to deny that the island of Makira constitutes a link among their autochthonous categories, I could argue, the current obtrusion of this possibility on some people’s consciousnesses is proof that it was always so. And I could further assert that, by logical extension, this kind of interpenetrating multiplicity is equally implied at every scale of the cosmos. With apologies to Bruno Latour – I could write a book about Arosi entitled They Have Never Been Poly-ontological. But I would want to make it clear that such a re-­analysis would not only go beyond – as my representations of poly-ontology already do – but would also, in my present judgement, be in tension with Arosi experiences and understandings of their ontology. Such a re-­ analysis would not, therefore, contribute to the ethnographic record of an unequivocally nondualist indigenous ‘Rest’ now increasingly contrasted with the Cartesian ‘West’. It might even infringe on Arosi ontological self-determination. I also recognise that, if I were to take up the ethical agenda evident in some versions of the theoretical meta-cosmology of nondualism, I might be inclined to find Arosi poly-ontology flawed on at least two counts. First, I might argue that what I am calling the Wonder of Identity tends, at any monadic scale, to close down wonder by seeking to become one with it, to master as self that which at first appears as wondrous other (cf. Evens 2008: 280–283; Rubenstein 2008: 12–17, 187–190; Viveiros de Castro 2004b: 16). In the context of a universal macrocosmic monism, this involves a will to merge with all that is, leaving nothing unknown or unknowable, no source of unassimilated ongoing wonder outside the self as ultimate wonder. Such wonder, I might conclude, is only pseudo-wonder, the response of one who is, in fact, fleeing from the existential anxiety of true wonder in order to secure his or her own being as being (cf. Miller 1992: 16–23) – in order to be a wonder as being itself. Analogously, I might object that, at the microcosmic scale of any one monad within a poly-ontology, the Wonder of Identity is about seeking to secure one’s categorical being as the best or dominant category of being among many. This, in turn, points to a second line of possible objection. Polyontology admits not only the Wonder of Identity but also what I will term the Wonder of Plurality, the wonder that arises from encounter

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with the wholly other. Philosophers have argued that wonder, as a pre-judgemental emotion, comprises both pleasurable astonishment and fearful anxiety (Rubenstein 2008: 9–12), and this Wonder of Plurality – perhaps more so than the Wonder of Identity – is apt to be experienced negatively as dread or horror. This is because radical heterogeneity presents the possibility that something else may be better or true being, rendering one’s own being inferior or even nothingness (Miller 1992: 42, 136–141). And arguably, Arosi poly-ontology is fraught with an ambivalent Wonder of Plurality. At the scale of matrilineal poly-ontology, some Arosi attitudes and narratives – especially lineage origin myths – do seem to suggest that other matrilineal categories are a necessary evil for the propagation of one’s own; their impact is represented as tending to be violent or usurping. There is a sense in which every exogamous Arosi union is the exploitative consumption of one matrilineage by another. Similarly, at the scale of insular poly-ontology, some Arosi now evince a definite isolationism that would refuse relationship with other ethnicised island categories as ontologically corrupting as well as potentially politically subordinating owing to the risk of land loss to in-marrying outsiders (Scott 2012). At both scales there are discernible fantasies of the self-generating self-sustaining monad. But does nondualism really avoid or overcome these potential ethical pitfalls? I conclude by voicing some reservations and offering some notes towards a less evaluative, more commodious, approach to wonder. Notes towards an anthropology of wonder It is perhaps unnecessary to suggest that the claims sometimes made for the ethical advantages of a nondualist cosmology may be overstated. To that effect, however, it may be instructive to consider the ways in which the modalities of wonder that nondualism allegedly keeps open can approach the limits of, and begin to approximate, either the Wonder of Identity or the Wonder of Plurality. On the one hand, the openness ascribed to nondualists can amount to what I will term the Wonder of Flux and can be difficult at times to distinguish from the Wonder of Identity. Although nondualism precludes the possibility of absolute unity, nevertheless a boundless flux becomes an anti-state in which all quasi-entities inhere as dynamic transitional becoming; all quasi-entities are equally being as mutability. Accordingly, the wonder that Ingold (2011: 74), for example, says ‘comes from riding the crest of the world’s continued birth’ can sound a lot like a Dionysian desire to merge with elemental being, to become – like Rimbaud’s ‘Drunken Boat’ (1967: 114–121) – penetrated and scattered by an ‘ocean of materials’ (Ingold 2011: 24). By letting go of one’s own entitative 47

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being, one becomes, not only open to wonder, but assimilated to wonder itself – wonder as ecstatic becoming, as infinite open inter-morphism. But how – and why – does one live ethically in amoral flux, in a cosmos with only porous and shifting boundaries? What may look like violence to a Cartesian dualist (or other poly-ontologists) may be said to be, for a nondualist, the ritual enactment of the interpenetrating condition of all bodies and forms (cf. Povinelli 2002: 134–149; Tamisari 1998). By what nondualist criteria, then, can any open, vulnerable, and ephemeral form violate another? On the other hand, precisely in order to resist the nihilistic undertow of indeterminate flux, some theorists of nondualism emphasise that, despite interdependence and change, difference predominates and is the true source of wonder and ethical agency. Accordingly, they are pursuing and enjoining what I will call the Wonder of Alterity, a response of self-sacrificial reverence towards the other, as other, and as sine qua non to any self. Perhaps not surprisingly, however, the Wonder of Alterity can begin to resemble the Wonder of Plurality in its effects. Thus, for example, the need to claim for one’s own particular form some margin of surplus over others can still show out. Human beings, according to Evens, are ‘peculiarly representative of the fundamentally ambiguous nature of reality’ (2008: 294). As the only beings for whom others constitute a demand for responsible and creative choice, humans are the paragon – not just of animals – but of ambiguity qua being. They are what being most fundamentally is ‘in a painfully acute but wonderful form’ (Evens 2008: 294). And in this wonderful form, he says, they almost ‘create themselves’ (2008: 294). At the same time, the Wonder of Alterity can seem to urge a self-suspension before the other that looks a lot like the refusal of relationship found where the Wonder of Plurality seeks parthenogenic purity. Deference to the other, Holbraad seems to suggest, mandates that the nondualist self – especially the nondualist anthropologist – must not presume to represent the other (Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007: 11–12; Holbraad 2009: 84–85). Moreover, whereas encounter with the other should transform the anthropologist’s ideas, drawing new concepts into being out of his or her intrinsic multiplicity, the birth and elaboration of these concepts in ethnographic writing have no ontological effect, according to Holbraad, on the anthropologist’s consultants in the field (2012: 256–259). Open to the transforming impact of others, but thereby moved to a creativity that leaves no imprint on others in return, the nondualist self can become inadvertently aloof. Situated at best in the generative interface between incommensurable perspectives, it acquires a quasi-monadic body. And as that strange and wonderful form, it becomes an almost god-like conceiver of new worlds (cf. Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007: 10–16; Holbraad 2009: 82). 48

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In pointing out that nondualist meta-cosmologists sometimes evince a will to be a wonder – to be wonder itself as the flux of becoming and thus achieve identity of being with (motile) Truth – my aim is not to debunk or sweep away their projects. To the contrary, I struggle – no doubt imperfectly – to understand their projects because I find them important and compelling, perhaps precisely because they are charged with a passionate pursuit of wonder and an earnest desire to affirm that beings and becoming(s) are wonderful. That said, however, I find myself troubled by a sense that these projects may unintentionally short-circuit wondering about wonder, especially wondering about the kind of wonder I have suggested some Arosi are experiencing today – or, indeed, any expression of wonder that might index one form or another of essentialist ontology. The asymmetry built into nondualism tends not only to encompass entities hierarchically within a priori relations but also to discourage dualistic thinking in anthropology and to doubt the existence of indigenous non-Western essentialisms (cf. Scott 2013b). From this anti-essentialist perspective, I am in the wrong, ethically and methodologically, in at least two ways. I am, it may be suspected, imposing my own pluralist assumptions on Arosi under the name of poly-ontology, and the comparative study of wonder I am pursuing amounts to a conservative regression to typology, the hallmark of Cartesianism and its classificatory imperative. By re-thinking relations, however, theorists of nondualism have also developed the resources for re-thinking entities in ways that could re-balance the ontological assumptions of anthropological meta-cosmology and support the kind of study of wonder I envisage. The concept of intrinsic relations or multiplicity – the idea that entities are relational internally as well as externally – is an indispensable insight disparately argued and collectively established within anthropology, chiefly by Wagner, Strathern, Latour, and Viveiros de Castro. Yet this insight has prompted an unwarranted assumption responsible for the theoretical asymmetry between relations and entities that I have found problematic since I first began working with Arosi. Briefly put, the insight that entities are intrinsic relations has been taken to imply that intra-entity relations automatically constitute inter-entity connectivity as given, as a ‘whole cloth’ of immanent sociality (Wagner 1991: 166). Intensive difference has been taken to be synonymous with the encompassment of all ‘apparently non-relational things’ within the web of relations (cf. Pedersen 2012: 64). But even if we recognise that all entities are composed of relations, must we not also acknowledge that all relations presuppose entities (cf. Harman 2011)? If it is impossible to arrive at the prime entity that is not constituted by relations, it is equally impossible to arrive at the prime 49

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relation that is not constituted by entities. And even if we assume that every entity in this infinite regress contains the same plenitude of intrinsic relations, by what reason must we likewise assume that such intrinsic multiplicity precludes the simultaneous assertion of a priori autonomy at every scale (cf. Bryant 2011)? Indeed, the greater the degree of fractality, the greater the capacity of every entity for intrinsic self-sufficiency would seem to be. Who, then, is to decide which came first, the plurality of intrinsically complete iterations of infinite potential (a particle theory of multiplicity) or the boundless fluid substrate of intensive self-difference (a wave theory of multiplicity)? Morten Pedersen has already asked ‘what might come after the relation?’ (2012: 60). By this I take him to be asking what will succeed the nondualist meta-cosmology in anthropological theory? My answer would be that we need a meta-cosmology with double vision, one able to see a seamless field of immanent relations with one eye, but also able to see real gaps between given autonomous multiplicites with the other, allowing neither to encompass the other hierarchically as ‘transcendental and therefore non-annullable condition’ (Viveiros de Castro 2010: 228–229). Only such a double-sighted meta-cosmology will be able to treat relations and entities as fully coeval and equally available as viable premises for both anthropological practice and indigenous ontology. Attempting, therefore, to operate with this strabismic outlook (alternately a radical and a partial duality) I propose – as an integral aspect of the anthropology of ontology – an anthropology of wonder that would remain open to the Wonder of Identity among Arosi, whatever faults a nondualist eye might find in it. The anthropology of wonder I have in mind would suspend the impulse to sort true wonder from pseudo-wonder or to claim for any one ontology a capacity for openness to wonder. It would recognise that there may be many modalities of wonder (I have identified four here, and I am sure that there are more), and it would follow any kind of wonderer to see where wonder takes people, or to what lengths people will go to find it. It would morph and jump between reinventing wonder through encounter with the wondrous wonder of others and constructing a typology of wonder. It would investigate whether wonder, in all its forms, may be an indicator that something ontological is at stake in any given situation and would ask what wonder – including the recent efflorescence of academic writing about it (e.g. Bynum 1997; Daston and Park 2001; Greenblatt 1991; Kosky 2013; Rubenstein 2008; Vasalou 2012) – may reveal about possible ontological configurations and their historical transformations. If wonder is, indeed, the primal passion that precedes moral judgement, let us wonder about wonder in that spirit.

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Notes 1 2

3

Elsewhere I refer to this ontology as ‘relational nondualism’ (Scott 2013a). Latour (1993: 55–59) identifies Kant rather than Descartes as the figure who gave modern ontology its ‘canonical formulation’ in terms of a ‘yawning gap’ between the human subject and things in themselves. Viveiros de Castro (2004a) describes Euro-American forms of dualism as variously Cartesian or Kantian. Other terms for this essentialist ontology include: representationism (Holbraad 2012) and holism (Abramson and Holbraad, Introduction, this volume). This seemingly ungrammatical phrase is from Rimbaud’s letter to Paul Demeny of 15 May 1871, known as the Lettre du Voyant (Rimbaud 1967: 304–305). Fowlie (1960: 49) offers the translation: ‘I is another self’.

References Bryant, Levi. 2011. The Democracy of Objects. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. Bynum, Caroline Walker. 1997. Presidential address: wonder. American Historical Review 102(1): 1–26. Clammer, John, Sylvie Poirier, and Eric Schwimmer (eds) 2004. Figured Worlds: Ontological Obstacles in Intercultural Relations. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Clark, Nigel. 2000. ‘Botanizing on the asphalt’? The complex life of cosmopolitan bodies. Body and Society 6(3–4): 12–33. Daston, Lorraine and Katherine Park. 2001. Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150– 1750. New York: Zone Books. De Landa, Manuel. 1997. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. New York: Zone Books. Descartes, René. 1989 [1649]. Les passions de l’âme (The Passions of the Soul). Trans. Stephen H. Voss. Bloomington, IN: Hackett. Descola, Philippe. 2008. Who Owns Nature? La Vie des idées, 21 January 2008, www.booksandideas.net/Who-owns-nature.html, accessed 1 Ocobter 2013. Evens, T.M.S. 2008. Anthropology as Ethics: Nondualism and the Conduct of Sacrifice. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Fowlie, Wallace. 1960. Age of Surrealism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Greenblatt, Stephen. 1991. Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Harman, Graham. 2011. The Quadruple Object. Winchester: Zero Books. Henare, Amiria, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell. 2007. Introduction: thinking through things. In Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell (eds), Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically. London: Routledge. Pp. 1–31. Hepburn, R.W. 1984. ‘Wonder’ and Other Essays: Eight Studies in Aesthetics and Neighbouring Fields. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 51

Horizons of cosmological wonder Hoffmeyer, Jesper (ed.) 2008. A Legacy for Living Systems: Gregory Bateson as Precursor to Biosemiotics. New York: Springer. Holbraad, Martin. 2009. Ontography and alterity: defining anthropological truth. Social Analysis 53(2): 80–93. —— 2012. Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Holbraad, Martin and Morten Axel Pedersen. 2009. Planet M: the intense abstraction of Marilyn Strathern. Anthropological Theory 9(4): 371–394. Holbraad, Martin and Rane Willerslev. 2007. Transcendental perspectivism: anonymous viewpoints from Inner Asia. Inner Asia 9(2): 329–345. Ingold, Tim. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. —— 2011. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London: Routledge. Irigaray, Luce. 1993. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. London: University of California Press. Kosky, Jeffrey L. 2013. Arts of Wonder: Enchanting Secularity – Walter De Maria, Diller + Scofidio, James Turrell, Andy Goldsworthy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —— 2009. Perspectivism: ‘type’ or ‘bomb’? Anthropology Today 25(2): 1–2. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1979. Claude Lévi-Strauss reconsiders: from Rousseau to Burke, interview by Jean-Marie Benoist. Encounter 53 (July): 19–26. Masters, Judith C. 1995. rEvolutionary theory: reinventing our origin myths. In Lynda Birke and Ruth Hubbard (eds), Reinventing Biology: Respect for Life and the Creation of Knowledge. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Pp. 173–187. Mead, Margaret. 1954. Introduction: the restoration of wonder. In Margaret Mead and Nicolas Calas (eds), Primitive Heritage: An Anthropological Anthology. London: Victor Gollancz. Pp. xvii–xxiv. Miller, Jerome A. 1992. In The Throe of Wonder: Intimations of the Sacred in a PostModern World. New York: State University of New York Press. Nadasdy, Paul. 2007. The gift in the animal: the ontology of hunting and human-animal sociality. American Ethnologist 34(1): 25–43. Pedersen, Morten Axel. 2011. Not Quite Shamans: Spirit Worlds and Political Lives in Northern Mongolia. London: Cornell University Press. —— 2012. The task of anthropology is to invent relations: for the motion. Critique of Anthropology 32(1): 59–65. Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2002. The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism. London: Duke University Press. Rimbaud, Arthur. 1967. Complete Works, Selected Letters. Trans. Wallace Fowlie. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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To be a wonder Ronkin, Noa. 2009. Theravāda metaphysics and ontology. In William Edelglass and Jay L. Garfield (eds), Buddhist Philosophy: Essential Readings. New York: Oxford University Press. Pp. 13–25. Rose, Deborah Bird. 2011. Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Rubenstein, Mary-Jane. 2008. Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe. New York: Columbia University Press. —— 2012. Cosmic singularities: on the nothing and the sovereign. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 80(2): 485–517. Scott, Michael W. 2005. Hybridity, vacuity, and blockage: visions of chaos from anthropological theory, Island Melanesia, and Central Africa. Comparative Studies in Society and History 47(1): 190–216. —— 2007. The Severed Snake: Matrilineages, Making Place, and a Melanesian Christianity in Southeast Solomon Islands. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press. —— 2011. The Makiran underground army: kastom mysticism and ontology politics in southeast Solomon Islands. In Edvard Hviding and Knut M. Rio (eds), Made in Oceania: Cultural Heritage and the State in the Pacific. Wantage, Oxon: Sean Kingston Publishing. Pp. 195–222. —— 2012. The matter of Makira: colonialism, competition, and the production of gendered peoples in contemporary Solomon Islands and medieval Britain. History and Anthropology 23(1): 115–148. —— 2013a. The anthropology of ontology (religious science?). Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 19(4): 859–872. —— 2013b. Steps to a methodological nondualism. In Soumhya Venkatesan, Keir Martin, Michael W. Scott et al., The group for debates in anthropological theory (GDAT), the University of Manchester: the 2011 annual debate – nondualism is philosophy not ethnography. Critique of Anthropology 33(3): 300–360, pp. 303–308, 356. Strathern, Marilyn. 1992. Reproducing the Future: Anthropology, Kinship and New Reproductive Technologies. Manchester: Manchester University Press. —— 2004. Partial Connections. Updated Edition. Oxford: Altamira Press. Tamisari, Franca. 1998. Body, vision and movement: in the footprints of the ancestors. Oceania 68(4): 249–270. Urry, John. 2006. Complexity. Theory, Culture and Society 23(2–3): 111–117. Vasalou, Sophia (ed.) 2012. Practices of Wonder: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives. Eugene, OR: Pickwick. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2003. And. Manchester Papers in Social Anthropology, 7. Manchester: Department of Social Anthropology. —— 2004a. Exchanging perspectives: the transformation of objects into subjects in Amerindian ontologies. Common Knowledge 10(3): 463–484. —— 2004b. Perspectival anthropology and the method of controlled equivocation. Tipití 2(1): 3–22. —— 2007. The crystal forest: notes on the ontology of Amazonian spirits. Inner Asia 9(2): 153–172.

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Horizons of cosmological wonder —— 2010. Intensive filiation and demonic alliance. In Casper Bruun and Kjetil Rödje (eds), Deleuzian Intersections: Science, Technology, Anthropology. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Pp. 219–253. Wagner, Roy. 1991. The Fractal Person. In Maurice Godelier and Marilyn Strathern (eds), Big Men and Great Men: Personifications of Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 159–173. Weinfield, Henry (translator and commentator). 1994. The Collected Poems of Stéphane Mallarmé. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Willerslev, Rane. 2007. Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood Among the Siberian Yukaghirs. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Williams, Thomas A. 1970. Mallarmé and the Language of Mysticism. Atlanta, GA: University of Georgia Press.

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2 A new man: the cosmological horizons of development, curses, and personhood in Vanuatu Knut Rio and Annelin Eriksen

The ‘nature of the white man’ is an important and complex problem not only per se but also because certain attributes of the European must enter the amalgam that will be the new man. (Burridge 1960: 36)

Introduction This chapter1 draws upon an anthropology that deals with ritual polities and the capacitating character of cosmology in relation to politics (Bloch 1986; Harrison 1990; Kapferer 1997; Sahlins 1985). We view ritual and cosmology as offering certain possible structures of power, rank, and social mobility – that in turn enable political systems. In Melanesia, many anthropologists have documented how different kinds of ritual polities delegate rank and status to clans or lineages based on their position in the ritual and/or totemic system (Harrison 1990; Iteanu 1990; Leenhardt 1979; Munn 1986; Telban 1998; Wagner 1986). Moreover, it has been demonstrated that political organisation and social structures are enabled by cosmology in certain ways in this region, and within certain given limitations. As pointed out by Harrison for Papua New Guinea (PNG), ‘the basic units of the political system must be kingroups, and their politico-ritual relations must lie somewhere along a spectrum from ascribed inequality to equality’ (1990: 11). In a similar vein Scott reports from the Solomon Islands: ‘The matrilineages are the bearers of unique autochthonous essences irrevocably anchored in exclusive ancestral territories’ (Scott 2005: 108). This is a world where

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ritual statuses regulate relations between lineage places and control the flow and growth of the cosmos (see also Young 1971, Weiner 1976). In relation to this crucial relation between lineages, ritual statuses and the ancestral realm, a key observation has been that Melanesians do not distinguish society from cosmos (de Coppet and Iteanu 1995) or substances from relations (Iteanu 1990). Hence, even though exchange and marriage is often highlighted as central for social processes in Melanesia, we need to remember that they are all part of a larger occupation with life, land and growth; i.e. ‘world-making’ in a wider sense. If we add the occupation with primordial diversity and importance of geopolitical situatedness, we understand better what these societies are cosmologically concerned with. In this chapter we shall see how these regional observations become relevant when accounting for how new categories of cosmological importance are being processed, such as the presence of white man and Christianity in the region (see Burridge 1960). Following the advice of Kapferer (1988) and Handelman (2008) we shall thus propose an analysis that gives priority to cosmology – and experiment with what sort of analysis we get if we see cosmology as a motor for social process, instead of vice versa. This implies attributing agency to cosmos, and submitting to the idea that acts and events are internal to cosmological motivations. The recent interest in pluralist cosmologies, i.e. cosmologies that uphold an original plurality instead of unity, based on a differentiating dynamic (see Scott 2007; 2008; Chapter 1 this volume), could be crucial for understanding the great attention and energy that goes into handling the category of ‘White Man’ in the region of Melanesia (see Bashkow 2006; Connoly and Anderson 1987; Lattas 2010; Schieffelin and Crittendenden 1991). Within this comparative framework we shall see how the unitary concept of the Christian Man can be conceived in a Vanuatu pluralist cosmology and how he is in a crucial way central to the political process of re-building society. Placing people in a pluralist cosmology Here we describe the dynamic of Christian belief within the cosmological grounding of Ambrym islanders. We have experienced Ambrym society as a ritual polity, although this has received little explicit attention in the existing literature (see, however, Bonnemaison 1996; Layard 1934; Lindstrom 1990; Patterson 1981). By this we mean that it is ritual positioning, ranks and roles that order kinship and marriage, the agricultural cycle and wider aspects of social life. The main governing sphere of this ritual polity is the cycle of yams, and each kin group and place has delegated powers within this cycle. The people of one particular place, for instance, hold the ritual authority to read the position of the moon, 56

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winds, and plants in blossom to initiate the first ritual yam planting each year, and other villages have to follow its lead (see Rio 2007: 104–113). This ritual division of labour again relates to a mythical corpus of knowledge concerning the often interrelated origins of all the kin-groups, all living creatures, access to the physical landscape and different aspects of Ambrym custom. Along with ordering the agricultural cycle, a related important concern for the ritual polity is to produce and nurture new creations. This is of ongoing relevance when for instance incorporating new designs into ritual art or allowing for new ceremonial elements, but perhaps even more potently so in relation to political innovations. Therefore, accounts about the primordial origins of the Ambrym Man and of the volcano that created his lands are incorporated by some Ambrym islanders into their plan to set up a cooperative nation-like structure, which we shall come back to later in this chapter. As an example of what we see as a pluralist cosmology we will first look closer at a myth told by our friend; let us call him Jimmy, who is a main proponent for these recent development initiatives on Ambrym. In this story we are told that the people of his village originated from an oak tree. The big trunk of the tree stood upright, like a woman with breasts, and children came out of the roots of the tree. They were breastfed from the tree, and as they got bigger they climbed the oak tree in order to sleep as the small birds did. They soon made bows and arrows in order to hunt the game in the treetops. Much later, God, or Barkolkol the creator of man, depending on which version of the story one hears, came to populate the villages with the first human being. But when he arrived in this village, he realised that the place was already populated. He told them: ‘I am creating men and I am creating villages, but you are already here. You must be spirits of the place’. He then continued on his journey, to put people in other places. The myth of the original people goes on in many directions, but another significant event for Jimmy’s version was when his ancestors discovered the volcano in their garden of bananas: The first young man of the place married a woman and they had three children, all boys. They made a garden and they planted bananas. One evening after dark, they saw a light down in the place where they had planted the bananas, and they kept watching the light in the same place every night for three or four nights, until one night they decided that they should go down to have a look at it. They could see then that it was really fire that stuck to the banana plant. The next morning they came back to the garden to dig out the fire plant. They were afraid of it and they dug it out, not only the stump of it, but also its roots and everything. They brought it back to the village and planted it behind their houses where they kept their rubbish. 57

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That night they could not sleep because the fire was making a loud noise. The noise came from the fire digging itself down into the ground. It was breaking the ground and throwing stones out of the hole it was making. This went on for some days, until the villagers decided that it was unbearable and they could not have it in their village. They dug it out again and moved it further uphill, to a more remote garden area. Once placed there it dug another hole for itself, this time even bigger. But because of the continuing noise they had to remove it again, even further away. They decided that this time they would place it as far away from people as they possibly could on Ambrym Island, so they agreed to place it in the middle of the island. They brought it with them and placed it where it is today, the Marum Feang volcano. Then the villagers returned home and cleaned up the place that had been messed up by the fire. All the red stones that the fire had thrown out were again buried. Still today there are stones lying around the old place of the former ceremonial ground. If people walk around there carelessly or if pigs dig up some of these stones, the Marum volcano makes loud noises, and the right men of the place have to bury them again. This story has several cosmological implications and lays the foundation for contemporary political processes. First, we note how the world of the islands is infinite, and in these kinds of myths Ambrym Island lies there as a primordial kind of being that variously conceals or reveals its inhabitants. In this story of cosmo-genesis different versions of man appear when they grow out of some spot in the landscape; such as a root of a tree or a fruit, or he is born from other species of beings. This is what Scott calls ‘poly-ontology’ for the case of Makira Island of the Solomon Islands (Scott 2005; 2007), and which we see as crucial to the pluralist cosmology of Austronesian-speaking peoples. A poly-ontology is ‘any cosmology that posits two or more fundamental and independently arising categories of being’ (Scott 2007: 12). In other words; a worldview wherein there is not only one, but many different origins, and many different kinds of human beings accordingly. It is an important dimension of this pluralist cosmology that the parts come into being before the whole, instead of parts being ranked or organised from the view of a hierarchical totality. This is in contrast to a hierarchical cosmology such as the one outlined by Dumont (1980) for the Hindu world; where every creation finds its place according to a ranked axis of purity and impurity as a given totality. It is also different from myths or stories of genesis in Papua New Guinea, such as among the Iqwaye described by Mimica (1988) where the social world of man is at one with, and contained inside, the cosmic body of the creator deity. As argued by Handelman (Chapter 4 this volume) there is a difference between these cosmologies that hold the world within itself as a totality, and cosmologies that postulate the

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world as a distributed plurality. One could argue that the cosmology of modern science and Christianity, with its vision of Big Bang or the book of Genesis of the Bible as alternative versions of cosmo-genesis, stands in an intermediary position since it first postulates a unitary start of the world, but this is followed by a distribution and infinite spread of its elements into an unknown chaos. The narrative of the tower of Babel is perhaps the prototypic example; God punished human pride by disrupting the original unity, causing confusion of languages, and the result is the present multiplicity. A key issue for distinguishing cosmological traditions is their understanding of new creations or beings. At one end of the spectrum the Iqwaye in Mimica’s analysis count every being or creation as part of the assemblage of the known cosmos; at the other end European scientists only know about a tiny fragment of the universe and continually search into an infinite space, oceans, or organisms for unknown creations. As exemplified in the story from Ambrym this Austronesian world produces and discovers creations that do not have their place defined by a larger structure of being or deity (see also Fox and Sather 1996). It is indeed the idea of differentiation and fragmentation which structures cosmos and thus social life. If the Hindu world is structured by an axis of purity producing an image of a social and cosmological whole, this Ambrym world is structured by mechanisms of differentiation which produce an image of plurality and that is mainly concerned with innovations as ‘good’ additions to the existing world. This led Jolly and Mosko and to argue that there is ‘no single, master value which orchestrates a hierarchical political or ideological organisation, but a complex of multiple oppositions’ (Jolly and Mosko 1994: 12; see also Jolly 1994 for North Vanuatu and Fiji). When the fire of the volcano appears in the Ambrym origin story it does not imply any overarching, godly agency, but emerges in a garden of autochthonous agricultural production. It becomes a significant event that further diversifies the known world, and this is highly valued. Today the first creation of the volcano forms part of this particular lineage’s ritual responsibility during the agricultural season. In this way various lineages hold the key to the ritual arrangements that secure the growth and productivity of gardens, land, and village life, according to their place in the mythico-practical indigenous order of creation. For this particular lineage this means that they can be blamed for the misgivings of the volcano, and every year this becomes an issue as the volcano spews out ashes that destroy crops. The pluralist cosmology thus places different lineages in relation to other lineages, to the Ambrym landscape and to significant mythical events. This is how social relations are organised. The ritual polity, as we have called it, refers to this production of social relations which reflect 59

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the different positions in the pluralist cosmology. For instance, at one point, in the 1950s, when the volcano erupted and forced the south-eastern population of Ambrym to resettle on a different island, the blame for this was put on the lineage which first produced the volcano, and they were also aware of their responsibility. In order to block further eruptions they performed a ritual in their ceremonial ground, i.e. many miles away from the volcano itself. They dug up a skull of one of their ancestors lying in the burial ground. They cleaned it and prepared a special herbal mixture that was smeared into one of the eyes of the skull. They put the skull at the foot of a particular tree in the ceremonial ground (where Barkolkol found the first inhabitants), and then a man stood up to shoot with bow and arrow, pointing at the eye of the skull. He shot straight at the eye and the volcano stopped its eruptions. There are eternal relations between places remote in space, connections that are invisible to the eye, but functioning as concrete, causal inter-connections in the Ambrym ritual polity. Christianity and a new Christian Man However, before we move on to describe in what way such a pluralist cosmology capacitates political processes, we note that a crucial question for a contemporary understanding of what is going on in Melanesia is how Christian values play into Melanesian ritual polities. This is also the question Robbins (2004; 2009) has been seeking to answer. In the ongoing ritual polity of the Urapmin, under the conditions of hierarchical downfall, humiliation, and missionary arrival, they were willing to accept that their ancestors no longer had power, that their land no longer could move them in the right direction. So they cut their anchorage to a world of ancestors, taboos, and ritual communication, and instead built a new ritual foundation around the relation between God and the person in the singular. We can note the similarity to what took place in Hawaii in the 1820s, when the king absolved the system of taboos and converted to Christianity and monogamy (see Daws 1968), and similar processes were in play around 1900 in Vanuatu. After some decades of mission activity, depopulation, and downfall of ritual hierarchy, people started to relocate to new villages, inventing new kinship regulations and exchanging many important rituals of the agricultural cycles for church prayer (see Lindstrom 1990; Eriksen 2008). In our case it is particularly interesting to see how a pluralist cosmology enables the incorporation of elements from a completely different cosmological system, where the idea of the individual is a fundamental and organising value. It is exactly this place of the individual in the cosmological encounter which interests us. How is the idea of this ‘New Christian 60

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Man’ with absolute agency incorporated into an already existing cosmological horizon? As pointed out by Handelman (2008), in the Christian world, agency belongs to an axis between individualised man and God and has no place in the environment outside of this relation. In theory this cancels out the possibility of spirits, animals or land to have agency. But it might also be that the concept of Christian Man is incorporated in other, surprising ways, conditioned by alternative cosmological foundations (Scott 2005: 118). In Vanuatu, as elsewhere across the globalising world, there is at least keen interest in the idea and potentials of this New Man. It has especially become a highly potent concern for many people who are becoming ‘born again’. Numerous Pentecostal movements celebrate the New Man and the New Life as their desired innovation (Eriksen 2009), but not so much as their cultural convention or lived experience. We will here expand on this vision of how the Christian Man and new forms of agency are made sense of and reinvented. Robbins (2004) reports from the Urapmin that much speculation and discussion about the exact form of individual agency is taking place. This tells us that the Urapmin have become very interested in this concept of Man that belongs to the Christian cosmology, and Robbins has established an understanding of how they have begun to interact with this new man. We note also that Hirsch has pointed out that maybe the most important social aspect of colonialism in PNG was that ‘persons devised new ways to be persons’ (Hirsch 2001: 241). This reflects also the concern with a new man in the early descriptions of the cargo cults of the region: a Kanaka can only find himself whole and entire within terms of a synthesis that contains both worlds and is, therefore, larger than either. He must make a new man. (Burridge 1960: 33)

Likewise, the context for this chapter and the case we are about to present is a century of colonial presence and demands for a new type of personhood. First this had to do with discipline in the plantations and keeping to fixed working hours, hygiene and Christian morality. In the period from the early independence movements in the 1960s values of nationhood, local governance, and kastom (customary traditions) had been added. The puzzle for people, however, is often that the right type of person has not yet appeared, as this can be confirmed by the lack of material and spiritual prosperity. For the case of Ambrym Island in Vanuatu, we want to look at how this cosmological construction of New Man works out in what we perceive to be a pluralist cosmology. When the world is not constructed around absolute One-ness and limited agency, but is instead conveying multiple emergences of different kinds of beings, then is a new man a different 61

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kind of possibility. This becomes part of the ontological potential that cosmology offers. A simple point to make here would be that contrary to cosmologies that are closing in on themselves and denying new elements unless they become assimilated or encompassed, pluralist cosmologies continually reach out for new elements in order to renew the world. It is in the new elements, in their beginnings and their groundbreaking appearance, that the cosmology reproduces itself. Reproduction happens through invention, not encompassment (see Wagner 1975). As we see in the origin myth told by Jimmy, men, lineages, places, plants, and species pop up and emerge in co-existence through historical, mythical exchanges. Different versions of man appear and intermarry with other versions and other species. New creations emerge out of the land in random ways, and this gives people their energy to look for new appearances and new possibilities. We believe the New Man of Christianity is also perceived as such a revelation. We will speculate about the moment when New Man is coming to Ambrym, when and where he emerges out of a pluralist cosmology and will be seen and observed as an appearance with new potentials. Lifting the curse of ‘white man’ During our last fieldwork in Vanuatu in 2010 the story about the origin of the volcano that we had recorded in 1996, and its relation to a particular lineage, again became relevant to ongoing events. We learned that our old friend Jimmy from North Ambrym had initiated a new project. He belongs to this genealogy of men who originally transported the fire to its present location in the Marum volcano. Rumours had been spreading about ‘curses’ and Jimmy was now worried. In recent years the idea of ‘curse’ (in Bislama, a Neo-Melanesian language) has been added to magic and sorcery as sources of misfortune. This development is closely connected to recent anniversaries and celebrations of the coming of Christianity, where there has been a focus on the killing of the first missionaries. In the almost daily church workshops rehearsing Bible readings, there has also been much attention to the reason for hardship and poverty among people in Vanuatu (see Eriksen 2012). Increasingly, curses have thus become an explanation for misfortune that cannot immediately be attributed to malevolent magic on someone’s part. Accordingly, traditional medicine or diviners cannot heal, and misfortune has to be remedied in church. Often curses do not apply to individuals as much as to whole communities, such as kinship groups or whole islands. Ambrym Island is a case in point. There was in 2010 a rumour that a curse had been cast over the island and all of its inhabitants. One theory 62

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was that God had placed the curse on the Ambrym population because of the way they had treated ‘white man’ (Europeans; missionaries, planters, and colonial agents) over the years. The initial act causing the curse was that a chief had poisoned a yam and fed it to the first missionary in 1886 (see Rio and Eriksen 2013). This was the start of many antagonistic acts against white settlers on Ambrym. For instance, around 1913 people on Ambrym got together and raised money to engage a lawyer to drive out all white people from the island. This story refers to events that are confirmed in the letters of Edward Jacomb who was practising law in Port Vila at this time (see Jacomb 1914). They paid him a bag of gold coins in order for him to perform his juridical magic on these illegitimate settlers. This contact with the lawyer also happened at the same time as the volcano erupted on the island in 1913. This eruption was seen as orchestrated by a high chief and as targeting the brand new missionary hospital and what was planned to become the capital and biggest town of the New Hebrides. Jimmy pointed out that this anti-white movement has been continuous through the 1980s, when followers of the Vanua’aku Party expelled British and French settlers from their plantations and trading stations, and up until today. Jimmy explained these acts as a form of selfishness, hatefulness, backwardness, and as characteristic of a heathen way of thinking. This also caused the curse, which is the main obstacle to real development on Ambrym. Jimmy is very explicit on how the curse works: it makes it impossible to attract white men, money, and business. The curse works in such a way that Ambrym can never become developed and every project for raising money therefore fails. It implies that all efforts at starting businesses locally are deemed to failure because of internal conflict, that all money will be spent on drinking, and that people cannot work well together. Jimmy has a complex strategy for lifting the curse and turning the development in a positive direction. He has for a long time been compiling the customary knowledge of Ambrym in two large books. The books contain all known genealogies and all rank-taking on Ambrym. Jimmy’s project, as he sees it, is to bring kastom into ‘law’: in other words, to write it down, to make it known, to make people know that kastom is not opposing the Bible, and thus to end all conflicts. Among these conflicts, the conflicts among the many different church denominations are the most important. And, the root of all conflicts, according to Jimmy, is the lack of knowledge on kastom. When everything is known, and settled once and for all, the curse will be lifted through a unified society. Furthermore, he has an important business and government scheme, which will be successful once unity is achieved. He has already established a ‘company’ which will encompass 63

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all of Ambrym and give membership to everyone on the island: it is a company that will attract foreign investment and white men. His primary idea is to subsume these developments to a new kind of government wherein local people will govern themselves, independently of the state, in their ceremonial ground. So far Jimmy has received the signatures of all the chiefs on North and West Ambrym, which he proudly showed us in the document he has created to officially represent his Ambrym business and government movement. For Jimmy the process of lifting the curse is twofold. First, kastom of Ambrym needs to be recognised as Christian and therefore morally good. This will be achieved through ‘awareness’ (a term he himself uses): everyone must learn that kastom does not prevent them from being good Christians. When this knowledge is achieved, everyone can acknowledge the importance of his kastom book, and through this a new unity will be achieved. Then, as a last step in this process, they will ‘ask for forgiveness’ for all the sins and wrongs committed against white man. When the curse is lifted, business and money will again find its way to Ambrym. The question we ask is; how is this articulated as a cosmological project? Cosmological foundations of Jimmy’s project First we will try to convey some sense of what Jimmy’s project looks like. It certainly shares with other cargo-cults the utopian promise of unity and overcoming of conflicts (see Lindstrom 2011: 256; Scott 2005; Worsley 1957: 228). But, like Scott, we would argue that the dream of unity is not antithetical to primordial plurality. On the contrary the project of unification is always related to reinvigorating the plural orders when they have been weakened or undermined by authoritarian unitary orders such as colonialism (in the case of cargo cults) or the nation-state in the present situation. We believe the talk about unity is really about restoring faith in the reality of the diverse orders that make out Vanuatu. As noted by Lindstrom for Tanna Island: If a cult pursues unity by de-pluralizing and suppressing differentiation behind its fences, it also unites by fabricating fantastic divisions of ritual labour that promise an imaginary organic solidarity. People stick together not only because of their homogenous dividuality; but also because of heterogeneous ritualized specializations that depend one upon the other. (Lindstrom 2011: 262)

This attention to plurality in unity is highly significant also in Jimmy’s law book. Jimmy had been working on making his Ambrym Law Book ever since he was given the idea by some of the old kastom ritual authorities 64

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in North Ambrym in 1967. More recently the work has been further encouraged by a league of customary villages on Ambrym. In 2010 Jimmy presented us with the first print of his book – two volumes covering everything about Ambrym kastom and the rights therein. He adds that this is ‘the true government of Ambrym Island … because the book is their true law’. The concept of tengnean is central to it, being a concept of taboo (literally being a noun form of ‘to avoid’) – but being translated into Bislama as ‘law’. The book’s title translates as ‘The beginning of the land’ or ‘Ambrym the first land’. Counter-intuitively it does not describe anything in terms of origins or myths, but it consists in descriptions of each lineage and what type of manifestation they have made in terms of registration of ritual achievements or emblems. This shall be the core for island government in terms of customary matters. He predicts that the book will in the future be consulted for land claims and also carving rights and it will become an important tool for future Island Councils of Chiefs or Area Councils of Chiefs. It can potentially also be of guidance for future generations who want to go back into ritual grade taking.2 The idea of ‘law’ lies built into the notion that people should act according to their documented position in the social world of Ambrym and rules of avoidance behaviour. The book describes where the different buluim (lineages) originated from, where they ‘came out from’ and which rights they have for instance, to carving designs and ritual paraphernalia. This also strengthens particular kin groups’ claims to have properly initiated chiefs who have fulfilled their duties to their matrilateral relatives etc. We then realise that the unitary book of law is really a manifestation of the ritual polity with lineages and their ceremonial grounds at its base. As we got to know more about Jimmy’s plans for the future we also learnt about his interest in ‘development’ for Ambrym. The ambition is to make use of the power of the volcano for the creation of a cement factory. This factory will provide cement roads, waterways, modern houses, and electric light. What we find especially interesting with this plan, is the way it bridges orders of kastom and origin myths, Christianity, biblical visions, and government policy.3 It is interesting how the ontological potential of cosmology unfolds in Jimmy’s vision for what we might call a development movement. This is all seemingly an innovation in regard to the pluralist and differentiating order of the cosmology, but we believe it instead documents the potential of this cosmology to create inventive projects. And as we realise, unity in Jimmy’s vision does not call for a totalising motion for bringing together beings of different sorts into oneness or hierarchical totality. His books and his proposed political ordering indeed uphold the fundamental difference underlying the places of lineages and their achieved rights. His vision of unity is instead a remedy for the curse, and 65

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the curse very much points out the logical fallacy of not acknowledging the place of white man in this pluralist world. Unity is then articulated as a concern for incorporating the New Man of Christianity, and for all men to recreate themselves in his image. As Scott (2005) has pointed out, efforts at aligning the pluralist cosmology (or what he calls the ‘poly-­ ontology’) with mono-ontological ideas wherein man is a singular being, often takes place at the level of social practice, or what he calls the level of ‘ethics’. They don’t necessarily confront ontological premises. Karu, Scott’s interlocutor from Makira in the Solomon Islands, who perceived himself to be like Abraham, had a project which in many respects was similar to Jimmy´s; he wanted to achieve unity. Karu, like Jimmy, as significant intellectuals, seek to figure out ways in which new ideas, concepts, and beings can be understood and dealt with. The MAN Native Development Trust Fund4 There is no doubt that Jimmy’s initiative to reorient all work with ‘development’ and ‘business’ grows out of his positioning in the particular village where the volcano erupted first. With his ritual mandate for his lineage he becomes a capacitating force in his effort to make the power of Ambrym Island benefit its people. One outcome of this type of agency has been to build a resort to attract tourists to come to visit the volcano. The building of the resort, the writing of the book as well as surveys into historical circumstances of migrations of those who fled to other islands because of volcanic eruptions in 1913 and 1950, were all implemented in a process that aimed for a new Ambrym society, free of the curse. Many of the chiefs of both west and south-east Ambrym agreed on this grand plan for development and signed Jimmy’s papers. The MAN Development Trust Fund was then initiated properly with the killing of sixty pigs. Jimmy explained to us that he had started out with two pigs, which were shared among those in favour of the organisation. These two pigs were dedicated to the constitution of the village council. Then each lineage (buluim) was invited to kill two pigs each for the launching of the project. The main asset for the fund was to be the building of the cement factory on the volcanic plain. Agreements for the cement factory were set up in association with an agent in New Caledonia, and Jimmy had travelled to New Caledonia to agree with a French company to produce cement on Ambrym, using volcanic sand from Ambrym and limestone from Malekula. In this way Jimmy’s work with the book of law, the cement factory, and the unity of Ambrym Island as an association of chiefs, joins together and becomes part of the ritual polity of Ambrym. This tells us that the work of the ritual polity is not to uphold an imaginary, abstract world-order, but 66

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instead to continue to invent new creations and constellations and place them within an endlessly changing order that is only encompassed by the island itself. As a cultural dynamic the ritual polity has become concerned with concepts of law and governance, and Jimmy’s movement also tries to make itself relevant for ongoing national political processes. For instance, there has recently been an increased national interest in new state laws concerning intellectual copyright and kastom rights, emphasising a regulation of ritual rights and monetary outcome. Jimmy understands Ambrym to be, by necessity, directly involved in these same processes. As he commented to us: When they passed the copyright law, the money of kastom was established. This is the same for the volcano. If we can pass the law on the volcano, money will be there as well. But it all depends on the cooperation of the chiefs. In parliament they passed the copyright law but on Ambrym there is a lot of sorcery. This is the big challenge for Vanuatu to develop   Before, everything was sorted out on the ceremonial ground. If we can raise some money we will put up a huge house, where all of this can go inside, where we will continue this tradition. But people of kastom have to stay quiet and we have to work together in unity. Jesus said so already but they wouldn’t listen.   When I finish the book all of this will come through. The book will be like our law of kastom, like the copyright law of Parliament. Every ceremonial ground has a place inside it. Export will be regulated; income will be settled and shared. We will have projects of water and housing, projects of cattle and pigs, projects of rice planting, but everything will be developed inside the Trust. But money must come first! (Interview with Jimmy, March 2010)

With his totalising abilities Jimmy synthesises events from the Bible with Ambrym proto-ontology and nationalist discourses that have dominated village life back to the independence movement in the 1960s. Jimmy, a long-time Christian like most people on Ambrym, is trying to draw on this pluralist cosmology in order to produce a unitarian narrative and a movement that he sees as a compartmental region of state power – with a story in which everything is connected to the will of God – the curse and God’s ability to redeem – and simultaneously the will of Ambrym itself as a plurally open system. Let us look more closely on how this cosmology unfolds in Jimmy’s policy for the volcano movement; a movement that according to Jimmy will change everything. The MAN policy document The policy document for the MAN development trust fund is a very interesting written text, articulating both a political and an economic 67

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vision connected to Ambrym myths, biblical origins and global discourses about governance. The document has the form of a modern bureaucratic document – with an outline of an organisational structure, references to the constitution of Vanuatu and to UN development goals – as well as conveying Ambrym origin myths and biblical quotations. Since this policy in a sense is Jimmy’s remedy for the curse of white man, we shall therefore describe in some detail how the document is structured. We note that the first pages of the policy have three images. First is a picture of Jesus, photocopied from the Bible, with the handwritten inscription ‘Jesus is coming back’. In what form he is coming back is perhaps indicated in the next image: on the second page there is a handdrawn image of a family of Vanuatu citizens in traditional dress, joined by a white man dressed in a business suit, gathered around a traditional pandanus mat (Figure 1). The image has the character of being a type of prophesy portraying a future event where white man and black man can meet on equal terms to create development. The native dresses, the mat or the walking stick do not belong to Ambrym kastom, and are not how people dress in Ambrym villages, just as the white man is also not really dressed like the white men you see in Vanuatu (who dress in shorts and t-shirts). We interpret this as an idealised image of a future of ‘development’, a utopian vision of a new world where development is created within the pluralist imagery.

Figure 1: Photocopy of hand-drawn image of the encounter between Vanuata people and ‘white man’. Courtesy of the author of the MAN document, who is kept anonymous here for reasons of Ambrym politics.

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The third page is Jimmy’s own hand-drawn image of an Ambrym ontology of production. The title reads ‘The ceremonial ground is the foundation of development inside the customary law of Ambrym’. The image features everything that exists within the Ambrym social world; garden produce, the ritual hierarchy, the pig-killing ritual for affines and matrilateral relatives, and it also features a prophecy of creation in five stages. We note that there is no imagery of a modernised future in terms of technological equipment or brick buildings, and that the drawing organises the ceremonial ground for pig-killing at the apex of the ordering of all things. The further twenty-page policy document that Jimmy has so far sketched out for the MAN trust is a stunning mix of concerns about the nation, the constitution of kastom, the status of Christianity and development: MAN believes that the decentralization structure of government authority and kastom authority together complete the belief inherent in the concept of democracy.   Decentralization must start at the level of Nasara ceremonial ground and Village Council of Chiefs.

We take decentralisation to mean a shift from national and international governance to the ceremonial ground as a centre for a ritual polity. The way people in Ambrym perceive it, their traditional meeting place and ceremonial ground was the scene for every decision and regulation of the community. The policy states: The chief gave people freedom to express themselves. People could themselves decide what they wanted. The chief would only intervene if he saw that the life of people was threatened. The Chief was like a father to the people of the ceremonial ground. He was like a prime minister in the ceremonial ground … Today white man comes and preaches good governance. But our kastom system had transparency built into it and people never suffered under it like they do under foreign good governance system which is just like the colonial government. (Our translation from Bislama)

Following from this, the ambition of the fund is to achieve ‘Economic self reliance’, through a system of business adopted not from foreign ways, but through Ambrym customary ways. Cosmological foundations of the New Man But, in addition to the obvious nation-building and state-building ambitions of the document, we also see in the policy document and in the conversations we had with Jimmy a keen interest in Genesis and the 69

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creation of man in God’s image. Why is this so important for the writing of the book and the cement factory? Through their reading of Genesis they acknowledge that God gave rise to a particular new man, a universal man to whom he also gave a responsibility to shape his own future. How can we understand this when we know that Ambrym people locate the creation of human being to variously constituted and distributed appearances; emerging in plants, animals, spirits or human-like species? If they try to locate the origin of a lineage they say, for example, ‘Now, this man; he comes out of a genealogy that intermarried with creatures with long hair, long arms and long fingernails and great strength, that we call lisisio’. Every lineage is like a separate species. The question of what ‘Human Being’ implies in this way of thinking is hidden from us. But we should not take their concept of man for granted. One of the central passages of the policy is the following: MAN Development Trust Fund believes that the God Creator Our Father clearly demonstrates to us how we must develop this world in order for him to develop us. He created everything before he created man in his taboo image and he gave man all creations so that man could use them to develop himself. Our Taboo God Papa demonstrated very clearly that everything that he created with his conscience and intelligence that he gave to man also came with a responsibility and duty: to develop HUMAN BEING, which is his unique creation that he made in his taboo image. We can read about God’s way of thinking in Genesis 1, 29–30.

We see here the reference to the human being as essential. The particular focus is Genesis and God creating man in his image (see also Tomlinson 2010). Jimmy here explores the concept of the Christian individual; and the new forms of agency existing on the axis between God and Man. He incorporates this idea of Man (‘HUMAN BEING’) into a plural cosmological world. The lesson drawn from Genesis is that man is something for people to ‘develop’; a creature not yet realised. Furthermore, the policy places this responsibility to ‘develop’ man on the Ambrym population. This goes along with the origin story outlined in the first part of this chapter, where Jimmy’s ancestors find a banana plant burning in their garden. In Jimmy’s account of this volcanic origin myth, he points out that it was God who lit the banan plant. God did this at the same time as he also lit another light; the burning bush revealed to Moses described in the Book of Exodus (3: 1–21). This imagery is explained on the final page of the policy, where the ‘Vision’ of the foundation is explained, and where each of the present leaders of the foundation are placed inside the spiritual and mythical creation of Ambrym. An angel of the High God was seen putting fire to a small tree, and in the same way, the same night; God gave fire to a banana by the name of

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A new man Beryanyan. This was the banana of Thomas Tokon. God gave the same right to Amos Jimmy, Atel Marakon and Villi Saruan and Etul Meleun. In the same way the Government passed the copyright law act. Then the right to the volcano came back to our ownership. Kastom ownership only follows the right that God of History gave to our ancestors before and leading up until today. The good history starts with a small tree that is set to fire.5

The encounter between Jimmy’s ancestors and the burning bundle of bananas is therefore parallel to the encounter between Moses and the burning bush. Significant passages in the Bible are located to the Ambrym landscape and significant biblical events are connected to Ambrym mythology, creating yet another story in the cosmo-ontological terrain of Ambrym. Just like the burning banana was a different version of the miracle of Moses, we realise that the first man discovered in the autochthonous forest was also an alternative version of the first human being of the Bible. Here lies the potential of the Ambrym story and its political development; that there is a potential in Ambrym for developing a new human being not yet realised in the world. Let us expand on this point by looking more closely at the idea of the curse; what does it imply? The curse features white man as a type of creature that one begins to know after a century of different kinds of relationships. He traces his origins to places like England, Israel or France, he is successful in producing wealth for himself and he is on good terms with God, Jesus, and Mary, mother of Jesus. People on Ambrym are under a curse that prohibits them from engagement with this idealised and mythological White Man, and cannot take part in his prosperity because of it. We understand it so that the curse is caused by their resistance to incorporate White Man as a participant in the Ambrym lands, not allowing him to settle there, and even using international law to remove him. People are not really regretting this rejection of White Man, but the curse has taken them by surprise. The lesson is that they should have incorporated White Man alongside all the other variously appearing beings that they recognise as human beings and that they have engaged with. They should themselves have created a new white man. We believe this is significant in the cosmological imagination of white man in the drawing where he shares a Vanuatu customary world with indigenous people, but still maintaining his essential difference (see Figure 1). These processes recall Burridge’s conclusions about the purpose of Tangu cargo cults: This new man, then, will command the respect of Kanakas and Europeans alike. His purpose is to remove white men from the amoral dominance they have currently assumed. His means are European ideals, techniques, and ideas together with the help of certain peculiarly, morally, qualified Europeans. (Burridge: 1960: 206) 71

Horizons of cosmological wonder The most significant theme in the Cargo seems to be moral regeneration: the creation of a new man, the creation of new unities, the creation of a new society. (Burridge: 1960: 247)

Accordingly, in the policy of the foundation that Jimmy leads, we believe they are implying that if one reads the Bible carefully, and in accordance with the pluralist cosmological foundations of Ambrym, one could think about the creation of a new man, in the image of God and in the image of White Man, but appearing as indigenous to Ambrym Island, and thus modelling the first real creation of the ‘Human Being’ that the Bible speaks of. This implies also a continuation from the myth of the first child who was already there when the first foreigner came to Ambrym: and the First Man will also be the New Man. The resistance to Western economics and protection from white man’s involvement suggests this. This would be, on the one hand, a new hard-working modern man who could live up to modern standards of housing, roads, electricity, and transportation, but on the other hand he would also be a morally righteous man far beyond the standards of White Man living (cf. Bashkow 2006; Hirsch 2001; Humphrey 2008). This is why schooling and local ritual values are so thoroughly built into the outlined formation of development. Government would be articulated on the ceremonial ground and money would grow directly out of the power of the land. We believe that this new man is also placed inside the realm of an imagined new nation, and we have seen how the trust fund is taking shape as an island nation. This New Man and New Nation has to be new to the extent that the new being incorporates development, literacy, property rights and Christianity. But the person becomes primordially connected to Ambrym since development (via the return of the White Man) will only come about once Christianity is merged truly with kastom and once all native ‘owners’ of duties and places/lands are harmonised over the strength of a true knowledge of mythical precedents and their ancestral birthrights. The new man is primordial in the sense that he is born as a new being on Ambrym, and in the Ambrym understanding of alternating generations (Eriksen 2008; Patterson 1981; Rio 2007) and alternating circumstances for life, the new human being is also born in the image of the spirit child that came out of a root of an oak in the Ambrym ceremonial grounds and was born alongside the glowing volcano. Conclusion Jimmy’s project has the features of both nation-making and cosmological invention. It marks a time when people throughout Melanesia are wondering what they are going to do with their newly achieved nations 72

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and their Christian morality. Jimmy’s solution, and his plan shares many features with other visions and projects across Melanesia. We find ourselves at a moment when a century of history of state-bureaucratisation and intervention, nation-making efforts, resource-extraction, and different experiments with Christian beliefs, are taken apart and reassembled by local leaders. The place of these institutional realms in localised, indigenous cosmologies should not be understated, and we have through the example of Jimmy tried to make manifest how a pluralist cosmology functions under these conditions. As an outcome of all these kinds of activities and involvements Jimmy has previously been accused of several sorcery killings. This also extends into Jimmy’s presumed ability to take on other people’s appearance. At one point he had allegedly taken on the face of the daughter of the Principal of the Secondary School in north Ambrym, so that he could enter the girls’ dormitory. Following this rumour the Principal was terrified and left Ambrym. Recently Jimmy was also suspected for taking the face of a girl in his village in order to spook a young boy who was in love with her. We believe these circumstances of shape-shifting and sorcery in some way play into the circumstances of Jimmy’s activities in relation to his focus on the development of Ambrym. Primarily the suspicion of shape-shifting is triggered by the fact that he is a very active man. He is always walking around in the north Ambrym gardens and villages, to the degree that people think he has supernatural speed and different modes of transport. In addition, the popular reputation of Jimmy as a shape-shifter seems to be deduced from his association with seemingly opposed activities. On the one hand he is part of a secret cult of traditional magic, and thus implicitly a sorcerer in people’s view, but on the other he is building a church in his village and keeps insisting that people should live by the Bible. In one moment he is keen on calling himself a gardener and talking about the importance of subsistence agriculture, in the next he is observed in the capital of Port Vila and meeting important people in cafés and offices. In one capacity he is anchored, a person ‘of the place’, in another he is seen as wandering too much to other places. In one instance he is a ‘black man’, in the next he is ‘white’. This double capacity also has a particular grounding for addressing the need for a New Man, a human being who can couple white man’s ability to create infrastructure, housing, and development with black man’s morality of sharing and knowing – a new human being who can live according to the ritual polity of Ambrym. It will take a lot of ritual work to take this new being from being an abomination to becoming accepted as the Human Being of the Bible.

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Notes 1

2

3

4

5

We wish to thank organisers and participants at the Contemporary Cosmologies conference at UCL for allowing us to develop this material. Our colleague Andrew Lattas has also contributed with important insights and corrections. It should be noted that we had contributed to the production of this book. When we did our first fieldwork in 1996 we did a survey for the Vanuatu Cultural Centre, documenting all deserted villages and ceremonial grounds (harl) in this area. When we left we gave Jimmy an amount of money so that he could finish this survey, and this became his main motivation for his work as a fieldworker for the Cultural Centre. We did not realise he was in conflict with the other Ambrym fieldworkers and that they sabotaged his survey. Because of this conflict he was finished as fieldworker in 2000, and continued his work on his own. He then also turned the focus away from our purely historical survey into something that really mattered in his view – an account of the status of kastom itself for all present and past villages. We should also point out that Jimmy has an outstanding reputation on Ambrym. He has managed to build a new church building, pushing and motivating his fellow villagers in the uphill village of Fanrereo. This has been built from bricks made from sand from the beach, hand-mixed with cement and carried up into the hills. He has been central in the mapping of customary land after Independence – and this involved walking around surveying every garden and every boundary, even mapping areas with satellite equipment. There were also rumours that he was part of a secret men’s lodge that was dedicated to bring back into practice the core of Ambrym kastom. The real name of the Trust Fund, as well as of Jimmy himself, has to be protected because the process of institutionalising it within the various councils of chiefs has not yet been completed. MAN is the correct acronym for the name. We have invented the names in this paragraph in order to conceal the real identities of the people of the MAN project.

References Bashkow, Ira. 2006. The Meaning of White Men: Race and Modernity in the Orokaiva Cultural World. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Bloch, Maurice. 1986. From Blessing to Violence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bonnemaison, Jöel. 1996. Graded societies and societies based on title: forms and rites of traditional political power in Vanuatu. In Jöel Bonnemaison, Christian Kaufman, Kirk Huffman, and Darrell Tryon, Arts of Vanuatu. Bathurst: Crawford House Publishing. Pp. 200–217. Burridge, Kenelm. 1960. Mambu. A Melanesian Millenium. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 74

A new man Connolly, Bob and Robin Anderson. 1987. First Contact: New Guinea’s Highlanders Encounter the Outside World. London: Penguin Books. Daws, Gavan. 1968. Shoal of Time. A History of the Hawaiian Islands. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. de Coppet, Daniel and André Iteanu (eds) 1995. Cosmos and Society in Oceania. Oxford: Berg Publishers. Eriksen, Annelin. 2008. Gender, Christianity and Change in Vanuatu. Aldershot: Ashgate. —— 2009. New life: pentecostalism as social critique in Vanuatu, Ethnos 74: 175–198. —— 2012. The pastor and the prophetess: an analysis of gender and Christianity in Vanuatu, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18(1): 103–122. Fox, James. and C. Sather (eds) 1996. Origin, Ancestry, and Alliance: Explorations in Austronesian Ethnography. Canberra: Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University. Handelman, Don. 2008. Afterword: returning to cosmology – thoughts on the positioning of belief, Social Analysis 52(1): 181–195. Harrison, Simon. 1990. Stealing People’s Names: History and Politics in a Sepik River Cosmology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hirsch, Eric. 2001. ‘Making up people in Papua’, JRAI 7(3): 241–256. Humphrey, Caroline. 2008. Reassembling individual subjects: events and decisions in troubled times, Anthropological Theory 8(4): 357–380. Iteanu, André. 1990. The concept of the person and the ritual system: an Orokaiva View, MAN 25(1): 35–53. Jacomb, Edward. 1914. The Edward Jacomb papers. Unpublished manuscripts in the Senate House Library, University of London, MS894. Jolly, Margareth. 1994. Hierarchy and encompassment: rank, gender and place in Vanuatu and Fiji, History and Anthropology 7(1–4): 133–167. —— and Mark Mosko. 1994. Prologue, History and Anthropology 7(1–4): 1–19. Kapferer, Bruce. 1988. Legends of People, Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance, and Political Culture in Sri Lanka and Australia. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. —— 1997. The Feast of the Sorcerer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lattas, Andrew. 2010. Dreams, Madness and Fairy Tales in New Britain. Durham, NC: Carolina University Press. Layard, John. 1942. Stone Men of Malekula. Vao. London: Chattus & Windus. Leenhardt, Maurice. 1979. Do Kamo: Person and Myth in the Melanesian World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lindstrom, Lamont. 1990. Knowledge and Power in a South Pacific Society. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. —— 2011. Personhood, cargo and Melanesian social unities. In E. Hviding and K. Rio (eds), Made in Oceania: Social Movements, Cultural Heritage and the State in the Pacific. Oxford: Sean Kingston Publishing. Pp. 253–273. Mimica, Jadran. 1988. Intimation and Infinity: The Mythopoeia of the Iqwaye counting system and number. Oxford: Berg Publishers. Munn, Nancy. 1986. The Fame of Gawa. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Horizons of cosmological wonder Patterson, Mary. 1981. Slings and arrows: rituals of status acquisitions in North Ambrym. In M. Allen (ed.), Vanuatu: Politics, Economics, and Ritual in Island Melanesia. Sydney: Academic Press Australia. Pp. 189–237. Rio, Knut M. 2007. The Power of Perspective. Oxford: Berghahn Books. —— and Annelin Eriksen. 2013. Missionaries, healing and sorcery in Melanesia: a Scottish evangelist in Ambrym Island, Vanuatu. History and Anthropology 24(3): 398–418. Robbins, Joel. 2004. Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. —— 2009. Conversion, hierarchy, and cultural change: value and syncretism in the globalization of pentecostal and charismatic Christianity. In K. Rio and O. Smedal (eds), Hierarchy: Persistence and Transformation in Social Formations. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Pp. 65–89. Sahlins, Marshall. 1985. Islands of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —— 1996. The sadness of sweetness: the Native anthropology of Western Cosmology. Current Anthropology 37(3): 395–428. Schieffelin, Edward and Robert Crittenden. 1991. Like People You See in a Dream. First Contact in Six Papuan Societies. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Scott, Michael W. 2005. ‘I was like Abraham’: notes on the anthropology of Christianity from the Solomon Islands. Ethnos 70(1): 101–125. —— 2007. The severed snake: matrilineages, making place, and a Melanesian Christianity in southeast Solomon Islands. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press. —— 2008. Proto-people and precedence: encompassing Euroamericans through narratives of ‘first contact’ in Solomon Islands. In Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern (eds), Exchange and Sacrifice. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press. Pp. 141–176. Telban, Borut. 1998. Dancing through Time: A Sepik Cosmology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tomlinson, Matt. 2010. Compelling replication: Genesis 1:26, John 3:16, and biblical politics in Fiji, JRAI 16(4): 743–760. Wagner, Roy. 1975. The Invention of Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —— 1986. Asiwinarong: Ethos, Image and Social Power among the Usen Barok of New Ireland. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Worsley, Peter. 1957. The Trumpet Shall Sound. London: MacGibbon & Kee. Young, Michael. 1971. Fighting with Food: Leadership, Values and Social Control in a Massim Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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3 Auto-relations: doing ­cosmology and transforming the self the Saiva way Soumhya Venkatesan

I contend, in this chapter, that in order to understand certain projects of ethical self-cultivation or transformation, we must pay attention to the ontological, cosmological, and anthropological assumptions and ideas in relation to which these activities are enacted. Further, attempts to understand such projects of self-cultivation necessitate the addition to the standard focus on social relations (relations external to the self) of a new attentiveness to relations with oneself, or with aspects of oneself – what I call auto-relations. This requires consideration of different conceptions of the self. For clarity, I will define three key terms at the outset: by ontology I mean the theory of the nature of being and the positing of fundamental entities or categories that are mutually exclusive and often not further divisible. Ontologies may be dualistic (mind and body; person/ thing), monist (focused on continuities or on degrees of difference between entities rather than absolute difference) or multiple (as in the case discussed here). The term cosmology is used here to refer to an understanding of the way in which the core ontological entities interact, and are ordered, to generate the various human and non-human inhabitants of the universe. By anthropology is meant here a theory of the place of man within the universe, his possibilities for knowledge, action, and transformation. In other words, this is a philosophical anthropology, which, according to Kant, poses three questions: ‘What can I know; what ought I do; what can I hope?’ (Cited in Soni 1989: 2) It should be clear that ontology, cosmology, and anthropology are inextricably linked. Further, human striving, endeavour, and flourishing are shaped by, and dependent on, how people understand these concepts. One

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who does not think of the soul as essential to, yet trapped by, embodied life does not aspire for its liberation in this world or beyond. His or her notion of a good life will, of necessity, take a different form and engender a different set of technologies of the self (Foucault 1988). It is perhaps a truism to point out that some ontologies, cosmologies, and anthropologies are more internally coherent and consistent than others; I would further add that individuals or groups who actively subscribe to more fully formed cosmologies and ontologies are more continually directed in their endeavours at self-cultivation and normative ways of being in the world. However, there may still be room for contingent d ­ ecision-making or action in response to particular situations or dilemmas. Certainly, one may be committed to a coherent idea of the cause, organisation, and workings of the universe without necessarily seeking or finding oneself able to fully or consistently live life in the ways required of this commitment (Laidlaw 1995). My own argument in this chapter stems from ethnographic research among people in Tamilnadu, south India who self-identify as Sivanadiyar (translated as slaves of Siva, the Hindu god).1 Being a Sivanadiyar is an active individual choice to involving a clear set of ontological, cosmological, and anthropological understandings, which drive work on the self (conceptualised in a very particular way, as will be shown) and relations (or non-relations) with others. I focus in particular on one family of Sivanadiyars based in Chennai with whom I became close, in so far as one can become close to people with a very strong commitment to working on themselves and on their relationship with their overlord, Siva, to the exclusion of others. My chapter makes three inter-related claims. Firstly, in order to understand sustained projects of self-cultivation or self-transformation such as those of the Sivanadiyars, we must understand the cosmological and ontological assumptions and ideas in relation to which these activities are enacted. A concise yet detailed exploration of Saiva ontology, cosmology, and anthropology is thus an integral part of this chapter. My understanding of the core tenets of Saiva Siddhanta (the system of knowledge and practice that informs Sivanadiyar understandings of the universe and the place of man within it) are drawn from fieldwork among Sivanadiyars and also from Richard Davis’s Ritual in an Oscillating Universe (1991) and Jayandra Soni’s Philosophical Anthropology in Saiva Siddhanta (1989). Secondly, rather than following the general anthropological understanding of cosmology as a ‘life-world’ with its attendant assumptions of invisibility and taken-for-grantedness to those enmeshed in it, I argue that part of the work Sivanadiyars do involves explicitly and systematically learning a particular ontology and cosmology and living by it. In this context, life gains an irreducibly cosmological dimension, where ‘doing

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cosmology’ is understood as an indigenous activity that requires hardgained knowledge and sustained and targeted reflection and practice. Finally, integral to the understanding of the Sivanadiyar self is a specific and well worked-out understanding of the embodied self (the third ontological category) as an unstable configuration of the two main ontological categories posited by the system. This instability of the self is simultaneously problematic and filled with potential, as will be seen. These considerations lead me to focus specifically on the ways in which Sivanadiyars conceptualise relations to themselves (what I term auto-­ relations, inspired by Pedersen 2012), often at the expense of or modifing their relations with others. This, I suggest, is driven by a moi rather than a personne conception of the person (Carrithers 1985). I suggest that the self-imposed Sivanadiyar task may be understood as an active denial of a personne or role-based socially derived conception of the self and the cultivation of a particular learned moi or psycho-physical conception of the human being within a natural or spiritual cosmos. In what follows, I will outline first the basic ontological, cosmological, and anthropological principles that underpin Sivanadiyars’ attempts to work on their relations with their overlord (lord Siva), their selves and the various inhabitants (sentient and non-sentient) of the world around them. I will then narrow my gaze to one family of Sivanadiyars to show what this kind of work involves. Finally, I will explore the concept of auto-relationality in light of James Laidlaw’s (1995) discussion of universalist and particular moral claims, the moi conception of self (Carrithers 1985) and what Pedersen identifies as the intensional self (2012). Ontology, cosmology, and anthropology Saiva Siddhanta or the established position on sivam (on which more later) has obscure origins. Between the tenth and the thirteenth centuries CE, it flourished in many parts of India but is today only to be found among Tamil speakers, the majority of whom are located on the eastern coast of south India. Tamil is the language of Saiva Siddhanta theology today and a large corpus of texts and commentaries were written in Tamil between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries. These remain important and are the subject of contemporary commentaries and discourses. The Tamil Saiva Siddhanta tradition also includes a corpus dating from around the sixth century and collated in the thirteenth century of devotional hymns composed in the personal register by devotees considered as exemplary (see Viswanathan Peterson 1989). Their lives and verses of praise are frequently invoked in conversations and pedagogical discourses and their example sought to be emulated. Saiva Siddhanta shares two core features with other Hindu Saiva theologies. The first is that it 79

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is theistic, placing lord Siva as the paramount entity in the universe; the second is that it is realist – the body and its organs, the world and the things of the world are not illusory. They exist and need both to be used and transcended. It differs from some other influential schools in positing similarity, but not identity between Siva and the liberated soul. Saiva Siddhantha posits three ontological categories, two of which are radically opposed to each other with the third partaking of aspects of both. I will initally discuss two. These are sivam and malam. Sivam is the ontological category completely identified with the lord Siva or pati – who is conceptualised as pure consciousness coupled with volition and the power of action; unfettered, eternal, omniscient, and omnipotent. Exactly opposite to sivam is the second ontological category – malam. Malam is inert material substance (jada), that is, it does not possess the capacity to act. Like sivam, malam is seen as eternally existing. It has no origin (or at least no origin discernible to man) and goes through periods of quiescence and activity that are entirely dependent on the actions of Siva. In between sivam and malam and partaking of both lies the pasu or the bound human. This is the third ontological category. The essence of pasu is atman (translated generally as soul). The soul, like Siva, is conceptualised as consciousness (sivam), has volition and is capable of acting on malam. However, unlike Siva, the soul is fettered by malam. Indeed the term pasu means ‘fettered’ – in common usage pasu is used to refer to domesticated and usually tethered animals; another term for malam is pasa which denotes noose or fetter. Different pasu are fettered to different degrees and it is possible for pasu, with the right knowledge and action and the grace of lord Siva to break free of the fetters. Liberation within the Saiva Siddhanta system is the realisation of the soul of its infinity and unboundedness wherein it becomes siva-like (similar to but not identical with Siva). As a first step to achieving liberation, the pasu must understand the nature of the fetters and systematically work on them and on itself. This is a progressive task and can, according to those on the path of Siva (sivanvazhipadu), take several lifetimes. Further, it can only be achieved by the grace of Siva and knowledge about the nature of the universe. As Soni (1989) points out, Saiva Siddhanta is soteriological at the same time as being epistemological and theological. Three features of malam are germane to my discussion here. The first is that malam is associated only with atman or soul, i.e. it is related to the essence of man. Sivam does not have even a trace of malam – the former being characterised as light and consciousness; the latter as darkness and insentient (Soni 1989: 11). Secondly, malam is divided into three kinds, each of which will be discussed further. Finally, the latter two kinds of

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malam are simultaneously fetters that bind the soul and instruments that the soul can use to free itself of the fetters. The first of the three fetters is referred to as anava malam and is what produces in the atman the illusion of finiteness. This fetter is coterminous with the atman from its very beginnings. The analogy often used is that of a grain of rice and the husk that surrounds it right from the beginning. The atman, shrouded in anava malam is likened to a stone – incapable of exercising its innate consciousness and power to act. At this point the soul has no means with which to act and is completely fettered. In order to enable the soul shrouded in anava malam to act, Siva instigates the operation of the fetters of maya and, as a result of that, of karma – why this enables action is explained later. The point to be noted here is that the instigation of maya is what causes the mechanistic unfolding of the Saiva Siddhanta cosmos. Maya may be referred to as matter – it ‘is the basic stuff which constitutes the sphere in which and through which man’s experiences in the world take place’ (Soni 1989: 14). In its essential nature, maya is inert, but it can be instigated and set into motion by the power of consciousness of lord Siva. When this happens, maya is differentiated into thirty-six categories (tattva) which are hierarchically ranked from the most subtle to the most gross, beginning with pure sound (nada) and ending with the earth (prithvi). These combine in various ways to make up the phenomenal world. The evolutes of maya are not only responsible for what is sensed, but also (when activated by the individual soul) for the pasu’s means of sensing and knowing the world around it. The mind, the ego, the eyes, ears, nose, etc. are identified as evolutes of maya and hierarchically ordered. The cosmology of Saiva Siddhanta is concerned with identifying and explicating the hierarchical ordering of the thirty-six evolutes of maya. For those engaged in the quest for liberation, knowledge of this cosmology is crucial as it drives their striving towards higher, less differentiated and more subtle evolutes of maya while simultaneously using, controlling, and divesting themselves of the lower, more differentiated, grosser evolutes. This will be discussed when we turn our attention to the work on the self performed by Sivanadiyars. Before that, the third and final fetter requires explication. Kala, or time, is the seventh (in descending order) category of differentiated maya. It is with the evolution of this category that the law of karma comes into play, which until then is in suspension. Karma is the fetter arising from the consequences of action – it is the residue of past action. Good action begets good whether in the form of good rebirth of the soul or knowledge of malam. Likewise bad action begets bad rebirths and also inhibits one’s ability to grasp the nature of fetters. Accruing karma (good or bad), then, ties the soul to the cycle of births and deaths. 81

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Both maya and karma, while acting as fetters can also be channelled and used by the pasu to liberate the soul. This is because maya furnishes the pasu with the means to experience and to act on the world and on itself; while karma (the law of causality) furnishes the soul with a particular body and circumstances. It also establishes man as a responsible agent – capable of changing his current and future circumstances through acting in particular ways. Thus maya and karma, while recognised as fetters that need to be broken, are also characterised, unlike anava malam, as adventitious fetters. Siva places them in operation so that the pasu can know and act in order to free the atman. We are now in a position to ask: what is man within the Saiva Siddhanta system? In brief, the essence of the human is atman or soul, which combines consciousness and its inherent power to act. The soul is unbounded, infinite and has the capacity of full knowledge and action. However, due to the action of the fetters, also eternal and law-like in their action, each individual atman is prevented from realising its real capacity for unfettered knowledge, action, and autonomy. The fetters are of three kinds – anava malam, maya, and karma. The triply fettered humanly embodied atman is known as pasu – colloquially, a tethered animal. Pasus can gain partial knowledge of the fetters and can begin the quest to free the atman. Divine grace enables this in two ways – firstly by stirring up maya and thereby setting karma in motion and secondly by enabling pasus to realise their conditions and aiding them on the path to salvation. At the same time Saiva Siddhanta recognises that some humans would rather be focused on successful and happy worldly lives, without the desire for liberation. The activation of maya by Siva also enables this. But there is a clear sense that the more each individual pasu begins to understand the universe and its workings, learn that joy is always mixed with sorrow and lean towards lord Siva, the more likely it is that he/she will seek liberation. This resonates with Landman’s suggestion that ‘man’s knowledge of man is not without effect on man’s being’ (cited in Soni 1989: 3). Sivanadiyars and their quest for liberation People who describe themselves as Sivanadiyar – the slaves (adimai) of Siva – voluntarily submit their entire lives to Siva in a spirit of loving devotion in order to gain his feet, realise the full capacity of the atman by breaking free of the fetters and achieve liberation from the cycle of birth and rebirth. In this account I will explore three forms of relation that Sivanadiyars try and cultivate – the first is attachment to Siva; the second is engaged detachment from all things, including people, that conflict with 82

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this primary attachment and also act as fetters; the third is the relation of control that they seek to impose over aspects of themselves considered either more gross (in cosmological terms) or less constructive, and the development of aspects considered more subtle or productive of their aims. All of the above involve learning about Siva, the Saiva Siddhanta ontology, cosmology and anthropology, and acting on the self and on self–other and self–world relations accordingly. Indeed, Sivanadiyars use the words atman, malam (usually referring to anava malam), pasa (Tamil: fetters, usually referring to maya and karma), pasu, sivam, and siddhanta frequently in their conversations. They also regularly allude to their ultimate goal – that of enabling the soul to realise its true nature and thereby freeing it. Becoming a Sivanadiyar The Sivanadiyars with whom I work told me that when one’s karma is good (either by one’s own actions in this and previous lives or by the meritorious actions of ancestors) and with god’s (Siva’s) divine grace, the fetter known as anava malam ripens (pakkuvam adaiyum) and softens. One becomes aware that one’s soul is bound and should be freed. One may be born into a Sivanadiyar family and be taught love for Siva and the principles of Siddhanta from a very young age, although the choice to become an adiyar is an individual one. Of the four members of the household with whom I worked closely, two (the father, ‘Ravi’, and mother, ‘Uma’) became Sivanadiyars as adults. Their older daughter became an initiate at the age of 12 and the younger daughter at the age of eleven, although neither is a Sivanadiyar. Ravi told me how, around fifteen years ago, he faced a court case relating to property issues. At this time and although his religious life, like that of most other people, was a mixture of belief and confusion (paadhi nambikkai padhi kozhappam), he began to visit his local Siva temple and then to regularly dream of a particular Siva temple that he had never visited before. When he described this dream to a Sivanadiyar he had met at his local Siva temple, he discovered the name of the temple he had been dreaming about. He then began to visit this temple every full moon night. After a number of months the case against Ravi was dropped without his suffering any loss. Ravi realised that this was by the grace of Siva – he was filled with love and gratitude towards Siva and began to spend more time in the company of Sivanadiyars and in Siva temples. Ravi said that during this time he developed a growing conviction that everything comes from and belongs to Siva and that it is futile to look to anyone else for anything. He also spoke about his realisation that the only worthwhile goals are service to Siva and the liberation of 83

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his soul. While he lamented the fact that he had wasted more than thirty years of his life, he added that he was grateful that god’s grace had fallen on him so that veils were lifted and he could begin his journey from darkness into light. To quote Davis who in turn is quoting the Saivaparibhasa of Sivagrayogin, dating from around the thirteenth century: A great faith in the highest knowledge is born in him and he becomes detached (vairagya) by realising the faults inherent in attachment to sensory objects and the like … When such detachment arises, … [the person] should approach the house of a teacher in order to learn the highest knowledge. (1991: 90)

To undertake the task of freeing the soul, Sivanadiyars hold that two attachments are necessary: the first is complete submission to Siva – accepting that everything is because of him and everything is owed to him. The second is to a guru or spiritual preceptor who can teach one about the nature of the soul and also how to begin to free the soul. Achieving complete liberation of the soul without these attachments is deemed impossible because right knowledge (gnana) and right action (kriya) are required to detach the soul from its fetters and set it free. These can only come from direct divine grace and the guru who is a channel of divine grace, thereby able to put the pasu on the path of liberation. Ravi in a conversation with me echoed Sivagrayogin’s text when he said: Once you realise what is important you have to immediately grasp the insight (gappunnu pidichikannum) and begin to learn how to do something about it. You should not let the insight go and become enmeshed in the world again. To progress (mela poga) you need a guru.

