The Power of Animals: An Ethnography 9781474215817

Citation preview

Preface I first came to Malawi in February 1958, sitting with my rucksack on the back of a pick-up truck as it passed through the Fort Manning (Mchinji) customs post. I had spent the previous four months hitch-hiking around south and central Africa, mostly sleeping rough. During that time I encountered no other hitch-hiker and very few tarred roads, and the only place I met tourists was at the Victoria Falls. I was, however, so attracted to Malawi and its people that I decided to give up my nomadic existence. I was fortunate to find a job working as a tea planter for Blantyre and East Africa Ltd., an old company founded by Hynde and Stark around the turn of the century. I spent over seven years as a tea planter working in the Thyolo (Zoa) and Mulanje (Limbuli) districts, spending much of my spare time engaged in natural history pursuits, my primary interests being small mammals (especially mice) and epiphytic orchids. The first article I ever published was based on my spare-time activities in Zoa, where I spent many hours with local people digging up mice. It was entitled 'Denizen of the Evergreen Forest' (1962), and recorded the ecology and behaviour of the rather rare pouched mouse (Beamys hindei). Since those days 1 have regularly returned to Malawi to undertake ethnobiological studies. I thus have a lifelong interest in the country and its history, the culture of its people and its fauna and flora. Some of my most memorable life experiences have been in Malawi, and many of my closest and cherished friendships have been with Malawians or with 'expatriates' who have spent their lives in the country. Altogether, I have spent over ten years of my life in Malawi, and apart from Chitipa and Karonga, I have visited and spent time in every part of the country, having climbed or explored almost every hill or mountain - usually with a Malawian as a companion, and looking for birds, mammals, medicines, epiphytic orchids or fungi, whichever was my current interest. The present study is specifically based on ethnozoological researches undertaken in 1990- 1991, which were supported with a grant from the Nufield Foundation. For this support I am grateful. With respect to this present study, I should also like to thank many friends and colleagues who have given me valuable data, encouragement, support and hospitality over the past thirty years, in particular, Derrick

Introduction This book is about Malawi culture and the relationship of Malawian people to the animal world, with a specific focus on mammals. The core of the study hinges around a dialectic between subsistence agriculture, focussed around a group of matrilineally-related women - and in the context of which mammals are seen as opposed to human well-being and hunting, which is centred around men, or more precisely, around men as affinal males. Thus, while women are closely identified with agriculture, the matrilineal kin group and the village community, men are identified with the woodland and wild mammals, hunting and masculinity being intrinsically linked. The organizing principle of the study, then, focusses on hunting and agriculture (matriliny) as two complementary domains that have historically constituted Malawian social life. Over the past two decades, within the context of an emerging ecological crisis, anthropologists, philosophers and historians have become increasingly concerned with exploring the relationship of humans to the natural world. We have thus seen a plethora, indeed a deluge, of books on ecological thought, on people's conceptions of nature or landscape, on animal rights and on green political issues. This interest is comparatively recent. When in 1980 I gave a talk on 'Changing Conceptions of Nature' to the Wildlife Society of Malawi, the number of books then available that dealt specifically with people's conceptions of nature (and wildlife) could almost be counted on the fingers of one hand (but see Collingwood 1945, Glacken 1967, Nash 1967, Barbour 1973, Worster 1985). As far as most philosophers, anthropologists and historians were concerned, nature was simply an existential background that could safely be ignored, and mammals hardly existed apart from the role they played in rituals and symbolism (in relation to Africa see the pioneering studies of Willis 1974 and Douglas 1975). Since then the 'environment', 'ecology', 'nature', 'landscape', 'hunting' and 'animals' have all become major research topics among academics, although some philosophers seem quite unaware that students of natural history and biologists (for instance, Charles Darwin) have for more than a century expressed a sustained interest in the natural world (cf. Merchant 1992, Soper 1995). But most of these recent texts describe cultures, even whole epochs, in

Matrilineal Kinship and Subsistence Agriculture lntrodustion In this chapter I present some background material to the study, outlining the importance of matrilineal kinship and the close association of the local kin group, largely focussed around women, with subsistence agriculture. In fact, social life in Malawi is largely structured around an explicit gender division, with women being the main agriculturists, the men, in rural areas at least, focussing their activities on fishing, hunting or trade, or in employment outside the village community. The chapter is divided into four sections. In the first section, I outline the three main forms of kin group in Malawi, the matriclan (pjuko), the sororate group (mbumba), based on a group of matrilineally-related women which forms the core of many villages, and the family or household (banja). I emphasize that historically matrilineal kinship is typical of a situation where hoe agriculture, largely under the control of women, is combined with the importance of hunting and trade focussed around men and where there was an incipient development of state systems, in the form of chiefdoms, as in Malawi. In the second section, I describe kinship categories in Malawi, specifically focusing on those of the NyanjdChewa, and outline patterns of marriage. I emphasize the importance of afinal ties between village communities and the fact that the in-marrying male afine is essentially seen as an outsider, uxorilocal residence being the norm. In the third section, I discuss historically the impact of those social factors that have profoundly influenced matrilineal kinship in Malawi, namely, the slave trade and the intrusion of the patrilineal Ngoni in the nineteenth century, the influence of the Christian missionaries and the socio-economic changes that have accompanied the development of capitalism. In the fourth section, I focus more specifically on gender and after a brief theoretical preamble - in which I question the cultural idealism of

