After Thoughts on Human Ecology

After Thoughts on Human EcologyAuthor(s): Douglas KennedySource: Folklore, Vol. 78, No. 2 (Summer, 1967), pp. 81-89Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of Folklore Enterprises, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1258647 .

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FOLKLORE - VOLUME 78 - SUMMER 1967

After Thoughts on Human Ecology by DOUGLAS KENNEDY

Presidential Address delivered before the Society at the Annual General Meeting on 15 March, I967

AFTER THOUGHTS ON HUMAN ECOLOGY

SINCE I first addressed you on Folklore and Human Ecology' it seems to me that the word Ecology is used with increasing frequency by the popular Press as well as in the serious periodicals. Not

always applied in the strict scientific sense its employment at least bears witness to a growing awareness of the significance of inter-

relationships. There has long been a recognition of the part environment plays in the behaviour of human beings whether the environment be the effect of conscious planning or natural growth. Our folklore which is part of our environment includes the

surviving traditions of country life and custom. Too often these traditions or fragments of them are presented as exposing just a

quaint idea or an absurd superstition or an unusual object. By themselves such recorded scraps do no more than faintly illumine

part of our environment. Folklore can do much more than that if it aims at the study of a whole environment or total ecological system where human beings are viewed not as isolated entities but as partners with each other with their habitat and with the multiple organism which constitutes a community.

In ecology this total picture calls for a wide-eyed comprehension and even so is difficult to interpret at first sight. The whole picture is the subject of folk-life study and I have drawn attention to the limitations of the information provided by the separate science- disciplines and to the vital need for overlapping observations and cross-references to give a truly scientific exposure. Regarded from the ecological standpoint any organic group attracts attention to its margins of give and take between the component parts. Study

1 Folklore, Vol. 76 (1965), Summer. F 81




should concentrate on these relations between boundaries which are often vaguely defined rather than on the more obvious individual components. When we wear our ecological spectacles we see connections rather than constituents. Marginal boundaries may not be material but only perceived or felt by changes near the border-line. For instance the 'feel' of a craft-tool between the fingers or within the palm, the feel of a ball in the bowler's fingers, the feel of a horse between the knees, the feel of an oar, of a rope or a tiller. The ecological stand point can be adopted toward every close relationship between partners or sets of partners including of course whole multiple organisms within their environment. The 'Folk' aspect as I see it applies where humans are involved unwittingly in an ecological situation. It is the unselfconscious behaviours within the relationship which conform to biological processes and to the delicate balance of tensions or opposing or competing forces.

Thus the term Human Ecology implies the non-calculating relationships which are bonded unwittingly by processes never more than half aware of themselves. As a concept then Ecology excludes consciously planned situations. So the term is not applicable to new towns and the housing estates being created today. But what about that very up-to-date science of Ergonomics, which seeks in a highly calculated way to shape an industrial environment to fit a conditioned industrial worker so that the most efficient and the most economical actions are encouraged. By experiment and through measurement the new study plans a programme of movements so that the right and proper practice can be established from the start with the minimum of adjustment.

This ultra-conscious process would appear to be the utter antithesis of a craft or some aspect of husbandry evolved after countless trials and repetitions each with its attendant feelings and aesthetic experience passed on down the generations through the traditional channels of folk culture.

But the contrast of Ergonomics and Ecology becomes less sharp if the contrived programme is set alongside the old form of guild apprenticeship to a craft, skill developed by repetition but under the watchful eye and guiding hand of a master-craftsman. No doubt this ancient form of training was closer to ecology than to ergonomics but there must have been some element of conscious

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instruction in medieval craft techniques. Here I am not so concerned to contrast the calculated with the intuitive process as with the human element in the Master and Apprentice relationship; the anxious creature thirsting for driblets of encouragement of a word of praise for some small creation recognized by the vastly more experienced fellow craftsman. These are important imponderables in an ecological situation. With such feelings in my heart I would be inclined to invite some ergonomic tutors to a future Folk-Life course. I would hope that they would meet natural situations which have been solved in traditional fashion to set beside their planned solutions. Folklore would win a new respect if it meant the lore to be learned from the standpoint of human ecology when studying such things as craftsmanship and the traditional bodily skills evolved by the practice of husbandry and folk-art through the ages.