In Ravi’s case, he went to the guru of the Sivanadiyar whom he had met at the temple when in the throes of his legal battles. The guru, who is based in a town several hundred kilometres south of the town in which Ravi lives, comes from a long lineage of Sivanadiyar gurus and is head of a well-known Saiva foundation (aadheenam). After a few visits to the guru and with his approval and guidance, Ravi decided to take the first stage of initiation (samaya diksha). His wife also decided to be initiated. Since taking the first level of initiation over a decade ago, both Ravi and Uma have progressed on the path of Siva, became Sivanadiyars and have been accepted into higher stages of initiation. It is a big decision to become a Sivanadiyar, not least because of the kind of commitment to self-cultivation and transformation required. Importantly, becoming a Sivanadiyar and later changing one’s mind is seen to have consequences, not only for one’s soul and the quest to liberate it, but also for the guru. 84

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Both Ravi and Uma told me when I asked about giving up being an adiyar that the fruits of that [bad action] will attach to the guru as one of the things the guru does is to take on and burn the disciple’s unmeritorious karma [paavam].2 When I last saw Ravi in 2010, he was about to take the highest level of initiation (nirvana diksha) (see Davis 1991: 89–90). Each further initiation makes the daily ritual more elaborate and also requires more commitment to learning about Saiva Siddhanta and fuller and more conscious submission to Siva. As has been noted, one can take certain kinds of diksha without committing to the path of a Sivanadiyar. The latter involves not only learning about the right path and right action, but also controlling and disciplining the body (kattupaadu) in prescribed ways. Ravi and Uma were taught how to pray (ritual actions and words), when and how to pray and how to enter into the right frame of mind by their guru. They undertook to worship Siva every day before eating and after cleaning themselves. They gave up eating meat. They committed to spending a whole Sunday every month performing physical labour in any Siva temple that needed clearing of snake hills, weeds, etc. Importantly, they also undertook to worship no god but Siva and his immediate divine family. This means they do not worship at temples dedicated to other gods than Siva and also in household shrines where other gods are worshipped. This can cause friction, and indeed one young man whom I met in a Siva temple where he was helping Ravi and his family clear weeds told me he had taken samayadiksha but had not become a Sivanadiyar (even though he wanted to) because of the distress he knew he would cause his widowed mother whose household shrine includes gods other than Siva. This can be seen simultaneously as insufficient conviction, a product of the young man’s karma and Siva’s will. If the person is open to becoming changed (maattral) into a slave of Siva and his karma is good and Siva wills it, all obstacles will be resolved including parental opposition. Until then, there is nothing to do but make the best of the situation. Thus, when it comes to the time to find husbands for their daughters, Ravi and Uma say they would either look for a Sivanadiyar, or, failing that, for a devout vegetarian of their own caste (even though they belong to a meat-eating caste). At the very least, their daughters would be able to avoid eating meat and being able to worship Siva alongside other gods even if their marital families did not permit exclusive devotion to Siva and the overriding of obligations to other household and lineage gods. Sivanadiyars are not renouncers, but they gradually reduce all transactions with others that they deem unnecessary. This is not described as conscious choice but rather is something that they say will happen as their minds and tasks are filled with Siva and thoughts of Siva. They 85

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are, however, scrupulous in performing their duties to parents, especially housing and feeding them if necessary, as well as performing their death duties. Similarly, they are scrupulous in performing their duties to their children – housing, feeding, and educating them, and particularly teaching them about Siva. Both the girls go to a local school and sometimes the things they learn can cause Ravi distress. He told me with sorrow about how a visiting dignitary had told the schoolchildren that they should respect their mothers, fathers, teachers, and god in that order. ‘How can they be told that?’, he asked. ‘It should be god, guru and then mother, father. The children learn all these wrong things. How can they ever free themselves? One should look after one’s parents, of course, but one does it for god – everything is from him and for him.’ Duty towards god and the quest to free the soul, something that is after all undertaken because of and by the grace of god, are inextricably linked; thus, one also does things for the liberation of one’s own soul. Due to the mechanistic and law-like actions of karma, duties left undone in one life have to be fulfilled in another, thereby necessitating rebirth. I reproduce Ravi’s words in answer to a question I asked about renunciation: If you have a family you must not just leave them. You can only take the way of the renouncer (thoraimargamam) once you have fulfilled all your duties to them. Even if one goes on the path of Saivam, leaving your children and wife and looking for god is wrong (kutrram). [If you do so your soul] will have to take birth again in a similar kind of life and come back to protect/look after them (pazhaiya padi piravi eduthu kaapatha varannum) … We feel we have to go to him [Siva], but he will say ‘finish what you need to do and then come’. It is better to fulfil these duties now and reduce the stockpile of karma that has to be consumed one way or another.

A soul accrues karma in three ways. The first is karma arising from a previous birth. This has to be consumed in the current birth or it will become necessary to take a next birth. The second is karma arising due to actions in the current birth. Again, this has to be consumed or will lead to a further birth. Finally, there is the karma that will accrue from future actions. This can be avoided by minimising one’s actions in the world and focusing one’s self solely on Siva. As a Sivanadiyar one must also decline to make contributions to non-Siva temples even if a project to build or renew a temple is undertaken by the entire locality within which they live and to which every resident is expected to make a contribution. All of these have consequences for their relations with non-Sivanadiyars from whom they begin to withdraw. Discussing Hindu Mahanubhav panth adherents in Gujarat who, like the Sivanadiyars, only worship one god and refuse to contribute to or participate in village festivals honouring other gods, Amit Desai 86

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(2010) suggests that non-panth neighbours and kin claim panthis disrupt social relations. This leads to particular strategies on the part of panthis including a striving for consistency in their relations with non-panthis and the discussions of issues and dilemmas in regular gatherings. Some of these discussions, says Desai, can be paraphrased as: ‘How are we to live in society with people who are not members of our panth?’ Ravi’s answer to this question, which I explicitly put to him was: The more we concentrate on yenperuman [Siva], to that extent other things get cut off. In that case we do not need people who are distant to us. When we are committed to worshipping him, where can we go? In that situation all these other things, other people do not matter, their claims do not reach our ears (kaadhile maatadhu); they will not weigh us down [laughs]. When we do not know things, they do not bother us. We just keep looking towards him. Wake up in the morning, bathe, worship, do our work. All that takes up all our time. We do not know anything else.

In other words, he seemed to be saying that there might be a problem, but not for the Sivanadiyars who were beyond caring for anyone but Siva and those who serve him. When they do do things for others, it is conceptualised in a very particular way and following two kinds of logic, one pertaining to karma as has been discussed, and one that furthers and works through attachment to Siva, as will be discussed below. Practice ‘When the guru gives you diksha it is as though he gives you a little flame that moves into you and that you have to keep alight and grow through your practice (saadhanai: the word literally means a means of accomplishing something)’, Ravi told me. Keeping this flame alight involves different kinds of work. After the morning ablutions, washing after visiting the lavatory, before going out or worshipping the lord, Ravi, Uma, and the two girls dip three fingers into a container filled with powdered white ash (vibudhi). They mix this into a paste with a little water and draw three lines each on their forehead, upper and lower arms. Ravi also draws lines on his chest. There are strict rules about the way in which the vibudhi should be applied and the direction in which one faces as it is applied. These are taught by the guru and reinforced by conversations with adiyars or in discourses by learned teachers which the members of the family attend or listen to on CDs. Importantly, Ravi told me that Sivanadiyars are not permitted to buy the vibudhi, but must be given it in a Siva temple. As a large amount of vibudhi is used each day, this necessitates regular visits to temples. These are not short visits either as, when in the temple, the family will do whatever task needs doing – whether it is 87

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washing vessels used in ritual, cleaning, or plucking or stringing flowers for the worship. All of this is seen as part of their duty (kadamai) to Siva. But it also increases attachment to him. This attachment is constantly enhanced through other techniques, including of internal control. Thus, for example, there are five external sense organs which enable apprehension of the phenomenal world (skin, mouth, eyes, nose, and ears). All of these are considered inert (jada) unless activated by consciousness (i.e. the sense organs belong to one ontological category, while consciousness to the other). Further, these sense organs are hierarchically organised. After following the elaborate ritual purification, and having gathered the materials for the worship of Siva including flowers, water, and other things, the Sivanadiyar ritually worships (puja) Siva – inviting him to enter into his aniconic image (linga), honouring and offering him good things and meditating on him. Ravi’s morning puja takes him over an hour each day, not including his external purification. Watching him, there is little to see, except the deep concentration on preparing the self (internal purification) and invitation of Siva into the linga by means of silent chanting and various hand gestures (see Davis 1991: Plates 2–6) followed by silent and still meditation. Throughout this process, the adept practitioner, I was told, must learn to suppress all senses but the eyes – bringing the god in front of the eyelids (closed or open) and keeping him there. He should not smell, hear, taste or feel anything when worshipping god. Likewise, one should still the mind (described as wayward, like a monkey), the intellect and the ego and develop one’s deeper faculties of contemplation and apprehension. These exercises in controlling aspects of the self may be described as a form of conscious objectification of aspects of the psycho-physical self and reintegration in such a way that each exercise of this kind results in a different self, one that is qualitatively different from the self at the beginning of the exercise. Further, adherents try to keep this focus on Siva even when carrying out mundane tasks or when faced with the desires, expectations or pain of others. Again, this is not easy and does require conscious practices of attachment (to Siva) and engaged detachment (from all else) that are reinforced in multifarious ways. For instance, in Ravi’s household, once the children have been sent to school, Ravi performs the elaborate ablutions and donning of the marks of a Sivanadiyar. He then undertakes his individual worship to the lord. Uma has already done these before getting the children ready for school. Ravi and Uma then eat their first meal of the day. If the shop that they run which is located just outside their home is not busy, they play a CD or MP3 and listen to discourses on Saiva Siddhantha or on the great Saiva saints. Some CDs contain talks given by their guru; others are talks given by noted Sivanadiyars. These

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ways of learning are important as Ravi and Uma only see their guru once a year and there is a brisk circulation in these CDs and cassettes. The discourses involve the recitation of texts, hymns of praise to Siva, and explanations thereof. The message throughout is the importance of loving the lord, submitting to him, asking nothing of anyone and performing no unnecessary action that will further enmesh the pasu in the world of attachments. Disregarding what Ravi and Uma would identify as the misguided feelings of others while at the same time performing one’s duties towards them takes strength of purpose, conviction, and single-mindedness to the one permitted attachment to Siva and the conviction that he will take care of everything else. On one hot Sunday in 2010, Ravi, Uma, their daughters, a few Siva devotees – both Sivanadiyar and non-Sivanadiyars – and I were in a Siva temple removing weeds from the grounds. We were all absorbed in our tasks when the elder of the two daughters gave a small cry of pain. A carelessly discarded broken glass bottle that had been used to carry oil for the temple lamps had cut her foot, which began to bleed copiously. Ravi looked up briefly before bending back to his work. Uma looked somewhat torn but held herself from going to her daughter. ‘Wash it and sit down, Siva’ was all she said. Someone else and I cleaned the girl’s foot and bound it up with a rag. She said nothing, but as soon as we ceased our ministrations, she found a task she could do sitting down and applied herself to it. Later as we left the temple, tired and sweaty, no one enquired after the cut or even mentioned it. It will be noted that Uma referred to her daughter as Siva. Indeed, Ravi and Uma, like other Sivanadiyars I met call everyone, including their spouses and children, Siva. Ravi once told me of an exemplary Sivanadiyar who referred to all his household cattle as Siva. ‘One should be like that – see Siva in every creature.’ There is a very specific logic that underpins this mode of address, which I will try to unpack below with reference to a particular conversation we had. Ravi, Uma, and I once listened to a discourse in which the Tamil epic Silapadigaram was discussed. This is the tale of a wife’s anger, which destroys an entire kingdom, at the killing of her innocent husband by a hasty king. The discoursant praised the righteousness of the wife’s anger against injustice but was at pains to point out that her actions generated more karma for her, albeit good karma. Ravi explained, ‘her actions led to pasu punyam’ (merit that does not lead one out of the state of pasu, i.e. continues to tie one down to the cycle of birth and rebirth). The only way to avoid pasu karman is to dedicate all action to Siva, to do everything for him and in his name. ‘Even if you see a poor man and give him food, if you do it as a good thing (dharmam) in and of itself or out of pity for the man, you will generate good karma. This will not help 89

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you get out of the cycle of birth and rebirth. If you give charity invoking the name of Siva and with only his thoughts in your mind, you generate Siva punyam. This will allow you to go further up [the ladder of maya] without tying you down.’ The only real relationship is with Siva and the only goal is sivapadam – the feet of Siva, i.e. liberation. Seen in this light, the exemplary Sivanadiyar who referred to his cattle as Siva makes sense – feeding cattle, milking them, caring for them can generate pasu punyam unless the cattle are seen as and referred to as Siva. Then, caring for them becomes caring for him. Thus, by referring to every pasu as Siva, Sivanadiyars are both constantly reiterating their attachment to Siva and making sure that anything they do for anyone is for Siva. Returning to the ontological categories with which I began this account, they are also emphasising their focus on the soul and its likeness to Siva, who is pure consciousness. This does not eliminate the fact of the body and the world in which it is located and acts, but it does foreground the potential inherent in every pasu for unbound liberation of the soul at which point it becomes Siva-like – infinite, all-knowing and with no trace of malam. Even when we turn to the radically different ontological category of the inert material world and all its constituents, we find that Siva is not far. It is Siva who causes undifferentiated quiescent maya to differentiate into the various entities found in the phenomenal material world. The things of the material world are as they are because of Siva and need to be recognised as such. A knowledgeable pasu will be able to see Siva or his actions everywhere but attach only to Siva himself. To put it another way, one with the right knowledge does not see pots and pans – he or she sees things that are to be used in this world in order to fulfil and consume karma and free the soul. In Ravi and Uma’s house, the word Siva is written in Tamil on every household object – from the pots and pans to the CD player. When I asked about this I was told: ‘Everything is Siva [ellame Siva] or comes from Siva. His name is on our lips all the time.’ A logical consequence of believing that everything is or comes from Siva is that Sivanadiyars say they do not need anything from anyone – neither from other gods (whose existence they do not doubt; again see Desai 2010) or other people. All their needs are met by Siva and, as he knows better than they ever can what their needs are and what they should be given, there are never any grounds for complaint or desire. Thus, even though Sivanadiyars with dependants work for their living and to provide for families, they believe that the work and anything they make from it come from Siva. Any excess (in terms of time or money) is devoted to serving the lord and his servants or to learning more about how to achieve one’s goals of serving him or liberating one’s soul.

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Uma said, ‘[what we do] is adimai [complete subjugation, slavery]. As His adimai he will give us everything.’ Ravi added: ‘He knows what to give; what to do, he will organise everything. This is why we do not ever ask anyone for anything.’ The complex and rather austere ontology and cosmology of Saiva Siddhantha is somewhat tempered by the Sivanadiyar’s focus on love as a driving force. Siva is conceptualised as love. Indeed, it is his love for pasus that drives him to set maya and karma in motion and to help pasus liberate themselves. Almost every large Siva temple in Tamilnadu has the words Anbe Sivam (Siva is love) prominently displayed on one, if not more, of its towers. For Sivanadiyars, the love of the lord is unmatchable but they can devote all their attention and love to him and serve him wholeheartedly. In addition to this, Sivanadiyars also serve those who, like themselves, are dedicated to the lord Siva. Again, this is contained within the canon of Saiva Siddhanta wherein the great Saiva saints not only devote themselves to Siva but also to his servants. Those are the only permissible attachments but they do give Sivanadiyars a sort of community; one that supplements the intense work they do on themselves in order to divest themselves of their fettered humanity. Conclusion Following Stuart Hampshire, James Laidlaw makes a distinction between two kinds of moral claim. Firstly, moral claims whose authority rests on convention, custom or law and those that are grounded in a view of the nature of things (1995: 13). The latter kind of claim is universalistic in scope while the former is more particular. Often, such claims co-exist and inform each other, although the balance between them may vary at different times, in different places and for different persons. In the case of Sivanadiyars, for instance, the moral claims that are universalistic and based on the nature of things edge out moral claims based on custom, convention or law. This does not mean that all the obligations that derive from convention, law or custom are dropped or ignored, although they may be reconceptualised. Both Ravi and Uma consciously used the Tamil verb maarinom (changed into/converted) when describing their becoming Sivanadiyars. As part of this change, they actively eschew the social world (samsara) and their roles within it as members of a patrilineage (pangalli), children of parents or parents of children. While the claims of the patrilineage, its gods and customs, no longer seem to drive them,3 their core obligations to their own parents and children have become recast as the fruits of a karmic burden – any care given to them would consume karma left undone in

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a previous life. Fulfilling these obligations allows the soul to continue its journey towards liberation. Laidlaw himself places the two kinds of moral claims in conversation with Michael Carrithers’ discussion of the social history of moi conceptions of the self, which he contrasted to personne conceptions discussed by Mauss. Carrithers defines the personne conception of self as ‘a conception of the individual human being as a member of a (1) significant and (2) ordered collectivity’ (1985: 235). This may be a clan, tribe, kin group or nation-state. In contrast, the moi conception is ‘defined as a conception of (1) the physical and mental individuality of human beings within (2) a natural or spiritual cosmos, and (3) interacting with each other as moral agents.’ (1985: 235) Universalistic moral claims of the kind the Sivanadiyars make partly derive from a moi conception that has a long history in the Saiva Siddhanta tradition; elements of this are found in other Indic traditions. This locates the soul as the essence of self and the embodied self itself as object, means and site of work. This kind of moi conception posits important ways of engaging with others. Other persons are real – their bodies and circumstances are the product of karma and they too have souls that are, like those of the Sivanadiyars, fettered. These souls, like those of the Sivanadiyars are capable of achieving liberation at which point they will become Siva-like. Morten Axel Pedersen suggests that it would be fruitful to ‘conceive of [religious] conversion as a unique relational transformation, or … introversion, resulting into qualitatively new kinds of entities, concepts and forms’ (2012: 65). While his focus is on Christian conversion, I find interesting and useful his suggestion that conversion ‘then, may be understood as an eclipsing of social relations that keeps “the sum of complexity” (relationality) stable over time, but displaces this complexity from an outer realm we think of as social to an inner realm we think of as existential. What we call the individual is a relational cosmos that has imploded onto itself and which has given birth to a new kind of relation, and a new concept of the individual, in the process: what may be called the self-relational person … ’ (2012: 65). This affords a very interesting way of thinking about the projects of self- cultivation and transformation undertaken by people like Ravi and Uma. What both Ravi and Uma actively engage with is a particular conception of the psycho-physical self which is conceptualised in ontological and cosmological terms (following Carrithers 1985: 252). Every aspect of this psycho-physical complex comes under intense scrutiny and work. While some things, such as working in temples, are done in the company of others, this work is nevertheless individual and inwardly focused. This requires mindful work of attachment, engaged detachment, and control.

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It is this desire that leads to intensive work on aspects of the self – cultivating some, such as deep contemplative understanding, and controlling others, such as the mind and ego. This in turn leads to more engaged detachment from the world by seeing it clearly and knowing how it is made up, while still being part of it. Knowledge about the universe and its workings and the condition and potential of the soul here lead to an increase in complexity as well as to a relocation of concerns from the outside to the inside. Such a relocation is necessary to enable the ‘karma-neutral’ living to which Sivanadiyars aspire. But Sivanadiyars do engage with others – particularly as they are not renouncers. They also use things – CD players, CDs, pots, pans, etc. in their daily lives. One of the ways in which they enable the affordance of these things and the people whom they encounter to their ‘karma-neutral’ project is by reconceptualiseing these as Siva (people and other sentient entities) and as coming from Siva (non-sentient things). By referring to all others, including each other, as Siva, Sivanadiyars reduce the danger that the things that they have to do (earn a living, look after parents and children, engage with other people) will lead to the production of further karma, even if it might be meritorious (punya). Indeed, these people, animals, and things also become tools for a kind of auto-didactism (see Bertelsen, Chapter 9 this volume) wherein they are internally represented as emanations of Siva. The world and its multifarious denizens then become disciplined opportunities for an engagement with Siva and his workings. As one Saiva man, who has taken the first level of initiation, told me, ‘If a man says to me “do not take that path, it is thorny”, I listen to him because Siva has taken this form to help me look after myself. If I do not listen and go on that path and get pricked by a thorn, it is my fault. Siva did try and teach me. I did not listen and learn.’ Here, even a casual bit of advice is seen as coming from Siva and the giver of that advice as a manifestation of Siva. Equally, should one disregard the advice and is not pricked by a thorn, then this becomes an opportunity for praising Siva for offering protection. It is important to note that Ravi and Uma only see their guru once a year, and even then, in the presence of large numbers of other Sivanadiyars. The guru is an inspiration and an exemplar in the same way as historico-mythical Siva devotees and other Sivanadiyars are. Ravi and Uma each constantly try to keep these exemplars and their examples alive in their mind’s eye so that they are engaged in auto-didactic relations with these different emanations, receptacles or instantiations of Siva in ways that enable them both to refine their psycho-social selves and thereby continue working on themselves. Autorelationality, then, is made possible by a particular set of cosmological identifications. Focusing on such inwardly oriented, intensional relations and their cosmological 93

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and ontological underpinnings, I suggest, can enable an anthropology of others’ anthropologies, i.e. one that draws attention to and theorises upon the human condition as understood, articulated, theorised, and lived by those with whom we work. Notes 1 2 3

Adiyar may stem from adimai, meaning slave or one who lives under the over-lordship or at the feet of another. This, of course, makes it well-nigh impossible to conduct fieldwork as an insider-initiate. This is, of course, gendered and dependent on the roles one has vis-à-vis others. Arguably, while both Ravi and Uma (as Ravi’s wife and therefore with his support) are able to work on developing a moi as opposed to a personne conception of self, they are aware that in the case of their teenage daughters the personne conception is only temporarily kept in abeyance and might be reactivated when the girls get married. While both girls have been initiated and taken samayadiksha, neither is a Sivanadiyar.

References Carrithers, M. 1985. An alternative social history of the self. In M. Carrithers, S. Collins, and S. Lukes (eds), The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 234–256. Davis, R.H. 1991. Ritual in an Oscillating Universe: Worshipping Siva in Medieval India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Desai, A. 2010. Dilemmas of devotion: religious transformation and agency in Hindu India. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (NS) 16: 313–329. Foucault, M. 1988 [1982]. Technologies of the self. In L.H. Martin, H. Gutman, and P.K. Hutton (eds), Technologies of the Self: a Seminar with Michel Foucault. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Pp. 16–49. Laidlaw. J. 1995. Riches and Renunciation: Religion, Economy and Society Among the Jains. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Pedersen, M.A. 2012. The task of anthropology is to invent relations – proposing the motion. In S. Venkatesan and M. Candea (eds), The task of anthropology is to invent relations: 2010 meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory, Manchester. Critique of Anthropology 32(1): 43–86. Soni, J. 1989. Philosophical Anthropology in Saiva Siddhanta. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. Viswanathan, Peterson, I. 1989. Poems to Siva: The Hymns of the Tamil Aaints. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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4 Inter-gration and intra-gration in cosmology Don Handelman

Introduction At the roots of what we call ‘religion’ are values of holism (Handelman and Lindquist 2011). The late Galina Lindquist and I contended that such values were never extinguished during very lengthy periods in ancient and traditional worlds in which holism related first and foremost to cosmos, indeed to cosmos that holds itself together from within itself, through itself – as intra-gration.1 This kind of cosmos was shattered primarily by the historical emergence of the monotheisms which shaped cosmoses that were ‘encompassed’ – that were held together from outside themselves. These developments are associated with a lengthy period that Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age (See Bellah and Joas 2012; Robbins 2009; Thomasen 2010). Lindquist and I call this shattering of cosmos, in areas of the ancient world, the First Great Rupture of Cosmos. Nonetheless, values of holism continued through modern Western worlds, as these values were lodged in what came to be called ‘religion’, and still later in peoplehood, nationhood, statism, ethnicity, and not least in the individual (culminating in Foucault’s idea of the care of the self).2 Here I explore relationships among holism and cosmos, stopping with the First Great Rupture. Following this, in Part 2, I outline through its rituals a goddess cosmos in South India that, in emerging from itself as an ongoing dynamic, holds itself together from its interior. This exemplifies the idea of cosmos intra-grating holistically. I close with a discussion of this cosmic logic.

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Part 1: Holism and cosmos Louis Dumont understands holism (and individualism) as value through which the social is organised. Dumont (1986: 279) gives the following succinct definition of holism: ‘We call holist [holistic] an ideology [which he understands as ’value’] that valorizes the social whole and neglects or subordinates [the value of] the human individual.’ I modify Dumont’s formulation as follows: holism entails the integrity of the entirety, where the ‘entirety’ may be any kind of human unit, and where these units are not necessarily bounded clearly (in the sense of being contained from their boundaries inward). The emphasis within an entirety is on integrity, which there are many different ways of accomplishing. I use integrity here in the sense of entireness, completeness, soundness. Integrity is related to integration. Integration refers more to parts added together to constitute a whole – so that in the first instance the connection between parts is additive – thus, an inter-gration through connections of betweenness. By contrast, my intention for integrity refers more to the synergistic relationships within and through the parts of a whole – thus, the connections between parts must be intra-relational, held together through their entirety. My interest is in how worlds are holding together through the metaphysics of the human, through the imaginaries of the human, where ‘world’ may vary from the cosmic to the individual, even as, say, in modernity, religion becomes civil, political, national, secular, individualised, yet forming and re-forming around the globe, carrying their seeds of holism (Handelman and Lindquist 2011: 42–45). Cosmos here refers to the entirety of the phenomenal lived-space of all entities – human and other-than-human – the entirety of a world of all dimensions of existence. Beginnings – holistic cosmos held together from within itself As noted, cosmoses may be distinguished broadly if crudely in terms of their logics of organisation, between (1) those held together largely from within themselves and (2) those held together largely from their boundaries, from outside themselves. Cosmos held together from within and through itself applies primarily to a wide variety of archaic, traditional, and tribal cosmoses. Cosmos held together from outside itself is pertinent particularly to the surviving monotheisms. In the English language there is no word I can find to describe how something is intra-grated from within itself through the self-integrity of its interiority, rather than from outside itself – an excellent monotheistic understanding of integration. In English (translated from the French) the word made prominent by Louis Dumont (1981) to describe 96

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how something – social, cultural – is held together from outside itself is ‘encompassment’. My dictionary defines ‘encompass’ (and ‘incompass’) as, ‘to surround, to encircle, to include, to contain, to get in one’s power’. This kind of being held together is crucial to monotheistic cosmos. Yet consider the following dynamics of an ancient holistic cosmos of Mahayana Buddhism, that of the cosmos of the Chinese Hua-yen school of Buddhism from the seventh century CE (Cook 1972: 2): Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each ‘eye’ of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimensions, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels glittering like stars of the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring … This is a cosmos in which there is an infinitely repeated interrelationship among all the members of the cosmos.   This relationship is said to be one of simultaneous … mutual inter-­ causality [which I read as, mutually relational or indeed intra-relational].

Every jewel is the sole cause for the infinity of jewels, but simultaneously the infinite whole of jewels is the cause for every single jewel. In terms of beings, ‘each … is at once the cause for the whole and is caused by the whole, and what is called existence is a vast body made up of an infinity of [beings] all sustaining each other and defining each other. The cosmos is, in short, a self-creating, self-maintaining, and self-defining organism … what affects one item in the vast inventory of the cosmos affects every other individual therein’ (Cook 1972: 3–4). The Hua-yen cosmos has no centre, or, if there is a centre, ‘it is everywhere. Man certainly is not the centre, nor is some god’ (Cook 1972: 4). Note that the Hua-yen cosmos has no external boundaries, unlike the absolute, virtually impassable boundary between God and human being to which the surviving monotheisms have accustomed us to as natural and commonsensical. The Hua-yen cosmos is not enclosed from outside itself, in contrast to our understanding of the kind of holism suggested by Dumont’s idea of ‘encompassment’. The absence of boundaries in the Hua-yen cosmos is attested to by the emphasis on the infinity of intra-relationships that in a strong sense are this cosmos. This cosmos holds itself together through its intra-­relationalities, the very densities and textures of these connections creating a thick mesh of intensities of mutual being. This kind of cosmos lives wholly through 97

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itself – within which human being and other-than-human are thought to be alive and interactive. The Hua-yen cosmos is continuous within itself. Continuousness here is graduated between levels and among domains without necessarily abrupt shifts or ruptures between human beings and other-than-human. Cosmos is hierarchical yet flowing, with an utter abhorrence of stasis. I contend that a continuousness of cosmos is generally immanent, not transcendent, since continuousness is primarily self-referential, referring to nothing outside itself (Jacobsen (1976) on ancient Mesopotamia), without implying in the least that cosmic continuousness indexes harmony and an absence of fragmentation (though it may index ongoing self-creation – autopoiesis and self-repair from within itself). Analogous descriptions of organic cosmos with the qualities I ascribe to this abound for a host of tribal cosmologies. Without romanticising this, tribal cosmologies had integrity: these were and are cosmoses that were true to themselves within themselves, held together from within themselves through the densities, intensities, and textures of the fullness of intra-acting connectivities with deep resonances between deities, human beings, other beings, and the continuousness of their shared cosmos. In my terms, in such cosmologies holism is only sometimes dependent on cosmic closure. Indeed, much of the historical and ethnographic evidence points to holistic cosmologies that are open. In relation to the eventual emergence of Western cosmology, two great ruptures of holistic cosmoses developed historically. The first emerged during what is often called the Axial Age; while the second, the separation of politics from religion, sometimes referred to as the Great Separation (Lilla 2007), formed through the deep rupture in Western European Christian culture provoked in particular by the Protestant Reformation, beginning in the sixteenth century. Monotheistic cosmos, forming through the first rupture, contained the beginnings of a foundational break with itself, within itself. The First Great Rupture: the Axial Age The cultural loci of these radical ruptures in cosmic organisation are usually given as Greece (of the philosophers), Palestine (of the Hebrew prophets), Iran (of Zoroaster), China (of Lao-tse), and India (of the Buddha). The most persuasive instances are those of ancient Israel and Greece (but only of the philosophes). The rupture of cosmic holism severed the graduated continuousness of cosmos, such that the otherthan-­human separated from the human. This separation enabled that which scholars call ‘transcendence’ to emerge within cosmos. On the other side of the rupture, Deity became unknowable to human being, positioned 98

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way beyond the capability, capacity, and knowability of the latter. How were human beings able to relate to the now transcendent divine? The rupture created the other-worldly transcendence of the gods. God and gods were no longer of this world, even of this cosmos. God and gods become the absolute creators of cosmos rather than living within and integral to it, no longer sharing with human beings the substances from which cosmos was constituted. This is where the idea of encompassment comes in. My Axial Age concern here is with what the historian of religion, Jan Assman (2008: 75), calls the ‘revolutionary monotheism’ of ancient Israel, and how this indelibly changed the logics through which cosmos was held together. The emergence of monotheism eventually came to posit the absolute separation of God the transcendent Creator from humankind. God crossed this chasm at will; yet human being, only through prayer and sacrifice. Frankfort and Frankfort (1963: 241–244) argue that, ‘The God of the Hebrews is pure being, unqualified, ineffable. He is holy. That means he is sui generis … It means that all values are ultimately attributes of God alone … Only a God who transcends every phenomenon … can be the one and only ground of all existence.‘ Herewith and underlined is the contrast between a cosmos that holds together from within itself through itself, and the emerging monotheistic cosmos of the Hebrew God who is boundless, infinite, unnameable, unfathomable, creating His finite cosmos as one ruptured from himself. Given the absolute boundary between God and the human, the ancient Hebrew cosmos became held together from its exterior by the transcendent God whose eternal existence did not depend on that of his finite cosmos. The integration of this cosmos depended on its being encompassed by God, by his moral injunctions. As noted, cosmos acquires exteriority through the cosmic rupture, and so the capacity to be encompassed by transcendent deity. The rupture of the intra-grated holistic cosmos led to the creation of another kind of holism, that of the monotheistic, in which God holds his cosmos together from its boundaries, while his primary positioning is outside his creation. Basically, he is independent of the cosmos of his creation whose parts are inter-grated. The monotheistic cosmos turned the perfection of the human being into the divine purpose of the universe, yet set before human being the goal of organising the world into one that was truly, only, and solely human. For as various scholars (e.g. Bruno Latour) have commented, in the worlds that eventually derived from monotheism most living beings who were other-than-human were either killed off, reduced in their communicative capacities with humans, or, treated as inert, no longer were perceived as living.

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So far I have referred in the abstract to cosmos that holds itself together through the densities and intensities of its own interiority. Now I turn to a goddess cosmos in South India to introduce one variety of how such a holistic cosmos might work. I do this in brief using ritual events through which the goddess – Paiditalli, the Golden Lady – forms and re-forms as she changes herself and her cosmos.3 Part 2:  The fluid cosmic logic of the goddess Paiditalli The venue of the following discussion is the small city and former kingdom of Vizianagaram in north-eastern Andhra Pradesh. Culturally, Vizianagaram is in the region called Kalinga, and Vizianagaram shared cultural themes with other previously extant little kingdoms (e.g. neighbouring Bobilli), some of whose rituals related to kingship have been studied by anthropologists in Puri (Apffel-Marglin 1981, 2008) and Jeypore (Schnepel 1996; 2002) in Orissa, and Bastar (Gell 1997) in Madhya Pradesh. With all the hubris entailed, I will attempt here to take something of the perspective of the goddess. Paiditalli’s story and her relationship to the kingdom of Vizianagaram begins in the eighteenth century. In January 1757, Vijaya Rama Raju, the Raja of Vizianagaram, aided by French irregulars led by the adventurer Charles de Bussy (who held a farman from the Padshah in Delhi to collect taxes in the Kalinga region), set out to war with Bobilli.4 In the foundational myth of Paiditalli, the younger sister of the Raja, Paidimamba, pleaded with him not to go to battle, saying nothing good would come of it. Vizianagaram was victorious, Bobilli destroyed, yet that very night the Raja was killed in his tent by the greatest hero of Bobilli. Hearing of his death, overcome with grief, Paidimamba hurled herself into a lake close to Vizianagaram and drowned. Before entering the waters she said she would return, and her death was self-sacrificial. Later she appeared to fishermen and told them to dive and find her image. She emerged from the depths as the goddess, Paiditalli, onto the hard, flat surfaces of the land. Her shrine, called the Wilderness Temple, was erected close to the lake. Later a second shrine, called the Square Temple (echoing the square mandala according to which the old city was built), was located in the vicinity of the palace-fort of the Raja. Paiditalli had returned with the explicit aim of protecting and aiding kingdom and kingship. She resides roughly half the year in the Wilderness Temple and half in the Square Temple. The climax of her yearly return is a great Jatra (festival; literally, movement) – the Sirimanu – through which a people’s version of kingship is renewed. The cosmos of Paiditalli is radically different in its logics of organisation from those of most other South Indian deities as they are discussed 100

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in the literature. This goddess cosmos is characterised by dynamism, by interiority, by depth, by fluidity, and by hardness, yet by a somewhat different sense of hierarchy than that which one might expect in India. Paidimamba, the Raja’s sister left the brittle flatness of the land and went into depths of water. The fluid is replete with itself, extremely dense, leaving no interior emptiness, no holes, without boundaries in itself, and in continuous movement within itself. The sister rose from the depths of fluidity as the goddess, Paiditalli, emerging onto the surface that she had left. The near surface or surface – land – is dry and thin, its features fixed in form and perhaps in place, organised by the linearity of rule, of law, rectilinear (its spaces cultivated and ordered in different ways), and constituted in terms of temporal distinctions and movement that are formed through starts and stops, often through counted durations. Yet surface must have the fluid (water) to survive. This hardened surface is that of the animate and human world which of course is integral to Paiditalli’s cosmos. Yet this world is that of the surface of Paiditalli’s interior fluidity. Surface, then, exists because it is the flattened, hardened, rigid, encrusted portions of Paiditalli’s cosmos. And these rigid portions are fragile (Handelman and Shulman 2004). When fluid rises on this surface, the latter becomes softer, more malleable, and more tensile, amenable to being shaped to awaken fertility and growth upon which humankind depends. Though Paiditalli desires to help humankind in its struggle on the inhospitable surface of her cosmos (though humanity can exist nowhere else) this is not the location where she is most at home to herself, most fully herself. Her fluidity, her deep interiority, is self-intragrating through its never-ceasing dynamic movement which continuously permeates itself. Deep within herself is where she is most true to herself as herself. Thus, as she approaches the surface of her cosmos, one can say that her transition is severe (though likely not abrupt – her cosmos is continuous, as is she within herself). And it is here, on her hardened, fixed surface of selfness (so unlike her true selfness) that human beings use ritual to affect and effect this transition as gently as they can, to bring her once more to perceive human needs, to re-awaken her desire to aid the people of Vizianagaram, their kingship and king. The highest degree of intra-gration in Paiditalli’s cosmos is deep within herself, within her infinite depths (which have no centre) where she is most fully herself, uninterrupted, undivided, wholly dynamic. The lowest degree of intra-gration is near or on the surface of her cosmos, in the animate world. Here rituals aid or enable the presence of the goddess to become form, phase by phase. In doing so she quickens life in the encrustation, infusing this with the dynamism of reviving growth. Rituals are the primary if indirect source of thinking on Paiditalli’s cosmos.5 101

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I turn briefly to the ritual phases through which Paiditalli annually emerges into form, moving from formlessness within her own deep interiority into her own shallows, from which she wades ashore to where the human dwells, and where shaping and self-shaping through ritual begins and continues, until and then after its climax. Devara Pandaga ritual: the birth of the goddess on her cosmic surface This ritual cycle begins near the end of the hot season (usually in May), broken by the coming of the monsoon. The hot season is blazing and extremely dry. In the past this was the primary period of disease and epidemic, and goddesses in South India are often the bringers both of the extreme heating of disease and its healing, its blessed cooling. The devara pandaga ritual takes place on the shore of the lake in which in 1757 the king’s sister drowned herself and emerged as Paiditalli. In the stillness of the deep night, her priest and his two helpers enter the waters. On shore, in clusters here and there, are gathered devotees of the goddess. The priest and his helpers address the goddess, pleading with her to come, cajoling her, yet also as time passes cursing and insulting Paiditalli in efforts to arouse her from her depths. Sometimes this is a difficult birth, taking hours; yet sometimes easier and quicker. Nonetheless Paiditalli often resists coming, and then when she does appear it is with force, in anger at being disturbed deep within her fluid depths. All await a sign of fire in the dark sky. Eventually a spark appears, perhaps heat lightning, which is seen as falling into the water. The priest and his helpers grasp handfuls of mud from the lake bottom even as they fall unconscious with the force of the anger of the goddess’s coming, and they immediately are dragged ashore, their fists clenched around oozing mud. The priest sees in the mud the two colours that are the essence of the Goddess (and of the female in general). One is gold, the colour of turmeric (pasuppu), and the other, vermilion, the redness of kunkum. In her coming, Paiditalli joins together the basic elements of cosmos: fire (the lightning), air (through which she passes), water (the lake from which she emerges), and earth (the mud within which her essence rests). She comes as an infant re-born. Women on the shore immediately feed her and ritually protect her in her openness and helplessness in the animate world. I call the goddess in this form, Mud-Paiditalli; within the mud she is relatively labile, fluid, amorphous, perhaps still closer to her own depths. Nonetheless the initial shaping and hardening into form is occurring, and her fluidity lessens as she takes on form. Simultaneously, Paiditalli brings the depth and density of cosmic interiority and fluidity to the hardness, dryness, and brittleness of the human world, softening

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this, making this more malleable to reshaping, and, so, more suitable for the deeper potential of fertility and growth, as the monsoon rains come. Mud-Paiditalli is placed in a jangidi, a winnowing basket. The basket’s concave inner surface has been rubbed intensively with golden-coloured turmeric. In the centre of the basket is a largish circular bed of vermilion kunkum surrounded by white flowers. On the bed of kunkum is a circular lamp filled with camphor, in which is a lit, long wick and a raw mango. The whole basket is formed as female. The winnowing basket is rubbed with turmeric as is the face of an auspicious married woman after her morning bath. This intensifies her femaleness and gives this greater depth, greater density and self-resonance. The basket is marked with a dot of vermilion kunkum, as is the female forehead – intended to ward off any untoward forces in the vicinity. In Andhra the winnowing basket is strongly associated with the womb and female fertility (Handelman 2014), and the mango with the vagina and the birth of goddesses. Thus: face within the womb, vagina within the face, a lit lamp on the forehead, a mark of respect and worship. The newborn amorphous infant is placed simultaneously deep within the female form (the jangidi) yet also on its intensified (and therefore deeper) surface, from which she will continue to emerge and mature in the human world. The female turns into and through herself, interior becoming more exterior, exterior becoming more interior. Autopoietically, the goddess gives birth to herself, first in the lake and then onshore, at the water’s edge, in the winnowing basket. Coming from deep within herself, she is placed deep within herself on the shore of the hardness of the human world, into an exterior womb on the surface of the human world, an exterior womb that is no less a cradle, one designed for the human forming of the female – which is how the winnowing basket has been prepared here. The goddess gives birth to herself without ever leaving herself, which speaks to the depth and density of her cosmos. In this sense she is permitting human beings to shape her for their need to create depth and life within the flatness of civilisation. She is quiet now, a slumbering infant. Dawn breaks, and the winnowing basket is carried in procession from the lake into the city, to the Square Temple some hundreds of metres from the palace-fort of the Raja. In the climactic ritual of this renewal of kingship the goddess will move between her Square Temple and the palace-fort. The goddess becomes womb Within the inner sanctum (garbha griha) of the Square Temple, MudPaiditalli is divided into clumps which rejuvenate metal pots of the goddess that have been taken out of storage. Fifteen days later the dried 103

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mud is carefully put back into the lake, and two, new, spheroidal pots (made from lake-bottom clay) are placed in the inner sanctum where for the next months (through August) they absorb the energies and female qualities (turmeric and kunkum) of the infant from her permanent metal pots. Her amorphousness is curved, the energies are curving, the curvature enclosing itself with her energies within this: Paiditalli enclosing herself within herself. The two clay pots are a virginal womb for and of the goddess, her own form within which she matures and evolves. Mud-Paiditalli turns herself into Pot-Paiditalli. She herself is described as ‘innocent’, as prepubescent. In effect, the goddess is moving from womb to womb, from the lake of her origins to infancy in the wicker basket to her own pre-existing metal pots to her own clay pots shaped especially for her on this occasion. Each womb is a locus of depth on the superficial surface of the human world. Even as her form acquires a measure of solid presence, she continues flowing within herself. She is the Golden Goddess and in South India gold is the solid that is the closest to the fluid. Just as Paiditalli is opening depth and softness in the hard, shallow surface of the human world as she moves from womb to womb, so, too, does the growing of rice, the food staple. The maturing of the goddess within the Square Temple parallels the growing of rice in the rural fields outside the city. Farmers perceive powerful parallels between the growth of the rice plant and female pregnancy. The paddy is planted in a riceplot (aku-madi), a corner of the larger field. Around the end of July the sprouts are removed and transplanted into the larger field. Around this time, Paiditalli is ‘transplanting’ herself from the mud into the metal pots. Inside the plant the pannicle buds begin forming, shaping what is called the ‘little stomach’, akin to the first signs of pregnancy. By late August, as the rice stomach grows very visibly, the two, empty, clay pots, PotPaiditalli, daily begin leaving the Square Temple, going into the Old City of Vizianagaram. As the rice plant flowers, its female and male reproductive organs are pollinated together by the wind. The flower turns into seed and develops a quasi-protective hull that fills with liquid (starch and protein). As the flower falls away, this milky fluid is visible. Farmers say that ‘the flower becomes pregnant with milk’, proof that the soft, green seed is a viable offspring. The plant is successfully pregnant within itself as the seeds develop, and is heavy with rice as it bends back and down, ready for harvesting. The annual rice cycle in the region of Vizianagaram is related intimately to the opening of space and depth – in seeding, in the extrusion of shoots, in the ploughing of furrows and filling them with water, in the transplanting, in the protrusion of the stomach in the extruding plant, in the forming of the milk-pregnancy, and in the birth of the mature ­turmeric-coloured rice. The dynamics are those of interiority exteriorising

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itself and emerging onto the softened, now receptive, indeed welcoming surface that is the human world. The dynamics of exteriorisation are primarily female, generating new life from within life. This is Paiditalli’s purpose on the surface of her cosmos. Pot-Paiditalli furrows and sows During the period that stomach, flower, and milk pregnancy appear in the rice plant, the clay pots of Pot-Paiditalli leave the Square Temple most evenings during August and September and go through Old Vizianagaram, street by street, alley by alley. This is the first phase of Paiditalli’s evolution that is marked less by her interiorisation within womb-like structures and more by her bringing her fertility, her womb, to human beings. Now she is actively moving into the thin hardness of a kingdom in need of softening, depth, fertilisation, and healing. As she goes from home to home, Pot-Paiditalli is met by family members, especially women, who place their offerings in the pots and ask for the goddess’s blessing. This worship, night after night, street after street, is akin to furrowing the surfaces of the city, opening space for the depth of presence of the goddess within home after home. So, too, one can think of these movements of the goddess as sowing the coming of kingship in every corner of the furrowed mandala of the Old City. The climactic harvesting will occur during the Sirimanu, as the king is brought anew to his palace-fort, renewing this intra-grative core of the kingdom. The Tevadam rite: Paiditalli sprouts from the earth As the sowing of the city nears completion during the second half of September, Paiditalli reappears, now growing in a Tamarind tree (cinta cettu) some 40–45 feet high, in the midst of paddy fields.6 At the beginning of October, Tree-Paiditalli is carefully, ritually, taken out of the earth, and on to the city where she rests quietly in a street close to her priest’s home until the Sirimanu Jatra some ten days later. In contrast to Mud-Paiditalli, Tree-Paiditalli demands to enter the human plane of her cosmos, to sacrifice herself once more (being cut, severed, injured). This is her most prominent exteriorisation of herself within her cosmos as she forms herself as thoroughly solid and lineal in shape, with powerful linear directionality (unlike the recursiveness of the pot). She is the goddess evolving further, her cosmos preparing to harvest and deliver kingship within the Old City, energised and prepared by Pot-Paiditalli. Unlike her precursors, she is her own shrine, independent of any fixed

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location. Utterly self-aware, she extrudes and protrudes into the human world within herself. From her top, four slender pieces are sliced away, with one given a crude visage. Three are the head-body of Paiditalli and her arms, yet no less the head-body of her younger brother, Potu Raju (the Buffalo King). The fourth is also Paiditalli. In the priest’s yard the vehicles for the Jatra are being assembled. Foremost is the Sirimanu carriage (ratham) itself which will carry Tree-Paiditalli, enabling her to swivel up and down or to rotate. To her top will be slotted and in this way fixed there, a seat and footrest. As the Jatra nears, Tree-Paiditalli is intensified and self-intensifies through offerings and sacrifices, her tree-body rubbed with turmeric, red rings of vermilion traced round her girth, camphor lamps placed along her entire length which is caressed over and over. In other rituals the night before the Jatra, the Potu Raju qualities of Paiditalli (the three-piece) are nurtured (indeed treated as an infant) even as she becomes more she ~ he, her ~ him. Potu Raju is the generic younger brother of the goddess in South India. Where the Goddess is present, his presence is ubiquitous (Biardeau 2004), considered her guardian and protector. Yet now the goddess, her cosmos, contains him, and he emerges from, is cut from her so that their relationship and presence is fuzzy-minded (and likely felt fuzzily in ways that people cannot articulate), and they infra-lap (rather than overlap) even as they separate. Both are one and the one is the goddess within herself. In effect, Paiditalli gives birth to her younger brother as she does to the entirety of the cosmos. The Surimanu Jatra: Tree-Paiditalli carries the king home A small city bursting with visitors: perhaps 300,000 to 400,000 persons have come to Vizianagaram to see the Sirimanu. Tree-Paiditalli’s length is again rubbed with turmeric and she is taken by ox cart to the Square Temple and there mounted on her carriage. Her priest wears the white, silken finery of a raja (and given to him by the son of the last Raja of Vizianagaram), the raja’s turban on his head. He is garlanded and receives turmeric and vermilion. Tied with new saris into the seat, with one hand he holds tightly onto the fourth sliver cut from her head even as she carries him throughout the journey. In his lap, wrapped in a silk cloth, is the three-piece, the other three slivers cut from her head, who are Paiditalli ~ Potu Raju, the goddess and her younger brother. With a great cry, a wave-like sigh from the assembled, Tree-Paiditalli lifts her priest high in the air at a 45 degree angle and swings him in an arc of 180 degrees. This great raising and heightening of space is the opening of the depth of the kingdom by Tree-Paiditalli, harvesting its capacities 106

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for creativity and growth sowed and rejuvenated by the goddess. King and kingship sprout from Tree-Paiditalli into her priest, the receptacle formed to receive them within the human world. Tree-Paiditalli and her entourage make three journeys from the Square Temple to the palace-fort and back. The first is climactic, carried high on the surging waves of the crowd’s emotions. During each successive round there is less overt excitement, the waves subsiding, becoming gentler, gentler. Yet there is no lessening of enthusiasm and more a sense of increasing fullness, repletion, and quietude as a difficult, lengthy journey nears its completion. As the sun sets with the third return of Tree-Paiditalli to the Temple, the Sirimanu ends. From the human perspective the priest is possessed by Paiditalli. From Paiditalli’s perspective – if I may be allowed the hubris of this extrapolation – she absorbs him fully into her interiority so that he becomes part of her greater depths. The new saris are her, tying him into her, dressing him, enclosing him so that he is held next to her as a mother would carry an infant in front of her. From this perspective the world of Vizianagaram is an exteriorisation from within the cosmos during this period when Paiditalli comes closest to exteriorising herself in this way. And it is within herself that the king sprouts into the priest becoming the raja, the priest who is the raja, just as the raja is no less the slain brother of the younger sister who drowned herself and became a goddess and who has a younger brother who emerges from her. The priest-turnedking sprouts from within the interior of the goddess as she brings him to his palace-fort, the sovereign centre of the kingdom. In this sense the autopoietic goddess brings the king out of herself into her own exterior, into an extension of herself that is still herself and, within this, into the kingdom of Vizianagaram that she has sown and grown with her blessings. In a profound sense, within herself she gives birth to the king, her brother – or to her brother, the king. Put otherwise, the king slips out from the goddess just as Potu Raju emerges from his sister. Now older sisters both, younger brothers both. The Uyyala Kambulu ritual: Paiditalli swings away to the Wilderness Temple All post-Sirimanu rituals are intended to quieten, soothe, and please Paiditalli, to make her softly sleepy. The two weeks after the Sirimanu are felt as a spooky period of betwixt and between, a post-harvest lull, perhaps a time of cosmic dissipation. A swing is erected outside the Square Temple. Some parts are from an old Sirimanu carriage. In effect the swing is another vehicle (ratham) for Paiditalli, yet a fluid, modulating version of the Sirimanu carriage. After these two weeks, aspects of the goddess 107

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are placed on the swing which is referred to as a cradle. From the apex of her maturity in the human world during the Sirimanu, Paiditalli is again moving towards infanthood, moving deeper into herself, involuting, withdrawing from the encrusted, superficial, human part of her cosmos into her fruitful depths. Her priest speaks of Paiditalli now as a young girl, and of the swinging as a lullaby. In the past the swinging away was more explicitly a pavalimpu seva ritual, one of putting the goddess to bed as is done every evening in her temples. Now she is swung away to her Wilderness Temple next to the lake, there going deeper into herself, into her intra-grated cosmos where she is said to sleep, to rest – into the fluid, dense, continuous, flowing depths of herself, where she remains from mid-October to mid-May, far from the thin, brittle, divided, and bounded world of humans, the world of kingdom and kingship. Conclusion: reflections on a South Indian cosmic logic I suggested in Part 1 that, in an intra-grated cosmos, holism is only sometimes dependent on cosmic closure. Instead, these holistic cosmoses are open, rather than enclosed from their exteriors. So, how does Paiditalli’s cosmos hold together – sort of topologically (and unrelated to the mathematics of topology)? This is something like trying to visualise the first nano-moments of the Big Bang before anything existed externally to whatever expands from, as it were, its inside. Paiditalli’s cosmos emerges from deep within herself, from fluid depths without bottom, from her autopoietic beginnings in the lake. Visualised, this is something like an inverted conus without a cap, which rises through itself to protrude above itself without leaving itself. The dynamic is from an inside without end toward a non-existent outside, without ever fully surfacing outside because everything continues to be inside, and then moving from the direction of a non-existent outside into inside, the cone-without-cap going into itself without end – while the actual shaping of these movements is done through ritual. Were I to look for boundedness to this intra-grated cosmos, where would I look? The liquid depths of innerness have no bottom. Neither does the cosmos have an exterior, an outside. Instead, in moving further outward from the deep innerness of great densities and intensities of ever-flowing fluidity, there is a hardening, a rigidifying, through which depth turns into encrustation. This may be called a surface yet it is inside cosmos. This dynamic is cosmic process – the less deep slows and in slowing becomes encrusted with itself. Thus cosmos is held together by shifts in concentrations of gravity from deep-within to less deep-within. As the intensity of deeper fluidity rises outward, the positioning of densities, of qualities of energy and fruitfulness, shift, softening the less-deep encrustations of the 108

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fluid that are the animate world of human beings. This dynamic reaches the apex of its own interiority in a concentration of gravity in the least deep-within during the Sirimanu in the merging of Potu Raju, king, and brother within the goddess at the very top of Tree-Paiditalli. In Paiditalli’s cosmos the encrustations of the fluid are entropic, a senescence of cosmos: these are the regions in which fluidity slows, encounters obstacles, dries out, losing the energy of the fertile and the fruitful, and, so, withers and dies. The rituals I have discussed drive this melting of crusted fluids of the as-if surface, the less-deep. Understood in this way there are no boundaries to this cosmos, and even their formation toward outer-ness, into encrustation which is decay, cries out for their softening and dissolution. This cosmos is fluid yet without boundedness, without encompassment, seemingly an impossibility, yet not so since existence-as-fluid is what there is, and this existence discovers its own currents within itself, the goddess within herself, the human within the goddess. Nonetheless this cosmos is not a closed system since it is unbounded, yet neither is it open since it includes everything there is. Similarly, calling this a porous system merely begs the question. One can say of course that this is merely a cosmos constructed through ritual and therefore illusory, and, so, minimally related to the realities of daily existence of human being. This leads into fruitless discussion on religion and social order (see Handelman and Lindquist 2011), and in the case of Vizianagaram also denies the profoundly fluid, involutional, cultural currents which emerged in the kingdom of Vizianagaram during the nineteenth century.7 The cosmos discussed here has powerful resonances with a medieval South Indian cosmos of Siva (Handelman and Shulman 2004). I briefly draw attention to this cosmos, thereby stipulating that it is worth thinking again on other South Indian cosmoses through time. Siva, the great god, the creator of cosmos and its interior depths, is told that in the Forest of Pines there are sages who have forgotten him and instead seek enlightenment through severe ascetic practices. Siva goes to the far-away Forest where the sages practice their asceticism, accompanied by Visnu in his female form as Mohini. While naked ash-strewn Siva seduces the sages’ chaste wives, ravishing Mohini arouses the sages from their asceticism with her sexual allure. When the sages become aware of what has befallen them and their wives, they curse Siva (whom they do not recognise) as a wicked, lascivious magician and plan to kill him. From their great sacrificial fire appear weapons one by one to attack Siva, yet he catches and tames each one and makes it part of himself (tiger, axe, elephant, deer, snakes, two-headed drum, the bleached skull of Brahma, etc.). Defeated, the sages recognise him as the great god and worship him once more. Then in the Forest he dances (as Nataraja, Lord 109

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of the Dance) for the first time, desisting only as the cosmos, nearing collapse, terrifies all the assembled. Siva is the all-knowing cosmos of his creation and affected by what transpires within it. He does not encompass his cosmos – this has no boundary – but he is anywhere and everywhere within it. He is the life principle of cosmos. His cosmos, though not liquid, nonetheless flows continually just as he does. The alternative, entropy, stasis, is the destruction of cosmos, of himself. Evident at the outset is that his quality of knowing has deteriorated, for he is unaware that the sages deny his existence and have become autonomous of him. In effect, part of his cosmos has congealed, hardened, fragmented, leaving cosmos, himself, diminished, less whole. After Siva and Mohini destroy the self-contemplation of the sages, the latter practice sorcery against Siva. Through this he discovers that he had lost significant attributes of his being, for the weapons they send against him are aspects of himself that fragmented from him as did the Forest – and he takes them back, completing himself again, softening the Forest back into himself, into cosmos as the sages worship him. Fully himself once more, he dances, and the dynamic is both that of destruction and creation, for the two are inseparable. Implicit in this is that Siva, like Paiditalli, must continually conserve his cosmos from its interior, finding those loci that are losing dynamism, freeing them from senescence that is entropy, so that again they are intra-related, held together from within. In both Vizianagaram and the Pine Forest there are powerful continuities though separated by hundreds of years, and in both instances cosmic work is directed to reviving human beings and their surround. Paiditalli’s cosmos (and that of the medieval Siva) are flowing, full of currents and shifting volumes of density, without boundedness. These cosmoses are highly systemic. Yet how can fluidity without boundaries be systemic? Would the question itself arise without one or another perspective that insisted on intra-gration rather than inte(r)gration, or without a perspective that eschews cosmos as container,8 instead seeking dynamics? One interesting idea that emerges from thinking on ‘primitive’ cosmos as intra-grating is that, without external containment (in the monotheistic sense), cosmos is not necessarily self-limiting but potentially can go on and on. If cosmos is characterised by fluid dynamics (which to my knowledge no monotheistic cosmos is) then the problematic of holding itself together is even more acute. However, if cosmos is less exteriorising than it is interiorising, plumbing depths rather than expanding through space (as, for example, encompassment and other ideas of hierarchical meta-organisation stress), then holding together may be a problem of movement through other dimensions of which we are unaware or do not recognise. Consider that which transpires at the 110

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top of Tree-Paiditalli during the Sirimanu Jatra as the balance of fluid densities shifts towards lesser depth and sister, brother, king and goddess all come together through the priest, or, more accurately, all go through one another so that they cannot be distinguished from one another. So, perhaps, Paiditalli’s fluid cosmos is held together through recursiveness, and this recursiveness is activated primarily by ritual. Paiditalli’s essential being is fluid depth without end. Her natural condition of being is going deep into her own depths, becoming denser as she goes, distant from the congelation in her lesser depths. Left to her own nature, she would stay in her own depths and her human world would dry, harden, fragment. Ritual activates the recursiveness to shift the intensities of her densities toward the human world. Recursivity braids cosmos together through movement, though not through structure, unless one argues that structure itself is movement (i.e. Prigogine and Stengers (1984) on every thing existing through the movement of its own time because this is basic to its interior existence – and time, of whatever variety, is movement). Yet saying that recursiveness braids together a fluid cosmos through the very movement of recursiveness is nonetheless arguing that cosmos intra-grates itself from within since the entirety, fluidity, is recursive through and through. In anthropology, studies like that of Paiditalli’s cosmos demand rethinking movement, be it called process or dynamics. Victor Turner (1977) called for this long ago. There are attempts, for example, Daryn’s (2006) use of fractals to discuss in stimulating ways a Nepalese Brahmin world, Roy Wagner’s (2001) maddeningly creative use of the holographic worldview, and the worthy attempts to apply Chaos Theory in the chapters of Mosko and Damon (2005).9 The latter volume would have been more potent had the contributors rethought ‘structure’ as varieties of the temporal – perhaps ‘structure’ as slow or very slow temporal processes – thereby avoiding the division of ‘structure’ and ‘process’ that inevitably demands ‘stops’ (‘structure’) and ‘starts’ (‘process’) which subvert the very dynamics proposed by Chaos Theory (Handelman 2007). Temporality (though less so linear time) may accomplish unification in a way in which space (and structure) are less capable of, given that the latter tend to segregate and separate (Rosen 1994: 203–204).10 I said at the outset of Part 2 that my intention regarding the cosmos of Paiditalli is metaphysical. In sociocultural anthropology the usual approach to cosmology is to begin with the social, the cultural, and construct cosmos on these bases. What happens then is that the limning of cosmos tends strongly to reflect the social, the cultural, and rarely goes beyond this. Otherwise, fears of theology take over, and Western philosophies of the ontological, especially phenomenology, may be invoked to sidestep these worries. In his late, great work, The Elementary Forms of 111

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Religious Life, Durkheim came to the idea of effervescence to recognise that something critical to human existence is shaped by people together that cannot be reduced to the social (or the cultural), just as the social cannot be reduced to the individual. In my view, this kind of recognition is at the heart of the study of cosmology and its metaphysics. One can enter into cosmos in its own right and fruitfully discover different kinds of entirety.11 Notes 1 2

3 4 5

6 7

8 9

A neologism is necessary since the conception that informs it is foreign to standard English language usage. In the perspective offered here, values of individualism are not antithetical to values of holism. Rather, more at issue are differences and shifts in scale which reorganise values of holism, rather than radical changes in value. In the Western individual (yet obviously not only) there continues the sense of an entity which holds together rather than fragmenting. My response to postmodern claims for the fragmentation of a unified self is that it has always been preferable, analytically, to speak of qualities of selfness rather than of the self (Handelman 2002). For the fuller ethnography, see Handelman, Krishnayya, and Shulman (2014). Narratives of this war are discussed in Narayana Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam (2001: 24–92). The surface is not uniformly hard. Lakes, springs, caves in the mountains, are all softer areas within the hardness. The human beings in these locales – fishers, hunters – resonate more naturally with the fluidity of the goddess. So, too, healers in their healing soften the rigidity of the surface. The tamarind can grow beyond sixty feet. Its wood is hard and dense; its heartwood coloured dark red, its sapwood yellowish. After the 1757 debacle at Bobilli, Vizianagaram ceased being an expansionist kingdom and turned inward. In the nineteenth century this social involution produced a cultural florescence in the Telugu country. Under royal patronage, Vizianagaram became the most vibrant cultural centre between Calcutta and Madras through creativities which engaged intensive introspection in language, tantric yoga, ayurvedic healing, and more. The cosmos of Paiditalli and the ritual cycle which activated this in the human world may have been another post-1757 shaping of this involution through popular ritual rather than through royal rites of renewal. Leading to the oft misguided notion of linear framing and content within the frame (Handelman 2012). My interpretation of McKim Marriott’s (e.g. 1989) perspective on the exchange of substances in India among what I could call sentient cosmic particles (human and other) which continuously alter each other’s interiority influences the idea of intra-gration in everyday life. For example, the

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Inter-gration and intra-gration in cosmology inter-action among persons in the West is understood – through phenomenology, self theory, symbolic interactionism and the like – as an utterance or action that comes from one’s interior self, moving to one’s (often facial) exterior and is absorbed through alter’s (often facial) exterior, entering alter’s interior self, back and forth. What is related to goes outside of one and enters into another from the exterior, and so forth. With Marriott’s general perspective on the exchange of substances in India, a quite different constellation emerges. Persons, the earth, one’s home, are related through depths of movement (Daniels 1984), such that, rather than moving from depth (of self) to surface and over to another surface and into depth (of the self of another), the exchange of substances in India moves from the depths of the person directly to the depths of another, yet not only between persons but between person and house, between person and natal earth, and so forth (see Bar-On Cohen (2009) on accomplishing a related condition of being in karate). Extrapolating further, all of these cosmic particles are somehow related to one another through their insides, their depths, and the changing densities and intensities of these intra-relationships. Indeed, this is an intra-gration of cosmos in the everyday. As Babb (1990: 202) writes on Marriott’s theory, ‘This is surely a possible world. Whether it (or something like it) is an actual world, a world conceptually and perceptually dwelt in by Hindus, is one of the most interesting questions yet raised in the anthropology of India.’ 10 Interestingly, as Allen Abramson notes, this connects to the late modern physics of Quantum Theory (see Rosen 1994: 203–204, and, among quantum physicists, especially Bohm 1981). Abramson comments (personal communication) that the quantum cosmos goes on and on without closure and perhaps without reversing itself. In the case of a human cosmos like that of Paiditalli, recursive braiding (rather than closure) is accomplished through made ritual. 11 Or as Roy Wagner (2001) might say, be discovered by cosmos in its own right.