Hunting Traditions Introduction In this chapter I outline the cultural traditions relating to hunting in Malawi, focussing specifically on subsistence hunting. The chapter consists of six sections. In the first section I discuss hunting from a historical perspective. I focus particularly on the hunting traditions of three African communities, the Bemba, Lele and Ndembu, and note certain themes that have specific relevance to my own studies: the communal nature of hunting, the irnportance of meat sharing, the use of medicines to ensure hunting success, the salience of ritual prohibitions and finally, the close association between hunting and male gender identity. I explore the gender aspect more fully in the following section, which focusses on hunting and masculinity. After a brief discussion of the literature on masculinity, I explore two conceptions of masculinity in Malawi, one associated with the matrilineal kin group, the other with men as male affines. In the latter, men are closely associated with hunting and symbolically identitied with the woodland and with the larger mammals, the emphasis being on their fierceness, virility and courage. In Section Three I provide some background material on hunting in Malawi, on hunting during the iron-age period, the importance of hunting in Malawi culture and the digging out and trapping of mammals. In Section Four 1 discuss the two main forms of hunting in Malawi, hunting by solitary individuals and communal hunting (uzimba). I stress the importance of hunting dogs, the empirical skills of Malawian hunters and the organized nature of communal hunts, which involves the sharing of meat. I conclude the section with a brief discussion of poaching in Malawi. Section Five explores the important ritual aspects of hunting in Malawi, for hunting is never a purely empirical activity. I suggest that although there is a symbolic opposition between hunting and sex in Malawi, this does not imply a negative attitude towards hunting, for as I go on to

Folk Classifications Introduction In the last two chapters, I have outlined two very contrasting attitudes towards wildlife that are expressed by Malawians. As subsistence agriculturists experiencing continual depredation of their crops by wild mammals, there is a pervasive sense that animals are in 'opposition' to human concerns and well-being. This opposition is expressed in many ritual contexts, where men, as afines, are associated with the woodland and with wild animals. This 'opposition', however, must not be construed as involving an attitude of control or dominion, still less one of technological mastery, over nature. It implies that humans and animals are essentially equals but in competition, the larger mammals, such as the buffalo, hippopotamus, lion and elephant (mammals which may embody the spirits of dead chiefs), are believed to have powers (mphamvu) superior to those of humans. It is noteworthy that humans and elephants are similar ecologically, sometimes competing for space in the Brachstegia woodland, and in the past the elephant often held the upper hand. In contrast, the woodlands, and the mammals (and spirits) that are associated with them, are also seen by Malawians as a source of building materials, medicinal substances and life-generating powers. And, as we observed in the last chapter, in the hunting domain humans, especialljl afinal males, are fundamentally identified with wild mammals, the attitude towards them being almost one of sacramental equality. Thus, a dialectical opposition - a 'unity-in-opposition' - between humans and mammals is pervasive in the culture and social practices of rural Malawians. This opposition reflects an ambivalent attitude towards the woodland, especially towards mammals. On the one hand, in terms of the village community and agriculture, wildlife from the woodlands is seen as fundamentally hostile and antagonistic to human endeavours. On the other hand, the woodland domain is seen as the external source of life-generating powers. Mammals are seen as prototypical of the woodland

Attitudes to Nature Introduction In the last two chapters, on hunting traditions and folk classifications, both empirical and symbolic, I have indicated some of the contrasting ways in which Malawian people acknowledge the nature of humanmammal interactions. I have thus indicated that Malawian attitudes towards mammals and to the natural world generally are diverse, complex and multi-faceted. We may, to facilitate the discussion, distinguish between the following eight social perspectives towards nature and towards mammals in particular. - A phenomenal attitude, expressed in the 'intuitive' - imaginative and

psychological - recognition of the discontinuities of nature. This is reflected in 'basic-level' categories and corresponds to what Heidegger refers to as Vorhandenheit, things 'present-at-hand' ( 1962: 106), an orientation towards the world that Heidegger misleadingly conjla/es, in a distorting fashion, with other very different attitudes towards nature. This is nature as phenomena. I have discussed this phenomenal attitude hlly in the last chapter. - A realist attitude, the acknowledgement that the natural world, mammals especially, have intrinsic value and inherent powers, properties and potentialities that are independent of humans. This is similar to the Greek notion of nature asphysis. This acknowledgement of a 'real' world independent of human cognition is not a 'positivist notion', and the conflation of realism with positivism by interpretative anthropologists and post-modem philosophy is obfuscating (Riesman 1986: 112; see Bhaskar 1989, Collier 1994). It has affinities to what Bruce Foltz, following Heidegger, calls the 'primordial sense' of nature (1995: 37-5 1). This attitude is reflected in the use of animals as medicine. - A theoretical attitude, expressed in terms of theoretical knowledge, a perspective that is akin to what the Greeks referred to a theoria, looking at the natural world in terms of rational contemplation. As Aristotle

Appendix: Some Common Malawian Proverbs 1. Carnivores Chi~jinclicho nkhandwe chalaka mwini msampha

The liver of the jackal baffled the owner of the trap (Accept one's limitations). Okonlrr atoni o n g a j ~ n g w e

Flow to be nice like a civet (never he ungrateful). U k ~ ~ p ln~~r~t o i l1oza - i mphanda

If you kill a genet, thank the branch (be grateful to those who help). AG'U/U kolikong~,c) wla nzeru za yekha

The clever slender mongoose died by himself (lis~enlo others). Chino.vu/u chinakanika fisi

Thc hyena would fail to become a Muslim. Chino n 'chinafisi alibe bwenzi

Say anything, the hyena has no friend (People who do i l l have no friends). f i i akugwa m 'ntbuna salankhula

If the hyena falls into a pit-fall trap, he does not talk (concentrate). Fisi okugw~t-asataya A hyena who holds, does not lose

(persevere). f i s i akakhii~asalira pompwepo A hyena who is satisfied does not cry at that place

(be grateful). Fisi akolola pfirpa sadyera pomwepo A hyena picks up the bone but does not eat there

(show discretion).