Many years ago I asked two potters, now famous master- craftsmen how one made a pot out of a lump of clay on the potter's wheel. Firstly they were careful to tell me how one did not make a pot. 'It is not made by the thought in the head', one said. 'Nor is it made just by the touch of the hand,' said the other. Then both blurted out with some excitement, 'You make it with your body." By body they meant the corporate sense of feeling and not an action of the trunk or torso. This kind of total bodily responsive awareness gives a physical literacy to a working country craftsman, who might be otherwise illiterate. Some of us have direct experience of this in the older generation of traditional dancers. But it is still observable in their everyday working movements. There is another expressive element of an artistic nature in the material objects of the countryman's craft the traditional implements of husbandry. While these were and are fashioned to essentially practical purposes they so often bear the personal touch of the human beings who created them. At the Keele Folk-Life course we were encouraged to handle as well as examine some of these implements. We found that nearly every one revealed some aesthetic quality giving a value factor which was surplus to the functional efficiency of the tool. Even if you failed to find any visual value-factor you would probably discover one in the balance of the implement or the feel of the tool fitting neatly into the palm of your hand. Such traditional tools of husbandry have evolved through the ages within the countryside ecology.

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This aesthetic element in these practical down-to-earth tools evokes value judgements based partly on Science and partly on Art. In our Folk-Life course our eight streams of study all dis- covered that the two faculties must be reckoned with in any aspect of folk-life. The attention devoted to the art and the science

aspects is not on an equal basis however. The scientific approach - so called - is high in the ascendant. Any approach involving the human animal in his more irrational behaviour must be imprecise and so not scientific nor indeed even respectable.

And so for lack of understanding of the importance of folk- behaviours we fail to read the significance into or appreciate the value of examples of human ecology. Failing over the message of the over all picture we rush to fragment it into special pieces -

ologies and nomics - before we have digested the implications of the cross-connections and interweavings by which the opposing tensions have come to terms. And all this 'break-down' in the pursuit of the so-called scientific approach.

Today some of the scientists, the big-scale men, are beginning to regard the word Science as a dirty word, battered out of its meaning and shape in the popular Press. They increasingly long for signs of cohesion in a growing welter of fragmentation. Folklore, the word or words, on the other hand, is not so black as it was, even if it is still regarded with much suspicion in University quarters.

Another word taking a battering and subject to wide differences of interpretation is that pleasantly attractive term 'human'. There is much talk of the complete human that will one day inherit the earth. This view has the effect of making us mortals only sub- human. To be reckoned as sub-human is calculated to make us behave like sub-humans. For me a human is homo a member of the Primates who has undoubtedly been elevated but still bears visible traces of his animal relations. 'Human' also carries an ecological undertone in so far as no human human-being is complete in himself normally requiring other human beings to keep him quite human. We have enough evidence too that rejection by us of our inherited animal traditions imperils our physical and mental health. The first primal religious impulse, to preserve our ecological connections with the animate and inanimate worlds, still leaves open the chance of transcendental promotion to super- humans without reducing us to the ranks of sub-humans.

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I find that, quite apart from such examples of words with different meanings, there is a lamentable lack of words to com- municate our deepest feelings. We have a marvellously rich vocabulary for our thoughts and ideas but for our world of feeling we woefully lack any lexicon and for the lack of it we drag in from the vocabulary of ideas unsuitable non-feeling words and phrases. This makes descriptions and discussions of expressive art, as distinct from art criticism, both difficult and confusing.

Nevertheless until our feeling vocabulary grows we must continue with our few and inadequate words, to insist on the vital importance of our feelings within a truly scientific approach to human affairs.

Living in East Anglia in a rural area, rich in pre-history, I am increasingly impressed by the local lessons to be learned in human ecology.