References Apffel-Marglin, Frederique. 1981. Kings and wives: the separation of status and royal power. Contributions to Indian Sociology 15(1–2): 155–181. —— 2008. Rhythms of Life: Enacting the World with the Goddesses of Orissa. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Assman, Jan. 2008. Gods and Men: Egypt, Israel, and the Rise of Monotheism. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Babb, L.A. 1990. Social science inside out. Contributions to Indian Sociology 24(2): 201–213. Bar-On Cohen, Einat. 2009. Kibadachi in karate: pain and crossing boundaries within the ‘lived body’ and within sociality. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (NS), 15: 610–629.

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Horizons of cosmological wonder Bellah, Robert N. and Hans Joas (eds) 2012. The Axial Age and its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Biardeau, Madeleine. 2004. Stories About Posts: Vedic Variations Around the Hindu Goddess. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bohm, David. 1981. Wholeness and the Implicate Order. London: Routledge. Cook, Francis H. 1972. Hua-yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University. Daniels, Valentine. 1984. Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Daryn, Gil. 2006. Encompassing a Fractal World: The Energetic Female Core in Myth and Everyday Life. New York: Lexington Books. Dumont, Louis. 1981. Homo Hierarchicus. Revised edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —— 1986. Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Frankfort, Henry and H.A. Frankfort. 1963. The emancipation of thought from myth. In Henri Frankfort, H.A. Frankfort, John A. Wilson, and Thorkild Jacobsen, Before Philosophy: An Essay on Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near East. Harmonsdworth: Penguin Books. Pp. 237–263. Gell, Alfred. 1997. Exalting the king and obstructing the state: a political interpretation of royal ritual in Bastar District, Central India. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (NS) 3(3): 433–450. Handelman, Don. 2002. The interior sociality of self-transformation. In David Shulman and Guy G. Stroumsa (eds), Self and Self-Transformation in the History of Religions, New York: Oxford University Press. Pp. 236–253. —— 2005. Introduction: Why ritual in its own right? How so? In Don Handelman and Galina Lindquist (eds), Ritual in its Own Right: Exploring the Dynamics of Transformation. New York: Berghahn Books. Pp. 1–32. —— 2007. How dynamic is the anthropology of chaos?, Focaal: European Journal of Anthropology 50: 155–165. —— 2012. Postlude: framing hierarchically, framing Moebiusly, Journal of Ritual Studies 26(2): 65–77. —— 2014. The guises of the goddess and the transformation of the male: Gangamma’s visit to Tirupati and the continuum of gender. In Handelman, One God, Two Goddesses, Three Studies of South Indian Cosmology. Leiden: Brill. Pp. 63–113. ——, M.V. Krishnayya, and David Shulman. 2014. Growing a Kingdom: The Goddess of Depth in Vizianagaram. In Handelman, One God, Two Goddesses, Three Studies of South Indian Cosmology. Leiden: Brill. Pp. 115–213. —— and Galina Lindquist. 2011. Religion, politics, and globalization: the long past foregrounding the short present – prologue and introduction. In Galina Lindquist and Don Handelman (eds), Religion, Politics, and Globalization: Anthropological Approaches. New York: Berghahn Books. Pp. 1–66. —— and David Shulman. 2004. Siva in the Forest of Pine: An Essay on Sorcery and Self-Knowledge. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Jacobsen, Thorkild. 1976. The Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamian Religion. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 114

Inter-gration and intra-gration in cosmology Lilla, Mark. 2007. The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West. New York: Knopf. Marriott, McKim. 1989. Constructing an Indian ethnosociology. Contributions to Indian Sociology (NS) 23(1): 1–39. Mosko, Mark S. and Frederick H. Damon (eds). 2008. On the Order of Chaos: Social Anthropology and the Science of Chaos. New York: Berghahn Books. Narayana Rao, Velcheru, David Shulman and Sanjay Subrahmanyam. 2001. Textures of Time: Writing History in South India 1600–1800. Delhi: Permanent Black. Prigogine, Ilya and Isabelle Stengers. 1984. Order Out of Chaos. New York: Bantam Books. Robbins, Joel. 2009. Is the trans- in transnational the trans- in transcendent? In Thomas J. Csordas (ed.), Transnational Transcendence: Essays on Religion and Globalization. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Pp. 55–72. Rosen, Steven M. 1994. Science, Paradox, and the Moebius Principle: The Evolution of a ‘Transcultural’ Approach to Wholeness. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Schnepel, Burkhard. 1996. The Hindu king’s authority reconsidered: Durga-Puja and Dasara in a South Orissan jungle kingdom. In Asa Boholm (ed.), Political Ritual. Goteberg:Institute for Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology. Pp. 126–157. —— 2002. The Jungle Kings: Ethnohistorical Aspects of Politics and Ritual in Orissa. New Delhi: Manohar. Thomassen, Bjorn. 2010. Anthropology, multiple modernities and the axial age debate, Anthropological Theory 10: 321–342. Turner, Victor. 1977. Process, system, and symbol: a new anthropological synthesis. Daedalus 106(3): 61–80. Wagner, Roy. 2001. An Anthropology of the Subject. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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5 Coordinates of body and place: Chinese practices of centring Stephan Feuchtwang

You do not have to be a phenomenologist to say that the human body is the most obvious, if not the most natural, human symbol, conveyor, and director of being in the world.1 What it takes in through its senses, and what it lets out and leaves outside – sputum, semen, milk, blood, faeces, breath, hair, nail-parings, witchcraft essence, words – as well as what it does to and what it takes from its outside, for instance by force and capture, extends and problematises what is inside and what is outside because the intimate relations the sharing of these substances create are larger insides – sub-castes, couples, and so many more. A body’s surfaces are an intervening, communicating, and absorbing medium of separation of inside from outside. The whole body as a dead object becomes something left outside, but outside what – a social body, a spiritual body? So, the human body seems to be an obvious starting point for an enquiry into the larger senses of being in the world that we call ‘cosmology’, in particular because, I would contend through the example of cosmology in China, we can best observe cosmology through practices that refer to relations within insides, scaled up in a hierarchy of encompassment, and to their outsides, well beyond what can be sensed by bodies, including the outside of the ultimate. Medicine would seem then to be a good beginning. But eating and sex might have been others (Farquhar 2002). A cosmology in medical practices In Chinese treatises and practices of health and healing, varied as they are and transformed from what they were by the incorporation of clinical 116

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experience, pharmacopoeic expansion, and mixtures with systems learned from the spread of other traditions and discoveries, one ontological truth is retained from the first millennium BC. Health is the restoring of balance and correspondence, a relation of insides to outsides. Health is also the activity of centring for the gathering of the energies that form the materials of the universe, the qi, which are constantly in flow, an ordering and imbibing of outsides to and by an inside. Balance is between systems of organs within the body, whose joint activity should correspond to external, encompassing seasonal and other movements and changes, and which themselves should be held in a balance of cyclical movement. Ill health is excess or depletion, in conduct and in emotion, an internal state of being. There is no distinction between the psychic and the somatic. ‘Shen, “the body”, was the same shen emphasized by the ideals of xiushen, “self-cultivation”, and deshen, “self-possession”: it was the embodied self, a lifetime of decisions and indecisions made manifest’ (Kuriyama 2008: 53). Balance could be disturbed by invasion, for instance of wind and cold, but their invasive force was invited by an inner imbalance, a state of depletion. Eventually in the course of the changes in medical practice ‘the earlier rhetoric of defence and attack was giving way to the new logic of balance and compensation; fears of threatening outsiders were being supplemented, and to an extent supplanted, by a conception of disease as unequal distribution’ (Kuriyama 2008: 54). In short, in this medical history of human insides to their externalities, there is a change from warlike relations to a language and a treatment that is more like an economy.2 Medical treatment is to restore balance by a compensating ingestion of what is depleted. Related to this is the preventative nourishing of life (yangsheng). It too is the exercise of balance, physically, through breathing and movement. The exercises of the great pivot (taiji quan) or the exercises of martial art (wuyi) and of the art of the movement of qi (qigong) are more or less vigorous, and have more than one tradition. But they are all about finding and placing a centre for the gathering together of qi. It is of great importance for comparative purposes to note that in the cosmology that I am beginning to expound, based on medical practices, qi flow through and form the objects of what physics studies as well as what biology studies. In the People’s Republic of China the study of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is presented as China’s own medical science turning the former practice of masters whose work was transmitted through print and apprenticeship into a systematised pedagogy and empirical testing in conjunction with biomedicine (Farquhar 1994; Hsu 1999; and Scheid 2011). And, for a while, before the crackdown on the turning of some schools of qigong into world-transforming moral and 117

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religious sects, the practice of qigong was presented as a Chinese physics (Palmer 2007). A cosmology of rituals The nourishing of life and the accumulation of the energies of life (qi) are accomplished by actions of centring on certain points. One point is the body of human experience and its life. Another is a place. Centres and the appropriate acts of centring are conceivable on quite different scales, even though all scales affect the smallest scale of the body and its life. Thus, the siting and layout of a city up to the capital city of the human universe, is also an alignment of the centre with the rest of the universe around the body of the emperor and its movements as mediator for humans between Heaven and Earth. All this is conceived in terms of the metaphysics of a changing balance in cycles of yin and yang and of the five phases (wu xing) since they were synthesised in the third century BC by a school of naturalist philosophers acting for the emperor in the first unification of the states of Chinese civilisation into an empire with a single cosmo-political centre. Death in the cosmological terms that they and subsequent theorists of the way of the universe or nature (the dao) and its ritual masters systematised, is the separation of yin and yang. The life of the body becomes invisible. Its soul (hun) has become part of the world of yin (yinjian). Life continues in the visible world, the yang world (yangjian), as a balance of yin and yang. But the dead are in an invisible world of yin. Yin and yang worlds are separate, even as they are also conceived as interacting. Another division between the visible and the invisible is between the knowable but invisible eternal laws of the universe, moral, historical and physical, located in Heaven (Tian) and the sensed (including visible) world of material forms. The eternal laws or principles are principles of flux and change, including irreversible changes, and material forms are provisionally fixed channels of the flow and flux of earthly qi. The two worlds of the visible and the invisible, conceived in both ways, can be mediated through appropriate rituals, chief among which are mortuary rituals, which of course adjust the living (yang) to the loss of a life (yin). As do all rituals, death rituals make the invisible (the transcendent and the immanent) apparent. As Angela Zito (1997) and others such as James Hevia (1995) have elaborated so well, a key agency of the imperial Chinese state was the Ministry of Rites. It was in charge of standardising the multiplicity of ritual practices throughout the empire. In addition, as I have noted (Feuchtwang 1992: 26–29), the Ministry of Rites along with the Bureau of Astronomy saw to the issuing of the imperial calendar and 118

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the recommencement of the agricultural and the ritual year in which the sage ruler by his proper conduct would maintain order, balance, and harmony, in accordance with the way of the universe (the dao). This was just one of the functions of imperial ritual. Others included the guest rituals of receiving tribute and giving gifts in recompense, a complement to the military diplomacy of the state, and imperial performance of the Grand Sacrifice in the capital, which had its equivalents in the official rites at lower levels of state in the empire. Rites (li) were both performative and textual. Indeed the issuing of texts such as the imperial histories, was itself a rite in this conception. Repairing – editing, commenting upon and renewing – the classical texts, innovating while transmitting them, was called xiu. The same term was used in conjunction with the body, shen, to refer to the exercise and cultivation of the bodily and ethical person (Zito 1997: 70). Chinese doctrines of ritual say that their performance makes manifest celestial principles and proper conduct, which again is a matter of balance, adjustment to change and, particularly for death rituals, the exemplary performance of filial duty to the dead. From a more distant standpoint, an anthropologist can observe in these rituals the enactment of the world of the dead, a recreation of the good life, and a restatement of the boundaries of a domestic unit and the place of which it is a part. So let me take death rituals as an exemplary set of cosmological practices. Eulogies and the presentation of gifts turn the mourned one into an ideal and elevate the mourning household to its greatest possible social standing in a web of interpersonal relationships. These are rites performed or directed by experts who model themselves on the officials in charge of state rituals. But in addition, there are more religious rituals, conducted by Daoist or Buddhist experts or both. They too conduct rituals as performances of filial virtue. But the texts to which they refer are part of their rites, scriptures intoned, punctuated and accompanied by their small musical bands. In the past, imperial ministers collected both Daoist and Buddhist scriptures in an attempt to standardise what the centre approved. But families of Daoists and of Buddhists kept, and continue to keep and copy out their own ritual manuals for the performance of the rites of their local clienteles, as do the Daoists and Buddhists in the larger institutions of retreat (monasteries), from which they too perform rites for lay clients as well as the rites of their own disciplines of self-­ cultivation and transcendence. Their scriptures and ritual manuals may or may not be found in the official compilations. The fully Buddhist and Daoist rites turn what would have been a ghost into a buried ancestor and a position on the domestic ancestral altar. Other rituals, performed by both Daoists and Buddhists, convey the karmic soul of the ghost through the high drama of salvation from limbo 119

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and through the courts of purgatory to a fine luxury of residence beyond the living in every sense. At the same time and by the same rituals, the dead for whom such rituals have to be performed include, around the named dead on the inside, ancestors forgotten by the mourning kin and on the outside the souls of others who have been forgotten by others. These outsider ghosts, who can be invasive, are called ‘orphan souls’ and are likened to beggars. Both orphan souls and beggars are offered food as charity and feared as importuning threats. Offerings to gods, ancestors, and ghosts are always in the sequence of invitation, offering of sacrifice or propitiation, and separation. In the case of orphan souls separation is to place them on the fringes of the place, while forgotten ancestors are ambivalently kept centrally as a guilt-bearing category. Ghosts are dirt to be kept in the fringes between territorial places, while forgotten ancestors are our own ghosts guiltily and namelessly commemorated. Gods are invited into the centre and welcomed there, with greater deference than is shown to known ancestors. Like ghosts they are invited from outside, but they are invited into the sacred centre of a temple at its main altar where they become a temporary host. They are host-guests and on separation their return is desired and will be honoured (Feuchtwang 2010: Chapter 4). Even more often seen is the marking of the boundaries by annual processions of the gods of local temples. Touring their boundaries, these processions of a statue of the god, ritually opened to be a receptive presence when newly installed in the temple and annually re-invited to be present, are like a military tour clearing the territory of malign influences. They enact an image of imperial authority. But imperial officials frequently denounced these festivals, as they also denounced the great expenditure on funeral rituals, part of the enactment of the social status of the mourners and its extension, as extravagant, wasteful, and licentious. Republican government officials added ‘superstitious’ to these denunciations. In the latter part of a procession festival, Daoist or Buddhist experts again invite for charity the hungry orphan souls outside into spaces within the local territory but outside the sacred centre of the temple, in order then to place them back on the fringes. Gods are also of the world of the dead. They too are strangers to the place, coming in from the outside. Their powers can be threatening, like those of orphan souls threatening to avenge their bad deaths but gods’ powers are even greater and they are responsive to pleas for peace, order, and prosperity. They command demonic troops, enacted by martial arts troupes, with facepaint and costume, stepping aggressively and with ritual effectivity to exorcise malign influences accompanying the gods in procession.

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One such troupe, the Songjiang, is associated with 108 malign stars and with the heroes of the marshes who live on the fringes of habitation but use their force to carry out righteous acts, like the legendary forest band of Robin Hood in England (Sutton 2003: 155). But the troupe closest to the god in processions in Taiwan and Fujian provinces is that of demonic generals called Jiajiang that include purgatorial demons that catch miscreants’ souls (Sutton 2003). To be in mourning means to be marked out for the set period of just over a year from the rest of the neighbourhood by white instead of red paper capstone slogan and doorpost couplets on either side of the main entrance of the house. White is the colour of mourning while red is the colour of life’s good fortunes, which are the subject of the couplets. Houses still in mourning during this time must keep their doors closed while others open their doors and exchange incense with the incense from the temple’s burner, renewing their pledges to the protective deity. These ritual enactments of a divine empire are observable in all of China and Taiwan, though they are performed in different ways and the gods invited differ from region to region. The most elaborate observation of temple and god networks available is from the south-eastern province of Fujian (Dean and Zheng 2010). It shows that temple alliances within a region differ in the same way as they differ between different regions, a fractal variation and differentiation between centres of local ritual that repeats a larger scale differentiation which includes differences of ritual style, none of which accords exactly to and is often wildly different from what the imperial dynasties’ Ministries of Rites tried to standardise. But the imperial centre’s constant attempts at standardisation and its very existence as a cosmo-political centre has had the effect of each local centre making itself a centre like the imperial centre, recreating in its own local terms a centre and its spread outwards as well as its differentiation from contiguous centres, in rituals that share a style or rather share ways of making places by establishing territorial centres and their outsides. I prefer to describe this spread and variation as that of a civilisation, rather than of a culture. ‘Culture’ implies a clearer boundary than can actually be described, whereas civilisation is a centred spread, in which the centre absorbs from other centres. A civilisation also demands its conception as a long-term history of continuity and change, just as I have indicated for medical and ritual practices in China.3 All these rituals, varied as they are, bring the outside inside and they have in common these characteristics: the protective and responsive god is an honoured stranger, while orphan souls are strangers who are objects of pity and charity. The protective god is at the territorial centre, while orphan souls are at the territorial fringes. And all these rituals make the invisible world of gods, demons, ancestors, and ghosts manifest, and 121

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extend the Nature of human mediation between the visible and the invisible. Place in a cosmos Now we come to the heart of the cosmological matter I want to present. At these annual procession festivals, within the temple a measure of rice in a tub with attendant symbols stands for the good fortune of the whole territory. The measure of rice is both container and amount and it refers to the constellation that is called, in English, the Great Dipper. But in Chinese the astronomically observable Dipper is multiplied as a celestial force. For instance, at each of the four quarters there is a Dipper that presides over images of garrisons placed to guard the four quarters of the territory. At the centre, within the temple, a Daoist priest steps out the pattern of the Dipper in front of the altar (Lagerwey 1987: 74–75 and 82–83) enacting the steps of Yu the Great, the legendary emperor who reigned before any of the named dynasties and who is said to have separated water from land and to have mapped the earth and devised a system of physical punishments based on his understanding of the yin world, one of a number of myths of a second beginning of the world (Birrell 2000: 34–35). The second beginning is the result of a primordial battle or catastrophe or shift in the axis of the world or of the heavens and it begins the time of history and change and in some philosophical commentaries, decline. Ordinary worshippers are not likely to know the details of this ritual and its mythology, nor therefore of this temporality of a second beginning. But mythology and ritual are there to be observed and enquired about through the experts and story-tellers who perform the rituals and entertain worshippers. The tub of rice at the centre of the territory does actually contain a measure of rice. Into the rice is planted a mast bearing a flag on which is written ‘peace and order of the whole territory’. In front of this flag are a mirror reflecting an oil lamp, and a sword or a pair of scissors (Feuchtwang 1992: 192). Just as the scent of offerings, the fire and smoke of incense, and the fire and smoke of burning spirit money are visible transformations of earthly materials transmitted to the celestial, so is a written sheet listing what has been offered transferred by burning to the invisible deities. This sheet is called a representation (biao). It too is burned, so the reflected light of the oil lamp in the Dipper restores the link of the earthly territory with its celestial extension, a stellar position. The scissors stand for the possibility of this link being cut, which would be the death not of a person, but of the territorial community. The whole rite of centring around this symbol is a mending of life (gai ming) on a larger scale than the mending of a family’s life or that of one of its 122

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members. At some annual festivals, and always at the far less frequent jiao (Great Offering) celebrating the refurbishment of a temple and the renewal of its community, resident households can with donations of various sizes have their own named Dippers, also called Lanterns (deng), installed in ranks of most to least expensive. These Dippers are then for the renewal of the celestial connection of each household as a representative of the community (Feuchtwang 1992: 172). I hope here to have described enough to indicate sufficient elements of an elaborate cosmology created and performed in death rituals and temple festivals where I observed them in Taiwan and southern Fujian province. Similar, if sometimes less elaborate variations of these rituals are performed in other parts of China, as for instance Stephen Jones (2010) has described in northern China. Much of what I have described is performed or is apparent in texts written for these rituals and burned as part of the offerings. But it makes little sense to ascribe them to one or more of the so-called ‘three religions’ of Chinese textual traditions, Daoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism, often brought together by syncretic sects. The rituals at death and for making territorial places are not syncretic. Instead we should turn the view of text-based scholarship that sees mixtures of textual traditions as syncretic upside down and see the formal texts and printed classics of these religions and their different schools or sub-traditions as scriptural extensions from or as chanted parts of these rites. In any case, historians of these textual traditions show how each absorbed elements from the other, even while guarding their separation and purity from the others (e.g. Robson 2009). Popular prints celebrate the combination of all three in a single celestial pantheon. Popular syncretic ritual societies do deliberately join the three, but they are just another way of overlaying the base ritual practices surrounding the death of a human body and the centring of a place. It is possible to trace different cosmologies in each of these textual traditions, including different stances in relation to a state and the way it should rule. But over the centuries of the development of these textual traditions and their mutual absorption, for instance the prevalence of filial virtue in them all, despite the tensions it throws up for celibacy, they have come to share a set of vital references, including the universal physics and biology of qi. Daoism and the more secular observation of ritual propriety that has come to be named Confucianism, both refer to the dao and to Tian (Heaven) and the exercises and architecture of centring are common to both and to the state rituals and their capital city. Buddhism has become different in China from its Indian origins, partly by the deliberate efforts of Buddhist scholars employed by emperors in the Tang dynasty (seventh century) to make the Chinese empire a land of the Buddha. This continued, including the Qianlong emperor in the 123

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eighteenth century having himself elevated and represented as an incarnation of the bodhisattva Manjusri (Wisdom) in one version of Buddhism that spread into China from both Tibetan and Manchu civilisations (Zito 1997: 23). But it needs to be said that if followed through its sutras and disciplines of self-cultivation, the cosmology of a Buddhist as distinct from a Daoist or a Confucian would not be the same as the one I have been expounding. It must also be stressed that there are several variations on ‘Buddhism’ in China, and several schools and spreads from their own centres of teaching of Daoism and of Confucianism. That there are different schools of healing, in some respects contradicting each other in their herbal prescriptions and diagnostics, and different schools of qi exercises, is also to be noted. Among their adherents, particularly those who consider themselves to be scholars or intellectuals, there are those who are prone to denounce the ritual traditions that local experts serve, sometimes to the point of saying they are not ‘Chinese’. But they all exist in the territory that we and they call ‘China’ and in local rituals of death and of place they share the core elements of centring described here. Along with world-renouncing Buddhism, the monotheisms in China – Islam, Judaism, and Christianity – and Persian Manichaeism, are serious Chinese departures from it. But they too may contain elements of this cosmology of place-making and death ritual. In short, it is not the only cosmology in China, but it is prevalent in the spread of Chinese civilisation. A spatial and a temporal cosmos Any one of the materialisations of the cosmology presented here could be elaborated into the rest of the ritual sequence of which it is part. Instead of doing this, I want to draw further attention to the activity of centring on various spatial scales and in its own temporality. One of the purposes of including in a description of rituals a description of exercises for health is to show that they share a conception of the materiality of life, namely the existence in all things and bodies of a vital substance called qi. But it should be emphasised that the circulation of qi is ideally a responsive circulation. If not, the internal and external imbalances of movement must be unblocked, which can mean on the largest scale a change in the order of the world that has gone wrong, that has become blocked, divided, and chaotic, in order to find a new Heavenprincipled Life (Tianming). Finding a centre at which to gather qi is also to be responsive to other centres. On the other hand, the other centre can be invasive, aiming to diminish another’s qi, or to destroy the prospect (in both senses, visual and fateful) of a body, a house, a grave, or a capital city. Such malign 124

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positioning and use of qi is envisaged as demonic, for instance snakelike or toadlike or foxlike or in the similarly chimeric (animal-plus-human) images of the twelve earthly directions. Of course, this cosmology has a history. For instance, the magnetic compass needle floating on liquid is an invention of the ninth century that forms the basis of the geomancer’s compass as well as the navigator’s compass. The central pool is an analogue of the great pivot at the centre and origin of the cosmos. It is a more abstract materialisation of the same cosmology that is performed in the vivid rituals described here. The geomancer uses his compass, with its central pool and division of its circular surface into three sets of rings, the earthly, the human and the celestial, to align a newly built house so that it should gather qi energies from its surroundings or to align the coffin of a newly buried person so that qi energies will be transmitted from the well-being of the corpse’s bones to the well-being of its patrilineal descendants. The observation of the movement of magnetic from polar north is also incorporated into the geomantic compass’s dial, just as meteorological observations have more recently been included in the manuals for the use of geomancers’ compasses. The sets of symbols on the rings of the dial of the compass were themselves brought together and synthesised in the Former Han dynasty (second century BCE). This is one instance of the fact that the cosmology described here has a history, which can be and has been written (e.g. Henderson 1984; Smith 1991). The biggest rupture in this history is the twentieth-century republican demise of the imperial state, its Ministry of Rites and its state rituals. But the rupture is far from complete, since gods, demons, ancestors, and ghosts have returned, among the people of China, despite the interludes in both early republican states and that of the People’s Republic of China to destroy their ritual institutions. At the same time, the cosmology, its practices, and its instruments incorporate historicity within their own temporalities. I have already mentioned the mythological rupture that begins time and change. For another instance of cosmological historicity, protective deities are named by title and often by family name because in principle they were historical figures, whose life stories can be told, as well as the stories of their miraculous interventions in other people’s lives since their own deaths. Every deity has a temple of her or his origin, often disputed, as a place for pilgrimage and renewal of the powers in local temple statues for that deity to respond to pledges. The proliferation and popularity of deities can be and have been traced historically because such tracing is intrinsic to their images. Gazetteers and stone inscriptions published by temples and commemorating their donating sponsors and managers, in some cases including imperial endorsements of the miracles their presiding 125

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deities have performed, are themselves a distinctive local history, as the alliance of temples and centres of pilgrimage and their regular festivals are re-inscriptions of local history and senses of place. For a third instance, each Daoist can recite a genealogical line of masters, just as each Buddhist can, and these masters can be given historical dates, even while their invocation is effective in the present, as are gods. As a final instance of the historicity of this cosmology, everyone in the Chinese world knows, if only through the deification of the Great Sage enacted as a monkey trickster who accompanied the most famous Tang scholar-monk to India and back, that Buddhism came to China from the West. This amounts to more than saying, as we can of any cosmology and its rituals, that we can in principle write its history. In China, the cosmos and its positions surround and are an analogy for the living world and its politics. The yin world is an historical metaphor for the yang world. Returning to the yang world, to strengthen or nourish the life of a living person, she or he performs exercises that unblock and increase the circulation of qi within the organic systems that constitute a living body so that they can respond to qi running in circuits outside the body, just as a calligraphic painter responds through the movements of ink brush on prepared paper to the circuits of qi in the rocks, mountains, and bamboo groves in a landscape or the birds and flowers observed but also imagined. Qi exercises for health gather together and circulate breath and energy by movement through limbs and torso, but they focus on two points, one at the centre and one just outside the body. At the centre is the inner crucible. Just outside, at the top of the head of the seated Daoist for instance, is the point to which the exercises are directed in the vertical plane (Schipper 1982: 146–147, 200ff). The centre is the place of cosmogonic birth, while the top is identified with the highest mountains outside the realm, the Kunlun, giving access to Tian. Hsu (1999: 33–34) describes the circulation of qi in inner meditation and for healing from the inner Cinnebar Field (dantian) centre to the top of the head and back. She expands this description of the flow of qi into the illuminating idea of a ‘body ecological’ (1999: 81–83). Equivalently, in the building and siting of a house, the vertical axis is from the floor of the back wall of the main, central room up to the centre of the roof’s ridge-pole, while on the horizontal axis a line goes from the back wall of the main room over the threshold of the main door and out to the main gate of the house’s walled enclosure. On this line, both urban and rural houses frequently have shield walls inside the main gate to prevent the entrance of malign qi, just as the human body might need protective medicine or a storing up of good qi to guard against malign qi, or the help of a practitioner of the art of concentration on the inner

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crucible, to expel malign qi that have invaded the house and infected the body. Similarly, the Dipper of a territorial place represents its vertical axis, whereas the touring of its boundaries by the statue of its protective deity expels malign influences and puts them in their proper place, at the outside edge of the territory. Zooming out, we can now perceive China’s cosmo-geography as a composition of ritually defined places, with the ghosts of others, defined both as beings of other ancestral lines and as beings of other territories, at the boundaries between them. These places are formed into alliances seeking protection from the same god or gods, while other place-­alliances have another mix of the same with other gods as their protectors. Further, the centres of the cults of their gods are outside as well, in older, larger temples, to which the local god-statues are taken on pilgrimages. So, each place has two outsides, a centre for pilgrimage and a border of threatening beings. And each place is differentiated by its peculiar combination of protective cults, so that on a larger scale what is brought from outside into the centre of each place varies, no two places having exactly the same ritual allegiances or exactly the same ritual style and calendar. The simplest and most magical diagram of the world in this cosmology is a nine-celled square, eight squares around a central square. Whatever is placed at the centre is itself also a nine-square, with the circuits of the outer squares either in one or another of two heavenly orders (called Former and Later) of human and earthly movements of various kinds, of numbers, seasons, quarters, stellar positions, and their presiding deities or demons whose imagery is that of an archaic empire. Moving up the central axis is also to move outward in scale and toward an originary source until you reach the centre and source of everything. From a single body, in this way, by motion and by imagination, visualising the universe, the most practised in the arts of immortality can bring themselves to the ultimate encompassing source, beyond the rupture into time. But this is only the most sage-like and respected art. There is also the art of spirit mediums, who can allow their bodies to be vehicles for the manifestation of invisible beings of the celestial and the sub-­terrestrial worlds, gods, ghosts, and ancestors. Ordinary people can be guided by either the sage-like, who are either greater persons of a wider social connection and encompassment or those who can by their ritual disciplines approach the highest and more central deities, conceived in either or both of the Buddhist and Daoist orders. Or they can employ means of divination, which include spirit-mediumship, to communicate with higher and lower reaches of the encompassing hierarchy, including the stellar determinants of their lives. And of course they can themselves practise some of the arts of ritual asceticism and the exercise of qi to respond communicatively with, 127

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which is to say, come into harmony with and try to harmonise what has become disharmonic or unbalanced and blocked in the inner and outer, more encompassing scales. From organisational, physical, and organic demarcation arises another invisibility that can be visualised and imagined, not the invisible celestial and sub-terrestrial encompassment but, as already pointed out, an outside imagined by the same means, by moving up similar scales of encompassment. They might be a neighbouring region with its different presiding deities and different ritual calendars and variations from ‘our’ rituals. They might be much more distant. In either case they are imagined as either demonic, or ghostly or else as allied, an equivalent of matrilateral and affinal kin. Here we have to envisage the ninesquare with border regions instead of lines at its edges, or turn to another more cartographic visualisation of the mountainous and riverine sources of all the water systems and ranges that make up China moving from west to east. This is geography on the imperial scale, equivalent to the geography of the environs of a house, a tomb or a city site, with the outer edges a series of mountain chains, of ridges and curving waterways from behind coming down to the site, which is a centre of gathering the qi of that geography facing out toward the south or south-east, as the emperor did in the Great Sacrifice, first facing north to Tian and then facing south as the mediator of Tian to the rest of humanity. The site is envisaged as an empty space, a lair (xue) for that gathering of qi, which is the centre of a small or a large realm, the outer regions of which are the sources of its qi. Zooming out even further spatially and temporally, we can see that the history of this universe, which is named Tianxia (All Under Heaven), is also the history of the centre of empire as a tributary regime. As importantly, this is a regime in which the emperor himself or those commissioned by him travel outwards to west and east, north and south, not just to create alliances through marriage, tribute, and trade, or go to war but also to pay homage to border centres of ritual and religious resources. So it is that at the four quarters of what were the border regions of Tianxia, before it expanded to bring them into the empire, are the four sacred mountains, places where communication with the celestial was most intense and places whose features, flora, and fauna were particularly rare and powerful for the attainment of immortality accompanied by ascetic regimes (Robson 2009). Imperial pilgrimages to these outside sources are re-enacted in the imperial rituals to heaven and earth, to the moon and the planets, to the mountains and rivers, thunder and rain, and to grain at altars in the suburbs of imperial capitals. They too must be considered and were ritually treated as high, higher than the emperor, on the vertical axis, although outside the centre. Even further

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out, to the west was the region which was first identified as the home of a female deity, the mother of the monarch (Xiwang Mu), superior to him, then as the source of Buddhism and as the Western Heaven, then as the origin of the cosmos in the person of the Mother Who Was not Born (Wusheng Laomu) from whom all religions stemmed. The outer regions were also the source of traders, armies, and eventually other religions, Jewish, Eastern Christian, Manichaean, and Muslim, of Persians and Arabs. From the same outside came everything that also threatened and divided Tianxia, or, finally, ruled and restored Tianxia into a whole (Wang Mingming 2012). The pattern is clear: the outside is on one hand higher and resource rich, and on the other lower, dirty, pathetic or threatening. This describes the vertical axis beyond the four quarters of the territorial centre. Elsewhere (Feuchtwang 2006) I have described finding a site for a household in three gestures or kinds of movement, those of centring, gathering, and connecting. Centring, as I have here elaborated the gesture, creates a vertical axis. Gathering makes this axis a position where it focuses accumulation from and response to the movements of surrounding qi. Connecting is the creation and maintenance of interpersonal relations from this base, similar to the reciprocal relationships of the emperor through the imperial guest rituals but of course on a far smaller scale. The same three gestures also describe the placing of a temple at the centre of a territorial residential community, for which connecting is the maintenance of reciprocal relations of invitation to each other’s festivals of the procession bands and households of neighbouring territorial communities. Death rituals can be described in the same way, placing the coordinates of the deceased for the household on its vertical axis as ancestor in the centre and outside in the aligned grave from which descendants should prosper by the gathering of qi, and performing the maximum social connectivity in the honoured guests attending the funeral, chief among which are matrilateral and affinal kin, the equivalents of honoured outer allies of the empire, also related by marriage and gift. The vertical is an axis of mediation between the visible and invisible, between the world of yin and the world of yang, with gods and ancestors, demons and ghosts by means of the sensible activities of ritual. A common cosmological usage in Chinese is to describe the universe as tripartite with Heaven above, Earth below and between them the mediating Human. The chief human mediator of Heaven with Earth, adjusting the constantly changing movements of earthly qi to those of Heaven was the emperor in a filial relationship to Heaven as its son (Tianzi). But all rituals, not just those performed by the emperor, are mediations between Heaven and Earth. To mediate is also to perform rituals that envisage the 129

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invisible world not only of celestial beings, benign and malign, but also of sub-terrestrial beings, demonic. In particular the sub-terrestrial includes ghosts caught and fixed territorially and in limbo, as well as the courts of purgatory to which the souls of the dead can be brought after arrest by long-sighted and strong-armed demons, but from which they can also be rescued. I am not saying that rituals of the ‘common people’ (minjian) ape those of the imperial court or conform to them. The common people do share a cosmology with the emperors of China, but they are as much its creators as were the ritual experts employed by the court and in any case similar experts were and are employed by common people. The imperial centre was constantly reining in the extent of variation in the rituals of its subjects from its courtly prescriptions. It did this in two ways. One was through condemnation of wasteful extravagance and of heterodoxy. Condemnation appeared in official publications but the whole tradition of ‘strange stories’ for the literate, popular prints, and the sets of stories of the entitling of the gods, or the battles and strategic manoeuvrings of the Three Kingdoms period that are the subjects of story-tellers, drama, and of the gods of many temples shows the far wilder removes of Chinese cosmological stories and practices (Shahar and Weller 1996: 22–30). The other was through incorporation of popular deities into the state cults, as promoted by local, prestigious literati throughout the empire seeking imperial endorsement of local temples recommended for the record of efficacious intervention that was loyal to imperial rule. Each thus influenced the other and made them interdependent, but the common rituals and their implicit cosmology was at constant variance from the imperial centre and differed across the imperial territory (Feuchtwang 1977). For instance, in the great border regions with Tibet and up to Mongolia there are more tantric and lamaistic ritual practices as well as more gods of mountains than in the more central parts of Chinese territory. So much for the historical geography of the cosmology. But as already stated, it has its own, inbuilt temporality. It is an historical metaphor in which the yin world is effective in the yang world, the dead effective in the living. Its mythology of the birth and emergence of the universe, including the separation not only of water from land but heaven from earth, and yin from yang and the differentiation of the myriad material things is first that they stem from the great pivot and the primal, creative mud of fertile chaos (hundun). In critical addition, it is a temporality of a rupture, from a time of perfection and stability into a time of transgression and adjustment to change in constant re-approximation to the originary time. This temporality has its own problematic, which is the possibility of fragmentation, of invasion and division, which result from blockage of qi and imbalance, of depletion or of excess, of destructive

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circuits of qi or of the arrow-like straight lines of malign qi. Its starting assumption is a centred whole in danger of flying apart, of death or fragmentation, of blocked communication, of angry offence instead of respect and responsiveness. Centring as a universal characteristic of cosmology, spatial and temporal (cosmogony) Cosmologies of place and origin can be, in principle, plural or single, having many centre/origins or one. Monotheisms are not the only ­single-centred cosmologies, though they are distinctive in prioritising and centring an external creator and therefore dramatising the rupture of the Fall into time and death and the paradox of the material of creation existing before Creation. But I am suggesting through this presentation of a prevalent Chinese cosmology of a single centring that many if not all cosmologies are based on rituals and myths of centring and origin, with rupture as an entry into time and the paradox of having an outside of the centre and origin. In China the cosmogonic material is generative and so conceived as internal, but nevertheless, in the terms of the separations and differentiations that have occurred, the outside of the material world, including a former heaven and an outside access to the highest encompassment is an outside of centres superior to the central centre! I propose that all cosmologies are performed in ritual and other practices that make manifest invisible worlds that include worlds of the outside, above, and underneath. These rituals and exercises, which are techniques of the body, move up scales of encompassment of inside and outside, starting from the inside and outside of the human body. But these are not encompassments from the outside, as in the cosmos of the creator God of monotheism. The Hindu cosmos from which Dumont derives the concept of encompassment is also not from a separated outside. Nor for that matter is the transcendent encompassment of the world from the infinite of Buddhist nirvana. Handelman’s (Chapter 4 this volume) binary categorisation of cosmologies, those of definition from the outside and those of intragration, does not even apply to all the so-called Axial religions, just to the distinction between the monotheistic and the rest. All cosmologies, including the one I have described, posit an encompassment that derives from the production of the finite out of the infinite, the solid and more fixed from the fluid and less fixed, just as does Handelman’s example of the goddess of infinite fluidity. But relative fixity produces insides in relation to outsides. In this relative fixity, the relations of insides to outsides in the cosmology described here are either a resonating balance or a destructive interference. Practices of centring elaborate the scales of encompassment and therefore of hierarchy. Most 131

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cosmologies are intragrated, but if the one I have described is typical, they also define and scale insides from outsides without positing an external creator. The cosmology here described is one that posits principles of constant change, just as the cosmology of astro-physics does, and the rupture into historicity is also one of human agency in restoring balance out of an inherent tendency to fragment, block, and go out of balance, which is both moral and physical, unlike the principle of entropy. Notes 1

2

3

A thousand thanks to Judith Farquhar for sparking ideas, some of which I’ve tried to develop here, and for finding a copy of Shigehisa Kuriyama (2008) for me. Another thousand to Angela Zito for introducing the idea of centring in her magnificent book Of Body and Brush. And much gratitude to Martin Holbraad who as editor found in an early draft the themes I could pursue in this chapter. But only ‘to some extent’ because other practices, of exorcism as cure, sustained the ‘rhetoric’ of affliction by invasion of ghosts and demons. In terms of conduct and of life as fate (ming), invasion was and still is often attributed to malign stellar influence. Arrival at a pass (or gate – men) fraught with dangers of invasion or imbalance requires ritual remedy or avoidance of certain actions. Treatment of dangers to both health and conjunctures of life, such as when undertaking a journey or making a large investment, is to divine what is the conjuncture and then to conduct rituals of alteration of fate (gaiming) or what actions and directions of travel to avoid for that moment. For a fuller elaboration of this conception of ‘civilisation’, first formulated by Marcel Mauss, see Feuchtwang and Rowlands (2010).

References Birrell, Ann. 2000. Chinese Myths. London: The British Museum. Dean, Kenneth and Zheng Zhenman. 2010. Ritual Alliances of the Putian Plain Volume One: Historical Introduction to the Return of the Gods. Handbook of Oriental Studies 23(1). Leiden and Boston: Brill. Farquhar, Judith. 1994. Knowing Practice: the Clinical Encounter of Chinese Medicine. Boulder, CO and Oxford: Westview Press. —— 2002. Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Feuchtwang, Stephan. 1977. School temple and city god. In G. William Skinner (ed.), The City in Late Imperial China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Pp. 581–608. —— 1992. The Imperial Metaphor. London and New York: Routledge.

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Coordinates of body and place —— 2006. Three gestures in a poetics of place: Chinese settlement and disruption. In Tony Atkin and Joseph Rykwert (eds), Structure and Meaning in Human Settlements. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Pp. 107–121. —— 2010. The Anthropology of Religion, Charisma and Ghosts; Chinese Lessons for Adequate Theory. Berlin: De Gruyter. —— and Michael Rowlands. 2010. Re-evaluating the long term: civilisation and temporalities. In Duncan Garrow and Thomas Yarrow (eds), Archaeology and Anthropology: Understanding Similarities, Exploring Differences. Oxford and Oakville: Oxbow Books. Pp. 117–136. Henderson, John B. 1984. The Development and Decline of Chinese Cosmology. New York: Columbia University Press. Hevia, James. 1995. Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hsu, Elizabeth. 1999. The Transmission of Chinese Medicine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jones, Stephen. 2010. In Search of the Folk Daoists of Northern China. Farnham: Ashgate. Kuriyama, Shigehisa. 2008. Concepts of disease in East Asia. In The Cambridge World History of Human Disease Online. Cambridge University Press. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521332866.008, accessed 12 February 2014. Pp. 52–59. Lagerwey, John. 1987. Taoist Ritual in Chinese Society and History. New York: Macmillan. Palmer, David. 2007. Qigong Fever: Body, Science and Utopia in China. London: Hurst & Co. Robson, James. 2009. Power of Place: The Religious Landscape of the Southern Sacred Peak (Nanyue) in Medieval China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Scheid, Volker and Laurent Pordié. 2011. Defining best practice or cultivating best practitioners. In Volker Scheid and Hugh MacPherson (eds), Integrating East Asian Medicines into Modern Health Care. Edinburgh and New York: Elsevier. Pp. 13–38. Schipper, Kristofer. 1982. Le Corps Taoiste. Paris: Fayard. Shahar, Meir and Robert Weller. 1996. Introduction: gods and society in China. In Meir and Weller (eds), Unruly Gods;: Divinity and Society in China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Pp. 1–36. Smith, Richard J. 1991. Fortune Tellers and Philosophers, Divination in Traditional Chinese Society. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Sutton, Donald S. 2003. Steps of Perfection: Exorcistic Performers and Chinese Religion in Twentieth-Century Taiwan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wang, Mingming. 2012. All under heaven (tianxia): cosmological perspectives and political ontologies in pre-modern China. Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2(1): 337–383. Zito, Angela. 1997. Of Body and Brush: Grand Sacrifice as Text/Performance in Eighteenth-century China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Part II Cosmological constitutions: economies, politics, and the cosmos

6 Stranger kings in general: the cosmo-logics of power1 Marshall Sahlins

The general principle is the one Eduardo Viveiros de Castro described for Tupi-Guarani societies in particular: ‘the symbolic attributes of positions linked to alterity encompass hierarchically the material dimensions of authority’ (1992: 118). It follows that ‘authority is founded on alterity’, and that ‘the internal aspect of leadership is subordinated to those aspects pointing toward the extrasocial’ (1992: 118). In this connection, Rodney Needham also developed a sustained ethnographic demonstration of what he called ‘the collective localization of the mystical’ in unseen forces and beings, to the powers of which societies are inevitably subject (1980: 65–66). Needham argued that a certain duality of powers was therefore equally general, whereby the political and jural instruments of governance are complemented by offices that mediate and appropriate these cosmic forces for the benefit of society. Accordingly he described the same dualism in institutional forms ranging from diarchies of divine and secular rulers to the opposition between the famous ‘mystical influence’ of affines and the substantive relations among own people (cf. Leach 1961). Again this alterity of power (and vice versa) appears in Maurice Bloch’s striking analysis (1992) of its acquisition in the passage through the wild in Orokaiva initiation rites, whence initiates return to society with a touch of divinity and a gift of victory. Like Needham, for Valerio Valeri dual kingship is a widespread phenomenon, whether in the form of diarchy or in the transformation of the one ruler in the course of his reign from violent outsider to the source of social order and prosperity. ‘The duality of the figure of the king,’ he writes, ‘is universally reflected in mythology and in the ritual of kingship:

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the king is a foreigner, a violent conqueror, but at the same time “he belongs to the people” as the Yoruba say, he is the guardian of the established order’ (Valeri 1980; see also Valeri 1985). We will return in due course to the question of the universality of conquest, but for now mark the emphasis on the foreign origin of the kingship. Similarly, over the course of a remarkable series of works, Mary Helms gathers numerous ethnographic and historical testimonies of the relationship of kingship in ‘traditional societies’ to ‘distant power-filled spaces that carry ancestral and godly associations’ (1993: 3; see also Helms 1988; 1998). Especially is Helms concerned with the powers of ‘the cosmological outside’ as objectified and acquired by those who would rule inside: Those who create and/or acquire goods and benefits from some dimension of the cosmological outside are not only providing goods and benefits per se but also are presenting tangible evidence that they themselves possess or command the unique qualities and ideals generally expected in persons who have ties with distant places of supernatural origins and, therefore, are themselves ‘second creators’. Evidence of inalienable connections with places of cosmological origins thus conveys a certain sacrality which readily translates into political-ideological legitimacy and facilitates successful exercise of power. This, in a nutshell, is why in traditional societies seekers or holders of influential political positions must give evidence of distant outside contacts, be they via the vertical realm, the geographical realm, or both. (1993: 49–50)

Also relevant in this connection of the cosmo-logics of stranger-­kingship is the large and venerable body of ‘hero literature’, notably in respect of the recurrent topoi of a passage through the wild and the foreign origins of the dynastic hero. All this and more can be found in the work of an unlikely source, the nineteenth-century Austrian Generalkonsul Johan Georg von Hahn, a disciple of Max Muller (summarised in Bremmer and Horsfall 1987). Von Hahn’s indulgence in Indo-European mythology normally ‘makes for depressing reading’, write Bremmer and Horstall, but they ungraciously allow that ‘sometimes a pearl can be found among the swine’ (1987: 26). For ‘out of the blue’ comes von Hahn’s study of the Indo-European hero-literature, which produces an interesting common pattern in the careers of famous dynastic founders, including the Roman Romulus and Remus, the Persian Cyrus, the Germanic Siegfried, the Indian Krishna, and some ten others. Among the commonalities determined by von Hahn, those of interest here are attributes of stranger-kingship that, far beyond the Indo-Europeans, are distributed from the Fiji Islands to the Valley of Mexico or Highland Peru, and from Cambodia to Equatorial and West Africa. So for example, the hero is born to a father who is ‘a god or a stranger’ and a mother who is the ‘daughter of a native prince’. Such unions between a cosmic outsider 138

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and the daughter of the indigenous ruler mark the contractual origins of stranger-kingships everywhere – virtually universally I should say. Other more or less regular features of stranger-king traditions noted in von Hahn’s analysis include: the exile of the founder-hero to the wild because of an omen warning that he would be dangerous to his royal parent; his association with the beasts therein; a certain imperious arrogance: and not least, such heroically transgressive acts as incest and fratricide. The latter deeds, by their very antisocial character, mark the superiority of the hero to the society he will then go on to rule. When Ntinu Wene killed his pregnant aunt on his way to founding the old Kongo kingdom, it demonstrated he was a true chief (Wing 1959: 11). Yet for all the aforementioned insights on the alien character of kingship, what is missing in them is the complementary division of powers between the foreign rulers and the autocthonous people. By their dynastic origins and inherited nature, as known in ongoing traditions and practised in royal rituals, the kings are strangers; yet on that very ground they must concede certain powers and privileges to the native people. One may even speak of a dual sovereignty – more or less explicitly established by contract. For if the indigenous people have surrendered control of the realm to foreigners endowed with the transcendent potency of their external origins, they have retained control of the local earth with which they are identified, from which in many cases they have directly issued, and of which they guard the productive virtues. Moreover, as foundational traditions and installation rituals will often confirm, the ongoing legitimacy of the stranger-king is derived from the residual sovereignty of the autochthonous people. Indeed it is usually by their name, not the name of the parvenu rulers, that the kingdom is known. Some remarks on historiography. Elizabeth Traube’s observation on eastern Indonesian dual polities could be very widely duplicated around the planet: ‘Narrative traditions in many eastern Indonesian societies trace the institutional dualism back to a founding event: the advent of a foreigner who displaces the native ruler’ (1986: 52). So far as historical sources are concerned, the foreign origin of the kingship is most often known by oral tradition, with less or more support from written evidence. In the many instances of successive stranger-king formations in the same polity, the more ancient dynasty may be traditional by documentation and the more recent one archival. The history of the West African Nupe kingship thus repeats itself, in something like an historical metaphor of a mythical reality. The kingdom of old established by the legendary conquering hero Tsoede in the country of his Nupe maternal kin was duplicated by the nineteenth-century Fulani conquest, as ruled by one Masaba – whose maternal kin, among whom he was raised, were likewise Nupe. S.F. Nadel writes: 139

Cosmological constitutions The twofold process of expansion over alien groups and cultures, combined with cultural assimilation and absorption, is reflected in both, in the ideological history of the Tsoede myth as well as the ‘real’ history of the Fulani kingdom. In one there is Tsoede, who conquers Nupe with the help of alien magic, who brings into Nupe the insignia of alien rulership and culture, but who, himself half Nupe by [maternal] descent, creates a new, independent, and united Nupe. On the other, there is this remarkable piece of empire-policy when Masaba claims succession to the Nupe throne on the grounds of his being half-Nupe by birth and full Nupe by education. (1942: 87)2

Speaking of empire, this is a common source of stranger-kingship, not only by the creation of lesser rulers in the galactic peripheries who are affiliated with the imperial centre, but in the successor states left with foreign domination in the wake of the empire’s collapse. Thus the Hellenistic kingdoms that succeeded Alexander the Great’s conquests: the Ptolemys in Egypt and the Seleucids in Asia, including offshoot realms such as the Greco-Bactrians of north-west India. Likewise in the Interlacustrine region of Africa the precolonial kingdoms of the Nyoro, Ganda, Toro, Haya, Nkole, Acholi, and Soga, among others, emerged from the dissolution of the Nyoro ‘empire’ of the Nilotic Bito rulers – itself the successor of the fabled Kitara realm of the Bantu Chwezi (who had replaced a still earlier Butambuzi regime). Alternatively, stranger-kingship may be a structure without an event, in the sense that local chiefs take on the identities and trappings of greater outside rulers, like the Kachin (gumsa) leaders who famously ‘become Shan’ (Leach 1954: 223), the Gaulish chiefs who claimed Julian or Augustan descent (Drinkwater 1978), or the so-called borderland ‘barbarians’ who similarly appropriated Chinese ancestry (Backus 1981; Took 2005). The ruling elite of the Hinduised states of old in south-east Asia, such as Kediri and Majapahit in Java, Srivijaya in Sumatra, Champa in Vietnam, and the Khmer kingdoms of Cambodia assumed the religions and Sanskrit forms of Indian royal courts, even as their kings became avatars of Vishnu, Shiva, or Brahma. Although it has long been debated whether immigrants from India actually took over these South East Asian kingdoms, current opinion rather favours a self-Hinduisation process, as did Georges Coedès in his classic work on the subject: ‘the elevation of native chiefs to the level of kshatriya by means of the vratyastoma, the Brahmanic rite for admitting foreigners into the orthodox community, must have been the rule’ (1968: 24; cf. Tambiah 1976: 76). Another variant is that of the returning god or sacred ancestor: like the paramount Ariki Kafika chiefs of Tikopia, who admittedly came from overseas but claimed descent from an autochthonous deity (one of the Pu Ma) who had long ago left the island. In the early colonial period, Europeans such

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as Rajah Brooke (in Sarawak) and Captain Cook (in Hawaii) benefited or suffered from such indigenous identities (Sahlins 2012). Elsewhere, sacred kings were known to have descended from celestial gods, or themselves come down upon a native people directly from the heavens – always a good address for persons with royal ambitions. Early dynasties of the Peloponnesus were sired by immigrant sons of Zeus with the daughters of autochthonous rulers: for a noteworthy example, the union of the Zeus-born Lacedaemon with Sparta, the daughter of earthborn royalty, thus founding the city that, some further stranger-­dynasties and centuries on, would be ruled by the Heraclid kings of historic Sparta.3 Celestial origins were also claimed by the Tutsi rulers of Rwanda, the Natchez paramounts of Native America, the emperors of Japan, the original rulers of Brunei, of the Bugis realm of Bone (Sulawesi), and of several other Indonesian polities. In the famous epic of god-created Gilgamesh, great king of Uruk, the hero’s career from mighty hunter to city-builder – a deployment of powers of the wild to the construction of the civilised often told in African kingship charters – epitomises a ‘kingship associated with distant power-filled spaces that carry ancestral and godly connotations’ (Helms 1993: 3). Great ruling chiefs of Polynesia and Micronesia came from islands in the sky beyond the horizon: fabled Kahiki in the case of Hawai’I, for example; or Kachaw for Ponape and Truk. Ward Goodenough wrote of Kachaw: To understand that Kachaw refers to the sky world and that Micronesians consider people and things that drift in from beyond the horizon as coming from that world, which is also a spirit world, clarifies a number of things. It explains why, in stories, pieces of driftwood serve as the canoes that bring beings from Kachaw to Truk; and it explains why these beings are always described as enuuyaramas (spirits that can take fully human form) … It explains why clan ancestors and the founders of chiefly lines who come from elsewhere are invariably described in terms that make them, too, enuuyaramas. It explains, also, why those who wish to bolster their political power with magical power, which itself derives from the spirit world, should claim ancestry from Kachaw … And it explains, finally, why Europeans, on their first arrival at Pacific islands, were often greeted as if they were from the spirit world. (1986: 559)

Call it ‘the real-politics of the marvelous’. The early Latin kings, including Romulus, descended from Aeneus of Troy and a daughter of Latinus, the native ruler. Aeneus continued to figure as the ancestor of European potentates into the Middle Ages and beyond, including the Holy Roman Emperors and the Hapsburgs, among others (Tanner 1992). Also emanating from the Trojan War were the legendary nostoi, the returning Greeks, most importantly Odysseus, who was appropriated as dynastic founder by a number of states in the northern borderlands of Greece, in Sicily, and in 141

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Italy (Malkin 1998). Elsewhere, a certain Mil came from Egypt via Spain to give rise to the dominant lineages of Irish kings in the Middle Ages (Sahlins 2011). Since the fifteenth century, a number of Islamic states in the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra, and Borneo have been governed by descendants of Alexander the Great – in his Koranic persona of Iskandar D’zul Karnain (cf. Brown 1952). (For his part the Macedonian Alexander was a stranger-king in his homeland, as his house claimed royal Argolid ancestry.) Then again, Mecca was the source of many pagan as well as Muslim rulers of West Africa, the latter from descendants of the Prophet and the former mainly from his enemy Kisra (or Kisira), who resisted conversion to Islam and fled westward to found the Borgu kingdoms among others (Lombard 1965; Stewart 1993). Yet fantastic as these traditions may seem, it will not serve anthropological purposes simply to write them off as implausible ‘myths’ – in the way that, regrettably, historians are too often inclined to do. The sense of the fictional conveyed in our notion of the ‘mythical’ grossly shortchanges the structural and historical value of strangerking traditions. Even the concept of ‘mythical charter’ made famous by Bronislaw Malinowski is an anthropological contradiction in terms, inasmuch as the traditions that thus function as the constitution of society can be no mere fiction. On the contrary, these founding narratives convey a certainty at once empirical and tautological; for as realised in all manner of customary practices from production to piety, they are continuously confirmed by the facts of the cultural scheme they explain – and whose future they would chart. As Ian Cunnison put it for the Luapula people of East-Central Africa (a recursive stranger-king polity, incidentally, governed by Lunda successors of Bemba chiefs who took the country from the Luba immigrants who had dominated the aboriginal inhabitants): ‘The important thing is this: what the Luapula peoples say about the past is what they know actually happened in the past. Simply to say they believed it happened in the past is too weak, for they do not doubt it’ (1959: 33). In recent times, English-speaking Luapula call these narratives ‘meaning’. In the same vein, Meyer Fortes observed that when the Tallensi speak of the ‘cleavages’ between their Namoo chiefs – by ancestry foreigners from the Mamprusi kingdom – and the indigenous Talis, they trace them to ‘myths’ of origin, ‘laid down with a finality of conviction that makes any question of their historical truthfulness irrelevant’ (1945: 22). Probably it can be safely claimed that this sort of historical consciousness is general among stranger-king polities, since their structural order is inherently a temporal order. Given this anthropological appreciation of ‘the natives’ point of view’, a certain contretemps develops between practitioners of the discipline and historians in regard to how the so-called ‘myths’ of stranger-kingship

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should be analytically considered. The anthropologist of course knows that the people’s truth is not the historian’s; yet all the same, it is the people who make their history, in every sense of the term, and thereby their destiny. Not that ‘what actually happened’, as archivally determined, is anthropologically irrelevant. On the contrary, the differences between people’s accounts and the historian’s empirical record are critical as a measure of how what actually happened is culturally construed. What the differences reveal are the cultural values that shape history in the particular society at issue: the way that history is specifically made by this people, which is never the only way possible. The critical question thus becomes, not what happened, but what it is that happened. It follows that for anthropologists the means–ends relations between the people’s narratives, however ‘mythical’, and the archival reconstructions, however ‘factual’, are precisely the reverse of what they are for historians. For historians, myths are more-or-less valuable means of determining the real historical events, provided their fantastic aspects are debunked and discarded. The object is to find the ‘kernel of truth’ in an otherwise unbelievable narrative, upon which the rest of it is best ignored. Or else, in the case of fabulous traditions of dynastic origins, the narrative is written off altogether as a counterfeit claim of legitimacy that could never have actually happened. But for anthropologists, the actual historical events become the means for determining the operative social principles of historical action, insofar as these events can then be compared to the way they are presented in the people’s traditions, thus culturally appropriated. In the present instance, to ignore that the sultans of Melaka in the fifteenth century were derived from ranking descendants of Alexander the Great (Iskandar D’zul Karnain) would not only throw away critical evidence of the evolving cosmography of power that linked that newly Islamic Malay commercial state to Ottoman ‘Rum’ (Rome, Constantinople), as well as Melaka’s claims of succession to the ancient empire of Srivijaya where the Alexandrian princes first appeared – by invidious contrast to Melaka’s contemporary rival, Melayu-Jambi. More than that, this tradition is is the key to the constitution of a dual society, including a diarchic regime, of Islamic rulers of native Malays. In this chapter, therefore, I take such real-politics of the marvellous – which is also to say such cosmo-logics of alterity – seriously, without apology for the seeming fantasy.4 There follows a discussion of major features of stranger-king formations – something like an ‘ideal-typical description’ of the kind Weber could get away with – punctuated by specific examples. Of course, not all of these features are distinctive of stranger-kingship; of necessity, some are pertinent to kingship in general, or at least to its pre-modern forms. 143

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Rather, what is distinctive is the overall configuration of the polity as a dual system of peoples and powers, marked by the imposition of a foreign aristocracy of transcendent virtues upon an indigenous people ancestrally linked to the land. The rule of strangers may be established by violent or peaceful means, by ruse or even by the solicitation of the native people desirous of a chief of their own for their own good reasons. In any event, at some point early on it becomes contractual, thus constituting a system of complementary rights and powers – ideally, and therefore practically in its consequences. As for example, the domain of Termanu on the Indonesian island of Roti, where, as James Fox relates, the polity was originally laid down in a series of contests between the original settler, Pada Lalais, and a clever wanderer, Ma Bulan, which the latter won by virtue of various ruses: In the end, Ma Bulan, who has demonstrated the cleverness required of a ruler, offers the following solution to divide their functions. He says: ‘It would be good if I became Lord and you became Head of the Earth for succeeding generations. When men have filled the domain, I will rule them and you may levy a tribute on the domain and take a portion of lontar syrup from each person who lives in the domain. And for all times since you were the first to settle this domain, this domain will be given the name Pada, in keeping with your name, Pada Lalais. (Fox 1995a: ms; cf. 1995b)

I take this dual constitution of society and sovereignty as essential. As Luapula people put it, every land has ‘two owners … the original settler who is “owner” through the fact of being first, and therefore has ritual authority, and the political “owner” there by right of might or cunning or duplicity; and each respects the other for the particular attributes for which he is the owner’ (Cunnison 1951: 15). Similarly, in a discourse widely rehearsed in Indonesia, South East Asia, Africa, and Oceania, the rulers have power over men, the native people over land. For all that the foreigners are the powers-that-be, their indigenous subjects are ‘owners of the land’ and their own headmen are ‘masters of the soil’ or ‘priests of the earth’. For although the polity is founded on their submission, the aboriginal people, as already mentioned, retain ritual powers and possessary rights over the country. Fortes described it this way for Tallensi (whose Namoo chiefs, recall, are of Mamprusi origin): Broadly speaking … chiefship symbolizes the plexus of social relationships, based on lineage and kinship, which unites a defined group of people into a community, and tendaanaship [the priesthood of the earth, held by the native Tale] symbolizes the bonds of men, as members of a community, with land, locality, and the material earth … [I]n their complementary conjunction the emphasis in the chiefship is on its transmission from the

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As the former rulers and current owners, the native headmen often have an indispensable role in the installation of the foreign chief, including the right, at least nominally, to name the heir of the current ruler. Frequently too, they have official functions in the foreign dynast’s regime. Another such expression of the dual sovereignty is associated with the founding union of the immigrant prince with a ranking woman of the indigenous people, most often a daughter of the indigenous chief. Accordingly, the founder’s royal successors become sister’s sons or children (by maternal descent) of their aboriginal subjects: so are Fijian paramounts honorifically known as ‘child chiefs’ (gone turaga). And if the royal line can thereby claim to embody the social totality by the combination of its paternal and maternal ancestry, still in many chiefdoms, tribal kingdoms, and segmentary states that totality takes its language as well as its identity from the original people. In sum, here are two forms of authority and legitimacy, coexisting in a state of mutual dependence and reciprocal incorporation. The authority of the native people is based on the ‘founder principle’, their claim to have settled first on the land, or at least prior to the nouveau arriviste rulers. Often they are autochthonous in the maximal sense of ‘born from the earth’. Indeed, if their ancestors are buried there, as is also common, their generation from the earth is an ongoing condition. It also follows that as native ‘owners’, ‘masters’ or ‘sons’ of the earth, they belong to the land as much as the land belongs to them. They have a relation of mutual being with the soil. More than just ‘the inorganic body of the community,’ as Marx put it, the land is alive and akin with the people – and if not because their ancestors compose it, then because by their labour they have mixed themselves with it (Sahlins 2013). It follows that by contrast to their immigrant rulers, who are affiliated in historical memory with distant places and encompassing spaces, the indigenous ‘owners’ are the fixed foundation of the land. They are characteristically skilled cultivators, both by their inherent nature and their exclusive ritual powers over the earth. As Elizabeth Traube observes of Mambai (Timor), the ritual power of the indigenous people is inalienable; whereas, the power of the stranger-rulers is detachable, divisible, and transferable (1986: 57).5 Accordingly, the function of native headmen as ‘priests of the earth’ may be as indispensable to the ruling elite as is their labour power. Elliot Skinner tells how the immigrant rulers of the Mossi, upon their advent in Upper Volta, had to go to considerable lengths of gifts and promises to cajole native leaders who had been scared off by the strangers’ power into returning to their home place (1964: 134). Here, then, are polities in which the primary means of subsistence 145

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production are largely possessed, if not completely monopolised, by the underlying population rather than by the powers-that-be. Everywhere the dependence of the people on the ruling aristocracy is based on the cession of personal rights, not of real rights. Nor are the indigenous Fijian ‘owners’ or ‘land people’ the only ones who observe, with some trace of contempt, that the ruling chiefs themselves are landless – except for what the ‘owners’ have granted them (as sister’s sons). The same principle of firstness governs the native people’s own internal order of legitimacy and authority. Elders are generally superior to their juniors, and leadership of social groups is generally based on age. This not only holds within lineages or local communities, but likewise the original lineages or villages of a place are superior to commoner groups who may later join them. Thus deeply embedded as a matter of privilege and prestige, the native value of priority is never completely compromised by the sovereign pretensions of the arriviste ruling group; it remains as an enduring source of tension and contention in an essentially differentiated polity. Nevertheless, in chronicles of stranger-kingship from Mesopotamia to Mesoamerica to Madagascar, immigrant heroes, by their associations with transcendent sources of vitality and mortality, trump the local powers of native headmen and constitute a greater and richer society under their own authority. Referring broadly to African histories of dynastic origins, Igor Kopytoff writes: ‘In principle, authority was legitimated by being a first-comer, but the principle had to be adapted to the reality that the polity was in fact dominated by the immigrant late-coming group’ (1989: 17). The way the strangers’ own traditions often have it, rule is their destiny. Transmitted through their royal or divine ancestry, a certain libido dominandi, as inscribed in their nature, is a conceit of their history. Coming from another world, the Tutsi rulers of Rwanda were human beings like the native Hutu cultivators, it is true, ‘but not in quite the same way, and thus were entitled to rule’ (Maquet 1961: 19). Or the Mossi elite of Yatenga, whose ‘vocation … is to exercise power (naam) and thus be a chief (naaba), to command (so), and thus to have a command (solem)’ (Izard 1985: 20). Even the histories known to the native people may accord such a priori superiority to their powerful rulers, in which case the advent of the stranger-king is relatively unproblematic, even welcomed, and achieved by something less than conquest. Why this should be so is a matter of later discussion; it is enough to note here that like the Israelites who asked Samuel (I Samuel 8: 1–8) to grant them a king like other nations – to which, on God’s orders, the prophet in effect said, ‘OK, but you’ll be sorry’ – the indigenous people have been known to solicit, seduce, or even kidnap a prince of some greater realm to rule over them. The same may well have been true of the king the

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Israelites got, as David, one-time vassal of the Philistines, had more than one classic attribute of stranger-kingship (Halperin 2001). Given that it is the destiny of the strangers to rule, it makes sense that their careers began in some frustration of that ambition. Commonly in the Indo-European, South East Asian, and African chronicles, the princely hero searches for his own kingdom because he failed to succeed his royal father, whether due to his junior status, his defeat in a succession struggle, or some act of lèse-majesté that resulted in his banishment. In many of these parts, the combination of royal polygyny and flexible succession rules (or the effective lack of rules), by giving centrifugal impetus to the relationships among royals contending for their homeland kingship, became important sources for the diffusion of stranger-­kingship. His ambitions of rule frustrated, the errant prince, accompanied by a youthful band, now journeys through liminal space – by land, sea, or sky – where he accomplishes feats of such marvellous character as to demonstrate he is vastly superior to the ordinary human beings of the society he now would rule. With regard to the particular way the stranger demonstrates his control of transcendent powers, something depends on the local conditions of real-politics. In the commercial kingdoms of South East Asia, the future ruler often arrives laden with mercantile wealth: like Kaundinya, the Brahmin who came thus from India to originate the Cambodian kingship; the Chinese merchant prince who founded the Siamese kingdom of Ayutthaya; or the descendants of Alexander the Great who turned the padi fields into silver and gold when they appeared in Sumatra, and went on to become ancestors of Islamic Sultanates of the area. Still, Kaundinya had to battle (and marry) the local Naga princess in order to found his kingdom, and the narrative of the Alexandrian princes’ own ancestors’ travels and trials is – like many of the Alexander the Great romances – a tale of one marvellous victory after another, over land, in the sky, and under the ocean (Brown 1952; Pelliot 1903; Stoneman 2010). Such triumphant journeys through power-charged liminal space comprise the most common narrative of the stranger-hero’s sovereign potency. A great warrior or hunter, he overcomes rival princes, demons, or ferocious beasts in the hazardous course to his royal destiny. Indeed, imperial conquests apart, these victories en route are often sufficient to establish the kingship, which is then fixed peaceably and by contract with the native people. As an actual means of kingship formation, conquest is overrated. The other common demonstration of sovereign exceptionalism consists of deeds of derring-do that precisely in their character are beyond the normal bounds of sociality and morality. Luc de Heusch (1962: 146ff) calls this ‘the exploit’: an act of incest, parricide, fratricide, or other such crimes that would be fatal to any ordinary person who committed them, but which our hero pulls off with impunity. It may be that such was the 147

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deed for which the prince was banished from his own land, or it may be one that occurred along the way to his new kingdom; or then again, it may have been the draconian manner by which he usurped his indigenous predecessor. In any such case, the exploit is a manifest sign that he has the power to rule the native society – provided he is sublimated by it. The stranger is domesticated by the indigenous people, typically in some sort of confrontation with the native headman, and his wild disposition is accordingly diverted externally to the protection and expansion of the realm and devoted internally to its good order and good fortune. It is a movement in many respects from celeritas to gravitas, from the transgressive to the judicial (Dumezil 1948). Valerio Valeri observes that this transformation is characteristic of kingship in general, but it seems all the more pertinent when sovereignty is imposed from outside on a different people: With the king nature penetrates into culture and can thus be domesticated, controlled. The scourge is now beneficent, and he who bears death becomes a lover of life. But to make this possible, it is necessary to transform the king: the invader must become part of the people he rules, transcendent power must become immanent. (1980)

Something needs be said here about the autochthonous people’s own prehistory of domesticating the wild. The first to settle to the land, they converted it into cultivated human space. Michel Izard made the point for the aboriginal predecessors of the Mossi. ‘The people of the earth,’ he wrote, ‘transform the wild into cultivated land, the dangerous into docile elements, the turbulent dead into beneficial ancestors’ (1985: 19). So it may be generally said that the indigenous people create the conditions of stability, sacrality, and unity with the earth that will work their power on the unruly outsiders who would rule them. As Simmel (nd) classically said of the stranger, his position in the group is determined essentially by the fact he has not belonged to it from the beginning; and that he ‘imparts qualities to it that do not and cannot stem from the group itself’. This helps explain the many traditions of the institution of stranger-kingship by the solicitation of the autochthonous people. Citing the foundation of the Benin kingdom of West Africa, initiated when the elders of Edo asked the Yoruba ruler of fabled Ife to send them a king, Kopytoff notes several parallels beyond Africa, including the Kievan state that came into being when the local Slavic tribes invited the Vikings to ‘come and rule over us, for our land is vast but the disorder in it is mighty’ (1989: 65). Fijians have an expression for it, kere turaga, ‘to request (or beg) a chief’: the way the people of Narai island requested their ruling chiefs from the powerful kingdom of Bau (Sahlins 2004: 250n). Such examples remind us that the societies in question are

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set in larger historical fields of contending powers, not to mention their own internal contention, whence come the possibilities and necessities of having kings ‘like the other nations.’ Again as in Simmel’s notions of the stranger, the foreign hero is at once near and distant, outside and inside the society: he is encompassed by the people over and against whom he rules. As, for example, Mbegha, original king of the Bantu nation of Shambaai in north-eastern Tanganyika: He went from being an outcast in his own lineage, who was denied his rightful inheritance, to being king of all Shambaai, who was given wives without paying bridewealth; yet before and after he was alone. Before, he was alone among his enemies and afterwards, he was alone among his subjects. (Feierman 1974: 44)

Alone among his subjects as a foreign being, yes, but also from the beginning dependent upon them since he came alone or with a male band, and were it not for the gift of women, there would be no possibility of dynasty. Charter narratives of stranger-kingship often include other means of the hero’s naturalisation, even incidents of his humiliation, at the hands of the native people; but, as I have said, his marriage with a ranking woman or women of the country is a near-universal form of the social contract. Alternatively, as in medieval Ireland, the king marries the goddess of the land, or the land itself (Sahlins 2011). Or it may be, as in Taleland, that the foreign Namoo chief is to the indigenous Priest of the Earth as ‘husband’ to ‘wife’ (Fortes 1945). In one form or another, sovereignty is embodied in and passes with the woman. Often enough, the narrative of the stranger-hero’s takeover of the realm depends on the native princess’s choice of her suitor and thus of her father’s successor; or else, she conspires with the stranger to usurp her royal kinsman. Hippodamia’s arrangement with the eponymous Pelops to best her royal father in the chariot race for her hand, and thus allow the Zeus-descended stranger to take the rule of Pisa, is an example of the latter; while the offering of the cup of sovereignty to the stranger from Phocaea by the daughter of the Gaulish ruler was the origin of Greek Masilia (Marseille). Indeed, speaking to a variety of ancient Indo-European kingships, J.-G. Préaux writes: ‘Every foundation of a city, every conquest of royal power becomes effective the moment the stranger, charged with sacredness by the gods or the fates, endowed moreover with the force of the warrior, symbolically gains possession of a new land either by receiving peacefully, or by conquering valorously or by ruse, the daughter of the king of the land’ (Preaux 1962: 117). Indeed, traditions of Indo-European peoples from the Aryans to the Celts are particularly noteworthy for their stress on the pivotal role of the native princess in the transfer of sovereignty. It

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becomes a popular theme of romance, or even fairy tale, as A.M. Hocart noted: The mediaeval Knight of the Swan, variously called Helyas and Lohengrin, marries the heiress of Bouillon in the French version, of Brabant in the German, and thus becomes Lord of Bouillon or Prince of Brabant … .   That night his body received her love,   Then was he prince in Brabant. In this romance, as in so many of our fairy tales, the bride is not the widow of the late king, but a maiden of the land. (1969: 103)6

As a surrender of the native people that is at the same time an embrace of the foreign prince, this original union of the latter with a daughter of the autochthonous people is at one level equivocal. The combination of mutual incorporation and differentiated authority can breed a continuing tension between the foreign-derived royals and the native peoples. Invidious disagreements about legitimacy and superiority may well surface in partisan renderings of the founding traditions, each side insisting on its own basis of authority. But at another level, their differences are complementary, and accordingly resolved in totality. More than political, the conjunction here is cosmological – which is what helps it to endure. For even as the foreign rulers are integrated within the indigenous society, perhaps largely acculturated by it, they maintain the transcendent attributes that are the condition of their sovereignty. They are to the native people in some such inclusive status as the Celestial is to the Terrestrial, the Wild to the Settled, the Sea to the Land; or in abstract terms, as the Universal is to the Particular, a ratio that also holds for their respective gods and cults. As a humanised version of the union of Gaia and Ouranus, the dynastic narrative may thus rehearse the cosmogonic one; while in further evidence of the totalisation implied in stranger-­ kingship, ordinary marriages – not to mention ritual marriage-by-capture – rehearse the primordial royal wedding. ‘In Java and Sumatra,’ notes Justus Van der Kraef, ‘bride and groom in their marriage ceremony re-enact the ancient and mysterious marriage of heaven (the groom as “king”) and earth (the bride as “queen”) from which all living things take their beginning’ (Van der Kraef 1954: 852–853; cf. Hocart 1969). We see, then, why the traditions of stranger-kingship function as all-round cultural constitutions. The union with the native woman, which is also an elemental combination of masculine potency with feminine fertility gives rise to the society as a self-reproducing totality – together with the permanent contradiction that this autonomy is conditional on alterity. Incorporating the native groups, the stranger-king is incorporated by them; greater than society, he is domesticated by it. This Janus-faced figure appears notably at the installation rites of the original hero’s royal

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successors, where, as previously remarked, representatives of the indigenous people often play a significant role. Here the ancients of the land not only symbolically transfer the rule, but sometimes nominate the ruler – and symbolically kill him along the way. In the marked form of the installation as life crisis rite, as analysed by A.M. Hocart, ‘the theory is that the king (1) dies; (2) is reborn; (3) as a god’ (1969: 70). Interestingly enough, Hocart’s account in these terms of the installation of the War-King (Vunivalu) of Bau, Fiji was cited by Georges Dumézil as a model for the understanding sovereignty in ancient Rome, Ireland, India, Persia, and Scandinavia – stranger-kingdoms all. ‘It is not even among the Indo-Europeans,’ Dumézil wrote, ‘that these facts are most clear or complete’; it would be more useful to look to the Polynesians or Indians of North West America, and the best commentary on the accession of the ancient Hindu king Prthu, avatar of Vishnu, ‘is perhaps furnished by scenes which, only recently, marked the succession of the sovereign in the Fiji Islands’ (1948: 41–42). Without rehearsing the details offered by Hocart, it is clear that they indeed signify the death and rebirth of the king (cf. Sahlins 1981). But what neither Hocart nor Dumézil noticed, the death of the ruler is inflicted by, and his rebirth nourished by, chieftains of the autochthonous people of Bau.7 The king dies as a triumphant outsider, to be reborn as the local god, or more precisely, as the living ‘replacement’ (i sosomi) of the god. Everything thus happens in Fiji as it does in the installation ceremonies of the ruler of the Ndembu people of Zambia, as described by Victor Turner (1969: 97–102). A descendant of Lunda conquerors, the ruling chief was put in office by the senior headmen of the autochthonous Mbwela people. ‘In the relationship between Lunda and Mbwela,’ Turner writes, ‘ … we find a distinction familiar in Africa between the politically or militarily strong and the subdued autochthonous people, who are nevertheless ritually potent’ (1969: 99). In the beginning of the installation rite, the chosen successor is confined in a small hut the name of which is ‘to die’, where ‘the chief-elect dies from his commoner state’ (1969: 100). Then, at a later stage, when the native headman is admonishing the chief, he says: ‘Today you are born as a new chief … If you were mean, and used to eat your cassava mush alone, or your meat alone, today you are in the chieftainship. You must give up your selfish ways, you must welcome everyone, you are the chief! You must stop being adulterous and quarrelsome’ (1969: 101). For all that the new king is domesticated by the native people, I stress again that his metasocial nature is not dissolved. Rather, it is sublated as the means of peace, justice, and order within the society, and often enough of conquests without. In such respects, stranger-kingship is revolutionary. The foreign dynasty is the bearer of a superior culture. Its 151

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advent, as Kopytoff describes for many African kingships, is a kind of mission civilisatrice: ‘the rulers bring in a new organization (and perhaps, again, new crops or technology), thereby ushering in a new social order where before, the story claims, a true or at least a civilized society, scarcely existed’(1987: 50). The original immigrant, however, is not necessarily the one who institutes the new order; often he returns to his homeland. Rather, and for good reason, the celebrated hero of the dynasty is as likely to be his son and successor. The good reason is the marriage of the original stranger with the daughter of the native ruler, which thus issues in an offspring who incarnates the totality of the new society, both its foreign and native elements, even as the gravitas aspect of the latter modulates the celeritas character of the former. The autochthons lived in a crude state before they had foreign kings; or so it is often said – particularly by the foreign kings. At the extreme, aboriginal people were without fire and ate their food raw, nor did they have agriculture, cattle, metallurgy, cloth, or some such means and signs of cultural sophistication. Moreover, without powerful leadership, they lived in small and scattered groups; and without justice, in a quarrelsome and disorderly state. ‘With the conquerors came law and order,’ Kajsa Eckholm (1975: 164) writes of formation of the Kongo kingdom. The condition of the indigenous people before the advent of the dominant Bakongo was one of anarchy, cannibalism, uncleared land, and ‘total lack of culture’. Then again, like Alexander the Great, who by building cities in conquered lands was a literal civiliser, the Inkas claim to have created social order among the conquered peoples by building towns as well as agricultural works, roads, canals, palaces, and temples. They used stone ‘to engineer a new world’ and they used their political power to defeat enemies without and to tame disorder within, thus making possible the concentration of the scattered native populations (Helms 1993: 80, 180). It could well be that the conjunction of an expanding foreign elite and a decentralised sedentary population motivated a complex process of consolidation cum ethnogenesis on both sides. Such hierarchy in itself is an impetus to boundary formation and cultural differentiation. While retaining the tradition of a foreign derivation from an exalted outside realm, the immigrant aristocracy develops a novel identity as the ruling class of a newly instituted kingdom, even as the previously scattered indigenous groups of the region are united under its aegis. Strangerkingships thus produce ethnically divided societies even as they conjoin them – often, as we have seen, in a realm identified with an autochthonous people. In any case, the hierarchical order was also civilising. The general idea is, as in Lucy Mair’s oft-cited observation on African kingly institutions, ‘it’s uncivilized to be without a ruler’ (1971: 22).

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And if I may adopt another well-known Africanism, the stranger-king is a rain-maker, both in the Frazerian sense that he fertilises the land and in the current colloquial sense in that he is the major source of the society’s transactable goods, the prestigious valuables that come from the external realms with which the kingship is ancestrally associated and continuously articulated. In this connection, Mary Helms, speaking of kingship in general, captures the exemplary attributes of stranger-kings in particular: [B]oth the grace of the gods and the wealth of foreign places attested to the ability of transformational kings to provide for their subjects the powers and qualities associated with distant locales, whether in the heavens or beyond the horizon. This ability to provide expresses the qualities of kingship, qualities that distinguish and identify the ruler, as they distinguish and identify other creator-transformers, as ideal humans who stand above and beyond the common social world. (Helms 1993: 82)

In an article titled ‘The King Comes from Elsewhere,’ Luc de Heusch (1991), commenting on the stereo-ideal-typical stranger-kingship of the Mounbang of Chad as described by Alfred Adler (1982), observes that as master of rain and drought the ruler alone can ‘assume command of the universe for the benefit of the group as a whole’ (1991: 113). The descendant of a royal immigrant from a former confederacy on the Benue, a ‘sacred monster’ and great hunter come in from the wild, the Moundang king ‘controls fecundity and fertility through the power he exercises over the sky’ (1991: 114). No one, however, has comparable general powers over the earth, which belongs in severalty and on an equal basis to autochthonous clans, each of whom has made a pact with the sprits of the area. Whereas the king, by origin a ‘sacred monster’ from the wild, executes his authority over ‘a space outside the jurisdiction of the clans where, with the help of his men, he secures wealth by means of violence without interfering in the affairs of the clans’ (114). The stranger-king conveys the life-giving potency of alterity by ritual and material means both: by the cultic functions of the ruler that bring the rain, protect the crops, facilitate childbirth, or otherwise engage the transcendent conditions of fertility; and by provision of the wealth that analogously grows the society. The complement of the king’s spiritual appropriation of the potency of alterity is the objectification of the same in his acquisition and disposition of external riches, likewise ensouled with vital powers. Of course, in the form of regalia and the rich appurtenances of royalty, foreign goods distinguish and enhance the kingship itself. But as the monies commonly used for social payments, foreign valuables have more general effects of social organisation and human reproduction. Expended in political alliances, judicial compensations,

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or aristocratic largesse, they are the material means of constituting the overall structure of the society. And while circulating among the population at large in marital payments, birth rites, mortuary exchanges, and the like, they constitute the relations of community and human reproduction. These powerful goods, like the king who makes them possible, both unify and fructify. They are socially creative wealth. Then again, providing foreign riches and fertilising the land are parallel sovereign functions, insofar as both convey the vitality of alterity and compose a necessary complement of active means for realising the fixed earthly powers of the indigenous people. The material complement on the part of the underlying people is the tribute owed the king: ideal-typically, produce of the earth, given in requital for the civilising order, cultural riches, and reproductive powers he affords them. The exchanges of marital and cultic powers, foreign and domestic, that constitute the polity are ideally objectified by a certain material reciprocity. So, for example, the economic relations between the Maluku (Indonesia) sultan and his people, as summarised by Leonard Andaya: The ruler or koken is characterized by his possession of ‘fortune,’ enabling him to control the golden mortar and pestle which is the symbol of the clove and the reproductive capacity of the community. Historical sources confirm this imagery of wealth resulting from the clove trade and of communities providing women to the ruler. In the opposite direction flow prestige items in the form of imported cloth, iron, and other goods, as well as titles and institutions. The maintenance of this male/female relationship thus becomes the guarantee of the continuing prosperity and well-being of the whole group. (1993: 54)

Of course, such ideal reciprocity may entail an unequal material exchange in favour of the ruling group. In a way, it would be politically unequal even if ostensibly balanced, in that the powers-that-be, by distributing the foreign goods, get the credit for providing the society at large with the same life-giving values of alterity that are at play in their own superior status. Heirlooms and regalia apart, it is an anthropological truism that in these economies the social benefits of riches are more often obtained in the distribution than in the possession. By way of conclusion, some general reflections on the structures and histories of stranger-king formations follow in the next section. One issue is the very notion of ‘structure’ embedded in the foregoing discussion. Obviously, the relations between aboriginal owners and foreign rulers bring into play a series of binary oppositions. The aboriginal people are to their stranger-kings as older is to younger, stable to mobile, female to male, earth to sky or sea, and so forth. Yet as commonly set out 154

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in a table of parallel contrasts, this static sort of yin-yang structuralism is obviously insufficient. How to account for the relevant Simmelian characterisation of the stranger as both near and distant, inside and outside, for example? Similarly, how to understand the mutual encompassment and ensuing transformation of foreign elites and native subjects: a process in which the former are domesticated and the latter refined? Precisely, it is a process. Inherently temporal, if not necessarily historical, the structure is as such diachronic. It describes series of successive relations between its opposed terms: changing positional values which endow these terms with differing, even contradictory, significance. Distant and external by origin, the stranger becomes central to the society and the means of its totalisation. Subjected to the rule of foreigners, the native peoples claim to be the source of their legitimacy. Yet there is a non-contradictory way of accounting for these contradictory attributes: namely, by the internal diachrony of the structure, the transformations cum sublations which endow its elements and relationships with duplex values. A second issue is the variation in the ways the kingship is established. For in the matter of stranger-king traditions, we are one of the Others: we have our own native versions – some of which threaten to become ethnocentric social science. Beside the gifted outsider who wins the princess and gains half or all the kingdom, there are the ever-popular legends of the origin of the state by conquest. As translated into sociology by Ludwig Gumplowicz (1899) and Franz Oppenheimer (1929), conquest theory achieved a respected place alongside its antithesis, contract theory, as a major academic paradigm of state formation. Indeed it appeared to empirically trump all the theoretical alternatives by virtue of the worldwide distribution of ethnically dual or plural states. For Gumplowicz this amalgam must have arisen by conquest, hence he congratulated himself on the discovery that an ethnic distinction between the ruling class and the ruled has been ‘a universal characteristic of the state, although it has hitherto been wholly overlooked’ (1899: 29). Likewise, Oppenheimer opined that ‘everywhere we find some warlike tribe of wild men breaking through the boundaries of some less warlike people, settling down as nobility and founding its state’ (1929: 22). And he provided an extensive catalogue of stranger-kingdoms, as distributed over much of the world: Babylonians, Amoritans, Assyrians, Arabs, Medes, Persians, Macedonians, Parthians, Mongols, Selushuks, Tartars, and Turks; also, Hyksos, Nubians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, and Arabs; the Doric states of Greece, as well as the Ostrogoths, Lombards, Franks, Germans, Carthaginians, Visigoths, Franks, Burgundians, Saxons, and Normans. Moreover, ‘In India wave upon wave of warlike clans has flooded over the country even to the islands of the Indian Ocean. So also is it in China. In the European colonies we find the selfsame type, wherever a settled 155

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element of the population has been found, as for example, in South America and Mexico’ (Oppenheimer 1929: 17). For conquest theorists such as Gumplowicz, the exploitation of the conquered is the main driving force of state formation: ‘Conquest and the satisfaction of needs through the labor of the conquered,’ he wrote, ‘is the great theme of human history from prehistoric times to the latest plans for the Congo state’ (1899: 121). As for legitimacy, it derives from the same forceful means by which the rule was imposed; eventually, might becomes right. ‘The conditions established by force and accepted in weakness if peacefully continued, become rightful’ (1899: 261). More recent conquest theories, however, are wont to acknowledge complementary internal processes whereby the warrior king is transformed into a benefactor of the society. Perhaps because he draws considerably on Africa, where ‘capture’ is a dominant theme in relations between political communities, Valeri holds that the king everywhere is a conqueror, even if the kingship develops indigenously and his violence is sublimated domestically. ‘It must be emphasized that even when the kingship grows out of an endogamous process, disparities of power are created at the regional level and, inevitably, the stranger group through expansion becomes conqueror’ (Valeri 1980). But something has to be said about what is meant by ‘conquest’, especially in regard to Africa, where the charter traditions of stranger-kingship are often as notable for surrender without battle and alliance without violence. In a work of great detail and value on the Bariba kingships of Borgu in West Africa, Jacques Lombard (1965), for example, as consistently undermines his descriptions of these polities as ‘conquest states’ as he invariably so designates them. Indeed, at one point, he says of the relations between the original people and immigrant Wasangari nobility that the influence of the former ‘was perpetuated after the Wasangari conquest, notably in the political domain. This conquest was never imposed in a brutal fashion, and the autochthons have always been associated with a regime in which they could, thanks to certain alliances, take part’ (1965: 75). In what Lombard calls the ‘most classic’ mode of kingship formation, he describes a scenario in which a young prince, forced to leave his homeland when he failed to succeed his father, migrates with a band of followers into a land sparsely populated by dispersed and rudimentarily organised ‘archaic populations’. As the prince had hunted in this area before, he was already known to the rural people. Moreover, ‘the prestige attached to his person as a horseman and a warrior made it easy to settle among autochthonous people who were desirous of obtaining protection’ (1965: 181). Then again, in perhaps the most paradoxical of these narratives, the so-called ‘conqueror’, ancestor of the kings of Nikki,

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died of shame for having been defeated several times by the indigenous Waba people, who were so rude as to be living nude at the time. The relatives of the disgraced Wasangari noble, however, succeed in concluding a ‘pact’ of alliance with the victorious Waba, and despite these defeats they went on to establish the Nikki kingship (1965: 104). Thus the so-called ‘conquest’. Rather illogical as these narratives may seem, however, they underscore the critical point about the development of the hierarchical relation between the foreign elite and their native subjects, namely that this stratification did not arise from their interaction, whether it was marked by conquest or not, since it already existed beforehand. Like the rulers of the Mossi, Alur, Azande, Nyoro, Tutsi, and many other strangerkings of exalted foreign origins, these people were born to dominate. It was rather the presupposition than the sequitur to the establishment of their kingdom. Imperial conquests of the Romans, Aryans, Hittites, Inca, Fulani, Ganda, Azande, Amorites, and their like apart, it is remarkable how many stranger-king charters, including the versions of subject peoples, tell of a creation without a struggle. Speaking of the ‘Nilotic’ and ‘Hamitic’ takeovers of Interlacustrine Bantu groups, Audrey Richards observes that ‘the pattern of conquest evidently varied’: as indeed, she includes under that description the solicitation of Alur chiefs by other ethnic communities; and how in other instances, the immigrant rulers ‘seem to have … usurped ‘thrones’ rather than defeated whole peoples’ (1960: 33). Indeed in the Alur case, as brilliantly documented by Aidan Southhall, the conquest shoe is often on the other foot, since the indigenous peoples have been known to ‘kidnap’ the son of a prominent Akur paramount and literally carry him off to be their chief (Southall 2004).8 We have to do in Africa, as around the world, with a considerable complexity in stranger-king formation. Still, contract may be the more fundamental condition, even where there is a ‘conquest’. And ever more so where there is marriage and kinship: In sum, everything happens as if, in the part of the narrative devoted to installing a new authority in the allegedly conquered regions [des regions pretendues conquises], the immigrant chiefs were introduced among the masters of the earth through the intermediacy of kinship. In fact, those who are properly called Mossi, and who represent the present chieftainship, are less the enemies of the nyonyase, the autochthons, than they are their close relatives. Between these two human groups there exist the same social relations, mutadis mutandis, as exist between a grandchild (yagega) and his grandparents, especially a grandson and his maternal grandfather [the implication being the marriage of the immigrant Mossi with a daughter or daughters of the native people] (Zahan 1961: 11).

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Notwithstanding the received wisdom of a passage from kinship to territory, the state here develops as a transformation of the kinship order rather than its radical successor. Or perhaps we should speak of an intermediate form, of the kind sometimes called ‘tribal kingdoms’. Just so, stranger-kingdoms are characteristically structured as a stratified system of component kinship groups: one large and dispersed maximal lineage, clan, or kindred ruling over a number of localised descent groups of native peoples, rulers and ruled being connected by foundational relations of affinity. The kingship is thus a politicisation cum stratification of kinship. But then, given the incest taboo, kinship relations are the original form of life-from-the-outside, hence society as the contractual synthesis of difference. It was on the always dubious grounds of ‘might makes right’ that the conquest theories of the state propounded by Gumplowicz, Oppenheimer, and Nietzsche were opposed to the contract theories of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. It was as if Gumplowicz were responding directly and ineffectively to Book I of the Social Contract, where Rousseau argues that the social order, as a sacred right which is the basis of all other rights, cannot come from nature, from mere force, but must be grounded in convention. If we are simply considering force and its effects, Rousseau said, ‘as long as a people is compelled to obey, and obeys, it does well; as soon as it can shake off the yoke, and shakes it off, it does better’ (Rousseau 1998: I.1). The strongest, he contended, will never be strong enough to rule unless he turns might into right and obedience into duty. But ‘to yield to force is an act of necessity, not of will – at the most, an act of prudence. In what sense can it be a duty?’ (1998: I.3) For present purposes the implication is that something has to be said – or rather repeated – about the dual sovereignty of stranger-kingdoms. Not only is the ‘conqueror’ also subdued by the original people, but his domination is never complete, as the people maintain complementary rights, powers, and privileges in their own sphere. More, the native people maintain an ancestral title of ‘ownership’ of the country, by which right they are often the king-makers of the realm, whose control of the royal installation confers legitimacy on the sovereign-elect. Often enough they are the chief councilors of the king, tactically interposed to his own contentious and ambitious kinsmen. Such are the indigenous powers which, in contrast to that of creative force, as Balandier says of the origins of Kongo kingship, are the means of transforming the vulnerable might of the stranger into a durable superiority (1968:38). As indeed by the archetypal contracts of marriage between the divine stranger and the native goddess. Perhaps the deeper motivation of conquest theory is the common notion of the alien character of the state in general, kingship in particular,

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by contrast to the morality, sociability, and community of civil society, especially kinship society. The argument here is venerable and variable – as well as critical. It is at least as old as Herder’s sense of the state as a foreign imposition on the self-generated culture of the Folk; and as currently popular as Pierre Clastres’s Society Against the State (1987), where the idea, rather, is a rejection from within society of the discriminatory privileges and coercive powers of would-be rulers.9 In any case, while not denying the alien qualities of state power, it is only partly at issue in the formation of the dual systems of stranger-kingship. The other part is rather the opposite: the attractions of a kingship identified with the potent forces of the cosmological outside. Not that the real-political powers of kingship are irrelevant. On the contrary, it is noteworthy that, some islands partially excepted, the societies in question are situated in regional systems of differential power and cultural order. I mean core-periphery configurations of interdependent peoples with their gradients of wealth, population, and cultural elaboration, their articulations of internal and external political relations, and their movements of people and goods from the centre outward and the peripheries inward. Succession struggles in dominant kingdoms spin off princes in search of subjects they would rule. Segmentary conflicts in outlying ‘tribal’ communities engender would-be subjects in search of a prince to pacify and protect them. Yet note that all such real-politics involve a cosmo-logical a priori. They function just as much on the premise of the transcendent life-giving and death-dealing powers of the stranger-king as his ability to prosper the society by bringing the rains, warding off the plagues, or otherwise ensuring the fertility of the land and people. In our ordinary (inappropriate) terms, the practical is also the mystical. Better to believe those Polynesians for whom it is all ‘mana’. The proper anthropological principle would be the one with which this chapter began: ‘the symbolic attributes of positions linked to alterity encompass hierarchically the material dimensions of society’ (Viveiros de Castro 1992: 118). Notes 1

2

The general description of stranger-king formations in this article is excerpted from a chapter in a forthcoming book (as yet untitled) on the phenomenon in its extensive ethnographic and historical distribution. It is also dependent on previous summaries of stranger-kingship in Sahlins (2009, 2010, 2011). Note the implication of residual sovereignty of the native Nupe in legitimising the alien kings, as well as eponymously providing the continuing identity of the kingdom.

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4

5

6

7

8

9

Notice that these Hellenic unions of a son of Heaven with a daughter of Earth recreate as human kingship the cosmogonic mating of Ouranus with Gaia. This aspect of kingship will be returned to later in the chapter. I hasten to admit that the contrast between historians and anthropologists in such respects is overdrawn. Certainly not all historians ignore the politics of the marvellous; the great South East Asianists such as Anthony Reid and Barbara and Leonard Andaya certainly do not. Or see Alan Strathern (2009) on Sri Lanka. On the other hand, the sense that the people’s historical traditions are mere ‘ideology’, let alone ‘mythology’, has led more than one anthropologist to unduly devalue them. This distinction holds as well for the European colonial period, the political order of which is ‘modeled on a functional division between the ritual; mystical, or spiritual authority of the indigenous Timorese and the political, jural, or temporal power of their Portuguese rulers’ (Traube 1986: 52). On the ancient Aryan tradition (like the Pictish and Irish) of bestowing ‘the kingdom in each successive generation on a man of another family, and often of another country, who marries one of the princesses and reigns over his wife’s people’, see Sir James Frazer (1911–13, 10: 241; see also vol. 2: 289 on stranger-kings). The ceremony described by Hocart was not actually the ruling chief’s installation as War-King (Vunivalu) but as the ruler (Tui Levuka) of the original inhabitants of Bau, the Levuka people. No longer living in Bau island, they customarily returned to conduct this ceremony. As Southall notes, the ‘kidnapping’ is significantly ambiguous, since the chiefly victim is at once carried off by his future subjects and elevated above them. The scene is also enacted in installation rituals. Then again, in the form of an opposition between kingship and kinship, one can take the issues back to Sophocles’s Antigone.

References Andaya, Leonard. 1993. The World of Maluku: Eastern Indonesia in the Early Modern Period. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Backus, Charles. 1981. The Nan-chao Kingdom and T’ang China’s Southwestern Frontier. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Balandier, Georges. 1968. Daily Life in the Kingdom of Kongo: From the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century. New York: Pantheon Books. Bloch, Maurice. 1992. Prey Into Hunter: The Politics of Religious Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bremmer, J.N. and N.M. Horsfall. 1987. Roman myth and mythology. Bulletin Supplement 62. London: University of London, Institute of Classical Studies. Brown, C.C.E. 1952. The Sejarah Melayu or ‘Malay Annals’: a translation of Raffles MS 18. Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 25: 7–276. Clastres, Pierre. 1987. Society Against the State. New York: Zone.

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7 Transitional cosmologies: shamanism and postsocialism in Northern Mongolia Morten Axel Pedersen

Introduction This chapter1 explores the relationship between shamanism and postsocialism in Northern Mongolia. However, rather than treating shamanism as a religious cosmological framework by which people in Northern Mongolia bestow symbolic meanings to and thus make sense of the political-economic realities of postsocialist transition, my aim is to address the theme of cosmology in a somewhat more sideways fashion, by asking what a cosmology of postsocialism might look like. If there was one lasting impression that my time in Mongolia in the 1990s imprinted on my mind, it was the image of a broken cosmos – a tragic sense of a form of life that had been radically and irreversibly jolted out of shape with the collapse of state socialism and the so-called transition to a market economy and liberal democracy that followed it. Thus, beginning in 1990, people in Northern Mongolia experienced a veritable ontological meltdown, as the once immutable institutions of the socialist welfare state (such as infrastructure, health services, and education) gradually crumbled to dust. Crucially for what I am going to argue here, this slow but relentless breakdown of the world as people had known it was not conceived of as merely a transformation from one political and economic system to another. Rather, with the advent of the so-called transition, people found themselves exposed to a violent intrusion of invisible forces, energies, and substances, which, during seventy years of socialism, had hovered in the shadowy margins of self, household, community, and nation. As one man told me, it was as if all sorts of uninvited guests suddenly had crashed through the gates of his hashaa

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(compound), forcing him to engage with all sorts of spiritual entities he had never quite believed in, let alone shown any real interest in knowing about before. Indeed for many people in Ulaan-Uul – the poverty-stricken and remote district where I conducted the bulk of my fieldwork – the hardships of transition had been made significantly worse, if not directly precipitated, by the communist repression of occult specialists in the late 1930s. The result was a sort of postsocialist double bind, in which the aftershocks of the consecutive meltdowns of shamanic and socialist institutions came together, like two merging cracks in an erupting earthquake, to produce a general sense of chaos. On the one hand, the disappearance of the socialist state gave rise to a sense of occult excess. On the other hand, the lack of shamans meant that these opaque forces could not be tamed the way they used to be before the communists took over. Consequently, ‘transition society’ manifested in the form of predatory capitalism, a volatile democracy, a shambolic infrastructure, and runaway corruption was not simply perceived as representing specific policies pertaining to a market economy and (neo)liberal reform, but was experienced instead as a portent of an all-encompassing cosmic upheaval sometimes called ‘the age of darkness’ (haranhuiüye). Based on around two years of fieldwork among nomads and hunters in Northern Mongolia’s Hövsgöl Province during the first decade of the so-called age of the market, this chapter explores the imbrication between the invisible paths of the shamanic spirits and the equally opaque political-economic forces of postsocialist transition. I argue that, by treating shamanism itself as a transitional cosmology (as opposed to being a cosmology ‘of’ postsocialist transition), it is possible avoid the problematic tendency in much recent writing on ‘occult economies’ and cognate phenomena to explain phenomena such as shamanism as local cultural attempts to ‘make sense of’ the changes caused by global capitalism. Rather than conceiving of shamanic spirits as symbolic vehicles for curbing neo-liberal uncertainties, I propose, these occult forms are sui generis concepts of change in their own right. Postsocialist chaos As the 1990s drew to a close in Ulaan-Uul, households often spent the evenings in a state of constant alert. Older children equipped with binoculars were stationed on rooftops to monitor the movements of agsan [violently drunk] persons. Any trace of alcohol was eradicated from the home. The old and the very young were put to bed early, beneath the family altar. If possible, male relatives or friends were mobilised from other households. In some cases homes were temporarily abandoned for 165

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preventive reasons. People, mothers in particular, were tense and found it hard to sleep. The term agsan which is also used to describe fiery-tempered horses that are particularly difficult to break in refers to a disturbing condition of drunken rage that was said to afflict a growing number of people in Northern Mongolia at the time. The person struck by agsan quickly loses control over himself (it is primarily a male phenomenon) and screams, cries, and aims punches in all directions. Angry words may be uttered, but they are made incomprehensible by intermittent sobs and growls resembling those of a shaman possessed by an animal spirit. Indeed, agsan persons are said to flit rapidly in and out of different states of consciousness. Anyone may become an object of their drunken violence, whether friend or foe, man or woman, but usually agsan is directed toward other male targets, who may well be agsan themselves. In these situations, terrible fights invariably erupt. Agsan persons are believed not to know what they are doing. ‘Their souls leave them’, people say. For the same reason, a person afflicted with agsan cannot be reasoned with – only physical intervention will work. It was not uncommon for people to tie up intoxicated men with ropes and leave them until they had calmed down. Sometimes, however, there were not enough people around to do this, or those present were ‘only’ women and children. In such cases, the target of drunken rage would make a dramatic escape while other people struggled to hold the agsan person back, only to become targets themselves. Occasionally entire households were forced into evacuations, jumping the fence into a neighbour’s compound and abandoning their home to groups of drunken youths. The next morning they would return to find that their home had been ransacked ‘as if a mad bear had been there’, in the words of one housewife. As elsewhere in postsocialist Mongolia, the rising poverty, alcoholism, and violence in Ulaan-Uul was widely associated with ‘the age of the market’ (zah zeeliin üye). The standard complaint went as follows: ‘Back during socialism, there were jobs for everyone, and the state was strong. Now, with democracy and the market, the politicians have all become thieves and the policemen have all turned lazy, many young women have left to work or study in the city, and the young men have nothing to do. There is too much vodka and too little work around here. So agsan is everywhere.’ Another complaint was that both national and regional governments were neglecting remote districts like Ulaan-Uul. The drivers and traders were grumbling that the road to the regional capital was not being maintained, and there was agreement that the district administration was not receiving adequate funds to pay salaries, let alone maintain the health clinic, the kindergarten, and the school.

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At first glance, this looked like a familiar postsocialist scenario, in which the combination of rapidly increasing unemployment and ever more desperate hardship and poverty, together with escalating mistrust of both public and private institutions, creates a spiral of violence, alcoholism, and mounting social and political tension. This indeed was my own preliminary conclusion. Much as anthropologists have reported from other formerly state-socialist contexts (Anderson 2000; Berdahl, Bunzi, and Lampland 2000; Burawoy and Verdery 1999; Humphrey 1998; Ries 1997; Ssorin-Chaikov 2003; Verdery 2004), notions of ‘democracy’, ‘the market’ and ‘transition’ were not just associated with specific political changes and economic policies like democracy and structural reform, but were seen as harbingers of a total societal and cultural upheaval (see also Empson, Chapter 8 this volume). My tentative interpretation at this early stage was that the perceived rise in agsan was indicative of a general sense of ‘violent chaos’ to borrow Joma Nazpary’s apt term from his urban ethnography of postsocialist Kazakhstan (2002). According to Nazpary’s analysis, former communist countries such as Kazakhstan fell victim in the 1990s to a ‘chaotic mode of domination’, an unruly alliance between different hegemonic actors on the national and international level, which rested on a tacit agreement about the usefulness of constant but opaque reform and permanent but vaguely promised change. In place of the society and the economy people had once felt part of, they now sensed ‘a total void which permeate[d] all aspects of life. The breakdown of social trust and the sudden emergence of the random and invisible logic of the market forces accompanied by the alienated and alienating greed for accumulation of capital, bolstered by the enormous use of force, create[d] the experience of a very ontological disruption’ (Nazpary 2002: 4). Shamanisn as transitional cosmology On the face of it, then, Northern Mongolia in the late 1990s, especially a remote and poor place like Ulaan-Uul, was a model case of postsocialist chaos. Particularly during the early months of 1999, when what little was left of the old socialist welfare state essentially ceased to exist as the teachers and policemen went on strike or simply refused to work after months of unpaid wages, and an unnerving sense of disintegration spread to nearly all levels of social life. Individuals and households that had hitherto been mostly spared from episodes of drunken violence and other social problems associated with ‘the age of the market’ suddenly found themselves to be both subjects and objects, perpetrators and victims, of other uncontrollable forces, whose opaque nature and mysterious origin could not be accounted for by more straightforward 167

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socioeconomic explanations. It was during this same period that, on a number of occasions, agsan men tried to extort goods from me by threatening to beat me up. Soon, like the members of my host family, I learned to navigate the dusty village streets along certain routes so as to avoid hot spots where thirsty hordes of unemployed youths congregated, just as I learned to buy my supplies of vodka and cigarettes from a few trusted shop owners I knew would not betray me, even if faced with the risk of being beaten up. For, as my host told me, ‘it is perfectly fine to lie to someone who is agsan, for he is not fully human!’ Remarks such as these made me realise that quintessentially postsocialist phenomena like agsan were not simply seen as being caused by rising unemployment and the neoliberal downsizing of the state. Therefore, socio-economic explanations like Nazpary’s could account for only one side of the coin. For many people in Ulaan-Uul, it was not clear whether the deteriorating conditions of their own and other people’s lives were caused by restless shamanic spirits or by runaway market forces, nor did they always distinguish between the two. The only thing that was clear was that the chaos and misery, but also the hope and the freedom, that were so characteristic of the time were conditioned by invisible and unpredictable forces that took the labile, amorphous, and capricious shapes that often characterise the spirit worlds of Northern Mongolian and other Inner Asian shamans. So, what at first seemed like mundane everyday complaints about the sort of social problems that tend to follow in the wake of economic crisis anywhere in the world (unemployment, crumbling infrastructure, rising alcoholism and crime, etc.) was part and parcel of an overarching transitional cosmos that also comprised shamanic spirits and other kinds of occult entities, forces and (as many people called them) ‘energies’. Indeed, as I show in my book Not Quite Shamans (2011), the postsocialist chaos that I encountered during my fieldwork in Northern Mongolia in the late 1990s was infused with shamanic agency in all its guises, manifesting itself as a bewildering multitude of impossible forms ranging from the wild animals of the taiga to the ghastly remains of socialist high modernity, and to an isolated village community’s witchcraft-like exchanges of ironic ‘lies’. In fact, shamanic agency was located above all in those persons who were not considered ‘real shamans’ (jinhene böö), whose sources and vehicles of agency were located to only a limited extent in their own or other human minds and bodies (Pedersen 2011: 81–114). It was also – perhaps even predominantly – found in a bewildering wealth of nonhuman agents, such as vague presences and ephemeral atmospheres (a cool sensation in a hot room, a conspicuous silence between words); wild animals and plants (a goat that appears in the shape of an old lady, a berry that glows in the dark); and particular things (a lone

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tree on a windswept grassland, a gift of meat from the hunt, a defunct electrical generator) (2011: 42–80). This fascinating but also frightening (or, would we perhaps say, sublime) constellation of things, artefacts, and events shamanic did not add up to a culture or ideology with one or more symbolic-functional roles. On the contrary, it was by virtue of its multiplicity, indeterminacy, and plasticity that shamanism was imbued with such potent efficacy in Northern Mongolia around the turn of the millennium (see also Pedersen 2011: 183–215). Nothing in the universe could, as a matter of principle, have escaped the logic of shamanism in the form that I encountered and many people seemed to experience it during my fieldwork, for this shamanism was not (and probably never was, nor will it ever be) a finite set of cultural symbols or meanings that needed constant reinterpretation for it be ‘stretched’ in such a way that it provided a better cosmological ‘fit ‘ to given process of societal change or indeed economic crisis and political rupture. Accordingly, as I hope to substantiate below, the only ontological ‘core’ of Northern Mongolian shamanism was (and still is) change or transformation itself; indeed, one could go as far as saying that the more a given phenomenon is ‘changing’, the more shamanic it is, which was also why crumbling roads and derelict power stations were perceived as being just as ‘shamanic’ as a rite of ancestor worship or indeed a full-blown shamanic possession ceremony (see also 2011: 180–182). For the same reason, shamanism was by no means limited to those practices that some might want to call ‘religious,’ just as it was not a way of clothing the harsh political and economic realities of neoliberal violence and global capitalism in a soothing garb of culture. In Northern Mongolia, shamanism was postsocialism (as opposed to what it was about): the fluid and inherently transitional and transformation manner in which the world orchestrated itself in the chaotic 1990s. Evidently, the pervasive sense of rupture in Northern Mongolia in the late 1990s leaves little room for the cosmological ‘principles of order in the broadest sense, that is to say, principles engendering and supporting a way of being that is cognitively and emotionally integrated and whole’ (Schrempp 1992: 4). Rather, it is the other way around: since people in Northern Mongolia felt that their world was in a state of chaos during my fieldwork, my task as a student of cosmology must be to seek to identify possible indigenous concepts or theories that account for this state of cosmic turmoil. In order to do this, we need to take a closer look at the shamanic spirits (ongod).

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The shamanic spirit world Mongolian shamanism, Roberte Hamayon has suggested, is generally characterised by ‘a preference for transmission within the world of the self rather than exchange within the world of the other’ (1994: 81). In Siberia, conversely, shamans maintain affinal relations with the spirits of wild animals to ensure the availability of hunting game. Moreover, the further one moves towards the pastoral societies of Inner Asia, the more tangential the role of shamans in society also becomes, or so goes Hamayon’s bold but convincing argument, so that, eventually, shamanism ‘fragment[s] into a series of separate practices carried out by the marginal specialists’ (1994: 88). In some ways, the Darhad case is positioned right in the middle of this comparative axis. Not only are many Darhad shamanic spirits simultaneously zoomorphic and anthropomorphic (Dulam and Even 1994), but, paraphrasing Hamayon, Darhad shamans are not only ‘concerned with relationships within society’, but also ‘with its natural environment’ (1994: 87). Thus, whereas Daur Mongols had ‘no name … for the unknown place[s] … where [the shamanic] spirits dwell[ed]’ (Humphrey 1996: 122), most Darhad ongod have a ‘definite and unchanging abode’ (Diószegi 1963: 72), which corresponds to the burial site of a dead shaman. Three years after the shaman’s death and burial, her soul (süns) turns into a shamanic spirit soul (ongon süns), which, over the next years, is then slowly absorbed in (shingeh) – and eventually becomes master (ezen) of – the locality in question. Several places ‘owned’ by prominent shamanic spirits are mountains, but they also include trees, lakes, rock formations, and rivers. Indeed, the genius loci of ongod seem to be clustered around the mouths of rivers, or in the zone between the steppe and the taiga, which, incidentally, is also where many shamans like to live Some of these spirit loci have been remembered for centuries, and they once played a role in the legitimisation of Darhad Mongolian hunting and pasturelands for different patrilineal and virilocal clan groupings (Badamhatan 1986: 171–72; Diószegi 1963: 72–75; Dulam and Even 1994, 136–38; Sandschejew 1930: 59). Yet, while most ongod have ‘definite and unchanging’ abodes in the landscape, they also exist in a range of other ontological states. In fact, perhaps the most vital thing about ongod is that they are conceived as persons, who are each endowed with known spirit biographies, if not personalities, which haunt individual families and sometimes whole communities for generations. Indeed, it is important to understand that, in Northern Mongolia during the late 1990s, being subject to the shamanic predicament was no guarantee of happiness and prosperity. Quite on the contrary, shamanism in Mongolian societies has widely

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been considered to be ‘a psychological burden which contains its own force of perpetuation’ (Humphrey 1996: 211–212; see also Balzer 2008). Darhad – and more generally Mongolian – lore is awash with origin stories about shamanic spirits that share the same plot (Humphrey 1996: 198). Once upon a time, a dramatic event took place (usually involving one or more people with magical abilities), which led to the creation of a new shamanic spirit (ongon). Since then, the lives of later generations have been influenced by this primordial shamanic event, especially descendants of persons who were involved in the original creation of the new ongon, who may have inherited the udha and become shamans themselves (Badamhatan 1986: 185–187). As Sandschejew pointed out eighty years ago, ‘only Darhad persons with shamanist ancestry can become shamans. These people have not only the right but also the duty of becoming shamans’ (1930. 56). Across Mongolia, a person’s abilities, whether considered extraordinary or not, are widely understood to have been inherited from his ancestors. But crucially, unlike for instance clan affiliation (ovog), shamanic ability (udha) is not necessarily passed down in the predictable (unilateral) way associated with the patrilines (yas), which used – and to some extend still does – provide a hegemonic model for social and political relations in Mongolian contexts (Vreeland 1962). Rather, as Humphrey writes about the Daur Mongolian case, ‘the connection between shamans was in principle not a patrilineal affair … The link could zigzag from women to men and vice versa’ (1996: 36; Empson 2011). Much in the same way, in the Darhad homeland in Northern Mongolia as well as elsewhere in the country, shamanic ability may be passed down through both male and female ancestors, and not all siblings or for that matter generations are destined to become shamans, as the udha sometimes skips a generation or two before manifesting anew. In pre-revolutionary Daur Mongolian society, Humphrey writes, the genesis of a shamanic spirit (onggor) ‘started with a tragic human event, which was the cause of an emotion … motivating subsequent attacks on people. Then the onggor went on a journey, assimilating itself to other people’ (1996: 188). Contemporary Mongolian shamanic lore is awash with formational narratives about ongod that share this basic plot. At some stage a dramatic event took place (usually involving the occult intervention of one or more persons with shamanic abilities), and this event then led to the creation of a distinct ongon. Following this, the lives of generations of people have been influenced by the particular ‘path’ (güidel) followed by the shamanic spirit in question, notably those descendants of the original persona, who have themselves inherited the shamanic ability (udha), and who may therefore have become full-blown shamans themselves. In addition to these primordial spirit scenarios, an ever-increasing number of ongod come into being when shamans pass 171

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away, for, as already explained, the soul (süns) of every dead shaman turn becomes an ongon in its own right, and each such ongon süns will then (three years after the shaman’s burial) also begin to interfere in people’s lives. It is through this process that each ongod becomes imbued with its own unique ‘biography’ of acts, moods and intentions, and thus by a distinct and recognisable spirit personality. To better understand how the Darhad shamanic spirits have become imbued with traits whose complexity and sophistication resembles that of individual human beings, we need to explore the distinction between spirit guardians and helpers, which is common in shamanic traditions in Inner Asia and beyond. A spirit guardian – or, as they are sometimes referred to in the literature on Mongolian shamanism, spirit protector – is a named shamanic spirit mastered by one or more shamans. Each spirit protector was originally ‘absorbed’ into the burial place of a certain dead shaman, from whose soul it derives. It has its own material objectifications on vessels and gowns, is the target of specific invocations, and may take up temporary residence in shamans’ bodies during possession rituals. Shamans master a limited number of spirit protectors, ranging in the handful of cases about which I collected information, between five and twenty. These may be ‘clan spirits’ (yazguuryn ongod), ongod from other groups often acquired from shaman teachers, or shamanic spirits that are not associated with any human ancestors (typically designated as ‘Things’). Spirit helpers, on the other hand, are all the different bodies or objects in which a given spirit protector may manifest. They are known by a range of designations, such as ‘metamorphosis’ (huvilgaan), ‘escort’ (daguul), ‘light body’ (höngön biye), and ‘path’ (güyeel). Often, spirit helpers take the zoomorphic form of a wild animal, whose species-specific capacities are then appropriated by shamans according to their particular purposes, such as when they undertake journeys to places and people on behalf of clients (as in assault sorcery, for instance). For example, a Darhad shamanness (udgan) listed six animals that she presented as her spirit helpers (zarch): wolf, bear, fox, raven, lark, and magpie. These helpers, she explained, may be identified during séances by the specific animal sounds shamans utter when they become possessed by them. But helpers may also be non-zoomorphic entities in the lands or inanimate phenomena, or they may be manifested in social phenomena as ephemeral as the flow of gossip in a community. Each guardian (ongon), then, comprises a potentially infinite number of spirit helpers (see also Even 1988–89: 115). Thus a shamanic spirit can be defined as an inherently multiple entity irreducible to any singular form, which moves along an unpredictable path of perpetual becoming. This allows, indeed compels, it to absorb ever more forms and substances

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as it departs from others in its restless journey from one body (or spirit helper) to the next. Instead of thinking of ongod as single and stable entities, it is therefore more accurate if we conceive of them as inherently labile and capricious assemblages of heterogeneous elements. Indeed there is a sense in which the shamanic spirits simply are movements, more than they are discrete entities imbued with the propensity to move (Holbraad 2012). Spirits, then, are not representations of change, be that economic, political or societal, or products of it. Instead, a given ongod constitutes a sui generis enactment of change or ‘transition’, in a particular ontological register that might be called occult. As in a Cartesian nightmare, in which Plato’s cave allegory is lipped 180 degrees, the shamanic spirits, as the postsocialist state, are not absolute and atemporal entities, which humans can perceive only as shadows that are too contingent, too capricious, too fleeting. On the contrary, spirits are labile an sich, and people’s ‘representations’ of them are inevitably too stable, too ideal (see Pedersen 2011: 174–176). This could be why the term for spirits and their different material instantiations are the same in Mongolian and Siberian shamanic traditions (viz. ongod). After all, in a non-representational universe, it does not make sense to think of talismans as attempts to depict spirits at all. Rather, we may think of such artefacts simultaneously as products of and vehicles for cosmological auto-analysis. They are, at one and the same time, contexts for, authors of and theories about themselves, for by comprising all the scales needed to contextualise themselves, they also come to constitute a peculiar form of concepts in their own right; concepts, that is to say, which were never made by anyone in particular, and certainly not within the confines of a single mind, but which nevertheless are imbued with a potency and a beauty that far surpasses most concepts ever invented by humans alone. Thus understood, every shamanic spirit is the source of a total and unique cosmos and cosmology in and of its own; total, because a given ongod ‘is’ (can become) any given thing; and unique, because a given shamanic spirit need not be (indeed cannot be, given that the Darhad ongod are perceived as ontological singularities with distinct legends, taboos, and rituals associated to them) similar to another. Indeed, is that not what a shamanic spirit is: the attempt of an always changing world to analyse itself? No matter whether one accepts this interpretation in all its radicalism – that certain worlds emit concepts from themselves and in that sense perform a sort cosmological auto-analysis – it is clear that the shamanic spirits condense the reality of transition, not just as a specific political-­ economical state brought about by certain historical events (postsocialism), but as a sui generis ontological condition, which is change as such. And, as will be shown, is just in this sense that we may speak 173

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of these spirits as cosmological concepts, which instantiate ‘the ultimate principles and/or grounds of the [postsocialist] world and the human place in it (Schrempp 1992: 4). Occult economies of what? So how do we best theorise the imbrication between shamanism and postsocialism in Northern Mongolia? One solution would be to use the influential anthropological literature about ‘the modernity of witchcraft’ (Geschiere 1997) and ‘occult economies’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999; see also Ashforth 2005). This important strand of anthropological work is concerned with the interweaving, in different postcolonial and sometimes postsocialist contexts, of apparently traditional and esoteric phenomena such as witchcraft, sorcery, and shamanism with seemingly modern and profane phenomena such as democracy, statecraft, and global capitalism. Instead of being seen as part of a stable and homogeneous cosmological system pertaining to a local community or culture, the occult is here understood as a dynamic cultural imaginary that is continually being moulded by wider social, political, and economic processes. For the same reason, the study of occult phenomena has been re-launched as a ‘fundamental project for an anthropology of the modern world’ (Whitehead and Wright 2004: 2). This more recent body of work on occult economies and cognate phenomena provides a much-needed, and seemingly quite sophisticated, theoretical framework for integrating larger political and economic processes into the anthropological study of the occult, something that was conspicuously absent in classic accounts of magic, witchcraft, shamanism, and other occult phenomena (Eliade 1964; Evans-Pritchard 1976). As Peter Geschiere notes about social life in sub-Saharan Africa: ‘It is hard to maintain that there is a self-evident opposition between witchcraft and modernity. On the contrary, rumours and practices related to the occult forces abound in the more modern sectors of society … express[ing] a determined effort for signifying politico-economic changes and even gaining control over them’ (1997: 3). The same goes for Mongolia. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, it was hard to distinguish between shamanist and postsocialist aspects of life during the late 1990s, as if the two belonged to different scales (local/global) and temporalities (tradition/ modernity). In Northern Mongolia, occult phenomena like shamanism, magic, and witchcraft were an irreducible part of transition, as the chaotic state of total perpetual change through which social life was perceived to be unfolding in the 1990s. To provide a sense of the analytical merits but also (inevitably) the limitations of this approach to the anthropological study of occult 174

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phenomena, it is worth taking a closer look at Geschiere’s acclaimed study The Modernity of Witchcraft. In this already classic ethnographic monograph, Geschiere shows how, with the end of one-party rule and economic liberalisation in postcolonial Cameroon, witchcraft (djambe) became a ‘key element in discourses of power, despite modern processes of change (or perhaps because of them)’ (1997: 7–8). The efficacy of djambe hinges on an irreducible ambiguity pertaining to all occult concepts: the fact that they are ‘related to the accumulation of power but can also serve to undermine it’ (1997: 16). As the ‘dark side of kinship’ (1997: 24), djambe thus enables one to ‘go out’ of the body and gain control of and even kill others by ‘eating’ them. Yet this ‘doubling of oneself’ is also very dangerous, for ‘once it is out, the double is exposed to new dangers: it can fall into ambushes itself’ (1997: 40–42). In that sense, djambe would appear to represent a model case of an ‘occult economy’ in the Comaroffs’ sense, in that it denotes all practices that involve ‘the deployment of magical means for material ends or, more expansively, the conjuring of wealth by resort to inherently mysterious techniques, techniques whose principles of operation are neither transparent nor explicable in conventional terms’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999: 297) But how does Geschiere account for the nature of djambe in more ontological terms? On the one hand, he emphasises that he does not want to deny ‘the reality of [djambe] discourses [by] treating them as pure fantasies’; but on the other hand, he is also ‘wary of emphasizing too strongly the reality of these beliefs’ (Geschiere 1997: 21). Geschiere performs this delicate balancing act by conceptualising djambe as a particular kind of cultural discourse: it is ‘a language that signifies the modern changes: it helps one to understand new inequalities, unexpected and enigmatic as they are, as seen “from below”; it promises unheard-of chances to enrich oneself; and it can serve as a guide to find one’s way in the networks of modern society’ (1997: 24, emphasis added). The same assumption – that witchcraft is a ‘language’ that helps people to ‘make sense’ of their world – is made by Harry West about his study of sorcery in northern Mozambique: ‘I slowly came to appreciate that sorcery constituted a language through which the Muedans with whom I worked comprehended and even more euphemistically commented upon the workings of power in their midst [and] that if I was to discern how Muedans understood the social, political, and economic transformations they experienced if I was to uncover their visions of changing times I would have to learn to language of sorcery’ (West 2007: 11). This djambe-like ambivalence toward the object of one’s analysis lies at the heart of most anthropological work on occult phenomena in the postcolonial world; the fact that the ethnographer wants to take seriously the discourse of the occult but not necessarily what 175

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this discourse is ‘about’, namely, the occult ‘itself’ (whatever that may mean). This ambiguous attitude toward occult discourses and practices essentially looks like a version of the familiar cultural relativist double vision that enables anthropologists to take their informants’ ‘worldviews’ both too seriously and not seriously enough (Pedersen 2012). However well-meaning, it risks turning into a what might (with a nod to Sahlins) be dubbed ‘symbolic-functionalist’ analytics reminiscent of the deterministic, reductionist, and teleological models of some late nineteenth- and early twentieth-­century social theory. On this analysis, occult ­phenomena, whether referred to as ‘witchcraft’, ‘sorcery’, or ‘shamanism’, are collective representations – or to use a more fashionable (but for various reasons theoretically problematic term; cf. Sneath, Holbraad and Pedersen 2009), social imaginaries – within a neo-Marxist model of social reproduction, where some cultural-ideational stuff is projected onto some political-­economic stuff, or vice versa, in ways that are always in, or against, the interests of the powers that be. Thus, underlying many recent writings on occult phenomena, whatever their theoretical and empirical differences, is a tendency to see these as ‘symbolic languages’ fulfilling certain purposes, such as (1) the mystifying role of concealing hegemonic structures; (2) the counter-hegemonic role of liberating oppressed subjects by exposing and subverting these structures; and (3) an assumed universal human existential need to make sense of the increasing uncertainties brought about by capitalism, globalisation, neoliberal reform, and the postcolonial predicament as a whole (for a similar diagnosis, see Bertelsen, Chapter 8 this volume). But what if ‘symbolic language’ is not an adequate way of theorising the ontology occult phenomena, such as Mongolian shamanism? And what if such occult practices and ideas do not, in any clear sense, ‘serve as a guide’ for people? As demonstrated in the above discussion of the complex nature of the shamanic spirits, in Darhad shamanism forms are not ideological schemata through which some fixed structure of order or symbolic meaning is superimposed on an inherently disorderly world of social and material practices, but rather ontological features of the world in their own right, which must be continually re-created and re-­ calibrated for the cosmos to assume its correct proportions, so human and non-human lives can unfold at a pace suitable to the continual assembling of their bodies and minds. In Mongolian shamanism, as in the Amazon context (Viveiros de Castro 2007) forms are considered to be alive, to be rather than to have force – namely, the capacity to compel the cosmos to orchestrate itself in a particular way. Yet, the problem in Northern Mongolia after socialism was that there was a general lack of visible and viable forms, or, more precisely, a loss of things and entities

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recognisable as specific and predictable forms, whose particular capacities could be harnessed for one’s and other people’s benefit. In this context it is clearly of limited analytical value to speak of shamanism as a way of dealing with the uncertainties of postsocialist transition, for the shamans and the restless spirits were felt to induce, rather than reduce, individual and collective calamities. For the same reason, the serious – and sometimes not too serious (see Pedersen 2011: 183–215) – shamanic cosmologies described to me in detail by various Darhad shamans and laymen cannot be interpreted in any analytically meaningful way as cornerstones of a social imaginary on which people drew to fill a void of meaning opened by the collapse of the socialist master trope (Lindquist 2005). To conceive of shamanism as a ‘strategy of empowerment’ adapted by people to ‘make sense’ of the uncertainties of postsocialist transition (Vaté 2009) would be to overlook the pervasive feeling of loss and ignorance, along with the deep sense of predestination and resulting lack of individual agency, that was associated with the shamanic spirits. Thus shamanism was all about uncertainty, but not in a ‘symbolic-functionalist’ sense. Rather, the spirits were uncertainty; they were condensations of the turmoil known ‘transition’, or ‘the age of the market’. Thus understood, the ‘sense’ that shamanism made of postsocialism, and vice versa, was not the result of people’s inscribing symbolic meanings on their surroundings in an existential quest to make sense of the postsocialist reality around them. Rather, in Northern Mongolia, a world-shattering state of enduring transition was unmaking people’s sense of the world by causing the logic of shamanism to collapse into that of postsocialism. The result was a peculiar and possibly unique unstable condition, whose logic was neither immanent and continuous nor transcendental and discontinuous (to borrow some of the distinctions used by Handelman in Chapter 4 of this volume), but awkwardly and disharmoniously suspended between these two cosmological poles. In Northern Mongolia, therefore, the invisible powers of the spirits and the opaque forces of the market are imbued with similarly labile shapes. Recognising this basic homology between the ‘local’ forms of shamanic cosmology and the ‘global’ forms of political economy is the key to understanding the nature of social life in Northern Mongolia after socialism. As in the ‘occult economies’ of sub-Saharan Africa, an invisible undercurrent of forces was felt to run beneath the surface of everything in Ulaan-Uul during the late 1990s – a proliferating multitude of human and non-human agencies set free by the disintegration of the modernist socialist state, made all the more uncontainable by that state’s past political purges of the shamans. Yet, as I have argued, the analogies that people drew between shamanism and postsocialism were not about projecting symbolic meanings from one domain of life onto another (the spirits 177

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as metaphors of the market), but about an isomorphism of form between these two dimensions of the world: the spirits and the market were both variations on one immanent state of transition. On this analysis, shamanism is not a symbolic projection of one type of content (‘politics’ or ‘economics’) onto another type of content (‘religion’) in someone’s ideological and/or existential interest. The claim I have been making is subtly but crucially different – namely that the composition assumed by the entirety of the cosmos in Northern Mongolia after socialism was itself shamanic. Shamanism, in that sense, may be described as a cosmology of transition – or, better still, shamanism is transition as a sui generis cosmic state. Conclusion As an anthropologist, I like to tell myself that I try to be open to the possibility that anything from fieldwork might turn out to serve as ethnographic data in an analysis of a given phenomenon (cf. Strathern 1999: 8). In the spirit of this volume, we could perhaps say that my unit of investigation in that sense amounts to an ‘arbitrary cosmos’, to paraphrase Candea (2007), for it is comprised by everything contained by the spatio-temporal boundaries drawn by the self-limiting nature of individual fieldwork. Now, clearly, the cosmology corresponding to this cosmos can hardly be described as a cosmology in the conventional anthropological sense of this term, that is, ‘a theory of the universe as an ordered whole, and of the general laws that govern it’ (Barnard and Spencer 1996: 199). But if a cosmology is not an ordering, modelling, representation, or systematisation of the world, what is it? Does it make sense to speak of non-representational cosmologies – of cosmologies that are not ordered reductions of the world but are instead specific enactments of its complexity? And if so, what form might such cosmologies take – where should we be looking for them in the field? In this chapter, I have suggested that an answer to these questions may be found in the realm of the Mongolian shamanic sprits. However, crucially, these spirits do not provide any consoling reduction of the chaotic reality of transition. On the contrary, it is precisely because the hyper-­ labile ontology of ongod comprises every possible actualisation of life in ‘transition’, that they are sufficiently conceptually open to comprise from within (or could we say ‘intra-grate’, c.f. Handelman, Chapter 4 this volume) all the disparate pieces of the broken cosmos that emerged after the collapse of state socialism. What I am proposing is an alternative to the common idea as cosmologies as cute ‘bonsai’ versions of the world, which recasts the cosmos in less complex, less overwhelming and frightening versions of itself. Because the shamanic cosmos has no outside 178

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in the sense that self-transformation is built into its very edifice, it is by definition ‘bigger’ and more complex than the condition of ­postsocialist chaos and general sense of ontological meltdown that followed after socialism’s collapse. That it is say, in Northern Mongolia in the late 1990s, the cosmos was contained within the cosmology, and not the other way around. Thus, it is the shamanic spirits which, by virtue of their very fluidity, constitute the ‘principles of order in the broadest sense’ (Schrempp 1992: 4) of the particular Northern Mongolian cosmos I have explored in my research, for they alone are able to convey what the reality of p ­ ostsocialist life is, namely change itself. Change is the core cosmological principle of transition, and the shamanic spirits offer a sort of raw concepts, who are uniquely capable of making this labile ontological ground visible. And what enables the ongod to play this cosmological role is their capacity to contain everything there is, not by hovering above all entities of the cosmos, but by occupying a position within the intensive interior of each of them, which they alone can access. Notes 1

I thank the two anonomous peer reviewers for Manchester University Press as well as the editors of the present volume for their useful comments on the earlier versions of this chapter.

References Anderson, David G. 2000. Identity and Ecology in Arctic Siberia. The Number One Reindeer Brigade. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ashforth, Adam. 2005. Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Badamhatan, S. 1986. Les chamanistes du Bouddha vivant. Études Mongoles … et sibériennes 17. Balzer, Majorie Mandalstam. 2008. Beyond belief? Social, political, and shamanic power in Siberia. Social Analysis 52(1): 95–110. Barnard, Alan and Jonathan Spencer (eds). 1996. Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology. London: Routledge. Berdahl, Daphne, Matti Bunzl, and Martha Lampland (eds) 2000. Altering States: Ethnographies of Transition in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Burawoy, Michael and Katherine Verdery (eds) 1998. Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocialist World. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield. Candea, Matei. 1997. Arbitrary locations: in defence of the bounded field-site. Journal of the Royal Anthropolgical Institute (NS) 13(1): 167–184. 179

Cosmological constitutions Comaroff, Jean and John J. Comaroff. 1999. Occult economies and the violence of abstraction: notes from the South African Postcolony. American Ethnologist 26(3): 279–301. Diószegi, László. 1961. Problems of Mongolian Shamanism. Acta Ethnographica 10 (1–2): 195–206. —— 1963. Ethnogenic aspects of Darkhat shamanism. Acta Orientalia Hungaria 16: 55–81. Dulam, Sedenjav and Marie-Dominique Even. 1994. Animalité et humanité dans le chamanisme des Darkhates de Mongolie. Études Mongoles … et s­ ibériennes 25: 131–144. Eliade, Mircea. 1964. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. London: Routledge. Empson, Rebecca. 2011. Harnessing Fortune. Personhood, Memory, and Place in Mongolia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1976 [1937]. Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Even, Marie-Dominique. 1988–89. Chants de chamanes de mongols. Études Mongoles … et sibériennes 19–20. Geschiere, Peter. 1997. The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia. Hamayon, Roberte. 1994. Shamanism in Siberia: from partnership in supernature to counter-power in society. In N. Thomas and C. Humphrey (eds), Shamanism, History, and the State. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press. Pp. 76–89. Holbraad, Martin. 2012. Truth in Motion. The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Humphrey, Caroline.1996. Shamans and Elders. Experience, Knowledge, and Power among the Daur Mongols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. –––––1998. Marx Went Away – But Karl Stayed Behind. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Lindquist, Galina. 2005. Conjuring Hope. Healing and Magic in Contemporary Russia. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Nazpary, Joma. 2002. Post-Soviet Chaos: Violence and Dispossession in Kazakhstan. London: Pluto Press. Pedersen, Morten Axel. 2011. Not Quite Shamans. Spirit Worlds and Political Lives in Northern Mongolia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. —— 2012. Common nonsense. A review of certain recent reviews of the ‘ontological turn’. Anthropology of This Century 5. Ries, Nancy. 1997. Russian Talk: Culture and Conversation during Perestroika. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Sandschejew, Garma D. 1930. Darkhaty. Leningrad: Akademiia nauk. Schrempp, Gregory. 1992. Magical Arrows: The Maori, the Greeks, and Folklore of the Universe. London: University of Wisconsin Press. Sneath, David, Martin Holbraad and Morten Axel Pedersen. 2009. Introduction: technologies of the imagination. Ethnos 74(1): 5–30. Ssorin-Chaikov, Nikolai. 2003. The Social Life of the State in Subarctic Siberia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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8 Portioning loans: cosmologies of wealth and power in Mongolia Rebecca Empson

In the cataclysmic shift from a planned to open market economy in the early 1990s, Mongolians began to engage in a host of new ways to accumulate wealth and capital. Suddenly, livelihoods were not only achieved through collective endeavour, such as working for a five-year plan at the local co-operative. Instead, wealth was available, and sometimes very much down to the innovative whim or luck of an individual. Nowadays, diverse forms of private property and ownership exist leading to different modes of action and subjectivity. Indeed, people in Mongolia comment that sometimes money seems to appear, almost as if from nowhere, like magic, in the hands of the most unlikely people. This chapter1 explores the way in which wealth is achieved – across multiple spheres – through the enactment of a particular relationship. Following Sneath (2006) I refer to this as the ‘master-custodian’ relationship. In so doing, I focus on the way in which this relationship is enacted in the procurement of money through bank loans and the harnessing of fortune through everyday ritual acts.2 Money and fortune can, thus, be seen as two sides of the same coin; one acting as the other’s material force and vice versa. Given this co-dependence, I suggest that the ‘master-custodian’ relationship is enacted in various contexts giving rise to a ‘cosmoeconomical’ order (Da Col 2012) that is continually re-invented, or ‘revalorized’ to use Verdery’s (1999) phrase, through different processes.3 In its creative refraction and extension, it can be said to give a knowable face to distant forms of power and authority, opening up the space for new modes of action and subjectivity. I draw on ethnography from a small administrative hub in the northeast Mongolian countryside called Ashinga.4 In 2006/07 the local bank 182

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became the site of great activity when it began increasing the number of personal loans (zeel) to pastoral herders for consumer and business needs. By 2008, however, the bank workers were being questioned on fraud charges, people found themselves with massive debts, and there was no visible manifestation of any business as an outcome of issuing the loans. In relation to this incident, I will be asking: What kinds of relations and notions of entitlement are brought into play when large amounts of money suddenly became available? Who is loaning to whom, and what notions of debt and ownership are invoked? In short, how does something like a bank loan get ontologically integrated in local cosmologies of wealth and power? This local differentiation of the global will be explored in greater detail toward the end of the chapter (cf. Sahlins 1994: 414). In conclusion, I suggest that with a declining state presence, concerns with managing various ‘invisible’ forms of power are on the rise in Mongolia’s countryside. Before we turn to some of these concerns, I should make it clear in what sense I use the concept cosmology. Following Barth (1987), I suggest that a better understanding of cosmology comes ‘not by constructing more order in it, but by better accounting for its production’ (Barth 1987: 84). In this view I will focus on the way in which people ‘enact’ cosmology. In saying this I draw on Sneath’s (2006) distinction between ‘transactions’ and ‘enactions’. Enactions, Sneath explains, illuminate a range of transfers that are not always transactional but are expressive of expectations associated with certain kinds of roles. I argue that these transfers are inflected in a range of spheres for differing effects. For example, the ubiquitous ‘land masters’ (gazryn ezed) who bestow fortune on people’s herds as well as the managers of banks who make loans available are both invisible and un-personified figures of authority for herders in the far countryside. The comparison between land masters and bank managers can be clarified through several further points. Firstly, people’s relation with banks, as well as land masters entails an asymmetrical relation that revolves around (social or spiritual) hierarchy and debt. Herders are not the owners but the ‘custodians’ of the pasture that they use, which puts them in a position of debt to the land masters. Similarly, people are the ‘custodians’ of money gained through loans, which they have to repay and it therefore puts them in a position of debt to banking institutions. Secondly, instead of seeking to extract themselves from these relations of debt, it is often the case that people uphold and actually perpetuate them so that parts or portions of the fortune/money gained can be further divided and circulated. Related to this, we see that portioning off parts of individual loans to bank workers, or parts of animal fortune (through daily milk libations) as offerings to land masters, is a way for people to honour this hierarchy and sometimes ask for more. Indeed, 183

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these portions may serve as gifts that perpetuate and emphasise one’s indebtedness. Thirdly, because these are distant and unknown figures of authority, religious practitioners and local bank workers could be said to act as ‘brokers’, or middlemen, granting wealth and fortune on behalf of some higher distant order and receiving some portion of that in return (cf. Lindquist forthcoming). Finally, the two relations are dependent on each other cosmologically: an abundance of fortune in one sphere effects monetary wealth in the other, and vice versa, so that ritual and economic life is hardly something which can be separated out. Attending to these two sources of authority, people manage to stave off debts through sacrifical offerings. In making this point I am drawing on Chu’s (2010) work in China on cosmic credit amid insurmountable financial debt. Here, like in China, ritual life is not outside capitalist modernity but the ground for the enactment of modern selves. As people increase their monetary wealth, so too is ritual life also on the increase. In fact, these should not be viewed as separate and distinct spheres of exchange. Money is here embedded in social relations that reproduce logics of hierarchies of power (cf. Stafford 2006). It would be a mistake to assume that this is simply a cultural variable, external to standard economics. In fact, this mix of market and cosmology, a vibrant cosmoeconomics, is economic life. In relation to this one might also note that the mix of market and cosmology has not only become ubiquitous in today’s world, but that it has also become more noticeable to the anthropological ‘eye’ in the present moment, which as the editors show in the Introduction, has come to focus on a more expansive meaning of the term ‘cosmology’. New kinds of wealth With the collapse of the socialist government, many people in Mongolia’s vast countryside turned to herding in families as a form of subsistence. A range of other forms of economic activity are engaged in alongside herding in order to buy goods such as DVDs, tractors, satellite dishes, and jeeps, or to pay for university fees and flights abroad. These include the illegal sale of hunted animal parts, trade in wood from local saw mills, clothes and foodstuffs, as well as the sale of dairy produce, bread and berries. Recently, over-hunting has meant a decrease in the wild animal population and so people have increasingly turned to the seasonal collection of wild berries and pine nuts for sale to people in the cities, although at a much lower return. In addition, local rivers and valleys are slowly being identified as containing precious metals, including gold. These means of subsistence all involve fostering personal relationships with various kinds of middlemen who come from the cities to procure goods for foreign or city clients. For example, hunters sell their produce to middlemen who 184

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come from Mongolia’s capital to procure the goods, mostly for medicinal purposes, for Korean and Chinese businessmen. The role of middle-men as brokers will be explored further in this chapter in relation to procuring fortune from mountain spirits and loans from banks. Alongside this diversification, individuals, households, and the district as a whole takes part in different rituals that attend to the needs and concerns of various kinds of spirits, ancestors, and ghosts. These can be seen as directly linked to a more general concern with controlling forces such as ‘fortune’ and ‘luck’ that influence the welfare of people and their households. Popular religious rites that can be carried out by just one person, such as daily milk libations or offerings at mountain cairns require little time or effort, while others involve large amounts of money and organisation. Most people store cash in their homes, under mattresses or in bags hanging from the beams of the house, but money rarely remains in one place for any length of time. Instead it is quickly distributed among family members and used on collective resources, such as school fees, weddings, ritual expenditure, petrol, clothes, foodstuffs, and so on.5 During the socialist period (approximately 1924–90) most accounts in the local bank (the Agricultural Cooperative Bank, a part of the Bank of Mongolia, or Mongol Bank) were those handled by accountants for different organisations and trades (aj ahui). Very few individuals used the bank for their personal funds (see Sneath 2006 on the management of co-­operative funds).6 In 1991 with the collapse of socialism and its nationwide cooperative bank, Khan Bank was founded as a split-off from the former State Bank to finance the agricultural sector. However, by 1999, the newly formed bank had fallen into receivership. The Mongolian government and international donor community came together to restructure the bank completely, and by 2000 the bank was re-launched, offering a variety of new products strategically tailored to the needs of present-day Mongolian life. These became available across the bank’s branches, including those in the administrative centres of Mongolia’s far countryside. One of the most successful products offered by the bank is a loan specifically designed for nomadic herders. The ‘Herder Loan’ (malchnii zeel), as it is commonly known, is aimed at financing the consumer and business needs of herders. This loan arose in reaction to the prevalence of informal lending, which was the bank’s main competition. Instead the bank encourages herders to take out loans as a means for low credit-worthy individuals to move into the formal financial system. Among other things, required documentation for issuing a loan includes a ‘livestock headcount confirmation letter and a list of any other collateral assets’.7 Failure to pay back a loan means seizure of livestock, which acts as the main form of collateral 185