Some of these local scenes have in recent years been well described and illustrated in the books of George Ewart Evans, a Welshman settled in Suffolk, who brings his Celtic imagery to illumine his careful observations of the countryside and its people with their old culture. He explores this culture, which, even if it is now at last beginning to change, has reflected, until recently, the intimate relationship between farming, local language, oral tradition and folklore, indeed a prime specimen of human ecology. His books, The Horse and the Furrow and Ask the Fellows who cut the Hay are widely read in Suffolk. Apart from the pleasure they give as accounts of country life, they call for a rescue effort of a way of life prized but fast receding and deserving of the closest study and careful recording before it is too late. For the old way of living almost gone in most of England, has faded more slowly in East Anglia but now the pace of departure accelerates. People of my advanced age, the last generation of the nineteenth century in Suffolk, who have inherited their traditional lore directly, accepted it as part of the air they breathed. The next generation, while they knew much of the lore, were sceptical of it in relation to their school learning. Now they react like some of the Africans who as a result of some education appear with brief case and bowler, the badges of a specious emancipation, ready, as we sadly found in South Africa, to scoff at their own native culture.

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In his latest Suffolk study2 George Evans, who permits me to quote freely, deals ecologically with houses, farms, customs, local speech and folklore but the outstanding study is his treatment of the relations between Horseman and horse. Here the association has intensified to a state of near-symbiosis, grown ever more closely over thousands of years in a stable ecology, weaving a mystique compounded of totemism and taboo. From the Palaeo- lithic age, when the wild horse provided the hunter's food, man has developed the symbiotic status with this totem. When hunters became conservers the horse flesh was taboo and the horse became a god. Horse sacrifices lasted into historical times in Europe, the animal-god representing a generalized fertility. This old religious tradition survives in our Hooden Horse and Hobby Horse customs, and its faint echoes may be heard in our fondness for show jumping, our pony clubs, and the racing rituals euphemistically labelled 'The Turf'. But it is with the pre-historic rituals among farm horsemen as they have survived in East Anglia and in North-East Scotland that George Evans really carries out a fine piece of folklore excavation. While some of the ancient practices are straight horse medicine there are others which have to do with the astonishing mastery exercised by the Horseman over his animals at work. The special controls are for start and stop. Stopping a horse so that in no circumstances will it move until given leave is known in East Anglia as 'jading'. Jading horses is documented back to the sixth century. An expert at jading then and for long afterward was regarded as a man-witch.

The stopping process depends on the smell of certain repellent substances plus the body odour of the Horseman.

The opposite process of starting or moving on was known as 'Drawing'. This depends upon the smell of aromatic oils attracting the animal toward the Horseman.

In North-East Scotland where old craft guilds have survived such as the Saddlers and the Hammermen, there is a Horsemen's Society. This guild has at times been driven to behave as a Secret Society, especially during periods of witch-hunting. Men initiated into this Society must take the Horseman's Oath, the form of which, Evans suggests, is clearly the outcome of natural evolution over a great stretch of time. The object of the Society is to bind

2 The Pattern under the Plough, Faber and Faber.

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each initiate to his brother Horsemen and to the Horse, for the animal was held to be at one with themselves. This is the ecological background of the intensely sacred bond between the ploughman and the working animals in his charge. In the Horsemen's Society there seems to have been no technical training or grounding in a grammar of horse-sense. It was a lore learned traditionally. Occasionally a Horseman would write down some of his lore, perhaps listing the Jading substances or the Drawing oils, but he would be careful to leave out his secrets of compounding and applying. Today the Horsemen's Society has become a formal trades union admitting anyone interested in horse matters but still bent on preserving the rich oral tradition of horse-lore.

In the concluding chapter of this book, Evan declares:

'After six years work collecting and attempting to order the material for the present book - I should like to reaffirm my conviction that the folk- life approach to the old rural society in Britain is the most fruitful one at the present time. If the separate disciplines continue to investigate the past of rural Britain, each in its own way, much will be lost ir- recoverably.'