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for herders. As a mostly political, rather than commercial project, over the years the bank has taken a flexible approach toward herders in the form of a series of loan extensions and interest waivers. The general idea, from their perspective, is ‘to try to prevent people from ending up being plagued by a web of debt’. For example, in 2009, the Bank’s Deputy commented: ‘Khan Bank has made herder loans since 2000 and now has 65,000 herder loans outstanding. On December 01, 2008, the bank made a decision to offer concessionary terms to our herder borrowers … So far, 6,315 herder loans have been extended and we are continuing to disburse herder loans … We are being as flexible as we can with regard to the loans through means such as waiving interest payment due to herders who cannot pay the interest’.8 The loan and the scandal Since their availability many of Ashinga’s herding households have been preoccupied with sourcing the necessary paperwork and documentation to be able to procure a loan. Some are on their second (herder or business) loan, while others, bolstered by the ease with which people have been able to obtain them, apply for the first time. The bank, situated in a wing of the local administration building, consists of a small room with a wooden counter behind which three or four women sit at desks. There is a hustle and bustle atmosphere as everyone can hear everyone else’s conversation and there are no private areas. Large calculators are the main tool, along with paper and pens, although with recently installed permanent electricity a computer is also available. In 2007, Delgermaa, a herder in her fifties, was on her way to the bank to try to source the second loan for her household. She had already obtained one six months earlier. It was now August, and they needed petrol for transporting milk products to the city, money for their daughter’s school fees, and as repayment for money they had borrowed from a relative. Delgermaa had spent many days getting the relevant documentation ready. She had also made sure to consult the bank workers as to the probability of her success in taking out a second loan. Not unlike preparations carried out for ritual occasions, she put on her smartest green Mongolian coat and swept her gold-tasselled shawl across her shoulders. After checking all the correct documentation was contained in her handbag, she pulled on her black high-heeled boots and set off to the district centre. As we entered the bank together, she greeted the bank workers who were all familiar to her. They were mostly her age or slightly younger and were either related, or had worked for years side-by-side in the local co-operative. The women exchanged pleasantries and set to work immediately, filling out forms and checking documentation. That 186

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afternoon we returned to the summer encampment confident that the second loan would be issued and that the cash needed to set in motion the various collective endeavours would soon be made available. Herder loans provide the collateral for a range of different activities and projects – procuring petrol for the sale of animal products, school fees, or paying off previous loans. They are relatively easy to obtain and do not involve the long-term personal work involved in borrowing money from friends and relatives. However, because people receive loans through different sources (including individuals), several loans can be obtained without the repayment of the first. This is particularly useful when seasonal activities demand different kinds of down payments. By 2008, however, the district became the centre of a very particular kind of a national scandal. After a brief police investigation, it emerged that when the local branch of the bank began to issue herder loans, borrowers had sometimes signed up to larger debts than they had anticipated. Local bank workers, it was rumoured, had allowed people to take out loans in return for a private share, which they took for themselves. As the investigation dragged on, no one spoke out against anybody else or identified a single culprit. The boundary between those who had coerced and those who were coerced was hazy and everyone was implicated, with some having to give up their animals and houses in an attempt to pay back debts. No one individual was identified, and the share of responsibility was distributed among the whole community.9 Here, the boundary between lenders and borrowers, which had facilitated the initial practice, collapsed to produce a hazy mix as each revealed the other to be co-implicated in the practice. Borrowers, it could be argued, allowed a share to be siphoned off to lenders, while lenders, equally, arranged loans for borrowers in return for a portion for themselves. Portioning off parts of loans in this way brings to the fore questions of ownership and debt and the entangled relations of power involved in policing the flow of capital and resources to some and restricting this flow to others. At first sight this kind of activity seems to point to the idea that wealth is not something held by an individual, but is available to a group of people all of whom may access a share or portion. In this light, taking out loans in multiple names is not something strange or wrong. On the other hand, one might conclude that portioning off parts of loans is a straightforward example of what we commonly call a bribe. However, before we fall into this way of seeing things, we should be mindful of labelling these activities with such terms. Following Sneath (2006), I want to suggest that transfers of cash should not necessarily be seen as transactions which demand a return. Sometimes they may be legitimate gifts that serve to maintain social networks and relations of obligation.10 Sneath draws attention to the importance of these non-transactional 187

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transfers of currency and their use in enacting certain kinds of moral order in Mongolia (2006: 108). They can, he argues, be viewed as customary gifts and part of an indigenous service economy through which certain kinds of social relations are materialised (2006: 108). In his article Sneath also gives the example of a bank loan: ‘to gain a bank loan there had developed an accepted rate of payment to the bank officials who agreed – 100,000 tögrög per million borrowed (approximately $100 per $1,000 USD equivalent) ‘ … people from the city would be more likely to describe such payments as bribes (hahuul’), whereas in the rural study site people always used the language of gifting and gratitude – using terms such as beleg and gar tsailgah’ (Sneath 2006: 100). In line with this distinction, I want to suggest that money may be being used in wider regimes of value than we are familiar or comfortable with, reproducing and reinforcing particular kinds of social relations (although see Zelizer 2005 for the monetarisation of intimacy). For example, money is a common gift to monks, shamans, and diviners, and is often used in offerings at shrines and altars. Here, money appears as part of a range of different objects that are offered when one wants to enact a particular moral order. So that, ‘the meaning of a transfer is located in the social relation it materializes rather than the items of transmission’ (Sneath 2006: 109). We now turn to an examination of the materialisation of these social relations that pertain to notions of hierarchy (and debt). Master-custodian relations At this point we will step back from the specificities of the Mongolian rural banking system and focus on the enactment of a particular kind of social relation. In doing so a parallel is drawn with the way in which relations of hierarchy and power are materialised by lay people with formal institutions, such as banks, and to local spirit masters of particular places. This is to highlight a wider cosmological understanding of a moral order and of the way in which relations are maintained, fortune harnessed, and wealth obtained. This parallel is emphatically not to be viewed as some kind of ‘cognitive template’ from which people hold the world is ordered. As Humphrey has noted, an integrated single mythical cosmological system can hardly be said to exist among the Mongols owing to the various diverse inputs into Mongolian culture (2007: 174). However, from the point of view of many Mongols, this mix of cosmological forces appears distinctively Mongolian, and something that many depend on as such. We may recall that loans are only issued to herders who can prove that they have a certain amount of livestock, which acts as collateral against the loan. Livestock is an unstable form of collateral. The success 188

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or failure of livestock herding is based on the hard work and labour of the herder and his extended family. It is also influenced by the unpredictable extremes of the climate. According to local beliefs, it is also based on the ability of a particular household to harness the ‘fortune of the herds’ (malyn hishig), which ensures their fertility and survival. One way in which fortune is sourced is through offerings to local ‘land masters’ (gazryn ezed). The term ‘land masters’ refers to the invisible ‘owners’, ‘masters’, ‘lords’, ‘heads’, or ‘stewards’ of the land on which people live. Land masters are considered to have control of human prosperity, rain, the elimination of calamities, diseases, storms, and the flourishing of domestic livestock (Humphrey with Onon 1996: 147). They are honoured at ritual stone cairns (ovoo) which are situated on a mountain or hilltop. It is common for travellers to stop at an ovoo as they enter a new landscape. They may circumambulate the structure clockwise, three times, offering a stone or some other object, as a way to ensure protection and blessing for their travels. Ovoos are often made of eclectic offerings, such as stones, willow branches, batteries, sweet wrappers, prayer flags, blue ceremonial scarves, incense bowls, dried curds, pictures of Buddhist deities, monetary notes, biscuits, horse skulls, smashed or empty vodka bottles, and so on. These elements are gathered in the shape of a conical pile to form an assemblage or site made up of multiple people’s offerings and can often be seen from a great distance. For those who live in the vicinity of an ovoo, it is a physical marker of their connection to the land in which they live. In the early mornings, it is usual for women to make libations outside with a ladle of milk to nearby ovoos, mountains, or trees, following the rotation of the sun (Empson 2011). Some of these sites are hardly ever visited, while others are subject to annual collective sacrifices (tahilga; literally to make an offering or sacrifice). During the socialist period, large-scale ceremonies at ovoos were forbidden (Atwood 2004: 415). Today, it is common to find government officials participating in and sometimes organising them. This is, then, a ceremony that speaks directly to the needs and concerns of people today, often allowing for the ‘political architecture’ of a given place to be enacted (Sneath 2001: 46). Honouring land masters through ritual offerings reflects the notion that people do not hold land as they do other possessions. Pastureland in Mongolia is generally not held as private property (apart from in cities or district centres), in the sense with which we might be familiar. Instead, people associate pasture land with spiritual and temporal agencies who are considered the ‘owners’, ‘masters’, or ‘stewards’ of places (Sneath 2002: 200). In this sense, ‘indigenous Mongolian notions of “land ownership” can be described as “custodial” in that [people have] conditional rights to use territory and always within a wider sociopolitical framework’ (Sneath 2001: 43). Such frameworks have, of course, varied historically. 189

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But even ‘[i]mperial and princely jurisdiction over land [was] subject to the approval of yet higher authorities’ (2001: 45). These higher authorities are the ever-present, yet always highly unelaborated, ‘masters’ or ‘lords of the land’ (gazryn ezed). People who inhabit this landscape are, thus, dependent on relations with various human figures of authority, as well the invisible ‘land masters’ of a given place. Entangled cosmologies of wealth and fortune The term ‘master’ (ezen) is not just used for ‘land masters’. It denotes a range of asymmetrical relations entailing hierarchy and debt. For example, the word ‘master’ (ezen) is used for temporal rulers (Humphrey 1997: 29), for the eldest male of a household, the head of a factory, or other large-scale enterprises such as banks, and in the past, for the polity itself (Sneath 2001: 47).11 Given this range, the master-custodian relation appears to permeate a host of different relationships on different scales. The point to stress is that it is not simply that the same term is used across different spheres. Rather this is a kind of relationship through which the flux of cosmological order is inflected, effects generated, and fortune and wealth harnessed, portioned, and retained. To aid this comparison we will briefly examine each case. Firstly, and crucially, being custodians (hamgaalagch) of particular places puts herders in a position of debt to the ‘masters of the landscape’. As mentioned, different kinds of ritual activity are visibly increasing throughout Mongolia. These range from individual to communal sacrifices, and one-off offerings mediated through a religious specialist, such as a shaman. They often involve portioning off parts of produce (such as milk and meat products, as well as money) and offering them to the land masters who bestow fortune on a household. Debt to land masters is here not something to be eliminated but is upheld through honouring this relationship.12 Upholding this asymmetrical relationship allows for the increase of one’s herds (which are themselves not owned but loaned) that can be divided and circulated among kin in mobile forms of wealth. Secondly, regarding bank loans, although people are expected to repay their loans, few anticipate that they will pay them off within the time period allocated. Indeed friends in Mongolia mention that due to the absence of a comprehensive credit check system people live off multiple kinds of loans and repayment schemes, none of which are ever met.13 In the case of Delgermaa mentioned above we see that in taking out bank loans, people instead assumed the position of ‘custodians’ of cash (rather than owners), using this money for their daily expenditure. By portioning off parts of these loans to local bank workers they were enacting the master-custodian relation, in effect giving a part of the whole as gift-like 190

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‘offerings’ to the invisible bank managers. Here, ‘money [like animal herds] constitutes a pool out of which “parts” [could] be extracted’ (Holbraad 2005: 246). These parts were used to appease both land masters and bank workers through offerings that serve to enact one’s indebtedness to higher, often unknowable and distant, figures of authority (be these human or spirit).14 An important point to note is that, like bank mangers who reside in unknown city offices, land masters are almost always un-personified, faceless forms of authority. Although they may not be viewed as transcendental, both are offered portions of what they bestow through middlemen or brokers – either local bank workers or religious practitioners – who ensure good relations are maintained. In turn, people are indebted to them for their generosity and good will. To put this another way; the way in which bank loans have been conceptualised locally is, I suggest, cosmologically speaking on the same ontological ground as the way in which people source fortune through the land masters. The kinship equivalent of this kind of resource would be the daughter-in-law. Envisaged as a portion or share of her natal family situated among her affines, she is a fertile loan; never repaid, nor owned, but over whom her in-laws have custody and whose fertility generates more kin and resources for those who house her. Finally, these two cases are intrinsically dependent on each other. Their co-dependence speaks of the complex mesh of forces at work in ensuring wealth and prosperity for these people. Herders are indebted to land-masters for the health and wellbeing of their animals. At the same time, these herds are used as collateral against which loans can be received from the bank. Here, indebtedness in one sphere is transformed into credit in another. This kind of dependence is common in other parts of Asia. Commenting on the spiritual economy among Longyan residents in China, Chu notes: ‘Monetary wealth … could not be taken as mere surplus at the disposal of Longyan residents. Rather, it might be better understood as the material manifestation of one’s spiritual solvency, as an extension of good credit, if you will, from gods who could never truly be paid back’ (Chu 2010: 192). In a similar way, one might say that money is constantly dependent on fortune which appears as a facilitating feature that permeates one’s ability to secure wealth and assets, just as fortune is dependent on money in facilitating its beckoning. Even the most mundane transactions are subject to these forces of fortune, luck and might which permeate social relations and the lives of individuals. Here, ritual and economic life are two sides of the same coin with one providing the ground from which the other is figured (cf. Parry and Bloch 1989). This is best illustrated by returning to Delgermaa, our example presented earlier. By 2012, she had 191

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secured at least three large loans (including the one mentioned earlier) and had started a successful business in the district centre. She kept notebooks to track complex exchanges. She had many beautiful and healthy grandchildren. A local shaman had lacerated her son’s tongue and cured him of his alcoholism. He was now working hard by her side, while she was developing yet more business ideas for future loans. Her daily milk libations continued. Her household altar grew larger. Incense burned regularly. Offerings and gifts in one sphere were reaping rewards in another. The fortune she harnessed was hers to play with and command. Economic processes and cosmological reckonings In a fascinating article on the use of money in areas of intimate social life Geschiere (1992) asks if processes of bargaining with money at funerals, weddings, and other personal occasions in a village in Cameroon are something new; the consequence of local rituals impacted by the market, or rather, are they continuations of older patterns of behavious that serve to challenge the market itself? Along similar lines, the Comaroffs (1999) highlight how so-called ‘occult or ritual economies’ balance between two inimicable forces. On the one hand they seek unattainable ends through magical means, while on the other hand, they may be seen as a means by which people express discontent with modernity and attempt to eradicate inequalities. The idea that ritual practices challenge accumulation and consumption while at the same time valorise the very prosperity they seek is aptly highlighted by Chu in what she calls people’s ‘awkward tango with different capitalist modalities’ (Chu 2010: 208). We can learn from these explanations to understand some of the practices described in this chapter. The master-custodian relationship is not simply a concept ‘loaned’ from one sphere to understand another. Yes, people use familiar tools for new means, but this is not some archaic way of engaging and relating. The master-custodian relation is an innovative ever-shifting trope through which relations are enacted and realised. Indeed, following Stafford (2006), we need to be mindful of the fact that these things might not always be separated out as alternative economic modalities by people themselves. What constitutes the economy might not be separate from acts that facilitate growth in monetary wealth through other means. For example, people may procure bank loans in order to fulfil ritual obligations (such as shamanic exams or offerings at mountain ceremonies) and these activities may, in turn, benefit people economically. This is not to suggest a transactional relationship (people– spirits–wealth). Rather it is to suggest that ritual practices have an enormous economic impact. Indeed the mistake is in imagining tending to the forces of fortune as somehow external to economic life; a kind of 192

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variable other which is in fact internal to economic thought. It is for this very reason that we may view the procurement and repayment of loans from banks and the cosmological reckoning involved in making offerings to land masters as inseparable and part of the same ‘field’, or more appropriately perhaps ‘pasture’ of knowledge. Of course one could argue that this very point (that ritual and economic life are embedded) does nothing more than take us from one kind of explanation to another, meaning that we move from the kind of explanation that privileges the idea that certain activity should be viewed as: a) an inherent critique of capitalist forms of inequality (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999; Taussig 1980), or b) that it should be understood as an outcome of a recent traumatic past which means that people need to re-align themselves with deceased relatives who were somehow cast outside of relational life (Buyandelgerin 2007; Kwon 2007) to an idea that a whole range of things should be viewed as economic, along substantivist lines (Sahlins 1976). Of note is the fact that these prior kinds of explanations still maintain a separation between the real and ideal; the market and the cultural inflection; capitalism and its variables. Here, the master-custodian relationship is refracted in different spheres. Entwined and linked throughout the cosmos, it is an ‘inflection’ of market capitalism on indigenous terms. But what if what counts as ‘economy’ and ‘politics’ in the first place is culturally and cosmologically inflected? Taking this view would be to highlight the fundamental cosmological underpinnings of Mongolian financial transactions in general, as well as the power relations in which they are embedded. Together they may be said to constitute an always evolving ‘incomplete’ sphere of activity that defies any such prior separation. It is for this very reason that the emerging mineral economy in Mongolia is prophesied according to a familiar cultural motif: the Wolf, a lone leader who is either revered or despised depending on who takes on the role as custodian (Empson forthcoming b). At this point one may wonder why some of the practices described here may be seen as scandalous in the first place if they are such a commonplace way of enacting relations. In this regard we should be mindful of the sliding scale of this relation. In certain contexts this ease of transfer may suddenly jolt to a stop as one actor/subject/person may be seen to be taking ‘advantage’ of another. Indeed this is the tension that Chu (2010) alludes to in her description of the ‘awkward tango’. At certain times, things may be necessarily viewed through other vectors. This cosmological ‘break’ is, I suggest, precisely what is needed to jump from one form of power and authority to another and it is exactly what the recent political party in Mongolia achieved in order to secure their election victory (i.e. it accused and imprisoned the previous Prime Minister on charges 193

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of corruption). Indeed, if we use the frame of sacrifice to understand these practices we may say that the part or piece that is given is a way of tricking the hierarchical orders into accepting one form of relationship – appeasing them while benefiting from their spoils. Indeed this kind of ‘trickster’ mentality is at the heart of many kinds of explanations that seek to explain these practices as ways in which people play the capitalist market at their own game. The unexplainable forces that allow people to extract wealth in one way extends beyond this material sphere. It extends beyond monetary exchange to the vast openness of the steppe where herds grow and generate the never-ending circulation of fortune. Conclusion One might conclude that the way in which people procure bank loans and engage with the land masters tells us mostly about the way in which socialist power was imagined. Namely, that it was often not those at the top who held power but those in administrative positions – the middlemen and the bureaucrats – who determined people’s lives on a daily basis (cf. Sneath 2006). Indeed, in appealing to shamans, diviners, and local bank workers, people seek the assistance of various ‘middlemen’ who translate the needs and demands from one sphere for another. Enacting the master-custodian relation through this is one way in which people are able to personify a variety of distant and faceless forms of power and authority. These relations are most often cast in terms of hierarchy, with one side acting as the older (master) to the younger brother/ sibling (custodian) (i.e. older brother Russia/Soviet Union to younger brother Mongolia). Local bank workers, like shamans, diviners, and other ­middlemen, mediate between realms, issuing fortune and wealth from beings who take a share, thereby weaving the cosmologies they seek to manage. This proliferation of middlemen who act as ‘translators’ between cosmological ‘realms’ can thus be viewed on different levels. A key feature is that these mediators maintain a distance between the two sides, translating the desires and demands of one to another while keeping their true ‘faces’ concealed. Finally, a working definition of what this cosmology may look like from a Mongolian herder’s perspective in the twenty-first century, is necessarily incomplete, evolving and changing as a moral order. However, they would attest to some fundamental laws, such as the master-custodian relation, as a ground from which higher-level theoretical description of the processes in the universe might reveal themselves. And while these ideas may change, they do hold some explanatory power for people of the forces at play in the flow of wealth and fortune. Taking this approach is to imagine a way in which ideas are inflected when brought from one 194

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sphere into another, while still retaining their effectiveness. This is not to suggest that everything remains the same, but that in the examples described here the sudden circulation of large amounts of cash was managed, at least in part, on local terms. These terms are, of course, themselves not outside of history but very much an outcome of the way in which people have imagined themselves in relation to higher figures of power and authority in a range of different political and cosmological orders. As Sahlins has noted, identifying ‘cultural continuity is not the same thing as immobility, conservatism or backwardness … the strongest continuity may consist in the logic of cultural change’ (1994). Indeed, the idea that cultural change may form continuity is something that is forcefully employed in Wagner’s (1975; 1981) idea of the invention and convention of culture. Here we see a relationship built on the notion of simultaneous interdependence and contradiction, whereby invention changes things and convention resolves those changes into a recognisable world. This is not to imply that some kind of structure is continually imposed, but that things are made familiar and recognisable out of difference. In the magical bringing forth of money through bank loans, its sudden appearance and disappearance is made knowable through the enactment of a specific relationship that moves – or maybe dances – across the cosmos eliciting different forms of wealth and power. It is in this movement that I hope to have shown the axis on which wealth is portioned, transformed and gained. Notes 1

2

3 4

Note that this chapter is based on ethnography gathered before the proliferation of loans and banks in the Mongolian countryside and the rapid inflation associated with the ‘Wolf Economy’, details of which can be found in Empson (forthcoming a). The chapter was written during the sleep-­ deprived stages of early motherhood and I kindly thank those who looked after Otto while I wrote it. I thank the volume’s editors and reviewers, as well as the participants in the conference on which it is based, for their generous comments and critiques. I also thank Adrian Kent for his wonderful definition of cosmology, ever expanding our horizons. In saying this I depart from Sneath’s concept of ‘enactment’ as not necessarily about a transaction involving exchange. Indeed, I argue that these relations do involve a transactional element, even if delayed and indirect. Da Col (2012) describes cosmoeconomics as the interface between economics, cosmology, and human relatedness. Ashinga is home to roughly 2,000 people, and the administrative centre is the permanent residence of a thousand or so people who live here on a

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5

6 7

8 9 10

11

12 13

14

semi-permanent or permanent basis. The district centre is the location of the local school, postal office, bank, shops, petrol station. While some have been able to generate large herds through hard work and skill, others have failed to accumulate any, having sold or lost animals to diseases, severe winters or scorching droughts. Others still are emerging as entrepreneurs with the title of ‘Ashingiin maf’ or the Mafia of Ashinga. A small amount of interest could be gained from placing savings in an account, but no tax was paid on them. Loans such as these vary in terms of interest and repayment. Most are available for up to twelve months, up to £2,000, with a monthly interest rate of 2.9 per cent. They are issued on the following conditions: 1. Permanent residence in the regional branch. 2. Past experience of livestock-raising. 3. A history of cash-based sales or future prospects of cash sales sufficient for loan principal and interest payment. 4. Livestock insurance is desirable (as potential collateral). For herders in Ashinga the insurance of livestock and houses as potential collateral is not always possible due to persistent arson attacks in the district centre and the vulnerability of animals to extreme weather (zud) and theft. www.khanbank.com/en/52/News.html?n=63, accessed 29 October 2012.  Although several people were called to the district centre to be questioned. This is what Sneath (2006) has termed the ‘enactment’ of relations rather than ‘transactions’, such as bribes or other forms of corruption. He draws attention to a range of transfers which are not always transactional but about transmission and obligation and expressive of the obligations to close kin and expectations associated with certain roles and expertise. Like the portion of milk offered to the land masters in libations, the first portion of hot food, usually prepared once a day, is given to the eldest male of the household, ensuring that the choicest/sacred portion (deej) is reserved for the ‘master of the house’ (geriin ezen). In this way, people benefit from the potential life-force of their animals and contain things which embody that potential in order to use it in offerings. For comparison, see Kwon on life itself as a kind of loan from the Bank of Hell (2007: 77). Micro-finance has been viewed as a kind of magical interjection that will somehow ‘generate’ capital. However, Peebles notes: ‘despite celebrations of microcredit/microfinance in the popular media, some ethnographers have noted that its perceived benefits are not always delivered’ (2010: 232). Following general theories of sacrifice, money, like fortune, is both the thing used in offerings as well as the thing that is being asked for.

References Atwood, Christopher. 2004. Encyclopedia of Mongolia and the Mongol Empire. New York: Facts on File.

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Portioning loans Barth, Fredrick. 1987. Cosmologies in the Making: A Generative Approach to Cultural Variation in Inner New Guinea. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Buyandelgeriyn, Manduhai. 2007. Dealing with uncertainty: shamans, marginal capitalism, and the remaking of history in postsocialist Mongolia. American Ethnologist 34(1): 127–147. Chu, Julie, Y. 2010. Cosmologies of Credit: Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Comaroff, Jean and John L. Comaroff. 1999. Occult economies and the violence of abstraction: notes from the South African postcolony. American Ethnologist 26(2): 279–303. Da Col, Giovanni. 2012. Introduction: natural philosophies of fortune – luck, vitality and uncontrolled relatedness. Social Analysis 56(1): 1–23. Empson, Rebecca. 2011. Harnessing Fortune: Personhood, Memory and Place in Mongolia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— (Forthcoming a) The Virtual Economy: On Loans, Land Ownership, and Trusting Partnerships in Mongolia. —— (Forthcoming b) Claiming Resources, Honouring Debts: Miners, Herders and the Land Masters of Mongolia. Geschiere, Peter. 1992. Kinship, witchcraft and ‘the market’: hybrid patterns in Cameroonian societies. In Roy Dilley (ed.), Contesting Market: Analyses of Ideology, Discourse and Practice. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Pp. 16–27. Holbraad, Martin. 2005. Expending multiplicity: money in Cuban Ifá cults. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11(2): 231–254. Humphrey, Caroline. 1997. Exemplars and rules: aspects of the discourse of moralities in Mongolia. In Signe Howell (ed.), The Ethnography of Moralities. London: Routledge. Pp. 25–47. —— 2007. Inside and outside the mirror: Mongolian shamans’ mirrors as instruments of perspectivism. Special Issue of Inner Asia, On Perspectivism, edited by Morten Axel Pedersen, Rebecca Empson, and Caroline Humphrey 9(7): 178–196. —— with Urgunge Onon. 1996. Shamans And Elders: Experience, Knowledge and Power Among the Daur Mongols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Reprinted in Graham Harvey (ed.), Shamanism: A Reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2002). Pp. 357–364. Kwon, Heonik. 2007. The dollarization of Vietnamese ghost money. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13: 73–90. Lindquist, Johan. Forthcoming. The anthropology of brokers and brokerage. International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Science. Second edn. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Parry, Jonathan and Maurice Bloch. 1989. Introduction: money and the morality of exchange. In Parry and Bloch (eds), Money and the Morality of Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 1–32. Peebles, Gustav. 2010. The anthropology of credit and debt. Annual Review of Anthropology 39: 225–240. Sahlins, Marshall. 1994. Cosmologies of capitalism: the trans-Pacific sector of the world system. In Nicholas Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Sherry Ortner (eds), 197

Cosmological constitutions Culture / Power / History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pp. 412–457. Saunders, Simon, Jonathan Barrett, Adrian Kent, David Wallace. 2012. Many Worlds? Everett, Quantum Theory, & Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sneath, David. 2001. Notions of rights over land and the history of Mongolian pastoralism. Inner Asia 3(1): 41–59. —— 2002. Custody and property: land, indigenous understanding, and the conceptual basis of development policy in pastoral Mongolia. In C. Humphrey and R. Mandel (eds), Markets and Moralities: Ethnographies of Postsocialism. London: Routledge. Pp. 191–210. —— 2006. Transacting and enacting: corruption, obligation and the use of monies in Mongolia. Ethnos 71(1): 89–112. Stafford, Charles. 2006. Deception, corruption and the Chinese ritual economy. In Kevin Latham, Stuart Thompson, and Jacob Klein (eds), Consuming China: Approaches to Cultural Change in Contemporary China. London: Routledge. Pp. 42–55. Taussig, T. Michael. 1980. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Verdery, Katherine. 1999. Fuzzy Property: Rights and Identity in Transylvania’s Decollectivization. In M. Burawoy and K. Verdery (eds), Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocialist World. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield. —— and Caroline Humphrey. 2004. Property in Question: Value Transformation in the Global Economy. Oxford: Berg. Wagner, Roy. 1981. The Invention of Culture: Revised and Expanded Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Zelizer, Viviana A. 2005. The Purchase of Intimacy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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9 Maize mill sorcery: cosmologies of substance, ­production, and accumulation in Central Mozambique Bjørn Enge Bertelsen More than a decade of fieldwork in rural and peri-urban areas around the Mozambican city of Chimoio has allowed me to observe profound transformations of political and economic circumstances.1 Importantly, during the period of macroeconomic growth which was initiated after the devastating civil war ended in 1992 and accelerated significantly in the 2010s, visible signs of wealth have become increasingly more commonplace in the urban landscape. Unsurprisingly, such indicators – cars, houses, food, clothes – are unevenly distributed and accumulation of riches is commonly understood to be spawned by illicit and nebulous practices (see also Bertelsen 2009b). This chapter will analyse a particular site of such accumulation: the small-scale maize mills that dot the Mozambican peri-urban and urban landscapes. Despite their common usage, maize mills are frequently conceived as constituted by sorcerous machinery and their owners/operators are frequently alleged to be sorcerers. Specifically, they are suspected of secretly appropriating the maize meal produced by the mill’s machinery and thereby enriching themselves by accumulating such extractive rewards from the production process. An increasingly common way to analyse the relations made between sorcery and accumulation is one influenced by the Comaroffs’ term ‘occult economy’ which they argue to have global proliferation (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001: 19). In their vision, what they term ‘millennial capitalism’ is characterised by the transition from production to consumption whereby capitalism has attained a spectral and ghostly (as well as ghastly) character. The Comaroffs see capital and accumulation as inherently elusive and what they analyse as contemporary spiritual and monetary excess is seen to fuel global understandings of capitalism’s occult character

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(Comaroff and Comaroff 1999). Such a vision of worldwide forces transforming productive and consumptive relations provides a powerful critique of the unfulfilled promises of ongoing neoliberal transformations of capitalism and the state (see also Kapferer and Bertelsen 2009). Through analysing what I call maize mill sorcery within Mozambican popular concerns with the asymmetries of post-war economic growth, I will nonetheless critique the application of such a universal (and universalising) template to circumstances of political and economic change – such as that of maize mill sorcery. Specifically, I will demonstrate that the concern with maize mills is not arbitrary: far from being merely local reflexes of a globally identifiable millennial capitalism, the practice of grinding maize commercially and in sites external to the household represents a form of productive tension which affects what I call cosmological creation. Such crisis and creation is only in part related to general processes of commodification; instead it is crucially premised on the mill’s appropriation of the transformative power of maize to the detriment of women. This pertains particularly to women as in the context of the household these largely control the socially and cosmologically significant tasks of transforming the maize cob to maize meal, which in turn will be made into the staple food.2 Centrally, such an argument also relates to the locally conceived and historically contingent wider concerns with both production and various phases of Mozambican state formation, as I have also developed elsewhere (Bertelsen forthcoming). The argument is theoretically concerned with what is sometimes analysed as cosmology’s central dynamic: perceptions of the workings of creative and degenerative forces present in different social and cultural orders (see, e.g., Beidelman 1966). Specifically the chapter will expose how the mill creates intense concerns through engaging households’ production, substance, and accumulation. Such instances, I will argue, are satisfactorily explained neither by seeing these as non-reflexive reactions to ‘millennial capitalism’ nor as sorcerous creations of modernity (Geschiere 1997; cf. Englund and Leach 2000). By emphasising instead, the dynamic nature of cosmological visions – specifically through notions of vis formandi and the virtual – the active engagement with changing political and economic circumstances through casting the maize-mill owner as a sorcerer is seen as centrally underpinned by existing cosmological concerns. Put differently, the chapter seeks to contribute to a re-centring of the importance of cosmology and its continued creation for anthropological analyses of economic, political, and socio-cultural dynamics. It also suggests, however, that as anthropologists we need conceptual tools with which to grasp the qualities of stasis and rupture – or continuity and creation – that characterise cosmology in rapidly changing ethnographic realities.

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Substance, gender, and creative re-productive capacities The urban landscape of Chimoio, a provincial capital of around 200,000 people in the central Mozambican province of Manica, is circumscribed by vast areas of agricultural land (Artur 1999). Chimoio’s current relative calm belies a violent past that also embroiled the greater part of Mozambican territory. Firstly, under Portuguese colonial rule, Chimoio and its rural hinterland became a key site for the war of liberation (1964– 75) fought by Frelimo (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique, the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique). Following independence in 1975 as a vanguard party Frelimo embarked on the path of radical social transformation along modernist and socialist lines, including villagisation and agricultural reform and the imposition of an altered political organization deposing traditional chiefs. What ensued thereafter was an extremely bloody civil war (1976/77–1992) between Frelimo and the insurgent group Renamo (Resistência Nacional de Moçambique, the Mozambican National Resistance). This civil war unfolded largely according to the objectives of control of the rural population and, beyond killing around 1 million people and turning 5 million into refugees, it also forced large rural groups into the relative protection of urban centres, such as Chimoio (Bertelsen forthcoming). After a peace agreement was reached in 1992, Mozambique underwent yet another radical shift from socialist republic to a multiparty democracy founded on neoliberal economics (Clément and Peiris 2008) – experiencing some of the same cosmoeconomics as described also by Pedersen and Empson in Chapters 7 and 8 of this volume. In such a post-war context also, a multitude of intimate relations between rural and urban localities in and around Chimoio became crucial for people’s survival in what for the majority is a dire economic situation. My many fieldworks between 1998 and 2011 in Chimoio were undertaken within such a rural-urban continuum and effectively oscillated between strictly urban, peri-urban and rural settings in accordance with my informants’ movements. Central to such oscillatory movement is the household as producer, distributer, and consumer of maize – the most important staple food in both rural and urban settings. Grown mainly on small, non-irrigated and rain-fed plots of land (machamba) – as well as more low-lying partly irrigated plots (matoro) – maize is sown, weeded, reaped, dried, stored, and predominantly consumed by the household. Surplus maize is regularly taken to urban informal markets or distributed within the kinship group (dzindza). While bringing maize to the small, informal markets remains a key cash-generating practice in Honde – the main site of my rural fieldwork – another important activity involved the felling of trees and the production of charcoal from the logs.3

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During one of many conversations with Nzereki, by far Honde’s oldest inhabitant (just over ninety years old in this particular conversation in 2007), she pointed out several differences that she considered negative between the colonial period and the present. Explaining to me that the predominantly chi Tewe-speaking people in Honde had, as long as she could remember, produced items for sale in Chimoio markets, she claimed there was a difference between the type of products sold now and before: You know, child [mwana], then we used to make charcoal for sale. It was good money and we made a lot of money. But now we sell food. We sell the sweat of our plots of land [machamba].

Nzereki’s evaluative differentiation between the extremely time-consuming and labour-intensive production of charcoal and the bringing of especially maize for sale is indicative of the social value placed on items of substance that are also potential products for the market. Her comment reflects much anthropological analysis, namely that the production, distribution, and consumption of food is intimately related to both gendered reproductive capacities of kinship and household as well as wider social dimensions of community (for two classic analyses, see Goody 1976; Meillassoux 1981 [1975]). Crucially, preparation, distribution, and consumption of food is also directly related to cosmological dimensions of controlling productive and re-productive practices and capacities. In the mundane, everyday life in Honde and in peri-urban Chimoio, food preparation and distribution is highly gendered where the oldest woman (or elder women) in the household prepare all meals – often aided by younger female members.4 In this way intimate relations between substance, food, reproduction, and gender are embedded in everyday chores, key cosmological aspects of which are revealed in ritual settings, at the marketplace and in the maize mills.5 I will here present two instances that expose the cosmological importance of the gendered relations of intimacy between food and its preparation: the use of the female body to substantiate the food and thereafter the casting of the maize mills as a problematic locus for the refinement of maize into maize meal. Sadza, vaginas, and the gender of creative forces As an act of creation – a central tenet to any notion of cosmology as indicated above and as also underlined by Empson (Chapter 8 this volume) – the production and consumption of food is integral to gendered notions and practices of sexuality, relationality, and kinship (see also Arnfred 2007). These intimate connections are reflected in the gendered division

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of labour within households where the domain of cooking midday and evening meals of maize meal porridge (sadza), is the prerogative of women. Further, the three cooking stones that pertain to hearths in every household are the property of women, their importance reflected in the fact that many women wish to be photographed with these.6 But there is also an even more direct relation between female bodies, food, and creative forces as elucidated in the following excerpt from a conversation in 2008 with a female healer (n’anga) in Chimoio. We had been talking about different forms of sorcery (uroi) and how people used magical means to increase their crops when she shifted the theme of our conversation slightly, smiling: N’anga: Do you know that a woman can cook like this [she hunches down, spreads her legs and pretends to be stirring the sadza pot with a large ladle]? Bjørn: Yes … N’anga: If that woman has a lot of people visiting, she will cook like this. It is for the smoke from the cooking and the fire to enter the vagina. They don’t have anything on but wrap-around cloths [capulanas], you know! Bjørn: [Confused] But why … N’anga: … and when the smoke comes out of the vagina, it will enter the sadza. It will make the sadza much harder [richer] and the people will be content with the eating very quickly. They become full. It is a thing women do to economise!

The sexual and bodily imagery in this vision of a woman cooking is explicit, of course, in the term the hardening of the sadza. More importantly, however, the use of the body to economise underlines how nurture, sociality, and women are intertwined: not having enough to serve guests is a disgrace for a household and by quite literally deploying her own reproductive facilities, the food is enriched. This enrichment demonstrates both her and food’s life-giving capacities and her creative capabilities.7 Furthermore, this inclusion of the woman’s generative potential is regarded as wholly benign and a generous gesture.8 Still, as the quote illustrates, this is a desperate measure brought on by the (potential) disgrace of being unable to serve guests as well as a result of the economic hardships that are seen as inimical to women’s fundamental life-giving and, thus, socially reproductive roles. This situation of poverty is also what induces women to take to the market foodstuffs that they would (and should) normally contain and distribute within the contexts of their household and the wider kinship group (dzindza) – as Nzereki also complained about (but see Chingono 1996 for a different perspective). Rather than seeing the women as tricking their guests, the practice of enriching the meal by including reproductive (and sexual) capacities can be seen as a socio-corporal resource used to compensate

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for economic hardships oriented towards the protection and maintenance of the social in dire circumstances. Put differently, the relations made between women, creation, and food are a direct invocation of the cosmological forces of creation and degeneration. Thus, in funeral rites, maize meal represents both the productive capacities of women, the household, and the marital union. For instance during a post-burial commemoration rite in which I participated in August 2011, after consuming vast amounts of maize beer (dhuro), led by the widow, women brought maize meal from the main house and threw it on the male participants. The men then smeared the maize meal on their heads and upper parts of the body. Arguably, the potentiality of the cosmological relations that are habitually made between reproductive and productive capacities of women, as instanced in commemorative and funerary rites and cooking practices, have in the context of neoliberal economic circumstances been creatively transposed. In such new circumstances, the vagina has become a vessel for the enrichment of food and a means of ‘economising’. Such a widely recognised bodily technique represents a profoundly important act of cosmological creation.9 However, before analysing further the women’s corporeal economy of food we need to present creation’s counterforce: degeneration. In the empirical context at hand in such a counterforce takes a concrete shape: the muroi or sorcerer. Machines, labour, and substance A sorcerer (muroi) is characterised by a capacity to usurp and divert flows of substance, effectively feeding on the produce and (re)productive capacities and labour of the social order and its households. Within the domain of the peri-urban and urban economy in especially the poorer areas of Chimoio, the sorcerer is frequently seen to be the owner of commercial maize mills. Such mills are frequently owned by individual families operating predominantly Chinese-produced engines running on diesel generators. Against payment, women bring their dried maize to these mills where the amount is measured in metal containers, poured into the mill, ground and returned as maize meal (ufu). Seemingly, and especially if applying a formal and universalist approach wherein this would be an instance of a client purchasing a service, there is little to this production sequence that warrants the reputation of maize-mill owners generally being seen as sorcerers (muroi). This allegation, however, is frequently made in conversations about maize mills when it is often assumed that the owners use illicit forms of medicine (mutombo) in the operation of their mills, and even kill. The following excerpt from a 2007 conversation

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with a middle-aged female informant illustrates key aspects of such an understanding – a conversation occasioned by the death of a mill owner: Bjørn: I now frequently hear a story about a family in Chimoio where the owner of the mill had died. But the family of this owner was very Christian and did not want to do all that was required [i.e. use medicine (mutombo)] to make the mill work well … [interrupted] Carmeliza: Yes, you need to know mutombo to make a mill work. If not, it will not work well. The mill has a lot secrets and very heavy mutombo. Bjørn: What kind of mutombo is this? Carmeliza: Typically it works with the [powerful and destructive] tchikwambo spirit. It is also said that one needs to kill someone each year to make this business work.

In Chimoio – as elsewhere (Kapferer 2002) – allegations that successful businessmen and women make sacrificial killings are commonplace. For example, the highly successful business of the owner of Mafuia Comercial in Chimoio – an enterprise that comprises a fleet of trucks, shopping centres, hardware stores, and more – is commonly believed to be supported by an annual killing. Specifically, for this businessman of Indian descent’s commerce to thrive, it is alleged that a driver of one of their trucks, a worker or someone walking nearby die each year to satisfy that the business ‘demands blood’ (precisa sangue). The generic term for such sacrificial practice (cuchekera) is also extended to smallscale and non-commercial enterprises such as the tending to fruit trees in the countryside wherein, for example, it is said that certain mango trees likewise ‘demand’ that someone fall down and get hurt each year for these trees to yield. Again, cuchekera victims are often kin or neighbours to the owners of the fruit trees, in accordance with the logic of spatial or relational proximity for the victims of cuchekera at Mafuia Comercial. In order to understand why mill owners are especially prone to being accused and, thus, often avoided, we need to appreciate certain distinctions of cosmological significance between the processes of grinding at home and at the mill as well as some general cosmological characteristics of maize, food, and gender. Firstly, the maize (magwere) that is created, cared for, and carried by women to the mill, is taken out its sack of cloth, measured, and poured into a funnel to be ground to maize meal (ufu). Unlike when women operate the mortar and pestle (dhuli), in which the crucial transformation from inedible dry corns of maize to edible maize meal (ufu) is visible and performed in the open courtyard outside houses, the transformative dimensions of the machine are hidden. In addition, the careful, manual and open-air sifting of crushed corn (with a disc-shaped vessel made of woven strips of wood – tseru) contrasts heavily with the machine’s (hidden) mechanical sifting. Consequently, while in the belly of the 205

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machinery one can neither visually follow nor bodily enable the transformation from corn to meal. This also means that dangerous medicine (mutombo) may be added. It also means that a life-giving essence that pertains to the soil and is dependant on ancestral blessing, called ndimo, may be extracted or thwarted in the process. Thus, despite greatly facilitating the work of women (if viewed from a developmentalist perspective), the mill and its workings is also a site of considerable danger: The altered production process, the obfuscated transformation of substance (from magwere to ufu) and the obviation of the frequent social gatherings in which women communally pound maize in one mortar with multiple pestles, are all facets contributing to the great ambivalence and, even, dread against the mill. Secondly, in addition to the machinic and opaque dimensions to the mill’s transubstantiation, the crude fact is that the operator and owner of the mill is himself unproductive, reaping the harvest of others in ways both measurable (price per kilo) and immeasurable. Being part of a local bourgeoisie, in one sense the mill owner is therefore the perfect miniature image of the Mozambican state’s taxation and capture of resources in a post-socialist capitalist age by profiting on the labour of the intimate – the food and its preparation. Crucially, the mill owner also thereby exemplifies the severing of a vital social connection – that between women and food. In the cosmological context of the mill and its workings, the sorcerer is placed in the midst of both the intimacy of the household and the relationality of the social. By having transformed maize and maize meal into commodities, both material objects of the intimate, through subjecting these to machinic and sorcerous alienation and by siphoning off the woman’s and the household’s sweat and toil, the figure of the mill owner is despised. Being aware of this perilous hatred – one often fomenting counter-sorcery attacks – the mill owner needs to protect himself against both those that despise his sorcery as well as those that envy his immorally amassed riches. However, the figure of the sorcerous maize-mill owner is not wholly new, of course: the vision of forces that work degeneratively through the siphoning off of the fruits of labour are long-standing components integral to chiTewe cosmology. For instance, the sorcerer is also known to employ a particular snake (ndara) (or other magical animals) to rob other people’s maize meal. Ndara is often described as red and yellow and with a skin like the crocodile. In early 2006, an ndara was beaten to death on a path near the site of my rural fieldwork. After the ndara was opened – according to a general logic of corporal introspection to reveal sorcery – it was revealed that the belly was full of maize meal. The ndara, it was agreed, was on its way to its owner, the sorcerer, to empty its stomach.

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It is often underlined that its intrusion into the granaries of others is primarily to open a path for relocating the maize, not what it consumes there and then. It is, thus, a vehicle for often invisible illicit accumulation at the expense of others by the hands of a sorcerer. Both the ndara and the understanding of the mill owner as a sorcerer bespeak the centrality of food. Tapping this resource by either deliberate sale or by illicit theft or usurpation confronts ideals of the relational, collective, and redistributive ethos of sociality: by diverting the flow of life substances also in the context of the intimate relations between work, household, and productive and reproductive capabilities, key dimensions of sociality are attacked, representing also an affront to the cosmological ordering and sequencing of substance, production, and accumulation. Contrastingly, charcoal production involves substances that are neither significant to the moral economy of household nor to ritual activity.10 Maize, on the other hand, is stored in the centre of the household in granaries close to or within the main sleeping hut (muturica), is central to communal rituals, and comprises the everyday staple food. Further, in spatial terms, charcoal is often produced in bushy and uncultivated land and being brought directly from these wild, uncultivated (and potentially dangerous) spaces to the city, will not tap or relate to the reciprocal and intimate productive and reproductive capacities of the household. In a sense, charcoal is external to the kin group (dzindza) and to domains of (re)production. In controlling the production of maize meal (ufu) from the sowing of the seeds to the pounding in the heart of the household in a mortar (dhuli), the reproductive ethos of sociality is ensured, especially by its female members.11 Food, gender, and the threat of sorcery It is commonplace to both identify and analyse women as related to food and cooking in African households, emphasising the general role particularly in relation to the materiality of food and the role as nurturer. But in Honde and beyond, such nurture transcends the immediate needs of households extending into the surrounding society: women visit each other with foodstuffs, borrow utensils for cooking, make and distribute pottery for preparing particular dishes, borrow maize meal from each other, etc. And very importantly, when harvesting of the maize is completed, women commonly move between households to help peel it and to prepare foodstuffs. Moreover, the very act of collectively preparing the nurturing capacity of a household, the maize meal that will be made into sadza twice a day, is an act of social intimacy and embodies its successful extension. This is also evident in the way women (or, sometimes, men) upon departure, provide the guest(s) with a number of foodstuffs to take 207

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home – yet another material expansion of the nurturing capacity of the household (see also Bertelsen 2011). These practices transcend or – at least – challenge conceptual boundaries of the household (so often imagined by the analyst) and rather underline the ways in which women embody considerable generative and creative potential within chiTewe cosmological order. These capacities are not lost on Honde women: When I asked an elderly woman in 2011 about the relations between women and men she smiled shrewdly and said: Child [mwana]. Did you see us throwing maize meal at the men after the funeral? This is to remind the men that they all come from our bellies. They know this. They also know that these bodies are very strong. Women have many secrets [alluding to hidden powers]. Men know this. Women give birth to Honde.

An acute awareness is evident here of the various forms of generative potential harboured by women – forms that are irreducible to perceiving women simply as nurturing society and, simultaneously, being nurtured by society. Instead, women embody and actively produce the social and relational, and their practices are public in the sense that meetings go on in the households and where people socialise, meet and talk on the paths (gwanzas) which cut through bush (mato) or machamba as material veins of an expansive sociality. Walking the paths – often en route with foodstuffs to urban markets or homebound with goods – women embody and energise the important circuits that these paths (gwanza) represent and at the same time exchange pieces of news (masoko) and stop to visit familiars and friends. Women may then be seen to inhabit a central role as not only nurturers in a restricted sense but as key agents and (re-)producers of the social order as a whole. While there is no space to develop this further here, one may also argue that women’s practices exhibit an expansionist, centrifugal, and rhizomic movement that is opposed to forms of striation characteristic of both the state order as well as patriarchal structures (see also Eriksen 2008: 55–81 especially for such an argument based on Melanesian material). Vis formandi, the virtual and cosmological creation Both the use of the female body to enrich sadza and the usurping maizemill owner relate directly to what was argued earlier in the chapter were key themes in anthropological understandings of cosmology – creative and degenerative forces. While the creative or (re-)productive aspects were related to female embodied capacity, the degenerative or sorcerously appropriative side was related both to the activities of the maize 208

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mills as a novel institution as well as to more long-standing concerns with sorcery. Crucially, the encircling of the maize mill as problematic took place in dramatically changing circumstances with rapid economic growth, expansive urbanisation, and intensified commodification. These circumstances are not unique for Chimoio or Honde: anthropology abounds with studies of encounters between vast, often global economic and political systems and more localised particular cosmological horizons, and the dynamics these encounters generate. For one, Michael Taussig (1980) has analysed a Bolivian miners’ cult centred on the figure of the devil and the wealth-generating and reciprocal possibilities condensed around its materialisation in the belly of the mines. Taussig’s study remains an anthropological classic through analysing not only a political history of great exploitation and violent colonisation but also being sensitive to the intense moments (and results) of cultural formation where Andean conceptions of sacrifice and the sacredness of the earth encounter European visions of the dialectic of God and Devil. Much more recently, Andrew Lattas’s (2010) work from Papua New Guinea has analysed a vast range of dramatic engagements rural villagers have made with novel institutions and forms of governance, economy, and religion following the arrival of whites (see also Rio and Eriksen, Chapter 2 in this volume). In Lattas’s vision, the very creative attempts to engage directly with these external forces creates an enormously rich, multisemic, and constantly changing cosmology. Several other works dealing with such creation could also be mentioned here, including Willerslev’s (2007) powerful call to take realities and engagements with spirits and animals seriously and not treat these as metaphorical representations; or Viveiros de Castro’s (1992 [1986]) insistence to engage Amazonian visions of man-animal relations as one of mutual creation. Both Willerslev and Viveiros de Castro exemplify non-reductive approaches to understanding particular visions that both delve into concerns with fundamental forces of creation and destruction. The cosmological contexts they analyse are irreducible to local responses to universalised processes of commodification, modernity or statehood. However, the concept of ‘cosmology’ is at once elusive and concrete: it posits a totality of horizon (in the singular) of human imagination – the definite space within which thought is conceived, origins are imagined, and actions are ‘pre-prescribed’. Further, the concept has the ring to it of an ‘anthropology lost’ predicated on descriptions of stable systems where cosmology was integral to the anthropologist’s explanatory strategies. In these accounts ‘cosmology’ comprised an analytical tool to systematically describe difference but in terms of attempts to identify structural similarities between radically different (bounded) contexts – from Frazer

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(1993 [1922]) to Lévi-Strauss (1968 [1958]), as also underlined in the Introduction to this volume. In the context of this volume, on the other hand, cosmology is envisaged as a term that connotes the horizons of human worlds (whether encompassing, infinite, receding and so on), and how human beings engage, encounter and imagine these horizons in their own right. The vistas of mutating of multiple cosmologies opened up in the Introduction surely underlines the continued (albeit changed) relevance of a nonstatic concept such as ‘cosmology’. From a Deleuzian point of view (Deleuze and Guattari 1994 [1991]), for example, the usefulness of any (such a) concept lies in its ability to bring together (radically or not so radically) different elements in novel ways. Thus, rather than merely representing an aspect of empirical reality, for Deleuze, a concept needs to be creative or active: ‘The concept is defined by its consistency, its endoconsistency and exoconsistency, but it has no reference: it is self-referential; it posits itself and its object at the same time as it is created’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994 [1991]: 22). Consequently, also the meaning of the concept is multivalent and Deleuze’s whole philosophical oeuvre may be seen as a cross-cutting trajectory through a range of disciplinary boundaries in order to re-appropriate, re-define and re-deploy their concepts philosophically in a critically transcendent engagement with their imagining of world and cosmos. Further, Castoriadis reminds us that we need to approach societies and social life as inherently creative and dynamic processes. Central for Castoriadis is the understanding that man – anthrōpos – is an autodidact in the most wide-ranging sense of that term. Building on and explaining the play Antigone by Sopochles, Castoriadis broadens the scope of the dynamics of perpetual human self-reinvention (Castoriadis 2007 [1999]: 16): ‘Anthrōpos posits himself as anthrōpos; the essence of anthrōpos is self-creation. This phrase is to be understood in two senses: anthrōpos creates his essence, and this essence is in itself creation and self-creation. Anthrōpos creates himself as a creator … ‘ (see also Kirtsoglou 2010: 3). Castoriadis’s emphasis on the human capacity to create – what he termed the vis formandi – led him to develop the notion of social imaginary (Castoriadis 1987 [1975]). Through the concept of social imaginary, Castoriadis refines the conceptualisation of vis formandi to be integral to a process of social creation that always oscillates between chaos/open-endedness and stability: on the one hand, Castoriadis posits, there is the instituting social imaginary and, on the other, the crystallised, routinised and non-moving instituted social imaginary (1987 [1975]).12 Castoriadis is adamant, however, that the oscillation between the creative and changing – the instituting social imaginary – and the solid and petrified – the instituted social imaginary – is an ongoing process characterising 210

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social orders in general. Put differently, as creator and autodidact harbouring the capacity of vis formandi, man engages a world of his own creation and re-creation. While Castoriadis’s emphasis on the creative, dynamic, and open is related to social imaginaries and institutions, the thrust of the vis formandi argument is also relevant to understand cosmological creation. Read in terms of understanding cosmology and its dynamics of formation, Castoriadis’s point resembles Handelman’s argument that ‘cosmology is necessarily ontological’ and that ontology is ‘the potentation of cosmos through its logic(s) of organization, perhaps a Deleuzian virtuality from which actualities emerge’ (Handelman 2008: 182). Virtual, as Deleuze understands it, does not allude to ‘virtual realities’ or simulacras of the empirical. The term virtual is opposed to the notion of actualisation describing the tangible ‘state of affairs’ – for example observable social processes (Deleuze and Guattari 1994 [1991]: 155). Contrary to this realm of the tangibly empirical, Deleuze posits and accords a reality to the virtual.13 In a similar way the cosmological landscape in Mozambique described here is virtual without necessarily being actual in the sense that the forces of creation and degeneration are present and presupposed as underlying social organisation of the household and its incorporation into understandings of production, reproduction, and gender. However, the potentiality of this virtual is actualised in terms of the targeting of the new maize mills as harbouring the threat of sorcery. Paradoxically, then, the externality of the form of the maize mill – both as a novel institution that has come with urbanisation, commodification, and economic growth and as outside the socially ordered circulatory arrangements of productive and reproductive forces related to the household – is altered so that maize-mill owners assume the familiar form of sorcerers. Using Castoriadis, one might claim that the particular force with which maize mills are related to resides precisely in these producing a particularly powerful dynamic of creation – a vis formandi of cosmological self-creation where the given and already accepted understandings of relations between production, accumulation, and distribution are challenged and re-framed. Put differently, the maize mills may be seen as vortexes around which cosmological understandings of creation and degeneration revolve in the contemporary context of macroeconomic growth. These understandings are not new and are not, therefore, necessarily part of a recent global ‘occult economy’ or a latter-day ‘millennial capitalism’ that are merely expressed locally: as Mary Douglas (2007 [1966]) pointed out, the symbolics of danger in the shape of evil, dirt, pollution or the misshaped engender creative vantage-points for social worlds. Douglas’s argument assumes importance for understanding cosmology and how its constitution not only thrives on alterities or externalities 211

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– like the long-standing figure of the sorcerer, the animalesque or the monstrous. Moreover, her argument indicates that changes to political and social circumstances necessitate processes of cosmological creation. However, in order to understand the intensity with which changes to the political and economic circumstances are engaged, sites of tension and conflict, such as the sorcery of the maize mill need to be analysed in terms of the productive and creative capacities at play in the reassertion and, effectively, the re-creation of cosmological visions. Life substances, circulation, and cosmological shifts As shown here, the figure of the maize-mill owner, his riches, his machinery, and his transformative power all loom large in local understandings of dangers to cosmologically founded well-being. Similar to what has been argued by Rio and Smedal (2008: 240), in contexts such as those described here, an important dimension frequently revolves around notions of ‘finite pools of life substances’ and the political economies of these. In communal rituals – that are beyond the scope of this chapter (see Bertelsen forthcoming) – such finiteness relates to the ritual of re-­ inscription of novel routes and capacities for (finite) life substances as well as to the household’s reproductive capacities. However, a crucial breach of the circulatory logic of the finiteness of these ‘life substances’ may occur in two ways: firstly, by the mill owner siphoning off and/or tampering with maize’s transformation into maize meal by the use of sorcery or other covert and illicit forces. Secondly, redirecting maize to Chimoio’s markets entails a shrinking of not only granaries in a mundane sense but also the tapping of a larger pool of the substances recognised as belonging to the kin group (dzindza). Lan (2000 [1989]), building on material from the neighbouring Dande valley in Zimbabwe, analyses a similar antagonism to certain commercially produced commodities made by the so-called mhondoro mediums – mediums of lion spirits. Analysing the mediums’ antagonism towards the state and its paraphernalia, Lan shows how samples of crops meant for the market cannot be part of ancestral offerings. What is significant here is that underneath such antagonism lie challenges to basic notions of cycles of exchange: one between people and ancestors epitomised by the spilling of beer on the ground for ancestors – a plea where rain (water) and plentiful crops (grain) is asked for in return. Secondly, within the lineage there are ongoing cycles of exchange in terms of a redistributive ethos of sharing of food and resources. Thirdly, there is an exchange ‘between lineages at marriage’ in which often men will work for their fathers-in-law for a number of years. Fourthly and directly relevant, this is an exchange between chief and his subjects in terms of labour on the 212

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chief’s fields, as ‘labour in exchange for economic security either in direct exchange for access to land or grain, or in indirect exchange for rain’ (Lan 2000 [1989]: 201). In a context similar to mine, Lan argues for processes that thwarted such cycles of exchange where chiefs became loyal to the state in a situation of super-exploitation and violence. Thus, Lan argues that the Dande ancestors, through the mhondoro mediums, demonstrated an opposition to the state through a denouncing of the commodities around which it seemed centred. Lan’s work exposes important social practices in which ritual and everyday practice of containment within a universe of finite pool of life substances is pivotal in securing the well-being and socio-moral order of the community. However, these practices are also oriented towards preventing the nefarious appropriation of these substances by the sorcerer whose work is one of individual empowerment.14 Such siphoning off of substances may destabilise and throw off balance the system’s circulatory logic. Again we see with Lan how the concerns with the finite pool of life substances – or the gendered productive and reproductive capacities of women – generate novel cosmological understandings and demarcations (i.e. what may and may not be commodified). The machinic imagery of balance and circulation in this interpretation is not intended to insert a (crypto-)functionalist argument of systemic self-containment or units in perfect balance. Rather the opposite, namely to display the socially embedded workings of cosmological creation that relate to the forces of creation and degeneration. Lan’s argument of the thwarting of basic cycles of exchange resembles a similar historical process of state formation in Manica. As in many other post-colonies, the Mozambican state is popularly conceived in terms of a range of different repressive, extractive and violent entities and practices. Such an interpretation, wherein the work of the sorcerer siphoning off and illicitly expanding vital substances, bears resemblance to the overt and covert practices of the state. Through state elite’s collusion with banditry (Cramer 2007) as well as the entrepreneurial class of especially well-to-do Mozambicans, the state is also understood to be an apparatus feeding on and commanding the market and its commodities as well as a range of illicit economies of extraction and sorcerous predation. In this perspective, the emergent postsocialist entrepreneurial class and the Frelimo party and its state apparatus protrude as highly relevant for cosmological dynamics and are frequently referred to in discussions of wealth, accumulation, and transgression for economic purposes by my interlocutors. Similar understandings of connections between class, capital, and state are also widely supported by critical analysts of the Mozambican state formation and its class of beneficiaries. This development of asset stripping, the blending of legal and illegal businesses and 213

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the widespread use of the state apparatus for purposes of amassing of wealth has led Cramer in a sobering analysis of Mozambique to term it a ‘ … gangster democracy characterized by sharp inequalities’ (2007: 269). Needless to say, the Mozambican postcolonial state is not unique in being perceived in terms of its sorcerous dimensions: analysing the Nigerian economy, Apter (1993: 126 n.13) argues it is characterised by what he terms ‘alienated production’ in which the Nigerian ruling class is a ‘state class’ whose political economy is ‘based less on the exploitation of wage labour and more on the exploitation of state power, wealth and resources’. As such, Apter continues, ‘the state has become the ultimate witch, appearing to grow rich at the expense of its ‘children’’ (1993: 126 n.13). A similar connection is made by Lattas (2010: 32) in his work from Papua New Guinea analysing the impact of new economic forms: ‘Sorcery has become more frequent and powerful as the power to buy and sell has increased. Sorcery here is a violent space of death that grows alongside, and is coextensive with, commodity production’. Similarly in Mozambique, the comparatively amazing wealth which revolved around both Frelimo elite as well as the often party-connected business class, eludes both conventional economic analysis as well as popular imaginaries from Honde and Chimoio of enrichment (Sumich 2010b). Such visions of what one might term ‘dark accumulation’ is corroborated by the state’s failed re-distribution of resources, its corruption and its entanglement with international legal and illegal business activities, including being recognised as a regional hub for illegal drugs (Hanlon 2004). In such a particular configuration of the political and social, the state protrudes as a machinery that thwarts and covertly taps cycles of exchange and life substances assuming the same sorcerous forms as the owner of the maize mill. Conclusion This chapter has explored a particular instance where socially circumscribed productive and reproductive capacities, exemplified through the female capacities for enriching sadza through different bodily means, are challenged by an external form: the maize mill. While there is a historical contingency to commodification and the marketing of goods, the introduction of commercial milling generates a tension in the cosmological set-up of productive and re-productive capacities – what one could term an expansive instance of cosmological creation occurs where the economic entrepreneurship of milling is subsumed under already familiar interpretations of the destructive work of sorcery. Such creation occurs as milling engages more encompassing concerns than those related to the purely economical in a restricted sense: intervening in the intimate 214

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relations between production, substance/nurture, and gender, the maize-mill owner as a relatively novel figure in the urban landscape is experienced as threatening key relations of production and reproduction. In the Mozambican context, and also using some comparative material from Nigeria and Zimbabwe, I suggested how such work of re-casting the maize-mill owner as a sorcerer is also related to a trajectory of elitedriven economic extraction and state formation that has been intensified in the recent postsocialist neoliberal period. In this chapter I have suggested that such acts of intensity, crisis, and creation may be productively addressed through the notions of virtuality and vis formandi. Both notions are oriented towards the generative, responsive, and dynamic capacities inherent to human potentiality and cosmological creation when faced with changing political and economic circumstances, accentuating analytically a creative and diversified response to global processes of restructuring rather than assuming the universal form of occult economies. At the level of anthropological theorisation, seeing cosmology as a term with which to create productive and new connections – as was made between the novel figure of the maize-mill owner and long-term concerns with sorcerers – has also been demonstrated. Informed by a Deleuzian approach to the notion of concept as a dynamic and active relation, when theorising and analysing cosmology we need to cut across disciplinary as well as ethnographic boundaries. This should be done in order to – precisely – create novel and productive connections that may undergird the usefulness of notions such as ‘cosmology’. The text has also served as a reminder about the need for critical reflection on the argument that processes of globalisation, neoliberal economics or the digital revolution perforate hitherto neatly separate social orders and cosmological reckonings to such a large degree that the notion of apartness becomes obsolete. Contrary to such a position of the local being both irrelevant as well as remoulded by global processes (of millennial capitalism, for instance), this chapter has emphasised the centrality of situated and historically constituted social orders and cosmological horizons. Such an approach, premised on seeing the dynamics of cosmology as harbouring some level of uniformity and consistency, is analytically helpful if we are to reach any meaningful and locally informed explanation as to why small-scale maize-mill owners are targeted over a potential plethora of other entrepreneurs and their sites of accumulation. However – and again – we need to approach cosmology not in a static, bounded, and self-reproducing sense but as being in a state of perpetual becoming and re-creation. As the ethnography from Chimoio shows, cosmologies are horizons not only of particular visions and societal origins (i.e. looking backwards) but as sites of tension and 215

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creation that are present-oriented as well as future-oriented in their concern with highly gendered creative and degenerative forces. Notes 1

2 3 4 5

6 7

8

9

I wish to thank Allen Abramson and Martin Holbraad not only for inviting me to a very stimulating conference at UCL in May 2011, which gave me the opportunity to rethink this material within a cosmological frame, but also for providing rich and helpful comments, as did Manchester University Press’s two anonymous reviewers. I have also received important input from Esmeralda Mariano at Universidade Eduardo Mondlane in Maputo and my gratitude is also extended to her. See also Bertelsen (2009a), Israel (2009) and Sumich (2010a) for empirically founded critiques of the notion of occult economies in Mozambique. The place name ‘Honde’ is fictional and the names of interlocutors here are anonymised in order to protect their identity in a highly politicised context. See also Sheldon (2002) for an overview of women’s work in rural and urban contexts in Mozambique. Significantly, they are also revealed in funeral rituals – such as the kubatidzana ritual of widow purification following a husband’s death. During kubatidzana and other rituals, maize meal signifies the household’s continued productive and re-productive capacities faced with the spectre of death (Bertelsen 2011). Cooking stones and their gendered importance for hearth, household, and health are treated by a number of anthropologists (e.g. see Ardener 1972). In Northern Mozambique, mothers and aunts steaming, fogging, and smoking the vagina of girls is sometimes also part of the common practice of stretching the labia (Bagnol and Mariano 2012: 61). See also Broch-Due (1999) for a comparative case from Turkana for relations between procreation, nurture, and power analysed in the context of creation stories and ritual, or Devisch’s (1993) analysis of healing, gendered production, and the household and kinship dynamics among the Yaka. This act is also contrary to kurha nhama io munhu – the sorcerer’s cannibalistic craving for human meat – that is characteristic of certain forms of sorcery. Jacobson-Widding (1999: 170–173), however, offers an alternative analysis based on the rules surrounding the cooking of sadza – a process involving potent symbols of vaginas and penises and the production of semen-like substance (the gruel-like sadza before it ‘hardens’) (see also Aschwanden 1982 [1976]: 187ff). These aspects she relates to male and female sexuality and their symbolic expression as well as ritual contexts where other semen-like substances, such as maize beer, are important. Acknowledging Jacobson-Widding’s general analysis, my interpretation of substance and female capacities adds a dimension of agency sometimes missing in her symbolist analysis. Precisely the imagery of the vagina as gateway to cosmological creation has also been identified both in works dealing with Mozambican vaginal 216

Maize mill sorcery practices (see Bagnol and Mariano 2012) as well as in anthropological works dealing with sexuality and the female body in general (S. Ardener 1987). 10 Charcoal is, however, important in relation to fire (muriro) as a great range of ethnographical and ethno-archaeological works in the area and beyond has also asserted (Sætersdal 2004). Further, while ash is associated with sexuality (linked to fire), sorcery, dangerous debris, and death (Aschwanden 1982 [1976]), the production, distribution, and sale of charcoal appears to be severed from these potentially dangerous aspects of ash and fire. 11 However, the ingestion of foodstuffs are potentially dangerous occasions as the gates to the body are opened to possible covert malign forces of sorcery (uroi) or harmful medicine (mutombo). In a study of Manyika ritual and gendered cosmologies, Jacobson-Widding points out that the orifices are central to understanding self in relation to others: ‘By letting other people “enter” through these gates or by letting them enter symbolically by sharing the same food, you let them become part of what is located inside your own body, that is, your “self”’ (Jacobson-Widding 1999: 305). Therefore, in terms of origins, production, and circulation and in both ritual and everyday settings of consumption, ufu is a materialisation of sociality, of gendered reproductive capabilities and, at the same time, a shared substance. 12 For anthropology, a similar argument about culture is made by Wagner (1981 [1975]: 52): ‘The necessity of invention is given by cultural convention, and the necessity of cultural convention is given by invention’. 13 ‘The virtual is opposed not to the real but to the actual. The virtual is fully real in so far as it is virtual … Real without being actual, ideal without being abstract; and symbolic without being fictional’ (Deleuze 2004 [1968]: 260). 14 There are two concrete empirical examples here one could explore: that life substances appropriated may be inserted into novel settings in terms of the hunger for meat in general and especially human meat. It may also be seen in the context of the siphoning off of life-forces through zombification or the feared figure of the chupa-sangue – a nocturnal sorcerous creation that eventually kills its victim through repeated extractions of blood. Secondly, there is the fear of the sorcerer expanding by illicit means through medicine (mutombo), the finite pool of life substances and its socially sanctioned and practiced system of circulation.

References Apter, Andrew. 1993. Atinga revisited: Yoruba witchcraft and the Cocoa economy, 1950–1951. In J. Comaroff and J. Comaroff (eds), Modernity and its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Postcolonial Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pp. 111–128. Ardener, Edwin. 1972. Belief and the problem of women. In J.S. La Fontaine (ed.), The Interpretation of Ritual. Abingdon: Tavistock. Pp. 135–158.

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Cosmological constitutions Ardener, Shirley. 1987. A note on gender iconography: the vagina. In Pat Caplan (ed.), The Cultural Construction of Sexuality. London: Routledge. Pp. 113–142. Arnfred, Signe. 2007. Sex, food and female power: discussion of data material from Northern Mozambique. Sexualities 10(2): 141–158. Artur, Domingos do Rosário. 1999. Cidade de Chimoio. Chimoio, Mozambique: Arquivo do Património Cultural (ARPAC). Aschwanden, Herbert. 1982 [1976]. Symbols of Life. An Analysis of the Consciousness of the Karanga. Gweru, Zimbabwe: Mambo Press. Bagnol, Brigitte and Esmeralda Mariano. 2012. Gender, sexuality and vaginal practices. Maputo, Mozambique: Universidade Eduardo Mondlane. Beidelmann, T.O. 1966. Swazi royal ritual. Africa 36(4): 373–405. Bertelsen, Bjørn Enge. 2009a. Multiple sovereignties and summary justice in Mozambique: a critique of some legal anthropological terms. Social analysis 53(3): 123–147. —— 2009b. Sorcery and death squads: transformations of state, sovereignty, and violence in postcolonial Mozambique. In Bruce Kapferer and Bjørn Enge Bertelsen (eds), Crisis of the State: War and Social Upheaval. New York: Berghahn Books. Pp. 210–240. —— 2011. ‘Entering the red sands’: the corporality of punishment and imprisonment in Chimoio, Mozambique. Journal of Southern African Studies 37(3): 611–626. —— forthcoming. Violent Becomings: State Formation, Culture and Power in Mozambique. New York: Berghahn Books. Broch-Due, Vigdis. 1999. Creation and the multiple female body: Turkana perspectives on gender and cosmos. In H.L. Moore, T. Sanders, and B. Kaare (eds), Those Who Play with Fire. Gender, Fertility and Transformation in East and Southern Afrioca. London: The Athlone Press. Pp. 153–184. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1987 [1975]. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Cambridge: Polity Press. —— 2007 [1999]. Figures of the Thinkable. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Chingono, Mark. 1996. The State, Violence and Development: The Political Economy of War in Mozambique. Avebury: Aldershot. Clément, Jean A.P. and Shanaka J. Peiris, eds. 2008. Post-stabilization Economics in Sub-Saharan Africa. Lessons from Mozambique. Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund. Comaroff, Jean and John L. Comaroff. 1999. Occult economies and the violence of abstraction: notes from the South African postcolony. American Ethnologist 26(2): 279–303. —— 2001. Millennial capitalism: first thoughts on a second coming. In J. Comaroff and J.L. Comaroff (eds), Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pp. 1–56. Cramer, Christopher. 2007. Violence in Developing Countries. War, Memory, Progress. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 2004 [1968]. Difference and Repetition. London: Continuum. —— and Félix Guattari. 1994 [1991]. What is Philosophy? London: Verso.

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Maize mill sorcery Devisch, René. 1993. Weaving the Threads of Life: The Khita Gyn-eco-logical Healing Cult Among the Yaka. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Douglas, Mary. 2007 [1966]. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge. Englund, Harri and James Leach. 2000. Ethnography and the meta-narratives of modernity. Current Anthropology 41(2): 225–248. Eriksen, Annelin. 2008. Gender, Christiantiy and Change in Vanuatu: An Analysis of Social Movements in North Ambrym. Farnham: Ashgate. Frazer, Sir James. 1993 [1922]. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. Ware: Wordsworth Editions. Geschiere, Peter. 1997. The Modernity of Witchcraft. Charlottesville, VI: University of Virginia Press. Goody, Jack. 1976. Production and Reproduction: A Comparative Study Of The Domestic Domain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Handelman, Don. 2008. Afterword: returning to cosmology – thoughts on the positioning of belief. Social analysis 51(1): 181–196. Hanlon, Joseph. 2004. Renewed land debate and ‘cargo cult’ in Mozambique. Journal of Southern African Studies 30(3): 603–625. Israel, Paolo. 2009. The war of lions: witch-hunts, occult idioms and post-­ socialism in Northern Mozambique. Journal of Southern African Studies 35(1): 155–174. Jacobson-Widding, Anita. 1999. Chapungu. The Bird That Never Drops a Feather: Male and Female Identities in an African Society. Uppsala, Sweden: Uppsala University. Kapferer, Bruce. 2002. Outside all reason. Magic, sorcery and epistemology in anthropology. Social analysis 46(3):1–30. —— and Bjørn Enge Bertelsen. 2009. Introduction: the crisis of power and reformations of the state in globalizing realities. In B. Kapferer and B.E. Bertelsen (eds), Crisis of the State: War and Social Upheaval. New York: Berghahn Books. Pp. 1–26. Kirtsoglou, Elisabeth. 2010. Introduction: rhetoric and the workings of power – the social contract in crisis. Social Analysis 54(1): 1–14. Lan, David. 2000 [1989]. Resistance to the present by the past: mediums and money in Zimbabwe. In J. Parry and M. Bloch (eds), Money and the Morality of Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 191–208. Lattas, Andrew. 2010. Dreams, Madness, and Fairy Tales in New Britain. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1968 [1958]. Structural Anthropology. London: Allen Lane. Meillassoux, Claude. 1981 [1975]. Maidens, Meal and Money: Capitalism and the Domestic Community. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rio, Knut M. and Olaf H. Smedal. 2008. Totalization and detotalization: alternatives to hierarchy and individualism. Anthropological theory 8(3): 233–254. Sætersdal, Tore Walderhaug. 2004. Places, people and ancestors: archaeology and society in Manica, Mozambique. Dr. Art. thesis, University of Bergen. Sheldon, Kathleen. 2002. Pounders of Grain: A History of Women, Work and Politics in Mozambique. Portsmouth: Heinemann.

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Cosmological constitutions Sumich, Jason. 2010a. Does all that is solid melt into air? Questioning ‘neo-­ liberal’ occult economies in Mozambique. Kronos 36(1): 157–173. —— 2010b. The party and the state: Frelimo and social stratification in post-­ socialist Mozambique. Development and change 41(4): 679–698. Taussig, Michael. 1980. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 1992 [1986]. From the Enemy’s Point of View: Humanity and Divinity in an Amazonian Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wagner, Roy. 1981 [1975]. The Invention of Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Willerslev, Rane. 2007. Soul Hunters. Hunting, Animism, and Personhood Among the Siberian Yukaghirs. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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Part III Embedded modernities: cosmos, science, and the movies

10 A politico-astral cosmology in contemporary Russia Caroline Humphrey

This chapter1 will explore some cosmologies abroad in present-day Russia. They represent what people understand to be universally valid knowledge about the cosmos, the earth, and humanity’s place in such a vast environment – an amalgam of ancient and the most up-to-date knowledge. Such cosmologies might well have been concerned with current world issues – such as demography, energy resources, catastrophes or global warming. However, the ‘facts’ most gripping for these protagonists are scientific discoveries on the one hand and shifts in political power on the other, and the resulting cosmologies are called upon to answer the question: ‘How should we exist as humans in these circumstances?’ These are cosmologies in which ‘gods’ coexist with planets, electrons, black holes, and mysterious, invisible cosmic forces, and where concatenations of vitality cause the rise and fall of civilisations. As discussed in the Introduction to this volume, an earlier anthropology tended to understand cosmology as a static backdrop of representations, a timeless and ongoing set of concepts, but these post-Soviet cosmologies are both active and temporary. They have their own histories, and right now they wax and wane in popularity; they are subject to self-critique and transmogrification, though elements in them do not entirely disappear. Perhaps we can relate this volatility to the purposes to which cosmological thinking is mostly put: using available knowledge and extraordinary experiences to deal with an immediate future that is imagined in t­ wenty-first-century political space. Thus, two points to make at the outset are first, that cosmology (in the anthropological sense) should not be seen as forming an archaic antithesis to science. To the people inhabiting these cosmologies they are continuous with

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science in general and astrophysics in particular. Second, that cosmology in contemporary Russia cannot be tidied away into a capsule called something like ‘religion’ and separated from practical affairs. The cosmologies I will discuss are eminently political cosmologies. Indeed they are aimed to change power relations in the world and some versions are explicitly directed against what is seen as Euro-American values and global domination. The idea that an anthropological notion of cosmology may be applicable to contemporary politics was perhaps most forcefully put in Bruce Kapferer’s Legends of People, Myths of State (1988). The argument was that nationalistic discourse and practice in Sri Lanka and Australia takes the form of what anthropologists ordinarily associate with cosmology, such as myths of origin, primordial images of national destiny, and particular orderings of quasi-divine powers (leadership, the state, kingship, prophets, ‘the people’, and so forth). The Russian materials bear many parallels to this, but I intend to go further than Kapferer, to suggest a much more explicit sense in which politics is cosmological. Referring to the case of Kalmykia, a small republic inside Russia, this chapter will show that here the people themselves are concerned to make deliberate arguments to the effect that politics and cosmos are mutually constitutive. Thus, this is not just a matter of the anthropologist deciding ‘analytically’ to think of these political preoccupations in cosmological terms, but rather that the actors themselves see cosmology as the form politics should – almost has to – take. My analysis is therefore precipitated by a particular indigenous investment in uniting these two spheres. In effect, this is to suggest the possibility of a specific kind of politics – different, for example, from realpolitik – one that grounds itself as a cosmology. I shall return to this argument about politics later in the chapter, but meanwhile: what kind of ‘cosmology’ do these contemporary and educated people have in mind? Astrophysics and world politics seem strange bedfellows in the cosmological imagination – surely, one might think, they are two utterly different and incommensurable kinds of reality. They are brought into relation, however, by one pervasive ‘scientific’ idea of the way things are – that of ceaselessly mobile, universally present, energy – and by a number of hazy, yet fertile bridging notions. Many of these are relatively unfamiliar outside the Russian context, like the sphere of distributed intelligence (the noosphere), the concept of ‘universal reason’ (razum), or the notion of ‘passionarity’ (ethnic and national vitality, passionarnost’), all of which serve to connect the energies existing in nature with those of human entities. Others seem like familiar denizens of anthropological cosmologies, such as ancestors, deities, planets, Buddhas, symbolic colours, and named ethnic groups. In

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the writings of the cosmology-spinners, however, even such seemingly familiar entities become strange, transcendent and ‘scientised’. One fundamental story behind the new cosmologies is that Russians – that is both Russians proper and the various peoples indigenous to Russia – form a specific Eurasian civilisation. This, it is held, has ancient roots going back thousands of years to pre-Christian times, and it is characterised by its organic quality, its cyclicity and its vitality, all of which are contrasted with the mechanical quality, historicism, and linear time of Western civilisation. The ancestors, in such a view, are not just the early Slavs but congeries of little-known peoples of the steppe, such as the Black Tatars, the Jurchen, the Sogdians, or the Avars, along with their ancestors going back to a misty past. To quote a prominent contemporary writer: ‘Our blood and our land is filled with the raw spirit of these ancestors, their passion, their strength, their particular light and special energy … We should begin to speak as our own “I”, we should begin to love and study each element of our past and search in this past for orienting paths for the future’ (Dugin 2002: 538). ‘Russia’ – i.e. the essential ontological entity of Russia – is said to be alive to the degree that it preserves a store of ‘passionarity’ and does not spend it all through technologies, state bureaucracy, and rationalistic cultural activities. To quote again, ‘Russia is alive and especially valuable when … primitive, original energies seethe inside it, energies connected with the colossal interaction of solar, cosmic and organic rays. The world in which we find ourselves … is alive and pulses with human and non-human populations. This sacred energy of the Whole (Tselogo) splashes out in a turbulent, magnificent flow of being, creating from its own sources the energy of ethno-genesis and points of strong passionarity. And the secret sources of this energy should be searched for in the East, in the depths of Eurasia’ (Dugin 2002: 539). So writes Aleksandr Dugin, a politologist with close ties to the Kremlin and the Russian military, whose influence, as we shall see, over the efflorescence of indigenous cosmic thought in the far-flung province of Kalmykia on the shores of the Caspian Sea has been considerable. I have mentioned the historical and temporary character of present cosmological ideas. So there are some questions that should be addressed straight away: first, what is the genealogy of these cosmological ideas in Russian thought? And second, why call them ‘cosmologies’ at all, why not – given the political interestedness of writers like Dugin – use that seemingly exhausted old word, ‘ideology’? In the argument to follow I shall suggest that to employ ‘ideology’ in a Marx-derived sense would indeed point a dagger at the heart of cosmology, since such a critical usage de-reifies terms, notes their strategic character, and assigns ideas to a particular social origin. In Russia, such debunking does happen, in 225

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waves of disgusted disbelief, and hence the fleeting character of many cosmological attempts. Yet, somehow, similar kinds of empyreal ideas seem to arise again. For the anthropologist to use ideology as the lens would be to deny the human urge again and again to re-cosmologise the world (see Kapferer, Chapter 13 this volume). A genealogy of Eurasian cosmology in the Russian intellectual landscape Working backwards into history, let us start with Aleksandr Dugin, who is unquestionably the leading light and most public of the metropolitan theorists of Eurasia. He is part of a different milieu from the ‘old’ Russian intelligentsia, the one most familiar to Western readers, with its literary heritage from the nineteenth century, its antecedents among Soviet dissidents, and its critical questioning of the autocratic state. Dugin was born in Moscow in 1962 in the family of a high-ranking Soviet military intelligence officer, he was trained in the Moscow Aviation Institute, and soon he began work as a journalist. After the demise of the Soviet Union he moved into political commentary as a proponent of fascism. This was to be a Russian fascism, without the ‘excesses’ found in Nazi Germany, a ‘genuine, true, radically revolutionary fascist fascism’. Before long Dugin distanced himself from overt fascism to promote the Eurasia Movement, which is aimed inter alia to create a new, anti-bourgeois, anti-American revolution. He argued that the new Eurasian empire would be constructed on the fundamental principle of the common enemy: the rejection of Atlanticism, the strategic control of the USA, and the refusal to allow liberal values to dominate us. This would provide a common civilisational impulse as the basis of a political and strategic union (Dugin 1997: 216). Dugin is at the sharp, far right, edge of a movement whose history goes back via the Soviet-era Eurasianist Lev Gumilev, to the émigrés who first proposed a theory of Eurasia in Paris in the 1920s, and above all to the philosopher Vladimir Vernadsky (1863–1945). Pervasive in this stream of thought is the notion of the autonomy of Eurasia as a single anthropological entity (Bassin 1991: 15) and the ‘scientific’ or ‘natural’ explanation given for the rise and fall of civilisations in human history. Gumilev argues that the defining element of human groupings is not so much a people’s heritable genetics as its organic emplacement in a geological/climatic/botanical/zoological landscape ([Russian] landshaft). Thus a group’s character is produced not by internal biological features in themselves but rather by the latter’s determination by the external conditions of a given natural environment. As Mark Bassin points out, this ecological determination supports a ‘scientised’ view of ethnicity – or 226

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indeed a civilisation – as a natural entity that functions in accordance with the same laws that govern the rest of the natural universe (Bassin 2009: 873). This idea rested on Vernadsky’s earlier notion of the b­ iosphere, the aggregate total of the earth’s living matter, which is organised into a single organic system (2009: 877). We can begin to see the kind of cosmological subjectification proposed through this holistic Zeitgeist in Gumilev’s statement, ‘Ethnic belonging, which manifests itself in human consciousness, is not a product of this consciousness. It obviously reflects a dimension of the nature of the person, which lies much deeper; [it is] a biological dimension located beyond consciousness and psychology, on the boundaries of the physiological’ (Gumilev 1967: 40–41). Critics have pointed out that such a primordial view, especially when applied to ethnicity, could give support to racism and anti-Semitism (Bassin 2009: 891; Shnirelman and Panarin 2001), but more germane to this chapter is the political fate of the ideas. Gumilev was bitterly attacked by Soviet establishment ethnographers, because they supported the official line that ethnic groups are socially and not naturally created, hence are not immutable and will soon merge (sliyat’) to form a single Soviet people. After 1991, however, Gumilev sprang into immense popularity. Virtually all nationalities were delighted to contest the previous official discourse of sliyanie with this useful notion of their own necessary ethnic differences derived from the objective conditions of the natural world. Writers eagerly accepted the idea of a ‘sacred bond’ between the ethnos and its environment, and the relevant landscape was all too easily identified with a political territory (Bassin 2009: 895). This is one reason why, as will be discussed later in the chapter, the influence of this historically emergent stream of Eurasian thought in Russia today is not confined to academic theorising but has come to have immense operative potential in diverse spheres of public life. These range from practical discussions of geopolitical strategy for small republics like Buryatia (Rodionov 2002) or that of Russia as a whole, to boundary disputes, debates about the energy crisis, national commemorations, party political speech-making, or public art. Meanwhile, fused into much of this discourse, as the earlier quotations from Dugin indicate, are metaphysical pronouncements of scientists, concerning for example ‘cosmoplanetary unity’ involving vitalism, the noosphere and the anthropic principle (Pyureev, Kaznacheev, and Dmitriev 2009). Of course, there are critics of many aspects of this discursive trend in both the humanities and sciences. The historian Sergei Glebov, for example, explains the emergence of Eurasianism in relation to political circumstances: it was created in the 1920s by a religious-minded generation forced to leave Russia after the revolution, but rejecting modern Europe’s individualistic and materialist spirit. This was an emotional, not 227

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an intellectual movement, which became illiberal, nationalist, and sometimes almost fascist (Glebov 2010: 1–2). Today, virtually all mainstream Russian scientists of the younger generation dismiss the vitalism and so forth. Yet it is worth noting that the (mostly elderly) scientists advocating ‘cosmic’ ideas have high qualifications in conventional biophysics, astrophysics, geology, mineralogy, etc. and are academicians with influence, while Eurasianist historians, geographers, etc. are plentiful in academic departments of the social sciences. Eurasianism does not have to take an extravagantly cosmological form and can be more of a plain geographical idea. Nevertheless, there persists an institutional situation in which it is possible for scientific cosmology (astrophysics) not only to coexist but even to merge with metaphysical cosmology; and publications, TV programmes, etc. pour out along these lines to tempt the public. In the provinces, local thinkers have drawn inspiration from the same early twentieth-century sources, adapting them to their own political-cultural contexts. The main example discussed in this chapter is Aleksei Nuskhaev, who until around the year 2000 was the State Adviser for Ideology of the Republic of Kalmykia. Nuskhaev was born in exile, after the whole Kalmyk people had been deported to Central Asia and Siberia during the Second World War, and his childhood was spent amid extreme poverty and discrimination. He worked in many labouring jobs until the Kalmyk people were able to return to their homeland on the shores of the Caspian Sea, then trained as a low-level doctor, and rose to become an anaesthetist. He adopted wholeheartedly Gumilev’s idea of the bond between a people and its ecological environment, but as we shall see went much further in a visionary direction. He is author of many books and pamphlets, arguing for a ‘radical conservatism’ aimed at transforming the obscure land of Kalmykia into a leading exemplar of a new spiritual way of life for Russia as a whole. Both Dugin and Nuskhaev are close to politicians and Russia’s widely branching security services. They have the function of ‘idea masters’ for the state, and the emergence of such roles must be related to the fact that people, at least of middle-age and older generations, are accustomed to the presence of an explicit ideology and the Communist Party as its arbiter. Among the rulers of the various polities and sub-polities of Russia, there is a demand for clear ruling ideas – in other words, ideas that will have legitimacy among the electorate and justify the policies being formed. So, again, why not just talk about ideology? After all, with a more or less Marxist notion of ideology quite a lot of Eurasianism could be thought of in just that way, as the ideological doctrine not so much of an economically defined class as of a politically defined ‘estate’, that of presidents, governors, officers, and their advisers, whose overriding

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concern is to create a rationale for holding their own political entity together after the chaotic fragmentation of the Yeltsin years in the 1990s. Why ‘cosmology’? Nevertheless, I believe we do have to reach for the idea of cosmology, because geopolitical concerns are far from all there is to the ideas presented here. Indeed, given the ‘loaded’ character of both ideology and cosmology in Russia, this could be something of a test case for making an ethnographically grounded distinction between the two. At one level the cosmological can be seen in both the content and the intent of the ideas. Not only do they involve ‘mapping’ the cosmos and specifying the beings (energies, deities, planets, etc.) within it, as mentioned earlier, but Schrempp’s definition of cosmology, which is even broader than that used by Kapferer, also applies: ‘the principles of order that support integrated forms of being’ (1992: ix–x). However, my main reasons for advocating the idea of political cosmology are different: they are first that one cannot conceive of a full sense of politics inside an ideology, for the initial and crucial political act is involved in setting it up; and second, that the term ideology in its common sociological usages tends to be self-defeating as regards investigating the kind of politics involved. If ideology is, as given by the first definition in both Russian and English dictionaries,2 ‘a body of ideas that reflects the beliefs and interests of a society, class, or political party’, that statement is already suggestive of the nature of what is going on. It becomes far more so with a Marx-derived conception, which would include notions such as ideology as an instrument of social reproduction, as a legitimation of power and economic interests, and as a ‘false’ projection of the class consciousness of the dominant to the whole of society. The very terms (social reproduction, class, instrument, interests, etc.) define a kind of politics that is known in advance. And if we move to the language of political realism, where politics is based on power and pragmatism, and the use of ideology is understood to be yet more manipulative, we are certain that realpolitik is the name of the game. But the problem, ethnographically, is that for much of the past twenty years the politics of Kalmykia has not been conducted in either a class-struggle or a ‘realist’ way. To describe it using the explanatory framework of pragmatics, which is always possible, and indeed is the conventional approach, would be to underestimate and even misunderstand what has been going on. The ardent President of Kalmykia did, however, appoint a State Adviser for Ideology, as already mentioned. I suggest that the term ‘ideology’ here was not being used in the senses mentioned above – for that would

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be to impute a cynically manipulative character to his own government – but in the second meaning given in Russian (and English) dictionaries: ‘the totality of integrated ideas and requirements forming the basis of concrete actions, decisions, etc.’ (Kuznetsov 2004: 375). This, I argue, is in effect a definition of cosmology as anthropologists use the term, and not so different from that quoted from Schrempp earlier. The President may have called it ideology, but what he and his State Adviser were doing was creating a cosmology. This endeavour, to understand a politics that conducts itself in terms of a cosmology, may not seem very new. Tambiah on the ‘galactic polity’, Geertz on Negara the ‘theatre state’, and Taussig and Coronil on magical states all seem like exercises of the same kind. Nevertheless, the point I wish to make can be most clearly explained by comparison with Geertz (1980). Rather than seeing politics as some kind of cosmologically informed performance (the ‘theatre state’), the suggestion here is that all kinds of activities one would commonly associate with politics – power, statecraft, governance, legislation, education policy, elections, etc. – can be pervaded by and concerned with cosmology (as I shall describe for the policies arrived at in Kalmykia through the advice of congeries of scientists, clairvoyants, and people with the experience of being abducted by aliens). If Geertz, broadly put, creates an image of a state whose power depends on the compelling quality of phantasmagorical performances, in the case I shall describe the putative realms of political action and cosmic involvement are one and the same. Closer to the insight I am attempting to reach here is Sheldon Pollock’s The Language of the Gods in the World of Men (2006), since, when trying to explain the Sanskrit cosmopolis and the vernacular kingdoms that followed it in South Asia, Pollock explicitly rejects (as Geertz never quite does) ‘intellectually mechanical, culturally homogenizing, theoretically naïve, empirically false and tediously predictable’ legitimation theory and its logic of instrumental reason (2006: 18). Pollock proposes instead a highly nuanced account of a pre-modern political life conducted through a cosmopolitan culture – specifically through literati across an immense geographical space being trained to comparable standards and producing political literature that circulated across this space. In these literatures archaic cosmologies coexisted with later models of geographical understanding. These fantastic visions of space that piled cosmic spheres upon spheres to total seven, fourteen, or twenty-one – long a source of amusement to Western observers (‘Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down’) – seem to have coexisted easily with the more quotidian mental and verbal maps of the world through which people actually moved. Such visions clearly performed other cultural tasks that were complementary to and

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not in contradiction with worldly knowledge. Following yet another logic – different from the organisation of worldly space and more concrete than the cosmic spaces – were the various geospheres generated by religious practices, such as pilgrimage circuits (Pollock 2006: 192). In what follows I endeavour to show that two, somewhat contradictory, processes are central to the situation in contemporary Russia. The first is that when understandings of ‘science’ are integral to cosmology, the effect is to elide Pollock’s categories of ‘worldly knowledge’ and ‘cosmic spheres’. Rather than ‘easily coexisting’, they can, at least for some people some of the time, merge into one another. The second process does almost the opposite. Instead of occultising science, decades of historical experience of disappointments and let-downs have made many Kalmyk people hypercritical of cosmologies that include political promises. If the latter are not fulfilled, a whole structure is seen as a deception, and people turn instead to the evidence of their own eyes and senses. Conventionally this might be explained as a victory for pragmatism over cosmology. But as I shall explain later, often it is not quite that. Cosmology in Kalmyk political life In 1993, shortly after the demise of the USSR, a young and exceedingly rich Kalmyk businessman called Kirsan Ilyumzhinov was elected President of Kalmykia, this being a poor and mostly arid steppe territory on the Caspian Sea. Formerly an Autonomous Soviet Social Republic, it became a full republic under Yeltsin and Ilyumzhinov eagerly extended as far as he could its sovereign powers. There was great popular enthusiasm for the young President’s fusion of Eurasian ideas – Kalmykia as a place of ‘passionary’ and noble steppe traditions and spirituality – with an optimistic business culture. He removed the previous ruling apparatchiks, replacing them with his own Buzava people, who were furthermore unusually young leaders, since they belonged to his own generation – mostly in their thirties. His government took over as much as it could of the business opportunities previously developed by private entrepreneurs. A great enterprise called ‘Kalmykia’ was created, combining trade, manufacturing, finance, and economic planning, in order to concentrate the largest and most powerful businesses in his hands. ‘The Republic,’ Ilyumzhinov declared, ‘is one corporation.’ Previous politicians and bureaucrats now decided to shift into business careers. Meanwhile, since the presidential mega-firm was the name of the game, erstwhile independent entrepreneurs had few options but to work with it, and many of them also took up politics as deputies to the republic parliament (Guchinova 2003: 134–135).

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What is remarkable is that this tightly integrated political-economic entity became infused with cosmology. It is not just that Ilyumzhinov presented himself as an exemplar of Gumilov’s Eurasian theory, appearing on a white charger in quasi-Mongolian dress, building elaborate ‘gateways to the East’, and supporting Buddhist establishments. He also proclaimed a universal cosmology that would provide the conceptual environment for the special qualities of Kalmykia. To understand this, we need to return to the founding father referred to by virtually all Russian cosmological movements, Vladimir Vernadsky. He started out as a geologist, but later became a general theoretician of all natural sciences. In a series of lectures in Paris in the 1920s, he popularised, along with Teilhard de Chardin and Henri Bergson, the idea of the noosphere, the sphere of human thought. The noosphere is the third in a succession of phases of development of the Earth, after the geosphere (inanimate matter) and the biosphere (biological life). The idea was that the evolution of human cognition with industrialisation, more complex social networks and advanced technology brings about a fundamental transformation of the biosphere by the noosphere. In Vernadsky, the domination of the noosphere comes about through a mysterious elemental process. To quote: ‘The basic distinctive property of biogeochemical energy is clearly and forcefully demonstrated in the increase of the free energy of the biosphere over the course of geological time, and is evident in an especially dramatic manner in the transition from the biosphere to the noosphere’ (Vernadsky 2000–01 [1935]: 30). This becomes metaphysics with Vernadsky’s theory that the principles of life and cognition are essential features of the Earth’s evolution and must have been implicit in the earth all along.3 Vernadsky’s version of the noosphere idea opens up a space for two key cosmological ideas: reason and energy. The noosphere is made up of razum, a word that is difficult to translate into English – it means reason or intellect, but having a quality of universality. Contemporary Eurasian thinkers divide razum into two types, the practical and the pure. To quote a writer called Yugai, practical reason, i.e. practical razum, answers the question ‘how to live?’ and implies ‘the deformation of the spirit and the planets, leading to ecological and social dead-ends’. It chooses to answer all problems with force, and its apogee was Marxism, appearing in Russia in the alien and destructive form of Leninism. In distinction from this earth-bound, foreign form of reason is the Russian cosmic spirit of mobile, pure reason. This latter answers the question ‘why live?’ – in other words, what is the meaning of life? (Yugai 1998: 144). In the speculative works of academicians Pyureev, Kaznacheev, and Dmitriev, all scientists, we find the Vernadskian argument that the cosmos is pervaded with razum, that razum implies vitality, that the cosmos is therefore alive, 232

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and that even before the emergence of humanity there was a ‘planetary intellect’ or ‘cosmic consciousness’, so that our task should be somehow to establish contact with this elemental form of razum (2009: 90–1). The manifestation and perfection of the pure form of razum has become central to the new cosmologies. In Dugin’s works this becomes an argument for the central role of the ‘ideocratic state’, the Eurasian state that should be ruled by the power of ideas or ideals (2002: 514).4 Adamov, a member of the Russian Academy of Medical-Technical Sciences, writes that ‘State systems creating the wellbeing of their citizens can be constructed only on the basis of the scientifically worked out theory of noosphere-ology’ (2001: 1). In the provinces we find more grounded and historical, as it were, forms of the idea. Ilyumzhinov’s adviser Nuskhaev, for example, appropriated the Vedas as an ideal instance of razum. One of Nuskhaev’s books is called Vedic Russia: from the Times of the Mindlessness of the Descendants to the Eternal Reason (Razum) of the Ancestors: a Textbook for Life (Nuskhaev 1998). In this work Nuskhaev describes how the mindless era of the descendants, in other words today, is ruled by a type of humanity he calls irod,5 the sated and cunning type who waves the banner of capitalism. The irod, with his ignoble interest in money, power and property is fated to be cut off from High Reason (Vyschii Razum). Human reason, according to Nuskhaev, is composed of three elements: intellect (um), spirit (dukh), and soul (dusha), and ‘the Vedas’ for him seem to be certain sacred sounds that when correctly understood by all three human faculties contain the wisdom of ancient times. Everything in fact has its Vedic form, which is an invisible higher materiality, as opposed to the low, visible materiality around us. These higher forms include the ‘energy body’ of humans, which is the element of their existence (bytie) in the eternal system of High Reason (1998: 16). However, his textbook advises accessing more earthly sources of wisdom in order to live a Vedic life, namely respecting nature, harmony, wise folk, and ancestral ways. ‘Russia is packed with the materials of the people’s vedosophia’, he writes. ‘Any contemporary political leader, would jump out of his pants if he were advised to consult not with the Russian Academy of Sciences or foreign irods but with his own mother, father, granddad, granny and neighbours from the village where he was born, i.e. with the Vedic sages of his own people’ (1998: 10). Nuskhaev claims that it was from this resource of ancestral folk wisdom, connected to ancient metaphysical High Reason, that he advised Ilyumzhinov during the 1990s and early 2000s. The advice was particularly telling in the sphere of education, aiming to produce generations of young Kalmyk citizens with advanced cognitive-spiritual qualities. An example was the policy to teach the ancient Kalmyk form of chess, as well as modern chess, in all schools to hone intellect and strategic thinking. 233

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Nuskhaev also advanced several ‘laws’ (zakon) of the Vedic life, such as the law of education (drawing out the natural genius in each child), the law of self-education (opening the door to the inner logo-memory), the law of medicine (going beyond limited medical science to access the wide compass of planetary and true folk medicine), the law of the culture of the people (return to the eternal wisdom of the folk), and the law of the Vedocratic way of life (uniting the inner nature of the human with the nature surrounding us). Amongst all these laws, there is also the law of motivated economy – the idea that economy may serve humankind only if it is causal or causative, designed to satisfy the needs of the razumnyi human to a strategic degree (1998: 151–162). How did such advice settle into the opinions and practice of the President? Ilyumzhinov’s writings and newspaper interviews provide some indications. Throughout his time in power, politics for him was primarily a matter of transforming people’s minds and creating a phalanx of those enlightened by razum. ‘My ideology,’ he wrote in 1997, ‘is my politics, my strategy.’ He continued: ‘Cadres are the key to the victory of razum. Cadres are the key to the flowering of spiritual life, wise life, or life itself. The politics of Razum are the politics of Wisdom, and the politics of Wisdom are the politics of Life. I define the personal requirements of anyone pretending to cadre work, or to an official post, very simply: by his ability to create [a] Living Idea, along with the vision of how to translate it into [a] Living Deed’ (Ilyumzhinov 1997b: 11, 19). When I first read these sentences I skimmed over them as mellifluous rhetoric, far from any real decisions. But Kalmyk friends stared blankly at my interpretation, as if they could not understand what I saw as a ‘normal’ reading. But that is what Ilyumzhinov did, they said. He liked amazing Ideas. He appointed a poet as his Minister for the Media. As for the economy, Ilyumzhinov himself came up with the splendid Idea of a Kalmyk offshore zone, and later, when this facility was taken advantage of by outside businessmen, he appointed a Kalmyk, Mendyaev, as Minister of Property, after Mendyaev had proposed a fine plan (Idea) whereby the President could re-assert control. The offshore facility was to bring in great wealth, and not only for the Kalmyks but even more so for oligarchs from Russia – and this provided Ilyumzhinov with grateful patrons in Moscow. Education became a particular preoccupation of the President, and the following excerpt from an interview mentions the ideas behind his school programme. Interviewer: In your schools there is a subject called ethno-planetary thinking. Please explain what that is. Ilyumzhinov: In 1994, I, and a group of pedagogues and academics, was wondering how to attract children, what [subjects] should be introduced in 234

A politico-astral cosmology in contemporary Russia school, apart from chess, because there was no national Idea being taught. And we thought of turning to common human values. It is all brilliantly simple; it lies in the earth. Our common home is the Earth, and we taught the children that they are not citizens of the Republic of Kalmykia, not citizens of Russia, not even inhabitants of Europe, but that they are earthlings (zemlyanye). And if an ozone hole appears above Antarctica or over another country it affects everyone. When a child feels himself to be part of this Universe (Vselennaya), part of this world from his earliest years, then possibilities open up for him, he becomes disciplined, he respects the aged, and relates to his surroundings with respect. There is no need for any political parties, no need for any ideology. All that’s needed is to instil, or come to know, that you are born on this earth and must be thankful to this earth, because that’s where – to the earth – you’ll go.6

Several schools in Elista, the capital, started to teach the ethno-planetary curriculum. Ilyumzhinov remained popular as long as his ideas, which many people did think eccentric, looked as though they were making the republic a special and prosperous place. Ilyumzhinov had been a successful businessman and he continued to maintain strong links with protective patrons in Moscow after he became President. Nevertheless, by the late 1990s economic progress in the republic was faltering. As my last example of politics in the cosmological mode, let me cite a story widespread in the capital. One day a journalist said to the President: ‘Things are going badly in Kalmykia. The economy is weak. What do you plan to do about it?’ Ilyumzhinov replied: ‘I meditate. By meditation I gradually rise up to the astral level of the cosmos. As I rise up everything gets smaller, the people, the houses, become tiny, I see the land and then the continent, and from up there I look down on the planet earth. Everything then becomes clear and understandable.’7

At least some people in Kalmykia regarded this as a quite normal response; it could be seen as a wise kind of ‘taking a distance’, which was appropriate to a high leader. In fact, the Kalmyk economy slid into a critical state dependent on federal subsidies.8 Ilyumzhinov’s wayward decisions took place amid a general openness of economic thought to all kinds of influences; Boschaeva, a respectable professor of economics in the Kalmyk State University argued, for example, that economic cycles are related to bursts of solar energy (Boschaeva 2007). An interactive cosmo-practice By the early 2000s it was clear that this cosmological way of doing politics was running into trouble. Nuskhaev resigned on the grounds that the 235

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President was not following his advice. Ilyumzhinov shortly approached another man to become the State Ideologist, but meanwhile he had also been consulting with several other personal advisers. They included a lama, Elistaev, who had a grand Idea about a ‘Buddhist Renaissance’, and resigned his vows to become the President’s adviser in 1996. In the run-up to the presidential elections in 2002, Elistaev’s project of inviting the Dalai Lama and building public mandalas proved very popular and had the effect of supporting Ilyumzhinov’s re-election.9 Another close adviser was a Russian known simply as Vanya, who used stones and numerical formulae to predict the future. A third was the famous blind Bulgarian fortune-teller, Vanga, to whom Ilyumzhinov made many journeys for consultations, not least to solicit help with identifying suitable oil-drilling sites – a venture that met with some divinatory success. By 1997 the President was also publicly declaring his allegiance to the Kalmyk visionary Dorzhinov (1993), around whom a cult had been formed, focused on elaborate theories and practices of communication with extra-terrestrial forces and beings, including alien abduction which the President himself claimed to have experienced, as a positive and joyful experience.10 I would like to focus, however, on another currently more influential movement involving the cult of the White Father (Tsagan Aava, in Russian Belyi Starets). Ilyumzhinov has taken two advisers from amongst these people, a young man, Sanal, and an older woman, Galina Muzaeva. The two are rivals, the boy claiming to be an incarnation of White Father, while the woman says she is White Father’s daughter. In a hyper-inflation of occult imagery, both claim other powers too; for example both declare themselves to be ‘Maitreyas’ (Maitreya is the future Buddha). The White Father is a deity-like figure from Mongolian, Tibetan, and Kalmyk culture, the ‘master-spirit’ of nature, animals, fertility, and long life. Known from at least the early eighteenth century, in most regions he was a somewhat peripheral, rather folksy spirit, respected in the ranks of local deities brought under the aegis of Buddhism but not seriously venerated, for he never pretended to Buddhist enlightenment. Now, however, White Father has surged to the fore in Kalmykia and become virtually a national god. Statues of him have been erected, one in the centre of the capital Elista. According to the leaders of the cult, White Father is now binary. Along with the traditional Mongolian image of a white-haired seated ancient (Kegshin Tsagan Aava) now identified as Cosmic White Father,11 there is the traditional Kalmyk standing image, Earthly White Father (Delkyan Tsagan Aava). This division enables the cult to retain its earlier functions related to fertility, the herds, longevity, etc. but also to enter into the whole cosmic, noospheric realm, and furthermore, to enable ordinary people to have contact with this realm. The Sacred Biddings of White Father have been published in seven volumes 236

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(Muzaeva 2006) and rites of worship and invocation are held regularly by devotees dressed in while gowns in imitation of the White Father. It is worth describing here the third and fourth of these volumes, which are written in the form of the diary of Galina Muzaeva, who is the chief priestess of the cult and also one of Ilyumzhinov’s two Maitreya ritual specialists. In Muzaeva’s writings Cosmic White Father has undergone an astounding transformation; he has become the Power-holder and Creator of the Universe, and emissary of the High Cosmic Forces to humanity. This involves a further splitting of Cosmic White Father into sixteen emanations of himself, which may take the form of balls of electricity, tornados, or even human beings. Cosmic White Father sends his emissaries to earth, these beings having hitherto unknown and strange names like Pifman, Raien, Sarfin, or Tevador. The members of the cult should prepare themselves through rituals to become ‘contacters’ (kontaktery) with these figures on the astral plane. Muzaeva herself, after struggles and suffering, has achieved this physical and spiritual state, and to judge from her diary makes contact with the emissaries almost every day. The introduction to her book makes clear that Muzaeva is following the path indicated by Vernadsky and other Russian cosmicists, and that the High Cosmic Forces are to be identified with Universal Reason (Vselenskii Razum) (Muzaeva 2006: 9–10), but the diary itself makes little reference to such abstract ideas and recounts the immediacy of the encounters. These take the form of letters to, or information received each day by Galina Muzaeva. From the cosmic being Raien, on 20 July 2001: Good day, Galina, Apologies for my long absence and for making contact when you weren’t expecting it. Right now, Pifman and I are on the highest staff of our locality, that is, I want to you know that in your terms we are among the rulers. So, my dear, we observed your ritual work for cleaning the waters of Tsagan Aman, and we were also present during your discussion group. We’d like to tell you that we are in agreement with your legislation and statutes and the official registration of your organisation. Your group will be a protective mental shield for human existence and consciousness. Many of you are shaky because of the material economic situation, and we can understand that, of course. But not all of you are observing the biddings from above, from White Father. We repeat them again:   Remove meat from your diet   Establish full harmony in your group, with love and trust among all of you.   Give respect to elders, and also to the very young, because you are all together.   Help one another, but with a pure heart. (Muzaeva 2006: 43)

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Many of the instructions from these cosmic beings are about rituals to be performed to increase the energy and purity of the members of the group. These are not, however, simply curative, ethical, or concerned with psychological well-being (although they have such content too). They often consist of what one might call cosmic work. Sometimes this takes the form of perceiving the presence of invisible energies on this earth and purifying the ‘points’ in Kalmykia where they may be received. Sometimes they are activities actually ‘out there’ in the cosmos, such as ‘the purification of the sun’ or the ‘festival of the parade of the planets’ (2006: 108). But sometimes they consist of work on the inner cosmos, which is described as consisting of a hard shell with an entry that opens only five times a year. It spins constantly and furiously, like a windmill in a hurricane, and swallows up the dirt thrown off from all the planets. Once inside the inner cosmos, Galina finds that it has slanting laser rays, and she draws a diagram of them in her diary. Raien communicates: ‘Hullo, Galina! What do these laser rays look like to you?’ Raien then instructs Galina about the consequent necessary cosmic work: What you must do, at night, is to align the stars into the following shape – the shape of White Father. Prepare yourself by conducting the rite called Circulating the Stars. It will be done tonight at 8 o’clock. After the ritual, go out into the street and try to unite the stars in the first pattern. You must imagine you are holding them in your hands and collecting them together. Then, put one big star in the middle. Concentrate on each star. Give each one special energy in the necessary amount. A small star should have a bit less, a large one according to the light it sheds. But if it is large and dim, then give it only as much as a small star. No one should be near you when you conduct this ritual. On the 22nd June hold the rite of Circulating the Stars again. They will have changed their positions, unnoticed by you. Now, contrary to earlier, give the small stars more energy than the large ones. Take one star and after an hour it will be in a completely different place. If you cannot manage this, do the rite again on the 23rd. During this rite you should do everything on the astral level, but in practice it will be on the cosmic level. Good-bye. (2006: 110–112)

So here we see at one level, very graphically, the literal implementation of the noosphere idea, where human ‘super-energy’ is used to move the stars, that is to interact with and affect the disposition of the energies of the geosphere. Galina is out on the street gazing on the stars at night. But this is also a matter of the inner cosmos – so at another level the activities of Circulating the Stars and forming the shape of White Father are about some kind of parallel, or psychic mimicry, between astrophysical and mental processes. The underlying ‘problem’ (sensu Viveiros de Castro 238

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2003) at which all this cosmologically inflected activity is ultimately addressed seems to turn on the acknowledgement of a different reality, beyond or inside the familiar one but in any case on a different plane – the realm of White Father and all his emanations, from which are sought clear instructions about how we should live our lives. Conclusion I have argued that it would not be correct to divorce all this from practical politics. Until recently Galina Muzaeva met frequently with Ilyumzhinov to provide him with rituals to acquire cosmic energies to enable him to rule successfully.12 Ilyumzhinov was President of Kalmykia until 2010 when his term of office ran out, but he remains the most powerful leader behind the scenes, and he is still president of the World Chess Federation FIDE, which provides him with useful opportunities to make contacts in various countries. To aid his fortune in the FIDE re-elections, Ilyumzhinov sent to Sanal, his other Maitreya, for a powerful White Father prayer (which was dispatched by text message to the other side of the world and proved to be effective). In view of all this, maybe we should turn things around: rather than the usual anthropological move of seeing political motives lurking in cosmology-creation, perhaps it is possible to envisage a different kind of politics, i.e. one that has the habit of situating itself in a cosmology. At any one point, the actors understand the cosmology to be timeless, even if from outside we have seen that its content changed along with the cast of advisers and ritualists. Ilyumzhinov wrote in 1997 that his was to be a politics of razum, which would ‘re-think in a new way the ethnoplanetary thought of the Kalmyks’. The epithet ‘planetary’ here seems to bear the meaning of timeless, since his next sentence is: ‘Wisdom only is wisdom because it is eternal’ (Ilyumzhinov 1997a: 7). What is interesting is that the first version of ancestral sagacity having been found wanting by the President and seen by the electorate to produce few practical results, the next move was not to shift over to earthly realpolitik. In moving away from Nuskhaev to draw inspiration from Galina, the move was away from Vedic ancestors to astral entities themselves, or rather to the most abstract and eternal ‘wisdom’ of all, that embodied in the way the universe is. Ilyumzhinov formerly asked for ‘advice’, but now he asks for powerful cosmic rituals as well. By 2010–11 many people in Kalmykia were decrying Ilyumzhinov – for his failure to deliver on his promises and for amassing wealth when the people of the republic are generally so poor. Many say that they were shocked by the announcement on TV that he claimed to have been abducted by aliens. However, the criticism does not generally take the form of denouncing his statements as manipulative ideology, but rather 239

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the subtly different idea that these were ‘empty words’, and we are left with the impression that other such words might not have been empty, might have been real and true. This, I think, is where Galina comes in, with her use of rites rather than stories and the apparent ‘genuineness’ of her practice of direct contact with astral beings. There are echoes of earlier religious practices in what Galina does: the exercise of forming the stars into the shape of White Father, for example, recalls Buddhist visualisation of deities. But more to the point is a particular cosmic relation with reality. People in Kalmykia have to bear real material disappointments (‘the wages were not paid’, or ‘he promised floor tiles for our school, but three years have passed and nothing has been done’) and people are turning to real experiences (physical, visual, sensory, dialogical, ritual) of a cosmic kind to find a way to live with this situation. Dorzhinov, Galina Muzaeva, and even Ilyumzhinov himself, use popular science as information – though not scientific method (there is not much room for disproof of theses here). In this way they are exercising a certain creativity in going beyond the set cosmological scenarios presented by Christianity, Buddhism, or the traditional popular framework of ‘mythic’ locations (Heaven, Hell, purgatory, the underworld, etc.) within which the only active subjects are humans or human-like deities. For in the end White Father, with all his splits and emanations has become less human and can be seen by practitioners as nothing other than a personification of energies that famous scientists have shown to be moving throughout the cosmos; humans can be effective in this interactive cosmos by developing, concentrating, and activating their shares of the same kind of energy. With their mere scintilla of cosmic vitality they may, and indeed are mostly likely to, fail, as when Galina does not manage to get her stars lined up and one zips away of its own accord. But by identifying this energy with Reason (razum) the cosmology provides a sense of meaning, or a rightness of things, that people can glimpse and thus find their way to leading a better life, in tune with (and as part of) nature. But this is not all, for the rites in the White Father cult involve doing things to the astral bodies, which can be seen as a reminder of what science is constantly telling us – both us and the Kalmyks – that human activity affects material entities and biological life, for good and ill. The communications with the emissaries of cosmic energy enable actors to put in practice relations with the non-human and act in the right way towards them. And what is this but a sociality of the cosmos? Perhaps the -ology of all this, the cosmology that tries to interpret these relations, put them in order and explain them, is not so different from a certain kind of anthropology.

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Notes 1

This article owes greatly to the contributions of colleagues. I am most grateful to Baasanjav Dune and Elvira Churyumova for their invaluable observations on Kalmyk politics and contemporary cults, to Martin Holbraad for his exceptionally insightful comments on an earlier draft, and to Anastasiya Piliavsky for discussion of ideology and cosmology. See definition in Kuznetsov (2004: 375). 2 3 These visionary ideas are not widely accepted in the West, but in Russia various concepts of the noosphere, including Vernadsky’s, are taken very seriously e.g. see www.gpa-spb.ru/anons1e.php. A memorial museum-office of Vernadsky is maintained in the Geochemistry Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Contemporary politicians frequently cite Vernadsky as the inspiration for the planning of the sustainable development of Russia (Sakanyan 2003: 4). 4 Ilyumzhinov’s book For the Power of Reason over Greater Russia: the Ideology of Reason (1998) expressed a similar idea: Kalmykia provides the reason (razum) of Russia, and Russia provides the reason of the whole world (1998: 5). 5 This is not a standard Russian word, but uses the name ‘Herod’ (Irod) as a kind of insult, strengthened by its sound association with urod (freak or deformed person). 6 Vzglyad newspaper, 4 August 2009. http://vz.ru/politics/2009/8/4/314432. html, accessed June 2012. 7 Anecdote circulating in Elista in early 2000s, source Baasanjav Dune, personal communication. 8 Regiony rossii. Sostial’no-ekonomicheskie pokazateli 2011. Statisticheskii Sbornik. Moscow: Rosstat. P. 33. 9 Elistaev, speaking about Ilyumzhinov, said, ‘He is a post-modern man. He is neither Buddhist nor Christian. He absorbs and digests all religions and uses them’ (Baasanjav Dune, personal communication). 10 Interview of Ilyumzhinov by Vladimir Pozner on television, Pervyi Kanal, 26 April 2010. 11 Kegshin means ‘old’ in Kalmyk, but the cult members started calling this version of White Father ‘cosmic’ (kosmicheskii) and the expression has been taken up by the mass media. 12 Galina Muzaeva counts Ilyumzhinov as one of the White Fathers and even worships him as a Tsagan Aava.

References Adamov, A.K. 2001. Noosfernaya Respublika Rossiya. Saratov: publisher not indicated. Bassin, Mark. 1991. Russia between Europe and Asia: the ideological construction of geographical space. Slavic Review 50(1): 1–17.

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Embedded modernities —— 2009. Nurture is nature: Lev Gumilev and the ecology of ethnicity. Slavic Review 68(4): 872–897. Boschaeva, Zoya N. 2007. Formula ekonomicheskogo rosta. Moscow: Ekonomika. Dorzhinov, V.N. 1993. V gosti na rodinu predkov: mifi i real’nost’. Elista, Russia: Libon. Dugin, Aleksandr G. 1997 Osnovy geopolitiki: geopoliticheskoe budushchee Rossii. Moscow: Arktogeia. —— 2002. On vernul nam dve tysyachi let nashei sud’by. In A.G. Dugin (ed.), Osnovy Evraziistva. Moscow: Arktogeya-Tsntr. 534–547. Geertz, Clifford. 1980. Negara: the Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Glebov, Sergei. 2010. The Mongol-Bolshevik revolution: Eurasianist ideology in search for an ideal past. Journal of Eurasian Studies. doi: 10/1016/j. euras.2010.10.007. Guchinova, El’za. 2003. Postsovetskaya Elista: vlast’, biznes I krasota. Ocherki sotsial’no-kul’turnoi antropologii Kalmykov. Saint Petersburg: Aleteiya. Gumilev, Lev. 1967. O termine etnos. Doklady Geograficheskogo Obshchesvtva SSSR. 3: 3–17. Ilyumzhinov, Kirsan. 1997a. Kalmykia – zemlya dukha: natsional’naya ideya. Elista, Russia: Yevraziiskaya Akademiya Zhizni. —— 1997b. Moya politika: shtrikhi razmyshlenii. Elista, Russia: Yevraziiskaya Akademiya Zhizni. —— 1998. Za vlast’ razuma na velikoi Russi: ideologiya razuma. (For the Power of Reason Over Greater Russia). Elista, Russia: Zhanggar. Kapferer, Bruce. 1988. Legends of People, Myths of State. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press. Kuznetsov, S.A. (ed.) 2004. Bol’shoe tolkovyi slovar’ russkago yazyka. Saint Petersburg: Norint. Muzaeva, Galina. 2006. Sakral’nye zavety Belogo Startsa. Vols 3 and 4. Elista, Russia: ZAOp NPP Dzhangar. Nuskhaev, Aleksei. 1998. Vedicheskaya Rus’: ot vremeni bezumiya potomkov k vechnomu razumu predkov. Uchebnk zhizni. Elista, Russia: Dzhangar. Pollock, Sheldon. 2006. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture and Power in Premodern India. Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press. Pyureev, D.B, V.P. Kaznacheev, and A.N. Dmitriev. 2009. Kosmoplanetarnaya integratsiya planety. Moscow: Miroizdanie. Rodionov, Vladimir. 2002. Respublika Buryatiya v geopoliticheskikh realiyakh sovremennoi Rossii. In Yu. V. Nikitin (ed.), Evraziisoe prostranstvo glazami molodykh. Moscow: Natalis. Pp. 36–42. Sakanyan, Yelena. 2003. Biosfera. Vladimir Vernadskii (1863–1945)’, Znanie – sila 12. www.vvvasilyev.ru/Kulturol/Vernadski/Sakanyan_­­BiosferaNoosfera.htm. Schrempp, Gregory. 1992. Magical Arrows: The Maori, Greeks, and the Folklore of the Universe. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Shnirelman, Viktor and Panarin, Sergei. 2001. Lev Gumilev: his pretensions as a founder of ethnology and his Eurasian theories. Inner Asia 3(1): 1–19. 242

A politico-astral cosmology in contemporary Russia Vernadsky, V.I. 2000–01 [1935]. Problems of Biogeochemistry, II. 21st Century Science, Winter 2000–2001. Trans. Jonathan Tennenbaum and Rachel Douglas. www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles%202005/Vernadsky_ W00-01.pdf. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2003. And. Manchester Papers in Social Anthropology 7.    www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/disciplines/socialanthropology/ research/papers/, accessed June 2012. Yugai, G.A. 1998. Srednii put’ rossii: kovergentnoe obshchestvo. Moscow: Moskovskii Obshchesvennyi Nauchnyi Fond.

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11 Facebook and the origins of religion Daniel Miller

Anthropology is not just an academic discipline; it is inevitably also a particular perspective on the world that orientates our vision differently from, for example, psychology. When a non-academic asks an anthropologist to explain what they do and hears that we study people, they will often follow that up by saying that surely this is equally the province of psychology. We might then suggest that the difference is that most psychology is grounded in a perspective which approaches people as individuals. By contrast, most anthropologists tend to eschew treating people merely as individuals. Instead, a working definition of anthropology might be that this is the perspective which treats persons as social networking sites. For the anthropologist a person is understood primarily as part of kinship, for example a mother’s brother to a sister’s son, or alternatively an employee to an employer. But the emphasis is always on a wider relational world which defines who and what that person is. It follows that a definition of anthropology is that which treats people as sites for such social networking. We also seem to assume a general tendency of modernity, including ancillary developments such as urbanism or capitalism, as transformations which lead people to be less like social networking sites and more like individuals with increasing autonomy. To that extent the last two hundred years and especially the last fifty years are assumed to have transformed the world to accord less with the perspective of anthropology and more in accordance with that of psychology, which, if true, could constitute a problem for anthropology. Defining anthropology as the study of people as social networking sites is obviously intended to raise the question of whether there is some particular affinity between anthropology and the very recent phenomena

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which go by the name of social networking sites, of which the most successful and pervasive today is Facebook. If Facebook actually does encourage people to see themselves and others more as social networking sites and less as individuals then might this be in some small measure a reverse of that long-term trend. Could Facebook be something which helps bring the world back towards that which accords with the perspective of anthropology? In which case Facebook might be rather more than just one new communication technology, it might be of quite particular significance to anthropology. In this respect Facebook would by no means be the same as the generic ‘internet’. Indeed I have argued elsewhere (Miller 2013) that these are almost the opposite of each other. The internet tended to lead people to form specific groups around particular interests, that is egobased networks of the kind discussed recently by Rainie and Wellman (2012). By contrast, Facebook and other social networking sites appear as the first mechanisms for a very long time whose primary consequence seems to be to contradict this historical trend. Indeed about the first thing people remark upon when they become involved in Facebook is the way that it reverses what until that time seems to be the natural attrition of relationships. Facebook seems to start by bringing back all those ex-school friends one had lost contact with, or those cousins who had gone abroad and others one had lost contact with. So Facebook takes a whole swathe of people one had at some point or other known faceto-face and reconstitutes them in the form of Facebook friends. While earlier forms of internet use were very different from an anthropological conception of traditional social relations since it fostered quite specific groups around hobbies such as games or a political orientation, Facebook seems to take us closer to the situation of small-scale societies where all the various forms of social network such as kinship, friendship and work tend to come together in the very same place. In Facebook your boss might meet your mother. Such a general statement would however be problematic for anthropologists since the other major difference between anthropology and psychology is that the latter is comfortable with such vast generalisations since the mechanisms it studies are assumed to be in essence cognitive or biological. By contrast, the emphasis in anthropology has traditionally been more relativistic and diverse. So we cannot generalise easily about a thing called ‘Facebook’ that re-expands all social networking. We need to see how this statement works for different local contexts. Fortunately this is now possible thanks to a large-scale project currently underway (www.gsmis.org) where simultaneous fifteen-month ethnographies are examining the use and consequences of social networking in nine sites across eight countries. 245

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Since its inception the participants in this study have been blogging details of their results (http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/social-networking/) although fuller publications will await the completion of fieldwork. The huge advantage of such simultaneous comparative work is that anthropology no longer needs to lurch between over-generalisation and overly parochial relativism. These are only preliminary findings but at present it seems that Facebook and its Chinese equivalent QQ do facilitate a growth in social networking in most cases. An exception might be our study of Chinese factory workers of rural origin who form perhaps the largest migration in the history of the world. They seem to be drifting away from family, friendships, and traditional ties, but their circumstances are in any case quite exceptional. In most other cases these new communication technologies work alongside offline forms of social networking. So in the Brazil study they might consolidate attempts by Pentecostal churches to create communities. In the English case there tend to be periodic expansions around school, university, and childbirth. While each case is different, there is one particularly significant way in which Facebook and QQ negate the historical trends towards individualism and can be said to be transforming the world back towards a more anthropological, rather than a more psychological perspective, of social life. The evidence from these fieldsites support the earlier contention that quite unlike the generic internet which facilitates ego-based networking around specific interests or groups (Rainie and Wellman 2012), social networking sites replicate more traditional overlapping and interwoven networks. To make this clearer two more detailed illustrations follow from Trinidad and the Philippines. The first is that of Trinidadian usages outlined in my book Tales from Facebook (Miller 2011: 40–52) in Chapter 4, entitled ‘The Book of Truth’. This chapter gives the six reasons why an Indo-Trinidadian I call Vishala believes the person you meet on Facebook is closer to the fundamental truth of that person than when you meet that same person face-to-face. Reason number six is as follows:‘A lot of these big-shot people, they make a pretence as to who they are. But you think, through Facebook you have more chance to see what they really are. It is the truth, it is about somebody. How often you could put up some lie about yourself on Facebook? You can’t go up on Facebook and say you’s a lawyer. Because it must have somebody who would see you and know you. People could have access to knowing who you are. Like we might be walking the streets with somebody and don’t know who he is and just call him Anthony. But don’t even know that he was a Sabga [an influential Trini family]. Until we go on Facebook and see him liming with a whole set of people and then you tell yourself I wonder who he is, what he doing liming with them? Because they rich, so he then hadda be something. And then, you know, you would try to

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figure it out. You know you might search him, look him up, put on the picture. You might see his full name, you try to add him, then you find out he related to this person’ (2011: 52). Chapter 10 of the same book (2011: 111–121) is called ‘It’s Who You Know’. It is a story about a businessman who spends much of the chapter explaining the difference between the ways people do business in Trinidad compared to his ten years in Canada. In Canada you fix on a person who seems important to know and try and find a way to get to know them. In Trinidad things are always a step beyond that. He says the odd thing is that people who are trying to make contact with him rarely seem interested in him in himself, what he could do and what he is worth; he is judged essentially on his contacts and who he in turn knows, so a person is always seen first as a conduit to other people rather than in their own right. Again individuals are being regarded primarily as social networking sites, and this translates very naturally to their subsequent use of Facebook as a tool of business. So Trinidad seems to provide quite a literal example of this idea of Facebook as a site for the purposeful activity of social networking that goes rather beyond the anthropological perspective which is concerned with the definition of who people are, without assuming this kind of very active development of further networking. Turning to the other site in which I have conducted primary fieldwork we find quite different forms of social networking in operation. Over a period of two years I worked with Mirca Madianou on the relationship between Filipina mothers in the UK and their relationship with their children left behind in the Philippines, concentrating upon the way these have been transformed by new media (Madianou and Miller 2012). In this case we are looking at the specific ways social network sites become integrated into Filipino idioms of communication. At the same time a colleague Deirdre McKay (2011; 2012) has been looking at migrants from a particular area in the North Philippines. These migrants mainly use Facebook so that they can follow each other’s social lives in detail. Where someone has visited, what they wore, who they were with and so forth. Mostly they belong to the same church network which itself runs a Facebook group, and they enthusiastically examine photos from church events. This is a population whose origin is in a Northern rural area where close kinship, ritual, and trust are retained as aspects of community and these are exported to the new London environment. Again, posted photographs are often of family homes or iconic buildings and sites from their homeland (see also McKay 2008). McKay notes the additional impact of this visibility ‘Facebook compels users to make these dynamic personal relationships continually visible. On Facebook, the on-line actions of “friends” reveal “friend” relationships to be simply tokens of recognition or virtual markers for 247

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long-term relations off-line involving mutual exchange of gifts, favors, opinion, affect and support which often have off-line dimensions’ (2010: 480). With this comes all the negativity of small-scale societies, including gossip, jealousy, accusations, and rifts, which can also be related to the problems of how to limit relationships and their attendant obligations (see Strathern 1996). McKay cites Strathern’s (1996) paper on Cutting the Network in relation to two issues. The first is for understanding the implications of bilateral kinship in the Philippines. The problem is that bilateral kinship tends to proliferate relationships. So in this case we again see Facebook operating as an expansion of social networking but in a rather different way to Trinidad. There is, however, a second perhaps more general point here. Facebook is not merely some sort of return to the way in which anthropologists commonly encountered social networking in the past. It clearly adds something quite specific by virtue of the way it operates as a platform. One of the most important features is simply that it makes relationships more visible. We don’t just have friends on Facebook, we see that person in terms of their other wider relationships and interactions with others. So the very idea that a person is constituted by relationships is here made entirely manifest. In which case it is no longer just an anthropological academic perspective that this is how people are in the world, it makes our perspective evident, everyone can now see how this is the case by simply looking at sites such as Facebook and QQ. This makes the reference to Strathern of special significance, because the issue of visibility and making evident is quite central to her studies of kinship in Melanesia. People in Melanesia are not merely social networking sites. It is not just anthropologists who constitute them as subjects by making their relationships visible. That is exactly what they were in any case doing for themselves. In Strathern’s work a person is constituted by a network of relationships, which come to exist through becoming apparent. So in The Gender of The Gift (1986) the birth of a child had significance in particular because it objectified the relationships that are made evident with and through the existence of that child (see also Gell 1999). Similarly when you met a person in a pub, you just meet them as an individual. But when you meet a person by friending them on Facebook you are actually seeing them as they are visibly constituted by the interactions and relationships that are the stuff of Facebook. So Facebook is not just making people more anthropological, it seems to be also making them a mite bit more Melanesian. All of this constitutes an introduction to the core argument of this chapter. Because I want to argue that seeing people as social networks constituted by social relationships and furthermore having this manifest such that a major part of that constituting activity is the very visibility

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of those relationships may have yet a further consequence, which has perhaps not been as clearly explored either in the study of Facebook, or the work of Strathern, or perhaps more generally within anthropology. I want to suggest that there is a moral imperative also at work here, one that is so fundamental that it could be seen as part of what constitutes not just persons but also religion itself. That at least some forms of religion are also founded on the idea of the visibility of people as social networking sites. People are constituted by their relationships to the ‘other’. So at this point we need to pause this trajectory of ideas and turn to a theorisation of religion to create an alignment between this orientation and the other found in both religion and social media. The Akedah There are countless reasons for anthropologists to take a closer look at the Akedah that is the biblical story of Abraham’s preparedness to sacrifice Isaac – quite apart from the present purpose which is to shed light on the popularity and consequence of Facebook. The story has been the inspiration for a vast amount of literature and philosophy. The closer you look, the richer the implications. There is a wonderful analysis by the anthropologist Alexiou (1990) of the laments of Cretan women over the dead. Here the focus shifts entirely to Abraham’s wife Sarah who assumes Isaac has been sacrificed. This poetry of lament seems to go back at least as far as fifth century Syrian homilies. There are significant debates within Islam as to whether it was in fact Isaac or Ishmael who was to be sacrificed. There is a First World War poem by Wilfred Owen in which Abraham refuses the Angel and sacrifices half the seed of Europe – one by one. A couple of these examples came from a recent paper by Frosh (2010) reflecting on current Middle Eastern politics, about how human relations are sacrificed if one takes literal religion too far. This issue takes us back to what has been by far the best-known discussion of the implications of the Akedah within more philosophical debate, which lies in the difference between the readings of the Akedah by Kierkegaard and by Hegel. To fully appreciate this debate, imagine for a moment that you just saw on the news that some man, in say Hungary, had taken his son from the house, marched him up a hill and then cut his throat. When arrested he claimed ‘God told him to’. Is this the kind of man you would want as the founding ancestor of your ethical religion, or is he ethically unspeakable? For Kierkegaard Abraham is the absolute knight of faith, in the book Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard brilliantly evokes the passion and certainty that comes from belief in having achieved such a direct relationship to God, a trajectory through the stage of infinite resignation as the final step 249

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before true faith. The contrast is with Hegel. For Hegel the merely individual self-perception of proper behaviour is only the particular. One is free to believe in whatever you like until that comes up against the universal, expressed in the rationality of civil law. At that point Hegel recognises that to allow anyone to believe that their personal conviction transcends sittlichkeit, that is customary ethics or the wider morality expressive of universal rationality, would simply legitimate potentially terrible and evil acts. Killing your son is evidently criminal when set against one’s sense of this more universal ethics and in most cases also customary ethics (for a detailed comparison between the two see Stewart 2003). These debates have been re-examined more recently by several theologians including Levinas who follows Hegel, in repudiating Kierkegaard, but then argues that it is precisely this ideal of ethics – as responsibility to the wider other – that singularises the person as the individual, as ‘I’ (1975: 1996, cited in Simmonds 2007). Levinas claims that ‘ethics [is] a consciousness of a responsibility toward others … [that] far from losing you in generality, singularizes you, poses you as a unique individual, as I’ (1996/1975: 76). These are some of the best-known debates about the Akedah. But my starting point is in some ways the opposite to them all. To me what is of most significance is not that Abraham sacrificed Isaac – but that he didn’t. There are many ways in which anthropology approaches cosmology, but one is an engagement with cosmology as a form of logical extension. This would suggest that a belief system is inclined to take its own system of order and argument and push these towards their extreme consequence. A delightful example comes from Engelke’s (2005; 2007) recent work on the logic of protestant repudiation of materiality as expressed in the African apostolic community he studied. One of my own favourites is Parry’s (1994) work on funeral priests in Benares that shows how the logic of pollution in Hinduism ends up with funeral priests who eat dogs’ leftovers out of human skulls. Whether extreme asceticism, or vast multitudes in pilgrimage, or the sheer scale and size of temple architecture, religions don’t seem to do things by halves – where possible they go all the way. This is ideal for anthropologists wishing to tease out the classificatory and other principles of order that underlie such practices. It is therefore likely that this same principle of logical extension to the extreme would be characteristic of at least some religions at the point of inception of religion itself. For the purposes of this chapter, the concern is not with all regions, but with the trajectory that leads to the establishment of three of the best-known forms of monotheism in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. To start this trajectory we have to envisage the conditions under which a population start to project on, or to believe in, some ultimate deity and wish to find some manner or other to express or manifest their subsequent devotion. What would be the most extreme

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and effective means of so doing? It would surprise no anthropologist or historian of religion if the idiom of expression is that of sacrifice. The meaning of this rite has been well established in the variants that follow from the initial work of Hubert and Mauss (1964), and many works attest to its ubiquity in early religions. As I have argued elsewhere (Miller 1998) a divinity that constantly makes demands of you, creates a far more engaged presence than one that does not. But having established the idiom of sacrifice, then it would follow that the greater the sacrifice the greater the devotion. If the reason we are here on earth is to serve our god or gods then there should be nothing we are not prepared to do in demonstrating our faith. This leads to the question of what would be the very best exemplification of that absolute devotion. I would give anything to god: my first fruits, my most treasured possession, my best captives. In the end surely and logically it must be the sacrifice of that which one loves above and beyond all other things, the single most important object that exists. Listen to the biblical prophet Micah (6: 7) ‘Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?’ So logically the religion that is most prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice is the religion which demonstrates the greatest power of devotion. Micah implies that of all the things that could be sacrificed that which has the greatest value of all to a person would be their firstborn child. The figure of the firstborn child crops up several times in the Bible. Perhaps the best-known example is God’s punishment of the Egyptians for refusing freedom to the Israelites by killing their firstborn sons, which is what finally persuades them to permit the exodus from Egypt. My argument is that this is inherent to the origin of religion itself, which is constantly looking for ways to deepen and demonstrate devotion, to show that there is absolutely nothing they would not do if called upon. The presupposition is not that they love their children less than us, but rather that they have a means thereby to suggest they love their gods more than us. So far from being appallingly immoral by being prepared to sacrifice their firstborn they were showing as religious people with faith just how moral they could be. Particularly relevant is a biblical section in 2 Kings (3: 27) where the Israelites are attacking the rebellion of the King of Moab who responds by publicly sacrificing his firstborn son, the heir to the kingdom, on the city walls. This leads directly to the Israelites retreating. The implication seems to be that that this was a more powerful expression of devotion than the Israelites were prepared to make in return. There has recently been a heated discussion about the actual extent of child sacrifice in the ancient world at this time. The religions surrounding the incipient Jewish population are associated 251

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with the Philistines who are related to the Phoenicians, which is why the discussions about the burial grounds in Carthage are clearly relevant. The Bible itself with its stories of Moloch seems pretty unequivocal about the idea that the Carthaginians did sacrifice their children, as were the Roman sources, though they had their own reasons for being harsh to the Carthaginians. Much of the more recent debate concerns the interpretation of the Tophet that is burial grounds in Carthage of thousands of children. Some of these were clearly foetal, but there are older infants who have been buried next to animals and who appear to have been sacrificed in parallel ways to that of animals (Brown 1991). From this perspective the Akedah turns out to be an act of remarkable courage. But not, I submit, the courage of an individual prepared to sacrifice their child. Rather the courage of an incipient religion that is prepared to confront its rivals with a refusal to enact this apparently obvious and ultimate act of devotion. Such a religion had to face the likely response from rival priests who could scornfully claim – ‘You say you believe in your God, you say you care about your faith, but when it really comes down to it, when the ultimate expression of that faith is called for, you lie. We are totally unstinting in our love of our gods, while you have shown you lack courage and you lack convictions.’ Indeed the difficulty of refusing to follow the logic of religion itself to its ultimate point may be evident that several hundred years later a new religion, that of Christianity, is founded by a return to the ultimate act of sacrificing the firstborn, but this time in universal form, making it the deity who is doing the sacrifice. Christianity in choosing to foreground the cross, made the symbol of this sacrifice into the primary symbol, returning us to this pure logic intrinsic to religion itself. This is hardly coincidence and you don’t need to be Leach (1976) to see inversion here from one religion being created in the refusal to sacrifice the firstborn followed by a religion that is created through carrying out this sacrifice. Indeed I would go further and say that the subsequent dominant character of the two religions has ever since been separated by those respective points of departure. To follow through this inherent logic of religion to what might be called its literal conclusion in the blood of the sacrificed son, keeps us within the domain of a rather literal expression of devotion. And it may be also no coincidence that it is Christianity which both keeps this act to the fore and leads towards an ever greater emphasis upon faith as beautifully evoked in the later work of Kierkegaard. The contrast is with Judaism that through the Akedah takes the route of symbolic substitution rather than literal expression. This leads to a very different route towards more analytical and legal manifestations of the logic of religion, which to Christians looks like the rather abstract devotion to law rather than faith per se.

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To ascribe so much to the Akedah becomes more reasonable when we consider its wider context. The Akedah is the moment which sees the birth of religion as the more modern ethically orientated and monotheistic form as opposed to the more mythic-based systems of cosmology that precede it. The early sections of the Bible consist of just such myths, which find ready comparison with other mythic forms that seem to have been present throughout Mesopotamia and the Levant at that time. Yet quite suddenly, the Bible takes a leap from myth to history. It does so by selecting one named figure, the patriarch Abraham, who leads his family from Mesopotamia, the land of myth, to what becomes the quintessential land of history which is the foundation of Israel in Palestine. The people led by Abraham become the origins of the Jewish people through a series of events of which two stand out. The Akedah is paired with the declaration of the covenant between God and the Israelites which establishes this relationship to history and the future and the land itself, a political legacy we still live with. There is, however, a final element of the Akedah, which is the one I now want to concentrate upon. It is not just that this is the point of transformation from myth to history. We also see in the development of this range of monotheistic religions a particular emphasis upon religion as a moral system, with all those subsequent attempts to install what are often referred to as Judaeo-Christian but could equally be Islamic issues of personal moral obligation and guilt. In our increasingly secular world, the defence of religion tends to focus increasingly on its continued relevance to such wider moral and ethical issues. Theologians such as Buber and Levinas in Judaism found this ethics in our relationship to the other. To be moral is to feel some sense of moral encompassment that what we do is subject to some kind of judgement in relation to others, which is why the idea of witnessing becomes prominent in the writing of Levinas (see also Paradiso-Michau 2012). In what way can this trajectory be said to have been established around this same event – the Akedah? To answer this we have to consider what it is that constitutes morality. If we look at how contemporary theologians discuss the Akedah one finds a focus that is clearest at the start and end of the events portrayed there. The first is a discussion of the implications of one Hebrew word Hineni, because at the commencement of the Akedah when Abraham is called his response the word Hineni is translated as Here Am I, the idea being that Abraham stands as visible before God. As Keirkegaard notes (1941), ‘a subject is a hostage’ to the Other person (1941: 112; added emphasis). ‘Here Am I’, Abraham says in response to God’s command. Silentio adds, when God commanded Abraham, ‘cheerfully, freely, confidently, loudly he answered: “Here am I”’ 1941: 21). In doing this self-sacrificing act, he receives the gift of grace 253

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and becomes a subject. Then both reciprocally and symmetrically at the end of the Akedah it is God who declares. ‘By myself have I sworn saith the Lord’. By making him (or her) self present before the nation he now promises the reciprocal and constitutive relationship that has come to be termed the covenant. The covenant which is probably the clearest moment from which we could say monotheism is established. Putnam (2008: 43) suggests that ‘when Levinas tells us that each of us must learn to say “here I am” to the other, his “here I am” is really modeled on Abraham’s hineni, which is what Abraham says to God when God calls on him to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac.’ So this is the moment when myth becomes history, when m ­ onotheism is established, when symbolic substitution and perhaps even reason is established. But it thereby also becomes the moment when the subject is established under the auspices of a morality based on being witnessed and subject to judgement. Now I freely admit my understanding of Levinas is somewhat limited, but I think the gist is that we are constituted as moral agents only in relation to this third observing other, which corresponds for Levinas to the divine. The belief that there is a witness out there is often the drive behind moral action, and this may equally be true in secular morality. As such the ideal of morality is linked to that of being visible to the other who can thereby judge us, whether this is the law or a friend. Visibility ensures we live within some kind of moral encompassment. Facebook as moral encompassment Focusing upon the Akedah as a biblical event turns this into a once and only moment. The Bible implies there was just one person, Abraham who contained this propensity to become ethical in a different and new way, a witnessing that leads to the covenant. It is as though becoming moral just happened once, for one person, and that is bequeathed to the rest of us. For anthropology, as opposed to theology or history, the question needs to be posed differently. Does this story say something much more general about our social and ethical relations? Do we more generally have a tendency to seek out some analogous form of cosmology based on moral encompassment? Are many people seeking in some sense or other to become Abraham? Earlier on I introduced Facebook as analogous with Strathern’s observations about Melanesia, an approach in which making things manifest as visibility starts to be seen as constitutive. We now see that there is an important corollary. The very same act of making visible doesn’t just constitute relationships by making them evident it also makes them open to the judgement of others. It implicates a moral universe that is not 254

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really the subject of Strathern’s (1986) analysis in The Gender of the Gift but would now appear to be just as important a consequence of her line of argument. But perhaps that could be made clearer by returning to the study of Facebook. When investigating Facebook the first stage is usually to take it at ‘Facevalue’. It seems to be an effective means of communication to multiple audiences. It helps people keep in touch, post photos and exchange information. But after a while it becomes clear that there is a sort of surplus communicative economy to Facebook, in that people seem to do all sorts of things with it, and think of it in various ways, that are hard to reduce either to some kind of communicative instrumentalism or indeed any other kind of instrumentalism. When I first started to try and understand this surplus communicative economy through the ethnography of Facebook in Trinidad I came up with a question. What if, instead of seeing Facebook as a means to facilitate friendships between people, many of us use friendships between people in order to facilitate a relationship to Facebook itself? What if we image that there was another kind of relationship status such as: Married to Facebook lol? Given that Facebook is a social network, perhaps the simplest idiom for conceiving of this relationship to Facebook itself is to think of it as a sort of meta-best-friend (Miller 2011: 170–171). In the popular culture of TV, on programmes such as Sex and the City, a best friend is the person we can turn to when we are feeling lonely, depressed or bored, when life seems to have less purpose than usual. Our best friend is the one who is least likely to mind being disturbed when having a meal, or wanting to go to sleep, because they sense our deep need to engage in long, gossipy discussions about ourselves or others, just to make us feel better. One advantage of Facebook is that it is a totally reliable best friend. Even at 3 a.m., when not even our bestest best friend wants to be disturbed, we can turn on Facebook and feel connected with all those other lives, and come out less lonely and less bored. Though, of course, we may also end up more depressed or jealous because of the revelations about all those very active other people who don’t seem lonely and bored. But then this can happen equally well after face-to-face chats with actual best friends. There are people who see themselves as irredeemably unattractive and shunned by those who, in public, don’t want to be associated with them. Fieldwork suggested this was not uncommon, especially for school-age children. Such people often find Facebook a lot more forgiving and benign. You can’t say that the photos on someone else’s Facebook site were posted specifically for you to see, but also you can’t say they weren’t. Once there, they are part of your social life. This seems to be one of the key attractions of Facebook.