I should like to continue quoting from this book for Evans' words seem to me to underline my own thoughts on man and his ecology. I believe that whenever man finds himself truly reflected from within his ecology he is spell-bound with awe feeling himself to be not a solitary individual but as a responding vibrant string in the living collective harmony of his surroundings. Many of us have found, as Evans has clearly found, that it is within oral tradition that one becomes so aware of these strings of connectedness composing a taut, highly strung harmony. Earlier3 I referred to the folk-tales, folk-songs and ballads in which oral transmission operates through the collective personality of a folk. In spite of the accumulating evidence of collective creation in music and poetry in many lands throughout the world, the academic scholar continues to talk and to think only in terms of consciously aware individuals composing works of art. Admittedly we cannot continue for ever to transmit orally the inherited traditions received over countless centuries. Our transmitting faculties are faulty. Neither can we do without writing nor without books. And yet on

" Folklore (1965), pp. 84-5.

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the other hand can we afford in human affairs to go on encouraging our students of human affairs to be brainwashed by bookishness? At our Keele Summer Course where we deliberately pursued the two paths of Science and Art of head and heart I felt that each of us was being dogged by his own specialization which had to be justified to the others. I have already said that within human ecology there is little available room for a human being by himself. He derives his very particular humanity from his relatedness to other human beings within the living vibrating environment. I introduce the word vibrating to emphasize that a stable environment or ecological situation does not mean static nor hidebound but rather a harmony of tensions.

When the individual human creature becomes the victim of a specialised enquiry pinning him down on his type card his situation only serves to emphasize some imbalance, some conflict within the two-fold field. 'Thinking' then clearly obstructs 'feeling'. Calculation blunts spontaneity and so on, providing more grist to the psychiatric mill. Within a balanced human being or ecology, there reigns a delicate give and take between strong forces seeking expression. Then it seems that feeling reinforces thinking and content gives meaning and purpose to form. We learned the hard way to live by the light of our own folklore before we had fresh light from the new discoveries.

In time and in turn yesterday's science is absorbed into the folklore of tomorrow and we have to develop and educate a capacity for relating the new outside discoveries to our own inner experience not on terms laid down by some technological establish- ment but on terms of a living ecology. This sounds difficult but I believe it only calls for a faculty we have as children to be totally absorbed in our surroundings when at play. This faculty we could continue to exercise. Instead we lose it all too soon.

A late afterthought: In our East Anglian ancient villages and towns moulded by tradition any new building grates on the senses. The fact that it may have been ingeniously designed and passed by a planning committee seems often to magnify the discordance. There is however, a sharpening of public awareness of the need to safeguard the old ecology including the still unspoilt countryside and such wildlife as survives. Such concerns for our surroundings

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need strengthening and educating. They are frequently outraged by planners for whom in the country so often a home is just a house and a human just a cog in the new geared world.

Two after-afterthoughts: On the matter of feeling the English are often accused, especially by their American cousins of fleeing from feeling as if scared of true sentiment. As a Scot I know that impression exists but I believe it stems not from fear of feeling of sentiment so much as a dread of false feeling, of sentimentality, of sob-stuff. Through this dread the balance is lost by overswing of the pendulum, as it were. But such overswings often occur between successive generations especially when there is no built-in com- pensating damper as in folk-life.

Indeed violent overswings stand out as a feature of our self- conscious society during the last two centuries of English History. It is no wonder that literate English love to look back three centuries to their Golden Age or that we can all look back with envy to Renaissance Italy where it seems that Religion, Art and Science bloomed together within a vivid, highly strung ecology.

My final afterthought is prompted by what seems to me an apt announcement of a series on the B.B.C. Third Programme. Some eminent Biologists are to discuss and if possible advise on a new threat to society which the programme calls 'The Biological Back- Lash'. This threat is brought about by our single-minded, one- eyed specialists inventing some new process or unleashing some new force with an unexpected impact upon what the programme describes as the delicately balanced natural world, which on occasion lashes back! The aim is to ask these eminent advisers such questions as: Can the technological gains be balanced against the possible biological loss? Can the actual impact be avoided? Can we not all learn to work in with the environment rather than against it? We might also ask can we have our cake and eat it? Even with 'Biologists' I am doubtful if a top level of specialists where the divergences are likely to be wide is the place to pose this sort of problem. My feeling is that it would be more accessible to study at folk-life level where the value-judgments can be based on more nearly related components of a balanced but still vital natural world.

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After Thoughts on Human Ecology