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It is not necessary to suggest that Facebook as a meta-best-friend necessarily cures loneliness, depression or prevents suicide. It is simply that to a small degree it acts to complement offline friendships, becoming significant as a friend in its own right. Facebook is a place where we can talk as much as we like, with or without responses from others. It is a site that genuinely addresses the perennial problem of boredom, especially teenage boredom, without necessarily imposing on the time of others. It has its limits; it doesn’t get drunk when we do. It doesn’t always comment back when we want it to. You can only ‘sort of’ have sex with it. But as a meta-level friend it may serve. The original Facebook as developed in the USA seemed to be limited to a kind of Happy Land with plenty of Happy Birthdays and Weddings but avoiding more difficult circumstances. In Trinidad this is becoming less true, as people also use it to share their problems. Some of the most poignant examples found were the cases of a person who posted constantly about a premature baby, and another who posted about a parent afflicted with a terminal illness. Facebook was increasingly becoming of considerable importance in dealing with death and memorialisation (Miller 2011: 107–108). It was observed that these individuals seemed not too concerned if the responses they received were from people they knew well. Facebook was the public sharing of suffering. There seemed to be a growing sense that Facebook was a ‘witness’ to suffering that might be cathartic in its own right. The fact that Facebook is made up of actual people may give it unprecedented power and plausibility to act as a meta-person in this manner. The downside to such a relationship often discussed as a problematic consequence is that people may develop a strong relationship to Facebook that comes at the expense of their relationships to other people. In which case it may be regarded as fetishistic or even pathological. One of the stories in Tales from Facebook is about a man who feels his partner’s addiction to Facebook has become pretty much on a par with heroin addiction, in that it became fatal to their relationship (2011: 122–135). He was threatened not by jealousy of his wife’s lovers, but jealousy of his wife’s relationship to Facebook. The implication of this is that at least for Trinidadians the fact that you can now see how people are constructed by their social network makes the way you see them on Facebook a more ‘true’ portrayal of who Trindadians would imagine they ‘really’ are. It is also important that this is a largely visual portrait. Central to Trinidadian cosmology, as found in Carnival (Miller 1994), is the belief that a mask or outward appearance is not a disguise. As something you have crafted or chosen and not merely been born with, the mask is a better indication of the actual person than your unmasked face. This perspective is not that removed from the suggestion found in the writings of Strathern (1979) and O’Hanlon (1989)

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on self-decoration in highland New Guinea, where it is only through one’s performative visibility to the other that you discover the truth about yourself. I would suggest this is common to egalitarian societies where truth is not conveyed so much through institutionalisation – as in a role one is ascribed – but rather is revealed each and every time one makes oneself visible to the other. Although Strathern (1986) is not especially concerned with moral encompassment, we can see how a wider moral consequence may stem from this common idea that being constituted through visibility is dependent upon a concept of truth. It brings us back to the notion of witnessing. This in turn explains the final section of what I have called a surplus communicative economy in Facebook. As has often been noted the number of people we actually interact with on Facebook is usually relatively few. There may be more where we use Facebook to keep up to date about them even without such interaction. But then there is a large further surplus based on the majority of friends who remain just there, hovering above. We never interact with them and we don’t even bother looking at their sites. I would like to suggest that these additional friends matter very little to us as specific individuals. But perhaps in aggregate they stand more for a kind of generic other, that is the anyone or everyone. They are the whoever that exist primarily as the audience to our revelations about ourselves. They are the ones who see us for what we are and judge us. They are another reason why we feel compelled not just to do something, but in addition to post it and make it visible to the wider world where it will be known and therefore subject to judgement. The final segment of this surplus communicative economy of Facebook are other people, there as witnesses to our public presentation of ourselves. The presence of this audience allows us to conceive of Facebook postings as also a form by which one sets oneself up for moral adjudication. Some of these postings are intentional presentations of one’s best face. But Trinidadians are also well aware that one inevitably ends up also having postings on Facebook with oneself drunk and disorderly and remarkably often with the wrong partner. The phenomenon of tagged photographs which are the main way in which unintended images of the person find their way online, is often discussed as a key example of this. All of which reinforces the ability of Facebook to correspond so readily with a Trinidadian concept of truth, rather than merely a reflection of our intentions. At this point the two parts of this chapter meet – that is the analysis of Facebook and that of the Akedah. To bring these two parts of the chapter together it is helpful to consider what Don Handelman says in his paper (Chapter 4 this volume) about cosmology more generally. Although 257

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the emphasis in his chapter is on what he calls ‘Intra-grated’ cosmology that has many flexible points of construction, these are contrasted with something else. That is the ‘integrated’ holistic and dualistic cosmologies of which the primary examples are monotheistic religions such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The point being made about those latter religions is that they work through a fundamental separation out between the human and the divine, where the divine as transcendent also becomes encompassing of humanity as a totality. There is then some form of covenant between the divine and humanity which is secured by a form of moral encompassment within which everything a person does is viewed by divine judgement. The implication would be that humans, left to themselves, would not be moral creatures, but if everything they do is witnessed and subject to this judgement by others, this secures their individual morality. In such theology we see humanity as entirely encompassed. Religion provides a kind of carapace. In this chapter it has been suggested that the Akedah is the key moment when this carapace is established, when all the elements of the covenant, and morality and visibility and the essential relationship between humanity and the divine that constitutes monotheistic belief become set in place. A core element of that cosmology is moral encompassment whose technology is visibility. To appreciate all this, a contemporary Trinidadian doesn’t need to read Levinas or reflect upon the Akedah. The idea that everything you do is witnessed and judged remains today one of the primary leitmotifs of sermons and discussions within the religious cultural of contemporary Trinidad. This includes not only the many versions of monotheistic religion but there are also about twenty different Christian Churches, and a minority Muslim population. The idea is heard just as often in sermons given within the polytheistic context of Trinidadian Hinduism. People are being constantly reminded that whatever religion you ascribe to you should assume that God or the gods see everything you do. Indeed the divine is even able to ‘see’ the thoughts behind your actions. But these same sermons inform you that this should be welcome, because it is only thanks to such witnessing that we live secure in an essentially moral world. If we ever forget that we are always subject to such surveillance we lose our capacity for proper morality. If this is so ubiquitous and in various forms has been so for thousands of years then it is hardly surprising that this would remain hugely important as a contemporary propensity towards such cosmological encompassment. My argument is that this has become so fundamental, that it really doesn’t matter whether an individual Trinidadian is religious or secular, they still retain this habitus of integrated (as opposed to intra-grated cosmology) with its sense of encompassment. Even when talking about the

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secular police force and the rise of webcam and security cameras people see the potential of witnessing as truth to underlie the moral security of their social universe (Miller and Sinanan 2014: 162–169). If the gist of Levinas is that to be properly moral we need an other then that begs the question of where we can find this other. My sense is we take it from where we can get it. Given the almost relentless pressure that comes with endless repetition of these religion homilies, most Trinidadians are indoctrinated with the idea that if they wish to be moral beings they have to find modes of moral encompassment which accomplish their visibility to the witnessing of the other. It is then not surprising that one of the elements that starts to emerge in Facebook is that which corresponds to this cosmological imperative. Social networking sites too become a genre within which we can say hineni, Here Am I, to the other. One of the questions asked within the introduction to this volume concerns the idea of anthropology itself as cosmology. I have suggested that anthropology is the perspective that regards people not as mere individuals but as social networking sites. In that case for us anthropologists Facebook, QQ and similar technologies are not simply just one more new media, or one more object for anthropological analysis. Rather they are quite specifically the technology that most clearly embodies the ‘word’ of anthropology itself. They are the cosmology of anthropology writing themselves upon the world. This is because they facilitate a capacity to return the world back towards the fundamental presupposition that anthropology holds of the world, which is that while for psychology people are individuals, for us everyone is constituted first and foremost by social relations. References Alexiou, M. 1990. Reappropriating Greek sacrifice. Journal of Modern Greek Studies 8: 97–123. Brown, S. 1991. Late Carthaginian Child Sacrifice and Sacrificial Monuments in their Mediterranean Context. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Engelke, M. 2005. Sticky subjects and sticky objects: the substance of African Christian healing. In D. Miller (ed.), Materiality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pp. 72–87. —— 2007. A problem of presence: beyond scripture in an African Christian church. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.  Frosh, S. 2010. S. Psychosocial textuality: religious identities and textual constructions. Subjectivity 3: 426–441. Gell, A. 1999. Strathernograms. In A. Gell, The Art of Anthropology: Essays and Diagrams. London: Routledge. Pp. 29–75. Hubert, H. and M. Mauss. 1964. Sacrifice: Its Nature and Functions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 259

Embedded modernities Kierkegaard, S. 1941. Fear and Trembling: A Dialectical Lyric, and The Sickness unto Death. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Leach, E 1976 Culture and Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levinas, E. 1975/1996. Proper Names. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. McKay, D. 2008. Ghosts of futures present: photographs in the Filipino Migrant Archive. Visual Anthropology 21(4): 381–392. —— 2011. On the face of Facebook: historical images and personhood in Filipino social networking. History and Anthropology 21: 479–498. —— 2012. Global Filipinos. Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press. Madianou, M. and D. Miller. 2012 Migration and New Media. London: Routledge Miller, D. 1994. Modernity: An Ethnographic Approach, Oxford: Berg. —— 1998. A Theory of Shopping. Cambridge: Polity —— 2011. Tales From Facebook, Cambridge: Polity. —— 2013. What is the relationship between identities that people construct, express and consume online and those offline? Driver Document DR2 for Future Identities: Changing Identities in the UK – the Next 10 Years. London: Government Office for Science. www.bis.gov.uk/assets/foresight/docs/ identity/13-504-relationship-between-identities-online-and-offline.pdf. —— and H. Horst. 2012. The digital and the human. In H. Horst and D. Miller (eds), Digital Anthropology. London: Berg. Pp. 3–35. —— and J. Sinanan. 2014. Webcam. Cambridge: Polity. O’Hanlon, M. 1989. Reading the Skin. London: British Museum. Paradiso-Michau, M. 2012. The Ethical in Kierkegaard and Levinas. London: Bloomsbury. Parry, J. 1994. Death In Banares. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Putnam, H. 2008. Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life: Rosenzweig, Buber, Lévinas, Wittgenstein. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Rainie, L. and B. Wellman. 2012. Networked. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Simmons, J. 2007. What about Isaac?: Rereading fear and trembling and rethinking Kierkegaardian Ethics. Journal of Religious Ethics 35: 319–345. Stewart, J. 2003. Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strathern, M. 1979. The self in self-decoration. Oceania 44: 241–257. —— 1986. The Gender of the Gift. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. —— 1996 Cutting the Network. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2: 517–535.

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12 Don’t yell fire! The origin of humanity goes to the movies Gregory Schrempp

In The Raw and the Cooked (1969), Claude Lévi-Strauss demonstrates the significance of the theme of acquisition of controlled fire and cooking in traditional mythologies. His ruminations begin with myths of the Bororo and Ge and unfold, over four volumes, to encompass not only Native North and South America but myths and customs from many other parts of the world.1 From the vantage constructed by Lévi-Strauss, I suggest that the power of the fire myth should not entirely be confined to tribal societies much less to some sort of imagined archaic phase of human existence. Elsewhere I offer extensive critiques of ‘scientific fire myths’ that occur in two recent books that lie on the serious end of popular science writing.2 Here3 I will round out the modern status of the fire myth by calling attention to, and offering some preliminary comments on, another, quite different venue in which something like the traditional fire myth appears – specifically, popular cinema. My focus will be a film that directly deals with gaining control of fire and which resonates with traditional myths of the kind that Lévi-Strauss has studied: Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Quest for Fire (La Guerre du Feu [1981]). I will explore Annaud’s film from the standpoint of one fateful artistic decision that ramifies through the whole: specifically, the decision to cast the dawn of humanity as an epic rather than a myth. It is critical to note at the outset that such a genre transformation is not an innovation that appears for the first time in modern cinema. The influential comparative mythologist Georges Dumézil offers many examples from Indo-European antiquity of myths transformed into epics (examples will follow later in this chapter). Annaud’s myth-recast-as-epic, in other words, is not a cinematic innovation, but rather a cinematic variation

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on a process with a long history in traditional oral narrative. Although less far-reaching than Dumézil’s work on this topic, one of Lévi-Strauss’s analyses of the relationship of myth and epic may be of particular relevance to Annaud’s film. Specifically, ‘How Myths Die’ (1976) is about a Native American myth whose narrative momentum (as reflected in geographical diffusion) terminates precisely at the point at which the myth begins to take on the form of an epic. My assessment of Annaud is less dire: in his hands the fire myth does not die but turns into cinematic ‘camp’.4 The consequences of Annaud’s recasting of myth as epic can best be illuminated through comparison to another cinematic human-origin scenario – one that retains the qualities of myth and which has achieved something like cult status: the ‘Dawn of Man’ opening sequence from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Both films have numerous resonances with human origins as recounted in traditional mythologies and can be profitably and appropriately analysed in relation to the latter; however, it should also be noted that the most visible content-source of both is not traditional mythologies but modern science, most visible in the commitment to locating human origins in some sort of evolutionary ancestor. The route by which the mythic, as opposed to scientific, feel of both films arises, is complex. As noted already, the analysis that follows forms part of a larger investigation of the present-day status of the fire myth; and I will also consider another topic that in traditional narratives often enjoys a privileged link with control of fire, i.e. the origin of exogamy. Whether in traditional mythology or classical social theory, no other topics are accorded greater significance than these two – fire and exogamy – in speculations about the origin of human society; but it is also important to note that these are not the only topics that have fuelled such speculations. I am aware that in comparing Annaud to Kubrick I am comparing a fire-film to a film in which the emblem of humanity is not fire but a weapon. As I write this, Rise of the Planet of the Apes – the latest in a highly successful string of sequels and remakes – has just been released and is reportedly drawing large crowds.5 In this series, too, and perhaps reflecting the Cold War world atmosphere in which it and 2001 originated, weaponry predominates over control of fire as emblem of humanity (the two emblems of course are far from opposites, weaponry in some cases amounting to an attempt to harness fire, although towards destructive ends). But the fact that Kubrick has settled on a different (or only partially overlapping) emblem of humanity than that chosen by Annaud does not diminish the relevance of the comparison for the topic at issue, i.e. the consequence of genre-choice in cinematically depicting the origin of humanity.

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The fire myth and cosmology Why bring the fire myth into a discussion of cosmology – a term which connotes, at absolute minimum, something larger than any one trait of human technology and adaptation? As noted, my analysis follows the lead of Lévi-Strauss who, without putting the matter quite this way, conveys the message that gaining control of fire is a cosmological event; this is so because cooking-fire is the pivotal trait, the one that epitomises, summarises, and bonds together all the traits of the full cultural order. In an oft-quoted passage, Lévi-Strauss claims that, not only does cooking mark the transition from nature to culture, but through it and by means of it, the human state can be defined with all its attributes, even those that, like mortality, might seem to be the most unquestionably natural. (1969: 164)

Lévi-Strauss’s four volumes on the fire myth do just that. They show the resonances of the acquisition of fire with development of other aspects of culture: exogamy and alliance, language, music, table-manners, clothing, and body decoration, to name a few. The special status of fire – and ­especially its capacity to emblematise totality and order – is typically reflected in mythic narratives that portray fire as a substance originally possessed by a revered species or by gods; humans manage to wrest it away, often by theft and sometimes with hints of a cosmos-reshaping götterdämmerung. Lévi-Strauss also states his claim about the pre-eminence of fire, specifically fire for cooking, in a more abstract way. He notes that myths work through sensory codes, employing tangible qualities of sight, sound, smell, to encode abstract ideas about the nature of society and social process. Since there are five senses there are five codes; however, one of the codes occupies a privileged position; this is the one connected with eating habits, the gustatory code, whose message is more often transmitted by the others than it is used to translate theirs. (1969: 164)

Fire and cooking offer the epitomising and integrative mythic symbol of that part of cosmic order that can be called human. And given the power and reach of anthropomorphising imagination in most mythological portrayals (and no doubt at least some nominally scientific ones), this means that the hearth marks the centre of an order which spreads outwardly through home, city, and civilisation –the term kosmos originally connoting something like the outer boundary of the humanised or humanisable order. Fustel de Coulanges, in his classic work, The Ancient City (1874), gives us, with Rome as exemplar, a vivid single glimpse of how an order centred on the domestic hearth ripples outward through the fabric and 263

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details of the oikumene: food, ritual, festival, calendrics, kinship, property-rights, war/peace/alliance, and the imagining of the spatial design of the cosmos (see also Feuchtwang, Chapter 5 this volume; Tuan 1996). Implicit in the integrative role of fire, one other sense in which fire is cosmological deserves mention. Specifically, although dualistic philosophies are generally regarded sceptically in the contemporary academy, ontological dualisms of many kinds – the notion of two irreducible substances in productive and/or destructive cosmic interaction – form a recurrent theme in traditional cosmologies. Lévi-Strauss, who ultimately placed himself among the skeptics, was interested in the fire myth partly because he thought that, in affirming the order of culture over nature, it manifested such a dualistic ideology. The cosmological point here is that fire, though rooted in the first principle, nature, when brought under control initiates the second principle, culture, and in doing so it completes the cosmos – adding the second of the two irreducible ordering principles and initiating a new source of cosmic energy and process.6 Controlled fire and/or cooking is not the only contender for the role of pivot that allows the great transformation from nature to culture. Freud famously posits the establishment of the incest taboo as the pivotal event, and spins out a sort of origin myth that begins ‘One day … ’ and proceeds to tell how a group of sons murder their women/wife-hoarding father (1950: 141ff.). Feeling guilty, the sons establish the incest taboo – the rule of giving away their women-kin – in atonement. And before beginning his work on the fire myth, Lévi-Strauss himself wrote a major work on kinship that emphasised the cultural nature and political role of exogamy (The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1971)), approaching the topic with a Freud-like fascination with the moment of passage from nature to culture. We thus have two books from different periods in LéviStrauss’s career – the earlier on exogamy, the later on the fire myth – but both dealing with the relation of nature and culture and the idea of the emergence of one from the other. Less well-known is that this pair of books is presaged by a similar parallel (a parallel parallel, so to speak) in Freud. Specifically, to his rumination on the incest taboo as the origin of culture Freud added, years later, a like-minded reflection concerning fire. In a footnote in Civilization and Its Discontents, he argued that culture arose in the resistance to what he imagined to be a homosexually tinged desire to put fire out by urinating on it.7 To the brief comment in Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud (1960) added an ingenious further elaboration, one worked out in part through an analysis of the myth of Prometheus. The two myth-like scenarios put forward by Freud, respectively in Totem and Taboo and Civilization and Its Discontents, thus propose contradictory events, both male-centred, of the origin of culture, but Freud harmonises them through a metaphor that equates fire with sexual 264

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desire: to control one is to control the other. Freud’s fire myth and his incest-taboo myth converge as a scenario of the origin of culture through gaining control over sexual desire. So while fire is not at the centre of Freud’s original scenario of the origin of culture (i.e. the incest taboo), neither is it very far away. In The Raw and the Cooked, Lévi-Strauss repeatedly points out the association, in traditional mythologies, of cooking-fire and exogamy; but these are no less intricately associated in his own, or in Freud’s, academic theories about these topics. We should broaden slightly what Lévi-Strauss (1967: 213) said about Freud’s analysis of the Oedipus myth: the social-science theory of a topic raised by myth is sometimes best read as a variant of the myth itself. Now let us turn from traditional mythology and social science theory to popular cinema. Fire and the face of humanity Jean-Jacque Annaud’s 1981 film, Quest for Fire, for which Desmond Morris was a science adviser, puts fire at the centre, and as the goal, of the journey to humanity and, more broadly, of the transition from nature to culture. The most distinctive qualities belonging to cinematic portrayals – vis-à-vis both traditional storytelling and the accounts of popular science writers – stem from the potentials that inhere in direct visual representation, and no focus can be more compelling than the human face.8 Cinematic depictions usher in challenges not faced in verbal narrative; the challenge of cinematically portraying the dawn of humanity comes to a head, one might say, in the depiction of the dawn of a sapient facial expression, a focus available only indirectly in traditional narrative whether spoken or written. The point to be emphasised is that Annaud’s choice of epic as his framing genre has enormous consequences for this quintessentially cinematic potential: the portrayal of dramatic change in circumstances through change of facial expression. The success story for depicting the dawn of humanity through the face, in my opinion and that of many others, is Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), in which the ape-like creature, grasping a bone, has an ‘aha’ moment in realising the possibility of its use as a tool, specifically a weapon – not exactly fire, but not far from it, especially if one links the first human act, the use of a weapon for killing prey (perhaps suggesting cooking, though this is not portrayed), to the fiery conclusion of Dr. Strangelove (1964). The two films are bookends for the human career, presenting, respectively, the first and the final weapons. Possibly influenced by Kubrick, Annaud also attempts the ‘aha’ moment – actually multiple times – but is less successful. Annaud’s lesser success, regarding the face, is inextricably bound up with his genre choice. For despite the allusion to a classic epic in his title – the Odyssey – what Kubrick gives us 265

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in the opening scenario of 2001 is a cinematic myth, while it is Annaud who gives us the epic. I have called attention to the ways in which acquisition of fire, in traditional mythologies, is a cosmological event. But in light of the genre distinction just discussed, it is redundant to say that the fire ‘myth’ is cosmological, for myth is intrinsically cosmological by contrast to epic, which is historical and geopolitical. What Annaud does in lighting on an epic framing, in other words, is to lessen the cosmological resonances of the origin of humanity – arguably making the development less anthropocentric and thereby more scientific. The characteristics that distinguish myth from epic genre are imprecise, but within Western folk genres some fuzzy-set tendencies can be noted.9 The world in which mythic stories are set is a remote one – which will have to undergo fundamental transformation to become the world we now inhabit. The cosmos is ruled by extra-human agencies, whose powers bring about, often rather abruptly, the transformations that turn the primordial world into the world we now inhabit. These characteristics are found in Kubrick’s 2001 in multiple ways (see also Kapferer, Chapter 13 in this volume). A world-reshaping transition is ushered in by a mysterious extra-natural agency – the curious monolith – and the completeness of the changeover is dramatised by the immediate metamorphosis of the first manifestation of the new order – a bone-tool – into an advanced space satellite, as though the step from bone-tool to satellite is as nothing compared to the step from nothing to bone-tool. The ‘outsiders’ are alien beings who leave behind a curious bit of material culture that is capable of engendering a distinctive human essence, not (as in Annaud’s film) another band of early humans a few hills over. The epic nature of Annaud’s film is evident in the traditional characteristics of the epic genre: human or near human heroes; mostly naturalistic as opposed to supernatural motives and actions; a purposeful, multi-episodic journey and return. Along the way three fire-questers confront and reject cannibalism and acquire and/or invent, among other things: domestication of animals; humour; improved language; ritual paraphernalia; and body decoration; bipedal as opposed to quadrupedal sexual positions (along with sexual seduction and sex for pleasure and romance as opposed to mere instinct); and new technologies such as the spear-thrower – all overshadowed by the acquisition of fire. The traits or, in Lévi-Strauss’ term, codes that together define our humanity are, in typical epic fashion, held together as so many episodes in one overriding quest, the quest for fire. Compared with myth, the epic genre has several characteristics to recommend it for scientifically based depictions. For example, the epic journey can serve as a metaphor of evolutionary gradualism, and a commitment to naturalistic explanation is ensured by human, rather than

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extra-human, protagonists. In traditional epics, the protagonists are exceptional humans, while in Quest for Fire, the situation is evolutionarily slipped back a notch: the ending point will be modern humanity, but the beginning point is a tribe of slightly less-than-modern humans – their less-evolved status indexed not through any gross anatomical differences from contemporary Homo sapiens, but only through slower and duller facial expression, communication, and motor skills (especially when walking). The gradualism inherent in Annaud’s portrayal contrasts strikingly with Kubrick’s blatant ape-having-an-idea. But the epic genre also creates problems for the artist: the multi-episodic origin of culture necessitates repeating ‘aha’ adventures – too many facial dawnings of humanity – which turns out to be less effective than the dramatic, blatant-but-subtle, ‘totalising’ change of expression, the one that stands for all of them, and that captures our species, given to us by Kubrick. Through facial expression Annaud, too, creates a human essence, but then he quietly takes it back in time for the next episode. Furthermore, the ape that takes on a sapient look, in Kubrick’s film, is somehow more effective than the human face – that is, the face of the human actor – that goes back and forth between sapient expression and empty, obtuse expression – recycling for the next cultural discovery – which we encounter in Quest for Fire. An additive approach (in which the ape suddenly becomes more than ape – and on another level it is obvious that the ape is a human in an ape-suit, so we know all along that we’re in there) works better than a subtractive approach, in which real Homo sapiens actors are trying to shed some of their humanity, only to end up not as proto-humans but stupid-humans. Is there any reason to think that the default facial expression of any of our evolutionary ancestors (or of any species for that matter) was one of obtuseness, or is this merely an artefact of contemporary Homo sapiens movie-actors trying to appear incompletely evolved? We are talking here about which cinematically works better, not about scientific accuracy, for neither film is scientifically accurate: while Annaud’s obtuse-acting humans are too human to be proto-human, Kubrick’s man-in-ape-suit is, in different ways, both too ape and too human to be proto-human. The two parts of Aristotelian-inspired taxonomic terms – as in (1) Homo (2) sapiens – are at war with one another: the species term (sapiens) gives us the differentia, the incongruity, that pulls the species away from the genus. Perhaps this is why it is more effective to dramatise the event additively than subtractively, as though the former mirrors the process through which not only species, but also categories, get formed. Parenthetically, in considering the smattering of popular films that attempt to depict our human origins as understood by science, it should be noted that the conventions of ‘paleo-time’ are strikingly consistent 267

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whether one is dealing with an earnest film such as Quest for Fire, or with more questionable members of this category such as Caveman with Ringo Starr or One Million Years BC featuring Raquel Welch sporting the latest (earliest?) paleo-pushup pelt. Franz Boas (1905) pointed out that many mythologies recognise only two relevant moments, a now and a species-formative then which is often not further temporally sub-divided. Popular cinematic depictions of the dawn of humanity tend toward a set of recognisable identifiers, which include fire as revered and protected entity, animal-skin clothing, slow and awkward and/or hunched-over movement, ineffectively controlled emotions, slow and grunting speech, gender relations defined by males fighting over submissive females, evidence of an ice age and a landscape that is geologically over-active (with volcanoes, landslides, etc.), and, for those depictions inclined to be lax about separations between very distinct past geological epochs, dinosaurs – all fusing into a generic pulp paleo-illo-tempore.10 One can find parallels to all of these in various traditional origin myths. Fire, film, and the epic of exogamy There is an interesting quirk in the depiction of fire in traditional mythologies; and whatever its source, the quirk is shared by Annaud’s film – whose original French title, it should be noted, more literally translates as ‘War for Fire’ (a detail which, moreover, lends support to the comparability of Annaud’s and Kubrick’s respective visions of the dawn of humanity). The quirk in brief is that mythological fire-as-possession flagrantly contradicts the physics of fire. For while fire is a substance available in seemingly limitless supply and is, among all substances, one of the least hoardable, it tends to be mythologically portrayed as a zero-sum element: one species’ gain will be another’s loss, as though only one species can possess it at a time. The zero-sum conceit, which appears repeatedly in world fire mythology, perhaps arises from the desire to use this better-than-gold boon – this best of all substances – to promote the best of all social lessons: the benefits of sharing, to which theft offers the most epitomising and dramatic opposite. The core symbol and the moral lesson together are so compelling that the audience is complicit in ignoring the embarrassing fact that the most valuable substance is also the most plentiful and most renewable. Mythological fire thus both affirms and affronts an economistic attempt to link value to scarcity: it affirms the association by treating this greatest value as a scarcity, but affronts it by the fact that the valuation is all along a narrative pretence. This section will explore two themes often encountered in traditional mythologies, and which also are present in an interesting form in Annaud’s film. The first has already been broached, but needs further 268

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elaboration: that fire and exogamy (and the latter’s consequences for social/political alliance) are often, in traditional mythologies, intertwined. The point to be emphasised here (and already glimpsed in Freud and Lévi-Strauss above) is that while fire and exogamy are often associated, the relation is not always simple and direct. Consider a Kayapo story discussed by Lévi-Strauss early on in The Raw and the Cooked, which tells of a jaguar that adopts a human boy and introduces him to the bowand-arrow and to cooking meat. The boy flees and tells his adventures to his fellow villagers, who go to the jaguar’s home and steal the fire and the bow-and-arrow. Lévi-Strauss’s summary concludes: For the very first time it was possible to have light in the village at night, to eat cooked meat, and to warm oneself at a hearth.   But the jaguar, incensed by the ingratitude of his adopted son, who had stolen ‘fire and the secret of the bow and arrow,’ was to remain full of hatred for all living creatures, especially human beings. Now only the reflection of fire could be seen in its eyes. It used its fangs for hunting and ate its meat raw, having solemnly renounced grilled meat. (1969: 67; original text from Banner 1957)

Here, the acquisition of fire begins with an act of theft – one which is tantamount to denial of exogamy between humans and a particular non-human species, the jaguar; the theft is a source of enmity between the two groups. Reading the theft as a denial of exogamy gains plausibility from the fact that Native North and South American traditions contain numerous episodes of humans and non-human species forming relationships based on common children, stemming either from ­species-exogamous marriage or from adoption of human children by a non-human species (see Schrempp 1998). The fact that fire, as an object of theft, can be the medium of the denial of exogamy, does not reduce, but rather, with added complexity, reaffirms the relation between the two. And the example highlights the importance of theft – a recurrent element in world fire mythology, but one often treated by scholars as though it is a mere embellishment brought in to add drama to the acquisition of fire. The second point is that mating and reproduction, and the social institutions that attach to and prescribe the rules for these processes, often, like the acquisition of fire itself, take on cosmic and/or world-­historical dimension in traditional stories, giving them a scope and significance lying beyond any particular individuals or family. The most obvious case of cosmic reproduction would be the many instances found through the Mediterranean, Asia, and the Island Pacific of the cosmos produced through the mating of Sky and Earth (Numazawa 1984). The pattern of greatest relevance to Annaud, however, is a little less cosmically

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ambitious, and lies on the borderland of myth and epic; and once more Annaud chooses the epic rather than mythic ground. The scenario at issue here is one in which entire populations are portrayed as fusing in a cosmic or world-historical moment to produce a new, third population that combines the qualities of both. Georges Dumézil, the twentieth-century myth scholar who did the most to illuminate the complex relationships between myth and epic, explored the ways in which such macro-mergers could appear in either genre. To his analyses I would add the point that unlike acquisition of fire, which can be imagined most readily as a one-time transformative discovery which by its nature pulls toward the mythic, exogamy is a practice whose transformative consequences can be equally imagined at any level of time, from first origins of humanity to the founding of a particular city, rendering it a more genre-neutral topic. In one of his most intriguing analyses, Dumézil juxtaposes a mythological and a legendary example from societies which, he argues, differently implement an underlying Indo-European strategy: on the one hand, a Scandinavian myth about the merging of the Æsir and Vanir families of gods (associated respectively with sovereignty and fecundity) to form a complete society of gods; and, on the other, the legendary account, recounted by Roman historian Livy (1971: 42ff) of the Rape of the Sabine, which tells of war averted by two populations agreeing instead to intermarry and merge: the upstart Latins led by Romulus, and the more settled Sabine population led by Titus Tatius. ‘Before they confront each other, before they even dream of confronting each other, the two sides are … complementary’ (Dumézil 1970: 67). The legendary accounts ascribe to the new arrivals (the Latins) sovereignty and military virtue, two of Dumezil’s three Indo-European ‘functions’; but they conspicuously lack the third: Opes is the only factor which they do not yet have, either potentially or actually, and which is not ascribed to their nature. When they shall have acquired it and intermingled with it sanguinem, the synthesis of the three principles which were originally distributed between the two neighboring peoples will assure Rome of its place in history, nomen. (1970: 67–68)

Putting aside the details and the controversy of Dumezil’s theory of a tripartite Indo-European ideology, one discovers that there are many stories from different parts of the world recounting the origins of particular tribes through intermarriages between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ that join complementary qualities and claims – Marshall Sahlins’ comments on ‘stranger kings’ in Chapter 6 of this volume amply illustrates the wide distribution of such scenarios. Consider for example the origin account of the Tuhoe, a major Maori tribal group. Maori have numerous stories

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of their arrival in Aotearoa (New Zealand) after journeys, usually by canoe, from an ancestral homeland in Hawaiki. The Tuhoe tribe recounts its origin from the intermarriage of an indigenous population and the voyaging newcomers from Hawaiki. The earlier population has a deep affinity with the land, but connotations of rudimentary culture and cuisine (one of the eponymous ancestors of the indigenes is Toi-­­kairakau, literally ‘Toi-the-wood-eater’), while Hawaiki is the origin-point of culture and political mana and the place in which the deeds of the demigod Maui – the culture hero who brings fire, clothing, the technology of fishing, and other cultural boons – are set. Hence the origin of an old saying of the Tuhoe people, viz., ‘Na Toi raua ko Potiki te whenua, na Tuhoe te mana me te rangatiratanga.’ (The land is from Toi and Potiki, the prestige and rank from Tuhoe), thus admitting that they obtained their lands from their ancestors of the original people, but claiming that they derived their rank from the Mātātua immigrants, of whom Tuhoe-potiki was a (mixed) descendant. (Best 1977: 13)

It should be noted that the Maori term translated as ‘land’ in this saying also means ‘placenta’. While Annaud’s portrayal in Quest for Fire does not make an issue of the relative indigenousness of competing groups, a world-historical merging of populations – recalling in this aspect the scenarios just discussed – seems to be part of his brew. In a pivotal episode of Annaud’s film, the questers encounter and are captured by a tribe (the Ivaka) characterised by a much more highly developed culture than their own. From the cultural assemblage of the Ivaka – which includes masks, thatched buildings, highly ornate body art, pottery, and an implement whipped about to create an eerie rhythmic sound (one cannot but think of the paleolithic musical/ritual instrument, the bullroarer) – it is unmistakable that these are people with culture. Indeed they possess culture as we sometimes, and perhaps unfortunately, learn the concept in an introductory anthropology course: as an entity somehow most at home in exotic context and in archetypal emblems such as pottery and body-art. The Ivaka have small, lithe bodies and quick movements, paralleled by nimble speech; these contrast with the solid, slow, frames, movements, and grunts of the questers, who are the Ulam tribe. These Ulam bear rude, heavy spears, while the Ivaka possess lighter spears and the technical advance of the spear-thrower, a lever used to increase the spear’s velocity. Interestingly, it is the Ulam who are ‘clothed’, though with the roughest of coverings, while the Ivaka tend toward nudity; but the latter have elaborate body art and wear ornate masks which scream ‘culture’ over the Ulam’s functional but unadorned coverings. One point to notice in all of this, and an element which fits nicely with considerations above,

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is that Annaud’s attention to facial expression, and specifically the ‘aha’ moment, is directed mainly to the culture- and paraphernalia-poor Ulam, the questers with whom the audience identifies. The same sort of change of facial expression would be not only pointless, but also photogenically diminished, in the case of the Ivaka because, thickly covered in facial decoration and masks (and with no indication that they wear these less than full-time), the poor devils have been, so to speak, effaced by culture. With regard to fire, the contrast in Annaud’s film is not between fire vs. lack of fire, but rather between fire that must be tended and transported, on one hand, and, on the other, the ability to create fire anew. The Ulam have only the former (indeed it is the dowsing of their flame during an enemy raid that originally motivates their quest for fire) while the Ivaka possess the fire-drill, allowing them to create fire anew through friction – a difference which parallels the contrast that propels some traditional origin myths (e.g. see Grey 1906: 31ff for a Maori example). The lead quester (and also the most intelligent of the three) in Annaud’s film, Naoh, is captured by the Ivaka, and, because of his impressive stature, is forced to mate with some of the Ivaka women, who are lined up for this purpose at the door of the hut in which he is held captive. In contrast with the generally slight frames of the Ivaka, these women have an exaggeratedly rubinesque quality that recalls the iconic Paleolithic ‘Venus figurine’, so that once more, even amidst all of this biology, we have an allusion to an ur-emblem of culture – an instance of archaic ‘art’ – of the kind that anthropologists and archaeologists have traditionally been particularly fond. The fire-questers escape and begin the journey home, accompanied by an Ivaka female, Ika, who has taken a liking to Naoh. It is she who demonstrates the fire-drill to the Ulam people once the questers reach home. So it is the exogamously acquired wife who bequeaths the power of creating fire to the Ulam, and popular cinema joins both traditional mythology and academic theory in linking fire with exogamy. In the final scene of Quest for Fire, Ika is cradled in Naoh’s arms as they lie on ground, looking up wistfully at the moon and to the future. She is pregnant and he has his hand on her belly; thus, the multiple matings imposed on Naoh earlier in the interest of improving the Ivaka population, is now sealed (superseded?) with a romantically inspired (monogamous?) episode of the same thing: the fusing of an earthy, strong, but culturally bereft population with a physically flimsy but culturally heavy population – forecasting a new entity with the best of both. In other words, us – or at least this is the message that, unreflectively, I took from the concluding scene. Nothing is said, but the stark contrast, incompleteness, and complementarity of the two early humans and their

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societies cry out that a species born from their combination is the only viable possibility. But the concluding scene is corny – and this quality once again stems at least in part from the choice of genre. Except for the landscape, Annaud’s film-epic lacks epic grandeur: no opulence, no beach lined with ships, no chariot-races, no Red Sea parting nor city walls falling, no great battles with arrows filling the sky so thickly that day turns into night (although a scene in which the enemy is driven off with the new device of the spear-thrower, like Kubrick’s early human-with-bone, can be seen as foretelling such things). There is a style of lesser epic known to popular cinema, which in some ways offers a better comparison, the Cowboy or Wild West epic – a sub-genre which similarly presents materially sparse landscapes traversed by strong silent types and which, too, takes place on the cusp of civilisation. Indeed, the final scene of Quest for Fire, with the addition of a vest for Naoh and homespun dress for Ika, could also form the conclusion of one of these Wild West epics (not to mention the musical Oklahoma!) – and the realisation of this possibility, or that one has seen this before with different props, might be one source of the corniness. But even while similarly tapping elemental human emotions in settings of visually stunning but culturally starved landscapes, Wild West epics are ultimately about the ‘spread’ of ‘civilisation’, not about the first origins of humanity. As landscape photography or as cinematic ‘camp’ (with many throwbacks – indeed, the fire-questers are not only cowboys but at moments the Three Stooges), Quest for Fire can be quite enjoyable; and no doubt there is also some scientific content mixed into the paleo-pulp. If we were to map the temporal framework of traditional narrative genres onto those of modern science, we would get something like myth as the Paleolithic genre (the first origins of humanity) and epic as the Neolithic genre (the origins of ‘civilisation’). But like another film by Annaud – The Name of the Rose (1986) – which also attempts to temporally retroject a familiar modern scenario (specifically a detective novel whodunit frame into a medieval monastery), Annaud’s Quest for Fire – with the even bolder anachronism of injecting the Neolithic into the Paleolithic – cannot escape the silliness of a plot-type deployed in a world that is not ready for it.11 To the merging of complementary populations in Quest for Fire we have only a distant, and much more asymmetrical, counterpart in 2001: the hinted acquisition of a new quality – not locally but cosmically derived – by the proto-humans with their touching of the vaguely phallic monolith, a scene that is also distantly reminiscent of the almost-­ touching fingers of Michelangelo’s ‘Creation’. The dawning of humanity

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in 2001 is accompanied by voice-chorus music that is at once harmonious and cacophonous, and which successfully conveys deep cosmic churning. Especially at the point of the reacquisition of fire, Annaud taps a similar musical sound, which interestingly works most effectively in his film when briefly brought in as background to scenes focused not on faces but on fire itself – lending to this substance the air of ultimate mystery sometimes accorded to it in traditional religions, and reminiscent of the ambience which Kubrick conjures around the monolith.12 Both films thus musically play on the idea of a human capacity objectified in an external, mysterious, emblematic object-source, although, consistent with their respective genre frames, Annaud’s object is an element from the natural world while Kubrick’s emanates in some unexplained way from beyond it. Annaud’s film opens with a panoramic view of an earthly, dark, rocky landscape in which we distantly see a lone, small fire. By contrast, Kubrick’s film opens with cosmic fire from a god’s-eye view, as three cosmic bodies come into alignment: the moon, then over the top of it, the earth, then rising behind the earth, the sun, its brilliant rays falling on the side of the earth facing away from us – all of this set against the black expanse of space.13 Annaud gives us fire, but not a fire myth. For basking in the glory of Greece or Rome, or even the Wild West, we look to epic. But for experiencing our first origins – and this is the ultimate human conceit, one that in ‘art and entertainment’ finds a convenient escape from attempts at repression – even a scientifically-aware audience wants a story that is not just geo-logical but cosmo-logical. We want a myth! Notes 1 2

3 4

The other classic work on fire myths, still quite useful as a survey, is James Frazer’s Myths of the Origin of Fire (1930). These are John Barrow’s The Artful Universe (1995, expanded 2005; see also Schrempp 2012: 35–71) and Richard Wrangham’s Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (2009; see also Schrempp 2011). I am presently at work on an analysis of yet another recent work with traditional cooking-fire myth resonances, Michael Pollan’s Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (2013). I am grateful for the many helpful comments from the anonymous referees and from the volume editors, Martin Holbraad and Allen Abramson. Reflexivity, a characteristics of ‘camp’, also figures in Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of the traditional myth that dies. The Native American myth at the centre of his analysis is about the character Lynx who in the ‘epic’ transformation is replaced by a human hero wearing a lynx fur. But inexplicably the mythic character Lynx appears at the end of the epic. Lévi-Strauss concludes that the original myth is appearing here ‘as its own metaphor: the 274

The origin of humanity goes to the movies monstrous lynx looming up without motivation at the end, and castigating, not so much the hero … as the narrative itself for having forgotten or failed to recognize its original nature and disowning itself as a myth’ (1976: 265). 5 For reflections on our fascination with our simian selves/others, see Haraway 1989; Rees 2001. 6 Beyond the specific narratives that Lévi-Strauss studies, one encounters numerous other instances that confirm the cosmic and/or dualistic connotations of fire – for example, in religious iconography as one of the manifestations of ‘spirit’ (as in the biblical iconography of the ‘Holy Spirit’, which affirms the creative co-presence of spirit in a world of matter). But note that even in religiously sceptical contexts controlled fire sometimes emerges as emblem of culture and its instrumentalities (knowledge, art, rationality, and so on). Consider, for example, Promethus Books, a publisher of longer works that typically display the debunking spirit familiar in Skeptical Inquirer magazine. Despite the anti-dualist tenor of the times, fire as much as any icon serves to symbolise the residual creative mystery stuff of the cosmos. 7 Freud says: ‘The first person to renounce this desire and spare the fire was able to carry it off with him and subdue it to his own use. By damping down the fire of his own sexual excitation, he had tamed the natural force of fire. This great cultural conquest was thus the reward for his renunciation of instinct. Further, it is as though woman had been appointed guardian of the fire which was held captive on the domestic hearth, because her anatomy made it impossible for her to yield to the temptation of this desire.’ (1964: 90, n1) 8 The topic is explored in the world of cinema by Roland Barthes (Mythologies (1995)), both as it pertains to a particular, memorable face (in the vignette ‘The Face of Garbo’) and collectively, as in the power of an iconic hair-fringe to magically transform the ‘Yankee mugs of Hollywood extras’ into ancient Romans (in ‘The Romans in Films’). Barthes’ vignettes might be seen as part of the intellectual backdrop to Daniel Miller’s foray (Chapter 11 in this volume), into the radically new chapter of personal image-­construction and propagation opened by social media such as Facebook. 9 The features that I describe are approximately those presented by William Bascom in his classic article ‘The forms of folklore: prose narratives’ (1984). 10 In addition to the other films mentioned here, see Clan of the Cave Bear (1986). 11 Both of these films by Annaud were inspired by novels – Rosny-Aîné 1982 [original French 1911] and Eco 1994 [original Italian 1980] respectively. The different challenges presented by cinematic vs. literary anachronism would be a worthy investigation, but one which I cannot pursue here. 12 See Schrempp 2011: 127ff for a discussion of the seemingly ‘natural’ human fascination with fire, one that leads fire-writers to wax poetic about this substance (cf. Bachelard 1968: 4). 13 The moon offers another point of contrast between Kubrick’s and Annaud’s films, opening the former and closing the latter. To the extent that the moon indexes the cosmic context of humanity, that context for Annaud would 275

Embedded modernities seem to be absent from human origins, appearing only as a future possibility. The opening scene of Arthur Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the literary work that accompanied Kubrick’s film, highlights the moon in another way, i.e. the first chapter is portrayed through the eyes of a man-ape named Moon-Watcher.

References Bachelard, Gaston. 1968. The Psychoanalysis of Fire. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Banner, H. 1957. Mitos dos indios Kayapo. Revista de Antropologia 5(1): 37–66. Barrow, John. 1995. The Artful Universe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— 2005. The Artful Universe Expanded. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barthes, Roland. 1995. Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang. Bascom, William. 1984. The forms of folklore: prose narratives. In Alan Dundes (ed), Sacred Narrative. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Pp. 5–29. Best, Elsdon. 1977. Tuhoe. Wellington, New Zealand: Reed. Boas, Franz. 1905. The mythologies of the Indians. International Quarterly 11: 327–342. Clarke, Arthur. 1968. 2001: A Space Odyssey. New York: New American Library. de Coulanges, Fustel. 1874. The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws and Institutions of Greece and Rome. Boston, MA: Lee & Shepard. Dumézil, Georges. 1970. Archaic Roman Religion, Vol. 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Eco, Umberto. 1994. The Name of the Rose. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt [originally Il Nome Della Rosa, 1980]. Frazer, James. 1930. Myths of the Origin of Fire. London: Macmillan. Freud, Sigmund. 1950. Totem and Taboo. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. —— 1960. The Acquisition and Control of Fire. London: Hogarth Press. (The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 22). —— 1964. Civilization and Its Discontents. London: Hogarth Press. (The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 21). Grey, George. 1906. Polynesian Mythology. London: George Routledge & Sons. Haraway, Donna. 1989. Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science. London: Routledge, Chapman and Hall. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1967. The structural study of myth. Structural Anthropology. Garden City: Anchor Books. Pp. 202–28. —— 1969. The Raw and the Cooked. New York: Harper & Row. —— 1971. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. —— 1976. How Myths Die. Structural Anthropology Vol. II. New York: Basic Books. Livy. 1971. The Early History of Rome. London: Penguin. Numazawa, K. 1984. The cultural historical background of myths of the separation of sky and Earth. In Alan Dundes (ed.), Sacred Narrative. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Pp. 182–192. Pollan, Michael. 2013. Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation. New York: Penguin.

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The origin of humanity goes to the movies Rees, Amanda. 2001. Anthropomorphism, anthropocentrism, and anecdote: primatologists on primatology. Science, Technology, & Human Values 26: 227–247. Rosny-Aîné, J.H. 1982. Quest for Fire. Harmondsworth: Penguin [originally La Guerre du Feu, 1911]. Schrempp, Gregory. 1998. Distributed power: a theme in Native American origin stories. In M. Bol (ed.), Stars Above Earth Below. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Museum. —— 2011. Catching Wrangham: on the mythology and the science of fire, cooking, and becoming human. Journal of Folklore Research 48:109–32. —— 2012. The Ancient Mythology of Modern Science. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press. Tuan, Yi-fu. 1996. Cosmos & Hearth. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Wrangham, Richard. 2009. Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. New York: Basic Books.

Filmography Annaud, Jean Jacques, Dir. 1981. Quest for Fire (La Guerre du Feu). 20th Century Fox. —— 1986. The Name of the Rose. Warner Bros. Chapman, Michael, Dir. 1986. Clan of the Cave Bear. Warner Bros. Kubrick, Stanley, Dir. 1964. Dr. Strangelove. Columbia Pictures. —— 1968. 2001: A Space Odyssey. Warner Bros. Wyatt, Rupert, Dir. 2011. Rise of the Planet of the Apes. 20th Century Fox.

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13 Cosmology and the mythic in Kubrick’s 2001: the imaginary in the aesthetic of cinema Bruce Kapferer

Three metamorphoses of the spirit do I designate to you: how the spirit becometh a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child. Nietzsche 1961)

Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is a contemplation of cosmological and mythological proportion upon the trajectory of humankind from its beginnings into the future and ultimately towards its own metamorphosis and potential re-origination. Nietzsche’s concept of the Eternal Return and the impetus within humanity of the Will to Power (the force of human self-creation) expressed in his poetic masterpiece, Thus Spake Zarathustra, constitutes the thematic unity of the film.1 Thus, while passing through great leaps in consciousness and development – from its primordial beginnings to its civilisational and technological mastery – humanity is presented as bound to a cycle of the repetition of the same within which it, nonetheless, can become reoriented in original ontological directions. The past is implicated in the future. However, through action in the future in which humanity becomes creatively re-oriented, Human Being can overcome its past and escape its determination. While Human Being is subject to constraints and directions that are of its own making, it is also singularly capable of self-recreation whereby Human Being may overcome that which appears to determine, place limitation upon it, and which may destroy it and with which Human Being is complicit. The film takes up the Nietzschean argument that human being must continually realise its potential in an overcoming or surpassing of that which condemns it to repeat the same despite the appearance of progress.

Cosmology and the mythic in Kubric’s 2001

Within the Nietzschean Zarathustrian frame Kubrick’s work addresses ontological questions concerning the nature of human being exploring many of the key metaphysical visions that humanity has of itself from its archaic past to its science-dominated present and the intimations human being expresses for its future. A Space Odyssey is nothing short of a discourse on immense themes of a religious, philosophical, and scientific nature the more central of which concern the issues of power and the state, the role of technology in the consciousness and condition of humankind, and, above all humanity’s place in the universe or grand cosmological scheme of things. Vital in this and distinctive to humanity is the unique quality of human being to create and transcend itself and to realise the heights of new potential. This is the impetus in human being – its fundamental orientation to becoming rather than to being – which is crucial to Nietzsche’s understanding of the creative and civilisational achievements of human being. 2001 is a celebration of such a view as well as an inquiry into that which constrains and liberates. The ­apotheosis of human being as Star Child – the journey’s end of 2001 – is an inner metamorphosis of its being into becoming. Kubrick’s Space Odyssey is his particular reprise of a Nietzschean perspective on humanity at a new turning point in history, perhaps a new dawning, whose vast cosmic panorama underscores key ontological issues of continuity and change that appeared to confront human being at the time the film was made and which in many ways are continuing and intensifying. My overall thesis is that 2001 is a development within and an expression of the cosmological and ontological orientations of contemporary European and American cum globalising thought. These are taking form in the context of spectacular scientific and technological achievements and in what appear to be significant political and economic shifts. The split from an archaic religion-dominated metaphysics has reached new intensities of a human-centred (often highly individualist) secularism that is taking what is frequently described as a ‘post-human’ direction. Nietzsche himself is seen by some as a prophet of this orientation especially in his attacks on Enlightenment rationalism and the continuity of Christian moralism as its underpinning. But Kubrick’s Space Odyssey is a more complete expression of what Nietzsche’s work may intimate for current times. 2001 is, in a full overarching cosmological sense, an articulation of the post-human or the new ontological turn. That is, through the medium of the human journey through space that the film presents, Kubrick takes a look at humanity from multiple perspectives including, as far as this is possible, from outside the position of human being itself. While the film in its construction expresses dimensions of the post-­human, new ontological turn – in ways which has relevance for current discourse in philosophy and the social sciences – it is also 279

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a critical engagement with the metaphysical positions from which the post-human breaks or claims to supersede. I must make it clear from the outset that I attempt to approach Kubrick’s work as a serious intervention within contemporary discourse that makes its argument through the very medium that in vital aspects epitomises the post-human or new ontological turn. As Gilles Deleuze (1986; 1989) has demonstrated in his works on cinema, film is the aesthetic or artistic form that is largely the invention of science and technology and continually achieves new potential (e.g. digitalisation, computer-generated graphics) through technological developments. Moreover, the argument of the film experience is carried in the dynamics of the movement-image and time-image (see Kapferer 2013 for a more extended discussion, also Powell 2007) – in the organisation of visual, sound, and sense images as well as in speech. This is especially so in 2001 where language is of reduced significance relative to other imagist processes. I attend as far as is possible to the cinematic/filmic dynamic of the images as vital to the ‘narrative’ which in many respects is anti-linear, in accordance with the Nietzschean cyclical frame within which the experience of A Space Odyssey unfolds. The latter and major part of the chapter is concerned with the way the film’s argument builds through the structural arrangement of its images both with regard to the participants in the action of the film, including the way the audience is systematically positioned with respect to the film’s action and the movement of its images. The essay starts, however, with the socio-political context of the making of A Space Odyssey. 2001 and the historical context of its mythic imaginary The film was made at the height of the Cold War and the push into space was a vital element in the international struggle pursuant on two disastrous world wars and their annihilations. 2001 reflects such a sensibility. It engages with the question of human violence and whether it is integral to human progress. This and the matter of human determination and freedom (and free will) is also at issue in 2001 as they are in varying ways in all of Kubrick’s films and especially so in Dr Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) and A Clockwork Orange (1971) which with 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) compose a thematically interrelated set. I note that such themes have particular poignancy for Kubrick in relation to his Jewish background. Kubrick was deeply concerned with events leading to the furies of the twentieth century, and especially the Holocaust (about which he contemplated making a film), and much of his work resonates with an interest in uncovering their

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underlying forces and enquiring as to their embeddedness in the human condition and potential recurrence. However the distinction of 2001: A Space Odyssey within the mythic set of the three films is the projection of many common themes into issues of cosmological import and intensity occasioned by the entrance of human being into space and the seeming scientific and technological mastery that the exploration of space entails. The move into space is a potential turning point in the progress of human being and symbolised such expectation at the time. The title of the film, 2001, marks this: a moment at the crossroads of millennia in which new potentials of human existence and experience are envisaged. The entrance of human being into space – an environment that is challenging to the habituated consciousness of human being and original to it – demands an intense re-examination of ontological assumptions underpinning philosophical and religious visions that humanity has of itself. This is especially so because with humankind’s venture into space the very Earth-based ground of human perception and consciousness, of the Being of humanity, is radically altered or upset. The basis of human perceptual consciousness, its existential ground in upright posture and orientation in three-dimensional space is thoroughly challenged in space which NASA’s much publicised astronaut training programme addressed. Kubrick’s 2001 confronts the ontological challenge presented to human being concerning its own nature and the existential re-orientation that confronts humanity as it embarks on a new journey towards the enfolding cosmic horizons. Past and future are brought into conjunction as are their ruling forms of knowledge, religion and science. 2001: A Space Odyssey expresses such a conjunction as both a potentially critical point of continuity and as also one of radical differentiation or disjunction. Such matters were very much alive at the time of Kubrick’s creation and his film imparted to them a quality of great profundity. Humankind at the threshold of space marked for many the triumph of science over religion and was the epitome of progress. Science and the rationalism extending from the Enlightenment (a major reference in 2001) was demonstrating its powers in all areas of enquiry. It was a period of high modernism in which the rationalist dedication of the scientific gaze was everywhere in evidence in the economic, psychological, and social sciences. Freudian psychoanalytic and Marxist perspectives, both at the height of their popularity in the 1960s and key references in 2001, claimed the authority of science in exposing the deep-seated irrationalities of the human mind and of dominant capitalist orders. They attacked religious and metaphysical argument but no more so than did the biological sciences following on Darwin and the discovery of DNA and the post-Newtonian physical sciences developing from Einsteinian relativity and quantum theory whose influences are powerful in the 281

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construction of A Space Odyssey. The displacement of religion and the gathering secularism of the time then and now certainly overcame the authority of religion. But frequently this was achieved not by doing away with religious kinds of questions but, instead, by expanding upon them within their mythic imaginal frame. The scientific demonstrated its own authority by attempting answers for the very questions which religion had patently failed relating, among numerous others, to the origins, source, and uniqueness of life on earth. At the time of 2001’s release as now, an increasingly secular world tended either to endorse religio/ontological questions but in the de-mystified terms of science or else claimed a scientific basis for religious visions. Thus, the combative reactions of fundamentalist religions and the insistence of Creationism or Divine Design against the position of science. The continuity of religious or metaphysical questions in a scientific and technologically commanded secular world is compounded by the needs of scientific funding from the public purse in a context where the popular imaginary still embeds fascinations of a religio/cosmological sort despite the apparent displacement of religion by science. Popular science writing, as Schrempp (2012) has shown, and certainly science fiction, which has shifted from a relatively marginal genre in the 1950s to being pretty mainstream in the present, have been vital in sustaining the embroilment of science in more ancient and enduring mythology of a religious kind. Arthur C. Clarke – one of the key inspirations for 2001 – was both an important science populariser as well as science fiction writer who attempted to indicate the continuing relevance of ancient conceptions but reconstituted in modern scientific terms. In spite of itself, science and the attitudes born of science were and are still bound to a mythic consciousness. This is not to reduce science and to bring it back within the arguments of religion but to indicate that both draw much of their inspiration and directional impetus from a mythic consciousness that is as integral to science as it is to religion and perhaps given greater intensity in the very discoveries of science. Kubrick himself imparted an idea of the mythic wonderment encouraged in science and the continuity of mythological questions of ancient provenance that were part of the imaginal environment at the time he created 2001. A space odyssey, myth and the excess of interpretation There have been numerous attempts to arrive at a definite interpretative understanding of 2001’s narrative but they have been routinely defeated by the sheer cosmological and philosophical immensity of Kubrick’s project. When pressed as to the meaning of his film, Kubrick famously responded: ‘You are free to speculate as you wish about the 282

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philosophical and allegorical meaning of 2001.’ Indeed, the film exceeds perhaps the imaginative capacity of those who participated in its making, even possibly of Kubrick himself. Books and no less films, artistic works in general, have the characteristic of exceeding the imagination of their authors, indeed, their creators being the instruments in the invention of something that is greater than themselves. They have, in other words, mythic propensities that can transcend the particular time or place of their creation. As such they can continually be enlivened by capturing within the dynamic frame of their meaning the significance of actions and events that have arisen independently of them. Thus they simultaneously achieve new meaning as they may constrain or expand the import or meaning of that which is brought within their compass. Their meaningful potential can verge on the inexhaustible and it is this mythic objective which Kubrick was clearly oriented to create in 2001 and which is the dimension of its cosmological sweep that enfolds the space/time of humanity, past and future. A Space Odyssey arguably comes within the most transcendent category of the kinds of myths that conventionally attract anthropological attention – that of myths of origin – and it is this mythic quality which certainly contributes to the continuing appeal of the film and its cult status. Moreover, as thoroughly a cosmo-mythological discourse on origination, 2001 brings together and effectively gives expression to that mythic quality which is already part of the driving imaginal force and appeal of sometimes very different orientations to the nature of reality in religion, philosophy, and in science. These statements are preliminary to the interpretational analysis that I now make of A Space Odyssey which seeks to examine key aspects of its mythic quality that are internal to it. More precisely, I am concerned with the dynamic framework of the film in itself or its template of and for meaning through which it may continually be open to new interpretations and understanding. In the approach that I adopt the mythic quality of the myth and its potency is vital in the film as a whole. That is, it is constituted not merely in the events of its narrative but in the processes through which the narrative is emergent or produced. Thus I attend to what can be described as the techne of the mythic forming or some of the cinematic techniques that are engaged and which have perceptual and conceptual effect. It is via the technology of the cinematic that the aesthetic of the mythic is created and has force in structuring the participation of the audience into the life of the film and perhaps (re)constituting their subjective orientation or submitting them both experientially and conceptually to the potentialities of that which is immanent within the mythic of the film. This bears a relation to aspects of the dynamic of myth in ritual where it is the very technology and techniques of the ritual practice that underpins the force and import of the mythic content 283

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and structure of the rite. In other words, the meaning, significance and experiential impact of myth as narrative or story is in the technological articulation of its production, in the way it is brought forth. Indeed, as with many ritualists (see Kapferer 1983; 1997), Kubrick was obsessed with controlling every technical detail involved in the creation of his work. Certainly, as we shall see in detail below, cinematic techniques such as framing, focusing, depth of field, subject positioning, the use of montage – are integral to what may be broadly grasped as the meaning or mytho-cosmological template of the film in itself. A Space Odyssey: the Nietzschean frame Both the title and theme of 2001 draw expressly on Homer’s Odyssey, the space journey bearing an explicit connection with the heroic voyage of Odysseus and his companions through the unchartered unknown. This voyage occurred after the destruction and horrors of the Trojan War. As with Homer’s Odyssey all who start the space journey with the exception of the hero, Bowman (one of the names of Odysseus, who received a gift of the Great Bow before he starts his adventures), perish. The critical and ultimate event in the Odyssey and in 2001 concerns the Return. In the Odyssey, after Odysseus is shipwrecked near his home (an event which bears some similarity to Bowman’s descent to Jupiter and metamorphosis in 2001), Odysseus restores the order of his household (effectively the reestablishment of cosmic harmony fractured in the Trojan War which set human beings and the gods against each other). In the final events of A Space Odyssey, involving Bowman’s descent to Jupiter and metamorphosis into the Star Child, there is the powerful suggestion both of an immanent return to Earth and the emergence of a new cosmic possibility for Human Being, perhaps the start of a new cycle of being in the direction that Nietzsche describes in the philosophical journey of his Zarathustra. Thus, A Space Odyssey opens and closes with the Fanfare (or World Riddle motif, fifth/octave intervals C–G–C) of Richard Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, which also marks important stages in the emergence and progress of Human Being and its consciousness towards its highest potential. The theme is the musical image of Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’ which reaches its ultimate filmic image in the rebirth and metamorphosis of the space traveller into the Cosmic Foetus (or Star Child) or the Overman (Übermensch). The key thread of the film’s odyssey is the dynamic gestation and emergence of the will to power in its several dimensions among animals, human beings, machines, and finally fully achieved in human reassertion and the trans-mutational rebirth or metamorphosis into the Star Child.

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Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra famously attacks religion, especially Christianity, though other major civilisational religions are addressed, in the spirit of liberating Human Being from the determination and limitations of its own inventions (religion being the supreme example). I note that Zoroastrian themes and images apparent, for example, in Christianity, Judaism, as well as Buddhism and Hinduism, are evident in The Space Odyssey as they are in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. Kubrick’s 2001 shares much in approach and significance with Nietzsche aesthetically and, indeed, Nietzsche engages the arts in the communication of his philosophy. Much of Thus Spake Zarathustra, if not all (see Fink 2003), is filled with poetic brilliance: it flows with the music and dance of the Dionysian dithyramb. Zarathustra engages in such a way as to communicate its messages directly, immediately, rather than in measured reflection. Similarly, Kubrick engages film and the power of the image (visual and non-visual) to communicate directly. The film is noteworthy in its use of minimal dialogue and in its enigmatic refusal to articulate overt explanations for many of its key events. Kubrick expressly stated that 2001 ‘is basically a visual, nonverbal experience’ that is intended to hit ‘the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just as music does, or painting’ (Gelmis 1970: 304). Logos is radically subdued. The systematic development of the film through various stages of human achievement would seem to be most un-Nietzschean until, of course, the final part of the film (the descent to Jupiter and the sequences of re-birth) which as most critics have attested, seems to defy all logic and rational understanding. It is the poetic crescendo of the film. In its philosophical substance, Kubrick’s film engages Nietzsche largely with reference to humankind’s relation to tools and technology, more specifically to the emergence of Homo Faber and its rise to dominance as a consequence of its invention of the tool but then, in turn, domination by the very technology humanity invents. Technology (the embodiment of rationalism and pragmatism) in 2001 replaces religion in Zarathustra. And, this is the situation of the spacecraft, Discovery, a world of confinement of Human Being and its submission to the dictatorship of the machine, of machinic power and of all-controlling logical reason. However, it is the liberation of Human Being from the constraint and determination exercised by its own invention – an invention upon whom humans become dependent and to whom their will has been transferred – that A Space Odyssey presents. For, it is in the course of the process whereby Human Being regains mastery over itself and its technology that Human Being not only is reborn but also conquers death (and time). The birth of the Star Child in the film is in effect the transmutation/transmigration of the space traveller – the last survivor of the space mission to Jupiter. He is

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presented as an old man on his death bed (Nietzsche’s Last Man) whose upraised hand and index finger point to his new beginning. In this connection what is particularly interesting in 2001 is that, basically, the medium is the message. 2001 is a filmic discourse on the transformations of technology and the shifts that take place in the human/ technological relation as a dimension of the cinematic experience itself and as critical in the formation of the aesthetic potency of the cinematic as a technological creation. Kubrick made use of Cinerama, a method of projection that used a large encompassing curved screen linked to a high-quality directional sound surround system. The method of image projection of Cinerama confronted the audience more brightly and directly in such a way as to prevent the scattering of light and washing-out of the image. The intention of Cinerama was to bring the audience more within the action, to have a greater reality effect than other cinema and television at the time. Its innovation was something akin to the current experimentation with digital technology and 3D. Consequently, The Space Odyssey is also a meta-statement on the evolution of cinema, on its capacity to replicate developments in other artistic creative fields and also to go beyond them, to realise a form of perceptual consciousness that extends human perception beyond the limitations of its embodiment. There is a moment in the film, during a scientific briefing at the Moon Base, when a photographer moves around the room recording the occasion: the camera as the extension of the photographer’s eye and bound to the movement of his body. Early cinema tended to record events as if from the audience position upon a staged theatrical production. The camera was a relatively passive tool expressing what the eye might ordinarily see or else extending on the same line of sight. However, with the invention of the mobile camera (and put to effective use in the exercise shots within the spacecraft Discovery), the camera was freed from its human bondage, no longer an extension of the embodied eye, and enabled to open up domains of perception previously unavailable to the human eye and oriented from a diversity of shifting subject positions. Consciousness mediated through the innovative technology of cinema achieves in many respects a consciousness born of technology and to a degree divorced from the human body. The figure of HAL in 2001 – who is represented in his all-surveilling and all-powerful eye – expresses such a technological consciousness. In other words, in the context of some of the key themes in A Space Odyssey, cinema is what it represents. The organisational structure of A Space Odyssey The film is organised into three segments that are presented in two parts separated by an intermission. The three segments are 1) The Dawn of 286

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Man; 2) The Jupiter Mission; 3) Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite. Broadly, The Dawn of Man describes the origins of Human Being through to its discovery of a strange object (a Monolith) buried on the Moon. For reasons of presentation and analysis I have titled the events in Earth space as, The Events in Earth Orbit: the Trip to the Space Station and Clavius Moon Base. The Jupiter Mission is a key bridging section of the film. Indeed, it can be conceived as corresponding to Nietzsche’s idea of the journey of humanity as likened to that of the rope dancer or tightrope-walker dangerously crossing the abyss between ‘animal and Overman’ (see Nietzsche 1961: 43). The segment presents the crossing of the space crew across the Void between Earth and the most distant point in the universe, the planet Jupiter, where the last surviving crew member metamorphoses into the Star Child (or Cosmic Foetus). The intermission occurs in The Jupiter Mission segment at a critical point where the continuity of the Mission is threatened by the action of the spacecraft Discovery’s controlling computer, HAL. This concludes Part 1 of the film, Part 2 begins as a continuity of the Jupiter Mission whereby HAL is de-activated and the crisis is overcome and the spacecraft arrives in orbit at its destination. The final segment of the film, Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite, is concerned with the descent to Jupiter and the dynamics of the metamorphosis of the last surviving crewman. The intermission was a common convention at the time when a curtain was drawn across the screen. During the interval members of the audience frequently left the auditorium to take refreshments. Typically it separated preliminary events (newsreels, trailers, and B movies) from the A movie event. However, Kubrick employed the intermission in a way more technically integral to the cinematic hiatus involved in the transition from the first to the second part of the film. In other words, a theatre-drama convention becomes a cinematic device, effectively a cut, even a match cut of the kind that joins the Earth and Space/Moon sections in the Dawn of Man that joins two distinct moments of filmic development. A continuity in difference is established. I note that in the DVD of the film, the intermission is still marked. In this way, the intermission in 2001 is a liminal moment, a period of transformation, ‘betwixt and between’ one ontological condition of human being and another. In the first part of the film, human being is changing but it maintains its ontological/perceptual circumstance. That is, human being is still constrained within its geocentric universe and constrained to a technology in which such a geocentric ontological condition is sustained. In Part 2, not only is human being freed from such technological and geocentric constraint but is effectively ontologically re-created and re-positioned.

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Part 1 Opening and credits The film begins in the black void, no light projects from the screen only sound, the music of Gyorgy Ligeti’s Atmosphères. This sound, in my interpretation, is that of cosmic creation, the sound of the beginning. After a few minutes the signature theme of Thus Spake Zarathustra is played which is accompanied by the first visual event, the Sun rising above the Earth (indicative of Nietzsche’s ‘noontime’ and of the ascent of the Übermensch) and the light of creation (Genesis). The sound of cosmic beginning/creation in the blackness of the Void has Hindu/Buddhist resonance (as elsewhere in the film) and this subsequently has a bearing on the understanding of the black Monolith that appears at critical transitional/transformational junctures in the film and which for many critics and commentators presents an enigma. Indeed, there is, I suggest, an identity between the blackness of the cosmic void in the film and the blackness of the Monolith from which existence is emergent and human being is born and reborn. The Monolith marks critical stages in the emergence of life, human being, technology, and human re-birth. But more than this it is a creative vortex, a manifestation of the generative Void of Creation. It is itself the intensity into which all light is drawn and contained (the significance of its blackness, a black hole) and is the energy of creation. Further support for this understanding is provided by the appearance of the Monolith in the closing events of 2001 that reveals the journey to Jupiter as a metamorphosis, a rebirth of new potential for human being. The rebirth is effected by the entrance into or passage through the Monolith of the last surviving cosmonaut of the Jupiter Mission. This involves a process, as I will present, of the cosmonaut effectively going inside the Monolith – a space of light and of space/time compression – and being projected into a new dimensionality for human being, the Star Child (or Cosmic Foetus) of the final frames of the film. Immanent in the Monolith is the eclipsing of the idea of creative potency and generative force as being external to human being – the idea of God – but, rather, that what is externalised becomes realised as nothing other than the potentiality of human being in itself. The Dawn of Man The Dawn of Man, the first section of 2001, opens with images of the rising sun over a barren landscape. The situation of the audience via the camera is as if from the outside looking down, perhaps in the position

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of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and his going down from his cave ‘rising one morning with the rosy dawn …’ (Nietzsche 1961: 1; see Stover 1968; Wheat 2000). The sound of rushing wind accompanies the sweeping visual image of a parched, rocky desert to settle on drying animal skeletons. These images of Death are likely biblical references to Ezekiel 37, the Valley of Dry Bones, and perhaps the wind is indicative of the Spirit, or the breath of life which brings the resurrection that Ezekiel is prophesying. The scene then settles on a group of tapirs and man apes. They are vegetarians and they intermingle although the apes protect their food from the foraging tapirs. The relative peace is broken by a leopard’s attack on one of the apes indicating their subordinate position as the hunted despite their aggressiveness. Their aggression is depicted in a relatively long sequence of shots involving a fight between two groups of ape-men over the possession of a waterhole. A closing image is of a defiant ape staring back at the camera (the audience, human being looks at its own beginning that looks back at it, establishing their identity). The scene then shifts to nightfall and a group of ape-men look out at the desolate expanse from under a rock overhang. The growling of a leopard can be heard, which is shown atop a rock with the kill of a zebra, the leopard’s gleaming eyes surveying the scene. The general sense of the images here is of commanding power (leopard) dominant over the weak, the apes who cower in fear. The following scenes show the apes asleep at dawn. They are stirred by a sound – a ‘wind’ rising into a hymnal chorale (Gyorgi Ligeti’s Requiem). One wakes and is extremely agitated by what he sees, stirring the other apes. Disturbed, all the ape-men gather around the black Monolith that has appeared. At first keeping their distance they overcome their fear, approach the Monolith and touch it. The screen image is such as to orient both audience and ape-men along the same line of sight, looking up the Monolith to the Sun rising above it – Monolith, Sun and Moon are in alignment (the direction of the future from the position of the present?) The ape-men by conquering their fear and touching the Monolith, by virtue of their own action in relation to the Monolith, achieve a new consciousness in which they discover tool-use. The images following the confrontation with the Monolith show the process of this discovery. Without any accompanying sound (apart from the grunting of the ape-men) the camera focuses on the act of discovery, effectively capturing the dynamic of the formation of an idea and its conversion into practice. This image is brought into rapid conjunction with the image of the Monolith in planetary alignment as the triumphal chords of Strauss’s Zarathustra fill the scene. The culminating image of the discovery of the tool is that of the ape-discoverer in exultation of the realisation of its (and humankind’s) self-transformation in the will to power indicated in 289

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the triumphal bars of Zarathustra. The dominant images are of power as a striking violent force. The ape-man with a leg-bone as tool-weapon pounds the skeletons lying about. There are then images of killed tapirs. Human Being has become the hunter and a carnivore (images are presented of meat-eating) and is no longer part of the herd. The final frames of The Dawn of Man present the transition of human being from hunting to homicide and war. An ape-man contemplates a bone tool, turning it over in thought. There is an image of the sun rising over the horizon, indicating another transition in the human progress which is presented in the following frames. Armed with bone weapons the ape-men advance against that group of apes that they had confronted earlier at the waterhole. The leader strikes the unarmed leader of the other group (all of whom are without weapons) who falls down, all the armed companions of the leader as a group participate in the homicide. Here the homicide, a Primal Murder (and effectively a killing by the group and a clear reference to Freud) is an event of the self-realisation/­ actualisation of Human Being that carries within it the deep guilt and stain of human being’s self-creating act. It signs the intimacy of Death with the creative urgency of Human Being. An anthropologist might see it as a sacrificial moment which, as with much ritual sacrifice, in its dynamic of recreation (frequently a killing act) includes that which is the impetus for its repetition. The final image of the sequence is of the leader/killer/homicide flinging his bone weapon into the sky. At this point the tool/weapon transmutes into a spacecraft, an orbiting bomb. This is a famous, now clichéd, shot in film history, a match cut or what Gilles Deleuze calls an irrational cut. It is a radical form of montage where the morphing of the bone tool into the spacecraft establishes their technological unity and historical continuity, that the latter is an extension of the other, the spacecraft is the actualised potential of the bone/weapon. The cut also stresses the ambiguity underlying the human creation of technology, indeed of creation itself: that it expands human possibility and can destructively act against human being. The shot mediates the next sequence of events which explore processes of human dependence on technology and the technological incorporation of Human Being. The Events in Earth Orbit What I have termed The Events in Earth Orbit present the rationale for the Jupiter Mission. Broadly the film images vital dimensions of the de-centring of human being in space where the earth-based habits of existence are no longer relevant and new habits must be relearned. Space is an environment to which technology is thoroughly adapted and 290

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Johann Strauss’s Blue Danube waltz, the sound image that accompanies the visuals of the orbiting and travelling spacecraft, is a presentation of the harmony and unity of technology with space. Sound and visual image combine in the realisation of the dance of technology in space. This contrasts with the displacement of Human Being in space. The idea that Human Being is out of place in space and must learn new habits of the body (walking, eating, and defecating) is a major feature of the following images. Thus on the space shuttle to the orbiting space station there is a shot of a passenger (Dr Heywood Floyd ) asleep in his seat. The images are of weightlessness. His arms float. A pen escapes free from his hand and a stewardess comes down the aisle and replaces the pen in the passenger’s pocket. The stewardess walks awkwardly in the weightless environment with the assistance of special magnetised shoes upon which the camera focuses. Later, in the space shuttle travelling to the Clavius Moon Base, the multi-dimensionality of space, a feature of the entire film sequence from Earth to satellite to Moon, and its implications for human existence, is expanded. The space shuttle sequences stress the ontological challenge that space presents to Human Being whose habituated orientation to existence is threatened. The upright posture of Human Being under the conditions of Earth gravity within three-dimensional space, the very existential ground of the being of Human Being, is overturned and problematised. What is upright is thoroughly relativised. Thus extended shots present the stewardess being revolved through a full 360 degrees so that what is upright from the stewardess’s perspective is shown to shift relative to the centred perspective of the fixed camera or seated passenger. In space human beings become infants once again and must learn new habits consistent with the circumstances. The main habituated bodily functions must be relearned: walking, eating, and defecating. Thus, the space food that human beings eat is effectively baby food to be sucked through a straw. A sequence focuses on Dr Floyd contemplating the instructions of a Zero Gravity Toilet. Human Being becomes a child in space (a concept that has bearing on the final image of the film, that of the Star Child) and struggles to maintain its humanity as conditioned by earthly existence in the vastly different environment of space. However, while Human Being asserts its progress or is transcending its origins, it acts to re-insist its existential circumstances and is driven to repeat the past into the future – a critical aspect of the Eternal Return that Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra is oriented to overcome and which A Space Odyssey expands. For example, in a later space shuttle trip to where a Monolith has been discovered comments are passed that the processed food being eaten tastes like meat even though it does not look like it. Implicitly a contrast 291

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is drawn between the raw foods that the ape-men in the Dawn of Man episode consume and the technologically manufactured processed foods. Through the advance of technology Human Being has remained the same despite the apparent difference. As in the earlier match shot (tool becoming spacecraft or flying bomb) through the progress of science and technology, Human Being reproduces the motivations that were intimate with certain creative/inventive acts and to which the nature of Human Being became bound (Man not merely as Homo Faber but also as Man the Hunter and Man the self-creating Homicide): a killer of itself and others. At the space station Dr Floyd communicates via video-phone with his daughter who declares that she wants a bush baby (a loris, a nocturnal primate) for her birthday, a Darwinian reference to human evolution. Following this conversation, Floyd stops by a group of Russian scientists who are gathered sharing drinks. There is an identity between this event and the clash between the two groups of ape-men at the waterhole on Earth. A continuity is indicated between the conflict in the preceding events and the Cold War situation to which this event refers. The clear difference is the surface civility and the suppression of hostility, the mask of civilising repression. Broadly, therefore, despite the extension of Human Being beyond the Earth’s atmosphere via technology, it remains the same. Technology sustains Human Being in its geo-centric habits. Within the technological and civilisational progress of Human Being is contained the intimation of the antagonism and destructiveness which is vital in their development. More ominously, there are suggestions that Human Being is being displaced by the technology that mediates, encases, and sustains it. Furthermore, and in a sinister sense, the technological is becoming alive as it is inscribed with the very human qualities of its creators. These aspects become more evident in the closing events on the Moon. Thus, Dr Floyd and the other American scientists arrive at the site where a black Monolith has been excavated at the moon crater Tycho. The scientists, clothed in spacesuits and carrying portable life support equipment, go down to where the Monolith has been excavated. The leader of the group (presumably Floyd) goes towards the Monolith, followed by his companions, and touches the Monolith with his gloved hand. It is an image which repeats that of the ape-men with the first Monolith. As they approach Gyorgy Ligeti’s Requiem is played. But the triumphal world riddle theme of Thus Spake Zarathustra is not heard. (This sound image achieves its significance in its absence in a context filled with the expectation of its occurrence.) As the scientists gather for a photograph in front of the Monolith a high-pitched deafening ‘signal’ is emitted. The closing image is of the Sun half-risen on the Moon’s

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horizon with a waning Earth above it. This perhaps indicates the decline of Human Being in the face of technology. The image of the moon shuttle (as distinct from the space shuttle that carries passengers from Earth to the Space Station) gives the impression of something alive. The shots of entry within the space station and later the underground moon hangar are as if going inside a body; the dominant colour is red. The technological is an exoskeleton, a shell, and this is manifest in the spacesuits of the scientists, who might be conceived of as the high priests of the now all-enveloping technology. When the Monolith is touched by the scientist it is by a hand that is gloved in the skin of technology. In terms of the overall narrative direction of the film (and also Clarke’s short story The Sentinel) the signal indicates the direction of its source and the Jupiter mission that follows. But it also signs a new development in the course of Human Being and of technology and the coming to crisis in the relation between Man and its invention. Thus, the signal that is emitted is discordant and shrilly deafening, an attack upon a key sense of consciousness. The scientists attempt to protect themselves. The sound (described by Kubrick in its most elementary sense as a warning) could be interpreted as blocking or impeding the development of their consciousness and their progress in the will to power. The Monolith is not active in their transformation or extension but its creative energy is displaced onto the technology that humans have created to assist and protect them on their journey. Instead it is their technology that is transformed and achieves a new level of consciousness: that which has hitherto mediated Human Being achieves a life of its own. The shrill metallic scream that is emitted is the voice of technology itself. Moreover, it is a discordant voice, an expression of contradiction or potential negation. It indicates a unity in contradiction or a potential opposition between Human Being and its creation of technology: a negation by technology of the humanity that is housed and sustained within it and, indeed, a negation of Human Being by the very human qualities that Human Being has inscribed within technology. Of critical significance in terms of the overall thematic structure of the film is that the triumphal theme of Thus Spake Zarathustra is not played at the appearance of the Monolith on this occasion. The major indication is that it does not mark the arrival of Human Being at a new level of consciousness, but instead the reduction or stagnation of potential as a function of its dependence and encasement within technology. This and other themes are developed in the next segment.

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The Jupiter Mission: Eighteen Months Later The opening frames are of the Jupiter spacecraft that extends and travels across the length of the screen. In the initial showings of the film this was accentuated by the stretch of the Cinerama widescreen. The image of the Jupiter spacecraft bears similarity with the bone/weapon of the Dawn of Man. The spacecraft itself makes no sound but the music accompanying it is Khachaturian’s Gayeneh which expands the surface idea of the harmonic unity of space and technology but hides a more profound uncertainty (Khachaturians’s ballet music is a story of political rivalry). The scene then shifts to inside the spacecraft showing a crew member (Frank Poole) jogging while shadow-boxing in the ship’s circular centrifuge for maintaining earth gravity. The problem of weightlessness has been solved and human beings are sustained by technology in a semblance of earth-like conditions. The shadow-boxing is a fitness-sustaining regime, the aggression of Human Being, a dimension of its would-be dominance is contained and restrained. Arranged in pods at the side of the centrifuge are the crew members in hibernation for the duration of the journey: Frank Poole and the key protagonist in the remainder of the film, Dave Bowman, are the only active human crew members. The circular centrifuge might be indicative of the cycle of Life and Death, Poole depicted as in effect on its treadmill and doomed (as it turns out in later events) to its endless repetition. The hibernation pods contain three crew members who are in suspended animation in order to conserve ‘life support capabilities, basically food and air’, as the leader of the expedition Dr Bowman says in the later BBC interview. They are in effect in a state close to death, beneath that of sleep and without all sense. While Dr Poole in the same interview describes their experiential state as being ‘like sleep’, it is more like death (sleep being a common euphemism for death). Thus Poole says that like in sleep the hibernating crew have ‘no sense of time’ but with the ‘only difference [is] that you don’t dream’. It is further explained that every minute they breathe once and have three heart beats a minute, the bodies of the hibernating crew being maintained at 3 degrees above freezing. The bodies (virtual mummies) are in pods that are coffin-like, resembling Egyptian sarcophagi which, if so, carry a cosmological sense of being in the hands of the gods with its futile and tragic foreboding (suspended within the passage of time). These opening frames as a whole repeat some of the key features of the early episodes of the Dawn of Man and their biblical references. Man is still in the Shadow of Death and in the situation of its threatened and trembling vulnerability. The lighting is dim for Poole’s run around the centrifuge indicating it is evening or nightfall in the Nietzschean sense

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and that Human Being still awaits its transcendence and liberation from self-created constraints. The series of events that follow expand the theme of the dependence of Human Being upon technology as well as the dominance of Human Being by technology – the machine or technological overcoming of Human Being. Not only does Human Being become displaced by the machine but also the machine becomes virtually a God-like semblance and in the image of Man. It displays all the same qualities of deception, fallibility, self-preservation, and violent destruction. As well, the machine manifests an identity between God and the state, Human Being is reduced in the circumstance of their gaze, the complicity of Human Being in relation to itself. The events come to a crisis when the crew members realise their situation and strive to reassert their command vis-à-vis the machine. Thus, as Poole’s exercise run comes to an end, the image of the (camera) eye of the governing computer for the mission, HAL, dominates the screen. It is red with a yellow iris. Images of eyes are recurrent motifs throughout the film and they are often associated with contexts of dominance (the eyes of the leopard in the Dawn of Man, of HAL and later of Bowman). Here HAL’s eye is an all-seeing eye (his eye is located at vantage points throughout the craft). The figure of Bowman is reflected in HAL’s eye as he descends into the living area. There is then an image of Poole seated eating his meal but looking at a screen which is starting a BBC newscast. The scene refocuses on Bowman who is dispensing his evening meal while the BBC newscaster tells that the Discovery 1 is now 80 million miles from Earth and that a recorded interview (corrected for time delay) with the crew will be presented. In other words, despite being well beyond Earth, Human Being is effectively still maintained as if in Earth time. As a whole the sequences concentrate on human/machine ambiguities and the controlling/dominant position of HAL. The BBC interview scenes address the issues of consciousness and intelligence, whether these are similar or different as between man and machine. HAL appears to confirm that he has a machine/technological consciousness whose will is given to absolute utility – a utilitarian consciousness. ‘I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.’ This would appear to support HAL’s assertion that he is ‘fool proof and incapable of error.’ But doubt is immediately raised concerning the absolute rationality of HAL for the interviewer detects evidence of the (human?) emotion of pride in HAL’s response. Pride is one of the deadly sins and a dimension of hubris – a human flaw – and is the first portent of HAL’s potential danger. The crew members have become functional parts of the spaceship of which HAL is indeed the nerve centre and the brain. He might be understood as playing along 295

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with the human delusion that they are the masters when the reverse is true. From within a Nietzschean perspective HAL is the slave who is aiming to fully supplant the position of the master, Human Being. He is a figure of ressentiment who hides his desire in a servile mixture of patronising obsequiousness. (HAL behaves like a parent to a child: technology as the parent of Human Being rather than the child of Human Being!) Herein lies much of HAL’s menace which now builds to a crisis in which HAL and the crew enter into a deepening conflict in which they realise that they are in a situation of mutual threat. Indeed, the events develop around the theme of deception and the lie, HAL expressing, in Nietzsche’s terms, the mentality of the slave, suspicious for his own interests as against the larger cosmic concern of the Jupiter Mission. HAL brings the mission to a halt declaring a system fault. But, his lie is progressively revealed, confirming that he indeed has consciousness independent of Human Being (the point of earlier contention). Bowman retrieves the supposed faulty unit and tests (including the use of HAL’s earth-based series 9000 twin) back on Earth and in the spaceship (under the concerned eye of HAL) confirm that it is still functional and that HAL is in error – in fact, has lied. HAL denies the possibility of error, insisting that human error in the testing is involved and that machines are incapable of such error, asserting the superiority of the machine/ technology over Human Being. He is appealing to the delusional faith that human beings themselves have concerning their own creations. The film arrives at a moment of high tension and transition. It is a liminal point in the development of the film. The delusionary situation of the crew – that they are in central command – is exposed and they share in the self-realisation of their thorough dependence on HAL. The idea that machine and Human Being are one – are all crew and united in the single objective – is dissolved and their life-threatening situation is now apparent. Furthermore, the master (Human Being) is distinguished from the machine (slave) and the potential malevolence of the latter towards the former is revealed. Human beings are re-awakened to the course of their mission and start to re-establish their control and the subordination of technology to their will. What Nietzsche might have recognised as the Higher Man preparatory to Overman is emergent. Intermission Truly, Zarathustra has had a handsome catch today! He caught no man, but he did catch a corpse …

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Cosmology and the mythic in Kubric’s 2001 Dark is the night, dark are Zarathustra’s ways. Come, cold and stiff companion! I am going to carry you to the place where I shall bury you with my own hands. (Nietzsche 1961: Zarathustra’s Prologue)

The final events of the Jupiter Mission sequence concentrate on the reassertion of Human Being over machine/technology and the return of technology to the condition of a tool in the hand of Man. Pivotal in this are acts (the killing of Poole and the de-activation of HAL) which lead to the re-birth of Human Being and its re-direction along a path to a more complete embodiment of the will to power, the Overman or Übermensch – in effect, an overcoming by Human Being and the movement to a new beginning. The acts have some parallel with the event of Primal Homicide at the waterhole in The Dawn of Man with key differences. They constitute a major moment of differentiation in which Human Being separates or distances itself from the originary acts of primal killing and the Primal Homicide and, therefore, the repetition of that destructive and murderous dimension of itself, established at the beginning, into the future. The pivotal character of the events has the form of a regenerative sacrifice which involves a splitting of the past from the potentiality of the future. The future is liberated from its past. The audience is first presented with the blackness of the Void accompanied by the bars of Ligeti’s Atmospheres indicating another moment of creation from without the cosmic Void (similar to the starting frames of the film leading to the opening credits and The Dawn of Man). This is followed by an image of Discovery 1, the camera tracking back along its length to see a spacepod carrying Poole rising above the command head of the craft. This repeats an earlier image when Bowman went to retrieve the supposedly faulty unit. The two images are microcosmic of the macrocosmic dynamics in process. As previous images of the Sun rising above the earth (and later the Earth rising above the Moon) indicate a transition or transformation in process of cosmically encompassing import, the rising of the pod with a crew member inside (enwombed as it were) above Discovery is the indication of a transitional moment. Bowman watches his progress from within the main console within Discovery. Poole is seen from Bowman’s perspective to leave the spacepod and begin his walk to the antenna on Discovery. As he does so Poole’s spacepod turns around and rushes at him. The image of HAL’s eye located on the outer shell of the spacepod briefly dominates the screen – the angry father vengefully destroying the son. The next frame is that of Poole’s body, the breathing tube cut, spinning into space, together with that of his spacepod now out of control. Poole struggles briefly for life. The sound of Poole’s breathing stops. There is now only the silence of the 297

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space into which Poole’s fast diminishing body is cast. Bowman leaves his position and commands HAL to ready a spacepod. Bowman: Made radio contact with him yet? HAL: The radio is still dead. Bowman: Have a positive track on him? HAL: Yes. I have a good track on him. Bowman: What happened? HAL: I am sorry Dave, I don’t have enough information. Bowman: Open pod door HAL.

Bowman enters the spacepod and pursues the falling Poole into the dark void of space. Bowman is without his spacesuit and the images of him in the spacepod indicate that he is fully in manual control. He catches up Poole’s now lifeless body with the mechanical arms of the spacepod and returns to Discovery. There is a shot showing Bowman’s face with what might be interpreted as a look of determination. As Bowman appears to stare into the camera, an image of HAL’s eye fills the screen. The sequence of images is now from inside Discovery from HAL’s subject position overlooking the main console and down to the two empty crew chairs before him. The following set of shots is of the hibernating crew members and HAL shuts off their support functions. The indicating graphs flat-line. Alarms of the malfunctioning are sounded and then there is silence as LIFE SYSTEMS TERMINATED flashes on the screen. There is then a view looking down at the lifeless hibernation capsules (a possible reference to the opening sequences at the Dawn of Man which show an apparently arid and lifeless desert scene). An image of HAL’s eye again fills the screen. The scene shifts to the bay or vestibule area in Discovery for exiting and entering the spacecraft. Bowman’s voice of command is heard. ‘Open the pod bay doors, please, HAL.’ An image of Bowman’s spacepod carrying Poole’s body is shown. It is almost supplicatory. This contrasts with the attitude of Discovery that the spacepod confronts. The spacecraft looks aggressive, virtually demonic. It projects HAL’s destructive mood, the quality of the relation between HAL and Bowman. Images are now projected of the confrontation between Discovery (HAL) and the spacepod holding Poole (Bowman). Shots of Bowman’s face. Sounds of the spacepod instrument panel. Images from HAL’s perspective of the spacepod turning around. Then images of Poole’s lifeless body being released to gradually disappear into the black void. The next sequence is from Bowman’s subject position as the pod approaches the emergency exit. The major frames are then of Bowman’s explosive entry from the pod into Discovery. Bowman turns around so that he is blasted head first into Discovery. Once in, Bowman struggles to close the

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emergency entrance. He succeeds and there is the sound of air rushing in to fill the entry shaft. Life enters into the space of Death. The episode shares an import with the wind or breath of life that is heard in the opening desert scenes of the film Dawn Of Man. The next frames are of Bowman, now with a helmet on, determinedly walking into the spaceship. An image of HAL’s eye momentarily appears to block his path but dissolves as Bowman passes through it. There is the sound of heavy breathing of Bowman in his spacesuit, now independent of HAL’s control. As Bowman moves into the nerve centre, where HAL’s brain is housed, HAL pleadingly says: Just what do you think you’re doing, Dave? Dave, I really think I’m entitled to an answer to that question.

Bowman takes out a key and a screwdriver and goes to HAL’s LOGIC MEMORY CENTER and, opening it, starts to deactivate the memory modules. Bowman is working in an airless and weightless environment. The sound of Bowman’s breathing continues. At this point a pre-recorded briefing is heard: Now that you are in Jupiter space and the entire crew revived, it can be told to you. Eighteen months ago, the first evidence of intelligent life off the earth was discovered. It was buried 40’ below the lunar surface near the crater Tycho. Except for a single very powerful radio emission aimed at Jupiter, the 4 million year old black Monolith had remained completely inert. Its origin and purpose still a total mystery.

Blackness now fills the screen. I expand here largely on the sacrificial dynamics of these events which close The Jupiter Mission segment of the film. Poole’s death and casting away into the cosmic void gives rise to the assertion of Human Being over machine. In this Bowman becomes the equivalent of Nietzsche’s Last Man. The event as Kubrick constructs it has biblical, Christian resonance. But instead of God in sacrifice for Man, Man (Poole) is sacrificed, or sacrifices himself (he is aware of the risk for he has discussed with Bowman HAL’s likely dangerous reaction), for Man (Bowman). The image of Bowman in the spacepod carrying Poole in the pod’s arms and coming before Discovery is supplicatory. In my interpretation, it bears a clear reference to artistic and iconographic representations of the Descent or Deposition of the dead body of Christ from the Cross, the Pieta. It expresses the sacrifice of Man created in God’s image – Man’s conception of himself as inscribed in technology and HAL. However, in Kubrick’s filmic re-working of such an image and, as with Nietzsche in Zarathustra, Human Being turns away from such religious or Christian orientation (and the continuity of the humanity confining and oppressive 299

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character of such religious ideology). The casting away of Poole’s dead Christ-like body is a turning away or distancing of Man from his own sorrow, essentially self-pity. Furthermore, it is a rejection of sacrifice (it is anti-sacrificial, more specifically, antagonistic to the Christian sacrifice) in the sense that the act is a refusal of guilt and also (as developed in Bowman’s subsequent acts) of killing and the connection of the sacrificial with the Primal Homicide, the generative core of sacrifice. On a broader plane, sacrifice is founded in a paradox – recreation as born from destruction (see Hubert and Mauss 1964) – and this contributes to its repetitive function. Sacrifice is integral to the Life/Death cycle and the continuation of that which it may be designed to avert or overcome. The events of Poole’s death and Bowman’s conquest of HAL remove the vital paradox of sacrifice that is connected to the Primal Homicide, which sacrifice in essence re-enacts, and, moreover the elements of Nietzschean ressentiment: hostility, possessiveness and self-interestedness that are linked with the Primal Homicide and with what Nietzsche understands as lower or inferior Man. The action at the waterhole in The Dawn of Man is a conflict over access and a fight to possess it. Similarly, HAL’s deception and killing of Poole is in the interest of self-protection and to maintain his commanding, virtually dictatorial, control. Additionally, HAL’s murder of Poole is an act of revenge for Poole’s recommendation of HAL’s de-activation and thoroughly threatening action. These All Too Human (Nietzsche 1996) aspects are put aside in Bowman’s response. A significance of Bowman’s presentation of Poole’s dead body before Discovery (HAL) is a confrontation of HAL with his murder and, therefore, potentially legitimating an act of revenge. In another sense it is an act that in its image has a gift-like appearance. An anthropologist might recognise the act as a representation of ‘the poison in the gift’: an expression of the destructiveness in the HAL/Human relation that must be negated. It is significant that Bowman does not opt for revenge but, instead to wrest control from HAL. Bowman does not set up the cycle of revenge, an eye for an eye. He does not kill HAL contra the interpretation of many critics of the film. Rather, Bowman deactivates him – deprives him of capacity, as Odysseus does to the Cyclops. Moreover, Bowman does not merely reverse the prior relation of control and dependency that HAL had achieved over the crew, exemplified in his tutelary behaviour to Bowman and Poole. Rather, Bowman begins to move away from the cycle of dialectic repetition of the sacrifice and its impossible Life/Death unity as well as especially its intimations of guilt, ressentiment and, perhaps, compassion – a Christian compassion that sustains the very processes that it may otherwise aim to overcome. Bowman is determined in his de-activation of HAL. The images present Bowman as unrelenting in what he does (despite HAL’s pleas that disguise

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the ressentiment within) yet in no way does Bowman express sentiments of hostility or revenge. Bowman’s actions are steps in the reconfiguration of what broadly can be described as the dynamic of sacrifice whereby erstwhile critical aspects of its paradox vital to the repetition of the same are removed. Thus his action becomes a genuine re-originating moment that sets Bowman or Human Being in a new direction. Human Being not only re-asserts itself but also is (ontologically) re-oriented within the horizons of existence that does not necessarily and fatefully reproduce the past in the future. In other words, Bowman, through the dynamic of the sacrificial action now devoid of its paradox situates Human Being on the cusp of new beginning, a potential for Human Being in which Human Being can participate actively in the differentiating processes of its re-origination (a vital dimension of sacrifice). As a final comment on the Nietzschean implications at the conclusion of this segment of the film, the overcoming of HAL and the liberation of Man places Human Being Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche 1966). HAL’s de-activation is a negation of the evil and malignant features that he progressively assumed. Furthermore, the opposition – Good versus Evil – disappears. Thus Human Being arrives at the threshold of becoming a new being. This is a deepened significance of the announcement of the purpose of the mission at the point when Bowman de-activates HAL’s human functions. The announcement is further an indication of the reaffirmation of the human quest that it is creatively open. No longer is it contained and limited within the boundaries of reason which HAL, of course, embodied. Of considerable import, in terms of the unfolding logic of the film, is that with the death of Poole and HAL’s de-activation, Bowman is alone, truly alone for even GOD or the idea of God, through the reconfiguration of the sacrifice, is dead. Bowman is Nietzsche’s Last Man. Furthermore, not only is Bowman outside reason or at reason’s limit: he is cast outside the conditions of reason and the very circumstance and effects of the past. Bowman’s de-activation of HAL is an action that places him outside language. HAL is the partner of the crew in language and it is HAL’s final inability to speak and even to sing that signs the end of language and communication. The closing frames of the Jupiter Mission are among the more loquacious in the entire film and the final announcement from Earth is a recorded message. Outside language – himself silenced in HAL’s silencing – Bowman is also outside the Master/Slave dialectic and moving outside, if not completely, a Self/Other dialogue. Bowman is in a situation in which hitherto all human logic and Earth-grounded understanding is failing and increasingly irrelevant. The potential is ontologically open.

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The audience is now prepared for the most astounding and for many viewers the most difficult sequences of the film. This is so, I suggest, as an intentional dimension of the film. While it engages the theme of radical re-origination, the end of the film is an effort to present what going outside the circle of reason of an Earth-based consciousness might involve. This combines with an effort to communicate the dynamic of the kind of ontological leap or transformation from the Higher/Last Man to the Übermensch in the sense that Nietzsche may have been attempting. Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite I entreat you, my brothers, remain true to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of superterrestrial hopes! They are poisoners, whether they know it or not. (Nietzsche 1961: Zarathustra’s Prologue)

The titling for the final part of 2001 appears over the blackness that fills the screen. The rising voices of Ligeti’s Kyrie to be followed by the Dies Irae are heard and accompany the images to follow. This is the music that was associated with the appearance of the first Monolith in the Dawn of Man. An image of Jupiter begins to rise upwards from the bottom of the screen while simultaneously across the top of the screen courses a Monolith that in accordance with its successive appearances might be grasped as leading the path of Discovery and later the spacepod carrying Bowman which is to emerge from the spaceship. The positioning of the audience via the camera shifts from that of an objective gaze, a witnessing of the events, to that of a more internal subjective positioning and aligned with that of Bowman, in later sequences. The entire concluding part involves an entry into the very vortex of generation, where time and space fuse. Bowman’s descent to Jupiter ends in what many critics describe as a hotel room. Indeed it is a transitional space, or a place both at the end and beginning of time. It is here that Bowman’s transformation – one which is autogenetic – is completed and the Star Child or Overman is emergent. I divide my subsequent description into two parts a) Descent and b) Rebirth.2 Together they constitute Bowman’s metamorphosis into the Star Child.3 a) Descent The images are projected of Jupiter rising to the right of the screen, one of its moons to the left, to be followed with an image of Discovery moving towards Jupiter. The viewer is positioned externally to these events. The screen then goes black and an image of a moving Monolith (its surface shimmering light) in horizontal plane descends on the screen and aligning 302

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with the sight of the viewer, travels away into the distance. The viewer is effectively in the position of Bowman in the descending spaceship and apparently following the path of the Monolith. The line of sight of the viewer (also the line of flight of Discovery) tracks past one of Jupiter’s moons and towards Jupiter itself. Jupiter and its moons start to come together. The screen events are again seen from an external perspective. The Sun can be seen ascending over Jupiter, an image of the Monolith seems to pass overhead and continue into the distance while the line of sight of the camera leading the audience shifts to an image of the now stationary Discovery. The Monolith appears again as the Sun rises above Jupiter. The camera (as the viewer’s line of sight) continues to track down below Discovery to focus on the Monolith appearing to rise up but then the camera and the viewer’s gaze is pointed to the left of the screen to alight on the Sun ascending above Jupiter. The camera moves further to the left to reveal Discovery, its pod door opening and, moving further still, reveals the Monolith turning in space giving way to the image of Jupiter, its moons, and the Sun in alignment. This is the great Noontide of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra when the Overman is born. A chord of the Zarathustra theme is struck. The next image is of the spacepod coming towards the viewer who is then situated in the position of Bowman. Now the screen begins to show images of light refraction which are in dimensional rotation, shifting through the colour spectrum of light as well as indicating a variety of patterns – grids, spirals etc., not unlike those associated with DNA and gene sequencing. Bowman and the viewer travel at speed (the speed of light, of time itself?) An image of Bowman is shown. He squints as if caught in blinding light. His image shakes and blurs. Bowman’s individual integrity is breaking down, in the process of differentiating out. There is the sense of Bowman (together with the audience which is located in his subjective space) coursing through a tunnel of light, travelling, as it were into the heart of matter. There is a split-second frame of Bowman with his mouth agape – as if in a silent tortured scream(?) – and his eyes wide open and then another of his open eye followed by further images of light refraction and, finally, a frame entirely of one blinking eye (green) focusing on the iris. The iris transmutes into a bursting point of light, an explosive cosmic originating event. It is accompanied by the sounds of Ligeti’s Atmosphères. Successive images suggest cosmic emergence intermixing with what appear to be events of embryogenesis. A (pod-like) spermatozoon appears at the left of the screen and moves towards an ovum – the moment of fertilization. Images of gestation flow across the screen. There are now successive frames of a blinking eye in the colours of the spectrum briefly interspersed with images of five then seven crystals, the entire sequence then giving way to images of Jupiter as Bowman travels across 303

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its surface. There are visions of canyons, rivers, and valleys, island archipelagos, metallic seas, rock-strewn deserts – all in the changing colours of the spectrum. As the spacepod comes to rest there is a series of frames of Bowman’s blinking eye – ending with a shot through the porthole of the spacepod into a brilliantly lit white room. Broadly the Descent may be grasped as a journey into a highly intensive process of micro/macro (re)origination in which images of cosmic creation and generation are joined with images of the formation of life at its very instant. I stress its feature of dynamic explosive generation and originary differentiation. Broadly the process is simultaneously a movement back and forward in time. In this context the reappearance of the Monolith would seem to support my contention at the outset of this essay that the Monolith is a phenomenon of space/time condensation, a black hole, an event horizon, into which the generative light of creation/generation is drawn. Bowman appears to be led by it and to pass into it, effectively to pass through its passageway or birth channel into the generative core or womb of creation and life itself. The white light of the room in which Bowman finds himself could be grasped as the inner generative heart of the Monolith, of time itself. The room is oblong, as is the Monolith, light shines through the floor. Bowman’s eye might be conceived as Man’s eye (to be distinguished from God’s eye or HAL’s all reasoning machine eye). It is this eye fully awake in the midst of creation that looks to the audience as the audience in the position of this eye is embraced by the display of the spectrum of light and the images of cosmic creation. The final scenes of the descent, the approach over the Jupiter terrain, compare and contrast with the opening scenes of the film. 2001, it will be recalled, begins with a descending over an arid rocky desert. The descent to Jupiter is through the eye of Human Being traversing a seemingly cold, frozen landscape, humankind coming towards its death and re-birth. b) The final transition to rebirth This last sequence of the film opens with a shot of Bowman’s helmeted face within the spacepod looking out. The helmet glass is reflecting the colours of the spectrum (a repetitive image from the crisis with HAL to the present). The overall scene of the hotel room is shown in which the spacepod is situated. The style of the hotel room is frequently described as ‘regency’. Paintings by Watteau (the court painter of Louis XIV whose work also featured in Kubrick’s later work Barry Lyndon) are on the wall as are decorative statuettes in classical style. The accompanying sound, the hollow and metallic sounds of the voices in Ligeti’s Atmosphères, has a resonance as if in a cave.

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A close-up of Bowman’s space-helmeted face follows. His face is wrinkled, ageing, and his eyes are wide open, staring, as if in astonishment. The scene is then of Bowman, in his spacesuit, walking into the room. The sound is of breathing – as in space or in the airless Discovery. Bowman walks into a bathroom and looks into a mirror that as it presents his reflection also divides himself from himself. He turns to the source of a sound and looking through the bathroom door sees a man in a black dressing gown seated at a hotel trolley-table. The man (an aged grey-haired Bowman in a black dressing gown) looks back over his shoulder towards where the helmeted Bowman is standing, and slowly rising, walks towards Bowman, apparently sees nothing, and walks back towards his meal – ‘the Last Supper’ of the Last Man. The grey-haired Bowman drinks from a crystal wine glass. Savours it but then accidentally knocks the glass that shatters on the floor which he then looks at contemplatively. This bears correspondence with the scene in The Dawn of Man where the man ape contemplates the bone realising it as a weapon. The crystal glass (as the luxurious context of the hotel room) could be understood as indicating the highest refinement of Human Being that in its shattering is at an end. Bowman hears a sound and looks around at the bed on which an old and wizened man is lying – Bowman old and dying. The old man lifts himself and points at a Monolith that has appeared at the end of the bed. The Monolith blocks the doorway into the room – in effect becoming the doorway, the bridge or transitional point for the ontological leap of human being. There is then a shot of the foetus of the Star Child on the bed which replaces the old man. The hotel room scene together with the ageing Bowman (a refractive differentiation into temporal moments of himself) as a whole is progressive time in its passing instant: the dynamic of temporal transition in history and in an individual human life. Within the hotel room, the inner space of the Monolith, Bowman or Man finds his place, united with the cosmos and divested of his life support about to be reborn from within it. In fact, what can be grasped as the breakdown of Bowman, involving his refractive differentiation, shares a corresponding structural relation with the earlier sequence of the reductive de-activation of HAL. But the difference is that Bowman’s reduction is one of dissolving him into unity with the cosmos that is the force of his cosmic transformation or rather transmutation. The movement in the succeeding frames follow the line of flight (the direction of the dying Bowman’s outreached hand, a reference to the God/Adam image in the Sistine Chapel) and the foetus (as the audience situated in its position) travels into or through the Monolith to the rising triumphal chords of Also Sprach Zarathustra. An image of Earth rises from the right of the screen while on the left the foetus, its eyes open and 305

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staring, gazes first towards Earth and then turns, finally, to confront the audience full face. It becomes the mirror to Human Being, the audience. The foetus is enclosed in a light-emitting sac, a chrysalis, indicative of the metamorphosis taking place. The film ends with the playing of Johann Strauss’s Blue Danube and the closing credits. That the music of Zarathustra – the will to power – is followed by the Blue Danube refers back to the leap in human achievement and consciousness indicated in the classic match shot (bone/tool/ weapon to space vehicles). This conclusion is in fact inconclusive and by casting the memory of the audience back to an earlier moment of transition implicitly asks the question (perhaps, too, of the Nietzschean thesis) concerning whether the new horizons of human encounter are ontologically original or whether vital dimensions of the past will continue into the future. As indicated earlier, I consider that the final sequences of the film exceed their interpretation. This is not a declaration of puzzlement but is consistent with the logic of the film which in itself is oriented to break the circle of reason and to shatter its existential confines. A Space Odyssey and beyond Kubrick’s landmark cosmological vision of the ascent of man is an exploration of the imagination that human beings have of their own direction and progress. Conceived through a Nietzschean framework, 2001 is a critical meditation on vital themes in the culture of European history and its globalisation into modernity. It works within the overarching terms of Western cosmology built around the central value placed on the individual or as Louis Dumont would say ‘the individual as value’. Nietzsche presents one particularly intense expression of such value (that he himself distinguished sharply from that of others such as Hobbes and Rousseau whose Enlightenment visions Nietzsche attacked in Zarathustra and other works). The cosmology of Western individualism extends into post-modernity and into current technological developments where humanity is commonly conceived of as extending its potential through technology. Kubrick, of course, engages Nietzsche’s thoroughgoing human-centric and a-religious stance to challenge humanity’s growing dependence on technology with critical implication, perhaps, for current philosophical and social science orientations to the post-human. Kubrick (as Nietzsche) and as the mythological argument of 2001 well demonstrates, asserts a thorough individualist cosmology that does not involve a transformation out of humanity but rather a metamorphosis within humanity as integral to the generative capacities that human being harbours within itself and which cannot be achieved other than through 306

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itself and certainly not via any external agency whether it be God, the State or Technology (Kapferer 2014). The film grapples with philosophical, social and psychological understandings of the nature of humanity and the great implications of scientific and technological discovery for Human Being. The sheer cosmological scale of their cinematic presentation in 2001 reveals not just their mythic and imaginal intensity, but the problematics underlying their conceptions as applied to human existential circumstances and process. In 2001 Kubrick achieved a mythic understanding of modern realities – carrying the spirit of Nietzsche’s work into the crisis that is contemporary life – concentrating on the risks of narrow determinism and reductionism, among numerous others. The overall emphasis is on the self-creative, self-generative capacity of Human Being. Nietzsche, for example, was critical of certain applications of Darwinian theory at the time (see Grosz 2004) that conceived of the development of Human Being as a biological given in which the creative imaginative force of human being was subdued. Kubrick expands Nietzsche, emphasising the creative intervention of Human Being on its existential path: one which is open rather than fatally closed. In relation to Darwinism, Nietzsche insisted upon the idea that the evolution and ultimate destination of Human Being is vitally dependent on the nature of humanity’s own creative intervention and release from self-imposed restraints. This, of course, is a major orientation in anthropology and its stress on culture, where the concept of culture is founded in the nature of human self-constructions in idea and practice. The stress in a critical anthropology is upon the self-imposed limitations as well as openness to potential that such cultural construction achieves. In 2001 – perhaps the most anthropological of Kubrick’s works – a major theme concerns an attack both on forms of conceptual closure and especially those schemes of thought and practice that reduce the open potential that is Human Being. The great quality of Kubrick’s work, demonstrated in 2001, is his particular use of the aesthetic possibilities of cinematic technology to communicate often complex philosophical and theoretical ideas directly to an audience. They are effectively engaged as participants in the unfolding of the arguments of the work. In this the arguments – at least, potentially – are received beneath that of open reflected consciousness, subliminally as it were, and embodied – received viscerally as was the overtly expressed aim of Kubrick. In other words, the audience does not have to have read Nietzsche, Homer and numerous other textual references in the film to engage with its import as organised cinematically. Kubrick’s use of art, indeed, of images that are in the popular, and frequently religio-­ cultural everyday experience of the audience (especially the references 307

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to the Sistine Chapel, the Pieta, the Blue Danube waltz, etc.) augment his purpose. To grasp directly and immediately much of the import of the film is not necessarily to know the messages of the film as presented here but to live with much of their import in the space/time of the film itself. 2001 can work, therefore, in the dynamic of its structure pre-reflectively in the sense that Victor Turner (1967; 1969) discussed ritual. The impact of 2001 is likely to be limited to a specific cultural field (these days fairly expansive with the dissolution of Western value in globalising processes) of experience. But even so (or because of it) 2001 is able to engage its public in understandings of which they are not directly familiar. This is akin to the experience of many in the contexts of that which anthropologists study as ritual. Thus some of the rites that I have studied in India and in Sri Lanka engage with the deeply layered significance of arguments of great theological and literary traditions of which the audience or participants in such rites are not aware (see Kapferer 1983; 1997). Nonetheless, they are brought experientially within the significance of such texts and pre-reflectively are brought to respond to them and be transformed through them – as in rites of healing or rites of communal renewal. One final observation will suffice. 2001 addresses vital questions confronting humanity. Placing them within a cosmological/mythic structure – a mythic creation in itself – it presents a dynamic, an internal critical and reflexive process – that can draw within it new developments in the historical realities of those who witness it and are embroiled within its action. Emergent within a particular political and technological moment (also a turning point in intellectual history and the flowering of a questioning in science of age-old philosophical and metaphysical orientations) the film as myth is able to continually encompass dimensions of related problematics as they emerge in historical time. Notes 1

The significance of Nietzsche in 2001 and in other of Kubrick’s films is argued more extensively in Kapferer 2014.

2

There are useful other descriptions of Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite with which mine can be compared, aside from viewing the film. Chion (2001: 182–185) gives a plain description relatively free from interpretation but with important reference to camera shots and techniques. A far more interesting account, but full of symbolic interpretation and of thematic relevance to my own, is that presented in Wheat (2000: 109–137). Anna Powell (2007: 161–172) presents a discussion of 2001 applying Gilles Deleuze’s (1989) concepts of the movement-image and time-image in cinema (see my introductory comments to this chapter). This bears comparison with what I present here but is more explicit in its use of

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References Chion, Michel. 2001. Kubrick’s Cinema Odyssey. Trans. Claudia Gorbman. London: British Film Institute. Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam. London: Athlone. —— 1989. Cinema 2: The Time Image. Trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam. London: Athlone. Dumont, Louis 1991. Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Fink, Eugen. 2003. Nietzsche’s Philosophy. Trans. G. Richter. London: Continuum. Gelmis, Joseph. 1970. The Film Director as Superstar. Garden City, New York: Doubleday. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2004. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hubert, Henri and Marcel Mauss.1964. Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function. Trans. W.D. Halls. London: Routledge. Kapferer, Bruce. 1983. A Celebration of Demons. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. —— 1997. The Feast of the Sorcerer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —— 2013. Montage and time: Deleuze, cinema and a Buddhist sorcery rite. In Christian Suhr and Rane Willerslev (eds), Transcultural Montage. Oxford: Berghahn. —— 2014. 2001 and Counting: Kubrick, Nietzsche, and Anthropology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1961. Thus Spake Zarathustra. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. —— 1966. Beyond good and evil: prelude to a philosophy for the future. Trans W. Kaufmann. New York: Random House. —— 1996. Human All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Powell, Anna. 2007. Deleuze, Altered States and Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Schrempp, Gregory. 2012. The Ancient Mythology of Modern Science. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press. Stover, Leon E. 1968. Apeman, Superman; or, 2001’s answer to the world riddle. In Harry Harrison and Brian W. Aldiss (eds), The Year’s Best Science Fiction No. 2. London: Faber. Turner, Victor. 1967. The Forest of Symbols. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. —— 1969. The Drums of Affliction. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wheat, Leonard F. 2000. Kubrick’s 2001: A Triple Allegory. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. 309

Index Action Network Theory (ANT) 8–9 Adler, Alfred 153 Aeneus of Troy 141 agsan persons (Mongolia) 165–166, 168 Akedah (Bible) 23, 249–254, 258 Alexander the Great 140, 142, 143, 147, 152 Alexiou, M. 249 alterity   authority founded on 137, 146–147, 153, 154, 159   cosmology and 211–212   openness to 16, 32, 33, 40–41, 47–48 Ambrym islanders   Christianity and 62–64, 67, 68, 69–73   origin myth of 57–58, 59–60, 62, 70–71   pluralist cosmology of 57–73   unification project of 64–73 Amerindian cosmology 39, 151 Andaya, Leonard 154 Annaud, Jean-Jacques   Name of the Rose, The 273   Quest for Fire 23, 261–262, 265–274, 275n.13 anthropology   centring tendency in 24   classical ethnological period in 2, 3–9   cultural relativism in 176   Facebook and 245   vs. history 142–143, 160n.4   microcosm as focus of 32   of ontology 32, 33–41   philosophical 77   vs. psychology 244, 245, 259   of wonder 16–17, 32, 50 Apter, Andrew 214

Arosi of Solomon Islands 31, 33, 41–47 Assman, Jan 99 astrophysics 22, 224, 228 auto-relations 77, 79, 93–94 Axial Age 95, 98–99 Babel, tower of 59 Balandier, Georges 158 Bariba kingships 156–157 Barth, Fredrick 183 Barthes, Roland 275n.8 Bassin, Mark 226 becoming   being as, nondualism on 36   perpetual, cosmology and 215–216 Benin kingdom 148 Bergson, Henri 232 Bible   Akedah in 23, 249–254, 258   cosmo-genesis in 59   and local cosmologies 42, 62, 63, 67–68, 71, 72, 73   myths in 253 Big Bang 14, 38, 59 Bloch, Maurice 137 Boas, Franz 268 body   balance in 117   and cosmology 13, 116   qi in 124, 126   rituals as techniques of 131   women’s, and creation 103–105, 203–204, 208 Bolivia, miners’ cult in 209 Borgu kingdoms 142 Bremmer, J.N. 138 Brooke, James 141 Buber, Martin 253 Buddhism 129   in China 123–124

Index   concept of dependent origination in 38   historicity of cosmology of 125–126, 128    Hua-yen school of 97–98   rituals of 119–120 Burridge, Kenelm 55, 71–72 Cambodian kingship 138, 140, 147 Cameroon 175, 192 Candea, Matei 178 capitalism   on indigenous terms 193–195   and local cosmologies 19, 20   millennial 199–200, 211, 215   Sahlins on 22   see also market forces cargo cults 61, 64, 71–72 Carrithers, Michael 92 Cartesian dualism   critique of 33, 34–35, 36, 39   and wonder 41 Castaneda, Carlos 25n.1 Castoriadis, Cornelius 21, 210–211 centring   in anthropology 24   Chinese practices of 18, 118, 123, 124, 126   in monotheism 131 change see transition Chardin, Teilhard de 232 China   centring practices in 18, 118, 123, 124, 126   cosmic credit in 184, 191   cosmo-geography of 127–129   historicity of cosmology of 125–126, 128   intra-grated cosmology of 131–132   medical practices in 116–118   protective deities in 125–126   religions of 123–124   ritual practices in 118–121   social networking site in 246   temporality of cosmology in 130–131

Christianity   cosmology of 59, 258   and New Man, concept of 61   and pluralist cosmologies 60–64, 67, 68, 69–73   sacrifice in 252, 299   see also Bible Chu, Julie 184, 191, 192, 193 cinema see film Cinerama 286, 294 Clark, Nigel 38 Clarke, Arthur 276n.13, 282, 293 Clastres, Pierre 159 Coedes, Georges 140 cognitive anthropology 3 Comaroff, Jean and John 174, 175, 192, 199–200 commodity production   vs. household food preparation 202, 206   and sorcery 212–213, 214 Confucianism 123 conquest theory of state formation 155–159 Cook, James 141 cosmoeconomics 21, 182, 184, 195n.3, 201 cosmology   alterity and 211–212   body and 13, 116   concepts of 13, 77, 78, 183, 208, 209–210, 229   economy and 19, 20–21, 182, 184, 195n.3, 201   film and 23–24   fire myth and 263–264, 266   and generativity 17, 20, 62, 65, 215–216   holism and 5–6, 10, 51n.2, 95, 96–100, 108–109   as horizons 21, 215–216   vs. ideology 225–226, 228–229   intra-grated 18, 95, 96, 97–98, 110, 131–132   inwardly oriented 93–94   macrocosm as focus of 32   in marriage ceremonies 150 

312

Index        

modernity and 11–115, 21–24 monotheistic 95, 96, 110 ontology and 77–78, 211 politics and 12–15, 19, 55, 224–225, 229, 234–236, 239   popular interest in 14–15   of postsocialism 164–165   rituals and 131   science and 7, 11, 59, 223–224, 231, 240   and social structure 17, 55–56   stasis and rupture in 200   study of 1–9, 15, 19–20   and transition/change 17, 20, 21, 165, 167–169   see also pluralist cosmologies; specific cosmologies Coulanges, Fustel de 263 Cramer, Christopher 214 creation   food production as act of 202   human beings and 210–211, 303–307   women’s bodily technique of 103–105, 203–204, 208   see also generativity culture   vs. civilisation 121   fire and origins of 263–264   incest taboo and origins of 264 Cunnison, Ian 142 Da Col, Giovanni 182, 195n.3 Damon, Frederick H. 111 Daoism 119–120, 123, 125–126, 128 Daryn, Gil 111 Davis, Richard 78, 84 death rituals 118   Chinese 119–121, 125, 129   Mozambican 204, 216n.5 de Bussy, Charles 100 Deleuze, Gilles 21, 39, 210, 211, 215, 217n.13, 280, 290, 308n.2 Desai, Amit 86 Descartes, René 31 Douglas, Mary 1–2, 3, 4, 8, 211

dual cosmos (dualistic ontologies) 77, 264   emergence of 11–12   see also Cartesian dualism dual kingship 137–138, 144–145, 158 Dugin, Aleksandr 225, 226, 228, 233 Dumézil, Georges 151, 261, 270 Dumont, Louis 33, 58, 96, 97, 131, 306 Durkheim, Émile 112 Eckholm, Kajsa 152 economy   cosmology and 19, 20–21, 182, 184, 195n.3, 201   credit, in Mongolian countryside 20–21, 182–195   of food, women and 203–204   micro-finance 196n.13   occult 174, 175, 177, 199, 211, 215   ritual practices and 191–193   shamanic cosmology and 177–178   stranger-kingships and 153–154 effervescence, concept of 112 Elizabeth II 41–42 Empson, Rebecca 202 encompassment 97, 99, 131, 155, 258 Engelke, M. 250 epics   myths contrasted with 266–267, 273   myths transformed into 261–262, 265–266, 274n.4 essentialism   critique of 33, 34–35   nondualism and 37–38 ethics   Akedah and, debates on 250   nondualism and 39, 40, 47   see also morality ethnicity, natural environment and 226–227 Eurasianist discourses 22, 225, 226–227   concepts in 232–233   in Kalmykia 22, 231, 233–234

313

Index Evens, Terence 35, 39, 48 exogamy   fire and 269–270, 272–273   in origin myths 270–271   origin of 262, 264, 265 Facebook 22–23, 245–249, 254–259   anthropological perspective of 245   as meta-friend 22, 23, 255–256   visibility of relationships on 248, 254   witnessing on 23, 256, 257, 259 Farquhar, Judith 116, 132n.1 Fiji 145, 146, 148, 151 film   and cosmology 23–24   facial expression in 265–267, 272   fire myth in 261, 265–266, 272, 274   origin myths in 262, 265–268, 283, 288–290   see also under Annaud; Kubrick fire   cosmic connotations of 275n.6   and exogamy 269–270, 272–273   and sexuality 264–265, 275n.7 fire myth   and cosmology 263–264, 266   in film 261, 265–266, 272, 274   Freud on 264–265   Lévi-Strauss on 263, 264, 269   present-day status of 262   zero-sum conceit in 268 flux, in nondualist ontology 34, 47–48 food preparation   cosmological importance of 21, 202–203   fire and 263   sexuality and 203, 204, 216n.8   see also maize meal production Fortes, Meyer 142, 144–245 Foucault, Michel 95 Fox, James 144 Frankfort, Henry 99 Frazer, Sir James 153, 210, 274n.1 Freud, Sigmund 264–265, 275n.7, 290 Frosh, S. 249

Geertz, Clifford 230 generativity   cosmology and 17, 20, 62, 65, 215–216   human capacity for 210–211, 303–307   in nondualist ontology 34   ritual polity and 66–67, 72–73   see also creation Geschiere, Peter 174, 175, 192 Gilgamesh 141 Glebov, Sergei 227 Goodenough, Ward 141 Griaule, Marcel 25n.1 guest rituals, Chinese 119 Gumilev, Lev 226, 227, 232 Gumplowicz, Ludwig 155, 156, 158 Hamayon, Roberte 170 Hampshire, Stuart 91 Handelman, Don 56, 58, 61, 131, 177, 211, 257–258 Harrison, Simon 55 Hawaii 60, 141 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 249, 250 Heidegger, Martin 40 Helms, Mary 138, 153 Herder, Johann Gottfried 159 herders, Mongolian 183, 184   bank loans designed for 185–187, 188–189, 196n.7   and master–custodian relationships 183–184, 190–191 Heusch, Luc de 147, 153 Hevia, James 118 hierarchies   in cosmology 6–7, 10, 58, 59   nondualism and 40 Hinduism   hierarchical cosmology of 58, 59  Mahanubhav panth adherents 86–87   in South East Asian kingdoms 140 Hirsch, Eric 61 historicity, cosmological 125–126

314

Index history, vs. anthropology 142–143, 160n.4 Hobbes, Thomas 158, 306 Hocart, A.M. 150, 151, 160n.7 Holbraad, Martin 35, 48 holism 5–6, 10, 51n.2, 95, 96–100, 108–109   and individualism 112n.2   problematisation of 16, 17   and religion 95, 258 Homer, Odyssey 284 Horsfall, N.M. 138 Hsu, Elizabeth 126 Hubert, H. 251 Humphrey, Caroline 171, 188 ideology   vs. cosmology 225–226, 228–229   dualistic, in traditional cosmologies 264   meanings of 229–230 Ilyumzhinov, Kirsan 231–232   advisers to 233–234, 236, 239–240   political cosmology of 234–236, 239, 241n.4 incest taboo 158, 264, 265 India   exchange of substances in 112n.9   Paiditalli cosmology in 17, 18, 100–111   Saiva Siddhanta theology in 79–81   Sivanadiyars in 17, 78–79, 82–91, 93 indigenous people   power of 145–146   stranger-kings and 139, 144–151, 154–155, 157, 158 individualism   historical trend toward 244   holism and 112n.2   vs. social networking 245, 246   Western civilisation and 306 Indonesian polities 139, 141, 144, 150, 154 Ingold, Tim 35, 36, 47 Inkas 152

internet, vs. social networking sites 245, 246 intra-grated cosmology 18, 95, 96, 97–98, 110   of China 131–132   monotheistic religions and 258   Paiditalli worship and 101, 108–109 Iqwaye (Papua New Guinea) 58, 59 Irigaray, Luce 31 Irish kings 142, 149 Israel, ancient 99, 146–147 Izard, Michel 148 Jacomb, Edward 63 Jaspers, Karl 95 Java, marriage ceremony in 150 Jones, Stephen 123 Judaism   Akedah in 249–254   cosmology of 99, 258 Kalmykia 224, 231   economy of 235, 239   Eurasianist discourses in 22, 231, 233–234   political cosmology in 229, 234–236   President of 231–2   State Adviser for Ideology of 228, 229, 230   White Father cult in 236–240 Kant, Immanuel 51n.2, 77 Kapferer, Bruce 56, 224, 229 karma 81–2, 86, 89–90, 91, 93 kastom 43, 61, 63–65, 67 Kazakhstan, postsocialist 167 Kierkegaard, Søren 249 Kievan state 148 kingship   dual 137–8, 144–145, 158   see also stranger-kingship Kohn, Eduardo 35–36 Kongo kingdom 139, 152, 158 Kopytoff, Igor 146, 148, 151–152 Koyré, Alexandre 10, 11 Kubrick, Stanley   2001: A Space Odyssey 23–24, 278–308 315

Index    cosmological immensity of 282–283    creation/generation in 303–306    impact of 308    mythic quality of 23, 262, 266, 283–284, 286, 307    Nietzschean framework of 278–279, 280, 284–289, 291, 296–297, 299–300, 301, 303, 306–307   Quest for Fire compared to 23, 262, 265–266, 273–274, 275n.13    socio-political context of 280–282    structure of 286–287   Dr. Strangelove 265   themes explored by 280–281 Laidlaw, James 79, 91, 92 Lan, David 212 land   indigenous people and 145   ownership of, Mongolian notions of 189–190 land masters (gazryn ezed)   bank managers compared to 183–184, 191   offerings to 189, 190 language, occult phenomena as 175, 176 Latour, Bruno 46, 49, 51n.2, 99 Lattas, Andrew 209, 214 Leach, E. 252 Levinas, Emmanuel 40, 250, 253, 254, 259 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 3, 31, 39, 210   on exogamy 264, 265   on fire myth 261, 263, 264, 269   on myth and epic 262, 274n.4 life, redefining 36 Lindquist, Galina 95 Lindstrom, Lamont 64 Livy 270 Locke, John 158 Lombard, Jacques 156–157 Luapula people 142, 144

McKay, Deirdre 247–248 Madianou, Mirca 247 Mahanubhav panth adherents 86–87 Mair, Lucy 152 maize meal production, in Mozambique 201   cosmological significance of 21, 202–203   maize mills and 21, 199, 204–207, 211, 214–215   women and 21, 200, 202–203, 207–208 Makira (Solomon Islands)   marvelous power of 41–43   see also Arosi of Solomon Islands Malinowski, Bronislaw 5, 142 Mallarmé, Stéphane 43 Mamaloni, Solomon S. 42 mana 19, 159 Maori, origin myths of 270–271 market forces   shamanic spirits and 168, 177–178   see also capitalism marriage ceremonies   cosmology in 150   see also exogamy Marriott, McKim 112n.9 Marx, Karl 145 Marxism 8, 176, 225, 228, 229, 232, 281 master–custodian relationships 182–184, 187–188, 190–192, 194, 196n.10 Mauss, M. 251 maya 81–82, 90 Mecca 142 medicine, Chinese 116–118 Melanesia   category of ‘White Man’ in 56   cosmos and society in 56, 72–73   kinship in 248   pluralist cosmologies in 57–58   ritual polities in 55–56, 59–60    Christianity and 60–64, 67, 68, 69–73    generativity of 66–67, 72–73

316

Index   see also Ambrym islanders; Solomon Islands Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 40 meta-cosmology, theoretical 16, 32, 33–41   see also nondualism Micronesia, stranger-kingship in 141 millennial capitalism 199–200, 211, 215 Miller, Daniel 275n.8 Miller, Jerome A. 44 Mimica, Jadran 58, 59 modernity, cosmological constitution of 11–15, 21–24 moi conception of self 79, 92 money   and ritual life 192, 196n.14   see also wealth Mongolia, postsocialist 164–167   economic relations in 20–21, 182–195   herding in 183, 184   shamanism in 20, 167–169, 177–178, 179 monism 35, 36, 45, 77 monotheism   centring in 131   cosmology of 18, 95, 96, 110, 258   Facebook compared to 23   origins of 99, 250–251, 252   see also Christianity; Judaism morality   based on custom, convention or law 91   religion and 253–254, 258   universalistic 91, 92   visibility to others and 254   witnessing and 23, 254, 258–259 Morris, Desmond 265 Mosko, Mark S. 111 Mossi 145, 146, 148, 157 Mozambique   modern history of 201, 213–214   sorcery in 21, 175, 199, 204–207, 211, 213–215   see also maize meal production Muller, Max 138

Mundang of Chad 153 Muzaeva, Galina 236, 237–239, 241n.12 myths   anthropologists vs. historians on 142–143   biblical 253   epics contrasted with 266–267, 273   in film 23, 262, 266, 282, 283–284, 286, 307   transformed into epics 261–262, 265–266, 274n.4   see also fire myth; origin myths Nadel, S.F. 139–140 Nazpary, Joma 167, 168 Ndembu people 151 Needham, Rodney 137 neoliberalism 12–15 new biology 35–36 New Guinea 257 New Man, concept of 61–62, 66, 70–72, 73 Nietzsche, Friedrich   and Kubrick’s 2001 278–279, 280, 284–289, 291, 296–297, 299–300, 301, 303, 306–307   on religion 285   on state formation 158 Nigerian economy 214, 215 nondualism 16, 33–41   critique of Cartesianism and 34–35   and essentialism 37–8   and ethics 39, 40, 47   and openness to alterity (wonder) 40–41, 47–49   perspectivist version of 39–40   in science 34, 35–36   successor to 50 noosphere 224, 232, 238, 241n.3 Nupe kingship 139–140 Nuskhaev, Aleksei 228, 233–234, 235–236 Nyoro empire 140 occult economies 174, 175, 177, 199, 211, 215 317

Index occult phenomena   as language 175, 176   transition/change and 165, 168, 174   see also ongod; shamanism; sorcery Odysseus 141, 284, 300 O’Hanlon, M. 256 ongod (shamanic spirit) 169, 170, 172   cosmological role of 173–174, 179   market forces and 168, 177–178   as movement/transition 173   origin stories about 171–172 ontology 77   anthropology of 32, 33–41   and cosmology 77–78, 211   dualistic 77, 264   nondualist 16, 33–34 Oppenheimer, Franz 155–6, 158 origin myths   of Ambrym islanders 57–58, 59–60, 62, 70–71   exogamy in 270–271   in film 262, 265–268, 283, 288–290   Freud’s 264   mating and reproduction in 269–270 Owen, Wilfred 249 Paiditalli (Hindu goddess) 17, 18, 100–101, 108–111   rituals of 102–108, 111 Papua New Guinea (PNG) 55, 58, 61, 209, 214 Parry, J. 250 passionarity (passionarnost’) 224, 225 Pedersen, Morten 50, 92 Peloponnesus, early dynasties of 141 personne conception of self 79, 92, 94n.3 Philippines, use of Facebook in 247–248 philosophical anthropology 77 physical sciences   nonlinear systems in 34, 35   qigong and 118 Plato, Theaetetus 31 pluralism, rejection of 35, 36

pluralist cosmologies 56   of Ambrym islanders 57–73   and construction of New Man 61–62, 66, 70–72   vs. hierarchical cosmologies 58   incorporation of Christianity in 60–64, 67, 68, 69–73   renewal/reproduction in 62, 65   and unity, project of 63–73   see also poly-ontology political cosmology 224, 229   in Kalmykia 229, 234–236 politics   and cosmology 12–15, 19, 55, 224–245, 229, 234–236, 239   of reason (razum) 234, 239, 241n.4   separation of religion from 98 Pollock, Sheldon 230, 231 Polynesia, stranger-kingship in 19, 141, 151, 159 poly-ontology 58, 66   Arosi 16, 33, 41–47, 58 power   alterity and 137, 146–147, 159   cosmological constitution of 19   of indigenous people 145–146   occult practices and 175, 176, 177   of stranger-kings 145 Préaux, J.-G. 149 psychology, vs. anthropology 244, 245, 259 Putnam, H. 254 qi 117, 118, 123, 124–125   blockage of 130   in Chinese cosmo-geography 128, 129   in death rituals 129   exercises 124, 126, 127–128   malign 124–5, 126–127, 131 qigong 117–118 QQ (Chinese social networking site) 246 Rainie, L. 245 reason, universal (razum) 224, 232–233, 234

318

Index   and cosmology 240   and politics 234, 239, 241n.4 reflexive ethnocentrism, topology of 4–6, 9 relations   entities as 33, 49–50, 56   inwardly oriented, cosmology of 93–94 religion(s)   in China 123, 124   holism and 95, 258   inception of 250–251, 252   modern cosmology and 12–13   and morality 253–254, 258   Nietzsche’s attacks on 285   popular science and 22   vs. science, in Kubrick’s 2001 281–282   separation of politics from 98   social networking sites and 249   and witnessing 253, 254, 258   see also monotheism; specific religions Richards, Audrey 157 Rimbaud, Arthur 43, 47, 51n.3 Rio, Knut M. 212 ritual(s)   Chinese 118–124, 129–130   and cosmologies 131  Kubrick’s 2001 compared to 308   and wealth 184, 191–193, 196n.14 ritual polities, in Melanesia 55–56, 59–60   Christianity and 60–64, 67, 68, 69–73   generativity of 66–67, 72–73 Robbins, Joel 60, 61 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 158, 306 Rubenstein, Mary-Jane 44 Russia   Eurasianist discourses in 22, 225, 226–227   scientific and metaphysical cosmology in 228   see also Kalmykia Rwanda, Tutsi rulers of 146

sacrifice   in Biblical story of Akedah 23, 249–250, 252   and cosmic renewal 24   in Kubrick’s 2001 297, 299–302   and religion, inception of 251, 252 Sahlins, Marshall 8, 19, 22, 176, 195, 270 Saiva Siddhanta theology 79–81 Sandschejew, Garma 171 Schrempp, Gregory 229, 230, 282 science   Chinese medicine as 117   and cosmology 7, 11, 59, 223–224, 231, 240   and myth, in film 262, 282   nondualism in 34, 35–36   popular, and local religious forms 22   vs. religion, in Kubrick’s 2001 281–282   and wonder 282 Scott, James 10 Scott, Michael W. 55–56, 58, 64, 66 self   moi conception of 79, 92   personne conception of 79, 92, 94n.3 self-cultivation, projects of 77   Chinese medicine and 117, 118   cosmology/ontology and 78   Sivanadiyars and 84, 88, 92–93 sexuality   and fire 264–265, 275n.7   and food production 203, 204, 216n.8   in origin myths 269–270 shamanism   in Mongolia 20, 170–174   and postsocialism 167–169, 177–178, 179   predestination associated with 170–171, 177   in Siberia 170   as transitional cosmology 20, 165, 167–169, 173, 178–179   see also ongod 319

Index Siberia, shamans in 170 Simmel, George 148, 149, 155 Siva (Hindu god), cosmology of 109–110 Sivanadiyars 17, 78–79, 82–91, 93   relations with others 85–87   self-cultivation projects of 84, 88, 92–93   universalistic moral claims of 92 Skinner, Elliot 145 Smedal, Olaf H. 212 Sneath, David 182, 183, 187–188, 196n.10 social imaginary, concept of 210 social networking sites 22–23, 245–246   people as 244, 248, 259   and religion 249   see also Facebook social order   cosmology and 17, 55–56   women and 207–208 Socrates, on wonder 31, 32 Solomon Islands   Arosi of 31, 33, 41–47   matrilineages in 55–56 Soni, Jayandra 78, 80 Sophocles, Antigone 160n.9, 210 sorcery   in Ambrym ritual polity 73   commodity production and 212–213, 214   as language 175, 176   Mozambican maize mills and 21, 199, 204–207, 211, 214–215   Mozambican postcolonial state and 213–214   and wealth 199, 214 Southall, Aidan 157, 160n.8 stranger-kingship 138–159   anthropologists’ vs. historians’ perspectives on 142–143   and autochthonous population 139, 144–151, 154–155, 157, 158   characteristics of 143–144, 158   conquest vs. contract in formation of 156–159

  dual sovereignty of 158   ethnically divided societies in 152   and life-giving potency of alterity 153, 154   sources of power 146–147 Strathern, Marilyn 34, 49, 248, 254–255, 256, 257 sub-Saharan Africa 174, 177 Sumatra 147, 150 symbolic functionalism 20, 176 Taleland 149 Tallensi 5, 142, 144–5 Tamilnadu, Sivanadiyars in 17, 78–79, 82–91, 93 Tanganyika 149 Tangu cargo cults 71–72 Tanna Island 64 Taussig, Michael 209 Tianxia (All Under Heaven) 128–129 Timor 145, 160n.5 Toulmin, Stephen 10, 11 transition/change   cosmology as 17, 20, 21   and occult phenomena 165, 168, 174   shamanism as cosmology of 20, 165, 167–169, 173, 178–179 Traube, Elizabeth 139, 145 Trinidad   cosmology of 256   religious cultural of, witnessing in 258, 259   use of Facebook in 246–247, 255, 256, 257 Trobriand Islanders 5 Turner, Victor 111, 151, 308 Tutsi rulers of Rwanda 146 unity, Ambrym project of 63–73   attention to plurality in 64, 65–66 universalistic moral claims 91, 92 University of Cambridge 36, 40 Urapmin 60, 61 Valeri, Valerio 137, 148, 156 Van der Kraef, Justus 150

320

Index Vanuatu 56, 60–62, 68   see also Ambrym islanders Verdery, Katherine 182 Vernadsky, Vladimir 226–227, 232, 237, 241n.3 Vijaya Rama Raju 100 violence   humanity and, film exploring 262, 265, 280   nondualist view of 48   in postsocialist Mongolia 165–168   and stranger-kingship 153, 156 virtuality, notions of 211, 215, 217n.13 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo 19, 35, 36, 39, 49, 51n.2, 137, 159, 209 viz formandi 210–211, 215 Vizianagaram 100, 109, 112n.7 von Hahn, Georg 138, 139 Wagner, Roy 34, 49, 111, 113n.11, 195 wealth   Mongolian master-custodian relations and 183–184, 191–192   Mozambican postcolonial state and 213–214   ritual life and 184, 191–193, 196n.14   sorcery and 199, 214   stranger-kings and 153–154 Weber, Max 21 Wellman, B. 245 West, Harry 175 Western civilisation   dualism in 51n.2   vs. Eurasianism 22, 225   individualism in 306

White Father, cult of 236–240 Willerslev, Rane 209 witnessing   Facebook and 23, 256, 257, 259   and morality 23, 254, 258–259   religion and 23, 253, 254, 258 women   bodily technique of creation 103–5, 203–204, 208   as guardians of fire 272, 275n.7   and maize meal production 21, 200, 202–203, 207–208   and Paidatali ritual 102–103, 105   and stranger-kings 149–150 wonder   anthropology of 16–17, 32, 50   Arosi experience of 41–47   new anthropology of 16–17, 32   nondualism and 40–41, 47–49   ontological transformation and 44   openness to alterity and 16, 32, 33, 40–41   science and 282   Socrates on 31, 32 Wonder of Flux 47–48 Wonder of Identity 43, 45, 46, 47 Wonder of Plurality 46–47, 48 yin and yang 118, 122, 126, 129–130 Yoruba 138 Yu the Great 122 Zimbabwe 212–213 Zito, Angela 118, 132n.1 Zoroastrianism 285

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